Why Muscle Is the Secret to a Faster Metabolism

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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, 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. 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 will reply directly, and trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribetojj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together. So let's talk about why metabolism becomes fragile. You get weak without muscle and why this is no longer optional after 40. So what actually happens to metabolism when muscle mass declines with age? Okay, so I like to say that muscle is 3 things. Muscle is your metabolic Spanx. Muscle is your sugar sponge. And muscle is your multitasking messenger. So the biggest thing that you can do to impact your resting metabolic rate, that's how many calories you burn at rest, is to put on more muscle. That's why I say muscle is your metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter and it boosts your metabolism. Not a ton, but enough. The next thing that muscle is, is a sugar sponge. It gives carbohydrates a great place to land in your liver, in your muscles, rather than on your belly. As fat. And muscle is this amazing multitasking messenger. This is the most exciting piece of all of it, honestly. When your muscles contract, when you're doing, say, a push-up or an air squat, your muscles contract and they produce myokines. These are messengers. And it is like your body's creating this amazing pharmacy of all sorts of different things, things that say, hey, make new mitochondria or renew, refresh my mitochondria. Lower my insulin, become more insulin sensitive, reduce my inflammation, boost my immune system, boost my mood, improve my cognition, build new neurons in my hippocampus. All sorts of amazing, ridiculously cool things that we want. Now, why do you think that muscle loss is this hidden driver behind the slower metabolism and insulin resistance and fat gain? Because it is. And the reason that it's this hidden driver is because the loss of it happens so slowly. And I believe that most of our muscle loss is not happening because we're aging. I think a lot of our muscle loss, not all of it, but most of it is happening because we are not challenging our muscles. And so our hormones start to shift, our growth hormone goes down, we're not challenging our muscles, and it's a bad equation. And so all of a sudden we're starting to lose muscle. So our metabolic rate's going down, we're more insulin resistant, we're not as resilient, we're moving less. And the less you do, guess what? The less you can do. But conversely, the more you do, the more you can do, right? So it works both ways. You're 30-plus and you're starting to lose a little bit, but again, I think a lot of that's because we're not using it. But then you go through menopause, and estrogen is actually anabolic, as is testosterone. These go down, and now you're having trouble recovering. You can't work out as hard, or you're more inflamed, your joints are achy, so you do less too. And that's where, again, we know your bone falls off a cliff after menopause when your hormones go down. You lose 2 to 5% of your bone every year for the first couple years post-menopause. And I haven't seen a study specifically on fat-free mass or skeletal muscle, but I suspect that they are similar. But they again don't need to be. In fact, if you think about a lot of what you can offset with resistance training, that little metabolic drop you get when estrogen goes down, offset that with training. That insulin resistance that you get when estrogen drops, the inflammation you get when estrogen drops, offset that with training. And of course, I highly recommend checking out hormone replacement therapy as well.. But one of the big things you can do is also support these things with training, cuz it will help. Here's the reality. What I see most women trying to do when all this starts to go haywire, and I'm really excited that Dr. Bill Campbell's doing a study on menopause, cuz I keep seeing people saying your metabolism doesn't drop till 60. I go, have you been a menopausal woman? Cuz I know what happens. I've seen it myself with my friends. With my clients. And generally what I see people trying to do is they try to do the outdated equation of, I'll just do more cardio and I'll eat less. And it just doesn't work. And here's the big problem. I'll walk more, walk more, walk more. And if anything, this is actually going to compound the problem because if you're doing a lot of steady-state cardio, might raise cortisol depending on how much you do, if your body sees it as a chronic stressor. But I'm more concerned about the fact that you're not doing things to really trigger your fast-twitch muscle fibers. These are the ones that help with strength and power. And so you're just going to lose more of them here, and that's going to be even worse for your metabolic health and your metabolism. Because remember, muscle acts very differently than fat does on your body. Fat— there's no carrying cost. Fat's just lying about being inflammatory, right? But muscle, again, releases those hormones to reduce inflammation, to improve insulin sensitivity. Again, that's why I always say it's this multitasking messenger. It's a metabolic organ. It does amazing things being on your body. Like, think of muscle as your body's internal pharmacy of incredible drugs that don't have any side effects. They only have side benefits. Now, here's what's interesting. So I have literally lifted weights my whole life. And one of the stories I like to tell is that I'm 6 feet tall and I was always playing on the boys' team in elementary school and junior high because there weren't enough boys. So I had to be on the boys' team. So I got used to that. And then when I went off to high school, the guys had the most amazing gym. They had squat racks and chest press and leg press, and the girls had a ballet bar and some mats. I kid you not, this was in the '80s, okay? And so I looked over the guys' gym, and I was used to working out with the guys. I'm like, I'm over there. So I've always been lifting weights. In high school, because I was 6 feet tall and I lived near San Francisco, friends were like, you should go see if you can be a model. So I go to the modeling agency, and I remember walking in the door to the modeling agency and looking around and looking at these creatures who did not look like me. Like, they literally looked like someone took a small person and stretched