Image: Pexels/Anna Shvets

If you are over age 30 and not working to counter the natural effects of aging, your muscles are wasting away as you read this. By age 70, you’ll have lost about 40% of your once enviable muscle mass. It doesn’t have to be like this, and if it is, you still have time to fix it.

You can build muscle at any age. It just gets a little more challenging later in life.

“Old and young people build muscle in the same way,” explains Roger Fielding, PhD, a professor of medicine at Tufts University. “But as you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective. This makes it harder for older people to build strength but also makes it that much more important for everyone to continue exercising as they age.”

Building muscle, no matter how old you are, offers clear and numerous health benefits.

Stronger body, longer life

You’ve probably heard plenty about physical and mental well-being boosts from aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking. A new study adds to the smaller but convincing body of work on the health benefits of building muscle.

Muscle-strengthening workouts — using weights, resistance bands or even just doing push-ups or some heavy lifting in the garden — lower the risk of heart disease and cancer, and up the odds of longer life, according to a review of 16 studies on the topic, published in the July 2022 issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes per week of strength training, by itself, is linked to a 10–20% lower mortality risk, the research shows. Adding aerobic workouts yields even greater health and longevity gains.

The findings, based mostly on U.S. studies involving observational data, not more rigorous clinical trials, do not prove cause and effect. But they indicate a strong link, one supported by other research that’s found older people with more muscle mass live longer.

You can do this

Around age 50, the chemical and biological processes that trigger muscle growth start working more slowly, Fielding writes. But the process doesn’t stop. It just means older people don’t gain muscle as easily as younger people. And while it might seem hard at first, building muscle gets easier with time, regardless of age.

I learned this in my mid-50s, when I went back to the gym after a sedentary period. At some point, I realized I was able to do more push-ups than I’d ever tried to do. So I set a goal to do 56 on my 56th birthday. It was hard, but I gradually got stronger, and it happened.

“When you do strength training, over time, exercises that at first felt difficult become easier as your muscles increase in strength and size — a process called hypertrophy,” Fielding explains. “Bigger muscles simply have larger muscle fibers and cells, and this allows you to lift heavier weights. As you keep working out, you can continue to increase the difficulty or weight of the exercises as your muscles get bigger and stronger.”

And there’s this: Strength training feels really good, giving you the accurate sense that your body is simply more capable—at anything. But it has a really practical benefit as we age, too: Building muscle helps prevent falls, the leading cause of injury-related death in people 65 and older.

The research: People age 70 and older with a history of falls, who then engaged at-home program to build strength and balance, were 36% less likely to fall again compared with similar at-risk seniors who did not do the exercises, according to a 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s never too late

What if you’ve never worked out before? No problem.

Just ask Mike Harrington, who was a complete couch potato at age 69 and is now a state-champion powerlifter.

Other research confirms what Harrington told me: It’s never too late to start, and anyone can get stronger. One example: People in their 90s, after a 12-week strength-building program, gained strength, power and muscle mass. They were then able to walk faster (which other research has linked to living longer) and get out of chairs more easily.

We don’t have to become powerlifters to reap significant health benefits. The American College of Sports Medicine suggests this basic approach for healthy adults who want to build strength:

• Warm up and cool down for 5–10 minutes.
• Choose a weight or resistance level that you can move eight to 15 times. The last repetition should be difficult.
• Do one to three sets, two or three days a week.
• Exercise all the major muscle groups.
• Use proper technique and full range of controlled motion.
• Seek a professional trainer if you don’t know proper technique.

Whatever activity you choose—weights, resistance bands, yoga, or simply body-weight exercises like push-ups and squats—you can expect the benefits to kick in immediately.

In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, people in their 70s and 80s who had never done structured exercise did one workout in a lab setting. Muscle biopsies found their muscles were responding to the exercise in the same constructive way as other folks their age who were lifelong exercisers. The conclusion, from study leader Leigh Breen, PhD, an exercise researcher at the University of Birmingham:

“It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been a regular exerciser throughout your life, you can still derive benefit from exercise whenever you start.”

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