Move to Boost: Exercise Strategies to Ignite Your Metabolism

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You cannot cardio your way out of a bad diet or a sluggish metabolism. In fact, the wrong exercise or too much of it can actually make things worse. Today, I'm gonna show you exactly how to exercise smarter after 40 with the 3 pillars of metabolic fitness: everyday movement, resistance training, and short strategic cardio sessions. You're gonna know exactly how to build a routine that burns fat, builds muscle, and keeps your metabolism strong without spending hours in the gym, I promise.

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 SubscribeToJJ.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.

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Terms apply. All right, let's get started. First off, let's talk about the power of NEAT. This is everyday movement, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Here's the deal. Sitting all day slows your metabolism. Movement's gotta be an all-day habit. You've heard it. Sitting's been called the new smoking. And research, by the way, backs this up. There was a large study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that tracked almost 482,000 people people for more than 12 years. And what they found was those who were mostly sedentary at work had a 16% higher risk of early death, and they had a 34% higher risk of cardiovascular death compared to the less sedentary people. So what is NEAT? Because this is the most modifiable thing that you can do for your total daily energy expenditure. So NEAT is all the stuff that we don't think of as exercise— walking, parking farther away, taking the stairs, cleaning, fidgeting, all that stuff. It can add up to 800 to 2,000 calories a day. There was a comprehensive review in Endotex. This was updated in November 2022 by Dr. Christian von Lufenhaus and Dr. Andreas Birkenfeld, where they found that NEAT can vary by as much as 2,000 calories a day between two people of the same size. Now, just think about that for a moment. That is the difference between steady weight and creeping weight gain. This can come just by how much you move in your everyday life. And here's the reality in today's like tech-driven deal, you know, where most of us are spending half the day sitting, which the review links to obesity, insulin resistance, and even fatty liver disease, could make all the difference. So here's the thing, you can't just rely on your workouts. You gotta find ways to move more all day long. Literally take the stairs, stand more, stretch, walk, fidget, anything that you can do because all those little movements can add up to a faster metabolism and better health. Here's your floor, 8,000 steps a day. Once you've gotten those 8,000 steps a day, then let's like push it a little bit more, maybe up to 10,000 or 12,000. More here is better. So anytime you have a break, you've got a phone call, you've got errands, look for any time you can sneak in some extra movement. I literally look now on how I can park farther away. Like at the gym, I go park as far away as possible in the parking lot and take the stairs to go to the gym. There was a study that was published in PubMed that found that postmenopausal Women who averaged 12,500 or more steps per day had significantly lower body fat, BMI, and waist-to-hip ratio compared to women that were walking 10,000 steps or fewer. So what are we going to do? We are going to swap watching TV or coffee dates for like active stuff. When I meet my girlfriend, we used to meet for coffee, now we meet for a walk. Like we go out to dinner, we go to this place, Goodnight John Boy, and dance. Look at all the ways you can move more throughout your day. There was a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found that reducing or replacing there's 30 minutes of sitting with light activity lowered the risk of early death by 14%. And if you replace it with moderate or vigorous activity, you lowered the risk by almost 45%. And that was a study of over 37,000 US adults over 14 years. So that's the first thing. How do we get that knee cranked up? One of the things I like to do, I've got an under-the-desk treadmill. I've got a light rucking vest, a little weighted vest. That's one way that I just spend more calories, move more throughout the day. The next one, of course, you knew this, is to build muscle. Do resistance training to boost your metabolism. Muscle is your metabolic engine, and lifting after 40 is non-negotiable. Cardio alone is not going to cut it. You've got to do lifting because it's going to signal your body to build muscle. Now, at the very least, you want to make sure you're maintaining what you got. But really, your goal should be at this point in your life to pack on as much muscle as possible. And right before you say, JJ, I do not want to get big, you would be lucky to put on a half pound to a pound of muscle a month. That would be amazing. So you can see you're not going to be getting big. Now, when you do resistance training, you actually create something called EPOC. It's an afterburn where your body's got to replace the oxygen consumption. And that means that you're burning more calories after the workout, plus you're burning more calories by having that muscle on you. But just post-workout, your body uses that extra energy to repair and build muscle, to get that oxygen back, to replenish your energy stores of glycogen. So again, It's not just how many calories you're burning when you're working out. You still got that repair afterwards and you got the metabolic spanx that you built because muscle requires a little bit more energy to be on your body than fat does, like 5 or 10 more calories per pound. Might not sound like much, but it adds up. So resistance training, you're going to hit each body part 2 to 3 times a week. I want you to think of upper body pushing things like push-ups and overhead presses, upper body pulling things like bent-over rows or pull-ups, and then hip and thigh hinging. Things like squats or step-ups. And again, you're going to hit each body part 2 to 3 times a week. Now you work in a range of anywhere from 6 to 30 repetitions. I like to say, you know, go 8 to 12. That's the best for hypertrophy. A little lower is better for strength. So maybe you want to work in the 5 to 8 range. Do multiple sets. But here's the thing. Here's the kicker. When you get close to the end. So let's say that you're doing 3 sets of 10. By the time you get to 8 or 9, you should start to feel like you're really slowing down. And by that 10th, when you think maybe I've got another rep or two in the tank, that's working at about 80% of your max. That's right, the sweet spot for where you want to be. Here's another important thing about resistance