How Long Should Workouts Be for Women Over 40?

Nikkiey: How long should your workouts actually be? The research on resistance training and building muscle consistently shows that the majority of the stimulus required for meaningful muscle growth can be achieved in a well-structured session. Focused, intentional, progressive work. And I'm going to dive into that intentional and focused part with you guys too.

What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys, welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott.

Today we're going to tackle something I get asked all the time, and I feel like it's creating unnecessary guilt and confusion for women in fitness when they're just trying to be consistent, track their nutrition and understand this journey. I get asked, how long should your workouts actually be? How long do you work out in the gym? And I'm like, how did we get here?

Because I think somewhere along the way, the industry has convinced women that overtraining, more time in the gym, is going to equal faster, quicker and better results. That a two-hour training session means you're more dedicated than being in the gym for 45 minutes. That if you're not spending a significant chunk of your day working out, you're not doing enough. And I'm just like, holy moly. First of all, I want to dismantle that completely today with you guys.

Because it's not true. And it's keeping women either in the gym way longer than they need to be, grinding through junk volume that is not really moving the needle at the end of the day, or feeling like they failed on the days when they can only give 45 minutes. Look, the length of your workout is not what produces results. The quality of what happens inside of it is.

So today I'm going to explain exactly what that means, what research has said about optimal training volume, and how to structure a workout that actually focuses on changing your body, in less time than you probably think. Okay? So I just want to trump this idea of, you guys, I'm going to do two or three hours a day, and if you're not, you're not working hard enough, and you've got to be in there six days a week. Okay, no.

But let's start with the science. Okay? Because this is one of those topics where the data is really, really clear, and the industry has largely been ignoring it. Or this narrative just got picked up by women that you've got to be in there, because somebody said it 10 years ago, that's how it was, and the narrative just keeps going. So I want to break it.

The research on resistance training and building muscle consistently shows that the majority of the stimulus required for meaningful muscle growth can be achieved in a well-structured 45 to 60 minute session. Not 90 minutes. Not two hours. Not three hours. You guys hear me loud and clear? 45 to 60 minutes of focused, intentional, progressive work. And I'm going to dive into that intentional and focused part with you guys too.

There was a research study on training volume that found 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week is the range that produces optimal muscle growth for most people.

Now break that down into a weekly training split. I'm saying women only need to be in there three to four times a week. You're looking at somewhere between three to six working sets per muscle group per session, at three to five minutes per set including rest. That is upwards of 30 minutes of actual working time per muscle group. So a properly structured full body session, or upper body split, or lower, or whatever you're covering, you can do that in 45 to 60 minutes.

Anything beyond that is just too long. Either you're warming up too long, or you're resting for too long. And I slowed down saying that, because we've got our phones in our hands for too long. If you're resting for five minutes, you are resting for way too long. Or maybe you're doing too many exercises, or you're doing volume that no research supports as giving you better results.

So the practical takeaway here is, if your workouts are consistently running 90 minutes or longer and you're not a competitive athlete with a specific performance goal, like you're not a marathon runner, you're not doing an Ironman, you're not doing a bodybuilding competition, you are almost certainly doing more than you need to be doing. And doing more than you need is not producing more results, point blank, period.

What it is doing is producing more fatigue, more recovery demand, and more time in the gym for the same or lesser outcome. So being focused and having intentionality behind your workouts is going to beat being in there for 90 minutes to two hours every single time.

And not to mention, with women and our hormones, the hormonal piece. I think this is the part most women have never really heard about, and it changes everything about how you think about training duration.

When you begin a strength training session, your body responds by releasing anabolic hormones, specifically testosterone and growth hormone. Those support muscle building, your fat metabolism and performance. Those are the hormones that make training productive. They create the environment in which your body can build and repair muscle efficiently.

In the first 45 to 60 minutes of a well-executed training session, those hormones are elevated and they are working for you. After that 60-minute mark of intense training, that shifts. Cortisol. And the cortisol police, don't come after me, because we really do need to stop talking about cortisol so much, but it deserves a place right here. A little bit of cortisol is okay, but that's your primary stress hormone.

