How to Get Rid of “Bat Wings” Under My Arm

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times Best Selling Authority. 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 most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. That's why I created the well beyond 40 podcasts 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 powerful 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 full out at 100. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now@subscribetoj.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Want to listen to the show ad free? Head over to subscribetojay.com and start your ad free experience today. Hey, it's JJ 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 budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend. And honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time. And that level of clarity could change everything. Right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code Virgin. When the holidays start to feel a.

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Sick of those bat wings under your arms? Well, let's talk about how you can tighten and tone this area with the right exercises and nutrition. I literally get asked all the time, how do you get those arms? Like, I went and bought them somewhere, right? So I'm going to share the top things you can do to improve your muscle definition and tone. And wear those sleeveless tops and feel great doing it. Let's dig into arms. And first of all, I hate. Can I be honest? That term bat wings. Where did this term come from? No one's taking responsibility for it, understandably so. But it's like it's described it as this loose, saggy skin, and I'm like, yeah, okay, thanks. Well, why is it that arms lose muscle tone, especially as we age? Let's first look at hormonal changes, because what's the big thing that happens as we age? Well, we know that Starting around age 30, we start to lose up to 1% of our muscle mass a year. It's about 3 to 8% per decade. And then that can double when we get into 60 and beyond. Wow. As that starts to happen, it's due to something called anabolic resistance. Now, I thought this was purely due to aging, but it also can be if you've got insulin resistance, if you have too much body fat, if you have fat in your muscles, this can happen, too. And this is where it gets really hard for your body to take the essential amino acids from the protein you eat and your resistance training and make muscle again. Use it or lose it. But it is also a phenomenon of aging. So as we talk about nutrition, you'll see why I'm going to make some specific recommendations. Same with what I when we talk resistance training, however, another thing happens as we age, specifically in our usually in our late 40s, but can happen anytime. And I'm talking women is declining estrogen levels and this contributes to muscle loss. Because estrogen for women is sort of like testosterone for men. It's anabolic. It helps us build muscle, helps us burn fat. So if estrogen is declining, we can't work out as hard, we don't build muscle as easily, and we're more inflamed and insulin resistant. So all those things together are problematic as we age. If you don't do something about it, you will lose muscle. It's not inevitable, though. Muscle loss is not inevitable with aging. Again, we've got to counteract that anabolic resistance that I just talked about. But the research is clear that you can build muscle. In fact, you can build the same amount of muscle at 65 as you could at 85. I was doing a PhD in exercise physiology, nutrition and aging at USC years ago, and we literally had people, masters athletes in their 80s and 90s, and they looked amazing. And I still remember going down to Gold's Gym in Venice and seeing women in their 70s. Back then they were so old. Now they seem like, you know, they're my sisters. So you can build muscle at any age. That's the great, great news. And there are very specific lifestyle factors that accelerate muscle loss. So, you know, again, if you're not using it, you're losing it. If you are stressed out, not sleeping well, not eating enough protein, it's going to cause problems for you. So we're going to dig into what you need to do with all of these things so that you can have arms that you will want to put into slee tops. How's that? Now, what about spot reduction? Can spot reduction exercises work for targeting bat wings? It's interesting when you think about spot reduction, usually that means burning fat in a specific area. And while it's interesting, when we burn fat, we burn fat systemically all over. So you can't say, you know what, I want to burn fat off the back of my arm, so I'm going to do lots and lots of tricep extensions and burn that fat off the back of my arms. Uh, it's not going to work that way. What does happen specifically in spots, is that you'll build the muscle and you will use the carbohydrates stored in the muscles called glycogen to do that. So you now give carbohydrates a place to go back to. Rather than being stored as fat, they'll go into your muscles to be stored as glycogen. So that happens. But in terms of spot reduction, here's how that actually work. If you start doing resistance training that focuses on your upper Body pushing and pulling exercises. We'll be discussing this. You will start to build your biceps and triceps. You build your biceps and triceps and you're going to have more muscle tone. Muscle tone is that partial contraction when you are at rest, which is going to give it a little bit of shape and help hold everything in tighter. Now, it's not going to burn fat off that area, but it's going to hold everything in tighter. And I always like to say that muscles metabolic Spanx. Right, Holds everything in tighter. So. And as far as I know, there are no actual Spanx for arms, are there? I don't think there are, hopefully that. We just will never have those. We'll just do what I'm talking about in this video. And the best strategy to lose fat in the stubborn areas like the underarms is to lose fat