As the number of candles on our birthday cakes grow, most of us are culturally conditioned to slow down, ease up and drop down a few gears when exercising.
However, a wave of new scientific research suggests we should be picking up the pace as we age. Researchers are finding that explosive exercise – such as fast-paced lifts or jumps in the gym, or high-intensity sprints when running or cycling – offers a powerful protective effect.
It helps us to retain muscle power, balance, mobility and bone health, and to avoid pain, aches and accidents through the improvement of our functional daily movement patterns.
“There seems to be a protection from any exercise,” explains Dr Kieran O’Sullivan, a senior lecturer in physiotherapy at the University of Limerick.
“But more recently the data goes beyond that to suggest there is something particularly useful, not just about pottering around and being active, but if you can include harder exercise – like some form of basic weight training, or more vigorous activity. In the past we had a habit of wrapping older people in cotton wool.”
One study of people aged 50 and above, by the University of Portsmouth, found people who perform vigorous or moderate exercise suffer less bone, joint and muscle pain in later life.
A 2014 study in the Journal of Pain found doing more moderate-to-vigorous exercise helped to protect people from chronic pain, whereas lighter activities did not.
A study in the Journal of Applied Physiology found there is no appreciable decline in the ability of the brain and nervous system to signal for an explosive muscle contraction, even in seniors.
So, perhaps this is another classic case of ‘use it or lose it’: it is our failure to use our muscles explosively that leads to a decline in power, not any inherent issue caused by an age-related neurological trigger.
Is it time to stop slowing down and start speeding up? Let’s take a look…
What is explosive training?
Explosive training is any form of exercise that recruits the type II fast-twitch muscle fibres in our body, which are responsible for rapid movements, whether sprinting in a race or lifting a shopping bag.
Explosive exercise could include powerful movements such as squats and deadlifts (typically with lighter weights, so you can focus on rapid lifts), kettlebell swings or medicine ball throws, plyometric work such as box jumps, skipping or agility ladders, or sprints when running, cycling or swimming.
Of course, any explosive training needs to be approached sensibly. “If we are trying to do high-intensity movements, we need to have a lot of skill to execute that,” says Dr Tom Maden-Wilkinson, a senior research fellow at Sheffield Hallam University and an expert in skeletal muscle physiology.
“We also need to have a general strength base. So, we can't just take someone off the street and suddenly go: 'right, we're going to do some plyo boxes and jump around!’. No, let’s build your general strength up, and let's work towards that power and velocity component.”
However, once you have built a strength base, you should not be afraid to start cranking up the explosive intensity of your training.
“The body is remarkably adaptive and it responds to what we ask of it,” says Dr O’Sullivan. “As long as we don't do things in a very silly or sudden manner, it adapts.
"When I start gardening, my muscles get sore and my dainty soft hands get blisters, but if I do it for a few weeks, even my hands get tougher.
"The same happens with our muscles: unless I do something truly daft, where I go from zero to 100, we will get a normal muscle soreness – and then we'll adapt to it.”
How does explosive training improve muscle health?
It seems that as we age, our power declines faster than our strength, negatively affecting our muscle function, balance, mobility, reaction times and, in time, our independence. After all, it is the loss of that power and balance that typically causes injuries.
Research suggests that from our mid-30s we start to lose our muscle mass at around 1% a year. But our power drops by around 2-4% a year. Fortunately, resistance training – and specifically explosive training – seems to offer us the best chance to slow that process down.
“A lot of my research has focused on when we start to get older and perhaps develop long-term conditions, and really trying to understand where muscle mass and strength can play a role in that,” says Dr Maden-Wilkinson.
“Particularly how we can offset that through resistance training, and stave off that ageing process for as long as we can. Even if we are doing resistance training, we will still lose our muscle mass and strength as we get older, but it's about trying to slow that down as much as possible.”
Explosive training is particularly important because we lose our much faster motor units, our type II X muscle fibres, more quickly as we get older or become sedentary.
“We see a much bigger drop in muscle power or muscle impulse than in strength alone,” Dr Maden-Wilkinson says.
“There's a big push within the research literature now to look at: can we start to do more power and high-intensity strength-based work, particularly within our 50s, 60s and 70s?
"Because that's the kind of training that is specifically targeting the mechanisms we would otherwise be losing.”
