The Washington Post includes an article: “It’s never too late to lift weights: Older bodies can still build muscle—The new study of resistance exercise and the elderly found that even people in their 80s and 90s — who had never lifted weights before — showed significant gains.”
Here are some excerpts:
Contrary to popular wisdom among many gym-goers and even some scientists, healthy people in their 60s, 70s and beyond can safely start lifting weights and rapidly build substantial muscle mass, strength and mobility.
A new study of resistance exercise and the elderly found that even people in their 80s and 90s — who hadn’t weight trained before — showed significant gains after starting a supervised program of lifting weights three times a week.
“It shows that healthy older people can certainly respond to resistance training, that their muscles are still plastic,” said Tommy Lundberg, an exercise researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who was not involved in the study.
Lundberg, the author of the new book, “The Physiology of Resistance Training,” said the research shows it’s never too late for older people to start lifting weights. “They can increase both their muscle size and their strength,” he said.
Most of all, the study implies that our perceptions of what’s physically possible in old age also may need updating.
“It is often assumed that the oldest old, or, say, people past the age of 80, are less likely to be able to gain muscle mass and strength,” said Luc van Loon, a professor of human biology at Maastricht University, and senior author of the new study.
This idea took hold partly because the oldest old so rarely were studied. Past weight-training research often capped volunteers’ ages at about 75, because of worries that older people would be unable to handle the training or that their muscles wouldn’t respond if they could manage to lift.
But van Loon and his colleagues were unconvinced. “Muscle tissue is constantly turning over as long as we live,” he said, so why shouldn’t an octogenarian’s muscles strengthen and grow as well as a youngster’s of 65?
To investigate that idea, he and his co-authors recruited 29 healthy, older men and women. The study consisted of two groups. The “younger old” included 17 people between the ages of 65 and 75. Participants in the “older old” group were at least 85. All lived independently and had no debilitating illnesses.
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