Here's how your fitness routine can reverse the effects of aging.
Everyone ages, and with age comes a natural decline of physical abilities. But fitness interventions can help combat the effects of aging—as long as you pick the right exercises.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hi, it’s Kevin Don, the Get-Fit Guy. Last week on the podcast, we discussed the differences between fitness and performance. If you haven’t yet, I’d definitely check that out. Today will be a continuation of that idea, as I’ll be exploring the best way for us to resist the inescapable effect on the body of… the aging process.
As we age, it's normal to see a gradual decline of our physical abilities. In order to help us combat this, a good starting point would be to define exactly what physical abilities or skills we, as humans, possess.
It is broadly agreed that there are ten physical skills. These ten physical skills were first defined by Bruce Evans and Jim Cawley of a company called Dynamax and they are now used by fitness organizations and gyms worldwide as a framework for a well-rounded approach to training.
These ten skills are:
Of these ten skills, strength is the most “general.” That is because strength will have a great impact on many of the other skills, whereas the other skills will mainly only be impactful upon themselves. For example, power, which is the ability to express maximal force in minimal time. Without the ability to create force, it will be an impossible task to express it quickly. Put simply: you can’t express what you don’t possess.
This leads us to the conclusion that strength is the area to spend most of our time, if the goal is well-rounded outcomes for the general population. Of course, for a particular sporting outcome, strength may not be the best choice, but here we are concerned with health and wellness, not performance.
Strength will also be the biggest bang for our buck as a hedge against the side effects of the aging process. It allows us to specifically tackle two of the major hallmarks of the aging process: sarcopenia, the loss the muscle mass, and osteopenia, the loss of bone mineral density
To improve the body's ability to retain muscle mass, like any other adaptation process, we have to apply an ongoing, ever-increasing external stress to the body. This is known as the SAID principle, which is an acronym that stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand.
In short, the body responds very specifically to the stress under which you place it. Not enough stress and there won’t be an adaptation. Too much stress and you won’t recover.
So what kind of stress do we need to combat loss of muscle mass and bone mineral density?
Let’s start with the soft tissues: muscles, ligaments, and tendons. The best way to improve strength here is tensile force. Tensile forces are where the body is resisting being pulled apart by the force of gravity. Think about your arms being pulled down by heavy grocery bags and how you have to brace against that.
Examples of tensile movements we can perform in the gym to improve muscle strength are:
But when it comes to improving strength in your bones, you’ll want to look at the opposite of tensile force: compression. Compression occurs when our body is being squashed by a load and gravity between an external object and the ground. This compression is resisted by the bones and, just like muscles, they respond to the increasing forces being applied. This is called Wolff’s Law. The idea is that a bone will adapt to the loads under which it is placed and as loading on a bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger and resist that loading.
Good examples of loaded movements that will improve bone density are:
Ironically, when I see aging populations training in the gym, I usually see them on elliptical trainers and hand bikes because they want to avoid impact. But in the absence of notable injury to the joints, impact and loading are exactly what we should be prioritizing as we age and are, in fact, the only way to overcome the main side effects of the entropic process on our physicality.
When it comes to selecting the exercises that are best for us to perform, its always a good starting point to consider exercise selection as a healthcare provider would consider a prescription. Training, after all, IS an intervention with effects on health and well-being.
We should have two main considerations for choosing exercises and movements:
The exercise must be safe for the person performing it. That is: we could select explosive, dynamic movements like sprints, certain weightlifting movements, or plyometrics, but they may have a great risk-to-reward ratio than other exercises we could perform. Explosive movements are harder to control and therefore won’t be as useful for improving motor patterns. They also make it more difficult to ascertain the effect of exercises and adjust the balance as needed.. We should be looking for slow, incremental improvements over time.
The exercise should be broad and effective. Just as one would not continue to take a pharmaceutical which wasn’t addressing the diagnosed problem, we should avoid exercises which don’t move the needle toward the intended outcome. As mentioned already, if the goal is to improve bone density and the trainee doesn’t have any notable injury, then an elliptical trainer might be considered a poor choice compared with a barbell squat.
As you can now imagine, there are many ways to improve strength in the various parts and pieces of the body and the patterns in which we move. Be sure to stay tuned to the podcast because very soon, I will be discussing the best movements for improving motor control, movement patterns, and localized strength!