Fit Living

I've talked before about how your leg muscles are the most important muscles when it comes to living a high quality of life because they help you move around and stay active.

Leg muscles are so important that I think everyone over 60 should be training their legs at least twice per week. Combining leg strengthening with exercises for balance can go a long way towards reducing your risk of falling.

The reason leg strengthening is so important is because after a certain age, you will start to naturally lose muscle mass. This process is called Sarcopenia, and a recent study from the University of Nottingham in England looked a little deeper into why it happens.

They took two groups—one with an average age of 25 and one with an average age of 65—and gave them insulin before breakfast to see how the insulin would affect muscle breakdown.

When you wake up in the morning, you haven’t eaten anything for 8 or more hours, so your body starts to break down muscle for energy. When you have breakfast, your body should stop breaking down that muscle because now it has energy from the food.

For the younger group of participants, that is exactly what happened. The insulin, which mimics what happens in your body after eating breakfast, stopped the muscle breakdown.

However, in the older group, it did not, meaning that muscle breakdown continued.

Unfortunately, you can’t do much about how your muscles react (or don’t react) to insulin, but the researchers think that strength training of the leg muscles can slow or stop the loss of muscle.

What are you doing for your legs?

Here are a few things to get you started.

1. Walk or use a cardio machine that uses the legs several times per week for at least 20 minutes. Good cardio machines would be an upright or recumbent stationary bike, Airdyne, NuStep, rower, or elliptical.

2. Strength train your legs 2 or 3 times per week. Your health club should have a good selection of leg strengthening machines. At home, you can do the stairs repeatedly or do squats up and down from a chair as well as marching in place.

Don’t let that precious muscle wither away, because it’s so crucial to your independence.