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I'm too old to gain muscle. Honestly, even I've been guilty of blaming my age as I get out of bed and feel a little bit creaky in the morning because our bodies do change and things do feel harder. And everything out there is telling you just to accept it. But age is rarely the real problem. It's just an easy excuse. It's even the accepted one. But it's still an excuse even when our effort is genuine and the frustration is real. So what I'm going to tell you is stop blaming your age. Start asking what actually needs to change because the reality is change is just simply needed. Today I'm going to give you seven tips to build muscle and improve your metabolism over 40 because harder is not the same as impossible. So go for a walk, listen as you meal prep or get comfy on the couch because by the end of this, you're going to stop using age as the excuse and start seeing it as almost motivation because age is a number, strength is a choice.
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So diving into the seven tips, I want to start with the most important one in my opinion. And part of it is tied to our mindset, use it or lose it. So I'm big on owning our reality and the reality is with age, things shift. But all we have to do is address that there is a change that is happening out there. And what we have to recognize is that so often we're seeing metabolic adaptations, strength being lost because we've actually shifted something because not so beneficial dieting and training practices have added up. Things that worked in the moment, but were quick fixes and are now backfiring. With more time, we've accumulated more. It's almost like that leaky ceiling, which you don't notice until it collapses. Even though there's been a leak there, it's just been slowly dripping for so long and finally you see the ramification of it.
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And that's what happens with age. But when we see that accumulation happen, instead of fixing the leak and then repairing the ceiling, we kind of go, "Oh, it's just there. We're just old now.This is what happens and we stop trying to make it better." So I'm going to tell you, you have to take the attitude of use it or lose it. This means that you have to create that challenge and change for your body. You have to challenge your neuromuscular connection, so your mind-body connection by doing different movements. You have to challenge yourself with intensity, with progression, which I'm going to go over later. Although I will go over one of my favorite lines ever with tip number six. And it's not a sexy one and it's one I actually learned very early on in life, not even with age, but I'm going to go over that in a second.
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It's one of my favorite lines. But anyway, but you have to own the changes and then you have to recognize that if you don't use it, you're going to lose it. We've got to constantly push that progression. We've got to challenge ourselves in new ways. If we're not challenging yourself, we're not creating that change. So I will tell you right now to set your mindset of being a little uncomfortable. That's something I think as we get older, we settle into routines, we settle into the familiar, we create habits, routines, patterns around certain things. We do get more complacent. We've been around this planet longer. We know ourselves better to some extent so we know what we like. But in creating that comfort, that's where we also start our progress. That's where we see we creep on around our middle because we're getting older, yes, but because we're not doing the same things that once kept us fit and healthy.
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Our habits have slid and we haven't noticed that slide because it's been so gradual over the years. So tip number one, you got to have the frame of mind of use it or lose it to keep that strength, to build that muscle and to keep that metabolism healthy because that's what really does it. Number two, stop the dieting. So even if you want to lose fat, and this is why I call it the muscle first fat loss approach, you've got to focus on building muscle because so often when we've chased faster results on the scale, we've slashed our calories lower. And then in the process of losing really fast, we've lost as much muscle as we have fat and our metabolism adapts down. It's why we can feel like we're eating less and less and still not even losing, but even gaining because our body is trying to survive, so it's trying to function off less.
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It means that we lose muscle in the process because that is metabolically costly. It takes energy to be maintained, energy our body fears it will not have coming in. So therefore, guess what? We're not going to maintain that lean muscle. We're going to lose it in seeking faster change on the scale. So those dieting practices we think led to great results to start. They're only going to work against us as we don't have the same optimal hormone levels. We actually are at greater risk for losing muscle anyway as we get older. We can see that anabolic resistance increase. We've also adjusted more training stimuli, which means that we have to create progression in new ways because our body's like, "Well, I can handle this, right? I've done this before." We've done more over our life. And so we have to really recognize that if we're dieting down, we're not going to be creating that muscle, which ends up helping our metabolism, keeping our hormones more balanced, helping with insulin sensitivity and changes in our insulin sensitivity as we get older or why we can see weight creep on around our middle, especially in perimenopause and menopause.
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So stop dieting down. Stop just treating your body like a math equation. Stop just cutting your calories lower. Instead, you've actually got to focus on tip number three, which is focus on protein, but not only focusing on protein, but increasing your protein portions per meal. So we've all been told, or most of us have heard, especially after 40 with all the things we're supposed to do, increase your protein and then you can feel like all you're doing is chowing down on protein, which in reality, when you adjust your portion or you're doing something new, it does feel very different. It's not necessarily what we always want to do or what we like to do, but there has to be a balance. And I think we have to remember too, that what we do to reach a goal is not what we do to maintain it.
