Fast Twitch Muscle Fibers & Age

We all know there is an age related decline in physical function as we age. While we can hugely disrupt how quickly and how severely this occurs, it will eventually happen. This is why we want to “raise the peak and slow the decline” as much as possible.

As we age we lose muscle mass, muscle strength, and muscle power. You may be aware that we have both slow twitch muscle fibers and fast twitch muscle fibers in each muscle group.

Slow twitch fibers are great for endurance and carrying out run of the mill daily tasks, while fast twitch fibers are recruited for very high effort activities. Fast twitch fibers are absolutely critical to our golf swing. These will be the ones that are important for generating club head speed.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not the speed of movement that dictates if we recruit the fast twitch fibers or not. It is the intent or effort to move as quickly as possible or produce as much force as possible.

For example, think of a very challenging leg press or bench press or any other weight lifting activity. Even if the weight is moving slowly, but we are trying to move it as fast as we can, it will be training or fast twitch fibers. The best part about this type of training for the fast twitch fibers is that it will stimulate them to grow in size. This is very important and valuable, as bigger fibers can produce more force aka create more “power”.

We will also be recruiting and training our fast twitch fibers when we move light weights or even just our body weight as quickly as we can. Think of swinging your driver or The Stack as fast as you can, short sprints, jumping, throwing and slamming medicine balls, pulling or rotating bands as fast as you can, or really any type of very explosive activity, where you try to move as quickly as possible for short bursts. These exercises are great for increasing the speed of the signal from our brain to our muscles, and how quickly these fibers can contract.

By combining heavy strength training to make our fast twitch muscle fibers bigger and high speed exercises to increase how quickly we can send signals to them and how quickly they can contract, we will be covering the most important aspects of “fast twitch” training.

This decline in muscle mass, muscle strength, and muscle fiber as we age is entirely a fast twitch fiber problem. There is evidence that slow twitch fibers are reasonably well maintained with regular daily activities, but this is absolutely not the case for the fast twitch fibers. They require very specific training.

“Being active” and doing cardiovascular exercise plus stretching, which is a common workout strategy, will absolutely not be sufficient for staving off this decline. (We should still do it, it’s good for us in other ways).

The loss of muscle mass, muscle strength, and muscle power as we age is not uniform. We lose power the earliest and it is affected the most severely. This is partly due to biology, and partly due to the fact that almost nobody trains power throughout life. If you follow the programs on the Fit For Golf App you will be in the very small minority that train power comprehensively!

We want to raise the peak of this graph as high as possible, then slow the decline as much as possible. It will be highly correlated not only to health and longevity, but also golf standard as we age!

This decline tends to begin slowly at around age 30, and speed up every decade. This is why golfers tend to see a big decline in distance once they get to around age 55-60, and certainly past 70 (but this will be different for everyone).

So what can we do? We can comprehensively train our fast twitch fibers and hugely slow down or even reverse this decline (at least for a while).

How do we do this? Well that’s where the programming on the Fit For Golf App comes in.

In a nutshell we need to perform challenging strength exercises to increase the strength and size of our fast twitch muscle fibers, and we need to perform high speed explosive exercises to improve how quickly we can produce force.

A simple way to do this is heavy strength training (heavy is relative to your current strength level), and swing speed training. Both of these are big features of The Fit For Golf App.

With bigger, stronger, and faster contracting fast twitch fibers, you can absolutely transform your club head speed, golf game, and life.

I have taken great care in ensuring the programs in the Fit For Golf App target these key physical qualities.

Regardless of your age, training experience, injury history, equipment or time availability, there are programs available for you.

The Program Matcher Feature on the app makes selecting the most appropriate program easy, and it only takes 30 seconds.