Why Muscle Mass becomes Crucial for Fat Loss and Optimal Health

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Welcome to the Virgin Diet Lifestyle show with your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin.

I like to think of muscle mass as your metabolic Spanx. And what I mean by that is it holds everything in tighter while boosting your metabolism. And guys, this goes for you too. In fact, what I heard is that the number one selling thing in the men's undergarment area now is Spanx and we just need to stop that. We can make our own. It's much better. Plus, you can't go naked with Spanx on, right? Just saying. So here's the deal with muscle mass, and this is so critical and especially if you are over the age of 50, 30. Well, even if you're under the age of 30. But as you're aging, you know, if you're not using it, you're losing it. And you really need to be focusing on building muscle mass. And endurance training does not build muscle mass, it breaks it down. So here's why muscle mass is so key. First of all, it requires more energy just to exist on your body. When you do weight training at the gym, your body has to do a lot to recover from that weight training. You know, when you go out and you do, say an easy run or an easy walk, your body doesn't have to do much to recover from that. But when you do weight training, there's a lot of work that has to happen for your body to recover from that. And just maintaining muscle on your body requires more energy. More energy means more calories, more food. When you do resistance training, you are burning sugar. When you do it. Now that might sound bad. You might say, hey, no, I want to burn fat. But what turns out is the fuel source you burn don't during exercise is the fuel source you store after exercise. So what do I mean by that? If you're burning more sugar during an exercise session, that's stored carbohydrates from your muscle. If you're burning more of that during exercise, after exercise, those energy stores are empty and your body goes, okay, I need more of that stored. So if you do eat carbohydrates because all carbohydrates turn to sugar. And remember, we want to make sugar from the food we eat, not mainline it. Then they're going to store that back in your muscles because you have a place for it to go. If you are doing exercise focusing on burning fat during the exercise session, like long, slow distance exercise, well then after exercise, you actually store more fat back on. You want to be a better fat burner, not a better fat storer, right? Also, this type of exercise burns off those fat storing enzymes. So you burn the sugar when you're doing this. So now your body has a place to put sugar back in because you store carbohydrates in your muscles as glycogen for energy to use next time. Now, here's another cool thing that resistance training does. It actually helps your body become more insulin sensitive. Remember, insulin is the hormone that your body raises when you eat carbohydrates to bring those carbohydrates down and store them either in the muscles. But of course, there's not a whole lot of room there. So if they can't store them in the muscles and liver, they store them as fat. So either to store it, store it. Now, insulin's a storage hormone and you want to be able to hear that very well. Because if you can't hear insulin well, it rides up high. And if it rides up high, it basically locks the doors to your fat cells so you can't burn off stored body fat for fuel. You want to be a fat burner. That's the key here. So one of the easiest ways to start restoring that insulin sensitivity is to do weight training, because the muscle is the fast place to restore insulin sensitivity. Also here's the thing. When you're doing resistance training, let's think about it. You're doing hard and recover. Hard and recover, right? You're teaching your sympathetic nervous system how to handle stress better. So key. And it's also protecting your bones. You know, I remember hearing something early on about osteoporosis is going to be one of the major diseases of our lifetimes. That's thinning of the bones. And that, you know, if we wanted to protect our bones, we should walk. Well, that doesn't make any sense. You want to protect your bones, you have to stress your bones. Your body responds to stress. And when you do it correctly by getting stronger. And so you want to load your spine, you want to load your hips, the places where we start to see bone loss and so things like squats or pushing weights over your Head hugely important for building better bones. Now, here's another one. And there's a big urban legend that if you lift weights, you get tighter and less flexible. Well, actually, the research shows just the opposite, that when you do this correctly, you improve your flexibility. Critical. So when you do full range of motion movements and what I teach people to do, and we're going to go through how to resistance train correctly, you're doing full range of motion. When you do full range of motion, you actually improve flexibility. And that actually also translates to better activities of daily living. That's a physical therapy term, but basically getting the groceries out of the car, moving things, lifting things, all of those things you'll be able to do better. Especially when you do resistance training correctly. That means not doing machines, but doing more free weight type of movement, because in life we are not bolted to the floor. Here's another one. Here's another key benefit. I think I alluded