Why What Worked in Your 30s Isn’t Working Anymore at 40

If you feel like you’re doing all the “right” things — working out, staying active, trying to take care of yourself — but your body just isn’t responding the same way anymore… this episode is for you.

In your 30s, certain habits worked. You could rely on cardio, push through low sleep, stay consistent “enough,” and still feel good in your body.

But in your 40s, your physiology changes, and those same habits don’t always give you the same results.

In this solo episode, I’m breaking down the specific habits that stop working after 40, what’s actually happening in your body, and how to adjust in a way that supports your strength, energy, and overall health moving forward.

This isn’t about doing more.
 It’s about understanding what your body actually needs now.

In this episode, we cover:

•  Why cardio alone stops being as effective after 40 
•  What’s really happening with sleep, cortisol, and recovery 
•  How alcohol impacts your body differently in midlife 
•  Why inconsistency hits harder now than it used to 
•  The role of mobility, joint health, and hormonal changes 

If this episode resonates with you, share it with a friend or someone who might need to hear it.

And if you want to stay connected or learn more about working together, visit:
 👉 www.livingwellwithkatie.net

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Here's something no one really tells you. Some of the habits that made you feel your best in your 30s are the exact ones quietly working against you in your 40s. And the frustrating part, you're probably still doing them. So let's talk about it. Welcome to Wellness After 40. Health, Goals, and Manifestation for Women, the podcast that empowers women in their 40s and beyond to embrace aging with vitality and purpose. I'm your host, Katie, an older millennial navigating wellness, personal groups in the art of the divine related exercise, material, mental health, goal setting, as well as manifest in the life of the mind. Along with conversations with experts between you thriving in your body, mind and spirit. Whether you're focused on achieving health goals, mastering your mental clarity, or transforming your life, this podcast will give you the tools to feel your best at every stage of life. Let's dive into the journey of not just surviving, but thriving after 40. Here's something we don't really talk about enough. There were a handful of habits that worked really well in your 30s that start to fall apart in your 40s. Not because they're bad habits, but because your body has changed. Because if you ever felt like you're doing the same things you've always done, but your body isn't responding the same way anymore, there's a lot of reasons why. And I wanted to walk through a few of them, some of those habits and what's actually happening in your body and how to adjust. Because these are things that I personally deal with, and I've tried to explore ways to fix them for myself or just ways to understand them more. So problem number one are cardio-only workouts. So back in my 30s, I used to do a ton of cardio. The sweat, the burn, the calories. I could stay really lean and feel great about it. Now that I'm in my 40s, it's definitely shifted. After 40, especially in women, there is a shift not just in muscle mass, but in muscle protein synthesis, which is your body's ability to build and maintain muscle. We hear a lot about it. Lean muscle mass is something that we have to deal with as we age. And so this all becomes less responsive over time. And this is something called anabolic resistance. So your body doesn't respond to exercise the same way it used to. At the same time, estrogen, which actually plays a role in muscle repair and recovery, starts to decline. So now you have reduced muscle building response, slower recovery, and a gradual loss of lean tissue, tissue. And cardio doesn't address it. It does burn energy, does burn calories, but it doesn't give your body the same signal to maintain the muscle. So this is why when we were in our 30s, we could work out every day on the treadmill or on the stairmaster, on a stationary bike, and we were lean and fit. But now our body just responds very differently. So you're not crazy. If you feel like you've been doing the same workouts for years and years and it's not producing the same results, there's a lot of science to why. So, how should we approach our workouts now that we're in our 40s? The one main thing that we have to start to incorporate is strength training because this really primes our body and signals to our body to build this muscle that's going to help us get the aesthetic look we're looking for, as well as having the longevity of health throughout our life. Cardio is still very supportive. It is wonderful for your organs and your blood flow, your cortisol levels, as well as just feeling more lean in your body, but it can't be the main driver any longer. You especially need enough intensity or load to stimulate muscle, and that alone is gonna help you push into health as you age. So, bottom line, cardio versus strength training, it's gotta change. It used to be cardio