How to build muscles as you age

Maintaining and building new muscle does become harder as you get older. Even if you work out regularly, you might struggle with, say, opening a pickle jar or lifting a suitcase more than you did when you were younger.

- Danielle Friedman

With age, your muscles become less responsive to the things that built them up in the past—namely strength training in combination with a protein-rich diet, said Dr. Bradley Schoenfeld, a professor of exercise science at Lehman College in New York.

At the same time, your sex hormones—primarily testosterone for men and estrogen for women—decline as you get older, which also hampers your body's ability to build new muscle. And chronic inflammation may also increase with age, which can make it harder to repair and build new muscle, since your immune system has to work harder to keep you healthy.

But your biology is not entirely your destiny, Dr. Schoenfeld said, and strength training can go a long way towards slowing or counteracting these changes.

While some muscle loss is inevitable, the rate at which it declines is heavily influenced by lifestyle. Regardless of when you begin, it is possible to build new muscle at any age.

SLOW DOWN THE CLOCK Several studies do suggest that adults lose 3 to 8 per cent of their lean muscle mass per decade starting at around age 30, and even more after age 50. But this decline is as much a result of shifting exercise habits as physiological changes, experts said.