Muscle Is Your Retirement Plan: Strength Training with Noelle McKenzie (Part 1)

COLD OPEN

Megan (00:11)
Paint you a picture. It’s something that really makes me smile. There’s a mother with a band of curls pulled on top of her head, absolutely beaming at her toddler who she is holding in her arms as she sits on the floor. Her baby is squealing with delight as her mother takes her feet, plants them on the floor, still holding her baby with bent arms in front of her body, and stands. Now imagine that same toddler in her grandmother’s arms.

Her grandmother has her on her hip while she’s sitting on the floor with bent knees. Her grandmother rolls forward so she’s standing on those knees, then she puts one foot out so that she can put her foot flat on the floor and push up to standing while still holding her grandbaby. The video I am describing is of my guest today with her mother and her daughter, three generations of strong women. I want you to think about this. Can you sit down on the floor right now holding a toddler, and then stand back up without putting them down? Can your mom do the same thing?

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Creating generations of strong women. Women who get to spend more years in this body than the women who came before them and who actually get to live those years, not just survive them. Move through them. Play on the floor with a grandbaby, travel, carry their own bags, stay independent.

That is the whole point of what we’re going to talk about today. And that’s exactly why I wanted Noelle McKenzie in this seat today. Noelle is the co-founder of Leading Edge Personal Trainers, a family business that she built in Brooklyn with her husband Kern. And before any of that, she was a dancer, then a walk-on Division I athlete at Temple University, who ended up breaking the school’s record for the thousand meters. She spent her whole career figuring out what a body is actually capable of when it’s trained right.

Noelle works with women 35 and up, helping them get strong, lean, and pain-free in a body that’s built to last. If you have noticed your body changing as you tiptoe into perimenopause, maybe your knees have started to hurt on the stairs, or your pants don’t fit like they used to. Maybe you have frozen shoulder or you can’t pick up your kiddo anymore.

If your body is not as strong and resilient, or feeling the way it used to, this conversation is for you.

WELCOME AND THE BODY’S FEEDBACK LOOP

Megan (02:41)
Noelle, welcome to Mornings with Megan.

Noelle McKenzie (02:44)
Thank you for having me.

Megan (02:46)
I am so excited that you are here today because I think that you have so many incredible things to share with our audience about truly being able to live life and the changes that we make in how we take care of our bodies after 35. Something that you have said is that the pain, the fatigue, the poor results, it’s not failure, it’s feedback. Your body gets smarter after 35. I couldn’t agree more. Talk to me about the symptoms of perimenopause and the body’s way of communicating and what that means to you.

Noelle McKenzie (03:22)
Well, I think the first thing that women tend to latch on to in perimenopause is this concept that what was working before is no longer working, so I must have to do more of it. And so they tend to want to push harder, exert themselves more in their workouts, more cardio, and then cut back their calories. So now they’re depriving themselves because they’re used to working in extremes. And then the body just hates that. It just backfires and they don’t understand why.

I think the biggest takeaway is to understand that when it comes to perimenopause, the biggest thing that you can focus on is building and retaining muscle. Muscle is the most important factor when it comes to aging, and that also includes hormonal changes.

And to do that, you don’t need to be pushing super hard in the gym every day. You need to be training smarter. You need to be thinking about, okay, what matters most here? It’s training for strength, it’s doing progressive overload, building on your program week over week, not spending hours on the cardio machines. And you need to fuel up for your goals. So when you get into the habit of depriving yourself too much with your intake, the opposite happens. You start storing more fat, you start having more issues with your weight management. It’s really just about being clear about what works and what doesn’t, and staying consistent, and not going into overdrive.

MUSCLE AS THE LONGEVITY ORGAN

Megan (04:38)
That really speaks to me. I love this idea of smarter, not harder, and doing what our body actually needs to give us those results. So before we get into the actual how, can you explain to our listeners what muscle actually does for the body that most women don’t realize?

