EP: 92 Build Your Best Body After 40 (The 4 Foundations)

0:00Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better, Better, and Stronger over 40. I'm your host and coach, Shauna. I'm 47, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach helping women over 40 become their best. Welcome or welcome back. Today we're going to talk about four foundational pillars that will change the game when it comes to you reaching your fitness goals. If you're over 40 and feel like getting the body that you want means you have to push harder in the gym or with your diet, I want to show you a different way. I got into the best shape of my life after 40, not by doing more, but by finally letting go of so many things that we were taught.

0:30Now at 47, I'm stronger, leaner, and more confident than I was in my 20s and 30s. And today I want to walk you through exactly what I changed and talk about my forever fit foundations that I have used with myself and the women that I coach. These are women just like you who are over 40, doing all the things, working hard and still stuck, but now seeing better progress than they have in years. And stick around because I know that you're going to take away some practical insights and tips that you can start applying to your own fitness journey and start to see amazing progress too. The way that I got here looks very different than how I spent my 20s and 30s.

1:02Back then, everything revolved around just getting smaller. Even when I strength trained, I was doing circuits, supersets, HIIT after every workout session. Anything to burn more calories and keep my heart rate up because that's what I thought would create a toned body. I was spending six days a week in the gym, sometimes for two hours at a time, trying to stay so buttoned up with my nutrition, followed by epic cheat meals on the weekends that left me bloated and guilty. Everything I was doing came from a place of just wanting to get smaller. And if I'm honest, it was also coming from a place of not really liking who I was.

1:31But thankfully, something happened that stopped me from fighting against my body and starting to work with it. At age 39, I had my first son, and that gave me a different perspective on almost everything, but especially my body and what I wanted my fitness goals to look like. During pregnancy and breastfeeding, it was the first time in decades where I wasn't eating just to look smaller. I was eating to actually nourish myself and my baby. And that break from chronic dieting opened my eyes to what my body could actually feel like when it was properly fueled. Honestly, it was a blessing in so many ways.

2:01I then set out on a different fitness journey, and my motivation came from loving my body and wanting to take care of it so that I was here for my son for as long as possible. It was not just to become the smallest version of myself anymore, but to become her, that strongest, healthiest version of myself inside and out. So I then spent time learning about longevity and health, and it kept leading me back to one thing, and that was muscle. And that wasn't really something I ever prioritized. I spent decades trying to burn, and now I had to learn how to build. That shift in my mindset led me to take a different approach with fitness and lean on what I now call the forever fit foundations or pillars.

2:36Now, the first one is called eat, and it's less about dieting and more about nourishing. For a lot of us, nutrition was always about trying to eat less so that the scale dropped. But if your goal is to get strong and sculpted, we have to stop focusing just on body weight and start to focus on body composition, meaning having more muscle and then less body fat. Achieving that look is gonna require strategy and phasing, not one permanent diet that we live in forever. And this phased approach with nutrition is how I've helped myself and my clients transform. I have a deep dive on this three-phased approach, and I will leave the link to that video below, but here is the gist.

3:08The first phase is called a priming phase, and this is for the woman who's been dieting for decades and now has a low baseline level of calories. We use a reverse diet in this phase to bring those calories up to a healthier level, giving your body the fuel that it needs to actually build muscle before we even talk about fat loss. Now, once the body is primed, then we can move into our fat loss phase. And this is a strategic period where we are in a conservative deficit, trying to lose body fat while preserving lean muscle tissue. Once that phase is done, we move into the third phase, which is maintenance.

3:37And this is where you actually get to live. It's where you have enough food to thrive, protect your hormones, and maintain the results long term. In fact, maintenance should be where you spend most of your time, only visiting those other phases when you want to make specific changes to your body composition. Now, regardless of which phase you're in, the rules of eat stay the same. Prioritize protein, having about one gram per pound of your goal body weight. Align your calories with your goals and practice the 80-20 % rule, where 80 % of your nutrition is coming from whole nutrient-dense foods.

4:08And use the other 20 % to leave room for some of the things that you enjoy. Remember, we're not just trying to shrink ourselves anymore. We are fueling that version of her we're trying to build for the long haul. And while nutrition is one of the strongest pillars, you cannot just eat your way into a sculpted physique. You have to give your body a reason to actually use that fuel to build muscle. And that brings us to foundation number two, which is to lift. And this is where we start to move away from exercising to burn and move into training to build, specifically to build muscle. because muscle is what's going to give your body that shape and definition and help your metabolism.

