I am unsure if this belongs in medical or training Q/A but basically what the title says, is there something special about the age of 30 when it comes to muscle mass? I know that once you get very old (75 or so if I had to guess) muscle loss and strength decline definitely become inevitable, but I’m much less sure about the 30th year being the onset due to coming across a lot of examples to the contrary.
If the 30th year onset is solely for inactive people then why don’t people who have been inactive their entire life start losing mass and strength at 25, 20 or even earlier? Why is 30 the special number? Does this imply that there is something particular about the age of 30 that will cause most people with few exceptions to start declining at 30 even with proper lifelong training and nutrition? Are most people going to be weaker at 35, 40, 50, 55 than at 30 even if they keep training? Is there any concrete evidence suggesting that trained people are worse off during middle age and “young old age” than their youth when it comes to muscle mass just like completely untrained people are? I guess basically what I am asking is through resistance training can you delay or compress the period of “inevitable decline” well into old age or are most people invariably going to decline slowly and gradually from 30 no matter what they do?
Second question about anabolic resistance, I’ve heard you two saying that even if someone is older they shouldn’t worry much about anabolic resistance if they have maintained their activity levels throughout their life so far and are otherwise healthy, I am assuming when you guys said older you were mostly referring to 50 year olds or 60 year olds. I am more interested in the 70-75 age group, is it possible for people in this age group to still not be anabolically resistant if they have maintained high activity levels (more specifically, if they have been doing heavy resistance training for most of their life and are now in their early to mid 70’s)? I’m certain that at some point even anabolic resistance probably also becomes inevitable, there are probably no 85 or 90 year olds who aren’t anabolic resistant, but what about the age group I mentioned? Is everyone aged 70-75 also going to be resistant or can people in this age group delay the onset of it?
I get the sense you are putting far too much emphasis on this exact number 30. It is not a “special number”; it is an average, typically based on population level grip-strength data, among physically inactive people, that has a range around it such that there will be substantial individual variation in onset.
No.
Yes, you can substantially delay and compress the period of decline with effective training.
I don’t have precise age-stratified data on this, but I would pose a question back to you: regardless of the answer here, what would you plan to do with that information?
In other words, imagine that I said “yes, you can delay the anabolic resistance with activity” – what would you do? Or, alternatively “no, you would inevitably develop some anabolic resistance” – what would you do?
In my mind, it seems the answer is the same either way: keep training, and adjust the dosage of stimulus (training, protein, etc.) based on your individual response and tolerance. Modifying the things you can, and not worrying about the things you can’t – the same way you’d do throughout life anyway.
Yeah, I wouldn’t do much with that one, second question about anabolic resistance was just a curiosity thing, information for the sake of information.
The main part was the first question about the 30 year onset because I’ve been seeing too many articles, videos, and even qualified professionals throughout the years saying that although you could slow the decline from 30 onwards, you cannot compress or delay it to a much older age, so as in even lifelong trainers would begin declining around 30 no matter what. I understand that all of us, if we end up living too long, would decline at some point, no one is immortal, but I’d rather have that declining period be latter than sooner, essentially compressing it to a shorter period in life.
The idea that people begin declining as early as 30 no matter what they do never sat well with me because that is still a very young age. Yes, in some forms of athletics top level athletes do seem to fall off around that time due to probably multitudes of reasons, and that itself probably also promotes the idea of all downhill after 30, but as far as solely strength/muscle mass go discounting dozens of other attributes most top level athletes need, the 30 year mark didn’t sit well with me. It probably also doesn’t help that everyone around me that I know in their 30s and 40s constantly talk about how “old and broken” they are, not to mention so many people who are only like 34 shilling for TRT, can’t help but think language and beliefs like these also affects the psyche of everyone around these people. I guess as someone who is soon going to turn 30 it’s been getting to me.