Fitness expert gives brutally honest fitness advice for men over 40

Lightly edited for readability. Watch the episode above for the full conversation.

I know for 100% I’m shortening my lifespan, guaranteed, but I’m cranking up my life years and I think that’s a good trade-off.

My guest today is Bryan Krahn. I went looking for him and I’ll tell you why. Bryan is an online physique coach and a personal trainer who has spent more than two decades doing this. He wrote the Men’s Health Training Guide for Muscle After 40. He does not coach professional athletes. He coaches guys like you. Guys with a company, a family, a calendar that owns him, who want to look good with their shirt off and still be capable at 60.

Ten years ago, he got hired to write over 40 training articles. Before he wrote it, he went and read what the outlet had published on the subject. He came back and said in public that the material was ineffective, out of touch, and condescending toward fit men over 40. He’s been making some version of that argument ever since. I’m Zac Armstrong, retired Naval Commander, F-18 guy, 27 years in uniform. Now I coach high-performing men over 40. This is No Hype, Just Standards. The rules do change after 40 and then again after 50. That is a programming problem. It is not a decline problem. I run the blood work. He runs the barbell. Between us, that’s the whole picture. And today, you get both halves.

Bryan, thank you again for joining us today. Ten years back, somebody hires you to write a training article for men over 40. Before you write a word, you go read what that outlet already published. Take me back to that archive.

Ten years ago I would have been 43. So I would have told you that over 40 is a total myth, that the body’s just absolutely fine and we’re actually at our peak and in our prime. And quite frankly, we kind of are, but things are happening under the hood and they really don’t start to manifest until you’re closer to my age now. I’m 53. So ten years ago I would have been a little bit more cocky almost. My training wouldn’t be terribly different than a 20 or 30 year old. Maybe just lower volume.

I see it all the time in my clients, or I hear it from somebody I talk to about potentially becoming a client. “I know what to do.” And when they say that, they’re reverting back to when they were 20. So what does the fitness industry get wrong about men over 40?

They quite frankly get everything wrong. It’s one of those things you’ve got to live through. Probably the best way to describe it is my own story. When I turned 40 I did what everyone else does when they turn 40. I did the photo shoot and made the post: look at me, I’m kicking Father Time’s ass, age is just a number, all that. Barely changed my training. Nothing really changed significantly. I felt great because I was only 40. That’s prime. Especially for bodybuilding or just looking good. We’re not athletes and we’re certainly not gymnasts. So 40 is like prime hypertrophy, and if you’ve been training a long time you’ve got 20 or 25 years of solid training under you. You should look good. You should look like a specimen. But what you should be doing, when you still feel good, is start making changes. Because I didn’t. And by the time I was 46, 47, comparatively I was a mess. I couldn’t do any of the stuff that I like to do. Everything hurt. All I did was go to the gym and go to my chiropractor friend. It was my little circuit. He’d work on my shoulder. After I had my son I’d be hurting my back picking him up, and he’s not that fat. I’m like, this is ridiculous, this is not how it’s supposed to be.

So in hindsight, what I should have done when I still felt awesome was: now I’m going to start changing how I train while I still feel good. A lot more machine-based training. Back away from the barbell lifts. I don’t need to squat, my legs are big enough. Or if I do squat, I’m going to be very respectful of the lift. I’m not going to go for one-rep maxes and I’m not going to take any barbell lift to failure. I’ll use machines for that, I’ll use cables for that. All these little changes I would have made while I still felt good.

It makes sense, because around our age an injury isn’t what it used to be in the 20s. It takes you out for weeks at a time. And for the guy who’s just getting started, that’s it. They started, they got injured, “I’m not doing that again.”

Let’s look at it from the other lens, the guy who hasn’t trained, now hitting his 40s and going, oh no, I need to do something. How is the fitness industry getting it wrong about that guy?

That’s a very different context. If you’re a newbie, you’re a newbie. If you’ve never trained before and you’re 40 years old, you can still put on 10 pounds that first year. Quality weight, absolutely. And you probably don’t have the wear and tear on the odometer in the same way, but you’ve still probably got lower back stuff, and you might even have some degeneration happening just from being detrained for so long, and poor posture, all these other things. So it’s not like you can go in like you’re 16 and just blast away. But what you can do is have higher expectations. With the right training program you could get 10 pounds on you in one year. I’d kill for that.

