Is Exercise/Building Muscle (not Anti-Inflammatory Pills) the Gold-Standard for Seniors?
As I look down the gun-barrel of next week’s annual physical (for my 68th year), I am pondering a seldom-asked question that may fly in the face of recent anti-inflammatory orthodoxies…should a Senior increase workouts while avoiding anti-inflammatory pills, do the opposite, or do both? The background of all this may surprise you!
Ok, I’m 68 and work out about 6 hours per week, doing 30 minutes a day on treadmill, rowing 3 times per week, and swimming twice weekly. My diet is good (about 30 gm of fiber per day, 70 gm protein, 60 net carbs), and yet my BMI is about 27 and I have some belly fat. I generally feel pretty good and have no back or joint pain. Like many, I have been seduced as of late by the promises of life-extension by taking supplements such as Statins, Metformin and Rapamycin, along with Metformin mimics Ashwagandha and Chondroitin/Glucosamine (inflammation inhibitors). Meanwhile, there’s growing evidence that maintaining muscle-mass into old age may be a key to longevity, but also that inflammation inhibitors work against the building of muscle mass. What to do? (Luks,2021),(Borst,2021)
Working Out Makes me Feel Good, if I Can Avoid Injury: Working out as a Senior presents a few dilemmas:
1) Exercise definitely makes you feel good and helps you sleep. It doesn’t however seem to help me lose weight (at least at my current levels). I’m beginning to understand the “diet for weight loss, exercise to feel good” mantra.
2) The problem of upping the exercise levels at my age is the risk of injury. If one gets a muscle strain it might then be a few weeks of “no exercise”, which undoes all that progress. One has to account for illness and vacations also, during which one’s exercise routine may be limited.
3) I live in a Senior housing complex with exercise facilities. Very few others exercise at the levels I do. Many are just stylin’ (hanging out in the jacuzzi after a few miserable laps in the pool).
4) If I do more lifting and less walking (along with protein supplements) I notice an increase in chest measurement, and a slight decrease in waist size. Seniors are sometimes advised to limit protein supplements (for reasons I’ll get to later)
5) I suspect that to reach the health benefit levels of inflammation reducing pills (let’s say Statins, Metformin, Ibuprofen), I’d need to increase my workout to about 10 hours per week (let’s say double the walking to 6.5 hours, Swimming to 1 hour, Rowing/Lifting to 2 hours). What’s nice about walking and swimming is that one doesn’t need to worry about injury (and it can sometimes be done on vacation). Rowing/lifting sometimes gives me a slight groin strain (I used to think it was the dumb bells, now I think it may be the rowing).
6) I suspect that the anti-inflammatory pills are short term inflammation reducers, and exercise a long-term one. Its interesting how inflammation works relative to exercise, since initially the muscles get stressed and call for inflammation, but then the muscles are repaired and the body settles into a state of net lower inflammation. Apparently anti-inflammatory pills are fooling your body into thinking those muscles don’t need repair, and defeating the muscle building process to some degree.
7) Supposedly, building muscle mass is a path to weight-loss as protein-building starves fat-cells, but I’ve yet to see it. (Walton,Dungan,Long,Tuggle,Kosmac, et al, 2019),(Burdeos,2023)
So What About Taking Anti-Inflammatory Pills?: It’s almost anathema to say this these days, but anti-inflammatories may not always be your friend. As said, several studies show that they defeat the muscle building process (especially in old age), and perhaps get you to lose weight to an unhealthy level (several studies say that a little extra weight going into old age is actually a good thing). So:
1) Do I go off anti-inflammatories all together? The one I depend upon the most is Ibuprofen. Not only does it help with nasal congestion but it seems to calm my oscillating prostate (I have BPH) and make me feel better after a workout. However, if I go on a six-mile hike, I generally sleep as though I’d taken about 4 Ibuprofens, so I suspect that exercise has its own Ibuprofen effect.
2) Taking statins has almost taken on religious significance for most Doctors, relative to old men. However, many studies show that once one is beyond the “danger zone” (generally 55–65), statins don’t really extend life. I had been taking them since they are also inflammation inhibitors (since arterial plaques have more to do with inflammation than cholesterol, contrary to what most people think). I suspect also that the era of early stroke and cardiac death had much to do with the 1918 Influenza cohort, since after that era passed stroke and heart attack are much less common (also something you seldom hear about). (Nelson,2017),(Blanchard,Bradshaw,Herbold,Smith,2020)
3) Obviously, another problem here is the “if one inflammatory inhibitor is good, are ten i.i.s even better?” There is probably diminishing returns here, and of course nobody talks about the “what happens if you don’t have enough inflammation” scenario (possibly implicated in not properly fighting off disease).
4) BMI (Body Mass Index, a kind of rough measure of your ideal weight, thought to be 20–25) is turning out to be bogus for body builders and seniors hoping to carry enough muscle and weight into old age. BMI may work for women and younger people, but if mine was less than the recommended 25, I’d begin to look sickly, because I REALLY WOULD BE SICKLY. That said I’d like to get my 27 down to 25 or 26 so some of my pants would fit better. Otherwise, I might become the dreaded “old guy with suspenders”, looking like Mr Green Jeans from “Captain Kangaroo”.
