If we can restore and stop that muscle loss, everything else improves. They’ve quite literally reversed aging. When you restore lost muscle mass, you start to feel decades younger. What implications are there then if we do nothing about this muscle loss? Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health and well -being.

I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to our series called Strength Training Reverses. So in today’s episode, we are going to talk about how strength training reverses sarcopenia.

If you’ve listened to this podcast for a little while or you attend an exercise coach studio, you might be familiar with the word sarcopenia, but if you are not, we’re going to start this episode by explaining what sarcopenia is, why it’s a problem, what the implications of it are and what they look like as we get older in our regular life, and then why reversing it matters so much. So, Dr. Fisher, how are you doing today? I’m doing great, thank you, Amy. How are you? Good. So I do want us to start off by answering the kind of golden question of today’s episode, which is, what is sarcopenia?

Yeah, so sarcopenia is, well, originally was defined by a decline in skeletal muscle as we age. Now, it’s worth clarifying that we will all lose muscle as we age. It’s part of our natural aging process. But I guess sarcopenia exists on this spectrum where it’s really identified as a drastic loss of muscle or a drastic lack of muscle as we age. Now, in fact, the powers that be redefined sarcopenia to also include muscular strength and muscle function. So it’s not just muscle mass.

It’s now muscular strength and muscle function. So as we age, if we get progressively weaker and we become frail or we lose independence, those are signs of sarcopenia. If we lose strength and physical functionality and we really lose muscle mass, those are signs of sarcopenia. Okay. So when does this start in most of us? So typically we have an anabolic phase.

I’ve mentioned this previously on the podcast, so some of you may be familiar with this. We have what I generally refer to as an anabolic phase of our life when we’re building, we’re growing, we’re developing. Obviously that happens from birth through up to typically our 30s. Now when sarcopenia begins or when that decline or that catabolic phase of our life kicks in is up for some debate. Some people say it basically begins at the end of our 30s, so let’s say our 40s. Let’s say we have an anabolic phase up to our 30s and somewhere in between it shifts to a catabolic phase.

I tend to think there’s probably a bit of a plateau in there somewhere where we’re just not growing and building anymore, but we’re not quite breaking down yet. But it would be fair to say that somewhere in our 40s, we start to lose muscle mass, we start to lose muscular strength and lose muscular function. And that’s generally what the literature suggests. And then it’s more accelerated into our late 50s and our 60s. And then obviously there’s typically a decline through our twilight years or through our later years.

Okay. Yeah. So it really speeds up somewhere around the 60s. We really notice it more, but I do think about like, you know, people say as soon as they hit 40, typically that their body starts to feel different. They start to notice, start to feel old. And I think what they’re talking about is symptoms of sarcopenia, starting to lose that muscular strength and the implications that that has for their lifestyle.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what, what implications are there then if we do nothing about this muscle loss? Well, I mean, metabolically muscle is hugely important. It’s, you know, it burns calories and it fights off diabetes and it prevents obesity. Uh, and as far as glucose disposal and glucose storage, it helps prevent things like Alzheimer’s.

So both, both psychological and cognitive as well as physical function, uh, we lose our independence. So our, our capacity to walk up a flight of stairs is reduced as probably an early sign and we need to take the elevator or the lift. It might be that we stop being able to rise from a chair. or even rise from the toilet, so we start to lose that independence quite drastically. So our muscular, our muscle mass as an organ is key, but our muscle mass is of course really closely associated with our muscle function and our strength. Now of course as soon as you lose that strength and that functionality and your ability to maybe walk or walk up a flight of stairs, you then start

to have other psychological and psychosocial implications where maybe you might not go outside because you’re thinking that you’re not capable of walking very far. You might stop meeting friends because you don’t go outside anymore. You might stop engaging in certain activities that you maybe did, which can lead to anxiety because you might be scared of falling. It can lead to depression because you don’t see many people, which can lead to further issues with cognitive decline and executive function and things that we’ve talked about in the podcast previously. So really it’s a, it’s, it’s quite a, uh, a slippery slope that leads to a, you know, a plethora of, of really. bad things that can happen as we age that we really want to avoid.

