Why Build Muscle After 40: Mistakes Women Should Avoid

Nikkiey: Muscle is the organ of longevity. What is going on, you guys? Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show. Or if you are a new listener, welcome 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 number 52, where I'm going to talk about why building muscle is so freaking beneficial.

I'm also going to touch on a few common mistakes that I see people make when they're trying to build muscle, and I want to talk about how to avoid them. So first and foremost, maybe you follow me, or maybe you are new to following me, or you've never heard of WarriorBabe before and you don't know what I'm all about. I am all about building muscle. Muscle is my jam. You want to talk to me about something? Talk to me about muscle, building muscle, how to get more muscle, how to tone. Tone is just more muscle. That word gets to me sometimes with the industry. But all things muscle related.

I want to speak to why I believe it is so beneficial for you to focus on building more muscle. And speaking to my women who are 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 years old, look, y'all grew up in the age when being skinny was cool. So we are transitioning, and WarriorBabe, Nikkiey Stott, is build muscle. That is what I identify with and what I believe in so much.

I'm going to talk about all of the reasons why. You guys grew up, obviously, before me, but your era was, yo, let's be skinny. All things skinny: diet, diet, diet, salads, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, all of the things to be skinny, right? Models, skinny. Even when you go into Macy's, the mannequins are skinny. Why don't those mannequins have muscles on them?

That's a great question to ask, right? So I feel like things are shifting, and I specifically want to get the word out that muscle is sexy. Muscle is a signature of strength, a signature of discipline, a signature of a healthy physique, all of the things. So I want to talk first about why it's so beneficial to focus on building muscle.

Then I'm going to talk about the common mistakes. So first and foremost, there is a woman I follow on Instagram, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. She shares this message through her platforms, and it resonates so hard with me as the one answer that sums up why building muscle is so beneficial. I'm going to elaborate a little bit more, obviously, but to sum it up: muscle is the organ of longevity.

Muscle is the organ of longevity. I want you to have that tagline, that motto, that summary in your head for the rest of the podcast, because everything I'm going to speak on really speaks to this one line. Muscle is the organ of longevity, okay? And if you follow me, you'll learn more about this.

Muscle is active tissue. I'll speak to all of the things: muscle, fat loss, X, Y and Z, how to build it. But muscle is active tissue in your body. There's a saying, and I'm sure you've heard it before: you either use it or you lose it. There was an interesting statistic I once read from the National Institutes of Health: the muscle mass on your body decreases approximately 3% to 8% per decade after the age of 30.

Like I said, I'm speaking to you guys who probably focused on trying to just be skinny and did all the things, like fad diets, or not really looking at how much food you are eating, or not eating enough, or doing tons and tons and tons of cardio because you think that's the way to get the body you want. And typically, a lot of you guys lose it.

You lose your muscle mass as you age throughout life, right? Especially the women I'm speaking to who are maybe going through menopause or are in the phases of about to experience menopause. You guys typically lose more muscle mass after that, especially if you're not focusing on strength training and putting an emphasis on building muscle. So to speak to what I just said a little bit more: you either use it or you lose it.

I also want to paint pictures mentally here. This may pull in a little bit of my nursing background, but I'm okay with that because I want to paint this picture really, really hard in your brain. I want you to think about your body at 70 years old, okay? What you do right now, at age 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, matters for that body at 70 years old.

Let's say you don't strength train. Let's say you don't eat the right types of foods. To pull my nursing background into this: I worked about nine to 10 years in the healthcare industry before I transitioned to the online space and started WarriorBabe. I worked in the emergency room, and before that I worked in long-term care in a nursing home facility. So I have seen and been exposed to what women's bodies look like if you don't incorporate a healthy lifestyle in your younger years.

That's why I am so passionate about this, because I've seen it. Not a lot of women do, right? Not a lot of women see nursing homes, or see firsthand what all of this can lead to, or have worked in emergency rooms. Nurses will be able to speak to this. Doctors will know all of this. But the majority of people who are not in that profession don't know this. That's why I believe in this so much and want to bring this vision to you guys firsthand, so you can make sure that right now you're doing all of the things to help your body at 70 years old.

So with a lot of the patients I used to see in the hospital, the reason they were coming in usually came down to weaker bones and a higher probability of fractures, right? Because when you have weaker bones, you have a higher probability of fractures. The majority of the cases I cared for in the nursing home were people who fell down and broke their hip. A lot of the people I would see in the ER were falls, right? Mainly women.

