Although it is true that as we age our hormonal environment changes and therefore a certain reduction or difficulty in maintaining our muscle mass should be expected, the real cause that causes a loss of muscle mass is sedentary lifestyle.
Let’s see it from another perspective. When we get older we tend to be more contemplative and sedentary, either because at this age the pace of life slows down or because we simply feel weaker and more fragile. This per se, will cause a loss in our muscle and bone tissue. So, do we lose muscle mass because we get more sedentary or do we get more sedentary because we lose muscle mass? Both.
That is why it is important to maintain good levels of physical activity in general and practice strength training in particular. In this article We explain what you need to know to avoid losing your muscle mass when you get older.
Practice strength training
It may seem the most obvious, especially if you are used to reading us, but we must constantly remember it.
More and more studies and more professionals point out that evaluating the physical condition of a person taking into account their amount of muscle tissue and even the strength of the hand measured by a dynamometer, is a very reliable predictor of health in advanced ages.
In this way we must evolve and begin to develop not only flexibility or aerobic capacity, but also strength. Without strength, the rest of the capacities cannot be developed.
Ideally, start with at least two days a week of strength training through 8-10 exercises of between 10 and 15 repetitions. Although you can start with your body weight and little else, we recommend you go to a gym and get advice from a professional who can make use of all the tools that a sports center offers.
The intensity of effort that you must print in each series has to be around 5-8 on a scale of 1 to 10.
don’t forget your bones
If muscle tissue is important, so is bone, especially since we tend to imagine our bones as inert tissue. Nothing further.
Pampering our bones is as important as pampering our muscles and for this we must take into account a nuance: compression stimuli.
It is true that by the simple fact of strength training our bones receive a large part of the stimuli they need to maintain proper renewal and regeneration. These stimuli derived from strength training are traction, that is, the ones our muscles produce in our bones when they pull on them. These traction stimuli stimulate the cortical bone, the densest and most superficial, to a greater extent. Metabolically it is also less active and is renewed less.
On the other hand, our bones can suffer compression stimuli, such as when the force of gravity acts directly on them. This happens in those exercises in which the load falls vertically on us (squats or deadlifts for example) or when we run. When we run our bones must withstand hundreds of small impacts of a compressive nature. These types of stimuli affect the trabecular bone to a greater extent, a type of bone that is more spongy and metabolically more active, so its renewal rate is higher. In short, train strength and run or do low-impact activities; a step class can be a great example.
In fact, osteoporosis mainly affects bones with a greater amount of trabecular tissue, such as the cervical vertebrae or the head of the femur.
So it’s important to strength train not only for our muscles, but also to maintain our bone tissue. If osteoporosis affects us, we will not be able to train properly and our muscle mass will be more compromised. Everything feeds back.
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