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So if we're seeing that we've lost muscle, we're not having the recount that we want to potentially build that muscle, fuel our metabolic health to start, we might have to do something that's not as comfortable to then come back to something that's more sustainable once we've actually achieved our goal and transition to maintenance. I say transition because there is that process going into maintenance and maintenance is doing one thing forever. But I would encourage you to actually increase your protein portion per meal. 20 to 30 grams might have worked really well when you were younger when your hormone environment was optimized, but because we can see anabolic resistance, which means we don't utilize protein as efficiently, occur as we get older, we need more. We need more to elicit that same muscle building response. Not to mention protein goes to so many other things than just building muscle.
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It's what makes up all the tissues of our body. So when we want to repair our skin, hair, nails, see all those things grow, we need more protein. So especially as we get older and we see changes even in our skin health, we need to focus on increasing our protein. And just to circle back to tip number two, because I actually forgot something I wanted to cover, which part of the reason why protein is so key for metabolic health too is that it requires more energy to be digested. But also with under eating, when we're seeing changes in actually our cortisol levels, when we're seeing changes in inflammation with perimenopause and menopause, under eating only makes those things worse. And then we think we're actually overtraining. And I actually saw a ton of people demonizing overtraining when really it was underfueling. So I just want to touch on that because not only under eating, but then under eating protein can be part of that where we do see inflammation rise, we do see slow recovery.
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So increase your protein intake because by increasing your protein intake, you're going to build muscle, fuel your metabolic health, you're going to be energized for your training, you're going to build a repair and recover faster from it. And especially make sure that you're getting quality protein, which has leucine in it. That is a very important amino acid that we want to focus on. So we want to get that quality protein, but shoot for even 40 grams per meal. It's magical. Then tip number four, be strategic with your meal timing. So I don't often talk about mealtiming because I do think it's a detail where if you just go, "I'm working out and lifting and I'm focusing on hanging macros, you're going to see pretty good results with those two basics." But I also think that with the popularity of fasting right now and even it being touted at times for all the longevity benefits, it can be misused.
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And so I bring it up now because I think there can be nuance in using it and I actually loved fasting for a long time, but when we're trying to build the muscle, anything that makes us depleted, that puts us in that energy deficit can fight against our muscle gains and our hard work in the gym. So if you feel like you've been working really hard in the gym, but you're not seeing that reconp happen, you don't look like you train as hard as you do, part of it might be that you're not building that lean muscle and it might be because you're going into training in a fasted state or you're not even breaking your fast right after. So I would say if you like fasting, you got to be really strategic with it, but you might actually want to let it go for a specific muscle building phase, especially to improve your metabolic health because it so often is tied to a calorie deficit, to a little bit lower calorie intake and being a little bit more depleted.
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So just be very conscious of how your mealtiming may be working against you for this next goal of building muscle fueling metabolic health, that muscle first approach, while it might have worked when you wanted to just lose weight overall. But again, are we controlling for muscle being lost or fat being lost? Because the less we control for it, especially the older we get, the more we're putting ourselves at risk for that metabolic slowdown and our muscle. And then we're blaming our age when it's really all these tips and dieting practices and training practices that have added up because we've approached it in a different way our entire life because we could get away with it because our hormone levels were more optimized. So pay attention to your meal timing, even getting in that pre-workout meal of a carbon fat just to make sure you're not depleted, you're going in with more energy because again, too, you have to push that progression, right?
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You got to use it or lose it. And if you can't push that progression because your 100% intensity is not a true 100%, you're really going to feel it. So I would even say optimizing for that pre-workout meal is even more important than we realize. Then tip number five, do not fear intensity. Embrace that challenge. Again, it goes back to the use it or lose it mindset. And this isn't no pain, no gain. You have to meet yourself where you are. You got to scale everything to where you're currently at in terms of your fitness level. However, we fear intensity more and more as we get older, partly because some of us have had injuries. I know I have had injuries and then you sort of fear getting back to the deadlifts that caused them or whatever else happened. But you have to recognize that that intensity when earned is exactly what keeps you growing stronger.
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It keeps that reaction time quick. So I'm talking about intensity not only lifting heavy, and when I'm saying lift heavy, it's not necessarily that you have to do max reps or one rep max or a five rep max. You can lift in higher rep ranges, but still challenge yourself for those even using rest pause so that if you get six reps, you put the weights down for a few seconds, pick them up, you do eight more just to really max out with that weight. So lifting heavy is for the reps and sets that you're using and that can be a diversity and should be a diversity. It can even be different types of tools. It's that challenge is that progression and progressive overload with movements that we're really seeking, not just loads, but you've got to do that and you've got to sprint. You've got to use this intensity and power.
