44- Boost Your Metabolism: The Role of Muscle in Women's Health After 30

In this episode of MilesFromHerView, Kat discusses why metabolism slows down with age and the importance of muscle for women in their thirties and beyond. Kat explains the science behind muscle loss, sarcopenia, and the critical role of strength training for maintaining and increasing muscle mass. Listeners will learn practical strategies for effective strength training, including compound movements, progressive overload, and the importance of sleep and nutrition. Kat also emphasizes women's unique challenges as they approach menopause and how maintaining muscle mass can improve overall health and vitality. If you're ready to take control of your metabolism and strength, this episode is for you!

00:00 Introduction: Why Your Metabolism Slows Down with Age
00:30 Welcome to MilesFromHerView
01:23 Weather Chat and Personal Updates
02:15 The Importance of Muscle for Metabolism
04:37 Understanding Muscle Mass and Metabolism
05:41 Strength Training: The Key to Combating Muscle Loss
06:07 The Role of Muscle in Metabolic Health
07:31 Navigating Muscle Health in Your Thirties and Forties
12:36 Practical Tips for Building and Maintaining Muscle
16:22 The Importance of Recovery and Nutrition
21:49 Muscle Health During Menopause
25:06 Final Takeaways and Encouragement
27:21 Closing Remarks and Call to Action

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Transcript

Kat: 0:00

Have you ever wondered why your metabolism slows down as you age, or maybe you wondered why it feels so hard to keep muscle tone after your thirties? In this episode, we're gonna break down. Why muscle is essential for your metabolism, especially as a woman in your thirties and beyond. I'm also gonna break down the science behind muscle loss and why strength training should be your ne new best friend and how you can maintain and even increase muscle mass through simple effective strategies. So let's dive in. Welcome to MilesFromHerView. The podcast powered by Kat Fit Strength, where busy women like you find practical solutions to fuel your fitness journey with authenticity and resilience. I'm Kat, your host, a mom of two active boys, a business owner, and an ultra marathon runner and a strength trainer in her forties with nearly two decades of experience. I'm here to help you cut through the noise of fads, hacks, and quick fixes. This is a space where we celebrate womanhood and motherhood. All while building strength and resilience and reconnecting with you from a place of self-compassion and worthiness. Whether you're lacing up your running shoes to go out for a run, driving your kids to practice or squeezing in a moment for yourself, I'm right here in the trenches with you. Let's dive in. Welcome back to MilesFromHerView. I'm Kat and I am your host. I am loving the weather we are having right now. I know I've. If you've been listening to the last couple episodes, I've been chatting about the weather, it is still February. The last day of February. I'm so excited that March is coming up because that's the official start, or halfway through. March is the official start of spring and I'm in the Northeast in Pennsylvania and it has been a bit. A cold, cold, wintery of winter, just a lot of winter. So I am excited. This week has been mild. The sun is out, the sky is blue. I've just felt this renewed sense of energy, so I hope wherever you're tuning in from, you are being blessed with some amazing weather and you are also feeling that energy. So today we're gonna be diving into the topic that is so crucial and I am so passionate about it, is something that gets very nuanced. A lot of fitness and wellness gets very nuanced, especially in a world flooded with social media. There's a lot of great, I. Content out there, however it can get hidden. Being in the business, knowing the information, and having two decades of experience with fitness strength training run training, all the things, training athletes to everyday individuals. I too get confused with a lot of things. So today we're gonna be focusing on muscle and metabolism. And you may not know the connection, but I'm gonna connect the two. The idea of muscle building seems like something that's reserved for bodybuilders or athletes. We think about those individuals who spend hours in the gym focusing on a certain. Muscle to grow that, or training for an athletic event or a on a team event or an individual athletic event. But actually it is extremely vital for our own fitness, health, and energy levels as we progress through the decades, especially thirties and forties and beyond. It is so, so vital. I cannot stress that enough. So. Whether you're just starting to think about this or maybe you've been trying to understand what's going on with your own metabolism. So we're gonna break this down today. We're gonna go over why muscle is so important for metabolism, how you can maintain and build muscle, and how muscle health plays a role in. Everything from energy levels, bone density, especially as we transition through perimenopause to menopause. The