Elderly Muscles Wilt Easily

As people age, they often seem to have shrunk within their clothes.  In fact, there is often loss of muscle, most noticeably on the arms and legs.  A study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows how this comes about.

Nottingham, UK, researchers have shown that there are probably two mechanisms contributing to the atrophy of muscle in aging people.  First, there’s a reduction in the ability of the body to form new muscle as speedily as in younger persons.  Consumed protein cannot be utilized as efficiently in older as in younger folk. 

Second, the role of insulin in preventing muscle breakdown is blunted in the elderly.  Eight young and 8 over-65 participants had their leg-protein breakdown process examined at two different blood insulin levels.  The younger subjects were able to utilize the higher insulin levels to stop overnight muscle breakdown, while older people could not.

A further study showed that the blunting effect noted in older people was related to lessened blood flow in the limbs.  This led the team to predict that weight training would increase blood flow in the older subjects, and hence reverse the insulin-blunting effect.  Three sessions of weight training a week for 20 weeks proved this to be true.

These studies show the way resistance training can, indeed, slow at least one effect of old age.  The benefits clearly don’t stop there, as other studies have shown.