How to Get Strong After 40

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:13.530] – Allan
Ras, how are you doing?

[00:02:15.000] – Ras
Good, how are you, Allan?

[00:02:16.860] – Allan
Busy, busy, busy. You know, doing the the traveling as we're recording this, I'm traveling a good bit to visit family and friends. And so it's go, go, go, go, go. And then getting our stuff together and getting it moved out and realizing how hard it is to let go of some things.

[00:02:32.760] – Allan
You know, we're taking far too much stuff down. But as this episode's going live I'm probably in North Carolina and I'll be heading home in about a week or so, so provide again, I can get a negative covid test 48 hours before the flight. So there'll be a little bit of push to get everything done and get get back on an airplane and get back down there. But looking forward to a good Thanksgiving week. That's coming up in about a week or so. So we'll get it done.

[00:03:02.130] – Ras
That sounds great. Glad you could get up here and make the rounds visiting family and friends and whatnot.

[00:03:08.190] – Allan
So what are you up to?

[00:03:09.900] – Ras
Well, we just got a new puppy. So,

[00:03:12.600] – Allan
Oh boy!

[00:03:13.440] – Ras
I am puppy training. Yep. And she's small black lab. And Mike wanted a puppy for duck hunting. But since she seems to be my shadow like my other pup, Stella, I suspect she'll be a good running partner in another year or so. So it's a real treat. She's a real treat.

[00:03:32.460] – Allan
So she can chase you or she can chase ducks.

[00:03:34.980] – Ras
Yes, exactly. Either way, we'll both be happy.

[00:03:37.800] – Allan
Yeah. There you go. All right. So the episode we're going to talk about today is about strength. So let's go ahead and listen.

Show

Hello and welcome to another solo episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast. Today, we're talking about a topic that is actually my favorite topic, How to Get Strong After 40. Now, I wrote a blog post about this a few days ago and I asked some questions on Facebook. So I may use a lot of that material here just as kind of a based as we have this conversation.

I really did want to take the time to dive in a little bit deeper into some of the topics that I just didn't feel like I got deep enough on on the blog post. So go check out that blog post on the website.

But, you know, most people who come to want wanting to get healthy and fit are typically starting with weight loss as a goal. And, you know, the basic number out there is lose the weight, then gain the muscle.

It sounds good. And in fact, it actually works a little bit because when you focus on one thing, it's obviously easier. But if you're over 40, that's not a good strategy at all. You know, people don't want to lift weights because they're afraid that they're going to get big. They're afraid they're going to stop their weight loss. And the reality of it is the exact opposite. The size of muscle relative to fat is is just tremendous.

If you've ever seen a picture, a meme on Facebook, you know, the fat is seven, eight times bigger pound for pound than muscle. So you're not going to get really, really big, you know, and the other side of it is, you know, people look at bodybuilders and think that's what strength training does. And the reality of it is entirely different. Bodybuilders don't train for strength. They train for muscle mass. So they train very differently.

They eat very differently and they're trained a lot more. Strength training doesn't have to be a profession. You can get a lot done in a little bit of time. And the other thing when you're looking at a bodybuilder is to recognize that many of them, even if they're generally natural, are still using some performance enhancing drugs to get to the size that they're at. They're training a lot harder and to be able to do that. Many of them are using steroids, peptides and SARMs to get those gains.

And so you can't look at a bodybuilder and think that's what you're going to get out of strength training. The other side is most of those folks are putting on that muscle in their 20s and through their 30s.

If you're over 40, you're not going to have the capacity to put on that much muscle, but you can get stronger. And another thing, you know, as we're getting into thinking about weight loss, because, you know, if you're coming at this, still wanting to lose weight, but you're believing you need to do some strength training, which is great is yes, your scale might change a little bit when you first get started, because a damaged muscle, which is part of what we're doing when we're doing the work, we're straining and stressing the muscle.

That effort on the muscle causes metabolic waste and that metabolic waste has to be flushed out. So whenever you do injure part of your body or you lift weights, yes, sometimes muscle will go in, water will go into the muscle. But recognize that weight is water weight and not not in any way your actual weight. And then once you're training regularly, you know, you won't even notice that, it's going to be kind of built into the formula.