them. Like, they were half of me. And I meet with this modeling agent, and I was, you know, 6 feet tall, about 140, and she said, you'll need to lose 20 to 30 pounds. Now, I went home and I checked out a library book on diets, and I started recording my calories and eating 1,000 calories a day. And the first thing that happened was I couldn't work out like I used to. No more working out with the guys. In fact, no more broken out. In fact, my dance teacher was like— I could hardly show up, and she finally said to me, are you anorexic? Like, what's going on with you? And thank God she said that. It was like a moonstruck moment of, okay, I can either be strong or skinny, but I can't be both. And I feel like crap. This doesn't make me happy. And even though it took 40 years for the strong to catch up and be in vogue, I literally had men all along my decades of life going, I don't like women with muscles. I'm like, all right, well, boo on you. It's been a while. I'm glad that strength is the new skinny, right? Being strong. Anyhow, I never really thought about it. I've always identified myself as being strong. A couple things happened along the way that just made me realize the importance of muscle. In my teens, I blew out my ACL on pointe ballet, which is— I'm 6 feet tall, that was dumb. And then I blew it out again on a volleyball court, and I had to have surgery. And I was non-weight-bearing on my right leg, my blown-out knee, for 6 weeks. And I remember looking at my quad after those 6 weeks of non-weight-bearing, and literally my right quad was the same size as my left calf. Like, I was like, wow, I had no idea how big muscles could be, right? So, and again, I don't say that to scare you women. Remember, muscles, metabolic Spanx, it holds everything in tighter. But it just was amazing to see how quickly you could lose muscle. And we know that even 1 week of bed rest, you can lose 2 to 4 pounds of muscle. And a lot of insulin sensitivity too, right? You become insulin resistant quickly. And then the other thing that happened just a couple years ago was I was struggling to open a jar. I'm like, what is going on here? And that's when I went, okay, I have to up my resistance training to the next level of it. Really challenge. I was kind of phoning it in at the gym. What I see with clients who for years, I always like to say my, you know, clients who forgot to lift weights because for women it was always stressed to do cardio unless you happen to work with me because I never did that. Was something that's known as TOFI or sarcopenic obesity, where they'd be normal weight, but they were high body fat, low muscle mass. And that's generally when you try to control weight by diet alone or by like diet and walking. And it's so different looking at a woman who's controlled her weight that way versus a woman who lifted weights. It's one is like you're fighting your metabolism, you're starving yourself. And the other one is you're supporting your metabolism, helping your metabolism work with you. I still remember I was going through my divorce in my 20s. I ran myself through my divorce. I was like Forrest Gump going through divorce, and I just ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and just kind of managed my mindset and my anxiety. First, I ran through my replaced Gore-Tex ligament in my knee, so that was bad. But the second thing that happened was it was so hard to build muscle at the time, and the minute I stopped doing so much cardio and started flipping back over to HIIT training, which is what I've tended to do most of my life— you know, I walk, I do brisk walks, I also do slow walks with my little tiny dogs. I do HIIT training and I do resistance training, and that really helps support muscle. And again, I think one of the things with aging is seeing that shift with my grip strength, even someone who's lifted weights all the time, made me really see that this is the most important thing for independence that we've got. It's going to help you look better. It's going to help you feel better. It's going to help you have more energy, better blood sugar control, better bone mineral density, better strength. But gosh. Just the independence, the idea that you're going to be able to keep doing all the cool stuff that you want to keep doing for as long as you want to do it. That's everything, right? And so I say that because I think about the costs of not doing resistance training, the things that I hear of, I don't want to get bulky, or I just do cardio, or it's too late for me, I don't want to get injured. And I would ask you to think about if any of these things ring true to you, that you're eating less than ever but you seem to be gaining fat, especially around your waist, that your blood sugar is just unstable. You just feel achy and tired. You don't feel as strong as you used to. Again, struggling to open like a jar or carry groceries up the stairs. You notice that you're the same weight, but your waist is not the same. Like your clothes are fitting you differently. Like they might be baggy in your butt and thighs, but tight in your belly. My mom called it shifting sands, but you're starting to lose muscle in your arms and legs and put on fat around your waistline. And you just feel soft. And so you might say, well, this is just aging, like that's just normal, or it's just hormones. And yeah, those things are not your friends for this, that's for sure. But I think the bigger thing is we're not focusing on changing what matters because muscle changes everything for us. And so often I think about a lot of the gyms when I was just first in the gym industry, because I kind of grew up with the gyms. They just started getting big when I started in all of this. And back then we used to have the women's gym, and the women's gym didn't have all the cool stuff the guys' gym had, but it had pink weights. I mean, it ridiculous. They had like inner and outer thigh machines and pink weights. Come on. And you know, when you think about this, and especially something like if you're concerned about joint pain or fatigue or injury, that's not going to go away. The way to combat that is to do resistance training. If you feel like you just can't seem to get a handle on your metabolism, that you gain weight no matter what you do, that's not going to go away. The answer is to put on muscle mass. And if you feel like I'm trying everything and nothing's working, again, like that feeling of either giving up, despair, failure, desperation. Muscle is the answer to that. And you know what's the