Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, Sexy, and Smart—Until You're 80 and Beyond, Second Edition by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health & Fitness, Longevity, Healthy Living & Personal Hygiene, Exercise, General
ISBN: 9781523508662
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Strength training works on these signals. Pushing a muscle hard sends a blaring signal back up to the brain. Remember adjusting the fan belt, the instant tightening of your joints on the staircase? This is important stuff for your body. If your brain slacks off for an instant and you don’t make the split-second adjustments, you might get hurt. You will pull a muscle, sprain an ankle, or break a leg. In nature, you can die from a minor injury. The endurance predator laid up for two weeks with a sprained ankle might never come back. So the signals to your brain from strength training are loud and important: priority news. And they create growth—first in the signaling pathways themselves, blazing that direct trail through the forest of neural networks, and second in the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints directly. With this growth comes a new integration between your brain and body. They have always been fused; we just forgot it. This is how you reconnect them. It’s a literal, physical reconnection: nerve fibers you can see under the microscope, brain chemistry you can see on MRI scans, reaction time you can measure in the lab. It’s skiing better, feeling stronger, feeling better.

It’s also not falling down. As Chris mentioned, you’re much more likely to fall as you get older unless you stay in great shape. This is a major public health issue, because you also fall harder and do more harm to yourself. C-6—hiss and, literally, bump in the night. Falls have been carefully studied, and it turns out you do not stumble any more often as you age; in other words, you catch your toe just as often as you did at twenty. But instead of easily recovering your balance, you’re more likely to hit the pavement. There are two reasons for this. To begin with, you have let your proprioception slow down a critical bit. It takes a split second longer before your brain realizes you’re falling, and in that split second momentum and gravity turn against you. The other point is that it takes strength to recover from a stumble. Your toe stops on the pavement, but your body keeps going, building up speed and momentum in a Newtonian drive toward earth. By the time you move your leg, your entire body mass is moving forward and down with increasing speed. It’s like jumping off a low wall. Your legs have to be strong enough to stop your momentum, or down you go.

Strength training gives you the power to fight gravity and stay on your feet. Even if you do take a fall, having strong reflexes and powerful muscles changes it from a head-on collision to a softer impact. Like the crumple zones in your car, your coordinated muscle action softens the blow. You will fall less if you are strong, and you will fall better, dramatically lowering your odds of serious injury.

Falls aside, strength training lowers your chance of injury with all forms of exercise—in

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