The Secret to Aging Well — Why Strength Improves Your Quality of Life
- Cole Mercer
- Jun 18
- 4 min read
You may have noticed that we progressively make things a little heavier, a little harder, or have you work a little faster over time. This is by design, and it is an effort to make you strong! However, there are some misconceptions about strength that I want to discuss before I tell you the magic of strength in keeping you feeling like you have what it takes to resist the effects of aging.
If I ask you to imagine someone strong, you might think of someone large, with big shoulders or big legs, visible abs, and a protein shake in their hands. While this person is likely strong, I want you to start looking in the mirror instead! Strength is a property of muscle, not a result of size. The more force your muscle can produce, the stronger it is. A simple physics equation governs this process in our body:
Force = Mass x Acceleration
The larger an object is and the faster it is moving, the more force that results from it. This is often why larger people are stronger than smaller people on average, but strength is a bit more complex than “being big”.
One can be exceptionally strong and not appear to be “Bulky”. Strength is about exposing your muscles to progressively increasing weights (mass) or speeds (acceleration) to elicit changes in that muscles ability to produce force. It actually takes a particularly dedicated effort to make a muscle much larger (hypertrophy), and a LOT of food to incentivise growth. If you are curious about hypertrophy, we will discuss it in the future. The first adaptation to occur when performing resistance training is neuromuscular, meaning the brain and muscles get better at talking to each other. Before “size” ever becomes a factor, the brain begins to use more of the muscle fibers available to a general area.
Example: To lift a grocery bag off the floor might only require 10% of the muscle fibers in the legs, but lifting a couch might require 60 or 70% of involved muscle fibers (which we call motor units).
We want to perform resistance training to increase your brain’s ability to access those strong motor units through repetition. There is a lot of carry over between high motor unit recruitment exercises like the squat and deadlift, and daily life. Functional Fitness training has become a very widely used term for life-specific activities, but there is nothing more specific to life than being stronger than any task life throws at you.
So what other benefits are there to being STRONG?
Stronger means a lot of different things. First, some literature results:
Exercise training in movements beyond daily living activities is associated with improvements in cognitive function, including memory and executive function (Cotman & Berchtold, 2002), (Garber, 2011)
Resistance training can result in 1-3% changes in bone mineral density and manage type-2 diabetes (Westcott, 2012)
Resistance training can counteract age-related decline in muscle function, muscle size, and strength (Fragala, 2019)
The National Strength and Conditioning Association suggests 2-3 sets of 1-2 multijoint exercises per major muscle group with an intensity of 70-85% of 1 repetition maximum 2-3 times per week for older adults (Fragala, 2019). While we don’t always focus on every “muscle group”, we focus on making sure the most important joints in the body are working hard (hips, shoulders, spine), which ends up involving most muscle groups anyways. If we are continuously keeping you lifting heavy relative to your ability while simultaneously keeping your mobile and in good aerobic conditioning, you will see large gains in your ability to do anything from basic household activities to enjoying sports and recreational activities!
At the end of the day, we want you to be stronger than anything you might encounter day-to-day, and the movements we do in here are in an effort to emphasize that. We don’t want you to care about heavy squats and deadlifts for the sake of heavy squats and deadlifts (although they are objectively awesome), we want you to care because it means you are more resilient!
Let your trainer know if you have any questions, or if you see me around on the floor I’m happy to help!
REFERENCES:
Garber, C. E., et al. (2011). Quantity and quality of exercise for developing and maintaining cardiorespiratory, musculoskeletal, and neuromotor fitness in apparently healthy adults: Guidance for prescribing exercise. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 43(7), 1334-1359. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0b013e318213fefb
Westcott, W. L. (2012). Resistance training is medicine: Effects of strength training on health. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 11(4), 209–216. https://doi.org/10.1249/JSR.0b013e31825dabb8
Fragala, M. S., et al. (2019). Resistance training for older adults: Position statement from the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 33(8), 2019–2052. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0000000000003230
Cotman, C. W., & Berchtold, N. C. (2002).
Exercise: A behavioral intervention to enhance brain health and plasticity.
Trends in Neurosciences, 25(6), 295–301.
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