I’ve been watching Farscape on repeat for the last year or two over on the never-ending marathon happening on the You-Tube. Farscape is an underrated gem and my low-key favorite space-opera series next to Babylon 5.
You ever notice how all those sci-fi shows set in space have the characters walking around like they’re on Earth in normal gravity? Babylon 5 is the one exception I can think of where the human ships had to rotate to create gravity.
Most of those shows use magic hoodoo-voodoo that keeps our valiant crew pinned to the floorboards at 9.8 meters per second squared with artificial gravity.
This is wildly unlike how it goes for real-life astronauts, who float weightless in zero gravity.
You probably never think about this, but your daily existence of being alive means you are constantly fighting against the pull of Earth’s gravity.
Even getting out of a chair and standing in place creates a downward force inside your body.
When they shoot a man into space, those forces are suddenly gone.
Astronauts who spend any time in orbit lose bone and muscle mass without the gentle hug of Mother Earth’s gravitational forces. A living body that spent its entire existence on Earth’s surface, which evolved to survive in one gee, finds itself without that constant stimulus.
Imagine taking a gym layoff and losing your muscle, only this applies to every cell in your body, 24/7.
Not good.
Like I say, your body is all signals.
The effects of muscle and bone wasting are so bad that they’re one of the major reasons we haven’t made any grand leaps out into space. Even a trip to Mars could leave the crew crippled on arrival.
Why am I telling you all this?
Normal aging processes from about age 30 onward lead to a steady decline in muscle mass. In women from their late 40s, from the onset menopause, bone loss becomes an additional issue.
This has led me to a clever Johnny-Cochrane-like tagline:
What youth gives for free, age takes a fee.
It isn’t any wonder that sedentary people experience their 30s, 40s, and beyond as a decline into aches, pains, and infirmities.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that damn near every one of these symptoms of decline is preventable and reversible with a healthy dose of resistance training and a lifestyle to support it.
Even modest doses of strength training plus a goodly daily hit of protein can keep the muscle-wasting bogeyman at bay.
That makes resistance training basically “artificial gravity” for an aging body.
I’ve used that metaphor to explain this idea over the past couple years and I’m writing about it now in public to stake my claim on it.
Yes, you do have to take intentional action to keep your body youth-like. I don’t know why people got it in their heads that you can act 16 in perpetuity and keep a healthy, thriving, vital life. But they have, and they do.
If you’re one of the minority not content with that, then you need to lift. There’s no way around it. Getting 10k steps a day and doing horse-dance aerobics classes do not cut it.
You need the right signals, not busyness for the sake of getting hot, sweaty, and out of breath. Lifting signals your body to stay muscular, lean, and healthy, and there are no substitutes.
I’m going to turn it over to you now.
What do you think? Does this help you understand what is going on, or am I losing you?
Matt Perryman