Simple resistance training may help counteract age-related nerve deterioration that puts seniors at risk of injuries from falls and other accidents, according to cross-institutional research led by postdoctoral researcher and Department of Exercise Science Professor .

The nerves that control our muscles naturally degrade and become slower as we age, a process referred to as denervation. This degradation is especially problematic in sedentary individuals. Counteracting this deterioration with exercise could help seniors enjoy greater independence and improve their quality of life.

“For people in their 70s and 80s, it’s about preserving what you have,” says Shields, who is working in the at the . “The aging process is going to happen no matter what, but can we slow it down.”

The study was in , the leading multidisciplinary research journal for the and one of the flagship journals within the fields of sports medicine and exercise physiology.

“Research on the adaptations to resistance training has historically been focused on muscle and bone, with very little known regarding the adaptability of the nerves,” Editor-in-Chief Andrew Jones wrote in MSSE’s current issue. “Because nerve health and function deteriorate with both age and prolonged sedentary lifestyles, it is important to know if resistance training is an effective countermeasure to combat this degradation.”

“Shields and colleagues show that nerve function in older adults is trainable, which may also have long-term implications for nerve health, motor function, independence and quality of life,” Jones said. “This work could stimulate investigations into whether resistance training is an effective countermeasure for other, non-age related sources of nerve degradation (for example, nervous system disorders).”

For their study, the researchers sought to determine the effects of resistance training on nerve conduction velocity (NCV), and if changes in NCV are dependent on age. Testing 48 subjects ranging from 18 to 84 years old, the researchers recorded NCV in the forearm and maximal strength before and after four weeks of handgrip training in both arms (training was conducted three times a week).

To measure each subject’s NCV, the researchers used nerve conduction tests that stimulated the nerves in the muscles of the forearm and measured how fast it took to activate the muscle.

In the post-training tests, every senior that performed the training showed improvement in their nerve conduction. A nerve contains both fast and slow motor neurons, and the fast neurons are the first to deteriorate, disconnect from muscle and become inactive with age. The researchers hypothesize that the training reactivated these fast neurons in the older participants, a process called reinnervation.

“When you lose fast neurons, you also lose the fast muscle fibers that are activated by them, and then your power, or the speed at which you can produce force, decreases,” says DeFreitas, chair of the and the at Falk College. “If you can reactivate those lost neurons, you can produce force faster again and that has practical implications so that a slip or a trip doesn’t become a terrible fall.”

The research team plans to conduct further studies to determine the role that exercise interventions play in mitigating age-related nerve deterioration, and if the reactivation of fast neurons translates to other parts of the body.

“If we’re reactivating those neurons that started to die, that can play a significant role in the preservation of strength and avoiding disability with aging,” DeFreitas says. “That to me is the likely hypothesis, so that’s the premise of the follow-up work we’re conducting.”

In addition to Shields and DeFreitas, the research team included , graduate research assistant at Falk College; Shawn Reese, assistant professor of exercise science at ; , assistant professor of kinesiology and recreation at Illinois State University; and , a master’s student at Oklahoma State University.

This project was funded in part by a doctoral research grant awarded through the of the American College of Sports Medicine.

The earliest memories  has involve playing sports and watching the golden age of Big East Conference basketball with stars like Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin and Syracuse University star Pearl Washington.

Now, as a father of two children who play youth sports, Tainsky says the “anchor events” in their household revolve around his children’s games and practices, and the sports they watch together on TV. Tainsky built his research career around the idea that sports bring people together, and that’s the focus and sensibility he’s bringing to the as its new senior associate dean of faculty affairs and academic operations.

“It’s the same feeling I hope to experience very shortly at the (JMA Wireless) Dome,” Tainsky says. “Being able to come together and root, root, root for the home team with the family was a salient experience for me as I grew up and became an athlete. Then, as a soon-retired athlete, it evolved from me competing to being one of the people either coaching or analyzing what’s going on for others to do their best to compete at the highest level.”

