Get Stronger, Feel Younger: The Science-Backed Way to Reverse Aging!

Aging is inevitable, but decline isn’t. The secret to staying strong, active, and youthful? Strength training. 💪 Backed by science and proven with our clients—even those in their 80s and 90s—building muscle can help you regain energy, improve balance, and maintain independence as you age.

In this video, Dr. Jeffrey Guild, a physical therapist and strength specialist, breaks down:
✅ How strength training slows aging and restores youthfulness
✅ The power of leg strength for mobility and independence
✅ Why posture and muscle balance are key to looking and feeling younger
✅ The hormonal and metabolic benefits of building muscle

Discover the simple, effective strategies to move better and age stronger! Watch now and start your journey to a stronger, more youthful you. 🔥

If you're interested in feeling younger as you get older, there's a great way to do that. Harnessing something that is now backed by science for people of any age. Strength training. As a physical therapist, I regularly work with people through their fifties and all the way through ninety five, plus helping them build muscle, regain their strength, and move with more ease by fully committing to developing your muscular system. You can create a more youthful body. If you follow this simple plan to incorporate strength training, you'll not only feel stronger and more confident, but also maintain better posture, balance, and vitality as you age. Many people struggle with a loss of strength, poor posture, and decreased energy levels. But by implementing these strategies, you can stay active, independent and age gracefully. Hi, I'm Doctor Jeffrey Guild. I'm a physical therapist and former strength and conditioning professional. I put this information out to empower middle aged and older adults to move better. Now, there's a reason why strength training is one of the best ways to slow aging and feel younger. We see this all the time with our clients, even those in their eighties and 90s. People have been exercising for a long time, and for years cardiovascular training was the dominant focus. However, despite regular exercising, walking, running, swimming, people still age at a rate that could still be improved. So many continue to accept aging as a part of life, and exercising might slow down. But can it really stop it? It's not that people don't age if they strength train, but what you will find is that strength training provides a powerful way to maintain and even restore youthfulness. And there are several reasons for this. If you are stronger, especially in your legs, your ability to generate force quickly is quite high. This means you can pop up out of a chair with ease. You can get off the ground effortlessly and move with more agility. And all these things are a great hallmark of youth. One of the main reasons people lose their youthfulness is a loss of leg power. And while there are certain physiological reasons for this, this is something that can be improved and restored, especially for people who are not training to optimize leg strength and power to begin with. So a lot of progress can be made in this area. For about ninety nine point nine percent of us, no matter what age we are. And leg power is especially important for older people. And we train clients every day who are in their eighties and 90s to improve their leg power all the time. And we see the progress and benefits with people over the age of eighty. And this is not with of course, this is not without its challenges, because what we find with people say eighty eight to above ninety is that energy can be more of a challenge. But that's where training for power might help also. So even with this challenge, if we're working with someone over the age of ninety, they can improve the way that they can pop out of the chair more quickly and easily with training. This can be a great way to conserve energy because we tend to bring repetitions down more like six or less to emphasize speed or resistance, rather than trying to move more repetitions. And by more repetitions this means more volume, which means more work for the older person, which means more tiring energy. So by focusing on less repetitions and focusing more on resistance and speed, the energy can be better focused and preserved while achieving the same and even better benefits. And this is especially true with older individuals. Now, for our clients who are in their eighties, we regularly focus with them on getting them to help them stand up from the ground more quickly and easily from a kneeling position, raising up from a chair quickly and easily, and climbing stairs safely and more quickly. These physical abilities are very essential for maintaining independence and a youthful way of living. There's nothing magical about this. It's simply how the human body adapts to when we provide it the right stimulus over time. And that's why we have many clients in their eighties who are actually getting younger as they get older. And you might be questioning right now okay. So basically what is power? What is this you're talking about? It's the ability to generate strength or force quickly. So the way we improve leg power is to focus on lifting heavier and less repetitions and emphasizing the speed of the movement. Now we can also reduce the resistance and emphasize speed. And we can go either way. So instead of standing up and down from a chair about twenty times over and over again, the focus might be standing up from the chair just five times. Strength, times speed. And yes, I know for the purists out there, power is work divided by time or force times velocity. But for everybody else. Strength is basically power is strength, times speed. When you improve force and power production, it becomes easier to pop out of a chair, rise from the ground and move more youthfully with ease and even walk faster. And walking speed is highly linked with fall risk, so you can dramatically reduce your fall risk by walking faster. And increasing leg power is one way that you can walk faster. Plus, walking faster will of course help you look younger, so that's always a benefit as well. Now another benefit of strength