Most people hit their 40s and assume the decline is just inevitable. Their workouts don’t recover the same way. The weight isn’t coming off like it used to. They feel like they’re doing everything right and getting less back for it. In Episode 22 of the Kraken Power Podcast, Josko and Brandon break down the real science behind what changes after 40 – and more importantly, what to actually do about it. Spoiler: it’s not as bleak as it sounds, and it’s never too late to start.
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What Actually Happens to Your Body After 40
The changes are real. Muscle mass typically peaks in your 30s, and after that, you lose 3 to 8% of it every decade without strength training. By the time you hit 50, that can add up to 16% of your peak muscle mass – gone. Bone density starts declining from your mid-20s, and for women, that process accelerates sharply through menopause when estrogen drops rapidly.
On the hormonal side, men lose about 1 to 2% of testosterone every year after 30. That compounds quietly for a decade before most people notice it. Less testosterone means less capacity to build and hold muscle, slower recovery, and changes to energy and body composition that feel like they came out of nowhere.
You also get the visible stuff – wrinkles, gray hair, changes in body fat distribution. These aren’t random. They’re downstream effects of hormonal and mineral shifts that have been building over time.
None of this means you’re broken or that it’s too late. It means the rules change, and if you keep training and eating the same way you did at 25, you’re going to keep getting frustrated. Your body is operating in a different environment now – one that responds really well to the right inputs, and really poorly to the same old volume-first, recover-later approach.
The biggest mistake people make is treating these changes as failures instead of information. Brandon puts it plainly: these are things you have to respect. The earlier you respect them, the better you can work with what your body is actually doing.
The Metabolism Myth Everyone Gets Wrong
A 2021 study found that most people’s metabolism stays relatively stable between ages 20 and 60. That gets shared online as good news – “your metabolism is fine, stop blaming it.” But that framing misses most of the story.
Yes, your metabolism might not be tanking. But what changes dramatically is how much you move. At 20, you might have had a job at McDonald’s, a grocery store, or retail – on your feet all day. Weekends were snowboarding, going out, being active without thinking about it. Then life shifted. Desk job. Kids. Commuting. You went from burning 3,000 calories a day to burning 2,100. That’s a 900 calorie difference that happened gradually and invisibly.
And it’s not as simple as telling someone to “just move more.” That 900 calorie gap was built into the structure of their old life, not something they chose. Now the structure is different, and that genuinely reduces their energy output regardless of what they want to do about it.
For some women, the gap is even more stark. If your metabolism was already on the lower end at 20 and then hormonal shifts knock it down further, you’re now working with a meaningfully smaller calorie budget. That’s not a character flaw. That’s biology, and treating it like willpower failure is both inaccurate and unhelpful.
The takeaway isn’t that metabolism is irrelevant after 40 – it’s that the bigger variable is usually movement, muscle loss, and life load. Fix those, and the metabolism follows.
How to Train Differently After 40
Train less, but train harder. That’s the short version – and it runs directly against how most people think about getting results.
Josko now trains with weights twice a week. At his peak he was doing three, four, sometimes five sessions a week on top of jiu-jitsu. He scaled back, kept the intensity high, added daily walks, and his testosterone actually went up. That’s not an anomaly. When your recovery capacity is reduced, adding more training doesn’t fill the gap – it widens it.
For people over 40, Brandon recommends compound strength movements done at high load with enough rest between sets to actually recover before the next one. Not circuit training. Not running yourself into the ground every session. Heavy work, proper rest, two or three times a week. That structure allows the adaptation to happen without constantly digging a hole your body can’t climb out of.
Machine-based work is completely valid here too. Guided movements reduce the injury risk that naturally increases with age, and the stimulus is the same. A seated leg press, a chest press, a lat pulldown – these are not beginner exercises. They’re appropriate for anyone who wants to train hard and recover properly, at any age.
The compound lifts – squats, presses, hinges, rows – remain important because they build the kind of functional strength that carries into daily life. The difference after 40 is the volume. Less is more. You’re not trying to out-train your younger self. You’re trying to maintain and build from where you are, with enough gas in the tank to actually live your life outside the gym.
Why Recovery Has to Come First
Recovery is where the actual progress happens. That’s true at any age, but after 40 it becomes the whole game.
When Josko was 20, he could lift heavy, snowboard for four hours, sleep five hours, and do it again. Now, that same weekend would wreck the next week of training. That’s not weakness – that’s a changed recovery environment. Fighting it doesn’t work. Working with it does.
