Menopause Strength Training & Fitness | 40+ Fitness for Women
Aug 4, 2026 · 24 min · 9 segments
You've been showing up. Lifting the weights. Doing the workouts. So why does your body look exactly the same as it did six months ago? Here's the truth most women in the weight room don't want to…
If you've been working out with weights and you're not seeing the results that you're expecting, and you've been doing this for a while, so you shouldn't expect results in days or even just a few weeks, but you've been doing this for months, like properly doing this, and you're not seeing results, then probably you are not lifting intensely enough, hard enough, challenging your body enough.
And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk to you about what that really means in the beginning of your strength training journey and then as you go along through the weeks and months and years of your strength training journey.
And I think this is a topic that is so important to address because I see it every week, women in the weight room that are showing up for themselves, but I can see from the way that they are training that they are not going to get the results that they could, and it's simply because they are not challenging their bodies enough.
Remember that change happens when we push ourselves outside our comfort zone.
We need to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones in order to grow.
If you wanna be able to run better, you need to push yourself to your limits so that your body adapts and becomes better at running, and it's the exact same thing with strength training.
One of the challenges we have with it though is that for so many years we women have been taught to be looking for the wrong signals, signals that are not necessary for proper progress in strength training, things like feeling the burn or getting sore, which are completely irrelevant.
Plus we've been fed things like, "Oh, if you want lean, long, toned muscle, then it needs to be these light weights and tons of reps," which, yes, you can build muscle with smaller weights and lots of reps, but, but the key is that you always need to be taking it close to failure.
And actually the range is anywhere from four reps or five reps all the way up to about 35 reps that you could be doing in your sets and still build muscle if you are training intensely enough, and that is a huge if.
And I'll tell you [laughs] that if you're doing 35 reps, you're probably never going to be training intensely enough because you are going to get tired [laughs], bored, and start feeling that burn long before your muscles give out.
And so mentally you're just gonna kinda shut down, and you're not gonna reach the point of training with enough intensity.
We are using strength training as a tool to signal to our bodies that we need to be stronger than we are today.
So we are gonna be pushing our bodies a little bit out of our comfort zone, out of the body's current comfort zone, out of its everyday capacity, pushing it right to the edge of the envelope.
It is not only gonna get your muscles stronger, it is also going to strengthen your bones and your tendons and your ligaments, and set off a whole host of other wonderful things that'll happen in your body to start, for example, shifting visceral fat.
And the latest research is also about how your skin is gonna improve, which is maybe why the lines in my forehead are not as deep [laughs] as they used to be.
If you've been working out with weights and you're not seeing the results that you're expecting, and you've been doing this for a while, so you shouldn't expect results in days or even just a few weeks, but you've been doing this for months, like properly doing this, and you're not seeing results, then probably you are not lifting intensely enough, hard enough, challenging your body enough.
And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk to you about what that really means in the beginning of your strength training journey and then as you go along through the weeks and months and years of your strength training journey.
And I think this is a topic that is so important to address because I see it every week, women in the weight room that are showing up for themselves, but I can see from the way that they are training that they are not going to get the results that they could, and it's simply because they are not challenging their bodies enough.
Remember that change happens when we push ourselves outside our comfort zone.
We need to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones in order to grow.
If you wanna be able to run better, you need to push yourself to your limits so that your body adapts and becomes better at running, and it's the exact same thing with strength training.
One of the challenges we have with it though is that for so many years we women have been taught to be looking for the wrong signals, signals that are not necessary for proper progress in strength training, things like feeling the burn or getting sore, which are completely irrelevant.
Plus we've been fed things like, "Oh, if you want lean, long, toned muscle, then it needs to be these light weights and tons of reps," which, yes, you can build muscle with smaller weights and lots of reps, but, but the key is that you always need to be taking it close to failure.
And actually the range is anywhere from four reps or five reps all the way up to about 35 reps that you could be doing in your sets and still build muscle if you are training intensely enough, and that is a huge if.
And I'll tell you [laughs] that if you're doing 35 reps, you're probably never going to be training intensely enough because you are going to get tired [laughs], bored, and start feeling that burn long before your muscles give out.
And so mentally you're just gonna kinda shut down, and you're not gonna reach the point of training with enough intensity.
We are using strength training as a tool to signal to our bodies that we need to be stronger than we are today.
So we are gonna be pushing our bodies a little bit out of our comfort zone, out of the body's current comfort zone, out of its everyday capacity, pushing it right to the edge of the envelope.
It is not only gonna get your muscles stronger, it is also going to strengthen your bones and your tendons and your ligaments, and set off a whole host of other wonderful things that'll happen in your body to start, for example, shifting visceral fat.
And the latest research is also about how your skin is gonna improve, which is maybe why the lines in my forehead are not as deep [laughs] as they used to be.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
