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Health See other Health Articles Title: Keeping muscles in shape Everyone can observe first-hand that as people age they become more frail and eventually more likely to fall over and damage themselves. The technical term for muscle atrophy is Sarcopenia and that is associated with a reduced rate of muscle protein synthesis. What most people do not realise is that the rate of muscle atrophy is a variable. Some men shuffle, waddle and totter along in their mid-50s and other men in their 80s still confidently take fast long purposeful strides. Why is this? Well of course, some part of this is to do with genetics. No one would deny that some men inherit the ability to age better. But there is very little doubt that there is much more at work here. Our modern society is proud of its laboursaving devices and culture. I am using software to dictate this e-mail to you. A few clicks of my mouse and it will be on its way to you. When I go to the shops it will be in my car equipped with power steering and an automatic shift and electric/electronics that will move my seats into any position I wish effortlessly. I hardly even have to twitch a muscle to open and close or lock windows and doors. If I wish to watch my TV I certainly do not have to stand up or do anything more than point a remote device at the TV and let my finger do all the work. In fact the only time I have to make a physical effort is to have sex. And I'm sure somebody must be working to invent a laboursaving way to do that. This is called a sedentary existence and probably 9 out of 10 people live this way. I'm sure you've heard the expression, if you don't use it, you lose it. Our bodies and minds are designed to be used and the process of using any part of our body or mind provides feedback to structure the body to strengthen whatever is needed so that your body can do it better. If you run, you get better at running. If you lift you get better at lifting. And here is the most important part of that, what determines your metabolism is the amount of muscle fibre in your body. The more exercise you do, the more muscle fibre you get, the faster your metabolism. So laboursaving devices cause obesity. But it gets worse, you see your most important muscles are your heart and lungs and if you don't stretch those, they also become weaker. If you have weak legs and even a little excess weight, walking becomes more of an effort and your weak lungs and heart struggle to cope with your most basic needs. With just a few pounds of excess weight in conjunction with weak legs you soon shuffle and totter. In addition your endocrine system also becomes less effective and your arteries become stiff. It all amounts to early disease and an early stroke or heart attack. So how does a man compensate for our laboursaving culture? The short answer is you go to a gym and you do interval exercise. Walking fast is better than nothing but it's not good enough. As far back as 1999 a study discovered that weightlifting or resistance exercise increased the rate of muscle protein synthesis in a group of physically frail 76 to 92-year-olds. In other words, without getting technical, if you do that kind of exercise at almost any age, you can reverse to some extent the process of muscle atrophy. So muscle atrophy while inevitable, is a variable and you control how slow or fast that goes. Needless to say, Exercise is also essential for healthy digestion and a healthy prostate since all organs are affected. Another study showed that progressive resistance exercise training (weight lifting) increased muscle strength, gait velocity, and stair-climbing power in institutionalized physically frail women and men who were an average age of 70 however the degree of their improvement was limited. Another study observed that weight-lifting exercise increased the rate of mixed-muscle protein synthesis in healthy 64- to 75-yr-old subjects to a similar magnitude as it did in healthy 20- to 30-yr-old subjects. In other words if you are healthy, even up to 75 years of age and start doing exercise you can increase the capacity of your muscles to the same degree than 20 to 30-year-olds doing exercise. So if you want to do exercise, what kind of exercise should you do? All the studies that have been done have shown that it is wrong to do long distance cardiovascular work. The body responds to that by optimising heart and lungs to be able to go the distance. And paradoxically, it achieves that by reducing the capacity of both heart and lungs. To optimise the strength and capacity of your heart and lungs you should do interval exercise which is the same kind of exercise done by Olympic athletes. It used to be thought that you need to be super fit to the extent of being an Olympic athlete in order to be able to handle interval exercise. We now know that as long as you build up gradually anyone, provided only that you are reasonably fit and healthy, at almost any age can benefit from interval exercise. "High-intensity interval training is twice as effective as normal exercise," said Jan Helgerud, an exercise expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. "This is like finding a new pill that works twice as well ... we should immediately throw out the old way of exercising." Intense interval training means working very hard for a few minutes, with rest periods in between sets. Experts have mostly tested people running or biking, but other sports like rowing or swimming should also work. Helgerud recommends people try four sessions lasting four minutes each, with three minutes of recovery time in between. Unless you're an elite athlete, he says it shouldn't be an a all-out effort. "You should be a little out of breath, but you shouldn't have the obvious feeling of exhaustion," Helgerud said. I believe that for optimum results you should build up gradually to the point where you really feel that you have exercised strongly. In Britain and the U.S., many experts recommend that people get about two and a half hours each week of moderate exercise. In my view, that is not sufficient in order to achieve peak performance and I'm not talking about at Olympic level. I do three quarters of an hour each day five days a week in the gym followed by half an hour in the pool doing fast intense laps with breaks in between each two laps. That is six and a quarter hours each week. The minimum that you should consider is doing three sessions in the gym each week for an hour. I wish you good health. Ben Ong Please visit my website for more information Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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