ATHE_Transcript_Ep 586_Strength Training for Women Over 40 Made Easy
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. Yes, I'm a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can, and that's why I created the Well Beyond 40 To synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive.
In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism, to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.[00:01:00]
Here's the deal. It is never too late. It's also never too soon. So if you are 40 plus, the most important exercise you can do is resistance training. Because starting at age 40, we can lose up to 1% of our muscle mass each year and even more of our strength and our power. This has a devastating impact on metabolism because muscle is our biggest tool to impact our metabolic rate and quickly improve insulin sensitivity.
Meaning burning fat plus resistance training is hugely important in reducing your risk of osteoporosis. I've been helping women get strong since 1983, 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 protected against injury and falls. Your risks [00:02:00] or 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 one. You 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 tissues.
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 bio impedance 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 [00:03:00] to improve it. The other thing we want to 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 a hold of it. It's going to 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 going to assess your goals. Now, I divide the body into four 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 [00:04:00] going to engage your core and your core is going to help with stability. Then, we are going to focus on priority areas first. So big body parts first, and then also areas that we really know we need to improve. We're going to focus on those.
We are going to work on two main things. We're going to work on strength. And what is strength? Strength is the amount of force a muscle 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 the 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're losing muscle as you age, you're losing strength as you age, you lose a little [00:05:00] 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 gonna 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, building new muscle, is doing more than muscle protein breakdown. 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 equation and our muscle protein synthesis is exceeding the breakdown.
How do we do that? Two things. Resistance training, progressive overload. More than what we're used to, right? If 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 [00:06:00] grams of protein in at a meal, you're getting in at least two and a half to three 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 grams per pound of target body weight. Now, you want all three of these things to happen. You want the hypertrophy, you want the strength, you want 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, 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's super [00:07:00] important. Let's talk about what things that you can do. Cause you can go to the gym, but I hear a lot of people, Oh my gosh, I'm too out of shape to go to the gym. I was like, well, wait a minute. How do we ever go to the gym? If we're too out of shape to go to the gym, but the gym is an option.
But if you don't want to go to the gym, or maybe you want to go to the gym one day a week and do some stuff at home. You know, some simple dumbbells, free weights, a TRX machine, or that lumen that comes off the wall, exercise bands, and a bench and or a ball can be some simple tools that you can get. You can literally build a whole home gym with a TRX, dumbbells, a bench, and a ball under 500 and you will have everything you need to be able to get a huge, great workout.
I'm going to walk you through the basics, plus I have a worksheet for you. So I created a worksheet with the program so that you can do this at home if you want, what I would highly recommend because technique is everything, is if you can work with a personal [00:08:00] trainer or physical therapist to help you make sure you nail your form, and then every maybe six to eight weeks, work with them again to help you progress, to help you modify your program.
And then remember, you're also on the scale at home watching your skeletal muscle. Now, building skeletal muscle is a little bit like watching grass grow, I'm going to be honest. It's a slow burn. So just make sure you give yourself time. You're not going to put on five pounds of muscle overnight, but you will be amazed at how much stronger you get and how quickly that happens.
But again, Technique comes first. Form is always the limiter. We never want to sacrifice form for the amount of weight because if you get injured, you're out. And injuries can really be detrimental when you're 40 plus. We do not want to be losing any muscle. We always want to be building it. So let's talk rep range.
Obviously, if you do the longer rep, the longer sets, it's going to take longer. So I really like to focus on somewhere in the 8 to 12 rep range. And what [00:09:00] I kind of say is, if you can't get to eight, hey, lighten it up. If you can go past 12, make it heavier. And what I want you to progress to is three sets with, you know, a 90 second to two minute break, see how long you need, plus a warmup set.
Now I'm going to focus on technique. And when you very first start, there's two things that you're really focusing on technique and what I call neurological learning. The first thing that happens as you start to lift weights is your Nerves and muscles need to connect with each other. And that's going to be the first way that you gain strength before you start to really even get the hypertrophy.
