Link to original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/06/15/how-reduce-age-related-muscle-loss-according-sports-medicine-doctor/
Column by Jordan D. Metzl, MD
I notice that even though I’m strength training twice per week, I’m losing muscle mass. Is there anything I can do to prevent it?
A patient in her late 60s recently asked me this without alarm, almost as if she was describing the weather.
“I feel like I’m getting scrawnier every year,” she added. She walks, practices yoga and lifts weights. She is doing what I have prescribed to my patients for decades. And yet her muscle loss continues.
Age-related muscle loss has a medical name: sarcopenia. It is common, well described and begins in our 40s, often earlier than most people realize. Yet we still tend to treat it like fate rather than physiology.
Sarcopenia is natural, but you have a lot more control over how much muscle you lose — and at what rate — than you probably imagine.
Combating it starts with recognizing why muscle loss happens, and then empowering yourself to not accept it as an inevitability.
Many people still think of muscle as tissue that supports our bodies and helps us move. While that view is accurate, it is incomplete.
Skeletal muscle is metabolically essential — it helps keep many of the body’s systems in check, including influencing insulin sensitivity, reducing inflammation and helping to shape our overall systemic resilience.
When muscle declines, consequences extend far beyond strength and include:
Muscle is increasingly viewed as a core determinant of health span. In many ways, the ability to get up from a chair, carry groceries, climb stairs or recover from illness depends more on muscle than on almost any lab value we routinely measure.
With aging, muscle fibers shrink. Fast-twitch fibers, which are responsible for things like jumping and sprinting, decline. Motor units, the building blocks of muscle, become less efficient. The body becomes less responsive to training and protein.