So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, wow. It really impacts everything. I mean, you just mentioned a whole bunch of things there, you know, increased dependency on other people, like using a cane or a walk or not, not being able to stand up. Maybe, you know, increased disease risk.

um, slower cognitive function. I would probably anticipate joint pain would start to creep in because of muscle atrophy. Um, you know, no longer protecting those vulnerable areas. Um, depression and, and yeah, there’s all kinds of negatives associated with this, huh? Yeah, absolutely. And our loss of function then means that we lose our bone mass as well.

So we have a knock -on effect of osteopenia. So sarcopenia is a loss of muscle flesh. Osteopenia is a loss of bone mass. So we lose our bone mass, our risk of falls, our balance declines, our risk of falls increases, our risk of bone breaks if we fall increases. So, you know, it really is a really dangerous to start to go down.

And of course, this is not meant to sound like, you know, scare tactics or anything like that. It’s, you know, a loss of muscle mass and muscle strength and muscular function is a natural part of aging. We can’t be 20 forever. But we can be close to 20 forever. Our body can physically function much better than it would naturally do so in our later years if we engage in the right type of exercise along the way. Okay, yeah, so you just made a big powerful claim there.

So let’s get into how this works. Yeah, so as I’ve done with all of these themes so far with the resistance training reverses theme of podcasts, we’re going to talk today that resistance exercise reverses sarcopenia, or resistance training reverses sarcopenia. I have a wonderful research paper here that I’ve put up onto the screen now, titled Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle. Now this is a 2007 paper, so it’s a relatively old paper, but in my mind this is a landmark paper by Simon Milovan and spearheaded by Mark Tonopolsky from McMaster University. This paper is part of a bigger project that they did, so this paper is really a bit of a synopsis of things, but let’s get into some of the details. So they had some younger adults and some older adults.

The older adults were in their 60s and their late 60s, and the younger adults were down in their 20s and their 30s. And they took muscle biopsies and they looked at physical strength, and they looked at some genetic markers from blood sampling. And what they did is they then put the older adults through six months of resistance training. And they go on to say, and I’ve put this up on the screen now, before resistance training, the older adults were on average 59 % weaker. than the younger adults.

So that’s a sign of sarcopenia. They’ve lost muscle mass, they’ve lost muscle strength and muscle function, and they’re now 59 % weaker than their younger counterparts. They go on to say, after six months of training in older adults, strength improved significantly, such that they were now only 38 % weaker than the younger adults. So immediately, and this was only in six months. So immediately they’ve taken that 20 % of that margin. They were 59%, nearly 60%.

They’re now only 38 % weaker. So nearly 40 % still, but they’ve reversed that by 20 % in just six months. And that’s quite fantastic. Um, Because it’s not just the physical function of the strength, it’s all of your things that go along with the strength training as well, which we’ve talked about previously and I’m not going to get into today. I promised myself I wouldn’t. But it’s the maybe the muscle building and the myokine release and the genetic element as well.

And that’s a big part of what they talked about in this paper. I’m just picturing when you restore lost muscle mass, you start to feel decades younger. Exactly. You start to feel like you did 10 years ago because you’ve restored some of that muscle. And in my head, when I look at this, I picture adults in their 60s who maybe are buying a bag of dog food. And at one stage, they’ve gone from a point where they go into the store and they have to get somebody to help them lift it into the trunk of their car.

And now they go into the store and when they get to the car, they can lift it out of the car and they can lift it to the trunk of the car themselves. So that’s quite literally reversing aging. Or once they could do that, they aged. to the point where they couldn’t do that. And now they’ve got strong enough that they can do that again. They’ve quite literally reversed aging.

They’ve improved their muscular strength to the point where they’re stronger than people of that age. And the timeline is amazing. I mean, in six months, strength training twice a week, you can shave off years of your life, essentially. So that is really, really encouraging. It doesn’t take 20 years the same amount of time it took you to lose all that muscle to regain it. It’s so much faster.

