6-Pack After 60

I was recently doing a consultation with a new retiree, who was 65 years old. Suddenly, he had an extra 40-45 hours per week to occupy, and an admirable project of his was to get a 6-pack. I love it! The first question he asked was whether it was possible at his age. The answer is a resounding “yes.”

Original source: here.

            The next question was how to do it. That’s what I’ll share with you in this article. But if you want more personal guidance than this article can offer, we have a program just for you, titled “6-pack after 60.” If you want to see whether this program is for you, just fill out the application form on our home page.

 

The Two Factors

It takes 2 things to get a 6-pack:

1. Low enough body fat to be able to see the abdominal muscles.
2. High enough muscle growth in the abdominal muscles to protrude through the skin.

 

That broadly guides our approach. In other words, it takes both fat loss and muscle gain. But both can’t be done at the same time. Why not? Think about it this way: If you need 2,500 calories to maintain your weight, then in order to gain muscle, you need more than 2,500. To lose fat, you need less than 2,500. Since you can’t have both more and less than maintenance calories at the same time, you have to choose which one to prioritize first. After you’ve accomplished it, switch focus to the other one.

          How do you choose which one to prioritize? Your current body fat levels. For men, a 6-pack could become vaguely visible around 15% body fat. For women, it’s around 12%. The 6-pack becomes really defined at about 8-10% body fat for both men and women.

So if you’re above those thresholds, I recommend doing a fat loss phase first, and a muscle gain phase second. If you’re at or below those thresholds, you can do a muscle gain phase first, and you may or may not need a fat loss phase second.

 

Fat Loss Phase

First, let’s talk about the fat loss phase. The duration of the fat loss phase will depend on your starting level of body fat. Obviously, if you have 50 pounds to lose, you’ll have a much longer fat loss phase than if you have 5 pounds to lose.

To have a successful fat loss phase, you need 2 things:

1. The right number of calories.
2. The right amount of protein. After all, we want fat loss, not weight loss. We want to hold on to as much muscle mass and bone mass as possible while losing body fat.

 

As a side note, if you’re wondering “what about carbs, intermittent fasting, eating after 6, etc.”, none of that stuff matters when it comes to fat loss. Want to know the only 2 things that matter? Read the section above again. Shocked? Don’t be. I elaborate on all the other unnecessary details in my article on the (un)surprising truth about why we get fat.

Back to the topic at hand – what’s the right number of calories for you to eat? Approximately 20-25% less than what you’re eating now. Which begs the question – how many calories are you eating now? If you’re using popular nutrition tracking apps, they’ll probably tell you that you’re eating an impossibly low number of calories. But those nutrition tracking apps suck, as I detail in a different article.

If your weight is stable, you’re currently eating your bodyweight (in lbs.) times 13, plus whatever you expend on exercise. Let’s say for the sake of illustration that you don’t exercise, and you weigh 200 pounds. You’re probably eating around 2,600 calories per day – knowingly or unknowingly. This formula is decent within about 200 calories.

Again, if you need 2,500 calories to maintain your weight, you want to create a 20% deficit. So you need to eat about 2,000 calories/day.

The other part of fat loss is adequate protein. Protein requirements depend on 3 factors:

1. Your weight: larger people need more protein.
2. Your activity levels: people who exercise need more protein than those that don’t. People who do strength training need more protein than those that only do cardio.
3. Your age. People over 60 need more protein than people under 60.

 

For the sake of this article, let’s assume that you’re over 60, and doing strength training. You need about 2-2.2 grams/kg/day. That’s a minimum. If you want to have more than that, go for it.

After you’ve met that minimum threshold, you can fill up the remainder with whatever else you want. Literally whatever. Else. You. Want. Want spaghetti? Go for it. Want salad? Go for that too. Want ice cream? Enjoy. Want quinoa? You can have that too. Because I can’t say it enough times – the ONLY 2 things that matter are:

1. Calories
2. Protein

I can’t tell you how often I talk to people, spending a good 10 minutes explaining that, and then I get questions like “what about carbs?” or “should I do intermittent fasting?” or “can I eat after 6?” or “can I eat fruits/dried fruits?”

Again, read the statement above – ONLY calories and protein make a difference. Everything else is just details (strictly for fat loss. For other goals, like blood sugar control, healthy cholesterol levels, fatty liver, etc., other nutritional factors come into play – but not many).

