JJ Virgin breaks down how to fight muscle loss with age: resistance training three times weekly, a 20-minute walk after dinner to direct glucose to muscle, and increasing daily movement. She calls meditation the "gym for the nervous system" and stresses that sleep is non-negotiable for muscle growth and hormone regulation.
And if you are not using your muscles, you are losing your muscles. Starting at age 40, we lose up to 1% of our muscle mass a year, 2 to 4% of our strength, and up to 6% of our power. And it starts to double at age 60. And I say, not on my watch. So you got to be doing resistance training. That means lifting heavy things for you. How heavy depends how much you can lift. You want to be working to a point somewhere, and by the way, it's pretty broad range, but somewhere between 8 repetitions and 30 repetitions multiple sets, but by the time you get towards the end, you should feel like you have to stop, that you're really getting to your max, that you're getting to that point of failure. So I'll go into the gym 3 times a week. I will do big compound movements like squats, like push-ups, like pull-ups, like overhead presses, chest presses, deadlifts, and I will get to the point on the last couple sets where I really feel like I cannot do another one. That's what you want to get to. That is going to help your body do muscle, go into muscle protein synthesis, repair, rebuild. That activity is going to— more muscle is going to boost your basal metabolic rate. The work your body has to do after the exercise is going to improve your metabolic rate. And again, you're building muscle that is your sugar sponge that gives carbs a place to land, and you're improving insulin sensitivity. So 3 times a week you're doing resistance training for big body parts— your upper body pushing, your upper body pulling, your, your hips and thighs, you're hinging. And my core, if I'm doing those types of things, is involved in everything. It's involved in a squat, it's involved in a pushup, right? The next one, and this is such a big important one, is walking after meals, especially your evening meal when you tend to be less insulin sensitive. This is gonna help drive sugar into the muscles rather than have that sugar stored as fat. So it's gonna lower the blood sugar response to the meal. So if you can just say, you know what, I'm gonna do 20 minutes of walking after my evening meal, huge bonus. The other thing that I want you to do is just move more all throughout the day. So that really works into the final part, which is something called NEAT. We tend to look at this and go, okay, gotta get my workout in. Well, workouts are gonna count for maybe 5% of your overall calorie burn. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis counts for anywhere from 5 to 15% of the calories we burn throughout the day. What is this? This means you're standing instead of sitting. I got a walking treadmill, put it over— I have a standing desk, and then I decided to take it a step further because I can stand or sit at my desk. I keep it raised. I have a treadmill underneath so that when I'm doing conference calls, I can get on the treadmill and walk so that I can just get more movement in. Because it's really easy to just kind of sink in a chair and not move all day. So set your little alarm on your watch, use an Oura Ring or an Apple Watch that will just kind of ping you and go— it'd be great. I actually had a friend who created this Pavlok that was going to shock you to get up like every 30 to 60 minutes. But do something to remind you to get up and move because it matters. So that is all number 1. I mean, it was a little bit of a cheat because I squeezed 4 things in there, but it's all under that umbrella of exercise because that is how important exercise is. And it was number 1 for a reason. Now the next one, and this is mission critical, and I'll share it with this story. So a couple of years ago during the pandemic, I started going to Dr. Joe Dispenza's meditation retreats. Perfect thing to do during the pandemic. All the other stuff was shut down. I'm like, I can finally focus on this. And I made a commitment to do meditation for 6 months, mainly because I was so rotten at it. And I was like, all right, I'm just going to give this a go and see what happens, do a little experiment. And what I likened it to is taking my nervous system to the gym. And the reality is you would never go to the gym for a week and go, I'm done, right? That's it, check it off. And that's what, you know, when I went to the first meditation retreat, I'm like, cool, I'm going to do this, it'll be a week, I'm done. I realized as I got into this, I go, this is not— oh, I need to really actually do this. And I really was bad at it, to be completely honest. I went with a group of friends. They're all like out there. I am sitting there like in my head the whole time. So I committed to it. I went to his week-long event in April. I went again in June. I went again in September. By September, I was like, you can't really tell if you're doing it right or not. But I was like, I think I feel better. And my team was like, you know, we've been tracking you since you've been starting this meditation and we Totally, definitely notice the difference. Keep going. But one thing that happened, and I had the opportunity to sit with Dr. Joe in September. Now, April, May, June, July, August. So this was not even totally 6 months yet. It was right around that mark, but I was now committed. But this funny thing happened. I lost 5 pounds. Now, I don't change things. Like, I eat the same, I exercise the same, I track stuff, you know, sleeping the same, blah, blah, blah. And I was sitting at dinner with Dr. Joe and I go, so funny, I lost 5 pounds. He goes, yeah, it's the no thing diet. Dr. Joe says, hey, you got to become nobody, nowhere, no thing. But the reality was my body finally got out of flight and fight. Now, if you're in flight or fight mode all the time, your body is breaking down muscle. You already heard what can happen with that. Sugar's going up, right? And I always had this little bit of belly fat and I was like, what the heck? Come on, right? And boom, gone. No, it's gone because I went and did a DEXA so I could see it. So remember, you got to help your body be more resilient. And HIIT training is one way, trains your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better, but meditation, Fabulous. And I will tell you, when I went to Dr. Joan, I'm like, okay, oh my gosh, I'm so busy. How am I going to fit 20 to 30 to 45 minutes of meditation into my already totally slammed day? And what I've discovered is that I am way more productive when I do this. So I actually gain time back. Now the other thing, and I'm completely like adamant about this, is sleep. I actually do not know how to help you build muscle and burn fat if you're not sleeping well. Just one poor night of sleep and you are more insulin resistant, your ghrelin is higher, you're hungrier. And I always say it's not for salmon and Brussels sprouts. Let's be real, because we know that poor sleep is going to affect your appetite regulation, your hormone regulation. It messes up everything. So I really group stress and sleep together because it's all, what do we need to do for your nervous system, right? So your nervous system can relax and your blood sugar can be stable. In fact, one of the things I used to do when I saw people one-on-one is I'd always check their fasting blood sugar because I knew that if our diet was dialed in everything looked good in terms of triglycerides and fasting blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c, insulin, and triglycerides, but their fasting blood sugar was elevated. It was a stress response. So I don't know how to fix this if you're not addressing stress. Hope I made that clear enough.
