Sarcopenia And The Fight To Stay Independent

Weakness is not an unavoidable side effect of aging. It’s often the predictable result of sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass, strength, and function that can start in your 30s and accelerate as you get older. If you’ve watched a parent or grandparent struggle to get up from the floor, lose balance, or never fully recover after a fall, you already know what’s at stake: freedom.

We zoom out from “fitness goals” and get real about why muscle is a health and longevity issue. We talk through the biggest causes of age-related muscle loss, including a sedentary lifestyle, chronically low protein intake, hormonal decline, chronic inflammation, and nervous system dysfunction that can shut down key movement patterns. We also connect the dots to metabolism and blood sugar, since skeletal muscle plays a central role in insulin sensitivity and glycogen storage.

Then we get practical. We outline a doable strength training approach built on compound lifts and progressive overload, including simple regressions like chair squats for anyone rebuilding confidence or joint tolerance. You’ll also hear clear protein guidance, recovery priorities like sleep and hydration, and the early warning signs of sarcopenia such as weaker grip strength, difficulty standing from a chair, balance issues, and fatigue with basic tasks.

If you want healthy aging that still includes travel, hobbies, and independence, start building strength with intention. Subscribe, share this with someone you want to see stay strong, and leave a review with the one habit you’re committing to this week.

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Transcript

Weakness Kills Before Age

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Most people don't die from old age. They die from weakness. There's a condition that's quietly stealing your strength, your independence, and eventually your life. It's called sarcopenia. And this podcast is about freedom, not necessarily fitness. Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life from Dr. Enrico Volchikori. And this week we're going to be talking about muscles. Not just the physiological responsibility of muscle, but what happens when we start to lose muscle. It's called sarcopenia. Struggling to get up off the floor, falling and never recovering, losing independence. We may have seen loved ones go through this: a parent, a grandparent, someone close to us who has lost a lot of muscle mass. And these things start to become issues, and not only issues, life-threatening issues that we are worried about. Their next fall could be their last fall, or getting on the floor at home and they're independent and no one being able to help them up for hours. These are scary things to think about. But what we're defining with those conditions is what's called sarcopenia. It's age-related loss of muscle mass, strength, and function due to muscle fibers weakening and decaying. The start of this process starts as early as our 30s and it accelerates into as we get into our 50s. And 3 to 8% of muscle loss happens per decade. So after our 20s, we start to lose about 3 to 8% of our muscle every decade onward in our 30s, in our 40s, and our 50s. And then that 8% sharply inclines in our 60s and 70s. So it's this uphill battle with muscle that we have to live with our entire life. This is not just aging, it's a preventable decline. And that's what this podcast is all about. Hopefully motivating you to take control of one big aspect of your life, which is your muscular system. The reason why we want to focus on this is because if you don't, this is where you lose your independence. You increase your fall risk, your metabolism slows, your fat increases, blood sugar issues, because muscles are the ones that are the gatekeepers to our blood sugar regulation and glycogen regulation, and higher mortality risk. We've seen this. People with increased levels of sarcopenia have a sharp incline in mortality risk, meaning that their chances of death increase quickly the more aggressive the stage of sarcopenia that happens. Muscle is not about looking good. It's your insurance policy for survival. It's linked to chronic disease, poor recovery from illness, and reduced lifespan. So that's just a synopsis or a nutshell of all the research we have on exercise physiology and muscle is it leads to these chronic conditions, it leads to poor recovery, it leads to increased risk and falls and reduced lifespan. If you don't need a bigger wake-up call than this, I don't know what else, what other cowbells to ring for you. Muscle is really important. And I want you to take that home. And whenever you're working out or whenever you're doing something active, you're thinking about your muscles and not about the distance, not how many steps you took, how far you went, or anything like that. It's about what you did for your muscles. How many squats did you do? How many lunges did you do? How many sit-ups did you do? How many pull-ups did you do? How many, whatever you can do, how many