In this educational video, JJ Virgin systematically debunks five pervasive fitness myths that especially affect women and older adults, backing each refutation with scientific studies and practical guidelines. She first challenges the notion that weight training should be postponed until weight loss is achieved, explaining how muscle increases resting metabolic rate, improves insulin sensitivity, and raises post‑exercise energy expenditure; she cites a 2021 systematic review of 58 studies showing resistance training reduces body fat and visceral fat across ages and sexes. Next, she argues that not all weight loss is beneficial, highlighting research that diet‑only weight loss in older adults leads to significant muscle loss, whereas combining diet with resistance training preserves lean mass; she recommends high protein intake (0.7–1.5 g per lb of target weight), creatine, and essential amino acids, referencing a 2020 trial in older women showing superior recomposition with higher protein. She then dispels the myth that lifting heavy makes women bulky, clarifying the distinction between strength (low‑rep, heavy loads) and hypertrophy (moderate‑rep, higher volume) and noting hormonal and fiber‑type differences that limit extreme size in women; she suggests 8–15 rep ranges, 20 sets per week per body part, and training to 1–2 reps in reserve. The fourth myth addressed is the belief that metabolism inevitably slows; she explains that resting metabolic rate is primarily driven by muscle mass, the thermic effect of protein, and non‑exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), and that modest declines occur only after age 60‑70. She cites studies showing trained individuals have an 11 % higher RMR and that NEAT can add up to 2,000 kcal/day. Throughout, she emphasizes a comprehensive program: regular resistance training, daily steps (≥8,000, ideally 12,000‑15,000), occasional rucking, twice‑weekly HIIT, and adequate protein and supplement intake. The video concludes with a call to watch a follow‑up routine for beginner resistance training tailored to aging adults.
Chapters
I'm going to expose the top fitness myths that keep women like us from seeing the progress we've been working so hard for. I want you to stop wasting your efforts on some outdated advice and some of the crazy misinformation out there and stick around and learn the truth about what works and what doesn't. First off, the big myth: don't lift weights till you lose the weight. This is such a crazy one, and I remember the first time I heard it. It was literally, gosh, 38 years ago when I was in graduate school. In fact, what our professors teaching us to do was do not have your clients do weight training. Have them only do cardio till they lose the weight. This is the most counterproductive advice that I can think of because you want to have that muscle. Muscle, when you look at your overall metabolism, we have your resting metabolic rate and then we have your thermic effect of food and then we have activity. The only way that you can really change your resting metabolic rate is by adding more muscle. But it goes farther than that. Not only is that gonna improve your resting metabolic rate, it's also gonna improve your insulin sensitivity and it's gonna give sugar a safe place to go, get stored in your muscles. And if you've got good fasting insulin, it's gonna make it easier for your body to burn stored body fat. Plus, when you do a big resistance training routine, your body has to work a lot harder afterwards to recover. It's more metabolically costly. Now, I'm not saying don't do the cardio, but I'm saying don't wait to do the resistance training. Start it now. There was a study in 2021. It was a systematic review and meta-analysis of 58 studies. It was published in Sports Medicine, and what it found was that resistance training significantly reduced body fat percentage and body fat mass and visceral fat. So again, look at resistance training as one of the key things that you can do to improve your body composition. And by the way, this didn't matter if they were, you know, how old they were, what sex they were. This is a powerful tool for for everyone. And when I think about this, we all think of lifting weights to build muscle, but again, I want you to think of lifting weights as a way to also lower body fat. And again, think of muscle as your metabolic Spanx that holds everything in tighter. There's also a study in 2021, it was another systematic review that was published in Obesity Reviews, that revealed that weightlifting plays a crucial role in weight loss and overall fitness. This is now updated recommendations from the European experts that highlights that while moderate aerobic exercise exercise can help with losing body fat and visceral fat, the expected weight loss is really pretty small, maybe about 5 pounds. However, for preserving lean muscle mass during weight loss, moderate to high-intensity resistance training is essential. Get that? Essential. And resistance training improves insulin sensitivity, cardiovascular fitness, and muscle strength. So what I want you to think about doing is doing resistance training and aerobic training, and especially what I like to I like to have people do is do their resistance training, get their steps in every day, 8,000 or more, ideally more, and add a little rucking vest to up the intensity. And then do some high-intensity interval training twice a week. When you do this and when you do that weight training, you're gonna improve your appetite control, your quality of life, everything. So weight training for the win. Do not wait to lift the weights. Get started now. Here's another important one. All weight loss is good. I like to say that if you are losing weight, but not losing your waist, you actually could make yourself worse, not better. Now, when you look at the