The Reality

Muscle & Strength Loss – a natural process

Every decade after the age of 30, we lose, on average, 1% of our lean body muscle mass. This rate of 1% per year increases in menopausal women, rising to 1.5% per year. Like grey hair and wrinkles, loss of muscle mass is a natural process we can’t stop, but we can mitigate its effects by reducing the associated loss of strength.

The loss of 1% of mass per year sounds bad, BUT 💪 the loss of strength can be 2-5 times greater 💪.

I liken strength to superannuation: it is better to start building it early rather than leave it until you are 50 or 60. If you left retirement planning and your superannuation until 50 or 60, you wouldn’t have much financial security when retiring at 67!

Sex Differences

Male Summary

💪 Staying Strong as You Age: For Men

As the years pass, your body changes — but staying active helps you maintain your independence and continue to be adventurous.

👊 Muscles shrink faster with age → Strength training keeps you powerful.
🦴 Bones thin slowly over time → Keep them strong with weight-bearing activity.
❤️ Heart and Lungs lose endurance → Regular walking, swimming, or cycling keeps you fit.
🍔 Belly Fat sneaks up → Healthy eating + movement help protect your heart.
🧍 Balance may decline suddenly → Practice exercises that keep you steady.

👉 Regular exercise, good sleep, and staying active in daily life are the best ways to maintain independence.

Male Specifics

1. Muscle Mass and Strength
   Men typically enter adulthood with more lean muscle mass, but their testosterone levels gradually decline with age. This reduction lowers the body’s ability to build and maintain muscle, leading to strength loss and reduced power.
2. Cardiovascular and Respiratory Fitness
   VO₂ max decreases steadily from midlife onward, leading to reduced endurance. Larger hearts and lungs initially provide an advantage, but aerobic capacity declines sharply over time.
3. Fat Distribution and Metabolism
   With age, men accumulate more visceral fat around the abdomen and organs, raising risk for diabetes and heart disease.
4. Balance and Falls
   Men tend to maintain mobility longer due to their greater initial muscle mass, but sudden health events (e.g., stroke, heart disease) can cause steep declines in mobility. Exercise reduces the risk of falls by 25%.

Female Summary

🌸 Staying Strong as You Age: For Women

Your body changes throughout life, especially after menopause — but movement is a powerful way to stay healthy and confident.

👊 Muscles are 20-25% smaller to start cf. males→ Building them early and keeping them strong makes everyday tasks easier.
🦴 Bones lose strength quickly after menopause → Lifting weights + Vitamin D help protect against fractures.
❤️ Heart Health needs extra care → Exercise reduces risk as natural protection decreases.
🍎 Fat Storage shifts toward the belly during menopause → Staying active helps control this. Midlife weight gain is more age-related than hormone-related.
🧍 Balance becomes more challenging → Strength, balance drills and maintaining flexibility help to prevent falls.

👉 Staying active helps you enjoy more adventures, protect your health, and keep doing what you love.

Female Specifics

1. Muscle Mass and Strength
   Women typically have lower muscle mass, making declines more noticeable during daily tasks. Hormonal changes reduce recovery and repair, emphasising the importance of resistance training. Ligaments, tendons and other soft tissues also undergo declines in strength, hydration and elasticity with reductions in estrogen. This is called the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause and affects 70% of women.
2. Bone Density
   Following menopause, estrogen levels fall sharply. This accelerates bone loss and significantly increases the risk of osteoporosis.
3. Cardiovascular and Respiratory Fitness
   Women have lower baseline aerobic capacity. After menopause, the loss of estrogen removes a layer of cardiovascular protection, increasing the risk of heart disease.
4. Fat Distribution and Metabolism
   Before menopause, fat is stored mainly around the hips and thighs. After menopause, fat tends to accumulate in the abdomen, increasing visceral fat and metabolic risk.
5. Balance and Falls
   Reduced muscle reserves, smaller body size, and declining bone density increase the risk of falls and fractures. Balance-focused exercise is crucial.
6. Mental Health
   While not directly a strength-related change, menopause can also have a significant impact on mental health, with changing hormone levels, fatigue, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression and ‘brain fog’. Sleep reductions and persistent fatigue may reduce exercise capacity and interest.