to this early on, but I'll say it again, because it's so important. You can't wear Spanx to bed. This makes you look better naked. And by the way, this is so much more fun than endurance training because you can see yourself getting stronger. You know, one day you're lifting 10 pound weights, then you're lifting 12 pound weights, then you're lifting 15 pound weights. So motivating. But speaking of lifting weights, and now I'm going to walk you through exactly how to do this. And it's whether you're using weights, bands, your body weight, you want to lift the heaviest weight you can handle safely in good form. Do not sacrifice form for how much weight you can lift. Okay, so it's the heaviest weight you can handle. Yes. But with good form. Now, when you're first starting out, don't go all crazy on this. Start with it. About 75% of what you think you can really handle, go for it to be a little bit easy, okay? But once you get into this and you're lifting weights on a regular basis, it's the heaviest weight you can handle safely in good form. You're going to do sets and repetitions. A set is a specific amount of times that you lift a weight. And the times you lift the weights are called repetitions. So if you do eight repetitions, that makes up a set. I teach people to do a range of 8 to 12 repetitions when they're starting out because that's the best range for building muscle, for hypertrophy. If you do less than that, three to six, it's better for building Strength, especially neurological strength. If you do more than that, like 15 to 30 reps, it's better for building endurance. So for the most part, focus on 8 to 12 repetitions. You may throw in the short heavies and the long, you know, long lighters for some breakup in your routine. Here and there I do that. But for the most part, I focus on 8 to 12 reps and multiple sets, 2 to 4 sets. And what I teach people to do is take a step 60 second rest break. If you take too long of a rest break, you let your body totally recover. If you don't take long enough, it's like you're just doing an endurance set. And the reason you want to give yourself enough time to semi but not totally recover is you're only going to stimulate the muscle fibers that you actually contract. So if you didn't use it, it's not going to impact it, basically. And whenever you're doing an exercise and repetition, you're going to use a percentage of your actual total muscle fibers in that muscle. When you work, do a set and then recover for a little bit. 60 seconds and do it again. You didn't allow your body to totally recover, so now you'll pull in new muscle fibers. So now you'll hit more of the muscle. That's why we do it that way. Then important, you're going to take a 48 to 72 hour rest break in between. So you're going to do work specific body parts and I have people pull and I'm going to talk about this a little bit, but I have you divide the body into upper body pushing, pulling, hips and thighs and power core. I'll go over what those are in a moment. Stay tuned. But basically, let's say that you did upper body pushing. You are not going to hit those muscles again for at least 48 hours. And you know what, maybe even 72 hours if you hit it really hard and you're still sore.

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You know, more is not better in exercise. Harder, more intensity is better, but more duration generally is not. So you're better to go all out hard, really work it and then recover well. You'll get more from it and it will save you time. And let's face it, the number one reason people don't exercise is because they don't have time. So let's save time. All right? Then you want to make sure you warm up before you got to get a little warm up. Now this is five minutes. This could be just walking up the stairs. One of the gyms I used to belong to in LA is called Sports Club la, and it was always so funny because there's this huge staircase up to the Gym floor and people would take the elevator. And like you just missed your warm up opportunity. All you had to do was get up those stairs. So, stairs, little cycle, little treadmill, walk, jog. Just a little easy warm up to raise your core body temperature throughout your body. And then you're going to make sure as you're working out that you're working through full range of motion. Ideally, do things as close to you want to move through as unstable a position as possible. So rather than sitting locked into a machine, standing, sitting on a ball, using cables, using free weights, I don't use a lot of machines except for the cable machines and the pulling machines where I can do like pull ups. But for the most part you want to use more of your body weight, more benches, more free weights, so you bring in more of your body. Because really, when you think about it, we talk a lot about core training, but core training should happen in every single exercise you do because you have to stabilize your core because you've created a little bit of an unstable environment. Even a bench press lying back on a bench with dumbbells is going to create a little bit of an unstable environment because you've got to balance between those two dumbbells. Also make sure that you are not using momentum. It's real tempting to swing the weights, but that's not using muscle, that's using momentum. So you want to make sure that you're using controlled movement and you're breathing through it. You don't hold your breath, you breathe through the motion, which means you inhale on the easy part and you exhale on the