Want Strong Muscles in Your 80s? This Strength Training Habit Matters Most

There's someone in nearly every neighborhood in their 70s who moves like they're decades younger. It's the person already out on a bike before your coffee is done, or the group of women who get 10,000+ steps a day by powering walking the sidewalks.

It's easy to call that good genes and move on. But research on lifelong athletes1 suggests that what we chalk up to luck may have more to do with how often those muscles get asked to work.

What researchers turned up says a lot about how much of aging we actually get to control.

About the study

Does muscle shrink and weaken because we're getting older, or because we stop moving? That's what researchers set out to investigate in this latest study.

Almost everything we know about muscle loss with age comes from studying people who don't move much, so this team went the other way and recruited 40 serious (but still recreational) athletes spanning ages 40 to 81, who all trained four to five times a week.

Each one got a health and activity check, a body composition assessment, a test of how much force their thigh muscles could produce, and MRI scans of both thighs to measure muscle along with fat stored under the skin and inside the muscle itself. Comparing people across those four decades let researchers look at aging muscle without disuse muddying the picture.

Muscle size & strength didn't decline across ages 40 to 81

Across the full 40-year span, thigh muscle didn't shrink with age, and lean mass held steady too. Strength did the same.

The older athletes produced just as much force with their thighs as the younger ones, and the strength they got out of the muscle they had didn't drop off either. Total body fat percentage did climb with age, so fat and muscle appear to move on separate tracks.

The more muscle area someone had, the more force they produced. Fat stored inside the muscle didn't track with strength in this group, and neither did lean mass, which points back to muscle area as the measure that mattered most here.

Keeping muscle after 40 may come down to not stopping

Forty athletes compared at different ages can't prove that hard training is what kept their muscle, and people who build a life around training may differ in ways the study couldn't measure.

What these athletes shared was frequency, four to five sessions a week they kept up rather than easing off as the years added up.

Four or five sessions a week is more than what the average person typically completes in a week. But here's how you can build off of it.

The takeaway

Consistency with strength training matters. What the athletes in this research shared was a training habit they never let lapse as they aged. If you're not sure where to start on your strength training journey (or want to level-up what you are doing), check out this expert-backed guide.