Editor’s Note: This post was updated on November 30, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally published on May 12, 2016.

Ask any financial advisor worth their salt about when you should invest for retirement and you’ll likely get the same response: it is crucial that you start as soon as you can, as much as you can.

Why? Because the sooner you invest for your future, the better your chances are of living a comfortable lifestyle in your old age. The sooner you start, the greater the chances you’ll have a healthy investment account that you can draw off later in life, which can allow you to do all the things you want in retirement.

The same applies to your health and your body composition.

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, it’s easy to completely disregard your fitness if you want to, just as it’s easy to forget about investing money for retirement. You look and feel healthy with little to no effort.

Time, it seems, is on your side. But you won’t be able to maintain your health if you keep living a unhealthy lifestyle.

As anyone reading this who is in their 40s or beyond will tell you: the time you’re living on is borrowed. You might feel invincible today, but time will catch up with you, and sooner than you think.

If you don’t start to develop and maintain a healthy body composition through exercise while you are young, you will be hit hard with the effects of old age. You will experience decreased strength, functional ability, and quality of life. You will be old and frail. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Read on to understand how aging affects your body, and learn exercises and workouts that will help preserve your body composition and strength and help you enjoy your golden years.  

Here’s How Aging Affects the Body

You may not realize it, but your muscles are constantly being broken down and repaired. When you use your muscles, microscopic tears are caused by daily wear and tear. This necessitates rebuilding those tears with protein.

Here’s the problem: as you get older, your body stops rebuilding your muscles as efficiently as it used to. Over time, this leads to a reduction in overall muscle mass and strength. That loss can be from a combination of factors including hormone changes (ex.the level of hormone testosterone gradually decreases), physical inactivity, and comorbid conditions (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer).

Now the kicker: this reduction in muscle mass doesn’t just occur in the elderly – unless you consider your 30s old. That’s right. Research has shown that strength and development peaks in the 20s and begins to plateau in your 30s.

For many people, decreased strength (whether consciously or not) translates to being less active, and previously routine activities become more difficult. Less activity means fewer calories burned, less muscle development, and over time, negative changes to your body composition – mainly muscle loss and an increase in percent body fat.

If left unchecked, at some point in your 30s, your body will start to progressively lose muscle year after year, and by the time you’re 50, you could have lost around 10% of your muscle area. Thereafter, you can lose an additional 15% of the remainder by the time you’re 60 and another 15% of that by 70. Eventually, you will be old and frail and unable to enjoy life to the fullest.  

Granted you won’t suddenly get all the symptoms of aging overnight. But over time you will begin to notice the effects of old age. Here are three things to watch out for.   

1. Moving will become harder

Right now, you’re probably taking your mobility for granted.  You can run, walk up a flight of stairs, throw a ball, and maybe even ride a bike.  All of these things seem easy now.

But when you start losing muscle, these simple actions can become difficult. All of the sudden, taking the elevator becomes a necessity, not a luxury. You get tired more easily. Even getting in and out of a car can become a challenge.  These are all possible experiences you may have as a result of losing muscle, as loss of function and independence is a pretty common consequence of muscle loss as you age.

2. Gaining fat becomes easy

Remember how your muscles were like your body’s engine and put a large demand on your body for calories to power them? In your youth, you didnt have to worry about a healthy diet. It felt like you could eat as many calories you wanted without putting on a pound.  Well, the reality is that your muscles are linked with your metabolism, so as soon your muscles start to diminish, so does your metabolism.

When this happens, many people describe it as their “metabolism slowing down.” That’s only partially true; the majority of what’s actually happening is muscle loss, which means your body needs fewer calories to operate.

If your body needs fewer calories but you continue to eat the same number of calories as you did before, you’ll start gaining body fat.  What’s more: this entire process can occur with no drastic changes to your weight.

As muscle loss progresses and is replaced by fat (two separate processes, mind you), your body weight can remain largely unchanged – masking significant changes in body composition and potentially leading to a wide array of health problems associated with obesity.

3. Health problems will begin to appear

Human beings tend to gain weight throughout middle age due to a combination of many different factors, including becoming less active.  Increased body fat has been linked with many different health problems.

