How Long Does It Take to Build Muscle After 40?

Nikkiey: When you start strength training and you start lifting, and after six weeks you're looking at your shoulders like, hello, where are you? Why isn't anything changing? Why don't I see my abs yet? I wish muscle worked like that, but that's not how it works. Muscle takes time. What if you gave yourself one full year? Not 30 days, not until the next vacation that you have or the wedding that you're planning for or until your birthday, but you just gave yourself one year. One year where you stopped hopping from program to program. One year that you followed one program consistently. One year where you actually progressed in your lifts. The year is going to pass anyway, so you can spend the year either training for three weeks and getting frustrated and changing programs and being exhausted and taking two weeks off and then jumping right back into something new, or you can keep doing the boring stuff that actually works and let it compound over time.

What's going on, everybody? Hey, my friends. Welcome back to another episode. On this show, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. I am your host, Nikkiey Stott. I want to talk about expectations today, and specifically expectations around changing your body composition. Not just losing weight, but building muscle, losing body fat, changing your shape and creating new shape, looking stronger and feeling better, and all of those things that a lot of you women say. Because I think one of the biggest reasons that women quit a plan that's actually working is simply because they expected their body to change faster.

You have a woman who's been strength training consistently for eight weeks. That person's getting stronger. You're eating your protein, following your nutrition, you're progressing, you're getting stronger in your lifts. But I typically hear this person say, 'I don't really feel like my body is changing.' And I'm like, okay, it's been eight weeks, not eight years. Eight weeks. And I say that with love, because I understand it. You're putting in the effort every single day. Eight weeks feels like a very, very long time. So I get it. You're doing the workouts, you're prepping the meals, you're showing up, you're getting the steps in. You probably changed a lot of your habits and implemented new habits, and some of you are creating new lifestyle things that you're following every single day.

I get it. You want to look different. But your expectations around how quickly muscle is built, and how quickly you experience body composition changes, might be the very thing that is convincing you that something isn't working. Expectations. Period. Your expectations, when something actually is working. I think we've been trained to expect a transformation very, very fast. Look at what you guys have been sold.

The industry continues to sell it. Like I've said multiple times on the podcast, people just keep repackaging things but giving the same promise. The injections, or back in the day, these six-week transformations, 30-day transformations. Quick fixes. The injections are just the same thing, repackaged differently. And they promise you you're going to tone up in 30 days, you're going to lose inches fast. And then with the before and after, you see someone's transformation, you see photo one, you see photo two, and that's it.

You don't see the years or the months between those pictures. I see WarriorBabes checking into their workouts, and they've hit 200 workouts. You don't see those workouts. You don't see the meal prep. A lot of people just post the highlight reels on social media. You don't see the actual work that goes in between. That's where I think social media does a disservice. You don't see the things that are being put into place where that person is getting stronger, but visually they don't look that different. You don't see the weeks where the measurements have barely changed. You don't see any of that.

So when you start strength training and you start lifting, and after six weeks you're looking at your shoulders like, hello, where are you? Why isn't anything changing? Why don't I see my abs yet? Listen, I wish muscle worked like that. I wish that we could do six weeks of just hitting lateral raises and front raises and wake up one morning with those capped shoulders. That would be amazing, right? But that's not how it works. Muscle takes time. And I think women really underestimate that.

One of the main questions I get most of the time is, 'How long, Nikkiey, did it take you to get where you are?' I'm like, dude, I'm still working at it, but it took me a solid three to four years to really build solid muscle. Think about what you're actually asking your body to do. You're asking it to build new muscle tissue. You're asking your muscles to adapt to this new training stimulus that maybe you've never done before. You're trying to progressively get stronger. You're trying to build your shoulders, your legs, your glutes, your back. And maybe simultaneously you're also trying to slowly reduce your body fat so that you can actually see more of that muscle.

Guys, what I just explained is a process. And it's not as easy as the things that you've done before where you get into a quick fix. Anybody can jump into that, and you're going to lose the weight. You're going to see some type of change happen, and you're going to see it happen fast. But building muscle in the process that I just explained takes a lot of time. And I think the frustrating part is that a lot of the early progress isn't necessarily the sexy progress. Early on, if you've never introduced this stimulus to your body before, you're learning how to lift. You've got to get your technique better. You're learning how to create better form. And I'm saying this to the women that are starting WarriorBabe.

I just did an in-person training experience with one of our babes. Her name is Julie. She's 70 years old. There were multiple things I had to help correct with her form, and this is something new for her. So everything's changing. Your nervous system is adapting. You're learning how to actually push yourself in your workouts, not just go through the motions. Do you know what I mean? All of that is happening. And you look in the mirror and you go, yeah, but I don't see it.

Yet. You don't see it yet. That's the part that I think we forget, and that's the word I want you to ingrain in your brain. If your only measurement of progress is, 'Do I look drastically different today?' that's a huge mistake. That's the wrong question to ask yourself. You're going to feel like you're failing most of the time. You're going to feel like the program is failing. You're going to feel like this isn't working, especially while you are building muscle.

