ATHE_Transcript_Ep 560_Unlocking the Fountain of Youth Through Fitness and Strength Training
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout. Sorry, mom, turn 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.[00:01:00]
Hey, it’s JJ here and I got this comment on one of, I think it was on Apple. iTunes says, JJ, thank you for a great podcast with bite sized pieces of advice to keep us informed about health. In one of your episodes, you mentioned to let you know if we want to know about your workout routine. So here it is.
What is your workout routine? More specifically, I’ve heard that lifting heavy is good, but do you recommend lifting heavy every time I go to the gym? Currently I go three times a week or should one day be heavy and others be exhausting. After the third rep, love to know. So I asked the team, I go, should I like, go do a whole thing on my routine.
And I’ll tell you full disclosure, at the time of this recording, I am counting down to my 60th birthday and I am fired up. In fact, there was some study, I’m trying to remember where I heard about the study, but basically the study said, That if you are fired up, excited, positive about aging, you live seven years longer.
So I’m staying fired up, excited and positive. And [00:02:00] so part of that is I have been massively up-leveling. I’ve been like training for my 60th and boy have I seen some shifts. It’s been super exciting. I’m actually lifting. I used to lift heavy, heavy weights now. In
my
JJ Virgin: twenties, like 45 pound dumbbell chest presses, things like that.
And I remember some of my guy friends at the time were like, what’s the goal? I think at the time they were bothered that I was lifting as heavy a weight as they were. And I kind of like calmed it down. I’m back at it, man. And I kind of a mantra now with aging because here’s what happens as we age, but it doesn’t have to.
And that’s the important thing, starting at age 40. If left unchecked, you lose up to 1% of your muscle mass every year, which starts to double at age 60, but worse, two to 4% of your strength and even more of your power. I’m gonna define all those things in a moment, and as we age, we become what’s called anabolical resistant, meaning that we have trouble.
Breaking down our [00:03:00] protein and then using those amino acids to build muscle. We have trouble going through muscle protein synthesis, and some of this is some of the hormonal stuff. You know, estrogens and anabolic hormones, so testosterone, cortisols coming up. As we age, we’re getting more insulin resistance, so some of it’s all that flux that we need to deal with.
And some of it is just we’re not doing what we need to do. And by the way, that 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week toss that out. That goes the way of the stupid protein recommendations too. That is not gonna have you being built to last and playing full out at a hundred, my friends. And so we are disregarding those dumb.
Recommendations cuz they’re not gonna get you to where you want to be. So I’m gonna walk you through what you know, really how you look at fitness and then how you identify where you are now. And then what I’m actually doing. Because that was what was asked. And I’ll also tell them constantly upgrading this thing too.
You gotta change things up. So first of all, how do you really look at fitness? And when you look at fitness, there’s five different ways it gets defined. One is strength, one is stamina, one [00:04:00] is balance, one is flexibility, and one is agility. Now, when I think about strength, that’s where I really start to look at muscle.
I think about muscle. We’ve got strength, we’ve got hypertrophy or size, and we’ve got power. So strength is really like, okay, the amount of force that you can, that you can use, or the amount of weight that you can lift, right? So that’s a one time, like, how much can I pick up? Move around. Endurance is how many times you can move that weight without getting to failure.
And power is the ability of the body to perform an activity quickly and repeatedly when I’m designing something. Just because you’re doing a program, like there’s a program that you could design for strength. For stamina, for hypertrophy, they’re all a little different, so I’ll talk about that because we also wanna make sure that we have hypertrophy going on as we age, but we also wanna make sure that we’re maintaining strength and power.
Then I think of stamina. When I think of stamina, you know, sure, there’s the stamina of muscle and lifting, but for this, what I’m really [00:05:00] looking at is stamina in terms of cardio, and when I think of a cardiovascular workout, I think of it in a couple different ways. I think first of all, high intensity interval training, and even within that, there’s.
There’s the super high intensity interval training or sprint training within that. And then there’s also what’s known as zone two, which is just below it’s, it’s where you’re working out. You sound breathy, but you can carry on a conversation. It’s like 60 to 70% of your target heart rate. And so those are the two areas I really focus on in cardio, and I’ll show you where I use them, especially with zone two after a meal.
