Exercise After 50: Essential Strategies for Strength, Health, and Longevity

Are you over 50 and wondering how to exercise effectively to stay strong, healthy, and independent? 

In today's episode, Josh debunks common myths about exercising as we age and outlines the key strategies you should focus on. 

Learn the essential types of exercise, why strength training is critical for your health and independence, and practical nutrition tips to complement your fitness efforts.

Disclaimer:
"During this episode, I referenced a study indicating cardiovascular training can reverse heart ageing by approximately 20 years. To clarify, the research I mentioned (Howden et al., 2018) involved previously sedentary adults who engaged in structured, high-intensity cardiovascular training consistently over two years (not one year, as stated).

Structured Show Notes:

• Introduction: Common exercise myths after 50
• Realities of Aging: Muscle mass, bone density, metabolism changes
• Strength Training: Why it's your #1 priority after 50
• Cardiovascular Fitness: Reversing heart aging with proper cardio
• Mobility & Flexibility: How it supports overall fitness
• Practical Tips to Get Started: Importance of personal training
• Nutritional Considerations: Protein, carbohydrates, & fats.
• Final Call to Action: Start today for lasting benefits

• Exercise after 50
• Strength training seniors
• Healthy aging fitness
• Muscle mass retention
• Cardiovascular health after 50
• Mobility exercises older adults
• Nutrition for seniors
• Transformation Fit Podcast

Did you enjoy this episode?
Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review the podcast—it really does help us grow and reach more listeners.

Book a 121 Consultation With Josh  - Click this link to schedule a call with Josh to discuss your health and fitness goals

📲 Connect with us online:

• Follow Josh on:
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshrylatt
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/joshrylatt9

Follow Transformation Fit

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformationfituk/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TransformationFitUK/
• Website & Coaching: https://transformationfit.co.uk/

💬 We'd love your feedback!
Let us know what resonated most with you, and what topics you'd like covered next.

Thanks for listening—we appreciate your support!

Transcript

Hey guys, welcome back to this week's podcast episode in today's episode. 

