Performance after 40. What changes?

In this episode we talk about the balance that we must maintain as we train over 40. Our training must shift to be smarter and more intent. If the right changes are made we can thrive in our 40s and beyond. If you have any questions regarding your health or longevity please check us out at https://infinitehealthandnutrition.com/. Thanks again for listening to our podcast and checking us out! You are appreciated! 

Transcript

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If you're over 40 and your body doesn't respond like it used to, you're not crazy. You're not lazy, you're not broken. You're definitely not too old. You're operating under a different physiological rule book than you were when you were 25. And no one handed you the updated manual. So you train harder, you diet more aggressively, and you add more cardio. And instead of getting leaner and stronger, you get inflamed, exhausted, discourages, discouraged, and in most cases you gain weight. Today we're breaking down why training after 40 is completely different hormonally, neurologically, metabolically, structurally, and how to turn that difference into an advantage. Because when you train intelligently after 40, you don't decline, you evolve. This is the Infinite Health Podcast. Welcome to the Infinite Health Podcast, where we break down performance, metabolic, health, longevity, and identity-driven transformation. I'm Jay, and today we're diving into why your body requires a new strategy after 40 and why this stage of life can actually become your strongest decade yet. Let's talk about the hormonal landscape and the layout in the body. So after 40, your anabolic hormones gradually decline. Testosterone, growth hormone, estrogen, balance shift, recovery signal slows. So your body's trying to tell these hormones to do different things, but your hormones in your body and your organ systems, your endocrine system is not responding the same way. The problem is the drop isn't catastrophic. It's not a massive change right away, so you don't even really notice it right away. It's cumulative. You lose margin for error. It creeps up on us, and our body can no longer cover up just the little changes that are happening. Those little changes add up to a huge change, and all of a sudden we're, holy cow, I can't function, I can't move, my workouts are horrible, and I'm gaining weight. For example, muscle protein synthesis still happens, but it requires higher quality stimulus, adequate protein, structured recovery. Before we could do pretty much any workout we wanted to at the gym, if we were even mildly consistent, things happen. You can't do that once you get to a certain age and hormones shift and the balance shifts. Your body becomes less forgiving, but not less capable. In relation to protein synthesis and then basically anabolic resistance, as we age, muscle becomes less responsive to weak training stimulus. Those workouts that really weren't that focused, that, and that we just kind of showed up for, but they still produce results when we were younger, don't have that same positive effect on us as we get older. We're showing up, we're doing the workout, but if we're not focused and we're intent when we're doing our workouts now, we don't get the results we want. In fact, we go the opposite direction. Casual workouts no longer produce strong adaptation from our body. And we don't see gains. We don't see fat loss, we don't stay lean. We get soft, we lose muscle. Those are the things that we get got away with when we were younger, we don't get away with now. After 40, every set needs intent. All of our workouts need intent. If we're doing workouts, even if we're just going out for a bike ride, to get benefit from that after 40, we need to do that workout with intent. So after 40, every set needs intent. We need mechanical tension, we need controlled tempo, progressive overload, focused execution. Precision replaces randomness. Our workouts now have to focus, have focus, and we have to work out with intent. Let's continue talking about hormones and adaptation and let's kind of touch on cortisol and stress. We've all heard the hormone about the hormone cortisol, the stress hormone, the hormone that makes us fat. We hear it all the time on social media now, the news, it's all over the internet. Supplements that can apparently cut cortisol levels down. So let's talk about it because it is directly related to stress, and it affects us a lot more as we get older because we can't adapt to that stress quite as quite as well. And we typically have more of that stress between kids, work obligations, and uh outside of home and outside of work obligations. Most people over 40 are under more psychological stress than ever. Chronically elevated cholesterol or chronically elevated cortisol, which is what happens when we have high psychological stress, it breaks down muscle, it increases visceral fat, it impairs sleep and it reduces testosterone, among other things. Stacking high-intensity workouts onto a high life stress backfires. Intelligent training includes strategic intensity, walking instead of excessive hit, which is high-intensity training. D-load phases. So if you're doing, if you're a hardcore trainer, maybe you do four to five weeks and then you have a week where you don't not necessarily not train, you just decrease your volume for a week before you ramp it up again. That's a deload phase. Sleep prioritization. We have to learn how to better control and balance the balance of stress, which is good and bad stress stimulation. We are putting on our body so we can get the body's hormonal systems in balance for better health. We are going to start touching base with many of these subjects, and stress is one of them. And subsequent podcasts and episodes coming up. These first few episodes of IHN Podcast are basically just to lay the ground floor and the ground groundwork for what we're going to talk about in more detail and as we have more guests on the show. Let's talk a bit about energy systems and how our body uses food for fuel and how to better structure workouts. Aerobic efficiency becomes increasingly important after 40. So zone two cardio improves. If we do more of that, fat oxidation, recovery, heart health, and longevity markers. Strength builds the engine, aerobic work builds the battery. So listen to that again. Strength builds the engine, and then aerobic work builds the battery. So in other words, both matter and both matter more now than they ever did. But one of the but the difference is we have to structure them in the right way and recover from them in the right way. One of the biggest mistakes people make as we get older and start to gain a little weight is that we tend to just keep piling on the cardio. And this actually compounds the problem. It makes it much worse because we end up burning muscle, which is so important as we age, that we should be doing the opposite and adding more strength workouts to a routine and less more focused cardio. Again, this will be a show that's coming up soon on the IHN podcast. These early shows in the