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Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

maturitas.org

51–60 of 194 posts

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of my injuries occurred while sleeping, which seems very weird.

I knew someone who dislocated her shoulder often while sleeping. If I remember right, she's dislocated it 17 times or some ridiculous number.

this happens to me quite frequently. i grew up playing years of baseball and my throwing shoulder is a bit loose as it is. combined with the way i fall asleep (on my stomach with my forearm under my pillow) i tend to dislocate or severely strain it pretty regularly

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#52
post #16
post #2

I’m genuinely confused. Was there any doubt before this study that sport makes people healthier?

I have met people who figured, because they don't excercise they don't wear their body out, so their joints etc. will last longer. Same for injury, no sport no injury, that must be good!

Donald Trump is one who also believes this. Apparently he believes you only have so many heartbeats, and so you should avoid increasing your pulse.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#53

> “High-intensity training reduced fat and maintained lean mass […] though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity…” High intensity does border on leading to injury — just making the wrong move — and you’re back to zero intensity?

Calisthenics is a really easy way to push intensity at basically 0 risk of injury. They're all compound and depending on the variation could require high reps, but between push ups, pull-ups, squats, their numerous variations, and accessory work, I would challenge anyone to actually injure themselves while also being able to push to true technical failure.

This is not good advice and please remove the “basically 0 risk of injury” wording. Mobility is a limiting factor and poor body positioning WILL result in injury. Barbells are safe, progressively overloadable, and learning to move them is a straight line is what most people need to do before a lot of calisthenics training. Most people can’t even do 1 pull up.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#54
post #20
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on how you define high-intensity. To build muscle, you need to push yourself to a limit. You can reduce the weight and increase the repetitions. This approach is just as effective and lowers the risk of injury.

This is what I do. When I was beginning with weight training, I followed other's recommendations back then and pushed hard. Had quite often minor issues or injuries in the joints which set me back for weeks or even months, my tendons seem to be my weak spot and it does get worse with age, both limits and recovery. Lowered the load, increased repetitions and basically nothing for a decade. I can still go almost to the…

Well, your body knows nothing about number of reps or the weights. You can also do your reps slower.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#55
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met people who figured, because they don't excercise they don't wear their body out, so their joints etc. will last longer. Same for injury, no sport no injury, that must be good!

Charlie Munger thought of exercise as adding mileage to the car.

Most people who talk about adding milage to a car have never tried to keep an old car running. Those who do have long learned that milage is a tiny issue, age is a much larger factor. They have also learned that low milage is a bad sign - what is wrong that you only drove it that much: often the answer is city driving which puts a lot more wear on the car than highway driving.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#57

> “High-intensity training reduced fat and maintained lean mass […] though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity…” High intensity does border on leading to injury — just making the wrong move — and you’re back to zero intensity?

There is no correlation between exercise intensity and likelihood of injury, this is nonsense. You could e.g. just as well make one wrong move when going for a one rep max.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#58
post #40

“though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity and considering measurement error”

So the the research is inconclusive?

Just read the study... It was not inconclusive, they found that HIIT was the most effective level of exercise intensity to improve body composition in the ages of people that were studied. It just wasn't a meaningful improvement over medium intensity.

That is a conclusion.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#59
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on how you define high-intensity. To build muscle, you need to push yourself to a limit. You can reduce the weight and increase the repetitions. This approach is just as effective and lowers the risk of injury.

Maybe with older adults the baseline goal should be to merely maintain or slow the loss of the muscle, mobility, and cardiovascular capacity they already have? It's not realistic for a 50 year old to think they could build muscle year-after-year for the next 30 years.

For the next 30 years, probably not, but mostly because you can get really strong really quickly, as most adults are really weak.

It's not that unusual for people to pick up e.g. powerlifting past 50 and still get to levels well beyond what most younger adults can lift.

I'm 51, and recently back into powerlifting after many years out of it, and I certainly expect to build back muscle and improving week over week for many years before I can't stem the decline any more, as long as avoid injury or health issues that takes me out of the gym - avoiding time off exercise is the biggest challenge with getting older.

Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

#60
post #40

“though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity and considering measurement error”

So the the research is inconclusive?

They measured body composition. Is that your goal? Remember this is for 70 year olds (and a small sample size), even if you got to the ideal 70 year old body, you won't look that good naked - which is all body composition is directly good for. My guess is you care more about health (you should break this down into more details of what health means) and long life.

Body composition is a factor in health and long life. However there are many confounding factors if that is your goal and so you cannot draw any conclusions unless the sample size is very large, and the study runs over a very long time. Thus we get a lot of small studies that study something easy and hope that this is a good proxy for what we really care about. Sometimes science eventually figures the proxy is good, sometimes not, but often we still don't know. (meta studies have been really helpful here)

Large sample sizes are very expensive to study, a grad student without large grants can study 50-100[1] people alone, which makes the study cheap enough that they can do it. This was a 6 month study, again making it something a grad student could do leaving plenty of time to then write the paper and get it published. (Each subject was studied for 6 months, I'm not clear if they were all studied at once, or if different subjects had different start/end dates). All respect for the grad students who do this - despite all the problems I've pointed out[2], they still did a lot of work.

[1] I've never been a grad student, much less one in a field where you would study this. The 50-100 number feels right in my uneducated opinion, but if someone with more knowledge says something I accept their correction in advance.

[2] I wonder what other problems someone in this field could point out.

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