Is amazing cuz it lowers the blood sugar response to the meal, sucks the carbs into the working muscles, and then balance and flexibility. Huge by the way. So, couple crazy statistics and I don’t have the exact ones right here, but they’re all over the place. And we will find them and put them in the show notes.
How’s that? The team loves it when I [00:06:00] do this, but turns out that grip strength is correlated with all cause mortality. People of weak grip strengths have higher risk of of every type of death. That’s what all cause mortality. Any which way you go. Also, turns out that. Someone who’s got less muscle mass is at a higher risk for death than someone who’s got more body fat.
So it is worse for you to lose muscle than it is for you to gain fat, and in fact, you’re better off having more fat, more muscle than having less fat, less muscle. So muscle is super duper important. And of course, grip strength is gonna go along with muscle, really not perfectly one-to-one, but it does Then, In terms of cardiovascular fitness, the people that were at the lowest end of cardiovascular fitness had 400% higher all cause mortality risks than people at the high end of cardiovascular fitness.
Then you look at balance and failure to be able to, to stay on one foot for 10 seconds. I mean, come on, 10 seconds. High risk of all cause mortality. [00:07:00] So this is not a vanity play here. Yes, you will look better naked if you’re doing these things. Yes, you will. You’ll look better, you know, in a short sleeved shirt, right?
Yes, you will. But that’s not the point. And this is why I want people to stop focusing on losing weight and start focusing on putting on muscle. It takes care of everything. It’s your metabolic span, right? But then balance and flexibility. So balance. Again, super important. As we age, and this is where I use yoga, and I also make sure that when I’m doing resistance training, I’m doing big ranges of motion to improve flexibility.
They used to say, oh, if you weight train, you’ll get less flexible. Not true if you’re doing good. Range of motion and then agility. And this is where, you know, we as adults do not have any fun. You know, I remember asking someone and then I kind of turned that question back on myself cuz I was asking client, Hey, when was the last time you had fun?
And I kinda looked at myself, Hey Missy, when was the last time you had fun? Like, what are you doing to play? What are you doing out there in the world? Like, are you going out and doing any [00:08:00] sports? Have you taken up pickleball? Like, what are the new things? Because you can teach an old dog new tricks and for agility, For reaction time, you know, think ping pong, pickleball, paddle boarding, things that cause, you know, rotational movements thing that cause, you know, quick shifts, so you have to go, oh, I have to move, like tap dancing, which I keep threatening to do.
Again, sadly, my old broken foot’s just not working with me, but we’ll see. But what sport can you put in that’s gonna involve that? Or could you throw in some plyometrics? I actually did my, a lot of my graduate work, like it’s all coming back to haunt me. One of them was doing, Spinal lifting, biomechanics and the fastest way to build strength.
And the other one project I did was all on plyometrics and we actually designed a plyometrics class back in the eighties. And the funniest thing was it was too hard. Back then, all the classes, fitness classes were 50 to 60 minutes. This class was, people were dead in 10 minutes and we didn’t know what to do.
You know? Now I’m like, [00:09:00] oh, I know exactly how to work with this. But back then there was no such thing. Like people didn’t understand the high intensity interval training, but plyometrics is another way to really do this jump training. So I say all that because you wanna be thinking about all these things as you’re putting fitness program together.
I’ve thought about it, so you don’t need to, how’s that? But you know, how do we measure success on this fitness program? Well, one of the things, is street body composition, now I. And really, really a stickler on this. I know there’s all this stuff about the scale, and I think the scale is just the stupidest thing.
We’ve gotta have a bio-impedance scale. Just knowing your weight, not knowing what that weight is made up of is a meaningless data. You know, let’s say me, I weigh 150 pounds. If I weigh 150 pounds and I’m 30% body fat, that is an entirely different body composition and healthy body composition, rather than, let’s say I’m 20% body fat.
So you got to, got to, got to know what your weight is made up of. So bio-impedance scale is great for that. And then going once or twice a [00:10:00] year, once you know, and really I think it should be twice a year and getting a DEXA scan because we need to see how much of your body is lean mass versus fat. And then we need to go farther than that because not only do we need to know what your body fat is, we really need to know what is visceral adipose tissue, what’s that fat around the organs?
That’s the fat that matters, right? And that’s where a tape measure and is perfect in betweens to measure as well. And then we wanna know how much of your lean mass is skeletal mass? And how are you looking there? Because that’s that thing that we can really improve and we improve skeletal mass will improve metabolism immune function.
