What Can You Do To Avoid Muscle Loss With Age?
Muscle loss is one of the defining characteristics of aging. Sarcopenia, as it’s called in medical circles, is responsible for the loss of strength and frailty as we get older. But what most people don’t realize is that we start losing muscle mass fairly early on in our lives.
After the age of 30, testosterone levels start to drop. And our body composition changes. It switches from high-muscle, low-fat to the reverse.
Even experienced bodybuilders know how the ravages of time affect their physiques. Most achieve peak mass in their early 40s. After that, there’s not much that they can to retain their immense size.
Research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that most people lose about a third of their muscle mass over the course of their lives. And some can lose up to 50 percent during their 80s and 90s.
How To Avoid Muscle Loss
So what can we all do, once we get past 30, to make sure that we avoid muscle loss and stay young, strong and healthy? Check this out:
1⃣ Keep Muscle Metabolism High
Researchers have known for a long time that muscle is key to keeping our metabolism in check. Less muscle mass means fewer calories burned at rest. And fewer calories burned at rest means that it’s a lot more likely we’ll put on weight.
According to doctors from the Mayo Clinic, just upping exercise a bit can help stave off the worst of muscle loss. Right now, they’re targeting elderly people with the message that simple things like gardening can help.
But younger people can benefit from their advice too. The main strategy today is to use a two-pronged exercise routine. When we’re younger, we tend to focus on either strength or endurance training. But experts now think that the best tactic is to use both.
Strength training helps to bring mass to the muscles and to fight off age-related muscle loss. And conditioning helps to increase blood flow and bring nutrients to the muscles.
Here’s Dr. Axe’s video containing 3 simple strategies to improve your metabolism:
2⃣ Boost Testosterone
It’s no secret that a lot of people in the fitness world use steroids to improve their performance.
Steroids work by increasing the amount of testosterone available in the body. And this then signals to the body to build more muscle after exercise. But artificially boosting testosterone is dangerous for many reasons you can read about here.
Doing it naturally, on the other hand, is perfectly healthy. There are now products, like Build the Muscle testo boosters, that can help reverse some of the loss in testosterone after 30.
3⃣ Be Sensible With Protein
The protein craze that has gripped the fitness world for the last forty years appears to be abating finally. The idea that we need hundreds of grams of protein every day to meet our needs is being proven wrong by the science.
This means that many fitness people are looking to new foods to shake up their otherwise bland diets. One thing that they’re doing to retain muscle mass is to eat a greater variety of veggies.
Veggies are important because they provide nutrients and the hormonal environment to stave off muscle loss. Interestingly, vegan men have higher testosterone levels than those that eat meat.