Right. And it’s fantastic because we know that there’s a loss of things like type two muscle fibers. They’re the first ones that we lose. There are our key muscle fibers that grow bigger and that can produce high amounts of force, but we can recover them. So this is a prime example that engaging in the right kind of resistance training can recover those type two muscle fibers, increase our strength and increase our functionality. But the authors go on and they took, as I said at the start, they took some muscle biopsies and some blood sampling, and they talk a little bit about genetics as well.

And they go on in the abstract to say, and I’ve put this up on the screen now, however, following exercise training, the transcriptional signature of aging was markedly reversed back to that of younger levels for most genes that were affected by both age and exercise. We conclude that healthy older adults show evidence of mitochondrial impairment and muscle weakness, but this can be partially reversed at the phenotypic level and substantially reversed at the transcriptome level following six months of resistance exercise training. We need to translate that sentence for us here. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve put this up on the screen. This is like one of my old lectures at university.

So I’ve put this up on the screen for people to be kind of guided through this. So let’s talk about the transcriptome level. This is talking about the functionality of genes and their expression. So we’re saying that resistance training can partially reverse at the phenotypic level, we’ll get to that, but substantial reversal at the transcriptome level. So I’ve put these in the boxes across the screen and if you’re not watching on YouTube, please take the time to go and just have a look at this slide because I think it will hopefully be really, really beneficial. So genetic expression improves our transcriptome.

So it improves the way that what’s called a ribonucleic acid can build proteins and support our mitochondrial function. And mitochondria are the powerhouse of every cell. So it’s effectively how every cell is kind of acting. So By genetic expression improving, it can then begin to repair mitochondria and our mitochondrial function is then improved. And one of the things that it goes on to say within the paper in detail is that mitochondrial impairment is a big sign of aging. That’s one of kind of the key markers associated with aging.

So simply our cells aren’t functioning the way that they’re meant to function. Okay. So our genetic expression improves, our cells begin repairing mitochondria, and our tissue function gradually improves. So therefore, we’re building muscle, we’re going back to our protein synthesis, which is the the rebuilding of proteins and the rebuilding of muscle mass, the proliferation of satellite cells that help to build muscle and bone and so forth. So it’s not just muscle in this case, it’s all kinds of things. It’s tissue function as a whole.

And then that has what’s called our observable traits, and that’s our phenotype. So going back to that statement, it says, this can be partially reversed at the phenotypic level. Well, partially reversed, is the difference between. the 59 % and the 38%. So we’ve taken 20 % improvement, but we’ve not had a 100 % improvement. So, and that’s why it’s saying partially reversed at the phenotypic level.

The phenotype is our observable traits. So that might be physical strength, physical function, it might be physical appearance. And we’ve talked about that on the show, about how resistance training can improve appearance in a previous podcast. And so that’s our phenotype. And so that’s how our resistance training or engagement in resistance training is improving our bodies at both a cellular and genetic level, which then has a trickle down, a top down effect to improve our physical function. Okay, Dr. Fisher, tell me if this analogy that I’m thinking of is accurate or not.

I’m picturing like a classic car. that is kind of decayed on the inside. Its engine isn’t that good anymore and it’s slowing and the spark plugs need to be replaced and things are broken. But strength training is like, getting a whole, rebuilding that car from the inside out so that you can drive that same old car, but it’s going to perform a lot faster like a new car because you’ve rebuilt it from the inside out. Is that a fair analogy? Yeah, I like that analogy.

I like that analogy a lot. The fact that when it’s broken down and old and it’s not functioning well, or it’s, and it’s not well on the inside, it doesn’t function well. But when we fix everything on the inside, it then functions better as well. Yeah. I like that. That’s great.

Okay, so one of the things that they go on to talk about in this paper, and this is something that I just wanted to clarify through this podcast, is that as we age, some genes become more active and some become less active, and that’s a natural part of aging to some extent. They refer to it as the transcriptional signature of aging. And that’s what they’re saying, that this transcriptome can be reversed. that the genes that typically become more active don’t become more active, and the genes that typically become less active don’t become less active with aging, that our transcriptome can be improved. And they go on to say sort of this is a mitochondrial decline. There are fewer mitochondria.

