Name: Building Muscle at 40: What Nobody Tells You
Uploaded: 2026-02-09T01:22:05.000Z
Duration: 8 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If we can correct our nutrition and we gear it towards skeletal muscle health, then we can change the trajectory of aging.

There's only two main ways that we can stimulate skeletal muscle.

We talk about lifespan, there's also muscle span.

Being sedentary is not the opposite of activity.

Being sedentary is a disease state in and of itself, period, end of story.

When we increase our dietary protein, skeletal muscle will mount a youthful response.

When we think about how we design a diet, we have to recognize a handful of things.

Number one, these essential amino acids, primarily leucine, is necessary to trigger muscle protein synthesis.

Number two, that aging impairs the efficiency of muscle protein synthesis.

If you start getting sarcopenia, if there's obesity and other markers of aging, you're losing muscle quality, AKA protein synthesis and other things.

And as a consequence, it makes it harder to increase muscle quality.

So you have to short circuit this pretty early.

I would even say that we talk about sarcopenia as a disease of aging, but

I think that there is a youthful phenotype of sarcopenia.

If we define sarcopenia as decreased muscle mass and strength, that can easily affect our youth.

You know, we talk about health span, we talk about lifespan.

And muscle span is this concept and that is really about the skeletal muscle health as we age.

And there's three primary components to that.

That's understanding that skeletal muscle health begins very early on.

And we're going to talk about, because I know that there's parents, I have two little kids, so I want to talk about the amount of protein necessary for children.

And then as we think about this muscle span, there is early on, early age, where you're laying down the foundation, where, where you're hopefully training, doing exercise, just doing movement.

Being sedentary is, in and of itself a diseaseome of inactivity.

Then midlife, we have to maintain the tissue.

In our 30s, we get a peak bone mass around the same time.

And then that later half of life, we have to do everything that we can to maintain that tissue because of this decrease in efficiency of skeletal muscle.

So skeletal muscle as a nutrient sensing organ can respond like youthful tissue and the way that it responds like youthful tissue.

From an amino acid perspective, just thinking about how we eat to maintain that is that when we increase our dietary protein, so older individuals or individual as they age require more protein to, to then stimulate MTOR.

So does that mean instead of eating 30 grams of protein per meal minimum, that people older than say 50, 60 should eat 40 or 50 grams of protein?

And by the way, skeletal muscle will mount a youthful response.

There's, you know, this was, the initial work was out of Bob Wolf's lab.

He's one of the, can I say grandfathers now, Bob Wolf and Don Layman and these guys, you know, I trained with Dr.

You know, these initial studies that we think about and we take for granted, dietary protein, we think, okay, well the bros have always known this, but

And when you are younger, there is a somewhat of a linear response.

Let's say a younger individual still growing, we'll just call them 10, 12 years old, or my children, I have a three and a four and a half year old.

They will respond with five grams of dietary protein, 10 grams of dietary protein, 15 grams of dietary protein versus an older individual will not respond at all to that.

However, that response can be augmented by increasing the dietary protein at that meal.

So an older individual will respond like a younger individual by 30 grams of protein.

We're going to talk about supplements, but I'm very curious.

Is there a place for supplementing leucine and other branched chain amino acids specifically?

You know, I always assumed that supplementing with branched chain amino acids was kind of the unique domain of people, you know, post exercise, trying to build more muscle.

But as you're telling me all this, it seems that adding leucine in powder form to a meal seems like it would be great for muscle health.

I would say that we do not add leucine alone because leucine, isoleucine and valine go hand in hand.

It would not be advisable to add a single amino acid.

The amino acid levels are maintained in the blood.

By adding more of one would have effects on the other side.

The way in which I would think about supplementing essential amino acids and or branch chains would be if an individual is choosing to have a lower protein meal.

I remember when I was in residency, the food choices were not very good.

And Maybe I had 2 ounces of fish, which wasn't enough to bring me up to a threshold.

That would be a place that I would add in branched chain amino acids.

Or essential amino acids that would bring someone's amino acid threshold up.

But we have to understand everything that we're doing, we should be doing with a purpose.

The idea of just sipping on branched chain amino acids or just adding amino acids would be the equivalent of putting a key into a car and trying to turn the car on, but

So you need the full spectrum of all the amino acids to affect skeletal muscle health.

Okay, well, that's reassuring to hear because I love the taste of scrambled eggs and steaks and I also like tuna and I also like chicken and I love all those, all those things.

And I have to imagine that as you mentioned before, there are other things in these quality animal proteins like you mentioned selenium, you mentioned other perhaps essential fatty acids and other vitamins that perhaps have something to do with what the animal ingested during its life that also benefit muscle.

We know that creatine at 5 grams of creatine will affect skeletal muscle, but

12 grams of creatine affects brain health.

And there's a lot of interesting research coming out on creatine and brain health.

Can you remind me the rough amounts of creatine and say you mentioned.

I mean, I must say a four and a half ounce steak feels rather poultry to me.

That's probably the size of it, but yeah, is a huge meal to me.

So let's say six ounce, let's be generous, a six ounce steak or four scrambled eggs.

I mean, how much creatine are we talking?

The amount of creatine in a pound of steak you're going to cringe is something like 2 grams.

But when we think about eating foods as in a food matrix, what you're saying is absolutely true.

We don't eat single nutrients while we think about dietary protein as a single nutrient and we think about carbohydrates.

But what we really do is we eat mixed meals.

When we think about that, the quality of the protein matters.

From a protein perspective, could you get plant based proteins and animal based proteins and could it be equal?