Nearing 40 Endurance Athlete Falls In Love w/ Hypertrophy | ADVICE

[easeintrick]

Hello all,

Coming here with some humility and an open mind to gather your advice and perspectives to add context to my focus in training.

Background:

I am a 5ft10in, 81kg, 39-year-old ultra-trail marathoner. Much like bodybuilders, runners are often…talentless stick-and-ball athletes but who love to work harder than anyone.

I have been running and cycling for decades but I have only been lifting in a dedicated way since November (4 months).

However, in my training regimes for ultramarathons, I have implemented strenuous calisthenics and runner-specific dumbbell routines (all compound in nature). Due to an education in athletics, I think my situation may be slightly unique for a “novice lifter”, and not necessarily in a wholly amazing way.

Firstly, I think obviously the resistance training i have done in the past has inevitably done a lot of the work that perhaps the first year or so a lifter achieves, albeit in a much less efficient way!

Secondly, I have noticed that, while leg day is my favorite (squatbro), interestingly, I think that decades of slow-twitch adaptations have instilled a muscular “stubbornness”, for lack of a better term, in the capacity for muscle-growth in my lower half. My upper body is visibly changing on a weekly basis. And though I can promise on my little doggie’s life that I am giving legs my honest effort, their size has only grown a little.

Also, unlike how I feel as a runner, it is clear that I have some talent for this (if only we had met earlier, bodybuilding!), but also that psychologically, from gritting out extreme endurance sports, my mind-muscle connection is strong and my brain also seems to know how to really push my system to failure, despite not having as much technical experience lifting.

I typically implement warm ups, heavy sets, slow eccentrics, drop sets, higher volume (15-20 reps), and classic hypertrophy ranges. My focus is to implement creative solutions to hover like a moth to the failure light for longer. Sometimes just doing straight reps feels too predicatable to my brain, but as simple a trick as it is to do a drop set, it maybe i’m a simp, but it really tricks my brain and I end up going super deep.

I have gone from 72kg @ ~14% body fat to 81kg at ~18 % body fat in 4 months. I have been eating and sleeping a lot more. I’m an ultra marathoner, trust me, I know how to eat units of foods.

Considering that I am technically performing most things passably decent in the gym, and bringing honest, focused effort 4x/week, how are things sounding? A little über? Or too prudent?

Is bulking rate to fast? And if you were me, when would you flip the script to cutting?

I know this is probably too ambiguous still but…I wanted to share a photo of where I am at today, physically, but not quite sure how to share a photo yet. Will add once i learn.

Will stop here for now. Happy to answer follow up questions.

My main ask is, i’ve got this passion for lifting that crept in super strong at 39 years old. What sagely advice do you have to someone totally past their prime but falling in with the sport and endlessly curious about the learning process?

[LWW]

You have a great story here OP and you already are several steps above many.

40-50s is your prime for lifting time so you are good there.

Hit that upper body as much as possible as often as possible, strive for more reps, more sets, more weight every single session. And keep eating those cals.

I’ve recently found out shoulders are the key foundation with the upper upper lats for the width of being a Bulborous Stallion!

[easeintrick]

Thanks for your reply LWW. I've got some pain in my R front-delt from a previous life as a bike-messenger (with one of those asymmetrical messenger bags), carrying dumb amounts of poundage across townage. I hope that as I get more bulbous and proficient at heaving and hoisting mass, that my upper body can prove worthy by paving over such youthful foolishness with ye olde contractile tish. Eww.

I hope that I am the last person to abbreviate tissue in such a way.

[StephenCGreen]

Your legs may already be big from all the running you have done. Now your upper body may be catching up, as it were.

But, if you really want bigger legs still, especially since you feel that they need to break out of long-time adaptations to running, you will need to add sets and reps and train them that way more than once per week. Naturally, calories will need to be there too, as it seems they are, judging by your upper body progress.

For example, pre-exhaust your quads with leg extensions, 5 sets 12 to 15 sets, before getting into your 6 sets of squats drop sets. After that, finish them off with 5 sets of 10 to 12 reps leg press. Finally do your leg curls, single leg extensions, and calf work.

You may already be doing something like this. In that case, be patient. If not, perhaps you can gradually work up to that leg volume until you begin to notice the change you are looking for.