Resistance Training as an Anti-Aging Remedy

If you want to live your best life for as long as possible, then we have to talk about aging. When it comes to health and happiness, aging is the invisible elephant in the room.

Aging, for instance, plays an outsized role in all the leading causes of death in the U.S. (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, dementia). The singular exception is drug overdoses. Beyond raising our chronic disease risk, aging jeopardizes our hard-earned retirement years by exposing us to serious falls and accidents and making us more vulnerable to infections (age is the No. 1 risk factor for COVID-19 deaths.). Remarkably, even the risk of death by suicide increases significantly at older ages.

However, aging has usually secretly stolen our quality of life for decades. Metabolic health declines noticeably for most people by midlife, sapping our energy and predisposing weight gain. Bones, muscles, and cardiac function atrophy diminishing our capacity to engage with the world in the ways we enjoy.

Hormone function, such as sex hormones, growth hormone, insulin, and thyroid hormones, becomes impaired, affecting not just our appearance but our healing capacity, sexual function, and mental health. Even a restful night's slumber becomes elusive. Both sleep quantity and sleep quality (for reasons we can't yet explain.) decline with age¹.

Faced with this grim picture of the aging process, it is perhaps no wonder that anti-aging is a more popular trend than ever. And there is good news to share. For the first time in the history of medicine and science, we now have credible theories about what is happening at the level of our genes and epigenome to cause aging².

As impressive, we can also now boast of successful interventions in non-human animals that reverse what was previously considered permanent age-related declines³. This research will take time to sort out, what if anything it will mean for human applications, The best news of all is that we already have one potent tool proven to slow or reverse many of the biological and behavioral effects of aging. This tool is called resistance training.

Source: Courtesy of Thomas Rutledge

If you were expecting this tool to be cosmetic surgery, nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) or nicotinamide riboside (NR) supplements, or even conventional cardiovascular (aerobic) exercise, this conclusion may come as a surprise. Yet the science is unequivocal: Regular resistance training induces changes in the brain and body, from the micro level of the genes and epigenome to the macrostructure and function of hormones, bones, and organs—yes, muscle is an organ.⁴ This surpasses any treatment currently available for slowing and reversing the process of aging⁵.

Truth and Reality About Resistance Training

It is easy to get lost in the superficialities of resistance training. For decades, our most common cultural references for resistance training have been athletes gaining muscles for display and performance and Hollywood actors using weight training to buff themselves up for movie roles. All the emphasis has been on the outside.

Yet what the recent two decades of research have revealed is that the most important effects of resistance training occur on the inside. Consider:

• Want strong bones? Then, talk to your health providers about resistance training, not calcium supplements, because nothing works better for building bones than exposing them to resistance⁶.
• Want to lift and play with your children or grandchildren instead of watching them play from a park bench or a wheelchair? Then know that resistance training works at any age⁷, maintain independence as well as or better than cardio, and that resistance training should be on building functional strength, not flashy muscles (although you can do both.).
• Resistance training improves sexual function, probably through favorable changes in hormones in men and women⁸, and enhances cognitive function and emotional well-being in both sexes.
• Resistance training improves the youthfulness of our skin—perhaps better than aerobic exercise—by fighting excess inflammation⁹.
• Your strength levels—measured as simply as by a handgrip test by your doctor—may better predict your lifespan than the usual medical suspects, such as blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol¹⁰. In addition to your lifespan, your strength and muscle mass predict how well you will live the final decades of your life better than anything else we've measured.

Summary

Resistance training is the closest thing to a fountain of youth we've yet discovered. And it doesn't have to be complicated, costly, or time-consuming. Body weight exercises, isometrics (e.g., planks), home routines with dumbbells, or traditional weight training in a gym, for example, all seem to work. So, simply pick the format that you find convenient. A resistance training partner is optional, although it enhances the experience for most.

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But the time to start resistance training is now. It takes time to develop consistent training habits. It takes time to learn resistance training exercises. And even when those variables are in place, it still takes time to build muscle and strength. This means that the sooner we start our resistance training journey, the sooner we get to reap the many rewards.