405: Muscle, Metabolism & Menopause: The Real Connection

In this solo episode of The Real Life Runners podcast, I’m diving into something so many of us struggle with after 40: why it feels harder to maintain a healthy weight, even when you’re exercising and eating right. Trust me, you’re not alone in this!

I’ll walk you through what’s really going on inside our bodies — how hormonal shifts, like drops in estrogen and progesterone, impact our metabolism and muscle mass. And more importantly, I’ll show you what we can do about it.

We’ll talk about why building muscle is key (it’s not just about losing weight anymore!), how much protein you actually need, and why proper recovery is just as important as training hard. I’ll also share how stress and nervous system regulation fit into the picture — because if we don’t manage those, it’s like swimming upstream.

I’m here to help you shift the focus from shrinking your body to building strength, energy, and vitality — because you deserve to feel powerful and alive at every age. I’ll wrap up with some practical tips you can start using today to rebuild muscle, boost your metabolism, and feel amazing again.

00:21 Understanding Metabolism Changes

01:52 Hormones and Their Impact

05:54 The Role of Stress and Cortisol

11:19 Importance of Muscle Building

16:37 Effective Training and Recovery

20:24 Shifting Focus: Strength Over Weight

22:23 Practical Tips for Building Muscle

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Transcript

Angie: 0:00

So you're eating healthy, running a few times a week, maybe even trying to cut back a little, but the scale won't budge or worse. It keeps creeping up. You're more tired than used to be, and the workouts that used to help you lose weight now, they just seem to make you hungrier, more exhausted. And more frustrated. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone and you're not doing anything wrong. Today, we're diving into the real reason. Your body feels different after 40. The truth is your metabolism has changed, but not because it's broken. It's because your body is asking for a new approach. In this episode, we're breaking down how hormone shifts, muscle loss, and nervous system stress are affecting your metabolism, and more importantly, what you can do about it. Because here's the good news. You are not stuck. You just need to train and fuel differently now. So today I'll show you how building muscle, eating enough protein and actually recovering, can reignite your energy, jumpstart fat loss, and help you feel strong, powerful, and vibrant. Again, this is about so much more than just your body. It's about reclaiming your strength and vitality in this next phase of life. So let's get into it. What's up runners? Welcome to the show today, it's a solo episode. I'm here by my lonesome self today. Unfortunately, Kevin isn't joining me this week, but that's okay because today I wanna talk about something that is so important. You guys all know that I love. Strength training and the importance of that. And so today we're talking about muscle metabolism and menopause so that you can really understand the real connection between these things and why it feels so much harder to change your body after 40. So if you're like so many women that I work with. What used to work doesn't work anymore, and there's a reason and also a real solution. So today we're breaking down why your metabolism shifts during perimenopause and menopause, and how building muscle is the most effective way to reclaim your energy, your strength, and your fat loss. So I know I used to fall into this trap as well of running more and eating less when I wanted to lose weight. But now that just leaves me exhausted and frustrated, and I know so many other women are feeling the same way here because this is how we've been conditioned. We've been conditioned to believe that if we want results, we need to do more. We need to push ourselves harder. We need to ignore hunger cues. We need to eat less and restrict, and that. Wrecks your body. When you start to enter perimenopause and menopause, you might have been able to get away with this. And this is the frustrating thing, and this is why so many women are confused because that strategy may have worked for you in your twenties, in your thirties, of like doing more and eating less. But once you start to get into your forties, your fifties and beyond. That strategy can actually backfire. And today I'm gonna explain why all of that's happening. So let's first start to talk about why it feels harder after 40 now when you're going into perimenopause and menopause. And I say after 40 because essentially that's when perimenopause. Menopause begins, and there's a lot of women that don't even realize that is what they're experiencing. And there's a lot of women that want to blame their age or think there's something wrong with me. And while age is related to it because perimenopause. Tends to be a little bit age related, right? It's not something that most women go through in their twenties. It's what most women go through. The average age of menopause is 51 in the United States, and so it is age related, somewhat, but you can go through perimenopause. There's a huge range of when women go through perimenopause and menopause, and when we start to go into this phase of our life, basically what happens is that our hormones start to shift. And this can lead to some major changes in our body and the way that our body responds to exercise. So estrogen and progesterone are two of the main female hormones that start changing and declining during perimenopause. And estrogen plays a very important role in the body. Now, I am a medical