As a physiotherapist, I worked on a specialized floor of the hospital to help rehabilitate older adults and elderly people after long hospital stays.
The rehab gym was in a corner of the hospital floor full of weights, bands, bikes, parallel bars, and some of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I loved seeing the huge progress that patients made in that gym.
One day, I was assisting a 100-year-old woman to walk into the gym for the very first time in her life. I’ll never forget the look of shock on her face when she asked, “who uses all those weights in the hospital?” and I replied, “you do!”
She went from never doing any formal exercise before to bicep curling 5-pound dumbbells and squatting her body weight for three sets of 12 repetitions. After weeks of being immobilized in a hospital bed, she was able to go back home to her 3-story house and continue to live independently.
Every day in Geriatrics, I saw the powerful benefits of strength training on patients’ muscles, joints, and overall level of physical ability.
In order to understand why strength training is so effective, we need to understand how aging affects our musculoskeletal systems, which is made up of our muscles, bones, joints, and surrounding tissues.
How Aging Affects our Muscles and Bones
I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news, but parts of our bodies tend to go downhill as we age.
Remember when you were a kid and you could fall and then get up unscathed? Now I just think about tripping and my back hurts for a week.
Our musculoskeletal systems are made up of our bones, muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments, and all their associated structures. Each of these components undergo various changes with age.
1. Bone density
After age 30, our bones become less dense. Our bones are constantly getting remodeled — new bone is built, and existing bone is degraded. As we age, the rate of bone loss overtakes the rate of bone being built.
This can progress to osteoporosis, a silent disease that’s more common in females after menopause, males over 70 years old, and people with risk factors.
2. Muscle strength
The muscles undergo their own decrease in density — a term called sarcopenia, which is the age-related loss of lean muscle mass. Part of this loss is due to the effects of aging; the older you are, the higher your risk for muscle loss. However, being sedentary accelerates the whole process.
Research shows we become less active as we age. There’s a steady decline in physical activity levels after the age of 24. Without as much physical activity, we progressively lose muscle mass and strength.
3. Tendon resilience
Tendons connect our muscles to our bones. As we age, we lose water from our tendons. This can make them less resilient to stress. Which translates into more injury-prone.
Age is a major risk factor for tendon problems like tendinopathy. As a former physiotherapist, I diagnosed a lot of tendon injuries. My patients would say things like, “but I’m not an athlete” or, “but I don’t workout” or, “but I sit at a desk all day! How did I injure my tendon?”
There’s a misconception that tendon injuries are for athletes or people who do the same activity a lot (think playing tennis and tennis elbow.) But most of the patients I saw with tendon injuries were older and sedentary/sporadically active.
How to Counteract the Physical Effects of Aging
Strength training directly combats these three processes. It has powerful effects on the body, as highlighted in this systematic review from 2020. It’s one of the best types of exercise for:
reducing all-cause mortality,
lowering the risk of chronic diseases, and
improving physical function.
One of the reasons why it’s so beneficial is because strength training forces the muscles, tendons and bones to adapt. It’s good stress! The muscles contract, which builds more muscle. The tendons contract, which helps them grow tougher and boosts their water content. The bones are forced to adapt by building more bone, making them denser.
How to Reap the Benefits of Strength Training
The most important thing to do to reap the benefits of strength training is to start. Whether you’re 25 or 85, you have the most to gain from strength training if you go from not doing any strength training to doing any amount every week.
In this new systematic review and meta-analysis, 30–60 minutes of strength training PER WEEK was enough to lower all-cause mortality by 10–20%.
I previously wrote about three easy ways to get started with strength training, and there are so many more. From doing a 5-minute workout in your kitchen, to enlisting friends to join you for a beginner strength training class, choose something and try it out.
Like I wrote about in my post on what counts as exercise, in order to get all the rewards of physical activity, the next step is to slowly make it harder so that your body adapts.
This can be straightforward with strength training — try to do a little bit more every week. This could mean doing one extra repetition, or adding a bit more weight to an exercise.
How can you add 30 minutes of strength training into your week right now? Let me know in the comments!
Stay well friends,
Dr. Kuhnow
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