Strength Training After 50: Why Your Routine Must Change

If you’ve ever wondered why your body doesn’t bounce back like it used to, this episode is for you.

In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, Lauren Eirk dives into a truth many adults over 50 experience—but few truly understand:

Why does strength training feel so different as we age?

If you’ve ever wondered why your body doesn’t respond the same way it did in your 20s or 30s… why recovery takes longer… why injuries seem to happen more easily… or why workouts that once worked now leave you feeling depleted instead of stronger—this episode is for you.

Lauren breaks down three major changes that affect strength after 50:

✔️ Neurological changes that affect muscle activation, reaction time, balance, and coordination
✔️ Hormonal shifts that impact muscle building, connective tissue health, and resilience
✔️ Recovery changes that make smart programming more important than ever

But this episode isn’t about decline.

It’s about learning how to train with greater wisdom.

Drawing from nearly 40 years in the fitness industry, and her own personal journey through injury, overtraining, and rebuilding, Lauren explains why harder is not always better, and why strategic resistance training becomes non-negotiable after 50.

You’ll also learn:

• Why random workouts stop working
• Why isometrics may be the smartest place to begin
• How muscle strength protects joints, balance, and longevity
• Why consistency beats intensity as we age
• How to rethink exercise if you want to stay active for life

If you’re ready to stop guessing and start training smarter, this episode will change how you think about strength forever.

Timestamps:
00:00 Trailer to MMM
00:24 Introduction
02:22 Neural Bucket
04:58 Hormonal Change Bucket
07:16 Recovery Bucket
09:25 My Aging Struggles
10:01 Solutions
12:07 Role of Muscle
16:39 The Isometric Method
19:44 Conclusion

