Ahh, working out. Lifting the iron. Picking heavy things up to put them back down again. Picking even heavier things up to put them back down again. Seeing how many times you can lift heavy things over your head. Watching the results of your slow but steady consistency manifest in the form of more muscle, a better physique, and abs, traps, biceps, triceps, quads that pop.

Some days you look in the mirror with such achievement and pride in your eyes and wonder how much stronger you can get, how much more muscle you can build, and how much more weight you can lift. I’d be lying if I said this isn’t me too, and how I plan to gain and maintain muscle all of my lifting life.

…but I fully realize gaining muscle forever isn’t a realistic thing, at least not in the way it’s generally perceived. So how do you keep building muscle as you age?

Let’s dive in.

Workout Edge: Build Muscle As You Age
[Here’s How]

If you’ve been training for a while now, you know that the phase where you see the most significant changes is in the beginning….and then, your noticeable muscle gains start to taper off.

This goes for men and women. Let’s get one thing cleared off the board right now – I fully recognize that there’s a huge research bias out there when it comes to studies done with men, versus studies done that focus on women and muscle mass gain.

Which is exactly why I’ve written this blog post with a slightly unconventional layout.

So full disclosure: I’ll start out discussing your actual age versus your lifting age, then to provide context for women I’ll debunk some myths around women’s muscle mass.

Guys, you’re welcome to read through the myth debunking part, and I highly encourage it, it’s informative…you might learn a thing or two about your girlfriend/wife the next time she hits up the gym with you.

Women, even if you think you know all there is to know about muscle mass building, entertain me and read it anyway – you might just be surprised with what you learn.

If either of you just want to skip right to the stuff that’s more ‘gender generic,’ the rest of this post will cover that immediately after the myth debunking section.

So let’s roll back our sleeves and get to work.

Actual Age vs Lifting Age

The slowing of muscle growth isn’t specific to age – it comes with training experience and adaptation, and this is where we can identify an overlap in the two. Think of how long you’ve been training as your ‘lifting age’. If you’re an advanced lifter – and by that I mean you’ve been training hard for at 10-15 years – you’ve already gained a respectable amount of muscle.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the body is an amazing thing; it will adapt to what you throw at it, but it’ll also enforce limitations. This means that while it can adapt, it also has a limited capacity to build and keep muscle naturally; and this can boil down to genetics. By genetics think skeletal frame, myostatin levels, the ACTN3 genotype, etc.

I would even say this is a built-in safety mechanism – every person has a different skeletal frame.

Speaking from experience, when you lift heavy, eat a lot, and hydrate to pack on muscle, it can get uncomfortable.

So for me, like all lifters I wanted to see how big I could get, and it’s an experience I don’t regret – would I do it again though? Probably not. I like being agile enough to fight like a boxer or martial artists, not a wrestler.

Your muscles bulge and look full, but it’s a lot to carry around and you can literally feel the discomfort despite looking good (or “hench” as I was called at one point while passing through the UK).

Essentially, it’s not something that’s sustainable over a prolonged period of time, no matter how good it looks.

The average person can (naturally) pack on 30-40 lbs of muscle above their normal weight during their training life.

Some say there are differences between how much muscle men and women can pack on, arguing that women will pack on less muscle than men. “Men can add 30-40 lbs, but women? Only 15-25 lbs,” I’ve both heard and read.

However, this is based on limited research articles, and as a result of this, somewhat biased theory. I say otherwise, having trained men and women; I’ve had clients who I’ve kept in contact with for years, very dedicated ones, that can pack on the same amount of muscle as men – and yes, all without the use of anabolic steroids (their lack of “man face” speaks only truth). The key difference is, just don’t look as ‘large’ as their male counterparts.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, fine, but just answer me one thing – have you SEEN the female gymnasts in the 2024 Olympics? Let alone the other athletes.

The muscle mass that gymnasts versus gym goers can gain is a whole other topic and unlocking your muscle mass potential like that is what some of the greats in bodybuilding used to do using a hybrid method of training (which I’ll cover in an upcoming blog post), but you get what I’m saying here.

Debunking the Myth: Women’s Muscle Mass

I know my readers are both men and women….and there is a lot (and I do mean a lot) of research out there that focuses on male muscle mass gains…so let’s tip the scales a little, taking a moment to stop and debunk the myths around female muscle mass growth and the perceived elusive question of “can women grow as much muscle mass as men?”

The short answer is absolutely yes.

Research shows women can grow the same amount (Roth et al, 2001) and gain more strength than men (O’Hagan et al, 1995). It also shows when muscle mass is the same between both sexes, surprisingly, women have a higher rate of muscle protein synthesis (Henderson et al, 2009).