For me, a lot of times with men over 40 the industry focuses on the workout. There are so many more things. You’ve got to look at sleep, you’ve got to look at nutrition, and it’s more than just nutrition because the same things you ate at 20 don’t do the same for you now.

What I do with a new client is, the first two-thirds of the time I’m asking, what’s your daily commute like? How many kids do you have? How old are they? Oh, they’re in prime sports age. Basically I’m looking at their life. I’m trying to figure out how much time do you have, how much structure do you have, or is your life just a chaos bomb, which mine often is. That tells me how much flexibility we have to work with and how much stress tolerance there is. Then of course there’s sleep. And then we get to exercise and diet. But I always start with their lifestyle.

I just had a doctor on the podcast before you and we talked about inflammation and stress and how stress is such a big determining factor on inflammation, and then how that feeds into sleep. Where do you put stress?

I find stress is kind of nebulous. The amount of structure in your life is so important to counteracting stress. People who have a personal sense of rhythm, they get up at the same time, they go to work at the same time, they have a supportive partner, they can handle phenomenal volumes of life stress because they have this inherent structure. Whereas someone who’s in chaos mode might still hit all the things they need to do every day, but they’re shell-shocked. They’re fight or flight.

Every man over 50 says the same sentence to me: my metabolism died.

That’s bullshit. Your metabolism, like, you’re in an airport lounge three days a week, and while you’re there you’re grabbing a snack because you’re bored, you’re waiting for your flight and working on the shitty airport Wi-Fi, and you’re not counting those calories or even acknowledging them. Then you get home and you’re wired, so you have a couple of drinks, and maybe you have a snack with that, but because you had a couple of drinks you don’t really pay attention to what you’ve been eating. It’s stuff like that. That’s what’s killing your metabolism.

I call it a loop. I see it with all the guys I talk to or work with. We get in this comfortable loop. I go to work. Stress here, stress here, stress here, many meetings. Then I come home. I kiss the wife. I need two drinks. Now that affects my sleep and I don’t sleep as much. It’s painful, and I live in this pain. I don’t like the person I see in the mirror. But I live in the loop because I’m comfortable with it. What do you say to that guy?

If someone is surviving, they’re doing something right. So I’m remiss to say, this thing you’re doing, this compensation strategy, it’s bullshit, we’re going to stop that. Because okay, now what? When someone has a thing they rely on that’s getting them through the day, you can’t just pull it out. Not right away. So you have to just do less of that thing and sneak in other compensatory strategies. My days of being a know-it-all and saying, you’ve got to replace that with this, I’ve left that person behind. I’m not that coach anymore.

I love hearing that because there are too many cookie-cutter coaches. I tell every person that comes on board, every person’s program has to be different, and every person’s nutrition has to be different, because everybody comes in with different starting points, different goals, different injuries, different hereditary problems. If you don’t pay attention to the individual, you’re not taking care of them. How do you pay attention to the individual?

I try to be as nosy as I can. But at the same time, I try to be very hands-off. I know how I am as a 53-year-old guy. If I had a coach and they were needling me every day, where’s your food log, why isn’t it updated, where’s your scale weight, breaking my chops every day, I’d fire them. But if they cut me loose and I never heard from them, I’d fire that coach too. So I try to see a person’s response time, how much they think they need me and how much I think they need me, and find a meeting that way. These are all mistakes that I’ve made: I’m going to contact you on this day, you’re going to fill out your check-in form at this time, all this bullshit, which is really just hoops for them to jump through. Anytime we put friction into anything, it’s a deterrent.

What about muscle loss with age? Could you put a number on it?

I just read the stats on sarcopenia and there are three profound ages in life where things accelerate, around 40 and around 60 and one more. But that’s all kind of irrelevant if you’re training. And I get a lot of guys who are former serious lifters, or they’ve taken their fair share of gear, so you’re going to be losing some muscle because you’re on a lower dose or whatever. There’s so much context. Very rarely do I get someone who’s never trained. Everything is case by case.

