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Your 90-year-old grandmother could put on 174% more leg strength in 8 weeks of weight training. Doctors proved it in 1990 by running ten nursing home residents (ages 86 to 96) through high-intensity strength sessions. Their walking speed climbed 48% and their muscle size grew 9%.
They ran it again four years later, on 100 frail residents whose average age was 87. Strength climbed 113% in 10 weeks, and the oldest participant was 98 years old. Even at 90, the body still builds new muscle. It just needs the signal.
Without that signal, your muscle starts shrinking around age 30. You lose 3 to 5 percent every decade until 60, then twice that much per decade after. By 80, somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 2 adults have lost so much muscle they struggle to open a jar or stand up from a chair. Doctors call this sarcopenia. Most of what looks like "getting old" (trouble standing, weak grip, falls, frailty) is actually this one process.
A UK study tracked 845 people past their 85th birthday for nearly ten years. One of the cleanest predictors of who'd still be alive at the end was how hard they could squeeze a grip meter. Women losing 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of grip strength a year had a 33% higher chance of dying. For people whose grip strength went UP, yes even after 85, the death rate dropped 31%.
In a US study of 216,339 older adults, any weight training cut overall death rates by 6% and heart disease deaths by 8%. A 15-year follow-up of older Americans who lifted weights twice a week (the official guideline almost no one follows) found 46% lower odds of dying.
And then the falls. If you're 65 or older and you break a hip, around 27% of you die within the year. Ten years out, only 8.5% of hip fracture patients are still alive, compared to about 40% of people who didn't break one. Strength training does two things at once. It prevents most falls in the first place. And it builds enough bone density to survive the ones that still happen.
Taiwan officially became a super-aged society this January. One in five Taiwanese is now 65 or older. They got there in 7 years, while Japan took 11 and Germany took 36. Of all the things Taiwan could be throwing at this, putting 89-year-old grandmothers in front of a barbell might be the cheapest, most evidence-backed thing on the list.
The Associated Press@AP
WATCH: Taiwanese grandmothers aged 89 and 91 train at the gym. An increasing number of elderly people in Taiwan’s super-aged society are hitting the gym to stay healthy, both physically and mentally.
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