EP 67: 5 Things I’d Do Differently If I Were Starting Fitness Over 40

0:00Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fit or Better and Stronger over 40. I'm your host and coach, Shauna. I'm 46, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach, helping women over 40 become their best. And in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through five things I would do differently if I was starting my journey over all again at 40. And the reason I want to walk through these things is because I know it would have gotten me results that much sooner. So if you are in a place where you're stuck, these tips are going to help you. But the other reason is that I see so many women over 40 thinking that their bodies are just not responding to what they used to do when in fact their bodies are just done tolerating some of those subpar methods that we were taught in the 90s.

0:38I spent years following the advice that I was taught in the 90s, something that you probably follow too, which is to burn more calories, to eat less, and to really sweat away in the gym, only to feel soft and stuck by the time I hit 40. But now at age 46, I look and feel better than I did at 26, and now I'm helping hundreds of women do the same. We are shifting away from those outdated methods and shifting into new methods that are actually meant to build our metabolism so that we have bodies that work with us instead of against us. If you can relate and you have been doing more and more only to see less and less results, you are in the right place.

1:14Today, you're going to learn how to build and keep your best body over 40. Now, the first thing I would do if I was starting my fitness journey again over at 40 is I would stop exercising and I would start training. And yes, there is a difference. Exercising is just the act of moving your body. It's getting your heart rate up. It's burning some calories. But training is something different. It has strategy and it has a desirable outcome. In this case, we're talking about building muscle. Years ago, I thought that the more I sweat, the more calories I burned, the better my results would be. And it's deceiving because you think if you're going to these classes and working so hard and burning so many calories, it has to transform you.

1:50But unfortunately, that just isn't the case. If that were true, you wouldn't be here right now. Something that I don't think a lot of us understand is that our bodies adapt over time. So initially, when you join one of those bootcamp classes, you're burning a ton of calories, but over time, you burn less and less, making them less effective. And sure, maybe the scale changes initially at first, but then you hit a plateau. And then where do you go from there? The other thing that those classes don't do is they don't help you to build muscle, which at the age of 40, that is the key to helping your metabolism, helping you look toned, and helping your health and longevity for the years ahead.

2:24And muscle is not burned away. It is built. Muscle takes intention and it takes strategy and it takes a plan with strength training, not just exercising. Now, when I say strength training, what I mean is that you are following one program for a set amount of weeks, using weight that's challenging to your muscles, getting close to failure within those exercises, and then striving to improve week after week. You're tracking your progress and then making sure that you're getting stronger every single week. When you do that, you are actually creating the stimulus for your body to change and grow and adapt.

2:56Muscle doesn't need confusion. Muscle doesn't need you to burn a ton of calories. It does, however, need you to challenge it and progressively challenge it week after week. And the only way that you can do that optimally is by following one program and then tracking your workouts and striving to get better and stronger each time. And when you're performing these reps, you're not just trying to get as many as you can in 60 seconds like some of these boot camp classes have us doing. You are connecting with the muscle. You are moving with intention. You are controlling the weight through the whole rep, making sure that you're keeping lots of tension on that muscle.

3:26That's what helps it to grow. Then you're actually resting in between sets. You're not doing plyos. You're not jumping around trying to burn more calories. You are there to build, not to burn. We have to step away from that mentality and understand that an effective strength training workout looks and feels different than those bootcamp classes that we're used to. But when we can dial that in, when we can properly strength train and apply progression over time, our bodies start to change. Our metabolism gets better and you build shape. You cannot look tone or get tone unless you have that foundation of muscle.

3:56Muscle is magical. It changes your body shape. It changes your metabolism. It helps your longevity and your health. It helps with insulin sensitivity and optimizing our hormones, which is really important as we're approaching perimenopause and menopause. Once I stopped exercising and started training, my body responded like I never thought was possible. My metabolism changed for the better. I looked more defined and I've been able to eat more while maintaining results. And that's really important. So remember, the gym is where we are building, not burning. Now, if you're listening in real time, it is Monday, March 2nd, which is the kickoff day for my Build to Burn challenge.

4:31You get a six-week workout program. You get guides that walk you through how to set up your calories and your protein to support your goals. You have a community. It's a one-time purchase and lifetime access. The women inside these challenges are amazing and they are building habits that will continue to get them results well after the six weeks is done. If you are interested and you want to come join us and build your best body over 40, I will leave all of the information in the show notes. Now, the second thing I would change if I was starting my fitness journey over again at 40 is that I would not just go into a deficit and stay there.

5:02So many of us started a diet way back in our 20s, and we just never stopped. We just hopped from one diet to another, thinking that fat loss only was the way that we could look and feel sculpted and toned. When in fact, now we understand muscle is the way we look sculpted and toned. And so if you are always in a calorie deficit, you are not optimizing your body to grow muscle. You're not giving it a chance to have that muscle foundation. Plus, your body adapts to lower calorie intake. So your body is meant to survive. It is meant to adapt to the environment that it's in. If you chronically eat less and less, your body has to adapt.

5:40It has to protect you. And so maybe initially your maintenance calories were 2 ,000, but because of all the years of yo-yo dieting, maybe you're now maintaining at 1 ,500, meaning anytime you try to go above that, you're going to be rebounding. And anytime you want to lose fat, you have to go well below that, which isn't sustainable. That's why sometimes taking some time to reverse into maintenance, get to a healthy calorie intake, put some more muscle on your frame, improve your metabolism, optimize your hormones, get your body out of stress, helps you to become more successful in your fat loss phase.