For example, a study was done with 813 volunteer elite athletes from a cross-section of 15 sporting categories (Healy et al, 2014). Blood samples were taken from all of them, and an endocrine profile was measured on a subset of 693; the samples were withdrawn within 2 hours of an event at a major national or international competition. Demographics and hormone profiles were taken on 454 male and 239 female elite athletes.

The results? Hormone profiles showed significant differences in 19 of 24 measured variables between sexes and between all of the 15 sporting disciplines in men and 11 out of 24 in women. 16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels with complete overlap between the sexes. In short, females had 85% as much lean muscle mass as their male counterparts, and there were highly significant correlations between many of the measured hormones.

So what does that mean? Well, hormone profiles of elite athletes are different than usual reference ranges. Individual results are dependent on a number of factors, including age, physique, and gender, and the differences in profiles between sports also suggest that an individual’s profile may contribute to his or her proficiency in a particular sport.

This reinforces how “myths” can easily be debunked, probably the biggest and most recent one being around boxing at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

I should also take a moment to mention that the research paper from Healy et al (2014) was dedicated to the memory of Dr Elizabeth Ferris, born in 1940 and passed in 2012.

For context (and a brief history lesson), she was an Olympic Bronze medalist in 1960 in Rome in the 3 meter Springboard event, and a Bronze and Silver medalist in the Commonwealth Games. She was a founding member of the Olympians movement and had been a strong voice for women in sports. In 1980 she received the IOC Olympic Order and in 2011 she was the first person to receive the British Olympic Association Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in the Olympic Movement.

Throughout her life she worked to promote the equality of women in sports. She was successful in persuading the IOC to drop gender testing and was strongly opposed to the current rule of the IOC and IAAF defining a ‘normal woman’ on the basis of a serum testosterone. She worked within the researchers’ team and presented the testosterone data from this study to the IOC/IAAF expert group emphasizing the overlap between male and female ranges…but very sadly, they paid no attention.

The difference in muscle mass between men and women comes down to multiple factors, including that women need 12% essential body fat to keep their hormones in check, whereas men can skate by on about 4%. Like I mentioned in the SUPP UP. guides, Women can go as low as 9%, and men can go as low as 2%, but I don’t know too many guys that want to start looking like a ripped version of Jack Skellington. Plus, getting that low with body fat percentages starts to become sort of a “danger zone”.

There’s also external factors that can inhibit women’s muscle growth, and further research on how testosterone isn’t the only thing that determines muscle growth in women; that can be an entirely different blog post on its own though, and I’ll leave that for an upcoming Workout Edge post in September (2 months from now), so stay tuned and look out for it.

The research examples above are the exact reason why I sneer at women and men who justify women taking the “easy” fallback excuse of why women can’t train hard – the potential is there, you’ve just got to tap into it.

Now, back to our more gender generic program.

The Closer You Are, The Slower it Gets

Earlier when I talked about 30-40 lbs, I’m also referring to only muscle weight. So you can see your weight increase by 50-60 lbs over your training years, but about 30-40 lbs of that will be muscle – the rest might be water, collagen, and glycogen, and maybe a bit of fat – either way, you’d still look great. The closer you get to attaining 30 lbs of muscle, the slower and harder things become.

So for example, take someone who’s middle age – by middle age, we’re defining it as a person who’s anywhere from 40-60 years old, so let’s start at the beginning of the scale. Let’s say a 40 year old whose usual non-lifting weight is about 160 lbs, after 15 years of training now sits at around 190 and has the relatively same amount of body fat. That’s 30 lbs of muscle they’ve added by lifting weights consistently over 15 years. This means that they’ve got around 10 more lbs of muscle left that they can add to their frame.

Now let’s say there’s another middle aged lifter, also 40, but they haven’t trained with the same consistency or intensity that the first 40 year old has. They’ve added only 10 lbs of muscle onto their frame throughout those 10-15 years, and if they train correctly, have the potential to gain more muscle than the first 40 year old.

Why is it that the person who’s older in ‘lifting age’ i.e. the one who’s more experienced and dedicated, has a more difficult time adding more muscle mass?

One word – adaptation.

This person’s body has become well-adapted to resistance training. Muscle mass is gained by creating stress on the body, and at the level this person is at, it’s very hard for their training to create a stress on their body. If training is no longer stressful for the body, it won’t develop more muscle because there’s no need for extra muscle to do the work. This is also known as what Schoenfeld et al (2019) calls the “ceiling effect”.

For those of you who have just started resistance training, or you’re still ‘young’ when it comes to your lifting age i.e. you’ve been lifting less time, you have a lot more muscle mass gains to come – celebrate. You’re going to see a lot more gains if you stay consistent and train smart.

There’s three things needed that increase training stress in order to trigger new muscle growth – going harder in your sets, doing more volume, and lifting more weight. Side note – ladies, did you know you can handle more volume than men?

Here’s the kicker though – all of these can raise cortisol levels and potentially stop progression. You also can’t always increase those three things.

