Why Cardio Backfires for Women Over 40 (and What Really Works)

Cardio for weight loss after 40 feels like the answer, but for a lot of women over 40, it's the reason the scale won't move, and the body won't change. If you're doing more cardio in perimenopause or menopause and getting little return on your investment, this episode is why.

For years, I did it the way we were all taught: eat less, stay in a deficit, and do cardio to burn off my food. Marathons, the StairMaster, spin class, the whole thing. I was thin but worn out, and it all barely made a difference in how my body looked. Then I learned what truly changes a woman's body after 40, and it wasn't more cardio.

In this episode, I talk through why cardio stops paying off the way it used to after 40, what's behind the weight that settles around your middle in perimenopause and menopause, and the shift that finally got my body to respond at 45.

If you're a woman over 40 who wants to lose weight, build muscle, and feel strong again without living on the treadmill, this episode is for you.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

💪🏼 The Strong Core Method: a 4-week, step-by-step core program for women over 40, every level, that includes 12 guided workouts, video demos, and a simple plan to help you build a stronger, more defined midsection in just 20 minutes, 3 times per week.

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🎧 Listen Next: Why Losing Weight After 40 Makes You Look Worse

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👋🏻 ABOUT ME: 

I'm Andrea, a double-certified NASM Nutrition and Fitness Coach and founder of Behind the Body. For 20 years, I under-ate, avoided weights, and lived on cardio chasing skinny, and none of it gave me a body I was proud of. In my mid-30s, I changed my approach: more protein, real strength training, and a plan that fit my life. I lost 20 pounds, and 10 years later, at 45, I'm still maintaining it through perimenopause. I help women over 40 simplify their approach, build real strength, and get results that last. Every week, I cover the science, the strategy, and the honest truth about fat loss and maintenance for women over 40.

MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: 

This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, exercise, or health routine. Results vary. Andrea is a NASM-certified Nutrition and Fitness Coach, not a doctor or registered dietitian.

