#158: Strength Training After 40 What to Expect in Your First 90 Days

How long does it actually take to see results when you start strength training after 40?

In this episode, I walk through what I’ve seen happen over and over again after helping hundreds of women start lifting weights through my one-to-one coaching, group coaching, and my Learn to Lift program.

We look at what the first 90 days of strength training typically look like for women who are just getting started, including the kinds of changes many women begin to notice during those first 10–12 weeks.

You’ll get a clearer picture of what realistic progress can look like in the early stages of strength training and the signs that your training is working.

And if you’ve been working out with weights for a while but you’re not noticing these kinds of changes, this episode will also help you evaluate what you’re doing and whether something in your program might need to change.

Enjoy the show!

Resources Mentioned

1. Lift-IT! 10-Day Intro to Strength Training
2. Learn to Lift 10-week beginner strength training program
3. Episode #114: Progressive Overload

If you’re enjoying the podcast, and would like to support my work please consider buying me a cup of coffee – link’s in the show notes! 

• Try out strength training with Lift-IT! My 10-day Intro to Strength Training >>
• Learn to Lift with my 10-week beginner program >>
• Download my free guide to working with your menopausal body >> 
• Subscribe to my weekly newsletter>>
• Support the show: Buy me a coffee >>

Transcript

#158: Strength Training After 40 What to Expect in Your First 90 Days

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host.

And today we're gonna talk about how long it takes. Before you will see results, when you start strength training and specifically what you can expect to have happen in those first 90 days after you get started.

I've helped hundreds of women get started lifting in my one-to-one coaching group, coaching and through my Learn to Lift program. And today I am going to share what I've seen over and over again happening with women. In those first 10 to 12 weeks after they get started.

That way you'll know whether you're on track and if you've been lifting for longer than that and you're not seeing these things happening to you. You'll know it might be time to take a closer look at what you're doing to make sure you're not missing some key [00:01:00] elements for getting results in strength training. So let's get into it.

So this is actually really great timing for this episode because I just finished a 12 week stint with a one-to-one client, and I think she's an amazing example of what strength training can actually do and how it progresses because she's somebody who had not strength trained at all before, and she was strength training, kind of the minimum that you could do. Right? So twice a week full body, which she actually split into Monday, upper body Tuesday, lower body Wednesday, upper body Thursday lower body. So she was doing half of a full body workout each day. So that meant she was hitting each of her muscle groups twice a week, but she wasn't really doing accessory exercises or anything like that.

And each of her sessions was about half an hour long, and [00:02:00] this was really the beginning of her strength training journey. She's now, gone on to my membership, so she's going to keep going. 

But I wanna read to you what she actually said, about how she is feeling at the end of this journey. She said, "I feel a lot firmer. My clothes really do fit better and my weight is down a few pounds. I feel stronger, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. I feel somehow more powerful as an independent woman."

the other thing that she talked about was that she has had a challenging relationship with her scale weight, right? That is something that stresses her out to weigh herself and really can affect her day if she hops on the scale, notices that there's like a, a pound more or pound less on the scale, and she said that. It's been really interesting that now that she has a little bit more muscle on her body, she actually has [00:03:00] noticed there's less fluctuation on the scale and that has made her feel really good. It's like her body can somehow adapt to her eating a little bit more, for example, Thanksgiving or something like that. And so that has made her feel a lot better too, that her response to her scale. Weight has changed that way. So I think that is super interesting to look at it from that context. But let's go into a little bit about what her journey and what so many other women's journey has been like.

So the beginning part of your strength training really is. Learning, and this is something where I encourage you to take your time because especially if you haven't been doing strength training before, or even if you've been going to group fitness classes where you're working out with weights, you want to learn how to do the exercises properly.

And it is important [00:04:00] because once you start loading those exercises, if you don't have proper technique, then you have a higher risk for injury. So the first weeks like three, four weeks of your strength training journey is really about learning those exercises. So you need to have the program in place that you are repeating.

You need to have very good videos explaining how to do the exercises, and I really encourage you to take video of yourself doing the exercises and look if you are looking like the videos, right? So if the video says, make sure your knees are going over your toes, or, make sure your butt is moving backwards. Look at the video of yourself. And I know that can feel. Really torturous in the beginning, but it's a good thing to get used to taking video of yourself and then watching them. And by the way, a small tip is that when you take the video, I mean you [00:05:00] just use your phone, right? Use the front camera of your phone.

