If you're
over 40, you probably have more “stuff” going on in your life than you did at
21, making it difficult to focus on eating right and training regularly. And
the enthusiasm you once had for exercise — especially if you haven’t seen the
results you were hoping for — may have waned, too.
You might
feel that your body can’t handle the kind of punishment you used to dish out in
your early twenties, and that it takes longer to recover than it used to.
But none of
this matters. With the right type of training, you can still build muscle and
get strong well into your forties, fifties, and beyond.
University
of Oklahoma researchers compared people of different ages who followed the
exact same program for eight weeks. They found that men between 35 and 50 years
old built just as much muscle as those between 18 and 22 years old.
DEXA
(duel-energy x-ray absorptiometry) scans showed that the college-aged men
gained around two pounds of muscle, while the middle-aged men put on 2.5 pounds
of muscle.
Moreover,
strength gains in both the bench press (7 pounds for the college-aged men and
14 pounds for the middle-aged men) and leg press (55 pounds for the
college-aged men and 40 pounds for the middle-aged men) were similar in both
groups.
The basic
rules for building muscle as you age are mostly the same. Yes, the number of
times you’ve travelled around the sun will affect the speed at which you make
progress. But your age isn’t something you can change, so there’s no point
worrying about it. You just need to train smart.
People of
different ages respond to training in much the same way. It’s only the size of
your results and the speed at which you attain them that varies.
So if
you’re entering your forties, fifties, or even sixties and want to build muscle
without injury, you can still make great gains by applying a few simple rules
to your training program.
Embrace
Light
If you lift
heavy all the time, you'll start to notice little aches and pains in your
knees, wrists, elbows, and shoulders.
Eventually,
those minor niggles will get so bad that they'll interfere with your training.
It will take weeks — maybe even months — before they clear up and you can train
properly again.
Luckily,
the solution is very simple: If going heavy on certain exercises causes you
pain, just go light instead.
Despite
what some people might say, you can and will build muscle using lighter weights
and higher reps.
In one
study, high reps and light weights (3 sets of 30-40 reps) stimulated just as
much muscle growth as heavy weights and lower reps (3 sets of 10-12 reps).
Doing 3
sets of 10 repetitions to failure promotes similar gains in muscle size as 7
sets of 3 repetitions with a much heavier weight.
Japanese
researchers found that taking a light weight and lifting it slowly
increased both muscle size and strength to a similar extent as heavy training
at a normal lifting speed.
So mix it
up. Heavy weights, medium weights, and light weights can all can be used
successfully to gain muscle.
Keep
Moving
The
standard approach to dealing with an injury is to rest. But with some injuries
at least, you may be better off moving.
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In one
study, Swedish scientists studied the effect of heavy eccentric calf training
in a group of 15 middle-aged recreational runners that had been diagnosed with
Achilles tendinitis, which refers to a degeneration of the tendon’s collagen in
response to chronic overuse.
They had
been in pain for an average of 18 months. Subjects were told to go ahead with
the training even if they experienced pain, and to stop only if the pain became
disabling.
At the
start of the study, the pain was so bad that it kept them from running. But
after 12 weeks of daily eccentric training (3 sets of 15 repetitions twice per
day), all the runners were back at their pre-injury levels.
A control
group of 15 runners with the same diagnosis and duration of symptoms was
treated conventionally. The conventional treatments were unsuccessful. All
patients in the control group ended up having surgery.
In a group
of subjects in their late forties with tennis elbow, the addition of an
eccentric exercise known as the Tyler Twist to a standard physical therapy
program led to a “marked improvement” in symptoms.
They did 3
sets of 15 reps daily for approximately 6 weeks. The treatment was effective in
the majority of patients.
Similar
results were seen in a group of men and women suffering from golfer’s elbow,
even after all other treatments — physical therapy, cortisone injections, and
pain killers — had previously failed.
There’s
also some intriguing research to show that regular heavy strength training
works just as well as eccentric training for the treatment of tendon pain.
