The Secret to Reversing Muscle Loss After 60 (A Doctor's Routine)

So starting with number one, do you know somebody who goes to the same class every single week for a whole year or to the same gym doing the same thing, and they are no stronger at the end than they were at the start of that year? Well, that is incredibly common, and there is a proper reason for it.

Most people know the headline advice, which is resistance training a couple of times a week and enough protein, somewhere in the region of 20 to 40 grams per meal from eggs and fish and dairy and meat or beans.

But what almost nobody explains is that as we get older, your muscle becomes what we call anabolically resistant, which means it is going a bit deaf or hard of hearing to the signals telling it to build and get bigger.

Basically, your muscle needs a louder shout to hear the same message, which means a bit more protein than when you were younger and exercise that is genuinely challenging rather than going just sort of through the motions and just lifting the same as you did a couple of years ago.

Remember that muscle only rebuilds and gets stronger when you ask it to do a little more than it did last time, and that principle is what we call progressive overload, which just means sort of nudging the challenge up a bit gradually over time, like a slightly heavier weight where you lift a different weight than last year because you've got stronger, a couple more reps each time or a deeper squat, you know, a bigger range of motion.

So basically, if you do the same workout with the same weight with the same number of sets and reps forever, you'll probably never build any muscle.

You will just stop yourself losing it, and those two are completely different things.

Now, let me explain what's actually happening inside your muscle when you lift something really heavy.

I think this is pretty interesting stuff.

So loading a muscle hard, it creates tiny amounts of stress in your muscle fibers, and that flips on a master switch inside your muscle cell called mTOR.

And you can think of mTOR as like the foreman on a building site.

Once that switch is switched on, once he's switched on, he sets the crew to work rebuilding those fibers You know, thicker and stronger than before using the protein that you've eaten as the building blocks.

And there is a study that I think about a lot here, and the link, as always, in the description below if you want to check that out.

This is what we call a randomized controlled trial, which is the strongest kind of evidence that we have.

And it was done in a Boston nursing home with a hundred very frail residents whose average age was eighty-seven.

Most of them were using a stick or a Zimmer frame to get around.

Now, they were randomly split into four groups.

One of them doing progressive resistance training three times a week, one of them having a nutritional supplement drink, one of them having both, and then one of them having neither.

After ten weeks, the people who trained had more than doubled their strength.

Their walking speed was up by around twelve percent, their stair climbing power, you know, by roughly twenty-eight percent, and scans actually showed the muscle in their thighs had grown considerably.

And the interesting thing about this is that the supplement, you know, that nutritional drink basically did essentially nothing.

So starting with number one, do you know somebody who goes to the same class every single week for a whole year or to the same gym doing the same thing, and they are no stronger at the end than they were at the start of that year? Well, that is incredibly common, and there is a proper reason for it.

Most people know the headline advice, which is resistance training a couple of times a week and enough protein, somewhere in the region of 20 to 40 grams per meal from eggs and fish and dairy and meat or beans.

But what almost nobody explains is that as we get older, your muscle becomes what we call anabolically resistant, which means it is going a bit deaf or hard of hearing to the signals telling it to build and get bigger.

Basically, your muscle needs a louder shout to hear the same message, which means a bit more protein than when you were younger and exercise that is genuinely challenging rather than going just sort of through the motions and just lifting the same as you did a couple of years ago.

Remember that muscle only rebuilds and gets stronger when you ask it to do a little more than it did last time, and that principle is what we call progressive overload, which just means sort of nudging the challenge up a bit gradually over time, like a slightly heavier weight where you lift a different weight than last year because you've got stronger, a couple more reps each time or a deeper squat, you know, a bigger range of motion.

So basically, if you do the same workout with the same weight with the same number of sets and reps forever, you'll probably never build any muscle.

You will just stop yourself losing it, and those two are completely different things.

Now, let me explain what's actually happening inside your muscle when you lift something really heavy.

I think this is pretty interesting stuff.

So loading a muscle hard, it creates tiny amounts of stress in your muscle fibers, and that flips on a master switch inside your muscle cell called mTOR.

And you can think of mTOR as like the foreman on a building site.

Once that switch is switched on, once he's switched on, he sets the crew to work rebuilding those fibers You know, thicker and stronger than before using the protein that you've eaten as the building blocks.

And there is a study that I think about a lot here, and the link, as always, in the description below if you want to check that out.

This is what we call a randomized controlled trial, which is the strongest kind of evidence that we have.

And it was done in a Boston nursing home with a hundred very frail residents whose average age was eighty-seven.

Most of them were using a stick or a Zimmer frame to get around.

Now, they were randomly split into four groups.

One of them doing progressive resistance training three times a week, one of them having a nutritional supplement drink, one of them having both, and then one of them having neither.

After ten weeks, the people who trained had more than doubled their strength.

Their walking speed was up by around twelve percent, their stair climbing power, you know, by roughly twenty-eight percent, and scans actually showed the muscle in their thighs had grown considerably.

And the interesting thing about this is that the supplement, you know, that nutritional drink basically did essentially nothing.