It begins to rise significantly when you're doing a workout for 90 minutes to two hours. And this isn't a small fluctuation. After an hour of hard training, those levels can increase substantially. Again, some cortisol while you're training is good, but going for too long is going to suppress your testosterone, impair your growth hormone, and basically begin to promote muscle breakdown, which is catabolism, the opposite of anabolic.

So your body is now in a state where it's not helping you build muscle. You break down muscle fibers in the gym so you can build them back after the gym, right? So the hormonal environment I'm speaking of that was supporting your progress in the first hour of your session actually starts undermining it in the second hour. You are not getting more out of the extra time. You are potentially getting less, especially if you're doing strength training workouts, because the hormonal environment has shifted from building to breaking down.

And I'm saying hormones because you break down muscle fibers in the gym, but those building hormones, testosterone and growth hormone, are there with you, active, in the first hour. They'll start declining afterwards, and the breakdown takes over.

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Now, let me pinpoint this, because this isn't true for every single person in every single circumstance. Well-trained athletes, people who do this all the time, have higher training volumes and can tolerate these longer sessions. But for the vast majority of people who train like us, women training for body composition, for building muscle, these longer sessions are not producing a proportionally better hormonal environment. They're allowing more catabolic hormones to take over, and that's going to work against you when you're trying to build muscle and lose fat.

Okay, so the takeaway for what I'm talking about here is: get in, do the work, get out. Protect that anabolic window. Don't grind through a 90-minute session, unless again you're a performance athlete, thinking that longer is going to create more results. It's the opposite. Less is more in this stage of life. Okay?

So let me lean in here with you guys. If research is saying 45 to 60 minutes is enough for your workouts, and you're doing 90 minutes or two hours, then something is eating your time that doesn't need to be. So I want to walk through that with you. Let's go front to end with a workout.

You could be warming up for too long. A warm-up should take 5 to 10 minutes, not 30 minutes. A few minutes of cardio to elevate your heart rate, or doing the specific movement from your actual program, the first exercise of your program, with no weight or body weight. Loosening the joints and warming up the muscles.

But spending 20 or 30 minutes on stretching or foam rolling or general mobility before every session is not giving you a better workout. It's just eating time that could be spent on actual training. So that's one thing.

The second thing you guys need to hear me on is too much rest between your sets. Rest periods matter. They matter big time. But you need to be intentional with them. If you're doing squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, the more compound movements, two minutes of rest between sets is appropriate. That's fine. For isolation exercises, maybe 60 seconds to 90 seconds, depending, but I would probably lean toward that 60-second mark. That's enough.

But what most women are actually doing is scrolling on their phone. They're chatting. They're wandering to get their water. They're just sitting there waiting. What happens is you end up resting four to six minutes between every set. That alone, guys, hear me loud and clear, can add 30 to 40 minutes to a session.

So time your rest periods and take them seriously. If you're chatting, say, hey, I've got to get back to my workout. That's a boundary for yourself inside the gym. It's not social hour. Call each other after the gym. Exchange phone numbers. Say, hey, I would love to keep this conversation going, but I'm going to finish my workout.

Make sure you're taking that rest period intentionally, because that's going to help you increase your training intensity. You don't want to be fully recovered. If you're fully recovered, you're not doing yourself a service in those workouts. So be more intentional with those rest periods.

And then you could just be doing way too many exercises. More exercises do not mean you're going to get more muscle. What produces muscle growth is adequate volume on movements that actually matter: the compound lifts that recruit the larger muscle groups, and isolation exercises for the smaller muscle groups.

If your session is 12 or 15 different exercises, half of them are probably redundant, or they're not meaningfully contributing to your goals. A focused session built around four to a max of seven key movements, depending on your training goals, done with full intention and with progressive overload, will outperform a wandering session with 12 exercises every single time.

So cut the junk, add intention. Your sessions will get shorter and your results will get better. I promise you.