One of the most frequently cited health risks is diabetes.  Studies have shown that steady weight gain throughout life can lead to adult onset diabetes.  This is due in part to not only more body fat but also muscle loss. Loss of skeletal muscle mass has been linked with insulin resistance: the less muscle you have, the less insulin sensitive you become – as your insulin sensitivity decreases and you become more resistant, your risk factor for type II diabetes increases (to review: insulin sensitivity is good, while insulin resistance is bad for your health).   

But don’t forget, the loss of muscle can cause other problems as you age.  A particularly damaging condition, especially for women, is the onset of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis occurs when more old bone is reabsorbed than new bone is created. A number of published studies in both men and women have linked decreased muscle mass with thinner, weaker bones, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and risk of serious injury from falls.

Muscle: Your Fountain of Youth

Muscle is an incredibly important tissue that is a crucial part of your body’s health.  Having a well-developed body with enough muscle mass isn’t just for looking good – it’s for promoting a healthy body and living a full life for as long as possible.

A helpful way to understand this is to think of body’s muscles as your body’s internal “savings.” As you work out and your body converts the protein from your diet into muscle protein, you create muscle “deposits,” similar to depositing money in a savings account.

Just as a bigger bank account can help you do the things you want to do in life financially, bigger muscles help you do the things you want to do physically.  And just like when hard financial times come – like when you lose a job unexpectedly – a healthy savings account can help you keep your head above water, when your body has a crisis – like becoming seriously ill or injured – your body draws on your muscles for protein reserves. The bigger the reserves, the easier it is to recover from a crisis, physical or financial.

If you don’t currently exercise and still feel great, you can likely thank your youth for that.  However, this free pass at health won’t last forever. If you’re still young, you need to preserve your advantage for as long as you can so when you start to lose muscle due to aging, you don’t become frail and weak.

Get a Leg Up On Muscle Loss

From your 30s onward, this is a crucial time to invest in your health. The time you spend to develop and preserve muscle mass now will pay dividends down the road.   

Fortunately, although your body may eventually start losing muscle mass at a faster rate because of your advancing age, your body doesn’t lose its ability to gain it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 23 or 84; resistance training (weight lifting or other workouts that challenges muscle) has a positive effect on building mass.

Some of the best exercises you can do to preserve muscle in all parts of your body that are both effective and time-efficient are the Olympic-style lifts: deadlifts, squats, bench press, and overhead press.  These exercises, while initially challenging, are great for people short on time because they target many different groups at once, and if performed correctly, can lead to the development of muscle across your whole body.

Even better news: people who are just getting started with these types of exercises can experience rapid gains in a relatively short time with little or no plateau.  For instance, a group of women who began exercising by performing squats in a controlled study experienced more than a pound of muscle gain in 4 weeks by squatting just twice a week. That’s just 8 sessions.

Squatting, in particular, is a good exercise to invest in because it targets the largest muscle group in your body – your legs – which make up around 40% of your overall skeletal muscle mass.  Increasing your muscle mass in your legs is a great way to increase your metabolism, burn extra calories when you aren’t working out (known as the EPOC effect), and fend off unwanted fat gain.

Make an Investment In Yourself

It’s really easy to think of yourself as healthy and invincible when you’re young, but make no mistake: age will catch up with you, just as it catches up with everyone.

Remember: your muscles will start to plateau in strength sometime in your 30s, potentially leading to you becoming less active. It’s likely you won’t notice a thing early on unless you’re already keeping fit and/or tracking your weight and body composition.

Being aware of your body fat percentage and tracking it over time is a good way to determine if your body composition is declining.  If you’ve noticed that your weight hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years but your body fat percentage has increased, that’s a red flag indicating aging-related muscle loss is occurring.

Invest in your muscles while you are young and one day they will take care of you!

Editor’s Note: This post was updated on November 15, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally published on August 31st, 2016.

As we age we lose muscle mass. There is even a fancy scientific word for it: sarcopenia. It means the loss of muscle mass due to aging.

Between the ages of 30 and 80, both men and women can lose anywhere from 30%-50% of their muscle strength. Decreasing strength can make it a challenge to lead an active lifestyle or find the energy level to complete the daily errands, much less exercise. Inactivity can make muscle loss even worse.

Despite the consequences of muscle mass loss, older individuals are still reluctant to try to improve their fitness level through resistance workouts. There’s false belief that after years of inactivity, they are too old to pick up a dumbbell. But with the right mindset, anyone can set goals to improve your body composition that’ll improve your energy level and keep you active long into your golden years.