You can lean it up against a water bottle, put it on a bench or whatever. And then the other thing that I use so much at the gym is I have this thing called a flip stick. It's on the back of my. Phone, it's like a little sticker that. When you open it, it uh, it provides this really, really sticky surface that you can hang on, hang it on mirrors and walls and equipment and everything.

And that makes it a lot easier for me to take form videos. And it makes it super subtle. Most of the people around me have no idea. I'm taking a form video of myself. So anyway, so form videos are really good, but so the beginning part really is. Learning the key thing that is going on in your body is that your body is learning how to recruit your muscles better so that mind muscle connection is starting to work. The parts of your [00:06:00] brain that are controlling your muscle contractions, those are getting some practice. All right? If you haven't been squeezing your hand tight, hold onto something. Your body is learning how to use those muscles, and as your body gets better at recruiting those muscle fibers, then you'll notice that you get stronger and the exercises get easier.

And so. Generally women are able to start doing more reps, increasing their weights. And if you're doing something where, the lighter version is actually doing a smaller range of motion, like a split squat, then you're able to go deeper into the split squad and then deeper and deeper as your body learns how to use those muscles. So that's very much going on in the first weeks. 

And the other thing that is happening, or can very much happen in the be beginning is you might feel really sore. Okay. [00:07:00] Especially after the first session. If you're doing an exercise that you haven't done before, you may be sore for days. So I definitely encourage you to take it easy in the first sessions so that you don't have extreme soreness. Focus more on learning the exercises and not so much in like doing them as hard as you can. There will be time for that. So the first. 2, 3, 4 weeks is about learning, getting your nervous system going, your muscles contracting properly, and then after that, you start to actually build muscle as you challenge yourself.

So I hope. That all of you are aware of a concept called progressive overload. I've talked about it very often on my podcast, so please go back and listen to [00:08:00] an episode on progressive overload. But basically what it means is that you. Increase the reps or increase the weights as you get stronger. And what that ensures is that you keep signaling to your body that, hey, I need to get a little bit stronger because I'm just at my limits.

Right? So, so then your body's like, oh man, Lynn's gotta get stronger. I gotta put some muscle on her. I gotta, you know, make her stronger.

And by the way, this early learning phase is the time where you'll get stronger, but you might not notice. Any muscle growth? Well, first of all, like muscle growth is slow. It's not something that happens overnight. Otherwise, everybody would have this amazing bikini body because they go to the gym for a month before summer starts. But that doesn't happen, right? Not even, you know, young guys are able to do it [00:09:00] that fast, and certainly not us midlife women. So the first thing that you're gonna notice is that you'll get stronger, but , the muscle, the visible, muscle is going to happen a lot more slowly than that. All right,

and in the first weeks, what you'll also notice if you're doing this strength training properly is that you'll start to lose visceral fat, that's why in this one-to-one client that I just talked about, her clothes were fitting her differently because there was body recomposition going on. And this can be, at different levels for different people. It was something I noticed very quickly when I started strengths training, you know, in the first three months. I really lost visceral fat, and that helps your pants fit nicer around the waist. And I also had another client who also was strength training just at home with dumbbells twice a week. And she had pretty amazing, before and [00:10:00] after. Pictures about that. So that is one of the things that you can definitely see, happening is your visceral fat decreasing. So if you have a chance to take, , a body composition scan or some kind of measurement before you get started, and then do it again after like three months of strength training and see how, how that has changed for you, most likely you'll see that something has happened. If you are doing the strength training right.

Now, even though you may not see a whole ton of visible muscle, one of the things I hear over and over again from my clients is that they feel firmer. Like when they touch their body, they can feel that they're not as mushy and jiggly as they were before. So the muscle is building under there.

Women have also shared that they do see a difference. I remember one of my one-to-one [00:11:00] clients, by the end of our time together, which was the three months, she was feeling already so much more confident about how her arms looked, that she was looking forward to summer, that, hey, I can. Finally put on little tank tops again and feeling really confident in herself, from the changes that she was seeing. So that's gonna be very individual. And then also how much fat you have on your body and all that. So that's something that you can also. Maybe even see in the first 12 weeks of your time. 

