“I want to be more toned” is a common desire shared with me by many of my clients. Most of us can relate to that sagging feeling we get as we get older. Our flesh seems to wobble more and there seems to be more of it! Not for everyone, of course, but putting on weight and losing muscle tone is a common experience for most.
The truth is that when we hit 50, we begin to lose 1% of our muscle mass every year and our strength deteriorates at double that rate. If we don’t use our muscles, those percentages go up. Oh, the joy of ageing!
I joke, but this is a serious concern and is medically known as sarcopenia in more serious cases. No-one wants to be weak and many of us would rather fat did not move in where muscle used to be. This is when body parts start to sag, and clothes do not fit us the way they used to.
We can just accept that fact and carry on getting weaker, heavier, and less toned or we can fight! Not literally, but we can put up some resistance through resistance training…and that means weights.
I am not saying you need to try to stride into your local gym and hang out with the beefcakes. But if you want to, go right ahead; I love that kind of confidence! Instead, I am recommending classes or home practice where you can use barbells, hand weights, kettlebells, resistance bands or even your own body weight.
I designed my own strength programme when I was recovering from a back injury and rely on it now to keep muscle loss at bay. I run an online strength class once a week to encourage my clients to add weights to their exercise training.
We combine exercise with weights to work every muscle group in the body while listening to my latest playlist. I do love a good playlist! I change up the session every few weeks with tweaks along the way to help my clients work harder to get the results they want.
Meanwhile, I also teach multiple Pilates classes – online and in-person – which offer options for body weight resistance, including the wonderful plank! For many of my clients, these classes are their two resistance training sessions for the week, which is the ideal number to keep yourself strong as you get older. My online clients can also get the recording of the strength class so they can do a second one in their own time if Pilates is not their thing.
As a point of note, if you think walking or running is enough to prevent muscle loss, then you’re wrong. You still need the weights! And if you add in strength training, you will be a better runner or walker.
You also need protein to help your muscles recover and re-build. I often share a photo of what I have eaten on my social media pages to remind my followers of the importance of eating protein after exercising. As we get older, protein can get missed as our taste changes or we develop problems with teeth, gums or swallowing, so it is important to make sure it is present in our diet in whatever form is palatable.
If you want to get toned, you need to prevent muscle loss. Using weights and resistance training does not mean you will end up like one of those beefcakes in the gym, but you will feel better about your body, will be stronger and ready for what ageing throws at you. That’s the kind of fight I am up for!
Want to try my online strength training class, follow this link, or join one of my taster classes for Pilates.