pounds did you lift? How many, you know, was it a five-pound dumbbell? Was it a two-pound dumbbell? What are you doing for your muscles? How are you nurturing them? Your muscles want to be pushed. They're designed to be pushed, they're designed to get you to the next level. They're designed to help you get things done. What are you doing that is pushing your muscles to not only grow? We're not, we're past the point of growth. If you're in your 40s or older, those days are behind you, trying to grow muscle. You can, you absolutely can. You can push yourself and do that, but that's that's aggressive. That's more in the fitness industry. We're talking about maintaining our muscle mass. If we can maintain whatever lean muscle mass we have now in our 40s and keep that into our 50s, or if you're in your 50s and keep that into your 60s, that's such a huge success. You've added years to your longevity in life. You literally have because of that. So that's the key principle we want to move forward with on this podcast. And we're going to keep this one short and sweet. Next week, I've got a great guest, Ryan, uh, Chris Ryan from Chris Ryan Fitness on the cover of uh Men's Health magazine, I think three, four, five times. I don't know. This guy just knows his stuff. And he's going to be here talking and diving deeper into fitness uh next week. So we have that recorded, and that's gonna be next Tuesday's podcast. So uh tune in for that one. But for today, I thought this would be a great one for muscles since we're leading into that. The root causes of sarcopenia. So we want to understand this. Why does it happen? We know exercise and resistance can prevent it, but why does it happen? It happens number one, is because of a sedentary lifestyle. And in North America, we've created a very comfortable sedentary life. We buy things, we buy the more comfy sofas, we got three recliners, we have comfy car seats, we have comfy cars, we drive everywhere, we sit everywhere, we get grumpy at the malls when they have a wooden bench, and we're like, this is not comfortable. Uh, because we sit, we live in a seated culture where the rest of the world really does not, does not have that luxury to be that comfortable. And that sedentary lifestyle, whether it's working all day at a computer or a workstation, uh, leads to sarcopenia and the detriment of muscle from the beginning. And we start our kids in in school sitting at a desk all day, and it just doesn't get much better. At least they got PE, sports, activities, they're keeping mobile. You are not. The second biggest reason this happens is a low protein diet. And no matter what number I say, everyone comes up very short of the number. If you're a female over 40 and you're not getting at least 100 grams of protein per day, you're you are missing the boat. Men, if you're getting under 150 grams of protein per day, you're you're not even close. You're not even close to what you need to be eating. Carbohydrates and proteins both carry four calories per gram, meaning energy, four energy units of calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate that you eat. If you need to be eating what the packages say, 2,000 calories per day, how much of that should be protein? Should be at least a third. Take the 2,000 calorie thing number that they've given you, divide that by three, and it's about 700 calories. Divide that by four, and that's how many grams of protein you need to have per day. Do the math. Are we at 300? We're at 300 grams of protein per day times four. No, sorry, two, almost 200 grams of protein per day. It's 800. Yeah, there you go. So 170, 180 grams of protein per day. That also means our carbohydrate should be around there as well, 150 to 200. People are eating 300, 400 grams of carbs per day, less than 100 grams of protein per day, and then the rest is from bad fats. And now we're back into our food and diet uh podcast that I've done a thousand times that we don't need to do. This low protein is an epidemic in our culture of just we're we're okay with it with eating packaged foods and low protein foods. It it's causing sarcopedia. Your muscles don't have enough energy to do what they need to do. They're made of, your muscles are literally made of protein. Then we got hormonal decline. So as our hormones start to change, whether it's postnatal, midlife, later in life, and our hormone systems start to change because of hyperinflammation for so long, that also leads to sarcopenia as well. Because now the hormonal regulation and moving uh proteins and carbohydrates properly throughout the body starts to get unefficient. Chronic inflammation is another reason. The chronic inflammation that we have in our body, and we start to feel it in the 40s and 50s. You touch muscles along your legs or along your glutes, and they're super sensitive. That's chronic inflammation of the fascia and muscle tissue around your knees, the IT band, the glutes, around the shoulders, you touch people's traps, and they're super tender, and they can barely touch them. That is that chronic inflammation we're