FULL PLAN to Lose 10 lbs of Fat and Maintain Muscle for Women 40+

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Things are different now. Don't try the same approach you tried in your 20s. It's not going to work. Obviously, resistance training is going to be more important than fuel for the actual muscle stimulus, but you got to have them both. But if you are not sleeping well, you're done. You're done. You're not going to have great muscle protein synthesis. You're not going to have the energy to work out. You're going to be more insulin resistant. So sleep is key. Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. Want an ad-free experience? You can now subscribe to my exclusive VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. It's like your daily latte, but better for your health. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review. Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. 2627. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best.

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Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com/brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com/studentoffer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms/collegepc. Here's what I would do if I wanted to lose 10 pounds of fat while maintaining, or better yet, building muscle. And if you are a woman over 40 and you feel like the scale just will not budge, do this. Number 1, throw out your traditional scale. Get rid of it and swap it for a bioimpedance scale. Yes, I want you to ditch that old scale. And two, if you've really hit the point where you've tried everything in your books and your weight just will not budge, it could be your hormones. After 40, hormonal shifts make it easier to lose muscle and store fat, especially that dreaded belly fat. And the old advice of doing more cardio and eating less, it just doesn't work like it did in your 20s and 30s. In fact, you may feel like it's actually backfiring and You are right. So I'm gonna walk you through exactly what I would do if I wanted to lose 10 pounds of fat while holding onto, or better yet, building muscle. We call it recomping in the biz. We're gonna break it down step by step, and you're going to see exactly how to structure your week with resistance training, high-intensity intervals, and recovery time so your workouts work with your hormones, not against them. And I'm also gonna teach you how to personalize this plan for where you are right now and how to pair it with a muscle-first nutrition strategy and why recovery is just as important as the workouts themselves. All right, let's get into it. Here's why your workouts after 40 need to change, cuz everything is changing. And again, if you're feeling like what you used to do is not working, you are right. Here's the things that start to happen. Estrogen starting to drop. And when estrogen drops, everything shifts because you need estrogen to build muscle. Now you probably thought of testosterone as what you use to build muscle. And yes, that's true too. But in women, estrogen is anabolic and it is one of the things we need to help build muscle. Now, a couple of things happen as estrogen is going down and progesterone are going down. Cortisol is coming up. And the other thing that's coming up is you're starting to get more insulin resistant. What does all that mean? You're better at storing fat around your midsection and you'll probably start to see this. My mom called it shifting sands. I was like, that is the worst name for this. But it basically is Your butt seems to have gone into your belly, right? And so if you are leaving this unchecked, you'll start to see, gosh, you know, starting around age 30, you start to lose muscle every single year. It can be up to 1% every year. It's about 3 to 8% a decade. And guess what? It starts to speed up when you hit 60. So get this together now because it just starts to go further and further. But the good news is you can turn this all around. Sarcopenia is where you have poor, low-quality muscle. A lot of times we talk about this idea of being skinny fat, where you're at the right weight, but you don't have enough muscle at that weight. If that's the case, what you're going to find is that you have a lower metabolic rate and you have less strength and you have less power. So we want to turn that all around. That's a huge problem. So we're going to walk through my Weekly Workout Blueprint, exactly what you need to do to shift this. And that's the most important thing is yes, You can shift this and you can shift it quickly, by the way. Now I say quickly, and I've gotta say that one of my favorite quotes is, "Changing your body composition's a little bit like watching grass grow, but improving your strength, you'll start to notice a lot and fairly quickly." So the first thing that we're gonna do is resistance training. Now, in my perfect world, you would do resistance training 3 days a week, full body. However, I will settle for 2. Think of 2 days a week of resistance training as your minimum effective dose. Okay? 3 days a week would be your fabulous dose. More than that, not necessary. Now, if you wanted to do weights 6 days a week, what you would do is you just split your routine. One day you do half your body, the other day you do the other half. So here's how I want you to think of your body. I divide it into 4 parts with the focus on 3. Number 1, upper body pushing. These are things like push-ups. Overhead