I’ve just turned 50. Should I change how I train?’
The honest answer? Maybe. But you definitely shouldn’t completely overhaul your training just because you’ve turned 50. The fundamentals don’t suddenly stop working and a specialised ‘over-fifties training programme’ isn’t automatically smarter than the plans you’ve been seeing results from for years. What is likely to change, however, is your margin for error in training, and that’s the part I think is worth respecting.
Let’s put to bed some common misconceptions around fitness and ageing: firstly, the idea that your body is doomed to downshift into slow-metabolism, low-testosterone and no-gains mode the moment 49 is in the rear-view. It’s not that simple. One of the most reassuring findings in this area is that metabolic rate is surprisingly stable from your twenties through to your late fifties, with more noticeable declines tending to show up later.
Ageing does come with some real physiological changes. Over time, we’ll all lose muscle and strength, partly due to lifestyle, but also due to a reduction in motor units and something known as anabolic resistance – your muscles becoming less sensitive to the growth signal from training and protein intake. This will catch up with us all, but you shouldn’t see this as a licence to throw in the towel, it’s actually a provocation to make strength training more of a priority than ever, as it’s your only defence against decline. You’ll still be chasing gains, but at this stage it’s also an insurance policy against muscle loss, bone density decreases and losing your physical independence.
If there are adjustments to be made in training, they should be based around how you lift. For starters, it’s a good idea to stop turning every session into a reckless max-effort battle. This doesn’t mean don’t lift heavy and hard, it just means lift heavy, hard and smart: prioritise high-quality reps, controlled tempo and a handful of challenging sets – dropping the volume to an amount you actually feel like you can recover from.
Regularly keep to a balanced mix of the big movement patterns – squat, hinge, push, pull and carry – just like you always have, but do it with more attention to how your body is actually responding, not how you want it to respond.
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Spend more time warming up, and if you’re finding a lift consistently irritating or causing niggles, sub it out for a joint-friendlier alternative rather than forcing it. Swaps such as trap-bar deadlift instead of barbell, neutral grip pull-ups and pull-downs, and using dumbbells on more lifts to unlock more comfortable ranges of motion are all good shouts. But the trick, I think, is not to pre-emptively lift like you’re fragile. As you age, you need durability and robustness more than ever, and robustness is built by doing hard work, not avoiding it.
One area that often gets undertrained, especially later in life, is power. The ability to produce force quickly tends to decline faster than strength, and it’s tightly linked to athleticism and everyday capability. Think catching yourself when you trip, getting out of the way quickly or just feeling springy rather than sluggish. Medicine ball throws, kettlebell swings, box jumps, hill sprints or fast reps with sub-maximal loads all tick the box.
You don’t need to change your training after 50. You only need to change it insofar as it helps you keep training consistently. Lift heavy, keep power in the mix, maintain conditioning, respect recovery and nail the boring fundamentals. The biggest mistake in midlife training is training like all hope is gone, when you should be training like your life is on the line – because it is.
