Source: TW
Decline pattern
How physical qualities degrade as you age.
I’ve been fit all my life. From late twenties to fifty I trained competitively. In my experience here’s the order in which physical performance degrades.
- 1 Recovery takes longer. You can train just as hard but are achy for longer. Sooner or later this means that frequency of hard sessions must decrease.
- 2 You become more prone to injury.
- 3 Need for a good warm-up increases.
- 4 Speed degrades.
- 5 Reactivity and agility degrades.
- 6 Tolerance to acidosis and hard repeats degrades.
- 7 Power degrades.
- 8 Strength degrades.
- 9 Endurance degrades.
Top performance starts to degrade when recovery takes longer and injury strikes - this means that quality volume and frequency is reduced; the start of long-term slow performance decline. For a while one can retain qualities by being more intelligent with training, knowing your body, and erring on the side of caution. Eventually, the inevitable decline in performance has to be accepted.
This decline is accelerated by chronic lack of sleep, chronic under-recovery, drinking too much alcohol, not getting quality nutrition.
However! If you look after yourself, keep healthy and stay consistent with exercise, diet and lifestyle, you can remain in great physical condition throughout life 💪☀️🌿
What supplements do you take?
Regularly, creatine. Intermittently, Vit C, D, Magnesium, Multivit/min, glucosamine, collagen
And there’s not much you can do about wear and tear except diet and exercise
There’s a lot said on twitter that ‘“motion is lotion”, “work your joints to keep them healthy”, “the risk of not doing exercise is better than the risk of not doing exercise” - this is all true - but training for years to maximise one’s physical performance will inevitably come with wear and tear.
Resistance training
Fit but Frail.
‘Lifelong aerobic exercise training is unable to prevent most of the decrements in fast fibre contractile function, which have been implicated as a primary mechanism for the age-related loss in whole-muscle power output’
Resistance Training is essential in old age. Preserve your fast-twitch fibres.
Gravity
GRAVITY 🌎🏋️♂️
Gravity is an increasing challenge for people as they age; they fall, they break bones, they have difficulty walking up stairs or slopes, they can’t get up from a chair without using their arms. Ironically, gravity is the upstream reason.
“One Week of Bed Rest Leads to Substantial Muscle Atrophy
and Induces Whole-Body Insulin Resistance in the Absence of Skeletal Muscle Lipid Accumulation”Short (<10 days) periods of muscle disuse, often necessary for recovery from illness or injury, lead to various negative health consequences.
Working against gravity is how we retain our strength. Using ‘hyper-gravity’ (my term for resistance training), in any direction or plane, means that normal gravity is easier to overcome. Strong, robust and enduring strength is the fountain of youth.
Look at the elderly people who have difficulty navigating your High St,
you notice it’s their legs which are the problem?
This didn’t just happen,
it’s the (near) end result of not resisting the effects of aging via strength training and robust activity.
This physical decline of strength and fitness starts in your 30’s
if you are not actively doing something about it.
Again, elderly people don’t suddenly become fragile,
it’s just a point on the unresisted trajectory of aging.
Deadlifts and Squats are Hyper-G.
Weight training is hyper-gravity training, so the effects go far deeper than strengthening muscles. If we increased gravity by 10% or changed some aspect of the environment, we would adapt to it (every chronic stressor elicits an adaptive ‘resistance’). The tale of Superman hit upon this in that Clark Kent (Kal-El) was normal under conditions on his planet but became superhuman on Earth. If you were born on the Moon, you wouldn’t be able to jump about like Neil Armstrong, and a holiday on Earth would be like wearing a 2001b weighted jacket (you’d need a wheelchair).The body is demand led. The demand is our environment. With weight training you are recreating (to an extent) hyper gravity. Hyper-G doesn’t just work the muscles but also the bones, the heart, and other systems of the body we haven’t yet figured out. We know that Zero-G has all sorts of effects far beyond muscle atrophy and bone weakness; maybe resistance training impacts the same (or some of the same) systems but in a positive way.
[From: Anaerobics: Destruction & Reconstruction]
LEGS
If you can’t do a single chin-up or pull-up that’s pretty bad, you may be overweight or plain weak, whatever. But if you can’t do a single air squat you probably only have a year or two (at most) to live. The condition and robustness of your legs tell us something about the state of your entire body. This is because your legs are practically inseparable from getting (and staying) fit, strong and healthy.
Weak and atrophied legs signal something is wrong; you are sedentary or spending too much time on only one aspect of fitness, say, chronic jogging at a snail’s pace.
As you age the legs become more and more important to combat fragility. You need your legs for locomotion and every meaningful activity. Working your lower body means you are working every system in the body, heart, lungs, muscles, mitochondria, blood supply… everything.
Research contradicts the common belief that muscle mass and strength decline as a function of aging alone. Instead, these declines may signal the effect of chronic disuse rather than muscle aging. Literally, ‘use it or lose it’. This is good to know, as the physical degradation of sedentary age can be reversed.
Whatever your ability, whatever your age, get started on ‘Hyper-G’. Resistance training will change your life, keep you young, and combat the physical degradation which comes from aging. Start it easy, take it slow and steady - there is no rush, but be consistent!