Speaker A
Let's talk about the real reason why women lose muscle after menopause and exactly what to do to get it back.
Discover why muscle loss occurs after menopause and how targeted exercise and protein intake can help women regain muscle effectively.
Key Takeaways
- Muscle loss after menopause is driven by hormonal changes causing anabolic resistance.
- Exercise is essential to enable protein and hormones to effectively rebuild muscle.
- Heavy resistance training twice weekly is safe and effective for postmenopausal women.
- Higher protein intake with adequate leucine is critical for preserving muscle mass with age.
- It’s never too late to start exercising, but early action prevents irreversible muscle damage.
Summary
- Women can lose more muscle in a 3-year postmenopausal window than in the previous 20 years combined.
- Muscle growth depends on the amino acid leucine, but protein alone isn't enough without exercise.
- Postmenopausal estrogen drop causes anabolic resistance, making muscle rebuilding difficult.
- Exercise, especially heavy lifting twice a week, opens the door for protein and hormones to build muscle.
- Studies show significant muscle and bone recovery in postmenopausal women with proper resistance training.
- Starting exercise later in life can still help regain muscle mass, but early intervention is best.
- Sarcopenia involves muscle, nervous system, and connective tissue loss, with a point of no return due to scar tissue.
- Hormone replacement can assist muscle gain but must be combined with exercise and proper hormone balance.
- Older adults require higher protein intake per meal (35-45g) with 3-4g leucine for muscle preservation.
- High-quality animal proteins like whey, chicken leg, beef, and tuna are best leucine sources for muscle health.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Muscle Loss After Menopause
- 00:45Role of Leucine in Muscle Growth
- 01:43Muscle Building and Breaking Down Postmenopause
- 02:24Understanding Anabolic Resistance
- 03:17Exercise as a Key to Muscle Recovery
- 04:19Heavy Lifting Benefits and Safety for Older Women
- 05:18Sarcopenia and the Importance of Early Intervention
- 06:22Hormone Replacement and Exercise Synergy
- 07:14Protein Requirements and Best Sources for Muscle Health
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
There's a 3-year window in a woman's life where she can lose more muscle in that period of time than the previous 20 years combined. As they cross from pre- to postmenopausal, they notice that their muscles are falling apart. A lot of women are going
Speaker A
on low carb, they're eating cleaner, they're even exercising, and nothing's happening. So, let's talk about what's really happening behind the scenes.
Speaker A
You know, we have this idea that if we eat more protein, we're going to build more muscle. So, that's the dietary protein. If we exercise more, that'll create more growth and building of muscle mass. Because we think that if
Speaker A
you're eating muscle, you're going to give your muscles exactly what they need to build them up, right? But within the muscle, there's really only one thing in that muscle that tells the muscle to grow. It's an amino acid called leucine.
Speaker A
And right there, you might think, "Well, I'll just take a leucine supplement through the day and I'll keep growing my muscles or preserve my muscles." The problem is it's just the message. It doesn't do the actual building. To do
Speaker A
all the building, you need several things and one is the raw material, which is actually in the other part of the protein. So, you really need between 3 to 4 grams of leucine within your protein.
Speaker A
And I'll explain the best protein sources for leucine in just a little bit. But the requirement for leucine and protein actually increases as you get older, especially if you're trying to maintain and preserve your muscle. The body is in a constant balance of
Speaker A
building and breaking down. But when you're postmenopausal, your level of building muscle is actually higher than before menopause.
Speaker A
Yeah, that's weird, isn't it? Then the question is, why are your muscles falling apart? Hormones.
Speaker A
What happens postmenopausal is the estrogen drops, okay? Other hormones drop, too, but estrogen drops. One of the purposes of estrogen is not to build muscle. It helps you conserve your muscles. So, to make this really simple, you have three
Speaker A
hormones that are crashing that are affecting your muscles in a way that it's making it very, very hard to build them. There is a medical name for this.
Speaker A
It's called anabolic resistance. Not that you need to know that, but I will put some data down below if you wanted to research that. And I know the question people are going to ask is, well, maybe I just need to start taking
Speaker A
hormones. Taking hormones may enhance your muscles, but unless you understand this next thing, you're not going to see much result. We're dealing with a muscle that's ignoring you. Muscles are designed to give you movement, motion.
Speaker A
So, the big question is, how do we get that muscle to start listening again?
Speaker A
And the answer is exercise. But not the typical exercise that you might think. Exercise in the past has been considered one item on the checklist of things to do to get your muscle back. Exercise actually opens the door to allow for the dietary protein to
Speaker A
actually go in there and build the muscle. If you don't do exercise and you eat protein, the door never opens. And the same thing with hormones, too. If you don't exercise with the hormones, you don't see many results with your
Speaker A
muscle. There was a very interesting trial called They took postmenopausal women, average age 65, all with thinning bones, osteopenia, osteoporosis, and muscle loss. The exact group that normally would be told to be very careful, don't lift much weight. And in this study,
Speaker A
they did the opposite, okay? They did heavy lifting, five sets of five reps at about 85% of their maximum intensity twice a week for a 30-minute workout. At 8 weeks, there was a significant difference in not just muscle mass
Speaker A
recovered, but also recovering their bone loss, and some of the women actually even got a little bit taller because of the regeneration of the bone.
