If you’re over 40, you probably have more “stuff” going on in your life than you did at 21, making it difficult to focus on eating right and training regularly. And the enthusiasm you once had for exercise—especially if you haven’t seen the results you were hoping for—may have waned, too

You might feel that your body can’t handle the kind of punishment you used to dish out in your early twenties, and that it takes longer to recover than it used to. But none of this matters. With the right type of training, you can still build muscle and get strong well into your forties, fifties, and beyond.

You can start by trying out a new routine, like the Men’s Heath MA40 program. The 8-week regimen from trainer David Jack is specifically designed for guys who have logged plenty of miles over the years — but still have plenty of gas left in the tank.

Older Guys Can Still Make Gains

University of Oklahoma researchers compared people of different ages who followed the exact same program for eight weeks. They found that guys between 35 and 50 years old built just as much muscle as those between 18 and 22 years old. DEXA (duel-energy x-ray absorptiometry) scans showed that the college-aged men gained around two pounds of muscle, while the middle-aged men put on 2.5 pounds of muscle. Moreover, strength gains in both the bench press (7 pounds for the college-aged men and 14 pounds for the middle-aged men) and leg press (55 pounds for the college-aged men and 40 pounds for the middle-aged men) were similar in both groups.

The basic rules for building muscle as you age are mostly the same. Yes, the number of times you’ve travelled around the sun will affect the speed at which you make progress. But your age isn’t something you can change, so there’s no point worrying about it. You just need to train smart

Embrace the Light

If you lift heavy all the time, you’ll start to notice little aches and pains in your knees, wrists, elbows, and shoulders. Eventually, those minor niggles will get so bad that they’ll interfere with your training. It will take weeks — maybe even months — before they clear up and you can train properly again

Luckily, the solution is very simple: If going heavy on certain exercises causes you pain, just go light instead. Despite what some people might say, you can and will build muscle using lighter weights and higher reps.

In one study, high reps and light weights (3 sets of 30 to 40 reps) stimulated just as much muscle growth as heavy weights and lower reps (3 sets of 10 to 12 reps). Doing 3 sets of 10 repetitions to failure promotes similar gains in muscle size as 7 sets of 3 repetitions with a much heavier weight.

Japanese researchers found that taking a light weight and lifting it slowly increased both muscle size and strength to a similar extent as heavy training at a normal lifting speed. So mix it up. Heavy weights, medium weights, and light weights can all can be used successfully to gain muscle.

Keep Moving

The standard approach to dealing with an injury is to rest. But with some injuries at least, you may be better off moving

Specifically, a form of resistance exercise known as eccentric training has been shown to work extremely well for the treatment of tendon pain in both the elbow and Achilles tendon. In some cases, it appears to potentially work better than surgery.

In one study, Swedish scientists studied the effect of heavy eccentric calf training in a group of 15 middle-aged recreational runners that had been diagnosed with Achilles tendinosis, which refers to a degeneration of the tendon’s collagen in response to chronic overuse. They had been in pain for an average of 18 months. Subjects were told to go ahead with the training even if they experienced pain, and to stop only if the pain became disabling.

At the start of the study, the pain was so bad that it kept them from running. But after 12 weeks of daily eccentric training (3 sets of 15 repetitions twice per day), all the runners were back at their pre-injury levels. A control group of 15 runners with the same diagnosis and duration of symptoms was treated conventionally. The conventional treatments were unsuccessful. All patients in the control group ended up having surgery.

Blast and Cruise

Your body isn’t a machine. It needs a rest now and again. Do this by including a “cruise” week (also known as a deload) for every 3 to 9 weeks of hard training.

Three weeks of intense training followed by a light week is a fairly widely accepted practice, although it’s not based on any research evidence that I’m aware of.

It’s not strictly necessary for everyone to deload after three weeks. But if I told you to deload “when you feel like it,” you probably wouldn’t do it at all. And your body wasn’t designed to go “all out” for 52 weeks of the year without some kind of break.

Pick Your Battles

Some people have a bone structure that makes them better suited to certain exercises than others. You might not be built for deep squats with a heavy barbell across your shoulders, deadlifts from the floor, chinups from a straight bar, or bench pressing through a full range of motion.

If you’ve got short arms and long legs, for example, it’ll be a lot harder to deadlift from the floor without rounding your back compared to someone with long arms and short legs. But that doesn’t mean you should give up on the deadlift. Just do rack pulls instead, using a starting position that allows you to maintain normal spinal curvature

Stretch What’s Tight

Static stretching has been heavily criticized in recent years. That’s because it doesn’t do a lot of the things it’s supposed to. Most of the research out there shows that stretching has little effect on muscle soreness, and doesn’t appear to do much for injury prevention either.

However, if you find that certain muscles feel a little “tight” (the hamstrings, hip flexors, quadriceps, and gluteals are the usual culprits), or there’s an “asymmetry” in flexibility (i.e. one leg feels substantially tighter than the other) then it’s worth experimenting with some static stretching to see if it makes you feel any better.

Take Your Time

Many in their late teens and early twenties will walk straight into the gym, do a few arm circles, and then jump straight into the heavy stuff. If you’re over 40, this approach will get you injured sooner or later. You have to make the time to warm up properly.

The exact warmup that you do will depend on what your workout looks like. It will also vary from person to person, depending on the environment you’re training in, how strong you are, and so on. So let me walk you through how I do it.

I like to start each workout with around 10 minutes of low-intensity cycling on an exercise bike. A rowing machine will also do the job just fine. This helps to raise your body temperature, which appears to be one of the main reasons that exercise performance is better in the evening than it is in the morning