I have a gym membership. I have had it for three years.

I have used it eleven times. I know the exact number because the app keeps count. That is a cruelty nobody warned me about in 1978.

Turns out I am the majority. The federal guideline asks adults to work all the major muscle groups on two days a week. Among Americans sixty-five to seventy-four, 19.3% report doing it.

Nineteen point three percent. Four out of five of us are simply not there.

 

Four to six pounds a decade is a number you can picture. Harvard puts the drift at one to two percent a year from around thirty-five. It rises to roughly three percent a year once you clear sixty.

Across the twenty years from fifty to seventy, one review puts the total loss of muscle mass near thirty percent.

So the research on this is settled and the participation rate is nineteen percent. That gap is the interesting part, and it is a business gap rather than a medical one.

Think what it takes to sell somebody two supervised hours a week for thirty years. A room. A schedule. A person standing there. None of it ships, and no factory makes it cheaper.

So the aisle filled up with everything that can.

This is the aisle the money reaches next, and it is already crowded.

Walk past the pharmacy counter in any supermarket and you will find where the money actually went.

Two catches here. Protein has real research behind it, so this is a genuine half of the thing rather than a con. And a powder is a commodity with no moat, competing on price on a shelf where the next tub is identical.

The arithmetic

The 19.3% of adults aged 65 to 74, and the figure below 15% for those 75 and over, meeting the guideline of moderate or high intensity muscle strengthening across all major muscle groups on two or more days a week, and the roughly 30% decline in muscle mass between ages 50 and 70, are reported in a 2024 Gerontological Society of America abstract published in Innovation in Aging, drawing on national survey data. The guideline itself is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s. Loss of four to six pounds of muscle per decade in adults who do not strength train, the drift of one to two percent a year from around age thirty-five, and the acceleration to about three percent a year after sixty are from Harvard Health Publishing, updated February 2026. The two dollars to one comparison in The Sequence is illustrative and is Boomers Trade’s own framing, not a measured market ratio. The read on who profits is Boomers Trade’s own. This is a letter about money and markets, and it is not medical advice.

 

Watch for the first operator who sells supervision at a price a seventy-year-old will actually pay. Whoever manages it owns something no factory can copy. Four out of five of us are the market. Eleven visits in three years. The app is still counting, and so is the other clock.

Andrew

Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.