Nutrition, Strength & Recovery After 40: A Simple Plan

You've cleaned up your diet. You're training three or four times a week. And yet the needle hasn't really moved — your energy still dips mid-afternoon, the weekend quietly undoes the week, and the body you're working towards stays just out of reach. What if the problem isn't your effort, but the order you're doing things in?

That's the question I put to transformation coach Martin Silva on a recent episode of me&my health up. Martin has spent nearly two decades in this industry — twelve years as an in-person trainer in Sydney, then building an online coaching practice for entrepreneurs and high achievers, most of them aged between 40 and 60. His answer was refreshingly blunt: get your health right first, and the physique follows.

Health First, Physique Follows

Martin learned this the hard way. He competed in bodybuilding nine times, got genuinely lean, and came out the other side with a poor relationship with food — restricting hard through the week, then binge eating every weekend for the better part of two years. He was measuring himself against his most shredded self, and the comparison was quietly wrecking him.

The turning point wasn't a new diet. It was a change of target. He stopped chasing a look and started chasing performance and health — strength in the gym, better digestion, better sleep. "And then the crazy thing is, my body started looking way better than it ever had," he told me. It came as a by-product.

I see this constantly in my own practice. People arrive wanting to change how they look, and what actually keeps them going twelve months later is the energy, the patience with their kids, the confidence. The aesthetics are the smallest part of the return.

Focus on Ingredients Before You Count Calories

If Martin could give his younger self one instruction, it would be this: pay attention to ingredients rather than obsessing over calories. Not because energy balance doesn't matter — it does — but because the quality of what you eat largely determines how much you eat.

Pick up a packet in the supermarket with thirty to fifty ingredients on the label, several of which you can't pronounce, and you're holding something engineered for one purpose: to make you eat more of it. Martin pointed to controlled research where the same people, crossed over between diets, ate roughly 500 calories more per day on ultra-processed food. You don't out-discipline food that's been designed in a lab.

His practical target is aiming for around 90% single-ingredient foods — beef, eggs, berries, vegetables. Things with one item on the label. Interestingly, he didn't get there by banning anything. He added more whole foods in, and his appetite for the ultra-processed stuff faded on its own. That's a very different experience from white-knuckling a list of forbidden foods, and it's the reason it lasted.

Protein: The Lever Most People Under-Use

Once food quality is heading the right way, protein is where Martin looks next. His rule of thumb is around two grams per kilogram of body weight — so roughly 160 grams a day if you weigh 80 kilos. Hit that consistently and it becomes genuinely difficult to overeat, because protein at that level blunts appetite. As he put it, your body's own GLP-1 response comes from eating well, not only from an injection. Fibre from vegetables does similar work: high volume, low calorie, and satisfying.

Most people think they're eating enough and aren't. If that's you, track your food honestly for seven days — not forever, just long enough to see the truth. And watch the weekend: Martin finds people drop protein sharply on Saturday and Sunday, and the body goes looking for those calories in fats and carbohydrates instead.

Where that protein comes from matters too. Get the bulk of it from good-quality whole foods, and treat bars and powders as occasional tools for a travel day rather than daily staples — most bars are ultra-processed food wearing a health label. Tracking, Martin was clear, is a starting point and not a destination. If you're still counting everything years later, something has gone wrong.

Train Smarter: Movement, Strength and the Right Dose

Picture exercise as a pyramid. The base is everyday movement, and this is where prolonged sitting does its damage. Martin dislikes arbitrary targets — telling someone on 4,000 steps to hit 10,000 tomorrow mostly guarantees they'll stop. He'd rather add fifteen minutes of walking, or 2,000 steps, and have it hold for years. He isn't planning your next ninety days; he's planning what you'll still be doing in a decade.

Above movement sits strength training, and here frequency beats heroics. Rather than two punishing hour-long sessions a week, splitting the same time across four shorter ones tends to produce more. Martin's word for the right amount is "appropriate" — the volume your body can genuinely recover from. Plenty of people are chasing a feeling instead: he calls them cortisol junkies, going all out, unable to walk for three days, and slowing their own progress in the process.

Recovery, Resilience and Never Missing Twice

Strength and recovery after 40 are inseparable. You don't grow in the gym — you cause inflammation there and adapt afterwards. Sleep leads everything: a single poor night can lift cravings by 30 to 40%. Martin uses a simple 3-2-1 framework — no food three hours before bed, no fluids two hours before, no screens in the final hour — plus a consistent bedtime and the phone charging outside the bedroom.

Then there's stress, which he describes as a bathtub. Work, family, life and training all pour into the same tub, and it overflows when the drain can't keep up. A morning walk in daylight before you touch your inbox is one of the cheapest, most effective plugs available. On supplements, he keeps it in proportion: nutrition and training are perhaps 95% of the result, supplements a few per cent. Creatine at 5 to 10 grams daily is his one near-universal pick, with vitamin D worth checking given how commonly people are low.

And for the weeks when life gets in the way — because it will — he borrows a line from James Clear: never miss twice. Miss a workout, fine. Have a rough night's sleep, fine. Just don't let it become two in a row. The people who succeed long term aren't the disciplined ones. They're the ones who bounce back quickly and don't punish themselves on the way.

Key Takeaways

• Chase health and performance rather than appearance — the physique tends to follow as a by-product.
• Prioritise ingredients over calories, aiming for roughly 90% single-ingredient whole foods.
• Target around 2g of protein per kg of body weight, mostly from whole foods, and don't let it collapse on weekends.
• Add movement in increments you'll sustain, and spread strength training across more frequent, shorter sessions.
• Protect sleep first, manage the total stress load, and keep supplements in proportion.
• When you slip, never miss twice.

What I appreciate about Martin's approach is how unglamorous it is. There's no protocol to buy and no biohack to master — just food you can recognise, strength you can build, sleep you protect, and enough self-compassion to get back on track on Monday. That's the same territory I work in at me&my wellness: looking at the whole picture, starting from where you actually are, and making the smallest change that will still be there in five years. Nutrition, strength and recovery after 40 aren't complicated. They're just rarely done in the right order. To understand which health markers matter most on this journey, read our guide: Healthspan After 40: Which Markers Matter Most?