Maintaining muscle for over 50's

andysport1

Does anyone actually know how much an over 50 has to do to maintain muscle rather than lose it ?
I cycle most days so my legs have plenty of muscle, my upper body has little muscle.
I have started doing 10 of each
Press up, sit up, bicep curl 5kg, Tri cep and lat
Also the plank for 2 minutes
I do this 3 times a week, is it enough?

I find this horrendously boring

serapel

I weight lift about 4 days a week

Day 1.
Hip thrusts - 260 lbs 3 sets 10
Curtesy squats - 40 lbs 3 sets 12
Band work - clams, hip flexors, etc

Day 2
Squats - lockdown piggy back my daughter 130 lbs 3 sets10
Deadlifts - 90 lbs 3 sets 10
Band work

Day 3 - repeat of day 1

Day 4 - trainer (focus on glutes and legs)
Barbell squat - up to 150 lbs being spotted

Kickbox 2 times a week (lots of ab work and HIIT)

Walk 8000 steps about 5 times a week

I’m very happy with my results. I turn 50 in a few months

sijomial

I'm 60 and your routine would be far too little for me, but I'm not you and I prefer to have more upper body muscle than many serious cyclists.
Do you really mean just ten reps of each exercise as that would be a tiny volume?

For the majority of my training life I've regarded as a general rule twice a week one hour sessions with heavy lifts (mostly compound lifts) as my muscle maintenance and three times a week required to make good progress.

As a keen cyclist I do little leg strength work unless I have a couple of days off the bike.
Restricted training at the moment with my gym shut so I'm doing a bodyweight and dumbbell routne at home which is mostly resulting in muscle maintenance (maybe some hypertrophy?) and some strength increase. I find home training dreadfully boring with restricted equipment choices but not as boring as losing strength and muscle and having to rebuild it yet again.
Fitting training into advert breaks while watching the telly helps!

Total reps per session and repeated three times a week:
4 x 50 sit ups on a gym ball (probably too high for most people but it's my key to managing my damaged lumbar discs).
60'ish dumbbell side bends (compliment to sit ups).
60'ish press ups and bent over rows (that's my horizontal push and pull).
60'ish shoulder press and bicep curls (that's my vertical push and pull).

All dumbell work done with a single dumbbell for a bit of extra core stability work. Varied weight and reps per set but mostly in 8 - 12 range. (Which is quite different to how I train in the gym, heavier weight and typically lower reps.)

With a cold and snowy week coming up stopping my cycling I'll be adding squats and deadlifts.

ninerbuff

At 57 I only train one body part a day for 30 to 45 minutes. BUT then again I've been training my whole life and have a substantial amount of muscle. So for me, this is just maintaining, but I do use a sufficient amount of resistance per session.
The amount of resistance you're using might be low if you can easily curl and do tricep work. You'd need to at least make the workout challenging.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

FitAgainBy55

You can't really compare your routine to others routine unless you have the same fitness profile (history of working out, age, injuries etc....)

The bottom line is your workout needs to be challenging to make a difference. Typical strength training routines are 3 sets of 10 (moderate weight) or 5 sets of 5 (heavier weight). Those aren't absolutes, just guidelines. Whether or not you do 15 reps or 8 reps at a particular resistance level your last rep should be difficult to finish. When you reach the level where that last rep isn't very difficult to finish it's time to either increase the resistance or increase the reps. Increasing the resistance is difficult for body weight exercises if you don't have access to weights, so you might have to just increase the reps until you reach fatigue at the last rep of each set.

Once again, you can't compare one person's routine to another, but based on my current fitness level if I were to do 10 body weight squats per day it would be completely useless. Why ? Because it's just too easy. So, instead, I do kettlebell goblet jump squat presses with a 40 lb weight, 3 sets of 12. When I finish that 12th I'm out of breath. Someone much stronger, lighter and more fit than me might do those and find it easy, so for them it might be of very little value.