#146: What Progressive Strength Training Is and Why It’s So Effective After 40
If you're a woman in midlife and you have noticed that you've lost muscle tone, that you're not looking athletic and fit, and that you are weaker, then you are not alone. And one of the most important things that you need to do in order to regain that muscle, start looking and feeling like yourself again. You know, get toned, get the kind of results that you want to out of the time you're spending. Exercising is applying methodology which actually gets you to grow muscle, and one of the most important concepts in this area is progressive overload. So in this episode and in the next, I think it's four, I am really going to be diving deep into progressive overload so that you are doing the right things to get the results that you want, because honestly, just picking up weights and doing something random is [00:01:00] not going to get you where you wanna be. And all of us want to get from where we are now, which is feeling weaker and blobby to where we wanna be, which is strong, firm, toned, ready to take on the decades ahead as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Because I don't know about you, but my life is busy. And I don't have time to be spinning my wheels, wasting time doing workouts that aren't moving the needle. So let's get into it.
If we haven't met before, I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, and I'm a menopause fitness coach, and I help women to get strong, toned, and feel like themselves again through. Proper strength training and switching up other fitness habits that are more suited to your midlife body.
So the first thing that you need to understand is that in order to build muscle [00:02:00] when you are in midlife and your estrogen is either fluctuating like a maniac or if you're postmenopausal like I am, and it has literally walked out the door, is that you can't do the same things that you used to do and expect the same result because you are working with a totally different body. And that means that you need to do things in a little bit more structured, systematic, um, way where you are working towards particular goals. And if you're listening to this episode, your goal is probably to look more toned, to get strong again, and to build muscle for metabolic health and all the other reasons, right?
And even if you are on hormone replacement therapy, that is not the same thing as turning the clock back 10, 20 years. Back to when you were in your childbearing years. Our bodies are fundamentally different in this stage of life, but that's okay. There are some great [00:03:00] things about being menopausal postmenopausal once you've gotten the symptoms worked out.
So today we're gonna talk about progressive strength training and what does that really mean? So the first thing to understand is that your body does not want to hold onto muscle. Naturally. You are losing muscle as you age. It is an expensive tissue for your body to hold onto. It burns more calories just when you're laying around on the sofa, and that's why it's actually a great thing for increasing your metabolism.
So the more muscle you have on your body, the higher your metabolic rate is, but it's also why your body, which is, let's face it, still the same as caveman's bodies where really food was a scarcity. So you didn't wanna keep on board any kinds of tissues that you didn't actually need for your survival. So the thing that we're doing [00:04:00] with, with strength training is we're trying to trick our bodies into thinking that we need to keep the muscle on them and even build some more so that we can get back to being the strong, capable women that we really are inside.
And the way you do this is that you need to be pushing your body just a little bit out of its comfort zone. And that signals to your body that hey, Lynn doesn't have quite what it takes to get through her life. So we better give her a little bit more muscle, a little bit more strength, so that she can manage.
And so progressive overload is the method that we're using to make sure that as we get stronger through strength training. We continue to push our bodies a little bit out of our comfort zone. And the thing is with strength training, which is a little different from other things, is that you don't kind of [00:05:00] do that naturally.
Now, if you were going out and starting out up running, this would happen pretty naturally. I think at least if you're kind of a, a, a goal oriented person like I am. Uh, you know, if you pick up jogging, you're gonna start by jogging some small loop, let's say around your block. And you're gonna go at the pace that you can go.
And if you're crazy like me, or maybe not so crazy, you are going to be timing how long that takes you and how far you actually went. So let's say the first time you go around your block and it takes you five minutes. Well, then you start a routine. I'm gonna run three days a week. I'm gonna go around the block and you time yourself every time because of course that makes you feel really good to be tracking.
It's very rewarding. So anyway, you go out and you do that a few times and you realize that hey, this is getting easier each time. And hey, maybe I could do a little bit more. I mean, [00:06:00] very few people will start up running and then always run the same loop.
Always at exactly the same speed because what's the fun in that really, right? So when you've been able to run around the block in five minutes, a few times, you're like, okay, maybe, maybe I could do it a little bit faster, or maybe I could go one and a half times around the block. Right? So just kind of naturally you start to push yourself as you are in better shape for running.
The thing is that when women start strength training, they're not really doing that. A lot of women get caught up just, using the same weights, the same reps all the time. And they don't do this kind of natural progression in strength training, and that's why it really is useful to start following a systematic plan.
I mean, think about it in most things, if you have a goal. If you have a structured plan for getting there, and especially if [00:07:00] you have a structured plan for getting there that you know works, that's been like scientifically proven to work, you are going to get there much faster and probably have better results by the time you get there.
So some basic things that you need to have in place when you're trying to progress to becoming stronger and having more muscle, is you need to be doing the same exercises over and over again. Right? When you're jogging, it's not like you jog one day and then you swim one day and then you surf on another day and you expect that your running is gonna get better.