average diet out there, a poorly designed diet— and this is whether you're using diet drugs or not, right— a poorly designed diet, it can cause anywhere from 25 to 50% muscle loss. And muscle loss gets worse as you get older. There was a 2009 clinical trial that was published in the Journal of Gerontology that concluded that weight loss in older adults often includes muscle loss, especially when they are just doing it through diet alone. And I would tell you, I'm going to be as bold as to say, I don't believe anyone should ever go on a diet without including resistance training. This study was a study of individuals around 67 years old, and they had diet-only and diet-plus-exercise groups. And what they found was the diet-only and exercise groups lost similar body weight and fat, but the diet-only group also experienced significant muscle loss, 4.3%, while the exercise group preserved most of their muscle mass. They only had a 1% Now, this is huge. This highlights that need for making sure that if you are ever going on a diet, you're always doing exercise. In fact, let's just say it, just always make sure that you're doing exercise. You're getting that resistance training in because you lose 4% of your muscle mass. That's hard to get back when you are 60+. So no caloric restriction without resistance training. You couldn't lose fat and put on muscle at the same time. I think that it's only been recently that people realize this isn't the case. I know that it's not the case because early on I was having people come to me and they wanted to lose fat and put on muscle. And sure enough, we were able to do it. And there's very specific ways that you want to be— that you need to do this because this is what we call body recomping. And if you want to body recomp, lose some body fat, put on some muscle mass, you may end up weighing the same, but your body will look entirely different. There's a very specific strategy that you need to do, which is make sure you're optimizing your protein intake. And this is where you might even want to go higher than 1 gram per pound of target body weight. You might even want to go up to 1.5 grams per pound of target body weight and really focusing on resistance training and high-intensity interval training. And creatine would definitely be one you want to put in here as well. Super important. There was a study in 2020, it was published in the Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise Journal, and it found that it's possible to lose weight and build muscle at the same time when you have resistance training combined with proper dietary intake. So they had 130 older women, which so rare. Thank you so much for doing this on older women. And it was over 24 weeks, and those with higher protein intake experienced greater increases in skeletal muscle mass and significant reductions in fat mass compared to those with lower protein intake. All the participants engaged in whole body resistance training program. And so we know, because the only difference was the diet, that the higher protein consumption led to a more favorable body recomposition. So again, if you want to recomp your body, it's not just resistance training, especially if you're doing caloric restriction. Make sure you're getting in that high protein. And generally we say 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. You might even want to pump it up a little bit more than that. And this is where I also love to add in an essential amino acid supplement like my Amino Acid Power. Okay, here's a myth that just will not die, that lifting heavy makes you big. Now here's what's really funny about this. Lifting really heavy. You know, we have muscle size, we have muscle strength, and we have muscle power. They're actually trained a little bit differently. And if you purely want to train for strength, you would be doing sets of 1 to 5 reps to failure and giving yourself a long break in between, like 5 minutes, and doing it again and doing like 5 or more sets of those. And you can actually get a lot stronger with minimal increase in muscle size. Now, generally, as you get— as you get— your muscles get bigger, they're also stronger, but it's not a straight line. So it's funny because the heavier lift with the shorter sets are going to make you stronger without as much size. What you really want for size is volume. It's time under tension. It's doing more sets of exercises. And generally that can be anywhere from 6 reps to 30 reps and combinations of it. I like to tell people to do somewhere in the 8 to 15 rep range, multiple sets, and get that volume in. 20 sets a week for each body part. And here's the thing, even doing that, even going for size, we are lucky if we can do— put on 1 to 2 pounds of of muscle a month. And as we do it, generally what's going to happen is your metabolism is going to get better, you're going to get more insulin sensitive, you're going to get better at burning fat, the muscle is going to hold everything in tighter. So you might be staying the same weight or even getting a little heavier as you're getting smaller. Now let's talk men versus women too, because women have 15 to 20 times lower testosterone levels. And we, you know, we need testosterone. We also need estrogen, but we need testosterone for muscle growth and development. So we're never going to get as big as men. Right? Even though testosterone is our dominant hormone, by the way. And we also have a difference in muscle fiber types. We women tend to have a higher proportion of, of the slow twitch muscle fibers compared to men who tend to have more of the fast twitch muscle fibers. And fast twitch have a greater capacity for hypertrophy, for getting big. But I really wanna emphasize lifting heavier for women to really, when you're lifting weights, to try to get to within what we call a 1 to 2 reps in reserve. That