I’ve been thinking about my grandmother a lot lately.

She’s this little petite woman, and for most of my life she was the most active person I knew. Always up, always doing something, always on her feet somewhere. For a stretch there she was even going to the gym regularly, and I was so proud of her. I bragged about her to people.

And then a few things happened with her health. Something with her neck. Some chronic pain. A couple of other things that piled up the way they do. And she started moving less. She stopped going to the gym. She stopped moving the way she always had.

I don’t think any of us clocked it while it was happening. That’s the part that stays with me. There was no single dramatic moment. Just a slow narrowing of what she did in a day, and then I looked up one afternoon and she was frail. The strength went first, and so much followed it.

I share this with love. She’s still with us, and I adore her. But I keep turning it over, because what I watched happen to her is the exact thing I spend my whole career trying to help people avoid. And honestly, it scares me a little for myself too. It’s the kind of thing that makes you look at your own body differently.

This post is adapted from Yoga for Longevity, my podcast where I share therapeutic yoga tools for healthy aging. I’m Mikah Horn, yoga therapist and founder of Lifelong Yoga Online, a membership designed especially for adults 50 and beyond. If you want a way to put what you read here into practice, you can explore it free for 7 days, with gentle classes for strength, balance, joint health, posture, and more.

What I really want you to take from this, especially if you’re somewhere in your 60s or 70s and you’ve started to notice that things which used to be easy now take a little more out of you, the last few stairs, getting up off the floor, carrying the groceries in one trip, is that this is not simply “getting old.”

That slow loss of strength has a name. It’s called sarcopenia, which is a clinical word for the muscle we lose as we age. We start losing it as early as our 30s, around 3 to 5 percent a decade, and it speeds up after 60. For women, the years around menopause speed up both muscle and bone loss at once, because we lose some of the protection estrogen used to give us. So if your body seemed to change faster than you expected somewhere in your 50s, you are not imagining it.

And it sneaks up on us because it doesn’t hurt. There’s no flare, no warning. It’s the most patient kind of loss. You go along living your life, and one day something is simply harder than it was.

That’s what happened with my grandmother. The decline picked up speed the moment she stopped moving. The strength went first, and the rest followed.

I tell you this not to frighten you, but because the other side of it is the most hopeful thing I know about aging. If a big reason we lose strength is that we stop using our muscles, then a big part of the answer is that we start using them again. And it works. There’s good research showing that even people in their 80s and 90s get measurably stronger when they start to train. Your body does not have an expiration date on this.

Now, I know what “building strength” brings to mind for a lot of people. Something grueling and intense you have to talk yourself into. I want to take that picture away, because it stops people before they ever start. Strength does not have to look like that, and it does not have to be something you dread.

The way I teach it, we build what I call mindful strength. We find small, almost playful ways to engage the muscles, often with a yoga block to press into or squeeze, so you can actually feel the muscle switch on. We hold a pose a few breaths longer than is comfortable. We lower down slowly instead of dropping. We pay close attention while the muscle works, and that attention is half of it. No weights required, and it still builds real, usable strength. It’s one of the five pillars I build every practice around, right next to balance, joint health, posture, and flexibility.

And I’d be leaving out the best part if I didn’t say this. There is a particular feeling that comes with getting stronger. Feeling steady when you stand. Feeling capable carrying something heavy. Feeling like your body is on your side again. I want that for you. I want it for my grandmother. I want it for myself, decades from now.

We don’t get to control everything about how we age. But this piece, the strength piece, is far more in our hands than most people are ever told. So start from wherever you are today. That is always enough to begin.

PS. If your bones are part of this picture too, if you’ve been told you have osteoporosis or osteopenia and you’ve been afraid to move, I’m building something for you. It’s a new mini course called Strong Bones, Safe Yoga, all about practicing safely and building strength without putting your spine at risk. I’ve opened a priority list so you’ll be first to know when it’s ready, with the best pricing. And if you’d like to start moving with me in the meantime, my membership Lifelong Yoga Online is open for a free 7 day trial. Come build a little mindful strength with us.