The key shift in thinking is this: the gym is not the only load your body is managing. If you have kids, a demanding job, a full schedule, and a night of broken sleep, those are all recovery demands your body is paying for. Adding three hard workouts on top of that doesn’t make you tougher – it just means your body is in debt.
Josko and Brandon talk about this as “life load” – the total stress your body is managing across all sources, not just training. A person who works 10-hour days, sleeps six hours, and manages a family cannot recover from the same training volume as a 22-year-old athlete with no obligations. The program has to account for reality.
If you have a ski trip coming up or a big event at work, that’s the week to do one workout, not three. There’s no shame in that. The intelligent move is to time your training around your life, not force your life to accommodate an aggressive training schedule that your body can’t sustain anyway.
Recovery tools that matter most after 40: sleep quality above everything, daily walking, not training more than two to three times a week with weights, and paying attention to how your body feels on a day-to-day basis. An Oura Ring or any HRV tracker helps make recovery visible, but you don’t need a device to notice when you’re running on empty.
How to Naturally Support Your Hormones
You can’t fully stop the hormonal shifts that come with age, but you can meaningfully slow them and work in the opposite direction. Josko went from a testosterone level of around 650 to 700 ng/dL to over 950 – flagged as high by his doctor – without any pharmaceutical help.
The changes he made: improved sleep quality, reduced training frequency, and adjusted his nutrition to include more foods with saturated fat and cholesterol, both of which are linked to testosterone production. It took a few years, not a few weeks. But the direction was consistently up.
Sleep is the biggest lever. Testosterone is produced largely during sleep – particularly during deep sleep phases. If you’re sleeping five or six hours, you’re cutting your production window short. Prioritizing sleep quality is probably the single highest-leverage thing someone over 40 can do for their hormones, energy, and recovery.
For women, the picture is different. Estrogen doesn’t respond to the same lifestyle variables the same way testosterone does in men, and the drop at menopause is sharper and faster. Strength training is the best tool here – it helps maintain muscle mass and bone density at exactly the point when both are at risk. Protein intake also becomes more critical; the recommended intake for people over 40 is 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight, higher than what most people are getting.
Hormone replacement therapy is a legitimate option some people pursue with their doctor. That’s a conversation to have with a physician, not a podcast. What Josko and Brandon focus on is the lifestyle side – and the evidence is clear that the lifestyle inputs move the needle more than most people expect.
It’s Never Too Late: Real Results After 60
Two real people from Kraken’s gym make this concrete.
Brandon’s dad is 65. He started training at Kraken about a year and a half ago with no real background in structured strength work. His previous experience was the old-school approach: run yourself into the ground every session, leave drenched, or what’s the point? That model came from an older era of fitness that didn’t account for recovery, load management, or longevity.
He now does two sessions a week – programmed compound lifts, targeted mobility work, high load with proper rest. The result: he plays more pickleball than he did before he started training, and he recovers from it faster. His whole relationship with his body changed.
Grace is 73. She started training in her early 60s. She’s not trying to become a powerlifter. She trains to stay capable, independent, and upright. What she tells Brandon every week is that when she goes out to lunch with her friends, she’s the only one sitting up straight. Everyone else is hunched over. She looks out for the group. That’s the win.
If you’re 40 and you haven’t started yet, you have decades of results ahead of you. If you’re 60 and thinking it’s too late, Brandon’s dad and Grace are both evidence that it isn’t. The body responds at any age – it just needs the right inputs and enough recovery to do something with them.
Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby works with clients across all of these age ranges. The approach scales to where you’re at – not where you think you should be.
FAQ
Does your metabolism really slow down after 40?
A 2021 study found metabolism stays relatively stable between ages 20 and 60. The bigger issue is movement – people move significantly less as life changes (desk jobs, kids, less active weekends). That drop in daily activity, combined with muscle loss, accounts for most age-related weight gain, not a slower metabolism.
How many times a week should I work out after 40?
Two to three strength training sessions per week is the sweet spot for most people over 40. The key is intensity over volume – train hard, then recover fully. Adding daily walking on top of that covers cardiovascular health without eating into recovery capacity that your body increasingly needs.
Can you still build muscle after 40?
Yes. Muscle growth slows compared to your 20s, but it doesn’t stop. The principles are the same – progressive overload, enough protein (1.6-2.2g per kg of body weight), sleep, and recovery. The difference is that recovery takes longer, so training frequency needs to come down while intensity stays high.
What type of training is best for people over 40?
Compound strength movements – squats, presses, rows, hinges – done at high load with adequate rest. These build functional strength that carries into daily life and help maintain muscle mass and bone density. Two to three sessions a week with full recovery between is more effective than five sessions your body can’t adapt to.
