Atrophy can happen at any age to anyone, from children to seniors. In most cases, it can be slowed down and reversed if it is caught early enough. But why does it happen? In one word: immobility!
Muscles can become immobilized in many different ways—not only through disuse but also through overdevelopment. (I’ll explain more about this in Chapter 6.) In other words, atrophy can happen to people who are in shape as well as those who are out of shape or those who are simply sedentary.
The best example I can give to clarify the power of immobility is a broken bone locked for several weeks in a cast. When the cast is finally removed, the once-broken limb is visibly shrunken and weaker than the corresponding, undamaged limb. It is at this point that a doctor will encourage the patient to undergo a physical rehabilitation program designed to stimulate the atrophied cells to rebuild and strengthen weakened muscles.
Broken bones and forced confinement in plaster casts are not the only ways that muscles can become immobilized; they are merely the most extreme and familiar example. A sedentary lifestyle—too much time spent on couches or at desks and not enough movement—is the most common trigger for muscular atrophy. When we move our muscles as little as possible, with a sedentary lifestyle, we turn down our furnaces and literally cause our muscles to atrophy. When the cells atrophy, we feel even more tired because we have fewer mitochondria generating ATP. A vicious circle begins: less energy leading to less movement, which leads to less energy, which leads to less movement.
Atrophy from a sedentary lifestyle leads to weight gain, loss of energy, and chronic aches and pains. But atrophy can be easily prevented, stopped, and even reversed with daily gentle full-body exercise. The start of reversing atrophy is the same as preventing cell death: We have to turn on our mitochondria in order to restore our cells to full working order. Daily exercise “reboots” the shrunken cells, reversing atrophy and supplying sufficient energy to make exercising easier. With very little exertion, you can experience a positive change in your energy and strength almost immediately. When people aren’t accustomed to exercising, even basic movements can feel difficult. This difficulty can lead to a negative attitude toward fitness, making recovery even more challenging. It is a slippery slope: The less you do, the more challenging exercise becomes, robbing you of your motivation. This consistent disuse triggers cell atrophy in the first place, but don’t be discouraged. Early-stage atrophy is easy to reverse. Your body has strong regenerative powers; it wants to move and will reward you for movement.
Physiotherapists describe the three stages of muscle atrophy in the following way:
•Stage one occurs when people can move their muscles under their own steam but it is really difficult and exhausting.
•Stage two is reached when these people are no longer able to move their muscles by themselves because their muscles have become too weak. However, with the assistance of someone else doing the actual manipulation, the muscles are somewhat pliable.
•Stage three is reached when the cells have totally atrophied; at that stage, the muscles are rock solid and totally immovable. In stage three, it is essentially game over for the atrophied muscles: the damage is irreversible.
If you have noticed that your energy level is lower than it used to be, that your weight and body shape are changing and seem to be more difficult to control, or that you suffer from chronic aches and pains, you are experiencing early symptoms of cell atrophy! Many people wait until they notice these changes before they consider addressing the problem, but ideally we want to prevent these symptoms before they set in and affect your life. But once these symptoms do set in, it is crucial to make changes—if you don’t do anything, each of these problems is only going to worsen, compounding your troubles and accelerating the aging process.
Although atrophy can happen to anyone at any age, you can see it most often among people who are starting to age, beginning around age 40. Some other signs of atrophy include:
•poor posture
•rounded back
•stiff movements
•walking slowly
•restricted range of motion
•tension or stiffness in your gait
•stiffness in hips, spine, or legs
•trouble getting into and out of a car
•trouble walking up and down stairs
We want to avoid stage 3 atrophy at all costs, and reverse any stage 1 or stage 2 atrophy that has already begun. In my years as a personal trainer, I have seen many people in their seventies reverse stage 2 atrophy, usually in the upper back. It requires daily exercise and persistence, but the rewards are well worth the effort. Atrophy is commonly reflected in poor posture, which can create a host of other issues associated with aging.
If you spend time people-watching, you will see signs of atrophy everywhere: not just in the limp of an aging woman with an ache in her hip, but in the slight hunch of a marathon runner or the spinal stiffness of a former basketball player. I hate seeing how widespread these problems are, and it pains me to point them out to people, but I know what these symptoms lead to and how debilitating and painful they become if left untreated. Atrophy begets more atrophy, and as one muscle group becomes stiff and immobile, its neighboring muscle groups will experience the same problems. This creates a dangerous chain reaction that is best addressed sooner rather than later.
ARE YOU AT RISK?
While neurogenic atrophy tends to occur suddenly or severely, when a nerve that connects to a muscle is injured (as in a broken bone) or diseased (as in ALS), the atrophy we’re talking about here comes about mainly through a lack of physical activity over a specific time period. Those most at risk of atrophy that occurs as a result of disuse are:
•people with sedentary jobs requiring them to sit at a desk all day
•people with medical conditions that limit movement
•people who’ve been bedridden for a few days or longer
•people whose decreased activity has corresponded with a “shrunken” appearance
Symptoms of atrophy include:
•“wasting” appearance, when lean muscle tissue seems thinner and less substantial than previously
•curved back, indicating onset of sarcopenia or osteoporosis
•shuffling gait or limp
Thankfully, disuse atrophy can be reversed with good nutrition and exercise. Atrophy is the most literal visual definition of “move it or lose it.”
