Expert advice for exercisers over 40 Muscle growth in middle age Part 2

The question was, what are the best tips for exercisers over 40? Here's what experts in the field of weight training and bodybuilding had to say.

Regenerate smarter and better

Recovery plays an important role for an ageing exerciser and yet it is often neglected. For me and my clients, intelligent regeneration measures inside and outside the gym have brought tangible benefits.

There are many recovery strategies that can be very useful: Active Release Technique (ART), myofascial release, articular pump training, muscle activation techniques (MAT), proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) or other variations or combinations. There are contrast methods, salt baths and even tanning beds that can improve your day-night rhythm and increase your vitamin D production.

However, sleep is most important - it is crucial to your recovery. Here are my sleep strategies:

• Lights out - About 1-2 hours before you go to bed, turn off all lights and only use candlelight.
• Turn off all electronic devices - About an hour before bedtime, turn off your cell phone, computer, TV and the like. Exposure to light stimulates a neural pathway from the eye to areas of the brain that control hormones, body temperature and other functions that play a role in whether we become sleepy or awake. One study, for example, found that unnatural light can have real consequences for our health, including an increased risk of depression.
• Be grateful - list three things you are grateful for just before going to bed. Positive thoughts before going to sleep further reduce stress levels. This is really effective.
• Supplement properly - My recommendations for a good night's sleep are
• 1 serving of ZMA
• 1 serving of melatonin or another sleep formula

- Michael Warren

There are a handful of things you should be aware of

Recovery, mobility, agility

These things need more and more attention as you get older. At 20 you may still be lax in this area, but at 40 you can no longer afford to be. Just add 10-15 minutes of leg swings and hip circles, followed by flexibility training with a band - anything to open up the shoulders like band pull-aparts, squats with overhead band pull apart, etc. Before training, use a broomstick or empty barbell to warm up for the exercise you are going to perform. Start with half repetitions and work your way up to repetitions over the full range of motion over the course of 20 repetitions. This will allow your muscles and joints to prepare for the exercise.

Use dynamic stretching before your training sessions and static stretching after training. Hold each stretch for 15-20 seconds and repeat two to three times.

Give your body enough time between really heavy exercises. As you get older, you need to better calculate your total volume and time between demanding exercises - both per training session and per week. At 40, you probably won't be able to do deadlifts three times a week.

Sleep

If you want to make progress, less than 8 hours of sleep per night will affect your recovery. A lack of sleep lowers testosterone and growth hormone levels and increases the production of cortisol, which is a bad combination for your training.

Nutrition

Make sure you eat good fats, enough protein, smart carbohydrate timing and the right supplements. These are important factors for everyone, but as we get older they can make or break our training. A couple basics for me are fish oil and curcumin three times a day. These support recovery and general health.

In terms of training nutrition, a good pre-workout supplement with EAAs is helpful. Also try to eat 4 to 6 meals a day to keep your metabolism active, stabilize your blood sugar levels and support your digestion.

Cardio

I hate to say this, but at this age you need to think about your heart, your blood pressure and your general wellbeing. I don't think I need to tell you that I love working out hard and could do without cardio, but three 30 minute cardio sessions a week will do wonders for all of the above. Sorry, but sex doesn't count here. Get outside and hike, climb stairs, ski, power walk, swim - do whatever you enjoy that gets your heart rate up and makes you sweat.

- Amit Sapir

Be careful with old injuries

You shouldn't just work towards your goals, you should do so in a way that allows you to keep exercising, which means you should take steps to reduce the risk of exercise-related injuries.

The risk of injury usually increases for those with previous injuries. Most weight training professionals already know this and clients and athletes will often tell their trainer about previous injuries and return to training after a period of rehabilitation. Here is some additional advice:

• Increase the weight you move and the volume carefully in areas of injury.
• Be extra careful with exercises and positions involved in previous injuries. For example, a person who injured their knee on a jump while playing basketball should be extra careful when doing one-legged jumping exercises.
• Don't neglect injured areas - building strength around injured joints is important. Specific training for injured areas has been shown to help prevent future injuries.

- Nick Tumminello

Stop training like you did when you were 20. I'm only 30, but this is solid advice for anyone over 30.

When I was 21, I hired a trainer to help me build mass and strength. And this one really pushed me to my limits. Lots of compound sets, triples and plenty of volume for mass. Then lots of heavy eccentric reps and tempo reps and heavy multi-joint exercises for strength. It was all good training Ten years later I'm still training hard, but things have changed. Getting older means more responsibility, usually more work and more accumulated stress on muscles, joints and connective tissue. I continue to train hard, but I wouldn't dream of pulling off the workouts I did 10 years ago.

Recovery is not something that happens in the blink of an eye, as it might have been in your early twenties. Accumulated age, stress and old injuries make it necessary to take recovery more seriously and train just as hard as intelligently according to age. And if I already feel this at 30, then I can imagine it will be even more pronounced at 40.

Being big and strong is great, but it's worthless if it has an early expiration date.

- Lee Boyce

Get smarter about training and nutrition

At some point it's time to throw in the towel and retire. I've competed in 27 IFBB pro events and in my forties there was only one thing I was missing - a win in a pro event. Now at almost 43, I have won four competitions in the last 2 years. Persistence has paid off, but I also approach my training more intelligently now. The same goes for my diet.