Growth hormone, bone density, like just the list goes on and on and on. Because muscle is a metabolic organ. It’s an endocrine organ. It’s not just there holding everything in tighter, right? It’s a sugar sponge. Gives your body a place to store amino acids and carbohydrates rather than storing those carbs on your belly.
But it also is the first place we can start to [00:11:00] restore insulin sensitivity. Okay. And again, It is literally healthier to have more muscle and more fat than to have less muscle and less fat. That’s why we gotta get off of this. I gotta lose weight. No. No. No, because if you lose weight and lose a bunch of muscle, you made yourself worse.
Not better. We want to hold onto and build muscle, then drop fat. And guess what? If you focus on the muscle, the rest will come. I say this because frailty is like the biggest scary risk as we age. And this is why this, the earlier you were when you started weight training, the better. But wherever you are now start.
If you haven’t started yet, start now. Okay. Single most important thing because we wanna avoid sarcopenia and. It was really interesting when my 16 year old son was in the hospital and I watched him go from, you know, being basically 180 pound guy, big six feet tall guy down to 145, and I was like watching him, [00:12:00] you know, become catabolic and, and waste away and I started hammering him with amino acids and starting to get all the movement I possibly could with him.
So that I could avoid this because frailty is a very dangerous thing. Frailty is sarcopenia. And how would you know? This is why you need to get a DEXA scan done. You need to do, be able to check at home with a bio-impedence scale because the big way you’d know is muscle weakness. But you know, people think this is natural aging.
No, this is because you’re sitting on the couch and you’re not eating enough protein. Okay? Very problematic. It’s because you’re not active and you’re not eating the right way. And remember, even just eating an inflammatory diet can block muscle protein. Since this, and here’s what’s scary about sarcopenia.
Up to 11% of the 50 and 60 year olds out there have this, this should not be happening. At 50 and 60, and ideally it does not have to happen. When I was doing my PhD work at University of Southern California, I was in the [00:13:00] exercise phys department, but my focus was exercise, physiology, gerontology, aging, and nutrition.
We had master athletes in there who were killing it at 90 years old. So none of this stuff has to happen. Yes, you’ll have some muscle loss. Yes, you’ll have some strength loss, but it will be like a fraction of what happens when people are not active and not eating correctly. So ways you can tell where you’re at.
Again, a balance test standing on one leg. Grip strength. I actually got a little hand dynamometer, they cost like 30 bucks. This is a great thing to have to monitor your strength. And I will tell you that I did a grip strength test fully expecting to like exceed everything. And my grip strength was, it was in the ideal range, was that the higher level of the ideal range.
But I didn’t get into the next category which said strong. And I’m like, you can imagine how my competitive little self felt. So I am now gonna be. Working more strength into my program because hypertrophy and strength are not the same you can do for your cardiovascular [00:14:00] fitness. There’s a Rockport, I think it’s a one mile walk test or a 12 minute walk test, but it basically is your walking speed.
You can also do a one minute step test on a 12 inch box and see how fast your heart rate recovers down. Also, a lot of the bikes have a little fitness test. It predicted VO2 max test on them. And what you’re really looking to is how high your heart rate’s going and how quickly it’s returning back down.
And then of course flexibility. Hey, can you touch your toes, right? Sit and reach test to touch your toes. Test. So that’s where you wanna see where you’re at. And the reason I bring those up is because we need to design the right fitness program for you. Now, if you’re super duper flexible, then we do not need to focus on that.
If you’ve been doing loads of cardio your whole life, like we can probably just focus on cardio two days a week. Or maybe you’ve been like me and I’m like, I will default to the gym above everything else. So I actually had to say, you know what? I’m gonna like start to make sure I’m getting that cardio burst training [00:15:00] in.
I’m getting the yoga in cuz those are not my natural state of happiness and I need to make sure they’re doing it. So that’s what I say when I look at this. Now, naturally I’m gonna tend to focus you towards resistance training because as we age we are losing that and so I really wanna make sure that you put that in as a priority.
So I think for the majority of us, we are gonna wanna hit each muscle group minimally two days a week. Up to three times a week. So depending on if you’re splitting up your muscles or if you’re doing ’em all at once, that’s either gonna be, you know, two, three or four days in the gym. But generally I’ll have people do three days, all body parts or four days, and I’ll have them do.
