There comes a point in your life when you realize that your body is changing. No, I’m not talking about the birds and the bees. I want to talk about the canes and the knees.
Medically, aging is inevitable. But the way we age is something we have a semblance of control over. As medicine has been able to increase life expectancy over the past couple of generations, we’ve seen the average age of the population increase. In 2022, 17.3% of the U.S. population was 65 or older, which is more than 1 in 6 people according to the Administration for Community Living. And that population grew from 2010 to 2020 at the fastest rate since 1880 to 1890 and reached 55.8 million, a 38.6% increase in just 10 years according to the US Census bureau.
And while we’re living longer, the diseases of aging like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s Disease threaten to slow the body down and decrease our quality of life in those years. Those diseases impact our independence and ability to perform activities of daily living like grocery shopping, showering, walking to get the mail, and doing household chores. The fact that chores don’t stop even when we retire, is rude if you really think about it.
Laundry and dishes aside, this is the part of the emerging field of longevity medicine that caught my attention: the focus on increasing health span, or the period of a person’s life when they’re healthy.
I remember reading something in 2018 in the New York Times that never left me (and if you ever took a fitness class with me around that time, you heard me quote it): “Resistance training is the closest thing to the fountain of youth that we have.” The article went on to share evidence to back the statement, “[strength training] increases your metabolism, lowers your body fat and protects you from some of the leading causes of early death and disability.”
Harvard Health shared that strength training is associated with a 10 to 17 percent lower risk of premature death from all causes, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. As great as strength training is for you only 6 percent of adults do the recommended amount of strength training exercise. As a refresher, the recommendation for US adults is to do muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity and that involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.
If a doctor handed you a pill and said it would lower your risk of dying prematurely by 10 to 17 percent, you would prioritize taking that pill. You would make sure you never run out of that pill. You would tell your friends about that pill.
That’s why a key piece of the longevity puzzle that you’ll read about in books like Outlive and experience at a practice like Innovative Vitality has a focus on your body composition – specifically on your muscle mass.
According to Dr. Rahul Khare, the CEO and founder of Innovative Care, a group of medical practices on the North side of Chicago, they focus on coaching patients to gain muscle not only for the well-documented preventative benefits, but also for the added independence in later life. Because “if you can gain muscle in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, that means in your 70s, 80s, and 90s, you’ll have enough muscle to perhaps put the bag over the overhead so you can travel to Italy and be independent.”
And there are cognitive benefits of strength training, specifically that “Low skeletal muscle mass is associated with cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults.”
I’m coming at you – with begrudging awareness – from middle age. At 39-years-old, I think about what my later life will look like. When I forget nouns (you know, that red-headed actress from La La Land), I think about my cognitive health. When I feel changes to my range of motion, I wonder how I’ll move 40 years from now.
Keeping me from spiraling when I feel age in my bones and brain are the meetings I have with my practitioner at Innovative Vitality. In our hourlong appointments, we talk about and track my protein intake and my strength workouts, paying attention to what moves the needle on my monthly InBody scans. Then, I’m not left wondering what my strategy should be for my health – we create a gameplan together.
That’s a key piece of owning my aging and my vitality now: taking actionable steps now to increase your lean muscle mass for a better quality of life now and as you age.
This is a part of a series on Longevity medicine with Innovative Vitality. Read more about what longevity medicine is here.
