Will Harlow

The research shows that you can make incredible improvements at any age.

And on the flight on the way over here, I read a new paper that came out just the other day

which said that a group of nursing home residents, so these were people in their 90s and older, were put through an eight-week quad strengthening program.

And in that eight weeks, they improved their strength by 175%.

Oh, my gosh.

175%.

Now, for those people, I have no doubt that was life-changing because they can start walking around again.

They can probably get in and out of chairs again independently.

It can make a huge difference to them.

So what this proves is that it's not too late at any age.

You can make improvements.

And another bit of great news is that when you first start working on your strength, we typically see improvements within as little as two weeks.

It's not because you can build muscle mass in that time because you can't, but you build up those neural connections again and that happens fast.

So your body learns these movement patterns quickly.

So within two weeks, there's a meaningful change in what you can functionally do, but you just have to get started and you just have to stick to it.

Definitely.

And we used to define sarcopenia just as a loss of muscle mass.

But now we define it as well as a loss of strength and function.

So there's multiple things happening at the same time.

And even though muscle mass and strength are very closely linked, they're not the same thing.