was king or queen when we were in our 30s, but now we have to add in a little more strength training. So my personal favorite strength trainings are body weight strength training. I love a power yoga class because I feel like I'm getting that weight training, that push and pull that I need. And then I'm also getting a little something from my mind. I do like lifting weights, but my pro tip on lifting weights, because I don't love it like I love a cardio class, I like to minimize my time and strength training by lifting as heavy as I can. So that's my pro tip. Topic number two of what we used to do in our 30s that no longer works now in our 40s. And it is getting a poor night's sleep and thinking we can push through. Sleep disruption in your 40s isn't just lifestyle, it's biological. You have rising cortisol variability, declining progesterone, which progesterone apparently has a like calming sleep supportive effect in the body, amongst a lot of other things that it does. And in women, early parametral pausal changes obviously affect sleep. We're thinking like night sweats. But cortisol specifically becomes dysregulated. Instead of like rising and falling predictably, you we get nighttime spikes, a lot of early waking, lighter, more fragmented sleep. And at the same time, poor sleep is directly linked to reduced insulin sensitivity, increased fat storage, impaired muscle recovery. So it's not just that you're feeling tired. Your body is literally less efficient the next day. And then when you start to look at the research, this is where it gets real. Because you can't just like sleep more. You have to start to learn how to support sleep differently. So, what I've read in the research, a few things that you should start doing. One is you are supposed to start to try to lower your evening cortisol. So that is less nighttime stimulation, put the work away, try to reduce screens before you go right to sleep. We also have to manage the temperature in the room. We may need a cooler room, cooling sheets because our body temperature is going to differentiate and regulate differently as it shifts through the night. So we're gonna need to help support that a little more. And then we also need consistent sleep timing. Circadian rhythms really start to matter more. So trying to stay in a consistent sleep timing is really important. For some women, they love to take a supplement. Think about magnesium. Magnesium glycinate is actually a supplement that you could take that's going to help support a lot of things in your body, and sleep is one of them. The goal isn't perfect sleep, it's just trying to reduce the disruption that causes us to have a poor night's sleep. I am currently on the hunt for cooling sheets. If anyone knows anyone, please message me and let me know because I am looking for a cooler night's sleep. I've definitely added a fan and I've given my husband a blanket because it's hot and I need it to be cooler. Topic number three is casual drinking. One used to be able to have a glass of wine and it was no big deal. Now all that's changed once you hit your 40s. What's actually happening is that alcohol metabolizes differently with age, especially in women. We have lower total body water, which is gonna have a higher blood alcohol concentration. You'll start to notice a reduced liver enzyme efficiency over time. That's just part of aging. And we also have more sensitivity to alcohol's effects on our sleep and then our hormones. But really, the biggest issue kind of goes back to sleep, and that alcohol suppresses REM sleep and disrupts our deep sleep cycles, which we need to prepare the body. So if even if we start to fall asleep more easily after that glass of alcohol, your sleep quality is much worse. Alcohol also increases overnight cortisol and your heart rate, which is gonna then affect your sleep. And this also means your body is less recovered the next day. And when recovery is always already limited because of all the other things going on with our hormones and the other systems in our body, this is gonna matter more. So in our 40s, it's not necessarily about cutting out alcohol, it's about understanding more of the trade-off. First, you want to try to space it away from bedtime. You want to reduce your frequency and just start to notice how your body responds the next day. Because the impact is no longer neutral. Topic number four. This is all about a regular exercise or the like the starting over. It used to be like I could take some time off, take a couple, like a week off of working out, and then I could jump right back in and feel like I'm getting my results right away. What's actually happening in your 40s is there's a neurological component to this that most people don't talk about. With age, we see changes in our motor unit recruitment, our neuromuscular coordination, and muscle fiber efficiency. So when we like start and stop, you're not just losing fitness, you're losing your efficiency in how your body moves and produces force, which means every time you restart, you're working harder to get back to the baseline. So in our 40s, it's not about working harder, it's about working smarter. And I find