242. For My 35+ Ladies - Why Are My Workouts No Longer Working?

Andrea discusses why tried and true workout and nutrition routines may suddenly stop working, especially for women in perimenopause and beyond. She explains how hormonal changes like declining estrogen impact muscle, metabolism, and insulin sensitivity, and offers clear strategies to adapt. From progressive overload and protein intake to helpful supplements and stress management, Andrea shares actionable tools to help listeners feel strong, supported, and confident as they age.

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Transcript

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So let me ask you a question. Do you ever feel like the workouts that used to work just aren't working anymore? Or like you're being pretty consistent, you're eating kind of the same, you're doing the same workouts, and all of a sudden you're gaining weight and you can't figure out what's going on? That's what we're going to talk about today, but I'm going to talk about it in the aspect of perimenopause and what is going on because there is a real reason why all of a sudden your workouts and your nutritional intake routine seems to not be not working out of the blue. And I'm going to break it down today and make it really easy for you to understand and give you some ideas of what to do about it. With the warmer weather, it is definitely a great time of year to take your workouts outside. But typically, when you take your workouts outside, you don't want to be blinded while you're doing it. This is why I suggest a quality pair of Gooder sunglasses. They're lightweight and comfortable, 100% polarized. They don't slip. They don't bounce. And they're super stylish. Plus, they have a one-year warranty and 30-day free return. They have so many different styles. You're definitely not going to be disappointed. You're going to find one that you like. There's no out about it. My husband orders from them because his style is very different than my style, and I finally gave in and ordered my two 12-year-old daughters. Well, they're not quite 12 yet. They're 11. But my two 11-year-old daughters' sunglasses because they're only$25 a pair, so they're not even overpriced, yet the quality is still awesome. And not only are they great for workouts, you can literally take them from working out to the pool up to the nightlife because they work for everything. So if you want a new pair of sunnies, Gooder is giving the Make Fit Simple listeners free shipping. So you can go to Goodr, that's G-O-O-D-R dot com slash simple and use the code simple for free shipping. Again, that's G-O-O-D-R dot com slash simple for free shipping. My name's Andrea Allen, and I am a mother of four girls under seven, a wifey to a mountain man, a personal trainer, and a nutrition coach. I love all things women's health and fitness, but let's face it, the fitness industry is complicated and it's not built for the everyday I'm happy you're here and I hope you stay a while. Now, as I mentioned, this episode is really going to focus on people who are 35 plus and who continue to age. If we're in our 20s, this information is definitely not as pertinent to you. But if you are in your mid-30s and up, this episode is definitely for you. So what is happening typically when you do have a current workout routine, you've been pretty consistent, maybe your exercise is the same and your nutritional intake, and all of a sudden you seem to have less muscle, you seem to be putting on fat, and all of these things are happening and you can't figure out why. If you are starting to go through perimenopause and as we get older, there's a real reason for this. So the first one is you're declining estrogen. So estrogen plays a really vital role in maintaining muscle and supporting the process in which the body builds and repairs muscle. It is literally kind of like the queen bee for females in helping us build and repair muscle. Estrogen also helps by reducing inflammation, which otherwise impairs muscle building. It also helps reduce the oxidative stress we have, and it enhances your muscle repair and regeneration in general. So as we shift into perimenopause and we start to get older into our mid-30s and 40s and 50s and beyond, what's happening is our estrogen starts to decline. And estrogen is even tricky at first, especially if you're in perimenopause, because sometimes it's really high and then sometimes it's really low because we know our periods start to become spotty eventually. But a lot of those symptoms start And as that estrogen starts to decline, it also increases muscle breakdown. Now, I'm sure you're thinking, but Andrea, you've told us before that when we work out, our muscles are supposed to break down so they can rebuild, and that's how we build muscle. Yes, that is true, but this is not the same process. These are not the same pathways when I say that when estrogen declines, that muscle starts to break down. So during resistance training or intense exercise, especially in the eccentric phase, movement. So that's literally like the lengthening of the muscle. So imagine a bicep curl. When your arm is going down in the bicep curl really, really slowly and your body's trying to do it slow, that's the eccentric motion. When this happens, there's tiny micro tears in your muscle fibers, and that is your muscle breaking down and food helps us repair those, and that's all effective and useful. This is known as exercise-induced muscle damage. So this is good. Literally, it triggers an adaptive response where our muscles break down, then they rebuild with food and they come back stronger and better and often bigger, which is great. The muscle breakdown I'm talking about with estrogen decline is different. Estrogen, as I mentioned, does have that vital role where it is a protective