Bigger Leaner Stronger

by Michael Matthews

  It’s always the opposite. Most of us lead busy, hectic lives and feel we don’t have time for anything new. But in almost all cases, that just isn’t true.

  As much as some people would like to think they’re too busy to exercise, when they analyze in detail how they actually spend their every waking minute every day, they discover how it could be worked out (no pun intended). And especially when they realize how little time it really takes to get fit!

  The reality is people who have successfully transformed their bodies have the same 24 hours in a day as you and the rest of us, and they still have lives to live.

  They still have to go work, spend time with their loved ones, maintain some semblance of a social life, and remember to decompress and have some fun now and then. The only difference is they’ve decided exercise is important enough to be in the plan.

  For some, that means watching less TV or giving it up altogether. For others, it means waking up an hour earlier than normal a few days per week to get into the gym. For others still it means asking the wife to take the kids after dinner (a favor that can be repaid for her workouts!).

  My point is: if you really want to carve out an hour a few days per week to train, I’m positive you can.

  Q: I’m in my 30s/40s/50s-plus. Can I do this program?

  A: Absolutely.

  Every week I get emailed by at least a few people asking if it’s too late to build muscle and get fit.

  Most are very pleasantly surprised when I explain that it’s definitely not too late, and that I’m regularly working with guys and gals in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s who are building their best bodies ever.

  How should people in their 40s and beyond go about building a great body, though? Certainly they can’t eat and train like the 20-year-olds, right?

  You might be surprised to learn that not nearly as much changes as people think.

  One of the first things I refer people to who are worried about age squashing their dreams of being fit is a study conducted by scientists at the University of Oklahoma, which had 24 college-aged (18 to 22) and 25 middle-aged (35 to 50) men follow the same weightlifting routine for eight weeks.1

  Researchers then analyzed everyone’s body composition and found that the middle-aged men had gained just as much muscle as their college-aged counterparts had. Strength gains were very similar as well.

  People in their 60s and beyond aren’t left out of the party, either. Studies show that they too can gain significant amounts of muscle and strength, and more importantly, that training and developing their muscles is a great way to fight the “dwindling health spiral” normally associated with aging.2

  There are two other age-related myths I’d like to debunk. The first is the claim that your metabolism craters as you get older. This is very fake news.

  Research shows that the average adult’s metabolism slows by just 1 to 3 percent per decade and that the primary reason for this is muscle loss, not genetic programming.3

  Therefore, if you maintain your muscle as you age, you maintain your metabolism. And if you add muscle to your frame, you can increase it.4

  Why do so many people gain weight as they get older, then?

  For most, it’s mainly a matter of lifestyle. They were far more active when they were younger, which allowed them to eat far more food without gaining any weight to speak of. Now, however, they’re mostly sedentary, which makes it very easy to overeat.

  So, unless you’ve lost significant amounts of muscle over the years from things like frenzied starvation dieting or excessive cardio, your metabolism is just fine. And even if you have made those mistakes, you can correct them now with proper diet and training.

  The second myth is the old saw about your hormones imploding as you get older.

  It was once believed that the hormonal disturbance associated with aging was inevitable. We now know this isn’t true. Research shows that lifestyle factors are equally causative of hormonal changes as aging itself, if not more so.

  For example, here’s a short list of the biggest lifestyle factors that can depress your testosterone levels:

  Weight gain5

  Stopping exercise6

  Chronic illness7

  Use of medications8

  Sleeping too little9

  Moderate alcohol consumption10

  These are all under your control. Your hormone health truly is in your hands.

  For example, studies show that there are plenty of ways to naturally improve your hormone profile, including staying lean, doing regular resistance training, and maintaining good sleep hygiene.11

  You’ll also be happy to know you don’t need stellar hormone levels to get fit. If you’re willing to work hard, you can have below-average hormones and a far-above-average physique.

  All that said, there are several key differences between college-aged and middle-aged bodies that make fitness a little harder as you get older.

  Research shows that after about age 50, your muscles recover slower from exercise and that you begin to lose muscle over time (if you don’t do anything to stop it).12

  Your tendons and ligaments also become stiffer and recover slower, which can increase the risk of injury.13

  Overall, though, the science is clear: you can stay in remarkably good shape well into old age if you stay active and take care of your body, and that’s just as true for men as it is for women.14

  How do you do that, though? You just have to make some adjustments to your training protocols and take some extra measures to ensure adequate recovery.

  Let’s go over the major points here.

  Be a stickler for form (especially if you’re new to weightlifting).

  A: The older you get, the less shenanigans you can get away with in your weightlifting.

  Lumbar rounding in your deadlifts . . . knee bowing in your squats . . . elbow flaring in your bench pressing . . . it all increases the risk of injury at any age, but it becomes more dangerous as the years go by.

  This is one of the reasons why I put a lot of emphasis on learning and using proper form from day one, regardless of age or fitness level.