So don't let weight loss be the reason that you're not doing strength training. It is really hard to get strong after 40. And you're going to have to do some work and you need to do that. The reason strength training is so critical, particularly after 40, is this thing called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is an aspect of muscle that over the course of each year we lose about one percent of our muscle. And after the age of 65, that loss accelerates.

If you're not strength training, you are definitely losing muscle and you're definitely losing strength. And in fact, in many cases, you're probably also losing bone density due to osteopenia. So strength training is going to help you maintain and maybe even gain some muscle.

But this is really about strength training. So to get strong after 40, you're going to do some training. If you don't do the training, you're going to get weak and weak and weak. And what that leads to is the potential loss of independence.

If you've ever tried to open a jar and struggled to open it, that's a loss of independence. You either had to do without what was in that jar or ask somebody else for help. Now, that's going to reverberate through your entire life as you don't have the strength to accomplish things like getting up from a toilet. You're definitely losing your independence on that one. So strength training is important and it's so important as we get older because we want to be able to continue to do the things we're doing and so few people do and they lose their independence and they don't want that to happen to you.

If you want to get strong after 40, you got to follow a few protocols. Your body's not going to be as forgiving as it was when you were in your 20s and 30s. You're going to have to be a little bit more careful and you're going to have to be a little bit smarter. So the very first thing to consider when you're getting ready to do any kind of lifting is to make sure that you warm up first.

I remember having a an instructor when I was in college that was, you know, the physiology and exercise class. And he he just really didn't believe warm ups were important and prove it to us. One day he was you know, he's in his 60s. He just started jumping up and down on his chair from the ground to the chair and back and forth. And then he was breathing heavy after a couple of minutes of that. And he said, see, I'm warm.

I didn't have to warm up before I did that. But I advise you to warm up. A cold muscle has much more likelihood of getting pulled or broken. And then the other problem is that your ligaments and tendons don't necessarily get good blood flow. So a good warm up is going to go a long way towards helping you prevent injury and just have better performance when you're lifting.

You'll want to make sure when you're lifting that your body is in a good position to move and do the right things. And that means that you have to have good mobility for those of us that have had office jobs for much of our lives with a lot of sitting, or if you're driving, you're sitting. If you don't spend a lot of time moving around, you've probably lost some of the mobility. Now, there are a few different ways that you can improve your mobility to include stretching and other things. I want to go briefly through a few things with regard to that.

Dynamic stretching is the most advisable kind of stretching when you're going to be doing strength training. Dynamic stretching is where you basically move through a range of motion. You start very slow and then as the muscle warms up, you're able to move a little bit faster, a little bit faster, and you kind of build up some some opportunity to work the full range of motion and get that muscle warmed up and going. OK, that gets good blood flow to the muscle, to the ligaments, to the tendons, and everything's good to go.

If you have a movement problem, you know, perfect example. Most people have very tight calves. You probably need to do some static stretching for those muscles. Static stretching is basically where you put the muscle into a stretched position. So it's at one range of the full range of motion. And you basically put a little bit of pressure on it such that that muscle is forced to lengthen.

That lengthening is important because if a muscle can't properly lengthen, it's going to affect the kinetic chain. For every muscle that you move contracts to move the weight, you have other muscles that are basically required to lengthen to allow you to move through that range of motion. And if some of those muscles are tight, they're going to keep you from completing the movement in a good form. And we're going to talk about that in a minute too. So make sure that you have a good pattern of movement.

If anything's inhibiting you from doing that, you want to stretch that muscle now, you don't stretch all the muscles because of a muscle is already loose. It doesn't need stretching. Dynamic stretching will be enough because you'll get blood flow to it and it'll be ready to go. You only want to statically stretch the muscles that are inhibiting your movement or keeping you from having a good range of motion because static stretching will reduce your strength.

If you do static stretching on a muscle that you intend to work, you're going to lose performance. And then, of course, if you're not doing as much weight on an exercise, you're not building as much strength, so if you want to get strong after 40. Don't statically stretch the muscles that you want to work.

