Middle age is a tricky time. You’ve accumulated a ton of wisdom, but younger generations don’t want to hear it. You’ve climbed the ladder at work, but barely speak the same language as the cubicle-dwellers around you. In many ways, you might feel caught between two worlds.
Reaching mid-life also comes with another curveball: making fitness gains is not as simple as it used to feel. Trying to put on five pounds of muscle? A month of work for a 21-year-old, but maybe six months for you at 48.
While it’s true that building muscle gets harder as you get older, it’s not impossible—especially with the right approach. Here, I’ll break down what your body is up against, plus tricks for working around these roadblocks and keeping your gains-train rolling well into your sunset years.
Why Do Gains Usually Stall In Midlife?
Generally, it’s quite easy to put on muscle when you first start hitting the gym, especially if you’re in your late teens or early twenties. During this phase, your body is physiologically primed to build muscle quickly, and you face fewer external stressors that hinder your progress However, as you progress from, say, 25 to 40, life often becomes more complex. Additional responsibilities such as new roles at work, marriage, children, and mortgages introduce significant stress into your life. By the time you reach middle age, stress may be a constant companion.
From a physiological perspective, building muscle is a response to the primary stressor of lifting weights. However, as additional stressors accumulate, the body’s ability to adapt to weightlifting diminishes. The energy required to manage these other stressors competes with the energy needed for muscle growth. Increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, further complicate muscle adaptation. Elevated cortisol levels, often a result of chronic stress, can lead to muscle breakdown and fat accumulation.
By the time individuals hit 40, levels of anabolic hormones—such as testosterone and growth hormone—which are crucial for muscle building, begin to decline. This combination of decreased anabolic hormone levels and increased cortisol creates a less favorable environment for muscle growth, making it more challenging to maintain the balance between building muscle and gaining fat.
Consequently, plateaus in muscle gains during midlife are common.
Tricks for Overcoming the Midlife Barrier
All of the factors listed above make it harder to build muscle in middle age—but don’t lose hope! You just need to pay extra attention to a handful of details and you can still make gains.
1. Narrow Your Focus On Resistance Training
This first one is the most important. If you want to put on muscle, you need to lift weights. This is true in your early twenties and even more vital in middle age. Remember, muscle growth is just an adaptation to the specific stress of lifting weights—a stimulus that can’t be achieved through any other exercise modality. Running, biking, walking, and the like are all great forms of exercise, but they won’t help you build muscle.
Read More: How To Reduce Pain When Performing Common Lifting Moves
Given the decline in anabolic hormones and increased life stressors that tend to come with middle age, shifting your routine to include more frequent strength training sessions can be beneficial. You may have been able to get away with two weekly lifting sessions in your 20s, but you’ll want to up that to three or four sessions per week by your 40s. This higher frequency can help maintain muscle mass and counteract the hormonal and physiological changes of aging.
2. Lift For Hypertrophy
Of course, how you lift is just as important as lifting itself here. Generally, try to get around eight to 12 reps and ensure your last few reps are noticeably harder than your first few. If you fly through 12 reps without issue, up your weight. This rep range is optimal for building muscle mass—and that ever-important stimulus really comes from those last few tough reps. The harder you push, the more muscle you can put on! Three to four sets of every exercise will help maximize your gains.
Additionally, incorporating more recovery time, focusing on proper nutrition (more on that soon), and integrating flexibility and mobility exercises can help support your overall fitness and muscle-building efforts as you age. Adjusting your routine to include these elements will help you continue to make gains and maintain muscle health.
3. Focus on Compound Movements
For older individuals, focusing on compound movements is a good idea. Compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and rows engage multiple muscle groups simultaneously and have been shown to elicit a greater anabolic hormone response compared to isolation exercises. This means that exercises involving large muscle groups and multiple joints not only build strength and muscle more efficiently but also stimulate the release of hormones like testosterone and growth hormone, which are crucial for muscle growth and recovery.
Building your routine around compound movements can have the following benefits:
- Enhanced hormonal response: Again, compound movements stimulate the production of anabolic hormones, which support muscle growth and overall strength.
- Efficient workouts: These exercises allow you to work multiple muscle groups in less time.
- Improved functional strength: Because compound movements mimic everyday activities, they can improve your functional strength, making daily tasks easier and reducing your risk of injury.
- Increased caloric burn: Engaging larger muscle groups requires more energy, which can help with fat loss and overall metabolic health.
While accessory work (a.k.a. isolation exercises) has its place in a balanced routine, prioritizing compound movements can help older individuals maximize their workout efficiency and overall health benefits.
