Most people celebrate weight loss, but very few ask, “Did I lose muscle too?”
Do you think we should pay more attention to building strength as we age? Why or why not?
I’m curious to hear different perspectives.
What if the biggest health mistake parents over 30 make isn't gaining fat... but losing muscle?
OldDoug
(Doug)
#2
I think most people should pay more attention to maintaining muscle and strength, or building strength - than they do.
I’ve got an 89 year old - my wife’s mom - who I see regularly, and a 93 year old - my wife’s aunt - who lives with us. People are living longer, and perhaps “80 is the new 60,” etc., but even with fairly good overall health, it’s a long pull from 75-80 to 90.
89 year old mom can no longer live totally independently. 93 year old aunt is doing better - she’s got her own kitchen and does her own thing; many days I don’t even see her. She totally loves her privacy, reads like crazy, watches TV, sleeps and is awake at a wide variety of hours.
Problems with balance and strength are apparent with both of them. If we want to keep doing things, then we better do them or else lose the ability, right down to just walking.
Muscle mass and healthy stress on bones means a lot - keeps us more metabolically healthy, lower risk of fractures, better bone mass/lower risk of osteoporosis, even better cognitive function (exercise and strength does appear to make some difference).
VirginiaEdie
(Edith)
#3
Yeah, I have been wondering how much of age related degeneration is related to just not getting enough nutrients, especially protein, as we age (especially in women) and not participating in activities that encourage muscle growth.
I was observing elderly men and women at the grocery store one Sunday. In general, the women tended to be more frail then the men. Why? Well, again, in general, men have more muscle mass than women, so as women age and lose muscle, they get to the point of frailty more quickly than men.
Women are also more likely to eat less protein, especially less red meat than men. I feel a good reason for this is cultural. It is not lady-like to eat a lot of meat. Women are more likely to be vegetarian and vegan, more likely to eat a lot of salad, etc. Women are also more likely to chose aerobic exercise over strength training. Aerobic exercise actually pairs down muscle to make the body more efficient at the aerobic exercise. So, women have a quadruple whammy: They don’t eat enough, they don’t eat enough protein, they tend to have lower muscle mass, and they don’t strength train.
I think osteoporosis can also be explained with the quadruple whammy. Most of bone is made of protein. You don’t eat enough protein, you are not going to maintain or build bone no matter how much vitamin D and calcium you ingest. Just like building muscle, you are not going to build muscle unless you give your body a stimulus to build muscle, you are not going to build bone if you don’t give your body a reason to build bone.
So, IMO more information needs to be provided to the elderly about how important it is to get adequate protein which should be quite a bit more than the RDA, especially for the elderly, and how important strength training throughout one’s lifetime is. I don’t think the message to “remain active” is enough.
Shinita
#4
(I reacted before reading your full comment, you mentioned this too.)
And the ones eating almost nothing to be skinny are more often female while their normal energy need is lower to begin with… Don’t expect healthy bones and muscle mass eating 800-1000 kcal a day (even 1200 unless one is tiny and has a really small energy need naturally) - and it’s true even when one is young.
Good thing no one told me that 
I eat very little meat all by myself (I ate little meat on carnivore too, well compared to carnivores. barely went over a pound a day in my most meaty times but I always go back to little meat)… But always high protein. I only could go down to adequate protein on plant-based days without vital gluten, my vegetarian days inevitably were high animal protein. But yep, I am aware I am not typical.
Yep, totally agree.
About the main question: yes, it’s very important to be active and have strength training. We can be fine without it when young but as we age, it gets really important (of course it’s best to start early. I haven’t done it). And it’s not just physical, I have heard it’s important for the brain too or something.
BuckRimfire
(BuckRimfire)
#5
Excellent point. I wonder how many people actually understand any of that? I’m sure I’m more aware of diet and exercise info than most of the population and I didn’t know how much of bone strength and toughness was due to protein in the bone until a few years ago.
Heck, I wonder how many MDs really understand this…
Hippie
(Ohio )
#6
There’s a direct correlation between grip strength & longevity. So that’s where I’m at. I still walk & bike, but my focus is forearm muscles, hands, shoulders, etc. (So no bench press either 
)
I’m not a parent though, nore am I that young.
BuckRimfire
(BuckRimfire)
#7
I haven’t looked into this, but I’m very suspicious that you are over-interpreting the specificity of that correlation. I’ll bet a dollar that grip strength is simply an easily-tested proxy for a whole bunch of factors affecting fitness, and that specifically training grip strength is not going to promote longevity.
One thing that really tends to kill the olds is falling, so maintaining fast-twitch muscles in the legs is likely to be important. You need to be able to move your leg quickly to catch yourself when you stumble. Does that correlate with grip strength? I haven’t looked at the data, but I’ll bet it does.