The study,
carried in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports,
compared three different treatments: corticosteroid injections, eccentric
single-leg squats, and heavy slow (6 seconds per rep) resistance training.
Again, the
researchers in this study emphasised the fact that pain during exercise was
“acceptable” but shouldn’t get worse once the workout was over. At 12 weeks,
all three treatments produced similar results.
But it was
a different story after six months. Specifically, the eccentric and resistance
training group maintained their improvements whereas they deteriorated in the
corticosteroid group.
NOTE: If you’re injured, the first
thing I’d suggest you do is get it checked out rather than trying to sort it
out yourself. And if what I’m telling you contradicts what they’re saying, take
their advice and not mine.
Stimulate,
Don’t Annihilate
It’s all
too easy to tell yourself that the reason you’re not gaining muscle is because
you’re not training hard enough. While lack of effort is certainly one reason
why people fail to build a decent amount of muscle, it's not the only reason.
There are
plenty of people out there who train extremely hard yet make little or no
progress despite all they're effort.
Walking out
of the gym feeling like you’ve just gone several rounds with Mike Tyson might
leave you thinking that your workout has been an effective one. But if it’s not
part of a structured plan that moves you towards a specific goal then much of
that effort will be wasted.
If you keep
on pushing your body to the limit in every workout, several things will happen.
In the evening you will have that “wired but tired” feeling where you want to
go to sleep but you can’t. You’ll find yourself staring at the ceiling
wondering why you’re still awake at 2 a.m. You’ll wake up the next day with
your heart pounding, just as tired as you were the night before.
Trivial
things that you never even noticed before will start to annoy you. You’ll feel
anxious, moody, irritable. Worst of all, your results in the gym will dry up
and you will gradually start to get weaker.
You need to
train hard enough to stimulate progress, but not so hard that it has a negative
impact on the quality of your other workouts.
Hard work
is a tool used to stimulate a physiological improvement. It’s a means to an
end, rather than the end itself.
Train
Hard and Rest
Your body
isn’t a machine. It needs a rest now and again. Do this by including a “cruise”
week (also known as a deload) for every 3 to 9 weeks of hard training.
Three weeks
of intense training followed by a light week is a fairly widely accepted
practice, although it’s not based on any research evidence that I’m aware of.
It’s not
strictly necessary for everyone to deload after three weeks. But if I told you
to deload “when you feel like it,” you probably wouldn't do it at all. And your
body wasn’t designed to go “all out” for 52 weeks of the year without some kind
of break.
In general,
the closer you are to your genetic potential (i.e. the upper limit of what
you’re capable of in terms of size and strength), the more often you’ll need to
deload. Those who are farther away from their genetic potential will be able to
reload less frequently.
Tight Means Stretch
Static stretching
has been heavily criticised in recent years. That’s because it doesn’t do a lot
of the things it’s supposed to. Most of the research out there shows that
stretching has little effect on muscle soreness, and doesn’t appear to do much
for injury prevention either.
However, if
you find that certain muscles feel a little “tight” (the hamstrings, hip flexors,
quadriceps, and glutes are the usual culprits), or there’s an “asymmetry” in
flexibility (i.e. one leg feels substantially tighter than the other) then it’s
worth experimenting with some static stretching to see if it makes you feel any
better.
If you want
a simple prescription for flexibility, aim to stretch any “tight” muscles for a
total of 60 seconds per day.
Stretching
for 60 seconds has been shown to improve flexibility more quickly than a
30-second or 15-second stretch in a group of subjects aged between 65 and 97,
all with “tight” hamstring muscles. What’s more, participants who stretched for
60 seconds remained more flexible for longer than subjects in the other groups.
One stretch
lasting 60 seconds or six stretches lasting 10 seconds work equally well when
it comes to increasing flexibility. Regardless of the length of a single
stretch, the key to improvement seems to be total daily stretch time.