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience. I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, and one day at a time. Over the years, I have seen many strong people start to doubt their bodies. Not because they stopped caring, but because strength actually showed up differently after the age of 50. In this episode, I'm going to talk with you about three categories in which our body does change between the ages of 40, 50, and 60 and give you some information about how we can make smarter training decisions. Now I'm going to tell you a little bit about some of my personal struggles and also give you some great resources of where to go next. Welcome to the Making Muscle Memories Podcast. My name is Lauren Erk and I will be your host today. In this episode, I want to talk with you about why strength changes in our 40s, 50s, and 60s. Now let's just begin with what you may be dealing with right now. Maybe when you were in your 20s and 30s, I know this has definitely been my experience. We could do just about anything and we could definitely benefit from it. Remember when you decide to go on a diet and you just gave up dessert a couple of times a week and all of a sudden the pounds came off? Or you went to the gym, you worked out, did a couple of workouts, and you started to see muscle growth within a matter of weeks. Well, this definitely is going to change when we get older. And when we certainly reach the peak that I say at age 50, man, it definitely changes. I know it did for me. But the real point that I want to make in this episode is that you're not doing anything wrong. You actually just need to understand why this is happening and look at this from a strength perspective in terms of how can we train smarter? It has been my experience in my 50s that I am in better shape and understand my body now way more than I ever did in my 20s when all I did was peep myself up. So what does change as we move into our 40s, 50s, and 60s? I'm going to talk about this in three different groups and I'm going to call them buckets. The first bucket is going to be the neural bucket. Why neural? Did you know that muscles cannot do their job unless the brain tells it to? And so if we're going to talk about the nervous system, we have to understand the main character, and that is the motor unit. What is a motor unit? I want you to think about a single nerve cell. This nerve cell innervates or connects into a specific amount of muscle fibers. So when we think about a motor unit, it is a motor neuron and all of the fibers that it innervates. So how would I think about this? It would be like if you have a light switch on in your house and you go to turn on your light and it actually ignites several different lamps or maybe something on the ceiling all at once. And I'm sure you all have experienced in a thunderstorm or a circuit breaker when the whole half of your house goes dark. This is kind of like what happens as we age. Not to mention the fact that the communication between one nerve cell and another, which we call that synaptic cleft there, that communication gets slower as we age. So you notice that when people go to react against something, maybe they walk along the road and they hit a pothole, they can't react as quickly. And we see people actually starting to fall in their 50s and 60s. And they're always coming to me like, what happened? I can't believe I'm falling all the time. It is simply because our motor units cannot be recruited as quickly, and they actually start to diminish as we age. And I know that this can seem depressing, but we have to accept the fact that our bodies are not going to be the same throughout our life. And you know, sometimes I think about this and I think it's not necessarily a bad thing because it makes us slow down. It makes us really enjoy the present moment and appreciate those days when things are firing all cylinders. Knowing this neurological connection, what we can do is we can warm up a little bit slower. We may need to do some isometrics before we go and do an activity. Maybe we need to spend some time learning about how our body is moving today because it may be moving differently than it was the day before, so that we know what we need to do to work out. I know for myself, this has taught me so much about my body and has made me appreciate and understand my body in such a way that I never would have experienced in my 20s, and I'm actually grateful for it. Now, in the next bucket, I want to talk with you about hormone changes. Yes, anabolic hormones. You just simply don't see a lot of major athletes come on the scene in their 50s. I mean, we see it from time to time, but most of the time you're gonna see an athlete start to thinking about retiring in their 50s and 60s. This is largely not only because the muscle, the motor units are declining, the motor units, it's actually because our hormones are declining as well. We have less estrogen, testosterone, and growth hormone. Our body produces less. We don't need it as much. We're not reproducing like we were when we were 20 in our 20s and 30s, and our lifestyle is going to change as well. Our priorities start to change as well. So we think about these changes in our hormones. Some people choose to do hormone replacement therapy, change their diets, whatnot. Certainly, resistance training, which I'm going to be talking with you a lot more here in just a bit, is going to be a part of that. But knowing this about our bodies and knowing this is going to be an inevitable thing, we have to understand that this is going to affect our connective tissue. Now, there's a reason why a lot of older women are going to the plastic surgeon to get collagen plumped into their face. Our skin doesn't stay the same as we get older. I know I've I have tried this once in my life, and I swore I would never do it again. It's awful, but I know some women do this all the time, and it is definitely a part of aging for sure. But we have to also think about the things that we can't see inside of our joints, and that would be our tendons and our ligaments. They are going to be a lot stiffer in our body because of this decline in hormones. What does that mean? Again, warming up and choosing activities that are not explosive or maybe outside of