Want to lead a long and healthy life? One of the keys lies in something you might not immediately consider – your muscles! A robust, healthy muscle mass can significantly enhance your lifespan and mitigate the risk of chronic ailments.
With aging comes the loss of muscle mass, leading to a host of health complications including reduced mobility, balance, and flexibility. Fortunately, there are straightforward steps you can take to build and maintain muscle mass, thereby improving your life quality and adding more years to your life.
How Building Muscle Mass Contributes to Longevity
Let's discuss how a healthy muscle mass can boost your lifespan.
Warding Off Sarcopenia (Muscle Loss)
Aging naturally brings along gradual muscle loss. However, this can escalate to severe conditions like sarcopenia, most common among the elderly, leading to loss of function, mobility, and independence due to muscle mass reduction. Sarcopenia can also potentially reduce your lifespan.
Muscle mass plays a crucial role in maintaining your body's stability, especially for the hips and shoulders. Loss of stability could increase susceptibility to falls, and coupled with low bone density, lead to fractures. Some fractures, like a broken hip, can increase mortality risk, particularly among older adults.
Fortunately, sarcopenia is preventable and even reversible through exercises like resistance and strength training. The earlier you start, the better, as preventing muscle loss is always easier than trying to reverse its effects.
Lowering Risk of Chronic Diseases
Muscle mass significantly reduces the risk of chronic diseases, one of the leading causes of death. Keeping your muscles healthy can also keep your heart, a muscle itself, healthy. The best way to prevent muscle atrophy is to engage in resistance training to build muscles, which come with a host of benefits.
Resistance training can lower the risk of chronic inflammation, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. Increasing muscle mass can enhance insulin sensitivity to help maintain normal blood sugar levels, which is essential in mitigating the risk of metabolic health issues such as type 2 diabetes.
Maintaining Optimal Functioning Into Your Senior Years
Healthy muscle mass can ensure optimal functioning in your later years by improving bone health, sense of balance, and flexibility. This can prevent bone fractures, falls, and the need for family members to take care of you or the need to be sent to a nursing home.
Healthy muscle mass enables you to maintain your mobility, as your skeletal muscles attached to your bones, tendons, and ligaments remain healthy and move freely. It can also prevent osteoarthritis, often linked to low muscle mass.
Fostering Emotional Health and Happiness
Building muscle mass can positively impact your emotional health by reducing the risk of emotional health issues like anxiety and depression. Exercising muscles helps reduce stress and improve sleep, both of which contribute to longevity.
Strength training can enhance your mood and immune system, as well as increase self-esteem. Plus, good emotional health can lead to a happier life, and happier people tend to live longer.
Conclusion
Muscle mass can significantly enhance your lifespan. Optimal muscle mass can reduce the risk of many chronic diseases, which are among the leading causes of death.
Preventing muscle loss and maintaining function in later years is possible. Regular strength training, essential for building and maintaining muscle mass, contributes to healthy aging and a high-quality life. If your muscle strength is good, you will function at a much higher level for longer!
