Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

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Resistance Is Useful!

At 10almonds we talk a lot about the importance of regular moderate exercise (e.g. walking, gardening, housework, etc), and with good reason: getting in those minutes (at least 150 minutes per week, so, a little over 20 minutes per day, or 25 minutes per day with one day off) is the exericise most consistently linked to better general health outcomes and reduced mortality risk.

We also often come back to mobility, because at the end of the day, being able to reach for something from a kitchen cabinet without doing oneself an injury is generally more important in life than being able to leg-press a car.

Today though, we’re going to talk about resistance training.

What is resistance training?

It can be weight-lifting, or it can be bodyweight exercises. In those cases, what you’re resisting is gravity. It can also be exercises with resistance bands or machines. In all cases, it’s about building and/or maintaining strength.

Why does it matter?

Let’s say you’re not an athlete, soldier, or laborer, and the heaviest thing you have to pick up is a bag of groceries. Strength still matters, for two main reasons:

  • Muscle strength correlates to bone strength. You can’t build (or maintain) strong muscles on weak bones, so if you take care of your muscles, then your body will keep your bones strong too.
    • That’s assuming you have a good diet as well—but today’s not about that. If you’d like to know more about eating for bone health though, do check out this previous article about that!
  • Muscle strength correlates to balance and stability. You can’t keep yourself from falling over if you are physically frail.

Both of those things matter, because falls and fractures often have terrible health outcomes (e.g., slower recovery and more complications) the older we get. So, we want to:

  • Ideally, not fall in the first place
  • If we do fall, have robust bones

See also: Effects of Resistance Exercise on Bone Health

How much should we do?

Let’s go to the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research on this one:

❝There is strong evidence to support the benefits of resistance exercise for countering many age-related processes of sarcopenia, muscle weakness, mobility loss, chronic disease, disability, and even premature mortality.

In addition, this Position Statement provides specific evidence-based practice recommendations to aid in the implementation of resistance exercise programs for healthy older adults and those with special considerations.

While there are instances where low-intensity, low-volume programs are appropriate (i.e., beginning programs for individuals with frailty or CVDs), the greatest benefits are possible with progression to moderate to higher intensity programs.❞

~ Fragala et al

Read the statement in full:

Resistance Training for Older Adults: Position Statement From the National Strength and Conditioning Association

There’s a lot of science there and it’s well worth reading if you have the time. It’s particularly good at delineating how much is not enough vs how much is too much, and the extent to which we should (or shouldn’t) train to exhaustion.

If you don’t fancy that, though, and/or just want to start with something accessible and work your way up, the below is a very good (and also evidence-based) start-up plan:

Healthline’s Exercise Plan For Seniors—For Strength, Balance, & Flexibility

(it has a weekly planner, step-by-step guides to the exercises, and very clear illustrative animations of each)

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  • When Did You Last Have a Cognitive Health Check-Up?

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    When Did You Last Have a Cognitive Health Check-Up?

    Regular health check-ups are an important part of a good health regime, especially as we get older. But after you’ve been prodded, probed, sampled and so forth… When did you last have a cognitive health check-up?

    Keeping on top of things

    In our recent Monday Research Review main feature about citicoline, we noted that it has beneficial effects for a lot of measures of cognitive health.

    And that brought us to realize: just how on top of this are we?

    Your writer here today could tell you what her sleep was like on any night in the past year, what her heart rate was like, her weight, and all that. Moods too! There’s an app for that. But cognitive health? My last IQ test was in 2001, and I forget when my last memory test was.

    It’s important to know how we’re doing, or else how to we know if there has been some decline? We’ve talked previously about the benefits of brain-training of various kinds to improve cognition, so in some parts we’ll draw on the same resources today, but this time the focus is on getting quick measurements that we can retest regularly (mark the calendar!)

    Some quick-fire tests

    These tests are all free, quick, and accessible. Some of them will try to upsell you on other (i.e. paid) services; we leave that to your own discretion, but the things we’ll be using today are free.

    Test your verbal memory

    This one’s a random word list generator. It defaults to 12 words, but you can change that if you like. Memorize the words, and then test yourself by seeing how many you can write down from memory. If it gets too easy, crank up the numbers.

    Click here to try it now

    Test your visual memory

    This one’s a series of images; the test is to click to say whether you’ve seen this exact image previously in the series or not.

