You need a workout plan that's for your age. It needs to include strength-training exercises for muscle gains, as well as an adequate amount of cardio to keep your body fat percentage low. Don't forget to follow a proper diet.
Average muscle lose is 1/2 lb. per year for adults.
You should change your program every couple of weeks or every month, to keep yourself interested and avoid not seeing a change. Weight training exercises help you maintain the muscle you have now and build more muscle, but it also helps other benefits. Boosting your energy, raising your resting metabolic rate, relieving stress, and preventing disease and degenerative conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. You should aim to include at least three workouts a week, completing two to three sets of 12 reps of each exercise each time. Include exercises like dumbbell squats, barbell rear lunges, dumbbell step-ups, glute-ham raises and weighted crunches to get big muscle gains.
Cardio is very important in your workout. After the age of 50. Not only does it help you lose body fat, which is harder than ever to lose as you get older, but it also improves your cardiovascular system, increases your energy and helps prevent disease. Try for three to five sessions lasting at least 30 minutes each during the week. Include mild to moderate intensity cardio exercises such as brisk walking, jogging, cycling, jumping rope and rowing -- these are all effective forms of cardio at the age of 50+ years. Before doing any exercises you need to warm your muscles by doing the routines with light weights then you can increase the weights. After doing weights then do cardio! Doing cardio first will make you exhausted and you won't have the strength to do weights. when you are finished you should use a foam roller to stretch your muscles.
You need to be eating right, you're going to notice a decrease in lean muscle mass and an increase in body fat. At the age of 50+ it's easier to accumulate body fat, so you have to be even more careful about the kinds of food you're eating. You should stick to a clean diet full of vitamin-rich fruits and veggies, foods that are high in protein like eggs, nuts and cottage cheese, and stay hydrated by drinking plenty of water throughout the day.
As you age, your muscle mass and strength begins to decline at an increasing rate, that means your body may need more protein than it did when you were younger.
Your ability to process protein also declines with age, raising your protein requirements.
Research published in the Journal of Nutrition, men who ate at least three ounces of protein a day, and women who ate at least 2.6 ounces per day, had more lean muscle mass. Overall, those with the highest intake of total protein and animal protein had the highest levels of lean muscle mass.
1 ounce of protein = 28 grams. Dietary guidelines suggest about 46 grams of protein a day for adult women and 56 grams for adult men, which amounts to about 0.8 grams of protein/kg of body weight per day.
A study published in the journal Clinical Nutrition also recommended higher protein intakes to help counteract the progressive loss of muscle mass and strength in older adults.
In 2014, research from Japan found that men who consumed higher levels of meat and fish had a 39 percent lower risk of both mental and physical decline compared to those who ate the least animal protein.
As the researchers suggested, that high-quality protein helps preserve lean muscle that is essential for daily functioning.
This study was done in Japan, it's also possible that the participants were consuming higher levels of omega-3 fats from seafood, which may have offered some of the brain-boosting benefits.
In 2012, research also showed that among people aged 70 to 89, those with the highest protein intake reduced their risk of mild cognitive impairment by 21 percent.
As the researchers pointed out, the Japanese study was observational, which means it simply shows a relationship between animal protein and decreased functional decline – it does not show a cause-and-effect relationship.
So it may very well be that the diets of those eating more animal protein were also lower in carbohydrates and, perhaps, higher in healthy fats, than those eating fewer animal proteins.
When protein is reduced, carbohydrate intake usually will increase, which may be bad for your health, especially as you age.
To figure whether or not you're getting too much protein, just calculate your body's requirement based on your lean body mass, as described above, and write down everything you eat for a few days. Then, calculate the amount of daily protein you've consumed from all sources.
Remember, you're aiming for one-half gram of protein per pound of lean body mass. If you're currently averaging a lot more than what is optimal, adjust downward. You could Google the food you want to know and you will quickly find the grams of protein in that food.
If you eat more protein than your body needs, it will convert most of those calories to sugar and then fat. Increased blood sugar levels can also feed pathogenic bacteria and yeast, like Candida as well as fueling cancer cell growth!
Before doing anything get the OK from your doctor.
First, is it true you're 57, as it says on your profile? Because starting out at that age will take longer than when you were 20. Testosterone drops as we age. Second, you say exercising but don't say what you're doing and you say light weights. Lifting the same amount of weight over and over is good exercise, but to get big bigger muscles you have to increase the amount you're lifting. And if the other exercise is a lot of cardio, then you might be burning off more than you're putting on. Last, you say you're dieting. You don't need to diet at all to lift weights, so what do you mean by that? If you've reduced your protein intake, you won't get muscle growth -- you need to increase it. That isn't going to make you healthier and might make you less healthy and shorten your life, but it is the way to increase muscle. Increasing muscle usually requires eating more, not less, but eating different foods. Again, it isn't a healthy thing to do, it's what people do who want bigger muscles quickly. For you it will take some time if that's your real age, and some people have better genetics for muscle gain than others. Also, don't underestimate how many people who grow muscles quickly are taking steroids and other drugs for it. If you're indeed starting from scratch, it will take time.