There are a couple different ways, other ways that you can improve your overall mobility if static stretching and dynamic stretching don't quite get you there. One of those is Self Myofascial Release or SMR. You may have heard this called rolling or smashing.

I don't like the term rolling because I think people do it wrong. You know, the object of self myofascial release is not to roll something over the muscle that stimulates the muscle. What you want to do is find those spots on the muscle that are tight and pressed into them. So smashing is probably a better depiction of what you want to do is press into that for about 30 to 60 seconds and then you'll feel the muscle release. This is a natural protective mechanism of a muscle.

If it were to get too tight, it doesn't want to break. So it has an automatic release and you want to kind of make that happen. And self myofascial release is a way to do that. If you've ever had a joint injury or something that's preventing you from moving, flossing is a way that you might be able to go about releasing that. And so, like, you know, if you sit a lot, you may have some hip issues where you're not getting your your upper leg, where it fits into the socket on your pelvis.

You might not be getting a full range of motion there and I mean a full mobility there. And if that's what's holding you up, flossing could be something. But self myofascial release and flossing are not for everybody. And if you're going to get into it, I would work with a professional coach to make sure that you get good advice and good guidance on how to do that properly because you can enjoy yourself if you're not flossing regularly, not flossing properly.

I've said it before, but I'm reiterate this, and this is very important. One of the most important rules here, and that's always use good form. If you don't know what good form is, find out. Don't just put weight on yourself. If you're not able to do the exercise properly, good form is going to be full range of motion. There's very few exercises when you're training for strength that you're going to do in a partial range.

You want to make sure you're doing a full range of motion and you also want to make sure that you have control of the weight. There's a lot of people like to throw a lot of weight around and they're not actually building strength. They're building something else, building power. So I want to switch this a little bit, when we're talking about lifting, we have three actual movement patterns that a muscle will do while while we're lifting.

The first is isometric. And that's basically where the force that we're applying to the weight is equal to the weight so the weight doesn't move. OK, so you can think of something in terms of like doing a plank where once you're holding a position, you're holding your core in a position and it's the gravity fighting against you, but you're holding it there. So you're applying just as much force as the gravity is in that instance to hold that pose. OK, that's an isometric movement.

A concentric movement is when you're moving a weight against the gravity. So you're moving a resistance against itself. So an example of that would be when I am curling my arm up. So if I'm bringing my fist up towards my shoulder. I'm curling. I'm having a concentric contraction in my bicep muscle. If you were doing a push up, when you're pushing your body away from the floor, your chest and triceps are doing a concentric movement to move you against that gravity.

An eccentric movement is when your body is still generally resisting gravity, but you're letting gravity kind of have its way of lowering. So if you in the top position of a push up and you slowly lowered yourself to the ground, or if you're in a top position of a bicep curl and you slowly let the weight go back down to the ground, that concentric movement is usually a power movement.

That's not exactly where you're building the most strength. It's the eccentric portion of the movement where you're building the most strength. So having control of the weight and not just dropping it after you get it moved up is really, really important. If you want to get strong after 40, that's where you're really building the strength is in that control of the eccentric portion of the movement.

OK, the final bit is that you should be trying to make sure that you maintain core endurance throughout the lift. Many of the lifts that you'll do will require you to have your core braced. And only way you can really properly do that is if you do have good core muscle endurance.

You build muscle endurance by holding positions for a period of time. And you want to think of your core, not just as your rectus dominates the muscles in the front, but the whole part of your body, the core of your body, so that's the back, the sides and the front. You want to think of it like a can.

If you thought a can of soda and you want to add a cinderblock and put it on top of that can, if the cans full, it can pretty much hold that cinder block, even if the cinder block is a little off whack. If you empty the can of fluid and you put it there, now it's a little bit more cumbersome. You could still set that cinder block on top. You have to be a little bit more careful.

And if it's a little bit off, it could crush the can. And if the can has a dividend in it anywhere and you try to put a cinder block on there, it's going to crush the can. So if you think of your core in that way, you want to have a good solid core and that requires some training of your core. So core work should be a regular part. And it's not just doing a function of hyper extensions and sit ups and things like that. You want to focus more on maintaining endurance.

