Muscles, movement and ageing
	Shakespeare in “As You Like It” has a soliloquy “ Seven Ages Of Man” ~ Birth, Discovery, Love, War, Wisdom, Dotage and Death ~ it is the slow haul towards dotage, that gets to most of us.
	Whatever we do, and however hard we try, there occurs during our life span, a series of slow change that are due to various factors ~ hormonal changes, lack of exercise, diets, environment, wear and tear, etc. Physically, these changes often show as a loss of strength, balance and flexibility.
	Every one knows that when we age, our muscles weaken and our movements become slower.  But why is that so?
	With ageing come a number of changes to the skeletal muscles.  Most marked is the loss of mass, which begins as early as 25 years of age.  By age 50, the skeletal muscle mass is often reduced by 10 percent and by age 80 approximately 50 percent of the muscle mass is gone. That gives all of us huge problems because it is our muscles that work to keep us upright, move, work, etc.
	This age-related reduction is caused mainly by a loss of muscle fibres. To counteract this, we can use load bearing exercises to stave off the loss of mass from the muscle as a whole. These exercises work by greatly thickening the individual fibres, but it appears to have no major effect on the loss of fibres.  Load bearing exercises also increases bone density and that gives increased resistance against osteoporosis.
	Before individual fibres are lost to atrophy [disuse], they change shape and appearance.  In young people, muscle fibres are distinctively angular, whereas in the elderly they often appear more rounded and in extreme cases banana-shaped.  Furthermore, ageing seems to induce 'type grouping": in young and middle-aged skeletal muscle the fast and slow fibres are distributed in a chessboard fashion, whereas in aged muscle the fibres cluster in groups of either slow or fast cells (this phenomenon also appears in younger people suffering from certain motor nerve-related diseases). Ageing appears to be harder on the fast fibres, which atrophy at a higher rate than the slow ones do. This may account for slower reactions with older people. So some researchers have long suspected that the distribution of fast and slow fibres gradually shifts as we age to favour the slow fibres. This, they reasoned, could help explain why a 10-yearold boy will outrun his 70-year-old grandfather in a 50-meter race, whereas Grandpa might still defeat Junior in a 2K race.
	Our muscles play a vital part in keeping in keeping us upright, maintaining our bone density and core structure. This is why, in yoga practice simple, strengthening exercises are so important and why ‘gentle Yoga’ may do a lot more harm that good. There has been an enormous amount of research by doctors, such as Fenham in the 70/80s and many more. More recently the work Dr D Skelton, et al,  has demonstrated what can be done to improve muscle, bone and joint function of older people.  Many problems concerning weakness with older people comes from disuse atrophy. It was reported by Dr P.H. Fentem in the late seventies, that even simple load bearing exercises will increase muscles tone and bone density by 8-10% of people ~ even into their eighties.
	It might be worth reminding ourselves that the word Hatha means forceful.
	The last two parts of “the seven ages’ of man are not too rewarding. Whatever you do muscles will change ~ it’s life’s natural process. It’s best to work harder to keep that quality of life.
	JC   …  2003

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