After you reach 40, you will notice your body changing. You adjust specific routines, maybe add goggles that help improve vision or knee pads during a run to prevent soreness. Aging is a process, and exercising regularly can help you do it in style. Bodyweight strengthening exercises are especially important as you enter your 40s and beyond.
Doctors, physical therapists or trainers will tell you that the idea that “everything is in a downward spiral when you exercise in middle age” is outdated. However, when your body changes, it’s a good idea to pay attention.
For example, testosterone levels may decrease as well as the tendon and ligament vascularization. You might also need more recovery time after hard workouts.
Fight the urge to make huge, dramatic changes in your exercise routine. Instead, make small changes, like correcting mistakes or overcoming bad habits. Check out these common bodyweight training mistakes to avoid.
You are not working on your flexibility and mobility
As you get older, it’s easy to forget the importance of exercise. We juggle family and work responsibilities, and exercise doesn’t always fit neatly into our schedule. In middle age, staying physically fit becomes even more important. Therefore, we have to get off the couch and practice, even when we don’t want to.
After all, a sedentary lifestyle will hurt you in various ways. Not only are you putting yourself at risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but your joints are also losing their ability to move through a full range of motion. This will cause you to lose flexibility, which you need for even the most routine daily activities.
Loss of flexibility also increases your risk of daily injury, limits circulation, and negatively affects your standing and sitting postures. Protect your muscles, tendons and ligaments. Avoid unnecessary surgeries.
Add rejuvenating exercises like yoga and pilates to your routine to maintain flexibility and mobility as you age.
You skip your warm-up and cool-down routines
Getting in shape at 40 means warming up before training and cooling down afterwards. This is vital, especially as we age, to avoid potential injury. If you don’t take the time to take care of yourself, you risk losing time to rest and losing your muscles. It’s not worth the shot.
Warming up and cooling down don’t have to be time-consuming activities. A few stretches or jumping rope will relax and warm up your muscles. This prepares them to be lifted so that your stabilizers and connective tissues work more efficiently. Lightweight warm-up sets also sync your mind-muscle connection to get the most out of every move.
Cooling down after a workout removes lactic acid from your body and slowly regulates your heart rate. Again, this shouldn’t take a lot of time. Incorporating simple stretches, covering major muscles, or a 6-7 minute yoga flow could give you the recovery time you need before you start your day.
You take it too easily
It’s common to reach your forties and forget to put on some intensity in workouts. Don’t fall into the trap of a dull, mundane exercise routine. You may feel the need to stick to what you know or do the bare minimum. But never questioning yourself has a price.
Sticking to the old routine of two to four sets of six to ten reps while overemphasizing things like time under tension can lead to muscle breakdown. Don’t miss the benefits of an important essential: power training. Add simple exercises like kettlebell swings into your regimen. Include other adjustments, like using more strength with bench presses and squats.
you are not consistent
You won’t see improvements or other positive results if you’re not consistent. Think back to when you were a little younger and just starting out. You trained with constant effort and energy. Week after week you showed up. And you have noticed results.
When you start missing a workout here or there, you might think it’s no big deal. You’ll just catch up when you get back to it. But when you reduce your intensity or stop completely, it becomes harder to get back to that energy. This is especially true if you eat and drink like you were working out when you quit.
Unfortunately, a lousy week can easily turn into a lousy month. If you don’t hold yourself accountable, it can be hard to get back to where you were. Inconsistencies with training lead to inconsistencies with nutrition and other areas of life. This is how people lose their way and start gaining weight and losing muscle in middle age.
You cannot always control external problems and you may have to miss a workout. However, you can create alternate plans to minimize the risk of interruption and, therefore, its effects.
Schedule social events and workouts so you can have both without compromising any gains you’ve made in your fitness level.
You don’t use modifications
The types of workouts that made sense in your 20s won’t make sense in your 40s. If you try to hang on to highs or right turns, you may end up with pain and injury. Sometimes you won’t be able to walk away at all.
Instead of clinging to what no longer serves you, use modifications that involve medium-weight, medium-repetition exercises. Even better? Incorporate routines with a wide range of movements. These changes include the use of the following:
- Kettlebells
- Yoga
- Swimming
- Martial Arts
- dumbbell exercises
Unfortunately, too many people over 40 skip certain exercises altogether because they think it’s too difficult for their age group. A better bet would be to use modifications that maximize results and produce exactly the type of the strength and flexibility your aging body needs.
You don’t balance your aerobic and anaerobic exercises
When you neglect the cardio and conditioning part of your workouts, you’ll run out of steam pretty quickly. You want to increase your longevity, not deplete it. Since the metabolism starts to slow down after 40, you have to burn calories in other ways. Discover exercises and routines that elevate your heart rate.
Start slowly. Find a way to include up to ten minutes of aerobic activity each day. Include these short but gentle bursts in strength training toward the end of the workout. To do this, jump on the treadmill or the rowing machine.
Push yourself a little more by adding less than a minute of interval training. A long run, bike ride, or swim will also add important cardio to your workout. Keep it steady and consistent on a weekly basis.
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