How to Build Muscle After 40: What Actually Works

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask for you to do is if you could leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

You have an injury. Well, how am I supposed to work through this injury? Rather than just accepting that you have an injury. Or my husband ended up in the hospital, but I need to go work out, right? That's an extreme thinking.

You're just going through the motions on a weekly basis, or you're changing up your freaking workout every single day, and it's something different. Then over time, your muscles may not continue to grow or adapt. And so if you're doing that, and/or you're inconsistent, or you're doing something different every single day, or you're not challenging yourself, and you're just going through the motions, man, six months from now, or even a year from now, you could be banging your head into a freaking wall being like, man, why am I not seeing the results that I want of putting on more muscle? Why am I not getting stronger? That's why.

Time under tension is a big thing, you guys. Slowing down the movement, mixing in what I said with four and six here. I said four is increasing the speed of the movement. Six is the opposite, as I said: slowing down the movement, putting more time under tension. So think about it. You've got a barbell squat, right? And you're lowering in the negative portion of the lift. And all of a sudden, man, it burns, right? And the same goes for all of the other things you could potentially be doing in other lifts as well, in the negative portion of the lift. And this can be more effective at inducing muscle damage.

And from there, because you're breaking down the muscle inside of the gym, you're creating the muscle damage, you're creating the muscle tears in the fibers and all that stuff. Post-workout, promoting the growth is what you're going to be doing when you're eating right and recovering right.

If your goal is to build muscle, to see the differences in your body composition, to have those visible changes, muscle is active tissue and it gets its energy from food. Okay? If you didn't know that, now you know it. Muscle doesn't stop, your metabolism doesn't stop. It needs energy, and it gets that energy in order to grow, in order to be recovered, all of the jazz, from food. Okay?

Plus, on top of that, there are some other things that happen. For you guys that are AM workout goers practicing IF, or you're not eating before you work out, you are lifting in a catabolic state. You're catabolic during your workout. So in layman's terms, when you're in this state, your body is breaking down muscle and storing body fat for the production of energy to get you through that workout. That is completely counterproductive to the goals that you are working towards. You want to live in an anabolic state where you build and maintain muscle and burn away body fat. You get there by fueling your body properly with food pre and post workout and all throughout the entire day.

Fitness, overall, is a game of consistency. So spreading your effort, such as working out for an hour across a 20-day period, is far more beneficial than trying to go all out for three hours in the gym for the first two weeks of starting your fitness journey. Not only is that a far more beneficial approach, but it also allows for recovery, for adaptation, for growth. Because you guys know I've said this time and time again: you don't build muscle inside the gym. You build muscle in the following hours with proper nutrition, sleep, hydration, all the things after that workout.

So it's not about how hard you can go all at once, you guys. It's not about how much you need to change all of these things when you're first starting a fitness journey. So many people focus on changing a hundred things when really you need to just focus on one thing, whether that may be drinking more water, or whether that may be throwing out all the processed shit inside of your house and putting in whole foods so that you have better options to choose from, right?

You have an injury. Well, how am I supposed to work through this injury, rather than just accepting that you have an injury? Or my husband ended up in the hospital, but I need to go work out, right? That's an extreme thinking. You feel like there's no flexibility to adjusting the expectations you have for yourself and following this plan based off of a circumstance or life that happens, right? You feel like you have to be 100% perfect in the plan that you're following even if life happens. And that can result in the inability to adapt to change or the unexpected situations that are going to happen in your life.

Being okay with rest days is extremely important. Being okay with allowing yourself to have occasional treats, ice cream, donuts, candy. I have candy. I have chocolate every single night at the end of my night. Allow yourself to have those things. It's not going to derail your progress, okay? What's going to derail your progress is continuing in this all-or-nothing mindset.

Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask for you to do is if you could leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.