Realistic muscle gains after 40

How much muscle can an advanced, natural, middle-aged bodybuilder gain, and what would the muscle gains look like?

We would love to tell you that if you are over 40, you can continue developing tons of muscle gains … but that would be a lie…

It is not even a matter of age (although that does play a role), but rather a matter of training experience and adaptation. For an “advanced lifter” like you, that means at least 15 years of hard training, which means you have already gained quite a few pounds of muscle.

 

What happens to the body?

The human body has a limited capacity to develop and maintain muscle naturally, and this depends largely on our genetics.

The ACTN3 genotype, myostatin levels, body structure, and many other factors come into play.

We still do not fully understand all the factors related to muscle gains; however, there is one irrefutable fact.

The average human male can add 10–20 kg of muscle above his normal adult body weight over the course of his training career.

Of course, using performance-enhancing drugs will overcome many of the limiting factors that prevent a natural lifter from growing to Mr. Olympia size; however, this is not worth considering, not only because of the health risks but also because of the dangers involved.

We are also talking about pure muscle weight.

• With those 10–20 kg, you will likely add a few additional kilograms in the form of glycogen, water, and collagen, not to mention that you could add some fat and still look great.
• You can add 20–25 kg to your scale weight over the course of your career, but only 10–20 kg of that weight would be muscle.

The closer you get to reaching those 10–20 kg, the slower and more difficult your muscle gains will become.

Why is it difficult to make new muscle gains?

Why will the most dedicated and experienced bodybuilder have more difficulty developing a lot of new muscle?

First, because of adaptation; your body is well adapted to lifting objects, and at that point, it is very difficult for training to represent a stress.

If training is no longer stressful, the body will not change because additional muscle is not needed to do the job.

If you want to increase training stress, you need to lift more weight or … do more volume or … push harder… 

These three things can raise cortisol and halt progress. In addition, once you are already training to muscular failure or close to it, there is not much room left to increase your muscle gains either.

And adding volume, especially for bodybuilders over 40, is one of the best ways to stop progress.

It is not very practical in the real world either, because a normal person with a job and a family cannot spend 2–3 hours in the gym every day.  An advanced lifter needs extremely high training stress to continue progressing, but doing this could actually do more harm than good.

Are there other related factors?

As you age, your physiology changes, and this is not ideal when it comes to developing muscle:

• Testosterone levels tend to decrease.
• Growth hormone and IGF-1 may decrease.

Stem cells decrease due to lower IGF-1 levels, and stem cells are required to repair muscle damage.

Fewer stem cells mean that you will not repair and develop muscle gains as easily.

On the other hand, your body is likely to have more chronic systemic inflammation; this can significantly reduce your ability to develop muscle (among other things), partly because it reduces insulin sensitivity.

When you are an adult, you also lose nerve cells and experience atrophy under other conditions, and this will reduce your strength. And if strength decreases, it may be more difficult to maintain, let alone add, more muscle tissue or muscle gains.

Muscle tissue adapts to a certain level of load; if your nerves no longer allow you to produce as much force, the lower level of muscle tension produced during training may not be enough to fully stimulate growth.

Finally, as you age, life tends to take over. If you have a full-time job and a family, you have much more stress. That can also affect your ability to progress.