Tainsky, who started at Falk College on July 1, was previously a professor of management and Director of Sport and Entertainment Management at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he was awarded Mike Ilitch School of Business awards for innovative teaching and excellence in research. He’s currently editor in chief of the , the official research journal of the (NASSM) and he has co-authored over 50 journal articles, becoming a NASSM Research Fellow in 2015.

At the core of Tainsky’s research are the decisions made by high-level sports managers and how they impact both organizational performance and the collective well-being of fans.

“Scott’s research interests–economics of sports leagues and teams, player performance analytics, and corporate social responsibility in national and international sports leagues–align perfectly with our vision for creating the nation’s premier College of Sport,” says Falk College Dean Jeremy Jordan. With programs in esports, exercise science, nutrition, sport analytics and sport management, the Falk College of Sport launched July 1 as the on a high-research activity campus (R1) to focus on sport through a holistic academic lens.

We connected with Tainsky to learn more about his research and how it will impact the College of Sport.

How did you develop an interest in studying the impact of sport?

My curiosity about the world and trying to incorporate that into my daily life. Being able to better the community that I’m a part of is ingrained by the fact that I grew up in a house where my father (Dr. Michael Tainsky) was a researcher—in his case he was trying to cure cancer and improve people’s lives that way.

Mine was much more social. As a social scientist, I have noticed the way sport can be such a valuable part of people’s lives. My first memory was watching Big East basketball, and I liked math. I try to bring those two worlds together to create the best social experiences for the greatest number of people possible.

One of the College of Sport’s areas of excellence is community sport and wellness, or as Dean Jordan also calls it, “sport for good.” How does your research fit with the uplifting power of sport?

The intellectual side of that is no one has to do sport; it’s an elective part of our lives. Since so many are choosing to spend so much of our attention on this leisure activity, it’s an incredible opportunity to see what people truly value. At the same time, we can provide leadership in utilizing that to help create the most good in the community.

We’re here to help round out that part of their choice, to provide the right amount of sport, marketed and delivered in a way that’s consumable and made more efficient, where the product is better and where the athletes are more informed.

Is there a specific theme throughout your research?

If there’s a theme to my research, it’s this idea of positive externalities, and that’s a very technical term of what is being produced can produce additional good captured by others. So, for example, in that I did with (Sport Analytics Professor) , we look at how the hotel industry is impacted by college football games. It’s not like Marriot or Hilton does anything different to be able to raise their rates or increase their occupancy rates on home football games. It happens because there’s so much excitement around sport; so much interest in being a part of that experience. So, in that case, we’re looking to quantify the externalities produced by football games.

There are other ways this presents in terms of viewership. When I follow Syracuse basketball and Syracuse basketball is having a good year, you would think that because we only have so much leisure time and I’m watching more of the Orange, it might take away the amount I choose to watch other basketball teams. But in fact, the opposite is true. As I become more deeply connected to Syracuse basketball, I’m actually more interested in some of the rival teams we’re competing against. So, we’re looking for those externalities, quantifying those externalities, and then helping round out the experience with the understanding that those things that may be counterintuitive are in play. How do we capitalize on this knowledge to produce the most good?

What are your impressions of the Falk College of Sport and what it can become?

Falk College and Syracuse University have recognized that there are four legs of the stool, and you can’t get any balance unless all four of them are functioning and working together. You can’t create athletes and have competition at the highest level without understanding the exercise science portion and the nutrition portion of sport. You can’t produce teams and individuals functioning at their highest level without sport management and sport analytics. You can’t appreciate the whole of it unless all of those pieces are talking with one another…and there is not one other place that’s doing what’s happening right now at Falk College. It’s 100 percent the reason I wanted to be a part of this project.

What drew me to Falk College was this vision of what can be if we bring together these disciplines that are often times separated and siloed. It’s such a welcome idea that I expect us to be doing incredible things quickly because of all the support I’m seeing and all of the buy-in for what we’re doing from so many different, important pieces of this puzzle.