No, you jog. And then you jog some more and you jog again, and you keep getting better at jogging. And it's the same thing with strength training. You choose particular exercises and you repeat them. You repeat them, and you do them a little bit. More and a little bit more every time, and I'll talk next week more about how you do that [00:08:00] progressing.
But the point is that if you keep swapping exercises, you're not gonna be able to do that. So the same way that you're jogging around the block is not gonna get better. If one day you're jogging, one day you're swimming, one day you're paragliding. One day you're playing tennis. You need to just be doing jogging If your, you know, goal is to be running further faster.
And then you need consistency. Obviously if you run today and then you take three months off and then you do it again, you cannot be expecting to get results. So you need to kind of get yourself into a program and then do it consistently. And with muscles, the thing that happens is that when you strength train, you actually stimulate your muscles to get stronger.
So after your workout is actually when the magic happens, so you, you go do your workout. That's the stimulus. Then during the 48 hours [00:09:00] afterwards is when the growth happens. So there's an area of anabolic where, which means growth. Anabolic window, and then after a little while, your muscles start to break down again.
So this aging process, not holding onto muscle, if you don't need it, use it or lose it, that starts to happen. So at that point, you need to train again so that you again stimulate muscle growth. So you need to be having some kind of a consistent schedule of strength training. Twice a week per muscle group is plenty.
So it's not like you need to be there every day. And for sure you wanna leave at least 48 hours in between training sessions. And as you get older, it's been shown that maybe you need a longer window for the recovery. And for women, it has been shown in some research that we actually recover a little bit faster than men.
For [00:10:00] me, as a post-menopausal 54-year-old woman, I noticed that. It is best for me if I give my muscles two days off before training them again. So if I've trained my upper body, I then take two days off before training my upper body again. So you wanna stick with these same exercises for at least eight to 12 weeks.
And then the other part of that is you wanna track, so very similarly to the running example where you probably are using your sports watch or like I used to back in high school, write it all down. I had it in my diary today. I ran.
Four miles and it took me 40 minutes or whatever it was. I don't remember what my, my speed was, but whatever. I wrote it down in my calendar every single time and then I would look at how I was improving over time.
So the same way with strength training, tracking is super important and it's also important because you know, when you go back [00:11:00] in to do it again. You wanna remember what is the weight that you used last time so you can, you know, start from there and how many reps you were able to do last time because then it sets your mind for that right Then, you know, ah, I've been able to do eight reps of this, so I know I can do at least eight reps of that.
And it's amazing. You know, our minds are really powerful for this. Just think about the example of running a four minute mile. Like for so long that was considered to be this magic, you know, glass ceiling. Nobody could run faster than that, and nobody did because nobody believed it was possible.
But once the first person did it, then people were like, wait a second, this is possible. And then the next person and the next person and the next person was able to do it. So in that way, like when you. Pick up your weights and you know that, Hey, I can do this weight and I can [00:12:00] do this many reps. It already sets you up mentally that, Hey, I can do at least this and maybe I can even do a little bit more.
Now in my membership I program in eight week training blocks because that allows you enough time to really apply progressive overload. And one of the most important things in the app besides being able to do the exercises correctly because there are demo videos. Is being able to track what you did last time so you know what you should do this time and you can watch your progress unfold.
Three big mistakes that I see women making with progressive overload are the following. The first is not getting the form right before you start pushing for more weight or more reps, form is critical. That's how you are going to ensure that you're making progress and also avoid injury. And that's one of the reasons why I offer form checks to all my [00:13:00] members. And nowadays you can send in your form checks through the app. It is so cool. So it makes it much, much easier for me to do form checks.
The second is that they're switching exercises too soon. Swapping them out every single workout, you know, picking a different online random workout to follow where the exercises are different each time. They may work the same muscles, but because you're not doing the exact same exercise, you're not able to apply progressive overload properly. There is this myth of muscle confusion, right, that you need to be switching things up all the time so that your muscles, you know, get worked in different ways. No, if you really want to get your muscles stronger, you need to choose a set of exercises and then do those for eight to 12 weeks.
And the third thing is that they're not tracking. It is not very intuitive to just naturally keep progressing [00:14:00] in strength training unless you are writing things down, looking at what you did last time and s ystematically planning to push yourself a little bit more and a little bit more. Tracking is a game changer as far as how you will do with getting results out of your strength training.
Okay, so that laid the groundwork on progressive overload,
in the following episodes, I'm gonna be talking about the types of progressive overload. So in other words, how do you actually apply progressive overload? How fast should you be increasing your weights? What to do when your progress stalls.
And what about intensity and training close to failure? So these are super important topics if you want to get results out of your training. So hit the subscribe button so you don't miss the next episodes. And. With that, I leave you till next week and wish you [00:15:00] happy training.
