I’m JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times bestselling 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 Podcast. 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.

How did you get those arms? So I get asked this all the time, and you may be surprised to learn that it’s actually not that hard to get ripped, lean, toned arms. It’s actually the easiest body part to transform, if you follow the strategies I’m going to share in this video. Now, there are three parts to building great arms, and the last one is super critical, and I find it’s usually the one that gets ignored.

So first, Obviously, you have to work them. The thing that’s critical for hypertrophy, building muscle, is volume. In order for you to build muscle, we’ve got to look at a couple different things. We need to look at the exercises you’re going to do, the sets of those exercises, the reps within the sets, and how much per week.

That’s a lot to unpack. First of all, you have an exercise, like let’s call it a push up, and you are going to do a set A set of push ups. A set is how many times you do it. That’s your repetitions. And then you’re going to do multiple times a week. We’re going to divide it into upper body pushing and upper body pulling.

I want you to do that at least twice a week, but ideally it’s going to be better off if you do them three times a week. Now, your repetitions. Let’s talk about that first. You can actually work within a pretty broad range of repetitions. To build muscle anywhere from as low as six repetitions per set, all the way up to 30 repetitions per set.

So it’s really where you feel more comfortable, but there is something important here. You have to get to a point at the end of the set where you feel like you could maybe only squeeze out one or two more. Again, you’re going to want to hit each body part. The pushing and the pulling minimum two times a week, ideally three times a week and with a good rest break in between.

So when you’re looking at building these great arms, now this was might surprise you. I’m going to focus on compound movements first rather than just my arms. So I focus on upper body pushing and upper body pulling. When I think of upper body pushing, this is going to involve my chest, my shoulders, and my triceps.

And these are exercises like a push up or a chest press, that’s chest, shoulders, triceps, an overhead press, and a dip. So the reason I focus on compound rather than single, like just doing a tricep extension, is that I’ve got to pull in a lot more muscles. And the cool thing is, I’m still using my triceps.

Anytime I’m pushing, my triceps are involved. But if I’m just doing, say, a triceps pushdown, I’m only really crossing the elbow joint. If I’m doing a dip, I’m crossing the elbow and the shoulder and the shoulder blades, the scapula. So I’m using a lot more joints. So I try to do compound movements because they’re way more metabolically costly and they will still Work my arms.

That’s the first piece. Now, when I think of upper body pushing, I’m going to have you start with these things. I want you to do some kind of a chest focused exercise. So again, that could be a push up, chest press. Then I want you to do some kind of a shoulder focused exercise. Easiest one there is an overhead press.

And then I love dips. Those are more tricep centric. On the other side, we’re going to look at upper body pulling. Anytime you’re pulling, you’re going to involve your bicep. But when I’m doing pulling, I’m also using my lap shoulders and the back of my shoulders. So I’ll start with something like a lap pull down or a pull up bent over row or a seated cable row and maybe an upright row.

So that’s the first part, is making sure that you’re working them, focusing on those compound movements and making sure that you have that volume in place, that you’re doing multiple sets of each exercise, and you’re getting to that point where you’re gotten one or two more that you can. Eek out, but you’re really starting to feel fatigued.

The next thing you have to do is make sure that you can feed those muscles. You have to have the right fuel on board. This is really twofold. Number one, obviously, is protein. And I’ve got a protein cheat sheet for you at jjvirgin. com forward slash protein cheat sheet. But basically, you’re going to eat 0.

7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight of protein. That’s about 30 grams to 40 grams at each meal minimum. 30 grams animal, 40 grams plant, 100 grams overall. That’s minimum. But we want that 30 to 40 grams because we want to have enough of an amino acid called leucine to trigger muscle protein synthesis.

Remember, as we age, we have a phenomenon called anabolic resistance that starts to hit where it’s harder for us to build muscle. We need more protein, not less to be able to have that trigger. And so, and when we’re younger, a lot of what we can do with building muscles, hormonal. 30 plus, not so anymore.

We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the protein that we need on board along with that resistance training. Uh, a little hack is also taking some essential amino acids. And there’s some pretty interesting research around essential amino acids helping with sarcopenia as we age. So I think this is a great thing.

