Strength Training for Over 60s

What changes in your muscles after 60

Less muscle disappears than most people assume. What goes faster is strength. In the studies that measured both size and strength in the same people, strength was lost two to five times faster than mass [Mitchell et al., 2012]. The mirror is the wrong instrument. You can look much the same at 70 as you did at 60 and find the same tasks harder.

The size loss is slow. Pooling the studies that measured it, the median rate is 0.47% of muscle mass a year in men and 0.37% a year in women [Mitchell et al., 2012]. Half a percent is invisible. You will not catch it in a mirror or on the bathroom scales, and no single year of it will change what you can do. It runs for twenty-five years. That is where it gets you.

Strength you do not use every day is reserve. Walking on flat ground asks for a small share of what your legs can produce, so it keeps feeling easy long after the reserve underneath it has thinned out. Standing up from a low chair asks for a much larger share. This is why someone can walk for half an hour daily, feel reasonably fit, and still need both hands on the armrests to get out of a soft sofa.

Three things tend to arrive before anyone thinks of themselves as having a strength problem. We hear all three in first sessions:

• Getting out of a low chair or the passenger seat needs a push off the armrest.
• Stairs get taken one leg at a time, leading with the stronger side.
• Grip goes before the arms do, on jar lids and on the walk in from the car with the shopping.

They are one problem in three sets of clothes. Each is a task that used to sit comfortably inside your reserve and now sits at the edge of it.

None of it is fixed in place. Resistance training means working a muscle against a load it is not used to: a dumbbell, a machine, a band, or your own body weight in the case of a squat to a chair.

In a study of older adults with no previous resistance training, both arm and leg strength had improved measurably after four weeks, and kept improving in every four-week block through to the end of the sixteen-week programme [Coetsee, 2015]. Across the full sixteen weeks arm strength rose 39% and leg strength 167% [Coetsee, 2015]. Both of those averages carry a wide spread, and a leg that has never been loaded has the most room to move, which is why the leg figure is so large. The direction is the part to take away. People starting from nothing got stronger, and went on getting stronger for as long as the researchers kept measuring.

What the guidelines recommend

New Zealand's Ministry of Health puts a number on it in its guidelines for people aged 65 and over, and the number is smaller than most people picture when they hear the word training.

“Aim to do three sessions of flexibility and balance activities, and two sessions of muscle-strengthening activities per week.” [Ministry of Health, 2013]

Two strength sessions. Three balance and flexibility sessions. Both halves are in that sentence, and the pairing is not decoration.

A Cochrane review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at exercise for preventing falls in older people living at home. Programmes that put balance and functional exercise together with resistance training reduced the rate of falls by 34%, at a rate ratio of 0.66 with a 95% confidence interval of 0.50 to 0.88, across 1,374 participants in 11 studies [BJSM, 2020].

Resistance training on its own, with no balance component, did not. The same review put it at a rate ratio of 1.14, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.67 to 1.97 that spans both a reduction and an increase in falls, and rated that evidence very low certainty [BJSM, 2020].

Read that second finding carefully, because it is easy to read backwards. It does not say lifting weights causes falls. It says nobody has yet shown that lifting on its own prevents them. If falls are your reason for starting, the balance work goes in alongside the strength work, not instead of it and not later.

New Zealand's own version of that pairing is the Otago programme, written here and distributed by ACC. It is home-based strength and balance retraining, and it cut both the number of falls and the number of injuries from falls by 35% [ACC, 2007].

What two sessions a week looks like in practice

A session at our studio runs about 40 minutes. Five or six exercises, two or three sets each, with the rest between sets long enough that you are not out of breath when you start the next one. Sitting down between sets is fine. The clock is not the point.

Heavy enough means the last two repetitions of a set are slow and take your attention. If you finish ten and could plainly have done another ten, that was a warm-up. If the second repetition is already a struggle, the weight is too much for today. The guideline names sessions, not kilograms, because the right load depends entirely on where you are starting from.

Sore for a day or two afterwards is normal, and it should feel like muscle rather than joint. A dull ache across the thighs after squats is the expected kind, and it fades. Sharp pain inside a knee during the movement is not. Stop, and say so. Soreness still there on day four, or soreness that changes how you take the stairs, means the last session was too big a step and the next one comes down.