There’s reduced ATP production. So ATP is our adenosine triphosphate. That’s our energy production. And there’s increased oxidative stress. So increased metabolites that can cause damage to cells and systemic inflammation and so forth. But by engaging in resistance training, we increase our physical function at the molecular, so at the genetic expression level, muscle cells start to behave more like younger muscle cells.

We activate genes involved in mitochondrial biogenesis, so new mitochondria are produced. Damaged mitochondria are removed so that good mitochondria can replace them and function properly, and cellular energy production improves. So our body is effectively, as you said with the car, it’s functioning the way it was meant to function when we were younger. We then have, as we’ve talked about, our protein synthesis increases, so our rebuilding of proteins, including our satellite cell activation. Now it’s worth, I’ve said that a couple of times now, but it’s worth clarifying, satellite cells are stem cells. So where we’ve talked, maybe people have heard in the media about stem cell therapy.

So satellite cells are stem cells. They’re the cells that effectively are anabolic. They’re building, they’re young, they’re good. Okay, we also handle glucose better. We improve our lipid metabolism, so our body’s capacity to deal with fat, and we have greater oxidative capacity, so less oxidative damage and stress. So all of those wonderful things are happening when we’re engaging in resistance training.

And as we’ve said, that’s effectively meaning our body functions like a younger person. Wow, that’s so cool. That is so cool. It’s kind of like a one -two punch, right? You are like warding things off, but also like proactively helping yourself behave like a younger version of yourself. internally when you strength train.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. And I love the idea that we can see changes on the outside in our strength and our physical function. But when we understand research like this, we can know that it’s not just something on the outside. So that something on the outside that we can see is a product of something on the inside that’s happening. Which means that even if we can’t see changes on the outside, there’s still things inside happening.

But if we do see changes on the outside, they’re a sign of things on the inside changing. being a practitioner is that we hear stories every single day from clients who are just delighted in the things that they can do that they weren’t able to do before they got started. Things that they were doing, you know, 10, 15 years ago that they just sort of gave up hope with that they’re now able to redo. So they’ve restored certain functionalities or clients say that, you know, fat gain is often a… One thing we didn’t mention at the beginning is, you know, fat gain is often associated with sarcopenia too. When we lose muscle mass, that is our metabolic engine, right?

And we have less of that as we get older and dieting can accelerate that. And so we see then this fat gain accompanying. And so people don’t like that either. And our clients say, you know, I have never been able to lose this body fat. But once they start strength training, you know, they’re able to see improvements after years of sort of being stalled out in that area.

So there’s so many areas. And I just look at sarcopenia and muscle loss as kind of like the center spoke of the wheel. If we can get that right, if we can restore and stop that muscle loss process, everything else improves. And that’s sort of what this whole series is about. So that’s why it’s strength training becomes one of the best things you can do for yourself. I hope this episode made that case to you as what you’re preventing.

You know, when you participate in strength training in the future and also kind of what you’re experiencing right now, it impacts everything, both now and in the future. Dr. Fisher, thank you so much for sharing this with us. Any closing thoughts or kind of admonitions or encouragement to leave listeners with to take away from this conversation? I really like the analogy you make about the center of the wheel. I think that the key is engaging in resistance training and then everything else comes from that. We’ve talked previously about myoclines.

We’ve talked here about our cells and our genetics and our physical function and our strength and our muscle mass. We’ve mentioned you know, osteopenia and bone mineral density. The wealth of benefits from strength training are phenomenal. So if you’re currently engaging in strength training, that’s great. If you know people that aren’t, then maybe encourage them to do so because it’s not just about the health benefits that they see in the short term, it’s about the health benefits that they see in the long term and the future that they’re building for themselves. Absolutely.

We care about people and we care about people living well, both now and in the future. I hope you were encouraged today by this episode and I can’t wait to delve into the next. topic as we talk about what else strength training reverses when it comes to aging. So thank you for tuning in and we will see you next week on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything . com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.