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Let’s get one thing straight right away. I don’t want any of you to think that just because you are 40 or over that you are close to being in the ground because you’re not. We can also be honest that being 40 years old today isn’t the same as it was for your Dad turning 40. Plenty of people who are well past 40 train with high intensity and look great for any age. 

I had to give you some hope before I hit you with some truth. Age-related muscle loss, also known as sarcopenia, starts around 401. Your fast twitch fibers and their motor units begin to decrease, which means you lose muscle tone, have less muscle control, lose power, and have reduced performance. 

Not a very fun list of symptoms, right? Don’t worry; exercise is the number one thing proven to fight sarcopenia. 

How long have you been lifting?

If you are just starting in your 40s, you can make some amazing progress. However, if you have been lifting since your 20s, you likely will have some wear and tear on your body. This could be in the form of scar tissue and less efficient at healing and producing collagen. Your body likely can’t withstand the same type of stress as you could when you were younger. In some cases, it can, but it won’t bounce back as fast. 

If you have been training for some time, you likely have gained quite a few pounds of muscle already. This depends on your genetics and training style over the years, but the average male can add about 30-40 pounds of muscle above their normal adult weight during a training career. We are talking pure muscle. There will also be some glycogen, water, collagen, and some fat. 

Let’s take a 40-year-old male who is around 175 pounds without lifting. After 15 years of training, he could be about 210 with a similar body fat percentage. After lifting for all those years, he added about 30-35 pounds of muscle to his frame. It would be the best-case scenario that he could add around 5-10 more pounds of muscle. 

Now let’s take another 40-year-old man who gained only 10 pounds throughout his training career because he wasn’t training hard, smart, and consistently. He has more potential to gain more muscle than that first guy if he trains the right way from here on out. 

So what is the takeaway here? You can still progress if you are in your 40s or older, but much of it will depend on your training history. Remember that most of your peers at that age have already started declining. Even if you’re maintaining, you’re doing much better than most. 

You’ve also got more stuff going on than when you were 20, and it can make everything more complicated. Your enthusiasm for training may be up and down, and testosterone may not be what it once was, but even with that, with proper diet, training, and tracking, you can certainly build muscle and get strong into your 40s, 50s, and beyond. 

Hold yourself accountable

Here’s the good news. The rules of building muscle are mostly the same whether you’re 20 or over 40. The results will still happen, but the size of them and the speed at which you attain them will vary. 

The tools that will help you the most are tracking everything and having an honest conversation with yourself. Let’s start with honesty. Ask yourself how much progress you have made in the last six months, the previous year, and the last five years. How are you feeling after your workouts? Are you limping out of the gym in pain and feeling run down the next day? Are you ego-lifting, trying to turn back the clock? 

If you can really answer these questions honestly, then you are ready to see how tracking everything will be your best friend. It's simple; if you haven't made progress, something needs to change. When you are younger, you can seemingly throw more weight on the bar every week, play some pick-up basketball, and burn off the diet decisions you made over the weekend. That’s not the case anymore, but it’s not as bad as you think.

A study showed that people ages 19-36 and 52-75 doing the same exercise and eating the same number of calories showed no significant difference in metabolic rate between the two groups2. This means it doesn’t slow down as fast as you think, and you will have to monitor your calories and manipulate them based on your progress. 

You will also need to track the total volume of your workouts and, of course, the weights you are using. Remember that weightlifting simply creates a stimulus. Your body then needs to recover and build muscle outside of the gym. You must use the correct volume for your age and training history. The days of marathon chest and shoulder days with 20 or more sets are likely long gone. Think of when you fill your car up with gas. It only holds so much, and overfilling it doesn’t do any good. It’s the same with your body and training volume, and it’s your job to keep an eye on how much you have in the tank and how the performance is going. 

Some simple rules of thumb per workout are 9-11 sets for the chest, 12-14 for the back, 12-14 for the legs, 6-9 for the shoulders, and 6-9 for the arms. You will, of course, have to do some trial and error on your part, but that’s a good starting point and another reminder that 20 sets on chest day, for example, is no longer a smart idea. 

Ok, so by now, you’ve had an honest conversation with yourself and understand how you need to track absolutely everything to ensure you are making progress. 

Let’s get to some guidelines. 

Guidelines for hypertrophy after 40

Don’t worry. You aren’t trading in your barbells and dumbbells for a wheelchair and water aerobics. However, you will have to approach your lifting a little bit differently. 

