Podcast Transcription: Building Muscle & Getting Fit in Your 40s: Expert Secrets for Long-Term Success  

Ted Ryce: What is up my friend, and welcome back to another episode of the Legendary Life Podcast. I'm your host, Ted Ryce, health expert and coach to executives, entrepreneurs, and other high performing professionals. Today's episode is a special one because we're doing something a bit different. It's going to be a compilation of expert insights. 

All about building muscle and getting fit after 40. So if you're in your forties or beyond and you wanna get leaner, stronger, and stay consistent without burning out, this episode is for you. You'll hear wisdom from three amazing experts, Dr. Eric Helms, Cliff Wilson, and Dr. Jorn Trommelen. Each sharing key lessons on how to train smarter and stay fit for life.  

By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear roadmap for building muscle and staying in shape as a busy driven person. In your forties, we're gonna talk about making fitness sustainable and enjoyable, so you actually stick with it. Why Balance and pacing beat all out intensity. In other words, doing that really hard workout. 

It doesn't really matter if you can't keep it up consistently. A few hard workouts over the course of the year versus medium workouts done consistently every week. The medium workouts, whatever you can be consistent with is going to win. And of course, the critical role of exercise and protein in preventing muscle loss as you age, because guess what, that's what we're fighting guys. 

It becomes easier to lose muscle the older you get. So does that sound good? Let's dive in. First up, let's talk about the foundation for success. Here's an insight from Dr. Eric Helms, an experience coach, natural bodybuilder, and accomplished researcher on why loving the process and setting yourself up for long-term success is the key. 

To transferring your body after 40. Eric emphasizes how important it is to approach fitness as a lifestyle, something we often say, but a lot of people don't get. So pay close attention to why he says, loving the process is so critical.  

 Eric Helms:  I think there's a lot to be said about making sure that you set the stage for success  it's really important to take all that motivation and lay the groundwork, think about how do I make this something sustainable?  What do I need to do to make sure that I'm gonna be most likely to succeed in this in the long run? Because if you're getting back into fitness or if you were in shape and then then you got outta shape, the lesson there is whatever I was doing before, I didn't stick with it. And that's the issue, you know, like most people are good at losing weight.  

They've done it and they regain it. So going back to the weight loss well and going well, I remember that last diet I did, worked well. Did it Like, is losing the same 20 pounds a diet that works well? No. You need to think about something that is not what you've done thus far, because that has resulted in doing it again.  

We want to have a, a true lifestyle change, and that doesn't happen from creating a rocky montage that you can follow for six weeks, maybe six months if you have, you know, enough Goggins playing in your ear. It's, it's actually about changing your lifestyle and finding habits that really mesh with you in, in loving the process, not kind of, you know, flagellating yourself with the whip behind your back as, as you, as you, as you go forward.  

What you want to do is really set up a lifestyle that's conducive, the type of training that we're, that will get you to your goals. And when you don't lay that ground groundwork, or at least do it in, in concert with the hard training, it can result in an, a worse outcome than before.The thing that's going to really be the most rewarding and that will ensure you stick with it, which becomes more and more important as we age, is that we keep lifting, keep exercising, is focusing on the enjoyment of the process. whatever gets someone in the gym, I'm happy to be like, great.  

But if it is coming out of a place of, I don't like the way I look, I want to be someone else and from a very negative place, unless that changes, that almost always results in recidivism. People don't stick with it.   

But I have met many people in my career as a trainer and a personal trainer and just in my life, who they started exercising because they didn't like the way they looked. They wanted to change the way they looked, and they found a sense of agency purpose and they liked seeing the numbers go up or they liked the, the feeling they got in the gym.  

They liked the pump or like, whatever it is. And I think that is really critical and it doesn't need to be lifting. But I think the, the perception that exercise is this thing that you're supposed to do for your health and that you get nagged by your doctor to do it, or maybe your partner wants your blood pressure's high.  

Seeing, seeing exercise as a chore rather than something that, for me, it's like play, like I, it's my favorite part of the day. Yes, I compete in it. Yes, I take it very seriously. Yes, I push myself to places that I don't want to go. But those are, those are choices that I've made and decisions to take it further beyond it being just this really fun thing.  

And if and when I stop competing, which I don't think I ever will, it'll go back to just being play rather than this play that I also compete in. And even among athletes, you'll see this, is that once they start this actually psychological research on this, once you start rewarding someone for something that they already like to do, if they're not careful, it can change their motivation around it and actually take away from their, their, their pursuit of that practice. And this is very basic developmental stuff. So I think it's really, really important. Even if you don't compete or you do compete, to really focus on enjoyment of the process, doing it for the love and everything else needs to kind of be seen as like the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself, which athletes often lose sight of, and very goal oriented people do as well, especially if they come from like a business background, they're chasing numbers.  

If you don't develop a deeper connection to the process specifically, uh, it's gonna be very challenging to keep doing it even when the progress stops or eventually starts to actually backslide and you're just simply holding back the tide of regression. 

