Our gym equipment was custom designed for a university-based research study and called The Time Machine in said research. Want to know why?
The name is connected to how we age. After the age of thirty we lose on average 0.5 lbs (0.23 kg) of muscle per year, which amounts to 6 lbs or close to 3 kg of muscle loss in 6 years!
We can lose up to 30% of our muscle mass by the age of 60, and this is what is commonly known as the aging process.
It isn’t just skeletal muscle that is being lost. We lose muscle from internal organs such as the heart and the intestine, causing reduced function. We also lose muscle from the face, causing the face to sag and promoting an aged look to the facial features. Having less muscle also causes us to release fewer youthful hormones (such as testosterone and growth hormone, vital for maintaining a lean and strong physique).
Does this mean we are facing a bleak future? Not necessarily; the research shows people who train on the Time Machine gain, on average, 6 lbs (3 kg) of muscle in the first 12 days! That is the same amount of muscle we previously saw is lost over the course of 6 years during the so-called natural aging process.
Gaining back skeletal muscle causes an increase in muscularity in general (internal organs and face, for example). Having more muscle also causes an increase in the output of our so-called youthful hormones (testosterone and growth hormone), which are the hormones that determine our body composition, or, in other words, the ratio of fat to muscle that your body is made up of.
So what is it about training on the Time Machine that caused such rapid muscle gain and, in effect, such a jump start to rejuvenation?
First of all, our gym equipment was built to facilitate working out in an inward-facing circle and without taking breaks in between exercises and sets. What this would do is facilitate completing your workout much faster, allowing you to have a full workout in just twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is the window of opportunity we have to work out before our output of the catabolic hormone cortisol (which breaks down muscle fiber) starts to increase.
Training this way (in an inward-facing circle without breaks) was also shown in the research to help people who trained deepen their attention to the point where they accessed a deeper-than-normal state of attention (named unconscious attention) in the research.
The research showed people who trained in this deeper state of attention were able to lift heavier and train at a higher intensity than they normally could. This helped them gain muscle faster than a person weight training in a normal gym on normal equipment, and therefore they had a fast return to their much younger self, on average, from six years ago.