Finally, remember – as you get leaner, your calories and protein will need to come down over time, until you reach 15% body fat as a man or 12% body fat as a woman.

That’s the nutrition portion of the fat loss phase. The exercise portion, I wrote about in my article on exercise for fat loss.

 

Is it Different After 60?

Before we get to the excuse-making, let’s address it here first. Is it more difficult to get a 6-pack after 60? Yes, but only slightly. If you even think about blaming your metabolism, stop. Your metabolism is working just fine. Only a little slower. One study showed there to be virtually no decline in metabolism between ages 18-50. Between ages 51-81, metabolism slows down by only 4% per decade. If it takes you 2,000 calories per day to maintain your weight under 50, it’ll take you 1920 calories to maintain your weight between 50 and 59.

Furthermore, about 3 of those 4% are attributed to the loss of muscle mass (and only 1% due to actual aging). So if you regain lost muscle, you’ll also speed up your metabolism.

 

Muscle Gain Phase

Next comes the muscle gain phase. During this phase, we need to enlarge the abdominal muscles. Most people think that it’s just about exercise selection, but that’s not the case. There’s more to it than that. The exercises are indeed important, but if you do the right exercises with the wrong “details”, your abs won’t grow.

So what are those details?

• Number of sets per week: 8-12. This is also a guideline for frequency. It makes only a very small difference how you spread out those sets. You could do them all in 1 workout, although you’ll walk out of the gym with a stomach-ache. Or, if you’re doing 8 sets, you can do 4 sets twice per week or 2 sets 4 times per week. It doesn’t matter.
• Proximity to muscular failure: when you’re finished the repetitions, you should feel like you might have only had another 1-2 more in you. If you think you could have done 3 more, you didn’t work hard enough.
• Number of repetitions: doesn’t matter. Research shows that you can get virtually identical muscle growth with as few as 5 repetitions and a many as 30. The number of reps doesn’t matter – getting close to muscular failure is what really matters.

 

Finally, we get to the exercises themselves. You really only need 2 ab exercises. Choose any 2 of these:

• Machine crunches
• Roman chair knee raises (technique note: it’s very important to get your knees to your chest)
• Lying leg raises
• Lying hip lifts
• Cable crunches

 

A Special Note for Women

Getting a 6-pack is way harder for women than it is for men. Why? For a few reasons:

1. Women naturally walk around at 8-10% more body fat than men, so they’re starting from a higher point.
2. The threshold of how low your body fat has to be is even lower for women than for men (again, men can start to see a vague 6-pack at about 15% body fat. Women start to see a vague 6-pack at about 12% body fat).
3. Women don’t build as much muscle as men. Again, one of the 2 components of a 6-pack is having large enough abdominal musculature to protrude through the skin.

 

Not to mention that the woman’s body fights back harder against extremely low body fat levels than men.

 

Is a 6-Pack Worth It?

For most women, I’d say it’s not even worth it. They might have a 6-pack, but they don’t feel great. They’re hungry all the time, their skin is either dry or oily, their hair might be less thick, they’re moody, and they might not sleep great. Plus, as I discuss in my menopause book, it’s actually healthy for women to gain a few pounds of fat (not even muscle or bone) as she’s going through menopause (on condition that she wasn’t overweight to begin with).

Men, on the other hand, can healthily get to the body fat levels required to maintain a 6-pack. Women start to suffer the consequences of excessively low body fat somewhere around 12-18% body fat (on average, although there are outliers). Men start to suffer the consequences of excessively low body fat around 3-5%.

The other component of whether it’s worth it is the time and effort that it takes. It’s much easier to maintain low body fat levels if you’re exercising 5-6 days per week (maybe 2-3 days per week of strength training and 3-4 of cardio). Are you willing to do that (and I mean real exercise – not just going for a stroll)? And can you eat low enough calories to get where you need to get without going hungry? For some people, yes, for other people, no.

Though even if you don’t get to a 6-pack, you’ll likely be healthier if you exercise more, eat adequate protein, and the right number of calories. So a 6-pack may or may not be worth it for you, but the attempt may come with improved health and fitness outcomes. Decisions, decisions.

If you want help figuring out whether a 6-pack is for you (and if so, a more personalized approach of how to get there), just fill out the application form on our home page.