How to Speed Up Your Aging Metabolism

Have you ever heard people say that your metabolism starts to decline when you hit 25? While you’re young, you might be able to get away with eating and drinking your way through the weekends without much effect on your waistline. But, as get older, the foods we eat and the activity we do (or don’t do) seems to hit us harder. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that way! Read on to find out how to avoid the dreaded ‘middle age spread’ and speed up your aging metabolism.

How Your Age Affects Metabolism

The truth is that it’s not your age that determines how fast or slow your metabolism is. The biggest factor that affects your metabolic rate is how much muscle you have. Muscle is metabolically active tissue meaning that it not only needs energy to move, it uses calories to simply exist.

As we get older, the downward shift in your metabolism is actually caused by our sedentary lifestyles. Our bodies are made to move all day long, but as adults we sit in our cars to get to work, sit and work at our desks all day long and then come home to sit some more as we watch tv or ‘play’ on our laptops or phones. Because of all that moving that we’re no longer doing, the amount of muscle on our bodies declines, de-conditioning ourselves into what some call ‘sedentary disease’.

Exercising to Keep You Young

It’s actually a good thing that it’s our lifestyles, not our age, that are slowing down our metabolisms. It means that we can do something about it! To prevent or speed up a slow, aging metabolism, we need to focus on activities that help us to build and maintain muscle mass.

Your weekly exercise regime should include a mix of strength and interval training to use resistance to challenge our muscles and keep them firing. Circuit training, hill sprints and plyometrics are also good choices that can easily be adjusted to suit your current abilities.

Lower intensity exercise like walking can help to burn extra calories but doesn’t do much for muscle preservation.

Eating to Keep You Young

As well as doing the right types of exercise, your diet needs to be focused on muscle growth too. Include lean protein with every meal and eat enough healthy fat to feed your muscles and boost your metabolism.

Starting to Speed Up Your Aging Metabolism

Exercising and eating right to speed up your aging metabolism can be done at any age. It’s not as hard as you might think and it’s never too late!

If you’d like extra guidance to start feeling younger, contact us today about personal training. Once you start to feel like your old, strong, healthy self, you’ll never go back!