And you're also going to make sure as you're doing this, that you're doing really good range of motion. You know, we used to think, Oh gosh, those bodybuilders and people lift weights, they're less flexible. The reality is you can have great flexibility if you're doing that big range of motion. And we're also going to make sure with the exercises we're doing, that we're doing things that require your core so that you then have your core in there for stability and [00:10:00] balance, because part of fitness is having, of course, great flexibility and also having great stability, right?
And then potentially, as you start to advance, you can even add in some balance like stepping on one leg or standing on a BOSU ball, or you can add some of this in as you're warming up. Now, when you're starting, you're going to want to do a full body warmup first. I have to do this because I like to cold plunge in the morning, and then I'm going to go to the gym and I'm cold and shivering.
So I always do a big full body warmup. I want to raise my core body temperature and get the blood flowing. That is the first thing. That could be something like, if you're going into the gym, could be walking on the treadmill and then just doing some big, full body movements. Doesn't matter, you're just getting your body moving, right?
Whatever you do, you can dance around the room, you can do jumping jacks, you can do reaches, full body squats. What I like to do when I get into the gym is I'll use the TRX machine to do big, deep squats, big, deep chest presses, big, deep pulls so that I just get all my body moving, [00:11:00] right? So full body movement, everything's moving first, getting that blood flowing, getting your core body temperature up.
That's where you start first. Then as you go into each exercise, the first thing you do is just A very light version of the exercise. So let's say that you are going to do a dumbbell chest press and heavy for you are 25 pound dumbbells. Your first set would be 10 pound dumbbells, right? Full range of motion.
Make it super easy. Just get the blood flowing. Tell your body, Hey, we're going to be doing this. So it's just firing up. That's important. Next thing, let's talk a little bit about soreness. What's good? What's your body saying? Knock it off. Especially as you're starting or you're progressing, you might get a little sore and some people get more sore than others.
I'm going to talk about some things we can do to help there. Soreness at the muscle. Day later, two days later, that's fine. Soreness a week later, that's not fine. We do not want joint site pain. That's always problematic, [00:12:00] right? And we shouldn't have muscle soreness continuing after like two days. Couple of things that can make you sore is doing really hard on eccentric contractions.
If you put a lot of load on concentric, that tends to get you more sore. So that's one thing that can do it. But things that can help with soreness, creatine actually can help you not be a sore. So creatine, of course, we know helps with strength, helps with muscle mass with hypertrophy, but it also can help with delayed onset of muscle soreness.
So there's another big shout out as to why we want to take creatine. Good sleep is mission critical here. Doing cold therapy. Now, here's the deal with cold therapy. Cold therapy can really help with reducing inflammation, with helping you with soreness, but it also can block muscle protein synthesis.
Remember, after you work out, you've done some micro tears, some damage to your muscles. That your muscles then repair and get stronger from. They go into muscle protein synthesis. So you actually want [00:13:00] that process to happen. If you jump into a cold plunge too soon after you shut that down. So that's still kind of all over the board as to how long you need to wait.
I wait till the next morning, but see how you feel. Maybe eight hours will do it, but you've got to watch that. Other things that can help, Epsom salts, hot baths, totally great, a sauna, foam rolling, massage, and then microcumin chews, amazing, and fish oil. Those things can also help with inflammation. Another mission critical thing I already mentioned, we've got to make sure the protein's happening with 30 grams of animal protein being your trigger because you'll get the leucine you need to activate mTOR to go through muscle protein synthesis.
Remember, as we age, we don't need less protein, we need more. And if you are a vegan or vegetarian, you're going to need more because you won't get that leucine necessarily that you need, you're going to need higher grams. Basically, I like to dose 0. 7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. And if you're really focusing on building muscle, I go to the one [00:14:00] gram per pound target body weight.
Focus the most on your first and last meals of the day, 30 grams is the minimum. I get about 50 grams in at both of those meals as my basics. All right, I'll give you a couple more things to think of. And then I'm going to give you a demo on some of these things as well. So again, global warmup, big movement, right?
