JJ Virgin explains that muscle mass declines starting in your 30s, especially for women who followed decades of bad diet advice: too much cardio, too little protein, constant calorie cutting. Building muscle through strength training and eating enough protein works better than restricting calories.
you look at what happens as we start 30-plus, we start this downhill slide with muscle mass. Now, I think this is way worse in women than it is in men. Because if you're a woman who's always tried to control her weight, and how do we try to control our weight? Think back, because you and I have been in the, you know, fitness industry a long time. And, you know, back when I was in grad school, they said, if you want to lose weight, you should not lift weights, you lift weights after you lose the weight. That was the prevailing idea, and that if you want to lose weight, you needed to do lots and lots and lots of cardio, which we now know is not the answer for this at all. But you think of women who for years and years and years have controlled their weight, or tried to because it's a really challenging thing to do this way, by caloric restriction, not eating very much protein, and doing loads of cardio. So now you've got a higher body fat percentage, right? And now you're going into your 30s, 40s, 50s, when in your perfect world we would have in our teens and 20s and 30s been trying to put on as much muscle as humanly possible, which By the way, would never have made us look like the Hulk, right?
Right. It's like so hard to gain a lot of muscle. Oh my God, it's like the hardest thing ever. And I feel like we've been sold this false bill of goods.
