How Long Until You See Fitness Results After 40?

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It's not going to happen by you following one training block in a program and then disappearing for three months. It requires you to be consistent over weeks and over months, it requires you to be consistent with the right type of nutrition, and it requires you to rest and recover. If you rush this entire process by overtraining or by not eating enough, you not only risk injury, but your body is not going to recover the way it should, and it's actually going to slow your progress.

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And now I want to hear your stories. If you could take 10 minutes of your time to fill out a testimonial, that link is in the description below. That would mean the absolute world to me. How has The WarriorBabe Show positively impacted your life? What have you taken away from this show? How have you applied it, and what results have you gotten? Your story could be featured in one of our special celebration episodes to come. So please head over to the testimonial link in the show notes below and share your journey with me. Thank you all so much for being an essential part of this freaking amazing The WarriorBabe Show community. You guys all rock. I love you all so much. So let's celebrate this achievement together. Again, that testimonial link is in the show notes below. Thank you all so much.

Yo, yo, yo. What is going on, you guys? Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, 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, and welcome to episode 167, where we're going to talk about a crucial concept: the time it takes to see results, and why zooming out and playing the long game is so essential for sustainable success along your fitness journey.

So I have a couple of questions, because I think we've all been here and we've all experienced this. How many of you have felt frustrated because you weren't seeing immediate results from a fitness program you were following? Maybe you're a WarriorBabe and you're like, hey, I've been in this for two months and I'm not seeing the results that I want to see. Keep listening. Maybe you've been eating right. Maybe you've been working out consistently, but the scale just won't budge. Or the muscle definition you're hoping to see is taking so freaking long.

This is a frustration that you have experienced, I've experienced, a lot of us have experienced at some point. And it's easy to get so caught up in the desire for the quick fix and the instant gratification. What I say is, you want to pop your body into a microwave, and 30 seconds later you're expecting to have a toned body, drop 5% body fat and see more muscle definition.

It's not just the instant gratification that a lot of people want. It's also the abundance of before and after photos everybody sees, and the quick transformation stories and people's successes all over social media. People don't show the hard work and the behind the scenes. And I'm kind of guilty of this. When you go to my Instagram, you see what I look like now and me sharing advice, tips and strategies. But there's no way I could show you everything behind this present day, other than going through all of my pictures and old videos from the eight or nine years that I've put in, unless you've been following me for that long.

A lot of people come to my Instagram who are new, and they're like, oh, this person just has a good body. But no, it took me eight, nine years to be where I am today, with consistent effort and hard work over that time. I didn't have this body eight years ago.

So to help break down this topic today, I want to dive into a little bit of science. I did some research to bring to this podcast, looking at what experts in the field of fitness, nutrition and health are saying. According to the research, it typically takes about eight to 12 weeks to start actually seeing noticeable changes in your body composition. I'm going to say that again so you hear me loud and clear, because so many people go into programs expecting results well before that timeframe. Eight to 12 weeks.

What I said earlier: maybe you're a WarriorBabe and it's been two months. That's only eight weeks of a journey, and you're just on the verge of starting to see noticeable changes in your body composition. Maybe it's only slight. And because you see yourself every single day, you're not seeing the changes that you want to see. But you're right there.

It's like what the book Atomic Habits says, which I've talked about on the podcast before, about habit formation and getting the results you want. I'm probably going to butcher this, but if you've read or listened to the book, you'll know what I'm talking about. He uses an ice cube as an example. He puts an ice cube on the table, and the room is set to a specific temperature. The room starts getting warmer and warmer and warmer, but the ice cube stays the same. It's just sitting there.

That's you putting in the work. If you're understanding the parallel here: degree after degree, week after week after week, you're doing the work, but your body is staying the same. The ice cube is staying the same. And then bam, all of a sudden, after no change whatsoever, the ice cube starts to melt.

It's the same thing with you guys. You're doing the same thing consistently over eight weeks, nine weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, four months, six months. And all of a sudden, bam, you start seeing the body composition change, and you start seeing the notable changes.

However, eight to 12 weeks is when you start seeing those notable changes. True transformation, the kind that actually sticks, can take anywhere from six months to a year or more. It depends on your lack of excuses, your thoroughness in following a program and listening to your coach. It depends on your consistency. It depends on whether you're following the right type of plan for you, whether you're taking responsibility for your life and actually abiding by the strategies you need, and whether you're breaking old habits and implementing new habits so you can get the type of results that you want.