our current limitations are going to be really crucial because, quite simply, as we get older, we are going to get injured more. I know I've had this lesson handed to me on a number of occasions when I have just felt really good. There was good music playing, I thought I'm just going to do the same thing I did when I was 20, and then I end up with an injury. So that is definitely something to consider. Now, on the last bucket, this is an important one. I want to talk with you about the idea of recovery. We simply don't recover as quickly from any sort of physical exercise or trauma the same way that we did when we were younger. Stress can show up from emotional stress, it can show up from physical stress, and it can come from nutritional stress. If you notice, if we have too much stress in those areas, as we get aged, we have less ability to manage that. And I know for me, I've had to be really sensitive about this as a trainer and as well as just an exercise professional in general. I have to understand that you know when someone is up in age, certain emotional events can have a dramatic effect on someone's body. And also, if I give them a really hard workout on Tuesday, I may have to intentionally back off on Thursday if their body is still not recovered. This is going to be prevalent throughout all of our lives. And again, I think this can actually be a good thing. I have learned as I've gotten older to appreciate the slower method in which I train. I actually now take days off that I never used to do when I was 20. I used to think that, you know, if working your abs were good, I should just work them every single day. Now I realize that muscles need to repair themselves, and that happens during my off days. Now you have to remember that any kind of injury or trauma that our body has experienced, they're still there in your body. If you're a woman listening to this podcast and you've had a C-section, I don't care if that C-section was 20 years ago. Your core is weak. With your core being weak because basically you've been sliced open, it is going to definitely set you up for a higher rate of injury in your lower back, sciatic pain, plantar fasciitis, frozen shoulder. A lot of that can be dialed down into a weak core. If you have arthritic joints due to wear and tear, I know this would be me. I used to be a long-distance runner, and I used to teach so many aerobic classes a week. I'm almost embarrassed to tell you guys. I probably will do an episode eventually and tell you a little bit about what I used to put myself through. But definitely, my joints are not the same as they were when they were 20, and I have to be respectful of that. I have stairs in my house. I have six flights of stairs, and when I'm doing laundry and I'm up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs, I know that the next day my knee is going to pay for it. And so I have to make sure that I continuously squat, do leg extensions, leg curls, leg presses, lunges, and I do this all throughout my platform, FIS on demand, because I really truly believe that we have to keep these muscles strong if we're going to keep our arthritic joints from wearing out over time. Now, we have to remember we can't do too much as we age. We have to sort of get a lot more variety in our programs than we ever had to do it before. Now, if you're somebody that's involved in some kind of a sport, maybe you do pickleball every day and you have to get that ball up and you have to swing it across your body, that is a repetitive activity. If you want to play golf and you're continuously swinging a golf club, your body will have to do some alternative things to be able to sustain that. And I've seen so many of my clients being completely depressed because they can't perform these activities the same way that they used to when they were in their 20s. Now, I want to talk with you about solutions. Why can this be a good thing and how can we train our bodies to match what's happening with our aging process? I'm gonna say resistance training is non-negotiable. Throughout my life, in my career, I feel like there were times in my life that I was focused on heart rate training. As I've gotten older, I realized everything as we get older is about the muscular system. So everything is a joint conversation. The joint is the meeting place between the two bones. What do muscles do in relationship to the joint? Well, they can move them. I can move my this arm to this arm, this this bone to this bone, and bend my elbow. I can also hold something still so that something else around it can actually happen and so I don't get hurt. Muscles also can push against things in our environment to keep us from getting hurt, and they can absorb forces, not only forces from the outside world, but from the inside world. So muscles are everything when it comes to keeping our bone dense and strong. They are everything that keeping our joints smooth and lubricated and healthy so that we can enjoy the things that we want to do in our life. And I'm so excited to see so much more literature coming out about these big organizations studying the role of muscle. And I've always said this, you know, when you go to the doctor, who takes a look at your muscles? Like nobody, nobody tests your muscles at the doctor. Muscles don't show up on an x-ray, they maybe show up on an MRI if something is torn. I know if you go to physical therapy, a lot of times they are dictated by whatever the diagnosis is to give you some certain exercises that match that diagnosis. But who really studies muscles? I've been doing muscle activation techniques for nearly 20 plus years, I guess, and have had my hands on thousands of bodies. And I can tell you, my aging clients, they have a couple of things. They have weak core, they have weak glutes, they usually have weak foot and ankle, and they have very little understanding of why their body is suddenly, you know, breaking down. And what I always tell my clients is, you know, workouts can't be random anymore when you get older. And I think this is again a really good thing. You know, when I was younger, I used to go to the gym and I would just go, oh, what do I feel like doing today? I think I'll get on the stairmaster and I will just ride on the elliptical for an hour