Heavy-load exercise in older adults
 

Yup, I believe it. The hard part IME as a geezer is doing it. It gets harder to do the work necessary to make progress. I didn't do much weight work training for this past season and my results really suffered. It's a very big deal. I'm having another run at it this fall.

+1
I think the science is pretty clear on this. Actually doing it is the hard part!

use it or lose it, eh?

I like to listen to anything by David Goggins if I need motivation.

I got some new running shoes about a month ago with better fit and lower heel. Turns out I’ve only biked a couple of times since then. If I’m going to run, it works better to do that most days and bike less often. I’m also walking more each day.

Easier to fit into my schedule especially as seasons change. It’s hard work though! Even a 9 minute pace is roughly 275 watts for me.

Looks like I should make sure to add squats and leg presses more when I’m at the rec center.

Otto

There was an article in the NYT some time ago about the same topic. In this article, they calculated the number of genes that turned off as one ages without exercise or with exercise. Exercise offered a better outcome. The force of the exercise i.e. HITT or strength application was not discussed as being and advantage or disadvantage.

My problem is that I drank the strength training Kool Aid in 1974 and it dominates my worldview. Of course, anything that supports ones world view is noteworthy.

FWIW, I like to strength train and I am doing it now as part of next years racing preparation. I belong to a gym and I have been using the Hammer Strength Olympic lifting station for the back squats and deadlifts. We have 5 stations at the gym. I have not seen anyone older than me lifting there (generally 50 is the cliff). In fact, it is mostly young men and women and some juniors.

What I find interesting is the amount of weight the young women can lift and some of the skinny junior men. There was a kid yesterday back squatting 115 albeit with poor form and just a couple of wobbly reps. And he had no muscle mass to speak of. The point is he was doing it and he will get a lot stronger.

I have a lot more musculature than many of the kids and they can kill me on these lifts. That is my motivation. Keep up with the juniors.:D Why not? There is a lesson there. Even if I always get beat my question is what if I were doing nothing. At least I am getting beat.

Raging hormones is hard to beat and is probably one of the many reasons strength decays with age.

And there are a few men who are just monsters doing the back squat. They are large men genetically built like football players. There are a couple of skinny men who back squat a lot. These guys are the other group that I follow. As a cyclist, I want to be very strong but not too heavy.

Taking all of the above into consideration, I have decided that putting on weight due to heavy lifting is fabulous. I should be so lucky and maybe improve my epigenetics. YMMV.

How old are you, if you don't mind me asking?
I'm 73 and have slowly let the strength training slide, but I still push myself on the bike every day and am working to improve cadence and speed. Since I started doing more stretching and less weight lifting, I have much fewer aches and pains.

I am 73 same as you. My wife is 72 and she is races and strength trains also.

By "back lift", you mean barbell back squats? I don't see any cyclists doing front squats, FWIW. For a cyclist, if one can back squat bodyweight for reps, full squats, say 10, that seems to do it. For half squats (90° knee angle), 1.5 * bodyweight. At 73, you're just where I noticed an inflection point in the aging process. After that year, every year was different.

The issue for us geezers is sarcopenia, the unavoidable death of muscle cells (apoptosis) which comes with age. That's why old folks commonly have skinny legs if they're not fat. But just because we're losing muscle cells doesn't mean we can't get stronger. We can make the remaining cells larger by doing lifts to exhaustion.

The literature seems to say that it's not the weight which matters so much as the exhaustion. When I started lifting in my 50s, I worked up to doing 3 sets of 30, all same weight, the weight chosen so that I could not complete the 3rd set of 30. I think that worked better than anything else I've tried, the drawback being that it's time-consuming and one's aerobics have to be pretty good. Plus side is that injury is not so much of a concern. That said, most studies feature far fewer reps, like 10 gradually dropping to 4 during the competition season, and way more weight. I think that's because high reps + high weight is quite tiring and will have a bigger effect on possible training volume on the bike.

My issue now with being able to make much progress is that the faster decay from day to day makes it harder to build up to heavy weights. It's discouraging. Legs 3Xweek pretty much eliminates cycle training, lower frequency = slower progress. I usually only do legs 1Xweek (the pushing day), and then have a pulling day 1Xweek. There's always some leg work no matter what one does. Just standing there doing cable curls works the legs, walking back and forth to the dumbbell rack, etc. "Life is hard and then you die."

I'm 77 and you are absolutely correct, you will have fewer aches and pains. OTOH as we age and don't strength train, our climbing ability and endurance drops. Stretching is a really good idea. I do it every morning + plank and pushups. Gotta do core and keep the triceps strong. But weight training makes a huge difference. Yes, aches and pains, happens. However they're trainable, like everything else. The more you do it, the less they are an issue, except for leg soreness. IME that's a thing. I figure if my legs aren't sore, I could do more. It's pretty amazing how well one can ride with sore legs, once they've warmed up for an hour. At the start, I'm always convinced that I'm an idiot and what I'm doing is stupid. One would think one would learn by experience, but maybe not, or maybe I'm an idiot after all.

I do wonder about "transcriptome" activity being a good metric. One of the best ways to induce a huge amount of transcription in an organism is to induce heat shock (eg: put your flies or whatever model organism at an uncomfortably high temperature) and transcription goes through the roof. A lot of transcription factors (proteins that comprise the on/off switches) have names that begin with HS... They are called "heat shock" proteins because they are discovered by inducing transcription via this method. Any other method that similarly induces a lot of physiological stress will also induce transcription, basically putting cells into an emergency response mode.

So does increased transcription in old people mean they are getting more benefit out of heavy-load exercise, or does it mean they are getting stressed much more by heavy-load exercise, due to their age and vulnerability?

To me, it was obvious in the study that both things were happening. For instance, the presence of HS proteins has been shown to improve performance in hot weather. One doesn't have to ride in the heat to get the HS proteins. A sauna almost every day also works, so runners who want to do the Badwater spend time in hot rooms as well as on the road. Works. So yes, old people experience more stress under heavy loads, which should produce results. Stress is the point. Being able to have a favorable physical response to stress is another matter. That's going to depend on experience, weights and reps chosen, nutrition, timing, etc. In the study, presumably those details were handled by the coaches. Helps to have a coach. With many people starting out on their own, what happens is they hurt something or get a bad cramp and decide it's not for them, too bad. I stress starting out with what's comfortable and gradually working up to discomfort. Friel's Cyclist's Training Bible has a good section on weight training.

I had the same general thought about nonspecific stress and also looked in vain for any attempt to account for the expected baseline activity difference between the older and younger subjects. Interesting study anyway.