Ted Ryce: Absolutely love that message from Eric. Sustainability and enjoyment, this is the core of what so many people miss when they try to get fit after 40. Of course, it can't all be enjoyable. Right. You've gotta do the work. If you like to play with the pink dumbbells or do functional training or whatever it is, you gotta stay, uh, true to the practice or, or to the practice that gets you results. 

But you can find enjoyment in that process. So ask yourself, how can you make your workouts the best part of your day? Or at least better, how can you turn healthy eating into something you actually like doing? When you figure that out, you've won more than half the battle. And of course I, I would argue that results help drive that, but even then, it's gonna be hard to keep up results. 

If you don't enjoy what you're doing. At first, the results drive you, but then to maintain it, you're not gonna change that fast anymore. Right? Once you pass that initial point where you're beyond the newbie gains, and it's quite. A bit of a grind to make progress with your physique, you've got to enjoy the process. 

So look, you might be tempted to still go all in and push yourself to the max to see faster results after all. Now we're high achievers and we love to grind, right? But as you're about to hear that all or nothing approach can backfire. And that brings us to our next expert insight, which is all about balancing your drive to push hard with the wisdom to back off when needed. 

In fact, I'm going through that right now. Uh, I've been doing so well with Juujitsu and my lifting, but I had to, I tweaked my shoulder, nothing major, but I had to stop. If I kept pushing through, it would've turned into a minor tweak into a major one. So you gotta, you know. You gotta develop that ability to regulate yourself and, and to back off when needed. 

So here's Cliff Wilson, one of the top natural body, uh, bodybuilding coaches in the world, talking about why you shouldn't be flooring the gas pedal 24/ 7. If you want long term success. 

Cliff Wilson:  I think people often miss that self-discipline and self-control research proven again to be like a muscle. It can be trained and overtrained. And so I see people go through something like a 75 heart. I think a lot of CrossFit is like this too. 

 I've seen people have balance in their CrossFit, but the majority of CrossFit is an imbalanced approach. It is a grind yourself into dust type of thing. And so the something occurs when you stretch yourself beyond your current self-discipline limits. Just like, okay, if you train and you train and you train, you're gonna get injured or get sick, right? 

You've overtrained yourself. If you do that mentally, you control yourself and discipline and discipline, discipline and force yourself to do everything. Something occurs called ego depletion, where you're gonna have nothing left to give. And um, that's where the weight gain return comes, right? The best results are gonna be when you're pushing minimally.If your situation does not call for a great degree of force, don't apply it. Apply the appropriate level of force. And then you have something when you need to dig deep, you have something in your tank to dig deep.  

I want people to learn to be able to relax because then when you have, relax, shut it off. Know when you need to have rest, because I wanna see you have something in the tank when you need to dig deep and you haven't depleted yourself. I mean, even if we're gonna just use an analogy of race, car, you know, some sort of, any sort of car racing. 

The guy that wins is not the one that puts his foot on the gas and doesn't pull it off the entire race. , he's the one that he, he'll give it gas when it's time to give it gas. He will break when it's time to break. And you gotta know when that is. 

 And that's skill development we're talking about, you know, and whether, whether you wanna have a health, just a healthy body and not be obese anymore, or you wanna be an elite athlete. Skill development of knowing when to gas and when to break. And don't tie your entire character to be like, I'm such a badass. I push all the time every day. You know?  

When your entire identity is bodybuilding or your physique, when you cheat on your diet, it's hard to get back on plan because, okay, if somebody has a well-rounded identity, if you cheat on your diet, which everyone does, even high level bodybuilders, they cheat on their diet. 

You cheat on your diet. You know what happens when you have a well-rounded identity? You say, oh, I messed up. Let's get right back on plan. No big deal. Right? We move forward. When you cheat on your diet and your entire identity is bodybuilding, you know what happens? Now you're having an existential crisis. you are now a failure because everything that you are, you just failed at. 

If you expect these magnificent returns and then you fall short of that goal, it gets coded in your brain as a failure, which anything coded in your brain as a failure is usually not a good thing for you. 

Ted Ryce: There's so much gold in what Cliff just shared. The truth is pushing yourself to li to the limit all the time will eventually lead to burnout, injury, or just mental exhaustion. So ask yourself, am I pacing myself? Do I know when to push hard and when to back off? If the answer is no, it's time to start practicing that. 

Not only will it keep you healthier and injury free, it's also gonna make fitness a more enjoyable part of your life, rather than a constant source of stress where you feel like, oh wow, I don't want to go to the gym. I'm gonna feel exhausted and I'm already tired. So we've talked about loving the process thanks to Eric Helms and balancing intensity with recovery courtesy of Cliff Wilson. 

Now let's get into something a bit more nuts and bolts. How to actually fight the muscle loss that can come with aging. And our, our final expert, Dr. Jorn Trommelen. Is a leading nutrition and exercise researcher who specializes in muscle metabolism. He's gonna shed light on what really matters for maintaining and building muscle as you get older, including the roles of exercise and protein. 

So if you're wondering whether you need more protein or less, or, you know, everybody says so many conflicting things about protein and high protein diets, especially with regards to longevity. You're gonna wanna listen to this segment. 