all over. And I've done videos, a lot of videos on how to lose body fat while holding onto or building muscle. So make sure that you check those out. But it's a multi pronged approach where you're going to do your resistance training to build muscle to have better resting energy expenditure and better insulin sensitivity, which allows you to burn fat better. Remember, when your muscles contract, they also help you burn fat and build muscle. And then you're going to go into a little bit of a caloric deficit so that your body has to use stored fat for fuel and you're going to eat protein first and lower your overall carbs so that you're going to also help your body use more fat for fuel. I've talked about this in depth in my other videos, so make sure you check those out. You're going to lose fat all over. You can't just lose fat in the areas you want to. I know every woman and every man out there wishes it could be that way. We would, like, keep the fat in our faces, lose the fat off our bellies, keep the fat. You know, like women would have fat go into their chest, their, their tush, out of their belly and onto their cheeks, but it doesn't work that way. So you got to lose fat systemically. And then you've got to do resistance training in those areas so that you build that muscle for that great muscle tone. And so certain exercises will help you do that. And remember, when we think about something giving you a more sculpted look, because I get asked all the time, are there specific exercises that can create a more sculpted look? Well, what's a sculpted look? A sculpted look means you dropped body fat overall and you built muscle that's going to help you have that definition, that sculpting, that toning. So let's talk about how we want to do that. And when I think about having great arms, you might be surprised to hear that I don't spend a lot of time doing biceps and triceps. In fact, I might do a specific bicep or tricep exercise maybe once a month if I've got a little extra time at the gym. I'm waiting for my husband, which normally it's the other way around. Let's be honest. Generally I do only compound movements. Here's why. They are going to work my biceps and triceps, but they're also much more metabolically costly. So think about the difference of doing a push up versus a tricep extension. Both worked my triceps, but the other one worked my chest, my core, my front of my shoulders. So I focus on upper body pushing exercises like push ups, overhead presses, dips. That will also get my triceps and upper body pulling exercises like pull ups and bent over rows and upright rows to work my biceps. And again, this will work my arms as well, but also get my shoulders in there. So, you know, again, just like there's no Spanx, we don't want to wear shoulder pads either. So get everything there. And you know, the reality is you have to build your body as a whole. If you want to try to just build your biceps, well, you can only build so much before you're going to have to issues where your lats and other muscles now are out of balance with them. So it's better to build in compound movements that mimic kind of how you live in life. Because I always like to say you train to get better at life and by training get better at life and doing these compound movements, you'll look better too. Your arms will look better too. So how does strength training help improve arm definition? Here's the reality. When you are lifting weights, something really interesting happens. Lifting weights can help you burn fat even when you're not working out. In fact, even more so than when you're working out. When I'm working out, I'm going hard, I'm doing intensity, and I'm actually going to use more of the carbohydrates stored in my muscles as glycogen than I am. Fat, fat something. You know, we're actually very rarely are we ever just burning fat or just burning carbs. We're generally a hybrid doing both. But if you are doing more intense exercise you'll be using more carbs. If you're doing more low level stuff, you'll be burning more fat. So when you're sitting around the house, you're doing a lot of fat burning, but you're not burning a lot of calories. When you're doing intense exercise, you're burning more carbs, but you're also burning a lot of calories. End of the day calorie deficit is going to determine if you have to dig into those fat stores and use fat for fuel. Lifting weights can help you burn fat even when you're not working out in a couple different ways. Number one, when you have more muscle on your body, you have a better resting energy expenditure. You use more calories, so that's super cool. And muscle protein turnover is a costly thing. Also, when you have more muscle and your body's used to working out, it's more metabolically flexible. It's able to be a better hybrid. Sometimes if you become more insulin resistant, it is hard for your body to use stored fat for fuel. And that will make you hungrier and that will make your blood sugar more unstable. That's problematic. We want to be able to shift between burning fat and burning carbs. Also, when you are contracting your muscles, you are releasing a bunch of different messages. Things that say, build muscle, lower inflammation, improve my immune system, build new mitochondria. But one of the messengers that's released is something called erisin. And erisin helps you take white fat and beige it, which makes it have more mitochondria and be easier to burn off, which is super cool. Now, can women get bulky arms from strength taining or is that a myth? Because I hear it all the time. Here's what I hear. I want to have your arms like yours. I don't want to get big. I'm like, well, I do really big stuff to get arms like this. So that's the reality of it. In 40 years of doing this, like, I just haven't had someone get bigger lifting weights. Their muscles get bigger and then they get smaller because their muscles hold everything in tighter and their muscles help them have a better resting energy expenditure. So now they're burning more calories.

