In over a decade working as a personal trainer, and as someone writing this article in my thirties, my observation is that the challenges of this decade have far more to do with how we manage the growing pressures of a more responsible life than any tangible descent of our hormones or metabolism. Indeed, I would say anecdotally that this anticipated decline is massively exaggerated and is all too often a self-imposed destination for many who believe they are fighting a losing battle. I work with a lot of people aged 40-60 and get excellent results. It’s hands down always those who have just turned 30 that are most worried about age, which considering the results I’m able to get with clients some 20 years older than them, is a concern more based on a conventional and expected narrative of how life plays out than what’s possible with a relatively unconsuming exercise regime if it’s implemented consistently. I raise the point because you have to be careful with assumptions like that, if you accept them as truth, it will set the standard you set for yourself.
Recent studies suggest that there really isn’t much holding you back from being in great shape throughout your thirties (and well beyond). The extent to which you will be is up to you and will ultimately be determined by the quality of your decisions and how consistently you can follow an effective exercise program.
What to expect from your body in your 30s:
Let’s take a look at what physical changes we can actually expect through our thirties. Recent studies have found that after age 30 we only lose between 3-8% of our muscle mass each decade. Interestingly, whereas most people expect this to get progressively worse as time goes on, these figures appear to hold up decade by decade until we reach the age of 60.
This process is called sarcopenia. The discussion around this should be nuanced because the causes of sarcopenia are multifactorial, i.e. it’s not simply age that influences the rate of an individual’s decline. Activity level, nutritional intake and other lifestyle factors like how one manages stress and sleep are going to play an important role too.
Remember the exception proves the rule. In my article about how to manage fitness in your twenties, I suggested that ideally, you would use that decade to maximise your muscular potential. Assuming you accomplished that, maintained a healthy lifestyle and only lost 5% of your muscle between 30-40, then another 5% between 40-50 and a further 5% between your 50-60’s, would it not be possible then to arrive at 60 years of age with 85% of your muscular potential? I don’t know about you but I’d take that deal in an instant.
Of course, I’m being a little facetious, few people know how to go about maximising their natural potential for muscle, and fewer still achieve it. But that’s not the point. The point is that the rate of decline can be acceptable, even minimal if we make the right lifestyle choices.
Perhaps more relevant to most people though, is the opportunity on the other end of that spectrum. Let’s say you never lifted a weight throughout your twenties, then fell in love with strength training at age 30. Whilst you may not have acquired 100% of the muscular potential you would have had if you had found this passion at 20, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t end your thirties with 10-20lbs+ more lean muscle than you started with.
Now all of that talk is a little muscle-heavy, which is by no means everyone’s goal, though it does highlight my point that there is a small decline in potential occurring over this decade but the extent to which it actually affects you is largely in your own hands. It actually highlights two related mistakes I often see people make in fitness.
The first is to underestimate the importance of preserving lean muscle mass. Think of your lean muscle mass as the engine of your metabolism. The more muscle mass you have the more calories you will burn at rest, so you should protect it at all costs even when ostensibly your goal is to lose body fat or lose weight, your real goal should always be framed as doing so without the loss of muscle mass.
The great thing about looking at things through this lens is that it rules out calorie restriction and excessive dieting because that would put your muscle mass in jeopardy. Believe me, it takes a lot more work to gain muscle than it does to lose fat, so protect your muscle at all costs.
The second mistake regularly made around muscle is failing to eat enough protein to support it, which as a quick aside is the number one reason we see people experiencing low energy day to day, it’s often corrected within a day or two on our online workout programs.
There are of course some other subtle changes you are likely to experience in your thirties, which I’ll dig into shortly.
The real challenge of your 30s: Social Pressure & Responsibility
Social and financial pressure really kicks in during our thirties. We find ourselves locked in the pursuit of our careers or to meet the demands of our growing personal responsibilities. We often sleep less, take on more stress, exercise less, and assign less time for relaxation and recreation. The combination of all of this generally leads to poorer, more expedient food choices and less energy to get to the gym. You can see how quickly ground is lost and things can easily start spiralling out of control.
In fact it’s such a common downward spiral that I would be confident in estimating that about 80% of my online personal training clients who find me in their 30’s resonate with the scenario above. Helping them out of that situation is always more about addressing broader lifestyle choices than the details of any one workout program.
Let’s have a look at the steps we can take to get the best out of health & fitness throughout our thirties…
Psychological state management
One of the biggest tips I could give anyone in their thirties is that, unlike your twenties, your energy levels are now a finite resource that need to be managed, not taken for granted. Again, this isn’t really because of your age, but because of the external demands and responsibilities that come along with this decade.