effect on muscle mass, on insulin sensitivity, and on protein synthesis. So when it decreases, it basically makes those processes decrease and that protective layer, for lack of a So it becomes harder to keep on that muscle mass and it becomes harder to have protein synthesis. So that is why that breakdown increases because estrogen, which let's call it the bodyguard for it, you know, the helper is less available and less there. So those processes are not as functional. So that is the difference when I say that when estrogen decreases, that your body starts breaking down muscle. And that is not in the good way. Now, not only does your body start breaking down muscle, as I mentioned, low estrogen actually reduces our anabolic signaling. Our anabolic signaling is basically the building signaling for our muscles to rebuild. So this makes it harder for us to maintain muscle with our current workout routines, let alone build new muscle, especially if we are not lifting really heavy weights and challenging ourselves and if we don't have the proper nutrition. So what's happening is all of these pieces work together. There's less estrogen. All of a sudden, we are breaking down muscle easier. All of a sudden, we're having a harder time building muscle because those signals are basically not as sensitive. And there is less protein synthesis, which is our body's ability to take the protein we eat and build the muscle. All of this causes anabolic resistance. And anabolic resistance is your body being less responsive to all of these signals and to your protein protein intake and to resistance exercise in general. So it's kind of like your muscles are hard of hearing. Like you're telling them, hey, I worked you. Now rebuild, do your job. And they're like, wait, what? What'd you say? I'm sorry. I went to lunch. I don't know what's going on. That's basically what your muscles are doing. They're just not as sensitive, not as in tune with the process. So circling back, this is why you are working out hard. This is why you're doing the same thing you've always done for years, and it's always worked. And all of a sudden, your body is no longer responding. This makes it harder, as I mentioned, to build new muscle. It makes it harder to maintain lean mass, and it makes it harder to recover. It's like a triple whammy on our ability to have muscle. The second thing that estrogen helps regulate is our insulin sensitivity. So as we shift into perimenopause, when we start to get older, we reduce estrogen, which also may lead to a higher insulin resistance. If you have higher insulin resistance, it lowers the muscle's ability to absorb the amino acids efficiently. Remember, when we eat protein, protein has amino acids in them. That is part of what makes them complete proteins and our body needs them as building blocks. So when we we have a higher resistance to insulin, your body is also not as sensitive to absorb those amino acids. And if it's not absorbing them, then again, it's gonna have a harder time building and maintaining muscle. I know this is getting discouraging, but please bear with me. I promise we're gonna turn a corner. The last thing I wanna point out is with this decline in our hormones, especially as we start to get older and go through perimenopause and just age, the growth hormone, also starts to decline with age and with that estrogen loss. So that is the hormone that is essentially helpful for tissue repair and tissue growth and fat metabolism. So I know this all sounds really crappy. You feel like I just dealt you a massive blow. So you're telling me, Andrea, that my workouts aren't as effective, my food's not as effective, and everything is starting to slowly not pay attention. Nothing's as sensitive. I am telling you that, but... I am not telling you that that means you're going to be stuck. It just means you've got to shift as you start to age. that you can no longer do the same thing you did at 20 years old, at even 30 years old, when you are 35, 40, 45, 50 plus, that those things are no longer gonna work because of all of these true hormonal factors that are happening in your body and are naturally and normally happening for everyone as they shift into perimenopause and then eventually they go to menopause. So what are we gonna do about it? Don't worry, I got your back because I'm in this world with you. I just turned 40 this year And I am diving deep into this area because I really want to understand it. I had my own hormone imbalances. I'm in Dr. Stacey Sims' course right now. I'm taking another course. I'm making sure all my coaches go through courses so that we can support in hormones better. But when it comes to this situation, as I mentioned, you can't keep doing the same thing. So what do we do? So first of all, we need to focus on progressive overload. You cannot continue to use the same 10 pounds to do the same 15 reps over and over again and think you can maintain that muscle anymore as you age. You will no longer to be able to do that. Not only because of the reasons I said about the hormones, but also once we hit our mid-30s, we start to slowly lose muscle naturally each year. It's called sarcopenia, and it increases rapidly as we go into our 50s. So doing the same thing over and over again isn't beneficial because it puts us actually on a downward slope going the wrong way, and we need to be going up. So you have to add progressive overload. Progressive overload is not just changing up your workouts or adding random things. It is following a clear-cut program that is slowly increasing challenge through weights. So you have to increase your weights for a cycle period. Typically, they can cycle at two weeks. They can cycle at four weeks. But there should be a cycle of where you're repeating something and then you're increasing the weights. You can do it through reps