Muscular Strength & Endurance (MSE)

The Department of Health advises us all to perform at least 150 minutes moderate intensity activity, 75 minutes’ vigorous activity, or a mixture of both, per week. Less well known is the exhortation that we perform muscle strengthening activities on two days per week.

You may have noticed that I talk a lot about the importance and effects of exercise but I very rarely write about different types of exercise. My claim is that all forms of exercise are good and that it is more important to choose the activity which your prefer than follow my advice on which might be the best one for you. In other words it does not matter what you do it – just do it!

I have had two communications recently which prompt me to modify this stance a bit. They are both to do with the balance between Aerobic Exercise (AE) and Muscular Strength & Endurance (MSE) exercise. Nearly every exercise modality involves a mixture of the two but maybe the balance does need some examination. For instance if you use gym-based exercise circuits you probably have a good mix – but if you are a walker or runner, the MSE component is restricted to your legs and maybe your arms need some attention?

Muscle strengthening

Thank you, Dave, for steering me this way. Dave sent me a copy of an article in, of all places, The Economist. This points out that about half of Western adults report meeting weekly guidelines for AE but less than 30% claimed to meet the minimum for strength work (Incidentally I don’t believe either of these figures – being self-reported they are undoubtedly also exaggerations.)

The Economist article continues by pointing out the shared benefits of AE and MSE, including cutting the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, some cancers and lifespan. However one more major benefit of MSE is the prevention of sarcopenia. This is the decline in bulk and strength of muscle as the years roll by. The result can be “frail and unsteady individuals struggling with the activities of daily living such as getting out of a chair or going out independently”. This increases the chance of falls and fractures as well as susceptibility to and inability to recover from infections and other illnesses. It is frailty which clogs our our hospitals – leading to the trail of slow ambulance responses, long queues of ambulances outside hospitals, trolleys lined up in hospital corridors, over-crowded wards and delayed discharge home.

As the article says “With most of the world ageing rapidly, sarcopenia is only going to become a bigger problem. It could even be aggravated by the use of drugs like Wegovy. Some of the weight lost by people taking these drugs seems to result from shedding muscle rather than fat,…Some degree of decrepitude is inevitable with age. But the evidence suggests that, even for people in their 80s, a bit of pumping iron can work wonders….The squat rack beckons!”

Celebrity endorsement of the RCAF approach

This the second trigger for approaching the MSE question – the example of Helen Mirren which has been reported by the media this week. The actress, who turns 80 in July, told Women’s Weekly that she was ‘a big believer in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) women’s exercise regime, which is 12 minutes work-out’. Called XBX (ten basic exercises), the programme first gained popularity in the late 1950s when it was developed by Dr Bill Orban to improve the fitness of females in the Air Force.

The programme aims to increase muscle strength and endurance. The XBX plan is composed of four charts of ten exercises, arranged in progressive order of difficulty.The charts are also divided into levels – 48 levels in total, 12 in each chart. ‘The time limit for each exercise remains the same in all charts, but the number of times the exercise is performed increases at each level within each chart’. For example, in Chart II, you perform exercise 2, 12 times at level 18, but 14 times at level 19.

The XBX programme for women developed from the male equivalent – the 5BX Plan. I have dug out my 1958 edition of the booklet describing the regime. It does indeed start at a very gently level and builds up in easy stages to very hard indeed! Each session should last 11 minutes – the warm-up is incorporated and no equipment is needed.

What now?

The 1958 pamphlet is not so easy to follow so I have bought the modern versions – “Physical Fitness. XBX 12 minute plan for women” and Physical Fitness. 5BX  11 minute plan fore men”. They contain the same exercise programmes as the originals but are much easier to follow and include plenty of room for recording your own progress. At £12.99 each they could save your life – even if you don’t get to look like Helen Mirren!