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And I would even say as long as you earn the impact, you'll want to keep in the impact because when you step off something, when you jump down from something in everyday life, when you're hiking and trying to be active and wanting to conquer all these new challenges, you've got to be able to move in every direction, you've got to be able to react, you've got to be able to move and recruit things quickly. That's where this intensity in the gym and a controlled environment where you can truly train it is so important. So do not fear intensity. Do that power and explosive work. And it doesn't have to mean impact to start. You've got to, again, meet yourself where you're at with your current fitness level with your injuries. So it might mean med ball work. It might mean seated battle ropes. It might mean that right now your sprints are walking intervals up an incline, but you want to use that intensity that really pushes your limits, pushes you to that next level, that challenges you a little bit progressively each and every week.
(11:18):
It's not jumping up 20 pounds on something. It's adding maybe five more the next week and then five more the week after that. And finding those little ways to progress movements so that you keep pushing that intensity, that you're not fearing it. You should slightly, and I know this sounds really weird because we want to be a little bit more, oh, you should love everything you're doing and like everything you're doing. And that's all well and good, but that's not the reality of what it means to achieve success. There is some discomfort, actually a lot of discomfort. And so in this, there should be times where you're pushing in your workouts and you're like, I kind of don't want to do this because it's hard. I have to push a little bit more. That intensity is uncomfortable, but do not fear it because fearing it is what makes you old really fast because when we're not pushing to sprint powerfully and quickly, we're not able to catch ourself when we fall.
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That reaction time slows as we get older. And if we're not training it, we're not training against the decline that's naturally there. But that's the thing, we're training against the decline that's naturally there instead of just writing ourselves off and allowing it to happen and allowing it to happen faster because so much of what they've shown with muscle loss and all these different things, really a lot is tied to our lifestyle factors. It's a lot slower than we actually recognize. Not that it's not there, but it's a lot slower. We just add to it by previous dieting practices, previous training practices and accepting the decline and then not using it out of fear, which I get that fear. I've been injured before, which brings me to actually tip number six, regress, regress. One of my favorite lines ever since I learned about the full prehab process and started really creating that off of my own injuries, I did a power lifting championship, was actually the best overall raw lifter and best in my weight class.
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Got injured shortly after that when I was like, I thought I was the strongest ever and recognized that my glutes were not activating in the way that they should, that I had some mobility restrictions and actually hip issues because of a previous ankle injury. So it led me down this whole spiral research mode to really recognize the three part prehab process, but it also made me embrace regress to progress. And I think this is more and more important as we get older because a lot of times too, what we don't recognize is our own inconsistency. We stop being as consistent with our workouts because life gets busy, so we get a workout here or workout there. And inconsistency is almost the worst thing that can happen to us because it allows us to think we can push hard because we're doing enough, but we haven't really built up those connective tissues.
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Our body hasn't really adapted to it because of the inconsistency. So sometimes we need to step back and recognize, hey, I haven't been consistent or hey, I've been out with injury and I have all these different things. I need to address my foundation first because previous injuries, they're never really gone. Yeah, we can rest them, but you didn't correct the underlying issue often. And unless you keep doing what made you better, again, use it or lose it, we can see those things pop up. And even when you're diligent about the different prehab work, different postures and positions, long road trip, different things can make it act up. So it's being conscious that it's never really gone, but you can never stop doing the things that made you better. But this means that a lot of times with getting older, with having more aches and pains that have added up, with even sometimes getting ego, so leading to our own overload and compensations and whatever else, where we end up trying to sort of cheat to do a weight that we really haven't earned and then our back gets a little achy even though we're not out, we keep trying to push and that ultimately sabotages us a lot of times in terms of our recovery.
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It can make us then have injuries that sideline us for longer. So sometimes we need to take our ego out of it and we need to regress to progress. You can only train as hard as you can recover from. So if you're not doing that mobility work, and I would even say overtraining is often under fueling too on top of not doing that mobility work, going back to the stop dieting tip number two, but we need to recognize this. So often what we need to do to actually build muscle is regress, progress. Go back to those basics, focus on the muscle activation, focus on the range of motion that we're completing, not just adding loads. And I say this too because we've adapted to more the longer we've been training and you can't just keep lifting more and more infinitely. The reality is we all have an upper limit to how much we can actually lift.
