What exactly is the battle at our age?
Ours is a battle of hormone control. We’ll fight this battle on three major fronts:
Gaining muscle
Decreasing inflammation
Improving hormone production, effectiveness, and efficiency
Gaining Muscle
The real villain of aging isn’t wrinkles or gray hair—it’s sarcopenia.
Sarcopenia is a big-sounding word defined as the “natural” loss of muscle as one ages. Before now, we have all been told losing muscle is the natural consequence of aging. And it is, but not on the level we’ve all been told. There is much we can do about the loss of muscle. In fact, science has shown untrained people in their 90s can grow muscle as fast, or even faster than kids in their 20s!
We are told inactive people will begin to lose muscle around the age of 30. If you do nothing to offset this, muscle mass will continue to decline by 3-10% per decade. It speeds up as you age.
If left unchecked, sarcopenia will rob our quality of life. Decreasing muscle mass decreases bone mass and the strength of our connective tissue (ligaments, tendons, etc.). When this happens, our nervous system also takes a hit. Keep this fact in the back of your mind. It’ll come up later.
What are the risks of letting sarcopenia run rampant?
It decreases metabolism, hormone production, balance, strength, immunity, independence, and much, much more.
It increases the risk of morbidity (death), diabetes, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, obesity, cognitive decline, and much, much more.
Yep. Eventually, we are going to face the effects of old age, but you and I will push it farther back than any generation that has come before. You’ll read about how to offset the ravages of sarcopenia later on. For now, you need to know sarcopenia is part of the battle and you and I can do some very cool stuff to prevent and slow its creep.
I should mention here that every bit of muscle you gain right now will stay with you further into old age. Think of building muscle right now like saving up for retirement. The more you have now, the more you’ll have later in life. I call this “strength banking.”
Decreasing Inflammation
Have you heard the term “inflammaging?” Now you have, and it’s a thing. If you live long enough and don’t do anything about it, chronic inflammation will become a pervasive feature of your life. Chronic inflammation is a low-grade, persistent condition that occurs in the absence of overt infection. Living in a state of chronic low-grade inflammation can do a lot of damage to your body. It represents one of the primary risk factors for a shorter life expectancy and a wide range of diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and joint damage.
Yep. These are big problems, but they really don’t tell the whole story.
For the above reasons alone it would suit you to manage inflammation at all costs, but research is giving us even more evidence that managing and reducing inflammation is paramount to our existence.
For example, pro-inflammatory markers in the blood and other tissues are often detected in high levels in older individuals. These predict the risk of cardiovascular disease, frailty, weakness, muscle loss, chronic disease, genomic instability, microbiota composition changes, auto-immune disease, and chronic infection. These markers are also associated with the death of motor neurons (the parts of the nervous system tasked with moving our bodies).
The decline of any part of the nervous system is cause for concern. Understand, every part of the nervous system is linked to every other part. If ONE part of our nervous system—like motor neurons—is affected by something detrimental, it has a ripple effect up-chain from the motor neuron and other areas of the nervous system are affected in similar negative ways.
Shit, that’s bad.
This means if we are losing motor neurons to muscle loss (sarcopenia), then we are losing other parts of our nervous system up chain since the entire nervous system is connected. Which parts? Ultimately, brain cells.
I don’t know about you, but the thought of losing my mobility is trumped by the thought of losing my ability to think and express myself. This makes losing ANY of it unacceptable.
Improving Hormone Production, Effectiveness, and Efficiency
Exercise done right (along with proper nutrition and stress management) stimulates a powerful cascade of feel-good and performance-enhancing hormones and neurotransmitters. These include dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, along with short-term increases in testosterone and growth hormone. Just as important—especially for women—exercise supports hormonal balance, including the regulation of estrogen, which plays a critical role in recovery, joint health, and overall well-being.
Exercise done wrong is particularly troublesome because the hormones it produces negate the good effects of exercise. Cortisol, the main product of bad exercise, is a catabolic hormone. Catabolic hormones break down muscle cells. You don’t need to be a trainer to know this sucks.
Female Hormonal Changes
For women, the hormonal story is even more dramatic. Female hormonal decline, particularly during perimenopause and menopause, involves a complex, systemic drop in multiple hormones—most notably progesterone and testosterone. As levels drop, women often experience increased joint pain, reduced collagen synthesis, and slower recovery from training. Along with this, increases in follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), leads to metabolic, cognitive, and cardiovascular changes. This makes intelligent programming—particularly managing volume, intensity, and recovery—absolutely essential.
We ended the section above (4 paragraphs above) with the line “losing muscle cells means losing brain cells.” I noted, “this sucks.” Want to know the only thing that sucks worse than that? When you lose muscle and brain cells, your hormones go to hell. After your hormones go to hell, EVERYTHING else goes to hell. What things? EVERYTHING. Name it. Immune system–shot. Mood regulation–screwed. Sleep cycle–gone. Metabolism–out the window. The list goes on.
Every last bodily system we hold near and dear to us is regulated by good hormones. Once those go–it all goes. Injuries and very serious diseases result. But here’s the thing–exercise done right has been shown to slow the decline and even prevent most of the serious conditions on that list.
“No prob, Neil, I’ll just supplement hormones,” you might say.
Try it. It might help, especially at first. But know this, you can’t just inject the hormones you are missing and hope for good things to happen. Your body needs to call for the hormones. Let’s take testosterone for example, and yes ladies, you need testosterone too. Protein synthesis (muscle growth) requires a dose of testosterone to make it happen. Testosterone increases the number of neurotransmitters, which encourages muscle and tissue growth. Testosterone also interacts with nuclear receptors in your DNA, which causes muscle growth.
In other words, building muscle makes your body “call for testosterone.” Your body will then create and use the testosterone because it has something it can do with it, namely make muscle, tendon and other connective tissues. However, if your body isn’t calling for testosterone to help it build muscle and you are still injecting it, your uptake won’t be as efficient. In essence, you’ll be wasting much of the injection since your body doesn’t need it.
Exercising the right way tunes up the hormonal system. It tunes everything up.
Remember, ours is a battle of hormone control. We’ll fight this battle by:
Gaining muscle
Decreasing inflammation
Improving hormone production, effectiveness, and efficiency
The WAR
The battle is one thing, but let’s never forget what the war is. Our war is against aging poorly. Our war is an outright rebellion against frailty, disease, and lack of mobility. Our war is against anything that will prohibit us from reaping all of the joys in life we desire. If we fight this war right, we will continue to live in ways that edify and inspire us deep into old age. We will gain all the benefits of a sound mind, body, and spirit. These things will help us continue to love our lives, love our people and always love our circumstances.