Is it too late to start exercising at 60 or 65?
Not at all. The body responds to strength training at any age. Kraken coaches have seen clients start in their 60s and have their lives change – better posture, more capability in sport and daily activity, less injury. The earlier you start the better, but starting late still produces real results.
Ready to Start?
If you’re in North Burnaby and you want a training approach that actually fits where your body is at right now – not a generic program built for a 25-year-old – Kraken Fitness works with clients across all ages and all starting points. A coach will assess where you’re at, build a plan around your recovery capacity and your life, and check in with you every week.
Listen and Watch
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/an6fQwhigEo
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ncfPra5FlX4867aT8WzWI?si=454df19b0e864d87
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-body-after-40-why-everything-changes-and-what-to/id1769000945?i=1000770971869
About the Author
Josko is the Founder & CEO of Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He’s been coaching for over 12 years and has worked with clients ranging from complete beginners to competitive athletes – including extensive experience training people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond.
Brandon is the Co-Owner & COO of Kraken Fitness and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He has a background in kinesiology and trains for jiu-jitsu performance. His work with clients like his own father has given him a front-row view of how training needs to shift as the body changes with age.
Full Transcript
[Brandon]
There was a study in 2021 noted that most people’s metabolism doesn’t actually drop off until they’re about 60 years of age. But what actually accounts for more weight gain is actually the loss of muscle mass and as well as movement. As you age, you’re going to move less. You know, maybe at the beginning, 20 years old, you had a job at McDonald’s. You’re on your feet the entire day. Then you go out on the weekend. Now you have kids. Now you have an office job. Now you’re sitting down more. And it’s not like you can just say like, “Oh, just move more.” It’s like this person now has a desk job. Before they were burning 3,000 calories. Now they’re burning 2100. That’s a significant difference. Welcome back to the Kraken Power podcast.
[Josko]
I’m not one to be ashamed of my age, you know, as you know, some people they’re like too scared to say how old they are and stuff. I’m 34 years old and I think for a 34 year old I feel pretty good. You know, I don’t have any crazy joint issues. I still move well. I still work out well. But I always thought it was a lie when people said like, “Oh, as soon as you hit 30, it’s downhill and you start feeling crappier or stuff.” And I always thought that was a lie. And it’s, you know, if you continue sleeping well and you continue training well, like it’s not true, right? You’re like, “That won’t happen to me.” I kind of feel it. Like, if I’m being completely honest, right, dude? When I was 20, I remember like I could easily work out in the morning, maybe even potentially do a run or a walk on the treadmill super long in the evening, go like snowboarding for 4 hours, and then come back, eat, and then go to bed late at like 11, wake up for work at like 5 or 6, and start my shift, do the same thing again when I was 20. But now, like, that sounds like a bad idea. Like, I would feel that the next day. I would feel more tired the next day. I wouldn’t get a good sleep, you know, like I would definitely not sleep like a baby because my body’s trying to recover. So my HRV is probably going to be like through the roof. It’s just not realistic for me anymore, you know?
[Brandon]
Well, I just noticed the other day where, you know, usually every morning I’ll get in a workout or some kind of strength training workout and I did a pretty heavy leg day and I was trying to get back into my deep focus work in like the middle of the afternoon. I’m like, why am I so tired? And before that would like re-energize me for the entire day. Okay, I’m going to go jiu-jitsu later today. I might get in a second run in today, too. But now it’s more so I really have to focus on the recovery time. And we’re not even there cuz today we’re going to be talking about what happens to your body after 40. Because we have lots of clients who have obviously passed that age group. Very experienced with training people beyond 40. And there are definitely different changes that happen to that population in which you might want to treat training and like we said earlier recovery differently. There is obviously science to this. What is that science? So a lot of the things you’re going to see pertains to how your body is going to recover, but just to kind of touch up on a few things here. So your muscle mass, your muscle mass will typically peak around your 30s. And unfortunately, every decade, you tend to lose around 3 to 8% of your muscle mass that you had at your peak. So what the crazy thing is by the time you get to 50, you can lose up to like 16% of what your muscle mass was. And this is primarily if people are – some people more. But this is primarily obviously if you’re not doing strength training. Another thing that will change is your bone density. And so a lot of people will lose their bone density after their mid-20s or so, especially women, after they go into menopause. And you’ll see lots of people with predisposed risk of osteoporosis again if you haven’t been doing strength training throughout these kind of years. And on the hormonal side, you’ll see different things for men and women. So for most people again after the age of 30 you’re going to see about a 1 to 2% drop of testosterone each year basically. And for women their estrogen will rapidly drop as soon as they hit menopause. And so these hormones are also going to affect again your muscle mass and your bone density which will affect how much you have capabilities in your daily life. You know, you’ll see a lot of changes in people as they progress through their 30s and 40s, right? So obviously you get wrinklier, right? You get gray hair, you get hair loss. Obviously there’s like some mineral imbalances going on and changes in your body, right, hormonally and stuff that are causing physical changes to you, right? So of course there’s going to be things happening to you over time that are affecting you, right? So it’s something that you have to respect, which is something that I didn’t respect as much before I started aging.