presses, dips. Notice that those 3 exercises were all multi-joint compound movements. I like to say, and they're very functional. In life, I have to push myself out of a chair, that's a dip. I have to put something overhead, that's an overhead press, right? So I like to say you train to get better at life. Not to say that you can't use things like machines at the gym to build muscle, 'cause you can, but I really prefer if we can also do some things like pushups and overhead presses and dips. Upper body pulling's the next one. Upper body pulling are things like pull-ups. Or pulldowns, bent-over rows or seated rows, upright rows. Now the pushes were using my chest, my shoulders, and my triceps. The pulls are using your lats and your shoulders and your deltoids, which are your shoulders actually repetitive, but your shoulders and your lats and also your biceps. I don't actually do tricep and bicep exercises because I do big compound movements that work my triceps and biceps. So I'm getting more bang for my energy buck I'm spending a lot more calories and getting more muscles involved, and it's more real life. Then the other body part is lower body hip and thigh hinging. So here's where I want you to think of things like deadlifts, squats, step-ups, lunges. Now I said 4 body parts, focus on 3 because the other body part is your core. And that would be your abdominals, your back extenders. But here's the thing. If you're doing a push-up, guess what you have to use? Your core. Same with a pull-up, same with the squat. So I don't actively work them. I actively focus on those 3 things: upper body pushing, upper body pulling, hips and thighs. Ideally, again, you're focusing on bigger compound movements, but if you are nervous about this to start, it's totally fine to start with some machines too. In fact, it's fine to stay on those. You'll still build muscle. In a perfect world, you would be able to hire a trainer, have them take you through, say, 5 to 6 exercises, stick with those for the first 4 to 8 weeks, and then progress from there. The big The most important thing with resistance training is once you've gotten through the first couple weeks where you're really learning the exercises and your muscles and nerves are learning how to talk to each other and you are getting your form right, then start to take the weight up. Work a couple sets with this about a 60 to 90-second rest break. So I would say my goal would be 3 sets or more, 90-second rest break, working somewhere in the you know, 6 to 15 rep range, then get to a point where it feels hard, where you feel like maybe you've got 1 or 2 left in the tank, that you can't keep going after that. In order for you to build muscle, you know what you have to do? You have to do more than what your body's used to. So your body has to get stronger. So that's the important thing. If you do the same thing every single time, you're not going to progress. It's kind of a thing for life, right? The reason we're doing this is we want to not just hold on to what we got, we want to actually increase it. And you wanna increase both your muscle size, hypertrophy, your muscle strength, how much you could lift one time hard, and your muscle power. So if we are working in these sets and the heavier you go with the lower weights, the more you'll build strength. But if you're doing that, you're going fast, you're gonna get hypertrophy, strength, and power. So that's 2 to 3 times a week. Again, if you wanna split it, you could do upper body push pull one day, hip and thigh hinging the next, whatever works for you in your schedule. 2 times for each body part a week with at least a 48-hour rest in between is minimum. 3 days, even better. So you might do Monday, Wednesday, Friday are your resistance training days. Well, what are you going to do on the other days? I have a great idea. I want you to burst to blast fat. I want you to do some high-intensity interval training. Here is why. One of the measures of longevity, in fact, it's the single apparently most predictive measure of all-cause mortality. Anything taking you out is your VO2 max. That is how much oxygen you can turn into energy when you're working hard. What they do to test this is not fun at all, I will tell you. You put this mask on your face, has to completely adhere to your face so that no air comes out. They run you on a treadmill, takes about 12 minutes till you can't run any harder. They're testing how much oxygen you're consuming, and that is your VO2 max, the max amount of oxygen you can consume at a high workload. The higher that is, the better you are. And the more it translates, you know, will translate into all your activities of daily living. Higher VO2 max, easier to bolt up the stairs, especially if you have leg strength too. The faster your walking gait, and we've associated now walking gait with all-cause mortality. So the reason I like HIIT training is it's a great way to train your VO2 max, but it's also a great way to burn more fat in less time, especially visceral adipose tissue. In fact, there was a a little Harvard article that compared 20 minutes of moderate intensity exercise to a 20-minute HIIT session, which burned more calories, did better for your heart, better VO2 max. But here's what happens when you do HIIT. I'm gonna talk you through a couple ways I like to do HIIT. When you do HIIT, you're raising your lactate levels. And when you raise your lactate levels, you've got a couple great things that happen. We