So.

So I just haven't seen it happen. If while you're lifting weights, all of a sudden one day you go, you know, I think I'm getting a little too big. Stop. But you won't have drive by muscle mass gain. Like muscle takes a while to build. You'd be lucky to put on a pound of muscle in a month. So you're not going to wake up one morning with like Popeye biceps. This happens over time. You can always back off. But in four years of doing this, I've never had someone want to do that. So not going to get bulky, it's going to hold everything in tighter. But you do want to make sure that you're losing body fat. You're going to lose body fat faster than you're going to build muscle. So I like to say lose one half to 1% of your total body weight each week. Ideally, you're losing fat and build about a pound of muscle a month. Now, if you really just want to focus on building muscle and getting strong, you would not do caloric restriction. You'd actually increase your calories a little bit by maybe 2 to 300 calories a day because it would help you build muscle. You'd put on a little fat too, and then at some point you'd want to take, you know, lose the fat. So if you really just are like, I want to build muscle. Well, that's how you would focus on it. How does progressive overload and muscular endurance factor into arm toning? You know, there's different types of ways that we can work out. There's muscle hypertrophy that's making your muscles bigger. There's muscle strength that's making your muscles stronger. And strength really defined by what's the most amount of weight you could lift one time and then muscle power. How far fast can you do something? They're similar. And as you build muscle size, you'll build some strength and you'll build some power. But if you really wanted to train just for strength, it would be a little bit different and you wouldn't get as much muscle size. Ditto power. And if you're going for muscle endurance, you really probably won't get much hypertrophy because that's doing things with longer term duration. Like maybe you're lifting, you're doing 100 or 200 repetitions in a row of something. For muscle hypertrophy, the range that's been found to be the best for building muscle is somewhere between six and 30 repetitions. That's how many times you lift a weight or do a movement. So 30 pushups, 6 to 30 pushups, multiple sets with about 90 seconds to 2 minutes rest break in between. If you don't give yourself long enough, it's sort of like you're doing just one long set. You want to give yourself that amount of rest and do repeated bouts of it. And Ideally, you're continuing to progress and it's called progressive overload. Because if your body gets adapts to something, what's exercise your body adapting to something that's hard so it gets stronger, you have to continue to overload the muscle so it will continue to hypertrophy and get, you know, get bigger. Right. So if you are doing the same old thing, you'll just maintain your results. If you want to get bigger muscles, you have to then do more. You're always trying to increase your volume, that could be doing more repetitions, that could be doing additional sets, that can be doing additional weight. There's a variety of ways to increase that volume. And volume is how many repetitions and how much weight. Kind of the perfect zone for hypertrophy has been shown to be 20 total sets per area per week. So if you really want to build those triceps or biceps, 20 sets a week. So you might do tricep dips and tricep push ups and you could do two sets of five of each of those twice a week. So you see how easy that is. Now with resistance training, is it improving skin elasticity or is it just improving the muscle underneath? Actually, resistance training does help some with skin elasticity. Now I remember back when I was on the Dr. Phil weight loss challenges and we had people who lost £100 or more. And you know, your skin's only so elastic, especially as we age. So you might find that you just have this a lot of loose skin as you're losing fat and your muscles only going to take so much up and your skin's only going to rebound so much. And so at that point you might want to look into a surgery or laser. I'd be more inclined to look at some things like laser because of the scars that those surgeries have. Creatine's also been shown to help here with some of that. Creatine of course, helps us with work out harder and recover, but it also can help with some skin elasticity. So I would look at that as well. All right, let's go back to how does fat loss throughout the body affect your arms? Now I already talked about the fact that you cannot spot reduce. You can't say, I've got fat on my arms, I want to lose it. And a lot of the bat wing stuff is actually loose skin. But how can you tell if your arms need more muscle or just lower body fat? Well, there's a couple different ways you can do this. Number one, I love the DEXA body scan because it's going to show you where your fat is. You might go, I know where my fat is. But it's going to give you that beautiful visual picture of where it is. Now. A in body does the same, but it's not quite as accurate as the DEXA body scan. But that's great with body composition is to be able to actually see where it