This is my personal experience. From the onset of deciding to do it the right way, hiring a coach and having an end goal of stepping on stage, that was a 10-month period. And I saw insane results, because I was consistently following everything to a T. I was dotting my i's and crossing my t's. I was your perfect freaking student. And I've seen this with the women inside of WarriorBabe, the clients I've coached and the coaches coaching their clients. The ones who follow it just like that, or at least 80% or 90% of the time, will see that type of result in that time frame.

So why does it take longer, and why is the long game so important for your long-term, sustainable success? It's because our bodies take time to adapt to any new workout routine. They take time to build muscle. They take time to shed body fat in a healthy way.

Quick fixes like crash diets or extreme workout routines might offer you fast results, and maybe you've seen that in the many you've tried over your journey. But they're often entirely unsustainable, and they can lead to burnout. They can lead to injury. And I think 90% of them lead to rebound weight gain.

Meaning you do this for 12 weeks. You crash diet. You follow an extreme workout routine. You're working out seven days a week. You're doing, I don't know, three miles five days a week, or an insane amount of cardio. And you see the weight loss. But once those 12 weeks are done, it's not sustainable to keep doing what you've just done. So you go back to all of your old habits and you rebound. You gain back all of the weight you started out with.

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So, keeping that at a high level, I want to dive a little deeper into why the long game is so important. First, I want you to consider muscle growth. I talk about this all the time on the podcast, but I believe in repetition. I believe in repeating myself over and over and over again, because I think that's what makes the best coach. And it depends on where you're at in your journey. The words I'm saying right now may be resonating with a few of you, but for others, it may be going in one ear and out the other. Then six months down the road, you're going to be like, oh, I remember Nikkiey said something along these lines on The WarriorBabe Show, and it's going to resonate with you at that point.

So, considering muscle growth: building muscle is a slow process, because it requires consistent strength training, consistent resistance on the muscles. It requires adequate protein intake on a daily basis. And it requires you to give your body proper recovery, which is hard for a lot of people.

Those three things are hard for a lot of people, because I typically hear objections like, I'm too busy and I don't have time to work out. Or, I'm too busy during the day and I don't have time to meal prep or eat enough protein. Or, I don't know what foods have protein in them, or I don't know how much protein I should be eating. And in terms of proper recovery, people just love to go ham six days a week. You can't build muscle going ham six to seven days a week, because muscle fibers need time to repair and grow stronger.

When you lift weights, you create tiny muscle fiber tears. When you're working out, you're breaking down the muscle, not building it up. You build it up outside of the workout, with recovery and the nutrition you eat. So every single time you work out, you're creating tiny tears in your muscle fibers. Your body repairs those tears, making the muscle fibers thicker and stronger in the process of recovery. The repair isn't instant, though. It requires consistent training over weeks and months, combined with adequate nutrition and rest.

This is what a lot of people think, and I know I did at the beginning of my journey, so I feel like I can say this. I went to the gym for two weeks and thought, oh yeah, I'm going to get muscle and I'm going to be toned. And then I wouldn't go anymore. I wasn't consistent. Building those muscle fibers back thicker and stronger is a huge process to undertake, and the process isn't instant.

It's not going to happen in two weeks. It's not going to happen in three weeks. It's not going to happen by you following one training block in a program and then disappearing for three months. It requires you to be consistent over weeks and over months. It requires you to be consistent with the right type of nutrition that makes those muscle fibers thicker and stronger. And it requires you to rest and recover. If you rush this entire process by overtraining or by not eating enough, you not only risk injury, but your body is not going to recover the way it should, and it's actually going to slow your progress.

So if you're working out seven days a week, doing tons and tons of cardio, yet your goal is to be more toned and build muscle, and you're also only eating a thousand calories a day, you risk burnout. You risk hurting yourself. And you actually slow down your progress, because you need the right type of food to recover and build the muscle fibers back thicker and stronger. You need consistent training, the right type of training, and not doing too much.

A lot of people can't believe it when I say you need to do less, not more, especially if you are 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 or older. It's about doing less, not more. You can't do what you were doing at 20 or 30 years old anymore. It's a different approach, a strategic approach that actually works for you in this season of your life rather than what worked for you 20 years ago. And you can still get the same type of results that you had 20 years ago.

And if you're eating a thousand calories and you're not resting, this whole process can't happen. It just slows down. If you're overtraining and not eating enough, consistently over time, rather than doing it the right way, and you think you're speeding up your progress, you're not. You're slowing it down. Think of it as doubling the time it's actually going to take you to get results. If you expect to see results in a year doing it this way, expect it to take two years, or even longer, depending on the person and whatever other factors play into you getting results. If you're doing this, it's going to take you longer, period, point blank, end of story.