Think about three months ago. What were you doing then, and what are you doing now? Were you maybe squatting or doing RDLs, and I'll use RDLs because it's one of my favorite exercises, with maybe 30-pound dumbbells, and now you're doing 45 pounds? That was something that Julie and I talked through on our in-person training experience. Before I got there, I looked at her training stats. She logs her weights inside her app, and I saw that she was progressively adding more weight. I'm like, this is incredible.

That alone, if three months ago you were doing 30 pounds and now you're doing 45 pounds or more, that's progress. That's what's happening inside the gym. Were you doing maybe eight reps of something and now you're doing 12 with the same weight? Or maybe you're even going heavier. That's progress. Maybe your form for a certain exercise was a complete disaster a couple of months ago, and now you have better form and better technique and you can actually feel the mind-muscle connection. That's progress. You can actually feel that pulldown instead of your biceps doing everything. That's progress.

A lot of people say, 'I'm getting stronger.' Are you training harder? Are you recovering better? These are things that matter, because those are the things that are going to happen before you see the visual payoff. All of these things are going to happen before you see the physical changes in the mirror. And this is also one of the firm reasons why I'm such a huge believer in tracking your training, because your brain is terrible at remembering progress.

You'll walk into the gym and think, 'I don't feel like I'm getting any stronger.' And then what you can do, like Julie has, is look back and realize, wait a second, I was doing 20 pounds, now I'm doing 40. That's a massive difference. But if you ain't tracking, you ain't going to be able to tell that you've got this progress happening. It's accumulation. It's a compound effect. You're not going to wake up every single morning and see a dramatic difference. But you're stacking these training sessions and these wins on a weekly basis, and eventually all those sessions are going to start showing up physically. That's the thing. Yeah, in a two-week period, if you jump into a quick fix, you're going to see changes happen. But it's about getting obsessed with the long-term game when it comes to changing your body composition.

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I also think body fat can mess with your head as well. Changing your body composition isn't about body weight. I've talked about this before: the difference between losing weight and losing body fat. Let's say you're strength training, you're building some muscle, you're slowly losing body fat. Your body weight might not dramatically change, and so you think, okay, nothing is happening here, because that's likely going to happen. I've seen WarriorBabes only lose three pounds, yet their progress photos look drastically different in six months. Meanwhile, when you say nothing's happening, your legs look different, your shoulders are developing, your waist measurement is coming down, you're able to fit into the jeans that you weren't able to fit into five years ago. Your glutes are fuller, everything just feels different, your skin is getting tighter. This is why I don't want women obsessed with making the scale go down.

If you're building muscle while you're reducing body fat at the same time, the scale isn't necessarily going to tell you that full story very well. And if you panic because the scale isn't dropping fast enough, what you're going to do, and I've seen this happen to thousands of women, is cut your calories even more, add in a bunch of cardio, and now you're potentially compromising the exact thing you're trying to build, which is muscle. You could actually interrupt a really productive body composition phase because you were expecting a weight loss result to happen pretty fast, instead of paying attention to the body composition result, which is dropping your body fat percentage and revealing the muscle you're working, either muscle you already had or muscle you're trying to build.

You're focusing on doing that. You're not necessarily going to see it on the scale, because muscle is more dense than fat and takes up less space than fat does. You've probably heard me say it or seen it on the internet: five pounds of muscle weighs exactly the same as five pounds of fat, but muscle takes up significantly less space because it's more dense. So just keep that in mind. Because you're focusing on building muscle, the number on the scale won't necessarily go down.

This is the biggest thing: you can't rush muscle. That's the biggest thing I want you to understand from this episode. Muscle is expensive tissue for your body to build. What I mean by that is it takes stimulus, it takes proper nutrition, it takes protein, it takes recovery, it takes time. You're not going to bully or push your body into building muscle faster because you're impatient. Doing more workouts isn't automatically going to speed up the process. Adding a sixth workout day to your week isn't going to speed up the process. Cutting your calories down because you aren't seeing results fast enough isn't going to help you maximize building more muscle, right?

There's a point where training harder isn't the answer. There's a point where you have to do less and get more. You have to train less, not harder. What I'm trying to say is that what you've been conditioned to understand and believe over the years, for decades, is the opposite of what works when it comes to building muscle. You can't rush that process. If you understand that your journey may take a certain amount of time, and it's going to look like maybe 18 months or more, and you can accept that, your journey is going to be so much better and more rewarding than hoping you're going to have a result in a matter of six to eight weeks.

Another expectation I want to challenge with you is that you don't always need to be actively losing body fat. Women are so conditioned to believe that if they're not getting smaller, if they're not seeing the number move on the scale, they're not progressing or moving forward. Maybe you're someone who comes into a program, and I'm thinking about everything that we do with our babes. I usually tell women that 80% of the women coming into our program don't necessarily need to be going into a deficit, a cut, or a fat loss phase, where we're focusing on getting smaller.