Strength training and longevity. How much connection is there?

I was also that guy who used to throw around anti-aging, life extension. It’s not. Quite frankly, carrying around a lot of extra muscle, I know for 100% I’m shortening my lifespan, guaranteed. But I’m cranking up my life years, and I think that’s a good trade-off. I would rather not live to be 90 and frail the last five years. I’d rather live to be 83, 84 doing my thing right until the very end, not being cared for, not needing a cane, not needing someone to help me wipe myself.

That’s the one I always use too. But carrying too much is only a small portion of the population. The majority has to worry about not carrying enough.

In terms of the general population, if you’re not strength training by the time you’re 50, you are really stacking the deck toward a lousy last third of your life. Sarcopenia really speeds up between 50 and 60. If you’re not doing even twice a week of strength training to mitigate that, that’s not a good outlook.

Why is strength training a necessity? Too many people think, I’ll just do cardio, I’ll run, I’ll lose weight that way.

It’s the only activity that builds muscle. We do lose muscle, very slowly, but we’re talking years over years over years. It adds up. And if you don’t have a lot to begin with. There are three things we lose: bone density, muscle mass, and testosterone, every year. What slows it down? Strength training. Cardio is not going to do that.

So help me understand. The guy running a company, three kids, four hours a week. Walk me through his week.

Four hours a week, I can probably get in three strength training sessions and one day of higher intensity cardio if applicable. And I’d try to get walking in every day. Even if it’s 10-minute walks here and there, I try to get the steps as well.

Those three days of strength training, how are they different from when he was 20? Let’s say this guy’s 48.

If you’ve got three days and the guy is late 40s, early 50s, we are not doing a bro split. There’s no arm day. We are doing full body, or upper, lower, upper, lower, full body. We’re using big exercises in a very respectful way. First we’re making sure we can do the exercise, and then we can load the exercise. As we progress, we’re never going to failure. We’re staying short of failure. And we’re doing it frequently. A handful of lifts done well, progressed, always keeping a rep or two in the hole, and we’re looking at frequency. Frequency is the bigger thing as you get older. The days of destroying a body part and then sitting back, that was chest Monday, when’s Monday again, those days are behind us. And focusing much more on movement patterns as opposed to specific exercises.

I personally run about 80 biomarkers on a guy before I write him anything as far as nutrition or a workout plan. How much of that side do you feel is important for men around our age?

I do try to get blood work whenever I can, but I don’t make it a requirement before I program for someone. I’ve been reading blood work on clients since the early 2000s, and I used to geek out on it and think it’s essential. I still feel that way, but I think we’ve leaned into it a little too much and everyone is optimizing lab markers now. I’m much more interested in long-term trends. Of course, if there’s a clear red flag, you address that right away. But when I see coaches that are so, we’ve got to run labs, we’ve got to run labs, I’m like, just get this guy training. Get him moving. If you want to run labs, great, run labs, but don’t program around the labs. If you get somebody who’s got terrible blood work and they’re ridiculously overweight, if you just get them losing fat, 90% of those lab values will improve.

The other thing is guys are using different labs, and when they get something that’s really off, they’re not having the client run it again. I had my testosterone done twice in one day. Something happened when they were collecting, I think the lab tech dropped it, so I had to redo the test. Two reports 30 minutes apart, over 100 points different. Same lab, same analysis. Now use a different lab company at another end of the country, you can have a significant margin of error. Whenever someone has something that’s a red flag, I like to run it again. Verify.

I use it as a tool. I had a client the other day who hadn’t had blood work in five, six years. Fully diabetic. No clue. We discovered it and now we’re working on it. But same thing: he loses weight, that comes down naturally. What about sleep?

That’s the one thing that always gets sacrificed. Some of the really dedicated family men, they’ve got their own goals and they watch a lot of self-help podcasts and have really high goals for themselves. God bless them, but that’s where the sacrifice is the sleep. What I look at first is, can I get consistent sleep? If I can only get five hours out of a guy, that sucks, but if it’s five really good hours, in bed by 10 consistently, up early to do his stuff, Monday to Sunday, every day that’s his pattern, we can make that work. Still not ideal, definitely not optimal, but we can make that work. Now if someone’s in chaos, one night two hours, the next night eight, that’s worse. So before we talk hygiene and shaded windows, let’s get some structure. Can we have some consistency in your life?