So the endurance comes from those isometric moves we talked about. So, you know, doing bird dogs and doing planks and, you know, some other types of exercises that you hold a position that's helping you build that core endurance. And many of the exercises that you're doing, as I said, require that core endurance. So you're building you're building some of that there, too. So but core training should be a part of your strength training to help you maintain good form.

SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast is sponsored by Best Self, I'm sure you've heard me extolling the value of journaling. Beyond the value of expressing gratitude and checking in with yourself, journaling is the best way to get more things done. If improving your health and fitness is important to you, you need the Self Journal by Best Self. This 13-week goal planner, backed by science and success psychology is designed to optimize your day, tackle your goals and live a more fulfilled life.

The Self Journal will help you set, plan and track progress towards your biggest goals, be more productive, overcome decision fatigue and focus on what matters most and prioritize your workload, build good habits and make every day count. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/bestself and use the discount code 40plus for 20% off sitewide. And while you're there, check out all the other great products. They have your discount code. 40plus is good for 20% sitewide. 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/bestself.

Next, I want to shift to talking about nutrition. The first thing that you want to make sure, because everything, every function in our body requires water and electrolytes to function properly. You want to make sure you're properly hydrated. So drinking plenty of water, you know, all day, not just during your workout or not just before your workout, but making sure you stay good and hydrated is going to help your muscles perform better. And when you talk about hydration, again, it's not always just about the water.

If you have issues with electrolytes, if you're sweating a lot and or if you're breathing a lot and even, you know, some dry, cold days can cause you to dehydrate a little bit. So making sure you stay hydrated requires you to make sure you're getting your potassium, magnesium, sodium and zinc. And it also requires you to make sure that you're getting plenty of POW plain old water. Don't overfeed.

If you came at this to lose weight and now you want to get strong, a lot of people have the tendency to think they need to overeat. You know, they'll tell you you need a calorie surplus to build muscle. And that's not actually completely true. Yes, if you have a calorie surplus, you'll put on more muscle faster for sure. But we're not worried if we're trying to get strong about actually putting on a whole lot more muscle.

What we just do is we want to build muscle to make it stronger. So you don't necessarily want to overfeed and you can still be at a slight calorie deficit and gain some muscle strength and gain some muscle mass. Even to do that, though, you've got to make sure that you are feeding the muscle. So you will if you're if you're lifting and particularly lifting heavy and you're lifting often, you're going to make sure that you're getting enough protein.

And as a general guideline, I typically try to target about a half a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So me sitting at about 200 pounds. That means I'm going to want about 100 grams of protein every day to make sure that I'm giving my muscles what they need to to build. On days that I train heavier, I'll probably add a little bit more protein on the days that I'm not training, I may eat a little bit less, but in general, I'm trying to average about 100 grams per day, half a gram per pound.

Next, I want to talk about rest and recovery. In between each lift you need to take a short break. Short break. These rest breaks in between each set is when your body basically is rebuilding the energy store inside the muscle. It's called APT. And the body can regenerate some APT in a very short period of time so that you're able to do a heavier lift the next time. So let's say you're doing three sets.

First starting out. You might find that a minute is a long enough rest period for you to be able to go back and do the same weight almost as many times as you did the first time, and then maybe the third time a little bit less than you did the first and second. But you generally want to make sure that you're still lifting in your desired rep range and staging your rest to allow that to happen is really, really important. So one minute works for most people.

If you're lifting heavier or you're going a little bit more intense with stuff, you might want to go to two and a half minutes, but you seldom need to go more than three. And I say that because you don't want to cool down. And if you're just sitting on your phone for five minutes, you probably want to do a little bit of warm up again before you get back into it. So, you know, a good one to two and a half minute break in between each lift.

Try to be consistent with it so you can at least monitor how the rest is working for you. And then you can, you know, ratchet up, ratchet it down as you go. But you want to give yourself at least a minute to allow your body to rebuild its energy stores. And then we're going to talk about recovery. OK, so recovery is the time between workouts. I don't know how many times I've been in the gym and seen, you know, the same person come into the gym, do the same workout every single day.

