Longevity
Muscle Mass: Your Best Retirement Insurance
Building muscle isn't just about appearance—it's your best retirement insurance. Regular strength training can prevent falls, fractures, and muscle loss in old age.
Longevity
Building muscle isn't just about appearance—it's your best retirement insurance. Regular strength training can prevent falls, fractures, and muscle loss in old age.
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When people hear "retirement planning," most think of one thing: money.
Of course, that's important, but today we want to tell you about a form of retirement planning that doesn't require a financial advisor.
It's your muscles.
Because muscle loss (sarcopenia) is one of the typical age-related diseases and can have very serious consequences, such as physical disability or even death.
Our muscles don't just keep us upright, help us breathe, and enable movement. They also play an important role in metabolism—serving as an amino acid reservoir and producing so-called myokines (muscle signaling molecules), such as Irisin.
Irisin can increase energy expenditure by converting white fat to beige fat.¹ White fat is pure storage fat. Beige fat tissue contains more mitochondria (hence the color) and is far more metabolically active.
As we know: beige and brown fat keep our metabolism healthy. In light of metabolic disorders that increase with age (think "age-related diabetes"), this is definitely advantageous.
Of course, muscles also consume a lot of energy—something most of us have in excess in the Western world. The more muscle mass your body has, the more energy is spent maintaining it.
Consequently, muscles can protect against obesity and its metabolic consequences, such as metabolic syndrome.
With sufficient muscle, age-related falls and hip fractures can be significantly reduced. Low muscle mass, on the other hand, is associated with reduced bone density, impaired balance, and thus increased fall risk.²
This is doubly dangerous. Consider Grandma Lore, who never thought about building muscle and now has very little at age 80.
Not only is her fall risk higher, but when she does fall, the lack of bone density means she's more likely to break something.
Following a hospital and rehabilitation stay, her muscle continues to waste away. Her bone density diminishes further too, because bone depends on regular, strong loading to maintain mass. The less the bone is loaded through movement, the more its mineralization decreases.
No wonder Grandma Lore has ended up in the hospital three times in the last two years after a fall, and continues to decline.
The situation is different for our fictional Grandpa Hans. Hans has always been athletic—at 75, he still lifts weights at the gym and rides his bike. Hans has considerable muscle mass and is in excellent physical condition.
But unfortunately, accidents can't always be prevented: due to an inattentive driver, Grandpa Hans had a cycling accident and broke his femur.
Compared to Grandma Lore, however, he recovered much more quickly—in large part due to his well-developed muscles.
With severe illness or trauma, the body needs large amounts of amino acids, which it obtains by breaking down muscle mass. It's no surprise that people with low muscle reserves don't cope well with stress from illness or injury.³
For example, survival rates after severe burns are lowest in people with low lean mass.⁴
…and take care to maintain high muscle mass. Through regular training, muscle loss and intramuscular fat accumulation can be effectively counteracted even at an advanced age.
In the illustration below,⁵ you can see the muscle cross-section of a young man (left) alongside that of two 66-year-old men. While one gets only 22 minutes of moderate activity daily and averages just over 3,000 steps per day (center), the other (Grandpa Hans, is that you?) gets over 2 hours of activity and over 12,000 steps daily.
With similar body mass, our Grandpa Hans has 40% less fat mass but almost three times as much fat-free mass—significantly more muscle.
So age is by no means an excuse for lacking muscle mass.
Just as with financial retirement planning, it pays to start building muscle (or money) as early as possible.
In younger years, it's easier to build muscle mass that you can draw on in old age. You can also build muscle in older age, but this requires greater attention to factors like anabolic resistance—for example, higher protein intake.
Anabolic resistance? What's that? Studies show that the amount of protein required to achieve maximum protein synthesis in older people is more than twice as high.
This means older adults are less responsive to protein intake and therefore have a higher relative protein requirement than younger people.⁶
So, hit the iron! And don't forget your protein shake afterward ;-)