other thing I am going to talk about is cat fit. That is my business, and I am in the business of helping women. Build strength, feel empowered, and get back to moving the way they want to, or maybe moving the way you've always want to. I have seen it not only for myself, but also for my clients, that building a strength training routine that works for your life and not against it. So I'm gonna share a little bit of that as we go through this. Let's start by talking about muscle mass itself. We often don't think about muscles as an organ. But it actually is, it's the largest organ in your body. Muscle tissue is. So incredibly metabolically active, meaning it burns energy, more energy at rest than fat tissue, more muscle mass. We have more calories we burn even at rest, or if you're working out, because as we age, muscle mass naturally declines. So studies show that after the age of 30, we start to lose about three to 8% of muscle mass. Per decade. It may not sound like a lot, but it does add up, and this process is called sarcopenia. It also leads to the slowdown of metabolism. This makes it harder to manage our weight, keep up with daily activities, and maintain strength as we get older. But here's the good news. Okay. Strength training is the best way to combat natural decline. Right. I, I wanna screen that through the rooftops and we're gonna dive into, not now we're, we're gonna stay in the sciencey bit, but just what does strength training mean and methods you can apply. So that you are seeing the benefits, not only just metabolically, but why muscle mass is important for your own independence as we've progressed through the the decades. So why does muscle matter for metabolism specifically? Let's, let's get a little into this here. Muscle is responsible for increasing the resting metabolic rate. This means you're maintaining or building muscle, you're burning. This means if you are maintaining or building muscle. You are burning more calories all day long, even when you are sitting, working at your computer, sitting at night watching a Netflix binge. Muscles also, and this is very important, improve insulin sensitivity. If you have more muscle, it's going to help you better process carbohydrates, manage blood sugar levels, and this is very crucial for overall medical or metabolic health. There muscles just don't keep your metabolism humming along. It's also linked to hormonal balance. Particularly as you approach menopause. Okay? So there's a lot there. Muscles are great at keeping you in that caloric burn, and I don't want you to think, oh, we just are gonna sit still and burn muscles. We need to actively strength train to maintain and build muscles. It also helps you. I'm gonna reiterate this process, those carbs, and manage those blood sugar levels, which is so vital. So let's zoom in a little bit more. What happens to muscle and metabolism as we enter our thirties and forties? So as women, our hormone levels do begin to change, particularly estrogen declines, which is it plays a huge role in muscle preservation. As estrogen drops, it can be more challenging to maintain muscle mass. Especially without intentional effort. So meaning if you are not engaged in a strength training program, and as we get into our thirties, estrogen is starting to decrease. Our muscle mass is going to start to decrease. So this is why it's so crucial for women to strength train, especially in our thirties and our forties. So into, in addition to that, is there's just a natural process of aging. Aging is going to happen, and I wanna just establish that point right there. Aging is going to happen. All the efforts that we take with strength training will help. Slow that process. What speeds that process up is if our body composition is low on muscle, so our lean mass is muscle, that aging process might be sped up a bit because we don't have that healthy metabolic tissue there. So as we lose muscle, we also lose strength. And this is a big one, bone density. So when we start to lose bone density, our the, we have an increase of osteoporosis. Now, strength training, that's like the key word for today, helps preserve both of those. So it helps keep that bone density there and the muscle. So this isn't just metabolic like essential for that metabolic response. It's for everyday function. Injury prevention. We don't tend to think about osteoporosis or even sarcopenia until like when we think about those, those type, those terms. We think of somebody potentially in their sixties, seventies, eighties, seventies and eighties there. And when we think about bone loss and fractures, we picture somebody seventies and eighties, however. This stuff starts in our thirties and a bit before. When we start to see those shifts, which is in our thirties, when we're most often, this is a generalization. Most often we are in the process of still building our families. If you choose that path, we might also be in the thick of our careers and getting our careers really hitting that. You know, awesome track. You know, we're out of our twenties. We've maybe established our