Muscle: The Real Fountain of Youth

By Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Excerpted from Forever Strong: A New Science Based Strategy for Aging Well

My goal is nothing short of upending modern medicine with a refocus on muscle as the fountain of youth. In real life, it’s neither a fantastical elixir nor a miraculous curative. But muscle can still be a magic pill for transforming health outcomes. And fortunately, muscle also happens to be the only organ over which we can voluntarily exert control. Accepting this minor miracle will empower you to shift into execution mode to improve your health, starting now.

Here’s a maxim to keep you motivated: the higher your healthy muscle mass, the greater your protection against all-cause mortality and morbidity .

Are you able to perform your daily activities? Do you experience pain throughout the day? Do you feel healthy? Do you have the energy to do the things you love? These are the key factors to consider as you evaluate your current health and gear up for making improvements:

Start Young

Remember, the game of life is survival of the strongest. Both nutritional and physical literacy—knowing what to eat and how to move—are imperative, and it’s never too early to start. Resistance training is safe and effective for children and adolescents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, leading to improvements in health, fitness, injury reduction, and rehabilitation, as well as physical literacy. Not limited to lifting weights, resistance exercise can incorporate a wide array of body-weight movements, including fun exercises such as frog jumps, bear crawls, crab walks, and kangaroo or one-leg hops.

Because young people exist in a hormone-driven growth phase, muscle tissue is much more responsive at an early age. Strength training performed safely at developmentally appropriate levels lays groundwork that lasts a lifetime.

Of all factors that we can manipulate, diet in infancy and early childhood is among the most influential. Providing our kids with nutritious, whole foods balanced in macronutrients can set them up for healthy development, a lean body composition, and habits that can nurture them through adolescence and into adulthood. Low-protein diets during these critical years can impede growth and cause fatigue during sports and active play. A protein-forward diet in youth, on the other hand, provides the fuel our kids need to learn, grow, thrive, and challenge themselves—as well as helping to prevent metabolic disasters later in life.

Twenties and Thirties

When you’re in your twenties and thirties, it might seem like you can get away with fad diets and cycling through juice cleanses—that you can chase every latest nutrition trend that convinces you to stockpile supplements, load up on “super” foods, decide to go vegan, or push the boundaries of going all plant-based at the expense of protein.

During early adulthood, your hormones reach their peak, with testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) primed for growth. Maybe, on a superficial level, you can get away with less discipline while these hormones are running high; your body will do its best with whatever nutrition you give it. But relying on a youth-dependent get-out-of-jail-free card can set you up for long-term bad habits.

Here’s a sobering bit of information that should help get you on track toward good health, despite the seemingly forgiving nature of your twenty- or thirty-something-year-old self. You will likely reach your peak bone mass between age 25 and 30. Bone health is determined in large part by muscle strength and the communication between these organ systems.

There is a clear positive correlation between lean body mass and bone density. You know how peaks work, right? Once you reach the top, it’s downhill from there. Why not set yourself up for the best possible descent?

Late Thirties and Early Forties

“Dr. Lyon, I don’t know what happened. I eat and exercise like I always have, but now I keep gaining weight.” Thirty- to forty-something-year-olds have reached the ultimate metabolic turning point, and signs will begin to appear on your body and potentially in your bloodwork. Seeing changes on the outside increases the likelihood that you’re carrying unhealthy skeletal muscle on the inside.

You don’t need to wait for the future to experience the benefits of working on your health today. Sure, body composition correction will give you the lift of seeing a rebalance in your bloodwork. But you will also feel better every day. Metabolic health allows for better sleep and increased energy. At a moment when your hormones are peaking, healthy muscle will make you mentally stronger, turbocharging your ability to shine at work, at a time when career building is often of paramount concern. Plus, exercise has been shown to increase libido.