know every time you contract your muscles, you're doing a pharmacy of amazing drugs within your body. You're lowering inflammation, you're boosting your immune system, you're boosting BDNF, which helps make new neurons in your hippocampus. Like all sorts of cool stuff is going on. But we also know that when you do this intense exercise, you convert lactic acid to lactate, and this lactate can go to your brain, can go to your heart, can make new mitochondria. It's, it's incredible what it does. So we want that lactate. It's actually a fuel source. And so when you're doing high-intensity interval training, is you're pushing and recovering and pushing and recovering, you're building up more and more until you reach kind of a lactate threshold. And so what— one way to do this is to do— in fact, that's what I did today— one minute on, one minute off. So I jumped on a StairMaster. I went one minute easy, one minute all out, one minute easy, one minute all out. And I did that back and forth for 20 total minutes, 10 minutes apart. I've got a Rev Bike at home, which is made by the same manufacturer as Power Plate, where the pedals vibrate. It is the hardest thing. It's a lactate trainer. So I will do 30 seconds all out on that. 3.5 minutes recover and repeat. It's kind of like what we call in grad school a Wingate test. You could do a Tabata type of training where you go 20 seconds all out, 10 seconds repeat, and do that multiple times. Or you can do something called the Norwegian 4x4, and that is where you go 4 minutes as hard as you can, sustained for 4 minutes, then 3 minutes easy recovery and repeat. So you might run fast for 4 minutes, walk it off for 3, repeat 4 times. Called that for the Norwegian cross-country team as the way that they built up their VO2 max. Here's the thing, do all of these different ones, rotate around. You want your exercise, you want to keep your body guessing. You want to keep your body having to adapt. If you do the same thing all the time, your body adapts to it. So you got to keep changing it up. And so different types of HIIT training are great. Now here's the thing, I was literally just with someone who was like, how do I lose this belly fat? Well, we were out at dinner and he was ordering steak frites. And I'm like, well, maybe try not having frites. That would be my first thing. But my second thing is how much HIIT training are you doing? Because I knew he was doing resistance training a couple of days a week. Like how much HIIT training? He goes, I've been doing it every day. I go, if you're doing it every day, you're not doing HIIT training. And he'd been doing it on the Peloton. I go, no, you're just probably doing zone 2 or maybe easy intervals. But the reality is if you do HIIT training right, you're gassed. You can do it probably 2 days a week, maybe 3. But for me, the dose I love here is 2 days a week. What else are you doing besides your HIIT and your resistance training? I want you walking a bunch. You know, we all think about exercise as this way to really boost your metabolism. But the reality is, so resistance training is going to help you have better total daily energy expenditure, better resting metabolic rate because it's adding more muscle onto your body. That's good. It's not as much as we think it is. It might be about 10 calories a day per pound of muscle, but it makes a difference. It also improves insulin sensitivity. Then we've got the just energy expenditure from doing these things, which is something, but it's not as big as we think. It may be 5% of your overall total daily energy expenditure. The biggest part of your energy expenditure actually is from all the other stuff, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis, walking around. And I've come— become a bit obsessed about just making sure that I get my steps in every single day. My goal this year was 10,000, and I had old foot injury from my 20s flare back up, so It's made walking hurt. And I'm still hitting at least 8,000 and some days 10,000 to 12,000. So if I can do it with a little hurt hoof, we can all do it. But getting that movement in all throughout the day, getting up as much as possible, especially doing it all throughout the day, not sitting for extended periods of time, but doing that to keep that metabolism sparked, right? Super important. I saw someone saying, people talking about weighted vests on Instagram are grifters. I'm like, what on earth are you talking about? Like, really? Okay. So if I'm a grifter, here we go. Weighted vests. Why do I like them? Because as you lose body weight, your metabolism will naturally go down a little bit. Weighted vest around, guess what? You bring it back up a little bit. And the other cool thing is, yes, you're going to load your skeleton a little bit. Okay. There's not great research saying it's going to do massive stuff, but every bit helps. It's not going to build muscle, but it is going to help put a little load on your spine and it is going to help burn more calories. So there, I think it's a great thing. I'll use it too. I've got a girlfriend I walk with in Tampa who is like 5 feet tall, so I can walk a lot faster than her. So I just throw a weighted vest on to slow my butt down. So you can do that too. All right. So a little bit on that, kind of irked me on Instagram. I'm like, oh my gosh, people are getting called out because of using weighted vests. Anyhow, I stand by my weighted vest love. So what else should we be doing during this