 So with that in mind we start with strength and muscle mass because that's what we care about at this age Sarcopenia is a loss of muscle mass through aging It's it's an inactivity thing it most of it is not due to some sort of inbuilt genetic or phenotypic Expression well the phenotypic expression is you've been sitting on your ass and that's why all the muscle went away because that doesn't require much Muscles required for strength a loss of muscle means loss of strength And it's the only thing that's independently associated with functional ability in the elderly To put it another way what good is having an amazing heart if you can't get out of your chair? this is this is the is the ground in which every other function in your life arises from and Balance isn't a magical lump of wonder stuff here You need muscle tissue and you need a sharp nervous system to enact those muscles in order to balance And so when you lose muscle the balance goes away as well. They're not separate things. They're part of the same spectrum So to further drive this home with some science. This is gonna be quite science. You're gonna see a lot of these references I'm gonna make it entertaining throughout. I'm gonna put on my website the entire bibliography in case and if you are curious of What I'm referencing here But in this particular 12-year study doing nothing these individuals between 55 and 65 lose 20 to 30% of their strength Just being sedentary And just a year of strength training increases strength by 29% in women and bone mineral density in the hip and back And if it does it in women It's gonna do it much better in in men because we have a favorable hormone profile profile for this sort of thing Doesn't mean women can't gain strength or puzzle clearly, but we do it even better and if these individuals you know through training gained 28% and stop training They will this particular study 12-week study they gain 28% strength on average if they stop training for 31 weeks Almost triple the amount of time they're training. They only lose half of what they gained and So when you're talking about a program you can stick with for the course of your life People get hung up on doing enough doing doing enough kind of a perfect program The reality is is that your body? For your body muscles expensive very expensive, and it's not gonna slosh it off willy-nilly Think about it like a corporation if you train your muscle tissue. It becomes a highly paid VP If if it's if you're sedentary, it's suddenly getting paid like a VP, but it's working like a mail room Intern so your body will get rid of it. You have to make that muscle important to your body And that's what keeps it on And so over the course of a lifetime. Here's how this might look This is out of a book bending the aging curve by Joseph Signorelli If you train over the course of your life By the time you get to 90 you'll have roughly the amount of muscle of an untrained 50 year old and If you perform an intervention later in life in middle age You would still at the age of 90 have the amount of muscle of an untrained 70 year old again Those 20 years are way different than moving from the age of 20 to the age of 40 as far as functional ability is concerned that is enormous and They do this they test this by pulling Core samples of the quadricep muscles out of individuals training and check the They do some staining to determine fast-twitch motor units and what tends to happen over the course of time as you get older You get this atrophy fibrosis where? Fast-twitch muscle fibers that don't get used the power the powerhouses the biggest strongest motor units They revert irreversibly to to connective tissue and you can't get them back So all everything you need to be powerful to get you out of a chair to move to be quick to climb a tree to do Whatever it's not there, and you can't train to get it back So that's why even if you train you're still much worse off than someone who's been training their entire life because the Demands to rebuild and turn over those fast-switch motor units are there always This is just a graph right and here's how it looks with MRI So what you got here is a 40 year old triathlete slice MRI Look at that wonderful ham steak, and you compare to the 70 year old triathlete also the exact same ham steak In fact, he might be a little leaner if you look at the outline of the fat mass here And then you compare it to seven sedentary 74 year old man Let me just look at just how little bone mass he has how there's all this intramuscular triglyceride going on And these guys it's very little And so this was a survey study These individuals that they trained three to five days a week. They didn't Determine how they trained certainly not not entirely with weights But if you look at weight training studies even late in life, what you'll see is that 12 weeks on 92 year old men in this case 12 weeks of resistance training increase the cross-sectional area by about 44 percent And that's in 92 year olds And that's in a controlled environment if you do something that's only say a B on a scale of perfection of a routine It's not everything you can do, but it fits with your schedule. You won't ever have to have the perfect routine later in life It's sort of like investing You're gonna get this compound interest working for you over time So that you don't have to try and save for retirement at 60 because you screwed up all of your life by not doing What wasn't perfect, but was pretty dang good