Sport and exercise stopped being compulsory the moment you left school. And if you've been giving them a wide berth ever since, you'll have been missing out on the many benefits that regular exercise has to offer.
If you’re the other side of 40, however, you may have fallen into the trap of thinking you’ve missed out on those benefits for good – that fitness is something that passed you by a long time ago and there’s no point starting to chase it now.
But you’d be wrong.
Even if you’ve led a slothful existence up to now, you can still reap significant health benefits simply by moving more.
In a recent paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers found that those who consistently exercised in adulthood could enjoy a 30–40 per cent lower risk of death from any cause in later life.
Even those people who switched from being physically inactive to active were 22 per cent less likely to die than those who remained sedentary.
An earlier paper published in JAMA Cardiology looked at more than 300,000 participants and found that those who became active at 40 and older could enjoy similar health benefits to those who had been exercising since adolescence.
So, there you go, the science has spoken. It’s never too late to make changes.
That said, if exercise is something that’s been low on your list of priorities over the last decade or two, it’s advisable to start slowly rather than throwing yourself into training for a marathon.
If you’re a heavy smoker or drinker, or significantly overweight, it might be worth having a chat with your doctor before embarking on a new regime.
How do I get started?
Walking is one of the best forms of exercise, says Stacy Clemes, professor of active living and public health at Loughborough University in the UK.
“It’s quite low impact on the body, so it’s less likely to cause injury. It’s free. You don’t need any special equipment – as long as you’ve got some relatively comfy shoes, you can do it.”
Through her research, she’s worked extensively with sedentary groups, including truck drivers, to help them increase their activity levels.
She’s found that a fitness tracker or pedometer can be really useful to help people monitor their exercise.
“Whether it’s step counts or minutes spent walking a day, it’s really good to physically see that [data], and then look back at it,” she says. “What’s also really effective is to use your data to set goals.”
Clemes says not to worry about what others are doing, but to try to build up your own activity incrementally.
“Say if last week you averaged 4,000 steps per day, then this week try and do 4,500 steps per day. The strong evidence [for health improvements] is in doing a little more, then sustaining that and gradually increasing it. That’s the big message for people to take on board.”
But what about that oft-touted goal of 10,000 steps a day? Sounds like a lot, right?
Well, you might breathe a sigh of relief when you learn that recent research published in The Lancet found that just 4,000 steps per day was associated with significant health improvements compared with 2,000 steps a day.
More than 4,000 steps was even better, with benefits levelling off at 7,000 steps.
Prof Stephen Harridge, head of the Centre for Human and Applied Physiological Sciences at King’s College, London, agrees that you should start with achievable goals.
“If you’ve done nothing, just start doing something. Walk to the next bus stop, don’t wait at the one that’s closest to you. Walk up the stairs rather than taking the lift.
"Just simple bits of behaviour that increase your overall activity are really good for your muscles, your metabolic health and your cardiovascular health.”
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How do I avoid injury?
Rather than rushing headlong into a strenuous workout plan, you should aim to build up your activity levels gradually, to reduce the risk of hurting yourself.
As well as causing pain, suffering an injury can leave people feeling demoralised and are less likely to continue their new exercise regime.
Starting gently may be particularly difficult for people who were active through their 20s and then took some time off because life got in the way, says Dr Miho Tanaka, director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Harvard Medical School.
“I think most people still feel like they can do the things that they used to do in their 20s, and so they go back to the same workouts,” she says.
“But the problem is that in your 40s, your body is different from how it was in your 20s. It’s not going to respond in the same way to the types of workouts that might have been good for you 20 years ago.”
This is because your muscle mass starts declining by between 3–8 per cent per decade after the age of 30, and this decline will accelerate after 60.
But not only that, the collagen in your muscles, joints and tendons starts to change once you hit 30, making them less elastic.
This means that you’ll have to leave your ego behind – it’s going to be harder to achieve the same personal bests as you could before. You have to be kind to yourself, or risk injury.
“The threshold between a workout and an injury becomes lower, and you need more time to recover,” says Tanaka. “Your ability to bounce back from inflammation is just slower.”
For those starting out, Tanaka is a fan of low-impact activities like swimming and cycling, because these offer plenty of cardiovascular benefits while lowering the risk of joint pain.
Then you can move on to things like hiking, before trying those high-impact activities such as running and CrossFit, which put more stress on joints.
The goal is to clock up 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise a week or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity to maximise benefits, such as improved cardiovascular health and reduced risk of diabetes and certain cancers.
What sort of exercises should I do?
For complete wellbeing, however, it’s important to include resistance exercises a couple of times a week, to help counteract the natural loss of muscle and bone mass as we age. And don’t just work your biceps!
It’s crucial to strengthen your core and back muscles, too.
The encouraging thing is, you don’t need to buy a load of skin-tight clothing and sign up for an expensive gym membership to do these workouts.
Exercises like planks, squats and push-ups are effective and can be done from home. The NHS has some really helpful examples on its website.
Tanaka is keen to stress that people shouldn’t neglect their stretching once they hit 40. “You can lose flexibility and range of motion,” she says.
“But to be able to hit a tennis ball or run efficiently, you have to have proper range in your joints. We naturally start to lose that as we age. Stretching counters that.”
How do I fit it all in?
If all this is feeling overwhelming – after all, many people in their 40s are juggling stressful jobs, tedious commutes, childcare and looking after older parents – then you might be encouraged by a study that found that cramming your exercise into the weekend still offers near identical benefits to spreading it throughout the week.
These findings were based on 64,000 participants aged 40 and older who were followed over the course of 18 years.
The researchers behind the study found that so-called ‘weekend warriors’ who did all their exercise on one or two days of the week, were able to slash their risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 41 per cent and cancer by 18 per cent, compared with those people who were inactive.
This was similar to people who exercised regularly on three or more days per week, who reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer by 41 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively.
Still not convinced? All of our experts agree that the most important thing is finding an exercise you enjoy, because then you’ll stick at it and reap the benefits.
Maybe you hate running? Give dancing a go. Loved a kickabout in school? Try walking football.
As a final word of encouragement, Harridge adds that it’s absolutely possible to be physically fitter at age 40 than in your 20s and 30s.
But he’s keen to point out that you won’t be reversing ageing, you’ll be taking away all the deconditioning that has come from inactivity, and putting yourself onto the trajectory that you should be on.
“It’s never too late,” he says. “At age 40, you’ve got plenty of time to change your life around!”
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