Why Strength Is The Secret To Longevity | Dan’s Journey Back to Health and Fitness (Pt. 3)

Ex-pro cyclist, Dan, is back! In the third episode of his 6-month fitness and longevity journey series, Dan explores the importance of strength, power, and muscle mass in achieving a long, healthy and comfortable life!

00:00 Why are power, strength, and muscle linked to longevity?
01:23 What is “strength” and “power”?
02:31 Why build power, muscle and strength now?
04:50 The benefits of resistance and weight training
06:36 When should I start?
08:08 What resistance training should I be doing?
09:28 How do I test my muscle mass and strength?
10:38 Do I need to change my diet?
11:50 How powerful can resistance training really be?
12:31 How’s Dan’s journey going so far?

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power strength and muscle my number one aim over the next few years is to gain functional power strength and muscle why to give myself the best chance of living a long healthy and Mobile Life coming up I’ll be letting you know why those three things have such strong links to longevity and give an update on how I’ve been getting on with my own changes in lifestyle as an endurance cyclist by trade I was never particularly concerned with putting on muscle in fact I was more concerned with not putting on muscle especially on my upper body muscle weighs a lot and that’s all weight as a cyclist you have to take uphill with you basically if you don’t need it you don’t want it simple as that and you don’t have to look too hard at professional endurance cyclist to realize that a near skeletal upper body is pretty much a requirement of being a great climber even sprinters and classic Riders who look muscular compared to their climbing peers are actually tiny when you see them in real life and that works for them but this series is not about becoming the best bike riders we can it’s about doing what we can to set ourselves up for later life and that means not having a skeletal body before I explain why power strength and muscle can help you live a longer better life I think it’s important to Define strength and P power and highlight the difference between those two so strength is the ability of a neuromuscular system to maintain or overcome external resistance by exerting Force more simply strength is how much force your muscles can produce power is different so power is about the speed with which we produce that force and I think we confuse that in cycling circles we often talk about strong Riders referring to somebody who can ride all day on the front at high speed in reality they are powerful power equals force time velocity so the strength you have and how quickly you can exert it to use cycling as an example if you exert a certain Force Through Your pedal stroke at 50 revs per minute you’re going to be producing half the amount of power as if you exert that exact same Force at 100 revs per minute [Music] back to the main topic then why do we need to build power strength and muscle now because we will steadily lose all three as we get older just like V2 Max our power up muscle mass and strength will decline with age so long as we continue to live the same lifestyle time for some stats so for most healthy people muscle mass and strength Peaks when they’re around 30 to 35 years old and decreases slowly after that initially that decline is at a rate of around 3 to 8% per decade but from the age of 65 in women 7 in men roughly that rate of decline increases dramatically those findings have come from Nia’s Baltimore longitudinal study of Aging which is the longest running study of its kind but plenty of other Studies have had similar findings it’s a similar story with bone mass which declines by around 1% per year from the age of 40 the name for age related loss of muscle mass and function is sarcopenia the good news is that although you can’t completely stop the decline you can significantly slow it down why would you want to slow it down well it might seem obvious but slowing it down is going to allow you to continue carrying out everyday tasks such as climbing upstairs opening a jar lifting yourself out of a chair or even just walking well into your old age it will also help prevent Falls and this is a really big one so if you’re over 65 and you break your hip or your femur through a fall you got a 15 to 30% chance of dying within 12 months that’s a staggering statistic isn’t it I should point out that I’m really not wanting to use this data as any kind of scare mongering I simply want to highlight some of the scientific data so you all have the knowledge of what will happen to your body over time that way you can make your own lifestyle decision based on that uh back to fools though it’s not necessarily the complications of the broken bone itself that leads to the patient losing their life it’s the other consequences it’s the loss of physical function from breaking your hip for example which leads to a loss of Independence that in turn leads to lessening social interaction all of these things can mean the start of the end now in order to prevent a hip or a leg fracture you want to reduce your chances of falling and also reduce your chances of breaking your bone if you do for a resistance and weight training is going to help with both increasing your strength will mean that if you do happen to get off balance you’re far more likely to be able to counterbalance and prevent a fall however if you do fall regular weight training will have built up your bone density making it slightly less likely you’ll break a bone on impact as cyclists this is where we really need to be attentive so people who only do nonweightbearing exercise such as cycling are more like to develop osteopenia or osteoporosis I mean don’t get me wrong on this one because cyclean really is good for you but it should be supplemented with weightbearing exercises such as resistance training or jogging and I’ve been trying to do both for the last few months another benefits to strength and resistance training is that it will help you to avoid injury in general the more you can avoid injury and illness especially in your older years is the less deterioration there’s going to be through periods of inactivity now I’m going to try and predict a few questions you might want to ask but just before I answer them a quick request if you enjoy content like this we would be really grateful if you could subscribe to our Channel give this video a like and share it with anyone you think could benefit that really goes a long long way to helping us continue making freeo view content [Music] okay question number one when should I start well just like with V2 Max and everything else I’ve talked about in this series the best time to start strength and resistance training is now but it’s also never too late to start all that matters is starting and then being consistent making it a habit how much should we be doing well that’s an it depends sort of question if strength training is an addition to a few hours of cardio work each week and two to three sessions of 45 minutes or so is enough to reap the benefits it doesn’t have to be at a gym you can do things from home with your own body weight or resistance bands but I personally found it easier to go to a gym have no distraction from what I want to achieve there either way we should think of all of our training like we would think about saving money consistency over time is the key put away some money every month and a few years years down the line with compounding interest you’re going to start noticing your savings Boom the more you have saved for your older years the more comfortable your later life will be financially your Fitness and your health is exactly the same as your finances consistency over time will pay huge dividends down the line and allow you to