The gym I go to, I walk up the stairs, but if I'm here, I'll get on the TRX. I walk around some, I get my body warm, and then I'll do a TRX and do big squats, big presses. I just mimic a lot of the movements I'm going to do to get my blood flowing. You're going to do three sets of 8 to 12 reps plus one easy warm up set.
A set is an exercise, right? So let's say that we're going to do push ups. We are going to do a set with repetitions in it. Each time you do 12 repetitions, that's a set. And we're going to do three of those. Your rest breaks, anywhere from 90 seconds to two [00:15:00] minutes. What are you doing during that rest break?
You walk around, you can stretch. I like to, quite often during my rest breaks, I'll throw in some abs. Like, I'll do some crunches, something like that. And again, remember, we're never sacrificing form for weight. Do not do that. And in form, we're always working through those full ranges of motion. And as much as possible, I like to do things standing, because in life, we're not bolted to the floor.
As you progress, you can do things on one leg. Now, how often should you do this? I would love to see you doing resistance training every other day, three times a week. Could you do split routines, all of that? Yes, but for just starting out, let's just focus on three days a week. That would be amazing because on the other days, I've got other things for you to do like HIIT training.
And you're going to do your rating of perceived exertion based on how much could you do in one repetition. Basically, what we are trying to do once you've gotten through the first week, [00:16:00] which I'm going to walk through, but basically what you want to work up to is doing 70 80% of your all out max effort so that by the time you get to that 10, 11, 12th rep, you feel like you just can barely get it done.
You really want to get as close to failure as possible. That is super important because you've got to do something called progressive overload. If you are new to this, we are starting out. This is your very first time ever. Welcome. I am so glad you're here. This is amazing and awesome. And the first week is your technique week.
And all you're going to do this week is really focus on getting the form down. You are not going to load yourself up and make this heavy. Just doing the exercise is enough. So we are doing super light resistance, about 30% of what you think you could do if you had to go all out. If you're not sure, don't use any weight.
Your body weight will be enough here. So first week is technique week. You're just focusing on nailing your form. And if you [00:17:00] are not sure of your form, this is where you really want to focus on a mirror or get a trainer or physical therapist to help you. Now it's week two. You're going to just do one set of your warmup.
That's that easy one like you just did last week. Now we're going to go to two sets of moderate. It should feel about 50% of your max effort for your second week. For your third week, we are going to do moderate resistance. Again, one easy set of a warmup. Now we're moving to three sets of that moderate, right?
Now we're moving on to week four. Now, by the way, all along the way here, if you're overly sore, take an extra day. Do not push yourself through or just do a technique day where you just move everything through and again, anytime you're sore at a joint site, that's a stop. Week four is when we start to move into hard where we do that one easy warm up set and now we're going to do our three sets and I really want you to be at like 80% where you go, holy smokes, this is hard.
That's where I want you to be. And then once you get [00:18:00] to that, that's where you now work out at that hard resistance. And one more real big caveat as we're walking through this, you did that first week of the technique week, all three days, the next week you went to moderate. All three days. And the next week you went to moderate and you added an extra set before you went to the fourth week of hard.
If anywhere along the way, this is feeling hard, back off, back off. I do not want you injured. I don't want you to sore. We can always build up. We can't take away. After we've done it, so just back off if you're not sure, just keep it simple and always focus on form. After you've done this for eight to 12 weeks, it's time to reevaluate.
It's like, how am I doing? And this is when things can get really exciting because now that you've built that strength in, now we can add in a power day. And here's why this is so important. Again, as we age, we're losing muscle, we're losing strength, but we're really losing [00:19:00] power. And when you think about it, it's that power that really is so important for so many of the things that we do throughout life.
And so after eight to 12 weeks, it's time to reevaluate. It's time to reevaluate your grip strength. It's time to reevaluate on the scale. How am I doing with muscle mass? And now… This is where you can start to add in one power day a week, one, okay? And that power day is going to replace one of the other days.
And this is different. You'll do a warmup set, and then you will do two sets. Remember when we did the moderate day, you're back to that moderate amount of weight, which now, by the way, is more than what it used to be, right? But this is where we're adding in some kind of explosion, some kind of acceleration.
