The Most Important Element of Strength and Muscle for 60+

We all understand that to age well, we should fight to maintain strength and muscle tissue.  Sarcopenia (the age-related loss of muscle) and dynapenia (the age-related loss of strength) are linked to (and likely causative) a myriad of the negative side effects of aging.

And of course, we all understand that as we age, we gradually get weaker and lose muscle.  If you were to look at a graph that illustrates average levels of strength and muscle mass of a population across the lifespan, you would observe a curved, downward trajectory from the late 40s that accelerates into the 60s, 70s, and 80s. 

This is what you would see across a population, but that’s not actually what happens to an individual.

Instead of looking at the entire population, when we look at one individual, we discover that we don’t get weaker and lose muscle gradually over time.  Research published by Dr. Sarah Oikawa (a brilliant exercise scientist who has appeared on the Discover Strength podcast and presented at our conference) indicates that we lose strength and muscle rapidly over very short periods of time (perhaps 2 weeks to 2 months) and this, as you might expect, is almost always linked to an injury.

We are 72 years of age and strong, fit, and vibrant.  We experience an orthopedic injury of some kind, and in the following weeks, our activity levels plummet, we are immobilized, and we stop strength training.  Our strength and muscle mass plummet (for weeks or months).  We then maintain that same, reduced level of strength and muscle for another 2-5 years (for example) until our next injury or surgery and commensurate period of inactivity.  We witness a stepwise reduction in our strength and muscle and of course, correlated almost directly with this comes a reduction in our quality of life.

Peter Attia, author of the best-selling “Outlive” recently discussed some of Oikawa’s research and concluded that we really need to focus on preventing injury (and of course, I agree: The entire design of the strength training workout should be injury prevention) but I think he misses the key point.

The take home message from this research should be: Strength train while you are injured.  Don’t stop.  If you break your left ankle, train your quads, hamstrings, and glutes with isolation movements while training your right calf and anterior tibialis; train your upper body and midsection.  Don’t stop.  If a hip replacement pauses lower body training for a few weeks, continue to train your upper body and in short time, your non-surgical leg.  Train as much of your musculature as possible.  Don’t stop.