Title: Older People Must Work Out More to Keep Muscles
Headings: Older People Must Work Out More to Keep Muscles
Older People Must Work Out More to Keep Muscles
Study Shows People Over Age 60 Need to Lift Weights More Often to Maintain Muscle Mass
Preventing Muscle Loss
further reading

Content: By the end of this first part of the study, everyone -- young and old -- had gained muscle. The second phase was designed to reveal how much of that muscle would be lost to inactivity or reduced exercise. To start, the researchers randomly divided the participants into three groups. Then, for the next 32 weeks, one group did no exercise at all, another group did the same exercises as before but only one day per week, while the third group reduced their regimen to one set of exercises once a week. Continued
By the end of the study, the differences between the young and old groups were striking. The younger participants who continued to exercise showed little or no reduction in the muscle gains they had made during the previous phase of the study, despite the less frequent and less intense workouts. Members of the older group, by contrast, lost muscle mass when they scaled back their training regimen, indicating that they need to lift weights more often than young people to keep their muscles buff. Their strength, however, remained the same. "Among the old," the researchers write, "neither prescription was sufficient to maintain the gains in muscle size." And maintaining muscle mass, the researchers conclude, is essential to healthy aging. "