Some women tell me that it gets harder for them to shed unwanted weight as they get older. There’s no doubt that pre- and post-menopausal hormonal changes can put a wrench in a woman’s weight loss efforts. However, getting older isn’t a good reason to allow ourselves to get fatter. I believe that many women over 40 struggle to lose weight because we’re approaching it all wrong. Sometimes we just need to “tweak” the program a bit.

Many of us “boomer” women have lived through some amazingly horrid diets and preposterous exercise programs over the years. Remember the ladies “spas” back in the 1970’s that had machines with belts that were supposed to jiggle the fat off of our rears? Remember the grapefruit diet? If only they had worked………

But I digress. My point today is we boomer women have been brought up with a lot of misinformation about proper nutrition and exercise for weight loss. Even today, I hear my personal training clients and boot camp participants say that their doctors are recommending they add several hours of moderate cardio to their week in order to lose weight. That’s a huge time commitment. Now, I don’t think there is anything inherently bad with long, moderate cardio workouts, per se. But boomer women need to understand one major flaw in the “do tons of cardio to lose weight” mantra. Cardio does indeed use calories while you exercise. And then you’re done. Muscle, however, uses calories while you exercise AND all day long. Muscle is your metabolism.

Women of a certain age should do strength training exercises to lose weight! Did I just say that?? Yep. I did. Many women cringe when they hear me say this, as they believe they will “bulk up”. They cringe again when I show them how to do a proper squat (”won’t squats make my butt bigger??”). No, they won’t. They will make your butt stronger, and they will help you burn more calories all day long, when combined with other full body strength training exercises.

Should you ditch cardio workouts? Absolutely not. Cardio workouts should be part of a well rounded exercise program. I prefer short cardio interval workouts over long, steady-state cardio workouts, though. I’ll share some tips on cardio interval workouts in my next post. For now, hit the free weight section of your gym and pump some iron to keep the post menopausal body fat from creeping onto your body!

Need some help getting started?? Look up in the right hand corner of this page–there’s a workout there for you. Just fill in your first name and your primary e-mail address and I’ll send you a quick upper body workout you can do at home or at the gym!

Becky

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Ah, yes, those dreaded “trouble spots”. I just had a new customer today tell me that she wanted to work on hers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting certain parts of your body to look leaner and more toned. In fact, I have a free booklet you can download by filling out your name and email address right up there in the right hand corner of this page that will help you get great looking arms. But, when this new customer mentioned those two words–trouble spots–I realized I needed to go into my little speech about how working a certain part of your body doesn’t remove body fat from that area. It bears repeating here.

Exercises that target your legs, your rear or your abs are great and should be in your program. In fact, I hope you do exercises that hit just those areas! However, we need to remember that doing squats (for the legs and rear) or a stability ball crunch (for the abs) won’t whittle down the girth of any of those areas. We’ll certainly strengthen those areas and perhaps they’ll feel firmer or tighter. But, I’d submit to you that they’ll still be “trouble spots” unless you’re also doing something to shed body fat.

That’s why I told my new customer she’ll be doing exercises that utilize a lot of her body at once as well as doing interval cardio workouts. Remember that old song that went something like “the leg bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the…..”?. This is a great way to look at exercise and the human body. We function due to movement of many muscles moving in concert with each other. It’s best to exercise the body this way and get lots of joints moving at once. This serves several great functions. First, we exercise using movements that are functional –they’re similar to activities we do in “real life”. Second, by moving large muscle groups and several joints at once (say the legs and rear) as opposed to single joint movement (like a biceps curl) we burn more calories while doing the exercise (muscles gobble up calories when they’re working hard!). Again, I see nothing wrong with biceps curls, but they should be an added extra to a full body strength training routine using multi-joint exercises. Burning a serious amount of calories in a strength training routine and following up with an interval cardio routine is the best way I can help a baby boomer shed body fat. That and a supportive nutrition plan, of course!

So, I have a little education to do in my first session with my new personal training customer tomorrow. After a brief evaluation and a good warm up, we’ll do a nice beginner level full body workout (mostly using body weight and maybe a few exercise bands), and finish up with an interval cardio workout on a stationary bike. We’ll be done in 45 minutes, most likely. It’s going to be a very different workout for this woman, a baby boomer in her early fifties. She was expecting a lot of low intensity cardio and strength work on machines. I guarantee she’s never worked out like this before!

I’ll be back later this week to give you more information on how to do cardio-interval workouts.

Committed to your success,

Becky

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