time? I, you know, it used to be an exercise that we're like, work out 5 days a week and then you must You must have rest days. And I was like, that is ridiculous. I actually do not believe in that at all anymore. I just think don't work out hard every day. Listen to your body and do recovery things. Like today is Friday. Friday I go to yoga. Thankfully, I got my husband back on board. He was on strike, yoga strike for a while. And I'm like, ugh. So we suffer through yoga together. I love my teachers. Shout out Megan and Elena. They're amazing. But I do not love me some yoga. I just go to yoga because I think it's like ultimately one of the best things for us because one of the challenges with resistance training is you tend to move a lot in sagittal plane. You're going back and forth instead of moving side to side or rotation, right? So I need to make sure that I do all those things. And yoga pushes me into positions I would never normally do. And I get a little under duress, I admit. So I think yoga is amazing and it's a great recovery as well. So I do yoga one of those days. I do a longer walk one of those days, or I do a longer cardio session, a zone 2, as they call it. So think about what else you can do. But here's the thing, like the crazy thing about steps. And again, I'm— for me, I think we should all have 8,000 as a non-negotiable and let's get up from there. And even days I'm traveling, things are crazy, I get me those 8K. What they found is 7,000 steps a day lowered the risk of heart disease and dementia and early death. That was published in JAMA. Internal Medicine. And then PubMed, there was another article that showed that 12,500 steps a day had people at lower body fat and a better waist-hip ratio. So this all matters. I think, you know, I had a girlfriend who I'd worked with for years on her health, and she joined my new Powerful Aging Method program. We're actually renaming that to go with my next book. Stay tuned. And she said, you know what, I realized I've been going to the gym 3 days a week, and on my gym days, I sit on my butt the rest of the day. And I was getting in like 4,000 or 5,000 steps those days. So all she did was start to pay attention to it and look for opportunities to move more throughout the day. And boom, you know, it's helping her drop a little body fat. So it's an easy thing to do. So why are we doing all these things again? Strength. I want you to make sure that you are not that statistic that you probably heard me talk about, that starting around age 30, we can lose up to 1% of our muscle mass a year. Twice as much strength and 3 times as much power. But what do we know? More muscle, a better metabolic rate, and better insulin sensitivity. Really, it's the only thing we can do to change— everyone's like, "I wanna boost my metabolism." Put on more muscle. That's how you do it. And then again, let's get that HIIT going so that we burn that belly fat off. And, you know, it's gonna give us a really good afterburn 'cause you've got oxygen deficit you've got to restore after you do HIIT and then recover. And here's one other thing that's really important for recovery. I talked about yoga and walking, but there's a couple other things. And what I really love to do here is monitor your HRV because that is one of the ways to see, did I sleep well? Did I recover well? Do I need to like cool it down a little bit? Sometimes I tend to push myself a bit much and then I'll see that my HRV is like sliding down. It's like, maybe it's a yoga day. Maybe it's a, it's a walk day. But the other thing that I use for recovery that I love is sauna. So today I went to yoga, and then afterwards I got in the sauna. It was like a double sweat. So I was also doing a lot of electrolytes because it's hot yoga and it's Tampa, so it's double hot yoga. Then I went into the— my sunlight and sauna, total amazingness thing, because the sauna can be anabolic. So whereas, you know, cold plunging, while I like to do that, it's not something you do post-workout because it's can block muscle protein synthesis. It's the opposite with sauna. It's anabolic. So remember this, we talked move and we talked about recovery and we will talk a little bit about fuel. But before that, I just want to talk about a couple of things you may need to shift based on what's going on for you. And here's an important thing in talking personalization. The important question is, how can I make this work for me? Not, I can't make this work because blah, blah, blah. So, and the reality is, If you've got anything going on joint-wise, even more of a reason to do this. Do you know that there was a hospital study where they took like 20-year-old men, something— they were young 20s— and put them on bed rest for a week and they lost 2 pounds of muscle and 37% full-body insulin sensitivity in a week? Young men. This is devastating. So although right now I have this sore foot from a stupid injury from when I was in my early 20s. I am still doing everything because I do not want to fall into that statistic. I don't want to lose muscle. I know how darn hard it is to get back on. I mean, you know, it could take a month to put on a pound of muscle. I'll talk about some ways to improve that in the nutrition piece, but it's important. And again, I blew out my knee in my teens doing pointe ballet, stupid for a 6-foot-tall gal. And so for years, like, I was able to push off a total knee replacement for 30 years because of what I did to keep my knee strong. And