Speaker A
And despite all this heavy lifting, there was only one injury, okay? It was a minor injury, someone sprained their back, but these fragile women actually got their bones back. And the next question that people might have is, is
Speaker A
it too late to start? Another study compared 150 runners, okay? Men and women in their late 60s who trained their entire life against another group in their 50s, okay? That just started working out, same average body weight, leg muscles, etc. The group
Speaker A
in their 50s that just started working out caught up with this other group that were athletes that worked out their whole life. So, I believe it's never too late to get started, but there is a limitation of matter if you let it go
Speaker A
too far, because when we're talking about muscle loss with aging, we're not just talking about a little bit of atrophy, you're talking about something called sarcopenia. What is that? That is a muscle loss related to age, but you're
Speaker A
not just losing muscles, you're losing your nervous system function, your connective tissue. And there is a point of no return where the scar tissue gets in there, you get inflammation, and then there's just no raw material to work
Speaker A
with. So, it's really important to know that so you can start as soon as possible after menopause. And the reason for that is inactivity creates very fast atrophy with your muscles. In another experiment, they took people who had 8,500 steps per day
Speaker A
and they brought them down to 1,900 steps and within just 2 weeks there was significant measurable muscle loss and weakness. I mean, just even people that are bedridden for 10 days can cause them about 2 pounds of leg muscle just from 2
Speaker A
weeks. So, in summary, the exercise can help reverse the resistance at the receptor level to allow for the protein to work, to also allow for hormones to work. If you were going to do hormone replacement, I would highly recommend
Speaker A
you find a good doctor to work with and a compound pharmacy to do bioidentical hormones and make sure that you're taking not just estrogen but the right amount of progesterone and testosterone.
Speaker A
And some of the data that I looked at showed that the creams work better than the injections for gaining muscle. So, exercise allows the muscle to hear the message grow. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It's
Speaker A
like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick. You could feed them the best food, you can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol,
Speaker A
inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel. But there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest and until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free 2-minute
Speaker A
quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. Now, let's talk about protein, okay?
Speaker A
When you're younger, you need between 20 to 25 grams of protein per meal, okay? When you get older, you need 35 to 45 grams of protein per meal to keep this muscle system intact. I'm talking about high-quality animal
Speaker A
protein. So, let's go through each protein source to explain what will give you the most leucine because the target is between 3 to 4 grams for an average woman that's 150 pounds. So, number one, whey protein, okay? Now, I wouldn't have this
Speaker A
as a meal, but maybe as a shake with the meal. One ounce will give you 3 grams of leucine.
Speaker A
Also gives you branched amino acids, which are other amino acids. And then we have chicken leg, okay, compared to a breast gives 2.2 grams of leucine. Chicken breast actually will give you less leucine.
Speaker A
Beef, 3 ounces, 2.2 grams. Tuna, 3 ounces, 2.2 grams. Salmon, 3 ounces, 1.8 grams. Cottage cheese, 1 cup, 2.5 grams. Now, I know right now you're probably taking notes and trying to figure this out. You don't have to worry
Speaker A
about that. I have a nice little download below that has all the details of this, of exactly what I would recommend you doing if you wanted to do th
Speaker A
exercise as well. So, that way you don't have to take any notes. It'll be detailed out for you in the download.
Speaker A
So, a lot of people ask me, "What supplements do I recommend?" Now, of course, I'm not biased of my own high quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg Supplements, you'll find more information. So, now I
Speaker A
need to get into something really important because I did a video on OMAD, eating one meal a day, and that's really good for most people. But, if you're going through menopause, OMAD might be good a few times a week, two to three times a
Speaker A
week, maybe twice a week, but not every day. Why? Because you won't be able to get enough of this message to build if you're just eating one meal a day. So, let's say for example, you're postmenopausal and you really don't have
Speaker A
a lot of issues. You just want to maintain things, then I would recommend doing two meals a day. If you have a really big problem with atrophy, you might need to do three meals a day. So again, it
Speaker A
depends on what's your situation, and I'm going to put all this in the download as well. Intermittent fasting is important, but not too much. And remember, when you're eating if you're eating two meals a day, the amount of
Speaker A
animal protein that you need to eat needs to be higher than someone younger, okay?
Speaker A
And so how much would that be? Would that be like 8 oz? Would it be like 6 oz? Well, definitely start at 8 oz, but probably going up to 10 oz of high-quality protein per meal. And again, it really depends on your size
Speaker A
and how much you weigh it. I will give you a little more details in the download, but for an average woman, they need between 35 to 45 g of protein per meal. Well, how much is that in ounces?
Speaker A
Well, it depends on what you're eating, but typically it's 8 to 10 oz. This is why if someone is a vegan or a vegetarian and they're trying to salvage their muscles postmenopausal with plant-based protein, they're going to run into a lot of
Speaker A
problems because there's not a high concentration of leucine in plant-based protein powders. There's a couple additional things that could be helpful.
Speaker A
Creatine. What is creatine? Creatine is something that actually can fuel the muscle and give you more energy to work out. It's also been known to help restore damaged muscle. At 5 g a day in a 24-week trial involving older women,
Speaker A
creatine plus exercise training produced the biggest strength and muscle gains of any group. When men and women are deficient vitamin D, they tend to have more muscle loss than if they had sufficient amounts. Another nutrient that's really important that you can
Speaker A
actually get in tuna and salmon is omega-3 fatty acids. These fish oils, especially the cod liver oil, can help the muscles as well. And the last thing that I want to mention about muscle, since we're dealing with motion and
Speaker A
exercise and energy, is magnesium. Magnesium fuels ATP. In order for ATP, that's the energy currency of the body to actually even exist, you need magnesium. I recommend out of all the nutrients that you take, make sure you take magnesium glycinate because that's
Speaker A
the gold standard for absorption, but it can actually really help a lot of things that go beyond just the muscle. And also, magnesium allows vitamin D to work as well. Click the link down below to get the download with
Speaker A
all the details. And I have another video on menopause that addresses different problems related to menopause that I think could be very helpful, and I put that right here. Check it out.
Topics:menopausemuscle lossanabolic resistanceleucineprotein intakeresistance trainingpostmenopausal healthhormone replacementsarcopeniamuscle preservation
