Pictured above is Ernestine Shepherd, born on June 16, 1936. She began her fitness journey at 56 and took up bodybuilding at 71. Now, at 88, she continues to inspire us all.

Photo Credit: Baltimore Sun Media Group

Muscle. My personal bias. I enjoy training to build muscle and with 35 years of consecutive training, it is now training to maintain it. Certainly, vanity is one of the drivers, but the most addicting aspect of training for muscle and strength is objectivity. Musician and author Henry Rollings once said in a love note to the iron, that “200lbs is always 200lbs.” If you can lift more weight than you did before, you are stronger. On your first day in the gym, did you press the 15lb training bar for five reps? Great! One month later, you pressed 25lbs for 5 reps. One year later, you pressed 65lbs. There is no doubt, you are stronger than you were before. Strength is the ability to produce force against an external object. You can now produce more force. For my Star Wars nerds, the force is literally now with you. The strength adaptation is the simplest adaptation to achieve (as opposed to speed, coordination, flexibility, etc.) and cascades to the greatest health benefits. It is your physical health foundation. If you don’t have strong legs and hips, then you can’t get off the toilet by yourself. Coach Louie Simmons (RIP) once said, “you can’t flex bone.” This is another way of saying movement requires muscle. And everyone takes movement for granted until they can’t do it anymore. If you are training global movements (squat, push, pull, hinge, lunge), then you are not only developing muscle mass, but you are training and maintaining strength, power, balance, and flexibility all at the same time.

Muscle has other benefits besides locomotion and looking good in a tank top. “Muscle is a sink.” I can’t recall where I first heard that metaphor, but it’s important. What this means is that the more muscle you have, the more it uses and properly disposes of energy. Energy? Like chakras and stuff? No, energy like food or more specifically carbohydrates, fats, and alcohol. How big is your sink? What can it hold? On balance, if we have excess body fat (join the club), we have been overconsuming energy and have started to store it for the next ice age. When we do this for too long, bad things can happen. Bad things like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. While my nutrition is far from perfect, my blood glucose measures (fasting glucose, A1C, fasting insulin) are excellent and the envy of my doctor. I don’t believe that it is wise to eat junk (highly processed and refined foods) consistently, but having significant muscle is a nice buffer when making poor nutritional choices. Muscles are calorically expensive. In case you are not getting the point, more muscle allows you to eat more food.

Muscle is your physical 401k. The more you can invest and deposit, the greater the principal at retirement. When was the best time to invest in your 401k? 30 years ago. And every week since then. When is the second-best time? Today. As we age, muscle goes away. Father time starts making withdrawals from the muscle bank. A most striking example is the case of old man butt (I still remember the Sex and the City episode where Samantha was dating the elderly sugar daddy – IYKYK). Or if you prefer, think of a “little old lady.” She wasn’t always old, and she wasn’t always that little. Sarcopenia is the term for muscle loss or muscle wasting most commonly from age. When we don’t train to build and maintain muscle, this process of slow muscle wasting begins in our thirties and continues in a linear fashion until around age 75. And then at age 75, without proper training in place, muscle mass falls off like a cliff. Certainly, we can’t live forever. But if you have ever said or thought, “I don’t want to gain any muscle or get bulky” you could not be more wrong. You want to build as much muscle, or deposit as much physical principal, as possible and then hold onto it for dear life. And you will not magically gain a bunch of unattractive muscle and end up looking like a professional bodybuilder. These athletes take a whole bunch of drugs to aid the process, eat more food than you could comprehend, and never miss workouts.

Here’s the deal. Your muscle is going away whether you want it to or not. What then goes with it is your physical independence. How fast it goes is up to you. Thankfully, we can significantly slow the process through strength training and proper nutrition.

Let’s not forget about bone density, especially for our female population. Bones, like muscle and connective tissue, adapt to stress and load. Your axial skeleton (spine) needs to be loaded to get stronger and more robust (squats & deadlifts). Water aerobics is certainly better than sitting on the couch, but it is not going to improve your bone density.

How do we train for strength and therefore muscle and bone density? We lift weights. We train so the resistance gets progressively more difficult over time. Does yoga count? No. Does Pilates count? No. Are these classes hard? Yes. Do they make my muscles burn? Yes. Do they have many other benefits? Yes. Is your body having to adapt to ever-increasing mechanical tension? No. Therefore it will not continue to generate a strength adaptation. Use the proper tool for the job.

Ok, maybe I’m starting to convince you that strength and muscle and lifting weights are important. But traditionally maybe you have not enjoyed it, you have no idea where to start and it’s a bit scary and you don’t want to look like a fool. I have good news. You don’t need to go full Arnold to get the amazing benefits that strength training has to offer. Spoiler alert: take a lifting class (Build, WOD, Kettlebell, or TRX) twice a week for the rest of your life. That would be two hours or only 1.19% of your week allocated to being physically independent, healthier, sexier, and not a liability to someone else. With the rest of those weekly hours, you can do as much yoga and Pilates as you like! (And you should, which we will discuss in the next installment). But our coaches and even our community will guide you along the way. Very, very few of our clients were experienced lifters and athletes when they started with us. But they took a chance and kept showing up. And that’s the secret sauce. Consistently showing up. Strength train twice a week. More if you want to. Rinse and Repeat for the rest of your life. As Mark Rippetoe says, “Stronger people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.”