This Is Why Your Workouts Stopped Working

You could be following the exact same training program, eat the same amount of protein and calories you did at 25, but as you get older your body produces a much smaller muscle building response from the same exact stimulus. This is called anabolic resistance and almost nobody can train around it. Most people think that anabolic resistance is just an old person thing, but you can also have this problem when you're young. Physical inactivity, metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance and being a hard gainer can all make you end up in a situation where you follow the same training program as someone else but gain significantly less muscle. So in this video I'm going to explain what anabolic resistance is, what causes it and most importantly how to make your muscles respond to training and nutrition the same way when you were 25. Also if you want to discover your own health percentile to know what level of health you're at with various different types of biomarkers like your fitness markers, body composition and blood work, what are your bottlenecks and biggest weaknesses, then take the health assessment in our top 1% health community, link in the description. First of all your muscles are constantly breaking down and rebuilding themselves. You have muscle protein breakdown on one side and muscle protein synthesis on the other. To build muscle you obviously want to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and whether you build muscle or lose muscle throughout the day depends on the balance between these two states. Two of the strongest ways to increase protein synthesis is resistance training and eating protein. You lift weights which stimulates muscle protein synthesis and makes the muscle more sensitive to amino acids. Then you eat protein which gives you the amino acids required to actually build the new muscle tissue. However the size or magnitude of this response isn't always the same. One of the classic studies on anabolic resistance compared healthy men around the age of 28 with older men around the age of 70. Interestingly their muscle protein synthesis at baseline was basically the same. However when they were given 10 grams of essential amino acids the older men had a much smaller muscle protein synthesis response and efficiency. Components of the mTOR muscle growth pathway were about 30 to 50 percent lower than in the 28 year olds. That's basically anabolic resistance. You're giving your muscles the same anabolic signal but they produce a much smaller response. You see the same thing with exercise. One study compared men around 24 years old with men around 70 and had them perform resistance exercise at different intensities. Both groups increased protein synthesis. However the response was significantly lower in the older men at several intensities. It doesn't mean that older people can't build muscle. They absolutely can. Even 90 year olds haven't seemed to see a 170 percent increase in muscle strength and nine percent increase in muscle size after just eight weeks of resistance training. It just means that you need a stronger stimulus to produce the same response. However anabolic resistance isn't exclusive to aging. There's no magical switch that flips when you're 40 years old that makes you build less muscle. Aging does increase the probability of experiencing anabolic resistance but your lifestyle and poor health can also accelerate this process. One of the biggest factors to anabolic resistance is physical inactivity. Researchers have literally induced anabolic resistance in healthy men in their early 20s just by making them inactive during bed rest. After 14 days of bed rest there was a correlation between the degree of anabolic resistance and quadriceps muscle volume. The more anabolic resistance the smaller the quadriceps muscle size. Obviously complete bed rest is a much more extreme situation than just sitting at your work and doing some daily movement like walking. But it shows that anabolic resistance isn't something that happens only when you're 70 years old. It can even happen in 20 year olds. Your muscles basically follow the principle of use it or lose it. If you're not using the muscle your body becomes less responsive to signals that tell it to maintain that muscle or build it. Being physically active does the opposite and it preserves anabolic sensitivity. Even light resistance exercise raises muscle protein synthesis in elderly men. Healthy men over 65 performed unilateral leg extensions using only 16% of their one rep maximum. That's extremely low intensity. The exercise leg showed increased muscle protein synthesis and activation of anabolic signaling. 16% of one rep max is very low stimulus. It's basically walking up a slight hill. In 71 year olds 12 weeks of resistance training at 60 to 75% of one rep max found no signs of significant anabolic resistance. Which means that anabolic resistance isn't inevitable in every healthy older person. So why is this anabolic resistance more likely as you get older? There probably isn't a single cause to this. First the anabolic signaling pathways inside the muscle become less responsive so the same amount of leucine or protein produces a weaker activation of mTOR and muscle protein synthesis. Secondly blood flow to the muscles after eating can decrease which means that fewer amino acids are actually being delivered to the muscles. That's because of poor vascular health and poor cardiovascular health. Older adults may also retain more of the amino acids they eat in the gut and liver which leaves less availability for muscle protein synthesis. Then you have insulin resistance and chronic inflammation both of which can interfere with the anabolic environment inside the muscle. And lastly one of the biggest contributors is probably simply