4. Sleep More
What happens in life when you keep piling more tasks, stressors, and responsibilities into the same 24-hour period each day? You need to take time from somewhere—and often, that “somewhere” ends up being from the time you’d otherwise spend in your bed. If your nightly sleep routine generally leaves you with fewer than six hours of shuteye, you’re doing yourself a disservice when it comes to building muscle.
Sleep is the “restorative” period of our day. It’s when our bodies recover, both mentally and physically, from the day’s stress. Not only is this period crucial for recovery and muscle growth but its duration and quality also affect how we function throughout the waking hours of the day. If you consistently cut your sleep short, you worsen the suboptimal hormonal environment discussed above. Hormones like testosterone drop a bit while cortisol and insulin upregulate a bit. This makes it harder to gain muscle, lose fat, and resist your favorite junk foods.
Read More: Exactly How Sleep Testosterone Levels (And Vice Versa)
Sound familiar? If you want to beat the middle-age muscle-building barrier, you need to dedicate seven hours of sleep each night. Establish a nighttime routine and set consistent bed and wake-up times. The more on-point your sleep is, the better your gains will be!
5. Ramp up the protein
Nutrition is usually a no-brainer topic when it comes to building muscle. It’s pretty intuitive that eating more leads to more gains. However, as we age, our bodies develop an annoying thing called “anabolic resistance.” Generally, it doesn’t really pick up until your mid-to-late 50s, but it starts to creep up in your 40s.
Anabolic resistance means that your protein synthesis response to consuming protein decreases. In your twenties, you would experience a spike of protein synthesis in response to eating 20 grams of protein and, whammo-bammo, you built muscle. But in mid-life and beyond, you might need more like 30 to 40 grams of protein to spark that same response.
This means you really need to pay attention to your protein intake if you’re trying to build muscle in middle age. Every gram of protein is a little less effective than it used to be, so go ahead and add that extra chicken to your Chipotle bowl and get yourself a protein powder.
Read More: 10 Snacks And Meals You Can Plus Up With Protein Powder
Ideally, consume at least a gram of protein per ideal pound of body weight. If my goal weight is 150 pounds, I should try and consume 150 grams of protein per day, spread out over three meals and a snack or two. Ideal forms of protein include lean steak, chicken, turkey, Greek yogurt, and eggs. However, when you’re on-the-go, supplementing with whey or casein protein (or a mixture of both) is a great option.
6. Mind your testosterone
Finally, middle-aged men can always consider the route of hormone therapy. This realm of medicine is still relatively niche, but a decent number of doctors and clinics are starting to really buy into the concept of using testosterone as a medication, rather than demonizing its use.
We know that testosterone levels generally start dropping in your 30s and continue to decline with age. Since testosterone plays a major role in building muscle, your gains might take a hit or become more sluggish as T production wanes.
That’s where testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) potentially comes into play. Talking to your doctor is your best move here, since a number of factors determine whether you might be a good candidate. Generally, TRT is safe when performed under a doctor’s supervision—and, for many people, it’s the golden key to maintaining a robust, more youthful physique and fitness level.
That said, TRT isn’t your only option when faced with a downturn in testosterone production. You can also try a number of natural supplements known for supporting healthy T.
Ashwagandha (300 milligrams twice daily) has been shown to support testosterone levels and muscle strength, while fenugreek (500 milligrams daily) has been found to support healthy testosterone and body composition. Zinc is crucial for testosterone production, and research suggests that supplementing with 30 milligrams per day promotes healthy levels. Finally, 3,000 IU of vitamin D per day has also been shown to positively impact T.
Don’t expect your T levels to suddenly skyrocket, but consider these supplements another tool in your gains-making tool belt. Thankfully, lifting weights, eating well, and getting plenty of sleep all do wonders for your resting testosterone levels, so keep your focus on the basics.
The Bottom Line
Building muscle as you approach “the hill” and move over it is certainly trickier than when you were in your twenties. However, it’s not an impossible task, and focusing on lifting weights, getting more sleep, and eating more protein usually helps you leap over the hurdles of middle age. Your gains train might move slower than it once did, but if you shovel more coal into the firebox, you’ll be back up and chugging along in no time.
Known as ‘The Muscle Ph.D.,’ Dr. Jacob Wilson has a knack for transforming challenging, complex concepts into understandable lessons that can support your body composition and health goals. A skeletal muscle physiologist and sports nutrition expert, Wilson is a leader in muscle sports nutrition. As the CEO of The Applied Science & Performance Institute, he researches supplementation, nutrition, and their impact on muscle size, strength, and power.