So that's the muscle growth process, which is a lot of what you guys want. Before I get into body fat: building muscle is and can only be done with strength training, with some type of dumbbell or barbell work. I know a lot of people want to do Pilates. I've seen older women do Pilates and think they're going to get the body that they want. That's not going to happen. Or running and doing cardio. Cardio is good, but it's not going to help you build muscle.

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Boot camps, F45. There needs to be a consistent program with progressive overload that you are following, where you're doing the boring work, essentially. I've talked about this on the podcast before. You're following the same thing for four to six weeks, and you're doing some of the same exercises. But if you're doing it the right way and changing up reps, sets and time periods, you will notice by the end of the block that you're getting stronger.

When it comes to muscle growth, a lot of you want it, but a lot of you won't do what's actually necessary to get that type of result. So I just want to hone in on that. If you want that, you need to give your body rest. You need to do consistent training over weeks and months. And you need to be eating right and giving your body the adequate nutrition it needs to recover and build back the muscle fibers thicker and stronger, which isn't an instant process.

I know I'm repeating myself here, but I feel like I need to drill it home. You can't just work out for three weeks and disappear. You can't just work out for six weeks and disappear. It has to be consistent effort over weeks and months, so that you're creating tiny tears in the muscle fibers and repairing those tears so they come back thicker and stronger. That process is not instant, and it requires consistent training over weeks and months.

On to body fat. Body fat loss is about creating a caloric deficit over time without depriving your body of the nutrients it needs. Drastic calorie cutting, which a lot of people like to do, leads to muscle loss. It leads to nutrient deficiencies, and it leads to a slowed metabolism, which I want to talk about in a second, along with why muscle and metabolism are so important. If you are drastically cutting your calories, you are losing muscle and slowing your metabolism down, which is completely counterproductive to wanting to be more toned and build more muscle.

When you're looking to maintain muscle mass while losing fat, a gradual approach helps. Meaning you are slowly lowering your calories, getting down into a deficit. I can think of tons and tons of WarriorBabes who all want to go into a drastic calorie deficit. And some of them are already eating 1,100 calories. And we're like, we can't go any lower.

I say it all the time. If you are eating 1,100 calories, you're basically eating the calories your body needs to sustain itself on a daily basis, for your organs to be happy and for you to live, to survive. You cannot go lower than that and hope to build more muscle and get the results you want to be leaner. You're just fighting an uphill battle at that point.

That's why we start people off by increasing their calories, and a lot of magic happens in doing that. People don't understand why, but trust us now, believe us later, because there's a method to the madness. People start eating more, and they start losing body fat and seeing more muscle definition. They're like, holy cow, I didn't know I could actually do this. Yeah, leave it up to the experts. But for those of you who want to go the opposite direction, it's doomsday at that point. You're paying for a program, you're not listening to the experts, and you're going to get more of the results you already have.

So a gradual approach helps you maintain muscle mass while you're losing body fat. It helps make sure you're staying on a healthier path, and it gives you a healthier and more aesthetically pleasing result. What I mean by that is, when you lose weight too quickly, you tend to lose muscle mass along with fat, which can decrease your overall strength and, as I mentioned, slow down your metabolism.

Some of you want to go into a deep calorie deficit right out of the gate. It boggles my mind to put anybody in a caloric deficit, because most of you aren't eating enough anyway. So I always like to either go up in a reverse, which is the concept I just explained, by you eating more, or put people at maintenance and start giving the body what it needs, because it's been in a calorie deficit for way too long.

Once you've done that phase first, you move into an appropriate deficit. You're coming down from maintenance, but you're coming down slowly. That's not only healthier for you, but you're not going to lose muscle mass at the same time that you're losing body fat, because you're holding on to and preserving muscle mass through adequate nutrition and the protein you're giving your body. So you're decreasing body fat over muscle, because you're holding on to the muscle. That's going to give you a more aesthetically pleasing result.

When you lose body fat too quickly, you're losing everything. This is what happens to a lot of people, where they become a skinny-fat version of themselves. This is why people can't perform in their workouts, and why people can't get the results they want, because their metabolism is now slower.

Muscle plays a crucial role in your metabolism, because muscle is metabolically active tissue. That means muscle burns more calories while you're at rest, helping to increase your BMR. I've increased my BMR over eight, nine years of strength training and building more muscle. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your BMR, which means your body burns more calories throughout the day. I personally burn more calories throughout the day.

BMR is what I was talking about earlier. 1,100 calories is basically some people's BMR, and that's all they're eating in a day. That's not going to help you build more muscle and be more toned. Building and maintaining muscle through strength training can therefore support fat loss, weight management and your overall metabolic health.

