BEST Total Body Workout for Women 40+ (Build Strength At Home!)

If you want a stronger, more defined body, but you hate the gym, I've got the perfect home workout routine designed for women over 40, and all you'll need is a few key pieces of equipment to get started. Here's the deal. Starting at around age 30, we start losing muscle. You've probably heard about this, 3 to 8% a decade. But actually, that's not the biggest problem. The bigger issues is that when we're losing up to 1% of our muscle, we're losing 2 to 4% of our strength. And 6 to 8% of our power. And that's annually. Now, how can you tell if this is happening to you? Check yourself out with what I call the jar strength. There is something called a handgrip dynamometer that can test your grip strength. You can get on Amazon for like $20. I highly recommend this. But one of the easiest ways to tell, think about opening a jar. If you used to be able to open all the jars and now you're handing it over to your, your son or your husband to open, you're losing some of that strength. Next one is how fast can you get up the stairs or how easy is it for you to do a big jump? Because that's really a sign of your power. Now, beyond just losing your strength and power, you also start to lose balance, flexibility, and stability. You can tell if you got a problem there because you're going through security, you took off your shoes, and now you got to stand up and put the shoe back on. Can you do it? You can also do something that's a little balance test where you literally lift a foot up, you cross your hands, and you close your eyes. This sounds really easy. Try it. It's way harder than it seems. And for someone who's 40 to 59, for men, you're gonna wanna be able to hold this for 11.5 to 26.9 seconds. And for women, 9.7 to 23.3 seconds. So those are the norms. So give that one a test. Again, one foot up, cross your arms, close your eyes, time it, and see how you do with that one. I've put together a simple set of exercises that you can do at home. Now here's what you're gonna need. You're gonna need a set of dumbbells. You're gonna need a kettlebell and you're gonna need a heavy ball. This is also called a medicine ball. And I've created a resistance training cheat sheet if you want a plan that you can print, download it, print it, put it on the wall. That you can get at jjvirgin.com/power. So what we're putting into this program are a couple things. Number 1, 3 big areas, upper body pushing, and that involves your chest, your shoulders, your triceps. So that's things like a pushup, or an overhead press. Upper body pulling, that is something like a bent-over row or an upright row. Those are things that involve your lats, your shoulders, your biceps, and then hip and thigh hinging for your glutes and your quads. Then of course, in this, we're creating something to build your strength, to build your muscle, to increase your power. We're gonna have your core engaged throughout, and we're also incorporating balance and flexibility and stability. Now, the other thing that I'm making sure is in this program that was, that we're moving in all the different planes. We're gonna move front to back, we'll move side to side, and we'll rotate. The whole point of this is, as Dr. Andy Galpin says, is to look, to feel, and to perform better. So all of these things are super duper functional. We're gonna start with ball squat throws. I actually just want you to do this with no weight, no ball at all, and you're just going to move your body through the motion. And what I like to do with this is if you feel unstable at all, just put a chair behind you to tap down on. But that first one, you're just doing as if you're doing the yoga chair pose where you have your arms straight up and you're just coming down and up for your first set. In all of these, I'm going to have you work in the hypertrophy range, which is 6 to 30 reps, but I'm going to have you just think about doing 8 to 12 reps. If you can't get to 8, lighten it up. In each of these exercises, you're going to start out with a bodyweight warm-up, easy one, and then you'll add the weight in. And then we're going to move into the squat with an overhead throw. So you're going down, tapping the ball, coming up and throwing the ball. Now that we've done your squats and what's cool with squats with an overhead throw is we involve power with the overhead throw. We got an overhead pushing exercise as well, which is really functional. Think of all the different times in life because I always say you get— you train to get better at life, not to get better at working out. What you have to do to put things up in that higher cabinet or maybe in the airplane to put it into the overhead compartment. The next one is going to move you to the side and this is a side lunge and this is going to involve some balance as well. It's also going to have some power and this is where you just do a side lunge. And lift back up. So again, I'm balancing, I'm having to do some speed and pushing. And when we're doing these, you're not looking at how slow you can go. You're looking at how fast you can push yourself back up. We're doing these to improve your balance so that in life you're able to catch yourself so that you don't fall. Now the next thing you're gonna do is do this with a kettlebell. Here's the thing, when I'm demoing exercises, I do not do the heaviest weight that I can handle. What you wanna do with these is always use the heaviest weight you can handle in good form, holding with both hands. And I'm just gonna show you a modification if you needed to. This could always be your modification. All right, the next one is a double or single-legged deadlift now, and I'm doing what's called a Romanian deadlift. What you would do is knees are slightly bent, abdominals pulled in tight, and I just come down and back up again. And what's important here is that my hands are coming down just below my knees, but see how my back stays extended and my hands stay close to my knees. The muscles that you're using here are your glutes, what's called your erector spinae in your spine that are keeping you extended and your hamstrings. Okay, now the other one that I love is something called a wood chop. One of the reasons I like this is cuz this is a way for us to get that rotation happening in our trunk. We're also going to get our quads, our glutes, our core, and this is one where you're gonna use that medicine ball, but you can just start right first with the movement just so you get used to doing it. And what you wanna make sure of is that your knees don't fold in. You're coming down to a little bit of a squat. It's really moving your trunk. It's as if your trunk and your arms were all one unit. Then we're gonna do something called a superset. And a superset is where you do two different exercises that work opposing muscle groups. In this case, we're gonna do a bent-over row and we're gonna do a set of those. And then we're gonna alternate that with a set of pushups. My hands on my knees, so I've got my back extended. When I come up, I'm squeezing my shoulder blades together, I'm rotating my palms in, and we'll recruit more bicep muscles. So I'm doing this and down. Now what you're going to do is you're going to alternate that with your push-up. You can do a push-up on your hands and toes, you can do a push-up on your hands and knees, or you could do a push-up against a bench. Whichever way you need to do it, it's hardest on your hands and toes, it's It's the easiest on your hands and knees. In between, on a bench. Now, with all this hard work, make sure you're supporting your efforts in the kitchen. I'm gonna tell you about the best foods to help build muscle and burn fat, how much protein you need, why food timing matters, my favorite protein sources, and so much more in this next video.