Remember those boxes of books you carried up the stairs so easily a few years ago? Or the jammed grocery bags you used to grab from your car’s trunk two at a time?
Maybe these days you’re packing less into storage cartons and shopping sacks, to make them lighter to lift, or enlisting a teenager’s help in hauling them. As we get older, many of us find ourselves becoming less strong than we once were. That’s to be expected in middle age and onward, especially if you’re a woman—right?
It doesn’t have to be so. Your healthy future depends upon keeping your muscles strong. Losing strength may result in serious health problems: fractures, imbalance, loss of mobility and inactivity—leading to diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Yet those risks can be turned around, and even prevented, with quick and simple strength training exercises.
“Strength training—as in lifting weights? I can’t do that!” you may be thinking.
Don’t worry. Even if you’d rather pump your own gas than pump iron, the exercises to help you stay strong are easy to do and won’t leave you looking like a professional body-builder.
And the health payoffs are big. Just a few months of strength (also called resistance) training—at home, in a gym or fitness center—can lower your cholesterol, reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, help you avoid osteoporosis, decrease arthritic symptoms and build muscle so you remain active and independent for years to come.
Losing muscle with age
Most women know that aging can weaken our bones. If left untreated, this condition (called osteopenia) can lead to osteoporosis. A related process—called sarcopenia—happens when our muscles and lean body mass begin to decline.
“The loss of muscle mass starts in your early 30s,” says Michael J. Hewitt, Ph.D., research director for exercise science at Canyon Ranch Health Resort in Tucson. “By the time a woman is in her mid-40s, she may have lost 6 to 7 percent of her muscle mass.”
If that muscle isn’t retained or rebuilt, you lose strength. You also lose metabolic rate, Hewitt adds, which causes you to gain weight. Eventually, as muscle mass declines further with each decade, everyday activities—such as rising from a chair, putting away the dishes, or getting out of the bathtub—may become too difficult to manage.
Many people believe such weakening is inevitable. “We have this idea that because we’re older, we’re not supposed to have the same level of function and that’s really wrong,” Hewitt says. Strength or resistance training—whether performed with handheld weights, exercise bands, or on more sophisticated machines—helps fight that muscle loss.