professional and I didn't even understand. All of the things that estrogen plays a role in until I started to really dig deep into this research myself. So estrogen is what's known as an anabolic hormone, so it helps our body to build. Okay? So think of anabolic is building. So it helps to build muscle, it helps to build bone, it helps our metabolism. It has an effect in fat distribution in the body and like how our body stores fat. And so as estrogen declines, those things also start changing. It becomes harder for us to build muscle. It becomes harder for us to build bone. We notice changes in metabolism and fat distribution mostly that a lot of women start gaining fat, especially around the belly area. And that's because of some of these changes. There's also something called sarcopenia, which is a natural loss of lean muscle mass that starts in our thirties. So even if you saw the title, hopefully if you saw the title, it didn't scare you away if you're not in menopause yet, because these changes start happening as early as our thirties and Sarcopenia is basically our body just starts to lose lean muscle mass if we aren't doing something to actively preserve it. If we're not strength training, if we're not actively trying to build muscle, our body starts to lose it. Now we wanna talk about stress, cortisol and nervous system dysregulation because these are three things that you all know that I am. Have become even more and more passionate about, because we just keep figuring out more and more links between these things and inflammation in the body and performance and overall health and chronic disease. There is so much, there's so many links, between stress and the nervous system and our hormones and all of the things. So when we go back to like why it's starting to feel harder after 40 estrogen as it's declining. Estrogen has an effect on cortisol. And so when estrogen declines, cortisol levels stay more elevated, they essentially become less checked. Like they're more unchecked because cortisol helps to, I'm sorry, estrogen helps to regulate cortisol. So when we start to lose estrogen, cortisol levels stay higher. Cortisol is your stress hormone and cortisol. Makes your body feel more stressed. It keeps your state, your body in a state of more sympathetic activation, which is your stress mode, your fight or flight response. And this causes your nervous system to get dysregulated. So basically we have these two sides of our nervous system, your, sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. And your sympathetic is known as your stress response or stress mode. That's your fight or flight, and your parasympathetic is your rest and recovery mode. And it's our normal state of being is to shift between these two things, like when we are out, when we're running, when we. When there's danger, our body needs to be in sympathetic mode because our heart rate needs to increase and our breathing needs to increase. It needs to prime the body to respond, and so when we sense danger, when we're stressed out, we tend to go into sympathetic activation. Parasympathetic activation is when our body can rest and recover and actually rebuild. Maybe you've heard me say that workouts and training actually break your body down, and during rest and recovery, that's when your body actually builds back stronger than it was before. So training is actually a stress on the body. And in our forties, our body just doesn't respond to stress in the same way because of these losses of estrogen and because our cortisol levels are. More elevated than they used to be. So that keeps our body more in that sympathetic activation state, which is more of that stress state. And when we're in that stress state. Our body does not burn fat efficiently. Our body does not recover and rebuild muscle, and that's why it becomes harder for a lot of women to build muscle after 40. That's why workouts also become harder because your body's just in this constant state of stress and it doesn't have as much time in the parasympathetic mode for it to. Rest and recover and rebuild, so you're never truly gaining the benefits of those harder workouts because your body doesn't have enough time to recover. And so this is one of the reasons why your old strategy no longer works. This whole idea of eating less and running more. Just leads to more stress on the body. It leads to a breakdown of your muscle and it leads to slower metabolism, which then of course leads to this cycle of frustration that so many women find themselves in and they have low energy levels, more belly fat, increased cravings, and it's becomes this very nasty cycle. So the important thing for you to understand. Is that me. Metabolism is not just calories in, calories out. This is one of those lies that has been perpetuated. Your metabolism is much more complicated than that. Your metabolism. Metabolism is driven by your lean muscle mass, so the more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism, because muscle is the most energy. requiring tissue in the body, like it requires more energy just to maintain muscle at rest, which is why they say you can burn fat at rest if you have more muscle. So that has a big role in your resting metabolism, your nervous system health. Again, if you're constantly in sympathetic mode and you're constantly stressed out, your metabolism is going to decrease because your body is trying to survive. When you're in sympathetic mode, that's your survival mode. Your, basically your body, just when it's in survival mode, it doesn't burn fat and energy effectively. It's trying to hold onto everything because it's trying to just survive. It's also driven by your recovery and your