Split routines, two days each. Okay. So again, think about where you are deficient. Right. So I’m gonna start first with resistance training. And it’s interesting. Back when I was in school, there was like these very specific parameters on how you were supposed to do things. [00:16:00] They’ve loosened up some. Now we know that for strength now, first, if you have never done resistance training before, my big recommendation is to hire a personal trainer to help you set up a program.
You do not need to work with them every single time, and that’s the, I think we don’t know the best way to use a personal trainer. And again, look for someone like who is N A s M and c s. National Strength and Conditioning Association, national Association of Sports Medicine, American College of Sports Medicine, look for someone who has got a really smart certification.
Those are, those are all great certifications, but what they can do is set up a program for you. Make sure that you are operating in good form. That is so important. And then they can revise that program for you every six to 12 weeks. So that’s a great use of a trainer. You are gonna design a program that helps you with your strength and your hypertrophy.
Now let me give you some kind of strength hypertrophy, stamina, ideas, strength. When we first start weight training. So the first, like let’s say four to six weeks, your strength training, a lot of what’s gonna be happening [00:17:00] is more like, Neural learning, your nervous system and your muscles are learning how to talk together.
So a lot of what happens is you’ll see a strength increase, but not a big hypertrophy increase yet that takes a little longer. So if you’re new to this, I just want you to know that for absolute strength, and whenever I say these things, this is the heaviest weight you can handle in this repetition range in good form.
Okay? That’s important. If your form goes stop, right? And what we’re really trying to get to is as close to failure, I can’t do another one as possible. So for strength, that ranges one to five repetitions and a repetition is you have a set, let’s say that you are doing overhead presses where you’re pushing a dumbbell over your head.
That’s the exercise overhead presses. A set is a group of repetitions. So if I did 12 repetitions, that would be one set of 12. I can do multiple sets. I can do repetition ranges and then I have rest breaks. In general, [00:18:00] the harder you’re gonna do, like if you’re gonna do big strength pushes, you’ll probably need a little longer time to recover, and you wanna give yourself at least a minute.
But some of these things you might take up to five minutes to recover. But generally I find for people it’s one to two minutes of recovery. And one of the things that’s happening when you start to work in the hypertrophy range, which tends to be eight to 15, but there’s no magic, like there isn’t some magic thing that happens between, you know, rep five and rep eight, right?
Eight to 12 used to be like, this is the hypertrophy range. Now it’s like, oh, could be 15. Oh, could even be up to 30. But what I like to think of is eight to 15 is my hypertrophy range. 20 to 30 is where I focus more on stamina. Yes, you will have hypertrophy in there too, but I use those because these three things help me shift my resistance training around.
So I’m continuing to change it up. So strength ranges might be one to five, and generally I’ll do like. Five of those. So I might do, you know, five sets of three reps hypertrophy. Eight to 15, [00:19:00] I’ll do three to four of those stamina, 20 to 30. I tend to do two of those and I hate it, so I make myself vary it up.
Now you can vary it within the workout or you can vary it within the week, and then also I’m throwing into there at least one day a week, some plyometrics. Those are jump types of training. And that is things like jumping jacks, could be a squat, jump, can be jumping up and down on a box.
Could be what’s called a speed skater or jumping side lunge burpees. You can use a TRX to do a jumping side squat. There’s a lot of different things that you can do there.
I am just letting you know this. I have on my list to do, my endless list to do. I’m sure you can relate to create my Built to Last exercise program where I teach these things. You’re gonna wanna get, ideally to near failure on [00:20:00] these. When you get towards the last set, that’s where you really want to go.
Ugh, I can’t do another one. That’s what really stimulates your muscles. If you’re doing the same thing, your muscles do not need to get stimulated. To grow more, you have to push more in order for your muscles to grow more. And sometimes for me, in order to get to the next heaviest weight, I have to drop it down.
Focus on strength. And then I move over to hypertrophy and I’m able to keep close to that weight as I move into hypertrophy. Then I’ll do hypertrophy for a while. Then I’ll move into stamina, and I get close to that weight to move into stamina, and then I just keep rolling it around. Now when I’m at the gym, I focus on compound movements.
