Especially relevant in people over 50, when strength falls 3%/year and muscle mass 1%/year.
Older adults with high muscle power had 43–45% lower mortality at 9 years; fat and powerful is equivalent to lean and powerful.
View the study (cohort) →High-velocity training (fast concentric phase, 40–80% 1RM, 6–10 repetitions) improves power by 10 to 97% more than traditional strength training.
View the study (meta-analysis) →*⏱ 2 min read
Around age 50, muscle strength begins to fall by approximately 3% per year, while muscle mass declines by 1% per year, and resistance training together with an adequate protein intake of 1.2 to 1.6 g per kilogram of body weight per day can counteract these losses and even reverse them; but there is a dimension of muscle that has received much less attention and whose loss has even more serious consequences: muscle power, which is the ability to generate force quickly.
Muscle power declines faster than mass or strength during aging, which makes it a more sensitive marker of functional decline, and researchers have proposed a new term for its age-related loss: powerpenia, in friendly reference to the better-known term sarcopenia; power is especially important because it is more strongly associated with critical functional outcomes such as mobility, fall prevention, and physical independence in older adults, compared with muscle strength or mass.
A study in older adults found that those with normal and high levels of relative muscle power had better 9-year survival than those with low muscle power; muscle power was even protective against death in older adults with high levels of body fat as measured by BMI and waist circumference, with being fat and powerful as protective as being lean and powerful, with mortality reductions of 43-45% in both cases compared with being lean and weak, which offered no survival advantage.
To train muscle power, high-velocity training is used, which emphasizes the speed of muscle contractions and produces 10-97% greater improvements in muscle power compared with traditional strength training; the key is to perform the concentric phase of each exercise, such as the lifting phase of a biceps curl, as quickly as possible while maintaining proper form, with loads of between 40% and 80% of one-repetition maximum, 2-3 sets of 6-10 repetitions, in multi-joint exercises that work the body's main muscle groups.
Information, not medical advice. Scientific evidence reflects the quality of the studies.