The medical marvel you already own – and how to get the most out of it
The article below is an excerpt from my newsletter: Well Enough with Harry Bullmore. To get my latest thoughts on fitness and wellbeing pop your email address into the box above to get the newsletter direct to your inbox.
To start this week’s newsletter, a question: “Would you buy something that promised to supercharge your fitness levels and preserve your health for decades to come?”
A follow-up question: “What if I told you it’s already in your possession?”
That thing is muscle – the medical marvel you don’t have to pay for. It holds us upright and helps us move. It powers every breath and regulates blood sugar levels to protect against chronic disease. It even secretes anti-inflammatory myokines to make your body a more enjoyable place to live.
All it needs is a little TLC every now and then, and it will work like a Trojan to keep you in tip-top shape. This week’s newsletter is all about giving your muscles that care.
This week I spoke to Dr Michael LaMonte at the University of Buffalo, who recently led research into the link between muscular strength and mortality in more than 5,000 women aged 63 to 99 – a novelty in a field dominated by studies of younger, trained men.
The results, in layman’s terms: strong muscles equal a longer (and healthier) life. This relationship compounds as you grow older too.
“When women go through menopause and lose their body’s own secretion of oestrogen, the loss of skeletal muscle mass increases rapidly,” says Dr LaMonte. “We typically see a change in their body composition, where they start losing muscle and holding fat in the belly area particularly. That’s not healthy.”
Both men and women also tend to become less active as they grow older, which can contribute to sarcopenia – the age-related loss of strength and muscle. “And when we can no longer get out of our chair and move around, we are in trouble,” Dr LaMonte says.
You don’t need to look or train like a bodybuilder to prevent this. But if you challenge the muscles across your body a couple of times a week, you can preserve – and even build – them.
If you’re looking for an easy place to start, our recent features have you covered: from the science-backed exercise method that helps counter the effects of ageing, to eight smart rules for strength training in midlife, and an expert-approved, four-move weekly workout designed to boost full-body strength, stabilise blood sugar and support bone density.
The other thing Dr LaMonte highlighted was the intelligence of muscle.
This tissue – and strength training in general – is often unfairly saddled with a meathead reputation: stupid, simple, brutish. I think that puts many people off.
But you only have to look at the athletic scholars of ancient Greece, or the exercise habits of other great thinkers through history, to see the symbiosis between mind and muscle.
Muscle is in constant conversation with other systems in the body, helping them run smoothly. It influences the heart, brain and other organs, lifting our mood and secreting signalling proteins called myokines with each contraction to combat inflammation. Healthy muscle does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to creating a happy mind and body.
Journalist and fervent surfer Bonnie Tsui, author of the best-selling book Why We Swim, is another person to recognise this: “Skeletal muscle is an endocrine tissue, responsible for making and releasing hormones which control the actions of other cells or organs in the body,” she told me – further evidence that muscle is smart, and incredibly chatty too.
Which is why it frustrates me when people try to hoodwink it. We’re fixated on “hacks” and trends to improve our health, when muscle has reliably responded to the same stimulus for years: semi-regular strength training sessions that challenge the body without exceeding our capabilities. Finding that sweet spot, just outside our comfort zone, is where muscular development lies.
The latest trend I’ve seen involves doing 50 jumps every morning, with viral videos promising endless benefits: “It wakes up your cardiovascular system… It improves lymphatic flow, which helps clear your body of waste… It elevates body temperature, which primes your metabolism…”
Yet when I put this to Jack McNamara, a senior lecturer at the University of East London’s School of Health, Sport and Bioscience, he told me the perks were “probably modest, but not zero”.
Anything that encourages people to move more is likely to be positive, and if this trend acts as a gateway to further exercise, it could be a force for good. But I worry that when it fails to deliver the riches promised, people will feel demoralised – and the effect will backfire.
A common thread among these fitness crazes is that they package a single exercise as a magic pill, then inflate the benefits for a snappy social media hook. In reality, the benefits aren’t exclusive to one movement – they’re the result of regular, consistent activity. That’s where the real magic lies.
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