career, established whether we're building a family wherever we're at. So our thirties are such an intense time that what I have seen and experienced to myself, my strength training and my even cardio training will lump that in. But predominantly, my strength training fell off a bit. For me personally, I was building my family. I had my first child at 29, my second child, oh gosh, when did it have him? When I was 32. Was it 32? Anyway you tend to forget these little things, but so I. For me, there was a lot going on in my thirties. I had a toddler, I had an infant, and you're dealing with sleepless nights. I was also building a business during that time. My strength training wasn't as I'm gonna say, intense and intentional as it is now. If you are in your thirties and you're like, I am dealing with baby through. Eldest child getting ready to go to kindergarten, and you can't even think about a strength training program. Then you hear this information, you're like, oh my goodness, I'm setting myself up for failure. I. You are not. That is the beauty about muscle is we can still build it. What I would encourage you, if you were in that intense time period, keeping your career afloat, building your family, you have infant to toddler, to almost grade school kids is start slowly start to just if, even if your consistency is one time a week. Brilliant. Even if it's body weight. Brilliant. Okay, so little sidetrack there, because as I just threw a lot at everyone, I don't want you to feel as though, well, I've not engaged in a strength training program. Maybe you were in your forties and you're like, oh gosh, I messed everything up. Nobody messed everything up. It's all good. So let's get back into it. Let's get into the nitty gritty of. How to maintain and build muscle. That is just the biggest thing. There's so many programs out there. There's so many different classes. There's so many different things offered. It is amazing, but it can be overwhelming. What I often hear from individuals is I've been strength training, I've been doing all these things, but I'm not seeing results. Let's get into that. We wanna find the simple strategies that we can implement. So strength training is we want to aim for two to three full body strength training sessions per week. We wanna focus on compound movements. A compound movement with strength training is exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once. For instance, squats, lunges, deadlifts, pushups. These exercise are very effective in building strength and improving muscle math without spending hours in the gym. Again, keyword there. Hours. We are not spending hours in the gym. If you're like, well, I do strength train two to three times a week. I go to two to three classes a week. We do squats. There's weights involved. Here is the pivotal point I. It is important to include progressive overload in your routine. Okay? What does that mean? You might have seen this around. This means you are gradually increasing the weight or resistance you're using, so your muscles are always being challenged. So this encourages muscle growth and strength gains over time. Okay, so what does that look like? This does not mean. And it's all about program design, and I don't wanna overcomplicate it here. So the way my clients' programs are set up is they are engaging in two to three full body strength training sessions per week. Their sessions include the compound movements is when I design them. They're on a four week period. Behind the scenes. I have a whole master plan that goes. You know, beyond that, four weeks to a year, and I look at how I wanna progress them from a week to year, the month to a year, et cetera. That's kind of like the behind the scenes situation. Progressive overload. When they do their workouts, they're focused on lifting a weight that challenges them. That is different for every single client. They know that weight. So we're gonna choose squats, and I'm gonna pick a random number so we provide a little bit more context. With this example. Let's say they're doing squats, dumbbell squats, make it real simple. And they start out with 25 pound dumbbells, one in each hand, and they're doing squats. So that's about 50 pounds load on the body. They do the prescribed sets and reps over the next three to four weeks. And on that week three to four, what they're noticing is. That weight, it starts to become easier to move from there. We want them to increase that weight, so they might go up to 30 pounds, so we're adding an additional. Load or resistance on that body to continue progressing that muscle to get stronger. That is what progressive overload is. There's a few other things that can go into it, but on the surface level, we want to be progressing the weight that is lifted so that the muscle is getting stronger and the tension is being put on the tendons and ligaments and the bone to keep that bone density. Strength training isn't just the only thing. It's also about recovery too. This is something that's not always talked about in the fitness world, is. Rest and sleep are just as