I’m 61. My favorite activity is sea kayaking, which I don’t get to indulge in very often due to work schedule and my wife’s cancer treatment. I try to maintain whole-body fitness with occasional stationary bike interval workouts (and WOW is it getting harder to elevate my heart rate vs even five years ago* OMG) and weight training. I find squats a bit scary, so I hit my legs mainly with trap-bar deadlifts, which have the advantage (or not) of also taxing my grip.
I should probably do more single leg work (split or Bulgarian dumbbell deadlifts) because I find those hard to stabilize, so I doubtless need to work the stabilizing muscles, and they would put way less abuse on my hands (for some reason only my right hand is ever stiff after training).
BTW, I turn the extra high handles on the trap bar down and use the smaller diameter 35# plates to load it, because I don’t need a hell of a lot of weight, so I am actually getting a greater range of motion than a standard deadlift. Effectively a modest “deficit deadlift.” I’m always pleasantly surprised that my slightly injured right knee cartilage doesn’t find all this nonsense troubling…
One thing I like about the trap bar is that I am very nearly the only person at my gym who ever uses it, so there is no competition for the equipment. I guess everyone younger than me thinks it’s lame and everyone older thinks it’s excessive.
*Ironically, I work in a university physiology department and one of the professors studies the control of heart rate. I doubt her work has anything to inform me, but I should go lodge some joking complaints about this subject with her anyway. Maybe at the departmental summer party coming up…
CFLBob
(Central Florida Bob )
#8
This. I bet the same study could demonstrate that good handwriting is an easily-tested proxy for it, too.
The vast majority of medical studies like that are just correlation vs. causation. To do that as a Randomized, Controlled Trial would give you better data, but you just can’t do studies like that. Too impractical, too expensive, too risky.
ctviggen
(Bob M)
#9
There are too many variables. There’s the “healthy user effect”, which means that healthy users are more likely to have better grip strength.
Even I will sometimes use a popper that pops the top of a top of a jar. I still have relatively high grip strength.
And this can also be trained. If you remember those metal hand springs, we were sitting around when I was in the military and put a penny in between the two plastic ends of the hand spring. We tested each person. The person with the best results had a lot of experience riding dirt bikes (motorcycles). He had outstanding strength there.
The rage lately is to stand up from or sit down to the floor without using your hands and only using your legs. I could not figure out how to do that. Then I saw a video of how someone did it from the floor up. I tried that, and reinjured an ankle injury I previously had, and couldn’t jog for … at least a month.
Meanwhile, I do body weight training multiple times per week, with a lot of one-legged training. I’m still strong, but I don’t have the best technique for getting up from the floor without my hands.
GSrider
(Philip H Kern)
#10
I agree entirely. I played various sports until I hit 49–couldn’t make it to 50 because the basketball comps were simply too late at night for me to keep going. When my activity declined, I put some fat on my generally lean frame. The doctor eventually told me to lose weight, so I did. I regret now my approach, which was to reduce and track calories. I slowed my metabolism and lost muscle: at 63, the muscle is proving hard to rebuild. If I could do it over, I would prioritise weight sessions twice per week of only 30 minutes, with the goal of building strength. I can’t imagine people losing muscle while building strength (unless chronically underfed).
VirginiaEdie
(Edith)
#11
Yes, but I believe grip strength is being used as a way to assess overall strength. The correlation goes: If you have a strong grip, you must be strong all over.
The same with balance. Yes, balance does require practice, but it also requires a strong core. So, being able to balance on one foot is a way to gauge core strength. If you have a strong core, you are better able to maintain your balance and less likely to fall.
So… the importance of strength training comes into play again. Throwing around a bunch of dumbbells will help improve grip strength. Building your core helps maintain balance. Just working on grip strength or just practicing balancing are too simplistic.
Shinita
#12
It makes sense to me.
Oh. But I always had a good balance (at least if my footwear is right. if it’s not and the ground is slippery, I can fall and hurt myself quite badly, it seems. my bones must be strong but there are other vulnerable parts) and an extremely weak core (since I am working on it, it got better. now I collapse after 10 seconds when planking, not 5!)…
NikoNeko
(Niko Neko)
#14
That sounds like a really cool activity - I find the sea a bit terrifying, but would like to find out more about this.
Does anyone know - if you have osteoporosis, can you repair it? Someone on another forum said she was doing Carnivore and went in for a DEXA scan and her bones became significantly worse. It’s made me nervous about the diet because I already have some degraded joints and arthritis.