so for a lot of people, they would tell me why they couldn't do something because of their knee. I'm like, no, that's why you need to do it. You need to do it for that reason. So again, quite often the why not is the why. And so quite often the things that hurts your joints the most is carrying excess weight, eating inflammatory foods, sitting on your butt. So if you are concerned about how to do something because of what's going on with your back or your knees, work with a really good personal trainer, one who's either certified by ACSM or NASM or one of the other great certifications out there. Or work with a physical therapist who can help you design a program that will work for you. There is always a way. Even when I had my knee surgery where I could not put any weight on it, I just hobbled to the gym on crutches and worked around it. So there's always a way. And let's say you have to do low-impact HIIT. You can do that on things like an elliptical or a bike. So there's always a way to work around these things. And one of the other things is something called blood flow restriction training. The person who discovered it was this Japanese Dr. Katsu. So you've probably heard of katsu Katsu bands. So you can also do that. So if you're recovering from something, you might want to do some muscle stim or use Katsu bands, and you can do lower weight and still get the resistance that you need. And then again, you know, pay attention to your body, pay attention to your heart rate variability. If it's dropping, then, you know, maybe add in some more sauna or restorative yoga that week. And of course, I must say the obligatory— also always check with your doctor before starting this if you haven't started yet and you're 50 plus. Definitely check in. So you're doing all the things. You're doing your appropriate resistance training. You're doing your high-intensity interval training. You got your recovery dialed in, although we're gonna talk a little more about that. What about the food? And here's the thing, if you wanna put on muscle, it's majority training, but then you gotta have the protein in there. But the training is the biggest stimulus, of course. And then of course you want the nutrition so you have the building blocks to build muscle. 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight is what I look for in terms of protein. Protein. If it's plant protein, push the higher, like 1 gram. Otherwise, 0.7 is going to be fine. And this is your target body weight. What is your ideal body weight? Where is your body composition the best? Even if you're not going to get there, that's what you base it off of. So things that you can use to support this— you're going, I don't know if I can get all that in. Well, protein powders for the win. Now what I did was I just upgraded my protein powders. I'm super excited about this over at Reignite Wellness. Here's what I did. I took my bone broth and pea-based protein powders. And for people who can't do whey— whey is called the gold standard for the best essential amino acid profile for anabolics. So what I did was I tweaked my bone broth and pea-based protein powders. I adjusted and added amino acids so that they would mimic the amino acid profile of whey. So you get the benefits without the bloat. So if you're one of those people that can't handle whey, then this is what you can do instead. I also made the scoops in 10-gram increments. So depending on how much you need, sometimes people are just adding it to something else. You can boost it up. So that's one way you can do it. I also have an essential amino acid product. So remember, we're eating to get those essential amino acids. If you don't quite hit it with your protein, you can supplement with essential amino acids to get you all the way there. So that's the first part. Second thing, I do collagen every day and I do it before a workout. Here is why. Collagen is super important for joint health and for the— all that connective tissue. It's not going to directly build muscle, but it's going to help support the tissue that you need strong to be able to have muscle built, like if you don't have strong connective tissue, that's gonna be the limiter for your body's muscles to be able to get stronger. So collagen is super important. So what I do is I take it before a workout so I have more blood flow to my joints. So it's gonna be easier to get the collagen there. So I do about 10 grams of collagen a day. If I'm healing from something, like I just did some big stem cell work on my foot, I jam it up a bit more. I go to 20 grams. One more thing about collagen. I have a product that is Fortigel and Verisol. Those are two patented collagen peptides. One's Verisol for skin, Fortigel for joints and bones. So, you know, look for that in your peptides. All collagen peptides are not created equal. And then I use another product called Myos. You'll see it online as Yoked. It's something called Fortetropin. It's fertilized egg yolk protein. I started using this and put on 2.5 pounds of fat-free mass. I did a DEXA 2 months, 1 month, and then another 2 months later and had done this. So I don't know what time period I did it in. This can increase muscle protein synthesis 18%. So in the show notes, I'll give you a little code to take 20% off Yoked because everyone I've turned it on to is like, oh my gosh. So 1 to 2 packets of that a day, you will absolutely notice the difference on that. So those are my favorite things to support. Muscle