How do you prevent muscle atrophy, or reverse muscle atrophy? When you are over 40, a gradual loss of muscle strength and a loss of muscle mass can start to limit your quality of life. For the elderly, muscle loss commonly becomes more pronounced, and is known as sarcopenia: a loss of muscle mass (muscle wasting) and a concomitant loss of muscle strength.
Sarcopenia has no known causes. It is an atrophy of muscle that can severely limit a persons’ mobility. Muscle loss is a condition that limits quality of life.
Initial Symptoms of Muscle Decline are Very Subtle
It’s not like you just wake up and you have overly skinny legs. Muscle loss happens gradually, over years. Some taumatic events can accelerate muscle decline; such as having surgery, or an overlooked concussion syndrome from even a mild hit to the head. The remnant of these traumatic events must be investigated and addressed as I do in here in Los Angeles. When sarcopenia/muscle wasting is already present, it will not be responsive to exercise, and exercise will be exhausting after just a short while.
I’ve been studying sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass and loss of muscle strength, because I realize that this affects entirely too many people, especially the elderly. The elderly should not have to suffer with sarcopenia/muscle wasting just because most doctors don’t have any clue to its causes, or any clue how to treat muscle wasting effectively (only prescribing exercise).
The Muscle Protocol: A Constructive, Metabolic, Nutritional Plan to Restore Muscle
A fellow chiropractor in Los Angeles, Dr. Mike Spearman, showed me a constructive metabolic nutritional program to help with muscle function, that he learned from the writings of Dr. Royal Lee. He has been using this constructive metabolic program with his own patients and seeing great success. I started using it with certain patients of my own who were unable to pass a certain type of muscle challenge test that I perform in my office. For those patients, I would individually design the program, based on the patient’s response to those in-office muscle challenge tests.
The feedback I receive from my patients is inspiring! One of my patients living in Los Angeles told me “the muscle protocol was my favorite protocol that you gave me.” Another told me that she was having trouble keeping up with the extensive exercises she was doing in her advanced yoga class, but after being on the muscle protocol, she can now do things that women 20 years younger than her can’t even do! Her yoga instructor even pointed to her during a class and said “what you see here is a miracle.”
Acknowledging the initial symptoms of muscle function decline
I was starting to notice a muscle burn in my gluteus muscles when I would run up two flights of stairs. The burn would be there if I even just walked up the stairs. When I reached the second floor platform and stopped climbing, I would notice a burning feeling in my butt muscles that would take about 3 seconds to disappear. It would only happen at the top of the stairs, after I finished climbing the stairs, and the duration was short, but it was there every time.
I passed it off as nothing meaningful except that I was not in as good a shape as I used to be, and I thought it meant that I just needed to start doing more exercise. I was not out of breath or anything, I just felt the burn in my muscles.
For a few months, especially after prolonged sitting at the computer and writing my original articles, or researching current scientific literature, I would notice an ache in my sacroiliac joints: the lowest joints in the low back, attached to the gluteus maximus muscles. I passed it off as a temporary joint instability due to prolonged poor sitting posture, needing a better chair, or just needing an overdue chiropractic alignment. Usually after getting up and walking around a little, the ache would go away after just a minute or two, but it would come back again if I sat for a while in the chair.
That ache in my sacroiliac joints (low back pain) became present, occasionally, when I first woke up in the morning. I ignored it because it would go away after I got up from bed. But I thought it was unusual, because I had not been sitting at the computer. Although I had been lying on my back, my sacroiliac joints were sore when I awoke. Then I noticed that I woke up with that feeling a few mornings in a row, and realized that I was experiencing a chronic low back pain symptom that felt like arthritis.
I’m a Chiropractor, so I know the problem is not the symptom, the problem is the underlying dysfunction that causes the symptom. If you just block the symptoms, you still have the underlying condition, but you are just less aware of its presence.
It should be obvious that pain killers are not going to help such a condition get any better, they would only make the symptom less noticeable. Those are different outcomes. Taking pain killers or any other drug such as an anti-inflammatory is not a sane long term solution and does not address the causes, or prevent the problem from getting worse.
Nuisance symptoms don’t require drugs, nuisance symptoms require correction.
I realized that my own symptoms, although only just a nuisance at the time, required action. I didn’t want to kid around anymore and let the underlying condition get any worse. I didn’t want to just accept someone else’s disempowering and uninformed opinion that there’s nothing you can do. Of course there’s something else you can do. You just have to do something totally different than what you were already doing. I needed to make a deeper commitment to my own well being and health. So I decided to give myself the gift I had given to my own patients. I decided to start the muscle protocol myself. I bought all the supplements and took them home.
No More Muscle Weakness
After only 2 days on the muscle protocol, I had no more muscle burn when I ran up two flights of stairs. Also, I no longer experienced low back ache after prolonged sitting at the computer, and I didn’t have any feeling of arthritis in my sacroiliac joints when I awoke from sleep.
Muscle Specialist
The muscle protocol helps my patients and myself. Muscle pain, muscle weakness, and increasing decline of muscle mass is definitely something that can be corrected. The muscle protocol is one major component of my comprehensive program to restore muscle function. Generally, you take it consistently for a few months, and then you don’t need it for many years. But I don’t give this protocol to just anybody. The typical person who needs this protocol is middle-age, and cannot pass the simple muscle challenge test that we do here in Beverly HIlls.
Protect yourself from a possible future of muscle wasting. Come get tested.