physical inactivity as people get older they generally move less and they use their muscles less. People think they're old so they shouldn't lift anything but that's the worst advice you could give to an old person. They need to lift something. And we know that inactivity itself causes anabolic resistance because researchers have induced it even in healthy 20 year olds. So age-related anabolic resistance is a combination of aging itself and the metabolic and lifestyle changes that happen as we get older. But most importantly many of these things are modifiable and preventable especially physical inactivity. So you could think of anabolic sensitivity or anabolic resistance as a spectrum. On one end you have someone who is young, active, metabolically healthy, they're resistance training and they're eating enough protein. This guy builds a lot of muscle very easily. On the other end you have someone who is older, sedentary, insulin resistant and barely uses their muscle. This individual loses a lot of muscle and it's hard for them to build it. But then you have a lot of people in the middle. Some of them might exercise but they're very old which would put them on the lower end of the spectrum. Then there are obese insulin resistant 20 year olds who will be on the higher end of the spectrum because they're biologically still young. And then there are the healthy older individuals who still exercise, who eat a healthy diet and who are insulin sensitive. But they're not as anabolic sensitive as the 20 year old who does all those things as well. This brings us to hard gainers. If you've been training for years and barely gained any muscle compared to someone else who seems to look at a dumbbell and grows, does it mean that you're anabolically resistant? Not necessarily. Studies show that there's a huge individual difference in the hypertrophy response to exercise. Some people build a lot of muscle very easily from very little training. Others need a lot more exercise or a lot more volume to do so. But there are many reasons to that, not just anabolic sensitivity. There's genetics, muscle fiber characteristics, their entire calorie intake, their protein intake, how consistent are they and even things like their gut health. In a 2005 study, they put 585 men and women through the same 12-week progressive resistance training program for the elbow flexors and they measured their bicep size with an MRI. The variation was enormous. Changes in muscle cross-sectional area ranged from minus 2 percent to plus 59 percent, while one rep strength changes ranged from 0 percent to 250 percent. So literally someone can build 59 percent more muscle from the same exact exercise program than someone else. It's also not a testosterone issue. It's been seen that muscle androgen receptor density, but not testosterone, predicts muscle growth from resistance training. In this 2018 study, testosterone, IGF-1 growth hormone, DHEA, luteinizing hormone or DHT, didn't predict muscle hypertrophy, but muscle androgen receptor density content did. Muscles have androgen receptors that mediate hypertrophy through gene expression, satellite cell activation and protein synthesis. They get activated by androgenic hormones like testosterone and DHT. You can have very high testosterone and DHT, but if there's low androgen receptor density, you'll build less muscle than someone with lower testosterone but higher androgen receptor density. The number one predictor of muscle androgen receptor density is genetics. That's why you see some guys build massive shoulders from their exercise program because the shoulders contain the most amount of androgen receptors. And that number is determined a lot by genetics, some other factors as well, like if you do a lot of resistance training, like a high volume, you eat a lot of protein, etc., then that can increase muscle androgen receptor density a little bit, but the number one determinant is genetics. Alright, now let's talk about how can you overcome anabolic resistance, no matter your age. Number one, eat enough protein. The protein RDA is only 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. That's enough to prevent protein deficiency, but it's not necessarily optimal for building muscle. A large meta-analysis of 49 studies and over 1800 people found that increasing protein intake during resistance training increased muscle and strength gains. The benefits appear to plateau around 1.6 grams per kilogram per day. Some people saw greater muscle growth from a higher protein intake, like 2 grams per kilogram per day, but statistically, 1.6 grams per kilogram appears to be enough for maximal muscle growth. So if you're 80 kilograms, then that would be around 130 grams of protein per day. You don't need to consume 200 or 250 grams of protein every day, unless you actually weigh over 100 kilos. But if you're training hard and you're eating let's say 70 grams of protein a day, let's say 1 gram per kilo of protein, then the first thing you should try to fix is to increase your protein to 1.6 grams per kilogram. If you're not building muscle on 1.6 grams per kilogram either, then I wouldn't necessarily try to increase your protein to 2 grams per kilogram. I would do it as a last resort before increasing the protein, check out these other factors. Number two, eat enough protein per meal. For net positive muscle protein synthesis for the day, the most important thing is to eat enough protein for the entire day. But you also want to eat enough protein in each meal. A 2018 review by leading experts concluded that a good amount of protein per meal is 0.4 grams per kilogram per meal, which for an 80 kilogram person would be 30 to 35 grams. If you eat three or four meals a day, then that already gets you close to the 1.6 grams per kilogram daily target. This doesn't mean that you couldn't build