Let’s say you try lifting more weight. Remember how I said earlier that the body has a limited capacity to keep and build muscle? Well, there’s eventually a point where it becomes difficult to add 5 lbs every 6-8 weeks to a lift…and if you’re already training to failure (or very close to failure), you don’t have a lot of wiggle room to increase anything there either.

Now let’s say you try adding more volume – for older lifters, this is one of the fastest ways to stop progress. It’s also time inefficient – as much as it is many a lifter’s dream, with life comes responsibilities, so not everyone can spend 3-6 hours in the gym like Arnie did back in his glory days. A seasoned lifter needs incredibly high training stress to keep progression going – but that may do more harm than good when you get to an advanced level.

What about going harder in the gym? While possible, as you get older, your physiology changes. The most relatable change is how life can get ‘busy’ – having a family and full time job / hands-on business can sometimes mean having more stress, which can affect your capacity to progress in the gym. Other things can happen “behind the scenes” as as well, including:

• Muscle tissue eventually adapts to a certain level of loading. If your nerves don’t allow you to produce as much force as you used to, the lower levels of muscle tension made when training may not be sufficient to fully stimulate growth.
• Testosterone levels also tend to decrease as people age.
• IGF-1 and growth hormone can decrease.
• Because of a lower IGF-1 level, stem cells also decrease. For context, you need stem cells to repair muscle damage. Less stem cells mean you repair and build muscle with less ease.
• Losing or having atrophy in nerve cells decreases strength. If your strength goes down, it’s harder to maintain or even add more muscle.
• The body can develop more chronic system inflammation, which can noticeably decrease the ability to build muscle (among other things) partially because it lowers insulin sensitivity.

Just because these things may happen, doesn’t mean you throw in the towel, plop yourself on the couch and start gorging on your favorite comfort foods though.

It just means you have to think differently about how to do it.

Like I say in the SUPP UP. No Bull Gym in a Bag Workout guide, once you understand how things work, you know how to approach your objective. So switch up your perspective and tip the scale by doing some of the things below.

Find Your “Look” and Then Create It

First thing’s first. You have to know what you want to look like as you age. Obviously, if you’ve been training for a while, you already have a good idea of the physique you want. If you’re just starting out, now’s a good time to get a clear picture of your ideal physique.

For the new lifter who’s between 40-60 years old, you’ll be starting from ground zero, so this is important.

For the seasoned lifter, once you’ve achieved your overall muscle mass and you’re close to your body’s genetic limit, you’ll start to hit a ceiling for muscle gain; each person has a maximum amount of muscle they can carry on their frame before they hit their peak.

But all’s not lost – you can still improve how your body looks all by changing where you hold the muscle, i.e., training for aesthetic.

In other words, if you know your body, train to “move” the muscle where you want it to go, for how you want to look – lose muscle in one place, and gain it in another. I’ll give you a few examples:

1. When I train like an athlete, I want a well-rounded body that can sprint/run and lift weights, switching from one to the other with ease. “Train to fight, but be able to run to where the fight is” would be the motto. This means having a little size lost in my arms and chest, but better developed upper and mid back, hamstrings, glutes, and calves.
2. When I train like a bodybuilder, I’ll shift focus to my chest, arms, and quads, but will ultimately lose size in my glutes and hamstrings, creating a more tapered look.
3. If I train like someone following bro science, I’ll put all my workouts into building my arms, shoulders, and chest, foregoing all types of lower body development and watch as my legs slowly turn to chicken sticks.
4. If I train like someone wanting to be #1 twerker on IG, I’ll forego all types of upper body development and put all my focus into my quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves as I watch the world burn.

While the last two were for a chuckle, ultimately it’s the same principle – your weight will stay roughly the same with all of the above scenarios, but the visuals change.

So when you’re starting to reach the peak amount of muscle mass you can carry around, start concentrating on developing muscles that give you the aesthetic you want, deliberately shifting muscles that don’t to the ‘low priority’ maintenance part of your training.

Train Smart, Not Hard

I mentioned this in an earlier blog post about how rest days ultimately equal growth. I’ll say it again here. Training hard workout after workout only forces more adaptation from your body. Lighter or maintenance workouts can help re-sensitize your body to training. It’s also a strategic method that helps restore your CNS.

In this scenario, create a workout plan where you do the minimum required to maintain your current muscle mass. If you’re a seasoned, consistent lifter, this is way less than you think. Cut back on volume, don’t push yourself to failure during sets (i.e. stop 2-3 reps shy of failure), and focus on good, strict form and technique instead of chasing the weight.

Shoot for 3 full body workouts every week, using 3-4 lifts per workout. After that time period, go hard for 6-8 weeks, ramping up your workouts every 2 weeks.