hormones. Okay? All of these things have an effect on your metabolism. So just counting calories and thinking it's as simple as calories in calories out is one of the reason that so many women are frustrated when it comes to trying to manage their weight and trying to build a stronger body, whether, whatever your goal is, you guys know if you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, that I don't usually like to talk about losing weight. Because I don't think it's the right focus for us as runners, as women. I think that we need to shift our focus, and we are gonna be talking about that in this episode of what we wanna shift our focus to instead. But I do wanna address it because I do know that this is where a lot of women are, and this is a goal that a lot of women have. And so I don't want to just tell you, that goal is not a good goal because if it means something to you, then we need to talk about it. We need to address this. I would love for you to start shifting away from your focus on losing weight into your focus of building muscle and building a stronger body and stronger bones like we're gonna be talking about today. But just understand that. Because I'm talking about losing weight doesn't mean that I think you should. It's because I know that there's a lot of women out there that feel like they should and that they want to, and I hope my, after this episode that you'll start to shift some of that. You can start to release this idea of just trying to get a smaller body of just trying to be thinner, just trying to lose weight, because that can lead to a lot of problems. So instead of. Really focusing on just losing weight and just numbers on the scale and just calories in, calories out. It's important for us in this phase of our life after 40 in perimenopause and post menopause, to really change our focus to building muscle because muscle is the missing link for your metabolism, for your running performance, for any of the goals that you want to achieve in your running and your fitness. You need muscle. You also need muscle to help you balance, to help keep you independent, to keep you active as you age. And that is such an important goal for us to start thinking about it. This phase of our life as well. Muscle leads to better balance. When you have more muscle and you have more strength, you're less likely to fall. If you're less likely to fall, you're less likely to break a bone. Resistance training and building muscle also strengthens your bones so that if you do fall. You're less likely to break a bone also, because you've probably heard that breaking bones when you're older can lead to a lot of health problems. So why not try to avoid that? Let's start to shift our focus into really understanding how important it's for us to build strength and muscle, of course, is a big part of that. So why is muscle so important? Why is muscle the thing that we need to be focusing on right now? Muscle is your metabolic engine. So when you have more muscles, you burn more calories at rest. Muscle also improves insulin sensitivity in the body, which means it helps to regulate your blood sugar levels. Now, if you've ever been hangry, we all heard that term of hangry, you understand the importance of your blood sugar. Blood sugar is not just about fat and. Se, fat storage. It's also about your moods. It regulates how you feel. A lot of people like how much energy you have, all of that. Is based on what's going on with your blood sugar. I shouldn't say all of it, but a lot of it is. And so your insulin sensitivity helps to regulate your blood sugar levels and muscle improves that. So let's get more muscle, right? Muscle also improves your hormonal balance and your energy levels through all of these things. Through, your helping to regulate your blood sugar through some of the other hormones that are released when we're building muscle and maintaining muscle. Yeah, your muscle's very important for your metabolism. Okay? Muscle is also anti-aging medicine, and this is what I started talking about before, muscle. When you build muscle by through resistance training, not only are you building stronger muscles, you're also building stronger bones. Resistance training has been shown to reduce the incidence of osteoporosis related fractures by 40 to 60%. That is huge. And considering that one in two women will suffer a fracture from osteoporosis at some point in their life, wouldn't, don't you wanna. To help to reduce that, right? So we can do that when we build stronger muscles through resistance Training stronger or muscle also helps us to have better balance and reduces our injury risk, not just from falling, but from running. Running is a very repetitive high impact activity and when you don't have enough muscle, your tendons, your joints, they absorb more of that stress when your muscles are stronger. They help to absorb some of the forces that come into your body through running, and they protect your joints and your tendons, so you have a reduced risk of running injury as well. And when I was in the clinic as a physical therapist, I gave everyone exercises. This is what we do. I know a lot of people think that PT is just about massage and electric stimulation and ultrasound and those tools. Have a very limited place in pt. The main thing that you do in PT is exercise. You do stretching and mobility work and strengthening exercise, because the truth is you need muscle. You need muscle to improve your balance. You need muscle to both rehab and prevent injury. When you have stronger muscles, you also have better posture. You have more power. You have improved running economy. When you have improved running economy, that