Hippie
(Ohio )
#15
I do lots of different kinds of yoga, and other core exercises. I thought I was throwing enough shade on the bench-press crowd to get that point across. I’m not sure how so much gets assumed from that one statement. Dr. Chat G.P.T. seems to agree w/ me. 
However I originally read it as “All cause mortality” if that matters. All I did was mention what I read in a book. (Offline stuff)
VirginiaEdie
(Edith)
#16
Yeah, I drank the strength training Kool-aid a couple of years ago, and there is nothing worse than a convert. 
I meant no disrespect for yoga. 
BuckRimfire
(BuckRimfire)
#17
Well, I don’t often paddle in “the sea,” meaning on the outer coast where the next land to the west is Hawaii, Japan or the Aleutian Islands, depending on which way you are looking. Mostly, I kayak in Puget Sound, near Seattle, or in the channels around the San Juan Islands, which are risky in their own way: water is always dangerously cold, and strong currents in spots can make it rough even when there is no wind, and very rough if the wind is at all significant. But I also white-water (river) kayak a little bit, only up to Class III water, so I’m comfortable in more waves than the average sea kayaker and can brace (use the paddle for supporting strokes instead of only propulsion and steering) well enough that I’ve never flipped in salt water and needed to test my mediocre rolling skills, except when screwing around out at Pacific Beach or Westport in actual beach-break.
I wrote a bit about this a couple of times before. I’ve been hoping to add San Juan Island to the 62 mile loop below (there’s a map if you follow the connect.garmin link) for a total of 73 miles, but haven’t been able to do that since 2020, due to wife’s cancer diagnosis and other life complications. I’m barely over 60, so I think I can probably still do this if I don’t wait too much longer. Maybe next year…
I am fairly comfortable, or maybe dangerously complacent, about being in the actual ocean, at least under mild conditions. One of my big regrets is that about ten years ago, two couples I know were sailing from Seattle to Cuba in a rather small sailing yacht (then the owners of the boat continued to Sicily where they lived aboard for several years before selling the boat and breaking up their marriage). It happened that the day they were passing the mouth of the Columbia River, we were in Seaside, Oregon because my daughter was in an Irish dance competition there that weekend, and I had brought one of my kayaks to play in the surf and paddle a few miles down the coast along shore. I realized too late that I should have pre-arranged with them to meet at a GPS waypoint, say five miles or so offshore. Even a mile would have been safe for their boat, because the bottom falls off quickly, but that would have given them a little bit more of a detour to round the next point of land to the south, so it would have been a good excuse to go out further so they didn’t have to bend their course as much. It was nice summer weather and the conditions of chugging out into the blue (or green, really, is the water color around here) for an hour and a half would have been more meditative than anything else. A sadly-lost opportunity!
Anecdotes aside, here is a review of the subject:
Full disclosure: I did not read the whole text, but skipped straight to the Discussion section because that’s where the take-home messages live (reading the rest makes sense mostly if you want all the details and intend to try to make judgements about them). The bottom line is, as is so often the case, that there simply isn’t enough good research in humans to be sure if the ketogenic diet (KD) has a negative or positive effect on bone density, and I’ll bet that goes double or triple for carnivore, since it’s studied much less.
The last paragraph:
In conclusion, there are currently no human clinical studies with powerful and adequate experimental designs to definitively understand the impact of KD therapy on bone health. The few articles included in this systematic review showed no significant changes in bone metabolism in patients treated with KD. In children with intractable epilepsy, the combination of KD and AED could explain the reduction in BMD and bone mass. Animal studies show low BMD and abnormal cortical and cancellous bone mass, but these results have not been reported in human studies. Due to the lack of clinical studies on the impact of KD on bone health conducted in adult men and its long-term effects, it is not possible to determine whether KD can result in osteopenia and osteoporosis.
What is pretty well known is that bone is a responsive organ and the way to strengthen bone is to load it more heavily so it responds by becoming stronger. If you can afford to hire a personal trainer to help you do squats or deadlifts, that is probably the most effective thing one could do to stimulate bone in the legs, in my very unprofessional and incompetent opinion.
As I said above, I find squats a bit scary and tricky. I occasionally do them solo, but I don’t love it. I would probably not recommend squats even with an amateur spotter unless they have quite a bit of weight-training experience. Having a real trainer would be reassuring.
Trap-bars aren’t found in every gym, but they’re not that rare. Deadlifts with a trap bar seem to require less skill than a straight barbell and might be less likely to lead to injury.
The biggest problem with deadlifts is that all the weight hangs from your hands (which is what makes squats appealing, since upper-body strength is less critical, I think). Wrist straps can help overcome limitations from grip strength, which might otherwise hold you back, but they’re a little awkward to employ, at least the ones I’ve tried.