Managing your state means choosing the things that are right for you, and taking ownership of discarding those that are not.
There is only so much time any of us have, so if we want to make the right things happen in our lives we need to be aware of and manage our own thoughts and emotions. This is what we might broadly consider your ‘psychological state’.
This means selfishly (in a good way) pursuing the things that keep you in a state of feeling good, it’s that simple. If you notice a certain setting, person, activity, food type, or even career choice is consistently making you feel negative over time, it’s best to re-examine your relationship to it as soon as you can, easier said than done, but such is the way with difficult decisions. Of course, I don’t mean this in an epicurean way, but rather choosing the things that you know are good for you and that naturally makes you feel good.
Allowing your state to be negatively impacted on a regular basis is going to lead to lower-quality thoughts and emotions. It then won’t be long before this starts influencing you to make worse decisions. A common short-term solution in a negative state is to start using food, alcohol or over-activity to null the pain of the gnawing reality of something in your life not feeling quite right.
My advice is to explore what is making you feel that way. Face it directly and try to cut it off at the pass. This type of action directed at your own self-interest may on the surface seem selfish, but for you to be the best version of yourself you need to pursue what is in your own judgement, good for you. The net effect is that all those who interact with the deliberate version of who you are going to get you at your best.
Managing your state positions your mental and emotional well-being as a priority. Which sets you up to feel good a higher proportion of the time. Helping you make better decisions. This kind of ‘state management’ allows you to stay far more consistent with your health and fitness efforts.
Managing Energy Levels
In your twenties, your energy levels probably felt unlimited. Unfortunately due to the common lifestyle constraints we’ve discussed, it’s not the same through your thirties. Meaning we have to manage our energy levels as a finite resource. Strategies that you once used to recover may not be available. For example, you’ll be less likely to be able to take naps when you want, and having a day off of work will feel progressively less guilt-free. Most people in their thirties generally find that they have ‘more on’ than they used to.
This might all be a good thing, after all, it’s part of the price of pursuing the kind of life you want to live. But just as with your psychological state, if you want to consistently be making the right decisions for your health, make sure you are managing your energy levels appropriately, and avoid burnout at all costs because that’s when things start to unravel.
All of this means you’ll need to get proper sleep, rest and recovery from exercise, avoid over-training and steer far clear of dietary ‘shortcuts’ and low-calorie quick-fix dieting.
Aim to navigate away from unnecessary stresses, have boundaries in place so that you don’t have to say yes to things that you don’t want to do out of politeness, or convention and of course, listen to your body when it tells you it needs to rest.
Understand your relationship to stress
What I’ve written above may come across as hiding from discomfort or perhaps aimlessly chasing feeling good all the time. It isn’t, and that wouldn’t be my suggestion. One thing certain in life is that it’ll throw us curve balls. It’s in our thirties that we’re likely to first experience a minor health scare or if not, almost certainly will know a peer that does.
Life is going to give us stress, believe me, if you stack on top of that what it’s going to take to pursue your life goals, and work on your own career and personal development in your thirties, you are going to encounter resistance and you will have to shoulder periods of high stress.
We might consider this ‘getting out of your comfort zone’, and a prerequisite to success in any field including exercise. It’s pretty much built-in and comes with stress by design. You could perhaps even call it positive or ‘eustress’ but what you want to avoid is the type of stress that has no practical utility that will only tire you and expose you to risk.
It’s prudent to build mental models and regular physical practices you can deploy to protect yourself from succumbing to the negative effects of stress. Let’s have a look at exactly what stress means through the lens of fitness.
Stress & The ‘fight or flight’ response
Firstly, stress isn’t inherently bad, it’s part of our body’s natural defence mechanism. When we’re in a stressful situation we trigger what is known as the ‘fight or flight’ response. This floods our bloodstream with adrenalin (epinephrine) and cortisol, giving us hyper-awareness, and the ability to flee or fight off a potential threat.
This process was all well and good many thousands of years ago when ‘stress’ may for example have come in the form of a sabre-tooth tiger attack. Back then we either got out of the situation alive or we didn’t – a simpler time.
Cut to the current version of ourselves in the modern world. We walk around worrying about paying bills, the boss breathing down our necks, making payroll and a million other daily stresses. The trouble is, our bodies don’t know the difference between a particularly awkward board meeting and a short-nosed bear stalking our settlement. The stress still is still felt, so the same hormones that helped our ancestors escape the Tiger could are flowing through our blood streams once more and could be very detrimental to our health.