means that. You use less energy to do the same thing, so running the same pace, running the same distance, you're using less energy when your economy is better because you're wasting less energy. So that's beautiful because that means you have more energy to actually do what you wanna do. When it comes to speed or endurance, running longer, running faster, all of that is easier when you have more muscle. So when we look at building muscle, it's not just about lifting. a lot of people think that, okay, in order to build muscle, I have to, I just have to lift weights. But that is not the full picture either. It's also about recovery and fuel, because like I mentioned earlier, when you train, whether it's running or lifting, when you're doing something hard and challenging your body. That's actually breaking your body down. And during rest and recovery, that's when your body has time and resources to actually rebuild your muscle. So if you're working out and you're lifting heavy and you're quote unquote, doing all the things that you're supposed to be doing in your exercise routine, but you're. Skimping on recovery. You're not getting enough sleep, you're not giving your body enough protein, you're not going to build the muscle because protein is the building block of muscle. So we have to make sure that we're getting enough protein. We have to make sure we're getting enough carbohydrates because carbohydrates are actually fuel for your training sessions, and we have to get enough sleep and recovery, especially in between those harder sessions so that our muscle actually has time to rebuild. Because the truth is as we get older and as these hormone shifts happens, it takes a little bit longer to build muscle in between sessions as well. So it's not just about lifting weights and doing resistance training. Yes, that is important, but it's also about combining that with rest, sleep, and protein so that your muscles will actually get stronger. Now all of this is also rooted in nervous system regulation because stress plays a huge role in your body's ability to actually sleep and recover and build that muscle as well. I forget where I heard this, but somewhere I heard someone make this distinction of when you're training, you could either be accumulating stress. Or adapting to stress and the goal is adaptation. Okay, so the whole idea of training is that you are doing something in your training, whether that's running, trying to run faster, or trying to run longer, or lifting heavier weights. And you want your body to adapt because when you place a stress on the body, if the body is not strong enough to handle that stress, then there's all these neural pathways and muscular pathways that happen, and basically your body gets the message of, oh, that load was a little too much, and so your body wants to be prepared. So during the rest period, it builds back stronger than it was so that when your body encounters that load again, now it is more able. To handle that load. So that is what's called adaptation, and that is the whole point of training, right? You do a little bit, you recover, you do a little bit more, you recover. You push your body to the edge or a little bit over the edge, and then you allow your body time to recover. And that is what allows you to get stronger. That's what allows you to run longer. So if you're training for a marathon. It's not like you just go out and run 26.2 miles. Most people would be completely wrecked or wouldn't even be able to complete that if they just went out and tried to do it. So during training, we push ourselves a little bit more. So say you're starting and currently you can run five miles, then. Maybe your long run over the weekend is six miles, and then you've got some shorter runs during the week, and then the following week you're at eight miles and then you pull back a little bit and then maybe you pull back to six miles after that eight. Because you, we always wanna give our body time to recover in between. We don't wanna just continuously build up. Again, that's one of those mistakes that. A lot of generic training plans make a lot of runners that don't, aren't following a training plan. They just think, oh, I'll just keep adding a mile every week, and that'll get to get me to where I wanna go. And that is a very outdated way of training. So please don't do that. You have to have pullback weeks, in there to allow adaptation versus just accumulation of more stress, right? So keep that in mind. We want adaptation, not accumulation. And this really goes back to again, this whole idea of I want to be strong versus I wanna be skinny. We have to start shifting the way that we're thinking about ourselves instead of just thinking about the size of our body instead of just thinking about a number on the scale. Why do you want, I would even invite you to just ask yourself, why do you even wanna lose weight? what is it about a smaller number on the scale that you think you want? And a lot of people say, I wanna fit back into my clothes. then ask, why does that matter to you? I wanna feel good in my skin. why does that matter to you? And does the number on the scale actually make you feel good about yourself or make you give you that confidence that you're looking for? How would you feel if you were stronger? If you knew that you were able to go out and run the distance that you wanted, or the speed that you wanted, or whatever your goal is? How would that feel? Isn't that really what you're going for? Because a lot of people associate body size or weight with allowing them to achieve a specific goal. Because you don't actually care about the number on this scale. You care about what you think that