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The age old myth is that people “become increasingly resistant to strength training as they age”.

Welcome to another fact-based article from Strength by Fitness.


Let us talk about old age and the myth that older people increasingly become resistant to strength training.

This Strength By Fitness article and the study I am citing are really important to take to heart, but why?

Because, we are unfortunately living in a fact-free world where a ton of people tragically assume that as they grow old there is absolutely nothing they can do to maintain better health, fitness, mobility, and body composition relative to their sedentary peers.

The result of this tragic belief is a form of inertia that cripples far too many people that could have been enjoying a vastly richer and healthier final half of their lives.

Billions of people do not exercise in a good enough way, or at all. So this is not an exaggeration. 

So instead of being able to enjoy their golden years with much better health, strength and endurance that promotes mobility and physical, and cognitive health and capacity, people are robbed of their motivation and energy to maintain a healthy fit lifestyle.

This is entirely understandable.

When society at large sells this harmful message that a 60-year-old should be overweight, weak, frail, and immobile because it´s just what happens when you go from 27 to 60 years of age, it doesn’t enrich people’s lives, their mood, spirits, health, and outlook on the journey ahead.

So instead of revitalizing their fellow humans’ interest in maintaining a more fulfilling life by making better food and fitness choices, people at large turn each other into pacified victims. 


The best way to describe it is to call it an almost self-fulfilling culture of poor health and diminishing quality of life years, that´s purposefully robbing people of the capable, active, and far healthier health-span they should be having.

And it does so decades ahead of its time.

As such, these harmful ideas only create even more sedentary and unhealthy people.

But, as we can see in this and so many other studies as well as countless of real life outcomes older people that maintain a healthy lean physique by remaining physically active throughout their health-span while consuming healthy, high-protein, high-satiety foods in a big enough volume for it to become nutritionally complete will maintain vastly better health, strength, endurance and quality of life relative to their sedentary peers.


This includes the topic of this article because these old but fit strength training people will preserve their anabolic sensitivity on a level that is very comparable to younger, healthy fit men.

In other words, chronological age alone will never cause a big enough increase in anabolic resistance for it to matter.

It´s there, but it´s pretty small.

 

From cited study number two, old muscles versus young.

Instead, what happens is that the combination of a slight increase in anabolic resistance together with many other factors, such as not training often and challenging enough, or at all, and not eating according to a fact-based high-protein plan pushes people off the cliff”.

Coach Mike, Strength By Fitness

Instead, what happens is that the combination of a slight increase in anabolic resistance together with many other factors, such as not training often and challenging enough, or at all, and not eating according to a fact-based high-protein plan will push people off the cliff, into a free fall of poor health outcomes, coupled with drastically decreased physical capacity and cognitive health too.

Having excess adiposity ( body fat ) is another aspect that is much more detrimental than the slight, largely preventable age-related reduction in protein synthesis, nutritional absorption and yes, the minor decline in anabolic resistance.

But thats me talking about people that maintain their healthy fit habits in the gym, lifting good enough weights and getting their protein while taking daily nonexhaustive walks and a couple of slow jogs, or run sessions per week. 

The real damage happens when you combine all the poor lifestyle choices that are considered the norm of how to live.


When we have older, sedentary people, who are not lifting weights and haven’t lifted any weights for decades, while either eating far too much food in general, or not enough food, and not getting enough protein in total, no matter the total food intake, the outcome is a severe loss of strength, mobility, health, and type II skeletal muscle fibers as they age.

This is sadly, the perfect storm for an extremely poor biological aging process, and the combined weight of all these contributing factors is why people wrongfully believe that older people can not maintain a strong and healthy fit body.

It´s not the accumulation of chronological age, it´s the accumulation of years spent making poor lifestyle choices versus years spent making wonderful, healthy fit choices.

Do you need help succesfully changing your lifestyle habits?

We provide coaching, online, and on-location, in-person.

Keep lifting weekly weights people and eat your daily high intake of protein, and fiber because as we see in study after study, and real-life outcome after real-life outcome.

It is your daily habits that drive most of your trajectories in health, fitness, body composition, and aging.

Please take note that I said most, not all.

This means that yes, there are things that will still degrade, as we age, but it makes no sense to focus on those minor areas that no one can do anything about, and it makes absolutely no sense to allow those small, unavoidable aspects of human ageing to take the focus away from the massive aspects of human health, fitness and aging which you do exert a major influence over with nothing more than your own daily habits.

Because, if you do that you will end up falling of the cliff of poor health, and lacklustre old age too.

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Let us take a quick little poll. Because, if a healthier & fitter old age is of interest, you need to lift weights & maintain some form of aerobic eXERCISE on a weekly basis.

To summarize.

A slight increase in resistance to strength and lean muscle mass progression, and reduction in nutritional absorption and protein synthesis is part of enjoying  healthy old age for us humans. But that decline is so small that it hardly even counts if you maintain a weekly strength training plan, even more so if you combine that with high-protein habits, creatine, and a proper amount of rest and sleep.

“It´s not the accumulation of chronological age, it´s the accumulation of years spent making poor lifestyle choices versus years spent making wonderful, healthy fit choices.”.

Coach Mike, Strength By Fitness.

 

 

 

 

 


Study setup number 1.

Ten lean and healthy young men aged around 22 years of age. And an average BMI of 23.4 went toe to toe with ten elderly men aged roughly 70 years of age. The older groups BMI came out as 22.7.