The fight-or-flight mechanism is intended for life-or-death situations. As such it should only occur temporarily and then diminish quickly once the ‘tiger or ‘bear’ is gone and calm can be restored. However, chronic stress (as we experience it) drips those stress hormones into our bloodstream like a leaky tap.
This is problematic because this response evolved as a short-term response. The cost of its efficacy is levied on long-term health processes like immune function, healing and reproductive function. Which makes sense because these are things you’ll only need if you get away from the tiger.
So if you are living a perpetually stressful life this could have a huge impact on your emotional and physical well-being. If the stress is not lifted, these functions may not be fully functioning (ever wondered why your libido drops or you get sick more when you’re stressed?)
It’s not just that, stress is linked to inflammation, and many of the most prevalent diseases in the modern world including heart disease, arthritis, cancer, and diabetes are linked to raised levels of inflammation.
I say all of that to drive home the point that we really need to take steps to avoid unnecessary stress. It’s also a great idea to develop systems and rituals to help manage it. Which could be as simple as keeping a list of the things that bring you joy on a piece of paper and making sure you tick everything off on the list each month, it really need not be more complicated than that.
Yoga Nidra is a great way to practice what has been coined ‘non-sleep deep rest’ (NDSR), a practice that has been shown in studies to aid in entering a restful state, reduce stress and anxiety and even speed up learning.
You could also try my short guided meditation practice below:
Consistency is everything
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with a health & fitness program is to get caught up in an ‘all or nothing’ cycle of full-on exercise and dieting and then allow things to go to zero when life gets in the way. In my estimation, this is the single biggest mistake you can make with exercise. All heavy losses are taken when you allow activity to go to nil, if you are in that position right now, I have a guide for how to get back into exercise after a long layoff.
The solution to this is to establish a ‘fall-back plan’ or ‘minimum viable dose’ of activity that you always maintain whether you are proactively pursuing a fitness goal or not. This way you hugely lower any potential downside and protect everything you’ve worked so hard for.
Remember humans evolved to move, not necessarily to go out lift heavy things in a nice air-conditioned gym, that’s optional, but a basic daily level of movement is not, that’s why health authorities tend to recommend a certain number of daily steps. It’s in accordance with a law of nature, entropy. I.e. that which is not used will be taken away.
When you accept inactivity over an extended period of time, you’ll likely lose hard-earned muscle, and fitness levels, not to mention expose yourself to health risks. All of this compounds to make your eventual return to exercise a far harder route than it had to be. You’re also likely to make worse short-term decisions in the pursuit of fast results (which in my experience never works).
Digestion is suddenly ‘a thing’
You may have taken bulletproof digestion for granted through your twenties. unfortunately, many people encounter their first form of digestive issue at some point during their thirties. In fact, I would say that 70-80% of my inbound online personal training clients report some form of regular digestive discomfort.
This could be due to a myriad of reasons; past medication use, bouts of food poisoning, poor dietary choices or even poor posture. Taking care of your digestive health is very important through your thirties, and getting out of regular discomfort can yield a significant increase in quality of life.
Whilst digestive enzymes and other supplementation such as glutamine (which may help repair gut lining) can help improve your digestion. Your thirties is the time to really explore what kind of diet works for you.
Finding the right diet for you and your goals is a very individual pursuit. For instance, just because a food type is consistent with a certain label or way of eating that is currently in vogue, does not mean that it is by definition healthy. Nor does it mean that it’s right for you. Often there are correlating factors between lifestyle measures implemented by those following a given diet and the content of the meals themselves. This does not confirm causation, so don’t fall into that trap.
Let’s take a look at an example, reducing refined sugar levels in your diet is generally going to be a good thing, but choosing the ‘low sugar’ versions of all your favourite foods is not necessarily an improvement because perhaps the displaced sugar has been replaced with a flavourings and chemicals that could be worse for your health. So in this scenario, avoiding anything that needed to be labelled ‘low sugar’ to be seen as healthy, then augmented with chemicals to make it palatable was the mistake. We mistook a reduced sugar load for healthy.
Also just because something is healthy and well-tolerated for one may not be well-tolerated by another. For example, Garlic, a reputable ‘superfood’ for many due to its anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral properties will be a valued part of a weekly meal plan yet for others, triggers days of discomfort because its high FODMAP. So find what works for you, and let trends fall by the wayside.