coolest thing when you start to put on muscle is that you can notice that you're getting stronger fairly quickly. In fact, if you've never lifted weights before, if you've never really challenged your muscles before, the first month your strength increases will be crazy. You won't really see muscle size for 6 to 8 weeks because first your nervous system and muscles learn to talk and then your connective tissue gets stronger and then you start to put on muscle. But it's really amazing. And it happens again quickly, and it doesn't take much. The minimum that you need really to protect your metabolism, 2 days a week, 30 minutes. In fact, I have a great handout on how to start a resistance training routine, and we'll put it in the show notes and a YouTube video about this. But basically, 2 days a week you hit your major body parts. So 2 days a week you do some upper body pushing, you know, things like push-ups or overhead presses. Upper body pulling, maybe a bent-over row or a high pull, and hip and thigh hinging, maybe a step-up and a squat. If you did that twice a week, 30 minutes, and you really did it— once you've taught your body the right movements, you've got the great form, you did it till you got close, not to failure, but where it got really hard, where you feel like if the next one you do or two, you're going to really mess your form up— form's always the limiter— that's exactly where you want to be. That's what will help you build muscle. The heavier you go, the more you start to get strength. The faster you go, the more you incorporate your power. The most important thing is that you just do it, is that you are consistent. The nice thing is there's a lot of different ways to do this, to challenge your muscles. You can do it with your body weight, you could do a TRX segmental trainer, you can use bands. I like TRX's Bandit bands. You could use Y-bells, kettlebells, machines, free weights, cables. Doesn't matter as long as it's hard and it gets to the point where you feel like you're going to break form in, say, 10 to 20 seconds of doing an exercise. That's kind of the golden spot there. Once you do that, your body goes, oh my gosh, I have to get stronger. And if you're worried, if you have joint issues, an injury, and you're worried, you can also do electrical muscle stim body workouts now. And there's a new training studio called E20 that can take you through this. So there's always a way to figure out how to do this. And you want to do this because it's so important for that insulin sensitivity, which is going to help you burn fat and help you have better blood sugar control, for your a lot of the stuff that goes sideways when you start to get into menopause, like the inflammation, the insulin, exercise can help offset. And remember, exercise is this endocrine organ too. So it's out there sending these amazing messages through the body. It just makes fat loss so much easier without you having to go into this crazy extreme caloric restriction. 'Cause muscle's where you burn fat, put more muscle on, boost your metabolism, and it's gonna give carbohydrates a place to go in your muscles rather than being stored as fat. So when you're doing this, The big thing I want you to promise me you'll do is don't use the scale as your metric of success. I think the thing that has damaged us women more than anything else is the stupid scale. Instead, trade that traditional scale that just looks at your weight rather than what your weight's made up of and get yourself a bioimpedance scale instead. I'm going to put a couple of the ones I like in the show notes. I've been using the new PATH scale. Amazing with a Bluetooth tape measure. BAT, Oxlean Pro, Renpho, InBody. There's a lot of different brands out there. We'll put some of my faves in the show notes. As I said, big important thing here is you want to be able to track to say that I am improving my fat-free mass as I'm losing fat. You want to ensure that you are not losing skeletal muscle as you're doing this, that you're improving and putting that on. That is your super, like, insurance for— think of this like your metabolic health insurance for the long and if I was going to think of one thing that I still hear that I'd love you to let go of that you might be thinking about lifting is, no, you're not going to get bulky. Remember what I said? Muscle is your metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter. And when you think of this as like your health insurance, your metabolic health insurance, this is something you get to do. It's not something you have to do. I want you to think of this as it's not a chore, it's a benefit. It's a thing that you get to do. And the consistency makes the biggest difference. So Again, it can be as simple as twice a week for 20 to 30 minutes. That's all you need to do. Now, along with that bioimpedance, two other things you can do to really see the quality of your muscle and put this together is a simple handgrip dynamometer. We'll put some of those I like in the show notes. And then also a sit-to-stand test where you do this chair sit-to-stand time test. Those are two ways to really look at the quality of your muscle, your strength, your power, which is so super important because when you look at this, what we're trying to do is ensure that you are maintaining that muscle with age, but ideally you're getting stronger, you're getting better. And I believe, especially if you haven't really done weight training consistently your whole life, you can actually probably be your strongest, your healthiest, your most powerful now. How cool is that? And if there is one thing that I want you to take away from this, here it is. Strength training is what keeps your metabolism running so that it does not age faster than you do. Remember, muscle protects your blood sugar. Muscle keeps your metabolism responsive. Muscle gives your body somewhere safe to put fuel instead of storing it as fat, especially belly fat. And you don't need hours in the gym to make this happen. You just need consistency and a commitment, a commitment to consistently challenge your muscles. Now, if this helped you understand your body in a new way and make some new commitments, make sure to subscribe and share this with a woman who needs to hear it. 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. 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 813-565-1111. 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 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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