Why? Because they’re more like life and life. Were not bolted to the floor. Right? And life, were not like doing, think of a bicep curl when, unless you’re, I don’t know what you would be doing in life where you’d ever be just doing a bicep curl. I know they act like that’s where you’re drinking beer. I don’t drink beer, but you know, what do you ever do?
That’s a single leg movement. And I think of the leg extension on the machine. Unless you’re like a drum major at, I don’t know what you’d be doing there. So I think of compound movements [00:21:00] and ideally I’m using a free weight or a cable or my body weight. Dumbbells, you know, and I’ve incorporating some balance in because this is more like real life.
So I’m gonna walk through some of these different ones for you, but that’s why I’m doing it. When you’re doing compound movements, you’re gonna pull in your core. The best way to work your core is not abs on the floor. The best way to work your core is to do things like pushups, squats, bend over rows that require your core work.
When I’m doing more muscles, I’m pulling in. More energy, right? So it’s gonna be better for my metabolism and it’s more functional. I have divided the body into, four parts. Number one is upper body pushing. And upper body pushing are things like pushups, overhead presses, dips. They involve your chest, they involve your shoulders, they involve your triceps, upper body pulling.
Are things that include your biceps, your lats, and your shoulders, especially your rhomboids, rear deltoids, hips and thighs [00:22:00] and hinging activities involve your glutes and your quads, and you’ll also pull in there some of your hamstring, right, and calves. But I really put the core. Exercise the core body parts, which to me are more hamstring, back extensors, truck extensors, rotational movements.
I put that in as what I call power core. Now, I don’t do a lot of focused work on the core because I do yoga and I do free weights, so I know I’m getting it. But I’ll share a couple things that I do do. Yes, I said do, do. And again, I’m gonna focus on wherever I can. Using dumbbells rather than a bar so that I don’t create imbalances using a single arm or a single leg where I can, and I can incorporate some balance using cables or a TRX.
I love me that T R X, I’ve got two at home. I’ve got one outside on the tree and I’ve got one in my home gym. And that one I, I take with me and I travel with I love, and I just, you know, gosh, when I forget my TRX, that’s just a sad day. But [00:23:00] that TRX saves you, especially if you go into a gym and it’s just mobbed.
You can always use the hotel stairwell and the TRX and you are covered, of course, your body weight and dumbbells. So let’s start first with. Hips and thighs. And when I think of hips and thighs, here’s the things that I love. First of all, a squat. Now a squat is just one of the most functional things ever.
You have to get up out of the chair, out of the car, off the toilet. That’s a squat, right? I blew out my knee. I initially injured my knee when I was 17. Blew it out in my early twenties. I mean, I’ve had a total knee replacement at 50 something. I have had. Major knee surgeries, so many of them because of this silly thing I did when I was on point ballet.
And so for years I’ve been modifying these. But I will tell you that like I can totally do squats and I would say what you do if you need to work with a trainer first to be able to do these things, you know, this is mimicking normal life. So we want to try [00:24:00] to get into these and do them with good form.
But you can’t always do a ball wall squat or a leg press if you need to, and you cannot do a regular squat. So you can do a squat. That’s the biggest one I would focus on. Obviously there’s other things that include your hips and thighs and hinging, like pleis, like leg press, like step-ups, like lunges.
But I love squats and single leg squats that I’ll do with the TRX. Now, the other thing I do in there that really is more of a power core move, but gets the glutes, of course, gets the hamstrings, gets the erector spine i. So it kind of fits in there as a deadlift. And I do a stiff legged deadlift. First of all, great glute exercise, great hamstring exercise, and I really focus on keeping my back extended and hinging from the hips, not the back.
But you know what? A functional movement, I mean these are things that we do in life is we have to stand up and then we have to pick something heavy up. That’s my first one. Now for upper body [00:25:00] pulling, I love bent over rose because again, I think of like pulling something like groceries out of the car. So I love bent over rows..
You can modify that into a one arm row. I also like using, at the gym, I’ll do a lat pull down. This could also be a pull up. I generally will do pull-ups. I can get about four pull-ups in. That’s it. Yeah. But I get an assist from my husband on those. So I will do pull-ups. Sometimes I’ll use my TRX to do a rowing type of exercise or a pull down modified pulldown.
You can use bands here, but my two favorite exercises here, Would be a bent over row and then either a pull up or pull down at the gym. That’s the same exercise. If they have one of those pull up machines, that’s an assisted pull-up machine. Those are fantastic upper body pushing. The thing I really love at upper body pushing, notice how simple I’m keeping this right now.
