As societies across the western world age, it’s increasingly important that we manage to age in a healthy way.  New research from the University of Birmingham provides a timely reminder that it’s never too late to start exercising, and people can gain significant benefits, even if they have been largely inactive for most of their adult life.

The research finds that people have just as much ability to gain muscle mass as peers who have been training for long periods.  It reminds us that resistance training can benefit people regardless of both their age and previous levels of fitness.

The researchers compared the muscle-building ability of two groups of older men, the first of whom were people who had exercised and competed all of their life, whereas the second group were people who had never participated in structured exercise before.

Muscle biopsies were taken from participants both before and after the exercise to show how the muscles were responding to exercise, with an isotope tracer used to show how proteins were developing inside the muscle.

The results reveal that the experienced athletes showed no greater ability to build muscle, despite their superior overall fitness levels.  Instead, both groups showed an equal capacity to build muscle.

“Our study clearly shows that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t been a regular exerciser throughout your life, you can still derive benefit from exercise whenever you start,” the researchers say. “Obviously a long term commitment to good health and exercise is the best approach to achieve whole-body health, but even starting later on in life will help delay age-related frailty and muscle weakness.”

Getting diet right

Of course, as experienced athletes will tell you, it’s hard to out-train a bad diet, so getting our food intake right is also important.  A second study, from the University of Michigan, suggests that the calorie budget approach adopted by the likes of Weight Watchers is the right approach.

Rather than setting a calorie budget by day, as is commonly the case with these kind of programs, they instead asked people to set a calorie budget by meal.

“We found that consumers set lower daily calorie budgets if they set them by meal versus by day,” the researchers say.

Indeed, it transpired that when volunteers set a calorie budget by meal rather than by day, it resulted in a lower daily limit of 100 calories, which translates to around a pound of weight loss every five weeks.

The authors suggest this is because when we budget by day, we tend not to think about cutting calories for all meals during the day, and therefore can often overconsume, whereas this doesn’t tend to happen when we budget per meal.

“We asked people to set budgets for the next day and then to take pictures of all the food and drink they consumed the next day,” the researchers explain. “We found that people who had set the daily calorie budget by meal ended up eating fewer calories the next day compared to people who had set the calorie budget by day.”

Whether it’s boosting your exercise levels or reducing your food intake, it’s clear that our understanding of what works is still evolving, but hopefully these two studies go some way towards helping us have a more scientific approach to living a healthy life.