by Deborah Frankiln

In the course of a year, Maida Kelly doubled her strength, lost weight, built bone, and developed the lithe and confident bearing of a woman 20 years younger. She skis occasionally in winter, cycle’s often in spring and line dances once or twice a week throughout the year.

What’s her trick? It turns out that there’s a way reverse physical ageing without risk or dramatic expense. This method can work whether you’re 30 or 90, fit or unfit, hoping to build bone, lose fat, and gain strength and energy, or wanting nothing more than to look better in a sleeveless shirt. Its benefits become visible in a few weeks. Maida Kelly’s wonderful magic elixir: weight training.

In the late 1980’s, just as the fitness boom was reaching a crescendo, physiologists were coming to a startling conclusion. Swimming, running, skating, and every permutation of step aerobics, cycling and dance, while great for the heart and lungs, can’t seem to stop the muscle shrivelling that accompanies ageing. The results of a Danish study published in 1990 were enough to give even marathon runners pause.

Henrik Klitgaard and colleagues at the August Krog Institute in Copenhagen studied swimmers and runners at competition level, male athletes who averaged 69years old and who had been training for at least a dozen years. To no-ones surprise, the men were exceptionally fit. But it was shocking to discover that these lean and vigorous athletes had no more muscle mass or strength than their peers who didn’t exercise at all. All were steadily losing muscle and, if luck enough to live past 80 or 90, would likely have as much trouble getting out of a chair as if they’d spent all those years watching TV.

Klitgaard and his team also looked at one additional set of athletes-weight lifters. What they discovered sent physiologists around the world scurrying to the gym: 67 year old men who had been training with fairly heavy weights for a decade or more were not only stronger than swimmers and runners of the same age; they were stronger than the average 28 year old man!

Muscle biopsies from each athlete’s thigh showed that the differences ran deep. The mix of muscle fibres in the weight lifters was essentially like that of younger men- a blend of what’s called slow-twitch, or Type I fibres and fast-twitch, or Type II fibres.

Slow twitch fibres are summoned like reliable workhorses during a walk or other low intensity activity as well as during anything strenuous that last more than a few minutes. Fast twitch fibres, in contrast, are the tightly strung cables that lend a muscle explosive, instant strength-the sort one needs to dodge a car on a pedestrian crossing or catch oneself in a fall.

In youth, even couch potatoes have a generous mix of both types of fibres. Klitgaard found that his weight lifters had managed to maintain that mix and also to beef up the size of both types of fibres. In all the other men the scientist studied, athletes and couch potatoes alike, some of the car dodging fast twitch fibres have withered away.

There is no question that aerobic exercise is an effective way to improve endurance, unclog arteries, lower blood pressure, decrease the risk of heart disease and some cancers, and cut the risk of adult onset diabetes.

But now top physiologists believe that by middle age, weight training is at least as important as aerobic exercise. And for the elderly, it may be even more crucial because it deters the sorts of injuries that most often cause an old body to fail.

Unfortunately, the message of weight trainings value in turning the clock back has been slow to break out of the gym, particularly to those who barely have the time to go for a walk, let alone heft a dumbbell.

Maida Kelly was one of those busy people. “When I was working full time in Boston, my idea of exercise was running to a sale in my lunch hour,” Kelly says. “My two boys had barbells in their bedrooms, but it never would have occurred to me to pick one up. Any way, what was the point?”

What indeed? Kelly was a staff manager who loved her job, had a close knit family and was blessed with good health, so as she neared retirement, she gave little though to the downside of getting older.

Still, a few experiences nagged. On a ski trip, she impulsively followed a friend down a steep slope and had to sit to keep from tumbling. Embarrassment turned to panic when she realized she didn’t have enough strength in her legs to stand up on her own. Maybe it was at that moment, sitting wet and helpless in the snow, that prompted her to respond to a newspaper advertisement in early 1991 asking volunteers for a study on strength training.

The ad had been placed by Miriam Nelson, a research physiologist at the Human Nutrition Research Centre on Ageing at Tufts University in Boston. Nelson was looking for post menopausal women to test her theory that strength training can slow down or even stop the steep bone loss that accompanies menopause.

Around the same time, geriatrician Maria Fiatarone, also of Tufts, was publishing the first findings about the astonishing power of strength training among the extremely frail elderly. People in nursing homes who had spent most days confined to bed or a chair, or who walked only with a stick, were often tossing the sticks away, playing with great grandchildren or going for walks.

“These sound like snake oil stories, but they’re true,” says Nelson.

Along with Kelly, 18 other women signed up for a year’s worth of twice weekly workouts. After a round of medical tests, Nelson measured the strength of each woman’s major muscle groups-those that power the arms, legs, back and abdomen-and from the results devised individual work out regimens using the sort of machines found in most health clubs. To get each woman’s starting weight for each lift, the researchers set the intensity of the training at 80% of each woman’s weight lifting capacity. As the women became stronger, and each lift easier, the researchers added a kilo or two of weight, usually every week or so over the year.

Kelly, who’d found aerobic dance classes exhausting, was amazed at how much easier she found Nelsons routine. “I thought you had to be sweaty and wrung out to get any benefit from exercise, “she says. “But this strength training has never been hard that way.”

Each work out lasted 45 minutes including five minutes of warm up pedalling on a stationary bike and five minutes of stretching before the heavy lifting began.

Some benefits were immediate. Unlike aerobic exercise, which can take months to produce visible slimming or better endurance, weight lifting’s first improvements are obvious within a couple of weeks as little used muscles begin to gain sudden strength and better definition. One of the first compliments Kelly got was from a female friend who noted how lucky Kelly was to look good in a sleeveless dress “at our age.”

Researchers know that the dramatic jump in strength during the first few months is due to the re-awakening of long dormant neuromuscular connections. The subsequent, more gradual strength gains seem more directly related to the growth in size of individual muscle fibres.

At the end of one year, Kelly’s lower body was 41% stronger then when she started, while her upper body strength had improved by a whopping 86%. Though she didn’t diet or try to lose weight, Kelly lost over two kilos of fat, and picked up three of lean body mass, most of which was muscle.

And confirming Miriam Nelson’s hunch, Kelly and every other weight lifter in the group maintained her bone mass, and even built a little extra at an age when, as women not taking oestrogen, they might have expected to lose up to 3% of their bone in a year. What’s more, as the weight lifters strength improved, so did their balance, a bonus every bit as important in preventing the terror of a hip fracture, and one that no amount of oestrogen or other hormone can deliver.

Kelly liked the changes in her body so much that even after retiring and moving away from Boston, she joined a local gym just to carry on weight training. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that what I learned at Tufts changed my life,” Kelly says. These days her biggest problem is finding someone her own age to play with. When she and her friends went on holiday, only one could head to the slopes with her, the others opted for shopping.