How To Gain Muscle As You Age
Recently, during last decade, all of my fitness focus was on resistance training. At the beginning of the decade before that, though, I was heavy into endurance training and mostly used resistance training to improve my endurance performance.
Resistance exercise and cardiovascular exercise seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. There are aspects of each, though, that are very complimentary. I can build a solid case proving that specific cardiovascular exercise types are suitable for enhancing muscle growth and maintenance benefits of resistance training.
Gaining Muscle Mass Should Be A Goal
One crucial weight-loss perspective centers on energy and metabolism. It involves muscle mass, the amount and types of food consumed, and how food fuels muscle growth. The idea is that with more muscle, a person has more flexibility in what they choose to include in their diet. The body burns more calories when it has more muscle mass.
How Muscle Cells Grow
Another biological dynamic I should mention has to do with how cells grow. One universal and fundamental outcome of fitness is that our muscle cells grow and fat gets burned. One way to think about weight loss is to focus on insulin. Sudden increases in insulin will cause cells to grow. When growing fat cells is not your goal, the trick is to get your body to where its muscle cells grow at rates faster than fat cells. Resistance training is a way to prime your body to maximize muscle growth and minimize fat cell growth.
This particular weight-loss perspective centers upon recovery from exercise and protein turnover. Protein is essential for muscle growth and satiation. Carbohydrates play a role in delivering vital nutrients to cells. As we approach forty years of age, we tend to be more catabolic, losing approximately one pound of muscle per year. If our goal is to maintain muscle mass or be more catabolic, we must fuel appropriately after exercise.
Develop a Balanced Cardiovascular-Resistance Training Strategy
I have spent many years focussing on endurance sports. It may sound counter-intuitive, but steady-state cardio should not be your fitness focus if weight loss is your goal. While training for triathlons, I noticed that most of my performance gains came from resistance training.
How I Built Leg Muscle
When I started training for triathlons, I often switched between riding a road bike and a mountain bike. For the first few months, I mostly road a mountain bike. I would train hills and ride my mountain bike everywhere I went. During the winter months, it was my primary source of transportation. It made for better riding in inclement weather.
During my first season of training, I switched to riding my road bike as the weather improved. Right off the bat, I recognized how much lighter the road bike was than my mountain bike. The difference in weight meant that I could ride up more hills in a single ride. It also meant I could ride hills faster than if I was riding them on my mountain bike. I had achieved my first significant performance improvement.
Measure Then Realize Your Gains
As I began training in my third sport, running, I decided to consult a physical trainer for help with my triathlon training. One of the exercises I needed to do was a seated leg press on leg day. Every time I sat for my seated leg press, I would make sure I used quick, explosive movements. Over time, I realized that the seated leg press helped me ride hills better than anyone I knew. Another thing I noticed was that my quadriceps were getting massive. Eventually, they got so big my underwear would fit around the waist but not around my quads. My first significant performance improvement had also resulted in massive leg muscle gains.
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