Stop skipping your warmup. You aren’t 20 anymore. You must get the blood flowing with light cardio, foam rolling, or dynamic warmup drills/corrective exercises. This also means that you start with the bar and light weights for your compound lifts before getting into working sets. 

Once you get into those working sets, you can still challenge yourself, but tons of heavy weight and high volume are likely a thing of the past. Now hang on a second I’m not saying to start doing light weights and high reps. You can still do the big lifts and make tons of progress with them if you perform them correctly. You will now chase perfect technique over ugly grinder reps with five more pounds than last week to boost your ego.

Focusing on control and time under tension during these lifts while hitting your required reps will be key. 

You might also need to rotate variations for these compound lifts if your body feels a bit beat up. Pause reps, slow eccentrics, or rest pauses are great options for getting stronger without stacking on more weight. Even trying a block of more unilateral training can allow you to come back stronger after fixing imbalances once you return to bilateral lifts. Make sure you aren’t going for personal bests on isolation exercises anymore, and save that for the compound lifts. Instead, focus on the mind-muscle connection with all the isolation stuff. 

If you have been training for 4-5 days a week and are still making progress, that’s great. If you haven’t been progressing, trying a three-day-a-week full-body routine may be worth trying. You should also shoot for sessions to be around 45-60 minutes and no longer. This training style has been shown to build more muscle than hitting muscle groups one day a week for people who have been training for some time3. 

I know it doesn’t sound as cool, but low-intensity cardio sessions and stretching will also be your friend. The cardio sessions will help you recover and keep your heart strong and metabolism up. Stretching isn’t going to be a magical fix, but if you notice before you lift that one side of something is much tighter than the other, 60 seconds of stretching has been shown to improve the range of motion4. A tight muscle/body will be an injured body, so don’t skip out on this stuff. 

On top of that, you will want to add a deload week. It’s common to do three hard weeks and one light week, but you can play around with it when you need it. Just remember, most of the time, you will feel like you can skip the deload week, but nobody can go 52 weeks a year without taking one. 

Finally, it’s time to give up any exercises that constantly leave you in pain. Find a better variation because you have accumulated some mileage on that body. Some easy examples are a heels elevated goblet squat instead of a barbell squat, a trap bar instead of a straight bar deadlift, a dumbbell bench press instead of a straight bar, or a bottoms-up kettlebell press instead of a barbell shoulder press. 

Wrapping up

Most people waste their prime training years by trying to be lean instead of building muscle. It’s a hard process that doesn’t get any easier over the years, but it certainly can be done. Be honest with yourself, track your training and diet, and make changes when you need to if you aren’t hitting your goals. 

Sometimes this stuff takes is a mindset shift. If you could bench 315 at 35 and still can at 45, it doesn’t mean you didn’t make any progress. We are all destined to lose muscle and strength at some point, so maintaining it over time is also a significant achievement. 

Now get in the gym and train hard and smart… for your age. 

About the Author

Travis Halena is a personal trainer with 14 years of experience that includes training professional athletes, teaching group fitness classes, designing programming and choreography for gyms, and one-on-one sessions with every type of client you can imagine. He is constantly learning and evolving to see what works and what doesn’t so he can help clients sift through the never-ending fitness content that’s available today. Travis aims to help everyone move pain-free, feel like an athlete, and look good doing it while fighting father time. After playing baseball and basketball at a high level, he now trains in Jiu-Jitsu when he isn’t with his family and dogs.

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Citations

1.Faulkner JA, Larkin LM, Claflin DR, Brooks SV. AGE-RELATED CHANGES IN THE STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF SKELETAL MUSCLES. Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology. 2007;34(11):1091-1096. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1440-1681.2007.04752.x

2.Van Pelt RE, Dinneno FA, Seals DR, Jones PP. Age-related decline in RMR in physically active men: relation to exercise volume and energy intake. American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism. 2001;281(3):E633-E639. doi:https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpendo.2001.281.3.e633

3.Schoenfeld BJ, Ratamess NA, Peterson MD, Contreras B, Tiryaki-Sonmez G. Influence of Resistance Training Frequency on Muscular Adaptations in Well-Trained Men. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2015;29(7):1821-1829. doi:https://doi.org/10.1519/jsc.0000000000000970

4.Feland JB, Myrer JW, Schulthies SS, Fellingham GW, Measom GW. The effect of duration of stretching of the hamstring muscle group for increasing range of motion in people aged 65 years or older. Physical Therapy. 2001;81(5):1110-1117. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11319936/

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