Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're talking about resistance training. When we think of exercising in our 70s and 80s, we often focus on gentle activities like walking, swimming some lengths in a pool.

However, are we overlooking a crucial

part of the fitness puzzle, something that could truly transform our later years. Strength training.

Because as we age, muscle loss isn't just about losing tone, it's about losing independence.

Dr. Brad Schoenfeld joins me to share how resistance training can preserve

strength, improve ability, and support a long and active life. Whether you've got five minutes

or 50, he'll show you how to get started. No gym membership required.

When muscles begin to shrink and they get weaker, you do not have sufficient strength to carry out basic tasks.

And then you lose your functional independence, which is the primary reason that most people go into nursing homes to care facilities as they age.

It also can lead to falls, hip fractures, which often are fatal over time,

that mortality in those elderly individuals who undergo falls is close to 50% over a period of a

couple of years. The functional disabilities, of course, are far-reaching as far as people's ability to carry out

activities on their own, which not only is really bad as far as their ability to engage in life,

but it's also demoralizing mentally. There's aspects far beyond that that also are important.

Muscles store glucose.

So glucose, of course, is stored in muscles as glycogen. If your muscles start to shrink,

you have less ability to store glucose. That tends to lead to diabetes. Also the functionality of the muscle themselves in terms of their insulin receptors, their ability to get glucose into the muscles. So it's not just the size and their

ability to store a certain amount of glucose, but it's their ability to take in the glucose.

And by the way, you mentioned earlier, also by pulling on the bones, they help to strengthen

bones or when they weaken, they facilitate the decrease in bone density.

So there's just really all organ systems kind of can be affected by muscle.

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