Dr. Anthony Youn

And those are called slow twitch muscle fibers.

Slow twitch muscle fibers are those fibers that our body uses for kind of endurance, where you're kind of doing the same thing over and over again in a slow fashion.

Those are slow twitch muscle fibers.

Fast twitch muscle fibers are those fibers that we, those muscles that we use for essentially explosive movement.

Okay.

So if you're going for sprints, if you're doing hip workouts, a lot of times you're using kind of the fast twitch muscle fibers.

They're also the muscle fibers that will go into play.

If you trip, if you're about to fall, those are the ones that will steady you.

You know, that's why, you know, if you see, you may see an older person who's like 70 or 80 and they trip on something and they just fall and hit their face.

Yes, because they haven't been working those fast twitch muscle fibers, so they don't have those reflexes, those reaction time, where if you or I, we hit a corner or a curb and we start to fall, we will steady ourselves very quickly because those muscle fibers are still working.

So those muscle fibers, they degenerate as we get older, and that's one reason why older people, they trip on something and they just go straight down because they haven't been working those.

So it's so, so important.

Yoga, I think, is awesome.

Those are also slow twitch muscle fibers, but yoga will help you, obviously, with your balance, which is so, so important, and flexibility.

Exactly.

And it's so great for the mind and for overall stress reduction.

But at the same time, definitely doing weight training, doing resistance training as people get older, not just walking.

And really, there's three exercises that if, you know, let's say you have, you know, somebody who's in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and like, well, I haven't done resistance training yet.

ever, then there's three things definitely to start with.

And I encourage anybody who's listening, if you've got somebody in your life who's older, you can see that their mobility is slowing down, just have them do three things to start out with.