    Click here to try it now

    Test your IQ

    This one’s intended to be general purpose intelligence; in reality, IQ tests have their flaws too, but it’s not a bad metric to keep track of. Just don’t get too hung up on the outcome, and remember, your only competition is yourself!

    Click here to try it now

    Test your attention / focus

    This writer opened this and this three other attention tests (to get you the best one) before getting distracted, noting the irony, and finally taking the test. Hopefully you can do better!

    Click here to try it now

    Test your creativity

    This one’s a random object generator. Give yourself a set period of time (per your preference, but make a note of the time you allow yourself, so that you can use the same time period when you retest yourself at a later date) in which to list as many different possible uses for the item.

    Click here to try it now

    Test your musical sense

    This one’s a pitch recognition test. So, with the caveat that it is partially testing your hearing as well as your cognition, it’s a good one to take and regularly retest in any case.

    Click here to try it now

    How often should you retest?

    There’s not really any “should” here, but to offer some advice:

    • If you take them too often, you might find you get bored of doing so and stop, essentially burning out.
    • If you don’t take them regularly, you may forget, lose this list of tests, etc.
    • Likely a good “sweet spot” is quarterly or six-monthly, but there’s nothing wrong with testing annually either.

    It’s all about the big picture, after all.

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  • What Size Breakfast Is Best, By Science?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, the popular wisdom goes. But, what should it consist of, and how much should we be eating for breakfast?

    It has been previously established that it is good if breakfast is the largest meal of the day:

    Mythbusting Breaktime

    …with meals getting progressively smaller thereafter.

    Of course, very many people do the inverse: small (or skipped) breakfast, moderate lunch, larger dinner. This, however, is probably more a result of when eating fits around the modern industrialized workday (and thus gets normalized), rather than actual health considerations.

    So, what’s the latest science?

    A plucky band of researchers led by Dr. Karla-Alejandra Pérez-Vega investigated the importance of breakfast in the context of heart health. This research was done as part of a larger study into the effects of the Mediterranean Diet on cardiovascular health, so if anyone wants a quick recap before we carry on, then:

    The Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For? ← the answer, by the way, is “pretty much everything”

    …and there are also different versions that each use the Mediterranean Diet as the core, while focussing extra on a different area of health, including one to make it extra heart-healthy:

    Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean ← most anti-inflammatory / gut-healthiest / heart-healthiest / brain-healthiest

    What they found

    In their sample population (n=383) of Spanish adults aged 55–75 with pre-diagnosed metabolic syndrome who, as part of the intervention of this 36-month interventional study, had now for the past 36 months been on a Mediterranean diet but without specific guidance on portion sizes:

    • Participants with insufficient breakfast energy intake had the highest adiposity (which is a measure of body fat expressed as a percentage of total mass)
    • Participants with low or high (but not moderate) breakfast energy intake had the larger BMI and waist circumference over time
    • Participants with low or high (but not moderate) breakfast energy intake had higher triglyceride and lower HDL (good) cholesterol levels
    • Participants who consumed 20–30% of their daily calories at breakfast enjoyed the greatest improvements in lipid profiles, with lower triglycerides and higher HDL (good) cholesterol levels
    • Participants with lower breakfast quality (lower adherence to Mediterranean Diet) had higher blood pressure levels
    • Participants with lower breakfast quality (lower adherence to Mediterranean Diet) had higher blood sugar levels
    • Participants with lower breakfast quality (lower adherence to Mediterranean Diet) had lower estimated glomerular filtration rate (which is an indicator of kidney function)
    • Participants with higher breakfast quality (higher adherence to Mediterranean Diet) had lower waist circumference, higher HDL cholesterol, and better kidney function

    You can see the paper itself here in the Journal of Nutrition, Health, and Aging:

    Breakfast energy intake and dietary quality and trajectories of cardiometabolic risk factors in older adults

    What this means

    According to this research, the heart-healthiest breakfast is:

    • not skipped
    • Mediterranean Diet adherent
    • within the range of of 20–30% of the total calories for the day

    Want to make it even better?

    Consider:

    Before You Eat Breakfast: 3 Surprising Facts About Intermittent Fasting

    Enjoy!

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  • You May Have More Air Pollution In Your Home Than In The Street

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Certainly, gas stoves and heaters can cause indoor air pollution, with carbon monoxide (CO) being the main risk. Even if you have a CO alarm, the level at which it will go off is usually the “this will kill you tonight if you don’t do something about it soon” level, rather than the “this will slowly kill your brain cells but you’ll keep functioning otherwise, until one day you don’t” levels of CO.

