For Ageing Well, Strength Exercises Matter More than Protein

Staying strong in later life depends less on how much protein you add and more on whether your muscles are challenged often enough to stay useful.

Apr 04, 2026

Last week, I was chatting with a friend in his fifties who’d recently had a DEXA scan.

The report was very much in the modern body-composition mould. It told him to cut his visceral fat, even though it was already well below average and nowhere near a level associated with health risk, and to build more lean mass, despite the fact that he already trains regularly and is in considerably better shape than most people I know.

Naturally, however, I had the inevitable thought: should I be paying more attention to my own lean body mass, too?

As it turns out, not really.

That was a useful learning. If you want to age well, the real question isn’t what percentage of your body is lean tissue according to a scan or some expensive scales. It’s whether you’re staying strong and physically capable.

That’s a much more practical question, and a much more important one. It’s the difference between treating muscle as a cosmetic asset and recognising it for what it really is: part of the machinery that keeps you upright, mobile, steady, and independent.

And that matters because muscle loss isn’t some niche gym concern for men who own too many shaker bottles. It’s a normal part of ageing, and one of the more dangerous ones. The trick isn’t just to know this is happening, but to do something about it before it starts quietly chipping away at what your body can manage, because the longer you leave it, the harder it is to fix.

So this piece is about sorting out the signal from the noise: what actually predicts healthy ageing when it comes to muscle, why protein matters but doesn’t come first, and what’s really worth doing if you want to stay strong on your own terms.

The wrong target

If you dig into the science on muscle and ageing, the first empowering finding is that lean body mass isn’t the main thing to obsess over.

In a pooled international analysis of more than 18,000 adults aged 65 and over, researchers compared three measures of muscle-related health: lean body mass, grip strength, and walking speed. They then looked at the outcomes we actually care about in later life: falls, reduced mobility, hip fractures, and death.

Lean body mass turned out to be a poor proxy for most of them.

Grip strength and walking speed were much more useful.

That’s not just a statistical nicety; it changes the question. Not: How muscular do I look on paper? But: Am I staying strong enough and moving briskly enough to stay independent?

A graph showing that weakness and slowness predict mortality, falls, hip fractures and reduced mobility in older adults. — Weakness and slowness in over-65s are linked to higher risks of death, limited mobility, falls and hip fractures | Data: Cawthon et al. 2020 | Image: Author

As the graph above shows, the pattern in that study was clear. People who were both slow and weak did worst. Those who were slow but not weak did a bit better. Those who were weak but not slow did better still. And those who were neither slow nor weak did best.

So grip strength and walking speed are better predictors of how independent we’ll be in later life because they tell us something larger about whole-body function.

Grip strength is a marker, not a goal. I briefly had the urge to buy a hand dynamometer and see how I was doing. This was, on reflection, exactly the wrong instinct. Buying a gadget and then practising crushing it on the sofa would be a wonderfully modern way to miss the point entirely.

If your legs, hips, and core are quietly deconditioning, your forearms are not going to ride in like a SWAT team and save the day.

Why this matters more than most of us realise

Muscle loss with ageing isn’t subtle.

From about 50 onwards, we lose roughly 0.8% of muscle mass and 2 to 3% of muscle strength each year.

That may not sound dramatic at first. It sounds like the sort of number you could file under “slightly regrettable” and move on. But by 70, it adds up to around 23% less muscle bulk and roughly half your strength.

Half your strength… gone.

That’s the difference between getting out of a chair easily and having to gather momentum first. Between catching yourself when you trip and going down hard. Between carrying luggage, climbing stairs, or lifting a grandchild without thinking twice, and starting to notice that ordinary life is becoming unpleasantly negotiation-based.

Over a broader timescale, as the diagram below shows, the proportion of our body weight made up of muscle halves from our twenties to our seventies, with most of that happening over the last two decades.

A diagram showing how our body composition changes from our twenties to our seventies, with muscle falling from an average of 48% body weight to 25%. — The years take their toll, and muscle makes up a much smaller share of body weight in our seventies than in our twenties | Data: Nowson & O’Connell 2015 | Image: Author

This is why age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) matters. Not because any of us are hoping to look like an action hero in later life, but because muscle is part of what keeps you upright, steady, mobile, and hard to knock over.

And when things do go wrong, the consequences can be severe. Roughly a quarter of older adults who break a hip die within a year. That outcome also reflects frailty and broader illness, not muscle alone, but loss of muscle means you’re more likely to fall, and there’s less padding to protect your bones when you do.

Muscle loss tends to sneak up in ordinary ways first: opening jars feels harder, carrying shopping bags is more of an effort, you’re slower on stairs, or getting out of a low chair has started to feel like work, or your glutes and thighs feel less full. Those changes are easy to shrug off. They’re also a good reason not to.

Walking is excellent. It isn’t enough

This is the second correction.

A lot of health-conscious adults do some form of regular activity. They walk, garden, stay busy, perhaps do the odd cycle ride or swim. All of that’s good. I am very much in favour of walking. I do it every day, and unlike resistance exercise, I don’t have to bargain with myself beforehand.

But walking doesn’t replace resistance exercise when the goal is preserving muscle and strength.

Walking is excellent for cardiovascular, metabolic, mood, and brain health. What it doesn’t do especially well is provide the repeated muscular challenge needed to tell your body, very plainly, that your muscle is still required.

Resistance exercise does that.

That’s why it comes first here. Protein matters, but it’s second. Protein is the building material. Resistance exercise is the signal that tells your body to keep keep your muscles.

Or, more bluntly: protein won’t save muscles you never use.

This is where many people are falling short. In a survey of nearly 384,000 American adults, only 23.5% met both the aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise recommendations. In adults aged 55 to 75, that fell to roughly 17 to 18%. People were around three times less likely to meet the strength target than the aerobic one.

