Building Muscle In Your Golden Years
No matter what you have heard, it’s never too late to grow stronger by developing a strength training exercise program. Keeping muscles strong as we age is more important than you might think, stronger muscles help prevent many old age problems such as a lower risk of osteoporosis, less frailty due to healthy muscles and bones, and greater mental and emotional health.
The Older You Get
You may not realize but the older you get, the more you have to work to maintain your muscles, researcher’s report that older men and women have to lift weights more often than younger adults to maintain muscle mass and muscle size. From the time you are born to around the time you turn 30, your muscles grow larger and stronger. But at some point in your 30s, you start to lose muscle mass and function.
Physically inactive people can lose as much as 3% to 5% of their muscle mass each decade after age 30. Even if you are active, you’ll still have some muscle loss. Starting around your 40s, your metabolism slows more and more rapidly with age. That’s because losing muscle mass is a natural part of aging. The more muscle mass you have, the faster your metabolism.
Now we all know what happens when your metabolism slows down, we gain weight, which is bad for your health no matter how old you are. As we get older, we get less and less active, and if we don’t change our eating habits, we have to start buying bigger pants size and who wants that.
As we age, muscle mass tends to decrease and fat tends to increase, which means your body won’t burn up as many calories as efficiently and your metabolism suffers. So, what’s the solution? I think you already know, change your eating habits and exercise more. It’s funny how the simplest solution is always the best one.
Maintaining Muscle Mass
Maintaining muscle mass in your 50s, 60s & 70s has so many benefits that can help you in virtually every area of life.
- More lean muscle naturally helps you burn more fat.
- Lean muscle makes you naturally stronger.
- More lean muscle will give you more stamina.
- Adding lean muscle makes your body look better and in return, you will feel better.
Now the best way to keep muscle tone is to lift weights, but you can also do simple push-ups or even simpler is dynamic tension, which if you remember, Charles Atlas pretty much developed. (Charles Atlas was a fitness guru in the 1950s, he would advertise on the back of comic books. Surprising you can still buy his body-building program on Amazon.)
Eating the right things is important, protein is the king of muscle food. The body breaks it down into amino acids, which it uses to build muscle. Reduce your fat consumption; eat things like lean meats, chicken breast, white meat turkey, solid white tuna, eggs, milk, yogurt, lentils, nuts and seeds, quinoa. Or you can always get whey protein; it comes in powdered form and many different flavors.
So although your cardio exercise is very important you must incorporate strength exercise into your daily routine. Remember if you are just starting out, take it easy, start off slow and work your way up.
Personally, I think that picture is gross, I would never want to look like that. I am happy to be able to “Pinch An Inch And Be Happy”