A pre-workout supplement with di- and tripeptides and dextrin is my trump card to beat the ravages of time on the recovery front. Ageing affects your metabolism, so you need to think more about what calories you're taking in and when. Staying in the single-digit body fat range means that you need to consume the majority of your carbohydrates around your workouts.

Even though a supplement like this will give you the fuel you need to get through brutal training sessions, you'd be well advised to avoid marathon training sessions. Instead, aim for more frequent training sessions of shorter duration.

Lately, I've seen good progress with workouts that last 60 minutes. The big difference involves moving as much weight over volume and shorter rest periods - in other words, high density training. This requires moving lighter weights, but the total weight moved in an hour is greater. The intensity is still high and muscle failure is reached, but not with a handful of sets with maximum weight. The limited rest intervals (15 to 30 seconds) will cause growth with less weight. Your joints and back will thank you.

For example, try leg raises with occlusion bandages alternating with goblet squats with elevated heels for 3 rounds, then remove the bandages and rest for 3 minutes. Repeat this one, two or even three more times, alternating the exercises until you have performed each one three times. Light weight, a crazy pump and maximum results with minimal weights.

- Mark Dugdale

Optimize your training with each session and use appropriate stimuli

Use new technology to your advantage. There are various types of affordable equipment that can measure the speed of movement of exercises - also known as velocity-based training (VBT). These devices can accurately predict what your training maximum is for the day and determine training intensities for your individual daily training maximum.

Become familiar with RPE (rate of perceived exertion) based training. Instead of training at a fixed percentage or at your repetition maximum, you can use RPE-based training to adapt to your daily fluctuations in how fresh you feel on a given day.

Use wellness data to monitor your recovery and training load. This includes acute training load and chronic training load. Tracking perceived recovery and especially acute and chronic training load can give you an idea of how ready your body is for training, allowing you to make informed decisions about how intensely you should train.

- Christian Bosse

Fight your anabolic resistance

The most important thing that an exerciser over 40 needs to understand is the concept of and how to combat something called anabolic resistance. This means that your body no longer responds in the same way - and as efficiently - to a growth stimulus as it did during your teens and twenties.

Probably the most important factor for experienced exercisers over 40 is consistently fighting inflammation and knowing that you need to eat more protein than you did when you were younger to even maintain muscle.

Hormones play the biggest role in muscle growth when everything else in training and nutrition is equal. And in your twenties, hormones are far more efficient at building muscle than they will be in your forties.

Because the hormonal response to training and amino acids is reduced in your forties (for example, it takes more leucine to stimulate muscle protein synthesis in your forties than it did during your twenties), it's crucial to identify and break through barriers that come with age.

Chronic underlying inflammation is a key component in reducing insulin sensitivity. However, insulin must function efficiently to transport nutrients into cells for repair and regeneration. For this reason, it is important for exercisers over 40 to reduce inflammation in order to remain as "anabolic" as possible.

To reduce chronic inflammation and increase muscle protein synthesis as much as possible, you should do the following:

• Consume high quality fish oil daily. This fights inflammation and improves muscle protein synthesis.
• Use intermittent fasting. Do this a few days a week for at least 16 hours a day.
• Walk barefoot outside. I know this may sound silly, but the benefits of this are proven and is probably the easiest way to get some natural therapy on a number of fronts. It has even been shown to reduce delayed onset muscle soreness.
• Increase your protein intake to 3 to 3.5 grams per kilogram of body weight on training days and the day after, with an emphasis on increasing leucine intake. Then reduce your protein intake during the fasting phases.
• Do everything you can to increase muscle protein synthesis as much as possible. Fighting the ravages of time is difficult. It's even harder when you're using the same training, diet and recovery protocols you used in your twenties.

- Paul Carter

References

1. Volpi, E, et al. "Exogenous amino acids stimulate net muscle protein synthesis in the elderly." Journal of Clinical Investigation, vol. 101, no. 9, Jan. 1998, pp. 2000-2007, doi:10.1172/jci939.
2. Maroon, Joseph Charles, and Jeffrey W. Bost. "ω-3 Fatty acids (Fish oil) as an anti-inflammatory: an alternative to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for discogenic pain." Surgical Neurology, vol. 65, no. 4, 2006, pp. 326-331, doi:10.1016/j.surneu.2005.10.023.
3. Lavin, Desiree N., et al. "Fasting Induces an Anti-Inflammatory Effect on the Neuroimmune System Which a High-Fat Diet Prevents." Obesity, vol. 19, no. 8, 2011, pp. 1586-1594, doi:10.1038/oby.2011.73.
4. Oschman, James, et al. "The effects of grounding (Earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases." Journal of Inflammation Research, 2015, p. 83, doi:10.2147/jir.s69656.
5. Smith, Gordon I., et al. "Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids augment the muscle protein anabolic response to hyperinsulinaemia-hyperaminoacidaemia in healthy young and middle-aged men and women." Clinical Science, vol. 121, no. 6, Jan. 2011, pp. 267-278, doi:10.1042/cs20100597

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/expert-advice-for-the-over-40-lifter