talking about. And then nervous system dysfunction. This nervous system dysfunction creates dysregulation and that creates mobility issues. And then when we have mobility issues, we shut down certain kinetic chains where certain muscles can't work. So we can see this in posterior chains like the glutes and hamstrings for a lot of people, which shifts their balance. Then they get weaker glutes, then they get low back pain, and then they get a stronger chest because they're doing everything with their chest and a weak back. And then we lead into spinal conditions of spinal pain, disc degeneration, and the list just keeps going on. So the importance of maintaining muscle, we can make this a six-hour podcast if we want. Your body adapts to what you demand of it or what you don't. I love that. You got to remember that. Your body adapts to what you demand of it, or what you don't demand of it. It will adapt to sitting at a desk if you teach it to do that. So that's the importance of facilitating our muscles. The solution is exercise. It's the best medicine you can have. And exercise can be defined in any way that you feel comfortable with. Exercise should be fun. You shouldn't just be looking on social media and seeing what the Kardashians are doing and be like, I need to do that. No, you don't. You're not a multi-billionaire that doesn't have to work and can just sit around and have a home gym, or you're the rock. Um, you can't do this. Uh, we just don't have that luxury. We have a job to do, we have a family to raise, we don't have nannies, we don't have cleaners, we don't have gardeners, we don't have all that stuff. We have to do a lot of that stuff ourselves. And it eats up a lot of the week and a lot of the time in our life, which is okay. But the small time that we have, we have to dedicate it to ourselves and our health and exercise. So, whatever exercise means to you is the best way to get started with exercise. Strength training is where I'm going to nudge you on this podcast to try and do it. And this is two to four times a week. It can be as quick as 15-minute exercises. It really can. Focus on compounding lifts and progressive overload. What that means is compounding muscles together. So squat is such a wonderful exercise. You can do this with no weights at all, just against the wall so you're safe. And just getting that motion back of being able to squat down and try to get that butt as close to the floor as you can and coming back up. That's the compound of coming down isolation and coming up and firing those quads and glutes to get your body back up. Just your body weight is a good enough exercise. For some of you, your body weight is going to be a huge challenge. And that's great too. You don't have to go as deep. Be mindful of your joints, your knees, your hips, and just go down and go up. That motion of trying to come back up from a seated position is wonderful. You can even use a chair to start with. Just bring your butt down to the chair so that you know you won't go past any dangerous points for your knees and come back up. Getting up from a chair 10 times, three times over, doing that three sets of 10. Uh, what a what an important function to have in our life of getting up from a chair. You do that multiple times a day, from your work chair, from the from the dinner table. You do this every day. It's a thing that you want to do when you're 95 as well. Trust me, when you're 95, we'll talk. We'll sit down for a coffee, um, probably in the Amalfi coast somewhere in Italy. And we're gonna sit down, we're gonna talk about why this was so important back in our life. And now that we're 90, we can still get up from the cafe table and go walk, you know, half a kilometer back to our house. That's the goal of all of this is having a long, healthy life and being able to do what we need to do. So that compounded lifts is something like a squat or a lunge or a push-up. That's and then progressive overload means that when you're lifting that five-pound weight, let's say you're doing dumbbell curls for your arms, over time, as the weeks go by, you turn that five-pound weight into a seven-pound weight, and then you progressively overload that as well. Or you take a light weight, and instead of doing 10, you do 20 and you burn out the muscle. You just you do your three sets and then you do a fourth set where you're like, you know what? I'm gonna go until failure, until this starts to burn. And once it burns, you progressively overload your biceps or whatever it muscle you're doing. And now your bicep tissue is like, what just happened? We got to send protein here. There's a little bit of micro damage in the tissue. We got to repair that tissue with more muscle fiber. And that's where we not only maintain the muscle mass we have, we progressively teach it to, we need a little bit more muscle. We're gonna start working a little bit harder. We love life, we want to live longer, we want to live better. And then your muscles or muscle system is gonna be like, okay, well, then let's use up this protein and let's do our