50 IS REALLY starting to seem like the new 30. Or, at least, it is if you have a decent training plan, a handle on your nutrition and a very real desire not to go gentle into that good night (aka fossilise on the sofa after your mid-40s).
Over the last few years, a slew of famous men in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond have proved that the brief for midlife fitness has changed. We’re not just talking about ‘looking good for your age’, either. We’re talking physiques, performance markers and daily habits that would make many men in their mid-20s blush.
Here’s what 10 seriously fit and famous men over 50 can teach the rest of us about training, eating and ageing well.
Ralph Fiennes, 63
Ralph Fiennes didn’t get in shape to look like a superhero. In fact, for The Return, the target was much weirder – and much more interesting. Director Uberto Pasolini didn’t want a pumped-up gym body. He wanted Fiennes, playing Odysseus, to look like ‘a bit of old rope’: hardened, weathered, capable and lived-in.
The route there, however, still required serious graft. Fiennes followed a disciplined five-month training plan built around progressive weight training, regular running and a nutritional base of lean protein, complex carbohydrates and vegetables.
At 62, Fiennes’ transformation is a reminder that training in later life doesn’t have to mean chasing size. It can mean building a body that looks – and more importantly, performs – like it still has a job to do.
Gordon Ramsay, 59
Gordon Ramsay’s training journey began with a fairly brutal wake-up call. After years consumed by restaurants, pressure and work, he realised he was overweight and out of control.
Since then, he has become almost as well known for endurance feats as kitchen rage. Over the past decade, Ramsay has competed in half marathons, marathons, triathlons and Ironman events, using training as a way to claw back time for himself. These days, he wakes around 5:30am, heads out for a short run, does mobility or core work, and occasionally jumps on the Wattbike after long workdays. Weekends are when he tends to push harder, including sessions such as a 2,000m swim followed by an hour of strength work.
His non-negotiable? Twenty-five push-ups first thing in the morning. Nutrition-wise, he grazes on smaller portions, shares starters and desserts at family meals, leans on vegetables, soups, beans and salads, and fuels rides with porridge, plant-based protein shakes and fruit.
Ernie Hudson, 80
Hudson uses intermittent fasting and doesn’t usually eat before noon. His first meal tends to be oatmeal or smoked salmon and eggs. He avoids faddy diets and hard rules, largely because rules make him want to break them. His guiding principle now is simple: keep trying to be a little bit better.
Training-wise, he goes to Studio G Fitness three times a week, where he has trained for 25 years. He keeps sessions to an hour or less, working on strength, mobility and balance. When he can’t get to the gym, he still does at least 100 push-ups at home.
His hotel-room routine is pure gold: push-ups, bodyweight squats, a plank, abs and stretching. He walks everywhere he can, avoids going too heavy, and trains to keep his muscles from wasting away.
Jason Statham, 58
Jason Statham has the unfair advantage of being Jason Statham. But even allowing for the martial arts background, the diving career and the general aura of a man who could reverse-park a tank, his fitness at 58 is ridiculous.
For The Beekeeper, Statham worked with James Moontasri, a former UFC welterweight and two-time taekwondo national champion. Training began 12 weeks before filming and often started at 5am, blending jiu-jitsu, boxing, stunt drills and long technical sessions designed to make every kick, punch and movement look flawless on screen.
Moontasri says Statham stays in phenomenal shape year-round, which means the coach’s job is mostly about helping him execute what he already knows. That includes a serious base of bodyweight strength. Statham can apparently crush pull-ups and muscle-ups on gymnastics rings, and he has the ability to push himself hard in isolation.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, 78
Arnie has trained through more lives than most men get to live: bodybuilding icon, Hollywood action hero, politician, newsletter philosopher, gym-world godfather. At 78, he is still training every day – not because he’s chasing another Mr Olympia title, but because it’s what makes Arnold, Arnold.