Defend mental & physical well-being
One of the lessons I’ve learned personally in my thirties is that one should defend a position of wellness as vehemently as one would try to heal a position of ill health. You never know when a big blow to your health by way of ailment or injury is coming.
I’ve seen people perfectly well one day wake up with potentially life-changing bouts of arthritis the next, still, others fine one week, and then in surgery the next. Life will hand us bad hands from time to time, but by developing what we might consider a ‘health consciousness’ we can do our bit to remain in the best possible position to fight it. Or perhaps be able to stay under a threshold for certain problems to rear their head in the first place, which may be the case if we’re able to keep levels of inflammation low as we discussed earlier.
Don’t wait until you are compromised. Second chances are less forthcoming the older we get. The road back gets longer and ground is lost faster. So it’s best to do all you can not to get yourself in that position. Then if fate strikes, you’ll be better poised to face it with a sense of surrender to what is.
The practical part: Exercise
A simple exercise regime
2/3 x weekly resistance training (de-load every 6 weeks) – 30 minute sessions
2 x HIIT workouts per week – 20 minute sessions
Mobility or light activity every day – No time constraints
Think in longer training periods
Now that we’ve discussed many of the psychological and lifestyle challenges you must face in your thirties, let’s discuss the practicalities of how to actually structure your fitness efforts.
Firstly, for many a mindset shift is useful with how you approach your workouts. If time is harder to come by, you may be lower on sleep than would be optimal and stress has become a daily factor, we should ensure that workouts are deliberate, efficient and have an intended outcome.
This means taking a longer-term view of working out and training in 4-8 weeks cycles. Book-ended with a week of active rest or ‘de-loading’ period. This will enable you to restore energy levels, let the CNS rest and heal all those little microscopical lesions you’ve induced with your resistance work (sounds much worse than it is, don’t worry it’s normal). Then return in earnest to face a new training protocol.
This is known as periodisation and is key to both ensuring you get results over time and avoiding burnout. For example, you might spend 6 weeks doing 2 x total body workouts at 3 x 15 reps, then take a rest week and come back to a new training phase which could be push, pull, legs at 4 x 12. For 6 weeks.
The important thing is long-term thinking. Knowing that you will be switching up training protocols after a certain amount of weeks. You should always Know what to track, and keep variables like rest, speed, reps, and exercise order consistent so that you’ll have options for what to vary in future training programs, that’s how you keep your body adapting to your training and build long terms success into your training regime.
Embrace rest
The big difference in your thirties compared to your twenties is that your lifestyle is different, you’re busy, stressed and often tired, so you need to account for that in the way you exercise. An excellent way to frame this mentally is that a workout is only going to be as effective as your ability to recover from it, and past 30 you’re going to have to include lifestyle factors like stress and sleep into that equation.
Stop the workout once the job is done
Avoid overtraining in your thirties by leaving the scene of your workout once the intended stimulus has been achieved – more is not better, and don’t exercise for longer than 50 minutes unless you do endurance sports. The added time you would have given to more exercise is better distributed across a portfolio of other, lower-intensity activities.
HIIT workouts can be effectively wrapped up within 20 minutes. Again more is not better, adequate recovery and your body having everything it needs to adapt is better.
Working out is not enough
In your thirties, you can be in great shape with an effective workout program, but that alone won’t keep the dragons of chaos at bay for long. Many of us sit more, have more stress, and generally just don’t move enough.
So don’t think that just because you look in great shape and get that morning workout like clockwork means that the rules around inactivity wouldn’t apply to the rest of your day. Sitting all day with poor posture is the type of lifestyle that can lead to a lot of pain and postural problems, notwithstanding that a workout took place earlier in the day. These are the kinds of problems that could easily keep out of training. in fact so much so that sitting has been coined ‘the new smoking’
You can avoid these problems by embracing hobbies, sports, yoga or just walking as often as you can, you might not have time to ‘play’ as much in your thirties as you did in your teens and twenties but you have to keep moving daily.
Final thoughts on exercise at 30
As you can deduce from what I’ve written above, I strongly believe the quality of your thirties will be determined by the choices you make over the course of those ten years, don’t buy into the hype that your fitness goals are no longer possible due to your age. There is absolutely no reason you can’t be in the shape of your life throughout your 30’s. Prioritise your health & well-being above all and you’ll end the decade in better shape than you started it with a more cultivated and long-term mindset around fitness.
If you would like to discuss working together on my online personal training program, let’s schedule a consultation call to discuss how I can help you achieve your fitness goals.