Best Exercise For Weight Loss At 40 & Beyond
After the age of 40, you lose muscle mass. Muscle is what burns calories, you lose around 1% of muscle mass every year from the age of 40. Even if you have never done strength training before – it’s not too late to start building lean muscle mass. This will help to burn fat and increase your metabolism, it also helps keep your bones and body strong and healthy.
While generally moving more will help – the best way in which you can combat the growing waist line and reverse what has already taken place (or curb it before it even happens) is a combination of strength training and high intensity training. This is exactly why I developed my strength and conditioning programme.
One key point to realise is that as our body ages our mind does too, once we hit 40 our brain loses 5% of its volume per decade, our brains actually shrink. The great news is that exercise strengthens your brain’s ability to learn at every age, giving your brain a steady flow of oxygen, glucose and hormones. Serotonin is released during exercise which calms your brain helping to learn new information. An intense workout releases endorphins which improve mood and elevate adrenaline which is powerful in focusing your brain.
I have openly spoken in the past about exercise being the best cure for anxiety and depression along side many other ailments and conditions. Depression and anxiety can increase with age, this can be hormonal or purely the fear of ageing.
Strength & Conditioning is a great way to improve your body by losing body fat and defining muscle at the same time, with the two vital ingredients (Strength & High intensity Cardio) in one workout, which maximises results in a shorter period of time. With my structured approach to training you get the benefits and results quicker that you could ever imagine.
You might be wondering how many hours you need to be spending on building lean muscle to see a real benefit. Much to your surprise it is actually less than you might think. 2-4 strength sessions per week is plenty. This is why I developed my programme to give you structured strength & conditioning workouts 3 x per week. Anything over and above this is down to you, your lifestyle and the time you have to train but paired with nutrition it is enough to combat the changes in your body and regain control of what is happening as you age. Compound moves are key ingredients to my workout plans – compound moves are when you are using multiple muscles and joints to perform a given exercise to maximise your results.
Not forgetting the fact that as we get older, you might have other priorities in life. Ask yourself if you are actually moving as much as you used to? It’s so easy to blame hormones for weight gain when in fact if you were honest with yourself if can actually be clearer than you think. Are you walking less, fidgeting less, generally moving less than you did in your last decade? The less you move the less calories you are burning.
If you are eating a similar amount to what you were a decade ago on top of moving less than you used to will of course equal weight gain.
It is more important now than ever that we work on – Flexibility, Cardiovascular Fitness, Muscle Gan, Balance & Mobility. All of which I cover I my programme.