exertion. Easy to remember, exhale, exertion. Now, I've divided the body into four parts. This makes so much more sense to me than what I see people doing. And that is upper body pulling, which would be things that incorporate the latissimus dorsi. Those are the biggest, those V like muscles in the back, the swimmer's back, biceps and the upper and shoulders and rear deltoids. And those exercises that incorporate those are pull ups and pull downs, bent over rows, one arm rows, upright rows. You'll notice here that I said all things that are multi joint exercises. So rather than doing a bicep curl, if I did an upright row, I got the biceps and the shoulders, or if I did a pull up, I got the biceps and the lats. Upper body pushing involves the chest, the front of the shoulders and upper back and the triceps. These are things like push ups, chest press, incline presses and overhead presses and dips hips and thighs. So this is the glutes, the quads, the calves, but really focusing on the glutes and the quads. And of course these types of things are going to be also where you can even do burst style training because it's such big body movements. Step ups, lunges, squats, leg presses, ball, wall squats, anything using. And I'll do a leg curl here, even though it's a small movement because it's really hard to get the hamstrings any other way. And then power core and power core is both the abdominals and the erector spinae and the back muscles. And that can be things like stiff leg deadlifts, soccer, sit ups, sit ups over a ball. But also I want to remind you that when you're doing resistance training correctly, everything you do becomes a power core movement. Because if you're doing push ups correctly, you better be pulling in your core. Same with pull ups, same with squats, same with bent over rows. So that's one thing I want you to really get in is we are going to do exercises that are really multifunctional exercises. I don't know if you've heard about primal exercises, but to me this is more stuff that you would be doing naturally because a bend of a row is a real functional exercise. Think about bending over and pulling the groceries out of the car. Maybe that's not primal, but we would have been picking up rocks before. I don't know, maybe a large animal. So same type of thing. All right, now what you're going to do, if you're just starting out, remember you warmed up. If you've just started, this is the first time ever. I just want you to start with incorporating three exercises from each of those areas and doing one set of them. And here's the thing, I like to divide those up. So what I do, and I'm always messing around with my workout and changing it up. Because your body adapts. That's the whole point of your body, what it does, it adapts. So there's the occasional time I'll go into the gym and I'll do upper body pushing, upper body pulling, hips and thighs and power core the whole thing together. Not very often though, because that's pretty exhausting. If I am doing that, I do about three to four exercises per area. But generally what I like to do is one day I'll go in and I'll do upper body pulling and upper body pushing, and the next day I'll come in and I'll do hips and Thighs and power core. Or I might come in and do upper body pulling and hips and thigh and the next day I'll come in and do upper body pushing and power core. So I'm alternating and again always giving a 48 to 72 hour rest break in between, in between workouts with those things. So that's nice to do. But if you're just starting out, just start out with one set, start out easy, see how your body feels and take it up from there. You can always take it up. But boy, if you go in there and really hit it hard that first time, it's really demotivating to come back in. I will share with you. When I first started 30 plus years ago as a trainer and I learned how to take someone through a gym workout, I took a gal who's a real good friend of mine, thankfully. So she forgave me for taking her in and I wanted to show teacher every single thing I'd learned. So I mean it was the two hour weight workout for someone who'd never done weights and she literally we, you know, threw her back out. She was in bed for a week. Oh my gosh. Oops. So I learned the hard way. Unfortunately, I learned it on a friend. I wish I'd learned it on my. So once you get advanced again, you can do, you know, you can do upper and lower one, you know, upper one day, lower the next lower and core one day. You can alternate these things out. The other thing, there's a couple other things you can do is fun variations. Once you get advanced, you can superset. So what I'll do is if I'm doing upper body pushing and upper body pulling, I will do a set of chest press and then I'll do a set of bent over rows and I'll alternate them. I will alternate a push exercise and a set with a pull set, push set, pull set. And then I'll go on to the next two exercises and alternate. Push and pull, push and pull, push and pull. So that's one way to do it. Some days I'll just do what I call focused fatigue. So let's say I'm going to do hips and thighs and power core. I will just stick with everything that's going to blow out my thighs. So I'll do squats, then I'll do lunges, then I'll do step ups, then I'll do ball wall squats, then I'll do plies. So I'll do everything that really fatigues that. Then I'll go do abs and abs, abs, abs. Then I'll go do things that work the glutes and hamstrings. So I just keep staying in one area until I'm really fatiguing it. And