บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ Strength Training for Moms over 35: Why Progress Feels Slow

Who also believed that if they didn't see results right away, they thought that they were failing. So I did what I always do when something matters to me. I dive in, I get a little bit nerdy about it, and I went on the journey to really figure out what the research actually says about how long we can expect to see those results, whether that's strength, building muscle, how often do we actually need to lift, and what food and sleep have to do with the equation. So let's go ahead and dive in. So, step one, we want to change the timeline or the deadline that we have set for ourselves. This is where we are going to look at swapping the clock, that internal clock that we have for how long we think our results should take. And I want to start with why I call strength a long-term investment and not just something that's going to show up with microwave speed results. A study came out earlier this year in JAMA, which is just a big medical journal. Researchers followed more than 5,000 women for about eight years. So that's a pretty big sample size. That's a long runway to collect data. The women were aged 63 to 99. At the start, they did two simple tests. One was to squeeze this handle as hard as you can. The next test was to stand up from a chair five times as fast as they could. What they found was the strongest women were less likely to die during those eight years. The ones with the strongest grip had about a third lower risk, and it held up even after the researchers factored in how much those women walked and moved around. So, other movement and exercise. Now, does that prove that lifting was the thing that necessarily kept them alive? No, it tells us strong women lived longer. It can't tell us. which one caused the other. And these women were in their late 70s. So unless you're way ahead of the schedule, they are likely a little bit older than you. But it does line up with some other research. When scientists pulled 16 studies, so they're looking at 16 different studies, people who did regular strength work were less likely to die early and less likely to get heart disease or diabetes. 30 to 60 minutes a week Seem to do the most good. So when we break that down, that's really not a lot of time. I'm not promising you that lifting is going to make you live forever, but what I am saying is that strength is what gets us up off the floor. It carry, it helps us carry our groceries, get up and down off of the toilet. And it really allows you to say yes to the things in your life that you actually want to do. That's not something that you can buy in a pill or buy. later in life. It's not something that you can even necessarily buy in such a short period of time. It's something that we work on building now and we continue to work on making those deposits so that it pays out both now and in the future. So, why does it feel a little bit like magic when we first get started? So the first month oftentimes feels good. Part of this is, maybe we're feeling stronger a little bit quicker. But I also think that there's the mental aspect of us feeling super inspired and super motivated to make the change, to see the results. That's going to happen no matter what it is that we're starting in the beginning of the journey all the time. So if you're new or coming back after a break, you probably will get a little bit stronger fast, maybe even faster than you expect. You're able to add a little weight. You finish a cell set that felt impossible a couple of weeks ago. And I don't not want to diminish that or take that away. But here's a little secret. In those first few weeks, you're not really growing a ton of new muscle. You're teaching your brain. Your brain is figuring out how to use the muscle you already have, how to turn more of it on to work, how to do the movement. It's kind of like riding a bike. Your legs didn't necessarily get bigger all of a sudden to rise to that demand. You just got better at it because you're Brain and your body were starting to communicate with that movement pattern. Scientists have watched this happen. In one study, the early jump came mostly from the brain and the nerves. And after about three to five weeks, that's when the muscle itself started to take over. In a newer one, in a newer study, beginners were about 15% stronger by week four before their muscle had really started to change. So that first jump is the easy part. That's your nervous system. It's fast because it's a new stimulus. And once you've learned something, you stop learning it at that same speed. If you use week four to decide what progress should feel like, meaning you're like, okay, I've gotten all of these strength gains, all of these results in the first four weeks. It should continue like that. You're probably gonna feel like you are failing by the time you hit month four because those strength gains are going to start to slow down. You're not failing, you just Are are out of that first part of the process where the results are coming a little bit faster, getting stronger a little bit quicker. Let's talk a little bit about why the mirror is painfully slow to show those results. Strength moves faster than the size of our muscle, as well as and then the mirror is going to move the slowest of all. In one example, scientists had 85 young women who had never lifted. Trained three days a week for twenty-four weeks over about six months. In one example, scientists had 85 young women who had never lifted before start training three days a week for about 24 weeks. By week 12, their squat was up about 24%. By week 24, so towards the end of the study, it was up another 11 or 12%. So it was still climbing. They were still seeing some gains. It just slowed down by almost half, actually. Their thigh muscles at three months. At three months, their thigh muscles were up about three percent. At six months, about four and a half. So there is some real meaningful changes happening. It's also is smaller, right? So they

