The 5 Biggest Fitness Mistakes Women Over 40 Make

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Doja Cat is playing at the Los Angeles Theater next Tuesday. Sweet Ray Ban Meta Glasses available at Ray Ban stores and other authorized retailers. I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, 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 by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast 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 healthy 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 out at 100.

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Hey JJ, virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me. Travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things, and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. 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 on your phone, Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of your reset could be a real goal this time. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monimal.com in your browser for half off Your first year, that's 50% off. Your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin. Saving on your education should be a right, not a competition. At University of Phoenix, you'll get the best scholarship or savings you qualify for. Simple as that. Explore scholarship options at University of Phoenix. Are you working out consistently, but you're just not getting the results you want? Turns out some of your habits might be doing more harm than good. So I'm going to help you get over that fitness plateau by sharing five big fitness mistakes that you could be making that could be holding you back from being the most powerful strong you you can be. So here's the first one. It's not lifting heavy enough. And I get asked all the time, how much should I lift? What's heavy? Whatever is heavy for you. You want to lift the heaviest weight you can in good form. And remember your technique. Your form is always limiter here. Now, what is the benefit of lifting heavy things? First of all, when you lift heavy things, it's going to help you hold on to or build muscle. It's going to put the stress on your bones to help you improve your bone density. And when you have better muscle, you know what you have, you have a better metabolism. When you look at your overall metabolism, the big way you can shift your resting metabolic rate is, is to put on more muscle. Super important. There was a study in 2002, it was a literature review published in the American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation that found that lifting heavy weights can enhance strength, power and local muscular endurance and manage health benefits like bone density, insulin sensitivity and obesity. So here's what we have to blow up this idea that if you're lifting heavy weights, you're going to get bulky. Do you know how much you have to lift and how long and how hard you have to lift to really put on muscle? You're lucky if you can put on one to two pounds of muscle a month. And you know what? If as you building muscle, you go, I'm not sure that I like the way this looks. You can just stop and you won't build any more muscle. The other thing that's important about muscle is think of muscle like your metabolic spinal Spanx. Muscle holds everything in tighter and it boosts your metabolic rate while doing that. So muscle really is the key here. And you want to make sure that you're doing enough stimulus as you do it. So if you can keep going, doing 20 reps, 30 reps, 40 reps of something, pump the weight up. Ideally work between, say 8 and 15 reps. And if you can keep going, get the weight up heavier, if you can't quite get to 5, 5, then let's lighten the load, but let's really start to push the heaviest weight you can handle. And again, the caveat is in good form. All right, here's mistake number two. Mistake number two is not getting in enough protein. You know, I say to eat protein first and that's because I want to ensure that you're getting what you need. I do have a little hack for you here. The reason that we want to get the protein in is you need the protein for your body to be able to build muscle. And you need enough protein at your meal so that you have the leucine that you need. 2.5 to 3 grams. This is the work of Dr. Donald Layman to trigger muscle protein synthesis. One of the things that I've been doing here to help people because I keep hearing I can't get the protein in. Well, we do have my 7 day eat protein first check challenge, which is free. And I will put the link in the notes for this. But also another thing that I think that all of us 40+ should be doing is is getting in one to two servings of essential amino acids a day. There was a study in 2011, another literature review. It was published in Medicine and science and Sports and Exercise and what they found was essential amino acids. By the way, this is not branch chain amino acids. This essential amino acids, the nine essentials, are vital for effective exercise recovery and particularly for women. Research shows that resistance exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis within an hour and it can remain elevated for as much as 48 hours. Well, essential amino acids enhance this process because they activate mtor. You've heard about this. This is what leucine activates. And this is a circle key pathway for muscle growth. So when you consume essential amino acids shortly after exercise, you can boost muscle protein synthesis more than just exercise or just taking essential amino acids. And this is super important for any 140 plus because we have a diminished response to anabolic stimuli. It's called anabolic resistance. So this can help with counteracting anabolic resistance, muscle wasting things like sarcopenia. And it's so easy to do. So here's what I recommend. What I do is I go to the gym with a big bottle, big water bottle, I fill it full of green tea and then I add in my essential amino acids, my amino acid power. I add in my clean creatine powder and I add in my electrolytes and literally it's a huge bottle that I drink when I do that, but that makes sure that I've got what I need. Now, again, I still want you eating your protein first and getting in 1 gram per pound of your target body weight. And I've got my seven day challenge, which is jjvirgin.com the number seven day. It's free for you to get started on that, but I am super keen on adding in essential amino acids because think of it like your insurance policy that you're getting what you need. All right, this one drove me crazy in graduate school. I was in graduate school for biomechanics and one of the big things that we were taught in graduate school is that you shouldn't lift weights until you lose the weight. And I still see this out there today. Now, 35, 40 years ago, when I was starting out with all of this, I went against the grain. I was like the black sheep over there and I had people going to the gym. I was focusing on resistance training because I knew that just doing cardio and not doing weights was actually going to be counterproductive because muscle is going to help you lose weight. It's more metabolically costly. We know that when you're building muscle, when you have more muscle that you give sugar carbohydrates a place to go and you also become more insulin sensitive. Plus again, muscle is your metabolic spanx. It requires more energy to be on your body. There is a 2021 systematic review and meta analysis of 58 studies that was published in Sports Medicine that found that resistance training, resistance training significantly reduced body fat percentage by 1.46% body fat mass by 0.55 kg. That's over a pound. And visceral fat illustrating that resistance training is highly effective for improving weight loss and body composition. