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

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 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. 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 gonna share what you should be prioritizing for the best body composition and overall health. So starting at around the age 30, you begin to lose 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? 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. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. And 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 note. They're like $30 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 is 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 the 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. And by the way, again, poor VO2 max right now is being thrown about as the number one indicator of all-cause mortality. So this is definitely one that you're gonna wanna know. Let's talk about bone mineral density and hip fractures. So 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 5 years. And after a hip fracture, only 26% of patients regain independent living 1 year post-injury. Many people, it changed the trajectory of their ability to live forever. So we gotta ensure that we're holding onto or building muscle and increasing strength and power, and we've got good agility, balance, and flexibility so that we're avoiding falls. Basically, we wanna 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. 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 gonna raise testosterone and growth hormone, two very important anabolic hormones that go down as we age. It also is gonna 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 exercise is 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 gonna 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 agility too. Now, what about cardio? Well, cardiovascular training is gonna help your heart. It's gonna help your blood pressure. It's gonna burn a bunch of calories. It's gonna 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 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. 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+ 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, wearables onto an app, then add some intensity, especially something like a rucking vest, a weighted vest or a weighted backpack, because that's gonna put that stress on your hips and your spine. That's gonna help with bone mineral density. 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.