Almost every successful guy sets an alarm to wake up at the same time every day. Very rarely does he go to bed at the same time. And REM and deep sleep is where the cognitive and muscular repair happen. How do you monitor sleep?

I use self-reporting. I don’t go by the sleep scores. I try to minimize the number of chefs in the kitchen. The wearable tech is so suspect, and if you get somebody who starts to geek out on that too much, they get in their head. When a client says, my HRV is really low, I’m not sure I’m going to train today, I say, how do you feel? Oh, I feel great. Well then go train. I’ve had one client wearing four different devices. Which one do you believe? It’s all interesting data. But when it crosses the line into relying on it to dictate your protocol, you’re in trouble.

We use devices as part of our program, and I’ve definitely seen guys get deterred by the scores and you have to talk them down. I think they’re useful in their place: steps, sleep monitoring, heart rate zones. Outside of that, it gets harder to tell what’s what.

Very few people have the objectivity to say, this is just data I’m collecting.

A guy comes to you. He’s 48, 30 pounds overweight, very limited working out in his life. How do you start him?

That’s a lot of weight to be carrying. Number one, fat loss. That’s the mother goal, and every decision I make will be subordinate to that. Diet will be the main focus. Overall movement, step count, probably number two. Strength training might be number two, but diet is the big one. The strength training would be very basic, just compound lifts, reps in the hole, nothing past failure, three days a week, 45-minute sessions. That gives me the mental space. If you have a lot of complexity in the training, you’re asking a lot of your client’s thinking, and I want that left over for the diet. The diet is going to be simple, repeatable, consistent, and accurate. That’s what you want with fat loss. Avoiding variety, avoiding making the process more difficult than it needs to be. The kings of fat loss are bodybuilders, and not a lot of rocket scientists in there, but a lot of ripped, incredible physiques, because they understand simple means repeatable. Once we get that 30 pounds off, which will take a while, then we push more energy into the training program and push food up a little.

When you say repeatable, what are the staples?

The first thing I have them do is really accurate logging, and I look for their staples, their mother meal. Guys get something they like and they stick with it. If it’s a good choice or reasonably good, and it’s easy to track and easy to repeat, that’s what we build around. If it’s their breakfast, great, don’t change that. Then we work on the next meal. Usually they’re doing something right and that’s a good building block. I don’t send anyone a meal plan. I know the targets we want to hit, I see what they’re currently doing, and we slowly move it so they get to the target.

Now what if we interlace two weeks of travel every month?

I’ve got extra gray hair right now because I’ve got four guys all doing a variation of that, all around my age, all complaining they’re not losing weight, and they all travel extensively. If you’ve got consistent, repeatable travel, you go to Boise every second Tuesday for four days, that’s easy, you can work around that. But Monday I’m going to Timbuktu, Thursday I’ve got to catch a flight here, that’s tough. First we manage expectations. The scale will not be your friend. It’ll be thrown off completely. Your body water is going to be up and down, your stress is going to be high. It’s not reflecting fat loss or fat gain, it’s mainly water. In terms of rules, if they can pack their meals, that is ideal, but none of them really do. So when they’re traveling, let’s go with fewer meals. Two meals a day and two snacks, and the snacks have to be single ingredient: a piece of fruit, or a Greek yogurt they can buy in a jiffy that’s 30 grams of protein. With the two meals, really basic guidelines. I’m limiting the opportunities for them to overshoot their calories.

And training on the road?

I’m not a big fan of circuit training and burn workouts as a staple, but when you’re traveling, those are great. Pretty much every hotel in the United States has two treadmills and dumbbells up to 50. You can make up stuff, go for a pump, get your heart rate up. It’s ideal when you’re traveling. The idea is just to get that training effect.

Let’s talk movement. Everybody’s worried about the workout program. We call it NEAT. You burn more calories a day moving than you will working out, unless you’re a crazy person.

