Muscle Strength Exercise, Supplements and the over 65's

As we get older body fat increases, there's more fat relative to muscle, less muscle, less strength and we are slower. It all adds up to bad news - best not to get old. Earlier this month (October 2007) a really encouraging paper was published " Creatine Monohydrate and Conjugated Linoleic Acid Improve Strength and Body Composition Following Resistance Exercise in Older Adults".

Men and women were involved in the trial with ages ranging between 65 and 85. All were pretty reasonably healthy in that they were independent and did not have any of the major health nasties (heart disease, uncontrolled hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, kidney failure) and none of them smoked.

This group contrasts with an earlier posting (October 7, 2007) where I referenced the Type 2 Diabetes Exercise Trial in Ottawa, Ontario, where all those participants had Type 2 Diabetes (fairly obviously).

The good news from this research is that muscle strength training increases muscle strength, luckily.

One group in the trial just did the exercise and took no supplements. They did well in both strength gain and tests of functional capabilities. The other group did the muscle strength exercises and took the two supplements and this group did even better than the first group.

As a Personal trainer I'm always reluctant to recommend supplements as most don't work and some have unpleasant side affects. This research gives me some solid information to share with clients.

This trial involved Creatine (supplied as Creatine Monohydrate) and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), together with regular resistance exercise and in this case, as well as muscle strength gains, there were significant loss of fat and an improvement in body composition - less fat and more muscle. The researchers think that most of the gain was due to the CLA. However using the two supplements together is interesting.

I'm sufficiently impressed with the results of taking Creatine and CLA to start my own personal trial - more at a future date. If you want to start your own trial the researchers provided 5 grams of Creatine Monohydrate and 6 grams of CLA every day.

A couple of things to note:
- The participants only did resistance training, NO cardio. Moreover the participants had not done any muscle strength training in the previous two years and for most of them never. Doing only resistance training is generally not a good idea if you are exercising for health reasons. the good results reported here might be related to a previous lack of muscle strengthening exercises.
- The picture on cholesterol was not so good. On one hand the ratio of good to bad (HDL/LDL) cholesterol did not change over the course of the trial but LDL (bad) cholesterol and total cholesterol increased. One can guess that this was related to lack of cardio and hence easily corrected.

One thing about this trial I especially liked was the use of functional tests - tests of capability related to normal everyday life. They used five tests:
1. Walking as fast as possible about 350 feet.
2. Balancing along a line on the ground for about 30 feet
3. Sit and stand - as many times as possible in 30 seconds
4. Get up from a chair, walk about 30 feet around a post and sit back into chair - as fast as possible
5.Climb two flights of stairs.

You can look up the results of these functional tests at the bottom of page 6 of the research report.