Ep 78: How Resistance Training and Self-Talk Boost Strength in Older Adults

Let’s make progressive overload more approachable for bone health! Progressive overload is a term you hear often in fitness, especially when it comes to building stronger bones. But what does it actually mean? Progressive overload is the gradual increase in stress placed on the body during exercise to stimulate the musculoskeletal and nervous systems to adapt. I think many of us fall into the trap of believing that adding more weight is the only way to progressively overload our bodies. While...

The jump is only the beginning. The most important part may be how you land. If the goal is to use impact as a tool for bone health, our bones respond to several factors, including: • Landing forces of approximately 3× body weight or greater • A rate of force development around 43 body weights per second • Novelty and variation in the direction of loading to help limit accommodation And all of these factors are influenced by how you land. Research has shown that a flat-footed landing with a s...

What is our capacity to improve muscular strength and muscle mass as we age, even into our 9th decade of life? A classic study published in JAMA provides a powerful answer. Researchers took a group of nine individuals in their 90s who had been living in a long-term care facility for an average of 3.5 years and put them through an 8-week high-intensity progressive strength training program. The program was simple. Three times per week, participants performed single-leg knee extensions for 3 se...

Resistance training is one of the most powerful tools we have to protect our strength, muscle mass, and independence as we age. But it’s not just about doing resistance training, it’s about how hard we train. Higher-intensity resistance training has been shown to produce greater improvements in muscle strength and mass than moderate intensity training. And perhaps even more importantly, those benefits may persist long after structured training ends. A recent study, “Heavy resistance training ...

Building and maintaining your ability to generate power becomes increasingly important as you age. And when it comes to bone health, it’s not optional, it’s essential. Power is your ability to produce force quickly. It’s what helps you catch yourself when you trip, stabilize when you lose balance, and move with confidence in unpredictable situations. Training for power stimulates your nervous system to recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers, the ones responsible for producing higher force and fast...