muscle on two meals a day or even one meal a day, because it's been shown that you can even absorb 100 grams of protein per meal and that will increase protein synthesis. However, if you are not building muscle on two meals a day, then increase to three meals a day and have at least this 0.4 grams per kilogram of protein each meal. Number three, the most important thing is to do resistance training. Resistance training doesn't just build muscle directly, it also makes your muscles more sensitive to the protein you eat. So exercise is basically one of the best ways to fight anabolic resistance. For most people, I recommend training around two to four times per week. You don't need to train five or six times per week, unless you're like an extreme athlete. You don't need to train every day, but the training needs to be sufficiently hard. What you need is progressive overload. Over time, you should be increasing the weight, the amount of reps you do, or the difficulty of the exercise. And your working sets should generally get reasonably close to muscular failure. You don't have to go to absolute failure on every set, but if you could do another 10 reps when you stop, you're not giving your muscles a strong enough reason to grow. It's good to go for at least one to two reps short of failure. Number four, don't be sedentary. Remember, just two weeks of bed rest is enough to induce anabolic resistance even in healthy young men. Obviously, walking isn't going to make you build muscle, but walking increases the use of your muscles in a different way. Even this low impact, low intensity type of exercise like walking is enough of a signal to tell the body that it needs to have some muscle. And walking also increases blood flow, which helps with delivering the amino acids to the muscles. Personally, I aim for around 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day, but walking is not enough if you're not doing any resistance training. Number five, eat enough calories. If you're a hard gainer, then this is probably the biggest reasons you can't build muscle. If it's hard for you to gain weight, then you need to eat a lot more than you think. If your body weight hasn't increased in months while you're trying to build muscle, then you're not consistently in a calorie surplus. You might feel like you're stuffing yourself, but your metabolic rate might be too high, or you might just burn off that extra energy. Some people compensate for eating more calories by unconsciously increasing their physical activity. They fidget more, they walk more, they burn more calories through what's called NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So they think they're eating in a surplus, but they're not. So if you're trying to build muscle, you can track your calorie intake and see if you're consistently in a surplus. And if the amount of calories you're eating doesn't make you gain weight or build muscle, then you still need to increase it even more. There are also some supplements that can help. Of course, everyone knows about creatine, and it is true that creatine helps you gain about 1.4 kilograms of lean mass. However, it's not the only one. Omega-3s interestingly have been seen to increase lean muscle growth. The effect is smaller than creatine, but still significant. Plus 0.67 kilograms. The reason for this is probably because omega-3s reduce inflammation and improve insulin sensitivity, which makes the muscles more anabolic sensitive. HMB is another one because it's a metabolite of leucine that helps with muscle growth. A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 clinical trials on adults over the age of 50 saw that 3 grams a day of HMB improved muscle mass, muscle strength, and gait speed. HMB has limited evidence for young anabolic sensitive people who are already doing resistance training and consuming enough protein. However, it appears to be useful for counteracting age-related muscle loss and muscle wasting. Lastly, you need sleep. Sleep deprivation can literally reduce muscle protein synthesis even in young people. One study restricted healthy young men to only 4 hours of sleep for 5 nights. Their muscle protein synthesis was lower compared to normal sleep. Now, exercising returned some of the protein synthesis back to normal levels. The problem is that the protein synthesis would have been above baseline if they had gotten normal sleep. So getting enough sleep plus exercising makes you build muscle while exercising and under-sleeping just maintains it. Alright, so let's summarize all the ideas. Aging increases anabolic resistance, but younger individuals can also experience it. If they're physically inactive, if they don't sleep enough, or they don't eat enough protein. To maximize your anabolic sensitivity, eat around 1.6 grams per kilogram of protein per day. Get around 0.4 grams per kilogram per meal divided into around 3-4 meals. If you eat 2 meals, then you just need a lot more protein per meal. Do resistance training 2-4 times per week. Use progressive overload and train reasonably close to failure, 1-2 reps short of failure. Stay physically active and avoid being sedentary. If you are trying to gain muscle, actually eat enough calories. You kinda need to force feed yourself if you're a hard gainer, or consume more like liquid high-calorie foods. Take 3-5 grams of creatine per day, take 2 grams of omega-3s per day, take 3 grams of HMB if you're older or are on a lower protein diet, and get 7-8 hours of sleep. You can completely prevent the changes that happen in your muscles during aging, and genetics will always have an impact on how much muscle you can build. But you shouldn't think of anabolic resistance as anabolic impossibility. Doesn't matter what age you're at, if you're 25, 45, or 65, or 95, you can still build muscle as shown by dozens of studies.