The Truth About Muscle Gain Over 40

When it comes to sheer poor advice on any topic regarding fitness, not much beats the topic of muscle gain. 

Before we get into the specifics of muscle gain, and what is or isn't important, it's a good idea to look at what has shaped the fitness industry, and the bedrock of lies most advice lies on. 

Fitness magazines lie

Right from the very start of muscle magazines, they've been filled with lies. Those lies come in two main forms. 

The first lie is that the people you see on the cover and within their pages are drug free. No one who makes the cover of a muscle magazine is drug free (unless they look awful, in which case it might be true). Some of these people lie outright and claim they're natural (Mike O'Hern, I'm looking at you) and others make the more modern claim of "just being on TRT". The "just TRT" crowd may be on TRT, but they're also on 600-1000mg of self-prescribed gear they bought on the black market. Others still manage to skirt around it by virtue of their fame (such as The Rock, Chris Hemsworth, or Hugh Jackman). None of these people are drug free yet we're told to believe they are. 

The second lie is that their use of the supplements sold within their pages are the key to their physiques, and not the drugs they're using. While there are some supplements that actually do work, none of them are needed to get leaner and/ or stronger. The most useful supplements for people over 40 aren't even things like protein powder or creatine, but more like Vitamin D and magnesium - health supplements rather than performance supplements. 

Magazines and Influencers Sell Fads

When people start off creating content online, they start with stuff that's actually important. But there's only so many articles or videos you can create telling people to get 8 hours of sleep every night or to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. Sooner or later people lose interest. They also lose interest in being told stuff the know they need to do but aren't doing because no one likes being lectured to. ( You can see this very clearly when looking at stats for content with high views for a subject early on, and then barely any when content matter is repeated months later). 

And so what are they to do to keep eyeballs on them, and sales high? Suddenly, instead of writing about the stuff most people should be doing, they're writing about some crazy, obscure topic that, at best, represents a 1% chance of improvement. Because people think they're advanced and they crave new and ever more complex information. And now they're worried about whether their elbow is bent 2 degrees too far for dumbbell lateral raises instead of whether they're adding weight or reps. 

And if you stay in the industry long enough you'll see the same thing repeated over and over in fairly consistent cycles. If you're in my parents age group, you'd have been about 30 when the Atkins Diet came out. That was about the year I was born. And then, when I first started training people about 30 years ago, Protein Power came out, which was really the Atkins Diet rewritten. Fast forward to a few years ago, when I had been training people for nearly 30 years, and suddenly keto diets are all the rage. But Atkins has always been a ketogenic diet. And if you go really far back you can read about the Banting Diet, which was really the first recorded mass health diet and it was a mostly ketogenic diet too. In other words, Ket zealots aren't onto anything new. They've just been sucked back into a diet fad that has been around for over a hundred years now. 

And it's not just diet fads, but training fads too. Back when I first started lifting weights, Arnold was still the biggest name in bodybuilding. He was famous for high volume training twice a day (which was obviously only possible due to his high drug consumption). But then along came Mike Mentzer and Arthur Jones and said that maybe lower volume but training to failure was more important. (And all while completely ignoring the drug side of the equation, of course). Then we had Lee Haney who was back to higher volume, which led to Dorian Yates who was lower volume and training to failure, and now we're back with "researchers" saying higher volumes are good again. In other words, they're fad based too, despite what all the content creators insist for the same reasons as always - they're trying to keep eyeballs on them and remain relevant to keep making as much money as possible. 

I don't begrudge people making a living, but some honesty would be nice. Or even an apology if they're going to come out and say stuff that directly contradicts something they've said or sold previously. That doesn't seem to be a level of integrity that most of the fitness operates with, though. 

The biggest fad to hit the fitness industry ever was the jogging craze of the 70s. It saw the rise of sports wear giants like Nike and grew an entire line of group fitness classes, aka aerobics. In typical fad based fashion, that saw the pendulum swing back the other way and saw the rise of the bodybuilder/ strength training culture, and now we're seeing it swing back the other way with people advocating for heart healthy, zone 2 cardio. For the few of us who have been staunchly stuck in the middle for years, it's nice to see I'm right (for as long as this fad lasts and then people will tell me I'm "wrong" again for about another 20 years until it swings back). 

The Two Factors of Muscle Growth

People will tell you that there are a myriad of factors involved in muscle growth. While there are certainly a lot of things that can influence whether or not you grow, such as how much you're sleeping and your diet, when it comes to what you're doing in the gym, there are only two things to worry about. 

Tension and fatigue. 