and a half, and then I think I'll go and do a class. When I get older, I have to think, okay, I've got to go to this thing on Saturday, or I want to be good for the rest of my next week. I don't need to be doing this right now. I don't need to be participating in the Louisville marathon, which is where I live, right? I don't need to need to participate in that because if I do this marathon and do everything that I want to do to be able to end this race in a certain amount of time, what is that gonna do for me in the future? Is this really gonna be good for the longevity of my joints, right? So we have to think that our workouts can no longer be random. They have to be intelligent, they have to be thought out. How do I work my muscle groups every week, at least twice a week, with a certain number of repetitions and a certain number of sets? How do I want to train, right? Do I want to build muscle? Am I strengthening for power? And is strengthening for power even appropriate right now? Like, do we have to just explode and lift as much as we can possibly lift at one time? Or is it better to have more consistency with the weight that we can handle and also a weight that continues to maintain the muscle that we have and potentially grow more muscle? Now I know this podcast is making muscle memories, and so I always try in every episode, and I think this helps to bring the information down to where it's actually enjoyable and not just a bunch of research thrown at you. I'm gonna tell you a personal story. Yes, I'm putting myself out there. I was an idiot when I was younger. I used to exercise for hours and hours and hours, and I used to take stepaerobics. I was one of those ones, didn't have to be on one riser, it had to be on three risers, right? I would go outside and I would just decide I would put on my headphones and just go off and start running. I wouldn't even know where I was going. And then about an hour later, I'd try to find my way home. So some of my runs became epically long. Well, my body started breaking down at a very young age. And at the time, oh my gosh, the depression that I went through, I can't even describe. I just really felt like my life was over. It affected my relationships, it affected how I saw myself. I felt like a failure. But it really was a blessing in disguise, and it absolutely made me understand how I need to work with other people. You know, when I early on in my career, and I talked about this a lot in my first couple of episodes, I didn't really think about who was in my classes or who I was training. It was like, well, that's all this really cool, you know, exercise, and I'm gonna give it to my client because I think it'll be really fun. And I didn't even look at the client itself until I actually experienced this in my own body. I know what it's like to be lifting your entire life, and then all of a sudden you realize I can't lift as much as I used to. I actually lift less heavy now as I did when I was in my 30s. But what has changed? I am so much smarter now than I was in my 20s and 30s. I have had to learn because of all my joint arthritic changes in my shoulder, my lower back, my knee, my foot. I've had to learn how to really understand the science of biomechanics. And if I had not experienced the breakdown in my own body, I wouldn't have come up with what I call the isometric method. I really do believe that isometrics are the way that we need to start. Because isometrics, which is basically creating a muscle contraction without moving, and I learned this through my study of yoga, but isometrics teach us how to understand where our body is able to move from point A to point B and where we can actually engage our muscles where we're not engaging our muscles and how we can integrate them. We have to learn how to squeeze our muscles and how to isolate our muscles before we can move. And so in my isometric method, I kind of call this the isometric version into the movement version. We have to learn how to squeeze our muscles and how to move through a range of motion before we ever add load. Adding load is another progression in itself about how much load do I add? Where do I place the load? What kind of load do I want to use? How do I position my body to oppose the load, right? What direction is the load going? Where direction am I going? All of these things I could have never learned had I not witnessed my own body failing. So I really hope that if you know anybody right now that is suffering from the kind of depression that I have that maybe you're suffering from, that you would forward this episode to them and give them the message that your body is not making a mistake. You are not making a mistake, and you can't fight Mother Nature, as they say. We have to accept the fact that our body is going to change. But we have really two choices. We can either, and I've seen a lot of clients do this, we can either decide I'm going to be depressed and just sit around and wish that we could be back in our 20s, in our 30s, and continuously do things that we used to do in our 20s and 30s. And we know how that ends, right? Injuries, constantly being set back. We do too much, we get injured, we're off six weeks, we try to come back, we do it again. Or we can decide I'm going to be observant. I'm going to respect who I am as an aging person, like who I am as an aging person, get to know who I am as an aging person, and do the things to age slower. I can lift more intelligently, I can take more days off, I can warm up more, I can observe the way my body is changing. And Paramount, if you have heard nothing else from this episode, you have to resistance train. Body weight training first, load training second, and then adding all kinds of challenges from there when appropriate. Now the science of biomechanics is really what I do in my platform FIS on demand. If you would like more information about how to train this way, there's a link below. You can take a look at everything that I have to offer, which is lots and lots of programs, modalities, and methodologies that will take you from point A to point B. Now, in my next episode, I'm going to be talking with you about the importance of consistency, so make sure not to miss it. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.