That change in mindset starts with gaining a better understanding of two major categories of fitness – physical fitness and functional fitness.

Physical Fitness vs Functional Fitness

If you’re from Generation X or older, you’re old enough to remember the now retired Presidential Physical Fitness Test (Now renamed the Presidential Youth Fitness Program.)

The yearly test held in grade schools across the nation involved a timed mile run, pull-ups, and other tests of strength, agility, endurance, and flexibility. Its goal was to improve the standard of physical fitness.

When you are younger, it’s easier to find a balance between obligations and time for yourself. But as you get older, family and work obligations grow and physical fitness starts to take a backseat to other priorities. If that sounds like you, that’s OK. Sure, achieving that perfect summer body may not be a priority anymore, but there is still an important fitness goal you work on for the rest of your life: functional fitness.

If you’ve never heard the term before, that’s not surprising. In fact, unless you’re over the age of sixty or seventy, it’s probably not even on your radar.  Functional fitness is about being able to perform everyday activities safely, like getting in and out of a seated position or grabbing the spices off the top shelf in your kitchen.

Sounds simple, right? Maybe it is for you now but consider this:

It turns out that 19% of women and 10% of men enrolled in Medicare-aged 65 years or older are unable to kneel. So what? You may have never thought of kneeling as a challenge, but that’s the type of motion that is useful when you need to pick up something that you’ve dropped on the floor. So if you don’t have the balance to kneel and pick something up, you’re in trouble.

It’s not just kneeling, either. Below is a graph showing, by percentages, other physical movements that Medicare enrollees aged 65 years or older cannot perform, such as walk two to three blocks or lift 10 pounds.

Source: CDC

Use it or lose it?

One way to maintain our ability to perform daily activities as we age is by strength training. But convincing men and women at any age to adopt an active lifestyle much less engage in some form of resistance training  can be a challenge.  But for older adults seeking motivation to become healthier and more mobile, make no mistake, as you age, if you don’t stay physically active through regular exercise your balance, energy level,  and mobility will decline.

Strength, balance and improved body composition

Functional fitness, the ability to move about comfortably in our daily lives, not only benefits you in terms of activity but also contributes to an improved body composition. In fact, working to reach a certain level of functional fitness and improving body composition go hand in hand.

The aging process has been shown to reduce our metabolic rate, which often leads to an increase in body fat. That’s largely due to the fact that people tend to lose Lean Body Mass as they age due to inactivity. Lean Body Mass contributes to your overall Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), also known as your metabolism, which is the number of calories your body needs to support its essential functions.

By engaging in strength training or resistance exercises, older adults – as well as anyone at any age — can regain some of the muscle loss due to aging/inactivity, which in turn can lead to an increase in their lean body mass. That increase Lean Body Mass increases BMR, which helps stave off fat gain if diet remains consistent.

Why do we care about improving our body composition as we age? For  important reasons like preventing bone loss, heart disease, obesity, and age-related falling, to name a few. As we age and lose lean muscle mass, balance and agility often go with it. Our tendency to fall increases and the injuries sustained from those falls can be detrimental to our overall health and quality of life.

Fracture’s caused by falling is higher in elderly women than men. Despite the fact that women can greatly benefit from resistance training, the number of women who lift regularly is still low. Fortunately for women, joining the ranks of the bench press/deadlift brigade isn’t necessary for results to come. In an all-women study involving 20 women over the age of 50, the subjects spent 12 weeks using bands as the chosen form of resistance training (as opposed to dumbbells or seated machines) and saw increases in strength. Also worth noting, none of the participants reported injuries. That’s important information for those who are worried that exercise may be too strenuous for their body.

It’s never too late to start lifting

Frankly, the numbers are pretty bleak. A shockingly low 6% of adults in the United States engage in resistance training or any type of weight training at least twice a week, the minimum criteria set forth in the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans (2008 Guidelines) and by the American College of Sports Medicine.

No doubt, misconceptions that weight training exercises have an age limit plays a large role. Part of the beauty of the benefits received from lifting weights, whether they be dumbbells, bodyweight exercises, bands, machines or otherwise, is that you don’t have to be young to reap the benefits.

