How to get healthy over 60 - Consistency and Recovery

“Muscle muscle is the currency of longevity” experts now believe, from looking at the science, muscle mass correlates positively with lower all cause mortality.

VO2 Max is also considered the best measure of health as the age. Of course VO2 Max is dictated by muscle for it is muscle that consumes oxygen. Anyone over the age of 60 who has not been actively maintaining their muscle will start to suffer sarcopenia. If you have muscle mass then training your BO2 mass Max is simple and fun quick. If you don't have muscle mass there's no amount of aerobic training that would increase your CO2 Max significantly. In this article we will look at how and why strength training correlates to health. Also we will explain how this is done for men or women over the age of 60.

Consistency

If you take two people over a three month period and one of them can do unlimited exercise but only in the first month and the other can do exercise spread out across the three months there will always be a clear winner. If the amount of training was the same then the person who has one month which probably overtrained. True exercise results in increased or at least maintained muscle mass this is because true exercise challenges the body and forces and positive adaptation. All that is meant by positive adaptation is beneficial changes are becoming stronger or maybe more flexible or maybe a lower heart rate for the same output. Of course lots of people want to lose weight and think of exercise as a method of doing this. Most think of exercise as a valid tool however it is only energy balance which affects the loss or increase of fat mass and that is a separate topic. Readers might be interested in fasting as a weight loss topic. 

To get the best results from exercise consistency and recovery are the key elements. Consistencies needed because the changes stimulated by proper strength training require a gap between sessions so that the body can recover. How big a gap will be part of this article often strength training is described as something you can do five times a week. Training too often is a common problem with weight training almost specifically training up muscle group to offen. Assuming the amount of strength training is just right, consistency of doing it i.e every five days is the key to continue to progress. Where's the correct stimulus to the muscle and five days of therapy people's muscle can recover and rebuild stronger a little bit. Like many maxims around compounding over time a little bit of increased muscle repeated consistently adds up to tremendous results over months. The truth that is often overlooked is that there is no shortcut, the rate increase of muscle mass is similar for most people. If for example an influencer gives a method of increase which appears to be fast than what most people achieve, that is simply because that person's genetics are different to most people's. At safe strength we have had dozens of people this Great Western railway to people there is a reliable consistency across people regardless of age or gender when it comes to increasing strength. Safe strength training is done weekly or twice weekly or three times fortnightly and this fits very well with the consistency rule. After a safe strength workout the trainee needs to recover. It is very important not to do other forms of strength training during the recovery. This said, it is possible for people to combine lots of different activities with safety training. These combinations can work because few activities are like safe strength training. Many other activities may feel strenuous but the design of the safe strength training is such that it targets fast twitch twitch muscle fiber directly. Training uses the size principle to recruit all of them as a fibre types. This is not easily done and will not naturally occur during other activities without focused deliberate strength training to fatigue muscles. Muscle fatigue is both the reason why most activities are not very effective at building muscle (because they cause a deep enough fatigue) and why proper training requires a long recovery period. There are very few things which affect the recovery process. It is natural and everyone's body is designed to recover. Other than interrupting recovery with more strength training, lack of sleep or high stress can delay recovery. 

There is a balance to be struck with strength training consistency and recovery. Strength training trust is too strenuous and too often means someone will not recover but would either become overtrained or injured. Strength training that is not that is not truly strength training, Ie. does not fatigue muscles deeply, will not cause the body to need to recover and those muscles will probably stay the same. Many activities can make people fitter but this is different to stronger, ‘fitter’ muscles are great in the short term but over the long term muscle mass may still decline. This is probably why many people could become disheartened from an exercise program where it delivers results initially but then people feel like they are stuck could not make any more progress. Safe strength is the perfect way to train over the long term as the great care is taken to make sure that each session provides the right stimulus.

Recovery timing

So how long does recovery from proper strength training take exactly? Body by science authors Dr Doug McGuff and John Little, who have long experience training clients, suggest this is 5-14 days. Most proponents of general strength training for older people recommend strength training 3-5 times per week. These two thoughts do not appear compatible, but each can be explained. One element in all matters of exercise is individual differences: age, gender, hormonal health, current muscle mass, diet, life stressors, mental health, sleep and genetics. If recovery takes 7 or more days then is once per week training the maximum? The answer is yes IF one’s training is both: fully challenging to deeply fatigue muscles, and involves most or all the body’s muscles. Many prefer not to train this way, as fatiguing the whole body is taxing and, for example, over 60s men and women may prefer either a lower level of fatigue or to divide the body into two separate workouts spreading the demands into two workouts; each being less taxing than a combined one. That explains how twice per week and 7 days of recovery can be combined, it is the individual muscle groups which get the recovery of 7 days as they are only deeply challenged once per week.

5 times per week then, why is this recommended by some? Usually, the ‘expert’ recommending this does not have a thorough understanding of strength training. Much exercise prescribed and undertaken which intends to be strength training is not truly effective at challenging fast twitch muscle. Such exercise is still good for health, however it will lose effectiveness over time and not produce long term results which are as good as proper strength training. Once exception for doing strength training, truly challenging strength training, 5 times per week and still recovering is possible. To do this one needs to divide the body into many sections, e.g. 5 sections, and train one section fully per day. This could look like: day 1 = upper leg training (leg press), day 2 = mid back and bicep training (pull down), day 3 = chest and tricep training, day 4 = calf and lower back training, day 5 = shoulder and abdominal training.