Geezer strength and muscle gains research

[AK49]

I came across an article about a new study that matches my experience with strength and muscle gain. It seems to conclude that strength can be gained by young and old at a similar rate but muscle mass gains are much less as we age.

I don't have access to the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. I hope someone who does can read it give their assessment of the quality of the research.

http://breakingmuscle.com/strength-c...ngth-as-we-age

The study: http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Ab...erm.97262.aspx

[Dave Klopp]

I saw this also and the findings make sense to me. However, though the rate of strength gain was about the same I would expect that the strength gains for geezers would plateau earlier than yonger lifters.

[JohnRoman]

It's interesting. You see some guys get started later (early Master's age) and they still build up to very respectable totals. It just takes them longer than if they had been 20 when they started.
Obviously, you will fight atrophy when you get to some age (~60?) and it gets into minimizing the loss of strength over gaining any strength. Here I really think about people like Dave Ricks.
He started early but was still very competitive in Open competition even as a Master.

I have some questions though :
1) I would expect that the older gentlemen in the study had suffered quite a bit of atrophy in comparison to the younger subjects of the study. So even though the strength gain was about even, were the older subjects still significantly BEHIND the younger ones in strength? For instance, maybe the younger subjects could do significantly more BW exercises vs the older subjects at the start of the study.
2) If the younger subject exhibited more hypertrophy but had the same strength I'm more than a little confused. Over time I would think that hypertrophy + strength has to significantly overtake just strength.
I.E. hypertrophy + strength >> strength
Especially as I transmute the new muscle mass towards strength.