Stronger with Age (2025)

23/09/2025

Just 22% of healthy adults report to be meeting the muscle-strengthening guidelines!

Those that report lower levels of muscle strength in mid-life, report more difficulty performing the everyday activities of daily life as an older adult. In the UK alone, we spend an estimated excess of £2.5 billion (!!) each year in health and social care costs due to muscle weakness.

Avoiding low muscle strength in mid-life and beyond is an urgent Public Health priority.

Our frontline workers, community-based exercise instructors, are directly responsible for essential physical activity services to the general public. We need to ensure not only that muscle-strengthening activity is included in their training and leisure centre offer, but that training and services are evidence-based (i.e. actually building muscle strength), so we can begin to improve muscle fitness and subsequently, population level health.

With the help of our champions in this area, Greater Manchester Moving, we brought together both community-based instructors as well as those in leadership roles around Greater Manchester to discuss barriers and facilitators to adopting and implementing a preventative strength training programme, STRONGER with AGE.

👀 Watch to see how it went (video by .works, full video over on LinkedIn)
📖 Read more (link in story)

15/09/2025

Who said strength training can’t be fun and games?

colleagues and Salford City citizens - get ready for something very exciting, right in your own backyard 🏋🏻‍♀️🛝👾🕹️

Stay tuned for updates!!

29/08/2025

Are we trading obesity for frailty?

Mounjaro is here for GPs in the NHS to prescribe - but only for those patients with a BMI > 40 *AND* at least four additional health conditions (cardiovascular disease, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea).

I’ve been talking to some very switched on clinicians lately about their (un)willingness to simply trade one condition for another.

As clinicians, we need to ask ourselves, are we really willing to

∘ Trade obesity for frailty?

∘ Trade being over weight for under muscled?

Or would the most responsible prescription mandate simultaneous strength training participation?

If used in this way, weight loss medications could act as a ‘teachable moment’

✔︎ for clinicians to encourage strength training in line with the physical activity guidelines,
✔︎ for patients to start new healthy behaviours, and
✔︎ to ensure strength training becomes a habit before patients discontinue their medication to help avoid weight regain

In that case, we could trade obesity for a healthy habit of a twice-per-week dose of strength training.

Not sure where clinical populations should start on their strength training journey? Print this poster by STRONGER at HOME to help you talk through the FITT-VP prescription with your patients!

Remember: You don’t have to be strong to start. But you do have to start to get strong.

21/08/2025

Are you an exercise professional looking to keep your practice aligned with the latest evidence for the very best outcomes for your clients?

American College of Sports Medicine’s latest issue in Health & Fitness is a must read!

This month, it’s all about Power Training!

In our article (link in my stories), Prof Stuart Phillips and I provide an easy to read background on this hot topic

💥 What muscle power is and why it’s important, especially as we age
💥 How and why we need to assess muscle power in practice
💥 Evidence-informed strategies to improve muscle power
💥 How to address barriers and implementation challenges to power training

Our suggested progression to power training is pictured below -

⚠️ With all the hype surrounding power training, it’s important that you (or your clients) have a solid foundation of muscle strength before you move on to power training.
🧠 Remember: you’re only as powerful as the force you can produce. No muscle strength = no muscle power.
🏋🏻‍♀️ But do ensure you move to power training as it is safe, effective, and indicated for older adults. For example, moving load quickly is incredibly important to being able to get your legs back under you after a slip or trip or just generally getting out of danger’s way in time (like clearing a cross-walk in time)

I hope this graphic and article are useful in helping you turn exercise science into practice!!

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 👋🏻

Stronger with Age

23/09/2025

15/09/2025

29/08/2025

21/08/2025

30/07/2025

28/07/2025

17/07/2025

15/07/2025

14/07/2025

16/06/2025

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25/05/2025

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