CCould Nicole Kidman be real? That was the question that arose from her photo shoot for perfect magazine, in which the 55-year-old strikes a powerful victory pose, arms flexing like a bodybuilder, biceps taut, huge, extremely detailed. She looks like an anatomical drawing, and like she can pull a truck out of a swamp. She was spellbound by her legs. It’s hard to see her muscular definition, from the front, on one of her legs. Oh boy, not anymore. The Daily Mail said she looked “decades younger” than her age, which isn’t true, as we don’t tend to age each other with our arms (it’s all in the eyes, folks). What you do see is absolutely torn, in her 50s. She looks like an elite athlete, just like David McCall54, with his rock hard six pack and even huw edwards61, who caused a stir by showing off his toned torso on Instagram.
There has been a visible strength trend in the female form in recent years, fueled by millennials exercising differently. They focus on body strength training and urban calisthenics, using online trainers, motivational Instagram communities and better lifestyles that deposit less fat. However, the important difference is in their sexual politics.
When we in our 50s or so were young, the female ideal was to be incredibly agile and slim. Muscle definition, especially in, God help you, the shoulders, was considered beefy and undesirable. The visible triceps were fine, indicative of low body fat, but it’s quite difficult to tone the triceps without affecting the shoulders. I remember being warned against rowing as an activity, with a scary story about someone’s sister who had tried it multiple times and ended up looking like a wrestler. There were myths sold as fact that if you accidentally built muscle and then didn’t take care of it, it would turn into immovable fat, hence Big Daddy. You would have this terrible ratchet where you would build a muscle, take care of the muscle, accidentally build more, and if you ever stopped, you would be seedless and no one would ever love you. Theoretically, this could continue until you became the Hulk, so it was safer to stick with aerobics. All of this was based on the idea that ultimate femininity should be as different as possible from the male, with your meaning as a woman generated by your difference from the man, in the Derrida tradition. Women born after the mid-80s don’t buy it anymore.
So he’s gotten pretty old. No have muscle definition, and frontier celebrities like Madonna have been very clear about it for years. However, I wouldn’t say that it has completely filtered down to the general population. “People in their 50s want to get rid of their bellies, usually,” says Leon Bolmeer, 51, owner of Geezers Boxing in Heacham, Norfolk. Personal trainer Lucinda Meade, 58, says: “Most people want to look strong but natural.”
But let’s say you want to be scarred at 50, could you play a prank on yourself? How difficult would it be? Can it be done from a standing start (or more likely, from a sitting start)?
Yes, everything is possible, he says Jenny Stoute57, a former Olympian and Gladiator. “It all depends on the individual and how committed they are to themselves. If you have a good enough diet and stick to your game plan, exercising, then of course you can change your body.” You most likely won’t end up looking like Kidman, though, unless you look like her from the start. “We can’t legislate on people’s body type,” Stoute continues. “If you have very good body composition, then you are one of the lucky ones.”
So what will it take? Do not be fooled: when you can see a muscle in all its splendor it is because it is not hidden under a mantle of fat. Diet is a necessary but insufficient part of having a defined figure: you could shed all the fat and still not have much muscle to show it, but you can’t see the muscle if you can still see the fat. And it’s harder to reduce body fat as you age, because the way you process blood sugar changes. I can’t stress this enough: getting rid of body fat is not having a nice balanced diet with lots of different colors on your plate and no cake. It’s pretty extreme and not at all Instagrammable: I once interviewed Helen O’Reilly, aka Panther the Gladiator, when she was preparing for a competition, and all she had eaten the day before was 18 chicken breasts.
“Then you have to think, what will your skin look like?” Meade advises. “How is your collagen? I know that for me, if I lose a lot of weight, I’m going to have skin hanging off.”
Stoute agrees: “We have to be very careful not to get too skinny and gaunt, because when you get old, you get very old.”
