“I did that stuff in college, when I was a wrestler, but I could never do that now.”
I was at a party hosted by some friends of my husband’s family, and I was talking to my mother in law’s neighbor. I waited for him to say more before I responded.
“I used to love to bench press. And what are those ones where you rip the bar up off the floor and land it on the front of your shoulders?”
“Cleans,” I said.
“Those. I worked out with a guy who could do those all day, really heavy, and I loved those, too. I remember how big my shoulders were, but that guy—I was nothing compared to some of the guys in my gym. It was fun. I enjoyed it.”
“So why don’t you do some of that now?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m too old. I mean, after a certain point, you can’t do as much. I don’t think I could ever get that back.”
As much as I wanted to tell him he was wrong, he was also kind of right. Yeah, after a certain age, you start to lose muscle. And you might not be able to best your 20-year-old-self’s bench press record if you start up again when you’re 59.
But the problem wasn’t just whether he was right. It was also his approach—he had clearly already bought into the idea that whatever he did now in the gym, as a man in his late 50s, was useless because it wasn’t the same as what he could do when he was 20.
And on that point, he was very, very wrong.
So you once bench pressed 225# for reps and now you can’t.
So what?
Does that make training now completely fruitless?
The answer, which I hope is obvious, is no. Training at ANY AGE is always beneficial.
For example, meet Claudia.
She is 75, she is my mother in law, and she trains with me at Fit House twice a week.
She can squat and deadlift. She can lunge and bench press. She does chin ups, ball slams, and abs. And she does these things alongside my other clients who are 20, 30, 40, even 50 years younger than she is.
What’s impressive about Claudia isn’t that she *can* do all these things, though that is impressive in itself.
What’s impressive about Claudia is that she *chooses* to do all these things.
It’s easy to assume that getting strong or healthy or more muscular is just for people who are young. It’s easy to write strength training off as something we no longer benefit from once we hit a certain age, especially if we are comparing our older selves to our former youthful glory days.
It’s also easy to assume we are doomed to getting weaker as we age. After all, once we reach age 40, we lose muscle mass. Some estimates put our muscle loss at around 0.4 pounds of muscle lost every year after age 40, meaning we lose about 4 pounds of muscle per decade when we are sedentary as we age.
Other estimates are even more dire—that we lose a pound of muscle every year after age 30, losing between 3 and 8% of our overall muscle mass every decade. This speeds up after age 60, and it speeds up again after age 70, so by that time, we could be losing 15% of our muscle mass each year.
EACH. YEAR.
And the more sedentary we are, the worse it gets.
The good news, though, is that it isn’t a lost cause. We CAN build muscle as we age. Studies have found that old folks who lift can gain muscle at the same rate as young folks.
But there’s a caveat:
We have to *choose* to train when we are older.
And many older people just aren’t used to the idea that working out is appropriate for them. Claudia’s generation wasn’t raised with the idea that older people should lift weights—and women in that generation are especially tough to convince about the benefits of lifting. They weren’t as encouraged to play sports as kids, and they grew up in a period when physical fitness for women was all about step aerobics and leotards, not squats and deadlifts.
Claudia, though, knew she needed to do something more than her daily walks and light at-home arm workouts. She was concerned about her bone density results, and she wanted to be strong enough to play with and carry around her grandson.
So she chose the only thing that could help her get both:
Strength training.
Now that she’s been doing this for a while, she tells everyone she can about her training. In fact, at the party where the 59-year-old gentleman told me he couldn’t start lifting again, Claudia overheard our conversation.
“Oh, if I can do it, so can you,” she told him. “I do squats and deadlifts, and I do everything everyone else does. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.”
Claudia was not an athlete in her youth, and she had done nothing but some arm exercises with 2.5 pound weights before she came to Fit House.
But at 75, she has built muscle. She has built strength. She’s built balance, and coordination, and core strength.
She was right when she spoke for me at that party, and I’ll let her speak for me again now:
If she can do it, so can you.
About the author
Kristen Perillo
Kristen Perillo is a teacher by day, trainer and nutrition coach by night. She's also a Star Wars nerd, writer, dog (and cat) mom, peanut butter junkie, and Seinfeld devotee. Fitness has done nothing but make her life better, and she is privileged to show other people that it will do the same for them.
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