What if You're Not Overfat, Just Under-Muscled?
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Healthy muscles come with a host of benefits that go far beyond staying strong. Think enhanced blood sugar regulation and better hunger regulation, sturdier bones, and increased mobility. Maintaining a healthy muscle mass even increases your chances of surviving several diseases, including cancer.
But here’s a sobering fact: After the age of 30, we lose muscle mass at a rate of 3 to 8 percent a decade, and the rate increases after age 60. “By your 80s, you may have lost nearly 40 percent of muscle,” says Gabrielle Lyon, a doctor of osteopathic medicine and the author of Forever Strong. “And we don’t age in a linear fashion. There are these moments of what we call catabolic crisis—where you get pneumonia or Covid or are laid up in bed for a week—that cause accelerated muscle loss. That’s why it’s so important to build skeletal muscle as early as you can.”
Put simply, “muscle is the currency of longevity,” Lyon says. “You will never make a better investment in your health.” Read on for a user’s guide.
How to build muscle and maintain it
“It doesn’t require a lot to maintain the health of our muscles and to protect lean tissue,” says Lyon. “It could be 30 minutes of walking five days a week, plus two days a week of resistance training,” which encompasses weight lifting (machines and free weights), resistance bands, and exercises that work by utilizing our own body weight, such as lunges and push-ups. Yoga and Pilates are great for your muscles, but they shouldn’t be the only source of strength training you do.
You can also try a few sessions with a personal trainer to boost your confidence, or sign up for a group HIIT—or high-intensity interval training—class at the gym. Even stashing dumbbells by the sofa and lifting while you watch TV counts, as does taking a mini desk break for 10 to 20 squats.
And then there’s the diet piece. You’ve probably heard that 60 percent of your body is made up of water, but did you know that half of the remaining 40 percent—everything from your brains to your bones—is made up of protein? It turns out that we’ve been thinking about this nutrient all wrong, says Lyon. While guidelines for carbs and cholesterol have been updated, the dietary protein recommendations haven’t changed for decades—and the old numbers are “actually the minimum to prevent deficiencies,” she says. “When it comes to body-composition correction and healthy aging, we are abysmal. We’re getting well below what we need.”
The current recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of protein is 46 grams for a woman and 56 grams for a man. Lyon says we should actually consume 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of our ideal body weight. So if you’d like to weigh 150 pounds, you need to be consuming more than 105 grams of protein a day. She recommends aiming for 30 to 50 grams at every meal.
But that’s just a baseline. Protein is the only macronutrient we need to eat more of as we age to counterbalance the accelerated loss of lean muscle mass as we grow older. “Around 40 percent of women over the age of 65 eat below the RDA of protein. The appetite for it seems to go down, but the need for it actually goes up,” Lyon says. For older women, she recommends eating at the higher end of the guidelines, depending on your personal protein target, ensuring that meals include at least 40 grams of protein.
That said, it’s never too early to embrace strength over fitting into a certain size. Here’s how to boost your muscle mass at every age.
In your 30s
Fad diets and hungover carb splurges might be okay in your 20s, but after the big 3-0, “the relationship you develop with food and exercise becomes critical,” says Lyon. “It’s going to be something you’re either going to be able to springboard off or spend decades trying to undo.”
Lyon says that this is a key age to focus on building muscle because the body does it at a more robust rate than in our 40s and 50s: “This is the time where your muscle is still really primed, and you’re very mobile.” She recommends introducing a consistent resistance-training routine, whether it’s 20 minutes on the weight machines at the gym, a total-body strength-training workout on YouTube (see also fitness platforms like Obé Fitness and Peloton), or just working through a set of body-weight exercises like squats and triceps dips.
Lastly, you’ll likely reach your peak bone mass between the ages of 25 and 30 (yikes!). So from 30 onward, you need to take optimal care of your bones. According to Lyon, there is a “clear positive correlation between lean body mass and bone density.” This is due in part to the muscles tugging on the bones as you exercise. The harder the muscles pull, the more your body fortifies the bones.
In your 40s
Many patients in this decade complain to Lyon that although they’re eating and exercising as before, they’re gaining weight. “We know that muscle’s ability to sense nutrients diminishes with age,” she explains. “When muscle becomes less responsive to protein…the tissue changes. When these changes occur, the metabolic abilities of the muscle tissue significantly decline, increasing our risks for disease, fatigue, and obesity.”
These changes generally become detectable in our 40s, and along with the hormonal chaos of perimenopause, they can spell trouble for your waistline. Lyon recommends adding in HIIT training once a week. HIIT involves short stretches of intense exercise, interspersed with rest periods. It has potent fat-burning effects at any age, but the impact is most potent in premenopausal women.
In your 50s
From this point on, muscle mass shrinks 1 to 2 percent per year, and is often replaced with fat, which slows our metabolism and further reduces muscle strength.
Hormones are likely to play a part in your motivation to work out. “After menopause, people’s movement decreases,” Lyon says. “We don’t know why a drop in estrogen changes activity level, but it does.”
That’s why resistance training is more vital than ever before. “It doesn't have to be heavy weights—it can be lighter weights and more repetition,” says Lyon. “If you haven’t hired a personal trainer or you haven’t done group training, this is where you really want to kick that into gear.”
Staying mobile in later life is probably the last thing on your mind as you launch your kids and scale new heights in your career, but laying a foundation now is crucial. “This is where we have to start thinking about how to maintain our independence as long as possible,” Lyon says. That means maintaining muscle mass to do seemingly mundane tasks: “You’re going to have to lift things overhead, and you’re going to have to carry groceries.”
In your 60s and beyond
Even if you’ve neglected your muscles all your life, there’s still plenty you can do now. A study of patients aged 86 to 96 showed that just eight weeks of resistance training yielded an average thigh muscle gain of 9 percent. “I don’t expect someone to do sprint intervals in their 60s or 70s, but I do expect them to do something that is challenging for them,” says Lyon, who recommends using resistance bands to build strength and incorporating a yoga practice into your life. “We’re not training to be better at exercise; we’re training to be more capable in our life,” says Lyon. Are you finally enjoying more freedom? Time to dust off those dumbbells.
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