5) For awhile, I was taking Metformin AND Ashwagandha AND Chondroitin/Glucosamine, but it turns out this is rather superfluous, since Ashwagandha and Chondroitin/Glucosamine are Metformin mimickers.
6) I got my doctor to measure my CRP (C-Reactive Protein), which is a rough measure of inflammation. When I’m working out heavily AND taking Metformin, it is low. Once I was building an addition for someone, and my CRP was surprisingly high (I suspect my body was “beat up”, even though my ultimate CRP would have been low…speaks to the temporarily high inflammation that exercise creates. Next time I’ll need to “game” the tests better)
7) I suppose your Cholesterol and blood panel are also a sort of inflammation score. Lower LDL and Triglycerides,, higher HDL are consistent with lower inflammation. We’re assuming here that seniors that work out are not diabetic. (Shmerling,2020)
I Couldn’t Find any Good Articles on This Subject: I’m going into this kind of blind. I’m going to guess and say that if you are old and possibly can, KEEP EXERCISING A LOT AND LAY OFF THE ANTI-INFLAMMATORIES!! Otherwise, if you’re old and can’t exercise, TAKE ALL THOSE ANTI-INFLAMMATORIES SINCE THAT’S YOUR ONLY LINE OF DEFENSE!! I’m also searching for a kind of middle course (possibly less exercise and less anti-inflammatories) but there is little research to back all this up. So here goes:
1) I’ll try my new 10 hour per week workout for a year (with no anti-inflammatories) and see what happens to my CRP, Cholesterol, and Blood Panel numbers. If they don’t improve, I’LL GO BACK TO 6 HRS PER WEEK, IBU, STATINS, AND POSSIBLY METFORMIN, muscles be damned.
2) I suspect that the “more exercise” route works, because my hero Jack LaLanne lived to be over 90 and fit in an era when diet and exercise were all there was (they didn’t have statins, metformin, or even Ibuprofen back then). It would’ve been interesting to have seen LaLanne’s CRP and Cholesterol numbers.
Accompanying Diet and Sleep: I can tell you that at my age, if I’m getting that much exercise, I’m damn sure gonna get my sleep. Sometimes though, when there’s a slight exercise induced injury, the sleep does suffer. As for diet, the problem is always those 2–3 times each week when you “break” your diet (also called going out to eat). Restaurants could care less about your calories, and Seniors go out to eat a lot (If you want to cattle call a bunch of Seniors, just yell “BUFFET!!!”) Most Seniors seem to only marginally care about exercise or how they look (the 70 and up ones anyway). The only over 70 guy I’ve seen that is really built is the one on the Testosterone Pill commercial, and he has a not-so-healthy tan. It should also be said that T-boosting has noted health risks, including the big C. Additionally, the related subject of steroids and growth-hormone to help old people gain muscle mass is a big one, which merits its own article! (genengnews.com,2020)
1) Right now, you’re probably looking for an “anti-inflammatory food”, and sad to say, there isn’t any such thing. All foods are at least a little inflammatory, and some foods (like sugary and fatty foods) are an inflamma-rama (highly inflammatory), while other foods (notably high-fiber ones) give your gut a workout, so that they’re only slightly inflammatory. But look on the bright side…the only things that are non-inflammatory are starvation and death! (Laurence,2021)
2) Relative to all this added exercise, I suppose I’ll need to add protein, probably in the form of more eggs, meat, beans, and fruity-protein shakes. Meat and dairy are famously not-so-good for Seniors, but I suppose it should all be looked at relative to one’s exercise level (so if I’m doing 10 hours a week, I’m going for it!) (Baum,Kim,Wolfe,2016)
Final Takeaways: I guess I’ll need to write another article one year from now (if I’m still alive), letting all of you know how this turned out. By then, I should be looking like a Himalayan Hunza-man, ready to procreate into his 90s. This brings up another nagging study though, the one that claims hunter-gatherers don’t really live that long (one assumes they get hecka lot of exercise, but I guess the infamous “lack of access to medical care” gets ’em in the end…and I thought that “access to medical care” was what killed old people half the time?). Also, you know how an old house starts to “settle” if its not taken care of, yet perks up when a few repairs are made/given a new paint job? I suspect our bodies are like that too, those that exercise late in life seem to have notably better posture and a brisker walk (Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and especially Dianne Feinstein may soon have wished that they’d read this article).
There are also many “halfway” scenarios, one of which has me a) looking like a geriatric Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of my “workout” years (climaxing at around age 75, at which point I’m chasing the cleaning lady around the house…just like Arnold), then b) getting injured and settling with a slow senescence, accompanied by anti-inflammatory life-extenders, until I begin looking like Gandhi and die a wisdom-giving sage in full Lotus position at around age 95, having gone full Siddhartha (my body may have dried up at this point but my brain-health will be off the charts?).
And so finally in a nutshell, up your late-life exercise regimen (if you can handle it), pop the anti-inflammatories if you can’t. Maybe senior muscle-building will restore our bodies to a previous youthful state-one where we got along fine without anti-inflammatories!