I figured out this strategy by accident when my career required me to travel more. Between travel and my workload, I trained about 3 times a week because my energy levels were low and I didn’t have the usual fuel in the tank to push myself. Once the travel died down though, I got back to my regular training and blew past a lot of PRs.

Decrease Inflammation

This is short and sweet. I’ve mentioned oxidative stress a few times over the years, and I should add it’s oxidative stress that prevents you from getting leaner and building more muscle as you age. Naturally, this is just one component – the others are nutrition uptake and lifestyle.

That being said, if you remember what I wrote in the SUPP UP. No Bull Whole Food Military Nutrition at Home guide, you’ll know that curcumin, which can most commonly be found in turmeric, is great at countering oxidative stress.

This is why it’s a good idea to add turmeric as a key ingredient in your meals, or take it as a supplement in capsule form.

I’ve also stressed that fish oil, specifically DHA rich fish oil is good for combating inflammation in the at home nutrition guide.

Don’t cheap out and get inferior fish oil, aim for something that’s high quality, from brands like NOW or Solgar.

Lean Out

I don’t need to do a long and detailed explanation as to why this is important. The more lean you are, the more defined you are – the more defined you are, the better you look.

For instance, I’ve been bigger and looked better in clothing, but not so much when I was at the beach. I’ve been leaner and while my clothing didn’t hug my skin i.e. arms, quads, calves etc as much, I’ve looked better going for a swim. Overall leaner was the better look, because you can always find better fitting clothing – but having a cut looking body when you’re near naked is a game changer.

It’s all about manipulating the visuals, so if you’re reaching your max in “lifting age”, or you’re reaching/already at middle age, while you may not be able to gain as much muscle as before, you can still look great by focusing on leaning out.

When you know, you know.

Approach Your Training Strategically

If you’ve been lifting for a while, you need a tremendous stimulus to push the body to adapt. Conversely, if you increase your training stress too much, your body can’t bounce back. Approaching your training strategically is a good way to ensure you get that “shock” to the muscles without excessively pushing your body.

So here’s what you do.

Choose a muscle group or two (or alternatively, one big lift) to concentrate on. Train those muscles 3 days a week. Then, train the rest of your body at maintenance level once a week –  you can do this by doing everything in one workout or split it into two. Then every 4 weeks, change gears and focus on a new lift or different muscles.

Take Home Message

While I love to tell myself each time I workout that I’ll continue to grow muscle well into my older years, I know it won’t always be at the rate I want it to be.

Whether it’s your lifting age or your actual age that’s increasing, the road to gaining more muscle can sometimes be a challenge. But just because it’s a challenge doesn’t mean it’s not doable – it’s all about finding ways to evolve and adapt.

Do your homework. I don’t care if you’re just starting out in your 40s, 50s, 60s, or even 70s. Do your homework. Figure out what you want. Figure out what you can do to get it. Then go train, and stay consistent.

If you don’t know where to start, come back to the SUPP UP. blog often, read through some of the old posts. At least understand how your muscles work first. Then, understand how nutrition works. Once you get those two things down and start applying yourself, you’re on your way to seeing real progress.

That’s all, folks.

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References

1. Healy, M.L., Gibney, J., Pentecost, C., Wheeler, M.J. and Sonksen, P.H. 2014. Endocrine profiles in 693 elite athletes in the postcompetition setting. Clin Endocrinol, 81: 294-305. https://doi.org/10.1111/cen.12445
2. Henderson, G.C., Dhatariya, K., Ford, G.C., Klaus, K.A., Basu, R., Rizza, R.A., Jensen, M.D., Khosla, S., O’Brien, P. and Nair, K.S. 2009. Higher muscle protein synthesis in women than men across the lifespan, and failure of androgen administration to amend age-related decrements. The FASEB Journal, 23: 631-641. https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.08-117200
3. O’Hagan, F. T., Sale, D. G., MacDougall, J. D., & Garner, S. H. 1995. Response to resistance training in young women and men. International journal of sports medicine, 16(5), 314–321. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-2007-973012 
4. Pickering, C., & Kiely, J. 2017. ACTN3: More than Just a Gene for Speed. Frontiers in physiology, 8, 1080. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.01080 
5. Roth, S. M., Ivey, F. M., Martel, G. F., Lemmer, J. T., Hurlbut, D. E., Siegel, E. L., Metter, E. J., Fleg, J. L., Fozard, J. L., Kostek, M. C., Wernick, D. M., & Hurley, B. F. 2001. Muscle size responses to strength training in young and older men and women. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 49(11), 1428–1433. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1532-5415.2001.4911233.x
6. Schoenfeld, B. J., Contreras, B., Krieger, J., Grgic, J., Delcastillo, K., Belliard, R., & Alto, A. 2019. Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy but Not Strength in Trained Men. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 51(1), 94–103. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000001764 

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