is. There are also these things called skin fold calipers. Now before the days of us being able to do DEXA scans for body composition or having a bioimpedance machine that's pretty easily accessible at home, I used to go to my clients houses with a tape measure, skin fold calipers and a scale. The good old days and a skin fold calipers. You would pinch right behind the tricep and you would see how much fat is there and you can just pull that skin. I'm doing it right now if you're watching me on YouTube and pull that skin right off your muscle. And so what you want to do is just let your arm hang down, there's a very specific site and then you would test it with your skin fold calipers and that is going to tell you, you know, how much body fat you have. Is that a higher area? You'll also see it if you do one of these bioimpedance scans or a DEXA scan. The other thing you can do for the muscle strength itself is do a grip strength test. Remember, if you're really focusing on building strength, you will build some muscle too, but they're not quite the same. But grip strength is going to tell you how strong your muscle is. And then you can also of course do a tape measure around your arm. But basically I would look more at going and getting body composition. Looking at how much skeletal muscle mass you have. You can look at either your fat free mass index, your appendicular lean or skeletal mass index and you want to be in the upper 25th percentile for your age of that. And then look at your body composition. You're actually it's more important for you to focus on muscle by the way, than fat. It is healthier for you to be over fat with more muscle than lean with less. So it's all about having the muscle and I always like to focus on there first. In grad school I was taught don't lift weights till you lose the weight. I knew that was wrong then and I rebelled and it's now I really know it's wrong now. I wish I could go back and find those teachers, but we really Want to focus on getting that muscle mass up, look at your overall body fat and also your visceral adipose tissue. But if you've got low muscle mass, high body fat, then you need both. If you've got high muscle mass and high body fat, then lose the body fat. If you've got low muscle mass, low body fat, then add the muscle. That's the easy peasy on it. Now what is the role of genetics in how fat is stored and lost in the arms? It's huge. So genetically we have some areas and we used to believe that there were only a couple times in life that you could lay down fat cells. And these are predominantly the times we will. It's like the times of rapid growth when you're a baby, when you're an adolescent, these are those times that you are really laying down fat cells. After that you're just expanding the ones that you have. Although we do now know that you can create more, but likely it's more. Where are these? And genetically, some people tend to have more fat on their arms, some people tend to have more fat around their belly. Now we know with women that we can shift some as we go through menopause, start to get more stormer of fat, viscerally, etc. But a lot of this has to do with genetics, right? However, some of it also has to do with hormones because we know as we age we can start to go more, shift more into our visceral adipose tissue than storing it out on our arms. But where you lose fat, you can't go, you know what? I really want to lose fat in my arms. Nope, you lose fat all over and you kind of lose fat genetically. I don't know how the genetics determines actually, but genetics does determine where we put our fat on. And only thing I could think of that would determine how we would lose it is what's going on with our insulin, our cortisol and our estrogen. So optimize those, become insulin sensitive, manage that stress, optimize that estrogen through perimenopause and menopause. And that will help you in the fat loss game to lose fat. There's different methods flying around out there and I want to just kind of break down what, what's most effective here because none of them specifically are going to target the arms. So don't think that you can do a specific type of fat loss and it's going to make you lose fat on your arms. It's not. Fat loss is always systemic, just know that. But we might Have a tendency more to hold on to it in our visceral adipose tissue if we've got insulin resistance or high cortisol. So we want to really resolve those. So sleep is super duper important. Managing stress is super important. Eating protein first with optimal amounts of fat and carbs for you, not eating ultra processed food so you help restore insulin sensitivity there. Super important. Moving a lot all throughout the day to improve your non activity exercise thermogenesis, super important. Adding that resistance training in for your muscles. Metabolic Spanx, super important. And then I really love high intensity interval training because it can help burn off that visceral adipose tissue. All of course too is you need a little bit of a caloric deficit to get digging into those fat stores. Now, does diet really impact how toned your arms look? How does protein intake affect muscle tone and fat loss in the arms? So diet is going to impact your arms because you