live a physically more comfortable later life personally I’m not expecting to look or feel hugely different after 6 months of documenting this process but I am expecting to feel a lot of benefits in 5 to 10 years time and decades beyond that if I stay consistent in what I’m doing what resistance training should we be doing well I’m not a qualified personal trainer nor do I know the individual needs and muscle imbalances of everybody watching this so I would recommend finding a good personal trainer to get you started or looking at some of the many helpful videos here on YouTube it’s really important that you do resistance training in the right way as there is a risk of injury the very thing it helps to prevent if you do it properly there is another thing that I would recommend you consider though the size of type 2 muscle fibers decline at an even quicker rate than overall strength and muscle mass and at a much greater rate than type one fibers so type two fibers are often referred to as fast twitch they’re what you use for explosive efforts like sprinting or jumping whilst type one fibers they slow twitch the ones we’ use for endurance exercises because they fatigue much slower because of the greater decline in fast twitch fibers it’s a really good idea to include some Dynamic explosive training in your weekly schedule so this could be box jumps or medicine bull throws anything that requires that really explosive movement and that will help preserve those fast twitch fibers you may also want to know how to test your muscle mass and strength so you can see if you’re improving or at least slowing your rate of decline well you may remember in episode one that I did a series of tests one of which was a dexa scan which analyzes your body composition how much is fat how much is muscle Etc and also a knee extension test to check leg strength both of those are relatively expensive to do however I also talked about the correlation between grip strength and mortality and that some doctors believe it’s a better indicator of life expectancy than blood pressure before you spend your days trying to improve your hand strength I should point out why many studies use that metric it’s because it’s easy so measurement of hand strength is cheap and easily available you could use a monitor like I did in episode one or you can just time how long you can hang off a bar a hand strength is seen by many as an easy way of giving an indication of someone’s overall strength and that’s because very few people have spent any portion of their life focusing on improving grip strength alone so a good grip strength very likely means that that person has generally looked after themselves the final question that many of you will have is do I need to change my diet with resistance training well diet and nutrition is something I will attempt to cover in a future episode but what I will say is that another thing that gets less efficient as we get older is protein synthesis so if you want to gain strength and muscle mass as an older athlete we want to be at the upper end of recommended protein intake guidelines here in the UK the reference nutrient intake recommends 55 gram per day for men 45 for women however some recent research suggests that older adults should be eating much more than that around 1.6 to 2.4 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day to support muscle growth for me at 75 Kg that’s 120 to 180 gram of protein per day a long way above the standard guidelines if you are getting that amount of protein then timing of ingestion doesn’t really matter so long as it’s spread throughout the [Music] day before I move on to my own progress I wanted to briefly mention a study that was done many years ago and published in the Journal of American Medical Association so it took a group of n people in their ’90s and put them through 8 weeks of what was for them high intensity strength training in just 8 weeks their strength gains averaged 174% their mid thigh muscle area increased by 9% and their walking speed improved by 48% that’s in 8 weeks for people in their ’90s that is how powerful resistance training can be if you’re pardon the pun right for those of VI that are interested I’m going to give an update on how I’ve been getting on now uh firstly the negative part I have lapsed with nicotine so a friend of mine uses the same nicotine pouches as me and I made the mistake of having a couple when I was with him in May unfortunately I then went out and bought another box the next day and I’ve been unsuccessful in quitting since I am disappointed with myself but at the same time try not to beat myself up over it I will quit again soon at least that’s what trying to tell myself uh by the way if anyone you know ever thinks of starting these tell them not to unless it’s to help them quit smoking they are unbelievably addictive and their prevalence is increasing so a recent survey commissioned by the professional footballers Association here in the UK showed that one in five professional players is using something like that a much better news though I have managed to keep to two days a week of alcohol which has been my goal and my ex side and sleep has been better than I’d hoped for so in April I logged 49 activities on straa and on my woop totaling 30 hours and 336 km in May a month I normally struggle with because of covering the duralia I did 53 activities 37 hours and 453 km now that’s the most I’ve done in many many years those activities are a mixture of running cycling strength training and walking and yes I do upload my walks to straa much to some people’s disgust and if you’d like to see what I’m doing each day and each week you can follow it all on my stra accounts so just search for Daniel Lloyd I’ve got to say I’m still really enjoying it I’ve been getting to bed quite early for the most part but then getting up early the next day and getting my exercise done first thing in the morning I know that’s not possible for all of you everybody’s circumstances are different but mine allow me to do that and I got to say it’s a lovely feeling getting a lot done before half 7 in the morning again I’ve had no concrete goals to my running cycling or weight training or walking and my goal has just been to exercise consistently to add to my savings as it were and so far I have achieved that I’ve also tried to be consistent with my sleep patterns but if I look at my whoop data I didn’t do quite so well in May so my sleep performance was down by 9% versus April and I think that’s mainly down to being in a different bed for the most part and having different different pillows my average whoop strain in April and May was quite similar around 11.5 and importantly a fair bit higher than those same months a year ago my average recovery has also been a fair bit higher this year versus last as has my average sleep performance my resting heart rate has been lower over the last two months than any other time since I started wearing a woop band which was around 3 years ago and my heart rate variability is also the highest I’ve seen since I started measuring it so most things seem to be going in the right direction what I’ve enjoyed most about going to the gym is that once you do push yourself to your limit on each exercise you don’t feel exhausted at the end of it like you can do for a long hard ride or run in fact I often feel more energized when I finished in the gym than when I started great news for those of you who are considering some resistance training after watching this episode uh just before I go I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on strength train and how you’ve been getting on if you’ve made some changes to your own lifestyle in recent weeks and months I’ll be reading all the comments that you leave below this video right I’ll be back very soon with episode 4