If you’re not quite hitting your protein needs at breakfast or dinner as well. A couple other things I like to do, I especially love fish protein, but I also think fish oil can be something important to add into. It’s anti inflammatory, which is really important because if you’re inflamed, you actually can block muscle protein synthesis and fish oil helps with insulin sensitivity.

And again, the things that can get in the way of you building muscle are being insulin resistant and inflamed. Another thing that I think is super important, especially for women, is taking creatine. I think there’s a lot of misinformation around creatine out there. So if you are concerned about creatine and fluid retention in the muscle, which is good, and if you’re using a bio impedance machine to monitor Your body composition, you’ll actually see this as increased total body water and increased muscle.

What you can do is instead of just going straight up to taking 5 grams of creatine a day, start with 1 gram and just bring it up every couple days until you get to 3 to 5 grams overall. The big thing that’s going to help you do is work out harder. And if you can work out harder, then it’s going to improve the quality of your workout, which is going to help you build muscle.

The other one that I take every day is something called So one of the things that happens as we age is our mitochondria, we are constantly in a state of breaking down and building up. You go to the gym, you break down a little bit, then your muscle has to go through muscle protein synthesis and build back up.

And we’re constantly breaking down and building up. We just want to make sure we’re building up more than we’re breaking down. The cool thing is there’s a product called MitoPure. It’s urolithin A. This is something that you take. I take it every day. It helps your mitochondria repair and regenerate better.

And then the other part of it is, you have to be able to show them. And that means you got to get rid of any fat covering them, right? You got to get lean. Now, what do you need to do to drop your body fat? Well, there’s two things that matter here. One of them is caloric restriction. Caloric restriction, what I like to have you do, To get yourself lean, to get your body fat down, is number one, just take a week and track how much you eat.

Don’t change anything. Now I’m already considering that you’re already optimizing for protein, you’re already doing that, but you’re just seeing how many calories you eat each day to maintain your weight. Once you can see that, and you do it over a week because of course it’ll fluctuate, but you should be able to see an average after you do it for a week of about how many calories you eat a day to maintain your weight.

Once you know that number, Then, you’re going to do caloric restriction to lean out a little bit if you want to drop your body fat. And I like to do a formula I learned from Dr. Bill Campbell. Five days of caloric restriction, 25 percent lower than what you need, so if you’re a 2, 000 calorie a day average person, go to 1, 500 for five days, then go back to 2, 000 for two.

And cycle that until you get to where you want to be. Alongside that, I want you to also track your overall activity. You can go work out three days a week, hit that upper body hard, but if you sit the rest of the time, it’s not going to help you. So what we want to make sure is that you’ve also increased your overall activity.

And there’s two things that are going to help you get lean here. Number one, just moving more all throughout the day. So that’s where you want to get your 8 to 12, 000 steps a day in and high intensity interval training. Okay. The research shows that doing high intensity interval training is really good for helping you lose body fat.

And so high intensity interval training is where you do cycles. There’s a variety of different ways to do this. There’s everything from Tabata, where you do 20 seconds all out and 10 seconds recovery, 20 seconds all out. 10 seconds recovery to a one minute on, one minute off, Norwegian four by four, which is four hard minutes and three minutes of recovery.

I like to mix it up. So some days I’ll do a Norwegian four by four and I’ll do four minutes of a really hard circuit. And then I’ll do three minutes of walk around and go back. Some days I’ll do one minute on my sprint treadmill and then one minute walking, mix it up, but that’s going to help your body use more.

Fat for fuel, it’s gonna help you drop body fat. So we talked about what you need to build them. We talked about what you need to do to feed them and then we talked about how to drop your body fat so that you will show them because you gotta have your arms lean so you can see that muscle. All those things matter.

And by the way, a little hack, a little bit of belongs are helps there too. Two,

be sure to join me next time for more tools. Tip. Words and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website jjvirgin. com and make sure to follow my podcast at subscribetojj. com so you don’t miss a single episode.

And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. 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 health care 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 this show or read in our show notes.

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