According to prevailing wisdom in the medical and exercise communities, men start losing muscle mass after age 30, 3-5% a year, and that is supposedly just how the aging process works. 

But this is really a classic example of confusing correlation with causation.   What is really happening is that men typically quit exercising as they age, and develop more sedentary lifestyles. 

Conventional wisdom says that the only  way someone like me, at 63, gets better times than when they were young is if:

1)      They use performance enhancing drugs. Never have, never will.

2)      They’re using some radically different  and more effective training method than when they were younger. I do vary my routines a bit from time to time, but not a lot.

The fact  is you can get stronger over time just by working at it. 

The youngest age for which I have a record of my pushups is when I did 37 in 2007; I was 46 years old.

I didn’t do them all the time; for my upper body workouts I was more often doing bench press, or other pressing movements like incline or military bench.  Sometimes I did pushups just to vary my workout.

In 2008 I did 40 in June and got to 51 in September.

I focused on other exercises for quite a while but got back to doing 47 pushups in 2021, then 55 in early 2022, then 64 in October of 2022.

After a long layoff, I started doing pushups again this year, and went from 53 in May to 72 on July 27 of this year, at age 63. You’ll find the video attached.

Does muscle mass really decrease over time? Only if you let it.