Strength And Cardiorespiratory Fitness After 40: What The Numbers Say, and What The Training Looks Like

By Your Health Magazine Contributor

Your Health Magazine Contributor

. https://YourHealthMagazine.net

More Weight Control, Nutrition & Exercise Articles

Strength And Cardiorespiratory Fitness After 40: What The Numbers Say, and What The Training Looks Like

Written by Bervin Manoharan, Co-Founder and General Manager, Catalyst Performance
Medically reviewed by Dr Luqman Haris, MBBS

Catalyst Performance is a personal training studio in Singapore built around helping adults maintain strength, fitness, and physical capability as they age, and the reason we built it that way is a set of numbers most people over 40 are never shown. Not a body-fat percentage. Four measurements that predict, better than almost anything else in a routine health screening, how the next thirty years are going to go.

What Actually Changes After 40

Two things move, and they move quietly.

The first is muscle. Adults lose roughly 3 to 8 percent of muscle mass per decade after age 30, and the rate accelerates after 60. That loss is not driven by age on its own. It is driven by what gets loaded and what gets left alone, which makes it one of the most modifiable markers of ageing anyone has.

The second is cardiorespiratory fitness, and it is the one that gets underrated. Across 20.9 million observations, adults in the highest fitness group carried around 53 percent lower all-cause mortality risk than those in the lowest, and every one-MET improvement is associated with an 11 to 17 percent drop in that risk. There are very few interventions in medicine with a slope like that.

Grip strength tells the same story from a third angle. In the PURE study across 17 countries, every 5 kg drop in grip strength was associated with 16 percent higher all-cause mortality risk, and grip outperformed systolic blood pressure as a predictor of death.

The honest summary is that after 40 the body stops being forgiving about disuse. Nothing dramatic happens. The margin just gets thinner every year you do not train against it.

The Gap Between What The Evidence Says And What People Do

Here is the part that should be encouraging rather than alarming. The dose is small. Around 60 minutes a week of resistance training is associated with roughly 27 percent lower all-cause mortality risk, and any weekly amount at all is associated with about 15 percent lower risk. The curve is steep early and then flattens, so more is not better past a point. The target is reachable for someone with a job and a family.

And almost nobody clears it. Only 17.3 percent of European adults do muscle-strengthening exercise at least twice a week, measured across 280,605 adults in 28 countries. Country rates run from 0.7 percent to 51.6 percent, so this is a behaviour, not a fixed trait.

One related problem is worth naming. GLP-1 medications are now doing a great deal of the fat loss in this age group, and between 25 and 39 percent of the weight lost on them is lean mass in people who are not resistance training to protect it. The drug does not distinguish between the tissue you want to lose and the tissue that keeps you independent. Resistance training and adequate protein, in the range of 1.2 to 1.6 g per kg of body weight, are what make that distinction for you.

What Our Own Data Shows

We run a free online healthspan self-assessment and we publish what comes back. That is first-party data from over 1,000 adults, most of them in Singapore, reported only in aggregate.

The people who take it are, by definition, a health-interested slice rather than a random cross-section, which is what makes the results striking rather than reassuring. The median Healthspan Score is 5.2 out of 10, and about 55 percent of respondents land in the two lowest readiness bands before they change anything at all. Most had already been sold something. Anyone shopping for personal training in Singapore, or anywhere else, is usually shown a package before a single thing has been measured.

The clearest signal in the set is the dose response. Median score by self-reported weekly strength sessions runs 4.0 at zero sessions, 4.8 at one, 5.6 at two, 6.5 at three and 7.6 at four or more, with no plateau anywhere in that line. We are careful about what it proves: this is an association in a single snapshot of self-reported answers, not evidence of cause, and strength feeds one of the four scored pillars by design. Read honestly, it still points where the wider literature points.

Two other patterns matter after 40. The weakest area shifts with age, with strength the most common weak point through the fifties and stability overtaking it after 60, which is the pillar most tied to fall risk. And women and men arrive with different gaps, women most often needing strength work, men most often needing body composition work. Those are different programmes, not one programme with a different weight on the bar.

What The Training Actually Looks Like

This is the part that disappoints people, and it should.

Two to three sessions a week. Around 60 minutes each. Compound loading that progresses, a cardiorespiratory component that is measured rather than guessed, dedicated stability work, and enough protein to make any of it stick. Then the same thing again next week.

We measure before we programme, because a programme written against an assumption is a guess with better presentation. Catalyst runs as a private personal training studio in Singapore for that reason, so the health and fitness assessment at the front of the relationship is done properly rather than in a queue. It covers body composition analysis, cardiorespiratory fitness, stability and strength, and we re-test at 16 weeks so the client sees whether the number moved rather than taking our word for it. Effective personal training should be able to show whether those measurements improve over time, and that is the standard we built the studio around.

The look comes with the work. It is a stop on the journey, not the destination. What a transformation gym sells as the finish line is a pit stop for us, because our clients are training for the next thirty years rather than the next eight weeks. That is the difference between body transformation as a product and longevity personal training in Singapore as a practice, and it is why we assembled our training team around a measurement protocol rather than around a before-and-after photo.

It is a test that travels. Ask a coach what they will measure, and ask when they will measure it again. We use that same standard at Catalyst and believe it is a useful benchmark for any strength coach working with adults. The work also looks different at 55 than it does at 35, because the weak point has moved. Personal training over 50 in Singapore that ignores that is a younger programme with lighter weights.

If you are over 40 and you have never had body composition analysis, a cardiorespiratory measurement and a grip test done in the same hour, you are guessing. Start with the numbers. The programme is the easy part once you can see them, which is why every client we take begins with a healthspan assessment in Singapore before a single session is written.

About the Author

Bervin Manoharan is Co-Founder and General Manager of Catalyst Performance, a longevity-focused personal training studio at Manulife Tower in Singapore’s Central Business District, providing longevity-focused personal training for professionals from their 30s onward. The studio was founded by Bervin Manoharan, Dr Luqman Haris and Jeremy Soh, whose coaching careers span more than 25 years combined. This article was medically reviewed by Dr Luqman Haris, MBBS. Catalyst Performance is a training studio, not a medical provider, and nothing here is individual medical advice.

Sources

1. Volpi E, Nazemi R, Fujita S. Muscle tissue changes with aging. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care, 2004;7(4):405-410.
   https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2804956/
2. Lang JJ, Prince SA, Merucci K, et al. Cardiorespiratory fitness is a strong and consistent predictor of morbidity and mortality among adults: an overview of meta-analyses representing over 20.9 million observations. Br J Sports Med, 2024;58(10):556-566.
   https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11103301/
3. Leong DP, et al. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the PURE study. The Lancet, 2015;386(9990):266-273.
   https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62000-6/abstract
4. Shailendra P, Baldock KL, Li LSK, Bennie JA, Boyle T. Resistance Training and Mortality Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Am J Prev Med, 2022;63(2):277-285.
   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2022.03.020
5. Bennie JA, De Cocker K, Smith JJ, Wiesner GH. The epidemiology of muscle-strengthening exercise in Europe: A 28-country comparison including 280,605 adults. PLoS One, 2020;15(11):e0242220.
   https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7688125/
6. Prado CM, et al. Body-composition outcomes of weight-loss interventions in adults with overweight or obesity. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol, 2024;12(3):171-183.
   https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(23)00374-X/fulltext
7. Catalyst Performance Healthspan Audit, aggregate data from over 1,000 respondents.
   https://catalystperformance.sg/fitness-and-longevity-statistics