Dr. Andy Galpin

So sarcopenia really refers to the excessive or additional loss of muscle beyond the normal loss with aging.

So those strength standards I gave you are rough guidelines.

But I want you to get as strong as possible.

I don't necessarily need you to be squatting or benching 1,300 pounds.

But I don't want you to just stop at body weight either.

So outside of, of course, leading to injury and getting hurt, which is something we don't want to do, there's no disadvantage to getting stronger.

I've tried to make that argument.

with muscle mass earlier in the show.

But I can really make that heavily with strength.

In fact, if you were to compare the two, muscle mass to muscle strength, muscle strength is by far a stronger predictor of both how long you're going to live as well as how well you will live within those years.

That's number one.

Number two, getting stronger only continues to reduce your risk of developing things like sarcopenia or late-onset dementia.

In fact, one particular study of note here, this study had around 500,000 or so individuals pulled from the UK Biobank, which is a similar setup as what we've got here in America that I talked about earlier in our NHANES database.

Now, they studied these individuals across nine years, and during that time, around 4,000 or so of the individuals developed dementia.

And so what's interesting is they're able to go back and say, okay, what unique characteristics existed prior to the dementia as well as after the onset, and how did that compare to the individuals who didn't have the dementia set in?

And in this one certain study, and just one study, so we want to be cautious of over-interpreting here, what they found was 30% of the dementia cases were attributed to having low grip strength.

And this was independent of a number of other important confounders.

We will talk about these things more in future episodes.

And I don't want you to get overly concerned with that specific result or those specific numbers.

I just wanted to highlight, though, the critical importance of getting stronger