    Still, do by all means have a CO alarm if you have anything in your house that can release CO!

    See also: Association Between Carbon Monoxide Intoxication and Incidence of Ischemic Stroke: A Retrospective Nested Case-Control Study in South Korea

    Fun fact about those stoves:

    ❝Just 1 kilogram of cooking fuel emits 10 quadrillion particles smaller than 3 nanometers, which matches or exceeds what’s emitted from cars with internal combustion engines.

    At that rate, you might be inhaling 10-100 times more of these sub-3 nanometer particles from cooking on a gas stove indoors than you would from car exhaust while standing on a busy street.❞

    ~ Ka‌yla Alb‌ert

    But today, we’re not here about that

    Rather, we are looking at some more innocent-seeming things, such as scented cleaning products and air fresheners. Notably, the biggest problem is often not even the cleaning chemicals themselves. Of course: please don’t breathe bleach fumes, etc.

    But that’s an obvious risk, and today we’re about the less obvious risks.

    So… What is the less obvious risk here?

    It’s the fragrances. The terpenes used to hold them react with ozone in the air, to create new nanoparticles. And, just like the nanoparticles from the stove, these can reach very high concentrations indoors, and suffice it to say, if you can smell the fragrance then you have the pollutants inside you.

    You can read about how badly different products score, here:

    Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings ← you’ll need to scroll down to the table with different cleaning products and air fresheners

    Further, the seemingly-harmless scented candle is, as it turns out, quite a menace too:

    ❝Full-scale emission experiments were conducted in the Purdue zEDGE Test House using a variety of scented candles (n = 5) and wax warmers/melts (n = 14) under different outdoor air exchange rates (AERs). Terpene concentrations were measured in real-time using a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS). PTR-TOF-MS measurements revealed that scented candle and wax warmer/melt products emit a variety of monoterpenes (C10H16) and oxygen-containing monoterpenoids (C10H14O, C10H16O, C10H18O, C10H20O), with peak concentrations in the range of 10−1 to 102 ppb. Monoterpene EFs were much greater for scented wax warmers/melts (C10H16 EFs ∼ 102 mg per g wax consumed) compared to scented candles (C10H16 EFs ∼ 10−1 to 100 mg per g wax consumed). Significant emissions of reactive terpenes from both products, along with nitrogen oxides (NO, NO2) from candles, depleted indoor ozone (O3) concentrations. Terpene iFs were similar between the two products (iFs ∼ 103 ppm) and increased with decreasing outdoor AER. Terpene iFs during concentration decay periods were similar to, or greater than, iFs during active emission periods for outdoor AERs ≤ 3.0 h−1.

    Overall, scented wax warmers/melts were found to release greater quantities of monoterpenes compared to other fragranced consumer products used in the home, including botanical disinfectants, hair care products, air fresheners, and scented sprays.❞

    ~ Dr. Emily Reidy et al.

    Read in full: Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings

    Put in fewer words: scented candles are bad, and wax melts (the kind with no flame, that one might easily expect to thus produce fewer emissions) are at least as bad if not worse, and both are even worse than cleaning products.

    Some of the same research team conducted further studies, because of this this, finding:

    ❝We performed field measurements in a residential test house to investigate atmospheric nanoparticle formation from scented wax melt use. We employed a high-resolution particle size magnifier-scanning mobility particle sizer (PSMPS) and a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS) for real-time monitoring of indoor atmospheric nanoparticle size distributions and terpene mixing ratios, respectively.

    Our findings reveal that terpenes released from scented wax melts react with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3) to initiate new particle formation (NPF) events, resulting in significant indoor atmospheric nanoparticle concentrations (>106 cm–3) comparable to those emitted by combustion-based scented candles, gas stoves, diesel engines, and natural gas engines.

    We show that scented wax melt-initiated NPF events can result in significant respiratory exposures, with nanoparticle respiratory tract deposited dose rates similar to those determined for combustion-based sources.

    Our results challenge the perception of scented wax melts as a safer alternative to combustion-based aromatherapy

    ~ Dr. Satya Patra et al.

    Read in full: Flame-Free Candles Are Not Pollution-Free: Scented Wax Melts as a Significant Source of Atmospheric Nanoparticles

    In short: you might want to ditch the fragranced products!

    Want to do more?

    Give your household hair a makeover with this multi-vector approach to deal with different risks:

    What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?

