In this episode I discuss why AGE IS JUST A NUMBER and how we can gain lean muscle mass at ANY age!

SUMMARY:

• Age is just a number. Fitness is about ABILITY!
• Key #1 To Gaining Muscle: Use it or lose it! Keep doing the things that made you strong and “young” in the first place!
• Key #2 To Gaining Muscle: Lift heavy! Challenge yourself. You are not too old to push hard in the gym. We need to work around our needs and goals and injuries but age should not dictate what we do! While we need to recognize how our “lifestyle” has added up, our AGE shouldn’t be a deciding factor of how we train.
• Key #3 To Gaining Muscle: Dial in your diet! Eat enough and focus on PROTEIN!

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1. Use it or lose it!
2. Challenge yourself with your workouts!
3. Don’t fall for fad diets and focus on protein!

RS PROGRAMS:

• The Macro Hacks Program – The best results happen when our diet and workouts work together. And my Macro Hacks goes over how to dial in your diet at EVERY AGE!

STUDIES:

• Resistance training is medicine: effects of strength training on health. “Benefits of resistance training include improved physical performance, movement control, walking speed, functional independence, cognitive abilities, and self-esteem. Resistance training may assist prevention and management of type 2 diabetes by decreasing visceral fat, reducing HbA1c, increasing the density of glucose transporter type 4, and improving insulin sensitivity. Resistance training may enhance cardiovascular health, by reducing resting blood pressure, decreasing low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides, and increasing high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Resistance training may promote bone development, with studies showing 1% to 3% increase in bone mineral density. Resistance training may be effective for reducing low back pain and easing discomfort associated with arthritis and fibromyalgia and has been shown to reverse specific aging factors in skeletal muscle.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22777332

• Physical activity and all-cause mortality across levels of overall and abdominal adiposity in European men and women: the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Study (EPIC). “One European study enlisted 334,161 individuals and followed up with them over 12.4 years. Among the vast amount of data they discovered, they found that those doing as little as 20 minutes of light exercise daily could reduce a person’s risk of early death by as much as 30%.”   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2573364 
  

• Muscle mass and strength gains following 6 months of resistance type exercise training are only partly preserved within one year with autonomous exercise continuation in older adults. “Though prolonged RT can effectively increase muscle mass and strength in the older population, muscle mass gains are lost and muscle strength gains are only partly preserved within one year if the supervised exercise program is not continued.”
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0531556518306673 
• The effects of resistance training volume on osteosarcopenic obesity in older women. “By doing 1 set of exercises three times a week were enough to provide increases in strength, skeletal muscle mass, and decreased body fat over 12 weeks. Increasing that to 3 sets of exercises three times a week resulted in a dramatic boost in results.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29125017 
• Skeletal muscle protein metabolism in the elderly: Interventions to counteract the ‘anabolic resistance’ of ageing. “Resistance exercise combined with amino acid ingestion elicits the greatest anabolic response and may assist elderly in producing a ‘youthful’ muscle protein synthetic response provided sufficient protein is ingested following exercise.”
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21975196?dopt=Abstract 
• When we do more extreme diets and end up losing more lean muscle mass, we put ourselves at greater risk for rebounding! Minimizing the loss of fat-free mass may help dieters prevent weight regain after the diet. Best practices for fat-free mass retention include an effective resistance training program, a conservative rate of weight loss, an emphasis on sufficient protein intake, adequate sleep, and appropriate management of cardiovascular training variables. Associations between the proportion of fat-free mass loss during weight loss, changes in appetite, and subsequent weight change: results from a randomized 2-stage dietary intervention trial. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31950141 
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26883880?dopt=Abstract
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40520-019-01234-2
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28871849
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8030593 
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3117172/
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40520-019-01155-0