Age & Strength Loss: What Happens When, & How Much Is Unavoidable?

When it comes to aging and loss of strength, a lot of focus is placed on loss of muscle mass (sarcopenia).

We talked about this in our article: Protein vs Sarcopenia: How Much Do We Need, Really?

And that is important, but it’s not the whole story!

Strong at every age

You can be strong at every age, if and only if you’re very intentional about it.

Researchers (Dr. Maria Westerståhl et al.) followed 427 people for 47 years, repeatedly measuring fitness, strength, muscle endurance, and power from adolescence all the way through into older adulthood.

First, the bad news: physical performance overall peaks in early adulthood and begins declining at around 26 for women and 36 for men, with initially gradual losses that accelerate with advancing age.

About that acceleration: aerobic capacity and muscular endurance initially fall by about 0.3–0.6 percent per year, later speeding up to roughly 2.0–2.5 percent per year, and the deterioration in muscle power gets a similar age-related acceleration.

Next, the worse news: physical power specifically starts its decline even sooner than the other factors, with women having their peak around 19 and men having their peak around 27.

It does, however, get worse: total losses in physical capacity from peak to age 63 range from 30–48%, which latter end of the range is quite a dramatic loss of physical capacity indeed. Note that that’s the aggregate figure, so we’re not just talking about strength here.

Is there any good news? Yes: it’s never too late! People who became physically active in adulthood improved physical capacity by about 5–10%, showing that starting later still provides meaningful benefits. To be clear, that’s a net improvement of 5–10%, we’re not talking about shaving 5–10% off the 30–48% loss.

If you want to go through all these numbers (and more) in detail, here’s the paper: Rise and Fall of Physical Capacity in a General Population: A 47-Year Longitudinal Study

As for what this means in realistic terms: you’re probably not only not as strong as you used to be, but also not as fit, fast, mobile, and so forth. Your power (explosive power, like sprints or best-effort lifts) and endurance (like long-distance cardio, or isometric holds) are probably not what they used to be either.

• On the one hand, you can improve them.
• On the other hand, you do have to actually do it—merely knowing about it will not help if you don’t take action!

So, how to do that?

Read on…

Want to learn more?

Here are some very good starting points:

• Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
• Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise
• How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
• HIIT, But Make It HIRT ← this is about high-intensity resistance training (HIRT); confusing the muscles like one confuses the heart in HIIT, which thus yields improved results
• Exercises To Do (And Ones To Avoid) If You Have Osteoporosis ← an important consideration for many

And if you’re really serious about it, then for a much deeper dive than we have room for here, we highly recommend this excellent book we reviewed a while back:

Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Aging with Power – by Dr. Vonda Wright ← So, she wants us to avoid the train of sarcopenia → osteopenia → osteoporosis → fractures → infections → death, by reducing our risk factors early, and staying more robust and biologically younger.