The Real Goal After 40 Is Building Muscle, Strength & Power

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After 40, the goal with exercise isn't to burn calories. Okay, let me repeat that for those of you in the back. After 40, your big exercise goal is not to burn calories. It's actually to build muscle and power and longevity. And today I'm going to show you why. Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, Sari 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 Subscribe to JJ.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. My virtual JJ Virgin 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.

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Now, I started my career as an aerobics instructor, and when I did, cardio was everything at the time. We were told that the key to staying lean, fit, and in control of your weight was cardio, cardio, and more cardio. However, I was always one to lift weights with the bros instead and go against the status quo, but a part of me still believed this myth to do consistent and endless cardio, that that was the hack for weight loss. Thankfully, I met Vicky, who spent years trapped in the cardio and dieting cycle. Vicky was like the queen of cardio and dieting. She had all the diet foods in her kitchen. She would literally go on the treadmill hours a day and get herself down to 1,000 to 1,200 calories. This would go on for a while, usually about a month, and then she'd lose it and she wouldn't do anything. And she'd overeat. And it turns out, I remember looking at some research way back when showing that women who controlled their weight by cardio alone, you know, the minute they stopped doing cardio, guess what happened? Boom, weight came back on. Thank you, Vicki, 'cause her story, she made me stop and look deeper because I noticed a pattern. It wasn't just Vicki. Most of my clients who were trying to use diet and cardio for weight loss were just not getting those results. And it wasn't because they were doing it wrong. It was because their biology had changed. Now hear me out. Cardio still has benefits. I'm not saying cardio is bad. It supports your heart, your brain, and your mood. But when it comes to optimizing your body composition, your strength, and ultimately your metabolism, it's only one piece of the puzzle and it is not the big lever. Today I'm going to show you why the old cardio equals fat loss story isn't going to be working. You probably noticed it already. What the research now says about muscle and aging, and how to train smarter so you look, feel, and function, not just years younger, I'm gonna say decades. So let's talk first about why cardio isn't your fat loss solution. Now, cardio burns calories in the moment. You wanna burn a lot of calories? Cardio's your jam, but it doesn't build the machinery that keeps you burning calories at rest. Cardio also makes you hungrier. When you chase that calorie burn, another thing happens. Your body tends to steal from your non-exercise activity. The calories you burn, just moving through life, which means you're moving less. So your body is adjusting, staying in homeostasis by dropping the NEAT. You end up where you were. Here's the science to back that up. In 2016, the evolutionary biologist Dr. Herman Ponce published a study in Current Biology that tracked the total energy expenditure in more than 300 adults across a huge range of activity levels. He found that while light to moderate movement raises calorie burn, once people started doing lots of endurance exercise, their total daily energy expenditure plateaus. The body simply compensates by using less energy in other places. Then in 2015, Dr. John Blundell reviewed dozens of trials in Obesity Reviews and showed that long bouts of cardio often increase appetite and reduce spontaneous movement—things like fidgeting or taking the stairs—which then of course lowers your overall calorie deficit. Again, you go back to where you were. And then a 2012 randomized trial in the Journal of Applied Physiology compared aerobic training, resistance training, and a combo. The aerobic-only group improved fitness but didn't change body composition or resting metabolism. While the resistance and the combo groups gained lean mass and lost fat. You know, whatever your shape is, with cardio you may become just a smaller version of that same shape, if you're lucky. But with resistance training, you can transform your shape. So what's the translation? Cardio is not bad, it's just incomplete. After 40, endless cardio can make you hungrier, zap your recovery, and in some cases chip away at the muscle that keeps your metabolism high. Now the fix isn't to stop moving, it's to shift the focus towards muscle strength and power while using short, efficient burst of cardio for your heart and your brain. And that's why women tell me, JJ, I'm doing an hour of cardio every morning and I'm gaining fat. Yeah, 'cause your body's conserving energy everywhere else. Now, if you're looking to understand the difference between weights and cardio from a different perspective, check out this quick clip from my conversation with Dr. Fit and Fabulous, the amazing Dr. Jamie Seaman, to see why we love the strong, not skinny