Stronger Muscles, Longer Lives

You don’t need to look like a bodybuilder, but according to a University at Buffalo-led study—the largest of its kind to date—maintaining muscle strength could be as important to healthy aging as aerobic activity.

The study, which involved more than 5,000 women between the ages of 63 and 99, found that women with higher levels of grip strength and those who completed five unassisted sit-to-stand chair raises in the fastest amount of time had significantly lower death risk over an eight-year follow-up.

Specifically, for every 7 kilograms of grip strength, there was, on average, a 12% lower mortality rate. When it came to chair stands, moving from the slowest time to the fastest time in 6-second increments, researchers saw a 4% lower mortality rate.

“If you don’t have enough muscle strength to get up, it is going to be hard to do aerobic activities, such as walking, which is the most commonly reported recreational activity in U.S. adults ages 65 and older,” says lead author Michael LaMonte, research professor in UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions.

“Healthy aging probably is best pursued through adequate amounts of both aerobic and muscle-strengthening physical activities,” he adds. “When we no longer can get out of the chair and move around, we are in trouble.”

According to LaMonte, previous large-scale epidemiologic studies did not have the measures of physical activity, inflammation and cardiovascular fitness used for this study. Including these important mortality factors allowed the research team to better isolate the association between mortality and muscular strength.

“We also showed that differences in body size did not explain the muscular strength relationship with death,” he says. “When we scaled the strength measures to body weight and even to lean body mass, there remained significantly lower mortality.”

Even among women who did not meet current physical activity guidelines for adults (150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity), those with higher muscular strength had significantly lower mortality. LaMonte says that’s a “major advancement” to the available evidence supporting the inclusion of muscle strength in public health messaging on physical activity—and should factor into doctor visits as well.

“I’d like to see primary health care professionals assess and intervene on functional health deficits as much as they do for conditions that are amendable to prescription drugs,” he says. “There is no drug for loss of muscle strength; it’s a behavioral issue that does not get enough attention in our aging society.”