4:44Weight loss can make you smaller, but without enough muscle, you're not going to have that defined strong look that you want or have a metabolism that thrives. And building muscle requires having a strategic training plan. This is why how you train in the gym matters so much. When you are strength training, there are three things that I want you to focus on. And if you apply these things, you're gonna see much better results with your body composition. The first thing that you need is structure. You need a program designed to progress over time, not just random workouts that you change every single week.

5:13The second thing that you need is intensity. You want to make sure that the weights that you're using are challenging you and you're bringing yourself close to failure with each set. Those reps that bring you close to failure are the ones that change your body the most. And then lastly, we need progression. So you want to track your weights and your reps and gradually work on asking your muscles to do more by adding reps, adding weight, or improving your form. Instead of going to the gym and judging your workout by how much you've sweat or how many calories you've burned, I want you to start to ask yourself, am I getting close to failure?

5:41Am I getting stronger week to week? If you start to chase strength over sweat, you're going to see your body change in the best of ways. While training provides the stimulus to grow muscle, what we do outside of the gym for the other 23 hours of the day also is important to our progress. That brings us to our third foundation, which is move. And this is separate from your workouts. And I used to think that if movement wasn't hard or sweaty, it didn't count. But now I'm a big believer in just walking more throughout the day. And this is especially important after 40. We want the movement that we do outside the gym to support our strength training, not create more fatigue that we have to recover from.

6:17This is why walking is one of my favorite things. It keeps your daily energy expenditure up without beating you up. It's also something that you can do anytime, anywhere. and being a person that just gets more movement in your day is only going to help your metabolism, help your stress level, your digestion, your blood sugar. There are countless things that more walking can help with. So getting into a habit where you are moving more is only going to help with everything, especially your fitness goals. And you don't have to overthink this. Just start by adding 10-minute walks when you can. Try to work up to a goal of 7 ,000 to 8 ,000 steps a day.

6:50And then you can always turn that dial up if you need to when you're in a fat loss phase, but staying active with movement that supports your goals rather than competes with them is only going to make this whole process that much easier. Now finally onto our fourth foundation that makes all of the others work so well, and that is sleep. Sleep is so underrated and so powerful. When you're sleep deprived, cortisol increases, you're hungrier, and you have less energy to train. This makes the process of getting stronger and leaner a whole lot harder. And I know this tip isn't new. It's probably something that you've heard from me before and from other people, but it's only because it's that powerful.

7:25If you're not getting seven plus hours of sleep a night, really try to dial in your routine. Keep your bedtimes consistent. Try to make sure that you're in bed at least like eight to nine hours before you wake up so you give yourself time to actually fall asleep. Limit screen time. Swap your phone for a book. It's really going to help put your mind in that relaxed state so that you can actually fall asleep and stay asleep. Keep your room cool and dark. You can take magnesium glycinate. And if you're doing all of those things and you're still struggling, sometimes it's hormonal shifts that are happening in that perimenopause, menopausal phase.

7:57So looking into support for your hormones could be your next step. I will leave a link to the company that I work with in the description. You can always reach out to them for a free consultation and see what some options are to support that. But please just know that sleep is the ultimate hack for better progress. And that wraps up those four foundations. Eat, lift, move, and sleep. These are what I focus on and what I have mastered. They are not fancy or flashy or sexy, and they're definitely not a quick fix, but they are what have helped me to build my best body at age 47. And they're also what I teach my clients so they can build their transformation on these strong foundations.

8:33Because at this stage of the game, we are looking for something that's going to provide a long lasting real transformation and change. We've all been burned by those fad quick fixes that maybe gave us short-term progress, but never really gave us those true transformations that last. So if you're over 40 and you are trying to look and feel your best, lean on these four foundations because they will not steer you wrong. I promise it's not too late. You are not too old. Your best body and your best years are still ahead of you. And I'm here to remind you of that every single week. I genuinely hope that you found this helpful.

9:04If you did, please leave a comment below. I would love to hear from you. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss future videos like this. And if you need help with your fitness journey, You can always find ways to work with me in the description. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. And if you enjoyed this video, then I will check out this one next. Thank you for joining me in today's episode. I genuinely hope that you found it helpful. If you did, please leave a rating or a review. I would be so appreciative. Until next week, keep getting stronger, and I will see you in the next episode.