How Do You Ensure That Your Body Retains Muscle Strength As You Age?

Muscle building is not just for fitness freaks, Muscle strength is vital for good health, especially as we age. One who can easily pick heavyweights, pedal steep inclines, or climb staircase without breaking a lot of sweat means to have good muscle strength. You can maintain muscle strength with the help of cardiovascular exercises and resistance exercises (such as weights, bodyweight, bands, etc)

Let Us Understand What Is Muscle Strength?

“Muscular strength relates to your ability to move and lift objects. It’s measured by how much force you can exert and how much weight you can lift for a short period of time”, as defined by Healthline.

And with age, your muscle diminishes in strength, and size and tends to lose some aerobic capacity. Muscles help maintain the metabolic system and protect against a fall in hormone function (testosterone, obesity, diabetes, or cardiovascular diseases). Hence it is important to maintain cardiovascular capability and muscle strength to slow down the aging process and improve cognitive functioning. [READ: 5 Exercises That Relieve Your PCOS Symptoms]

The conclusion is, that maintaining muscle strength is crucial to prevent physical energy loss, vulnerability to disease, gain excess weight, and premature aging.

How To Maintain Muscle Strength As You Age

Resistance Training

Resistance training is very necessary as each time you pull, press, or lift some weight; there are microscopic tears in your muscle. To this our body responds by sending signals for repairing the muscle and thus building strong muscle fibers, prompting hypertrophy and, reducing sarcopenia risk. Resistance training is especially crucial as you age for maintaining contractile muscle strength.

Cardiovascular Exercise

Cardiovascular exercises play a very important role in keeping your muscles healthy by promoting better blood flow. It also helps in maintaining the strength of the heart. You can choose from many different ways of cardiovascular exercise like walking, cycling, gardening, jogging, and swimming. Make sure to do this at least 3 times a week for about 30-60 minutes. [READ: Explore The 8 Amazing Benefits of Yoga]

Good Nutrition

We all know Muscles are made up of protein. And as you get older your body demands more proteins for building the same amount of muscle than your younger age. Incorporating protein-rich foods also gets difficult due to the aging body that is less efficient for processing protein. One is advised to add 30 grams of protein per meal. Amino acids present in protein act as the building blocks of your muscle – hence, diet is the must-do change with aging. [READ: 22 Amazing Benefits Of Soy Protein For Health, Skin, And Hair]

Add Omega-3 fats to your diet that help in boosting heart functions. This is also essential to keep a check on Vitamin D levels to fight inflammation and muscle protein synthesis with aging.