Give me strength
We’re turning into a nation of middle-aged weaklings, experts say, and need to step up the exercise intensity.
We’re turning into a nation of middle-aged weaklings, experts say, and need to step up the exercise intensity.
This is a story about exercise, but not as you might know it. This is not about toning your ass, as much as saving it. You’ve probably heard it all by now – how a brisk 30-minute walk five times a week can add years to your life. But now there’s growing evidence that you’ll need to work much harder than that to ward off a future of frailty.
“We’re the undermuscled generation,” says Auckland University nutrition professor David Cameron-Smith. For too long, he says, we’ve focused on our heart and brain health at the expense of what he calls our most significant tissue – our muscles.
The modern world makes it easy for us to go through life without the intensity of exercise our ancestors did: we are rarely required to lift, pull or push. The result, he says, is “an epidemic of frailty. We are just puny compared to previous generations.”
In middle age – which he categorises as 30 to 60 – we’re embracing a false sense of wellness, he says. We’re juggling a job, child or senior care, and increasingly complex lives, but most of us are fortunate enough to have no obvious disease. At the same time, however, we’re beginning to lose muscle mass and strength. The loss begins in our thirties and accelerates from our mid-forties. And for many years, we hardly notice.
“You feel there’s nothing wrong with you but you could be better,” says Cameron-Smith. “You could be fitter, you could be stronger, you could have more muscle, you could have greater concentration. But it’s false wellness because if you carry on, you’re going to slide, little by little, breath by breath. Without actively doing something about it, you’ll end up with some element of chronic disease.” Isn’t that just called ageing, and inevitable for us all? Nope, says Cameron-Smith. What’s important is the pace at which we’re ageing, and that will depend largely on not only our cardiovascular fitness, but also our physical strength. In otherwise similar individuals, that varies enormously.
Cameron-Smith and a team at the university’s Liggins Institute have been researching muscle mass and strength in healthy, middle-aged men and discovered a four-fold difference among them in muscle size, and a three-fold difference in muscle strength. The men, aged between 50 and 52, had all let their physical fitness slide. They were “average Joes”, he says, none of whom had done much if any exercise for the past year,
“There’s an epidemic of frailty. We are just puny compared to previous generations.” “These are men who live normal lives in the community. They’re just profoundly weak.”
or had a history of sportiness that might have explained the varying results.
All had similar BMIs (body mass index), and similar diets. “Middle-aged men have a very similar diet – they are all partial to a bit of meat, and like a beer on occasions. None had a particularly unhealthy diet, but nor were they particularly healthy.”
He says if there was a four-fold difference in, say, memory among average 50-yearolds, “we’d have a national crisis to try to understand why, because the ones with the lowest memory scores would be at significant risk of cognitive impairment. The variation in muscle strength should be treated in the same light because those