thing. And it just has that positive feedback loop from that. So, by doing this, by having progressive overload and focusing on compound lifts, we build muscle, we improve bone density. So, some of you may have heard that you may be osteopenic or starting to become osteopenic or hopefully not osteoporotic yet. And we need to improve bone density. The number one way to improve calcium intake into the bone is progressive overload or resistance training on the tendons. So that means lifting stuff that's a little heavy. That's the importance of that. Enhancing it enhances metabolism because what metabolism is, and we have some metabolism podcasts you can go back to, metabolism is muscle efficiency. That's what metabolism really means. We look at metabolism as how well do we burn calories, but you burn calories through muscle usage. Your body's basal metabolic rate is just for basic function, organ function, and that only takes a few hundred calories per day. It doesn't take much. Your brain only needs a few, I think, what's the say 30 to 40 grams of carbs of glucose per day. I don't even think it's 30 grams of glucose. I think it's less than that of glucose energy per day, and it's made up of cholesterol. That's what your brain is. So the rest of it is all to fuel the motion that you're doing in your life. And that comes from good source protein diet, and it improves insulin sensitivity, which runs with the metabolism as well. The better we we refill our muscles with glycogen and use that energy, the better our insulin sensitivity is as well. There is no pill, no supplement, no therapy more powerful than resistance training when it comes to your muscular system. So, why do we want to do this? That is the biggest question you need to answer yourself. Why should I be consistent with this? And it's gonna come from a simple answer: playing with your grandkids, traveling freely, being on a cruise ship when you're 82 years old, deciding to choose to play golf nine holes with your grandkid or your or your children well into your 80s, staying independent, telling your kids, hey, no, I'm okay. I it can be in my house. What are you guys talking about? I don't need to go to any assistant living, I'm doing just fine. I haven't fallen, I haven't done anything. Leave me alone. And being 83 years old, uh, avoid the nursing homes and and doing these things. So whatever, whatever resonates with you, whatever goal that is. I've heard some tear-jerking confessions from hundreds of patients over my 20 years of doing this, and the reasons of why they want to do something and they come in and they do it, and they are super successful doing it. They hit all their goals because they were so determined. It was as simple as wanting to be there for their daughter's wedding or their grandkids' wedding, which was coming up in three, four years. So they ended up losing 96 pounds or whatever. I've some amazing stories. And it's gonna come from a why that no one can tell you. No podcast you can listen to can motivate you any more than you in your life and what motivates you the most. So, whatever that is, say it to yourself, answer that why, and then implement the right things for your life. Aging is inevitable. So, saying, Well, I don't want to age, that's a great why to do what you want to do. But unfortunately, I got some bad news for you that the clock keeps ticking every day, every minute. And because it does, we age every minute, every minute of every day. So, aging is inevitable. Weakness is optional. Strong people live better and longer. It's been documented. We know this, it's proven. So, here's some habits that I want you just to take in that will help you on your success journey with this right off the bat is protein intake has to be 0.7 to one gram. I like the one gram because it just makes the math really easy. One gram per body weight, ideal for adapt active adults, and you're all gonna be active because you're all gonna be doing muscle work. So one gram of protein of your body weight. So if you're 196 pounds, you need 196 grams of protein per day, or about that. Daily movement. Steps matter. You can you can use steps to monitor all this, but daily movement, resistance training, sleep recovery, prioritizing sleep so that you can recover. So when we do the work that we do every day, our muscles and our body can heal at night and repair to do it again tomorrow. So sleep's really important. It's the only time we have to heal. Hydration, hydration really important. Make sure you're getting almost a gallon of water a day if you're being active, you need that. And then nervous system optimization. Gotta have your nervous system optimal to do all of this so that you can recover and heal properly. Adjustments, electrolytes, uh, stretching, meditation, whatever it is that you need to do to regulate the nervous system. And don't forget about the warning signs of sarcopenia. If you're starting to get the warning signs, you're out of time. You have to take action right now. If you're on full, full-fledged sarcopenia, well, it's too late. And these are