A Simple Guide for Women Over 45
One of the things I really want women to understand is how we actually build muscle, because once you understand the basics, strength training suddenly makes much more sense. You don’t need to know lots of complicated gym terminology and you certainly don’t need to become a bodybuilder. Building muscle is essentially about giving your muscles an appropriate challenge, allowing them to recover and then gradually asking a little more of them over time.
When we lift a weight or work against resistance, we’re asking our muscles to produce force. If the exercise is challenging enough, the body gets a message that it needs to adapt to cope with that demand. With repeated training, enough food and protein, and sufficient recovery, the muscles can gradually become stronger and, over time, increase in size. It doesn’t happen after one workout. It’s the result of repeatedly giving the body the right stimulus and then giving it the opportunity to adapt.
This is where progressive overload comes in. It sounds terribly technical, but it’s actually very simple. If you always do exactly the same exercise with exactly the same weight for exactly the same number of repetitions, eventually your body becomes used to it. To continue progressing, we gradually increase the challenge. That might mean lifting a slightly heavier weight, doing another repetition, adding another set, improving the range of movement or performing the exercise with better control. You don’t have to make huge jumps. Small increases over time can make a big difference.
The weight also needs to provide enough resistance. If you can easily perform 20 repetitions and feel as though you could carry on for another 20, the exercise probably isn’t providing much of a strength challenge. On the other hand, you don’t need to choose a weight that’s so heavy that your technique disappears. I want the final repetitions of a set to feel challenging while you can still perform the movement well. Learning what that feels like is part of learning to strength train.
Something else that’s important to understand is that muscle isn’t built while we’re actually lifting the weight. Training provides the stimulus, but adaptation happens during the time between sessions. That’s why recovery matters. We don’t need to train the same muscles hard every single day. Rest, sleep and appropriate recovery give the body time to respond to the work we’ve done. More exercise isn’t automatically better exercise.
Nutrition is another part of the picture. If we’re asking our bodies to maintain or build muscle, we need to give them the building blocks to do it. Protein is particularly important because it supplies amino acids that the body uses for muscle repair and growth. Rather than thinking about protein as something only bodybuilders need, I encourage women to include good sources of protein regularly throughout the day alongside vegetables, fruit, whole grains, healthy fats and the other foods that make up a balanced diet.
And then we need consistency. This is probably the least glamorous part of building muscle, but it’s one of the most important. You don’t need a perfect workout. You need to keep coming back. A sensible strength programme performed consistently over months is going to achieve far more than an incredibly hard programme you can only maintain for two weeks.
For women over 45, I think understanding this is incredibly empowering. We’re often told about all the things our bodies may lose as we get older, but we don’t hear nearly enough about what we can still build. We can train our muscles. We can become stronger. We can learn new movements. We can gradually lift more than we used to. Ageing doesn’t mean that improvement suddenly stops.
When I’m training someone, I’m therefore not simply choosing random exercises to make them tired. There’s a reason behind what we’re doing. We learn the movement, find an appropriate resistance, repeat it consistently and gradually progress it as the body becomes stronger. Alongside that, we pay attention to nutrition, breathing, mobility and recovery.
You don’t need to leave every session completely exhausted and you don’t need to be sore for three days to prove that your workout worked. Building muscle is much less dramatic than that. It’s about giving your body a clear message, again and again: I need you to become stronger.
Then we give it the movement, nourishment, recovery and consistency it needs to respond.
That’s how strength is built — one repetition, one session and one small progression at a time.
Selena
Personal Trainer, Yoga Teacher & Wellbeing Coach
In Flow Wellbeing Studio, Cheltenham