Strength = Independence = Enjoyment

Keeping it very simple, your strength (which, as noted above, naturally decreases) is your independence. This brutal truth is clearly demonstrated during hand-grip tests. This simple test correlates strength to longevity. Loss of strength is directly related to a shorter life and loss of doing the things we enjoy, love and are passionate about, be it fishing, playing with grandkids, gardening, hiking or scuba diving. Once we no longer have the strength to do these things we enjoy, we can’t do them. Period. Building or at least maintaining our strength, therefore, becomes imperative.

Building strength through targeted repetitions (reps)

The only way to build strength is through resistance training, whether using weights, elastic bands, or body weight. Repetition ranges are low, say 5-10. Once repetitions rise much higher, you move into more of a cardio workout, which doesn’t focus the body on building muscle. I focus on five repetitions as the sweet spot for a couple of reasons. First, it facilitates muscle growth, as noted previously, and second, it is an ideal number to maintain good form and concentration. Often, when people are doing 10-12 reps, the last 3-5 are fatiguing, or they lose concentration, so the quality of the movement degrades. No point practising poor habits and pushing the risk of injury with ’empty reps.’

Goal = 70% loading for each muscle/exercise

To facilitate muscle growth, we need sufficient physical stress on our muscles. However, as we get older, our muscles become stiffer, recover more slowly, and adapt to load changes more slowly. This means we aim for around 70% maximal loading, not 85-90% as in our younger days. In this way, we have enough stimulus to promote muscle growth, we can do back-to-back sessions (consistency is king with building muscle), and we reduce our risk profile of injury.

How do I determine what 70% of my maximal capacity is for each exercise? There is a complicated process that takes time in the gym under supervision, but for our situation, what weight you can achieve around 14 times is your 70% max lift weight for that exercise.

Frequency & format for the overall program

In part, this has to do with how much time you have to allocate to your resistance training, given your other fitness goals (cardio, flexibility), family, work, and community commitments. However, given that you are possibly a role model for children/grandchildren, you want to facilitate an active and enjoyable post-50 lifestyle, and you understand now the critical role strength training has for all this to happen, two sessions of around 45 -60 minutes would be a minimum. Ideally, three and I aim for four per week personally.

I use a 5×5 program. This means I do five repetitions of an exercise and repeat it five times. A block consists of three strength exercises followed by one stretch exercise, and I have two blocks in a workout. Each workout is preceded by 10-15 minutes of warmup to bring my body up to operating temperature and focus my mind on the workout. I have two workouts (one more focused on legs, the other on arms) that are balanced with my other exercises: swimming, hiking, and cycling.

Daily workout program:

Monday/Thursday			Tuesday/Friday
Warmup			Warmup
Block 1	Block 2		Block 1	Block 2
Calf raise	Bench press		Abdominal pike	Lat pulldowns
RDL single	Shoulder external rotation		Pect cable flys	Decline pushups
Biceps	Split squat		Anterior tibials	Step down single squat
Hamstring stretch	Calf stretch/Squat		Hamstring stretch	Calf stretch/Squat

You can download a program template here.

Weekly workout program:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Gym/Legs	Gym/ Arms	Cycle	Gym/Legs	Gym/Arms	Hike	Rest
Swim			Swim

Stretching

Stretching is another critical element of general fitness, especially if you have an X & Y chromosome!

• Can you do a full squat while wearing gym shoes and keep your heels on the ground?
• Does your neck turn 90 degrees each way?
• Can you lift your arm above your head so it is parallel to your trunk? These are all important functional requirements.

As a general rule, women are more flexible (talking, here, physically, of course!) and tend to spend more time in yoga and pilates classes. Guys, on the other hand, lean towards the gym and work on their strength. We tend to do what feels easier, rather than what would be better for us. While both sexes need to work on strength, guys should focus a bit more on mobility, and women should focus more on strength.

I focus on two of my tightest areas, calves (short and long groups) and hamstrings, during my gym workouts. I will do a couple of longer stretch sessions in the evening, lasting 30+ minutes, in combination with a massage gun, often while watching television, talking, or listening to music.