There’s a hidden epidemic of strength loss occurring around the world that every coach, every doctor, every therapist, needs to be aware of, and we need to know how to deal with it. The strength loss I’m talking about is the strength loss of aging. Most people are aware that as you get older, particularly after the age of 40, people begin to lose strength at the rate of one to 2% per year if they’re not doing something to counteract it. That’s not really the hidden epidemic I’m talking about. The hidden epidemic is actually called, new research term, powerpenia. So what we’re seeing is that while after the age of 40 strength decreases between one and 2% per year power, our ability to generate force at a, at a fast velocity actually decreases faster than that at almost double the rate.
So we’re seeing in aging adults a loss of 3-4% of their capacity to generate power happening per year. And that is the stuff that will actually kill people. As people age, we’re gonna see an increased risk of falls and inability to get outta the way of something coming at them. If it’s an aging athlete, we’re gonna see a loss of agility, a loss of explosiveness.
All those things add up to increased risk of falls, a loss of athletic capacity, and inability to live independently as people get older. So powerpenia is something that we all need to be paying attention to, and I’m gonna give you some ideas on how to solve that from a brain-based perspective. Now, if you are a doctor, a coach, a therapist, and you’re interested in integrating neuroscience into what you do, please DM us on Instagram so we can chat with you or drop us an email, because what we are trying to do is show you how to blend biomechanics with emerging neuroscience to give your clients and athletes and patients the very best care possible.
Now, back to powerpenia. Whenever we talk about powerpenia and how to deal with it, we just have to think about, okay, what does the research say? And what have we known for a long time? If I want to increase your ability to move with power, I’m gonna have to ask you to move quickly under load. So our very first research based approach, everyone knows we’re gonna use lighter weights and we’re gonna do high velocity strength training.
So that might be something as simple as using bands and doing fast chest presses. Any exercise that you can think of done with a lighter weight at a higher speed will help decrease the impact of powerpenia on people as they age. So hopefully everyone knows how to do that already.
From there, we wanna talk about plyometrics. A lot of people think about plyometrics as box jumps, et cetera, that athletes do. The fact is you can scale plyometrics for any age. So even older clients in a safe, supportive way, can actually work on more explosive movements. So we want to use high velocity strength training. We want to use versions of plyometrics. That may be something as simple as side to side jumps, having them learn to skip rope again, having them do that in a supported way.
Even people who are very compromised can do balance recovery. I’m gonna push you over and you’re just gonna have to step and catch yourself. That’s not plyometric like I’m preparing you for the Olympics, but it is a fast movement that’s gonna require you to stop yourself and then come out of something. So there’s a lot of ways that you can, again, do sub max plyometrics, and that will also improve our capacity to maintain power as we get older. From there, we can start looking at the real basics. Maintain your strength reserve. What does that mean? It means that your ability to apply power is to some degree related to your relative strength levels.
So if we continually train ourselves, we do, we add weight training to our older clients. We want to have portions of their programming dedicated to making them just basically stronger all of our basic lifts. If we have the strength reserve available, then whenever we apply like high velocity training, they’re going to get more out of it.
So we have kind of three major things. The fourth thing would then be to continually work on motor control and coordination. Power is really only useful if we can control it, right? So we wanna make sure that in addition to having them do these different types of, or using different modalities of training, we wanna make sure that they can control their own body.
So ensuring that you’re using different motor control exercises that involve dual tasking and other cognitive tasks. All of those things can create this beautiful, recipe for making sure that as people get older, they get better and not worse.
Now finally, from a brain-based perspective, all the things I just talked about, high velocity strength training, working on plyometrics, doing maybe some reactive agility as a part of a motor control exercise, none of that actually is going to be very effective if there are higher order systems that are interfering with the brain’s desire to move quickly. What does that mean? It means that if they have vision issues, they have inner ear issues, they have poor sensation, right? Anywhere in their body, all of those things are gonna be perceived as a higher level threat by the brain, which will restrict their ability to generate power and force.
So I want you to just kind of look at this as a recipe. You have a bunch of people that as they get older, and we all know that the, particularly in the US the population’s getting older and older and older, we’re seeing higher levels of fall risk. We’re seeing more and more injuries, and even in athletics because we have many people who are aging, who are also continuing to engage in sports, we’re seeing high injury rates. Why? Well, a lot of this comes down to a loss of power capacity. So think about this whole, like I said, recipe, dealing with their eyes, dealing with their inner ear, dealing with their sensation, their proprioceptive capacity, their motor control, and then think about how I’m gonna program into what they do. Building better strength reserves, adding in some plyometrics and high velocity resistance training. And you have really, like I said, the recipe for keeping people healthy, safe and independent as they age, and making sure that your athletes are also continuing to improve.
This is, like I said, kinda a public service announcement because it is a hidden epidemic. It is increasing. We’re seeing rates and rates, uh, increasing as we look at the research literature. So make sure you’re familiar with the topic. Make sure you know how to talk about the topic. And most importantly, know how to program things for your patients, for your clients to prevent this from happening because it is literally a life-saving endeavor.
Again, if you’re a doctor, coach, therapist, you’re interested in blending more of this stuff into what you do, make sure to DM us on Instagram or email from the comments below, we’d love to chat with you.
