Hello listeners, I hope everyone is having a good week.

This episode I'm going to be addressing the issue of older trainees and the idea that as we age,

we should be doing less or perhaps doing things with less intensity and less loading.

Is there any truth to this?

Should I now be looking forward to a future

where I wear Velcro tennis shoes and use that hand bike thing at the gym? Now, the first thing to

note here is that as we get older, we do suffer from age-related loss of muscle mass. I've spoken

about this before. It's called sarcopenia, which my biggest

detractors will call a gratuitous use of Latin because I love making out I'm real smart. Well,

fooled you because it's actually Greek. And it means death of the flesh. Same prefix is in

sarcophagus. As we age, we become anabolicly resistant, anabolic being muscle

building, catabolic being the opposite. An anabolic resistance comes about due to a decreased

response to stimuli like exercise and protein consumption. This decreased response leads to sarcopenia, which displays itself in

ways such as decreased strength, balanced problems, decreased mobility, and increase in risk of having

a fall. So why does this happen? Why do older people become metabolically resistant or resistant to muscle building?

Well, first of all, there's an event that occurs when we ingest protein. It's called myofibular

protein synthesis. This is way too complex for me to get into in a 10-minute podcast and don't think it's really

particularly interesting anyway. So in the interest of keeping it light, we'll say that some

types of amino acids, when consumed, trigger a metabolic process that builds muscle mass.

This is important because it repairs muscle damage from exercise. I say some types of

amino acids because when we consume protein from different sources, whether they're plant or

animal based, they contain different amino acids in varying amounts. The amino acid that we're

...