I’m not giving you a ton of exercises. I’m having you do a squat and a deadlift. I’m having you do a bent over row and a pull down and then I’m gonna have you do a chest press. Now at home, this could be a push up [00:26:00] and I want an overhead press and I really love a standing overhead press with dumbbells because we’re gonna axial load your spine.
You want great bone density. It’s not happening from walking, okay, it, you need to load your spine. Squats are great for that. Overhead presses are great for that. So that is where I love that. And again, how could we divide it? You could do your squat deadlift one day and then the bent over rose chest press the next day.
But I really see this and go, what if we just took these exercises and said, I’m gonna go to a workout and I’m gonna do a squat, a deadlift, a bent over row, pull down a chest press and overhead press three days a week and I’m gonna rotate between one day. I’ll go in there and I will do my strength, one to five, five sets.
The next time, I’ll go in there and I will do my hypertrophy three sets, eight to 12. My next time I’m gonna go in there and I’m gonna do my stamina, two sets of 20 to 30, and I’m gonna do those so that the last set, when I’m doing it, I get to the point where I’m like, I can’t do it again. I, I will tell you, when I’m doing the hypertrophy ones, I’m getting that way on a couple [00:27:00] of the sets.
That’s where you want to be. That’s the progressive overload that makes your body come back stronger. We’ll talk about food in a moment cuz that yes matters. Okay? So that’s my resistance training. Now, if you’ve been around my community, you know that I was a very resistant yoga person. I avoided it like the plague, and then I went to Cal-a-Vie to go speak.
And I took a yoga class, hated every minute of it, but realized how amazing it was and that I needed to do this. Remember I talked earlier about where are you good and where are you not? I just, I was like in the weight room. That’s what I like to do. I do weights, hiking and hit that Was it. And I went, you know what, I’m gonna do yoga.
And I recruited Tim, my hubby to do it with me because he is really, really disciplined. So now we go do hot yoga one to two times a week. It has been a game changer for us. We are the oldest people in the class. We went to the class with all the young yogis who are literally like 20 and 30 and you know, doing like [00:28:00] standing crow pose or whatever the heck it is.
But we now, I crow pose. I will tell you. So yoga one to two times a week balance isometrics, a lot of sweating cuz I do hot yoga, a lot of mindfulness in there. We also do a sound healing workshop before one of them. That’s my little thing there is with my resistance training and my yoga. And I literally now have taken my weights where I used to go to the gym six days a week.
I admit it, I now go three times a week, some maybe four. And I do yoga one to two times a week cuz I’m doing my cardio the rest of the time cause I will naturally default. Over two weights and blow everything else off. So I need to focus on my cardio. The way I like to do cardio is, I think of it this doing hit and sit.
Hit training is where you go all out from anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds. You recover for twice as long and you repeat. And I actually went and bought running shoes so I could start doing this outside. And I also got a rucking vest so I could start doing the next thing, which is [00:29:00] zone two outside. So HIT training.
That’s HIT training, but there’s a part of HIT training called SIT training, sprint interval training. That’s even harder. And that is literally where you kill yourself for like eight to 10 seconds and then you walk it off and then you do it again and you walk it off. So I’m doing some sit and hit to accumulate at least four minutes of really hard, sometimes eight.
And then after that I’m moving into zone two for 20 to 30 minutes. And that’s where you can keep your heart rates up, your breathy, your breathing hard but you can carry on a conversation. That’s when you know you’re in zone two. Now, the other time to do zone two is after meals. And so what I put into my practice, cuz I was like, oh, you gotta walk after every meal.
Well then I was not doing it. I’m just being fully transparent here. So what I decided is I’m gonna make sure every morning and every night that I do some self-care morning, I find it way easier to get the routine down. I do meditation, I do some, some positive reading. I do cold plunge, and then I go [00:30:00] workout.
Evening. I just decided I’m gonna put one thing in, so maybe it’s sauna one night, one night. It’s rock walking, so whatever it is, one. Every night I do something. Know if I really am just getting in the way of myself, I can always just do red light therapy for 10 minutes. Something has to happen every night.