look. It's called Weightlifting Versus Cardio for Women Over 40. All right, let's talk about the real goal. After 40 then? What is it? I bet you're getting that it's to build muscle and strength and power because your biggest risk factor after 40 is not your body fat, it's your muscle loss. You probably heard we start losing up to 1% of our muscle every year after 30. It's about 3 to 8% per decade. And that like speeds up, accelerates with menopause. That loss drives everything we blame on aging, a slower metabolism, insulin resistance, belly fat, weaker bones, brain fog, the whole enchilada. There was a study called Human Aging, Muscle Mass, and Fiber Type Composition. It was in the Journal of Gerontology, and it showed that aging is accompanied by a reduction in number and size of muscle fibers, and it was mainly type 2. This is why we are losing more of that power, right, and strength. And another one in something exponential gerontology in ScienceDirect was— showed that a decline in skeletal muscle mass with aging, again, is mainly attributed to smaller Type 2 muscle fiber size. Why am I saying this? Here's the reality. We have two types of muscle fibers predominantly. Type 1, this is our endurance muscle fibers. These are the ones that are allowing me to sit up right now. They're allowing you to walk around, just basic everyday movement. Type 2 is fast twitch. That's your power, that's your balance, that's your strength, that's your independence, right? Remember I said we had Type 1 and Type 2? Well, we also have these hybrid fibers. And what's interesting about these hybrid fibers, the 2A and the 2X, is that these things can actually shift. What we know is that if you're doing a lot of slow twitch fiber, you'll lose more of those ones that are hybrid, can shift into more slow twitch. If you're doing a fast twitch, then those type 2 hybrids can switch more to fast twitch. Whatever you do more of, your body is going to help you do more of, right? I like to say the more you do, the more you can do. If you're doing more slow movement, your body will go slower. If you're doing more fast, it's going to recruit the fibers in order to go fast, to go hard, to go powerful. There are a lot of research studies that show that type 2 fast-twitch fibers shrink in size and number with age. And again, that's why I like to focus on making sure we're putting exercise in that focuses on strength and power. The Human Performance Alliance created a paper, How to Maintain Muscle Power as We Age, in 2023. And what they noted was fast-twitch muscle fibers are lost at a faster rate compared to slow-twitch. And again, one more nail in the coffin. In the Journal of Applied Physiology, they showed that the impact of lifelong strength versus endurance training on type 2 myofibers in aging. And what they showed is that endurance training, guess what, converted some of those hybrid fibers I talked about into more of the oxidative fibers. So you're gonna lose more of those fast twitchers that we want. So the big important thing here is that we wanna focus on resistance training and resistance training that's hard and fast. Because that is going to help us build muscle, build strength, and build power. When we age without doing this stuff, we'll start to lose more of these slow twitch fibers, and we'll have proportionately more of these slow twitch fibers than the fast twitch fibers. So again, that's why I look at it and go, I think we should all be walking, but then I think for exercise, our priority should be on more high-intensity exercise, more resistance training, especially focusing on speed and strength so that we can take those hybrid fibers I was talking about and really incorporate them into our fast twitch, making sure they're really focused on fast twitch so we minimize the loss of type 2 fibers. Here's the bottom line. The problems we tend to blame on aging, which would be a slower metabolism, insulin resistance, weaker bones, brain fog, are often just because we're losing muscle. And I don't believe we're losing muscle so much because we're aging. I think we're aging because we're losing muscle, and it's because we're not prioritizing the right types of activity. If you're over 40 and you're feeling this, This is your biology changing, and it's time to move off of a lot of that slow, steady cardio and move over to things like high-intensity interval training and resistance training so that you're building muscle and getting that— preserving your power and ultimately preserving your independence. So what's this mean practically? I want you to move all throughout the day. Where I always start people is first tracking your NEAT. Again, your NEAT is your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. That is the first place to start because if you don't get tracking that first and you start adding in exercise, quite often, as you heard from Herman Ponce and all the rest of the research I started this with, you steal from your NEAT and then you, you kind of get back to ground zero, right? So first thing that I want you to do is just use some kind of tracking device to see how much you move all throughout the day. Now, I use an Oura Ring 'cause it's like easy for me to do.

