This may be one of the most important articles I’ve ever written with respect to helping you understand how important resistance exercise is to not only slowing down the aging process but improving your overall metabolic health. We know this is important because studies have shown that over 75% of those over 65 do not exercise enough to stay healthy.
But, the key is to understand the type of exercise that will give you the greatest benefit for the time invested. If we had to engage in hard physical labor for our work we wouldn’t need to exercise. Formal exercise is only needed because most of us have long ago stopped engaging in manual labor. Modern society has allowed us to obtain food and shelter with relatively little effort. So, we need exercise to compensate for this if we hope to optimize our physical health.
I want to share my experience with you so you don’t make the same mistakes I did 50 year ago. To me the evidence is crystal clear: As you age you need to engage in some type of resistance training to compensate for the degeneration that typically accompanies aging and decreased physical activity. You can do cardio if you have the time, but not at the expense of building lean muscle mass. This is largely because aging accelerates muscle loss.
