You Can Get Stronger and Healthier as You Age

Written by Dr Joseph Mercola on June 7, 2023. Posted in Current News

Sarcopenia — age-related muscle loss — threatens a healthy lifespan

With society aging worldwide, the prevalence of sarcopenia increases the urgent need to establish prevention and intervention strategies.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recognizes sarcopenia as an independently reportable medical condition.(1)

Many don’t realize that skeletal muscle not only manages physical activity, but also plays a major role in metabolism, circulation and cognition, as seen in the following figure.

Skeletal muscle not only functions to generate force and movement, but it is now known that your muscles actually serve an important endocrine function. They secrete special cytokines (i.e. myokines) and transcription factors into the bloodstream, thereby regulating the function of other organs.

Furthermore, skeletal muscle is a metabolically active tissue with an important role in the maintenance of metabolic homeostasis.

Skeletal muscle is the most abundant tissue, comprising 40% of your body mass,(2) and is the primary sink of insulin-mediated glucose disposal. Muscle is also the major site for insulin-stimulated glucose uptake, as well as the main energy consumer of fat.(3) After meals, about 80 percent of glucose is deposited in your skeletal muscle.(4)(5)

How Sarcopenia Sabotages Your Health

The loss of muscle mass with advancing age is thought to be a primary driver of insulin resistance in older adults.(6) The declining muscle strength and progressive mobility impairment with age also likely causes a reduction in daily physical activity which can contribute to metabolic dysfunction.(7)(8)

The loss of resilience as a result of sarcopenia is underappreciated as a major factor in the ability to recover from life’s inevitable challenges. It is clear that elderly with low muscle mass experience delayed recovery,(9)(10) and have higher rates of complications and infections following surgery,(11) greater drug toxicity(12) and higher disease-specific and all-cause mortality.(13)

Sarcopenia also predicts both the risk for community-acquired pneumonia in the elderly,(14) as well as 90-day mortality in patients suffering from aspiration pneumonia.(15)

Muscle is increasingly recognized as an organ with immune regulatory properties. As such, skeletal muscle cells modulate immune function by signaling through different soluble factors, cell surface molecules or cell-to-cell interactions.(16)

It is also speculated that sarcopenia contributes to immunosenescence — the gradual deterioration of your immune system — which is a leading cause of death in the elderly.(17)

Additionally, recent reviews found strong evidence that frailty due to sarcopenia(18) is a risk factor for adverse outcomes, such as longer hospital stay, functional decline at discharge, and both in-hospital and medium, lower quality of life, (19) and long-term mortality.(20)

My Strategy and Recommendation to Combat Sarcopenia

Now, I am no stranger to exercise. I have been exercising since 1968, which is 52 years. The problem is that the first 43 years were exclusively cardio, and in my case long distance running. I like to compete, so I got relatively decent and was eventually able to run a 2:50 marathon, which was good enough back then to get me on the post-graduate University of Chicago Track Club.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that while cardiovascular exercise can lower your risk of heart disease, it is a highly catabolic activity and will actually lower your ability to build muscle.

Below is a picture of me taken during my peak running condition. As you can see by the arrow, I had a gigantic 10.5-inch arm circumference.

Contrast that to the picture below, taken December 8, 2020, where my arm circumference is 15 inches. I had just finished doing a PR video for the deadlift at 370 pounds. The video (below) was posted to Instagram on the same date.

The blue plates are 45 pounds each; the black ones are the same width as the blue ones, but are plastic and are 25 pounds; and the bar is 50 pounds. My team wanted me to do a story on how I did this to, hopefully, inspire you to similar, if not better, levels of strength.

What Caused the Change?

The simple answer to this question is that I ditched my cardio and started resistance training. It is important to note that these changes did not occur overnight, so please don’t expect immediate results.

I was well over 50 when I first started and I’m now 67. It requires consistency and dedication; however, I will share a few tricks that should significantly cut your time to get results.

First, let’s explore the exercise changes. For the last dozen years or so, I have not run at all and have used resistance training as my primary exercise training. I probably lift weights about five hours a week, but I also spend the same amount of time in a variety of stretching and general body movement exercises, so it is a balanced program.

It is key to always have significant recovery period to allow your connective tissue and muscles to recover. That is why I only deadlift once a week or less. Although this is a fabulous total body movement, any exercise done in excess can cause you to get injured and force you to stop exercising.

I made this mistake with wide grip pullups. I used a weight belt with 25 pounds to build my strength so I could eventually do 20 pullups. Unfortunately, I was doing this six or seven times a week and never gave my body enough time to recover. So, I wound up injuring my anterior deltoid muscle, which prevented me from doing that exercise for several months.

I have a regular personal trainer who guides me through these exercises, but he occasionally leaves for a month, and with COVID-19, I didn’t see him for three months, which wasn’t a problem.

If you can’t afford a trainer, there are many GREAT free videos on YouTube that can guide you in lieu of a personal trainer. My favorite YouTube exercise channel is ATHLEAN-X, which has 11 million subscribers, but there are many excellent channels that will teach and guide you for free.