and rounds. So maybe you're adding an extra round. You're keeping the same weight, but you're doing more rounds. You can do it through changing the rest times. So maybe you're not resting as long or maybe you're resting longer, but you're pushing a heavier weight. You can do it through time under tension. So I do this often in my app because I know a lot of people don't have heavier weights where I change the speed at which they are doing the exercise. eccentric and the concentric motion. So that's the lengthening of the muscle and the contracting of the muscle. So let's talk about a bicep curl. You can do three counts down, four counts down, one count down, and then you do the same thing going up. So you can offset those numbers drastically and create tempo or time under tension, which is also going to create progression. you can do it through pyramid workouts where you're changing the reps or drop sets where you are kind of going to failure. You're using one weight and you're going to failure and then you're lowering the weight. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, but you can't randomly do it. You have to have a program that knows what they're doing. They do a workout program and then they cycle through and they tell you how they're changing the program. So for example, in my strength and sculpt program, we change it with the reps and the rest most of the time. So in the first month, the reps are a In the second month, we shift to a medium rep range. And in the last month, I'm trying to use a lower rep range. But I want you to push your weights heavier as the reps go down. You can also do it where the workouts are exactly the same, which is like my Strength and Sculpt 2.0. The workouts are the same four weeks and four weeks, but the goal is to get them to increase the weight. So I say, you've already done this workout. You've tracked the workout weight you use. Now I need you to increase that. Those are all ways we add progressive overload. But the whole point is you have to progressively challenge the muscle to get it to break down and you can't do the same thing because we're already on that downward slope where things aren't working as well. So we have to really push through and challenge to keep that muscle and even push more to be able to build it. So you have to have progressive overload. The second piece to that progressive overload, obviously it helps you maintain and build muscle. And the more muscle that you have, it also helps regulate your insulin levels and your blood sugar. So as we shift into perimenopause and start getting older, your insulin sensitivity, as I mentioned, decreases, but the more muscle you have, it helps keep it a little bit more balanced. So it's like a tool you have in your toolkit if you have more muscle to kind of keep that insulin a little more balanced compared to if you didn't have a lot of muscle. The second tool in your toolkit to make workouts more effective for you is you have to eat enough protein and you have to monitor your protein intake. The amount of protein that you ate 5 or 10 years ago was probably enough. Your body was super sensitive and it responded really quickly. But since this process has started, that protein is less efficient, which means you have to be serious about getting your protein in because protein is what builds muscle. You need that protein synthesis to keep muscle, which is going to keep your metabolism stronger. I highly suggest one gram of protein per pound of body weight. I know the guidelines are lower than that, but those guidelines are typically for sedentary people or people who are just trying to maintain at a younger age or aren't trying to build muscle. So if you're trying to get over this hump of perimenopause or you're trying to add muscle, you need more protein to fuel that process. So that's why I suggest one gram per pound of body weight. The second piece to that protein intake is, I know I talked a couple weeks ago about calorie restriction and how if you are living your life in a calorie restriction long term, it affects your hormones. Not only that, but if you're doing that for long term as you're older, you're accelerating your muscle loss. You're making it so much worse. I know you think you're trying to lose fat that way, but you're breaking down your muscle even faster and that muscle is precious as you get older. So if you're training hard and you're not eating enough on a regular basis and you're aging, you will start to lose more muscle and it won't make sense to you because you're not realizing that you need more to maintain that muscle as you age. So you do want to make sure you're eating enough. We know calorie deficits can be very effective for fat loss in short-term windows, but that's not where you live your life. The next tool in your toolbox is you can add some high quality supplements that are going to help support your muscle maintenance and your muscle growth and repair. So as I mentioned, we do naturally lose muscle once we get in our mid 30s and it accelerates as we get into our 50s. So we do want to try to offset that the best we can with food and with workouts. But a really great tool supplement to take, and I'm going to list a few. But the first one I'm going to list is creatine. It is a game changer. I have an episode earlier this year. That episode breaks down creatine, breaks down all of the facts, all of the myths, everything you need to know. And it even talks about creatine as you start to age and go into perimenopause and menopause. Creatine is effective for pretty much anyone at any age. It helps increase ATP in the muscles. So that's basically energy in the muscles. So that makes you be able to work out hard because you have literally more ATP, more energy in the muscle. It helps with muscle recovery and it helps with gains. And the