Athlete For Life
Strength & Muscle Mass Are Not The Goal
by Jeremy Hudson, Athlete For Life
Strength and muscle mass are not the goal.
I know how that sounds. If you’re over 40 and lifting, those are probably your goals — and they’re good things to build.
They’re just not the goal.
Because aging doesn’t take everything from you at once. It follows a sequence — and the first thing it takes is the one thing almost nobody trains.
Last issue, the research showed the clock can move in both directions. This issue is about the first place to point your training.
Powerpenia: the decline with a head start
You may have heard of sarcopenia — the age-related loss of muscle mass. Maybe even dynapenia, the loss of strength. In 2024, researchers writing in Sports Medicine – Open proposed a third term that matters more than either: powerpenia — the loss of muscle power.
Power is your ability to produce force quickly. Not how much you lift — rather, it’s how fast you can express it. And the evidence suggests decline follows an order: power goes first, and fastest. Then strength. Then muscle mass.
Which means the mirror is the last place you’ll see it. You can look fine, still lift respectable weight — while the quality that made you an athlete has been quietly draining for a decade. By the time you notice muscle loss, power has had years of a head start.
The fitness industry has almost entirely missed this. When the researchers behind the powerpenia paper reviewed 220 studies on age-related muscle decline published between 2008 and 2023, they found only two that directly measured power.
Why nobody measures it
Two out of 220. Because power means doing things faster, and faster gets labeled dangerous — and who’s going to take on that liability? So the industry quietly steers everyone toward slow, controlled, machine-based training — and they call it safety.
It runs all the way up into the research world, where scientists have had to publish entire studies just to demonstrate that vertical jump testing is safe for older adults.
Notice the irony: we avoid measuring power because it seems risky — but losing power is what actually makes life risky.
Where life asks for something fast
After twenty-seven years of coaching, I can tell you exactly where power loss shows up first: the legs. Vertical jump. Hops. Bounce.
When someone returns to the gym after years away, that spring is the first thing that’s gone — long before their squat numbers would tell you anything is wrong.
And power isn’t a gym-only quality. Jogging up a flight of stairs. Picking something heavy up off the ground quickly. Keeping up with your kids — or that first step in sport.
But the most important use case is one most people don’t even realize exists — until they reach the stage of life where they suddenly need it: catching yourself when you fall.
The outcome of a fall comes down to speed — can your body react and produce force fast enough to catch you? That includes your arms bracing you on the way down.
Power isn’t just a performance luxury. It’s the quality that decides whether a stumble becomes a funny story or a serious injury.
Why your current training isn’t bringing it back
Typical gym training won’t fully restore power. Slow, controlled work builds the foundation — but power won’t express itself unless you actually train it.
And there’s a trap on the cardio side too: so all that treadmill time might feel like you’re doing everything right — but if power is what you’ve lost, too much cardio can actually push it further away.
What power training actually looks like at 50
Simpler — and gentler — than you’re picturing. Two rules govern everything:
Lift heavy. Lift fast. Both completely relative to you.
On heavy days, you lift your heaviest — relative to what you can actually do — at near-maximum effort for your rep range.
On fast days, you simply move quicker — and how much quicker depends on your level.
Take split squats: instead of six heavy, slow reps, cut the load by half and perform the reps with rhythm. Now you’re training power.
Typically, heavy days and fast days are done separately — especially at first. But you attack both ends of the spectrum — heavy and fast — because power is the byproduct of the two. You train the ends to build the middle.
And nobody jumps into jumping. Power work is gated: you need a base of strength and control before you earn the next step.
I have a client in her sixties learning to hop — like a bunny rabbit, two legs, soft and gentle — and learning to land, starting from a step about three inches high. When she’s coordinated there, we add speed. Every step earned, every step within her own guidelines.
That’s why it’s safe. Not because we avoid speed — because we build up to it.
What happens when it comes back
Here’s the good news hiding in the sequence: power declines first — but once you start training it, the results are often very noticeable within a short period of time, and they’re the ones you’ll feel the most.
Most clients don’t see the first one coming: their heavy lifts start going up. They tell me, “this strength training is really working.” It’s the power training doing it — the speed at which they can contract their muscles carries over into their heavier lifts.
My favorite example: a client who could already lift decent weight, and could already jump — but power was her weak point, so we made it the focus.
Eight to twelve weeks on a power protocol. Her vertical jump went up four to five inches.
On video, it’s priceless: she performs the jump, lands, and just looks at me — in complete awe. That look is why I do this.
Power is the main goal
Here’s the bigger point all of this leads to — and it applies to everybody in the gym, at any age:
Power is the main goal of training. And if it’s not yours, it should be.
Because power is how we express our movements, how we reduce our risk of injury — and how we stay in the game for the long haul. Power is strength expressed with speed — whether slow or fast. To become more powerful, you have to improve both.
Chase strength alone and speed can quietly slip away. Chase power, and strength and speed rise together — along with everything they carry: your lifts, your bounce, your first step, your ability to catch yourself.
Now, to put the debate to rest: power training includes heavy lifting. The strength and muscle mass everyone wants still get built — they just become part of the package, instead of being the whole plan.
Aging takes power first. Now you know why getting it back is the main goal.
Stay athletic,
Jeremy
–30–
Jeremy Hudson is a strength and conditioning coach (NSCA-CSCS) with 27 years in the field. He runs Athlete for Life in London, training adults in their 30s through 60s to move like athletes again. Curious how you’re actually holding up? Find your Athletic Age in three minutes: athleteforlife.ca