We're going to be discussing exercise after the age of 50. What really works for staying strong, staying healthy, and continuing to be able to do the things that you enjoy in life through smart, nutrition and exercise strategies. So to begin with, there's a lot of common myths that we hear around what you should be doing with regards to your exercise as you get older. A lot of people believe that once you're over the age of 50, it can be too late for you to start exercising, you shouldn't be doing weightlifting or resistance training after the age of 50 because of your weak joints. And I'm here to tell you that these myths aren't just incorrect, but they're actually quite harmful as well. So the reality is, depending on individual lifestyle, genetic factors, from around age 40, a typical male will lose around 1% of his muscle mass each year. And upon the onset of menopause symptoms, a typical female will lose on average 30% of their muscle mass within seven years. So the reality is, once we hit 40, 50 years of age, there are certain changes inside of your body, which means that muscle mass is reduced limiting your function and ability to move, bone density is decreased, meaning that if you were to fall or slip or trip as a result of that loss of muscle mass, you're more likely to break a bone. And because of those reductions in muscle mass, that also has a significant negative impact on your metabolic rate, which is the amount of calories that your body burns at rest. Now, a couple of months ago, I was having a review with a client who was in her early 50s. She was an accountant, so it was a desk based job. And she first came to us because she was feeling weak and she was feeling tired. And she couldn't get her head around it. Her weight hadn't changed at all since she started the menopause, but how she looked, how her clothes fit in the way she felt about herself had changed negatively, massively. So because her weight hadn't changed, she didn't think she needed to make any changes. And I had to explain that once we'd done the in body scan with her, it was showing that her fat mass was high and her muscle mass was low. And these are one of the kind of negative pitfalls you can get into when you only look at body weight. The reality is, as you age, your weight might not change, but the amount of muscle you have decrease in the amount of fat mass increases and that creates a negative health situation in your body. And there are certain techniques such as using strength training and utilising and eating the right amount of protein and a regular basis, which can help offset some of these things. So what we're going to do now is just take a deeper dive into what you should be doing. Okay? And how we do that safely and effectively. So the key types of exercise that you should be prioritising after the age of 50 Number one priority, in my opinion, would be strength training. Now, the strength training is essential for muscle retention and bone retention. You don't get that from sitting on an exercise bike or, you know, doing low intensity circuit training, for example. Okay. The benefits and the benefits, they are there, but they're just not great for the strength training inside of it. You're not going to retain your muscle m. You're not going to build strength. You're not going to increase your bone health in your metabolic rate with that type of training. So what we actually recommend is picking, you know, two to three exercises that cover different joints in your body. Okay? And then performing them maybe two, three days a week, but increasing the amount of reps or increasing the amount of weight that you use each time. Okay? So that's what we call progressive overload. We like compound exercises about hit two or more joints in one go. So things like squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, those types of exercises are particularly beneficial for building up your strength, retaining your muscle mass and retaining your bone health. And there are certain studies which show that having a lack of muscle mass as you age increases your risk of dying from all causes. So when we have certain amounts of grip strength, when we have certain amounts of leg strength, that actually decreases your risk of dying from a whole host of different reasons. So it's vital that you really work on those big muscle groups, your legs, your chest, your back, your arms, those types of areas to help cover you as you age so you can continue to function and do the things that you enjoy. I'd like you to imagine a really frail or elderly relative and think about what got them there. In most cases, they didn't wake up overnight like that. There was a slow degradation of their capacity to move, their strength, their functionality with their day to day tasks. And you have to help them a little bit more and a little bit more as time goes by. Now, if those people engaged in regular strength training, unless there was something really unlucky or a sudden accident or something like that, the likelihood is they'd be able to retain those capabilities and that's why we've got people in their late 70s, their 80s, driving, walking around, still working, being able to do things that they enjoy because they regularly take part in strength training. The second area of exercise, which I'd love for you to focus on is actually cardiiovascular exercise. Now, there's a recent study which showed that working on your cardiovascular fitness, four days per week at the age of 50, reversed hearts age by around 20 years. So one year of intense structured training, working on your cardiovascular systems, that means getting out of prayer, that's, you're running, you're cycling, you're rowing, you know, cross-r of those types of things that are good at high enough intensity and high enough volume can reduce the age of your heart by around 20 years. That's with just one year of exercise and all the participants in that study were aged over 50. If you're not doing that type of exercise, then I'd encourage you to start. Now, another great benefit is strength training just to bring it back a moment is that actually there is a cardiovascular benefit when you first start out, because your level of fitness can be quite low if you're a beginner. When you do strength training, that can actually increase your cardiovascular fitness as well, but there will come a point where that strength training isn't particularly working on that mode of fitness to any great extent. So the more stronger you become, the more important it is that you include that cardiovascular exercise as well. And then a lot of people talk to me around flexibility and mobility and they think that their training should include more things like stretching and mobility and flexibility type exercises. Now, the research on this is very clear. When we look at reducing injury risk, OK, stretching does have a positive effects on reducing injury risk, OK? It will reduce your risk of injury by around about four or 5%. When we look at strength training, though, that can reduce your injury risk by around 69%, OK? And what I'd like