My Dad is 75, probably not that old in the scheme of things but I really noticed over the last few days, probably for the first time that he has become an old man.
How much of ageing is just inevitable? What can you do to prevent some of the major problems associated with getting older?
Looking at my Dad I noticed a few things:
- A loss of muscle - I remember him as a big man, with a huge barrel chest and some lean mass around his upper body. Somehow in recent months that has gone. The muscle is disappearing.
- Posture - he is bending over. The tonic muscles are getting tighter and he is bending at the hips and neck...stooping.
- Confidence - he is starting to be less confident in his own abilities, physically and mentally.
- Balance - he looks unsteady.
I think training could remedy much - posture, muscle mass, balance. In Body by Science, McGuff and Little talk about a study done into resistance training for the elderly and how it can actually reverse ageing in human skeletal muscle.
Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle
Human aging is associated with skeletal muscle atrophy and functional impairment (sarcopenia). Multiple lines of evidence suggest that mitochondrial dysfunction is a major contributor to sarcopenia. We evaluated whether healthy aging was associated with a transcriptional profile reflecting mitochondrial impairment and whether resistance exercise could reverse this signature to that approximating a younger physiological age. Skeletal muscle biopsies from healthy older (N = 25) and younger (N = 26) adult men and women were compared using gene expression profiling, and a subset of these were related to measurements of muscle strength. 14 of the older adults had muscle samples taken before and after a six-month resistance exercise-training program. Before exercise training, older adults were 59% weaker than younger, but after six months of training in older adults, strength improved significantly (P<0.001) such that they were only 38% lower than young adults. As a consequence of age, we found 596 genes differentially expressed using a false discovery rate cut-off of 5%. Prior to the exercise training, the transcriptome profile showed a dramatic enrichment of genes associated with mitochondrial function with age. However, following exercise training the transcriptional signature of aging was markedly reversed back to that of younger levels for most genes that were affected by both age and exercise. We conclude that healthy older adults show evidence of mitochondrial impairment and muscle weakness, but that this can be partially reversed at the phenotypic level, and substantially reversed at the transcriptome level, following six months of resistance exercise training.
I wish my Dad would train. However while I think training could do something, maybe we are also fooling ourselves. We are going to get older and we will deteriorate.
The other thing that seeing him made me think about was the shortness of life. No matter what you do for your health - exercise, diet, whatever - you will die. This will end.
There is a passage in the Bible (Ecclesiastes 7:2) that says:
[It is] better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that [is] the end of all men; and the living will lay [it] to his heart.
Going to a funeral is better than going to a party because it makes you appreciate that all men will die. It makes you take to heart your own mortality and the fact that you will not be here forever.
What do you do with that? Appreciate what you have now. Reflect on eternity.