important as training is itself. Okay? Muscle grows and repairs when we're at rest, especially during deep sleep. Deep sleep, not just resting in bed. We want that deep sleep that is important for recovery, that is important for your body to repair itself. Estimated you wanna get about seven to nine hours of sleep per night to support muscle. You might be like. I have toddlers and babies at home. I cannot get a full night's sleep. I want to get a full night's sleep, but I am up in the middle of the night. Do not stress that your strength training that you're currently doing now is null and void because you have young children who are dependent on you in the middle of the night. If you have a smart watch, start to look at how you're sleeping. Even with the interruptions of young children, look at the breakdown of your sleep, your deep sleep, light sleep, and your rem. Typically, we wanna get on average per night,'cause you're never gonna get seven to nine hours of deep sleep. That's not how we want. We want the cycles of sleep. You're gonna come in and out of the cycles of sleep. That deep sleep, on average, a healthy amount, where we're getting that good, solid recovery is gonna look different for every person is really between 90. Minutes to two hours, over that seven to nine hours of sleep might be more. For some, it might be less. If you can, and if you are in that time period where you are having interrupted sleep, what I highly recommend is with your partner, coordinating times in which you can get that uninterrupted sleep. May not be every night, but split the duties if possible. That is a way to help give back to you, so you are getting that essential rest and sleep that your body demands if you do not have that ability. Please do not think that your workouts aren't helping maintain your strength with that. What I would say is when you are strength training, make sure you are tuning into your body. And not bulldozing through and forcing your body, overworking your body, really. We don't wanna overly stress it to the point where you can't recover and you're feeling absolutely drained and exhausted all the time because you don't have that sleep backing it. That is not a state that we wanna live in. So nutrition is also a big piece of this. So when I go over this, I don't want you to feel if you're not doing it all, none of it will work. These are, I'm just presenting these fundamental blocks to help the best outcome. I have been there with my kids, being young, as I said before, in my thirties, my strength training was, oh my goodness. It was, it was all over the place. My nutrition too, and my sleep. But now I'm in my forties and things are clicking. I am seeing results. I am seeing. I am gonna say the change I want. I'm feeling the power, I'm feeling that confidence in my body, and I also see it with my clients too. So please do not feel like there is no hope this season will pass. So focus right now on what you can do, and please do not chastise yourself or shame yourself of things that you, it's just not in your capacity because seasons will change. So with nutrition. Protein is essential for muscle repair and growth to simplify this, okay, because there is a range, we want one and a half to 2.2 grams per pound for body weight, or to simplify it, I always do the one for one, one gram of protein for one pound of body weight. Okay? If you are someone who is training for an athletic event, you know, for me, I'm an ultra marathoner, a, you know, an endurance. So my protein, I bump it up a little bit more because I'm putting more of a stress on my body with those training adaptations. But really a one for one is awesome if you can get more. Fantastic. So that is the one thing about protein. Protein is the only macronutrient that we cannot store in our body. So that's. Sometimes why you hear people screaming about protein, protein, protein, get your protein, any type of protein, animal-based or plant-based is just as brilliant. Do not feel like you have to be null on a Turkey leg as soon as you wake up. Protein is protein. What I would say in regards to protein is please make sure you are getting whole food protein throughout the day. Protein shakes are brilliant. Protein products that are packaged out there are, can help substitute, but they should not be the primary source of your protein per day. Admittedly, yes, I love myself, a good protein shake. I utilize them in my every day, but they are not the primary source of the backing of my protein. I look at animal-based as well as plant-based. And I get, make sure I'm getting those in every time I'm eating, whether it be in the three square meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if I'm having a snack that day. Let's dive into muscle health for women and when we're going through menopause. So we've discussed lightly. Hormones are a whole other topic, but we've discussed how estrogen, when it starts to decline, it impacts our muscle. So when estrogen decreases, it accelerates. The muscle loss. You heard me talk before that once we hit 30, we average three, three to 8%. I