Dr Niall Moyna: ‘As we age, we should do resistance training to maintain our muscle’

As the global population continues to age, the phenomenon of longevity is reshaping our understanding of life, health and well-being. Experts are exploring the secrets behind living longer and healthier lives. Professor Niall Moyna is Professor of Clinical Exercise Physiology at DCU's School of Health and Human Performance and he joins me on the line now. Niall, you're very welcome. Thank you very much Claire, lovely to be with you. I said the secrets behind living longer but you've been shouting about this for quite some time. We have known for some time that probably the best secret of aging is actually exercise and more so your physical fitness. It really is an excellent determinant not just how long you're going to live but also of the quality of your life and I suppose there's a term that I like to use, it's called eudomonia. It's an Aristotelian term. It relates to flourishing or fulfilling a person's potential as a human being and as we age that's what we want to do. We want to flourish this notion when you get to a time in the age of 65 and then all of a sudden your life wades away. I think we need to change that paradigm. This should be the healthiest, most productive years of your life. You use the term fitness there and exercise but I find them to be quite broad term so what do you mean when it comes to that? Well exercise is when, well maybe let's get back, let's differentiate physical activity to exercise. So physical activity is any body movement other than lying or sitting. So if you're standing any form of movement at all that's been physically active. You're burning more calories than you would if you were resting, either sitting or lying. Whereas exercise is discretionary, planned, structured physical activity so it's purposeful. You actually plan it, that's the difference. There's some people when you mention the word exercise they just switch off, that's not me, that's for sports people etc etc because that's planned structured activity but you know going far, walking around the garden, doing the gardening, taking out the wash, doing simple activities of daily living. You've been physically active, you're burning more calories than you would at rest and you get significant benefits from actually doing that. So that, so it's important to be able to differentiate between that. Then when it comes to physical fitness, again physical fitness for health is very different to physical activity say for sport and basically the definition that we use in academia that it's basically it's a state of being that reflects your ability to perform say specific exercises or functions like going to the bathroom, walking up a flight of stairs and it's related to both your present and your future health. And there are four components of health-related fitness. They are cardiovascular fitness, that's your heart and your lungs and your muscles, maintaining muscular strength and endurance, maintaining ideal body composition so you're not losing muscle and then good flexibility and balance. They're what we refer to as the four health-related fitness components and it's important to maintain them throughout life. And I think when people hear the term fitness they think they have to be ready to run a marathon, but that's not necessarily true either. You hit the nail on the head, that is so, so, so true. This is not about performance, this is about your overall health. Now one of the things particularly as we age, people think we hear every day about the steps and the 10,000 steps with and that's another issue, but one of the things that the current guidelines in Ireland recommend is that as we age, that we do some form of resistance training, that is to maintain our muscle because after the age of 30, we tend to lose 8 to 10 percent of our muscle per decade. And importantly, women because they start to lose, they don't put on the same amount of muscle as men up to the age of 30, they don't have the same levels of testosterone. So they start to lose their muscle from a much lower level and the likelihood is they will lose so much muscle that they will become frailty and lose their independence much earlier than men. So women tend to switch off when I start talking about muscle and resistance training, it is probably more important for women that they initiate or maintain at least two days a week, I would say three days a week of some form of resistance training and that can be done at home doing simple body, body weird exercises or actually going to a gym. And I think that's key to the messaging, isn't it? That it's simple, consistent and often. You don't necessarily have to take up CrossFit or go to Berlin to do high rocks as fantastic as these endeavours are. It's small and often that's important. Well, you know, it's different strokes for different folks and the vast majority of us do not engage in physical activity as we age and you hit the nail on the head. The key word is consistency and that means going out and maybe and there's clear evidence now that we don't need to do near as much exercise as we thought we needed to do to maintain our overall health as we age. But the key is to be consistent. Get your daily walk or your daily cycle in and maybe two or three times a week do some form of resistance exercise. Whereas doing a push-up against a wall, doing heel raises on the stairs, whatever the case may be, going to Google, look at exercises, you can't go wrong, but doing it consistently. If you're doing 15, 20 minutes a day, you do 365 days a year, I can guarantee you there is no drug in the pharmacy that will come close to giving you the benefits of that much activity. I think when people hear the term ageing as well, it's something they kind of kick down the road. Whereas your message is very much from the age of 30 on, what you do from 30 to 50 impacts how you'll be beyond that. Well, I would actually go beyond that because chronological and biological age are two different constructs. We have data here in DC, we're from looking at the blood vessels of teenagers in Ireland showing that they have a vascular age of between 55 and 60 if you're inactive and you've low fitness levels. So it's not just you, yes, you can reach your peak at 30 and then it starts to weigh in, but many of us start to age well before that. But anyway, if you get to 30, that's when you start specifically biologically, it's ingrained in all of us, our genetics, we are going to lose muscle mass. So, and again, it's a bit like compound interest, put on as much muscle as you can during your midlife because you'll get okay around the age of 60, 65, then you'll see a precipitous drop. So the higher it's falling from, the higher the more muscle you have, the longer the time it will be before you reach 30 and hopefully very, very few of us should ever reach 30. That's the reality here. We want to compress our ill health into the last months of our life, not into the last decade or two decades of our life. So again, I can't emphasize it enough doing a little bit and doing it often. And it's clear something else that helps you stay young, Niall, is that you have a passion and a purpose in life. You're always such a great voice in this space and it's always a pleasure to have you on. Niall is giving a talk on fitness and aging well at the Age Well Expo. It's on Wednesday, June 11th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Talbot Hotel in Stalorgan in Dublin. It's free to attend and you'll find out more at dlorevents.eventbrite.ie. Alive and Kicking with Claire McKenna, Sunday morning at 8 p.m. on News Talk.