  It’s also why I’m not willing to sacrifice form to hit PRs and chest bump with my buddies. I’m willing to give sets everything I’ve got, but if I’m going for a big pull and feel my lower-back rounding, I drop the weight. If I’m squatting and deep into my set, I simply can’t keep my shoulders rising with my hips, I set the weight down on the safety arms.

  I’m not a competitive powerlifter or strength athlete. I like lifting heavy things and being strong, but I like staying healthy and injury-free more. I suspect you’re in the same boat.

  Make sure you take at least one day off the weights each week. Two is better.

  A: Don’t underestimate how taxing heavy weightlifting is on your body. Even the young’uns can’t do it every day, week after week, without eventually running themselves into the ground.

  Train hard six or seven days per week, and physical fatigue will start accumulating. Your sleep will deteriorate. Your workouts will suffer. You’ll continue feeling worse and worse until you rein it in and give your body more time to rest.

  That’s why a big part of proper recovery is taking time off the weights every week and resisting the urge to replace weightlifting with some other form of intense physical exercise or activity.

  Depending on your goals, that may mean you have to eat less than you’d like on your rest days. That’s just part of the game.

  Don’t fall into the trap of using exercise as a way to eat more and more food. That’s a one-way street to overtraining, not to mention life and psychological imbalances.

  Forcing yourself to do excessive amounts of exercise just so you can gorge on food is a terrible use of time and great way to develop anxiety or even eating disorders.

  Rest or deload more
frequently.

  Even when you’re properly managing your workout volume and intensity and taking a couple of days off each week, your body eventually needs a bigger break. And the older you are, the sooner that time comes.

  Specifically, what I’ve found is while guys and gals in their 20s can go anywhere from 12 to 15 weeks or longer before needing additional recovery time, people in their 40s and 50s need it more frequently, sometimes as often as every 4 to 6 weeks.

  There are many factors that determine how long you’ll be able to go before needing additional rest—age, training programming and history, genetics, sleep hygiene, diet, etc.—but it’s pretty easy to discover for yourself.

  As you continue to train and progress, you’ll start noticing symptoms like worse sleep, lower energy levels, aches and pains, and less interest in training. Deload the following week, and they should disappear.

  Many people mistake these symptoms as mental obstacles to push through and try to fight fire with fire. It doesn’t go well. Listen to your body, play the long game, and play it intelligently.

  Q: If I cut first will I sacrifice my newbie gains?

  A: To some degree, yes.

  If you start the program with cutting, you’re going to gain less muscle and strength during that period than you would by starting with lean bulking or maintaining.

  That said, thanks to newbie gains, you can still gain a significant amount of muscle and strength while cutting when you start out—far more than later, when you’re a more experienced weightlifter.

  Then, when you’ve completed your first cut, you can switch to lean bulking or maintaining and reap more muscle-building benefits from whatever is left of your “honeymoon phase.”

  Q: How do I switch from cutting to maintaining or lean bulking?

  A: To go from cutting to maintaining, simply increase your calories to about 90 percent of your average TDEE (as calculated per the methods in chapter 17), and set up your macros for maintenance (30 percent protein, 45 percent carbohydrate, and 25 percent dietary fat).

  You can expect to gain weight for the first week or two mostly due to the increase in carbohydrate intake, not body fat. After that your weight should stabilize.

  To go from cutting to lean bulking, first increase your calories to about 90 percent of your average TDEE and set up your macros for maintenance. Then, after three or four weeks of this, increase your calories to 110 percent of your average TDEE and switch to lean bulking macros (25 percent protein, 55 percent carbohydrate, and 20 percent dietary fat).

  Q: I travel a lot. Can I follow this program?

  A: Yes, but it’ll require some forethought.

  First, you’ll want to book hotels that are close to adequate gyms (hotel gyms suck), and you’ll want to plan ahead to determine when you’ll work out (early in the morning or after dinner works best for most people).

  Second, you have three options for your diet:

  You can make a meal plan of simple foods that you can pick up at a local grocery store and store and prepare in your hotel room. Good choices include salad, deli meat, rotisserie chicken, fruit, nuts, and the like. A grocery delivery service like Instacart (www.instacart.com) can be incredibly helpful here.

  You can track food intake on the go with an app like MyFitnessPal.

  You can eat according to your appetite and do your best to keep your calorie and macro intakes in check.

  If you travel a lot and still want to make good progress, options one and two are your best bets. Option three works fine for the occasional short trip but not for regular travelers.

  Q: I’m not getting very sore. Is that a problem?

  A: I used to think that perpetual muscle soreness was a price you had to pay to build muscle.

  In time, I almost thought of this as a badge of honor. (“Damn straight I have to walk down stairs backwards! My legs are going to be HUGE!”)

