The other week I got a rather specific question from a reader about staving off the declines of age:
I am a rockclimber, which involves power, strength and endurance to varying degrees, depending on the sub-discipline. At 56, I still feel pretty strong and still hit my strength benchmarks. I haven’t lost muscle mass. But I have lost power. Apparently this is due to an age-related decline in type IIa muscle fibres as there is an increasing, age-related bias for type I fibres. There are various ways to train for power in climbing (search for “campus board training” for example) but I haven’t been able to stem this decline despite mostly focusing on power training.
So my question to you is: is this steep decline in power, as opposed to strength, inevitable? I mean, I know it is, but is there some way to slow it down?
There’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that Saturn, stern lord of time and consequences that he is, devours all his children sooner or later.
Nothing to be done about that in this mortal life.
There’s little to gain by dwelling on that, so let’s get to the good news.
What do you do to fight off age-related decline as best you can?
I confess that I don’t know too much about the specific hows and whys of age-related decline in power, but my recollection is that it’s linked to that whole process of sarcopenia that slowly weakens and shrinkens muscles as we get older.
The quick of it is that a whole list of Bad Juju goes down in skeletal muscles starting around age 40-50 which leads to culling of the strong and fast type II fibers, and possibly some chicanery with motor neurons, degrading force-producing abilities.
That’s assuming the typical sedentary person. I include as sedentary even otherwise-active people who are not involved in effective strength training.
The best medicine against this decline is regular exposure to effective strength training.
It takes a very specific set of signals to make and keep muscle in working order. A lot of exercise methods, even if you’ve got a dumbbell in hand, don’t tap those buttons.
Effective means intense, challenging, with enough work to be effective, but not so much that it’s racking up tiredness for the heck of it, and repeated frequently enough to make a dent in your system.
Support it with quantity and quality of protein intake, plenty of good sleep, and your favored stress-relieving methods to keep generic agitation in check. I like meditation and relaxing music.
The other bonus of a strength-training foundation is that you get a level of power for free.
Power is force applied quickly. If you want to apply force quickly, you must first be able to apply force.
As it was told to me:
A strong person isn’t always powerful, but a powerful person is always strong.
Muscle mass and strength are the foundation on which power is released.
Sprinters and throwers lift for a reason, and so should you.
The tl;dr is that the major age-reversing factors within your control all come back to regular effective strength training.
What about explosive training and plyos and all that?
Where power for a specific activity is an issue, you’d ideally include some explosive training in there. Sprinters have the same problem as they get older, and the last thing they need to do is stop sprinting.
But things have to change.
Joints and soft connective tissues need extra care. Tendons and ligaments stiffen with age, which is a mixed blessing. Stiffer means stronger, but it also means more likely to go “pop” when exposed to brief but peak forces.
Which happens to be exactly what power involves. A quick drop and reversal can create momentary forces many times what you could generate with a voluntary contraction.
The explosive power-training that you’d want to use turns into a unique risk factor for aging tissues.
I had a not so nice reminder of this a couple months ago when I blew out an essential leg muscle. Thankfully it was only a partial tear of a stabilizer, which is now back to about 95%, but you really do not want to deal with that if you can avoid it. If you goof up with a torn Achilles or equivalent in your arms or shoulders for a climber, it’s game-over, man.
For those reasons I’m cautious about telling anybody, at any age, to do plyometrics, but I don’t think they should be dropped and quadruply so if you’re in a sport that gives you a good reason to use them.
Use it or lose it must be balanced with clear-eyed attention to the risks. I remind you that conservative-but-intact beats aggressive-but-tore-up in every case.
To sum all that up, lift and support your lifting. Practice your sport. If you have explosive or plyo work you can do to supplement that, do it, and be mindful of joints and soft tissues. Even without a full-on injury you can aggravate them to something not-so-fun.
One last thing:
The word “intentionality” can indicate many powers that some consider unnatural. It may be worth your time to investigate what it means.
I have nothing more to say about that for now.
Yall send me more questions like this. It’s way more productive than posting my abs and bf% at the Low-Carb Zombies over on LinkedIn while I eat Oreos and chocolate bars.
The LLMs have turned information into cheaper-than-dirt commodity, as long as you don’t mind the systematic inaccuracies and made-up un-facts. The upside is that real-live experience and the wisdom won from it are on a comeback tour like Quiet Riot, and this old dawg has a lot of that to share.
But you got to ask if you want it to come out.
Matt Perryman