You could use a Fitbit, an Apple Watch, a Garmin, or you could go old school school.

I remember back in the day, this— remember, I started out as an aerobics instructor 40 years ago, so I've seen it all. We used to use these little pedometers. I think they're like $10. They still work. Whatever your budget, there's a way to do this. You just need to track. What you measure and monitor, you can improve. So literally, I want to make sure that you are starting with tracking your NEAT. You want your baseline to be 8,000 steps a day. More is better. But if you're doing more of that and not doing your, your actual exercise, then it's not better. So 8,000. Then add in your exercise. And if you can move around more, especially all throughout the day, breaking up periods of seat— sitting, good for glucose control. Bonus points. Way better. Okay, so now we know you are not going to be stealing from NEAT. You're going to prioritize resistance training first. You want to hit each body part twice a week. I really like doing full body, like one day of push-pull and lower body hinging, because then I know you got it in. If you miss a day, you could miss a whole body part. I like compound lifts. And so what does this all mean? I divided the body into 3 parts. Well, actually 4, but I'll give you a little secret about this. So there's upper body pushing. These are things like push-ups, dips, overhead presses, upper body pulling, pull-up, bent-over row, a high pull, hip and thigh hinging, squats, step-ups, deadlifts, and then power core. I figure if I'm doing my push-ups, I'm getting my core. If I'm doing my squats, I'm getting my core. So I work my core into everything I do. So it's super functional and I'm training to get better at life, not training to get better training. So that's how I involve my core minimally. And by the way, it doesn't take much to start to build muscle. Minimally, it's 2 days a week. You could start at home, 30 minutes twice a week, and you could do a push-up, a bent-over row, and a squat. And you could start with just body weight, keep it easy, and then get your form down, and then start adding resistance bands or free weights and just build from there. There is really no excuse. You can do this fairly easily. As you progress, you can add more sets, you can add more exercises. Again, I like to focus on multi-joint exercises because they're more metabolically expensive, and I like to focus on more free weight band types of things. So I pull in more of my core and I use more of my nervous system too. So that's my basics on resistance training. You could hit each body part 3 times a week too, but again, 2 times a week will do it. That can, that can make it work. So don't let time be your enemy, which means you could actually do pushing exercises 2 days a week, pulling exercises 2 days a week, and hip and thigh hinging 2 days a week, 10 minutes a day, and get it in. One important thing, because I see a bunch of people going, I'm not building any muscle. First of all, muscle's slow to build. If you're worried about getting bulky, there's no drive-by muscle. If you start going, wow, my muscles are getting too big, which I have never had happen ever in my entire life of working in the field, 40 years. But if that was to happen for you, you could just stop, right? Back off. But what you want to do when you're doing this is form's always your limiter. Work in great form. And ideally, you get right up to the point where maybe you could eke out 1 or 2 more repetitions, but that's it. You really have to get that progressive overload and that volume in order to stimulate muscle growth. The other thing is, as you do start to progress and get more advanced, you can start to add in more power, more speed, maybe unilateral single leg or single arm movements, more balance so that you can continue to progress and challenge your body. The other thing that I like to throw in here next up, so I have NEAT, resistance training, and then I really love high-intensity interval training. High-intensity interval training. We know that resistance training actually is good for your heart and for your VO2 max, but high-intensity interval training is very specific to this. And the reason it's specific to this is because it is built to really push what's called your lactate threshold. When you go all out doing cardio, which is what high-intensity interval training is, it's intervals of all-out work followed by active recovery. So maybe you're sprinting for a minute, walking it off for a minute. What's happening during that all-out is your body is producing lactate. And then during the recovery, it's using it as fuel for your heart and for your brain. It's really good for helping your mitochondria. So that's why we wanna increase that lactate, but it's also great for boosting your VO2 max, which it's been suggested is probably the biggest determinant of your healthspan, lifespan, and lowering your risk of all-cause mortality. In fact, a 2023 Cleveland Clinic study found people in the top 2% for VO2 max had an 80% lower risk of early death. So cardio matters. And yes, long slow distance can help with VO2 max, but HIIT training I prefer because it saves time and It's also going to build that power. And it's going to really help improve