I used to build muscle without trying
I grew up on acreage. My childhood was riding horses, water skiing and all the physical jobs that come with living on land. I never thought of any of it as exercise. It was simply how our days ran.
Muscle came easily to me for a long time. If I took a break and went back to training, the strength returned within weeks. There’s real biology behind that. When you train, your muscle fibres gain extra nuclei, the control centres that drive repair, and research suggests they stay put even when you stop. That makes rebuilding faster later. I was drawing on years of stored capacity.
Midlife changed the equation. These days I exercise to keep the muscle I have. Building new muscle takes more training, more consistency and more recovery than it ever did, and a few missed weeks show up far faster.
You’re putting in the effort and seeing less for it
….I hear this in clinic every week.
You’re doing reformer Pilates or getting to the gym three times a week. It’s the same effort that used to work. Yet you feel softer than you used to, especially through the middle. The weight that once shifted with that effort now stays put. You’re feeling flat by mid-afternoon, your joints feel stiffer in the morning, and the words – well, they go missing mid-sentence more often than you’d like. Your blood tests come back “within range,” and you’re left wondering whether this is how the next thirty years will feel.
Many women say to me that they assume they’ve lost their discipline. Instead, what you’re feeling has a clear physiological explanation, and once you understand it, you can work with it.
Your muscle cells are tuned to oestrogen. It helps them repair after exercise and respond to the signal to grow. As oestrogen starts to swing and then decline through perimenopause, muscle becomes less responsive to that signal. We call this anabolic resistance. In plain terms, the same meal and the same exercise class build less muscle than they did a decade ago.
This is the shift I’ve felt in my own training, and the one my clients describe when the same Pilates class or gym session stops delivering the same result.
Other pressures pile on at the same time. When stress runs high for months, cortisol starts breaking muscle down for fuel. Broken sleep cuts into the deep-sleep hours when most of your repair happens. And many women eat less protein as they try to manage their weight by cutting back on food. Muscle is affected in many ways, often years before anyone thinks to measure it.
Why this matters well beyond how your clothes fit
When I explain this to clients, I describe muscle as one of the hardest-working tissues in the body. It does far more than move you around. When it starts slipping away, you feel it in places you’d never think to connect to muscle.
Your blood sugar. Your muscles soak up most of the sugar from a meal and use it for fuel. With less muscle, that sugar hangs around in your blood for longer, and your body releases more insulin to deal with it. More insulin tells your body to store fat, and the middle is where it tends to settle. It’s also behind that 3pm slump and the biscuit or chocolate that you suddenly can’t stop thinking about.
Your bones. Every time a muscle pulls on a bone, it sends a message telling that bone to stay strong. In the years around menopause, falling oestrogen means bone is being broken down faster than before. Your muscle becomes one of the main things keeping your bones in rebuilding mode.
Your memory and mood. This is the one that surprises women most. Working muscle releases chemical messengers that travel to your brain and support memory. It also clears out a stress by-product that would otherwise reach your brain and pull your mood down.
Inflammation. Active muscle helps calm the low-level inflammation that tends to creep up through midlife, the kind you feel as stiff joints and general achiness. Less muscle means less of that calming effect.
The years ahead. Muscle is the reserve you’ll draw on in your seventies and eighties. It’s what lets you carry grandchildren, garden, travel and get up off the floor with ease. Looking after your muscles now is important because it is what you’ll be living on later.
The four things that decide whether your effort turns into muscle
The usual advice is to eat more protein and lift weights. Both matter. What I see in clinic is that this advice often stalls because something further back is getting in the way. I think about it in four parts.
1. The signal. Your muscle needs a reason to build, and that reason is being challenged. In midlife, the bar is set higher. The gentle workout that used to keep you toned may no longer be enough to tell your muscles they need to grow.
2.The supply. Protein only helps if your body can break it down and absorb it. That depends on your stomach, your digestive enzymes and the health of your gut. I see plenty of women who eat beautifully and still aren’t getting what their muscle needs, because their digestion has become the hold-up.
3.The environment. Muscle builds best when your body feels safe and steady. If your blood sugar is up and down, stress has been running high for months, inflammation is simmering, or you’re low in key nutrients, your body puts muscle-building at the bottom of the list. Your exercise training ends up swimming against the current.
4.The recovery. Muscle gets built after the workout, mostly while you sleep. If you’re waking at 3am or never reaching deep sleep, much of the benefit from your effort never gets banked.
When women plateau, it’s usually because one or two of these have quietly slipped. Training harder rarely fixes a digestion or sleep problem.
How I work through this with you
I’m a naturopath, biochemist and microbiologist, and I’ve been in clinical practice for nearly 30 years. That combination means I look at muscle loss as a whole-body question. I want to know what’s happening with your digestion, your blood sugar, your stress, your sleep and your hormones, and how they’re affecting each other.
If you’re putting in the work and your body isn’t responding the way it used to, I’d love to help you find out why. We’ll look at the full picture, work out which of those four areas is holding you back, and map out a plan that fits your life.
Next week I’m taking this into territory many of you have been asking about: what happens to muscle when you lose weight, whether through cutting calories or with a GLP-1 medication, and why it has such a big influence on what happens after the weight comes off.
Look after your muscle this week. It’s looking after more
Teressa,
Naturopath | Clinical Nutritionist | Biochemist
Gold Coast Naturopath, Gold Coast Health, Naturopath Australia, Gold Coast Wellness, Holistic Health, Naturopathic Medicine, Functional Health, Midlife, Personalised Healthcare, Muscle Loss in Midlife