His morning routine is as wholesome as it is simple. He wakes up, starts the coffee, feeds the animals, drinks the coffee, gets on his bike, rides to the gym, trains, then rides to breakfast. Arnie doesn’t negotiate with motivation, he just cracks on. Every day.
His wider message on ageing is just as useful. Progress doesn’t need to mean smashing yourself. It means finding joy in the work, building habits that compound and turning up often enough that training becomes part of who you are. The Austrian Oak might be older now, but the roots are still deep.
Hugh Jackman, 57
If anyone has earned the right to stop training, it’s Hugh Jackman. He’s played Wolverine across nine films over 26 years, and instead of easing off as the franchise wore on, he got more extreme with every outing, culminating in the brutal, vein-popping shape he showed up in for Deadpool & Wolverine.
His regimen blends old-school bodybuilding with functional strength work, often training twice a day during peak prep. Mornings might mean heavy compound lifts, while a second session later in the day focuses on conditioning or targeted hypertrophy work for whichever body part needs sharpening up on camera.
Jackman has openly credited consistency over intensity as the real secret. He trains six days a week and treats recovery as seriously as the lifting itself. To be lean and dense for Wolverine, he opts for a high-protein, controlled-carb approach with meals spaced through the day to keep him fuelled for double sessions.
Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, 54
Dwayne Johnson’s size has become a part of his brand. The Rock treats his body like a piece of machinery that needs constant maintenance, fuel and load management to keep performing at the scale audiences expect.
His week is built around a high-volume, bodybuilding-style split: legs, back, shoulders, arms and chest each get dedicated days, often with sessions stretching past 90 minutes. Training frequently starts before dawn, a habit Johnson has talked about for years as he believes the gym is the one thing that has to happen first, before the day has a chance to eat it.
Johnson has long been eating multiple meals a day loaded with lean protein alongside rice and vegetables, adjusting portions up or down depending on whether he’s bulking or leaning out.
Mark Wahlberg, 55
Mark Wahlberg’s training day starts at a time most people would call the middle of the night. He starts putting in work around 2:30 or 3am, and by the time most of the world is having breakfast, he’s already trained, eaten twice and is well into his day.
He follows up the early morning lifting with some cardio later in the day, often cycling or hitting the golf course as active recovery. For roles requiring serious size, Wahlberg has used high-volume strength training paired with a punishing meal frequency, eating as often as every two to three hours to keep feeding muscle growth.
Recovery is where Wahlberg is always looking to use new tech. He’s spoken about using cryotherapy, infrared saunas and ice baths religiously.
Lenny Kravitz, 62
Lenny Kravitz has a physique you’d expect from an action star half his age. His approach is a disciplined, old-fashioned strength routine with compound lifts, consistent gym sessions and a long-standing habit of training. Kravitz has talked about staying active throughout his life rather than treating fitness as something to suddenly fix in midlife, which shows up in the durability of his physique.
Diet-wise, he utilises a largely plant-based, vegetarian approach and prioritises whole foods.
Matt Damon, 55
Matt Damon famously dropped to 60kg for Courage Under Fire in 1996, losing around 20kg in 100 days, a crash diet he later admitted left him sick.
It’s the kind of story that makes his most recent transformation, for The Odyssey, all the more notable. For the role of Odysseus, Damon wanted to be lean but strong, which he achieved through a tighter routine, a stricter diet, and a mindset shift. He lost around 15kg during filming (the lightest he’d been since high school), while gaining muscle. Under his doctor’s guidance, he cut out gluten entirely, and has stayed gluten-free since.
Frank Grillo, 61
Frank Grillo works hard for his physique. He spends two-and-a-half hours in the gym on a typical day, working through a combination of boxing and strength work. After 20 minutes of warming up by shadow boxing, he moves into heavy compound movements for his chest, back or legs, with six exercises thrown in at the end of the workout to challenge his core. In the middle of the workout he will also take time to hit the boxing pads.
