Resistance training has two jobs: to make you stronger, and to make your muscles bigger. These two jobs are connected, since bigger muscles are usually stronger. But they’re not identical. You can get stronger without adding muscle, for example by improving how well signals are carried from your brain to your muscles, or how effectively your existing muscle fibers are recruited. And you can add muscle without necessarily getting functionally stronger, which typically happens when you gain weight.
This distinction between strength and muscle is at the heart of a new study in the journal Lifestyle Medicine, which explores how each of these parameters influences the rate of cognitive decline in older adults. As a skinny endurance athlete who dutifully hits the gym, I’ve long wondered whether my pull-ups and squats are pointless, since I never seem to put on any muscle. But the new results, from a team led by Kristi Storoschuk of Queen’s University in Canada and Thomas Wood of the University of Washington, are reassuring.
Storoschuk and her colleagues pulled data from 1,424 adults over the age of 60 enrolled in the…
