YOU CAN BUILD MUSCLE AT ANY AGE
You’ve probably discovered that it’s not as easy to build up muscle as an older adult as it was when you were young. However, whether you’re woman or man, keeping up and even increasing your muscle mass is still essential for healthy living. That’s because less muscle means greater weakness and less mobility, both of which may increase your risk of falls.
If you want to successfully build muscle, it’s crucial to focus on one particular kind of exercise—strength training. And it’s also important to get plenty of protein in your diet. The body breaks protein down into amino acids, which it uses to build muscle. Yet, as you age your body’s ability to break down and synthesize protein lessens. So you’ll need more of it for strength training and muscle building than you would in an average diet.
Please refer to my May 17 post Strength Training Made Easy for some great basic exercises. And to give you more encouragement, here are excerpts from the August 7, 2019 Silver Sneakers article by Aleisha Fetters, How Long Does It Take to Build Muscle?
“No matter how much you enjoy strength training, you probably don’t lift for the pure joy of picking up stuff and putting it down. It’s a means to an end—namely, building muscle.
So, how long does that take? The unfortunate answer: It depends.
“Every person builds muscle differently,” explains Chris Kolba, a physical therapist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
One key factor: age. “We know that around the age of 25 or 30, we start to lose lean muscle mass, and around age 50, there’s a significant drop in the number of strength and power fibers in your muscles,” Kolba says.
In other words, not only are you losing existing muscle mass, but you won’t be able to build muscle back up at the same rate as you did when you were younger.
It’s Never Too Late to Build Muscle
These muscle gains might not completely change your silhouette or require new clothes, but they will transform your function, mobility, and quality of life. Over the long term, they can improve your balance and help prevent injuries.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people 65 and older do muscle-strengthening activities at least twice per week. If you’re up to it or as you get stronger, many fitness experts recommend doing three or four sessions per week.
New to strength training? Do what you can to start—and hang in there. The German researchers noted that people with “poor performance at the outset can achieve improvement even with less frequent training.”
The Bigger Prize: Strength You Can’t See
There’s a difference between muscle size and muscle strength. While they definitely overlap, strength has a larger neurological component, depending not only on the size of your muscle fibers but also on your body’s ability to activate those fibers. Meanwhile, muscle size is all about those muscle fibers getting bigger.
“You will always notice gains in strength before you notice gains in size,” Kolba says. “In fact, when beginning a strength program, about 80 percent of strength increases will be neurological. These progressions come almost immediately and give you the encouragement to keep working toward size changes.”
Case in point: When starting a new strength exercise, your first set might feel weak, shaky, and a little sloppy. But by your third set, you likely feel much more solid and stronger.
What happened? You didn’t magically build muscle in a course of a few minutes. Rather, the nerve cells that tell your muscle fibers to contract learned how to better coordinate the movement and keep your muscles working together.
Even if strength training has minimal effects on muscle size, it still significantly increases muscle strength in those older than 75, according to 2019 research in Geriatrics and Gerontology International.
So, while you may not see muscle definition as quickly as you would like, remember that every time you do a squat, pick up a weight, or use an exercise band, you are improving your strength. And changes are happening at the cellular level that will lead to a more toned physique bit by bit.
Stay consistent, play the long game, and you will see and feel lasting results.”