training. It's kind of good news, bad news. You're getting stronger. Good news. Bad news. It's never going to get easier because the reality is, as you get stronger, you got to keep pushing up the weight. So either you do more sets, you do more reps, or you increase the weight, but you got to progressively overload to continue to improve. It never gets easier because you just keep getting stronger. And as you get stronger, you're increasing the volume either by increasing your weights, reps, your sets, or all of the above. That's how your muscles continue to grow stronger. That's how we get better with age, right? So as you build muscle, what happens? It's going to give you better bones. It's going to give you better insulin sensitivity. It's going to make everything you do, all those activities of daily living, easier. And that's why I like to train specifically big compound movements that resemble what I do in life. Like squats. Resistance training also is going to help your bone density, which can help protect against osteoporosis, right? That's another really big important one. But the big thing is, since we've ditched the scale, we're focusing on body composition. We're putting on muscle that's helping us burn fat and it's changing our body composition. And that makes everything in your life a lot easier. Carrying those groceries up the stairs? Eh, no big deal. And here's the thing. If you're thinking, oh, but I'm 60, I'm 70, I'm 80, you can build muscle at 40, at 50, at 60, at 70, at 80, at 90. There are studies in adults over 90 showing gains in muscle and balance and walking speed. And if you feel like at first, you're like, I feel a little intimidated by this, the first thing you can do at home is just start with body weight, some resistance bands, maybe water bottles. You just got to get started and progress. There was a study in the Journal of Diabetes that found that in just 6 weeks, of progressive resistance training, they improved insulin sensitivity in the muscle by more than 20%. The participants also were significantly stronger. So they got stronger and they had better metabolic gains and better strength gains, just 6 weeks. So you just got to get started. So resistance training, first is NEAT in the exercise hierarchy. It's actually the activity hierarchy because don't think of NEAT as exercise. Then you add in that resistance training, hit each body part at least twice a week. So kind of your Your bare floors, 30 minutes twice a week of resistance training. And then we are going to add in high-intensity interval training. This is where you work smarter, not longer, because a lot of steady-state cardio can raise cortisol, can burn muscle. It's catabolic and get you into that skinny fat trap. What I want you to do instead is move a lot throughout the day, get that resistance training in, and then add in HIIT, high-intensity interval training, which means You're doing short bursts and recovering and short bursts and recovering. And there was a study in the Journal of Obesity that looked at women doing HIIT versus steady cardio, 20 minutes of HIIT, 3 times a week for 15 weeks. What they found was the HIIT led to more belly fat loss, but also better insulin sensitivity compared to the women— get this— spending twice as long doing steady-state cardio. Now, there is still a place for a little steady-state cardio, maybe 1 session a week of zone 2. And of course, we're doing a lot of walking, moving, but I really want you to focus on 2 HIIT sessions a week, and that's all you have to do. And they'll take maybe 15 or 20 minutes per session, depending on the type of HIIT training that you're doing. But basically, think of one of my favorite ways to do this is a 1:1, 1 minute hard, 1 minute recover, 1 minute hard, 1 minute recover. I did that today on the StairMaster. I did bouts of 30 and 60 seconds with the same amount of recovery where I went really hard. And I took it all the way down. You're doing that active recovery in between. You're doing high-intensity interval training to boost lactate, which is a fuel source for your brain, for your heart, helps your mitochondria get ramped up and strong. It's amazing for your brain. It raises BDNF alpha, which is— BDNF rather, which is like Miracle-Gro for your brain. Really good for you. Now, one other thing that I have in there is I do a little zone 2, like once a week. Do a zone 2 exercise. That's where you can work out, you sound a little sexy breathing, but you can still breathe and talk. So maybe one day a week you do a long walk with a, with a rucking vest on with a girlfriend, maybe 10-pound rucking vest for 30 to 60 minutes. It helps you burn fat. It's good for endurance, good for VO2 max. By the way, high-intensity interval training is great for VO2 max. And the important thing here too is you want to make sure you're working hard, but you're also recovering. You're recovering with good sleep, but you're recovering with, you know, other activities. This is where you might do a resistance, hard resistance training workout one day, a HIIT workout, and then maybe a long walk and then repeat, right? So pay attention to yourself. If you're tired, if your HRV is tanking, if you're always sore, you might need to back it off a little bit. It might be a sign of overtraining. I want to just do a call-out for my video, "You've Been Lied to About Metabolism." It's going to talk about cardio, about recovery, all the myths around that, and also why sleep and recovery days can sometimes do more for your metabolism than just doing more. More is not better. The right amount with the right amount of intensity is really what makes the difference. So again, here's the formula: move more throughout the day, 8,000 steps, 10,000 steps, more is better. Then do that resistance training to build muscle. HIIT each body part at least twice a week, and then 2 days a week HIIT training. And then you can add in that 1 longer zone 2 too, if you want. That's kind of more of my recovery in there as well. Build it neat, then resistance, then HIIT, then a zone 2. And I love to throw a yoga class in there for kind of some recovery. Here's the biggest, most important thing. It's not about doing this perfectly. It's about doing it consistently. Doing a few workouts consistently a week is going to be way better than just overtraining and killing yourself and getting exhausted and getting hurt and getting out, right? It's you being active, you being consistent, then you'll get stronger. And of course, along the way, making sure you're giving yourself the time and space to recover well too.

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 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 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.

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