At a certain point, it becomes hard to tell the difference between cell death and atrophy. Cell death is something that must be prevented to be overcome. We must act now and continue the fight as long as we possibly can.
THE PERILS OF GOING OVERBOARD
All movement is preferable to no movement, but a variety of movements are far better than just a few movements. Some of us are obsessed with finding just one form of exercise and sticking with it. But in order to send the message “I’m still here!” loud and clear, the best approach for your body is to do many different types of movements, so you can hit all of your 620 muscles. Choosing to exercise only certain parts of the body, with the vague hope that the other muscles will get strengthened through some form of osmosis, will have negative ramifications—sometimes among the “fittest” people we know.
Many popular fitness programs and sporting activities target primary muscles, using exercises or machines that rely on repetitive, robotic movements. They also contract muscles to strengthen them. This concentric exercise results in compression and shorter muscle fibers, as well as pain, injury, and lack of mobility. Instructors and clients alike mistakenly believe that an injury or pain is due to the fact that the clients are getting old. The truth is that these well-intentioned people have been unknowingly damaged by the very training they were doing to stay healthy!
To keep all 620 muscles from aging, you have to honestly assess all the different ways you exercise. I certainly don’t want to deter you from any specific exercise or sport that you love. I just ask that you make sure
to find time to move your less commonly used muscles at some point every day. Even some of the most popular exercises—such as walking, sit-ups, and weight machine work—can affect your muscles in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Walking is fun, a social activity that gets us out in the fresh air, but it engages primarily the leg muscles, meaning that the torso and upper body are largely neglected. If walking were your only source of exercise, some 300 upper body muscles would be allowed to age and atrophy! ESSENTRICS can be a nice complement to a daily walk to help engage the muscles above the waist.
Sit-ups are the most well known of the basic core exercises, done with all kinds of fancy machines or simply by lying on the floor. Sit-ups engage mostly the front of your trunk, strengthening your abdominal muscles. Even when done correctly, all forms of sit-ups engage only about 100 muscles.
Most people don’t do sit-ups correctly; they often use the head as a pump to help lift the shoulders off the floor. This causes neck pain and does nothing for the actual abdominal muscles that sit-ups are intended to strengthen. Sit-ups can also lead to all kinds of spinal injuries, especially when modifications for an individual’s shape and body type are not taken into consideration. Perhaps the most disheartening problem for those who do sit-ups is that, when done incorrectly, they can result in a very strong, round muscle mass around the stomach—exactly the opposite of the desired flat abdominal muscles.
The ESSENTRICS core program featured in Chapter 10 will help you strengthen as you lengthen, so that you develop a stronger core and back muscles to ensure the proper posture and the flatter stomach you’ve been hoping for.
Most exercise equipment or machinery offers opportunities for strengthening targeted muscle groups. These exercises are concentric, which means that they shorten or contract the muscles in strengthening them. After years and years of contracting or shortening, the muscles will begin to squeeze the joints, restricting movement and range of motion, and leading to stiffness, pain, and arthritis.
In addition to the long-term problems brought on by shortening of the muscles, most fitness equipment is not designed to work through the full range of motion of any joint; instead it isolates and strengthens specific individual muscles. The result is muscular imbalance, as some muscles are strengthened while adjoining muscles remain weak, which inevitably leads to discomfort and possible injury. These machines limit the number of muscles they recruit, leaving hundreds of others untouched. (And as we now know, unused muscles in people over 40 are destined to atrophy and die!)
Some of the worst posture I have ever seen is in people who overdo upper body strengthening. They’re so focused on increasing how many pounds they can lift that they fail to notice the damage they’re doing to their back muscles as they overtrain the upper body. Certainly the most bizarre form of atrophy I’ve seen is in weight-lifting enthusiasts who have overbuilt their muscles to the extent that these muscles have become immobile. If you take a close look at bodybuilders (or people who aspire to be like them), you will see not just impressive biceps but also rounded backs and poor posture.
When I work with these people, I find that they also have very limited movement, flexibility, and range of motion in their muscles. They come to me when they approach 40 and are in pain due to the extreme contracting of their muscles. The atrophy from having permanently contracted muscles is excruciating.
In our instructor training for ESSENTRICS, I’ve worked with former yoga, Pilates, weight-lifting, and aerobics instructors. Most of these fitness experts are suffering from various degrees of atrophy caused by repetitive pounding, pumping, or holding a pose or position for extended periods of time. They are shocked when they see what has happened to their own muscles because their fitness programs typically train body parts (such as the abs and butt), but they’ve never trained the whole body as a unit. How upsetting that the people who are most dedicated to doing the right thing for their bodies and their clients’ bodies unwittingly cause them damage! They put so much effort toward staying healthy and in shape, and yet the focus on strengthening without flexibility makes their muscles unhealthy.