There’s always something or a hot bath with Epson salt bath. That’s an easy default, but especially great if you can do this after a meal. If you can go and do some zone two after a meal, or even even milder than zone two. But a 20 minute walk after a meal can lower the blood sugar response, the meal.
Suck the carbs into your working muscles. Yay. Yay. So that’s fantastic. Now there’s one more thing here, and this is the one that I’m working on too, is learning new things, getting yourself outta your comfort zone, trying something different. So this could be trying pickleball, which we literally have a pickleball court, private pickleball court.
We share a street with a neighbor and I’m like going like, I still haven’t tried it. So that could be, it’s something that involves [00:31:00] some. Agility, right? Some reaction time. So could be ping pong, pickleball. I do paddle boarding. You know what is something that you can try that’s new and different? That’s gonna take a little bit of learning too, cuz you want to be the old dog learning new tricks.
So that’s the other piece. To put on in there. Now, it’s not just how you work the muscles, it’s also how you fuel them. This is super duper important. I will tell you just like I think that it is just ridiculous. This 150 minutes of easy / moderate exercise, no lift, heavy things. The other thing here is that you need to fuel too.
And this idea that we need 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight is ridiculous. As we age, we need more protein, not less. We tend to eat less, so this has to be priority. You have to do protein first, and I want you to get 0.7 grams per one pound of target body weight. So whatever you know your ideal body weight to be.
Point seven grams to one pound of target body weight. Here’s the deal. If you are vegan, vegetarian, go to the higher level. [00:32:00] If you are trying to lose weight, go to the higher level. If you are working out hard, go to the higher level. I’d rather you air higher than lower, and you need that protein after that workout.
So super important. The reason I have you go higher is because we need to make sure with you vegans, vegetarians, that you’re getting the branch chain aminos, and especially the leucine that you need to trigger mTOR to trigger muscle protein synthesis. Just like protein’s critical. Cause you need the amino acids to, for the building blocks of muscle.
And by the way, even if you’re not working out, which you are because. You are going to lift heavy things, right? That’s why you’re listening to this. Even if you weren’t, if all you did was get your protein to optimal levels, you will increase your lean body mass. How cool is that? Think about what happens when you put the two together and then you make sure that you’re getting good carbohydrates to fuel muscle protein.
Synthesis, carbohydrates basically are that fuel, and they’re also stored in your muscles for energy because when you’re lifting heavy weights, you’re not using fat. You are using carbs for that when you’re doing these explosive anaerobic [00:33:00] moves, that’s carbohydrate driven, not fat driven. The biggest time we use fat is when we are sitting around, right?
That’s when our body’s the best fat burner. We need to be able to burn fat, burn sugar, and so you need those carbohydrates. We eat carbohydrates. We store ’em in our muscles so that we can use them when we are putting our body under stress. And so what kind of carbohydrates? Every day we need to make sure, along with getting at least 30 grams of protein at each meal, especially your breakfast when you break your fast and your dinner, the bumper meals.
Then if you need, like me, I’m 150 pounds. I get 150 grams of protein in a day. My breakfast and dinner tend to be about 50 grams of protein. I’d like to eat 50 grams of each meal. My low end that I’ll get to is 120 grams carbs. You should have two fruit servings every day. And here’s the thing, diversity matters.
We know that a better gut microbiome, more diverse gut microbiome. Things like exercise. Do this, by the way, a little bit of intermittent fasting. You gotta make sure this isn’t a [00:34:00] daily thing cuz you need to make sure you’re getting in enough protein for muscle protein synthesis. But two days a week, shortened feeding window of like six to eight hours is gonna help you with gut microbiome diversity.
Eating more plants, gut microbiome diversity, and that means you’ll have better bacteroides to Firmicutes ratio. Firmicutes makes you store fat. Bacteroides helps you be lean, so that’s super helpful. Is getting in least two fruits every day. Rotate them not the same fruit every day, and getting in at least five servings of non-starchy vegetables cup raw half cup cooked broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, red peppers.
Ondi, eat from the rainbow. All the different polyphenols, all do different things, and then slow, low carbs, legumes, roots, that kind of thing, close to nature as possible. The big question I get asked is, should I work out fast? It turns out for women, it’s really actually a disadvantage for us. What you don’t wanna do is go eat a bunch and then go work out because you only have so much blood and you wanna make sure your blood’s able to go to your working muscles.