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to do resistance training and you're going to do your cardio training. In fact, my perfect formula is making sure you're getting in your 8 to 12,000 steps a day or more and add some intensity, add a wrecking vest. That's the easy way to do it. Get in that resistance training, right? And get in some high intensity interval training twice a week. That's my formula for success here. All right, next we're to going mistake focusing on weight loss over fat loss. Now, if I could could change things, I would make it so that we never used scales, that we only used body composition scales, that we were always looking not at weight, but what your Weight is made up of because it is such a huge difference. In fact, if you just wanted to lose weight, the best thing you possibly could do would be to sit on the couch and have an IV drip of glucose and not move and do a lot of caloric restriction and you could lose 25 to 50% of your muscle and you would devastate your metabolism. There was a 2008 study that was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. They found that weight loss diets can lead to muscle loss with an average of 32% of total weight loss as lean mass. But you could mitigate this with a higher protein intake during caloric restriction to preserve lean mass. Now you've heard about muscle loss with all the GLP1 agonists. I contend that it's not the drug, it's the diet. So if we are eating protein first, optimizing that protein, adding in those essential amino acids and doing resistance training, this does not need to happen. But we need to be monitoring it, tracking it to know what's going on. And you can't see that from a regular scale. All that's telling you is your weight, not what that weight's made up of. So the way that you can do this at home is get yourself a bioimpedance scale. Now it's way more accurate to go do a dexa and I would highly recommend doing that one or two times a year. But that's not something you're going to be doing every day. And we want to track your weight, your body composition on the daily take, the average over the week so that we can see the trends. Biome Peens is going to tell us totally total body water. And it's going to extrapolate how much your body is fat mass, how much of your body is fat free mass, and then from that, how much is skeletal mass so we can see the trends for you. And so if it's not quite accurate compared to dexa, it's fine. We're looking for the relative change over time. And again, I say over time because your weight's going to bounce every day, but you'll see this change over time. And realistically, you're going to lose up to 1% of your body weight in fat a week. And you can put on, you know, depending on if you have been working out for a long time or not. If you're just starting out, you'll put on more muscle as you go. It takes longer. So think one to two pounds of muscle a month. So body composition's a little bit like watching grass grow, but we want to monitor it with a bioimpedance scale. Do not rely on a regular scale. The next one is not prioritizing your recovery. And this is really important for women over 40. There was a study in 2011, it was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research and it showed that men and women lose about the same amount of strength right after exercise for men at 74%, women 60, 76% and felt about the same amount of muscle soreness two days later. But women took longer to regain their strength over the next four days. Now, both men and women showed similar changes in their muscles thickness. It was really the difference in how well we recover. So how do you know if you're recovering well or not well? There's some very clear signs of inadequate recovery. The couple things to think about here is hrv. Is your HRV low? Like if you're watching on an Oura ring or a Fitbit or a an Apple watch, track your hrv, see what's normal for you. If it's lower than normal, this could be because you're not giving yourself adequate recovery. Is your grip strength reduced? One of the great ways of testing things for testing your grip strength is checking to see if you're recovering well. If it's 10% lower than normal, you're not recovering well. If you've got all over fatigue right, you're not recovering well. If your resting heart rate is elevated, it's higher, 10 beats or more higher than normal, you're not recovering well. Listen to your body here. Don't push it on that day that you might go, you know, everything feels a little achy. I just feel a little bit tired. Maybe that's the day to take a long walk or go do some restorative yoga. And then I'm going to give you a bonus one. I said there were five mistakes, but I'm giving you one extra one because this one is such a big deal and one that I'm kind of beating myself up about because why didn't I know about this years ago? And in fact, I did know about it years ago, but I thought it was for the bros. So back when I was in college and graduate school, I used to take clients to Gold's Gym in Venice, the mecca of bodybuilding, to really show them what was possible. What was possible when you leaned into resistance training and all the guys there were taking creatine. So I always thought it was a bro day dude thing. And I never paid any attention to it I now know that it is probably the number one supplement for women over 40. It helps with muscle strength, bone health, cognitive health, even skin wrinkles. There's lots of studies out there to support it. I'm going to tell you about a 2021 lit review published in Nutrients Journal that found that creatine supplementation offers significant benefits for women over 40, particular particularly in the context of hormone related changes. And it turns out that women have 70 to 80% lower endogenous creatine stores compared to men. So supplementation for us is even more important. And what the research shows that postmenopausal women can experience improvements in their skeletal muscle size and function and bone health when they take creatine with resistance training. This isn't going to happen just by sitting on your channel couch, right? Obviously. Also, creatine can enhance your mood and cognition because it can help restore brain energy levels. The majority of creatine is in our muscles, but we have a little bit in our brain as well, which is why it's so important for mood and brain. Here's something else cool about creatine that I didn't know and I found out about two months ago, which was perfect timing because what happened over the last two months is I went from from Florida to London, London back to Florida, to Boston to Europe and then back over to Florida over to British Columbia. A lot of time zone changing, very few days to do it. And I used to always get stressed out about time zones because I always said I'm really bad with jet lag. I'm not anymore. And you know why? Because creatine helps you time zone adjustments. In fact, it is my number one way that I time zone adjust now is to use creatine. So creatine I love because you're actually going to feel the difference when you take it. But it also can help with so many other things beyond just exercise performance, which is how you're going to improve your muscle strength. 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@subscribetoj.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 ways 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. 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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