Depending on the person, that might just lead to the limiting part of the chain becoming the shoulders. Again, a competent trainer might be able to help avoid shoulder injuries, although I seem to have gotten away with going it alone, maybe. I’ve been doing deadlifts pretty regularly for a couple of years or so, and for roughly the same time, I’ve had occasional “problems” with a LOUD popping noise from my neck when I’m laying in bed with my head propped up to watch TV and I turn my head sideways. Basically the same phenomenon as cracking your knuckles, I guess. There doesn’t seem to be any harm in it, but it’s quite surprising and I don’t like it! I suspect this has something to do with increased tension in some muscles in the back of my neck stimulated by deadlifting.
Doing a few weeks of shoulder training before deadlifting might be prudent. I like this guy. I did a few of these exercises a year ago when my shoulder was slightly sore and it seemed to help:
NikoNeko
(Niko Neko)
#18
Oh wow, that is so cool. I live at the mouth of the Columbia river, I ride my bike out to the spit where it’s river on one side and ocean on the other. (Brutal crosswinds through…nice wildlife overlook on the Columbia side :D)
I drive into Seaside sometimes but the summer tourism traffic can be packed, I love the feed the seals at the Seaside Aquarium though. It’s a fun area. My husband works in Astoria - we transplanted up here because he’s a tech, but I’m from Oklahoma / Texas originally so yeah, these wild COLD waters around here to me are incredible and super daunting.
I have never been kayaking but live inside Fort Stevens and we have Coffenbury lake which recently began renting kayaks and paddle boards. I hope to get into shape and at least get a wet suit and attempt paddle boarding next year
Fort Stevens has miles of trails with river, ocean, lake and various biomes. Highly recommend it. Here is Coffenbury Lake.
I also dutifully always have to recommend Lewis and Clark National Historical Park – a very nice museum, great staff, lots of trails. Really amazing volunteers (haha, I used to be a volunteer ;-P)
I’ve been doing some free weights but I have a long way to go until I feel fit I think. Gotta keep after it. My neck pops a lot too, hmm, there is some yoga moves that require head circles and my neck always pops loudly.
Anyway, hope you get back down to Oregon sometime
BuckRimfire
(BuckRimfire)
#19
I’ve been paddleboarding once, or maybe twice, and only in protected water. I don’t like it! Paddleboarding is WAY harder than kayaking! Standing up and using that long paddle gives the water more leverage against you, and forces you to transmit the forces all the way from your feet to your hands and back down the paddle. It’s a huge disadvantage relative to a kayak (or canoe, which is not quite the same but is closer than standing). Canoeing or kayaking are pretty good core workouts (if done with correct technique, which is actually fairly rare), but paddleboarding is even better!
And standing up you catch ALL of the wind on your body, so at the same time that the force you can generate is less, the force of wind you have to overcome is much more. It’s brutal. For most people, I’d estimate that the distance they could cover in a good kayak is five to ten times more than on a paddleboard. I am not kidding!
I understand why paddleboarding is so much more popular lately: A kayak, particularly a long sea kayak, is a hugely inconvenient thing to store. When we were shopping for our house 25 years ago, my only criterion was that the garage had to be at least 19 feet long inside to fit my 18 foot boat which was then on order, and preferably over 21 in case we bought a double some day. That’s a big luxury compared to an inflatable paddleboard which can be rolled up and stored in a typical closet without using more than 1/4 or 1/3 of that space. So if your choice is an inflatable paddleboard or not being able to get out on the water at all, that’s a pretty easy choice. (Inflatable kayaks kinda suck, and folding kayaks are expensive and prone to wearing out quicker than a rigid boat, I believe.)
What’s less clear to me is why some people like rigid paddleboards. Yes, they’re faster than an inflatable paddleboard, but they’re slower and less seaworthy than a good sea kayak, and not THAT much cheaper or easier to store.
BuckRimfire
(BuckRimfire)
#20
Good idea on the wetsuit. I wear mine (a 3 mm Farmer John) almost all the time, except in VERY protected locations. Enough that someone would be forgiven for thinking I have a fetish for rubber clothing, which I do not. I just don’t like drowning for stupid reasons. (I don’t consider doing long crossings alone stupid, but that’s a separate argument, and I think the risk is worth the fun.)
Even when you skip a dry top or paddling jacket in deference to warm weather, that’s enough neoprene to make a short swim during a self-rescue more bearable. I’ll often put on a waterproof top for the most risky legs of a route and take it off at breaks during the less threatening legs.
I also keep a VHF marine radio clipped to my PFD shoulder strap, so if it gets so bad I can’t do a self-rescue, I have at least some hope of calling for help and being picked up.