Mid- To Late Forties

Sick of gaining and losing the same ten pounds? Desperate for a solid night of uninterrupted sleep? Wish you could make it to 3 p.m. without dragging yourself through the remainder of your day? Struggling with brain fog, word retrieval, or feeling demoralized? I’m here to tell you, relief is in sight!

Right here, right now, is your opportunity to seize control of your health rather than allowing the aging process to take away your freedom.

We know that muscle’s ability to sense nutrients diminishes with age. When muscle becomes less responsive to protein—particularly low doses of amino acids—the tissue changes. When these changes occur, the metabolic abilities of the muscle tissue significantly decline, increasing our risks for disease, fatigue, and obesity. Once tissue destruction begins (which can happen at any age but is generally detectable in your 40s), combating the inevitable weight-loss and health struggles becomes more of a challenge.

Obesity impairs muscle by creating a toxic metabolic environment in the muscle. Toxic fat by-products overpack our skeletal-muscle suitcase, leaving us weak, less flexible, and unable to efficiently process the food calories that we eat. The deposit of lipids into skeletal muscle impairs muscle’s ability to contract, while interfering with the synthesis of amino acids into new healthy muscle tissue. Fat accumulation does not just build up in fat cells but spreads into muscle. This makes it more difficult to recover from exercise or injury as well as blunting the ability to lay down more muscle.

Consider this the make-or-break decade. By the fifth decade of life, metabolism improvement becomes significantly more difficult, but the window of wellness opportunity never closes completely. At this age, if you eat the proper quantity, quality, and distribution of protein and train aggressively to heal and build your muscle, you can reverse metabolic dysfunction and, depending on your current metrics, build back pounds of muscle within months.

Fifties

Getting older brings us maturity, perspective, and sometimes even wisdom! Plus, research conducted over a twenty-year span showed that many of us feel less stress as we age. Still, Father Time also challenges us with the loss of skeletal-muscle mass. After about age 50, muscle mass decreases at an annual rate of 1 to 2 percent. Often the lost muscle is replaced by body fat, reducing muscle strength and mobility while also disrupting metabolism.

The decline in muscle strength is even higher. A perfect storm of reduced activity, subpar nutrition, hormone decreases, injury, and inflammation often plays a role. But unlike with the weather, we can change the forces that create these declines. We can blunt the loss of both muscle mass and strength by making smart choices about dietary protein and resistance exercise. Older adults need more dietary protein to support good health, promote recovery from illness, and maintain functionality.

Fortunately, even aging muscle remains plastic, meaning improvement is always possible.

Sixty and Beyond

Beyond 60, you will reap the rewards of the habits you’ve cultivated toward strength and committed physical effort. Your muscles have cellular memory, so a nervous system that has been well trained for movement is primed to protect you.

For people older than 60, quality of life becomes the primary consideration for any diet and exercise plan. I’ll say it again: the best way to safeguard your independence is to protect your skeletal-muscle mass. According to the CDC, 3 million older people are treated in emergency departments annually for falls. Each year, one in three adults older than sixty-five falls. One-quarter of those who suffer a hip fracture die in the following year, and the most common cause of accidental death in people older than 65 is fall-related injury.

Research shows that a well-designed resistance-training program of two to four days a week successfully increases maximal strength, muscle mass, muscle power, and functional capacity among individuals older than 65. Other studies highlight the cognitive benefits of cardio and resistance training for people in this age group, citing the brain-boosting, body-awareness benefits of the feel-good hormones that the combination of these types of exercise releases. While improvements won’t happen as quickly as starting when you’re younger, a well-designed program can bring you these benefits even if you begin exercising later in life.

People often suggest that you visualize what you want and how it will feel when you get it. Here’s what I’ve found works better: do a future projection of what it will cost you if you hang on to your current bad habits. This is incredibly effective. It highlights what you will have to give up if you continue to make negative choices.

Sit in a quiet place and imagine . . .

If you continue these negative practices going forward, what will it cost you in two years? How about four? How about twenty?