In a recent study published in Frontiers in Physiology, researchers found older people who have never taken part in the sustained exercise have the same ability to build muscle mass as highly trained master athletes of a similar age.
The finding shows that even those who are entirely unaccustomed to exercise can benefit from resistance exercises such as weight training. This means it’s never too late to start exercising.
The research is from the University of Birmingham. The lead author is Dr. Leigh Breen.
In the study, the team compared muscle-building ability in two groups of older men.
The first group was classed as ‘master athletes’ – people in their 70s and 80s who are lifelong exercisers and still competing at top levels in their sport.
In the second group, people were healthy individuals of a similar age, who had never participated in structured exercise programs.
Each participant was given an isotope tracer, in the form of a drink of ‘heavy’ water, and then took part in a single bout of exercise, involving weight training on an exercise machine.
The researchers took muscle biopsies from participants in the 48 hour periods just before and just after the exercise, and examined these to look for signs of how the muscles were responding to the exercise.
The isotope tracer showed how proteins were developing within the muscle.
The researchers had expected that the master athletes would have an increased ability to build muscle due to their superior levels of fitness over a prolonged period of time.
In fact, the results showed that both groups had an equal capacity to build muscle in response to exercise.
The finding suggests that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t been a regular exerciser throughout your life, you can still derive benefit from exercise whenever you start/
A long-term commitment to good health and exercise is the best approach to achieve whole-body health, but even starting later in life will help delay age-related frailty and muscle weakness.
If you care about muscle health, please read studies about this everyday fruit may keep your muscles young and findings of a new drug that could delay muscle aging.
For more information about muscles, please see recent studies about these two exercises may help protect your muscles and results showing that vitamin D deficiency may lead to poor muscle function in older people.
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