Q: I’ve heard that we lose up to 8 percent of our muscle mass per decade, starting at age 30. What’s the best way to build new muscle in midlife and beyond?
Maintaining and building new muscle does become harder as you get older. Even if you work out regularly, you might struggle with, say, opening a pickle jar or lifting a suitcase more than you did when you were younger.
With age, your muscles become less responsive to the things that built them up in the past — namely strength training in combination with a protein-rich diet, said Bradley Schoenfeld, a professor of exercise science at Lehman College in New York.
At the same time, your sex hormones — primarily testosterone for men and estrogen for women — decline as you get older, which also hampers your body’s ability to build new muscle. And chronic inflammation may also increase with age, which can make it harder to repair and build new muscle, since your immune system has to work harder to keep you healthy.
But your biology isn’t entirely your destiny, Dr. Schoenfeld said, and strength training can go a long way toward slowing or counteracting these changes. While some muscle loss is inevitable, the rate at which it declines is heavily influenced by lifestyle. Resistance training is like saving for retirement, he said. The earlier you start, the better off you’ll be down the road. Regardless of when you begin, though, it is possible to build new muscle at any age.
You can slow down the clock.
Several studies do suggest that adults lose 3 to 8 percent of their lean muscle mass per decade starting at around age 30, and even more after age 50. But this decline is as much a result of shifting exercise habits as physiological changes, experts said. The less you work your muscles, the less work they are able to do and the faster they atrophy.