Transcript

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I'm at the gym first thing, most mornings, Monday through Friday. So I tend to see the same faces. And lately there's one woman that I cannot stop noticing. She looks like she's in her early 20s. And every time I'm in there, she is running hard on the treadmill. She doesn't look like she's training for anything. She looks like she's just running. Like the way you run when you're trying to say small and burn off everything you ate. Because somewhere along the line, you just learn that's how you keep your body in shape. Every time I see her, my heart sinks a little bit because I see so much of myself in her. That used to be me. What I want to walk over and tell her is that the very thing that would change everything for her isn't more time on that treadmill. It's not doing more cardio. It's picking up a set of weights. It would change her shape, how she feels in her own skin, and how strong she'll be in her 40s and 50s. Of course, I will never go up and say this to her, and she'll probably figure it out eventually. But I just wish that somebody had grabbed me sooner and told me that. If you're over 40 and you're trying to lose weight, you've probably been taught the same thing that she was and I was. Eat a little less, stay in a calorie deficit, and do your cardio to burn off your food or manage your weight. That's the holy grail, right? It's so baked into us that we don't even question it. I didn't, at least. Cardio was my entire strategy and plan for years. Today I barely do cardio. And I can honestly say that my body's in such better shape today at 45 than it ever was back in my 20s and 30s when cardio was all I did. So in today's episode, I want to talk about the role of cardio, why it's not the solution for us anymore, what truly changes your body after 40, and what will protect us women for decades because it is not more cardio. Welcome to Behind the Body. I'm Andrea, certified nutrition and fitness coach. In my 30s, I lost 20 pounds and I've maintained it well through my 40s. Every week here, we talk about what's really happening with perimenopause and weight gain, what to do about it, and the brutal but beautiful truth about this stage of life. Whether you're just starting or tired of starting over, you are in the right place, and I'm so happy you're here. Let's dive in. So, why do we trust cardio this much? It's actually not random. There are two reasons that we reach for that or we think about that first. The first reason is that cardio pays us back right away. We are drenched, we're sweating, our heart rates are up, they're pounding, we feel wiped out. And then our brain goes, okay, that worked. You earned it. Lifting weights doesn't give you that same rush. So you can finish a weightlifting session and feel like you barely did anything. The second reason that we trust cardio so much is that we were raised on it. If you grew up in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s, like I did, it was steparobics, jazz or size, spin classes, the lean women on every single magazine cover telling us to get our heart rates up and burn more calories. That's 30 years of the same message. Of course, cardio is your instinct. It was mine too. So when the weight stops moving or you put on a few pounds that you want to get off, you do the most natural thing to you. You go back to the thing that you trust and you do more cardio. But after 40, that strategy just isn't it for us anymore. And let's talk about why. But let me be fair to cardio first, because I'm not here to trash it. I actually really love cardio. It's amazing for your heart, it's good for your mental health, it clears your head, it brings stress down after a long day. And yes, it burns calories. I won't pretend that it doesn't. If you ate 500 calories over your maintenance one day and then went and burned off 500 calories on the treadmill, you'd cancel it out. You can manage your weight this way. It is possible. But you can and you should are two different things. For the amount of work that cardio asks of you, you actually get little back in return. Let me tell you what that looks like with real numbers from my own experience. I'll get on the stairmaster for about 30 minutes once a week, and my heart rate goes way up. It shoots up high into the 160s and it stays there because the stairmaster is hard, right? But I'm genuinely working for 30 full minutes. I'm drenched in sweat. I'm literally dying. And that gets me about 250 calories burned. 250. That's like a small handful of nuts or one of those little bags of potato chips. Like 30 hard minutes dying on the stairmaster for something you can literally eat in 60 seconds. So to out-exercise the way that you eat, you'd basically have to live on a cardio machine and nobody can keep it up for that long. That's just not sustainable. But then there's what it's doing to you beneath the surface. When you do hard cardio five or six days a week, you're keeping your body stressed and your cortisol running high. And as your estrogen drops in perimenopause and menopause, your body gets far more sensitive to that stress. And high cortisol tells your body to hold on to your belly fat. So the very thing that you're doing to lose that belly fat can be literally part of the reason that it won't go away. And there's one more cost to leaning on cardio. It's actually the biggest reason of all, but I'm gonna come back to that in a minute. Now, for many years of my life, I was running five days a week. And on top of that, I did other things like marathons and half marathons, the Stairmaster. I did orange theory for a while, my Peloton, eating in a calorie deficit the whole time. And yes, I was thin. I was thin and exhausted, literally running myself into the ground just to stay that way. And then one day I looked at a picture of myself in a bathing suit, years of running five days a week, and I didn't look any better than the day I started. Years of my life, hours of my day, and literally looking at the same body. I was so upset. I don't know if upset is the word. I was like, I felt so disappointed, like so deflated, and I just couldn't understand. And I think I was at the perfect age to have this epiphany because I knew that it was when I was in my mid-30s, and I knew that maybe some of this was because of my age. And so I just got really curious about what I was doing and the impact it had on my body relative to my goals. And so I started asking a better question. Instead of how do I burn more calories in today's workout, I asked myself, how do I build a body that I like? If I was doing all of the things I thought I should do or that created a lean, ideal body in my mind and that wasn't working out for me. Well, then how do I get a body that I like that feels good and healthy? And the answer to that, I learned, was never going to be cardio. It was muscle. Muscle is a thing that works for you all the time, even when you're not working out. It's expensive for your body to carry. So the more you have of it, the more calories that you burn by just living while you sleep, while you sit at your desk and work, while you watch Netflix at night. And after a real weightlifting session, your body spends the next day or so repairing those muscles, which means that you keep burning calories a little extra long after you finished your workout. And picture this imagine that you weigh the same exact number six months from now, but the genes that won't button today slide right on. That happens all the time with strength training because muscle and fat take up completely different room on your body. The scale will tell you that nothing has changed because you weigh the same, but your genes would tell you that so much has changed. That's exactly why I don't want you or any woman over 40 living and dying by the number on the scale. And this is truly the part that I care about most. The muscle that you build in your 40s and your 50s is the same muscle that keeps you strong and steady in your 70s and your 80s and your 90s. And I know most of us don't think about that far out, but why not set ourselves up for the most healthy, successful lives in the future while also reaping the benefits today? I know we're all focused on looking good right now. I mean, I am, I'm no different. And I want that for you too. I really do. I want you to feel good in your clothes and I want you to feel good naked. But muscle is the one thing that gives you