(15:08):
And so you need to use progression in different ways. And sometimes stepping back, we can actually progress through doing more unstable, awkward balance movements, which we only need more. We need that proprioception, that mind-body connections so that we can be aware of our body and space and have that balance as we get older. But those moves are awkward, right? They're not the glamor moves of challenging yourself with the weight so we don't regress to progress in that way. But sometimes we need to ditch the ego, find different ways to progress movements that allows us to step back and strengthen that foundation and not skip our warmup. That's another key component of the regress to progress. The thing that we think, oh, I'll just skip the warmup to get to the good stuff. No, no, no, you're not getting as much out of the good stuff because you're skipping the warmup.
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And I know that sounds weird when I'm talking about muscle and metabolism, but honestly, if you want to build muscle faster, you got to be actually able to use the muscle correctly in a movement. So if you're deadlifting and trying to build your glutes, your hamstrings, all these different things, and you're only feeling your lower back because you didn't do that warmup and you didn't do that prehab work, guess what? You're not actually building the muscle you want from that movement. So you're working really hard to ultimately make yourself potentially injured and not see it pay off. So I can tell you a little prehab work, even a five minute warmup of foam only stretching and activation can go a long way in improving your muscle hypertrophy. You build more lean muscle, you actually work the large muscles the way they're supposed to be. Instead of having smaller muscles compensate, you're going to burn more calories in your workout.
(16:23):
You're going to rev your metabolism also through building muscle. It's a win-win all around and the higher your metabolic rate, the more you're burning calories at rest, even from building that lean muscle. The more ultimately you're going to lose fat, you're going to feel better, you're going to move stronger, you're going to stop blaming your age because you're going to feel freaking phenomenal. Now, the last thing I want to go over is tip number seven, make your rest days work for you. So it is hard to slow down. It is much easier to say, "I'm just going to throw more effort at it. I'm going to lift more because that feels like what's productive to build muscle, but our muscles repair and rebuild when we take time off." So you need to make those rest days work for you. Now, rest days don't have to be not doing anything.
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You actually want to be active on there. And I would say, especially as we get older, motion is lotion. So you want to make sure that you're going for that walk, which increases your need, which increases your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Fancy way of saying you burn more calories at rest, so you know what? You help your metabolism, you help yourself lose fat. Walking is also a de-stressor, so it's great for reducing inflammation. Lowering cortisol levels, again, helps you all recover, helps you build that muscle, keeps your metabolic rate higher, and fights against that aging process because we are seeing hormonal shifts that are not necessarily in our favor. So use the recovery days to go for a walk. Do that mobility work so that you move better in your sessions so that you're recovering faster. And then also recognize that your rest days working for you doesn't mean eat less on those days.
(17:46):
I often get asked should I eat less on the days that I'm not training? No. Often we need more fuel even on those days to rebuild and repair. So I like to try and keep a consistent weekly average for people. Obviously it's going to vary a little bit for you, but don't underfuel on those days that are in between just because you're not burning as many calories in the day. You need to help make sure that you have enough fuel so that you can rebuild the muscle, but also keep your hormones balanced, keep your body functioning optimally because underfueling your body does go into, what is the best way of saying it is sort of survival mode in that it wants to conserve energy to function off of what you're giving it because it doesn't always trust that it's going to get more calories later.
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That's why when you even increase your calories to start, when you come out of that stop dieting mode, you might find that you are building strength before you're losing fat because your metabolism is rebuilding. Basically it's relearning to use the calories because it can actually trust that they're coming in consistently over being in conservation mode because it's like, we don't know if we'll have these calories coming in enough to actually upregulate other processes, expend this energy in this way so it stores fat. And that's why you can feel like you're even overeating when you're actually under eating. But use the rest day strategically to make sure that you're actually repairing and rebuilding and not just throwing more effort at a problem to a point of diminishing returns. And I will tell you, it can feel like as we get older, we need more recovery and rest.
(19:06):
It's also about designing strategically how you're lifting to make sure that you do have enough time between, but listening to your body, recognizing there has to be some consistency in it. So stop blaming your age. I'm going to tell you, suck it up buttercup in terms of that. It's going to be hard sometimes getting back into it when we have been blaming our age. There are lots of different aches and pains that happen with age too where it's hard to get in the groove, but what actually makes them better is that movement, is that proper fueling, right? So embrace that it is going to be hard to get that momentum going in the right direction, but also embrace that a lot of what you were doing prior is part of the problem. It might have got you to a great place even in the past, but what got you here won't always get you there.
(19:48):
And the more we cling to that, the more we're going to keep bashing our head into the same ceiling, wondering why we can't break through. So stop blaming your age. Recognize that your age is just a number and strength is a choice and you can make that choice by implementing these seven tips. Would love to hear in the comments which one of these hit home for you the most and if you're going to suck it up buttercup and keep defying that number and showing what you're made of.
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