The thing is, they're not building any strength. They haven't allowed their body to recover. They haven't allowed the muscles to rebuild. The way muscles, muscle and strength works is you do the stimulus, which is the lifting. After you do the stimulus, you make sure you've got the food. So we're getting plenty of protein and we're staying hydrated.

And then we give our body 48 to 72 hours to rebuild that muscle. The stimulus tells the muscle that it needs to be able to do something. And so its response is going to be to make itself stronger. And that's how this whole thing works. And it works whether you're in your 20s all the way up to your 80s and past. If you want to get strong after 40, you need to lift and you need to rest. And that recovery time is really, really important.

A lot of folks, when they first start out, can do a full body. If you think about it in those terms, that just means if you work out on a Monday, you come back in on Thursday, you come back in on Sunday, you come back in on Wednesday. So you're getting two to two and a half workouts per week, and that's plenty of stimulus, particularly in the beginning, to give your muscles what it needs to know, that it needs to grow.

If you find that you want to do more volume because you're getting conditioned, you can do more volume, but you're probably going to have to break up your workouts in what we call splits. And we'll talk a little bit more about exercise selection and things like that and later on. But just kind of give you an idea of how a structure would work.

You need to make sure you're giving your body at least 48 hours to recover and pay attention to it, because some people do recover a little faster. Some some muscles recover a little slower. My upper body recovers much faster than my lower body so it can take on more volume than my lower than my lower body can. But sometimes I need the whole 72 hours for my lower body.And I take that into account based on how hard I'm training.

OK, the next thing I want to talk about is consistency. You can't lift once a month and get strong after 40. It just, that just doesn't work that way. Consistency takes three things. It takes patience. You know, as you go to the gym each day, you're going to have days that are great and you're going to have days that are actually not so great. This can be because of a myriad of things.

It might be your immune system might be dealing with a virus. You might just be a little bit lower energy that day for one reason or another, because your thyroid, because you didn't sleep well, a lot of different things could be going on. You may not have fully recovered, but and so your workouts aren't quite as good. So you're going to have this this thing happening where it's not necessarily a linear thing.

If you have the persistence, which is the second “P” here, you keep showing up and you keep doing it. And what happens over time is you do see a trend to get stronger. And at first it's actually pretty cool because your brain is learning the exercises. It's learning how to fire more and more muscles to muscle fibers to make that movement happen.

A lot of people early on see really good strength improvement and then that kind of seems to plateau. So you have to have the patience and then the persistence to keep pushing on. And that's where the other one comes in, the other “P”, progression.

Progression is about getting stronger. It's about putting more on. You want to do that in a smart way. I call it gentle nudges. So you shouldn't ever increase the weight from one workout to the other more than, say, 10% or so. And sometimes that's hard. I know if you're dealing with dumbbells and it's a 15 dumbbell and now you're ready to move to the next weight and the next weight is a 20, I get it.

That's, that's a lot more than 10%. And so sometimes you're going to be stuck with what you have, but in a general sense to get a really good progression and a strength workout, you want to just try to move up no more than 10%. So a couple of pounds on an exercise is a progression. And when you can get those the full sets in and the reps in and use good form, that's when you want to progress.

I've talked about people coming into the gym. They do the same workout every time they set the weights on the same thing, every time they're not getting stronger because, one they're not stimulating their muscles, because they're not progressing, they're not adding weight to that workout. And then, of course, they're not recovering. But they didn't do the work to need to recover. So they just they're coming in and they're doing a workout, which is great.

I'm glad you're there. I'm glad you're moving. Movement is important, but you're not getting stronger and you're not building strength. So that's what we want to do. We don't want to just stay where we are. We want to get a little bit stronger. We want to add a little bit more muscle mass, because if Sarcopenia kicks in, it's going to start reducing that muscle mass. And as it does, the more muscle you have and start with, the better you're going to be when you start going against that even heavier. So patience, persistence and progression lead to consistency and consistency leads to results.

