Why Muscle Strength Is the Foundation of Ageing Well

Why Should We Care About Our Muscles?

When I think about ageing well, what comes to mind is a very ordinary life. Being able to walk, to climb stairs, to swim, to carry my own suitcase, to get up off the floor without difficulty, to wander a city's streets for hours. To keep doing my own everyday things myself, for as long as possible.

To do any of that, we need our muscles.

Using our muscles from a young age and keeping them strong is one of the best investments we can make in the years ahead. And as we age, that investment has to be maintained.

Our Muscles Start Changing in Our Thirties

Muscle mass reaches its peak in young adulthood. From our thirties onward it naturally begins to decline. Research reports this loss can be somewhere around 3 to 8 percent per decade, and that it can accelerate further in later years.

And it is not only the amount of muscle that changes over time. Our strength and our physical performance are affected too.

When we say “muscle loss” you might picture muscle cells disappearing one by one, but the process works a little differently. With age and with inactivity, muscle fibres can shrink. We call this muscle atrophy. In later years, the loss of some muscle fibres and of the motor units that govern them can accompany the process.

A marked age related decline in strength, muscle mass and physical performance brings us to the idea of sarcopenia. What that term means in daily life is very familiar. Pushing off with your hands to get out of a chair, no longer climbing stairs as easily, walking more slowly, shopping bags starting to feel heavy, struggling to get up from the floor...

This is the real reason to care about our muscles.

Our Muscles Have a Memory

One of my favourite ideas about muscle is muscle memory.

Anyone who trained for years, stopped, and started again knows the feeling. The first days are hard. After a while the movements become familiar again and the body starts to adapt.

There is science behind this. Research suggests that some of the cellular and epigenetic adaptations exercise creates in our muscles can be retained for a time. Work on the mechanisms underlying muscle memory is still going on.

My favourite part is this:

Training when you are young is precious. Continuing to use those muscles in the years that follow is what helps us keep what we built.

Keeping an Exercise Routine Is Not Always Easy

I trained regularly for many years. I have known how much muscle matters for a long time, and I tell the people around me to move.

Even so, I lose my own routine often.

The rhythm of life changes. Travel, work and the daily rush get in the way. After a while I find myself trying to make room again for something that was a natural part of my life for years.

So I understand how hard it can be to build an exercise habit, and especially to hold onto it across years.

Saying “exercise” is easy. Fitting it into a real life takes more effort than that.

That is why I love the idea of muscle memory. Knowing that my body can draw on its past experience when I start again is a good feeling.

But for the training I did in the past to protect the muscles I have today, I have to move again now.

Let Us Walk, and Get a Little Stronger

I love walking. It is one of the easiest kinds of movement to add to daily life.

When we walk we work the heart and the vascular system, we support our metabolic health, and we get outside. Walking with a friend brings conversation and a social bond into it as well. While the body moves, we mix back into life.

As we age, adding resistance exercise alongside walking becomes especially important.

The World Health Organization recommends that adults do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity a week, plus strengthening exercise working the major muscle groups on at least two days a week. In later years, strength and balance work is also recommended as part of the weekly pattern.

Resistance work can use weights. It can also use resistance bands, or our own body weight. And some of the movements we already make in daily life can be turned into small strength sessions.

Standing up from a chair and sitting back down is one of the best examples.

We Can Scatter Movement Through the Day

There is an idea I have come across in the scientific literature in recent years and have grown very fond of: exercise snacks.

The logic is simple. We scatter movement through the day in short pieces.

On a day when we cannot find an hour, we can walk for ten minutes. When we have been at a desk for a long stretch, we can stand up and sit down a few times. We can get out of the lift a floor early and take the stairs.

There are studies suggesting that breaking up long periods of sitting with short bouts of movement can have a positive effect on metabolic markers, particularly the glucose and insulin response.

I find this approach fits real life very well.

If there is no hour, there are ten minutes. If there are no ten minutes, there are five sit to stands.

What matters is moving again, and keeping that inside our lives as much as we can.

With every movement we send our muscles the same message:

I remind myself of this while I rebuild my own routine.

Walking, swimming, going back to strength work, and moving through the day...

If we want our muscles to carry us in good health years from now, we have to keep using them today.