Both groups performed unilateral resistance exercises with one leg, while the other did not perform any exercise, this was then followed by a feed session that included essential amino acids.

You train, adapt, recover, and progress to what you do, and how you do it. No matter your age.

 

Postworkout, measured peak plasma levels of EAA and leucine ended up similar between both groups in this study. Muscle EAA and leucine peaked roughly 60 min post-exercise, with a higher concentration in the leg that exercised.

Once again, however, there were no differences between the young and old groups. And that is, of course, the interesting bit. Both young and old people responded in a similar fashion to strength training & a higher protein intake.

Speaking of protein. Muscle protein synthesis increased, as expected, in both the rested and exercised leg muscles with no real difference between the two age groups.

Diving into this study, I can find some differences between the two groups, however. 

Phosphorylation displayed some temporary post-exercise differences between the two age groups. But this ties back to what I said earlier in this article, and it reflects something I have been preaching to our clients for the past decade.

Some things change, but it´s the same for everyone, so do not focus your energy on that. Instead, accept the many things that have nothing to do with the way you age and everything to do with your ongoing habits. 

Or to borrow the scientist’s own conclusion in this study.

“Conclusion.
Lean and healthy old men do not manifest anabolic resistance as evidenced by potent increases in muscle protein synthesis and mTORC1 signaling following EAA intake and exercise”.

What does this mean for you? To paraphrase myself from the many conversations and articles I have written and published during the last 10 to 15 years.

Lift good enough weights, with a big enough effort, often enough every week of your life. Eat, nutritionally complete, high-protein foods and plenty of whole plant-based foods and you will age as well as is humanly possible to do.

Simple as that folks.

No, you do not need to buy EAA products, EAA is just whole protein that´s been processed and stripped of non-essential amino acid content. There is nothing wrong with taking EAA, but eat enough whole protein from food and protein supplements and EAA provides nothing beneficial in comparison.

Study number two. Sedentary people that do not lift weights, will mostly lose the strong and explosive type 2 muscle fibers.

You have plenty of recent articles and podcasts from Strength By Fitness on the topic of old age and the stark decline in type II fibers in people who do not strength train with a big enough load, often enough in an explosive way, or at all. 

So there is no need for me to rehash all that.

But I included this short part about this particular study in this article because it ties so incredibly well together with the entire premise of anabolic resistance in older sedentary people.

You lose what you do not do.

Something this study too demonstrates incredibly clearly and beautifully.

I am saying this because once again we have one older and one younger group of lean and healthy fit men. Roughly 22 years of age and 69 years of age for the older group.

The outcome? 

Older people displayed a relative increase in type 1 muscle fibers. This makes sense because it means that the older the nonresistance training group got the less their bodies held on to the stronger, more powerful, and explosive type II muscle fibers.

We could also see how older muscles contained roughly 32 % smaller and deformed type II myofibres. But it doesn’t stop there, those poorly aged muscles also had about 29% fewer capillaries and almost 40% fewer satellite cells surrounding their type II fibers.

All bad news.

But is this proof that you can do nothing? 

No, not at all. It´s proof of the complete opposite because what these two studies show us is that in order to enjoy a healthier, fitter, more capable old age, you have to maintain strength training with good enough load, and you have to lift that weight in an explosive way, and you need to do it often enough on a weekly basis, all while meeting your need for recovery.

The Strength By Fitness Way to Healthy Fit Old Age.

This is why Strength By Fitness in general advises our older clients to lift bigger weights and do slightly less volume per exercise and workout session, and in total per week. 

They are advised to do this in combination with eating enough nutritionally complete, high-satiety foods with a high-protein intake of around 1.6 to 2.0 grams of protein per kilo of body weight, if fit ( or target weight if the client is obese when they start working with us ).

This allows our clients to increase strength and muscle mass even at an advanced age while maintaining higher daily energy levels, and enjoying the marvel that is good, effortless recovery.

Now, when we put these two studies together, the outcome is pretty obvious, right?

Do nothing, and you will age in a bad way, that does make you weaker, more frail, less mobile, less capable, and more unhealthy.

But if instead, you maintain good enough strength training and you eat healthy foods rich in protein, and fiber you will mitigate most, but not all, of the age-related decline we see in sedentary old people. 

This includes anabolic resistance to strength training, it includes the massive decline in type 2 muscle fibers, strength, and mobility, and it even includes things such as heart health and brain matter, cognitive capacity, dementia, endurance, walk speed, cancer risk, fall risk, and bone health.

Strength train on a weekly basis. Consume high-protein foods on a daily basis, walk once per day, and reward yourself with a far healthier second half of your life.

Cited study.

1. Anabolic sensitivity in older fit people vs young and fit people.
Anabolic Sensitivity in Healthy, Lean, Older Men Is Associated With Higher Expression of Amino Acid Sensors and mTORC1 Activators Compared to Young — Horwath — Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle — Wiley Online Library

2. Age-related decline in type II skeletal muscle fiber unless you strength train good enough.
Aging leads to selective type II myofibre deterioration and denervation independent of reinnervative capacity in human skeletal muscle — Horwath — Experimental Physiology — Wiley Online Library

Do you need help with your fitness, health, habits, and nutrition? Strength By Fitness doesn’t just produce fact-based content across all these domains, we also coach and train people in-person and online.

Click coaching in the menu on top and get in touch.

You can also read this article over at Medium if you are a paying Medium Member.

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