podcast, again, are setting the tone for knowledge, and then we'll dive into more detail. Let's touch base on mobility and movement quality and functional strength. Mobility is no longer optional because that starts to decrease as we get older. We have to keep mobility up because I don't know about you, but when I'm 70, 80 years old, I still want to have the mobility I have in my 40s and my 50s. Hip mobility, thoracic extension, ankle mobility, scapular stability, these things prevent injury. That's why they're just as important. Plus, we want to be able to function as we get older and do the things we're doing in our 40s. We want to be able to do those when we're in our 80s. We can't do that if we don't continue to start to work on our mobility and be more intent about our mobility in our workouts in our 40s and our 50s. Warm-ups must include now activation drills, activate those muscles before you pound on them, dynamic mobility, work on movement, not just static stressing, but dynamic stretching, ramp up sets. Training begins before the first workouts working set now. Mobility and warmups that we could get away with skipping when we were younger are not an option anymore. We have to do them and they have to be part of our lifestyle, and for sure, a part of our workouts. Activating muscles before pushing them hard is so much more important as we age. Again, this becomes comes down to structure of workouts and how we do them and intent in workouts. We can't just throw on the weight and start to pound out the heavy reps with the sets. We have to prime and warm up and activate the muscle first. Here's one of the biggest topics now that we are going to talk about that we have to control as we age: inflammation, inflammation, and nutrition. Now on the news, you hear it called inflammaging and talk about inflammation as we age and how important it is. Inflammation blocks progress. Nutrition is a huge part of this process. Improper nutrition and nothing functions properly, and inflammation skyrockets in the body. Processed foods, poor sleep, alcohol, and stress amplify inflammatory load. Nutrition must support recovery. Adequate protein, micronutrient density, hydration, omega-3 balance, lack of making sure we don't eat those micro-ultra-processed foods. Crash dieting sabotages hormone balance and muscle retention. For example, let's compare person A who trains six days a week, sleeps poorly, diets aggressively, and feels exhausted. Person B trains three to four days, walks daily, prioritizes sleep, and follows progressive overload. After 12 weeks, person B is leaner, stronger, and more energized. Same age, different strategy, less training, but smarter training, and more effective training. What we can do, you can still train six days a week, but the intent has to be different on different days. We can't go pound the same body part day after day or do the same exact workouts day after day. We have to allow for recovery. That includes sleep, mobility, nutrition, and rest. So again, same age, different strategy, less overall training, but smarter training and more effective training. Another thing that becomes a concern as our hormones become out of balance is bone density and longevity. After 40, bone density begins to decline. Resistance training stimulates bone remodeling. In other words, it helps with bone density immensely. Heavy compound lifts, safely programmed and structured schedule protect skeletal integrity for decades. Training is insurance for your 60s and 70s. So training in our 40s and 50s is the cheapest insurance we can get for us to be healthy and live a full and long life in our 60s, 70s, and 80s. Proper strength training is not an option as we age. It is a necessity and a very cheap insurance policy for health as we age. We have to have balance in our workouts, nutrition, and recovery. Let's touch on recovery for just a short time now. Here's some very important recovery metrics that I like to use with my clients, and we get these from advanced technology like your Apple Watch, Whoop, Aura Ring, Fitbit, SmartScales, CGMs, et cetera. These metrics can give us so much information to help us increase our longevity and quality of health as we age. Things to monitor like resting heart rate, sleep quality, strength progression, mood and libido, waist circumference, HRV or heart rate variability, a huge number for us as we get older, energy levels, and so many more. If strength stalls and sleep drops, you need recovery, not more volume. We can't just work, overwork something now. We have to be smart about it. When we talk about workout structure, let's give you an example. Here's a sample week for a client of mine. Day one is a full body strength. Day two is a zone workout, cardio, with some mobility afterwards. Day three is upper body strength, upper body strength workout. Day four is walking plus core. Day five is lower body strength, and the weekend is active recovery. In other words, go for a hike, go for a walk by the river, go play football with your kids in the yard or grandkids in the yard. Go play frisbee, go walk and play some golf, that type of thing. Active recovery, not a hardcore intent workout, but still doing something and moving. Stimulus without overload, balance and health are what is important. And you get all of those with the type of structure I just mentioned. There's other types of structure as well, but that is just one example. Random workouts just don't get the results we want anymore. After 40, we are smarter in our workouts and we have a physiological advantage to that and a psychological advantage to that if we take it, if we use it as an advantage and not a disadvantage. After 40, you have discipline and perspective. You understand consistency and delayed gratification. When that mindset meets intelligent programming, results will compound and they'll compound fast. Training after 40 is not about staying young, it's about becoming durable and not getting injured and staying stable. Durability meets intensity long term. Durability beats ego lifting. Durability builds resilience, strength, and longevity. So if you're over 40 and you're frustrated, it's not because your body betrayed you. It's because the strategy needs to evolve. Less chaos, more structure, less punishment, more precision, less ego, more intelligence. Training after 40 is different, but different is powerful. If you're ready to train with a structured performance system built for 40 plus physiology, visit Infinite Health and Nutrition and book a performance consult. And you can get that, find that at infinite health and nutrition.com. That's infinite health and nutrition.com in our Prime 40 performance program. Let us build your blueprint for the next 20 years. You can find out more about us at infinite health and nutrition.com again, and we'd love to help you instructure a program for you. This is the end of today's show. This is in the Infinite Health and Nutrition Podcast, or IHN podcast. And if this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. We don't train to survive, we train to build something that lasts. I'll see you in the next episode.