I'm putting this in here because I want it to start painting a picture, right? If you don't strength train and you don't eat the right types of food right now, whatever age you are, 60 and below, 50 and below, 40 and below, I want you to think about your body at 70 years old. This could be a probable statistic, and this could be you, right? I don't mean to say that in a daunting or scary way.

I say it to empower you to start doing these things, like strength training, building muscle and having a strong body now, rather than waiting until it's too late, okay? Another interesting stat from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, states that 95% of hip fractures are from falling, and women fall more than men because women more often have osteoporosis, a disease that weakens the bones and makes them more likely to break.

So if you don't strength train with weights and eat right to fuel your body and make it strong, what I just explained is a possibility for your future. And maybe you're thinking, Nikkiey, you're scaring me. Good. Go and start taking strength training seriously. Not doing endless amounts of cardio, not doing all these HIIT classes and boot camps, not thinking, let me eat less, because this is what's going to get my body to be skinny, right?

Then you just end up skinny fat, and the relative proportion of muscle mass on your body is nothing. So yeah, maybe I do want to poke you a little bit here and shake you to wake you up if you aren't doing all of these things. Or if you are, and you know friends and family members who are not, maybe it's best for you to share this podcast with them so they can hear it from a professional and not just from you. Instead of you saying, yo, you need to start strength training, go work out, go lift some weights, bring them into a professional space, me, right?

Share this with them so they can have this eye-opening enlightenment from this podcast. Because if you don't strength train and you don't eat right to fuel your body and make it strong... And if you follow me, you know what I preach: you've got to eat. If you're eating the right amount of food, protein, fats and carbohydrates, you're giving your body enough calories to support building muscle. Muscle is active tissue, so where do you think it gets its energy from? It gets its energy from food.

So if you're not fueling your body enough and you're not doing all the right things, muscle mass is going to decrease. Osteoporosis is going to sneak up a little bit more. All of these things will happen. What I explained is a possibility for your future. And to drive it home, I say this with love, because I want you guys to take this stuff seriously. I took care of my grandmother. You know this from episode one, where I shared my journey and all the things I did. I took care of my sick grandmother. I lived in her home. I took care of her in the morning, got her dressed, helped her do her hair, showered her, bathed her.

I did this for many patients. When I worked in a nursing home, I wiped their butts, right? I did all of these things to help care for them. It's like what Tony Robbins says: you can look at a body and understand how they live their life. So when I looked at the women's bodies I was taking care of, and at my grandmother, I knew she didn't work out a day in her life. Or maybe she did work out a day in her life; let's not take that literally.

But she didn't incorporate strength training consistently over years, right? So what it amounted to was her having a weaker body, having to use a walker at first, and then having to use a wheelchair because therapy wasn't really helping as much. She had to sit back. And if you guys knew my grandmother, she was a nurse as well, always on her feet, so active. I joke about this because my grandfather didn't know how to crack an egg or cook an egg at age 80 when I was living with them.

She literally did everything in the house for him: laundry, dishes, cleaning. She was all over the place. So having to watch my grandmother sit back and watch my younger cousins run around and have fun, and not be able to be involved in that, sucked.

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I could see that the life in her face just wasn't her, you know? She wanted to run around. She wanted to do all of the things. So that's the difference between the two. There's this one avenue, right? Let's say you don't strength train. Let's say you don't eat all of the right foods. This is what's going to happen. Like I said, think about your body at 70 years old.

Muscle is the organ of longevity. If you're not doing all of the things, muscle mass decreases, and you have higher chances of all these things: chronic disease, hip fractures, all of it, okay? So now flip it. You have that avenue, and then there's the opposite: you do strength train. You do eat all the right types of foods. You do take it seriously. You do it consistently. You're not eliminating cardio, but you're lessening the amount of cardio you're doing.

You stop focusing on eating in a deficit for so freaking long because you're so adamant about getting skinny while not focusing on strength training. You're doing the opposite of that: you're strength training and eating all the right types of foods. And so the opposite of what I just explained happens.

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To bring it back to the fall example, fracturing your bones and weaker bones: if you do fall, you're more likely to have bones strong enough to withstand that fall.

Why? Because you're doing the strength training. And what do you think that helps do? It builds stronger bones and stronger muscles around the bones. So if you do fall, you're more likely to have bones strong enough to withstand the fall. You're also more likely, if you do break anything, to have a quicker, easier recovery, because you've been so active beforehand. So that sheds a little light on the falling example I used. If you do strength train and you do eat right, it's going to be a little bit easier.