As for muscle hypertrophy, the act of getting a muscle and making it bigger, that’s not for the faint-hearted. “It means training each muscle group to exhaustion two or three times a week,” says Meade. “You’re damaging that muscle, then you have to rest it, then it builds up with protein synthesis to end up bigger. It takes time and you have to be prepared to feel uncomfortable.” This brings us to the question: are you willing to be the most important person on your schedule? “It’s possible, but it’s about the sacrifice of everyone around you, isn’t it?” Bolmeer says thoughtfully. “You are probably more stressed in this decade: parents pass away, men and women take full responsibility for their families. That’s probably the problem at 50: you come in last.”
While you can get incredibly ripped when you’re younger using nothing more than your own bodyweight and maybe some barbells in a pinch, you’ll need weights as you get older as your muscles are already disintegrating (sorry to be a bummer). . So it’s helpful if you have a pre-existing gym ethic, like you really enjoy being there, as well as some grounding in strength training. It basically helps if you’re a Stoute: “I’d exercise all day every day if I could. That’s my enthusiasm”, but not all of us can be Olympians.
You have some advantages at this stage of your life. It is said that you have more stamina as you get older. That’s what it looks like, if you ever see a senior Ironman or the like, a sudden injection of staying power, an unexpected gift from the universe. That’s not all, though: “We’ve been on the planet long enough that, at this age, we have a good understanding of our bodies,” says Stoute. You instinctively know when to rest and how much you need, you don’t run out of energy. “We used to hold the veteran triathlon championships where I served in the military,” says Bolmeer, “and his endurance was incredible. But they worked and then slept for 12 hours.”
The pitfalls are: for both genders, you’re going to break your joints unless you listen to them. If there are things that Stoute can’t do because it will destroy his lower back and knees, there are definitely things your I can’t do. You can’t argue with your dolls to begin with. It’s not so much a tradeoff (you’re going to help your joints in the long run if you build muscle around them), but it’s an ongoing consideration, one that will certainly disrupt your hypertrophy plans from time to time.
Relatedly, posture is key, particularly the back and, in the case of women, the pelvic floor. It’s impossible to overstate how bad those five decades of sitting were that you just did. “That affects you just as much as being a builder,” says Bolmeer. So while his training goals are primarily trying to burn out three times a week, he’ll also need to carve out time for something like pilates or yoga. “You can’t do the required training unless your pelvic floor is in order,” says Meade. “That is the main posture that keeps you upright. If you urinate when you lift a lot of weight or have painful intercourse, your pelvic floor is not in order.
Is it worth all this pain? I made a fits in my 40 column, and for a while, between street dance classes and Hiit workouts, I had really great arms. I’d be in a bar class next to a mirror the size of a room, thinking, “Wow. I could probably be in an ad, as long as they erased my head and it was a gun ad.” However, I am not sure that it has improved my quality of life. Being ripped is mostly an aesthetic decision, and if you get that washboard stomach, what are you going to do with it? Wear a crop top? To the garden center?
Without a doubt, though, whatever muscle you build, you’ll thank yourself in your 70s and 80s. It’s peculiar how well versed we are (even if we do nothing about it) in cancer and heart disease and how to prevent it, when falls are a huge factor in poor quality of life and building muscle mass is a really obvious prophylactic.
Finally, is there a shortcut? Yes, according to YouTube, with its numerous advertisements for the “electronic muscle stimulator that melts body fat.” Muscle stimulation has medical uses, to retrain muscles, reduce muscle spasms and prevent muscle atrophy after a stroke or accident. But there’s still no evidence of girth reduction, fat melting, or “rock hard abs.”
There are also camouflage effects that you can try. Once, a friend wanted to go to a costume party as an emcee and asked a makeup artist to paint a six-pack on his stomach. It might have worked, if I hadn’t been up all night saying, “Look at this amazing makeup job on my fat belly.” But there are other things he could have tried, like wearing a shirt. It’s not in the emcee’s code that you have to go bare-chested.
In conclusion, of course you can become marked if you want. This is almost the cornerstone of the health and fitness creed, that anything is possible if you want it bad enough. You have my blessing, but I’m not sure I’d bet on you.
