How To Build Muscle In Midlife, Without Lifting A Weight

As we age, muscle loss (also known as sarcopenia) begins to affect our frailty, fall risk, and even our likelihood of developing dementia.

To combat this, strength training is king – as Dr Asiya Maula, a GP at The Health Suite, previously told HuffPost UK: “Building and maintaining muscle mass is so important, especially as we age.” Yet only one in 20 UK adults is believed to challenge their muscles enough.

Dr Maula sticks to at least two resistance sessions a week and aims for another form of movement, like walking, every day.

But a new study involving 64 healthy sedentary adults, aged between 45 and 65 years old, seemed to suggest that taking creatine could mimic some of the benefits of exercise without having to so much as pick up a dumbbell.

It’s not an artificial booster, like steroids. Creatine is a natural source of energy, according to Cleveland Clinic, which helps our muscles contract.

Almost half of your body’s creatine supply comes from your diet (largely protein-rich foods), Dr Rupa Parmar, GP and medical director of Midland Health, formerly explained, while the rest is naturally produced by your body in the liver, kidneys and pancreas.

“Protein-rich foods, like red meat, seafood, and milk, all contain creatine, but nowhere near the amount found in supplements,” said Dr Parmar.

In this research, the scientists split participants into two groups: those who took 10g of creatine for 12 weeks, and those given a placebo.

These groups were both split again into people who were asked to exercise throughout the trial and participants who were told to continue their sedentary lifestyle. That left four pools:

• Non-exercising with creatine supplementation,
• Exercising with creatine supplementation,
• Non-exercising with a placebo,
• Exercising with a placebo.

Both halfway through the trial and at the end of the experiment, researchers measured participants’ body compositions.

They found that the non-exercising group who took creatine tended to get more lean muscle mass and greater muscle strength and endurance than those in either the exercising or non-exercising placebo groups.

Members of this group performed better on cognitive and memory tests after the period of supplementation, too, and their blood sugar levels lowered.

Exercising participants who took creatine saw these results as well, but they seemed to be even stronger.

However, creatine didn’t seem to improve aerobic capacity, which has been described as a “key predictor of longevity”.

And exercise is still one of the best ways to boost your health and quality of life.

If you’re looking for an added boost, though, the paper suggests that “[creatine] supplementation with and without exercise and diet intervention may help middle-aged and older adults maintain muscle mass and strength while favourably affecting selected markers of health and cognitive function”.