If you don’t use your muscles, they just grow weaker

Published 1:30 am Thursday, May 11, 2017

By Wina Sturgeon

Adventure Sports Weekly

Once you turn 55 or older, you’re usually nowhere near as active as you once were. That means certain muscles will atrophy or waste away.

For example, if you spend a lot of time sitting, you’re not working your glutes. This is the buttocks, composed of three muscles, and it’s the largest muscle group in the body.

The buttocks help perform many necessary movements, like stepping up on a curb or climbing stairs, even just ordinary walking. If these muscles do not have the strength to support the body, it might be impossible to move quickly enough to cross an intersection once the signal numbers have started counting down. Weak glutes are often a cause of lower back pain.

Perhaps your weak spot is your core — your midsection. Since every limb movement originates in the core, a weak core will create a weakness in limb movements as well.

The shoulders are a complex and important series of tendons and joints. They allow the arms to rotate, providing a variety of movements.

However, there is another kind of weakness that many older folks don’t even know they have. They allow one side of the body do more work than the other side. This causes a muscle imbalance that, with time, can even pull on the bones of the skeleton.

It takes a good physical therapist to diagnose a muscle imbalance, and it’s done with special tools that can identify whether one glute or one thigh is doing more work than the other. The therapist can then create an exercise program that will build up the weaker side.

The program can never be accomplished in just a few months. It takes a long time to rebuild a weak spot — a year or maybe even two years.

One good thing: Medicare will pay most of the cost of working out in a physical therapy or rehab center.

Wina Sturgeon offers news on the science of anti-aging adventuresportsweekly.com.