How can it be that you’re doing all the right workouts, eating all the right foods, and following along with your favorite fitness influencer every week, and yet your arms aren’t any tighter, your glutes aren’t any rounder, and you still don’t have abs?
If you’re in your thirties, especially over 35, one of these 3 things might be the reason why your workouts aren’t effective.
And no, I’m not going to talk about hormonal changes or anything along those lines (I’m not a doctor or in any way a medical professional). And as much as it might go against popular opinion, the issue probably isn’t that you need to be in more of a calorie deficit. (In fact, I think this is rarely the case, and I will address that in another post or video but that’s a topic for another day.)
These 3 things are far simpler than that, and I promise this isn’t advice you’ve likely come across before because frankly I don’t hear anyone talking to women in their late thirties about this.
The first reason your workouts aren’t effective is that you are likely only imitating a movement, not getting the benefit of the movement. Your physical fitness is an instance where understanding the how and why actually DO matter and make a difference, so let me explain.
Doing an exercise with “correct form” doesn’t mean you’re using the right muscles to complete the movement. It just means that you’ve maneuvered your body into a position (or “form”) that imitates what’s being demonstrated. For example, you can get into a forearm plank so that everything looks correct, but if your pelvis is tilted toward the ground and your neck and shoulders are screaming, chances are good that you aren’t actually using your abdominal muscles, even though from the outside your “form” looks correct.
What we need to focus on instead is which muscles we are recruiting to perform the function of an exercise. Continuing with the example of the forearm plank, the primary muscles involved in the static hold are abdominal muscle groups, quads, and glutes. If those are engaged correctly, your pelvis should be neutral, and your shoulders are mostly just stabilizing the upper body (not bearing the weight).
If you’re struggling with poor cues from coaches, whether in person or online, download my freebie on the 5 Worst Exercise Cues and learn how to fix them at home!
The second thing we need to talk about (and the reason it’s so hard sometimes to recruit the right muscles to perform an exercise) is muscle atrophy from disuse.
We typically think about atrophy in cases of long-term bedrest and severe injury. But if you’ve had a desk job for over a decade (on top of a lifetime’s education also behind a desk), your body has already experienced some muscular atrophy from disuse. Most commonly in office workers the atrophy occurs in the posterior chain; think your back, glutes, and hamstrings.
When we sit on these muscles all day, they get used to not showing up to do much of anything. We’re still walking around and able to perform most daily functional movements (maybe), but what’s happening is that other muscle groups are tagging in when the primary movers are so used to not working that they can’t be bothered even when asked.
When a primary mover (the muscle group that should be primarily responsible for driving a movement) isn’t firing as much as it should, usually the muscle groups closest to it will tag in and make the movement happen. When the glutes aren’t responding like they should, this usually means that the hamstrings and lower back will tag-team to get the job done.
If you’ve ever performed weighted hip thrusts (right), Romanian deadlifts (above), or traditional back squats, and felt your hamstrings and lower back more than your glutes, you’ve experienced this in real time.
To resolve this, the most important thing to do is to stop doing exercises that you can’t perform using the appropriate muscles to drive the movement. In the example of the back squat, if you keep squatting using your lower back, those workouts aren’t effective! All you’re doing is continuing to tighten up those back muscles, causing more pain, and your glutes aren’t learning how to take over like they should.
The best thing to do is go back to the basics. Use bodyweight movements and spend signifiant time on establishing the mind-muscle connection needed to get the right muscle groups firing. Otherwise, you can squat three times a week for a year and you still won’t see any growth in your glutes.
And the last reason it may be that your workouts aren’t effective is what I’ve come to call inspiration fatigue.
To understand what I mean by that let’s look backward for a second. In your twenties you were fresh from a system of having milestones set out for you, being given a set of instructions to achieve those milestones, and as long as you played along you were pretty much guaranteed results. And depending on what you spent your twenties doing, your mindset probably didn’t shift too much; follow the given set of instructions to achieve a result.
And it probably worked out that way at least for a few years.
But then you expanded into new territory, tried new things, where maybe you didn’t have a clear set of instructions for what you wanted to achieve anymore. So you found someone on the internet who ostensibly had already achieved what you want for yourself and you started following their blueprint.
But there’s a big problem with that.
Back in school you and all your classmates were on a level playing field, given the same set of instructions, and set out to achieve the same goal. But out in the world, the person who has already achieved your fitness dreams might be a woman ten years younger than you who doesn’t have fifteen years behind a desk impinging upon what her body is capable of. So you can follow her instructions all day long and never get to the same place she has gotten.
It’s the idea that staying motivated to achieve something comes from seeing results commensurate with the level of effort you’ve put in. If you’re putting in tons of effort, the workouts aren’t effective, and you’re not getting the results you think you should be getting, it’s discouraging. Continuing to find inspiration becomes fatiguing. It’s just one more drain on your already exhausting day-to-day life. And that will have an impact on your results as well.
The worst thing that people do to try and overcome these issues is to go harder. Lift heavier weights, complete more repetitions, on the theory that eventually the right muscles will have to activate or get involved so you can keep going. This couldn’t be further from the truth. All that’s happening when you do this is you’re continuing to strengthen the wrong muscles, allowing the primary movers to become weaker and weaker. And take it from someone who knows, the longer you let this go on, the harder it will become to correct.
These are not the types of issues that the most popular fitness influencers will address for you. They put out loads and loads of workouts, and there’s nothing wrong with the workouts themselves. It’s just that if you aren’t doing them correctly, you’re really never going to see the results that you want.
So when I considered pivoting back to the physical fitness niche I debated whether to bother because I think a lot of people are happy to just sort of check the box saying they got a workout in, without really giving it any more consideration than that. But then I thought you know…there must be SOME people like me who are really wanting to reverse the physical effects of sitting behind a desk for the last 15 years. So maybe I’ll do it for us.
So if that sounds like you, please enjoy my new content! I hope this helped you realize why your workouts aren’t effective for you. And if you’re still wondering if maybe you’d see better results if you just honed in on your diet more, make sure you watch this video >>> to understand why your calorie deficit isn’t the problem.
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