You don’t have to train at a high-intensity. You don’t have to be a beacon of health. It seems odd that we still have to clarify this, but it’s important to reiterate that both men and women can benefit from lifting weights.

For older adults interested in increasing their energy levels and decreasing their body fat, look to resistance training. A study published in Sports Medicine on the effects of strength training on the elderly stated,

Resistance training in older adults also increases power, reduces the difficulty of performing daily tasks, enhances energy expenditure and body composition, and promotes participation in spontaneous physical activity.

In light of this information, take comfort in knowing that it’s never too late in life to start lifting.

Enjoying Your Golden Years 

Strength comes in many forms. And it comes from wisdom and experience, both gained over a lifetime. And today, we know that benefits from resistance exercises go beyond just physical appearance. Let’s consciously decide to look forward to our golden years and promise ourselves something as simple as supporting our own body weight won’t be a significant challenge. As a popular saying goes, “Working out is hard, but living life without muscles is harder.” Don’t believe that it’s too late after years of inactivity. Anyone can get on the cable machine and start lifting to improve their life because strength training has no age limit.  

***

Hilary Fosdal is an ACE certified personal trainer. She also does a lot of heavy lifting at redphonestudio.com, a web design and digital marketing company that helps health practitioners improve their professional identity.

Editor’s Note: This post was updated on September 18, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally published on September 14, 2016.

You notice the early signs of crow’s feet under unflattering lighting.

You don’t know how your upper arms got so flabby.

And you are embarrassingly out of breath when you’re forced to take the stairs.

Admit it, the thought of getting older bothers you sometimes.

You’re trying to just accept these changes as part of getting older, since everyone else seems to.

But what if I told you, you may not have to? While there may be limitations, it’s absolutely possible to naturally maintain or slow down the decline of your physical health and function into your golden years. And it all comes down to improving and maintaining your body composition.

Just take it from Dr. Wayne Westcott, professor of exercise science at Quincy College, who managed to maintain the body composition and functional fitness he had in his 20s at age 67, with a healthy body fat percentage of around 12%.

While it is true that your body won’t function the same as it did when you were a teenager, this doesn’t mean you have to accept a lower quality of life as you age.

With the right attitude and a little effort, you can preserve your body, mind, and even your appearance by engaging your body’s built-in anti-aging system: your Skeletal Muscle Mass.

Muscles: More Than Just For Lifting

It turns out that your muscles help you in ways you didn’t think of. For one, your muscular health can have a profound impact on how well you age. Anyone who’s looking into aging gracefully and maintaining their quality of life should start paying attention to the current state of their muscle mass.

Why?

First, let’s take a look at sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is the natural loss of muscle tissue, or muscle atrophy, as part of the aging process. The mechanism behind this phenomenon is often attributed to dwindling motor neurons during the first six decades of life  and sudden decline thereafter.

Motor what?

Imagine your motor neurons as telephone wires. These motor neurons act as messengers between your muscle and the brain, sending signals when you think of moving your feet so you can walk. The less you use your muscles, the weaker these neurons becomes. Even a week of bed rest can result in a substantial reduction in skeletal muscle mass.

It is indeed possible to delay your muscle loss, and as we’ll see, improving your muscle quality and then maintaining that level as you age could be the true fountain of youth.

Move Over Antioxidants, Muscle is the New King of Anti-Aging

The idea of consuming antioxidants as part of an anti-aging plan has been around for years. Take carotenoids for instance. This particular antioxidant gives carrots, melons, and other fruits & vegetables their color, and it has been associated with reducing risk of premature skin aging and preventing cancer.

Fast forward to the present – new studies are now indicating that muscle mass may be giving antioxidants a run for their money in the race to be the most effective means of anti-aging.

Recent research reveals that track and field athletes in their 80s were able to slow down muscle atrophy by avoiding the sudden decline in the number of motor neurons. In fact, they had 28% more functioning motor units  and were functioning better than the control group — a group of healthy, but inactive, 80-year-olds.

Sounds good, but what if you’re not an athlete?

If you take anything away from this article, take away this: research has shown that muscle loss and weakness is not actually a part of aging per se, but rather a result of chronic disuse. That’s right: although people tend to lose muscle mass as they get older, it’s not because of the aging process itself that causes muscle atrophy, but because people tend to become inactive as they age. Inactivity is the true culprit behind muscle loss and weakness.

