Age-related muscle loss, known as sarcopenia, starts much earlier than you may think. After the age of 30, you lose as much as 3-8% of your muscle mass with each passing decade, and the decline worsens after age 60. Sarcopenia doesn’t just affect your athletic performance or how you look in a swimsuit, it also impacts your longevity. Sarcopenia is a major cause of frailty as you age and leads to falls and broken hips, and even prevents you from fully recovering after those tumbles. In other words, it can leave you enfeebled as a senior, when you should be enjoying those golden years.
The good news is, sarcopenia is avoidable and even, to some degree, reversible. Here’s how to preserve the muscle you’ve got — and get back what you’ve lost.
1. Move it or lose it: Exercise is a no-brainer when it comes to building muscle; specifically, resistance training, which can prevent or reverse sarcopenia and helps your neuromuscular system and hormones. Resistance training also can improve an older adult's ability to convert protein to energy in as little as two weeks.
2. Eat more protein: You want to consume leucine, which preserves body muscle and is found in higher amounts in the animal foods so if you are wondering if plant proteins fit into the mix, well, in the case of sarcopenia it doesn’t. Good protein options are low-mercury fish, grass-fed beef and lamb, pastured eggs, hydrolyzed collagen, gelatin, and clean whey concentrate.
3. Consume omega-3 fatty acids: Consuming omega-3 fatty acids speed up protein metabolism in your body. Eat your omega-3s in the form of wild salmon and grass-fed beef or supplement with low-mercury fish (or krill) oil. Research shows that in a matter of six months, you can increase your muscle mass by 3.6 percent with fish oil.
4. Balance your hormones: Hormone regulation is a key component to managing muscle mass. Estrogen preserves muscle; testosterone builds muscle; and growth hormones contribute to muscular performance — all of which assist to combat sarcopenia. The general rule of thumb is to start checking your hormone levels at age 40.
These simple steps will provide the foundation for keeping you strong, mobile, and independent. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to be or stay active, eat healthy and supplement where needed.