Your muscles have the best chance of taking shape during the younger years of your life with regular resistance training. However, one annoying fitness fact is this: take a break for more than a couple of weeks and your muscles will begin to waste. We have all known someone who has broken a limb that has been placed in plaster; did you notice how great the muscle wastage was when the plaster was removed?
Muscle Decline
After a certain age, the ability of your body to maintain muscle mass gradually declines. Past studies have shown that muscle loss begins around the age of 40 and from here onwards you start to lose 0.5 - 2% of skeletal muscle each year. If that news wasn't bad enough, muscle mass typically declines by a third between the ages of 50 and 80.
Cardiovascular training, such as running, cycling and swimming won't be enough to fight against muscle loss effectively, due to the fact that the load placed on the working muscles isn't tough enough to stimulate rapid growth.
Lift Heavy
To minimise muscle wasting , it's crucial to follow a varied routine of resistance training - remembering to work with a challenging weight. It can sometimes be tempting to use a light weight, but this will only slow down your results.
Strength training will also help to keep your bones strong, essential to help fight against osteoporosis. A. Hassin (fitness trainer) explains, "The risk of osteoporosis increases as we get older; the risk is much higher for women. Weight training is crucial to help prevent the brittle bone disease. As we get older we start to think that lifting heavy is too dangerous, so we go down the easy road of lifting light, but lifting light isn't going to help against muscle wastage. You have to challenge yourself when it comes to training to slow down muscle decline as we age."
Keep Your Body Guessing
Aim to complete your strength training workout around three to four times a week, making sure to include rest days between workouts. It's important to change your exercises on a regular basis, making sure you hit all of your major muscle groups each time you train - chest, back, shoulders, legs, core, arms. If you do the same exercises all the time you train you will reach a plateau and your results will dramatically slow down. Keep stimulating your muscles from different angles to keep your results on track. You can do this by using different types of equipment, mixing your workout with barbells, dumbbells, resistance bands, medicine balls and even bodyweight exercises. The trick is to keep your body guessing.
