Effects of Older Athletes Aging: Muscles, Fascia, and the Nervous System

No one wants to age, that's a fact. No one asks for their muscles and joints to get stiff or their range of motion to drop dramatically. "It's all a part of getting older" we know this phrase and accept the various changes that occur when we age but there needs to be some more insight into what actually occurs inside our systems that causes aging, and perhaps what we can do to slow it down or reduce the pain or the effects of it by a significant amount. Let's go over in this article the science behind aging, the numbers behind all of this, and what we can do about it.

First off let's start easy with our muscles. Prepare for your mind to be blown: you start losing muscle mass from the time you are THIRTY YEARS OLD to the day we die. It gradually decreases from your thirties on. The concept of taking care of yourself and your muscles starting at a way younger age is just now being realized, but man does it make a difference. Studies have shown that there is a 30-50% reduction in the number and 10-40% reduction in the size of skeletal muscle fibers, those numbers are throughout the aging process all put together. The loss of muscle mass also goes hand in hand with muscle performance and neuromuscular performance as well. So how fast you can get up from a chair from sitting, or how long it takes you to walk up a flight of stairs. To be fair, on muscle mass loss, it is the same for men and women, around just under .5% a year, year over year. We all know we lose muscle mass as we age, we know it is coming, but what about our fascia? Our skin? And the skin beneath the surface that is intwined in our muscle helping them function? What happens to them as we age?

Fascia is a little more complicated, since we include tendons, proteins in the muscles, ligaments, and water. Fascia is associated with the stiffness we feel as we get older. Your muscles don't necessarily get tighter as you age, but the ligaments and tissue inside your muscles do. For example, a significant amount of older people need hip replacements, but why? Why is it almost always the hips? When you age you have less water running through your systems and your joints, you start to dry up in your tendons and ligaments. You hips are a major highway for your thighs, gluts, and back joints to all meet in your hip socket. Over time and with less water, every time you press the ball into the socket of the hip joint, there will be less water to coat or lubricate the hips, and eventually there will be so little that it feels like bone on bone, henceforth the hip surgeries. Your hips never got any tighter, they just lost a lot of water over the years until there was none left, that is the process of aging in our skin. We hydrate our skin on the top with lotions and moisturizers, but we don't think about the water inside of us that help us do everyday tasks. We need to take care of our skin from the inside out. It should be noted too that fascia gets thicker as we age, so the amount of water we need goes way up with our age.

what can we do about all of this? Don't worry, there is hope! Your fascia and muscles still contain a degree of plasticity as you age. That means they are still willing to change their form if given the right environments. As in working out, stretching on a daily basis to keep that fascia thin and spreading, trying to use your bigger muscles as much as possible, and don't sit for hours on end!! Activity is your friend as you age, and water. From walking to yoga and stretching, all of these allow your skin and muscles to still change with you as you age but in a more graceful slower way. Take that as a blessing and use that knowledge to your advantage. You can still change your skin and the shape of your muscles as you get older, you just need to be willing to try.