I also want to speak to osteoporosis, which is a condition that gets worse following menopause, as I mentioned, because bone density decreases and bones become weaker. A way to help that, you guys, is to strength train, have a nutrient-dense diet and do weight-bearing exercises to help prevent further bone loss and rebuild bones, but most importantly, build muscle around those bones to make them even stronger.

So to wrap up why I believe building muscle is so beneficial, and to marry those two images together: muscle is the organ of longevity. I went on the rants about what could happen if you don't and what could happen if you do. Think about your body at age 70, because what you do right now matters so much.

Building muscle is so beneficial. Muscle is literally the organ of longevity. As I said, it is the key to your life. I will boldly say this: it is the key to living longer, from being able to withstand a fall, as in the example I explained, to lowering your risk of any type of chronic disease that may run in your family.

So I believe in this so much, not just for the aesthetics of what muscle can do for your body and the look of it as a signature of strength, power, empowerment, boldness and living a healthy life. Beyond being sexy, it is so beneficial for your overall health and the trajectory of your life. It is the key to living longer. Muscle is the organ of longevity. Again, that was quoted from Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And for every decade after you turn 30, your muscle mass decreases by 3% to 8%.

So from 30 to, let's say, 60, that's three decades of your muscle mass decreasing. That's why women's bodies are so fragile post-menopause, on top of all the things that happen internally during menopause. That is why every single day, I want you to think: when you're 70 years old, do you want to look back and say, I did everything the right way, and that helped me be where I am today with my body and my health?

If you're not doing that right now, and you're not incorporating strength training, and you're not eating right to fuel those processes, then I challenge you to take it more seriously, because I want you to live longer. And most importantly, I don't want you to be how my grandmother was. I want you to be the grandmother who is running around with her kids, having fun with them, playing with them in the backyard, being able to engage in those memories more. So that is why I believe building muscle is so freaking beneficial.

Now, really quick, I want to talk about the common mistakes people make when they're trying to build muscle and how you can avoid them. A couple of these are more mindset related, and some of them I already touched on. But I think they're so important, because you have to get your mental game on board with building muscle and almost eliminate all the things I mentioned at the beginning, all the things you grew up with, tried or have done. They clearly aren't working for you, and you need to switch to a more supportive mindset and new things to try.

Building muscle is not what you think it is from how you grew up. You can't do all the things you did before and then expect to build muscle. You have to eat more. You have to strength train. You have to challenge your body. You have to do more than just the cardio and all the things people think it is. And if you can't get your mindset on board with that, the rest isn't going to follow.

So, three, maybe four things here. The main one is like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. And this isn't a woman's fault, right? Like I mentioned, growing up, for you guys it was all about being skinny. It was all about looking skinny. It was all about eat this diet to get skinny. Eat less, do more cardio. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig. All of that marketing is ingrained in the brains of women 45 plus, 50- and 60-year-olds.

It's sad because that's all you guys know, right? And you think eating less is the answer. The main problem I always hear from women is that they are not eating enough food. It's slowly becoming more apparent that that's not the take on things anymore, that food is fuel for strong bodies and that you need food to build muscle, et cetera, et cetera. And I stand behind that message so freaking much.

So a mistake I see is women being stuck in that old mentality of needing to eat less to lose weight, and stuck in the cardio machine mentality, all of that stuff you grew up with. That's one of the biggest mistakes I see women make when they're trying to build more muscle. Again, it's not your fault, but you have to break that pattern. You have to be so open to food as fuel and to wanting to eat more, and keep in mind the picture I just painted for you, in order to have a strong body at 70.

You have to do all of these things: eating more, strength training, eating the right types of foods, paying attention to that stuff. So that's the main one I see. We have to create a mental shift to get women to trust that eating 2,000 calories is okay, and that it's needed when you want to build and put muscle on your body, to make you feel stronger and to make you healthier. Not even just for aesthetics. Let's just focus on health right now, okay?

So that's the biggest mistake I see. Another mistake I see is being stuck in that cardio machine mentality. Too much cardio works against you when you're trying to build more muscle, especially if you aren't eating enough, which, like I said, is the biggest struggle point for the majority of people. To avoid this, you still need to incorporate cardio into your routine. I'm not saying to completely nix it, because your heart is a muscle, and your heart needs cardiovascular exercise to make it strong as well.