Now, the next thing I want to talk about in this lineup is exercise selection, and this is really, really important because so many people love to come in and do work that makes them feel good. And that's awesome, but again, it's not going to help you really get stronger. If you see a lot of people coming to the gym and they just blast their arms with these isolation movements. And that's fine. Isolation exercises where you're really just working one muscle and that's fine. If you want to have bigger biceps, you have bigger triceps. That's great to work those muscles, but it's not really helping you get a lot stronger because they're not muscles that you're going to be doing.

What was the heaviest thing that you lift up to your mouth from a low point. And then reality is you're going to find that you're just not using your biceps that much to lift a lot of weight. Now you are using your back and you are using your chest and you are using your legs. So focusing on compound movements now, compound movements are movements that move multiple muscles.

A push up is requiring you to move your chest and your triceps. So it's working multiple muscles. A squat is requiring you to use your quadriceps and your glutes. And deadlift is causing you to use your your glutes and your back and your hamstrings.

So compound movements are going to be your bread and butter for strength exercises. And so as you're doing this exercise selection, a good starting point for most beginners. If you look at most beginner workouts, they're going to involve a squat. There probably can involve a lunge or a deadlift. They're going to involve a push up or a bench press, and they're going to involve a pulling movement like a row or pull up. And then finally, they're going to involve some form of overhead press.

That's a basic five exercise compound movement workout. Three sets of ten start very low in weight. And, you know, as you get good form and you feel good about it, you can begin to do that progression. But all of those are compound movements. Now, if you find that you know your triceps are what's keeping you from being stronger when you do your base workout, maybe you want to add some tricep work in there just to strengthen them a little bit more, because you don't want anyone body part being the laggard that's keeping you from optimizing the strength in other muscles.

So you may do some of that. You may split this up and start doing more of that. And then the final point I want to talk about as far as exercise selection is a term called periodization. When you do the same thing over time, initially, yes, your brain connects with the muscles. It learns how to use more muscle fibers to affect the movement. And your strength gains are pretty good. After that now we're really into the muscle building.

Now we're into the, you know, really focusing on the muscle becoming stronger, not just the neuromuscular connection being firmer. We're actually now strengthening the muscle at many points in time that can stall. That can feel like it's just not going anywhere, and you might feel like you've plateaued. That's where periodization can help. You can set up periodization in any kind of schedule you want. I'm a big fan of either four weeks or eight weeks.

I found that, you know, after about four weeks strength training, you know, that's where they start to see kind of that flattening out by eight weeks. Most people are flattened out. And so if you change up the exercises, in many cases, you're going to spurring more connections for your brain to your muscle fibers and you're building additional strength in those muscles.

So about once every eight weeks, you're probably going to want to change up your program to incorporate different exercises that basically accomplish some of the same tasks. So an example would be, let's say you started out with a back squat where the bars on your back and you're doing that for eight weeks. You may want to switch up and for the next eight weeks do a front squat.

This changes the dynamic of the movement. You're at a slightly different angle. And what I found is for a lot of people, once they learn the front squat, get really good at the front, squat, their back squat naturally gets stronger because they have better core positioning and they feel better under the bar. But understanding these progressions and understanding periodization is really, really important. If you want to continue to see progress and get stronger after 40. The final thing I want to talk about is about getting help.

Weightlifting is it may feel like a very solo sport because it's just you against the weight, but in reality, it should not be a solo sport. The first thing I want to preach here is safety. You do not want to be under a weight that you can't control or that you can't lift if that way it's going to come down on you. So exercise is like the squat and the bench press and in some cases, maybe even the overhead press are things that you just want to be very, very careful with.

Having someone there, or at the very least having a safety rack is really important. I'm going to put a link in the show notes of this podcast where you can go in and see video that I've done about safety rack and how you can use a safety rack for safety. I used one, I basically did three exercises as part what we talked about the squat, the bench press and the overhead press.

On each of those exercises, I use the safety rack to provide safety so that if I couldn't complete the lift, I could get out from under the bar without it, you know, being on top of me. So having someone there to spot you is is really, really important if you don't have access to a safety rack.