Okay, so let me give you guys a clear, practical picture here, because I don't want this to just be abstract, me telling you this is how long your session should be, this is what your training volume should look like, X, Y and Z with your rest periods. Here's what a focused, efficient, 45-minute training session actually looks like if you are trying to build muscle, lose body fat and change your body composition.

Minutes zero to five, or zero to eight, you're warming up. Cardio, get that heart rate up, get the blood moving. Then a couple of minutes of a movement-specific warm-up, like lighter sets of your first exercise. Get those joints primed. Get that movement pattern going. Done. You're ready to train.

Then minutes 8 to 40, those are your working sets. You're doing five, six, seven exercises. Each exercise is three to four working sets. Rest 60 seconds to two minutes between sets, depending on whether it's compound or isolation. Every set is performed with intention. Your weights are genuinely challenging. You're targeting a rep range, whether that's 8 to 12 reps, and you should always be pushing yourself toward failure on those last two to three reps, where it's a struggle to move the weight. That's where you're creating that metabolic stress and demand on the muscle. Okay?

So, a sample structure. A compound lower body movement, like a squat, for four sets. Then a push upper body movement, something for your chest, maybe something for your shoulders. You move into back. You're doing three sets for these. Then you move into biceps and triceps. That's six to seven exercises, three to four working sets each.

That adds up to around 13 or 14 working sets together, and that lines up with the research-supported range for weekly volume. Whether you're doing full body or muscle-specific workouts, that is enough of a stimulus for your body to adapt, delivered in 45 minutes of actual training time.

And then if you have time at the end, you do a five-minute cool-down. A light walk, light stretching. Maybe you're stretching while you're writing down what weights you did so you know for your next session. Just five minutes. That's it.

Overall, 45 minutes. Every muscle has been stimulated. You've done progressive overload. You've protected the hormonal environment. You trained efficiently, and you did everything your body needed in 45 minutes. Not a 90-minute or two-hour session. A focused 45-minute session.

Let me start to close this episode by saying something a little more directly. You are allowed to have a 45-minute workout and feel good about it. You're allowed to leave the gym before the two-hour mark and know that you did enough. You are allowed to feel like you just had a real, effective, results-producing training session on a lunch break or after school drop-off. Or you stole 45 minutes in the day when the day got away from you. You found 45 minutes. You don't need two hours.

Because the belief that only long sessions count, that anything under an hour is not really training, that you have to earn your results by grinding through two-hour sessions, is what keeps women from training consistently. Women don't want to have to do that. If they think they have to do these 90-minute to two-hour training sessions, that's going to keep them from wanting to go to the gym consistently.

It creates an all-or-nothing relationship with the gym, where either you have enough time for a full session, or you skip entirely because you don't have enough time. And skipping entirely is what actually kills your progress.

You just need a focused, put-your-head-down, put-your-hat-on, 45 to 60 minute session, three, four, or five days a week if you want to. That will always outperform a 90-minute session three days a week. Not because of the frequency alone, but because the consistent, sustainable, fits-into-your-real-life version of training is the one you're actually going to be able to do for months and years. And months and years of showing up is what produces the transformation, not one single epic two-hour session.

So, 45 minutes, bottom line. 60 minutes, bottom line. That's going to give you enough time to produce real, meaningful body composition change. More time does not equal more results. Remember, it gets you outside that hormonal environment. It causes more fatigue. It puts more recovery demand on you.

So just get in. Do the work with real intensity and real intention. Put the phone down. Stop chit-chatting. Get out. And repeat that consistently. That is your formula. That's it. 45 minutes, 60 minutes. Please stop thinking, or rewire that narrative in your mind, that you have to be in there for two hours. Because you don't.

And if you guys want to learn exactly how to focus on the type of training that produces the outcome you need to change your body composition, I do free webinars every week, Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern, live. And I pull three people from the room that I get to talk to live and help. That could be you. I could have a conversation with you where I'm hearing your current situation and helping you know, hey, this is what you've got to do. That's it. Okay? That link is in the show notes.

But until next time I get to chat with you guys on this podcast, just know 45 to 60 minutes is enough time. And that's it. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

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