[Josko]
With all these changes coming down the pipe, how would we change our training? How do we change our nutrition? How would we generally approach our lifestyle habits to ensure that we can continue to glide that plane for longer and a better quality flight? So you know this about me, but like about 2 or 3 years ago, I got like really into testosterone maxing, I guess you could call it, as the kids say. Yeah. I got into testosterone maxing naturally, right? So I was doing things like icing my balls. Just straight up saying it. Feels great. Yeah, it does feel great. It does get toasty in there. And doing things like also, of course, working on my sleep, working on my nutrition, eating more foods with like saturated fat and cholesterol and stuff. Those are all known to increase your testosterone. Since I started doing that, my testosterone over the years has actually increased. So before I remember my testosterone was somewhere around like 23. This is Canadian measurements. So if I had to put the number into American units – freedom units. Yeah. I think it was around like 650 to 700. And then now my testosterone’s well over 900. So I believe it was like the last time we tested it was like about 950, which is about 31 in Canadian units. It’s actually flagged as too high. And so this was over the years I’ve actually been able to increase my testosterone despite aging. So the 1 to 2% is not realistic for me, you know. So it is definitely possible for you to combat all of these issues with aging. There’s people that have been known to reverse wrinkles and reverse gray hairs. So those are all things that you can work on on your body to prevent yourself from aging. And when it comes into the fitness side of things, of course, like you mentioned earlier, women going through menopause are going to be losing muscle mass and bone density at a rapid rate. And the way that you prevent that is by weight training.
By the way, if you’re watching this thinking, I wish I had a coach like that, you can. We coach people online. You get a real dedicated Kraken coach writing your program, checking in every single week through video, all through your phone. The links in the description.
And strength training is so important because not only is it going to help you hormonally, like increase the amount of testosterone that you have, but it’s going to allow you to build muscle mass and hold bone density as long as possible because your tissues, they love that tension. And it has to be weightbearing, obviously, so they can go through that adaptation process and rebuild and continue to flourish. Now, when we’re talking about fitness, however, though, and we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts, it’s not only just doing the work, but being able to recover from it. And being someone who is older than 40, you’re obviously not going to recover as someone who is in their 20s, who has a raging amount of testosterone, and they’re at their peak muscle mass and peak bone density. So what does a training split and recovery look like for you optimally who’s kind of reversed that a bit?
So I’ve increased my testosterone and part of the reason why I think that it’s increased – it’s difficult for me to decipher and say like, oh, this is the one thing that I did, right? But I think a huge part of it was actually reducing my training frequency. So I only train two times per week now, weight training. Whereas before I was training three, four, five times per week on top of that maybe even doing some jiu-jitsu. So now what I do is just walk every day and I have two weight training sessions. I think that was a huge part of it. I know that this is crazy to a lot of people but I increased my testosterone by training less. My workouts however are harder than they were before. So I actually go higher intensity and I push my body harder but then I also on the flip side recover way more. So recovery is a huge part of it as you age. You have to work on the recovery. And so when you’re 25, you don’t have to worry about recovery. You know, you can go work out, you can snowboard immediately after and snowboard for like four hours straight. You wake up the next morning, you’re like, “Ah, feel great.” But you just can’t do that anymore. And that’s the thing – that’s okay. It’s okay. There’s no shame in that, you know. And like let’s say I worked out two times or I have snowboarding on the weekend, and I need to go snowboarding. I’m still going to go snowboarding. I’m still going to go hang out with my family. I might do one workout that week, you know, like if I had to time it right, I might do one workout. It would be the intelligent thing to do. And there’s no shame in that.