In most gyms, when you're working out, if you need a spot, ask for a spot. And people will love to come over and help you as long as it's not something that's, you know, too long, too much. But just, you know, tap a guy and say, hey, do you mind spotting me?

And most people in gyms are going to be more than happy to come over there and help you get that lift done safely. Or you can hire a personal trainer. Now, I want to take just a moment to step away from, you know, working with a personal trainer to say there are personal trainers and there are coaches. And it's kind of important to understand who you're hiring if you're going to hire one or the other.

A personal trainer is really good about meeting you in the gym at a certain time, giving you a workout, making sure that you're getting good periodization, good exercise selection, again, which was very, very important, that they're timing your rest, they're counting your reps and they're there to spot you on your lifts. And, you know, in some cases, yes, that's even nice that they're there to help you load and unload machines or weights. But personal trainers, really that I mean, they're in the gym giving you, and most personal trainers are not going to be attentive to you or really care too much about what you're doing outside of the hour, two hour, three hours per week that you spend with them.

A coach, on the other hand, is someone who is going to want to spend more time with you. They're going to want to know what you're doing for the rest of the week. They're going to talk to you about nutrition. They're going to talk to you about rests. They're going to talk to you about sleep. They're going to talk to you about a lot of things to make sure that you're doing things outside the gym that will benefit what you're doing in the gym.

And then again, the coach, if they're there with you, is counting reps. They're looking at your form. They're giving you cues. So a coach is more than a personal trainer. It's truly a coach that's there to help you win. And so, you know, if you're looking for a coach, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/programs-guides-challenges. I have a few different ways that you can work with me.

And I'm a coach. I'm not a personal trainer anymore. We focus on a lot more than just here's your workout, here's your thing. Most of what I do is custom for you. So if you come in to work out, there will be some space workouts. But in a general sense, we're going to talk. And if we decide you need to make some changes in your nutrition, your sleep, your rest, your stress or your lifting or the things you're doing outside of lifting, then, you know, we make those changes.

Now, I did get a few questions on Facebook. One of them related to training as a runner and runners are really interesting because a lot of runners don't really want to weight train. And I get it, because if having the best time is what's really important to you, you have to think about your strength versus mass, OK, or power versus mass.

So if you actually are lifting and gaining weight, gaining pounds of muscle, which can happen, what you might find is that that actually slows your time. So you don't necessarily want to get bigger and put on muscle mass if you're a runner. But lifting can be a good adjunct to your running and areas where I see that most runners can benefit from strength training is in the core work and the lateral work.

So exercises that are not just going and then most runners need to do more upper body training. They don't you know, they don't get any work on their arms while they're running. And as a result, they don't see, they basically don't have enough muscle mass up there to have the things we're talking about to build strength. But you can work and build strength and be a runner, too. It just takes training again, a little bit smarter. If you're doing long runs, obviously, you don't want to do a leg day before a long run, so you have to time your rest and recovery better.

Those are some basic aspects there, you know, as far as someone just getting started out. I'd really encourage you to to consider hiring a personal trainer or coach, because if they can show you how to do the exercise properly, you're going to use good form. You're not going to injure yourself. And by all means, if you do ever find yourself that you have an injury, don't don't try to power through it all pain, no gain is actually doesn't work that way.

If you hurt yourself, you're out of the game and you're not going to get stronger. So if you're over 40, I strongly encourage you and you haven't lifted before. I strongly encourage you to get a coach. Someone will teach you how to do the exercises properly. Someone will pay attention to your movement patterns and make sure that you're doing the right things in the gym and away from the gym to get strong after 40 and optimize your results in time.

You know, if you spent hours in a gym each week, you want to make sure you're getting a benefit for that time. If you're eating extra protein and you're, you know, working on your sleep and your health, all those different things, you want to make sure you're getting your results.

And so you don't want to be injured. You want to make sure you're doing it right, and you want to make sure there's someone there to kind of push you and hold you accountable. So hiring a good coach is really, really important if you want to get the optimal results.

Post Show/Recap

Post show with Rachel.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian
– Barbara Costello	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Deb Scarlett	– Leigh Tanner

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Get bigger, leaner, and stronger with Michael Matthews

Less...