EP 113- How to Actually Build Muscle After 35: Failure, Volume, and Why More Isn't Always Better

Kat, host of MilesFromHerView (powered by KatFit Strength), breaks down hypertrophy (muscle growth) and explains what truly matters for building and maintaining muscle as women age, especially during perimenopause and menopause, when estrogen declines and muscle loss accelerates. She covers three common topics: training to failure, training volume, and heavy loads. Kat defines true failure and recommends training close to failure (leaving 1–2 reps in reserve/RPE 8–9) on big compound lifts, saving true failure for lower-risk accessory work. She warns against “trash volume,” noting that newer research shows similar hypertrophy with fewer sets, and suggests 12–20 challenging sets per muscle group per week for most people. Finally, she encourages progressive overload and heavier loads (safely progressed with good form), emphasizing muscle as “metabolic currency” that supports joints, bone density, and independence.

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00:00 Training Questions Answered

00:55 Podcast Welcome

02:23 What Is Hypertrophy

02:41 Why Muscle Matters

04:24 Training Near Failure

07:28 Avoiding Trash Volume

08:09 How Much Volume Works

10:32 When To Lift Heavy

12:16 Progressive Overload Safely

13:52 Three Key Takeaways

15:00 Coaching Invitation

15:43 Final Outro

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Transcript

0:00

I get this question a lot. How should I be training right now? Should I be lifting heavy? Should I be doing more sets, higher reps? Do I need to go to failure? Am I doing too much or not enough? And honestly, I love when I get this question because the answer isn't complicated as the fitness industry wants you to believe. So today we're gonna be breaking down hypertrophy, which is a fancy word for muscle growth, and we're gonna be talking about three things that get a lot of airtime online: training to volume, training to failure, and heavy loads. My goal is at the end of this episode, you'll know what actually matters for building and keeping muscle in your 30s, 40s, and beyond, and then also what is just noise. So let's dive in. Welcome to MilesFromHerView, the podcast powered by KatFit 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 ultramarathon runner, and a strength trainer in her 40s. 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 MilesFromReview. I am Kat, your host, and if you're new here, welcome. If you're a longtime listener, welcome. I hope wherever you are today, you're having a wonderful day or had a wonderful day, depending on what time you're listening, and I hope you get a lot out of this episode. Know that you can always message the podcast. Hop up into the show notes, click on the message button, and if there's something you wanna hear on the podcast or if you have a question, just let me know. I answer all of the emails that come in. Please note that it may take forty-eight to seventy-two hours for me to get back to you, but I have not forgotten about you and I will respond. Let's dive into hypertrophy. It is a fancy term. It's a scientific term, and what it really means is your muscle cells are getting bigger. So when you lift they grow, and the whole muscle grows, and that's it. It's just muscle growth. And why this matters, if you're a longtime listener, you've heard me talk a lot, muscle is very important as we age. You may have heard that we lose muscle as we age. This is true for men. This is true for women. Why it is so critical for women and why is it getting in a lot of air time is because when our estrogen decreases, we lose muscle faster. So a- across every single decade, you're losing around 2 to 3% of muscle, and if you don't have a lot of muscle in the beginning or if you don't have- A good muscle composition throughout the decades and you're d- losing your current muscle composition when you hit perimenopause, then eventually menopause, it isn't going to help your overall health. So muscle isn't just about vanity or aesthetics, it is metabolic currency. So strength in reserve for decades ahead. So this is what protects your joints, your bone density, and your independence as you age., If you are in perimenopause or post-menopause, you know how your body can shift. Building and holding onto muscle is one of the most powerful tools you have to work with those shifts instead of against them. When we go into talking about training to failure or volume or heavy loads, I'm not talking about chasing a look. I'm talking about chasing capability. So training to failure, do you really need it? This one gets a lot of people nervous, and I understand, especially if you are newer to lifting or coming back to lifting after maybe a 10 or 20 year pause. What true failure actually looks like is you're moving with control. You're not jerking, no breaking form, and the weight simply stops moving no matter how hard you try. That's real muscle failure. It's not dangerous when it's done correctly, But it's not something you need to chase on every single set. And my honest take on this, based on the years of coaching and lifting myself, is you don't need to hit true failure most of the time. What you need to do is train close to it. What this means is leaving one to two reps on the table. In the fitness industry, this is called reps in reserve or RIR, abbreviated. And it can also be, and what I like to framework it as with my clients, is RPE of eight or nine. RPE stands for rate of perceived exertion, and the scale is one to ten. The scale, the Borg scale of what the rate perceived of exertion actually is a little bit different, but I simplify it, and this is a bit of a universal term. So not just something I made up to simplify it for my clients, but when you are engaged in many lifting programs and they use an RPE, it's typically one through ten, not the Borg scale, which is a little bit more skewed. So RPE between eight or nine is what the sweet spot is for building muscle without beating up your joints or your nervous system. So we want to save the true failure to accessory work. So that would be bicep curls, lateral raises, leg extensions, where there's a lower risk. Your big compound lifts, such as your squats, your deadlifts, your presses, you want to stay around one to two reps shy of failure most of the time. So keeping that RIR, the reps in reserve there. And that's especially true if you're newer to lifting or you have a lower training age, meaning fewer year, fewer years of consistent strength training under your belt. Think about yourself coming back to lifting after years away, maybe juggling perimenopause. So If I have a client who is coming to me after years away from lifting, and they may be juggling perimenopause symptoms where sleep isn't great, stress is very high, I don't want her to be grinding to failure on a heavy squat set. She needs consistency, control, and a stimulus that her body can actually recover from, and that's where training near failure, not at it, becomes a smarter long-term strategy. Trash volume. So more sets does not equal more muscle, and I want you to really think about that. Not all volume builds muscle. A lot of it is really just trash volume, meaning extra work for doing work, and it isn't doing