As greater numbers of high-performance athletes and everyday “weekend warriors” grow older, the signs of atrophy caused by overtightening the muscles will become more obvious. The first symptom is pain, which is likely to be followed by chronic injuries—the result of 10 to 15 years of intense training with minimal flexibility work to counteract the tightening of the muscles. The impact on the joints and muscles from years of playing squash, tennis, or football; running; or extreme weight training first shows up as bulky, rigid muscles. Many athletes don’t know how to maintain a balance between strength, flexibility, and range of motion, perhaps not appreciating that range of motion is just as important as strength, not only for performance but to prevent injury. Often, the athletes who were admired as gods or goddesses in their youth are riddled with pain and discomfort in their late thirties and early forties, requiring hip or knee replacement surgery, or regular cortisone injections to loosen rigid muscles.
Sadly, thousands of once fit individuals are aging prematurely because they’ve been injured by incorrect training. We have all heard stories of a favorite athlete whose body is destroyed before age 50. Such athletes are experiencing a form of muscle atrophy, one that can be prevented or reversed with corrective flexibility exercises to release the tension causing the immobility and pain. Reversing this type of atrophy is difficult, however, and requires a lot of patience. It can take months, even years, to completely reverse the damage caused by strengthening the muscles without paying equal attention to range of motion or flexibility.
THE PERILS OF DOING TOO LITTLE
As dangerous as it is to overtrain and overspecialize, it is far more common not to exercise enough. To me, the situation is most tragic when a person has developed disdain for exercise and avoids it at all costs. Some people have had a bad experience in a high school gym class, have tried programs that were too advanced, have shied away from the often prohibitively high cost of gym membership, or simply feel they do not have the time for daily exercise.
People cite many reasons why they don’t enjoy exercising. I’m going to try to help you overcome all of those reasons by showing you that doing gentle, full-body exercise for 20 to 30 minutes is actually enjoyable. A good exercise program is one that not only challenges your body but also is well suited to your fitness level. A good exercise program is one that you will actually look forward to doing because it feels good while you are doing it. And a good exercise program is one that will also give you real results you can see and feel throughout the rest of your day.
It is never too late to slow down and reverse the aging process. Now you know that aging is caused by cell atrophy and cell loss and that it can be prevented, slowed down, or reversed with exercise. Now is the time to fight for your youth!
EVERY MUSCLE COUNTS
There is no cheating when it comes to preventing the negative effects of aging; our muscles know when they are and aren’t being used. When we fail to engage all 620 muscles of our body, the message to “let die” will slip out from those fallow muscles and start spreading throughout your body. After the age of 40, people who are inactive, overly sedentary, or simply doing the wrong exercises are signaling to their master control that they do not need their muscles, triggering the message “Let the cells die.”
In addition to these global triggers of decomposition, the individual muscles we don’t use will atrophy and lead to an unbalanced body that results in pain and injury—which will only further accelerate aging. Unfortunately, the body’s master control doesn’t give any free passes!
The ESSENTRICS technique is quite simple and easy to do, and was designed to engage all 620 muscles with exercises that mimic daily life. By using each and every muscle, you are sending a message to your body every day: “Hey, I still need that one!” Full-body exercise is the secret to preventing cell death. Let’s learn more about how engaging each one of those m
uscles acts as a megaphone to our DNA, shouting loud and clear, “I want to live!”
CHAPTER 4
MEET YOUR MUSCLES, LIGAMENTS, AND JOINTS
We’ve talked about how essential it is to move your muscles, and we’re starting to understand why it’s so important to move all of them. But how can you actually do that—reach every single muscle, all 620 of them? And how do you even know if you are engaging all of them? To understand this concept and the method behind ESSENTRICS, we need to stop thinking of each muscle individually and start thinking of muscles as a complex, interlocking system that works with our ligaments and joints to relay communication throughout our bodies on a second-by-second basis. That’s when we’ll also learn to spot problems and seek out opportunities to use every single muscle in our daily lives—the most sustainable and impactful way we can start Aging Backwards.
MUSCLE CHAINS COMMUNICATE THE MOVEMENT
Our skeletal muscles are the ones that move the bones and joints; they are attached directly to the bones by the tendons. We have 620 skeletal muscles in our body, all differing in size and shape, according to their function and duty.
The brain is like the puppet master, using the muscles as strings to lift our bones like the wooden parts of a marionette. Our muscles are made of thousands of cells bundled together, cells that need to slide around one another as we stretch or contract our muscles, each working independently and as part of a coordinated system. The bones of our arms are attached to other bones by an intricate array of muscles that run in varying patterns, from the elbows to the front and back ribs, over and under the shoulders, and into the spine. Just to attach the arms to the torso and make them work requires a phenomenal number of muscles. Even when all the muscles are working perfectly, it takes only one to give us trouble by getting injured. We create movement with this complex series of levers and pulleys that move our bones around under the direction of signals from our brain.
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