Fend Off Muscle Loss Due To Aging
You may notice many older people have less muscle mass. That’s because of sarcopenia, which is muscle loss due to aging and related to a reduction in hormones. You can slow the process and even reverse it in some cases and many of my senior members at Next Level Fitness in Irvine, CA, prove it all the time. At one time, it was just accepted that you had to get older and more feeble as you age, but not today. While you can’t completely stop aging, you can slow and even reverse muscle loss with exercise and a healthy diet.
Even if you’ve never exercised, it’s not too late.
You might not be able to go to the gym and lift your own weight, half your weight or even ten pounds and running further than to the end of the driveway may be challenging, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change that. Each person is different, so you need a program of exercise that is created for your needs and level of fitness. You can start out slowly, like walking a little more and a little faster every day and lifting 5-pound weights twice a week, then build to heavier amounts and more reps as you improve.
Exercising regularly has more than just benefits for the muscles.
You’ll be protecting your body at the cellular level when you workout. Exercise causes the length of the telomeres to increase. Telomeres are at the end of chromosomes and protest them from damage, which protects your cells and allows longer replication with less damage. The more you exercise, the longer they are. Exercise increases circulation which helps your skin, heart and even ability to breathe better. A program of regular exercise literally keeps all cells in the body healthier and prevents muscle wasting.
Your diet plays a big role in the loss or gain of muscle mass.
If you don’t have all the building materials, you can’t build a house. The same is true of building your muscles. You need protein and other nutrients to do that. Seniors, particularly me, often develop anabolic resistance. That impedes the body’s ability to synthesize protein. Getting older means eating more protein. Consuming more lean poultry, fatty fish like salmon, plain yogurt and plant protein like beans is a healthier way to achieve that. For seniors, adding protein powder to smoothies is also an option.
- Don’t compare your progress to anyone, even your younger self. You’ll see slower progress than you might have twenty to thirty years prior, especially if you’re a senior.
- Always check with your health care professional first to see if working out is safe for you. Also let your personal trainer know if you have medical issues, so he or she can adjust the workout.
- Make sure your program is varied. You need flexibility, endurance, balance and strength training. That ensures you a much safer exercise program and a healthier body.
- Try HIIT—High-intensity interval training. It can get you back into shape faster and only requires you alternate intensity. Any exercise can be used. Just do it at a high intensity level and drop down to a moderate recovery level for the same amount of time or longer, then back up to high intensity.
For more information, contact us today at Next Level Fitness
You are what you eat and if you want to look younger and be the best version of yourself, there are foods that can help you do it. Foods contain not only nutrients for building healthy looking skin a more youthful appearance, but also antioxidants that protect each cell from free radicals. Free radicals cause cell damage and death and the more damage and death that occurs, the more potential for serious conditions, aging and even death.
If you want to take seconds of your running time, your natural inclination is to run more. However, there are other things you can do to improve your performance when it comes to running. There are workouts to get faster and ways to improve your overall fitness that will cut seconds to minutes off your time. Building power and improving explosive movements help you when you push off to start the run. That ultimately improves your stride, making each step more powerful and faster than you thought possible.
Have you read about a waist trainer and thought it looked like a no effort option to get a smaller waist? Maybe you didn’t even know exactly what one was. A waist trainer squeezes your midsection and is supposed to train your waist to an hour glass figure. Think corset. You know those antiquated undergarments that cinched your waist to its tiniest. It’s not exactly as easy as it may seem on the surface. In fact, you’re far better off doing it permanently with exercise and diet.
At Next Level Fitness in Irvine, CA, we devise training schedules and workouts based on individual needs. In some cases, we create workouts that use full body workouts, other times, we create those that break down the workouts to various parts of the body. When you do isolation exercises, leg day seems to be the hardest for everyone and there’s good reason why. It’s working the largest muscle groups. That takes a lot of energy and means you’ll have more micro tears that create soreness. Those tears need to heal before doing the next round of exercises on those muscle groups.
At Next Level Fitness in Irvine, CA, we help you with every aspect of fitness. Fitness through exercise is only one part of our service. We offer help in all areas of health, wellness and making lifestyle changes to achieve those goals. Learning to eat healthy is just as important as having a regular workout schedule. In fact, a healthy body starts in the kitchen. Identifying the difference between saturated and unsaturated fat and which is healthier can help guide you toward a healthier lifestyle.
If you’re like many people, you go to the gym three times a week, but is that all you really need to be fit? It all depends on your goals. Do you want to lose weight? Is building more muscle your goal? There’s a lot to be said for home cardio workouts as a supplement to regular training. In fact, a personal trainer can help you develop a workout plan that addresses your goals for those days you don’t come to the gym.
People overweight and those with high blood pressure are often given a diet without salt. Studies all agree that the average American diet is contains too much sodium. The chemical name for salt is sodium chloride, and it’s one of the leading causes of too much sodium that can lead to stroke and heart disease. While most people think that adding salt is the problem, the real problem comes from packaged food and those that are ready to heat and serve. That’s why reading the label is important. However, you need some sodium intake and too little can also cause problems.
The body uses various types of fatty acids to run smoothly. There are two types of essential fatty acids that the body can’t make. They come from diet. Those two are omega-6 and omega-3. The healthiest blend of the two is 4 to 1, or four times as much omega6 as omega3. Throughout the US, our diet has changed significantly and today people are consuming far more omega-6 fatty acids than they should, consuming a 50 to 1 ratio. To create a healthier balance, you need to raise the amount of omega-3 fatty acids and reduce the amount of omega-6. At Next Level Fitness in Irvine, CA, we can help you make smarter decisions to make the ratio better.
If you don’t know what leaky gut is, don’t worry, there’s still some discussion on whether it’s a real. According to proponents, it occurs when the permeability of the gut increases, thus allowing even more than just nutrients and water to exit, but also harmful substances. That allows toxins to enter the bloodstream and creates a host of symptoms that range from fatigue, inflammation, skin issues and digestive problems that range from food sensitivity to bloating and gas. It’s blamed for a host of conditions which include migraines, fibromyalgia, thyroid problems, mood swings and autism. There are things you can do and supplements for leaky gut if you believe you have the condition.