But too much cardio works against you, right? You don't want to be doing cardio six or seven days a week for an hour, or running a shit ton of miles, without backing it up with the proper nutrition. You need to find the right balance of the two, but make sure you're doing more strength training than cardio and eating enough to fuel both types of activity. If you're somebody who loves to run, that's amazing. Make sure you're fueling your body for both your strength training and your cardio.

That is hard to do, because if you're doing both, you're probably going to need to eat a decent amount of food to fuel those activities and to fuel all of the organs in your body so they're actively running as well. Remember, a lot of the stuff in your body is active tissue, and the way it operates fully and functionally is by getting energy. The way you give your body energy is through nutrition and eating the right types of foods. So that's mistake number two that I usually see when people are trying to build more muscle: cardio, and doing a crap ton of it.

Another mistake I see is that women are so afraid to get bulky. Women think that if they strength train, they're going to get bulky and look like a man. This thought process literally stops women in their tracks from wanting to touch a dumbbell or a barbell. So they end up skinny fat. They end up, so to speak, in the pictures I painted for you guys.

Right? I want you to eliminate this freaking false statement from your mind. I absolutely hate that this statement runs around the industry, that if you lift weights you're going to get too bulky. I think it mainly comes from seeing men who are huge because all they do is strength train, or women who may be on PEDs, which are performance-enhancing drugs, and seeing those images and thinking that's going to happen to you too.

Look, guys, please understand that the people you fear looking like are taking PEDs and have higher levels of testosterone in their bodies than normal folks like you, me or the women listening to this. So just eliminate that freaking statement from your brain, the idea that lifting is going to make you too bulky. Muscle is sexy.

Muscle is the organ of longevity. So be okay with going to lift a dumbbell and going to lift a barbell. You're not going to get bulky. Please just eliminate that thought process from your brain. So those are a couple of the common mistakes I see. Another big mistake I see, and I want to save this for a future podcast where I break it down a little bit more, is the scale. I know so many of you freak out when you see the number on the scale increase.

Let me just plug this in here: when I first started my journey back in 2015, I weighed 140 pounds. To this day, eight years later, I weigh 155 pounds. That is a 15-pound increase. And first of all, my body looks completely different from 2015 to now, because I have more muscle mass on my body.

Muscle is more dense than body fat. They weigh the same, but muscle is more dense, so it takes up less space than body fat does. That's why I could weigh 140 pounds then and 155 pounds now, yet look completely different: I have more dense, lean muscle on my body than body fat. And do you think that along my journey, which clearly isn't over because I'm still going...

As I saw the scale going up, 145, 148, 150, I had to break down so many behavioral patterns around that number on the scale. I think that's better for a full podcast, where I want to elaborate on how I got myself to stop emotionally attaching myself to that number. Because if I hadn't, I would not have continued my journey to be where I am today, with the body composition I have, while seeing the scale continue to go up.

That's if I hadn't broken down all the behavioral patterns and emotional attachments I had to seeing that number on the scale. So that's a big mistake I see. Women attach themselves so emotionally to the number on the scale that it will literally stop you from making the progress you want to see when it comes to building muscle on your body. If you are somebody who wants to build muscle, you may not be in the boat of, I want to drop 10 pounds, or I want to drop 15 pounds, or I need to drop 20 pounds.

You may drop five, then build more muscle, and then be 10 pounds heavier, yet your body looks completely different, your waist is smaller and your clothing sizes are down. So fuck the scale. Literally, please. I'll bring you a deeper podcast on this, but that thing does not serve you if you are so emotionally charged by it, especially if you want to build muscle. Because if you want to build muscle, the scale may not change, and it may increase.

So those are a couple of the mistakes I see when women try to build muscle, and some ways to avoid them. That encompasses this whole podcast, which I freaking love. If you enjoyed it, please let me know. Screenshot it, share it to social media and tag me. I love seeing that feedback. Rate and review this podcast if you haven't done that already. I don't run any ads for this podcast, so it grows totally organically, and because of you guys, we have been in the top 20 since launch day in January of 2023.

So please rate and review it if you haven't already. When you do that, it helps get the podcast in front of other women who need to hear this message too. So that wraps up the podcast: why building muscle is so freaking beneficial, all of the things muscle related, how it gives you literally the key to living longer, because muscle is the organ of longevity, and then the common mistakes I see when women are trying to build more muscle and how to avoid them.

I hope you guys enjoyed it. Peace out. I'll see you in the next podcast.

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