training is improved posture. Strength training is one of the only ways to truly reshape your body. If you look at those who train thoughtfully and consistently, you'll find how strength training sculpts the body and changes its structure. Overall. This isn't just for younger people, by the way. This can be true of anybody of any age. So especially for those in their seventies and eighties, sculpting the body like a bodybuilder may not be the goal, but improving posture often is a major priority for a lot of our clients age seventy plus, and many people assume that aging naturally leads to a more hunched forward look, leaning forward and generally kind of going forward and having poor posture. And while this can happen with age, this is mostly due because of muscular imbalances. With proper strength training, we can counteract these tendencies and strengthen the muscles that pull our body back into a better position. Stretch out the muscles that pull us forward and combining corrective exercises with strength training, we're able to help people stand taller, move better, and ultimately appear more youthful. Now, corrective exercises are essential to this process as well. And I'll be honest with you, I wouldn't know how to approach strength training at this point in my career without corrective exercises, because they've become such an integral part of how I do my work, and I've been doing this for so long. So you might be asking, okay, so what are corrective exercises? So these are specific exercises that we can do to correct movement problems, muscle imbalances, and promote better control of our muscles and our bodies and improve our posture. When I was a personal trainer, I would spend a full hour assessing all of my clients movements before giving them exercises. Then I would add exercises to correct any movement problems I would discover after the assessment. That way we would prevent injuries long before the injury would happen. This was especially important before I gave people complicated exercise with weight. So by looking for movement problems, we can reduce the risk of injury far in advance. And this is something commonly done with elite athletes. And as I discovered with my clientele when I was a personal trainer, this works very well with middle aged and older adults as well. And of course, I do this all the time for myself as well. Now you might be wondering, okay, how am I going to assess my basic movement problems? I'm not a strength conditioning professional. I don't have a degree in kinesiology, so there's a few ways you can go about doing this. You yourself can hire a very knowledgeable personal trainer or rehab professional so they can help you to accomplish what you want to do, spot the movement problems, and implement the corrections. You can also do a lot of research on your own with all the information out there on social media. Now, if you really want to start with low hanging fruit, start with just stretching the muscles that you know are tight. What you can also do is subscribe to this channel, and we'll talk a lot about corrective exercises and how you can spot them, and how to implement a solution for yourself. Now back to posture. By strengthening the muscles around the skeleton, we can create a more youthful posture. So of course there are limitations. If the spine is already reached a certain point, some changes may not be reversible. However, what we've seen with our clients in their eighties, we can significantly improve their posture and alignment by building muscle around the bones and in a way that supports that the spine better and improve their posture. And here's the even bigger benefit of this. When you do this, you won't even have to think about your posture as you go about your day. All the work is done during the exercises, in the weight room or during the corrective exercises. Now, another benefit to strength training is hormonal and metabolic in nature. So another way muscle keeps us young is through its effect on hormones and our metabolism. Our ability to store and regulate blood sugar, for instance, is directly tied with how much muscle mass we have. The more muscle we have, the more glycogen stored blood sugar we can hold. And so then helping maintain stable blood sugar levels, we can be more effective at improving our cardiovascular system. And this is a very effective way to do this. Increase the amount of muscle that we have and we can more easily control blood sugar. Now do this along with what all the other things that your doctor prescribes and and recommends. And this can be a very effective way at improving this. Now, along with blood sugar we can also improve our endocrine system. So basically our hormone system through the exercise that we do in the gym, we can actually improve testosterone and growth hormone levels. Both of these hormones decline with age. So strength training is one of the best ways to naturally boost these hormones and promote a more youthful physiological state. So let's recap. So we talked about three ways in which we can develop our muscles and strength as we age. We can train for power to build strength. And this allows you to perform more activities more youthfully, including standing up quickly, getting off the ground more easily, and of course, overall maintaining independence. Our posture and alignment is a huge benefit when we strength train, and we can improve this significantly. Well, if we're strength training on a regular basis and balancing out our muscles properly. And of course, there's our metabolic system and our hormones that if we're strength training on a regular basis, it can help with these systems as well. And that's not to mention improved energy. So when we strength train more, we increase muscle mass. It can help us increase energy and actually can increase the amount of calories that we're burning at rest, because then our metabolism increases. Increased metabolism, of course, is commonly associated with more youthful individuals. So more strength training, increased metabolism, look and feel younger. If you found this information helpful, go ahead and subscribe and share it with someone that you care about and we'll get more information out to you.