people on using walkers to walk. Um, they're just past the point of being able to do what they need to do to maintain, or not only maintain, but try and get some muscle strength back. They're they're past the point. For those of you listening, I don't think any of you are at that point. So you all have a chance to do this. But here is the here is the warning signs that you need to just listen to really quickly. Weak grip strength, your hand strength used to be strong five years ago, and now you're grabbing things and you just don't feel like you have that grip strength. That's the first warning sign of sarcopenia. Trouble getting up from a chair. You used to just be able to maybe use the armrest and push yourself up or not even use it and just kind of stand up and you can't now. Now you're leaning to one side, you're pushing yourself up, not because of pain in the knee, but because you physically just can't do it and you're not being honest with yourself. You're like, oh, I got it. I can just push myself up. That's sarcopenia. Loss of balance, just randomly losing your balance and catching yourself and fatigue with simple tasks, just doing something simple and just being super fatigued, uh, weed whacking for 10 minutes, or uh moving some stuff in the garage for 15 minutes and you just feel weak. These are all signs. This hopefully gives you a little bit more of awareness when it comes to that. So, what do we do from this podcast? We're going to start lifting weights, any type of weight, kettlebells, dumbbells, resistance bands, whatever you have, three times per week. And you're gonna change the muscle groups each time. We're gonna eat protein. How much protein? One gram per pound of body weight. We're gonna walk daily. Walking does not count as your exercise. We're talking about sarcopenia and muscles. We need to do the resistance training three times a week. That's what we're talking about. Every other day, we're going for a walk. The 10,000 steps, I love it. It's about 5K. I love that. Track strength progress so that you know when you need to increase the weight to continue overloading progressive overload on your muscle. Make it doable, not overwhelming. Don't jump into a full-fledged fitness program that you haven't been to the gym for five years, and now you're gonna jump into a fitness program. That doesn't make any sense. Start with the simple things. Get the body moving, see what muscles hurt a little bit. Maybe you don't want to do a fitness program yet because you got a shoulder that's just a little weak right now, and all you need to do is just get some shoulder exercises for 12 weeks going and just work on it. And then three months from now, see how you feel. That's how I started four years ago. I started, I did some skull crushers and some shoulder stuff, and I hurt my shoulder immediately. And it took me a couple months to get that under control. And I just kept it light, and then once everything started to feel good and my and my weights increased, doing you see, all the overload. Like this morning at the gym, it was chest day, and I've been doing the same weights all the time. I got up to 225 pounds on the on the inclined press, and I've been doing that for months. I'm like, okay, well, I know what I know. I teach. People, this if I can do this easily, I gotta do some more. Went and grabbed the 115-pound dumbbells. I'm not doing this to brag in each hand, laid down on a flat bench press, and I started to do three sets of 10. The third one was eight because I got the failure, and I'm like, I dropped these things. I'm like, geez, man, you're not in college anymore. You don't need to do this, but I know what I know. And if I have to progressively overload the tendons, then I can't just keep doing 150 or 10 pounds. I gotta bring it up to 115 pounds. And I'm at a point where now I gotta figure out how not to hurt myself. So that but even I'm walking the walk, talking the talk, because I'm in my 40s and I have to be realistic with it. If I want to maintain what I have, I'm gonna have to push a little bit harder. So if you're feeling weak, tired, or like your body isn't responding the way it used to, it's normal. And it's not something, it's not normal, it's not normal, and it's not something you should ignore. You don't lose muscle because you age. You age because you lose muscle. Age is just a number. You can have a 50-year-old that looks like a 35-year-old, and you can have a 40-year-old that looks like a 60-year-old, and the difference is strength. That's truly what the difference is. Your future quality of life is decided by what you do today. This isn't um this isn't a warning. This is just strategy on how to maintain uh your muscle, healthy aging, and staying well for as long as you possibly can. It's all wellness based. And then tune in next week for Chris. You're gonna love that episode about fitness and what he's created with his programs as well to hold you accountable and all the options that are out there for you to keep you strong and healthy. Stay well, stay healthy, and catch you next week.