that today and protects you for the foreseeable future in your later years. I literally think about that every single time I pick up a weight. I'm not just training for a summer body. I'm training to be super independent at 80 years old. Stop exercising to shrink yourself and start exercising to get strong. And I know that's easier said than done, but that one shift, if you put that into motion, can literally change everything. Okay, let's come back to that cost of leaning on cardio that I told you I'd come back to. Too much cardio just doesn't fail to build muscle. In excess, it can actually chip away at the muscle that you already have. And remember, that muscle is the engine that's burning calories all day for you. So overdoing cardio can shrink the very thing that makes your metabolism work better and makes staying lean easier. And your body only has so much in the tank to recover with each day. So if you spend an hour of that on hard cardio, there's left left over to repair and grow your muscles. The research on doing both cardio and weightlifting at once backs this up. And at once I mean in the same day. The more cardio that you stack on, either more days or longer sessions or both, the more it chips away your strength and muscle gains. And this is exactly why I'm so intentional now. I've been working for years, actually for five years specifically on growing my glutes. And on my lower body days, which are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I train them three days a week because I need so much work and help. I don't do a single minute of cardio on those days. I want all of my energy, all of my food, all of my protein going straight into that workout, not burned on a treadmill or on my Peloton. Cardio is never going to grow my glutes. It's only gonna hurt me. So on those days, it does not get a vote. I'm definitely not telling you to pile on weightlifting on top of all the cardio that you're already doing. The goal is to flip it so that strength training leads and cardio takes a backseat or supporting role. And I'll give you an example of what my week of workouts looks like now. So I go to the gym about four to five days a week to lift weights. I do lower body three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, like I mentioned. And then I'll do upper body on Tuesdays and Thursdays or combine them both into one day if I'm stretched for time. My workouts are about 30 to 60 minutes, usually never more or never less than that. And I try to do each week a little bit more than I did the week before, whether that be a few more reps or a little bit heavier weight. A few days a week, I walk. And I mean like a real walk where I can, you know, still chat with a friend the entire time and not some like crazy steep incline that I'm sprinting up. But I don't walk to burn calories. I actually do it to keep me moving, to get my steps in, to lower my stress, to help with my own mental health, to get outside, to get some sunshine, to get some fresh air. And then maybe one day a week, if I'm in the mood, I'll do more intensive cardio, like the Stairmaster, or get on my Peloton for 20 to 30 minutes. And that's genuinely to keep my heart healthy and my head clear. I mean it when I say cardio used to be my entire strategy. And now it's just a cherry on top. If I want to do it to keep my heart healthy and to keep my head clear and as a supporting role. And if I'm ever searched for time and I only have the option to do one workout, it's definitely going to be strength training every time. Now, if you've never picked up a weight in your life, and I know that's many women, and that's totally fine. I know that this can feel intimidating, and I'm not going to gloss over that. I understand what it's like to work out for the very first time and how that feels. The wall of dumbbells, the machines that you've never touched and that look like, you know, foreign objects, the worry that everybody's gonna watch you and think that you're doing it wrong. Every single one of us started exactly there. I still now can walk into a new gym and have to take minutes, if not longer, to figure out the layout, to figure out what machines they have, to figure out how some of the machines work that I've never seen before. Every single one of us has a day one. We will always have a day one if we're progressing or moving around in life. And there's nothing unique or embarrassing about yours, I promise. And the great thing is, you don't even need a fancy gym to start. Honestly, two or three sets of dumbbells that you can get off of Amazon in your living room and a good program to follow is a real effective workout. I mean, the gym is great when you're ready to go heavier, but starting at home can absolutely make an impact. And please do not worry about getting bulky. And I say this because I hear this so often from women, and it shocks me that women in their 40s think that it's that easy to get bulky. Getting genuinely big takes years of heavy intentional training and eating in a real surplus on purpose. You're not gonna wake up one morning accidentally bulky. But what you're going to get is lean and strong and toned, which is probably exactly what brought you here. If you want the easiest place to start for your workouts, that's exactly why I created my strong core method. It's a four-week program, just three 20-minute workouts a week right at your home with no equipment. It builds a core strength that everything else is built off of. So when you do start lifting, you have a really solid foundation under you. It won't melt fat off your belly, but no workout can do that on its own. But it does get you on a path to build a strong toned core. If you're interested and want to check that out, I'll link it in the description below. Okay, so here's what I want you to do this week to make some progress. If you are doing cardio, I want you to take a single session of cardio and swap it for a 30-minute strength training session. If you're not doing any type of exercise, that's okay. I just want you to find 30 minutes in your schedule this week for a 30-minute strength training session. That's it. Just one. I want you to grab some dumbbells, use a resistance ban, follow along with the YouTube video, like whatever feels doable for where you are right now. I want you to add that in and I want you to pay attention to how your body looks and feels when you consistently do this over the next couple of weeks. And then you'll have the proof that you can trust because it'll be your own. You'll see how amazing that you feel mentally and physically. And if you keep that up, the progression of those feelings is just going to increase right along with your progress. And at the end of the day, the goal isn't to burn the most amount of calories in one workout. The goal is a body that works for you the other 23 hours of the day, you're not doing cardio that feels good and healthy and that's still strong and capable decades from now, because that matters. Your older self matters a lot. And that body gets built with muscle, not on a treadmill, no matter how many hours you pour into it. If cardio has been your main tool and you are still not liking your body, you're still not seeing the weight loss or the weight maintenance that you expect and that you want, there's usually something else that could be going on underneath. And it's really helpful to know what that is. I have a free metabolism type quiz, and it really helps to understand your habits and how that's impacting your weight loss efforts. It'll give you a specific plan for your metabolism type. It's only two minutes, it's free. And I will link that in the description below for you as well. If you like this podcast or you found this episode helpful, please follow the show so that the next episode lands in your library automatically. And if you've got 10 seconds, I would be so grateful if you could leave a quick reading. It's the single biggest thing that helps other women find this podcast. And I'm trying to grow it. And if you want more on everything health, fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle for us women over 40, come and join the behind the body community. Every week I send something right to your inbox that will help you keep making progress. You can sign up for free at behind the body.com forward slash newsletter. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. I'm so glad you did, and I can't wait to chat with you next week.