Jorn Trommelen:  Typically the older adult has a slightly higher infl inflammation than younger adults. That's probably part of it. And probably it's a list of 50 things, lower hormone levels. Um, it's probably a bunch of things, but the end result is. Just has less of a stimulatory effect in older adults. And that is the main reason why there's sarcopenia. So muscle loss.  

Some in the longevity field have a quite contrasting view where they believe that you should try to restrict protein to increase longevity. Now, that is mostly based on animal work. But there is some suggestion that too much protein might not be good. And there the idea of otography comes back where you have this concept protein stimulates embolism, which you need protein breakdown, otherwise, basically bad proteins build up and you don't want that You want, you want them to be broken down so they don't accumulate in your body. Uh, I have some concerns with that research for, I'll, I'll give you an example. If you're a rats like. It's not like you'll have social isolation because you're weak and you cannot go out of your house, which would happen in a human if they have sarcopenia. 

Like the rat is alone in this cage anyway, right? So for example, that simple, uh, like the, the negative impacts other than the direct metabolic negative impacts of low muscle mass don't apply to a rat, for example. So it's not necessarily that I'm saying, well, a human has to be different than a rat. There's just so much more than just, oh, I have more lean body mass, so my insulin sensitive.  

That's one aspect of it. So now we get back to, to the sarcopenia. What can you do again? So how, how do we stay healthy? Well, I would say that it's just quite clear that if you do some type of exercise, protein helps improve muscle mass and that just strongly improves your quality of life as you're old.  

My ideal scenario number one is do exercise. Ideally resistance exercise. But any exercise is good. Endurance fine. But we even see that if you just take extra steps on a day, you walk more. That already has impact on muscle protein synthesis. So that's number one. Do exercise. But what's also quite clear is that protein on its own is not gonna help you maintain your muscle mass. 

You need that exercise stimulus. So, exercise is a stimulus where your body says, okay, we can use muscle mass, essentially, and then protein provides the building blocks. Just giving the building blocks on its own doesn't seem to be that effective, and we kind of know that otherwise you wouldn't have to go to the gym, just eat protein and you would become a bodybuilder. 

But that doesn't work. But it's the same with older adults. You need to have the exercise to make use of the protein you have. So, if you're concerned about potential detrimental effects of protein, definitely don't have a high protein diet if you're not exercising because there's almost no benefit of protein in that context. 

But you do have the potential concerns. But I think once you do exercise, which kind of takes away all the scary things like, ooh, insulin resistance, um, because exercise is just that powerful. In that context, I think protein intake is very beneficial to combat sarcopenia. So that's my main advice. 

Number one, absolutely do exercise if you can. And if you do exercise, then I think protein intake is beneficial. Please do any type of exercise. The more it resembles resistance training the better. But again, even walking is great and if you do a lot of exercise in that context, my personal belief is that some additional protein has more pros and cons if you simply wanna stay healthy, even aside from just having better training adaptations. 

Ted Ryce: So, Dr. Trommelen just gave us a masterclass and why exercise and protein go hand in hand, especially as we get older. I really appreciate how Jorn addressed the protein and longevity debate. Muscle is not just for show. It's crucial for mobility, metabolic health, and overall vitality. So while extremely high protein might not have much benefit, if you're sedentary in the context of exercise, it is hugely beneficial. 

And those theoretical risks largely fade away, especially if you're talking about actually being able to enjoy being alive, right? It's one thing, it's like, oh, I'm, I'm living for a long time, but I've, you know, fasted and avoided eating protein, so I've lost a lot of muscle mass and can't do much. That's not a life I wanna live, right? 

And I know that's not something you're interested in either. So make sure you're moving your body consistently, challenging your muscles and eating enough protein to support that activity. I also want to highlight Jordan's remark. Exercise is so powerful that it takes away all the scary things people often worry about, like insulin resistance or other issues. 

Meaning that staying active fundamentally improves your health and can offset potential downsides of a higher protein intake in case there happens to be some truth to that argument. In short, exercise plus protein equals your recipe for staying muscular, healthy, and lean after 40. So take that one to heart folks. 

There you have it. Three powerful insights on building muscle and getting fit after 40, whether it's falling in love with the process, finding balance instead of burning out or using protein and training. Smart to stay strong. The message is clear. This is the long game. So what's your next step? Maybe it's getting back into a workout you actually enjoy. 

Maybe it's letting go of that all or nothing mindset and giving yourself permission to kind of half ass a workout sometimes, just so that you're consistent. Or maybe it's just adding more protein and movement for your day. Whatever it is, keep it simple and most importantly, stay consistent. And if you want expert support on your journey, I invite you to book a free strategy call with me. 

We'll talk about where you are right now. What's holding you back. And how my unstoppable after 40 coaching program can help you build the body you want without injury, without burning out, and without sliding backwards, and also without giving up your favorite foods, just go to legendary live podcast.com/apply to schedule your call. That's legendary life podcast.com/apply. Thanks for listening. Have an amazing week and talk to you on Monday.