they grew in strength way faster than their muscle size grew. So that's why you've got to stay with it. Three months of showing up, and the muscle they could actually measure had barely moved. However, we gotta still stick with it, right? It's like we just need to shift our expectations away from having these microwave results and really buckle in for the long term. Now you think about this. That study looked at young women. It didn't say exactly the ages. So you wanna think, when we're younger, we're gaining strength and muscle at even a quicker rate than as we get older. That's not to be a discouragement, but if anything, to help you have a better perception or a better perspective on the timeline. So as we get a little bit older, we can expect those changes to probably happen a little bit slower as well. I want to be completely up front with you in that I I, nor I or any other coach out there can give you an exact timeline for the body that you want, the strength that you want, to see, you know, like to see any of those health markers moving in the direction that you want. It's really is going to be so dependent on you and where you're starting, your genes. your lifestyle, so how you're eating, how you're sleeping, how you're moving, all of those types of things. The the consistency, right? It's like when I say consistency, we're not talking about perfection or hitting it a hundred percent of the time. But if we have periods where we're doing something for two to three days or two to three weeks and then we stop doing that for a few days or a few weeks, we're slowing our progress down a lot more than we think that we are. What I can tell you Mm-hmm. So all those times that you've started and stopped, you might be wondering, is the work that you put in gone? Really and truly, here the science seems to be mixed. So you've likely heard of a term muscle memory, where your body remembers like the movement or it remembers the stimulus and builds back faster. In some animal studies, they find that that actually backs that up. In people studies, scientists are kind of still arguing about it. At this point, I'm like, what else is new? So I'm not going to overpromise that, but I want to highlight you are rarely going to be starting back at zero. So the moves, you know what it takes, you've got some of that confidence. You are going to probably snap into the movement pattern a lot quicker. And I do think that, you know, your body does kind of remember that. But I what you know, the biggest thing here is. To not judge your results by the mirror. The mirror, remember, is going to be the slowest scoreboard. So you want to watch your lifts. are you getting stronger? Are you noticing that you're able to climb the stairs without getting winded or carry in more groceries? Right. So you want to look at all of these other things and not just what you're seeing in the mirror, not just what you're seeing with your clothes. I'm a big advocate for having multiple things to measure anyway, just because we don't want to be a slave to the scale or a slave to all of the body image stuff that all of us, grew up steeped in. So step two, how many days a week do you actually need to train? There is no study that says lifting once a week. Hmm. So how many days a week do you need to train? A lot of that's really going to depend on what you can actually fit into your day-to-day life, something that you're going to be consistent with. The research is mixed on, is it one day, two days, three days a week? I think what they have found is that it really what matters most is the total amount of work that you do in a week. Realistically, it seems like you're not if you're busy, it's gonna be a lot harder to potentially get one of those full workouts in in one day, especially time-wise, but also fatigue-wise. So I think, you know, for most people, starting with two days a week, full body, is a great place to start. And then you can look at adding a third day, possibly a fourth day in. but you also want to leave enough space in your calendar in your life to add in some of those other types of exercise, different types of cardio, because again, we know that there is so much value in having a ver a variety of different types of exercise, just like in our nutrition, we don't want to just eat the same vegetables, we don't want to just eat the same fruit or the same carbs, we want to have a nice variety. It's the same thing with exercise. So once a week, if that is what you have right now, I want you to know that that is not you failing. It's a place to start. Right. And here is what I would expect as a coach is that you are going to get stronger, especially if you are newer to lifting. You're going to build some confidence. You're going to build a habit that you can actually keep. And you're going to build that trust and that belief with yourself that you are showing up, which is the biggest thing here. Twice a week for most busy women that I train, this tends to be the sweet spot. This is really where I start a lot of my clients anyway, when we're working together. And the research does kind of point to when you are working each big muscle twice a week, you are going to tend to build more muscle than when you are working it just once, one time a week. The people who write the exercise guidelines say two to three days for beginners. And nobody has shown that three beats two. The research does indicate that when you work each big muscle group twice a week, you tend to build more muscle than when you work it once. That makes sense because you're getting more total volume in. Again, if you could get all the volume that you need in one workout, fantastic, but time is going to be a limiting factor there, as well as just what your body can tolerate. So two days a week typically is enough to make steady progress. It's going to leave those rest days. It's also going to fit most of our real life schedules. It's going to leave some room

