Please Mansplain! (Thoughts For Women Between 40-60 About Strength Training For Fat Loss…)

I have worked with numerous women in the 40-60 age bracket who are looking to use strength training to lose fat, among other health goals. 

In my experience, it’s quite common for women in this cohort to have inaccurate expectations about how intense strength training ought to feel.

These expectations are an issue because they can lead to effort which backfires. 

How so?

A 40-60 year old woman who is new to strength training may push too hard and rest too little to make her effort level in a training session conform to what she feels is needed: heart pounding, sweating profusely, gasping for air.

This is not how effective strength training ought to feel, and hunting for a running or aerobics level of energy expenditure will almost certainly backfire.

But before we dive into this topic in greater detail, let me make a couple of general comments.

1/ Strength training has many health benefits irrespective of fat loss

It’s important to say: there are many many benefits to strength training irrespective of any effect on body fat. 

Exercise in general has many positive effects on body systems creating fantastic changes in terms of mood, sleep, learning & focus, physical capability and prevention of major diseases (cardiovascular disease & cancer plus more). 

Many people find that when they get exercise sorted, it can have a snowballing influence on other things like staying organised, planning effectively, eating a healthy diet and keeping alcohol in its proper place.

Strength training especially helps with forming and maintaining dense bones (of special relevance to women 40-60), preserving muscle and mobility into old age and maintaining cardio fitness (loss of strength is one mechanism behind age-related loss of cardiorespiratory fitness).

Let me reiterate: even if there’s no change to body fat after forming a strength training habit, that person becomes much healthier.

2/ The diet is, by far and away, the key driver of the modern obesity epidemic

The fact is that the diet (a person’s habitual patterns of eating and drinking) is THE major factor driving their level of body fatness, whether they are very lean, “normal”, overweight or obese. As the saying goes, “you can’t out-train a bad diet.”

(Please note: there are OTHER very significant factors, which are often surprising. Such as genetics, with some people being much more “obese sensitive” by virtue of inherited characteristics).

The relevance of this point is that strength training can’t be approached as simply a way to burn energy that day.

A strength training session, when looked at in the context of a day’s energy expenditure, doesn’t use much energy.

And, while cardio training IS more energy intensive, it still doesn’t use that much. 

Not so much that the diet can be ignored if fat loss is a person’s major goal.

Getting stronger DOES help with fat loss, but it does so quite indirectly and the effect is something you gradually build up over time:

• when you exercise regularly, you develop your body’s natural propensity to access stored fat for fuel

• a stronger version of you has more energy and may be more likely to engage in spontaneous and incidental activity, thereby increasing your typical energy requirements (which can allow you to have a more satisfying quantity of food & drink)

• a more muscled version of you has a higher basal metabolic rate and needs more fuel to simply survive

If you think the reason for strength training session is to burn calories that day, you may behave in such a way as to self sabotage - and destroy the fat loss benefit of gaining strength and putting on muscle.

Okay, back to the main point: how approaching strength training with inappropriate expectations around effort may cause poor execution and ruin results.

These days, many more women are starting strength training during midlife. They are often responding to media messaging about the importance of strength and muscle mass for health - including weight management.

The fact midlife women are hearing this message is a fantastic development because strength training has so much to offer. But many bring some erroneous expectations about how intense strength work ought to be.

This is very understandable given they came of age in the aerobics era, which was characterised by the “no pain no gain” approach to exercise, where women were inculturated into a self-punishing approach to their bodies.

When they are coached as to what effective strength and hypertrophy training looks like (short periods of intense effort with substantial rest breaks), they often feel like “it won’t work” because they are not suffering. They think, and often say, “it doesn’t count” unless it feels really hard.

Sadly, this misplaced belief (”it ought to really suck”) leads them to lift too much, rest too little and hurry for progression. They find it really hard to deprogram their expectations and accept that strength training can even be a pleasant experience (or at the least quite tolerable).

This can lead to self sabotage, with the woman driving herself to injury, overtraining, extreme soreness or just a deeply unpleasant experience of exercise. Because she’s labouring under the belief that it HAS to be an intense, punishing experience, she grasps for the benefits of exercise  SO HARD, that she crushes them in her hands. 

This is a crying shame, because if she had accepted the benefits with a looser grip, understanding that sometimes good things can come EASILY, she’d preserve the benefit and find the process much more enjoyable.

So what’s the practical takeaway:

1/ Understand that strength training is rarely a sweat fest. Chances are your breathing and heart rate will feel quite relaxed by and large.

NB: Getting your heart rate really high and breathing hard is very valuable too, but it is often better to separate this activity out from a time allocated to building strength.

2/ Rest between sets is very important - to minimise soreness and ensure you can push quite hard during a set (which is needed to send the adaptation signal to your body). 

Generally speaking, when pursuing strength or hypertrophy orientated training, your rest period between sets should be NO LESS than one minute. The heavier the weight in relation to your limits (e.g. five reps of a really heavy weight with the last rep being a big struggle to finish) the more rest you need.

Your breathing is a useful guide. You ought to wait until your breathing is quite calm before starting a new set.

3/ Intensity control is important to get the benefits from strength training. If you push too hard and rest too little, you’ll undermine your potential to slowly accumulate more and more benefit. This is because you’ll get extremely sore, injured or demotivated (because it sucks to repeatedly grind yourself into the dust).