Tag: Resistance Exercise

So Use It …

Resistance Exercise Training (RET) is good for you.

Muscle mass begins a slow decline from about 30 years of age, accelerating into old age and resulting in sarcopenia for most older people. There is a fair amount of strength in reserve at the beginning of this process but ultimately there may not be enough to cope with daily life activities. Falls and fractures are bad news for the frail elderly.

Good news – old muscles respond to training in just the same way as young ones. For a review of the science regarding RET in older folk see <HERE>.

Key Messages

  • Strength (resistance) training is effective in elderly persons and can be undertaken without notable adverse effects.

  • Strength (resistance) training is subject to a dose-response relation. Higher intensities yield greater effects than low or medium intensities.

  • Strength (resistance) training in elderly persons aims to increase muscle mass (hypertrophy) on the one hand, and on the other hand, promote neuronal adaptation (intermuscular and intramuscular coordination).

If you have despaired at the mythology surrounding diet or cycling be ready to ignore an even greater torrent of nonsense regarding doing weights. High reps, low weights for stamina, low reps very high weights for strength, medium reps medium weights for bulk. It’s all frog shit.

The reality is that the results depend on the intensity and your genes. Light weights and many reps until exhausted will have the same result as heavy weights and few reps until exhausted. The key is the exhaustion. Near exhaustion is very nearly as effective and has a few advantages!

Recovery and avoiding over-training are the other side of the coin. The science to back up these last few paragraphs can be found in a review paper by Morton et al. Their key recommendations include choosing weights that lead to volitional fatigue, three times per week with a total of at least 10 reps per muscle group and not more than 15 sets per muscle group.

And that leaves plenty of scope. I favour beginning with compound exercises such as squats and lat pull-downs, heavy enough so that 10 to 12 is the limit, 2 or 3 sets, followed by 1 set each for whichever individual muscles best serve your vanity. Don’t waste too much time on the biceps it’s the lats and deltoids that make the upper body!

Assembling the Weapon …

The posh name for it these days is Resistance Exercise Training or RET for short. When I was a lad we just called it weight training and it is sometimes referred to as strength training. I have indulged in it for some big chunks of my life sometimes by going to the gym and sometimes by means of a home gym.

One of my sons has a basic set up that he uses to good effect. When I decided to halt my slide into decrepitude I started to make use of his equipment. And then came Covid-19 and the lock down. I decided to buy some equipment of my own. Me and every other like minded person. I hit the web and found a lot of sold out signs but eventually I found machines for sale.

An outfit called Gym and Fitness were happy to take my order and of course my money and promised to pack and ship my machine within days. I enjoyed a state of happy anticipation for about a week. The excuses then started. They were really busy. How awful for a business. Their sales software wasn’t linked to their inventory software. How stupid for a business to be selling machines it didn’t have. The third version was that they never actually stocked this machine in the first place relying on the suppliers to ship it once the order was received. They really don’t belong in business.

They refunded my money. By that stage it was really hard to find a machine but eventually I found the Celsius GS2 from Rebel Sports. Delivery took a while but eventually a number of battered cardboard boxes on a broken pallet made it to my door. The machine had evidently had its first workout in transit. Fortunately the damage was only to the cosmetics.

Putting it together was the next challenge. The instructions for the frame were pretty good. Finding the parts was the hardest bit but of course that got easier as the job progressed. Fitting the cables was a different story. I think a different team had written the instructions for that phase. The instruction booklet showed the cables in a different configuration than they were supplied but there were only five and eventually they were sorted out.

The machine is working well. The cables run smoothly and a good variety of exercises are possible.