Lean Muscle might just be the key to living your best life, post 40.

A lot of women can balk when we talk about gaining muscle, but it is so important to remember that how we move, look and feel is all directly related to healthy muscle tissue. When you start diving into it, it becomes crystal clear that having lean muscle is literally a lifesaver.

Your muscles power every move you make, from walking to talking to standing upright. Muscles also keep you strong, mobile and help prevent injuries and falls. However, it’s also linked to your metabolic rate, insulin sensitivity, immune system and metabolic flexibility. 

As you strengthen and develop muscle you’ll improve your resting metabolic rate (RMR), which is responsible for 60-70% of the amount of calories you burn daily. That makes you a more effective and efficient fat burner.

Focusing on fuelling and training for muscular strength rather than just dieting or doing long, slow cardio for fat loss, will increase your quality of life, support healthy ageing and it will more effectively shift your body composition (muscle to fat ratio). Research now calls muscle, the “organ of longevity” and it is for this reason that muscle needs to be a priority in our training.

Did you know that during perimenopause and menopause it’s important to incorporate more strength training?

From our mid 30s, we all start to lose muscle mass – this is called sarcopenia. When we enter peri/menopause and our hormones start to decline, we begin to lose the regular, monthly fluctuation of estrogen/progesterone (our monthly cycle). Estrogen has an anabolic role in our body, meaning it helps to build muscle. As our estrogen declines into menopause, we now need to find external stimulus to help us maintain the lean muscle that we have, and in a lot of cases, try and gain new muscle mass.  

One of these ways  is to add resistance training into our routine. This can be done in several different ways – using body weight against gravity, resistance bands and then ramping up to using weighted objects like dumbbells, cables, and/or barbells and weight machines. 

While resistance training is amazing for us at every life stage, it’s particularly beneficial for body composition shifts, as our hormones start to change (like in peri/menopause).

Through perimenopause and beyond, strength training 2-3 x every week, shows enormous benefit. So, we no longer need to train hard, every day, burning ourselves into the ground. Strength training 2-3 times each week, with plenty of movement in between (walking is amazing) is our new prescription.

What might be a new concept too, is the idea of recovery. In our 20s and even 30s, a lot of us trained every day, hard, and ‘recovery’ or ‘taking a day off’, felt like cheating. The thing is, now in our 40s+, being strategic about our recovery is also how we get stronger and lay down new muscle. If we train too much and too often, the body can’t keep up with the repair process and we end up in a constant state of inflammation which can promote fat storage and more muscle breakdown. The exact opposite of what we want! Working hard and then taking a recovery day will promote the best results in lean muscle growth (and remember, this is our goal ;-)).

Your 40s+ and beyond present a time where you need to work a little differently with your training, not simply harder. And we appreciate that this might take a real shift in mindset – it certainly did for us. Yet, it is important that we don’t simply train HARDER, but we train DIFFERENT.

Another important strategy that we can use in order to support your lean muscle is your dietary intake of protein. Protein is made up of amino acids and is necessary for, among other things, muscle repair and recovery.  If you aren’t getting enough protein into your late 30s, 40s and beyond – at the same time of life that your hormones are changing – you’ll not only potentially lose more muscle but your recovery from your workouts, will also be impaired.

When you can combine the power of resistance training and adequate intake of dietary protein, you will start to feel and look better, your body composition will shift and you will see your confidence, power and energy skyrocket. It’s time to prioritise our lean muscle for now and for our ‘old lady bodies’!

Not sure where to start with resistance training, we offer you a FREE 7 day trial of our online fitness studio, SSH Move. Cancel any time, no obligation. Check it out HERE.

And our secret weapon to helping us get adequate protein intake, we LOVE protein powder and you can check out our SSH Protein here.

Anna & Em xo