By lifting for all those years, he added around 30-35 pounds of muscle to his

frame. Realistically, he can now hope to add 5-10 pounds of muscle at most.

If a second 40-year-old man gained only 10 pounds over the course of his
training career (because he hasn't been training hard and smart consistently),
he has the potential to gain more muscle than the first guy if he trains the right
way.

Why is the more dedicated and experienced lifter going to have a harder time
building a lot of new muscle? First because of adaptation. His body is well
adapted to lifting. It's very hard at that point for training to represent a stress. If
the training is no longer a stress, the body won't change because extra
muscle isn't needed to do the work.

If you want to increase the training stress you need to:

1. Lift more weight or...

2. Do more volume or...
3. Push your sets harder

But there's the catch-22. All three of these things can jack up cortisol and
might stop progression. Furthermore, you can't always push them up. There
will be a point where it's hard to add 5 pounds per 6-8 weeks on a lift. And if
you already train to failure or close to it, there isn't much room to increase
there either.

And adding volume – especially in older lifters – is one of the best ways to halt
progress. It's also not very practical for the real world. A normal human being
with a job and family can't spend 2-3 hours in the gym every day. An
advanced lifter needs an extremely high training stress to keep progressing,
but doing just that might actually do more harm than good.
 Also, as you get older your physiology changes, and not for the best when it
comes to building muscle:

 Testosterone levels tend to decrease.

 Growth hormone and IGF-1 can decrease.

 Stem cells decrease due to a lower IGF-1 level. Stem cells are required
to repair muscle damage. Fewer stem cells means that you don't repair and
build muscle as easily.
 Your body likely has more chronic systemic inflammation. This can
significantly decrease your capacity to build muscle (among other things) in
part because it reduces insulin sensitivity.
 You lose nerve cells and have atrophy in others. This will decrease
strength. And if strength goes down, it can be harder to maintain, much less
add, more muscle tissue. The muscle tissue is adapted to a certain level of
loading. If your nerves no longer allow you to produce as much force, the
lower level of muscle tension produced when training might not be enough to
fully stimulate growth.
 Finally, as you're getting older, life tends to take over. If you have a full-
time job and a family, you have a lot more stress. That can also impact your
capacity to progress.
Now The Good News

Don't stop trying to improve because it's possible to surprise yourself and
achieve more than you thought. I got into my best shape at 41 and I'm still
able to improve a bit.

Here are a few guidelines that tend to help older lifters keep making progress:

1. Don't always train hard.

I know this sounds counterintuitive, but periods of maintenance training can

help re-sensitize your body to training. Call it "strategic deconditioning" if you
want.
For 3-5 weeks, do the minimum necessary to avoid losing muscle. If you're a
dedicated lifter, that's going to be much less than you think. Do less volume,
don't push your sets hard (stop 2-3 reps short of failure), and focus on
technique rather than load.

I like three full-body workouts per week using 3-4 lifts per session at that time.
After that period, push hard for 6-8 weeks, ramping up the demands of your
workout every two weeks or so.

I actually discovered this strategy when I started doing more seminars. I spent
a period of four weeks training 2-3 times a week and not having the energy to
push super hard. But when I got back to serious training, I surpassed my
previous best.

2. Use a specialization approach.

This is something I began using with high-level bodybuilders to blast through a

growth plateau.

When you're advanced you need a serious stimulus to force the body to
adapt. But at the same time, if you increase overall training stress you won't
be able to recover. Specialization is a great way to achieve that strong
stimulus without excessively overloading your body.

Select one or two muscle groups (or one big lift) to focus on. Train them three
days a week and the rest of the body once a week at maintenance level
(either by doing everything in one workout or splitting it in two). Then, every
four weeks, place your focus on different muscles or a new lift.

3. Focus on creating the look you want.

There's a phenomenon I call "muscle migration." When you've achieved an
overall muscle mass close to your limit, you can still create an aesthetic
evolution of your body by changing WHERE you're holding that muscle.