number is going to mean or what you, how you think you're going to feel when you achieve that number. So I'd love to invite you just to ask yourself that question, like, how do I, how would that make me feel? if my goal is to lose weight, what do I think that will give me? And then make that the goal to celebrate what your body can do. Not just how it looks and to choose to feel confident, to choose to feel strong, to really focus in. On being strong and making sustainable changes to your training, not just trying to lose weight quickly in six weeks and then go right back to you where you were just a couple months later. We wanna be starting to shift the way that we look at our body shift, the way that we're looking about what we can do and who we are, and really adopt this mindset of wanting to be strong versus just wanting a smaller body. So now that you understand why muscle is so important, the question then is, how do I build it? How do I actually train and fuel to build muscle? Number one, strength training. Okay. Strength training is non-negotiable after the age of 40. I think after the age of 30, I think every woman should be strength training, no matter what age you are, because strength training is very important for so many reasons. So it definitely becomes non-negotiable after 40. So you have to focus on resistance training, and we also have to start lifting heavier. Now be careful when I say this because. There's always a caveat. If you've never strength trained before, don't just jump into the gym and start lifting heavy weights. That's a great way to hurt yourself, and I don't want that for you. You have to meet yourself where you are. You have to figure out like what you're currently capable of that's not going to wreck you for a week. Because a lot of people, they go in and maybe that first session they're like, okay, this was hard, but like I could do it. But then. They're sore for a week afterwards. Okay, that was too much. So we have to figure out where you are, meet yourself where you are, and then gently and progressively overload the body from there with a focus on progressive overload like I just mentioned, which means like a gradual increase in the load that you're placing on the body. In a very intelligent way with a focus on your form with these exercises so that you don't hurt yourself. And a focus on recovery because again, during recovery and rest, that's when your muscles actually get stronger. So you need to be strength training at least two, two times a week as minimum, I would suggest two to three times, depending on who you are and what your goal is. Second thing you have to do is fuel your body, right? And this. Is where protein becomes a priority. We as women need to be eating more protein. Most women aren't getting enough protein, which is make what makes it harder for women to build muscle in this phase of life as well. And it becomes very important to not only get the right amount of protein, but also time out your protein too. So especially like before and after your runs or before and after your training sessions, it's important to fuel your body to both give yourself energy through the carbohydrates and then give your body enough protein so that your body's able to build the muscle. So the new recommendations are that we should be aiming for about one gram. Of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So if you, if your goal is to weigh 130 pounds, you should be aiming for 130 grams of protein per day. And I know that sounds like a lot, it's much more than a lot of women are eating right now. So if you realize that you're not eating enough protein, again, start where you are. Don't try to go from 60 grams of protein a day to 130 grams of protein a day, because that's gonna be very difficult and hard to sustain. But just. Gently start to increase how much protein you're eating throughout the day. And again, if you want more guidance on this, we go through all of this stuff in a great amount of detail inside of Running Reconnected, which is the step-by-step program that will help lead you through all of these things. Okay? Then the third thing that we wanna focus on when it comes to building muscle is what's called polarized training. And we went through this concept in one of our recent podcasts. Let's see, I think it was episode number. 3 98, if you wanna go back and check that one out. polarized training means that not all of your runs need to feel the same. You have to have a combination of easy days and hard days. If you want to build strength, build speed, build muscle, build endurance, whatever it is that you're trying to improve upon. We have to focus on making sure that our easy days actually feel easy, and then we have to have a couple hard days in there as well. Because doing hard things is important. It is important to challenge ourselves, but we can't be pushing hard all day every day on every single training session because that's a great way to get injured or burn the body out. I don't want that for you, and I know that you don't want that. So let's, instead of, continuing to think about just pushing harder and doing more, we have to make sure we are doing polarized training, avoiding that moderate effort level, which is where so many runners find themselves. When I ask this question to most runners, I say, okay, on a scale of one to 10, how hard are most of your runs? I'll answer that question right now for yourself. So when you go out on your normal run, on a scale of one to 10, how hard is your normal run? And if you're like a lot of runners that I talk to, most runners before they find the podcast and join our program, they're somewhere in the range of five