When we stop using muscles—metaphorical muscles or physical ones—we tend to lose the ability to use them. A few examples:
Maybe you or someone you know used to be very fluent in another language, but without the chance to practice it, it kind of goes away.
Or maybe there’s a hobby or an avocation that you were into at one time, but you just haven’t had the time to really pursue it, and you know that your skills have fallen off.
Since I’m talking about personal habits and skills, I’ll add one of mine. I used to run marathons, a full 20 years ago. But I had one kind of stupid injury during a light run the week after I ran one of them.
And, to be honest, I never really 100 percent recovered.
I had all of this in mind when I came across a recent study showing what happened when older adults with signs of frailty were encouraged to walk a little bit more briskly during supervised exercise sessions.
Writing in the journal PLOS One, researchers described an experiment involving residents of retirement communities around Chicago. They enrolled 165 people, with 105 ultimately included in the analysis. Their average age was about 79.
The researchers randomly assigned retirement communities to one of two walking programs. Participants in both groups participated in individual, 45-minute sessions with trained research assistants, three times a week for 16 weeks.
One group walked at a casual pace. The other was encouraged to walk as fast as they safely could, aiming for roughly 70 percent of their maximum heart rate.
Short version: Those who walked faster were more likely to become less frail.
I spoke with the study’s lead author, Margaret Danilovich.
She’s a physical therapist who conducted the research while an assistant professor at Northwestern University. (She is now director of clinical programs at Agilon Health.)
For years, she told me, there had been a tendency to treat frailty as something that only gets worse—and to avoid asking too much of people who already have limited strength and endurance.
But her experience working with patients made her suspect that “maybe this hands-off approach was not actually helpful.”
Frailty here is something researchers actually measured, using grip strength and questions about fatigue, appetite, mobility, and physical activity.
At the end of the experiment, about 70 percent of participants with follow-up frailty measurements in the faster-walking group improved by at least one frailty category.
That compared with about 46 percent in the casual-walking group.
Look, I find this research hopeful, but I also hope I’m a long way off from having to worry about something like frailty.
But it has me thinking about the things I want to stay proficient at, and whether I’m actually doing them often enough.
Or if maybe I could even turn back time, through sheer effort.
I wouldn’t pretend that I’m going to start running marathons again just because I read a study.
Although ...
Anyway, if there are things you want to remain able to do, you probably have to make room to keep doing them—and sometimes ask a little more of yourself while you’re at it.
As a wise man once said: “If you rest, you rust.”
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Other things worth knowing …
UF Election Lab | No Labels: Election Day is today in the United States. As of 11 p.m. ET Monday, 58.6 million people had voted early, a big increase over the last midterm election in 2022, when a total of 45.9 million voted early.
WashPost: For 11 years, President Donald Trump’s rallies have offered a spectacle to a political movement. As Election Day approached, however, and Trump approached the lame-duck phase of his presidency, he appeared to be contemplating the end of an era: “I’m closing it down tonight,” Trump said as he opened his final rally in Kansas, before the midterm elections. “This is it.”
AP: Voters on both the left and right agree on one thing: they fear the America they’ve known is slipping away.
AP: A business jet carrying nine people nose-dived into a South Florida neighborhood Sunday and erupted into a giant fireball that appeared to just miss homes near a busy roadway. Everyone on board was killed, the nation’s transportation secretary said.
Axios: President Trump said Monday he’d protect Elon Musk if Democrats investigate SpaceX and Tesla CEO after the midterm elections, and suggested he might use pre-emptive pardons for his staff and others around him. Musk has spent nearly half a billion dollars opposing Democrats during this election cycle.
NPR: A federal magistrate judge on Monday dismissed the Justice Department’s criminal case against two former FBI officials charged in connection with the bureau’s investigations into former President Joe Biden’s son. “I am deeply troubled,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a scathing ruling from the bench. “What transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”
BBC: Dozens of supermarkets in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland were hit by a cyber-attack affecting their refrigerators and freezers. One manufacturer said refrigerators' evaporators were hacked and switched to defrost mode, causing them to warm up, in what is believed to be the same method used in last month’s incident that hit hundreds of French supermarkets.
Yahoo Tech: Have you been vibe-coding? Sorry to say it’s already been supplanted. People are ‘vibe manufacturing’ now.
Thanks for reading. Photo by sporlab on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
Just the same old "use it or lose it" mantra at work. Pretty much applies to anything you might do
I never really understood strolling anyway, always aim to get to where I am going at a good pace.
Election results should be interesting.
Hi all,
I'm going on 77. I found out much too late, how important it is to stay fit. I had knee replacement (both knees) &its taken its toll on me. I asked around before l had the ops. & was told pretty much unanimously, that tops a year to recuperate. I'm 7/8 months past the first one which is giving me more trouble than the other.
Anyway the point is l highly recommended to everyone to start exercising while you're still young so it'll become a habit. I'm finding it quite hard to discipline myself to exercise every day. I wish l'd started at a younger age & was now exercising regularly as a matter of habit.
We learn by our mistakes, & l've certainly learned. Take it from me, the earlier you start the easier it'll be when it really counts. Good luck.
( getting old sucks, but the alternative is worse)