to add cardio or different types of movement in as well. You can expect your strength to climb steadily and expect to see changes in months, not weeks. So I want to keep highlighting that. You need to probably shift your expectations a little bit here. What drives your progress at two days isn't necessarily going to be adding a third day. It's how hard you are training in each session and slowly working on progressing a little bit each week, whether that's adding sets, adding weight, maybe adding range of motion or time under tension. Those are all ways that you can progress. What happens at three times a week? So three days is going to give you more total work. Or volume. It's going to give you more practice with the lifts. One big review did find a small strength edge for training more often, but not necessarily making it better at building muscle. So more days of training doesn't automatically equal more muscle, but it does look like it's going to give you a slight edge when it comes to building strength. So again, it depends on what your goals are, what you're looking for in your training, and then just tempering your expectations accordingly. If you have the time and the energy, three days can be great, but you are going to want to also make some changes in other areas. The more that we are training, especially with intensity, we actually need more food for fuel, not less. We're going to need more rest, we're going to need more sleep. maybe more walking, some more mobility to make sure that our joints are staying nice and healthy. So if you are feeling like you're already stretched a little bit thin, adding that third day can actually backfire. One more thing to note is that most of this research is either on younger people or it's on men, which unfortunately that is what we are finding in a lot of the research out there. Thankfully, more and more is being done on women and being done on women, you know, maybe in perimenopause. But I did not find specific studies that are looking at women in perimenopause on this. So take all of this information again, looking at it as I guess some general guidelines, some general things that we can expect. And then you've got to take it to yourself as sort of that N of one. Here is the thread that runs through it all. The total hard work and slowly doing a little bit more over time is really what is going to matter the most and move the needle the most. How many days you train is mostly going to be how we get all of that work done. Just the keeping in mind the best schedule is going to be the one that you are actually able to keep with yourself. The best schedule is the one that you actually keep. So, step three, let's talk about food and sleep. Does any of it change if you lift once, twice, or three times a week? So on food, your protein needs are not necessarily going to change based on how many days you train. So it's going to be kind of that one standard target throughout the week. A big review pulled together 49 studies and more than 1800 people. And what they found is that adding protein helped them gain more strength and more muscle from lifting. This is not news, however, it does really highlight the importance of protein. I think a lot of us know how important protein is. And there are days where we do really good at hitting it, other days where we don't. What's gonna matter most is being as consistent with it as you possibly can. So on average, the benefit did level off around 1.6 grams of protein. For every kilogram of body weight, but that is every single day. It helped a little less as people got older. So you're gonna actually need a little bit more protein as you age. There are some scientists who think that we actually need a little bit more than that 1.6 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. this is where, again, I kind of, you know. To make the math easy, if you just aim for about one gram per pound of your target body weight, for most of us, we're not gonna hit that every single day anyway, but we're gonna be much higher than if we had a lower target that we were aiming for. You wanna think about spreading it over your whole day and not just eating all of it in one meal. In fact, for most of us, if we were eating our target amount of protein, would be hard to eat it all at once because you're gonna feel so full and so satiated. some of the experts in the field around like women's fitness and strength, like Dr. Stacey Sims, suggests about 1.4 to 2.2 grams per kilogram for women. and that's, you know, her expert advice. I tend to, you know, really value what she says. I would say she's like one of the pioneers in our space. and then a study in older women found that eating more than about a gram per kilo went into helping with some more muscle gain. So as it gets a little bit harder for us to gain muscle, we want to do everything that we can to help ourselves succeed. and to set ourselves up for success. So it might mean that we have to actually hit lift a little bit heavier, eat a little bit more protein as we get older. And that's all good, right? It's like that's just what's gonna happen. So, as for total calories, that tends to be a bigger conversation. And we did talk a little bit about fueling our bodies enough in a previous episode. So we will have that linked for you down in the show notes so that you can go back and listen to that. So, sleep. this is where sometimes the importance of it can be maybe a little bit Overestimated. However, I am definitely noticing as I've gotten a little bit older, sleep disturbances happening with hormonal changes and things like that. It does seem like it's more and more important to focus on sleep. Now, sleep does matter for building muscle. In a small study, they found a single night with no sleep dropped muscle building by about 18%. Now For most of us, we're probably not going a single night without any sleep. but you know, that is showing that when we aren't maybe getting enough