Don't get
discouraged if your flexibility hits a ceiling, though. Like most things,
flexibility is influenced by your genes.
There’s a
gene called COL5A1, which is linked to your hereditary level of flexibility.
One version of the gene means you’re quite flexible, the other means you’re
not. Which means that the rate at which your flexibility improves, as well as
the point at which it stops improving, are not entirely under your control.
Three
Is Enough
There is no
correct training frequency that works for all people, all of the time. Nor are
there rigid guidelines that determine exactly what your training routine should
look like at any stage of life.
You may be
doing just fine on a program that involves lifting weights 4 to 5 times a week.
If that's the case, keep doing it.
However,
from the studies I've read a program that involves lifting weights no more than
three times a week is best for anyone in their forties. It allows for more
recovery time, and keeps big, demanding exercises like the squat and the
deadlift away from each other in your programming.
Take
Your Time
Many in
their late teens and early twenties will walk straight into the gym, do a few
arm circles, and then jump straight into the heavy stuff. If you’re over 40,
this approach will get you injured sooner or later. You have to make the time
to warm up properly.
The exact
warmup that you do will depend on what your workout looks like. It will also
vary from person to person, depending on the environment you’re training in,
how strong you are, and so on. So let me walk you through how I do it.
I like to
start each workout with around 10 minutes of low-intensity cardio to get my
heart pumping and warm my muscles. This helps to raise your body temperature,
which appears to be one of the main reasons that exercise performance is better
in the evening than it is in the morning.
The amount
of time you spend doing this will depend on the environment you’re training in.
If it’s very warm, you might be able to get away with a few minutes on the bike
or rowing machine. If it’s cold, you’ll need to spend a little longer warming
up.
Doing my
cardio helps to clear my mind and gets me focused on the workout to come. I
like to have a workout plan written down before I get to the gym. Having a plan
written down means that I don’t need to think about anything. All I need to do
is follow the plan and focus on training as hard as I can.
Next, I
move straight to my first exercise — usually one of the compound lifts, such as
the bench press or squat — and perform 15 reps with an empty bar. Then, I
progressively increase the weight over the course of several sets.
All of this
helps to prepare the joints, the muscles, and the nervous system that controls
those muscles for the heavy work to come.
While a
good warmup can reduce the risk of injury and improve your performance, it
doesn’t need to last forever. Foam rolling, dynamic activation drills, and
various “alignment” exercises can be useful at certain times and for certain
individuals.
Don't just
copy what other people are doing — choose things that are actually helping your
own body and workout.
Pick
Your Battles
Some people
have a bone structure that makes them better suited to certain exercises than
others. You might not be built for deep squats with a heavy barbell across your
shoulders, deadlifts from the floor, chinups from a straight bar, or bench
pressing through a full range of motion.
If you’ve
got short arms and long legs, for example, it'll be a lot harder to deadlift
from the floor without rounding your back compared to someone with long arms
and short legs.
But that
doesn’t mean you should give up on the deadlift. Just do rack pulls instead,
using a starting position that allows you to maintain normal spinal curvature.
If your
wrists hurt when you’re doing chinups from a straight bar, use a suspension
trainer. This allows your wrists to move freely rather than being locked in the
same position throughout the movement.
If the
bench press hurts your shoulders, try the floor press, where you stop the bar 2
to 3 inches off your chest. Or use dumbbells with your palms turned in and
elbows moved closer to your body (this one simple tweak is often enough to get
rid of shoulder pain almost instantly).
And don’t
worry if you can’t squat “ass-to-ankles” without losing the arch in your lower
back. Squatting to parallel, or even slightly above parallel, is good enough.
Studies have found that you don’t need to train through a full range of motion
to make your muscles grow, especially if doing so causes you pain.
There are
some exercises that will hurt no matter what. If so, don’t be afraid to ditch
that exercise and find a similar one that doesn’t. There is no single “must do”
exercise that can’t be replaced with something else.
Do it. You’ll thank
yourself for it.
That is all -
David
