Do you feel like maybe your bones creek more than they used to, or doing something like lifting your shopping bags feels like you're competing in Olympic powerlifting, or even going up the stairs feels like you're climbing Everest and your oxygen tank is running low.
Unfortunately, and I hate to tell you this, but as you get older your body starts losing muscle mass, losing up to 8% a decade after 30, affecting your strength, your endurance and your force.
Now to get technical (sorry). This occurs due to a few potential reasons. Firstly as we age the proteins we ingest do little to boost our muscle mass. Protein is absorbed into our bloodstream and that creates amino acids, the building blocks of protein to create our muscles. The amino acids created in our gut are transported by our blood to our muscles, which start something called the mTOr pathway, basically shoving all of these amino acids in the muscles ,making the muscle bigger. But when we get older this process slows down, with the amino acids staying in the gut longer, and it also doesn't help that our metabolic rate also slows, this makes it easier for a larger creation of fat around the muscle cells basically suffocating our muscles, triggering their ability to fire less.
There are also hormonal factors involved, such as a drop off of testosterone and estrogen production as we age. Definitely not helping our muscles grow.
As well as this, our ability to digest sugary food decreases, the more sugary food we digest the more insulin we create to break it down. However, there comes a time where this has a negative impact where our bodies become glucose (sugar) intolerant and insulin resistant. Therefore, instead of the sugar being broken down it collects in our bodies and on our muscles as fat, again stopping muscle growth.
As we age our bone density and muscle fibers decrease. Now, before you ask I’ll explain what that means. Muscle fibers are single muscle cells when grouped together help to move your body. Bone density is basically how many minerals like calcium are in your bones, the more the better! Following the trend of what I said before, unfortunately, these decrease as we age.
This may all sound a bit depressing, BUT IT'S NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM. Have you ever heard of the saying use it or lose it? Well in this case it is true, by building our muscle strength, it not only creates and increases the size of muscle fibers, but by training our muscles we increase our metabolism (food into energy), reducing our obesity risk and our sugar levels making us age gracefully. Strength training also increases bone strength and size, slowing bone mineral loss and creating more bone, weirdly.
And always apply sun cream.
Now, you might be thinking “this sounds great and everything but I hate exercise”. Well, no one said it has to be boring right? At Cloud we specialise on various levels of strength training from our strong and bendy class to our entry level pole and aerial classes through to the toughest of beasts - straps class. Every single one of our aerial classes strengthens all of your muscles and helps you create as much bone density as you want in an exciting but also challenging way. Come check them out and show the under 30s how it's done!
-Written by our straps student Sufyaan
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