sleep, there can be some consequences to that. Other studies, again, mostly done in younger people, found that several nights of what they would consider really short sleep made big lifts harder and slowed muscle building. So just kind of keeping in mind every time that you go to the gym. You might have to shift what you're doing a little bit in terms of the weight that you're lifting or the intensity based on how you slept, how you ate the day before, how well fueled you are before your workout. so again, you know, it just kind of goes back to tempering those expectations and being flexible and making some adjustments as needed. Now, those two studies were focusing on extreme sleep loss. And there doesn't seem to be a magic number out there for women in midlife or perimenopause and how much sleep we need to build muscle. and there was nothing out there that really pointed to one bad night is going to totally stall and wreck your progress. Just like one meal that you know, was quote unquote off or something like that, that's not going to wreck your progress. One missed workout isn't going to completely wreck your progress. It's what are we doing most of the time that matters the most. So what I will say though is that bad sleep or poor sleep obviously is going to make training harder. It may slow how well you actually build muscle. So you definitely want to be proactive in protecting your sleep when you can. And on the rough weeks, maybe you again temper your workout. So remembering a shorter workout still counts. Walking is still gonna count as movement. and showing up small for yourself is gonna be not showing up for yourself at all. So we've got a couple of roads. On the first one, maybe we can keep going with these crazy timelines and these crazy expectations. We, get after it gung-ho on a Monday, feeling like it's us that's the failure, like we're the problem, and we're in the same spot doing the exact same thing a year from now. Maybe feeling a little bit more discouraged, a little bit more defeated, a little bit more like a failure, and less sure that you can actually trust yourself to show up. Or we can decide to maybe challenge those expectations and challenge the timelines that have been set by the diet industry, the fitness industry. And we just slow down a little bit. We give ourselves a little bit more time, something that's actually going to work and fit with our life. Not this imaginary perfect schedule and perfect life that we hope to have one day. We're actually feeding ourselves enough. We're protecting our sleep when we can. We're not beating ourselves up when we can't do it perfectly. And we just let the results speak for themselves slowly over time. So we're towards the end of the year. I want you to imagine you're standing a year from now. You're lifting things that maybe used to feel out of reach for you. You're doing things in your life that you didn't think were possible for you. You've stopped negotiating with yourself about whether or not today was a good enough workout or you did a good enough job. The food noise is actually quieter because you're no longer starving your body. You're, you've got your brain a little bit more under control. You're not necessarily working towards some magic number so that you can finally start living your life. You're already living your life and showing up the way that you want to. You're strong enough to enjoy the life that you have now. Because here's what I know: you were never made to spend your one life waiting for a magic number on the scale. I believe that each and every woman is made for a calling to have a strong and steady and healthy body. was made for a calling and a strong, healthy, steady body is just the foundation that you build it on. And honestly, you are probably still gonna have some days you'd rather lay on the floor. Nobody is doing this perfectly. The thing that sets the women apart who go on to achieve their goals from the ones that don't is that they learn to do it imperfectly and to keep moving and keep picking themselves up. So here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to pick your number if you're not strength training yet. Are we going to go once a week or twice a week or three times a week? Whichever is honestly going to fit your life right now, and the one that you think you'll actually stick with is the one that you should pick. I want you to put those sessions on your calendar, like it's a doctor's appointment, like it's a meeting with somebody important because it is. And then give it a full 12-week block before you decide whether or not it's working. In fact, it's so funny when I think about that. That was really one of the reasons that I set out to do a bodybuilding show in the first place. Was I wanted to see if I could stick with the goal for 12 weeks. So I want you to kind of reframe it that way. Maybe unattached from the results that you're hoping to see. And it's like the result becomes can I just stick with this for 12 weeks without quitting? That's my coaching suggestion, right? So it's. And if you are listening to this and thinking, I already know what to do, I just need somebody in my corner for those 12 weeks. I would love to be that person for you. So you can go to the strongerway.com backslash work dash with dash us to check out all of the ways that you can take the next step that is right for you in this season. Hope that you have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for hanging out with me, and we will be back here with you again next week. Until then, bye.