Right now, maybe that looks like you need to build muscle. Maybe you need to eat around your maintenance number. Maybe your body weight stays pretty stable for a couple of months, but you're getting stronger, you're eating more, you're recovering better, your training quality is improving. You're building a better foundation so that when you do go into a fat loss phase, it's going to produce more of the results you want because you have the foundation built. That's not a waste of time.

A lot of women come in and say, 'Well, I just spent the last 12 months doing what you just said.' I'm like, yeah, I'm not surprised, because you probably needed to do it. You probably just spent the last 20 years in a deficit. Your body had no idea what to do with eating only 1,100 calories. You've done that for 20 years and it hasn't worked. You know what I mean? If that's the case, you have to look at it as an incredibly productive phase you need to go through. But if you're constantly chasing that lower body fat or that lower weight year-round, and you never give yourself enough time or resources to actually build the muscle that creates the shape you want, then you're doing yourself a disservice.

I want to say this, and I don't want to discourage you: the body that you want might take you years. Like I said a couple of minutes ago, if you can think about it from that frame, it's going to be freeing for you. Once you accept it, you stop freaking out every month. You stop expecting every four weeks to produce this insane transformation in your body. You stop thinking something's wrong with you, and you just start showing up. You almost detach yourself from the outcome of what you want. You take it day by day, focus on what you can control, and release control of the goal you're striving for. That's freeing. You just focus on training, getting stronger, eating appropriately, learning and understanding your body. You keep going, right? And then one day you're looking at a photo of yourself and you're like, holy crap, my body is completely different. That is literally how it happens.

I've seen that happen with more than 22,000 women who have come through our VIP one-on-one coaching program. Those are some of the biggest transformations I've seen. They're not created in six weeks. They're created in a year. And the majority of our women are in the program for at least three to four years, and those are the biggest transformations. You can't fake the accumulation of your work.

So what I like to ask women is, what if you gave yourself one full year? Not 30 days. Not until the next vacation you have, or the wedding you're planning for, or your birthday. You just gave yourself one year. One year where you stopped hopping from program to program. One year that you followed one program consistently. One year where you actually progressed in your lifts. One year where your protein intake became normal. One year where you only trained four days a week, not five or six or seven, and you actually gave yourself the recovery you needed. One year where you learned how to sleep eight hours instead of six. One year where you built a routine that actually works for you, and stayed in that routine even when life happens, even when it gets super busy and there's chaos. You'll go through four different seasons of life in one year. So I would ask that. And I would also ask, would your body be different?

The answer is, of course it would. The year is going to pass anyway. So you can spend the year training for three weeks, getting frustrated, changing programs, being exhausted, taking two weeks off and then jumping right back into something new. Or you can keep doing the boring stuff that actually works and let it compound over time. I think that's really important for some of you to just sit with and accept.

What I want you to do, leaving this episode with me today, is before you decide that your program isn't working, or that you're going to jump to another program, ask yourself a couple of questions. Am I getting stronger? Am I progressing, if I'm paying attention to my weights? Am I getting better at form? Am I recovering? Am I consistently hitting my protein? Am I consistently allowing my brain to get past the narrative that eating more is going to make me fat? Do my clothes fit differently? How long have I actually been doing this consistently? And then the biggest question: is the plan not working, or is my body just not changing as fast as I expected it to? Those are two completely different things. It's probably not the plan. It's just the expectations you're bringing into it. It's a matter of being really honest with yourself and looking at the full picture, not just weeks at a time.

I think we need to normalize the fact that building an incredible body, changing your body composition and building muscle takes time. The process takes time. Losing body fat while also holding on to muscle takes time. Changing your body composition takes time. And that's okay. That's okay. I've seen women do this and change their body composition at 60 years old. You're not behind. You're not too late. You haven't missed the train. You're probably doing everything right, or you just need to get into a program that's going to ingrain this mindset into you.

And that's what we do at WarriorBabe. What I love about what we built is it's not just about the macro numbers, your nutrition program, the coaching or the training aspect. It's well-rounded. We understand mindset is a huge pillar. We have 90 coaches on our team. The coaches are going to coach you through your limiting beliefs and the narratives you have in your mind, or point blank, we're going to help you get out of your own way, keep pushing you forward and keep helping you get over roadblocks. And I guarantee you, because, like I said, 22,000 women have come through our one-on-one coaching program, eventually you're going to see it. You're going to see your body change. You're going to see your back look different. You're going to see and feel your clothes fit differently. The thing is, I see women do this in a year inside of WarriorBabe where it would have taken them five years, 10 years, a decade or more on their own.

Keep that in mind. I would just question some things you're doing along the way. And before you quit a plan that's actually working because you thought you'd be further along by now, just check the expectations you've set for yourself going into the program. Maybe you just need to give it enough time to do its job. All right, you guys, I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.

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