Muscular tension when it comes to muscle growth is simple - how hard was the muscle forced to contract? This is not the same as deliberately tensing a muscle while exercising, although many claim that this is important. It's solely a factor of how heavy the weight is. Most research puts this at 80-85% of your limit load, or 1RM. In other words, a weight that will only be able to lift 5-6 times, and an attempt at a 7th rep will be impossible. 

And that gets me to the second factor, fatigue. Training to failure, or near failure, is the second contributing factor to muscle growth. If you finish a set and could have done more than a single rep more, then that set was largely wasted from a muscle gain perspective. 

Studies have shown that it doesn't matter which rep you achieve failure on, with equal growth being shown failing at 5, 15, and 25 reps. And if that's the case, why would you waste the extra time in the gym doing 25 reps when you could do 5-10 reps and halve your workout time? 

Neural and Metabolic Training

There are two main benefits we get from strength training. One relates to the nervous system and how effectively it tells the muscles to contract, and the other relates to things going on within the muscle cells themselves. The first type of adaptations are called neural adaptations as they relate to our nervous system, and the adaptations relating to changes within the cells are termed metabolic changes. (Metabolic changes are things like increased number of mitchondria, increased muscle cell size, and increased glycogen storage or fat utilisation). 

Sets of less than 5 reps are predominantly neural in terms of adaptations. Sets of 8+ reps are predominantly metabolic. So if we want to make the most of our training time, then we want to achieve both types of adaptations, and that means that most of our sets should be in the 5-8 range, with failure occurring around the 8th rep. 

If you really want to make sure you hit the tension component, then pick a big exercise for the muscle group that you're working on and work up to a have 2-3RM. And then go do your other exercises for that muscle group working in the 5-8 range, and making sure to hit failure in the last set of each exercise. 

Reps and Sets

People make this way more complicated than it needs to be. Again, they're trying to keep eyeballs on them by offering something "new and improved" but nothing about muscle has changed in our lifetimes. There has been no significant evolutionary shift since any of us were born, meaning that what works now is the same thing that has always worked. And that means that you need 100 to 150 reps per target muscle group per week. Smaller muscle groups, like chest, will be on the lower end, and larger ones, like legs and back, will be at the higher end. For assistance muscle groups, like arms and shoulders that get used in everything else, you can halve that number as they're already getting tons of work in all other upper body movements. 

It doesn't matter if you choose to spread this volume out over a week, or do all your work for each bodypart within a single session. The only downside to spreading it out over multiple sessions is that you won't be hitting that tension requirement unless you work up to a heavy double or triple in all major lifts every training session - and that will clearly wipe you out pretty quickly and become unmanageable from a recovery perspective. 

As an example using chest, if you worked up to your set of 3, you now need 97 more reps roughly. (And we only count the heavy reps, not warm ups). That means you need roughly 12 sets of 8 reps. That is as simple as 4 sets each of 3 exercises, or 3 sets each of 4 exercises if you wanted more variety. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. 

Real World Results

Following these simple guidelines, I've seen clients putting on 2-3kg of muscle per year over an extended timeframe. I know people will tell you that you should be able to gain much more than that, but most of what people say is muscle gain is really fat gain. When people mistakenly try to bulk they add at least 1kg of fat for every 1kg of eventual muscle, if not 2-3kg. So a 3kg muscle gain is often a 10kg overall weight gain. When they diet off all the fat they've gained, they usually find that the total amount they gain naturally as a 40-plus year old is in the 2-3kg range, with women about half that. That may not sound like much, but that means that over a 3 year period, these people have added 6+kg of lean tissue to their frames, which more than most ever gain in the gym, even in their 20s. 

The benefit of understanding that it is a slow and drawn out process is the avoidance of unhealthy bulking diets and mindsets. While adding tons of weight when younger may seem like a good idea, as you get past 40 all that extra weight gain is going to be a huge negative. Your blood pressure will go up, as will your cholesterol, and if you really go crazy, you may even find that you become a Type II Diabetic. Those two things alone will cause your doctor to start trying to put you on lifelong medication. 

If we add up 3kg of muscle gain over a year, that amounts to 12,000 calories extra needed. To fuel that, we need an extra 32 calories daily from protein versus your normal maintenance diet. That's 8g of extra protein daily, or about 1oz or 30g of chicken breast extra daily. (If you've been sucked in by fitness magazines and the bulking culture, I know this seems like a ridiculously low number, but this is the power of logic, common sense, and math.). No one is gaining extra, unhealthy fat on an extra 30g of chicken breast daily. 

Spend a year following these common sense guidelines and you'll find you've actually gained muscle at the end of the year instead of wasting yet another year fluffing about. Always focus on the two main drivers of tension and fatigue. That means add weight when possible and ensure you work to failure on the last set of each exercise. 

As an extra bonus, think of all the time I've just saved you this year watching YouTube videos hoping to find some new secret.