So on a step up, it could be that we're adding in a big knee lift fast, or we're adding in a little hop. On a squat, we might add in a little jump, or we might jump onto a little box, or we could add a kettleball swing. These are the types of things. [00:20:00] That are going to really help you as we're aging, playful out.
I always say play full out at a hundred. I love this idea that Peter Attia talks about, Dr. Peter Attia on the Drive podcast, where like the centenary and decathlon, what do you need to do now to be able to do the things you want to do at a hundred? And one of the things you need to do is make sure you're maintaining the power.
So check out all of these exercises and see what you can do. And again. We're always going to do these carefully, right? Because what we want to do is avoid injury at all costs. The place you're most likely to get injured is not doing this stuff. It's doing the stuff during normal life. That's why we're doing this.
So with the step up, you want to make sure that your bench You're either at or below a right angle at your knee and hip. If this is higher, that's a problem. And then you're stepping up, you keep it on just one leg to start. Do not alternate back and forth. That makes it too easy. Then you can add [00:21:00] dumbbells.
I'm going to show you a few ways to make it even harder besides adding weights. So these are super simple. What you can do to make it a little bit harder, you can also compound with a chest press, or an overhead press rather, and push. If you want to add a little bit more of a power move, you can just jump.
Now, again, with power moves, it's less weight. So I would not be doing this with any dumbbells. That would just be that. And trust me, just that alone, you feel it. Okay. So another super functional move is a squat. We do this all the time. Again, you'd start with no weight whatsoever, really working on form.
Make sure that your hips come back. You want to do this and not elevate your heels. I see people do that by putting a weight plate down. You don't want to do that. This is really working range of motion, flexibility. So you want to make sure that you're working through your Achilles tendon too, and lengthening that.
And then again, as you progress, you can add [00:22:00] more weight, you can do what's called a goblet squat, where you fold one dumbbell up here and do it. You could put a bar on your shoulders, any which way you want to do it. If you've got back or knee issues, and you're not able to do this, one of the alternative things you can do is take An exercise ball and put it against a wall and do a modified squat.
So this is another way you can modify a squat. If you've got back and knee problems, I can take my feet out a little bit more to take some of the pressure off my knees. I can always hold dumbbells. So this is a ball wall squat. It's a great way to start working into doing squatting motions. When I think of a really great functional exercise, it's the bent over row.
This is you getting the groceries out of the car, picking something up off the floor. This is an amazing exercise. It's also pretty advanced because there's a lot of stuff that has to go right. So I'm going to show you a variation from this as well. But basically, what you want to make sure of is that your knees are bent, Your hands stay close to your [00:23:00] legs, your belly button's pulled to your spine.
So right here already I'm using my quads and my glutes and my back extensors and my core to keep me here. Then I'm going to rotate my hands and bring my palms up towards my chest. And bring it back down, up and down. So my body is completely stable. I'm using my core, my glutes, my quads to keep me that way.
And then I'm doing a bent over row. Super functional exercise. If you've got any back injuries, this is a little bit like all, I'm going to give you a modification that you can do. This is a one arm row, and I see these done all the time at the gym, and my whole graduate work was in biomechanics and spinal biomechanics.
When I see it done at the gym, I always want to go change, correct them, and I hold back because I know they don't want my opinion. But what I want to make sure is when you do this is that you don't do what I see people do wrong, which is put a knee and a hand on a bench. The reason being [00:24:00] is that unless the bench is exactly at the right level for you, now threw your hip off.
So instead of doing that, you are going to instead think of yourself like a tripod. So here I am over a bench. I've got my belly button pulled in tight. My knee's a little soft. And then I want you to think of yourself just as if you were a tripod. So I'm not over here, my hands were together, I'm moving one hand off.
I'm going to grab the dumbbell, and then I'm going to pull it up and back down. And see how I'm rotating it up? It's called supinating. Works more of your bicep when you do that. And I'm really focusing on lifting my elbow up, drawing my shoulder blade back. So that is the modification. Okay, so I love push ups because there's so many ways that you can modify them.
