During my degree college days, I had a person come to coach us on Day Trading. This was in 2006-7. I was around 19. I remember him saying that “If I can make money doing day trading then so can you”. And I thought the same, if this guy can make money then this is my ticket to wealth. All I needed to do was buy his course which was Rs. 10,000. Today I know better, I know that more than 70% of people who do equity trades lose money. I also know that 90% of those who trade in Futures and Options lose money as well. The source for this data is SEBI. This mindset of “if it works for them, it works for me” is called survivorship bias.You assume what works for the small insignificant population is the general rule.

I get a similar pushback when I tell clients to lift weights. Their response is “my grandpa never lifted weights. He is still fit in his 70s. Why should I lift weights?”. Yes, your grandpa also never completed his education. He never studied beyond his 10th grade, why did you have to do a CA, engineering or MBA?

When they tell me their grandpa is fit, the definition they have of being fit is very poor. They tell me he can move around by himself and even do gardening work. Yes, that is alright but however your grandpa is not immune to the laws of biology. If you have not been doing weight training, you will inevitably experience sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle as you get older. This is a natural process but can be mitigated entirely with weight training.

One example of how sarcopenia can affect you as you get older is the loss of power. Power is how fast your body can move over a short distance. This includes simple things like how fast can you get up from the chair or even something more challenging like getting up off the ground. You’d have seen that the senior population moves quite slow to do simple movements like these. This is the loss of muscle and hence the loss of power. Here is a study to explain this PMID: 31943003

Aside from loss in muscle, women are more susceptible to loss of bone mass because of menopause which leads to decline in production of estrogen. Estrogen maintains bone health. The negligible production of lack of estrogen in the body can lead to osteoporosis and makes it easy to break a bone.

Weight training prevents sacropenia and strengthens bones. This may not 100% guarantee that you will never have a fracture but it mitigates the problem almost entirely. Resistance training improves blood-glucose control and is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer mortality. (PMID: 38623887, PMID: 35228201, PMID: 34051796)

So, saying that your grandpa is fine in his 70s without weight training so therefore even you will be is just ridiculous. There are countless other grandpas who have regretted not being physically active. A single fall in an older adult can have consequences far beyond the fall itself. A hip fracture, for example, can result in prolonged loss of mobility, dependence and reduced quality of life.