The actor isn’t interested in vanity muscles. “I don’t do biceps, I don’t do triceps,” he told Men’s Health US in 2021. “I do core and heavy exercises on the chest, shoulders, squats and deadlifts, but as far as the vanity muscles. it’s not something [I focus on]”.
It must be noted, however, that Grillo has been open about being on Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT), which helps him stick to such an intense training schedule.
Dave Bautista, 57
Dave Bautista has dropped a lot of weight since his days as a mountain of muscle in the WWE – and he feels better for it. “I started trimming down for a particular reason: I was uncomfortably big,” he said while being interviewed on TODAY. “Now looking back at it, I probably overdid it.”
How did he lose the weight? A mostly plant-based diet. When giving Men’s Health US a tour of his fridge, he said “I usually have a couple fish meals and I typically eat eggs every morning… everything else is kind of typical healthy foods, plant based, rice and beans.”
Recently, Bautista has been enjoying cardio training such as cycling and boxing. “Me looking the way I do is really just kind of a by-product of that,” he said. ‘I’m not consumed about like, ‘Oh, I can bench 500 pounds, I can deadlift 800 pounds.’ I’m not that guy at all. I’d rather watch someone else deadlift than do it myself. I’d rather be boxing or doing some type of interesting cardio like cycling.”
Sylvester Stallone, 79
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Sylvester Stallone explained that most of his training these days is focused on maintaining mobility. “I’ve had five back operations, two shoulders, three neck fusions, both knees – I’m bionic,” he said in the interview. “I’ve gone from lifting regular weights to mostly bands, cables.”
“It’s kind of like physical therapy,” he continued. “So, you’re using the bar, you’re using different motions and keeping those joints moving all the time.”
Earlier this year, Stallone gave us a unique insight into his home gym set-up, where he does the majority of his training. “Every year it gets harder and harder, but that’s why you gotta push harder and harder. Blood, sweat and tears,” he wrote in a motivating Instagram post.
In a separate post, Stallone confirmed just how important he sees physical health at his age. “It’s not about living in a gym,” he said, “but just finding something that gets the blood flowing through the body. It will affect your brain, it’ll affect your confidence, it’ll affect your optimism.”
JK Simmons, 71
JK Simmons has repeatedly surprised audiences with his muscular physique – which he has maintained into his seventies. One such surprise came in a scene from 2024’s Red One, in which Simmons works out alongside The Rock and doesn’t look out of place.
Simmons says the transformation didn’t require anything too crazy. “It’s just old-school hard work and nutrition,” he told Men’s Health UK. “I’ve never gone in for any of the miracles of modern science – you know, ‘chemical help’. It doesn’t seem worth it at my age.”
In the gym, Simmons’ focus is similarly simple. He tries to cap his workouts at one hour and trains his whole body. “It’s moderate weights. You don’t skip leg day, especially at my age. Working on staying strong in the lower half, in the core – all those things,” he said. “Some of it is working on the movie muscles, but a lot of it is just trying to stay healthy.”
Tom Cruise, 63
At 62, Tom Cruise is still jumping off cliffs, clinging to airborne planes, and sprinting full tilt in every movie he’s in. According to the Mission: Impossible star himself, it’s all thanks to a habitual, consistent workout routine.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Cruise explained that his approach to training is what allows him to keep living a lifestyle men half his age might deem a bit extreme. “I work seven days a week. I live on movie sets and editing rooms and that’s been my life. I just finished another movie. I have four other movies that we’re lining up,” he said. “I look at a body kind of like a car… I have to take care of it.”
To keep the engine running, Cruise treats his workouts like hygiene. “For me it’s like brushing my teeth. You gotta brush your teeth – we’re all like, ‘Oh God, do I really have to?’ But it just takes a minute. That’s how I have to train my body.”
Ready to build muscle, burn fat and come out the other side looking, feeling and performing better? Click here to purchase a downloadable pdf of Men’s Health’s Muscle After 40 bookazine.