is doing collagen, myos, essential aminos, protein powders. And then of course there's one more and it's creatine. Now I use specifically creatine HCL. I made a product called Sheateen because I want women to get over their fear of this. And it's creatine HCL, which you use a fraction of the dose of monohydrate cuz it's 7 times more bioavailable, goes into the muscle without causing extracellular fluid retention, bloating, or GI stuff. And I also put it with taurine and magnesium to really help your body boost ATP production. So really helps with energy. And it's one that people are like, oh my gosh, I feel this. Like, you can totally feel it. And I push it a little bit. If you're going to use it more for brain, push your doses up a little bit. But this is one that foundationally you can take like 750 to 1 gram of creatine HCL. It'll come along with taurine and magnesium. And then if you want more for stress, for a harder workout, for brain, then, then take it double or triple from there. Those are my favorite things for all of your workout support. Now, the other thing I talked about was sleep. So here's the thing, we've got these 3 pillars. Obviously, resistance training is going to be more important than fuel for the actual muscle stimulus, but you got to have them both, right? But if you are not sleeping well, you're done. You're done. You're not going to have great muscle protein synthesis. You're not going to have the energy to work out. You're going to be more insulin resistant. So sleep is key. And I know that as we go through all the hormonal stuff and progesterone dumps sleep goes out the window. So again, we're always looking at hormones and things that can support, because you don't want that one poor night's sleep. You're hungrier, your ghrelin's elevated, you are better storing fat, your insulin sensitivity is down, and you're blocking muscle protein synthesis. So this is a massive thing. The thing that I do every night is I take my sleep candy from Reignite Wellness, which is 5-HTP and melatonin and theanine and inositol and B6. And then I also take some of my Magnesium Body Calm because it's got magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate. So both of those really help with muscle recovery. The other things I love, again, sauna. You don't have a sauna though, by the way, baths work great, especially Epsom salts baths, get more of that magnesium in. You can use the cold, but use the cold away from your workout. Couple other things I love, omega-3s and Qualia has a product called Joint Health. That's fantastic. I'll put that in the show notes too. They turned me onto it a couple of months ago. I was like, perfect timing. Just when my foot started to hurt, I'm like, thank you. So I don't know where I would be without it. I don't wanna know either. All right, let's recap. So every week we're doing strength, lowest resistance training, minimum effective dose is 2 times a week. Better is to go 3 times a week for each body part. 2 days a week of high-intensity interval training. Lots of walking each day, 8,000 steps plus, add a longer one of those, and then add in a yoga. Right? There you go. This will also help if you're deciding on HRT or not. I think this should be everybody's personal decision. Personally, I've been on them since my hormones made any kind of a dump years ago, like literally started way back when. But you want to support your body's natural production as much as possible. And so the more you can do to support, then you can use lower amounts, which is really where things will happen. So, you know, train appropriate to where you are now in your life cycle. It will help improve all that hormonal balance and, then, well, you lose some fat. Super important. All right. So you got the game plan that's going to help your muscle. It's also going to help your bone. It's going to help boost your metabolism. And again, that weighted vest, I think, is another one to great to, to help really support keeping the caloric burn up. Also, remember, things are different now. Don't try the same approach you tried in your 20s. It's not going to work. No, you're not crazy. You just have a different body now. Hormones have shifted. You get to shift too. And I do want a little bit of impact in there as well, because that's really good for your bones. And so if this has helped you and you've got some friends that it would help, be sure to share it with them. Subscribe, like it. And oh, by the way, I also have a free Facebook community, which I will link in the show notes where we have my clone in there. I have a clone, by the way, video, audio, who is more me than me at this point. And a little, a little freaky, a little eerie, but you can ask all your questions too. I have coaches in there, so lots of cool stuff in there. So jump on over there and I will see you either in the Facebook group or in the next video. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Would you prefer an Want an ad-free experience? Join my VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year to unlock uninterrupted ad-free access to all the episodes and insights you love. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day, and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next episode. 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. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice. Diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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