best thing about creatine is that it actually also helps support brain health. Like who doesn't need a little bit of brain support? I know I do. I definitely need some brain support. So it's super beneficial. In a meta-analysis, it showed that older adults who supplement with creatine during strength training gain more lean mass and strength than those who did train without it. So there are a lot of studies that show this. I know in that episode, I linked probably five or studies that explain this as well so go back and listen to that episode if you're at all leery about creatine it's just back earlier this year For creatine, I take two different brands. I have two bottles of it just for a change up. I use Just Ingredients creatine. It has no fillers in it. It's been triple lab tested. I love her company. I drink a lot of her protein. I take her Adrenal Complex, a lot of different things they have. I get 10% off. I will add that link in the show notes. It's Andrea DFH. So that's an option. And I also have a bottle of Kion's creatine, which I've recently been taking as well. Both of those are plain. They don't have flavors. So you can just mix them into any and they're just really easy to be added in. The thing you do need to know about creatine though is it does cause people to bloat at first. I go over this in detail in that episode. In fact, I will link that episode in the show notes so you don't have to search back for it. So just look in the show notes and I'll link it. It can cause you to bloat at first because it pulls water into the cells. But typically after a couple of days or a couple of weeks, that subsides because the muscles are fully saturated with the creatine. Some people don't notice that bloat. Some people Don't overthink it. It happened to me too. Even the very first time I took it out, I was like, what is happening? And then I was like, oh yeah, it pulls water in the cells. So don't overthink that. The next supplement I'm going to suggest is an essential amino acid. So this is, for short, people call it an EAA. I've also talked about this one before. It plays a critical role in preserving and building muscle mass, especially as we are trying to combat these age-related muscle loss situations because it helps stimulate protein synthesis. And not only does it help stimulate that synthesis, which is building that muscle, it also helps preserve muscle tissue when you are working out or even in situations where you're injured or you have an illness or limited movement because it helps protect that muscle from being broken down. Now, here's a caveat to this one. This is a supplement I've taken for a really, really long time. As I mentioned, an EAA just is the nine essential amino acids that your body doesn't make. You have to eat them to be able to ingest them, and they are part of the building blocks of protein synthesis. If you are eating enough protein, you don't need an EAA supplement because a complete protein has EAAs in it. But if you are someone who has a weak protein intake and you don't feel like you hit your protein numbers, then I would suggest this supplement. So again, you got to remember supplements are supporting roles. They're not main players. They're not foundational, but they help us. So if you have enough protein, you don't have to have an EAA. But if you at all feel like your protein intake is weak, then I highly suggest an EAA. I definitely take one just because not every day, my protein's not always always perfect. So I drink an EAA. I drink Keon. I will add that link in the show notes. I've had this supplement for a really long time and I switched to this brand probably about a year and a half ago. I love their brand because it's high quality. I had the CEO on the podcast maybe last year to kind of talk about protein and how aminos were beneficial. And I will add that link in the show notes. They give me 20% off. But I also don't want you to feel like you have to have what I'm having. If you have a brand you love, go for it. Go for it. There's lots of good brands out there. These are just brands I love and I ask for discounts because I love them, but there are a lot of good brands. So don't be fooled into just only one good brand. These are just brands I love. And if you have one you love, by all means do it. And it can be very beneficial. Both of those supplements for muscle. The last supplements I'm going to suggest possibly thinking about, and this is going to depend, magnesium is a really important one because it helps with muscle contraction and recovery. Vitamin D can be helpful, especially if you're low on vitamin D because it helps support bone health. And then also just omega-3 fatty acids. They can be really helpful because they help reduce inflammation and may enhance muscle function and repair. Those ones are a little bit different, but just to kind of bring those up that they can be very helpful. Okay, so you know you got to add muscle, progressive overload. You got to eat enough protein. You have some supplement ideas. The next thing I'm going to tell you that is going to help protect your muscle and get you going is stress management. And I know you're like, oh, Andrea, I have so much stress. I know. I know because I have so much stress. So I feel you. We can walk hand in hand on this one because this is a hard one for me. And this is something I have worked incredibly hard over the last year on. And I can be honest and tell you, I have a long way to go. I've got to improve a lot. But just like I'm telling you, I'm soaking in this information as I'm in some of these courses that cortisol can further increase the breakdown of muscle when it is unmanaged. Cortisol literally breaks down muscle protein into the aminos and makes them not as effective. So remember, we're like trying to add supplements and we're trying to eat