I call that focus fatigue. Some days I'll go in and I'll do endurance reps and instead of doing it for number of times I do something, I do it for time. So I'll do 60 seconds of a specific exercise at a lower weight and I'll take a minute break and do it again. On some days I do what I call neurotraining and I'll do three sets of six of the heaviest weight I can handle. So when I'm doing endurance training, obviously I'm probably taking it down about 20, 30% from my normal weight. And when I'm doing neuro training, I'm taking it up about 20%. All this stuff does is confuse the heck out of my body. It's like, what is this girl going to do to me next? And you need to do that because your body's big thing it does is adapt to what you give it. So if you go in there and work out a specific workout and that's what you do day in, day out for months, it gets really good at that and you will not continue to see improvements. You got to shake it up. And that's why one of the really cool things that you can do is work with a personal trainer. There's this idea out there that oh yeah, you're going to work with a personal trainer and you see them a couple times a week, well, that's not really the case. You can actually work with a personal trainer and have them create a new workout for you once a month or you can have them work you out once a week. But think about using a personal trainer differently because boy, if you knew that you were going to once a week get weighed and measured and get your butt kicked or once a month you were going to get a brand new workout and you were going to bring in your whole workout log and get it reviewed and get everything checked and get reassessed, you would be a lot more focused because you have someone that you are accountable to and boy, there is nothing more powerful than than having an amazing coach. So think about using a trainer that way. It's a lot more cost effective and you will get a lot better results.

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Also, I want to make sure that you're monitoring your body fat and your measurements, not just your weight. And it reminds me of the story of Vicki. I used to own a gym, and I had a gal come in. Awesome. She was, I think, about 45 at the time, and she wanted to lose weight. But I looked at her, you know, she stepped on the scale, and she didn't need to lose weight by the scale. She needed to lose body fat. She was fluffy. She was not solid like a rock. She had a belly. She was just soft. But she wasn't overweight. She was over fat. She was thin outside, fat inside, because she. It's called tofi, by the way, not tofu. Tofi. She'd managed to maintain her weight by diet alone. So it's interesting because she didn't lose weight. She lost 4% body fat. She went from. I think she started out like 25% body fat. She went down to, gosh, she lost more than that. She was down in the 18s in her body fat. She dropped clothing size. She looks entirely different, but her weight didn't change. So that's why it's very important to make sure you're monitoring your measurements. We do waist and hip, and here I would also say do your thighs and monitor your body fat. Those body fat scales are so inexpensive now because it's going to blow you away at the difference that you see. I remember very early on when I started weight training with women, and it was 30 years ago, and women at the time, everything was about doing long, slow distance. If you wanted to lose weight, that's what you. What you needed to do was lots of walking, walking, walking. And I thought, that makes no sense. The research actually didn't make sense for this, but that's what everyone was about. So I'm bucking this trend, telling people they need to lift weights to lose weight. And they kept saying, oh, but I'll get bigger, I'll get bulky. I'm like, no, you won't. It'll hold everything in tighter. And at the same time, there was a gal out of Tufts doing research on it. I think her name was Miriam Nestle. Anyway, what she found was that women lifted weights, they got smaller, they got tighter, they held everything in tighter. So that's what I've seen over and over again. Now, this has been 30 years of seeing this. So I am convinced of the fact men will get bigger unless they've got a ton of body fat, in which case they'll get like, if they start out just normal, they'll get a little bit bigger. If women start out normal, they'll get smaller. And that's how most people want to be anyway. So it sort of normalizes you wherever you want to be. But again, make sure that you're monitoring that all the way throughout and also monitoring how your weights increase, which is so motivating and so cool. Now I know I've rattled through a lot of this, and if you would like some of my favorite workout routines, all you need to do is text 58885 and enter JJ Waits. Put a space, then enter your first name, put another space, enter your email address. Again, you're going to text to 58885 and enter JJ Waits. And that's by the way, we I G H T S J J Waits space. Then enter your first name, put another space, and your email address, and I'll send you some of my favorite workout routines. You can do them at home, you can do them at the gym. Whatever works best for you. In the Sugar Impact Diet, I help you clear up the confusion around sugar and take back the control that sugar has over your life. In just two weeks, you'll lose your sweet tooth and shrink your waistline. Why wait? Start those two weeks today.

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