JJ Virgin explains why women over 40 lose muscle and gain belly fat: perimenopause drops estrogen and progesterone, raising cortisol and insulin resistance. Heavy strength training counters this by building muscle, improving insulin sensitivity, and protecting bone density. Cardio alone won't do it.
Why is strength training crucial for women over 40 in terms of fat burning? How does strength training impact the hormonal shifts that happen to women over 40? Let's break down what happens. You've already heard that you start to lose muscle around age 30. You lose muscle, you lose strength, you lose power. It gets doubles, by the way, around age 60. And a lot of that is because of the hormonal shifts that start to happen in our 40s. Sometime in your 40s, you're going to start going into perimenopause. Buckle up. So what happens during this time? Progesterone starts to decline, your sleep starts to go wonky. So you'll notice with progesterone, all of a sudden you're like anxious and your sleep sucks. Your estrogen starts to go down, you start to feel like you can't recover from a workout, you have hot flashes, maybe you're not able to build muscle like you used to, you can't focus, think straight. Estrogen— I know we always think of this in terms of testosterone, but estrogen actually is mission critical for women to help them burn fat and put on muscle. And as estrogen goes down, cortisol can come up, and you can become insulin resistant and have chronic inflammation as well. So you'll see a couple things if you're monitoring on labs. All of a sudden, fasting insulin that was always nice and low is jumping up, blood sugar is creeping up, you're starting to have these cortisol issues where maybe you're tired and wired and you can't fall asleep, you're starting to put on visceral adipose tissue where you never had an issue with it before. It's like your weight may not change that much, but where it is and what's going on with it, like your clothes just don't fit the way they used to. My mom called it shifting sands. All I know is I kept looking at that going, this is not happening to me. Because for her, shifting sands basically meant the fat in your butt went to the fat in your gut. I'm like, oh no. So, but you can counteract it. And strength training is great for that because you, need to have this stimulus of lifting heavy things to help to counteract estrogen going down, testosterone going down, the inflammation. Remember, muscle contractions can help reduce inflammation as well and help improve insulin sensitivity. So muscle can help counteract a lot of these things. And as we age, your metabolism's slowing down. Yes. But the big slowdown tends to happen around 60. I think it's really the cumulative loss of muscle. We also, during this time, become more insulin resistant. Which then makes it harder for you to, to burn off fat and better at storing it, which is not what you want to do. And of course, muscle is the fastest way we can start to restore this insulin sensitivity and maintain our metabolism. Again, we got a couple things going on. Slight metabolic decline, it really hits at 60, but the bigger thing is those hormonal shifts changing how we store fat and how we're able to build muscle. And that means you really need to focus on strength training. Cardio alone is not going to cut it. In fact, Doing a lot of chronic cardio, I'm not talking about doing some high-intensity interval training. I love this for you because it teaches your body how to handle stress better and recover. I'm talking if you're doing more like, I'm going to go out and do an hour run or train for a marathon. These things that are more like 80%, 70 to 80% of your max heart rate for extended period of time. This can just give you another hit to your cortisol. First of all, it's going to break you down more than it builds you up. It's going to create more oxidative stress, more stress on your body, and you're not building muscle. So that's not really the prescription we have to look at for women over 40. Now, strength training over 40, can it help preserve bone density in women while burning fat? I don't think of resistance training again. I think of the effects of resistance training, the effects of building muscle, making you better at burning fat. But one of the things that really resistance training can be super for is helping with bone mineral density. In a perfect world, boy, are we far from that at the moment, but in a perfect world, you would get a bone mineral density test in your teens when you're building a lot of bone, in your early 20s. Right now, the— I think the recommendation's like in your 60s when the eggs have been scrambled. So you really want to do a bone mineral density test. You get that done as you do a DEXA. You do a DEXA, you find out your bone mineral density, your TNZ scores. You also find out your body fat and where that body fat's located, and you find out your skeletal muscle mass. It's such a great test and not expensive. So like if they're going, we aren't gonna cover this with insurance cuz you're not 65, it's like $100. It's super duper worth it if you can pull it off. And what you're gonna find is resistance training loads your spine, loads your hips. So important for bone mineral density. Now there are other things that are super helpful as well, but strength training is one of the things that can really help with bone mineral density. And osteoporotic fractures are super common in women 50 plus. I, I think I read somewhere that it was like half the women over 50 would have some kind of an osteoporotic fracture, but that just seems ridiculously high. But just know wherever it is, it's not good. So this is one of the ways you can stop yourself from being a statistic.
