What to eat for strong muscles
Healthy muscle development requires more than just protein and intense training. It is also essential to focus on the correct intake of minerals.
Muscles are the foundation of physical strength and endurance, and are the core of performance-based activities, such as sports and strength training. While many athletes tend to focus on protein and intense strength exercises to promote muscle growth, it is often overlooked that the role of minerals is invaluable in this process. Without these vital nutrients, our muscles would not be able to perform and grow optimally.
Muscles: magnesium
Minerals are essential for many processes in the body, particularly muscle contractions, repair and growth. Calcium, magnesium, potassium, and other minerals play a crucial role in maintaining electrolyte balance and optimizing muscle function. A lack of these minerals can lead to reduced performance, increased risk of injuries and longer recovery times.
That is why it is vital that athletes not only focus on protein intake and strength training, but also on ensuring an adequate intake of minerals. A balanced diet that is rich in minerals, combined with regular exercise, will not only improve performance but also promote overall health and well-being. In this introduction, we'll delve deeper into the importance of minerals for muscle growth, strength and recovery, and how athletes can integrate these crucial nutrients into their training regimen.
Minerals play a key role in maintaining healthy muscles. Calcium, for example, is essential for muscle contraction and relaxation, while magnesium helps regulate muscle contractions and prevent cramps. Potassium is also vital for maintaining the correct balance of electrolytes in muscle cells, which is essential for their optimal functioning. A lack of these minerals can lead to muscle weakness, cramps and fatigue. That is why it is important to consume a balanced diet that is rich in calcium, magnesium, potassium, and other essential minerals. In addition, regular exercise, including both strength training and cardio, is vital to keep muscles healthy and strong. By taking care of our muscles and getting enough minerals, we can promote good health and an active lifestyle.
Strength training for elderly people
It's not for nothing that muscles become 'the organ of longevity' called, or “the longevity organ”. It received this name because of the protection that the organ offers against age-related diseases and disorders. And because it protects against falls, the most common cause of serious injuries in old age.
Longevity Loneliness [lnˈdɛvˈti] - noun ● longevity (duration) ● old age ● life expectancy ● longevity
Your muscles and brain are talking to each other non-stop. This happens, among other things, through myokines, the messengers of our muscles. Myokines are substances that are released to a greater or lesser extent under the influence of muscle activity and thus a certain amount of effort. These myokines “move” through the bloodstream and in turn cause different health effects via various routes. Myokines take great care of your memory, learning ability, mood and emotional behavior. They ensure that new brain cells are created and protect them against aging. Did you know that 6 months of strength training protects the brain against Alzheimer's? That is the conclusion of a major study in Australia.
“This is the first time that an intervention delays or even stops the degeneration in areas of the brain that are highly vulnerable to Alzheimer's for such a long time.” Prof. Valenzuela, Sydney Medical School
More about Professor Valenzuela you can find it here.
Elderly people and exercise
Sarcopenia is the term for the loss and reduction of the quality of muscle mass and strength as you age. This process ensures that, over time, daily things themselves do not always run smoothly. Elderly people then indicate that walking, bending, lifting and lifting stairs becomes difficult. Older people are moving less and less. This in turn ensures that people move even less. For example, these elderly people fall into a vicious cycle that can lead to an additional risk of falls and reduced autonomy.
Restoring mitochondria
Because older people move less, they create fewer “satellite cells”. When you exercise, muscle fibers are broken down and satellite cells in the vicinity are activated. These satellite cells deliver nutrients to the muscles and fuse with the muscle fibers to to strengthen the muscle structure and you create “muscle cell nuclei”. These muscle cell nuclei are found in your muscle fibers. The more muscle fiber cell nuclei a muscle has, the bigger the muscle becomes.Strength training increases the amount of muscle cell nuclei in a muscle. New muscle proteins are produced, creating a larger muscle. Then there is mitochondrial dysfunction that leads to sarcopenia. To work efficiently, muscles need a good number of working ones mitochondria, the muscle cell's energy factories. To maintain muscle strength, muscles must get rid of their waste before it accumulates in the muscle.
The process that recycles damaged proteins, organelles, and other cellular structures is called autophagy. Because elderly people have lower autophagy levels, their absorbed proteins cannot be used quickly enough to maintain a balance with muscle tissue degradation. And of course, the number of hormones is lower when you are older, which has an effect on muscle aging.
Exercises for exercise for older people
The good news is that exercise can reduce or even bring back reduced strength and muscle mass loss.
Physical actionActivity can help reduce or even change many of these age-related changes. This is in contrast to sitting still, which increases muscle aging. The number of satellite cells will increase during sports. Active elderly people have more of these cells than more elderly people who don't move. This is also one of the reasons why it is very useful to exercise before a knee or hip surgery. Too little exercise reduces the efficiency and number of mitochondria in muscle cells while physical activity promotes mitochondrial health. Physical activity can raise myokine levels again. Of course, SMPL contributes to the removal of waste products, very important for activity, and to deliver nutrients to the cell. So that the energy factories, the mitochondria in the cell, keep working properly.
More about fulvic acid you can read in this blog.
Science is unanimous that a more physical lifestyle may not effectively age much in years, but it will significantly improve the quality of aging. And the earlier it starts... the better! Good muscle mass ensures that you burn more calories. When you build muscle By doing strength training, you also significantly reduce your risk of developing type II diabetes. And muscles 💪 keep your blood pressure up and reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease.
