That’s right athletes it is time to start strength training your coaches! The adage, ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it.’ is certainly true when it comes to your strength. Those who do not train are in for some early unnecessary misery as they age.

Sooo, if you want your coaches to run on the field with you or walk instead of limp out to practice, get them in the weight room.

Sarcopenia is an age-related degenerative loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength that we all experience.

It is accelerated with a lack of physical activity, especially the lack of overload to the muscle.

Physically inactive adults see a faster and greater loss of muscle mass than physically active adults.

In physically inactive people, after the age of 30 there is a loss of approximately 3-5% of muscle mass per decade and a decline in muscle strength. Some research shows a loss as early as 25 and by the age of 50 some have already lost 10% of their musculature.

Even active people will have a steady decline in performance.

Skeletal muscles are composed of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of individual, elongated, multinucleated cells called fibers. An individual muscle fiber contains a bundle of myofibrils. The number of fibers in a given healthy muscle is determined at birth and changes little throughout the life span.

The number of myofibrils can change, thus the muscle fiber cross-sectional area can change dramatically with normal growth or by strength training and decrease with atrophy associated with lack of activity, immobilization, disease, or old age.

Muscle is the body’s most metabolically active tissue, not something that we want to atrophy quickly. Sarcopenia is linked to an increased tendency towards obesity. It is also associated with glucose intolerance, osteoporosis, the inability to regulate body temperature, physical disability, an increase risk of falling, and an increase risk of mortality. These are a few of the effects of having dramatically less muscle tissue.

The trick is to ‘bank’  muscle when you are young and maintain it with regular progressive resistance exercise as you grow older. Study after study has shown weight training of sufficient intensity regardless of one’s age, is the key to reducing the rate of inevitable muscle loss as we grow older.

As you age the first area in your anatomy to be noticeably affected  are the hips. So when you build your gym you better include the Pendulum Hip Press. It will make walking to practice a lot easier.

And is a great way to Get Strong.