If this all sounds like it is more relevant to Olympic sprinters and power lifters, think again. Those fast-twitch type II muscle fibres are needed for everything from lifting a toddler to climbing steps.
“This stuff is much more representative of everyday function, namely our muscle impulse, or how quickly we can produce force over a time period,” Dr Maden-Wilkinson explains. “This is what dictates if we can get up from a chair.”
How does explosive training build bone health?
Vigorous and explosive training will also boost your bone health. “We have only spoken about muscle so far, but there is also the role that muscle plays on bone,” says Dr Maden-Wilkinson.
“It is particularly important for post-menopausal women to really try and concentrate on loading the bone.
"That is really a preventative strategy for osteopenia or osteoporosis. We lose a lot of bone tissue during that post-menopausal period because we lose that oestrogen protective effect.
“So, where strength training really can come in is it provides not only that mechanical load on the bone itself to stimulate bone remodelling, but also the factors released from the muscle during exercise that then act on the bone to deliver that stimulus.”
How does explosive training prevent aches and injuries?
In the Portsmouth University study, although any kind of exercise was found to protect against pain, only high physical activity (defined as vigorous activity at least once a week) was associated with a lower risk of musculoskeletal pain 10 years later.
The study suggests people who keep challenging their bodies in their senior years have cracked the code to healthy pain-free ageing.
“We knew that physical activity can be beneficial in the context of pain, but what's really novel is that the activity needs to be of sufficient intensity and frequency,” explains Dr Nils Niederstrasser, a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.
“It's important to stay physically active. And if you can be active, try to make it of sufficient frequency and intensity.”
Researchers think this protective effect may be because explosive exercise improves muscle function, cartilage health and bone mass better than mild exercise, thereby lowering any risk of joint and muscle pain.
Power, therefore, becomes one of the best predictors of how well you’ll be able to handle the typical activities of daily living, such as climbing stairs and hoisting yourself out of a chair.
It helps you to react quickly to stumbles and to perform everyday tasks with more balance and control.
Dr O’Sullivan explains that medical practitioners, physios and fitness coaches have often been too quick to tell older people not to push themselves. He insists we should grant ourselves permission to do more vigorous exercise as we age.
“There's no exercise that I can think of that is dangerous, unless you have a very specific medical risk,” he says.
“There's no reason not to go to the gym, or to the pool, or walking, hiking or cycling. Will they make you tired? Yes. Could you be a bit stiff and sore after them? Yes. But that soreness is as much to do with not being used to it, and your muscles getting achy, rather than damaging any part of your body.”
5 home exercises to build explosive power
Deadlift
- Boosts all major muscles
- 3-5 sets x 6-10 reps, 20-60kg load
Use a heavy weight here, but load up 50 per cent of your full training weight to practise technique first. To build strength, perform fewer reps at a higher weight.
To perform the lift, stand with your feet a shoulder width apart and grip the bar. Contract your abdominal muscles to maintain your back position, raise the bar by straightening your legs and keep the bar close to your shins on the way up. Breathe out once you’re in an upright position, then lower the bar and repeat.
Lunge
- Boosts leg strength
- 3-5 sets x 20-30 reps
Standing upright and holding a light weight in each hand, step forward, transferring your weight over the foot you have just planted in front of you. As you move forward and back, try to keep your hip, knee and foot in line with each other. You should also alternate the leg you step forward on.
Lumbar hyperextension
- 3-5 sets x 15 reps
Lie on your front on a ball – or a mat – with your arms crossed and hands on your shoulders. Keeping your head position neutral, look forward, gently arch yourself backwards using your lower back, then return to the start position.
Alternate hip thrust
- Boosts leg muscles
- 3-5 sets x 20-30 reps
Sitting on an exercise bench with your hands supporting you at your sides, raise your legs and perform an alternate leg cycling action, ensuring that your toes are pulled towards your body on the straightening leg. You should try to maintain a straight back throughout this exercise.
Russian twist
- Boosts core muscle control
- 3-5 sets x 20-30 reps.
Sit in the crunch position holding onto a small medicine ball (2-6kg). Rotate your trunk while holding onto the ball, but try to maintain a straight back. At the same time, perform a cycling action by straightening your leg in the direction of rotation.
