In this instructional video, JJ Virgin outlines a comprehensive, injury‑free resistance‑training program tailored for women over 40. She begins by emphasizing the importance of assessing one’s starting point through body‑composition measurements (DEXA scans, bio‑impedance scales, waist‑to‑height ratios) and strength gauges (hand‑grip dynamometer). She then introduces a simple four‑part movement taxonomy—upper‑body pulling, upper‑body pushing, hip/thigh hinging, and core—to structure workouts. Virgin stresses the use of compound movements that cross multiple joints, prioritizing large muscle groups first and targeting personal weak points. She differentiates strength (force) from power (force applied quickly) and highlights that power declines most sharply with age, making it crucial for maintaining functional independence. The video explains muscle hypertrophy as the balance of muscle‑protein synthesis versus breakdown, recommending progressive overload and precise protein nutrition (≥30 g protein per meal, 2.5‑3 g leucine, ≥100 g total protein, roughly 0.7‑1 g per lb of target body weight). Throughout, the focus remains on building functional, “real‑world” muscle that supports everyday activities and enjoyable pursuits, rather than merely improving gym performance.
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and I'm gonna share exactly how to start and progress a resistance training program to build muscle and increase strength and power, and important, without getting injured. And speaking of injury, more muscle is protective against injury and falls. Your risks for injury are actually way bigger outside of the gym or wherever you're working out. All right, let's get started. So here's step 1. You've got to know your starting point. So the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to assess and you're going to set goals. So one of the things I want you to do is your body composition and measurements. Bonus points if you can go get a DEXA scan. I would love to see you doing these twice a year. This is what they use to do bone mineral density, but you can also find out your skeletal muscle mass, your body fat, your visceral adipose tissue. So highly recommend going and getting that done. And you can find this a lot of the different fitness centers, hospitals, etc. And then at home, you'll have a bioimpedance scale. These are inexpensive now. You can get them on Amazon. And a tape measure to measure your waist and do a waist height comparison. So that's where I want you to start because we got to know what your weight's made up of. I want to know how much skeletal muscle you have starting with so we can see what we need to do to improve it. The other thing we wanna look at is your current strength. And one of the simplest ways to get a gauge on your current strength is a hand grip dynamometer. This is something inexpensive from Amazon. You just grab ahold of it. It's gonna give you a score based on your age, and then you can assess your progress, right? By how much increases, because we are going to track all of this stuff. So that's the first part is we're gonna assess your goals. Now I divide the body into 4 parts. Super easy to remember. First up, upper body pulling. Those are things like bent-over rows, pull-ups. They involve your biceps, your lats, your shoulders. Upper body pushing, things like overhead presses, chest presses, push-ups. Those involve your chest, your triceps, your shoulders. Then hip and thigh hinging, things like step-ups and lunges and squats that involve your glutes and your quads and your hamstrings, your calves. And then core, which what I find when you're doing all the rest of that correctly, you're going to engage your core and your core is going to help with stability. But this is really your abdominals and your back extensor muscles. When I'm going to walk you through this, what I'm going to have you do is focus on compound movements. That means that we are crossing more than one joint. An example would be this is not a compound movement. I am just moving, I'm crossing over my elbow joint. But if I do this, now I am moving at my elbow joint, my shoulder, but also back over into my scapula, into my shoulder blades. So now I'm doing a compound movement. What's super cool about compound movements is they're what we do in life. Like in life, you don't do this, do you? It would look weird and not very effective. Then we are gonna focus on priority areas first. So big first body parts first, and then also areas that we really know we need to improve. We're gonna focus on those. We are gonna work on two main things. We're gonna work on strength. And what is strength? Strength is the amount of force a muscle can, can exert against a resistance. So what that would be is like how much you could bench press, how much you could push up one time, or how much you could squat one time. Power is the ability to overcome that resistance in the shortest period of time, leading to the ability to produce higher velocities against a given load. It's moving resistance over time, and it's often an explosive movement. It would be an example if you're doing a squat and you're coming up as quickly as possible, or maybe even tossing a jump into it. The reason I bring up power is, remember, You know, you're losing muscle as you age. You're losing strength as you age. You lose little muscle, you lose more strength, and you lose the most in power. And power is really what is the most closely linked to keeping you able to do the things you want to do. Now, if we're training for strength and power, we're going to get a side effect of more muscle and muscle hypertrophy, more muscle. This is when your muscles increase in size. This happens when muscle protein synthesis, new muscle, building new muscle, right, is better, is doing more than muscle protein breakdown. So as we age, what happens? Muscle protein breakdown exceeds muscle protein synthesis and we start to lose muscle. What we want to make sure of is that we are flipping that, that equation and our muscle protein synthesis is exceeding the breakdown. And how do we do that? 2 things: resistance training, progressive overload, load more than what we're used to, right? We're doing the same stuff, we are not going to progress. And protein intake, and that is super duper important. And you want to make sure that you're getting at least 30 grams of protein in a meal, you're getting in at least 2.5 to 3 grams of leucine to trigger that muscle protein synthesis by activating mTOR and at least 100 grams of protein overall. And you'll probably need more. I basically dose that 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Now you want all 3 of these things to happen. You want the hypertrophy, you want the strength, you want the power. You want to build this quality functional muscle that is going to be able to help you do all the typical things in your day and fun stuff in your day too, right? And when you think about this, like, if you want to be able to do the things in your day, you've got to train for them. So we are training here not to get better at training at the gym. We are training here so that we can get better at life, so that as we age, we can keep doing all the cool, fun stuff that we want to do, that we've been working our butts off for so long to be able to have more time to do. We want to make sure that we can keep doing them. That is what super important.
