Is Age Causing You to Lose Muscle Mass? Build Strength as You Get Older!

Time's a-Wastin

Build Strength as You Get Older

When I became a Chiropractor at age 33, I spent many hours every week taking care of patients. As I do today, I pay attention to my patients and their progress, constantly trying to observe any changes and figure out how to better help the people I work with. One day, I had an 87-year-old woman come to my clinic after she hurt her back lifting the hood of her car. While she was lying face down on my table, I evaluated exactly where I needed to adjust her to relieve her pain. I asked her to lie on her side so that I could make my adjustment. She agreed and she struggled to shift from lying prone (face down) to lying on her side. It took well over a minute and maybe even two for her to achieve this minor shift in position. She was a tall, slender woman, and she looked like she had lost every bit of muscle she had as a young woman. I began to notice that as many patients get older, their muscle mass diminished quite markedly and the fat on their body often increased significantly as well.

Many older Americans have a significant loss of balance, they can’t run or ride a bike, and even people who were athletes in their younger years can’t lift their carry-on bag to put it in the luggage compartment on an airplane. The medical term for this loss of muscle and thinning of skin associated with aging is called sarcopenia. (Sarco means flesh, and penia means loss.)

More on Muscle Loss

Since I was working on an advanced degree in Neurology, I also worked with quite a few patients who’d had strokes. Most strokes are caused by blood clotting in the brain. The clotting blocks the flow of blood and many brain cells get starved of oxygen and nutrients and die. I noticed that the muscles in the limbs affected by the stroke often showed a significant degree of atrophy (muscle wasting) as well. Even while these patients were going through rehab for their affected limbs, a very noticeable level of atrophy was present. So, with stroke, there is always neurological damage and atrophy. With aging, there is loss of muscle tone and volume (atrophy) and there is usually a significant amount of weight gain. I wondered what the connection was. It turns out that when someone has a stroke, there is much less neurological activity in certain parts of the body. As a result, the affected limbs are weaker and less flexible.

Key Factors To Regaining Strength

Regarding the atrophy caused by aging, there is also diminished levels of nervous system activity, loss of strength and loss of flexibility. It turns out that the nervous system plays a role, nutrition plays a role and exercise plays a role in this aging process. Today, we will talk about the nervous system, muscle and strength. In our next few blogs, we will talk about flexibility and nutrition.

The nervous system controls the tone of your muscles. In my post-doctoral neurology training, I learned that between the ages of 45-50, most people have a dramatic reduction in the function of their nervous system. The nervous system slows down and as a result, you lose some of the tone of your muscles. (That means that you get weaker to some degree.) As a result, you also lose muscle mass.

We can easily see lack of function with a stroke patient, so I can use this as an obvious example, but even without a stroke our nervous system loses function as we age. After a stroke, the nervous system activity in a part of an arm or a leg that is affected is reduced and that group of muscles gets weaker immediately.

What You Can Do About It

The more active your nervous system, the better the tone of your muscles. Chiropractic adjustments, exercise, and improved oxygenation of your tissues all activate your nervous system and increase the tone of your muscles.

Exercise helps you to maintain and improve your muscle volume and strength. Since a major part of your nervous system is diminished in function with age, if you just exercise about twice as much as you did in your earlier years, you can maintain your muscle volume and tone. Here is the big question: Are you exercising twice as much in your 50’s and 60’s as you were in your teens and twenties? For most people, probably not. That said, you have to find another way to activate your nervous system and do efficient exercises to maintain your muscle tone.

Keeping Your Nervous System Active

To keep your nervous system more active, Chiropractic adjustments are about the best thing known to man. Increased oxygen levels also dramatically increase the metabolic activity of your brain and so increase the tone of your muscles. Using an upper body ergometer (the main neurological exercise rehab unit we use in our office) or a rowing machine is a great way to increase neurological activity and function.

Resistance exercise, especially weight training is the major way to maintain muscle volume as we age. We can do resistance training with exercise bands, exercise machines and with weights. All of these can be hugely helpful in aging gracefully.

Good News

Here is some more good news. Your muscles are storage depots for glucose (the name of the sugar in your blood) and the more you exercise and fatigue these muscles, the more glucose they store and the more they burn. Many of my patients are diabetic. Most American adults are overweight or obese. So, when individuals keep their muscle tone and volume up through aerobic and resistance exercise, they burn more glucose and store more glucose. As a result, their blood glucose levels are come down nicely and they usually need less (or no) medication to control their Type 2 diabetes. One other benefit is that they can often lose a good amount of weight and fat.

At our clinic, we work with people to find a program that works for them. Want to talk about a program of nerve system activation custom-tailored to you? Do you want to talk about how you can ease into a program of resistance training to help you burn fat and build muscle?

Give our office a call at: (408) 984-7444 and set up a consultation with me to get you started on the road back to health that can include more muscle and less fat, more energy and vitality. (And you will look better, too!)

Do it now, time’s a-wastin!

To your health,

Richard F. Gringeri, DC