Remember that if you are doing resistance training, avoid doing the same exercise every day to allow your body time to recover and repair so you will get the benefits and avoid injuries.

Food Choices Are Vital to Get These Gains

My understanding of optimizing nutrition for health has been a greater than five-decade journey. At the beginning, I fell into the low-fat diet myth and thought I was eating healthy with my grains and margarine alternatives, but I was fooled.

The key here is that I was motivated to make the right choices: I simply lacked proper mentoring and information.

That was one of the primary reasons I started this website over two decades ago. I believed that people didn’t need to make the same silly mistakes I made, and by sharing my insight I could save them needless pain and grief.

Another major mistake was the lack of appreciation of never taking time off from eating. It seemed to make sense that you need to eat around the clock, and that going without food for days could wreck your health by losing muscle mass from inadequate protein intake.

After researching this, I realized it was seriously wrong and actually highly counterproductive. Your body actually requires regular intervals where you aren’t eating and failing to do so is a prescription for metabolic disaster.

Research by Satchidananda Panda, Ph.D., suggests 90 percent of people are eating more than 12 hours per day, and perhaps 50 percent of the population eat up to 16 hours a day. There are even many that wake up in the middle of the night to eat.

This is perfectly understandable as you need fuel to run your body and most people, as I wrote extensively in my bestselling book, “Fat for Fuel,” are using carbs, not fat, as their primary fuel. Since your body has a minute supply of stored carbs relative to fats, you simply need to eat far more frequently to avoid feeling ravenously hungry and tired as your body runs out of fuel.

Time-Restricted Eating Is a Key Health Principle

One of the most important health principles is time-restricted eating (TRE), which is a form of intermittent fasting. Contrary to modern belief, your body isn’t designed to be fed throughout the day, and the near-continuous grazing that most engage in can have serious health consequences.

When you eat throughout the day and never skip a meal your body adapts to burning sugar as its primary fuel, resulting in the downregulation of enzymes that utilize and burn stored fat.(21)(22) As a result, you become progressively more insulin resistant and start gaining weight.

Many biological repair and rejuvenation processes also take place while you’re fasting, and this is another reason why all-day grazing triggers diseases while fasting prevents them.(23)

There are a number of different intermittent fasting regimes, some of which are more extreme than others, but all are based on the premise that you need to fast for periods of time. TRE is one of the easiest to follow as you simply abstain from food for 16 to 18 hours a day and eat all your meals within a window of two to eight hours.

A four- to six-hour window is likely close to metabolic ideal for most.

By restricting the timing of your meals so that you’re fasting for a greater number of hours than you’re eating, your body will, over time, learn to burn fat for fuel again, rather than relying on fast-burning carbs. Eventually, you’ll also start accessing and burning stored body fat.

While TRE will shift your body from carb-burning to fat-burning by itself, it’s more effective when you’re also eating a cyclical ketogenic diet.

Help Build Muscle by Combining TRE With Exercise

With respect to exercise, the “magic” formula is to exercise while you are fasting. For most, this means not eating at least three hours before bedtime and exercising first thing in the morning, before breakfast.

The reason you do this is because the mTOR anabolic pathway is maximally suppressed when you are fasting, and suppresses even further with exercise. The mTOR pathway can be likened to a coiled spring — you compress it, and then you eat food and it explodes into action.

mTOR is the signal your body uses to build muscle mass. It really is the key. You need to radically stimulate mTOR to build muscle tissue. You really only want to do this once a day, though, because if you are constantly activating mTOR, you will increase your risk of cancer.

The other factor that activates mTOR is branched chain amino acids. Leucine appears to be the most potent, with hydroxy methyl butyrate (HMB) — a leucine metabolite — being the most potent of all. Below is a table of foods with the grams of leucine per 100 grams of the protein:

So, immediately after your resistance exercise, you’ll want to have at least 3 grams of leucine or HMB. This will give your body the optimal anabolic stimulus to increase muscle protein synthesis to boost your muscle mass.

There are other foods that have leucine, like almonds, chicken and soy protein powder, but I don’t recommend them as they have high amounts of the omega-6 fat linoleic acid. If you are over 60 or have kidney impairment, I also don’t recommend whey protein as it is high in phosphate, which can impair kidney function.

So, it seems the safest strategy is to take a supplement. You can take branched chain amino acids, essential amino acids or simply HMB, as long as you are getting 3 grams after your workout, as that will maximally activate mTOR.

Remember, more is not better, and will not stimulate it more. All you need is 3 grams.

The BEST Strategy I Know of to Increase Muscle Size

There are loads of ways to increase your muscle mass but they mostly involve moving, pushing or pulling heavy weights or resistance bands. The problem with this strategy is that if you are not in good shape, and especially if you are elderly, there is a very high likelihood that you will get injured. In most cases, it is not if you will get injured but when.

The answer to this problem is an exercise strategy known as blood flow restriction training or BFR. As the name implies, BFR involves modifying the arterial inflow and venous outflow while you’re working the muscle by placing an inflatable band around the extremity.(24)

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here theepochtimes

Header image: Ridofranz / iStock

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