need protein to hold on to or build muscle. Remember I talked earlier about anabolic resistance, a phenomenon that starts in our 30s. I was thinking, oh, you know what, this isn't going to be a thing if you work out. No, it's aging. So as we start to age, we start to have difficulty triggering muscle protein synthesis from the protein we eat and the resistance training we do. So we need more, not less of both as we age. Right. Especially that protein. So that's the first thing that's really important. Diet will impact that anabolic resistance and so we want to push past the that. And of course diet will also impact if you're insulin sensitive or not. Now of course so does sleep and so does stress and so does resistance training. But if you're eating like a really crappy ultra processed food diet with a lot of fructose in it, that could drive that insulin resistance and that can make it really hard for you to lose fat too. And that inflammation can also make it harder to build muscle. Speaking of inflammation, can an anti inflammatory diet help improve skin tightness and muscle visibility? So the issue with inflammation is that inflammation can drive insulin resistance. Insulin resistance can drive inflammation. It's kind of a bad cycle. And inflammation can also block muscle protein synthesis. So if you've got inflammation going on, it can be really hard for you to build muscle. So the good news is as you start to use your muscles, those contractions help to lower inflammation and it will help to counteract it. But whether it will really do much with skin tightness, it really has to do much more with dropping body fat. Super duper important. Now one of the things that I would focus on here too is I think it's really important to eat a collagen rich diet. So beyond protein, the most abundant protein in our body is collagen. Now, collagen is not going to help you build muscle. It will, though indirectly. Because here's the thing, as you start to do resistance training, especially for the first time, your body has to learn how to do this. Your muscles and your nerves need to learn how to talk to each other. That's why I like to start slow and low and just get your body used to the movements and then start to add more and more and more resistance. Once your muscles and nerves are really connected, takes about a month of this going on, then you're really going to start to push more and rely on your muscles and ligaments working well together. Because here's the thing, your muscles and tendons and your ligaments, this is where you'll tend to get injured. You don't tend to tear a muscle. You tend to tear where the muscle and the tendon connect, or the tendon and the bone connect or the ligament connects to the bone. These soft tissue tends to be more of the issue. And this is where collagen can be super duper supportive. So I think collagen can help here. It can help with the skin as well. So big collagen fan, but for that reason, not for muscle building itself. And one of the other things that can help here again is creatine. Big fan of chiotene, my product that I created with creatine HCl, seven times more bioavailable, more absorbed than monohydrate. You will hear the difference out there. You can check out all my information on creatine, where I dig into this and the sciences in detail because I was a skeptic too and I put it in together with taurine and magnesium to really help with performance and recovery. But we also know that creatine, hydration, collagen, these can all help with skin elasticity. They can all help here as well. And when I think about which specific foods can help promote fat loss or muscle retention in the arms, these things can help with everywhere and that is making sure that you, you're eating protein first. 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Protein is the most thermic of all the macronutrients. About 25% of the calories from protein are used in the assimilation metabolizing of protein. So protein super duper important here for all of this. There's also for fat Loss. I gotta do a little shout out on resistant starch, which helps produce butyrate in the colon. That helps your body burn fat and makes it harder for your body to absorb fat into the fat cells. So resistant starch through things like cooled potatoes, slightly green bananas, cooled rice. Legumes can be an amazing thing here too. So you got skin under your arms. How do you tighten it up? Can you do it alone through exercise again? See how far you can get with exercise. See how far you can get with taking collagen using creatine. Another one I would highly, highly recommend are estradiol estriol creams. I've been using one that I love. I kind of feel like I've been under a rock for a while because once I found this, everyone's like, yeah. All my friends are like, yeah, we've been using this for a while. I'm like, why didn't anyone tell me about this? Anyway? So I've been using that. So try that on your arms as well and see how far you get. And then you might just want to go check and see about some of the stuff. Skin tightening, lasers, that would probably be my other, my other thing that I would look at there if not. So how often should you do arm focused exercises to see results? Do you want to train your