#176: Why Muscle Loss After 50 Is So Dangerous & How to Fix It

You've noticed your arms are softer. Things feel heavier than they used to. And you figure that's just what happens after 50.

What's actually going on underneath is a lot bigger than what you can see in the mirror.

In this episode I get into what muscle is really doing for you, and what starts breaking down when it goes. Some of it surprised even me, and I've been studying this stuff for years.

If you're over 50, this one matters more than you think.

Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned:

Lift-IT 10-Day Strength Training Kickstart > 

Strength Training Membership > 

Transcript

#176: Why Muscle Loss After 50 Is So Dangerous & How to Fix It

[00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in through my strength training programs and membership

all right, so I recently had my Lift-Off Challenge, and there I asked the hundreds of women that joined why they wanna start strength training, and overwhelmingly the answer was because they're losing muscle and they're feeling weaker. And that is exactly what is in store for you if you continue to age naturally.
Sarcopenia, right? That is the loss of muscle as we age, and it's a totally natural thing that happens. We lose 3 to 8% of our muscle mass each decade starting at about age 30, and after age [00:01:00] 60 that rate actually speeds up. 
And that in itself is scary. But guess what's even scarier? Is that we lose strength 2-3 times faster than we lose muscle. Just think about that. We are not only losing muscle, we're getting weaker. And what happens when we get weaker? We are less able to cope in life, we have decades ahead, so we need to be stopping the slide
And if you're one of the huge number of women who have spent their lives in a dieting rollercoaster, you know, gaining weight slowly, then going on a crash diet, losing those 10 pounds, gaining the 10 pounds, losing the 10 pounds, then your situation is actually probably worse because each time you diet, if you're not actively strength training properly, and that's [00:02:00] different than working out with weights, up to 30% of the weight that you lose is muscle. And if you are close to normal weight, so you're just losing that last five or 10 pounds, then that number is even higher. Up to 35% of the weight that you lose is actually muscle, not fat at all. And the thing is that when you gain the weight back, you're not gaining muscle back. You're gaining back primarily fat. So every diet cycle leaves you with less muscle and more fat than you had before. Repeat that five or six times over 20 years and you can see the problem
So if you think about these two factors going on, that you are losing muscle as you age, and if you've been on a diet rollercoaster, you've lost even more muscle over that time than you would have naturally [00:03:00] otherwise
and women describe this to me as things feel harder. Life feels harder. The groceries are heavier. Getting up off the floor is harder. When was the last time you tried getting up off the floor? Can you still do it? Getting up off the sofa is harder. Putting your luggage in the overhead compartment, you have to really think about, "Am I gonna be able to manage this suitcase?" when you go on a trip. And then looking ahead into the future, how am I gonna play with my grandkids? Am I actually gonna be able to take care of them, lift them, get on the floor with them? This is what getting weaker looks like
Muscles have been reclassified by researchers as an endocrine organ that means they don't just sit there looking pretty, they're actually doing things. And in fact, when you contract your muscles, they release molecules called myokines, and these travel around your body, [00:04:00] including crossing the blood-brain barrier, doing good things for your brain, helping with brain fog, your mood, and feeling like yourself. So the evidence for having muscle and strength training just keeps piling up why muscle matters
But let's look at some of the other reasons why muscle is so important So first of all, regulating blood sugar and reducing insulin resistance because your muscles are a glucose sink. So when you eat, it helps to clear the glucose out of your blood more quickly and helps to prevent type 2 diabetes. That's why if you are pre-diabetic, you will often be recommended to start strength training and build muscle. I know I have a lot of women in my programs who are there for precisely that reason
Then there are structural benefits, [00:05:00] As estrogen leaves the building, your tendons and your ligaments start to get weaker, and strength training, in addition to building muscle, strengthens your tendons and ligaments. As they get stress on them, your body is signaled to keep them strong and functional, and that's the same reason why strength training is strengthening your bones. So when you're strength training, you're strengthening bones, tendons and ligaments, and muscles. It's the whole package that is getting stronger. And if you have arthritis, it's particularly important because when you strength train and you're strengthening those tendons, ligaments, and muscles, that is supporting your joints. . I have an arthritic knee, and as I got stronger, my knee stopped giving me problems. Didn't happen overnight, but this has been the cure [00:06:00] for my knee, and now I have the decades ahead to enjoy not having a knee that bugs me
Having muscle helps prevent falling, falls and bone fractures are some of the biggest risks for us. So we're strengthening our bones, we're stopping ourselves from falling. It's just win-win all over the place 
And then one of the biggest things that women complain about is that they're gaining weight. And part of that is that our basal metabolic rate is going down as we age and we lose muscle. Okay? So if we can put more muscle on our bodies, we can raise our basal metabolic rate. And even beyond the number of calories that it officially burns more than fat does, I have noticed, and so many of my clients have noticed, that your body just seems to be so much more forgiving of periods of eating in a higher calorie, range. So for example, holiday [00:07:00] seasons. You bounce back from it in a totally different way
And then chronic inflammation. This is something we hear about all the time, but when you contract your muscles, you release anti-inflammatory agents which help with chronic inflammation that so many women in midlife struggle with
And if we think about getting sick, it is important that we have enough muscle on our bodies so that even if we're laid up for a few weeks, then when we get better again, we have the strength to start taking care of ourselves again. And that relates very much into the long-term thinking, and I know if you're anything like me, you are thinking about the decades ahead and watching your parents' lives shrink as they get weaker and more frail. We don't want that. We wanna age strong. We want to keep living our best lives. We are in bloom in [00:08:00] midlife, and we're not ready to call it quits yet