  I assumed a major reason we trained our muscles was to damage them, which resulted in soreness. Therefore, considerable soreness meant considerable damage that would hopefully lead to considerable muscle gain, right?

  Not quite.

  Research shows that muscle damage may contribute to muscle growth but isn’t a requirement.15 This is why workouts that produce large amounts of muscle soreness won’t necessarily result in muscle growth, and workouts that produce very little soreness can result in significant muscle growth.16

  For instance, an hour of downhill running can produce a tremendous amount of muscle soreness in your legs, but it isn’t going to do much toward building strong, toned leg muscles.17

  Similarly, modifying your workouts to produce more muscle damage can cause significantly more muscle soreness, but doesn’t necessarily result in more muscle growth.18

  Several other observations provide more evidence of the disconnect between muscle soreness and muscle building:

  People who train infrequently build far less muscle but experience far more muscle soreness than those who train more frequently.

  Muscle soreness generally decreases as training frequency increases, which can accelerate muscle growth.

  Muscles like the shoulders and calves generally don’t get very sore from training but can grow substantially.

  Further complicating matters is the fact that the degree of muscle soreness you experience after workouts isn’t a reliable indicator of the degree of muscle damage caused.19

  In other words, a high or low amount of muscle soreness doesn’t necessarily reflect a high or low amount of muscle damage.

  To quote scientists at Yokohama City University who examined the relationship between strength training and muscle soreness:

  Because of generally poor correlations between DOMS [delayed onset muscle soreness] and other indicators, we conclude that use of DOMS is a poor reflector of eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage and inflammation, and changes in indirect markers of muscle damage and inflammation are not necessarily accompanied with DOMS.20

  That is, damaged muscles won’t necessarily hurt, and muscles that hurt aren’t necessarily much damaged.

  The physiology of these phenomena isn’t fully understood yet, but one study conducted by scientists at Concordia University found that at least some of the pain we’re feeling in muscle soreness stems from the connective tissue holding muscle fibers together, not from the actual fibers themselves.21

  Therefore, what you think is “muscle soreness” is at least partially (if not mostly) “connective tissue” soreness.

  And while we’re on the topic of muscle soreness, we might as well tackle another common question:

  Can you train muscles that are still sore from a previous workout?

  Yes, you can.

  Despite what you’ve probably heard, training sore muscles doesn’t necessarily hinder recovery and prevent muscle growth.22

  That said, regardless of the presence or absence of muscle soreness, intense workouts do cause muscle damage that must be repaired before the muscles are ready for another round.

  That’s one of the reasons why training too intensely too frequently can impair your progress.

  Q: Should I exercise when I’m sick?

  A: No. At least not intensely.

  I totally understand the desire to exercise when sick. Once you’ve established a good workout routine, skipping days can be harder than going to the gym even when you’re not feeling well.

  Force yourself to rest, though, because your normal workouts are only going to make things worse by temporarily depressing immune function.23

  That said, animal research shows that light exercise (20 to 30 minutes of light jogging on a treadmill) while infected with the influenza virus boosts immune function and speeds recovery.24 Similar effects have been seen in human studies as well.25

  Human research also shows that light exercise like walking
or jogging doesn’t impair immune function or prolong or worsen infections.26

  So if you’re going to do any exercise while under the weather, make it 20 minutes or so of very light cardio (you should never get too winded to speak comfortably).

  Q: I only have dumbbells. Can I do the program?

  A: Kind of.

  You can’t do the program exactly as I’ve laid it out because there are no great dumbbell substitutions for some of the exercises, but you can still use a lot of what you’ve learned to create effective dumbbell workouts.

  To do this, you have the dumbbell exercises I’ve provided you with, but those won’t be enough for all the major muscle groups. Here’s a more extensive list of dumbbell and bodyweight exercises to choose from:

  Chest

  Dumbbell Bench Press

  Incline Dumbbell Bench Press

  Dumbbell Fly*

  Dumbbell Pullover*

  Dumbbell Floor Press

  Shoulders

  Seated Dumbbell Press

  Dumbbell Side Lateral Raise*

  Dumbbell Rear Lateral Raise*

  Back

  Dumbbell Deadlift

  One-Arm Dumbbell Row

  Chin-Up

  Inverted Row

  Arms

  Dumbbell Curl

  Dumbbell Hammer Curl

  Dumbbell Triceps Kickback*

  Dumbbell Lying Triceps Extension (Skullcrusher)

  Core

  Captain’s Chair Leg Raise

  Lying Leg Raise

  Hanging Leg Raise

  Crunch

  Weighted Sit-Up

  Plank

  Abdominal Rollout

  Dumbbell Weighted Crunch

  Dumbbell Weighted Sit-Up

  Dumbbell Leg Raise

  Legs

  Goblet Squat*

  Dumbbell Squat

  Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift

  Dumbbell Lunge (Walking or In-Place, Forward or Reverse)

  Nordic Hamstring Curl*