It’s not sitting there going to [00:35:00] digestion, but you are better off having something to eat prior to a workout. I find most women do way better with that. We are better generally at using fat during workouts than men anyway. So it’s not how much fat you burn during the workout, it’s how much fat you burn during the day.
It’s how much quality workout, how hard you can workout. And generally if you eat and hour or so before a workout, you’re gonna have a better, heavier, harder workout. And that’s what makes the difference. So I’m not a fan of fasted workouts. The things that I think are super important to take here to support. I use my paleo inspired shake and then I add an extra collagen.
It’s got collagen in it because it’s bone broth protein. But I add an extra scoop because that gets me up to 30 grams of protein right there. Then I will add in, I use flax milk, that’s called this Good Karma protein plus flax milk. So I’m getting extra protein there. When you’re doing that, you’re getting your branch chains in there as well?
Of course. Because they’re in that protein. Now other things that I’m taking, creatine should be on everybody’s list. [00:36:00] The minute you’re 50 plus, you should be taking creatine, depending on your size, three to five grams a day. It takes you about a month to get up to tissue saturation. If you want to jumpstart that, then take the dose that you’ll end up taking.
Take that four times a day for five days. So if you’re a smaller person, say 120 pounds or less, three grams a day. If you’re more than that, five grams a day. I take five grams of creatine monohydrate every single day. I take it along with something called GG that’s in my menopause support packet that helps anabolic hormone production, helps with bone density, helps with inflammation.
So those two together are my big key products. The other thing that I use here is mito pure by timeline, because Mitopure by timeline, I call it exercise in a bottle. I do not say that so that you will not exercise. But what it does is it helps your mitochondria actually go through mycophagy because mitochondria, your mitochondria are always going through just like your bones.
Do this. Your body is breaking down and building up, breaking down and building up [00:37:00] your mitochondria, your powerhouses of the cell, are doing this. And in your muscles, you have lots of mitochondria in your muscle cells, right as you age. They break down more than they build up and you, when you break ’em down, you should use those recycling products.
To build new mitochondria, right? To build new tissue. So Mitopure helps you do that, helps facilitate that process so that we are in that great stage of mycophagy, we’re not just breaking down or stuck there with all the cellular debris stuck, clogging things up so that you cannot go through mycophagy. So I use that.
I also use water with my electro replenish, so I take that with me. I drink a electrolyte drink every day. And then I also do my vitamin C drink, but I don’t drink it near my workout. I drink that way later in the day because there’s just like cold plunging. I do cold plunging usually about 18 hours after a workout because it can reduce the, remember when you work out, you are doing microtearing, you’re doing hormesis, you’re [00:38:00] stressing your body, and your body has to go through this process of rebuilding.
And if you then all of a sudden go, I’m gonna take a. Cold plunge, it can just shut that process off. So we don’t want to do that. So I’ll use that again. I’ll do it in the morning. Then I take a hot shower after that to heat myself up because I need to be warm to go into the gym. Other key important thing here is sleep.
This is when we’re raising growth hormone. This is when we’re repairing. And then also important thing here is monitoring your H, your H R V heart rate variability. And if you see your heart rate, we used to monitor your resting heart rate, and if we saw your resting heart rate creeping up, we’re like, oh, you’re over training.
Oh my gosh. This is now. What you’re gonna do is monitor your sleep and your H R V and see how those are doing. And if you’re getting issues with H R V, we might need to adjust your training. And then finally, if you can either get a massage or do some foam rolling, that can be super helpful too. The big takeaway here is to start thinking now, how do I want to be living at a hundred?
And if I wanna playful [00:39:00] out at a hundred, what needs to happen? And what needs to happen is that you have to lift heavy things so that you build that muscle, then you have to. Eat protein first. So you have the building blocks to build that muscle and add creatine in there, and then you have to sleep like a baby so that your body can recover and repair and restore.
There it is. That’s the easy peasy formula. But this is not easy. Remember, you’re lifting heavy things, and I’d love to hear from you how this is working for you, because I’m really on a, just like a mission to get people to stop focusing on losing weight. I still have to say this because people, again, that’s what they look at, but again, once I get your attention, it’s like it’s not about the weight loss.
It’s about knowing what your weight’s made up of and putting on muscle. That’s your focus. There you go. All right, I will see you next time. Thanks so much for tuning in. 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, [00:40:00] 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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