#84: 5 Reasons Your Muscles Aren't Growing (and how to fix it)

Are you working out hard but still not seeing the muscle growth you expected?

In this episode of 40+ Fitness for Women, I’m breaking down the top five reasons why your muscles might not be growing, even if you're putting in the effort.
 
Whether you’re in perimenopause, menopause, or beyond, these common pitfalls can stand in the way of your muscle-building goals.

In this episode, I cover:

1. Mixing cardio with weight training
2. Switching programs too often
3. Not eating enough protein
4. Skimping on sleep
5. Lacking patience with the process

If you’ve been frustrated with your progress, this episode is packed with actionable tips that will help you get back on track and start seeing the muscle gains you deserve.

Resources mentioned in this episode: 

• Struggling with sleep? Check out episode #63 for tips on improving your rest 
• Having trouble getting enough protein? Check out episode #32

Chapters

• 0:00 Separating Cardio and Strength Training
• 2:09 Consistency Over Variety
• 3:27 Reason 3: Importance of Protein Intake
• 4:52 Reason 4: The Role of Sleep in Muscle Growth
• 5:53 Reason 5: Patience and Time in Building Muscle
• 7:01 Summary and Final Thoughts

Transcript

POD84 - 5 Reasons You're Not Seeing Muscle Growth

 Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach helping women in perimenopause and beyond build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. And today we're doing one of these fun five reasons why episodes, and this time on why you might not be seeing muscle growth, even though you're working out hard. Because as we know, muscle is super important so this is a good list of things to check that you're not doing these things wrong.

I think the number one most important biggest one is you are combining your cardio and your strength training. Separate those two puppies, please, okay? So where are you combining them? You're combining them if you're going to pump classes, if you're going even to the gym, and then doing some aerobics, like jumping jacks in between, your sets, or doing some online classes where you're doing combination exercises and you're really feeling the burn, sweating, your heart rate is going up.

So if the exercise that you're doing is causing you to burn a lot of calories, sweat a lot, and get really out of breath, then you're not Strength training, right? That is cardio. Separate the cardio from your strength training. Do some systematic strength training for your muscles. Do the cardio separately, please.

That is really, I think, the place where most people get it wrong. It is absolutely where I got it wrong for years and years and years just because I didn't know. Nobody told me. But hey, you don't have that excuse because now I've told you. Get out of the pump classes. Get in the weight room. or buy some weights and start training at home.

Reason number two, you're getting bored. You're switching programs because you're bored. Oh, I can't do the same thing day in and day out. That's so boring. You know what? You are going to get the most results by doing the same thing day in and day out and applying progressive overload. That is how muscles are built.

Sorry. It's like trying to, you know, decide that, Hey, I'm going to become a marathon runner by like doing different dance classes every day. No, that's not going to work. You need to put in the miles running in order to become a marathon runner. And in order to build muscles, you need to put in the hours lifting weights and applying progressive overload.

It actually gets super exciting once you start seeing the muscles and noticing how you are getting stronger and feeling how different your body feels when you can once again lift heavy things like your groceries, like car tires, like whatever, you know, those garden, those sacks of gardening dirt, 

so yeah. It's boring. Maybe. Not so boring. The result though.

Number three, you're not eating enough protein. So contrary to what you may have thought, we need to be eating more protein as we get older, rather than eating less, because our bodies are worse at processing the protein that we consume.

we consume we consume so aim for at least the 100 grams of protein a day, and if you're really trying to build muscle, I would really be aiming more for the one gram per pound of body weight. Protein it's made up of amino acids. So when you eat protein, you give your body the amino acids that it needs to build your muscles. Trying to build muscle without those amino acids, is like trying to build a brick house without bricks. You just don't have the material to do it with.

So start building protein into each of your meals. It's not really going to work if you try to kind of stack it all into one meal. Oh my God, no way.

And have a big dose of protein right after your training sessions. This has been recommended particularly for us midlife women to help us to build and maintain muscle.

Fourth thing. Get enough sleep. I know sleep is not sexy and sleep can be super hard at this point in life. I mean, sleep disturbances in perimenopause and menopause are rampant, but please try to get sleep under control so that you are getting enough of it. They've done recent studies on people who are weight training.

And trying to build muscle and the two groups had varying amounts of sleep. So getting enough sleep. So some of the eight hours of sleep at night and getting too little sleep. And there was a significant difference in how much muscle the people who are getting enough sleep, you know, we're putting on. So there's a simple thing, not so simple and, you know, maybe in practice, but there's something you can do, and if you're having trouble with sleep, then check out my episode on sleep link in the show notes.

And then finally, this is the one that you're not going to want to hear, but I think is often, often the biggest culprit is that you haven't given it enough time yet. Okay. So if you are following a program, applying progressive overload and training consistently, that could be two days a week. That could be four days a week. You just need to give it time. Muscles are not built overnight. This is good news for those of you who are afraid of getting all of a sudden too muscular, that it is not built overnight. It takes weeks and months for it to really start to show. All right. So just keep going, trust the process, make sure you have a good process in place, i. e. that you have a good program, that you're applying progressive overload, that you're doing those right things. And just keep going. The results will start to show eventually.

All right. So to summarize, the five things that you should check if you are not building muscle is that you are separating your cardio from your muscle building work. So pump classes, toss them aside, bootcamp classes, toss them aside. You're going to do far better by doing your cardio as cardio and doing your weight training as weight training. 

You're getting bored and you're switching programs, you need to just do the same good program, keep applying progressive overload and rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. That is how you're going to get the results. Every time you change exercises, you take a little pause, or even a little bit of a step back.

You're not getting enough protein, so please feed your body so that it can build muscles. And by the way, I'll mention that if you're in a severe calorie deficit, that's also going to be a big, you know, break on you building muscles. 

Sleep. Sleep is really important for so many things, including this. So focus on getting good quality sleep and enough of it.

And finally, patience. This takes time. It is not an overnight thing. If muscles were quick and easy to build, if you could do it in 12 weeks, for example, don't you think everybody would be running around out there looking amazing and fit and muscular? Building muscle takes time and it brings amazing rewards.

Just instead of thinking of this as a 12 week sprint that, Oh, then I don't have to do this anymore. No, this is a lifestyle change. This is a new habit that you're incorporating into your life and just keep going. And the months will just kind of go by and you'll notice that, Oh, wow. My biceps are bigger than they were last year. Or, you know, in the spring, you'll notice that they are bigger than they were last fall. That kind of thing. 

All right. So I hope that these helped. And let me know if you have some other ones that you've noticed are stopping you from building muscle. I'd love to hear. 

And for more information on getting enough sleep, check out my podcast on sleep. And for more information on how to get enough protein, check out my podcast on protein. 

Till next week, happy training.