Other things that are maybe more subtle are changes in your posture, how you carry yourself. I've had many clients, comment that, oh, they saw friends that they hadn't seen in a while, and the friends are like. Oh, you look different. You're standing up straighter, you know, and it's probably because your whole body is stronger, so your posture gets better. As your back muscles are stronger, your core is stronger, everything is stronger. [00:12:00] Plus, honestly, you just start to feel better about yourself, like the amount of kind of confidence that women start to feel from lifting, it happens quite quickly. In that first 10 to 12 weeks really, and so that may have a real factor in that you're just standing up a little bit straighter because you just feel better about yourself as your strength training.

And then I think the mindset shift is one that I love that change, and that's another one that I've heard many, many times. I had one, client in particular. I remember when she started, she was really concerned about, you know, she was gaining some weight and she wanted to lose some weight, so she wanted to start strength training. She had been doing cardio only up until then, and then when she'd been doing strength training for a while, she was like. You know what? I don't even wanna look at the scale. I am [00:13:00] excited about being strong and she was looking really a lot stronger because her muscles were showing, her body shape was evolving. And that's what will happen over time. Maybe not in the first 10 or 12 weeks. But in general, like what does strength training do? You know if you are able to. Keep your calories at a maintenance level, which means that you're not eating more than your body needs, in other words, you're not gaining more fat, what is going to happen in your body is that you are gonna put on more muscle. And you are going to lose the visceral fat and some of the subcutaneous fat. So your body composition is gonna change in a much more positive direction. You're going to have a higher percentage of muscle versus fat. Your metabolism is gonna increase. I mean, it's not huge amounts but still, those [00:14:00] little things really add up over time and this, client that I just finished with mentioned that she was already noticing that her weight was staying more steady now that she was beginning to put muscle on her body.

And I've noticed that myself, I don't need to be quite so strict in my eating, because my body somehow handles food a little bit differently and it, it's not something that I've seen studies about and like said, the fact that you have muscle does increase your metabolism, but I honestly think it does something else too, which is what I keep hearing over and over again from. Women and what I've noticed in my own experience. 

All right, so I think to summarize the things that you can expect over the first 10 to 12 weeks are that the first month is really gonna be about learning, and you should give yourself time to learn. [00:15:00] Also keeping in mind that our bodies are not 20 anymore, so we do have maybe arthritis in our joints. Our tendons and ligaments may have weakened because we are going into menopause and estrogen, stores are not so regular. Or if we're in post menopause, we don't have estrogen. Keeping them nice and healthy and supple and working and all that. So it is a good idea to just take it like at a gentle pace in the first month and then start slowly increasing.

 So in that first month, you will notice that you're getting stronger, and through that whole 10 to 12 weeks, you will notice that you're getting stronger. Likely, you're gonna notice that your clothes are fitting a little bit differently because of a decrease in visceral fat, which means that your waistline is going to get smaller.

You may notice that your body is feeling firmer, right? That you, your body is not as [00:16:00] jiggly feeling as it was before, and some of you may even notice some muscle definition coming back in. That a little bit depends on how much body fat you have. And then things like feeling different in your body, standing straighter, feeling more confident, and the mindset changes, which I think are just amazing.

And if you're not feeling these things and you've been working out with weights, then really evaluate what you're doing. And are you actually doing progressive strength training? Have you been following the same program for long enough? And all the things that I talk about. In this podcast, and 

if you haven't started strength training yet and you want to get a feel for it, you know, dip your toe in. You're not sure if this is your thing, and is this so different from what I'm doing right now with weights? Then try out my. A 10 day intro to strength training. It's called [00:17:00] Lift It, and it gives you four mini workouts that you can do, and it gives you a little bit more education around strength training, and it's a really good way to dip your toe in. I've had a lot of women go through that and then they're like, yes, and then they go into my Learn to Lift program because it's kind of given them the confidence that, yes, I can do this. Yes, this is what I need to be doing. And then they move on to the Learn to Lift.

If you know you're ready to go straight into a real program, then my 10 week program Learn to Lift is there for you. You can train two, three, or four times a week at home or the gym. And at home, all you need is dumbbells. I really wanna lower the barrier for people to get started, so I have those options available to you.

All right ladies, . So if we got to the end of this podcast episode and you're like, Hey, wait a second, I've been lifting. I haven't been noticing any of these things. Then I have some episodes for you in [00:18:00] the show notes where you can check to kind of troubleshoot your program so that you can actually start getting results with the time that you're spending working out. And with that, I wish you a wonderful week ahead. See you next week, and happy training.