6:12When you take the time to do this, when you set yourself up for better fat loss, it becomes easier to lose fat because you can lose at a higher calorie intake. Then you understand and know how to reverse back to maintenance once you're done with fat loss. And that's how you keep results. We don't keep results by just staying in fat loss. Fat loss is not a lifestyle. It should be a means to an end, a method, one phase to lose body fat. But then we go back to maintenance where our metabolisms can thrive, our hormones can be in a good place, our stress levels can be in a good place, and we can actually put on lean muscle tissue, which is going to be the most impactful part of your body transformation.

6:49The best thing I did for myself was to stop chronically dieting and walk myself through a reverse diet, eating a little bit more, putting on lean muscle tissue. And once I did that, my body was more responsive. Fat loss became easier to achieve and easier to maintain. If the idea of phasing your nutrition or reverse dieting is new to you, I will leave two episodes in the show notes that I've done on phasing your nutrition and reverse dieting. I highly suggest you go take a listen. I broke everything down into steps so that you can follow them. But taking some time to set yourself up and set your metabolism up is really going to optimize your body to be more responsive.

7:24And that's what we want. Just remember that fat loss is not a lifestyle. It's a place we visit. And then we want to get back to maintenance where our bodies can thrive. The third thing I would do if I was starting my fitness journey over again at 40 is that I would swap out my HIIT exercise for walking. And there's a couple of key reasons here. Number one, we have to prioritize strength training because we are losing muscle as we age. If we are not actively trying to preserve or build it. So strength training has to be a key priority for us. when we're talking about our exercise program. Strength training on its own is a stressor to the body.

7:56It's a good stressor, but we also have to allow time to recover. And if we are pairing our strength training with lots of HIIT activity, we don't get that time to recover. And our bodies after 40 are more sensitive to stress load. So if we are overdoing it with HIIT cardio, strength training, not allowing enough recovery, we're actually gonna see less results instead of more. Walking on the other hand is really restorative. It allows recovery. It helps cortisol, it helps your digestion, it helps regulate blood sugar, and it allows us to recover so that we can see the results from our efforts in the gym.

8:28And doesn't spike hunger, unlike high-intensity cardio can, which is really important if you are in a deficit with the intention of fat loss. The last thing that you wanna do in a fat loss phase is spike your hunger. That is just asking for trouble. But walking and weightlifting are a magical combination for women over 40. As far as how much walking, I would just aim to walk daily. You can start tracking your steps. and have a goal of getting to 8 ,000 steps a day, that's considered active. And then you can always increase your step count or add incline walking if you're in a fat loss phase just to increase caloric output and help to steepen the deficit without taking away more food.

9:04But if your goal is to look and feel your best over 40, start to add in those hot girl walks. Now, the fourth thing I would do if I was starting my fitness journey over again at 40 is I would track more than just pounds. In the 90s, we were just taught that success with our fitness journey looked like being smaller, the scale dropping. But if we are only tracking that piece of data, we are gonna miss out on so much more. After 40, we need to be just as concerned with body composition as we are with body weight. If the scale is going down, but you're losing muscle mass, you are setting yourself up for a slower metabolism and a higher chance that you are going to rebound at the end, staying soft and stuck.

9:44When you're on this fitness journey, instead of just paying attention to the scale, I also want you to pay attention to photos weight measurements, strength, energy, digestion, mood. If those things are improving, then you know you are going in the right direction, even if the scale isn't changing much. And sometimes the scale won't change a ton. In fact, I just had a six-week challenge that I ran, and some women didn't see a ton of change in the scale, but they saw inches gone from their waist. Their body compositions changed. And that's what we want to pay attention to, because that will tell you the bigger story of whether or not you are making true changes and transforming your body.

10:18So use the scale, but remember it's one piece of data. You wanna pay attention to those other pieces of data so you don't miss the big picture. Now, the fifth and final thing that I would change if I was starting my fitness journey over again at 40 is I would prioritize recovery. And this ties back into that 90s mindset where we thought more meant more, more caloric restriction, more activity. But that plan was silently setting us up to stay soft and stuck. The more we dieted, the more we just leaned on cardio, the more muscle we lost. And now you pair that with muscle loss from age and changing hormones, and it sets us up to be stuck.

10:52We don't need more at age 40. We just need better. We need to be in the gym, prioritizing strength training. But then we also need to prioritize recovery. In the gym, we are breaking the muscle down. But then in recovery, we are allowing it time to repair and grow. Without that proper recovery time, we're going to be disappointed with our results. So take rest days and then pair those rest days with activity, hiking, walking, things that help your recovery instead of take away from it. And then also sleep. Sleep is a big part of recovery. Sleep is magical. It is when all of your hormones regulate.

11:26So things like cortisol and hunger hormones. If you're not getting proper sleep, you're going to be more stressed. You're going to be more inflamed. It's going to be harder for you to stay adherent to your diet. So prioritize sleep. Make sure you have a little bit of a routine. Turn the lights down low. Minimize screen time. Take a shower or a bath. It lowers your core body temperature so that you can fall asleep and stay asleep. Other things you can do is take magnesium glycinate that helps to calm your central nervous system. And if you're already doing those things and you're having a hard time falling or staying asleep, it could be some shifts with hormones.

11:56I recently started my HRT journey and supplementing with progesterone has been a game changer for my sleep. If you're having trouble sleeping and you're experiencing other symptoms that might be from perimenopause, it might be worth getting your blood work done so you can see where your levels are at and see what options you have to support your health. But prioritize recovery, prioritize sleep, and your results are going to be that much easier to attain. And that sums up everything that I would do if I was starting my fitness journey over again. I know that if I had done these things earlier, I would have gotten results that much sooner.

12:28I really hope that you found these tips helpful. if you did please leave a rating or a review it really just does help the show grow and if you have episode ideas dm me on instagram i would love to hear from you until next week keep getting stronger and i will see you in the next episode