almost said three to 33 to 8% of muscle loss per decade. Again, that doesn't sound like a lot, but it does impact you. Then when you start to get into that perimenopause through menopause, the estrogen starts to decrease and that accelerates. Muscle loss. This is why it is vital that we are strength training to help fortify our bodies as we go through menopause. When, and, and this is also why we feel that I had a great metabolism, but now it's not. It is just so slow. The way to quote unquote speed up your metabolism is by gaining muscle. Maintaining muscle. Muscle is a metabolic organ, as I said before. At rest, it burns more calories, it uses more energy at rest and at work. This is something that is going to help you prevent weight, gain, energy, di dips, and just feeling that loss of. Vitality that tends to happen as menopause approaches and you go through it. Okay, so strength training is your BSF. As we progress through the decades, if you can preserve that muscle mass, I. Maintain that healthy metabolism and it will help combat those symptoms that you get with menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, and fatigue. It does not eliminate them. Studies show when you are strength training and when you maintain that muscle mass as well as gaining it, the menopausal symptoms. You tend to have a better time as you go through it. So this is just why it is important to prioritize that muscle building during this phase of life. So what I specifically do when a client comes in, I literally look at that whole person. Who are they? Where are they at in their life? What is their background? What have they done? What? I just wanna know who they are because when I'm building a plan for someone, I wanna make sure it meets their needs. It meets them where they are and elevates them to where they wanna go. I want them to build that muscle, but overall, that vitality, that strength, that energy and that resilience, because we're here to be more and live more and do the things we want. The last thing I want is an individual to feel inhibited in their body because. They're moving through the decades of life. So that's why I structure my plan to meet each individual where they're at, so that they maintain that muscle and metabolism through all our stages. Let me give you a few very practical tips to help you take action. Start with two to three strength training sessions per week using compound exercises, squats, lunges. Planks pushups gradually increase your weights. So progressive overload is key. Focus on protein at every meal, and also consider doing that at your post-workout. Nutrition. Prioritize rest. Especially sleep. Sleep allows you to recover. So we want those muscles to have great recovery so that all that awesome work you've put in in your workout session, you reap the benefits of it. And most importantly, be consistent. Building muscle is a a long-term commitment. Commitment, but it genuinely pays off. I wanna say this again, it's a long term commitment, does not mean you won't see results. I wanna just make that distinction there. Long term doesn't mean no results. Long term means sustainability. We want to be able to be stronger in each subsequent decorate. Be consistent. Focus on getting those quality strength trace training sessions in. If you're like, I am lost, I just want to know what to do, I don't wanna think about anything. I want a program that just does it for me. I got you. Let's talk in the show notes. Click on the link, let's. Let's get on a call and let's talk and see if we're a good fit because this is what I do. This is what I've been doing for two decades. I have clients who are, oh my goodness, some I am so inspired by. They have super busy lives. Yet they show up and I'm excited for them because their program works for them and their life, and they're seeing the strength, the mobility, and the recovery, and creating that flexibility with a sustainable plan that works for that. Takeaways here, muscle plays such a pivotal role in your metabolism, energy, and overall health, especially in your thirties and forties and beyond. Strength training isn't just about looking good. Sure. That is such a awesome side effect, but it's about feeling strong and energetic so that you're capable in every stage of life. Again, if you want some guidance, check out Cat Fit. You know I'm here to help you build the strength for life. Thank you for tuning in to Miles Home Review, powered by Cat Fit Strength. If this podcast inspires you, don't keep it for yourself. Hit follow or subscribe to Stay updated on the new episodes and leave us a review to help more women and moms discover this space. Your feedback fuels this podcast and I'd love to hear what's working for you or what topics you want to dive into Next. You can connect with me on Instagram at Cat Fit Strength or share this episode with a friend who is ready to embrace her strength. Remember, fitness isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself and finding strength in every step of your journey. Until next time, keep moving forward one mile at a time.