That rings true. Most people know they ought to exercise. Far fewer have made peace with the fact that some of that needs to involve muscles protesting.

None of this means you need to become a “gym person”. It means you need to give your muscles a job that’s hard enough, often enough, that your body doesn’t quietly conclude they’re an optional luxury.

Let’s pause for a second to take stock of what you’re already doing.

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Protein matters more as you get older

Protein matters because ageing muscle becomes less responsive to it. That’s the broad idea behind anabolic resistance, which we’ll get into more next issue. The short version is that older muscles need a stronger stimulus, both from exercise and from dietary protein, to maintain themselves well.

That’s inconvenient, because older adults often eat less protein just as their needs are rising.

Between about one in five and one in three older adults don’t meet recommended protein targets. And even among those who do, intake is often near the low end of the suggested range. In one study of more than 2,000 people in their seventies, even the highest-protein group averaged only about 1.1g/kg/day.

That’s below the 1.2g/kg/day recommended by most experts for older adults.

In over-65s, higher protein intake is generally associated with lower all-cause mortality. It’s the opposite in younger adults as we’ve discussed before. So this isn’t a universal “everyone should eat more protein” message. It becomes more relevant as muscle preservation grows in importance with age.

The practical upshot is that once we get into our sixties, we need to actively ensure we’re getting enough protein, not just assume that we are.

We should note that chronic kidney disease becomes increasingly common with age, often without obvious symptoms. Almost half of adults over 70 may have it, and most don’t know they do. In that setting, aggressively increasing protein intake may be the wrong move.

So the protein advice has to stay sensible. Older adults typically need more protein, but not everyone should blindly chase higher numbers because a wellness influencer has discovered Greek yogurt.

If you are in that age bracket, or you have diabetes, high blood pressure, known kidney disease, or abnormal kidney blood tests, it’s worth checking what’s appropriate for you.

It’s also worth saying that the protein and mortality data are observational. They show associations, not proof. But taken alongside what we know about muscle loss, function, frailty, and anabolic resistance, the overall direction is still pretty clear.

The big mistake is to think of muscle preservation as mainly a nutrition problem.

It isn’t.

It’s primarily a use-it-or-lose-it problem, with protein as essential backup.

So what does this add up to for you?

The real question isn’t whether you should care more about lean mass on a scan. It’s about whether your week contains anything that asks your muscles to stay useful. If it doesn’t, that’s the first thing to change. Once you have that in place, then the protein has somewhere to go.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

If you skimmed the rest, here is the practical takeaway: don’t treat muscle as mainly a food problem. Protein matters, especially as you get older, but the first priority is to regularly give your muscles a reason to stick around.

That’s this week’s tweak: add two or three simple strength sessions to your week, on non-consecutive days.

This does not mean joining a gym, buying special kit, or learning a new dialect involving sets, reps, and people called ‘bro’. It just means regularly giving your muscles a job that feels properly effortful for a short period of time.

A good session can be as simple as choosing five or six everyday movements that help preserve the abilities you will want later in life:

Stand up from a chair repeatedly
Ideally without using your hands.
Step up onto a stair or sturdy step
Slow and controlled is fine.
Push away from a wall or kitchen counter
A gentle version of a press-up.
Pull a resistance band towards your body
If you have one.
Carry two reasonably heavy bags for a short distance
Shopping as strength training. Less glamorous than a gym, but still effective.
Lift a bag or weight from chair or table height
The sort of movement real life keeps asking of you.

For most of these, do 8 to 12 repetitions, pause briefly, then repeat 2 or 3 times before moving on to the next exercise. For carrying, do 2 or 3 short carries.

The easiest way to judge whether it’s hard enough is that by the end, it should feel challenging but still controlled. You should finish thinking, I probably could have done another two or three, but not loads more.

That rule matters more than getting the routine perfect.

Once something starts to feel comfortable, make it a little harder. Use a heavier bag. Move from wall press-ups to kitchen-counter press-ups. Sit on a slightly lower chair. Use a stronger resistance band. Add another round. Your muscles need a reason to stay.

And because starting from scratch is often the hardest part, here are a couple of useful YouTube videos to make this feel more concrete:

Bob and Brad – a simple, friendly beginner routine from two phyisical therapists:

Grow Young Fitness – another approachable example for older adults:

Well re-visit protein next time, but if you’re over 65 and there’s no reason not to, aiming for around 1.2g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day is a sensible ballpark. But think of that as support, not the main event. (If you have kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, or you are not sure whether higher protein is appropriate for you, check with your doctor before deliberately increasing it.)

The aim isn’t to become a gym person, or to win a contest against a body-composition printout. It’s to keep the strength to get out of chairs easily, carry luggage, climb stairs, steady yourself when life literally knocks you off balance, and stay independent for longer.

That’s worth a couple of slightly boring, mildly annoying strength sessions a week.

🎧 Prefer to listen while putting your muscles to use?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast is about why muscle matters more than lean-mass numbers, why strength beats aesthetics, and what’s actually worth doing if you want to stay capable as you age.

You’ll hear:

Why grip strength and walking speed tell us more about healthy ageing than a body-composition printout
Why walking is excellent, but not enough on its own to preserve muscle and strength
How to start simple, no-jargon strength work at home without turning yourself into a gym person.

👉 Good company for your next walk, commute, or while eyeing a shopping bag and wondering whether it might finally be useful for something beyond shopping.

👉 Listen now!

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research - and unlock practical tools to help you stay strong, steady, and independent without turning health into a second job.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 Have you done any deliberate strength work this week - or is this an area you know you’ve been neglecting? I’d love to hear what feels realistic for you, and what usually gets in the way.

One Health Tweak a Week

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