    For that matter, the air is a very important factor for the health of your lungs (and thus, for the health of everything that’s fed oxygen by your lungs), and there are more things we can do in that regard as well:

    Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!

    Take care!

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  • Come As You Are – by Dr. Emily Nagoski

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    We’ve all heard the jokes, things like: Q: “Why is the clitoris like Antarctica?” A: “Most men know it’s there; most don’t give a damn”

    But… How much do people, in general, really know about the anatomy and physiology of sexual function? Usually very little, but often without knowing how little we know.

    This book looks to change that. Geared to a female audience, but almost everyone will gain useful knowledge from this.

    The writing style is very easy-to-read, and there are “tl;dr” summaries for those who prefer to skim for relevant information in this rather sizeable (400 pages) tome.

    Yes, that’s “what most people don’t know”. Four. Hundred. Pages.

    We recommend reading it. You can thank us later!

    Get your copy of Come As You Are from Amazon today!

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  • Squat Variations for Painful Knees (No More Pain!)

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Having bad knees can be a bit of a catch-22; you want to squat to make them stronger, but you can’t do that because your knees are not good. But, there are ways to do it!

    Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, a doctor of physical therapy, advises:

    Gently does it

    Ten ways to choose from:

    1. Pool Squats: performed in a pool for joint-friendly support. Can use both hands, one hand, or no support. Focus on sitting back and standing up, aiming for 10–20 reps.
    2. Supported Squats: use a sink, rings, or handles for support. Stand a distance away and sit back while keeping your knees behind your heels. Perform 10–20 reps for 2–3 sets.
    3. Chair Loop Squats: use a resistance band around your knees while sitting on a chair. Press your knees outward as you stand and sit to strengthen hip and knee stability. Do 8–12 reps for 2–3 sets.
    4. Heel Elevated Squats: place your heels on dumbbells to shift emphasis to thighs and reduce knee strain. Ideal for stiff ankles or back tightness. Perform 10–15 reps for 2–3 sets.
    5. Sumo Squats: a wide stance squat, good for hip strength and reducing knee stress. Adjust your foot positioning for comfort. Perform 15–20 reps for 2–3 sets.
    6. Chair Squats: hold a weight close to your chest while sitting and standing from a chair. Can use kettlebells or dumbbells. Do 8–10 reps for 2–3 sets.
    7. Band Squats: use a resistance band secured behind your knees to provide support and encourage proper squat mechanics. Perform 5–12 reps for 2–3 sets.
    8. Modified Single Leg Squat: sit-to-stand using one leg with the other as a kickstand. Adjust your foot position for difficulty. Perform 8–12 reps per side for 2–3 sets.
    9. Weighted Squats: add weight using dumbbells or a barbell. Maintain an upright torso. Adjust the weight and reps based on difficulty, and do 5–10 reps for 2–4 sets.
    10. Split Squat: a stationary lunge, keeping your feet in place and lowering straight down. Focus on your front leg while keeping balance. Can add weight if you want. Perform 5–12 reps per side based on difficulty.

    For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    The Squat Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering the Squat and Finding Your True Strength – by Dr. Aaron Horschig

    Take care!

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  • The Path to Longevity – by Dr. Luigi Fontana

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    We’ve reviewed other “expand your healthspan” books, and while they’re good (or else we wouldn’t include them), this is top-tier, up there with Dr. Greger’s books while being more accessible (more on this later).

    This book is far more informational than opinionated, and while some reviewers have described the book as motivating them, that’s not at all the tone, and it’s clear that (beyond hoping for the reader to have to information to promote a long healthy life), the author has no particular agenda to push.

    One example: while he gives a whole-foods, plant-based diet a “A+” rating, he puts the (often meat/fish-heavy) paleo diet at a close “A-“, depending on the animal products chosen (which can swing it a lot, and he discusses this in some detail).

    In the category of criticism… This reviewer has none. Sometimes it seemed something was going unaddressed, but it would be addressed later.

    Stylistically, the text is easy-reading and/but has a lot of references to hard science, complete with charts, diagrams, and so forth. The impression that this reviewer got is that Dr. Fontana took pains to convey as much science as possible, with (unlike Dr. Greger) as little jargon as possible. And that goes a long way.

    Bottom line: if you’re looking for a “healthy aging” book that has a lot more science than “copy the Blue Zone supercentenarians and hope” without being so scientifically dense as “How Not To Die” or “How Not To Age“, then this is the book for you.

    Click here to check out The Path to Longevity, and optimize the path you take!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

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