means that if you're doing, let's say, 10 squats that you feel like you could maybe eke out 1 or 2 more of those squats with the weight that you're handling, that you want to really lift heavy. It's gonna improve your strength. It's gonna improve your muscle size. It's gonna improve your bone density. And again, your overall metabolism. And it's interesting cuz I hear so often from women, I don't wanna get big. I just wanna get toned. Well, toned is building muscle so that you have high quality muscle, right? And that muscle can hold everything in tighter and burn more fat. So when I think of tone, it's really having quality muscle that's holding everything in. I think when we think of bulky, we think of big muscle size, but really getting you to a point where you're really bulky, unless you want to start cranking some testosterone, anabolic steroids, it's probably not going to happen. And I will tell you, in 40 years of doing this, I've never seen it happen. And I've worked with thousands of women. So let's just put that myth to rest. The next one is My metabolism is slow. So I think that this is actually really a misnomer. Number one, in looking at all of the different research out there, our metabolisms really don't slow down much and they don't tend to really slow down much until about 60 or 70 years old. Now, your metabolism is dictated in 3 different areas. We have your resting metabolic rate, and I think when people talk about their metabolism slowing down, they're really looking at that. Well, the way that your metabolism would slow down, your resting metabolic rate slow down is twofold. Number one, a little bit lower estrogen level will contribute to that. So yes, as we start to notice that we're starting to gain weight during menopause, some of that is that decline in estrogen slightly slowing down your metabolism, but probably more of it's the fact that that estrogen drop is contributing to insulin resistance, and that's creating the problem. But the other thing that's going to slow down that metabolism is the fact that you are not holding on to your muscle. Starting around the age of 30, we start to lose muscle, as you know, anywhere from up to 1% a year, but basically 3 to 8% each decade, which starts to double at age 60. Well, basal metabolic rate, the biggest thing that we can do to improve it is to have more muscle mass, is to have more skeletal muscle. So that's the first thing. The other two ways that you can impact your metabolism, one is the thermic effect of food. And so if you focus on eating protein first and getting in optimum protein, that's the best way to affect that thermic effect. And then the other one is activity. Now here's what's interesting. When you look at the contributors, you would think exercise would be the big contributor there, but it It turns out that exercise is only maybe 5% of your metabolic rate, that the one that really changes there is non-exercise. So that would be simply standing rather than sitting, moving more. And what you wanna do there is really track your steps. So I become kind of obsessive, I admit, on tracking my steps each day and ensuring bare minimum. So let's say that I'm traveling and I've been traveling a lot on long flights, bare minimum, make sure I get in 8,000 steps that day, even if I'm having to pace the flight aisle, the plane aisles, which they love, but make sure you're getting in 8,000 is your bare minimum. And really, I'm trying to get 12,000, 15,000 when I'm places where I can walk 20,000 or more. Anytime you can add some intensity with something like throwing a rucking vest in, better. But for a lot of this, you're doing exercise to create the metabolic aftereffect that you get from HIIT or to create the— add in the muscle from resistance training. And then you're trying to move more all throughout the day, whether it's fidgeting, standing, moving, etc. They make a big difference. I'm going to share a study that was a 1986 study, and it was published in the International Journal of Obesity, and it found that exercise significantly affects resting metabolic rate. Remember what I said here? It wasn't so much the regular metabolic rate throughout the day. It was resting metabolic rate that trained individuals had, are a resting metabolic rate that was 11% higher than non-trained individuals. Again, when you have muscle, this is the way you can push that resting metabolic rate. Now exercise is a minimal amount, but that non-exercise can account for 15 to 20% of your metabolism. There was a study in 2015, it was published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, and it found that if you focused on non-exercise activity thermogenesis, this could be the game changer. This includes things like walking, standing, and fidgeting. You can burn up to an extra 2,000 calories a day. I think that one of the challenges that happened during the pandemic that led to weight gain is we just weren't going anywhere or moving at all. So again, look at how you can incorporate NEAT into your daily routine. How many more times can you take the stairs? When I was on vacation, I never took the elevator. I always took the stairs. And when you can incorporate that into your daily life, into your leisure time, that can help you burn those extra calories. And those extra calorie burn can make the difference of, you know, reducing your metabolic syndrome risk, improving your cardiovascular health, and reducing your risk of all-cause mortality. So there you go. Now you know the facts versus fiction when it comes to fitness. So I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do to start a workout routine that works. I want you to watch this next video where I walk you through a beginner resistance training routine that's going to help you age powerfully through your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, and beyond.
