The question of whether all muscles need to have explicit strength training or whether training the big muscles has knock on effects for the smaller ones is interesting.
I’m hoping for the latter, because training all of those 600 muscles seems difficult. I can imagine that part of the cause of sarcopenia is actually a whole body effect, as in a combination of hormones & other molecules that travel in the bloodstream have an effect on all muscles.
Does anyone know what the cause of sarcopenia is at a tissue/cellular/biochemical level? Or does anyone know of a plausible seeming theory?
I watched part of the videos, which mainly said, this seems to work & a bit on how to do it.
Has there been any work on why it might help? Attia (?) seemed to suggest it has to do with growing the capillary bed, which suggests that muscles may detect they aren’t getting enough blood and so grow new capillaries to distribute the blood they do get.
Seems like exercise hackers have already addressed this issue, you can judge re “difficulty”:
You could hit all muscle groups with only 4 exercises.
Re causes of sarcopenia, aside from aging, seems multi factorial. Senescence in muscle cells is highly implicated. Building muscle mass and strength in advance of the aging decline is a critical intervention. That’s my focus at 57.
Exercise is a whole body intervention bathing every cell in endogenous nootropics and other anti-aging signalling metabolites. I think of the mitochondria as cellular level muscles, and exercise building their efficiency/reserve and blunting their senescence.
Hahaha Joseph… He is…the most interesting man in the world.
Not qute all on that sound tape… but a few years ago I did write a thriller nonfiction book that was turned into a #1Hollywood Box Office hit at the theaters in the USA and international. Hahaha. Subsequent films have been #1 hits in India… so Bollywood too.
Used some of the royalties for medical care of kids at Be Tho Orphanage in Saigon Vietnam. The rest on roadsters.
I have hobnobbed with Hollywood Stars and walked the red carpet at my movie’s premiere.
Yes, I regularly employ it in my resistance training. It is quite effective and well-suited to older population. BFR causes mechanical tension & metabolic stress signaling which induces a number of mechanisms for muscle growth… the relatively contributions of each mechanism remain largely unknown. There is a large and growing literature on BFR.
I only use BFR for exercising muscles distal to the band. I think more serious athletes should go for the inflatable cuff and be more diligent than I am about it. I like using high reps (30) at 30-40% of max and working to failure regardless of whether I’m using bands, followed by 3 sets of 15 reps with about 20 second rests. I can adjust the rest periods as well as the number of reps in order to achieve 4 sets to failure. This works for me and is time efficient.
Another muscle growth / maintenance approach, has anyone tried it?
EMS is the practice of delivering small currents of electricity to muscles that are under strain and working out. After literally spraying the trainee with water (a great conductor of electricity) and having them wear a suit with built-in electrodes targeting and stimulating specific muscles during the workout, the trainer controls individual intensities in the main muscle groups: quads, calves, glutes, lower back, lats, upper back, abs, pecs, biceps, and triceps. Just a 20-minute workout of high intensity and lots of incoming tiny currents are enough to replace a normal 90-minute workout of sweating your fat off in the gym, EMS advocates say.
Too good to be true?
After 10 weeks of training, Patten reports he went from about 247 pounds to underneath 220 pounds (he is 6 feet 3 inches tall). He went on his skiing trip where he says he skied “further and longer and in a more dynamic way” than ever before. He has since continued training via EMS, to which he credits his ability to ride his bike around London easier. It also makes mowing the grass in his garden more effortless, he says. “I’m getting a lot out of EMS in a shorter time,” he says. “And sort of intellectually, I feel stronger in myself,” he continues. “As you get older, working out is harder and puts stresses and strains on your back and joints.
Related Research Paper:
Effects of whole-body electromyostimulation on health indicators of older people: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials
Conclusions
This review provides further evidence for significant, moderate to large effect sizes of WB-EMS on sarcopenia, muscle mass and strength parameters, but not on waist circumference and triglycerides.