arms every day or should you give yourself time to recover? Here's the thing, and you've always heard this like you need that rest day. What you really want to do is think about your upper body in terms of upper body pushing exercises and upper body pulling exercises. You can do upper body pulling and pushing on one day together, then take a day or two rest, then do it again. But make sure you do have those rest days because when you're doing this, you're doing a little bit of damage to your muscles, right? And then your muscles are going to recover and get stronger and build and get more defined and more toned and have that partial contraction that holds everything in tighter. As you start to do this, you will notice that, like if you've never done resistance training before, how it can exciting. You're going to start to notice strength so quickly, but you probably won't really notice any definition of any sort for about a, I don't know, six weeks. So it's kind of like watching grass grow. Once you get through that initial period, then you'll start to see things, but initially you'll just notice that your strength is improving. And what I like to do is I divided the body into four parts, upper body pushing, Upper body pulling, hips and thighs, hip and thigh hinging and power core. And some days I'll go into the gym and I'll do all of them. And most the time though, I'll do upper body pushing and pulling one day and I'll do hips and thighs hinging the next. By the way, power core, I do that in everything because when I do push ups, guess what? I'm using my core. When I do bent over rows, I'm using my core. So I don't worry so much about my core. Every once in a while I'll throw something in. I also do yoga once a week, so I get it in. So that is the way that I like to do it is I do full compound movements from my upper body and I really focus on those multi joint exercises. And then every once in a while I might throw a bicep or tricep exercise in. I actually have one I call the Vanity Trio, which I'll share in a little bit when I talk about the best exercises for toning your arms, as far as how quickly you'll see results. Actually, the biggest thing that's going to shift is if you've been doing resistance training, that's going to be very different than you've never done resistance training. Never done resistance training. Give yourself that four to six weeks again to go through that initial time period. If you've done resistance training and we're just shifting your program, you'll start to see things a lot more quickly, like within a week or two. But either which way, you'll just notice that you are stronger and more powerful in all of these different exercises right now. What are some signs that you might be over training or not training hard enough? This is where there's a couple things I want you to really think about. Number one, if you are sore at a joint site or sore to the touch, that's a sign you're doing too much. Sore at a joint site means that that muscle tendon connection or the tendon bone connection is irritated. That is not a good sign. That is a back off sign. Now, being a little sore, like, I don't know about you, but like when my triceps are a little sore, I'm like, yay me. But when you are sore to the touch or sore for days too much, you went overboard. That's why we want to do progressive overload. We're gradually increasing the amount of weight we do. We're not just like going, let's double the weight. No, we don't do that. Go Low and slow. If you just seem like you're breezing through it, push it. There's a little phenomenon called reps in reserve, and that is how many more reps could you do? And kind of the idea in the bodybuilding resistance training world is that each time you do an exercise, once you've warmed up, you should only have one or two reps in reserves. One or two reps that you could do in good form in the tank. That is getting training close to failure. So let's say that I'm doing something like overhead presses with dumbbells right up and over my head and I can do 10 reps, but the 11th rep, my forms just absolutely goes through terrible. If I did eight reps, that, that would be my failure. By the way, your failure is when your form goes. Your failure is not when you can't do another one in any way, shape or form, it's when your form goes. That's the limiter, right? That's when you are done, when your form goes. And so if I can get to 10 reps, but the 11th, my form fails, then that would be, I got to basically, you know, one rep in reserve. If I went to eight at 11, my form went, that would be two to three reps in reserve. So you kind of want to push it till you feel like the next one you're going to do. You start to do it and your form goes, or you really slow down. You want to move quickly through your sets and your reps. By the way, if you train slow, you go slow. So you actually want to put some, some speed into these things. Safe, but speed, that's better for your power. But when you start to really slow down, that's because your fatigue fatigued. So you're getting close to those, that failure, those reps in reserve. Now, if you find that you're feeling sore, achy, tired, and this is where creatine, my chiatine can help here too, because it helps you recover