Building good muscle mass is perhaps one of the best ways to invest in your health. As the years count, that muscle mass can ensure that you stay healthy and vital. And if you become seriously ill, that muscle mass can increase your chances of survival. It is illustrative of the vital role of muscle mass dissertation by Dutch doctor Jeroen van Vugt, who obtained his PhD at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
Van Vugt conducted research with patients who are on the waiting list for a liver transplant and patients who suffer from cancer in the gastrointestinal system and who needed surgery. He listed the abdominal CT scans of all patients and colored the abdominal and back muscles. They provide a good indication of the entire muscle mass. He divided the patients into different groups according to the height of their muscle mass. In the group of people with the lowest muscle mass, he discovered significantly more postoperative complications such as wound infections. In addition, among the people who are on the waiting list for a liver transplant, significantly more people with low muscle mass died from their liver disease before they could be transplanted.
Healthy food
The muscle mass says something about the patient's overall condition: the less well developed the muscles are, the worse the condition. “Of course, the loss of muscle mass is related to the disease that these people have. But the condition they have before they get sick is also likely to have an influence. Sufficient exercise, a healthy diet and a healthy weight are therefore not only important to stay healthy, but also to be more resistant to diseases.” The results of Van Vugt's research are important because it is now possible to look at patients' muscle mass in a timely manner. If it appears to be low, the patient may be encouraged to strengthen muscle mass before and after surgery.
Van Vugt's results are also important because they show that the reimbursements paid to hospitals for treating diseases cannot actually be standardized. “This study shows that low skeletal muscle mass means that more costs are incurred for treatment. That can amount to thousands of euros per patient. University hospitals receive a relatively large number of vulnerable, complicated patients, but now receive the same benefits as hospitals that primarily treat more resilient patients.”
Building muscle mass
For now, the problem is that no standard values have been set for healthy muscle mass. It is not yet known what is an optimal amount of muscle mass for a 45-year-old woman who is 1.78 meters tall or a 57-year-old man who is 1.98 meters tall. “We are working hard to reach a kind of average. For example, the consultation office has a growth curve that looks at whether a child is growing as expected. But that is a very big challenge from a methodological point of view.”
Aging healthily (after illness)
If you think that Van Vugt's research results were a fluke, we can reassure you. That is not the case. Scientists have come across these kinds of positive health effects of muscle mass before. In 2017, for example, American oncologists published a research in Clinical Cancer Research in which they followed 40 women with an incurable form of breast cancer for several years. The researchers divided the women into two groups, one with relatively much muscle mass and one with relatively little muscle mass. In the second group mentioned, no one was even alive after a year and a half. In the first group, those with a relatively large amount of muscle, 'only' half died after 3 years. And when, after 8 years, the researchers stopped following the women, there were still women alive in this group. Their muscles apparently slowed the course of their illness.
Muscle mass for women and men
Muscle mass also has a protective effect in older people. When researchers follow large groups of people for years on end, it is invariably men and women with relatively large amounts of muscle who manage to reach an extremely old age. It doesn't matter if that research was done in Netherlands, Sweden,Italy or in the United States- the results almost always point in the same direction.
Health reset
Initially, scientists explained away the link between muscle mass and health and thought that there is a false connection. Muscular people simply eat healthy and exercise a lot. As a result, they are healthier, those scientists said. And the fact that they are also more muscular is a result of a lifestyle that makes them healthy, but muscles themselves do not make them healthy.
Of course, those critical scientists have a point. But further research has now shown that healthy muscle mass itself really has a positive health effect and can mean a health reset.
A group of sports scientists who have done a lot of important work in elucidating the link between muscle and health is at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. One of those researchers, Bente Klarlund Pedersen, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2011 a product where she was the first to formulate the idea that muscles not only enable people to move, but are also an organ.Muscles are the largest organ in the human body.
And like many other organs, healthy muscle tissue therefore produces myokines. One of those myokines is irisin. In test tubes irisin kills cancer cells. Spanish researchers found in a study, which appeared in 2014 in the American Journal of Medicine, a surprising amount of irisin in the blood of healthy centenarians. The Spanish suspect that irisin, in a way that is far from clear, prolongs life and keeps illness at bay and can reset your body.
There are dozens of myokines like irisin, and they have positive effects in the body in a lot of different ways.
Common sense
Do you then have to do extreme strength sports? It's a great investment in your long-term health. But whether this also applies to athletes who use doping is questionable. Experience shows that pharmacologically acquired muscle mass is not permanent. When “doping athletes” stop using, their muscle mass disappears like snow in the sun.
No matter how big and impressive these strength athletes look, by the time muscle mass can mean the difference between life and death, all those muscles will probably no longer be there. So physically “working up a sweat”, without doping, provides numerous health benefits for your body (and brain). Every reason to pull out your running shoes, cycling clothes, swimming trunks or fitness gear and work up a sweat again. All sports, but also more physical jobs, or even climbing stairs and gardening, count. We might have to think about how smart it is that one third of the Dutch people over the age of 12 now have an electric bike. And you can rent electric bikes... You may wonder what that does to our muscle power. From young people and especially older people. Because people aged 65 and over mainly use the electric bike.
Biking against the wind. It's not very nice indeed, but what is nice is developing muscle power.Researchers recommend that we should make efforts to prevent sarcopenia in the elderly population Maybe just start to leave the e-bike behind? And just let young people cycle again? Very simple. Very SMPL.
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