to eight out of 10. And this is one of the reasons that they stop seeing progress because they're just in this gray zone of constantly pushing but never recovering and asking their body to. More, do more. And again, just accumulating stress on the body. And when they start to shift over to easy days, easy, hard days, hard. Number one, they start feeling better almost instantly. Like they enjoy their runs again, their body's not sore. They have more energy. And then. A lot of our clients really love going hard on hard days then, because they're not wiped out all the time, so they have more energy to push harder, and they're hitting speeds on their hard days that they have maybe never even seen ever in their lives, or maybe they haven't seen them in years. And that's the true way that you start to see actual progress. Now, going back to this whole idea of stress and accumulation, this is where the nervous system comes in, and this is why. Stress regulation matters and nervous system regulation matters because when your body is constantly stressed out, it stays in that state of sympathetic activation or survival mode where your body is literally breaking down muscle and storing fat, which is the opposite of what you want, right? I think. Anyone listening to this podcast, if I ask you, would you like to burn muscle or burn fat? They would probably say, I'd like to burn fat, please. And I say, would you like to build muscle or build fat? They'd probably say, I wanna build muscle. But when you're stuck in sympathetic stress mode. Survival mode. Your body's doing the opposite of what you want. It's burning your muscle, breaking down your muscle, and breaking down your bone and storing fat. So recovery and nervous system regulation is where true change happens. And this is one of those areas that not a lot of people understand and not a lot of people are talking about. And so that's why you're gonna hear me talking about it a lot because we need to get this message out there. It's not just about the training. Yes, your training matters. Yes, your nutrition matters. All of those things matter. But if you are constantly stressed out, if you are eating on the go, if you are stressed out about the food that you're eating, if you're stressed out about your training, I. Your body like the hormones in your body. They don't know the difference between physical stress and emotional stress. Stress is stress. The same hormones are released. Cortisol is still being released regardless of what kind of stress you're under. And so once you start to understand how to regulate your stress and how to recover. That's when you really start seeing the change, and again, this goes back to how you're thinking about your body, really understanding the proper way to train in a different strategy that you need to start using when it comes to building muscle, improving your running, not feeling exhausted all the time. We need to stop trying to fix things. Stop trying to fix your body. Your body is amazing. Start honoring your body. Start supporting your body like an athlete. Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing is broken. You are just. Most likely, if you're not seeing the results that you want, you're most likely under fueling, over training and under recovering. Those are the three biggest mistakes that I often see. Or again, thinking that you're broken, thinking that there's something to fix here. We just need to start shifting and supporting our body and starting to ask ourselves, okay, what can I do here to support my body? What can I do to get stronger? As a little recap. Yes, it's normal that all this becomes harder after 40 because of the physiological changes that are happening in the body. But that doesn't mean you're broken. It just means that you need a new strategy. And muscle is really the key to your metabolism, to your vitality, and to your fat loss. And so is nervous system regulation because without a regulated nervous system. You're not gonna be able to burn muscle. Your body's gonna be breaking it down. So you need to train differently, fuel differently, and recover. Prioritize recovery now. And that is a very empowering place to be because I want you to understand it's not your age. It's not that you're. Anything's wrong here. We just have to start changing up the way we do things, okay? And that's exactly what we teach inside of Running Reconnected. So if you want more information about that program, you can head over to our website, real life runners.com/reconnect. We're running a special right now, so you can check that out. If you want to go into more detail in my training, I've got a couple free trainings coming up. You can join my free class. You can check that out over@realliferunners.com slash strong. If you wanna join my free class or catch the replay of it, you can get all that, all those links there. And then exciting announcement, we've got our five day challenge coming up at in May. Okay? So stay tuned, to all of your real life runners channels so that you can find out all the details on the five day Challenge coming up. So again. This season of life is not about shrinking. It's about stepping into your power as a woman over 40, as a strong woman over 40 that is building sustainable habits, sustainable fitness, so that you can be strong both now and for decades to come. So if you loved this episode, I would love to invite you to write a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, and let us know. What you gained or to share this episode with a friend. And as always, thanks for joining us. This has been The Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 405. Now, get out there and run your life.