Frailty Starts Earlier Than You Think — And Here's What to Do About It

Johanna is sharing an episode from Dr. Tyna Moore's podcast where she talks how frailty is something most people don’t think about until it’s too late, but it’s one of the biggest predictors of whether you survive illness, recover from injury, or maintain independence as you age. It’s also the harbinger of doom for all cause mortality and dementia.

In this episode, she breaks down why frailty isn’t just “getting older”, it’s a metabolic and muscular decline that starts earlier than you think and accelerates fast if you’re not actively fighting it.

🤩Dr Tyna Show

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-tyna-show/id1577258582?i=1000762531487

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Swingin' through the ears with legging old Mid life's golden honey where nobody's full. Got the fire side where I'm not the shine. This is our time, yeah. So divine, old and five, old and free. Women own in midlife, just do a changes with the heart so strong. This is our anthem. Coming sing along.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Hi my friends, and welcome back to Not Your Mother's Midlife. I'm your host, Joanna, and today we're talking about muscle and everything that threatens it. I'm sharing an episode from Dr. Tina Moore's podcast. Her episode is called Frailty is the Kiss of Death. Dr. I said that's so scary. Dr. Tina is a naturopathic and chiropractic doctor who has spent decades working in muscoskeletal health. And she also has a workout program now called The Strength Vault that you can find at the bottom of her um episodes. Anyway, she opens up this podcast by talking about something she calls normalizing frailty, this idea that we have collectively just accepted the physical decline as part of our getting older. She pushes back on that hard and she uses farming communities and more physically active lifestyles as a reference point. People who move their bodies as part of a daily life don't experience the same rate of decline that most elderly people that we know do, which tells us a lot about what's driving this. Then she gets into how frailty actually starts. And this is where I want you to pay attention because the answer is not just when you're old. Frailty begins with small gradual losses of muscle and strength that most of us don't notice until something forces us to notice it. You don't go from fine one day and frail overnight. It just starts slowly creeping up on you. And then she talks about what accelerates it illness. This part is confronting. When you get sick, even with something that seems manageable, your body can lose muscle at a rate that takes months to rebuild. She's worked with enough patients in acute care situations to see this play out repeatedly. You go into hospital reasonably strong and you come out significantly weaker. The older you are when that happens, the harder the comeback is. She shares this personal experience, the hospitalization of her mother that served as a huge wake-up call to her, and how it shifted the way she thinks about building and protecting muscles as insurance. We've all probably had that experience when an older parent goes into hospital for something and they come out, I don't know, lacking confidence and just more frail than when they went in. You notice it, it's a it's a huge difference in them. And we can all try to avoid that happening to us when we get older. She also goes into the cultural obsession of being small, being light, having low body weight. It has cost women muscles. And muscles, she argues, is the one most protective thing that you can have. Low muscle mass is linked to worse outcomes across almost every health category. Being thin and being healthy are not the same thing. She also talks about elderly weight loss and why losing weight when you're older is actually a warning sign, not something to celebrate. Unintentional weight loss in older adults is associated with muscle loss and increased mortality. She then defines frailty properly and goes through the warning signs, things like grip strength, walking pace, how easily you get fatigued, whether you're losing weight without even trying, what to look for, that means that you can catch the slide early. The section on HRT or hormone replacement therapy and sleep is important because a lot of the muscle conversation focuses on training and hormones, but sleep is where so much of the repair actually hell happens. Estrogen affects estrogen. I feel like I talk about estrogen in every single episode, so it's just got to show you how important it is for us ladies. Estrogen affects sleep quality. Poor sleep affects recovery. Poor recovery affects muscle. It's a chain. And hormone replacement therapy can be part of a stabilizing mechanism. Not a magic fix, but a meaningful piece. Then she covers the actual science and statistics behind everything she's been saying. And she ends with what you can actually do about it, which I love because this kind of episode can feel overwhelming if it just leaves you sitting there with the problem still. She talks about strength training. It's a non-negotiable. She loves that word, actually. She says that mostly in every episode, non-negotiable. I hear a lot of people saying that. But yeah, she says strength training is a non-negotiable, but it also talks about how to think about your metabolic health, your training status, and how hormone therapy fits into the bigger picture of protecting your body long term. The full episode is going to be in the show notes as usual. If you have a woman in your life who's been putting off taking her health seriously, this is the episode to center. Or maybe it's yourself that needs to make a change in how you move and feed your body. Thank you again for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, like I said, please share it with a friend who'd love it too. Subscribe to my podcast and go over and subscribe to my YouTube channel. There's lots of interesting videos I've been making over there. So you will never miss one. If you're subscribed, leave me a five-star review. That helps other people find me and I really appreciate it. And until next week, I am Joanna Hart, and this is not your mother's midlife. Bye bye.