Golden GRITGIRLS
I will never forget the day I was training Danny, an 18-year-old rugby player, he was doing my signature hill sprints with heavy resistance, his shirt off, flaunting the physique he had built over 2 years of hard work with me, and one of my future champions very politely interjected as he's trying to sprint and I'm pulling back with all my force on this huge rubber band, "I'm so sorry to interrupt, but do you have a card?" She was 69 at the time, with no history of working out. She was, in the purest sense, fearless in that moment.
There is something that happens to women later in life that seems like an awakening, a long-forgotten hunger, an opening of a cupboard that hasn't been opened since before kids, before careers, before marriages and houses and holidays...all of a sudden these incredible women just show up, looking for me, looking for physical strength, willing to work harder than people half their age and try in a way that is SO REMARKABLE. If you are looking for that seed of inspiration, if you want to see with your own eyes how to reject time, turn a limiting self-image upside down and inside out, fiercely reversing the natural course of atrophy both physically and emotionally, come check out my girls in action, it's borderline unbelievable.
at·ro·phy ˈatrəfē/ verb
1. (of body tissue or an organ) waste away, typically due to the degeneration of cells, or become vestigial during evolution.
2. gradually decline in effectiveness or vigor due to underuse or neglect.
““I cannot stress enough how important muscle mass is to your life,” says Holly Perkins, author of Women’s Health Lift to Get Lean and founder of Women’s Strength Nation. ”There is a direct correlation between your health and the amount of muscle mass that you have. The more you build, the faster your metabolism hums, the tighter and firmer you get, and the easier it is to lose weight and keep it off.” It also decreases your risk for diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and makes you less likely to fall or become injured.”
At some point in your 30s, you start to lose muscle mass and function. Yes, I said 30's. The cause is age-related sarcopenia or sarcopenia with aging.
Physically inactive people can lose as much as 3% to 5% of their muscle mass each decade after age 30, and that number increases after 65.
Although sarcopenia is seen mostly in people who are inactive, the fact that it also occurs in people who stay physically active suggests there are other factors in its development. Researchers believe these include:
- Reduction in nerve cells responsible for sending signals from the brain to the muscles to start movement
- Lower concentrations of some hormones, including growth hormone, testosterone, and insulin-like growth factor
- A decrease in the ability to turn protein into energy
- Not getting enough calories or protein each day to sustain muscle mass
