Cardio vs Weights After 40s, 50s, 60s (Wish I Knew This Sooner!)

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout.

Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author.

Yes, I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at.

Health conferences and trainings around the globe.

But I'm driven by my insatiable curios and love of science to keep asking.

Questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can.

And that's why I created the well.

Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify.

The science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive.

In each episode, we'll talk about what's.

Working in the world of wellness, from.

Personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to.

Healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.

Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Hey, it's J.J. here. Now, let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best.

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This episode is Brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just need to hit pause and refresh. An ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break. It's your chance to catch your breath and savor a moment that's all about you. Always refreshing. Still the same great taste. Diet Coke make time for you time.

If you're sick of spending all your time on the treadmill and not getting any results, or you're afraid of the weight room thinking you're going to get bulky, you're going to want to listen up. I'm going to talk about what actually works best for women in their 40s, 50s and 60s and beyond. And what I wish I knew sooner so you can learn from my mistakes and and get on the fast track to better fitness. Now when I was in grad school, no joke, we were taught, do not lift weights until you lose the weight. Everything back then was about lsd. Long slow distance was the best thing for weight loss. In fact, they told us back then that if you couldn't do at least 30 minutes of cardio, don't even bother starting. But you should be doing at least an hour a day. It was all cardio, cardio, cardio for calorie burning and fat burning. And you had to be in your fat burning zone. You remember all of that now you've likely heard the opposite too. Don't do cardio, it burns up your muscle. Don't do cardio, it raises cortisol. Don't do cardio. It's going to age you faster due to all the increased oxidative stress. Please. Plus, cardio just makes you hungry. And what about weights? Can they make you bigger? I mean, you're not really going to be burning fat like you do in a cardio workout. So what do you do? Okay, it's time to cut through the confusion. I'm going to share what you should be prioritizing for the best body composition and overall health. And let's start with some stats and really what we want to avoid. So starting at around the age 30, you begin to lose. You don't have to, by the way, but you will. Left unchecked, up to 1% of your muscle mass every year, up to 2 to 4% of your strength every year. That's. Can you get the jar lid off the Jar? Up to 6 to 8% of your power per year. That's how fast you're moving now. Grip strength. The reason I mentioned that jar is a great proxy for overall strength. There was a study in 2017 that looked at grip strength and all cause mortality. They reviewed 42 other studies. They looked at 3 million participants and it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. What they found was that lower grip strength is linked to higher risk of death and cardiovascular diseases. In fact, people with the lowest grip strength had a 41% higher risk of all cause mortality and a 63% higher risk of cardiovascular diseases compared to those with the highest grip strength. Now, grip strength is a really good proxy for overall strength. You can check yours by using something called a hand grip dynamometer. We'll put a link to how you can get one in the notes and they're like 30 bucks on Amazon. But the other way you can check your overall strength is a push up test. Next thing, VO2 max. So VO2 max is probably the best predictor of all cause mortality of anything. When you think about you go to the doctor's office to get all these labs done, you should be doing a VO2 max. So 5 to 15% of your VO2 max you start to lose every decade starting at age 30. And what again this VO2 max, it's your body's ability to use oxygen during exercise. So we start to lose it again like the others. We don't have to lose it at the sharp decline you're hearing about. So There was a 2016 observational study that was published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings and it looked at the changes in cardiorespiratory fitness measured by maximal oxygen uptake. That's VO2 max during exercise and how it affected your all cause mortality. And what study found that was that for each 1 ML per minute per kg increase in VO2 max, it was associated with a 9% reduction in the risk of death. And by the way, that is not a big increase to have that big of a reduction. By the way, again, poor VO2 Max right now is being thrown about as the number one indicator of all cause mortality. This is definitely one that you're going to want to know. Let's talk about bone mineral density and hip fractures. There was a study that showed that over 19% of patients over 65 who had a hip fracture died within the first year. And there was a cumulative mortality rate of over 54% within five years. And after a hip fracture, only 26% of patients regained independent living one year post injury. Many people, it changed the trajectory of their ability to live forever. So we got to ensure that we're holding onto or building muscle, better yet, building right and increasing strength and Power that we are supporting a really good VO2 max and that we're keeping our bones strong and we've got good agility, balance and flexibility so that we're avoiding falls. Basically, we want to make sure that we're doing the right exercises to be built to last and be able to play full out as we age. So the big question is, is that cardio or weights? And what I say is it's not either or. It's really how you do these and what you prioritize. So I want to talk through the benefits and then how you're going to put it all together. So let's first talk about the benefits of resistance training. So resistance training is anabolic. That means it builds you and it also builds your fast twitch muscle fibers. So when we talk about anabolic, it's going to raise testosterone and growth hormone, two very important anabolic hormones that go down as we age. It also is going to help build something called your fast twitch muscle fibers. We have on our body slow and fast twitch muscle fibers, and then ones that are hybrids that can become one or the other as we age, we tend to lose a lot more of those fast twitch fibers and those are more of that explosive strength and power. And so that's why we start to get weaker and slower as we age. Well, resistance training can build back those fast twitch fibers. What's cool, and what you probably wouldn't have thought made sense is you can actually improve your VO2 max with resistance training too. So it's good for your cardiovascular system. And by putting on more muscle, you're going to improve your resting metabolic rate. Plus, the way you work out when you do resistance training creates a big