But the thing about muscle is that, as I mentioned earlier, we lose it naturally. So it really is a use it or lose it material, and the reason is that it is biologically very expensive. That's why our metabolic rates go up when we have more muscle, because it costs more for our bodies to take care of it, and that's why our bodies are happy to shed it if we don't need it.
Okay? So we need to be doing things to trick our bodies or convince our bodies that we need to hold onto muscle and even build more. And absolutely, you can build muscle after menopause. I have a whole episode on it, and I've built all of my muscle post-menopause. I am stronger than I ever was [00:09:00] in my 20s or 30s or 40s. I'm 55 now. I started strength training when I was 49. So absolutely possible for you, too
so what is gonna stop the slide is proper strength training, and this has been so studied how to put muscle on your body. And let me tell you some things that the research has never supported , the things that you do not need to have in your workout to build muscle. You do not need to raise your heart rate. That's cardio. You do not need to feel the burn. You do not need to burn calories. Nothing to do with building muscle, burning calories. And you do not need to feel like you were hit by a truck when the session is over. What you do need to do is you need to be pushing your body close to its limits. to convince your [00:10:00] body that, hey, I need to be stronger than what I am today, and you do that by lifting things that are heavy for you, and then as you keep going with your strength training, you need to keep increasing the resistance, because guess what? You're gonna be stronger. So the resistance that worked today to trigger muscle growth and strength increases is not actually gonna be a trigger anymore. I mean, think about when you had your kids, for those of you who have kids.
Um, when you first held that newborn baby and you're, like, carrying it a- around all day, you're like, "Okay, this is kind of, like, heavy," you know? Then the kid grows, and because you're picking it up every day, it's not a problem for you because your body is adapting. You got used to picking up the, the baby [00:11:00] when it was one-month-old.
Then when it's two months old, it's heavier, but your body's already adapted to picking up a one-month-old weight baby, so the two-month-old weight baby is, like, the next thing. And you continue to get stronger as your baby gets bigger because you are actually, not purposefully, but that is applying progressive overload.
Your body's adapting to how heavy your baby is, and then your baby gets a little bit bigger, your body adapts again and again and again. But you can imagine that when you're carrying your two-year-old on your hip, right, if you were suddenly to switch to carrying a newborn, that's not challenging at all anymore because your body is stronger, and that is why you need to keep increasing the load over time.
It's not like that two-year-old is feeling super heavy. Your two-year-old is not feeling super [00:12:00] heavy because you're used to lifting that kid as it grew. You progressed to the weight of that two-year-old, and that's the same thing with strength training, right? As you get stronger, you increase the load on you, and it never feels overwhelming because your body has continued to adapt over time.
Okay, that's a new an- analogy that I'm testing out here. Let me know if that made any sense to you, because I think a lot of people think that, hey, you need to be adding weight. Oh my God, it's all of a sudden going to be really heavy. But actually, the thing is that you're gonna be okay to lift that heavier thing because your body is stronger at that point.
Just like you were fine to pick up the two-year-old, but that might have felt pretty darn heavy to you if you had been given that heavy of a child the moment it was born. Okay. Good
And the thing is that it is really important that you do [00:13:00] this now because every single day, every week, every month, you are continuing to decline. You are losing muscle, and you need to stop that, okay? Your body is not the same body a week from now or two weeks from now or at the end of the summer or at the end of the year, right?
So get started now. It really, really is important for you to cut the downhill slide and start getting stronger again. And the reason I'm so passionate about making programs that you can fit into your busy life is that this is so important. It's important not only for how we look, which matters to us because we still wanna look good. We haven't, like, lost that desire, but we want to stay healthy and we wanna age well. We don't want to be sickly, frail, [00:14:00] dependent on other people, We want to be in our power, doing the things that we wanna do, and spending time with the people that we want to spend time with
So please get started. And I have an easy way for you to do it. I have my Lift-IT 10-day strength training kickstart so you can see what the fuss is all about. If you're not strength training yet, that is a perfect place to start. It costs a whopping $27, and it gives you a mini program that you can start doing right away. Real strength training. And it's in my app now. This is, like, my exciting new announcement is that it is now delivered via my app, which means that you have all the exercise videos, the instructional videos. You can swap out the exercises if you need to. There are alternate [00:15:00] exercises in there, plus you have access to me one-to-one chat through my app.
So you can get started that way. And if you've been just working out with weights, so doing things like BodyPump classes and YouTube workouts, then join my strength training membership and get serious about this. It makes a huge difference.
 So in summary, you've noticed that you're losing muscle, but did you realize you're losing strength twice as fast as you're losing muscle? And then there are all these other downsides to losing muscle. Your body is not as strong, it's not as functional, it will not be as prepared to carry you through the decades ahead, and you need to stop the slide because this is a natural process for you to get weaker and more frail.
Just like wrinkles are a natural process for [00:16:00] us, and we put different things on our faces so that we can halt that process, well, for our body's strength and functionality, strength training is that thing that we need to do to keep it working as well as it possibly can. It is really foundational to your fitness program, and even two days a week of 30 minutes a day is going to make a huge difference.
I really encourage you to try out my Lift-IT program if you don't have a strength training program yet, and you get the advantage of being able to chat with me, ask me all your questions. All right. I hope that helped, and if you have any topics, by the way, that you would like me to cover, then please let me know in the comments.
If you're watching this on an audio podcast player, there is leave me a message in the show notes. [00:17:00] So I'd love to hear from you. With that, I wish you a wonderful week ahead, and happy training