As you get older, it's tempting to think you need to train harder to keep building muscle. But according to strength coach Jason Brown, the opposite approach may actually lead to better long-term progress.
Brown, who specialises in coaching men over 40, argues that recovery often becomes the limiting factor with age. Instead of spending five or six days a week in the gym, he recommends scaling back your strength training and focusing on getting more out of each session.
'I think 40-plus men have a lot of unique challenges and the best approach is often the approach that we think is too easy or maybe it's not as intense as what we did in our 20s,' he says. 'I think that's a misconception that we need to break down.'
Why Full-Body Training Works
Brown recommends full-body workouts that allow you to train each major movement pattern several times a week while keeping your overall training volume realistic and manageable.
'A full-body split has a number of advantages even if you are an advanced trainee,' he says. 'I've been training my entire life, seriously, 25-plus years, and this is a split that I've dug into more over the last five to six years.'
He believes that two to three strength sessions per week are all you need, explaining: 'You can check all your boxes by hitting your foundational movement patterns. The other end of it is that it gives you more time to recover. You're not trashing your body with an upper-lower split or a body-part split. Those are hard to recover from.'
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Prioritise Recovery
Brown's argument isn't that lifting less somehow stimulates more muscle growth. Rather, reducing unnecessary training volume allows you to recover better, maintain training quality and stay consistent over months and even years.
'You can do a lot more with a lot less. You don't need to go through the roof with volume and intensity in every training session,' he explains. 'We know that if you are staying close to failure with fewer overall sets, we can get a bigger bang for the buck. This is a split that allows you to manage more quality over quantity.'
The approach also frees up time for aerobic conditioning, which many lifters tend to neglect. He recommends using the days between strength sessions for steady-state cardio, explaining that improving your aerobic fitness can support recovery between workouts while benefiting your long-term health.
Your Weekly Split
'Most people have about four sessions per week to train,' he says. 'We can do two full-body strength sessions and two aerobic conditioning sessions. If your stress levels are low, you can do three full-body strength sessions and one aerobic conditioning session.'
He also encourages lifters to stop comparing themselves with the version of themselves that trained decades earlier.
'Be honest with yourself about what you can commit to. I think a lot of guys are thinking about what they did in their 20s. Who you are today is not who you were then. And you probably have a lot more on your plate today than you did in your 20s.'
'It's not just about pushing harder with training. You have to maintain quality over quantity. You have to go with your stress levels,' he says.
In other words, the goal isn't to do more for the sake of it, but to recover well enough that every session moves you forwards.
'I've made the best progress by being mindful of the cycles, by being mindful of how I feel on any given day,' he adds.
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