What if the biggest health mistake parents over 30 make isn't gaining fat... but losing muscle?

(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 :smiling_imp:)

I’m not a parent though, nore am I that young.

(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…

(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.

(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.

(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).

(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.

#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!)…

(Edith) #13

You’ve improved your plank 100%, not bad! :blush:

(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.

(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. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: 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)

(Edith) #16

Yeah, I drank the strength training Kool-aid a couple of years ago, and there is nothing worse than a convert. :laughing: I meant no disrespect for yoga. :blush:

(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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE0ktBkeo64

(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 :smiley:

Fort Stevens has miles of trails with river, ocean, lake and various biomes. Highly recommend it. Here is Coffenbury Lake.

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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 :smiley:

(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) #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.

(Niko Neko) #21

I’m usually out along the water and some mornings are so eerie, those weird slack tides, the call of a lonely aquatic bird, a bit of fog - to set out in a Kayak is brave! It sounds like yours is a lot larger than what I’ve seen around here though, tourists get those smaller red ones from Walmart but it’s impossible to find paddles - that’s a whole other thing, lol, my Son works in sporting goods. I’m terrified of rolling it and with my lack of grace I would definitely not right myself, so I thought maybe paddle board :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I have a large shop / barn that is largely unused and I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t get my storage items more organized and rent it out for someone’s boat storage. I don’t know how the insurance aspect would go - I don’t want to be responsible if a typhoon wind brings down one of these 70ft trees on it. Hmm. I do have the storage capacity though which is worth gold in the PNW where space is a premium.

(BuckRimfire) #22

Yes, that’s an interesting question. If you had to file a claim, I have no idea if the insurance company would ask to see evidence of purchase for “your” kayak. However, there may be a limit on the value anyway. IIRC I only got enough by default to cover about 1/2 of one of my nicer boats, so I bought a rider on the policy to cover all of them, in case my garage burns up. It was pretty cheap. Whether someone else could get a policy to cover their boat in your shop I don’t know, but I’d guess not.

You could just have an agreement with the person storing the boat that you’ll do your best to secure the space but you can’t cover them for theft, fire, or Act of God (is that what a windstorm would be considered?), and see what they say. If they’re OK with that and will write it down, no problem!

(BuckRimfire) #23

I remember hearing about that test before but never really tried it until this week after reading your post. I had done some strength training on Saturday and Sunday (with some leg work both days although lighter on Sunday) and a four-mile walk on Monday. On Tuesday I tried the test and I could get up easily by bending my knees so my feet went over to the right, then pivoting up over my heels and on into a split squat, but I couldn’t do it at all to the left! My legs were too stiff (or maybe my hips) and I couldn’t rotate them into position, which I hadn’t even noticed in normal activities.

But Tuesday was otherwise a rest day, and on Wednesday I could do it easily on both sides. My legs felt a lot looser that day.

This was interesting. I should remember to do this periodically and write it down to keep track.

(BuckRimfire) #24

Yes, self-rescue on a paddleboard is much more simple. Self-rescues and buddy rescues with a sit-inside kayak definitely have a lot of technique and practice required. Also probably requires more upper-body strength since the boat deck is higher. Between that and the technique, it can be challenging.

There are also sit-on-top kayaks which are somewhat easier to get back on and are self-bailing, but in they’re more popular in places where it is warmer and less rainy. They have their pros and cons, for sure…

BTW, among all the kayakers I talk to, the jargon is pretty specific: to “roll” is to roll UP, while going over is “flipping,” whether voluntary or involuntary. We would say “They both flipped in that rapid, but she rolled and he swam.” Or in a pool session, you might say “Go ahead and flip, and if you miss your roll, I’ll give you a bow rescue so you don’t need to wet-exit.” So, if you want to sound like a pro, that’s the way to go.

Being able to roll is pretty much a requirement for whitewater or surf kayaking, but not for sea kayaking. Even in the heyday of sea kayaking in the 1990s, most people who did only sea kayaking did not know how to roll, or could do it in the pool but not very reliably in real conditions. You just don’t go over often enough to stay in practice. I don’t go whitewater kayaking very frequently, and I sold my surf kayaks because I suck and gave that up, so it’s likely that I’m too out of practice to be even somewhat reliable at rolling.

Ugh, yeah, those under-twelve-foot kayaks are known as “recreational kayaks” or rec kayaks, and they’re pretty terrible. They have the virtue only of being cheap, and I guess pretty easy to steer. The big problem is that they have virtually no buoyancy in the ends. Without quite a lot of volume protected from water in both ends of the boat (whether by bulkheads, foam, or airbags) self rescue is impossible and buddy rescue is VERY difficult, and maybe impossible in conditions that would otherwise be do-able in a bigger and better boat. So, going more than easy swimming distance from an accessible beach in one of those is potentially a one-way ticket! And in the cold water we have in the PNW, easy swimming distance is best measured in dozens of yards unless you have a wetsuit on. Best for very small bodies of water with no current.

Fully capable sea kayaks are usually 14 to 18 feet long, although I have one, a Mariner Coaster, that is only 13.5 feet yet could easily carry a 200 pound athletic guy, but it’s an unusual design and not very common. It seems like most of the manufacturers I was familiar with a couple of decades ago have gone out of business. A lot of what’s left skews a bit to the shorter end of that size range than was common before, which may be sensible if you are only planning day trips or maybe one night of camping, rather than a full-on expedition.

Unfortunately, sea kayaking (with a good boat) is kinda expensive. Buying all new gear, it can easily be $3000 to $5000, although maybe a bit less than that range if you stick to the low end. OTOH, there are lots of people aging out of the sport, so if you know what to look for and drive a slightly hard bargain, with a little patience it’s probably possible to get almost everything you need as a used package from a motivated seller for $1000.

(Jane) #25

When I was 26, I could stand up from a cross-legged position on the floor, holding my 30-lb kid and stand stright up without holding onto anything.

At 67… well, I am just happy I can stand up from the floor, but I have to use my hands on the ground to help, but at least I don’t have to hold onto anything. If I had to do that, I would have to give up gardening, which I dearly love.

From the main floor of my house to the meadow where my garden and chickens are is about the same as 3 flights of stairs. In the summer I make the trek several times a day. In the winter… not so much… and I sure feel it in the spring after the first few trips!

I live in rural Arkansas and there are so many broken-down elderly people at Walmart, with their carts loaded with carbage. Many of them on the electric carts. I understand having to use one if you have true mobility conditions, but I know some just don’t want to walk the store and they are doing their bodies a great disservice as they will lose their ability to do so much faster.