Getting Fit in your 40s and Beyond

Looking after your fitness is always important but even more so in our middle age. The benefits both physically and mentally are too numerous and wide reaching to address in this post. I’m often asked by patients what they should and how they should go about looking after themselves in middle age and beyond so I’d thought I’d share some tips on how to achieve your goals.

Have a Plan

Its good to have some structure especially building it around your week with realistic amounts of time that you can devote. Ideally following a training plan – these can be found online or even better is to have coach create a bespoke one for you. This helps to keep the training varied and interesting. Its important to have rest days and weeks where you build effort and weeks when you consolidate

Strength Training

There are a number of age related changes including reducing VO2 max, muscle mass, immune function and increased fat deposition and recovery time. Strength training helps to combat these effects. It can be anything from holding postures longer in yoga to weights sessions.

HITT

Its important also to get ones heart rate up. I won’t address the physiology here but it really helps to make gains in fitness

Diet

To combat the muscle loss and fat deposition try to stick to a diet with increased protein and reduced carbohydrate – obviously making sure all the other boxes are ticked like plenty of veg and fruit, fresh whole foods etc etc

Sleep

The body responds to any exercise we’ve done when resting so making sure we get adequate sleep and down time

Fun

Finally make sure you’re enjoying it otherwise we will probably give it up. Classes and groups really help as well as offering the benefits of socialising

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