So when you're building more muscle and eating the nutrients your body needs to sustain that process, and then you go into decreasing body fat, which is phase two, there's going to be better support for losing body fat and better support for your overall metabolic health, because your metabolism is healthy at that point. Is this making sense? I hope it's sticking, because I feel like this is honestly the best way I've articulated it in any podcast I've ever recorded.

Little pin here: next episode, I'm going to share my whole caffeine journey. I started caffeine back today. I feel so good, you guys. I went five weeks without it. We'll talk about all of that in the next episode.

So we've talked about considering muscle growth for long-term success, then losing body fat the appropriate way so you can preserve lean muscle, rather than crash dieting and not being happy with the results, and how your metabolism needs muscle in order to be metabolically healthy.

The last thing I want to talk about is your sanity. Your mental and emotional health plays a significant role in your fitness journey, more than I think anybody really understands. A lot of people just want the tangible, physical result, and they don't really think about their mental and emotional well-being while they're going through the journey.

The stress of unrealistic expectations can lead to insane frustration and insane demotivation. When you expect instant results and you don't see them, it's easy to feel like a failure and give up. This is why it's so important to manage expectations and understand that real, lasting change takes time.

If you can adapt your mindset and get it on board with a long-term mindset, and adopt that long-term mindset, you can cultivate patience, celebrate small victories, maintain your motivation and develop self-discipline. Each step forward, no matter how big, no matter how small, is progress.

I've always said this: once you can accept that your journey is going to take 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, and you have the long-term mindset, your journey gets so much more enjoyable. That mindset shift allows you to appreciate the journey and stay consistent no matter what. To understand that, oh, maybe I didn't get in four workouts this week, but I got in three, and I'm still going to show up for myself the next day.

Actually, here's a great little example to sum it up. I walk the trail by my place every morning with Maverick, and I ran into a friend on the trail. He had been on vacation and enjoyed himself, and then he came back and was right back to it. But a lot of you, if you mess up, to my point a minute ago, like, oh, I only got to the gym three times this week, you think, oh God, I can't do this, I can't do this next week. A lot of people fall off, and they don't get right back to it, regardless of whether they missed their workout or their nutrition the day before.

If I go off track for a day or two, I have the ability to get right back on the next day. A lot of people will wait until Monday, or they'll wait until the new month. When you shift that mindset, it's no longer about quick results. People want quick results, and they're like, oh, I screwed up, I need to start over again. No, it doesn't matter. You're going to screw up.

As long as you can accept the long-term mindset, when you know this is just your life, a journey you're on, and fitness is just who you are, then if I'm inconsistent this week, I'm consistent the next week. If I'm inconsistent one day, I'm consistent the next day. When you shift your mindset to, oh, I messed up yesterday, I'm going to get right back on board today, then 90% of the time you're consistent. Your mindset shifts to, I appreciate this journey, I'm going to stay consistent, and I'm going to avoid the burnout that comes with trying to do too much too quickly.

So it's not just the aesthetics and the tangible results. It's also the emotional and mental health you experience when quick fixes give you unrealistic expectations and lead to frustration. You've done it over and over and over again. And it's like Einstein's quote: the definition of insanity is doing things over and over again and expecting different results. You can't keep doing quick fixes, so something needs to change. Maybe I need to truly adopt this long-term mindset. I need to cultivate patience. I need to celebrate small victories, non-scale victories. I need to maintain motivation throughout and just stay consistent. That gives you realistic expectations, and that gives you an understanding that real, lasting change takes time.

So all in all, you guys, I think that's really important to understand. That concept of playing the long game and zooming out is so essential for sustainable, long-term success. All right, my friends?

If you enjoy this podcast, share this podcast. I feel like so many people need to hear this, and I'm one person. You guys are many. Share this with somebody, whether it's a friend, a relative, a cousin, a girlfriend, a friend's girlfriend, I don't know. Share this. Let's spread the freaking word, because people need to hear this, and they need to adopt this mentality and this understanding, okay? Appreciate you guys. Love y'all, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for sticking around to the end of the show. I hope you really enjoyed that episode. Really quick, if you're a woman aged 45 through 65 and finding menopause challenging, listen closely. WarriorBabe is here to help you reclaim your body and your confidence. At WarriorBabe, we've empowered over 18,000 women to lose stubborn body fat, build toned muscle and understand their bodies better. Our personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more ensure you get exactly what you need to see real results, results that last. Imagine feeling stronger, more energized and in control of your health. Don't let menopause hold you back any longer. Head over to warriorbabe.com/apply and join our amazing community today. That's warriorbabe.com/apply. The link is in the show notes below. Thanks again for listening to the episode, and I'll see you in the next one.