enough food to get the aminos and now it's doing the opposite job. It's like you're pouring water into the cup and it's dumping it out. So you don't want them fighting each other. Not only that, but cortisol also It also raises your blood sugar. It helps fuel vital organs. So basically it breaks down those amino acids to fuel the vital organs because it thinks it's under stress because cortisol is the threat hormone. So it thinks it's under threat and it starts to break stuff down. Cortisol also is really tricky because it's not like a one-time breakdown. It can literally consistently break down your muscle if you are not managing stress. So if you are stressed all day, it can just slowly, consistently break things down. It is literally that slope moving backwards. Now, I've been very honest on the podcast. I've told you guys my own issues with hormones. I have a thyroid problem. I also have some issues with cortisol. I'm working like a maniac to try to improve my cortisol all. But I can be honest and I actually need to, I need to add a picture on Instagram. I have lost muscle in this battle with my hormones because I know my cortisol is breaking down some muscle and I know with thyroid, there's some other issues there that are hindering my abilities with my metabolism. So I want you to know that I know this is hard, but we can work on it. So I am working on winding down in the evening. I'm working on coping skills with breathing. I'm working on more downtime because a lot of times during my downtime, I'm just thinking of new ideas or what I want to work on next. And I'm trying to avoid that where I literally have downtime. I'm working on time away from my phone. I'm working on grounding exercises where I go outside and I pay attention to the sounds and the smells and everything around me and what my Feet are feeling and all of those things. I'm gonna link a previous episode I did on ideas I'm working on to help reduce stress and kind of to improve circadian rhythm and so many other things. But this is a really big piece that you've gotta get under control, especially as we age. The last one I'm gonna point out is sleep. And the worst thing about sleep is sleep and stress go hand in hand. When your stress is bad, your sleep is bad. When your stress is managed, your sleep is better. And again, this is something I know from experience. If you are someone who wakes up consistently between like 2 and 4 a.m., typically around 3 a.m., it means your stress is really high because your circadian rhythm, the way that it works is your cortisol wakes you up in the morning. Cortisol has a good purpose as well until it runs rampant. But your cortisol wakes you up. And if your stress is already high when it starts to rise in the middle of the night to wake you up at, let's say, 6 or 7 a.m. or maybe 8 a.m., whatever you wake up, if your cortisol is already high and it starts to rise, then all of a sudden you're awake at 3 a.m. And you're not supposed to be awake at 3 a.m., but that is a sign that your cortisol could be too high. So it does play a vital role. We've got those really do go hand in hand. We've got to work on both of them. But not only that, but your muscles repair when you are sleeping. So if you have poor sleep, you're going to inhibit the muscle building process. So you have to have enough sleep as you age. Now, obviously, there are other options with HRT, with messing with your estrogen intake, with messing with your progesterone intake. I will have an expert on to talk about some of those things because they are very effective. But I definitely want to have someone else speaking on those as I go through some of these courses. So I will work on getting someone to speak on those. And it's important to be aware of that. And You can see a doctor to talk to about HRT if you're in this situation and you're having tough symptoms. But I wanted to share ways today that we could do it, anybody, whether you have lots of money or no money, whether you have lots of time or no time, just ideas that we could change that are habits and things that we can control. So I hope the ideas I gave you today are incredibly helpful. I want you to know that I know this journey is hard. As I mentioned, I've struggled with pieces of it myself. I work on it. And I think anyone who acts like they have their life all together and all the pieces in place perfectly. They're lying. They're lying to you. They're lying to you because everybody struggles with things. That's normal. That is normal. But the best thing is we have each other. We can learn, we can grow, and we can get ideas from each other. So I love that. I'm going to do a post this week in my stories. So keep your eyes open in the stories. And I'm going to ask what ways you try to manage your sleep and you try to improve your stress management. And I'm going to collect all of those answers. And then I'm going to make a little PDF out of it for everybody. So this week, when this episode airs Wednesday to Wednesday. Keep your eyes on my story so you can add to that. And then we'll make that PDF and I'll share that as well because we all can benefit from these things because we want our workouts to be effective. We want our food to be effective and we want to feel good in our body and we want to maintain our muscle and keep a strong metabolism. All right. That's it for today. As always, you are doing so much better than you think you are. I know things are hard sometimes. I know it's hard to watch yourself sometimes get old. There's definitely some beauty in it. Don't get me wrong. There's some things that I'm like, I love getting older. And there's some things that I don't. And that's okay. That is the beauty of being proud of where you are and continuing to move forward. So you really are doing better than you think you are. We'll chat next week.