How To Age Like Fine Wine: The Secret Behind Barbells

Does Getting Old Mean Becoming Fragile?

I’ll spoil it right off the bat – absolutely not. In fact, acting as if you were fragile is likely contributing to you becoming fragile. Truth be told, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly, it’s largely perpetuated by modern media and conventional “wisdom”. I’m not sure where these attitudes came from, but they’re perpetuated on the basis of ignorance. In fact, taking care of your health as you age should be the rule, not the exception.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone mention that feeling broken down and weak is part of aging, I’d be able to hire Bezos as a personal butler. The truth is, at least in the United States, we’re victims of our own first-world leisure. Most jobs are desk jobs, or at least not very physically demanding.

Our idea of “relaxing” involves Cheeto Puffs and the Bachelor, and “normal” is sitting around for 8+ hours a day. When we leave machinery lying around and neglected, it rusts. When you feed your body terrible food and neglect it by not exercising in a meaningful way, it will also break down.

Thankfully, we have a scientific community dedicated to investigating these claims. As it turns out, the process of aging is more a reflection of how you decide to live rather than an inevitable decay that results in frailty and a permanent cognitive fog. Even more fortunate is that in order to age gracefully, it only takes a couple hours a week to their health.

Let’s focus on a couple common health concerns with aging.

• Osteoporosis and Osteopenia (Bone Loss)
• Cardiovascular Disease and Impaired Cognition
• Poor mobility and Strength to Accomplish Simple Tasks

Bone loss in older individuals is a massive cause of losing independence. Fragile, less dense, bones are more prone to fractures/breaks. When this is combined with poor muscle coordination, breaking bones becomes unfortunately common.

One of the most significant benefits of training with relatively heavy weight is that it actively fights against bone loss. Heavy resistance training increases bone density toward the medial (middle) areas of the bone. Impact training like box jumps increase bone density toward the distal (ends) areas of a bone.

It’s significantly harder to retroactively fight bone loss than proactively preventing it.

Make it a priority to strengthen your bones starting in your adult life!

By the time you get to an age where these become common problems, you will have spent decades proactively protecting yourself against them.

Is Heavy Lifting Safe?

Some specific exercises I’d like to mention are Squats and Deadlifts. Many people are worried that they’ll hurt themselves performing these exercises. These exercises actually have lower rates of incidence than typical team sports. I’ve included a reference below if you’re curious to see the systematic review conducted to reach that conclusion.

While the majority of the research we reviewed utilized retrospective designs, the weight-training sports appear to have relatively low rates of injury compared with common team sports.

The Epidemiology of Injuries Across the Weight-Training Sports

It’s important to include heavy resistance training that includes axial (spinal) loading if you’re healthy enough to do so. Spinal integrity is one of the major risks when it comes to dealing with bone loss. Exercises like a heavy squat or a heavy deadlift both contribute to increasing spinal bone density due to their nature of axial loading. They’re also great for your femurs and hip girdles, two major candidates for injury in older populations.

Heavy resistance training has substantially lower risk of Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) when trained independent of aerobic exercise.

Another major problem facing an aging population is CVD. While aerobic exercise does provide great benefits, so does heavy resistance training. If you’re like most people, you also don’t have 2-3 hours a day to dedicate to various types of exercise. Aerobic exercise doesn’t provide much, if any that I’m aware of, benefit to bone density.

If your goal is to better your health all around with a limited amount of time to spare, resistance training is going to take the cake once again. You can get in a solid session within anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. You’ll reap some major benefits, one of which being a healthier heart.

Resistance Training Increases mobility and proprioception.

Joint Mobility
(Flexibility of the joint)

Another issue with age is the tendency towards stiff muscles due to lack of use. Stretching does provide benefits in regards to being able to move through a greater range of motion. However, it does not necessarily make you stronger in that range of motion, just more elastic.

The benefit of resistance training is that not only are you able to take your joints through a larger range of motion, but you actively strengthen them within that very range of motion. What’s the point of moving your hands overhead if you’re unable to take out the trash? Or being able to get into a deep squat position if you can’t stand back up?

Proprioception
(Perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body)

Even better yet, resistance training increases proprioception. As falling and general clumsiness is a significant problem for aging populations. Imagine an elderly population that not only has bones dense enough to fall over without injury. Furthermore, imagine an elderly population that rarely falls. One of the major adaptations to training is having a better sense of awareness of your own body. As muscle develops, so does your ability to control that muscle. Even without developing new muscle, you can still train your muscles to be more precise.

Much of society has bought into the lie that you essentially have to give in to frailty as you get older. Or at least get weak enough so that you’re at the mercy and goodwill of everyone else. On the other hand, lifting heavy weights starting in early adulthood may enable you to lead a life of self-sufficiency all the way up to your last breath.

Take control of your health now, make the decision that you want to lead a full life with every second of it. It’s a relatively small time investment for what would be an incredible increase in quality of life as you age. Don’t wait to treat the symptoms later, but actively make the choice to be proactive about the risks today.

Citations:

• Nagamatsu, L. S., Handy, T. C., Hsu, C. L., Voss, M., & Liu-Ambrose, T. (2012). Resistance training promotes cognitive and functional brain plasticity in seniors with probable mild cognitive impairment. Archives of Internal Medicine, 172(8), 666–668. – Positive effects on cognition
  
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21969080/ – Flexibility and Strength
  
• Lambert C, Beck BR, Harding AT, Watson SL, Weeks BK. Regional changes in indices of bone strength of upper and lower limbs in response to high-intensity impact loading or high-intensity resistance training. Bone. 2020 Mar;132:115192. doi: 10.1016/j.bone.2019.115192. Epub 2019 Dec 15. PMID: 31846824. – Effects on Bone Health
  
• Liu Y, Lee DC, Li Y, Zhu W, Zhang R, Sui X, Lavie CJ, Blair SN. Associations of Resistance Exercise with Cardiovascular Disease Morbidity and Mortality. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2019 Mar;51(3):499-508. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000001822. PMID: 30376511; PMCID: PMC7385554. – Effects on Cardiovascular health
  
• Keogh, J.W.L., Winwood, P.W. The Epidemiology of Injuries Across the Weight-Training Sports. Sports Med 47, 479–501 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0575-0