The TOP 2 Ways for Men Over 40 to Build Muscle Quickly
If you want to build high-quality, usable muscle, then I built this program specifically for guys over 40. Check it out here.
And if you want to build up to a pound of muscle a week using a pair of kettlebells in as little as an hour a week?
You’ll want to use this one.
Every man over 40 should be focused on building and maintaining muscle.
But what’s the best way to do it?
In this video, I break down the 2 main types of muscle growth and explain which one I think is more useful for guys our age.
This is the “M” in the RSMP Method — MUSCLE.
As we get older, muscle becomes increasingly important.
Your fast-twitch muscle fibers are the ones responsible for producing high levels of force.
They help you:
Lift more weight.
Move faster.
Jump higher.
And as you age, they also play an important role in helping you stay capable, strong, and harder to knock off balance.
I also like to think of muscle as your metabolic machinery.
The more muscle you have — and the more often you actually use it — the more useful that muscle becomes for handling the demands you place on your body.
But here’s where a lot of guys over 40 go wrong.
We think back to the old bodybuilding days.
Train hard.
Push every set to failure.
Destroy the muscle.
Get sore.
Recover.
Repeat.
That used to be considered “hard-core.”
But you do not need to take every set to momentary muscular failure to build muscle.
And for guys our age, doing that can create a bigger recovery cost than we actually need.
More muscle damage.
More soreness.
Longer recovery.
And potentially less exposure to the productive training stimulus we actually want.
The better approach is to create enough mechanical tension to stimulate muscle growth without unnecessarily wrecking yourself.
From there, I break muscle growth into two main categories:
1. Myofibrillar Hypertrophy
This is the type of growth that increases the size of the muscle fibers themselves.
This is the kind of muscle development you commonly see in:
Olympic weightlifters.
Sprinters.
Track and field athletes.
Powerlifters.
The benefit here is that you’re not just building a bigger muscle.
You’re building a muscle with more potential to produce force.
2. Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy
This is the type of muscle growth more commonly associated with bodybuilding-style training.
It increases the fluid and other components around the muscle fibers and is commonly trained with higher repetitions, often around:
12–20+ reps per set
That can certainly increase muscular size.
But it does not build nearly as much strength as the type of training aimed more toward myofibrillar hypertrophy.
For guys over 40, I prefer focusing heavily on building high-quality, usable muscle.
And for best results, I recommend eventually alternating cycles between:
Building muscle
and
Building strength
Because a bigger muscle has more potential to become a stronger muscle.
Stay Strong,
Geoff Neupert.
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