The first step, I'm going to show you a push up against a bench. But this can also be done against a wall. So literally anyone can do a push up. So the first one would be against a bench, but this again could also be against [00:25:00] a wall. And the mission critical thing here is that I'm not sagging, that I'm using my core here, my belly button's pulled to my spine.
And then I'm coming down to a right angle at my elbows and back up. And I'm not locking as I come up and then I'm keeping my trunk very stable. So that's the first one. So again, that could have been done against a wall that can be done against a bench. So that's going to be an easier version. Now here's the thing, you might say I can't do a push up on the floor, well you can with your knees, and you can start simply with a tabletop push up.
You always want to have your chest coming between your hands and a right angle at your elbows. But it's all about how much weight is over your hands. This, moving my hands out farther and bringing more weight over is harder. The most important thing is that I've got my belly button lifted, so that I'm using my core as well and I'm coming to a right angle.
One of the best exercises is a pull up. And for you, if you can get a pull up bar at home, it may just start with [00:26:00] a hang. Then it might start with a flexed hang before you can actually do any of these. If you have someone that can assist you by you bending your knees and them holding your knees, great. If you don't have any ability to do that, I'm going to show you another thing you can do instead.
And that is to use a band to do something called a pull apart that mimics it. But I'm going to really emphasize that if you can do this, boy, the grip strength you get by having to hang is amazing too. Okay, so here's one way you can do this at home. And here's what's important. And you'll see this done wrong at the gym.
Now you'll know when just… Again, they probably don't want you to be their personal trainer. I've learned the hard way, but you'll see people at the gym doing a lot pulled in and doing it behind. Do not do that. Very bad on your shoulder girdle. What I want you to do is pull this part to your chest. Now keep your shoulders down, bend your knees, belly button to the spine.
I'm keeping my arms long, but I'm pulling it to my chest. I am not pulling it behind me. Don't do that at the [00:27:00] gym. Very bad on your shoulder girl. So that is how we mimic a lat pulldown. What's great about these bands is you can get tougher resistance. You can always double them up so they continue to progress with you.
They give you a couple ways that you can use a pull up bar to do this as well. You can start with a bent hang. You can see me shaking. That's hard. You can get someone to help support your knees. Or you can just start with, how many can I do, right? So think about what you can do in between those exercises.
Walk it off, drink some water, do some stretching, do some crunches. What things can you do during your time to just use all that time efficiently? Couple key important things here. First of all, progress over perfection, right? Don't get yourself all here and going, I want to hit that. We will just give yourself time.
This is super duper important. And I want you to track your progress. It is so motivating to see the muscle mass go up on the scale, or all of a [00:28:00] sudden your grip strength's bigger, or all of a sudden, you know, you were squatting, holding 10 pound dumbbells, and now you're doing 20 pound dumbbells. It's amazing.
And I want you to celebrate that. Focus on the strength, focus on the power, focus on the muscle. When you do that, everything else is going to get better. Remember, muscle is that metabolic spanx. Muscle is that sugar sponge. You build more muscle, everything improves. Here's the thing. I literally started resistance training when I was 16.
There were none of these health clubs back then in those days. And I was working out with the high school football team. I joke now saying I was training for my sixties when I was 16. And so you might say, Oh my gosh, you didn't start then. Well, it's never too late and it's never too early. Resistance training is non negotiable if you want to age powerfully.
And of course you do, right? And have that great quality of life as you age. And help you keep track of your progress and stay motivated. I promised I had this. I have this handy worksheet that you can download for free so that you can record your [00:29:00] exercises, your sets, your reps, your weights, and you can track your progress over time.
And it's all about consistency. Consistency is key. You got to stick to your training and you got to continue to challenge yourself. That is mission critical key. Now, here's the deal. I'll put the handout at jjvirgin.com/Power. This is to aging powerfully. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great.
And more importantly, that you're built to last. And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website, JJVirgin.Com. And make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode at subscribetojj.com. See you next time.

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