that if I do an extremely hard workout, I'm not going back the next day. I'm probably not going to go back for two or three more days. So, going back to this old adage is that consistency is the magic. Being able to do a workout every single day or at least multiple times a week is going to be so much better than going hard in the gym like we used to do in our 30s and thinking, oh, well, we can just get right back to it next week. This is where I have added in walking. I love walking. I put on a podcast, I put on an audio book. Sometimes I just go outside and listen to the outside. And while walking isn't as like calorie-reducing as cardio running, you know, up the hill and through the woods, walking has been a godsend for me. It's a way to be able to move and do something every single day and not overwhelm my system. And also gives me that movement movement component that I really need. So when it comes to working out, when we're in our 40s versus our 30s, it's not about perfection, it's about frequency. The last topic that I wanted to discuss today was ignoring your mobility and your joint care. This is definitely something that I have done a lot of personal research on. And being in my profession working in yoga as well as mobility, I'm I'm a really, really big advocate for this. In our 30s, we didn't really necessarily need the warm-up. We didn't really need to stretch after our workout. We didn't really think about mobility. But as we age, our hormones shift, which we all know about, and things like collagen production starts to decline, our connective tissue starts to get a little more stiff, our joint lubrication decreases, and we have potentially years of years of using those muscles, bones, and joints that has left us with injuries. And speaking of the hormones, we're going to go back to estrogen for a moment because estrogen actually plays a role in tendon and ligament health. So as it starts to decline, our tissues become less resilient. So stiffness is not random, it's actually structural. And when you ignore it, you increase load on your joints and compensation starts to happen. So what does this mean for us in our 40s? It just means that mobility isn't optional anymore. Mobility is how you prevent injury, that you can maintain your range of motion. And honestly, I personally think it actually feels really good to the body. Looking into different types of wellness for your mobility is what I suggest. You can pop back to the episode I did with Michelle Pond. I'll link it in the show notes, who is a physical therapist who talks all about mobility. If you have the time, you can always talk to a physical therapist about ways to incorporate mobility. A very common way to add mobility to your life is your yoga class. Yoga isn't just stretching, it is about load bearing, which is great for your muscles, but also adds that element of flexibility because there is some types of poses that will increase that range of motion for you. And also it's going to add a lot of balance, which you need the literal balance of maybe standing on one foot, but it's also going to help balance the muscles in your body. So I love a yoga class because it's going to give you all of those things that you need, especially in the range of mobility. And yoga is widely, widely out there. Pop on YouTube right now, and you can find tons of free yoga classes customized to what you're looking for. This may be a small tangent, but I do want to always say that if you're new to a modality coming from a fitness arena as a fitness instructor, if you're new to a workout, like especially like something like yoga, I love taking a class in person first. You're going to have a real instructor looking at your body, giving you feedback in the moment. Whereas going on to a YouTube video, while it's very accessible, you're not going to necessarily get those questions answered for your body. So yeah, I suggested going on YouTube. For sure, do that. But if you have a studio that's local to you, go and take a class, talk to the instructor about what's going on, see how that they can help you in real time, and then take that knowledge with you back to YouTube. So when we look at all of this, it's not that these habits are bad. It's just that our body is different. We're different now. I think that's one of the main gifts of being in our 40s, is that we're going to shift. And the things that we thought were possible are now different, and there's new possibilities. So I don't think that these changes are anything negative. I think that they are honestly an evolution and an opportunity to try something new. Well, that's a wrap on this solo episode of Wellness After 40. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, it would mean so much if you shared it or sent it to someone who might need to hear it. You can subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss a single episode. And if you'd like to stay connected or learn more ways that we can work together, you can visit my website. I'll link everything in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for being here. Can't wait to share more episodes with you. And here's to your help.