you to think about now is actually, flexibility and mobility training is a form of strength training, OK? We're working the muscles and the joints through a large range of motion. We're activating those muscle groups when we use them. But the problem is, once you've unlocked the required range of motion in your joints and you can move freely again, that mobility training doesn't really benefit you anymore above just kind of keeping you where you're at. And if that's if you're happy with that, that's fine. What we need to do is we need to add load as time goes by. So mobility and flexibility training really is like the beginning phase of a strength training programme. And the body will stop adapting if the exercise isn't progressed and advanced over a period of time. And that's where so many people go wrong with their gym membership. They go in, they do a few different exercises, they pick the same weight every week. They pick the same amount of reps, the same routine, and they don't ever progress it. If you don't ever progress it, then your body is not being told to adapt and respond and to give you further results. So you've got to progress and you've got to advance those exercises as time goes by. So how do you actually get started or restarted if you used to exercising the past? Well, I'm of the opinion that anybody can go and do this type of exercise. I have clients who have started with me in their late 70s, who can't even walk, but we still did strength training because that was the fastest route to get them back on their feet. If you feel weak, if you feel achy, if you feel fragile, if you feel like you can't do strength training because of your lack of exercise or lack of strength or whatever it is, injury risk, you are the type of person who will benefit most from that type of exercising. So when you begin, honestly, the best approach would be to hire a coach. So go and find a personal trainer who can help teach you these exercises in the most safe and effective way. People think of personal training, coaching as a pure expense and they contrast it to the price of a gym membership. But my advice would be to think about it as an investment, okay? Look at what you're going to get back from that investment into that coaching, into that personal training. You're going to learn tools and techniques and strategies for life, which, you know, they may not add 10, 15, 20 years onto your life. They may do, but they might not. But what they will do is ensure that that last five or ten years of your life are spent living on your own terms and not depending on other people as well as your relatives. Okay, so think about investing in coaching, think about investing in personal training programmes as an investment into your future self, okay? I'm not going to sit here bashing commercial gyms too much, but people will often compare our programme with a pure gym, which is a fraction of a cost. And the reality is, you can't compare the two guys. Honestly, you can't. You go into a commercial gym, you don't get any support, you don't get anybody watching over you, making sure that you're doing it correct. You don't have anybody checking in with you. If you don't show up for two weeks. In fact, their business model is based on around 80 to 85% of their members who are paying, not actually showing up, right? If everybody who was a member actually showed up to those gyms, they'd be a massive trouble because they wouldn't be able to fit everybody in. So you can't compare a personal trainer a coach with a commercial gym because the two things are completely different. So if you're starting out or restarting, I honestly believe it is worth it investment in the coaching to set you on the right path, give you all the tools and the techniques that you need, they can adapt it and personalise it to your fitness level right now and that is the best way to start. If you don't have the expense or the inclination to invest into your health by hiring a coach, then your next best bet is like looking at YouTube, you know, get the YouTube, get the YouTube app open on your phone, go into the gyms, watch for tutorials of how to perform a squat safely, record yourself, doing it, and then compare the recording of you doing it tuber tutorial and try to self-coach. The problem with that is it takes so much time, you don't get that immediate feedback and my advice would be, don't start, you know, trying to do crazy weights to begin with because you're likely to get injured. And that's the second, you know, that's the last thing I'm going to talk about in terms of getting started. It's going to be uncomfortable when you begin, guys. You're not going to feel you feel confident doing these exercises. You can feel quite sore in your muscles, in your joints once you start exercising after a long layoff and it can be quite hard to identify what is a good pain and what is a bad pain when you first start. So try and be as safe as possible, but just remember that sooner or later, you're going to need to progress these exercises and make them more difficult if you want to continue seeing the results as well. Now it wouldn't be fair for me to close off with a little bit of nutrition advice around this as well, because the reality is, even if you do start all of this exercise and you're being consistent with it, your results can definitely be thwarted by not focussing on your nutrition. So I'm not going to lecture you for too long about the diet side of things, but it's super crucial that you're consuming enough protein to allow your muscles to recover and grow after these types of exercises. Okay? So typical typical recommendations would be 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per kilogramme of body weight on dietary carbohydrate intake, depending on how active you are, you'd want to go between, you know, even zero to two grams of carbohydrates per kilo for typical person, the more active you are, then the higher I would go on that range. And in terms of dietary fat intake, I would make sure that I'm consuming maybe one gram of fat per kilo of body weight as a starting point. Supplements like multivitamins, Omega free fish oils, create a team on a hydrate can help massively as you age, as well as vitamin D free and magnesium unreommending more and more. I'm not going to go into all of the details around those supplements now. That'll be safe for another episode, purely because of time constraints. So final tips and call to action is really simple. If you're not doing any of those types of exercise and you are over the age of 50, I would massively encourage you to just get started. It doesn't have to be perfect, okay? It's not going to be perfect when you first begin. But if you value your health, if you value being able to do the things that you enjoy with your friends, your family, your kids, your grandkids, then strength training, cardiovascular training, mobility training, are the tools that you can use to continue doing those things as you age? Don't wait until it's too late. Get started as soon as you can, and I'll see you on the next podcast. Take care, guys.