anything except making you tired. Personally, I want clients in the gym getting the benefit of their work, not just making them tired. Because to be quite honest, life is exhausting, so I want them to get to the gym, do what is effective so they have the most effective dose of strength training, and then they can go home and they can recover. What Research suggests that you can get a similar effect from four to six sets of ten at the same load. So there's a lot of old school programming that came out based on old research, where ten sets of ten on one lift showed that it was getting a good work, that there was hypertrophy effect there. But newer research shows that you can get a similar effect from four to six sets of ten at the same load, and those extra sets really aren't adding much, they're just adding fatigue. And here's a number that I think is generally useful for most research points to somewhere between twelve to twenty challenging sets per muscle group per week as a threshold for maximizing hypertrophy. Not more, that's the threshold. Looking at your whole week, that it's between twelve to twenty challenging sets per muscle group as a threshold. If your workout has eight exercises and there's three sets of ten on everything, that's twenty-four sets in one session alone, and ask yourself, "Could I get the same result or better from four exercises at three sets each working closer to failure?" More often than not, the answer is yes. Efficient training always beats exhausting training, especially when your recovery capacity isn't what it was at twenty-five. So again, when I'm working with women who have come to me doing an hour and a half in the gym, hitting every machine at every angle, or maybe doing a lot of circuit training with high volume, multiple rounds, and they're just not seeing the changes that they want, the fix is not adding more. It's actually tightening up what's already there and training for fewer sets with real intensity. So we're going for that quality over quantity of exercises every time. Now, the caveat here is if you've been lifting consistently for years and your training age is higher, your body may actually need a little bit more volume to keep adapting. So it isn't always a one-size-fits-all, but when you're working with a professional who understands lifting and hypertrophy can tweak. However, if you're early in your strength training journey, more is rarely the answer so high loads. So where does heavy weight fit in? Heavy weights or lifting heavy is getting all the buzz in the industry because if you lift heavy, you're going to get a greater stimulus. So let's debunk this and understand this a little bit more Some individuals who I work with have always been told that lighter weight is better and higher reps are safer, or it's more appropriate as you get older that you should only be lifting lighter. And I'm gonna challenge that because research comparing high volume, low load training to low volume, high load training, both groups did build muscle in lower body. But for upper body pressing movements, the heavier load group saw better results. So that's not a definitive science, but What it does suggest is as your training experience grows, heavier loads may carry real benefits for hypertrophy, not just strength. And personally, I have always responded to lower volume and higher loads. And it could be that's how my body's built. But here's the bigger point. Most people, especially women in our demographic, are not training heavy enough, even when they think they're doing high volume work. People assume heavy automatically means low volume, but that's not actually the rule. You can and should be challenging yourself with real weights regardless of your rep range. So don't be afraid of the heavier dumbbell or the next weight plate on the barbell. Progressive overload, meaning gradually increasing the demand on your muscles over time, is one of the most important drivers of muscle and bone health as we age. So light weights done forever will maintain very little. Clients who I see who are in their forties and fifties can sometimes have a notion of bulking up when they're lifting heavier or scared of hurting themselves with heavier loads. That's where I work on building confidence with form. I progress them slowly, and the results and the strength and body composition in how they feel from day to day, and it completely shifts their relationship with the gym. If you're someone who, and this is totally fine, may be nervous about hurting yourself lifting heavy, no, it's not a, I'm picking arbitrary numbers here, going from a ten-pound weight to a sixty-pound weight. There is a progression here, and I'm a firm believer we need to build that confidence with form and progress as we move along. Again, I never take a client who may be brand new to strength training or there may be a bit of a pause in between the last time they were We're consistent with strength training and say, Okay, you last left off," picking arbitrary numbers here, "at squatting 120 pounds, so we will start you now at 140 pounds." No. We're gonna come in, I'm gonna look at where they're at, I'm gonna see their form. I'm gonna also understand what is their body history, how do their joints move, and then we're gonna find what's heavy for them now to build so they can progressively build that strength all right, let's bring all of these three things together. One, you don't need to train to true failure all the time. Train to close it, especially on your big lifts, and save true failure for, say, for accessory work. Number two, more volume is not the goal. We want effective volume. That is the goal. 12 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week is plenty for pe- most people. So that realistically is broken down between two to three strength training sessions. Trash volume just adds fatigue without adding results. And number three, do not shy away from heavier loads. Progressive overload matters at every age and especially in the season of life when we're actively working to protect muscle, bone, and metabolic health. So that is your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, your 70s, okay? We want to protect that muscle, bone, and metabolic health. If you've been stuck in a workout routine that feels long, exhausting, and you're just not actually moving the needle, this is your sign to simplify. Lift heavier and train with more intention instead of more volume. And if you're listening to this thinking, "Okay, Kat, I get it, but I have no idea how to actually build this into my week," this is exactly what I help with. This is the work that I do inside my coaching programs, figuring out the right volume, the right loads, the right intensity for your body, your training age, and the season of life you're in. If this is something you want more support with, reach out to me directly or book a call with me. The link is in the show notes, and we can talk through what this would look like for you. Until next time, keep moving forward. Keep lifting, and challenge yourself. And as always, I love to hear your questions, so send them my way, Thank you for tuning in to MilesFromHerView, powered by KatFit 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 KatFit 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.