Health Claims

For older adults with diabetes, having weak hand grip—less than 35 kg for men or 20 kg for women—might be a strong sign they’re struggling with everyday tasks like dressing or cooking, and this simple test could be better than other methods at spotting who’s at risk of losing independence.

If an older adult takes 12 seconds or more to stand up and sit down five times, they're more likely to be someone who's had falls — this test correctly identifies fallers about 65% of the time.

Older adults around age 72 who have fallen before aren't any weaker in their knee muscles than those who haven't fallen — so knee strength might not help predict who's more likely to fall.

Older adults around age 72 who don’t fall tend to have stronger leg power—especially when standing up quickly from a chair—compared to those who do fall, suggesting that how fast you can move your legs might matter more than raw strength when predicting fall risk.

Sprint and hard steady workouts get your heart pumping faster and keep it near maximum longer than burpee workouts in young, somewhat active people — at least during 9-minute sessions.

After a quick 9-minute workout, sprint intervals might make your heart take longer to calm down compared to burpees or steady hard exercise — at least in young, somewhat active people.

For young adults who exercise a bit, doing a quick 9-minute sprint workout leads to bigger drops in muscle power—like how high you can jump or how strong your legs and arms feel—compared to other similar workouts using burpees or steady hard exercise.

After running a 400-meter sprint really fast, college sprinters aren't as powerful when jumping — especially in the first part of the jump — and this weakness can last up to a full day.

Even when male college sprinters say they feel back to normal after a hard 400-meter race, their leg power is still down by over 7% the next day — meaning their muscles might not be fully recovered even if they feel fine.

After a really hard sprint, college male runners seem to jump differently for over a day — their muscles spend more time stretching and less time shortening, which might be their body’s way of adjusting after intense effort.

After college guys run a really hard 400-meter sprint, their explosive jumping power stays about 10% lower the next day, showing their muscles are still tired even a full day later.

Doctors use different rules to diagnose weak muscles in people with type 2 diabetes, but those rules give wildly different results — from 7% to 58% of patients. That confusion means we probably need better, diabetes-specific rules to spot this problem accurately.

When people with type 2 diabetes lose muscle strength, their muscle cells—especially the endurance type—don’t produce energy as well, which might explain why they get tired more easily during physical activity.

In type 2 diabetes, muscles that are supposed to use sugar well might not work as well because they lose a key sugar-transporting protein, which could make those muscle fibers shrink over time.

Muscle loss in people with type 2 diabetes happens even in younger adults, not just older people — so it's not just aging causing it, and might be due to different reasons than regular age-related muscle loss.

People with type 2 diabetes who lose muscle tend to lose a specific kind called 'slow-twitch' muscle first, which is different from regular aging muscle loss or muscle loss from not moving much. This suggests diabetes-related muscle loss might be its own unique condition.

Staying active as you get older might help keep your leg strength from decreasing as quickly.

As people get older, their muscles get worse at staying strong when moving quickly — and this gets worse by about 0.1% each year after middle age.

As people in their younger and middle years get older, their muscle power relative to body weight drops faster than total muscle power—partly because BMI tends to go up, making it harder to stay strong for your size.

As people get older, their muscles lose power — but how that happens changes over time. Younger adults mostly lose strength, while older adults lose both strength and speed, meaning different things go wrong in the body as we age.

As people get older, their leg muscle power slowly gets weaker — and it starts to drop faster after age 60. A long-term study found that this loss speeds up with age and could be a sign of overall physical decline as we get older.

For heart patients, how much total energy you burn during exercise might matter more than whether you do intense bursts or steady workouts — when both types burn the same calories, they seem to help your fitness just as much.

People with heart disease who did either short bursts of intense exercise or longer, steady workouts felt about the same in terms of how their physical, emotional, and social lives were affected — and the evidence we have isn't very strong.

For people with heart disease, short bursts of intense exercise don’t seem to work much better than steady, moderate exercise when both burn the same number of calories — both help a bit, but the difference between them is tiny.