Stronger with Age

30/07/2025

Active healthcare providers make *AMAZING* advocates for physical activity.

Healthcare providers have an enormous reach, especially into underserved populations. They see far more people than researchers could ever hope to!

With active healthcare providers on-board, we have a real shot at increasing the health of our communities and the healthspan of our nations.

As a result, we *urgently* need to look at ways at increasing the physical activity of our healthcare colleagues and help them have meaningful conversations about the importance of muscle strength to healthy ageing 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

28/07/2025

Who’s getting today 🙋🏻‍♀️

17/07/2025

It was such an honour to present my latest research last month at the 2025 conference in Auckland, New Zealand in front of respected research colleagues BUT...

Absolutely NOTHING compares to catching up with the very special people who made it all possible - my phenomenal older adult participants from my my PhD days at and of course, my incredible and supportive supervisor, Prof Nigel Harris.

With many now approaching 85 years of age, every one of them are still participating in strength training, and every one of them are even better humans. Without their trust in a little Canadian girl with a Medical Science background coming to New Zealand to put them through a VERY heavy load Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) I might still be in the operating theatre trying to cure disease rather than using my passion to prevent it!

I am saddened that people STILL think making people STRONG is dangerous - all I have seen is the long lasting effects of STRONG social bonds, exercise competence, confidence, and independence. The two way learning we shared on that journey has changed us forever - and I am eternally grateful for their willingness to take a stand against ageist stereotypes 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

Now THAT’S what I call true

15/07/2025

Word is getting out about the importance of muscle strength and its relationship to health.

An easy way to objectively measure muscle strength in clinics, communities, and research is by using a handgrip dynamometer. There’s even a movement to include handgrip strength as one of the basic vital signs for health.

That means people will inevitably try to hack their handgrip strength with various gizmos and gadgets.

If we begin to measure handgrip strength in clinic and communities (which we should), we must also now educate that handgrip is simply a proxy for overall muscle strength and function and that solely focusing on hand strength is *not* going to improve our overall strength or health.

High levels of handgrip strength from all the lifting, pulling, and carrying of external loads during the compound exercises in our progressive strength training programmes is what we are aiming for - and not hacking the handgrip strength test with little rubber balls while we sit at home in front of our TV.

And for researchers -
Our latest study showed evidence of hacking the handgrip strength test, something that we must now take into account when analysing and explaining our objective handgrip strength results.
This is just another potential bias in this space, along with the misclassification, recall, and social desirability biases of subjective, self-reporting of participation in muscle-strengthening activities.

14/07/2025

Could just 5 minutes with your GP improve strength??

We know that physical activity levels are unacceptably low with only 27% of English adults self-reporting to participate in muscle strengthening exercise (Katrien De Cocker, 2020).

Our healthcare providers are in an ideal position, with their high levels of patient contact, reach, and influence, to promote the muscle strengthening guidelines and encourage participation in this modality of physical activity. In fact, this is encouraged by the NICE - National Institute for Health and Care Excellence - who recommend that primary care practitioners provide brief physical activity advice in clinic.

Unfortunately, due to increasing time pressures in primary care, brief interventions are no longer feasible. Laura Lamming et al. (2017) recommend that research focus on *very* brief interventions, consisting of advice of no longer than 5 minutes. In addition, Freene et al (2024) developed a physical activity advice continuum tool to guide healthcare practitioners - but the equally important yet often forgotten muscle strengthening guideline has been left out once again 🥺🥺🥺

I’m here to change that!

We aimed to explore whether 5-minutes (very brief intervention, or VBI) could lead to objective strength grain in middle-aged and older adults and whether this would be an acceptable to those on the receiving end of the intervention.

Take a scroll through the pages below and read our preprint over at SportRxiv to find out more!

With muscle weakness conservatively estimated to cost an excess of £2.5 billion (Rafael Pinedo Villanueva et al. 2019), ways to increase population levels of muscle strength should be of greater interest...

16/06/2025

A common barrier to strength training is its perceived complexity. Therefore, even people who might know all the benefits that participation in strength training can have find it hard to know how to start.

If you are or know of someone who wants to try strength training for the very first time, why not read this step-by-step set of instructions and give your first strength training session a go? It also acts as an effective way to break up your sitting while you work from home.

article in my stories

12/06/2025

If you’re looking for the MOST effective way to improve your health, longevity, and quality of life - it’s not pills, potions, or expensive procedures, it’s evidence-based strength training.

Muscle-strengthening exercise is also an incredibly time-efficient way to counteract the dangerous effects that are associated with prolonged sitting.

If you sit for an hour or more at a time and are interested in improving your immediate and long-term health - take a read (link in story) and stay tuned for my next post where I dive into how we can actually get started with strength training!

25/05/2025

🙅🏻‍♀️This isn’t just another wellness event or academic conference.

There’s no sponsorship. No sales agenda. No affiliations.

Just real, evidence-based, actionable insights from some of the UK’s leading experts in longevity science, covering:

• The biology of ageing
• Brain and cognitive health
• Nutrition and gut health
• Strength training and resilience
• Sleep and recovery
• Skin health and inflammation

It’s designed to be practical, accessible, and empowering — for everyone and anyone who wants to better understand how to live well, for longer.