Why is this great news? Because unlike aging, you can actually do something about inactivity.

For example, a study on postmenopausal women, revealed that consistent resistance training resulted to increased muscle strength by upwards of 19% after one year. The researchers attributed this to increased bone mineral density (BMD), which defends against brittle bones – another hallmark of aging.

A review of related studies on the same subject also confirmed that frailty can be reduced.  Muscle quality (strength relative to muscle mass) can indeed be improved with resistance training.

A running theme throughout these studies is the idea that physical aging can be slowed down with regular physical activity — specifically exercise to keep those muscles from thinking that they don’t have a purpose anymore.

You’re probably curious about what kind of exercise intensity is required to receive these benefits.  To get closer to answering this question, we need to meet a second major player in the conversation about muscle mass and aging: telomeres.

Longer Telomeres, Longer Life

Just what the heck are telomeres? An article published in Nature – Telomeres and Adversity: Too Toxic to Ignore wonderfully describes the nature and function of telomeres (emphasis added):

Telomeres are the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes, like the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces. Without the coating, shoelaces become frayed until they can no longer do their job, just as without telomeres, DNA strands become damaged and our cells can’t do their job.

Telomere shortening is one of the hallmarks of cellular aging and has been a reliable predictor of mortality. Often, cells with shortened telomeres tend to become malfunctional and secrete hormone factors that trigger inflammatory processes and tumor formation.

Here’s a helpful graphic that illustrates it further:

So, unlike muscle wasting, telomere shortening is directly associated with aging. However, just like muscle wasting, you can do something about it.

A 2015 study found out that people who regularly exercise have longer telomeres, but what was especially interesting was that these benefits are achievable for everyone. You don’t have to spend the entire day at the gym; in fact, moderate, not heavy strength training exercise was found to be effective.

Moderate is the keyword here, which brings us all the way back to Dr. Wescott and his fitness routine. He describes it this way:

“..I do strength training twice a week, and endurance exercise in some form probably about five times a week, whether it’s cycling or jogging or walking.”

Strength training twice a week? That’s not too demanding, and in terms of the optimal training frequency, may be all that you need to do anyway to see measurable changes in Lean Body Mass, especially if you’re doing a whole body workout.

Endurance exercise 5 times a week? That may seem like a big commitment, but when you consider that there are many ways to achieve this, as Wescott does, the options for endurance exercise are various enough to allow for anyone to get started.

As a beginner, you don’t have to run marathons nor start lifting heavy at the gym. Exercising in moderation — just keeping those muscles moving (and, consequently, maintaining muscle mass) and heart rate pumping  — is the key.

Bonus Benefits

Besides delaying telomere shortening, maintaining muscle mass as you age has the following healthy benefits:

• Muscle loss is linked to a reduced metabolic rate. This means you are more likely to gain body fat because you have less muscle mass to burn those calories. Increased body fat can plague people as they age, so any help in stopping fat gain is a definite perk.

• Loss of skeletal muscle mass has been associated with increased insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is a known precursor of diabetes.

•  A 15-year cohort study of American adults aged 65 years old and above found that individuals who strength trained at least twice a week had 46 percent lower odds of death (all-cause mortality) than those who did not.

It’s quite common for older folks to simply rely on cardio-based workouts such as running instead of doing a strength training workout to help build and maintain muscle mass.

Sure, cardio has its own set of benefits. However, keep in mind that the greatest benefits often result from going out of your comfort zone. Strength training has no age limit  after all!

As previously mentioned, doing strength training twice a week regularly can be all that you need to get anti-aging benefits.

As you get stronger and the routine feels less challenging, you can progress to adding free weights or adding more resistance by going to the gym or purchasing kettlebells, new equipment etc. You can also try more advanced body weight workouts.

Hopefully, you’ve seen that you don’t need to resign yourself to becoming slower and weaker as a consequence of age.  You don’t have to be an athlete, and you don’t need to pretend to be one, either. Improving your muscle mass is something anyone can do.

If you ever find yourself looking at anti-aging tips, maybe it’s time to rethink your relationship between you and your muscles.

***

Kyjean Tomboc is a nurse turned freelance healthcare copywriter and UX researcher.  After experimenting with going paleo and vegetarian, she realized that it all boils down to eating real food.