Maintaining muscle

I don’t know about you but I have a pretty cool wireless scale. It keeps track of my weight, syncs the info with my phone and watch, calculates my BMI and even tells me the weather for the day. But there is one thing I DREAD seeing. It calculates the percentage of body fat in my body. Oh my goodness if you could see that number you would be surprised that I can even stand up and walk around. Seriously my body fat is so high I am almost a jelly fish. 

Everyone knows that as we age we lose muscle and bone density. A recent study from Duke University showed that this process starts accelerating in our 50’s. And while I know many of you aren’t anywhere near that age, habits you build now can help you from a dismal future to come. This loss of muscle mass as you age- barring any efforts to preserve or rebuild it — could translate into trouble getting up from a chair in the future.

Put another way: Without any interventions, people have been shown to lose about 30 percent of their muscle mass between ages 50 and 70. You don’t have to let that happen. And that’s where strength-building workouts come in.

The AARP website shares that Bryant Johnson, who trains Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, notes that while some of his older clients are perfectly able to get out and walk or bike without encouragement, they need a little push when it comes to building muscle.

Sometimes, he says, people get tripped up by the idea that strength training is all about sculpting biceps in a loud and crowded gym. Often, they’re just not used to the feeling of working out until their muscles become fatigued.

Not that he’s accepting any excuses. As he tells it, if Justice Ginsburg — an 86-year-old, three-time cancer surgery survivor with a stent in her chest and a highly demanding day job — can strength train twice a week, well, so can you.“As we get older, we start to lose bone density and muscle, and there is only one way to increase it, and that is to do weight

bearing exercise. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it,” he says.

But getting in this type of exercise doesn’t necessarily require hitting the gym. There are simple strength-training moves you can do at home — using hand-held weights, elastic bands known as resistance tubes, or just the weight of your own body — that work your muscles as you need to. A you-tube search for “At home resistance training or strength training” should give you some good ideas. 

Your goal should be working in strength-training exercises at least twice a week, (for the rest of your life) as recommended by federal exercise guidelines. Ginsburg knocks out things like planks and knee lifts for an hour twice a week, but you can start with very short, single sets of strength-training exercises — think just a few reps or minutes at a time — and build up from there.

Beyond that, Johnson says, just try not to go more than three days without doing some kind of muscle-building activity. As he often tells his clients, You can do this.

So you guessed it— your challenge for this week is to do some kind of strength training exercises. You can choose to devote 10 minutes of each day’s work out or substitute (or continue if you have already been doing this) strength training for your cardio or stretching exercise at least 3X this week. And if you do so you can claim the 35 bonus points. 

Oh and btw I have started tracking my percentage of body fat (as measured by my scale) and am trying to use that statistics to continue to inspire me to build mass and lose fat! Wish me luck!