Losing Muscle After Menopause? Protein Isn’t Enough (Do THIS 2x a Week)

Postmenopausal muscle loss is a real problem many women deal with, but it doesn’t have to be. Find out how to build muscle after menopause to help you stay healthy, strong, and youthful.

Let’s talk about the real reason why women lose muscle after menopause and exactly what to do to get it back. 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 and notice that their muscles are falling apart. A lot of women are going 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.

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 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. 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 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 g of leucine within your protein. 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 building and breaking down. But when you’re postmenopausal, your level of building muscle is actually higher than before menopause.

Yeah, that’s weird, isn’t it? Then the question is, why are your muscles falling apart? Hormones. 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 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. 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 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.

So, the big question is, how do we get that muscle to start listening again? 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 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 muscle. There was a very interesting trial called They took postmenopausal women, average age is 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 lb of leg muscle just from 2 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 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.

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 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, 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 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? When you’re younger, you need between 20 to 25 g of protein per meal, okay? When you get older, you need 35 to 45 g of protein per meal to keep this muscle system intact.

I’m talking about high quality animal 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 g for an average woman that’s 150 lb. So, number one, whey protein, okay? Now, I wouldn’t have this as a meal, but maybe as a shake with the meal. 1 oz will give you 3 g of leucine.

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 g of leucine. Chicken breast actually will give you less leucine. Beef, 3 oz, 2.

2 g. Tuna, 3 oz, 2. 2 g. Salmon, 3 oz, 1. 8