your VO2 max. So we tend to think of muscle as this functional tissue, but it's really a metabolic organ. And when we look at your overall metabolism, muscle is really the way you can change your resting metabolic rate, how much you burn at rest, because every pound of muscle burns 3 to 6 times more calories than that blob of fat does at rest. And it's releasing these powerful messengers, these myokines that talk to your brain, your liver, your immune system saying, you know, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce inflammation, improve your immune system. Plus lifting resets your glucose handling better than cardio because muscle's really a glucose sponge. It's a sugar sponge. Okay, so let's put this all together and you can see how an easy week could be. And this is, you know, again, start with NEAT. Once you've got that NEAT down, add the next thing, 2 resistance training sessions. Minimums 30 minutes, each of those 3 body parts. Then add in 2 HIIT training sessions. They're going to take about 20 minutes. And then make sure you've got that NEAT going again. And if you have time beyond that, I love to throw in an active recovery session. And for me, that's yoga. I go to hot yoga. And of course, you're pairing that with high-quality protein. You're getting 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of your target body weight, getting in at least 30 to 40 grams at your breakfast and dinner and at least 100 grams overall. And you're also getting your sleep in. Remember, you're building muscle when you're recovering. What I love for recovery is both sleep and heat. Either a hot bath or a hot sauna can be super amazing for this as well. Make sure that you're monitoring this. Now, when you're monitoring on a bioimpedance scale, what you're going to see there is fat-free mass. Fat-free mass is everything but fat, but it's also— it's not just muscle, it's organs, it's bones, it's tissue, it's water, right? So it's all the things. Only 25 to 45 to maybe 50% of your fat-free mass is actually skeletal muscle, but it's going to be the thing you're shifting when you're shifting your fat-free mass. But the other thing you want to put together with this, because it's slow to build muscle but it's quicker to build strength, is just monitor how many push-ups are you able to do. If you've done a grip strength test at home, which I highly recommend, is it improving? If your strength improving, your quality muscle's improving, and likely the first place you'll start to see a shift is in how your clothes fit too. Now, if you're not where you want to be, if you started doing all this and you're like, doesn't seem to be working, remember, improving your body composition is a little bit like watching grass grow. So it takes time. But here's some things. Let's check in and make sure that you are not doing. You got to make sure you're getting enough protein in. Under eating protein, you won't have the essential amino acids to trigger muscle protein synthesis and to fuel it. You're not challenging your muscles. I watch you at the gym. Sometimes I see some of you phoning it in. You gotta challenge your muscles. They've gotta do more than what they're used to so they get stronger. They recover and repair. Speaking of repair, sleep and recovery. Don't just hit it hard every day. If all that's going well, check out your hormones. Insulin, thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol. All these things can really mess up your ability to build muscle. And then one other thing, I love me some chiotine. So my creatine HCL plus magnesium and taurine that works, lets you work out harder and recover better. And then another product that's amazing is Fortetropin, which as we age, myostatin can go up, which kind of blocks your ability to build muscle. Fortetropin can lower this. So it's a product called Yoked and it's incredible. I put on 2.5 pounds of fat-free mass in under 2 months taking it. I'm a big fan. So those are two of the things that I really, really love to help. And again, if you're finding that you're doing all the things and you're still stuck, check all of your hormones. Low thyroid, hard to build muscle. Low testosterone or estrogen, hard to build muscle. Elevated cortisol, you're more catabolic. So check all your hormones as well, because those can really get in the way and muck things up. Okay, so here's the takeaway. Cardio is not the enemy, but it is not the strategy that's going to reshape your body And Transform You After 40, because muscle is really the driver of your metabolism and your strength and your balance and how young you feel and look. So I want you to train for strength and power, move throughout the day, and pair it with optimal protein and good recovery. That's the formula. It's pretty simple right now. If this helped you rethink your routine, hit subscribe, share this video with another woman who needs it, and tell me in the comments the part of your training you are ready to upgrade because your body is not slowing down. It's just waiting for the right stimulus. 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 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 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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