Muscles decrease as we age reducing strength and increasing the danger of suffering from fractures in falls. And if they do get injured, the chances of dying within two years of the fall doubles.

Older people are unable to make muscles as fast as younger people as they cannot convert food protein vital to maintaining muscle density as efficiently as younger people.

While changes in insulin levels no longer slows down muscle breakdown.

But weightlifting rejuvenates blood flow to muscles thereby helping lessen muscle wasting that occurs naturally as people age.

Now researchers at University of Nottingham said pensioners need only do an hour's worth of weightlifting session twice a week to help preserve muscles.

Professor of Clinical Physiology Michael Rennie said: "I recommend they should go to the gym and do weight training. They will stay lean and strong.

"Running or walking alone does not improve muscles, although it may improve fitness of your heart.

"You don't have to do a lot of weight training. People in our research were in their 60s and 70s and they managed to do it twice a week.

"Everybody tends to suffer from muscle wasting. We are not curing it but we are lessening it.

"One of the ways weight training works is by increasing the delivery to muscles of blood that carries nutrients and hormones.

"It may be one of the reasons is that hormones don't get right into the muscles. It like a sponge. If half the holes are blocked you are not going to get much water into your sponge.

And he added increased muscles will improve the ability to older people to withstand falls.

He said: "If they fall over and break the hip, the chances of dying is twice as great within two years."

His team found that the suppression of muscle breakdown, which also happens during feeding, is blunted with age.

Older people when they eat don't build enough muscle with the protein in food while insulin – a hormone released during a meal – fails to shut down the muscle breakdown that rises between meals and overnight.

Normally, in young people, insulin acts to slow muscle breakdown.

The research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared one group of people in their late 60s to a group of 25-year-olds, with equal numbers of men and women.

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Reference Source 172
September 15, 2009