[Brandon]
Totally. Because you have to look at your workouts as well as your life as a whole. When you’re thinking about the load that your body is taking, you can’t just think about the things that are just happening in the gym because you’re a father with kids and you have a job. Like that is load that your body has to recover from. I’ve talked about this in previous episodes. And so if we just add extra workouts in there, you’re just again digging yourself further into a hole and you’re not going to be able to recover from that. And the recovery is where all the progress is actually made. And now that we’ve noted that there’s different measures for recovery, you’re not recovering as well. So you just can’t do as much. So as I was doing research before this podcast, cuz I wanted to be very well informed, one really interesting thing that I learned – there was a study in 2021 noted that most people’s metabolism doesn’t actually drop off until they’re about 60 years of age. It’s fairly stable between the ages of 20 to 60. But what actually accounts for most people’s weight gain is actually the loss of muscle mass and as well of movement. So as you age, you’re going to move less. You know, maybe at the beginning, you at 20 years old, you had a job at McDonald’s. You’re on your feet the entire day. You’re working at a grocery store. You were doing retail. You’re on your feet the entire day. Then you go out on the weekend, you go dancing with your friends, you go out and hang out with them, you go snowboarding, right? And then as you age, now you have kids, now you have an office job, now you’re sitting down more. So yeah, that reduces your metabolism even more. And then it reduces movement, so you’re burning less calories as you age. Like yes, it does remain relatively stable until you’re 60, but you’re definitely moving less now. And that’s really hard for people. And it’s not like you can just say like, “Oh, just move more.” You know, it’s like this person now has a desk job. Before they were burning 3,000 calories, now they’re burning 2100. That’s a significant difference, right? So yes, like that study, although it is true, you still have to account for all of those things. And the reality is that for some people maybe when they were 16 or maybe when they were 20 they were burning like 1,600, 1,700 calories some women right and then now by the time they aged, you know, some hormone things happen and stuff like now they’re burning like 1,200 calories. Like that’s a significant amount where like their metabolism was already slow and then now it’s even slower. So yeah, I have a lot of sympathy for those people who struggle with that. And so yeah, like although this study may be true, I feel like it’s almost like begging for misinformation, you know? It’s like your metabolism is fine, don’t worry about it, you know? Like what you were trying to say is just a lot of missing context, too.
[Josko]
Exactly. Because like we were saying earlier, it’s being older than 40 is more than just like what you do in the gym. It’s like having a life and having the family that’s adding to that load or more importantly like the stress that’s loading onto your body. And so with that plus a lack of activity plus a lack of what you used to do in your younger days, maybe that is also attributing to like weight gain as well. So your dad actually comes to the gym now. He trains with one of our trainers and I think that his life changed ever since he started training here and before he never like did any weight training. I think he was maybe even kind of against it. So I don’t know. Tell me what kind of results has your dad seen because he’s – no, my dad’s 63. No, 65 this year. 65. Crazy. There he goes.
[Brandon]
Yeah. So he actually started training with us about a year and a half, two years ago now. And you know, he’s been an athlete all of his life. He’s done some kind of weight training before, but nothing really structured, especially for his age. Coming out from a different, let’s say, time and fitness or era, like the goal for him to go into the gym was just to obliterate his body every single time. Like I remember being younger, like 12 years old, going to him and his personal trainer, and his personal trainer would just get him to run the circuit and just run him into the ground. And so his perception of fitness was that if he wasn’t leaving the gym in a graveling pool of sweat every time he went to the gym, what was even the point? So when I was trying to get him into our gym and I was like, “Hey, you really need a personal trainer because you’re having all these injuries. I want you to be around longer. What are you doing on Monday? You now are a personal trainer.” And so he started – he’s like, “I don’t know about this.” And you know, we implemented a plan for him where he’s doing, you know, very programmed strength training now where he’s doing compound lifts, high intensity, high load, but lots of time to recover in between and things that are targeted strength exercises that are targeted on increasing his mobility and his capability in a lunging position or something that he might see in his sport more often. And because he’s only doing this two times a week, he’s able to recover more and he’s able to do way more things in his life. Like his passion is playing pickleball more than when he wasn’t doing any of this.
[Josko]
And if I meant to add like another example is like my client, you know her very well. My oldest client Grace is 73 now. 73. And the thing that she always says is like, “Oh, I wish I started this earlier.” Because she got into training right around the same time as my dad, probably when she was like in her early 60s. But the greatest thing for her is not that she’s becoming like a bodybuilder or a big powerlifter or anything is that she always mentions to me every week when I see her is when she goes out to lunch with all of her friends, all of her friends are drooped over and she’s the only one standing up straight looking out for the rest of the group. So yeah, it’s never too late to start. For these people, they’ve had their life completely change starting when they were 60. If you’re 40 and you haven’t exercised, just get going. You’ll still see amazing results and it’s not too late.