Tickets are still available:

https://lnkd.in/ebJarGvK

🎟️If you’re planning on attending, contact me for a discount code

And if you’re attending, let me know!! If you know someone who’d benefit, please pass it on.

See you Saturday 👋🏻

12/05/2025

The detrimental health consequences of mentally overestimating your future health in later life.

Having high levels of future health expectations (if they are ultimately unmet and thus, inaccurate), have been shown to be negatively associated with physical functioning. That is, older adults who answered ‘will improve greatly’ to the question, ‘how do you expect your state of health to change in the future’ AND then reporting (in the future) that their health DID NOT ‘improve greatly,’ had a MUCH lower ability to perform the every day activities of life (walking, bathing, etc)!! 🤯🤯🤯

In this case, the leading theory is that realistic health expectations in later life may be a more adaptive mindset. Having realistic expectations can help older adults anticipate declines, but most of all, to prepare for and adjust to challenges that will come in older age (hint hint - prepare for challenges and build resilience by increasing reserves of muscle strength).

This is opposed to having an overestimation mindset (and likely, also having the mindset that health is fixed and cannot be improved by adopting positive lifestyle behaviours). The problem here is that consistently unmet expectations may lead to feelings of helplessness, erode motivation, and as research has shown, exacerbate physical disability.

The take home message is this - for older adults who have never participated in structured exercise but still have a ‘I went without exercise for this long and I’m still okay’ mindset, it may help to educate on the expected declines in later life to foster a slightly more realistic expectation for the future (if they continue to avoid participation in exercise). For example, ‘declines to my fitness and physical abilities will happen in later life, but I am not helpless and can offset this trajectory if I start an appropriate strength training programme.’

24/04/2025

Intensity plays a major role in many physical, physiological, psychological, and mental health benefits from physical activity participation and strength training is no different.

While the physical benefits of heavy loads are more obvious (i.e. lift heavier things, become stronger), other benefits vital to healthy ageing are often forgotten (i.e. rate of force development, power, neural adaptations).

Performing strength training with heavy loads is important, at all ages. Beyond the dose-response relationship between strength and health...

✔︎ Older adults with limited strength have to work at near maximal capacity just to get out of a chair, walk up the stairs, or push doors open. If you are training to match or exceed that intensity, you will be able to restore their strength quickly so their strength is no longer responsible for decreasing their independence and quality of life. If not, you may be helping to accelerate their decline.

✔︎ Ideally, we want people to start strength training from a young age to reap the benefits later in life. However, health is a ‘stock’ that requires consistent investments over time. Thus, health is quite costly in terms of time and resources we must devote to our health-enhancing behaviours (i.e. participating in strength training). Strength training consistently requires developing a powerful delayed gratification mindset (because skipping the gym to stay on the couch and watch TV feels so good right now). But most people today want instant gratification from their actions. This is where intensity can play a role. Intensity can help people see and feel that each and every strength training session is getting them closer to their goals (they see they are able to increase their weights, they leave with a positive accomplishment feeling...). On the other hand, sessions of low intensity and effort make end goals seem too far in the future, and what feels good now (skipping the gym) may seem like the more rewarding choice in the moment.

22/04/2025

Great post as always from, Stuart Phillips, Ph.D. 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

✨ Postmenopausal muscles respond just like men to resistance training ✨



Recent meta-analyses decisively show that postmenopausal women are not resistant to loading—they gain strength and hypertrophy on par with their male counterparts:

• In adults >50 years, no s*x differences in relative strength or muscle‐size gains after identical resistance training protocols (Sports Med, 2021; PMID 33332016)
• In adults ≥ 60 years, comparable increases in muscle mass and strength for women and men (Ageing Res Rev, 2023; PMID 37507092) citeturn1search7

💪 Menopause ≠ Muscle Resistance 💪
Postmenopausal women respond to resistance training just as powerfully as men—gaining comparable strength and hypertrophy when results are expressed relative to their baselines.



CONCLUSION
Postmenopausal women are not resistant to loading—just like younger women, they build muscle and strength with every rep. Let’s empower every woman to pick up those weights and prove that age and hormones don’t limit progress!

So grab those weights, trust the process, and show the world that age and hormones don’t hold you back—they’re your superpower. Let’s empower all women to lift, train, and thrive at every stage of life! Share this with a woman who needs to know how important lifting is. ❤️




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08/04/2025

Proud to be a certified Implementation Support Specialist with The Center for Implementation.

As a researcher who started out in basic science, this marks a huge career development milestone for me.

‘Research is often depicted as a pipeline or process that begins with basic research, followed by increasingly applied research, ultimately leading to the adoption of research findings that benefit the health and welfare of individuals and societies.’ - Per Nilsen

However, we in exercise science have NOT been able to translate decades of robust research findings into increased participation in exercise or improved health of our society.

This is where Implementation Science can play a monumental role.

Implementation Science is the ‘scientific study of methods and strategies that facilitate the uptake of evidence-based research into regular use by practitioners and policymakers.’

I am so excited and eager to start applying implementation science to design, implement, spread, and scale the use of evidence into places and spaces that we need it most! Collaborations always welcome!

As always, let’s get everyone