Came across this story about the startling effects of strength training for 90 year olds
Sounds crazy ? It remains as one of the most influential experiments every conducted with older people
The ninetysomethings who revolutionized how we think about strength training
One simple exercise proved older adults can build and retain muscle – and caused a paradigm shift in science
Michael Joseph Gross
Wed 12 Mar 2025 03.00 AEDT
In 1988, 712 people lived at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged, a
Boston nursing home affectionately named “Hebrew rehab” by its residents and staff. The residents’ average age was 88, and three-quarters of them were women. Every resident had multiple medical conditions. Almost half required help to engage in the essential activities of daily life: getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, walking, eating. But they were survivors. Some had survived the Holocaust. Others fled the Cossacks. They all lived through the Great Depression.
... Beginning in the late 1980s, Fiatarone ran a series of studies in which she asked residents to commit to a regimen of high-intensity strength training. To many of her colleagues, the research seemed risky. Conventional wisdom in medicine at that time said the oldest people were not capable of lifting heavy weights – it might cause cardiac events. In all of western medical literature, Fiatarone found no evidence that any doctor had ever previously tried to teach frail 90-year-olds to do this kind of training.
But she pressed forward with the research, and the Hebrew rehab lifters produced unprecedented proof that high-intensity progressive resistance training can strengthen and build muscle even for the oldest people, with life-changing effects. Hebrew rehab residents who lifted weights gained power to function more independently, and to live with more autonomy and dignity, into their last years.
One simple exercise proved older adults can build and retain muscle – and caused a paradigm shift in science
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