better, especially when you combine creatine HCl with magnesium and taurine like I did. Also monitor something called your heart rate variability. You can do this on an OURA ring, an apple watch, but what you're looking for is where is my heart rate variability? The higher it is, the better because that's showing that you've got a good kind of working between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system. If you find that your HRV starts to drop down, or if you're doing grip strength testing at home with a hand grip dynamometer I just happen to have one right here. And you notice your grip strength drops by 10%. That is a sign that you need a little break. Take a break, go for a walk that day. Do some restorative yoga, right? Take a day off. Or do your do your legs that day instead. Do hip and thigh hinging. Now let's talk about the best exercises to really tone up that underarm area. When I think of that, I really think of doing all the push and pull. Because it's not just about underarm, which you might think of as your triceps. It's really about building all of your arm muscles, your biceps and your triceps. You can use body weight exercises to do this. You can do weights, you can do cables, you can do bands. It really doesn't matter. What matters is that you're getting close to that, you know, breaking of good form. That's what matters is that you're doing it hard enough. Because if you're not doing it hard enough, then your body is not going to have to get stronger and build muscle because of it, right? You're doing what you're accustomed to. Exercise is doing more than what you're used to. So your body has to adapt and build muscle and get stronger. So it doesn't matter if you're doing push ups. You might find that to start with push ups, you have to do them against a desk or on your hands and knees until you can get to your toes. But if you get to a point where you can do 50 push ups in a row, then your push ups, it's gotten too easy for you and you need to do another type of exercise. Remember, that range is really 6 to 30. And in that range, when you get towards the end, you really want to go to the point where the next one you're going to lose your form on. So it doesn't matter if you're doing body weight, doesn't matter if you're doing resistance training with dumbbells, with cables, as long as it's hard for you to do right, you're lifting heavy for you. People always say, how much should I wait? As much as you can in good form until you start to break form, then stop. And so, you know, a lot of times people want to do these high reps with light weights, thinking that this is going to help them build more tone. I really like to work in more of an 8 to 15 rep range and really more like a even 6 to 12 rep range. Heavier, heavier weights, because then I'm going to Build more strength along with that muscle hypertrophy. And I'm going to offset some of the things that happens as we age where we're losing that hypertrophy. The size, strength and power and estrogen going down is also getting in the way of us building strength. So I prefer to have you work in the lower rep range and again I'd say 6 to 12. And in fact if you're really focused on building more strength, you'd work more in the 5 to 6 rep range. So think about that kind of best of both worlds Goldilocks area right in there. Heavier weights, less reps, multiple sets. And I really like to focus on these compound, metabolically costly exercises. So think of a push up and a tricep D dip and an overhead press versus just a tricep kickback because I'm crossing multiple joints that are much more like the things I do in everyday life. For upper body pushing, that could be a push up or a bench press or a seated bench press or a standing cable press. It could be an incline press, could be an overhead press, it can be a dip occasionally and this will happen like again maybe once or twice a month. When I have some ext time at the gym, I might do some tricep kickbacks or a tricep rope extension or a tricep press for fun, but I don't focus on those because I know I'm hitting my triceps when I'm doing my pushing. For upper body pulling, pull ups or hanging. But hanging is not going to get your biceps. But pull ups, assisted or non, that's where you could use resistance bands to help you with the assist or a willing husband or partner around or one of those machines at the gym. Or a lat pull down bent over row or a seated cable row or a one arm row and a upright row. Those are my favorite pulling exercises. Now occasionally I'll do a biceps curl, but generally I focus on those compound movements because I'm going to get my arms, but I'm also going to get my shoulders and then I'm going to get my chest and my lats as well. So I can do all, all of my things at once, which is super awesome. 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. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website, jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast at subscribe to JJ.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Want to listen to the show ad free? Head over to subscribe to JJ.com and start your ad free experience today. 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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