Building Muscle As You Age One Month Program
LET’S BUILD SOME MUSCLE!
If there is one thing I am sure of, it’s this: I want to go into the second half of my life as healthy as possible and moving daily is a massive part of that.As women age, many develop sarcopenia (in Greek this translates to poverty of flesh). In the Journals of Gerontology, sarcopenia is defined as the loss of muscle mass and strength with age. The abstract also shows that many studies have documented that “exercise training can reverse sarcopenia and that people who retain a high level of physical activity throughout their lives maintain a higher level of physical functioning and can live longer.” Yes please.
This one month program is going to help you do just that! Before we get started, let’s look at the foundation or ‘first principles’of muscle building.
3 Categories For Muscle Building:
1. Muscular Strength -The driver of muscle growth here is intensity
2. Hypertrophy -The driver of muscle growth here is volume
3. Endurance -The driver of muscle growth here is time
In order for growth to occur in any of these categories, you need to push the system. There needs to be some sort of progressive overload on the muscles, in order for the muscle to adapt and change. In Muscular Strength, you are choosing heavier weights, and lower reps. In Hypertrophy, you are targeting individual muscles with a lot of volume throughout the week. You won’t just be doing 1 triceps set per week, rather, you’ll be aiming for between 10-15 sets per week. Volume! In Endurance, you can lift lighter weights, but your rep range will be higher and you will be challenging the muscle to fatigue or failure even.
This program camps in the middle aiming for Hypertrophy. Some of these exclusive workouts are timed, and others are in rep range. I feel like rep range workouts allow me to lift heavier, and gauge my own rest after each exercise. In the timed workouts, you’ll likely find yourself lifting a little lighter (more in the Endurance phase), so be sure to choose weights that fatigue the muscle toward the end of the set.
I have written the program as 5 days/week strength training but by no means do you have to train all 5 days. First and foremost, do what is sustainable! We don’t want you to start and stop. It is recommended to do at least 2-3 strength training workouts per week for muscle maintenance. For muscle growth, remember the driver is volume which is certainly what you’ll get with this program below
If you’ve already been training regularly or doing my workouts, this split should be a good one for you. If you are new to my workouts, or to regular strength training, take your time and ease into it. Volume means that you are able to show up the next day! If you push too hard and get too sore (DOMS -delayed onset of muscle soreness) and can’t show up the next day or the day after that, you haven’t won. Volume means that you are able to show up and train, even if you start by lifting really light weights.
