Article Link 78 Science-backed Benefits of Weightlifting for Seniors

[yogapam]

Originally Posted by JackieB

I find articles like this misleading. Exercise science is in its infancy and there's so much that researchers don't know. 100 years ago nobody worried about getting in their "workout" as life provided plenty of physical work just to live.

Exercise is a piece of the puzzle...and an important one. I can't help but think of Michael Mosely's PBS piece "The Truth about Exercise" and comparing executives and waitress and in between. An hour long workout paired with sitting the rest of the day does not equal a fit person. Varried movement throughout the day seems to be key to maintaining and improving mobility...loss of mobility is what shrinks muscles, creates the stiffening and adhesions of fascia.

Just like Katy Bowman's Movement Matters....we need bites of nutritious movement through the day. Body weight counts as resistance training. There's no end all be all to exercise...the important thing is we all find movement we love because if we hate it, we won't do it.

If you love to weight train, yay. If not, find some other things to keep active. Keep moving, whatever you choose because ultimately if you don't use it, you lose it.

Again....exercise is a small piece of the equation. Sleep, nutrition, stress, supplements, hormones, psychological health, support, toxins, digestion....look at the big picture.

Yes, well said indeed!

[Vintage VFer]

Originally Posted by JackieB

...
Again....exercise is a small piece of the equation. Sleep, nutrition, stress, supplements, hormones, psychological health, support, toxins, digestion....look at the big picture.

I agree that the big picture of healthy aging contains many components.

Yet, none of the above-mentioned things will help me get out of a chair at 90 as much as strength training (including yoga). One needs to keep the quads and abs strong. Or else, one will be really healthy and stuck on the couch.

[yogapam]

Deleted

[Messe]

Originally Posted by Vintage VFer

I agree that the big picture of healthy aging contains many components.

Yet, none of the above-mentioned things will help me get out of a chair at 90 as much as strength training (including yoga). One needs to keep the quads and abs strong. Or else, one will be really healthy and stuck on the couch.

This.

Science and medicine aren't static. Otherwise, no one would still be doing research that has the potential to improve the quality of our lives. Exercise science has been around for nearly 50 years, at least in peer-reviewed publications. That list of 78 science-backed benefits of weightlifting is a stellar example of the fruits of those years of research.

[JackieB]

Originally Posted by Vintage VFer

I agree that the big picture of healthy aging contains many components.

Yet, none of the above-mentioned things will help me get out of a chair at 90 as much as strength training (including yoga). One needs to keep the quads and abs strong. Or else, one will be really healthy and stuck on the couch.

You won't be able to get out of your chair if you don't have balance, mobility, range of motion AND strength. It all works together.

You also won't be able to get out of your chair if your health fails and you have some awful degenerative disease, or you're in an accident.

Strength training is important. Everything else is, too. Some in our circle of influence, some outside of it.

ETA--you probably won't be really healthy if you're "stuck on the couch"!

[Joni O]

What Jackie said!

[yogapam]

Originally Posted by Joni O

What Jackie said!

Agree!

[hch]

I do think that such articles should be careful to avoid the appearance of promoting Doing Only One Thing and eliminating everything else. In this article, I would've liked an explicit note (at least around the introduction, the conclusion, or the tips) that the author in no way discourages other activities, if only because some readers may assume wrongly.

But does anyone "here"--the article author, the researchers cited, anyone in this thread--advocate doing only weights? It'll be some time before I can review everything in the article more closely, but I haven't seen any evidence yet that someone here does.

Originally Posted by JackieB

You won't be able to get out of your chair if you don't have balance, mobility, range of motion AND strength. It all works together.

I also hope that this article doesn't discourage or even appear to discourage other forms of movement that may be more specifically intended to improve balance, mobility, and flexibility, for example. Remember, the title is "78 Science-backed Benefits of Weightlifting for Seniors," not "78 Science-backed Drawbacks of Everything Else."

But as I wrote earlier, those three words all appear in the article as part of the benefits, as well as terms like "functional capabilities" and "functional independence." If the purported benefits of weight training were limited to strength in isolation, this would've been a rather short article.

[hch]

Here's a good place to mention this other piece, which I haven't viewed in a few years.

Strength Training Elderly Nursing Home Patients

There is a measure, the FIM score ("Functional Independence Measurement"):

The 11 point increase represented a 14 percent improvement in functional independence, indicating considerably less need for care giver assistance.

[snip]

Other indicators of improved functional capacity were mobility distance, which increased by 71 percent, and incidence of falls, which decreased by 36 percent. All of these factors taken together attest to the practical benefits of the basic strength training program.

I also like the interviews mentioned in the Discussion section.

Resident Esther Duvall, after using both therapy and strength training, moved from the nursing home to the independent living campus to live with her husband. Resident Peg Terbeek, described as "active and energetic" already, reported significant improvements in her energy, posture, and back pain. "In fact, she insisted that she now feels just like she did in her 20s in terms of muscle strength and physical function."

And what did the director of nursing notice?

Ms. Sullivan stated that with more muscle strength, some patients could spend less time in wheelchairs, and reported that one resident no longer needed a wheelchair after completing the strength training program.

[hch]

While not quite searching for something to add to this thread, I found two more articles, both from 2018, through a general search for a related subject. If they didn't work so well as additions to this thread, I'd start a new one for them.

This post concerns the first, a usnews.com article from March. It resembles an abridged version of the original article of this thread.

11 Benefits of Strength Training That Have Nothing to Do With Muscle Size

It, too, mentions balance, flexibility, and mobility. It also mentions a lot of things, such as brain health, mentioned in "78 benefits." I haven't compared the two yet to see how much they use the same studies, but "11 benefits" is faster to read.

This article also explicitly mentions a problem that should be mentioned more:

"A lot of people believe that if they don't want to look like a bodybuilder, they shouldn't perform resistance training," says Michael Rebold, director of integrative exercise sciences at Hiram College in Ohio. "So the only form of exercise they do is aerobic – and then they wonder why they are having trouble making significant improvements in their health," he explains.

I'm happy that I never thought this way, also happy (if I may so admit) that the tone on VF towards strength training has been shifting, and impressed that researchers are identifying benefits that most of us (including me) never anticipated.

But as I said earlier in this thread, I'm also appalled to see just how harm has been done and how much good has been left undone through popular attitudes towards exercise (attitudes, mind you, that could be and already were being identified as problematic years ago, even without the recent research).

At least when I first loaded this page, it linked to a second piece, which I'll discuss in another post:

Muscle’s Many Powers
Scientists are learning that resistance training confers much more than strength. It’s key to your overall health.