It is really eye-opening how many calories everyday movement burns. I never respected it until probably 10 years ago. I used to make fun of people: oh, I do a lot of gardening in the summer. But look at the calories that burns. If someone can have a standing desk and a walking pad underneath, that’s a huge hack. If you can get your step count well above 10,000, I think the return starts around 15,000, while you’re working, doing your everyday tasks, that’s huge.

I have a standing desk in my office and a walking pad underneath, and anytime I have a client call, I’m walking on that pad. To make them feel a little guilty, and to make them get it too, because they can all afford it. A walking pad is a hundred dollars on Amazon.

The more movement you can weave into your day, if I can weave exercise into someone’s daily life to make it kind of painless, wherever I can lower the resistance, that’s what I try to do. I’m going to contradict myself now, because earlier I said basic movements, full body. If someone has to train arms, I’m not going to take that away from them. All right, man, we’re going to do arms every day. Because then I’ll have 30 minutes after arms to do other stuff that’s more productive. If I can get them in there doing stuff they like, that’s great. It doesn’t matter if it’s not ideal. Them not working out, that’s the one that’s not optimal.

Rapid fire. Does metabolism slow with age? One sentence.

No, it does not.

The archive you read before you wrote the over 40 piece. The line that set you off.

The whole over 40 scene is bullshit, because the wheels come off the road when you turn 50. So over 40 should be prepping for 50.

Muscle After 40, 112 pages. What got cut?

That was with Lou Schuler. He’s the writing brains behind that one. He was that keyed into it: how many sets here, what’s the progression model. I really respect that book for that. It’s a great program because he made sure it was a great program.

The five-day plan you put in Men’s Health. Which day do men quietly skip?

Leg day. That’s universal.

The principle men ignore most?

Definitely mobility. Especially as we age. Younger me would never have done mobility work.

In this industry, plenty of work goes out under someone else’s name. Have you done it?

I was a ghostwriter, and I did a lot of ghost editing. I used to work at T Nation in their editorial department under TC Luoma. Part of my job was to seek out new talent. I got John Meadows’ first stuff going at T Nation, and I miss him dearly. What’s funny is I’d get submissions every day from aspiring writers, and often it would be stuff that I edited personally that they’d copied off someone else. That’s my joke that I put into this old article.

Over 50 muscle. Why 50 and not 40?

I like to write what I know. And 50 is the big one. We overdo 40 so much. 40 is prime.

Which piece do men still email you about?

That Muscle After 40 book with Lou Schuler. I still get people saying, I bought your book, I like it, I can’t afford a coach right now, what do I do with this book, how could I extend it? I’m like, just go through it again. New edition.

Regular people without turning their lives upside down. That’s your line. Which half do clients fight you on?

Diet. Every time.

Last question. Semi-serious physique athlete. Where is the line between semi and serious?

I consider myself a serious physique athlete, and I start laughing as I say it, because I don’t compete or enter shows. But I compete ferociously with myself. I’m always trying to look a little better than I did last year, and now in my mid-fifties it’s still improving. I’ve got to work harder and be more on point, but you can still eke out progress. When you are just gunning at self-improvement, then I think you’re serious, because then you’re making choices all around that. When I’m planning my day, where’s my workout going to be. After I drop my son at school, it’s to the gym.

When my wife and I travel, we look at the hotel gyms before we ever book. Every time. And that’s a great thing to end on, because what you really just said is the ones that are seeking out self-improvement. That’s what you’re asking of people. Bryan, I greatly appreciate you being on the show today.

Here’s what I want you to take out of that. The guy in the mirror this morning did not fail. His program did. There’s a difference, and the difference is everything, because one of those you can fix on Monday and the other one you just carry around. Bryan said it and he has been saying it for a decade: the rules change after 40 and then they change again after 50. That is a programming problem. Nobody handed you a new set of rules, so you kept running the old ones harder and got worse results, and then somebody told you that’s just age. It’s not just your age. So do two things this week. Pick the smallest program you will genuinely do every week for a year, not the best one on paper. And go get real information about what is happening inside you, because looking fine and being fine are not the same thing, and normal only means you’re not sick enough for medication yet. Bryan Krahn, find his work, find his coaching. All of it is linked below. If this one hit, subscribe, and send it to the guy you train with who’s been telling you he is too old. This is No Hype, Just Standards.