oxygen debt. So you've got to do more after the exercises go, called a metabolic cost. Your body's going to spend more calories post exercise to recover from it. So it's improving your muscle size, your muscle strength, your muscle power. It's going to help with your bone density because when you're putting that stress on your bones by lifting weights, it helps them get stronger. And if you're doing resistance training correctly, you're also pulling in balance and flexibility and hopefully adjustments agility too. Now, what about cardio? Well, cardiovascular training is going to help your heart, it's going to help your blood pressure, it's going to burn a bunch of calories, it's going to help your VO2 max. And if you're doing cardiovascular training in a very specific way called high intensity interval training, this can also help with visceral adipose tissue, that bad fat around your abdominal area. And the reason I really love high intensity interval training is it's going to boost growth hormone, it's going to create a bigger metabolic cost and it's very time efficient. But it is the best thing for improving VO2 max, especially done in very specific ways. And here's one other cool thing that both you'll find both with resistance training and cardiovascular training, they actually can help control your appetite. So do not worry about that urban legend. So when you hear this, you're like, oh, well, I need to do both. But there's specific things that you're going to want to do with both. And I will tell you that ideally you want to prioritize that resistance training. But first, the very first thing you want to start with is making sure that you're moving more. It's getting in that 8,000 plus steps per day, with 8,000 being the floor, right. And ideally you're going for 12,000 or more. Once you've got that done, that you're tracking through using a tracking app, like you know, one of the wearables onto an app, then add some intensity, especially something like a rucking vest, a weighted vest or a weighted backpack, because that's going to put that stress on your hips and your spine. That's going to help with bone mineral density. So that's the first part. And by the way, into those steps we could add a little high intensity interval training too. 2 Bonus. Now, once you've got your steps down, you know that you're doing that every single day, that it's a non negotiable. The next thing you're going to do is you're going to add resistance training. And I like to say that you do resistance training not to get better at resistance training. You do resistance training to get better at life, to get better at doing the things that we have to do throughout life. So I emphasize exercises that are compound movements, meaning they're doing moving through multiple joints. So a bicep curl, where I'm not moving my shoulder is a single joint at the elbow, an upright row. I've got multiple joints moving because I've got my elbow, I've got my wrist, I've got my shoulder, I got my shoulder blade, a lot of stuff going on here. So I like to do compound movements, especially ones that mimic activities of daily living through as full a range of motion as possible, which is going to also help with flexibility. And when I do these things, I'm doing them both to help with muscle hypertrophy by doing a volume of exercise. And then I'll do some heavy things to help with the strength and then I'll do some things that are fast to bring in the power. The other piece that I like to incorporate into the resistance training world is to make sure that I'm doing some things that require some stability, agility and balance. Now, when you're doing some things like free weights, let's say you're doing an overhead press standing look, I have to stay very stable. Same with if I'm doing a bent over row, I'm having to pull in my core and work in stability. But I can also do things like little simple jump training or I can lift one leg up to do my overhead press to pull and balance. So as you progress in resistance training, you can add in some of these concepts to continue to challenge yourself. That again will help you out in the wild, so that if you step off a curb wrong, if you have to get out of the way fast, that you've got the agility and balance to be able to maneuver it and the strength to be able to grab something, hold on or get out of the way. So that's resistance training. So remember, first is move more, get those steps steps in, then get the resistance training in. And then the next thing that I like to add in here is high intensity interval training. Now I tell you what I've been playing around with, because there's high intensity interval training, there are a variety of different ways to do it. It's one of the most common ways to do it is you warm up and then you do 30 seconds all out. Maybe you're on a bike standing up, pumping really hard, or you're sprinting on a tree treadmill, or you're on a Stairmaster going all out and then you do 30 seconds, recover and repeat. You might do more of a tabata, tabata type of thing where you do twice. So you do 20 seconds all out, 10 seconds, recover 20 seconds. So I like to mix it up as much as possible and I really like to get in more sprint interval trainings of 20 to 30 seconds where I really go all out. I'm talking as hard as I possibly we can, like lungs and thighs on fire. Now there's another type of interval training that's really good for training VO2 max, and it is called the Norwegian 4x4. And that is where you do four minutes as hard as you can, steady state for those four minutes and then you have three minutes of active recovery. So maybe four minutes you're running fast. Three minutes you're walking it off and repeating that four times. So that's the Norwegian 4x4. So what you'll hear that I don't do here is regular old steady state cardio. I'm either walking, maybe adding a rucking vest for some intensity. I'm doing my resistance training or I'm doing my HIIT training. And one other thing I've been playing around with in my HIIT training is something called high intensity functional training. And that is where I will do a circuit and my circuit might be doing some squat jumps and then I'm going to do maybe some some simple lunges. Then I'll be doing some up downs and then I'll do some push ups. So I keep varying it from a very intense full body exercise to something that's a little bit easier, back and forth, back and forth. But I'm using my intense sprints to do things that are functional training exercises. Again, like a squat jump, like a skater, like a medicine ball throw. So that's another option too. I've been doing that once a week. Okay, so lots of fun things in here to do. But again, you build on that progress. And what's fun about these things is as you're building on the progress, you're going to be blown away by how quickly you start to feel stronger and the shifts that you start to notice in your body composition. It takes a little longer for you to put on muscle, but you'll be able to see the fat probably quicker than that. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you.

Can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last.

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You on the next episode.

Foreign.

Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only.

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