Noelle McKenzie (04:57)
Oh my gosh. So muscle is called the longevity organ for a reason. It literally is the powerhouse for anti-aging. A lot of people think about muscle as the thing that helps you look better aesthetically, and so they think, well, if I don’t care about having more muscle in my body aesthetically, maybe I don’t need muscle.

But that’s so far from the truth, because you need muscle for everything. Muscle is the building block for how your body responds in terms of metabolic health. Muscle regulates your blood sugar. So when we think about diabetes, when we think about becoming insulin resistant, you need to have muscle in order to slow down or prevent that from ever happening. There are even studies that show muscle is linked to reducing your risk for all-cause mortality, cancer, heart disease. Obviously, risk of falling too.

The biggest factor when it comes to aging that matters most, that people don’t think about, it’s not smoking, it’s not how overweight you are, it’s how strong or weak you are. Muscle is the gateway to getting stronger. It is the gateway to building a body that’s resilient for decades to come.

Megan (06:01)
Resilience, that’s such an important word, and one that I speak to so often in the perimenopause space, because as we age and as we get into that hormonal up and down, our resilience does change and we don’t just wake up in the morning with resilience hanging out anymore. We kind of have to work harder to build that resilience. You have been training people for over a decade now. What is the difference that you see years down the road when women start building strength versus the women who are afraid of it or avoid it?

Noelle McKenzie (06:34)
Women that focus on building strength and that aren’t afraid of lifting heavy and putting on muscle find that, I mean, the biggest feedback I get from clients is that life just gets easier. They can keep up with their kids, they can do the heavy lifting, their independence goes through the roof because they don’t have to rely on someone else to do it for them. Aches and pains go away. So no more throbbing knee pain, hip pain, back pain. All the things that we tend to run to the doctor for, we no longer need.

We end up really taking an active stance in our own health. Women that shy away from this and focus on really light resistance training, if any at all, or cardio, cardio, cardio, or just class hopping without a trackable routine that’s really working on getting their body stronger over time, it’s the same cycle. They’re just constantly battling their weight, which compounds the effects on their joints. They just chalk up joint pain to aging and don’t realize there’s actually a way out of that. It’s not the norm that we think it is. They don’t understand how exercise makes them better because they don’t see how it translates, so it doesn’t become such a permanent non-negotiable in their life the same way it does for people who can see what this kind of progressive model of strength training does for them in the long haul.

THE PREVENTABLE DECADE OF DECLINE

Megan (07:53)
That non-negotiable piece, I think, is so important. And it’s one of the things that as nutritionists, I talk about a lot. I feel like this should be just as non-negotiable as taking care of ourselves from a nutrition perspective, because all the things you were just talking about are what that marginal decade of life so many people experience looks like, where they hit 70, hit 75, and then it’s just this slow decline. It’s the pain, it’s the joints, it’s not being able to get out of bed, it’s not being able to pick your grandbabies up, it’s not being able to carry your groceries or put a suitcase above your head. And then you lose all of that independence you’re talking about, which is so sad. How much of that decline do you think is actually preventable?

Noelle McKenzie (08:32)
Most of it, if not all of it. Obviously there are always outliers. We can’t control our genetic disposition, but lifestyle even so has been proven to be more of a telling factor in how our body ages than our genetic makeup.

So yes, the earlier you start on this journey, the better, obviously, but it’s also never too late. You could be 60, 70 years old and just starting out, and you can start reaping the benefits immediately, because the body is extremely adaptive and responsive to consistency and programming and doing this work day in and day out. And when I’m talking about instant change, I mean from week to week you’ll start to see how much easier it is to move about your day, the tolerance that you develop in your body, how pain starts to dissipate. It is a pretty consistent, gradual improvement that you can expect to make as soon as you start. So it’s never too late.

DEMYSTIFYING “BULKING UP”

Megan (09:37)
That is music to my ears, that it is never too late. And I want everyone sitting here to remember that it is never too late. It’s not too late for you. It’s not too late for your mom. It’s not too late for any of the women in your life to do what Noelle is talking about and start taking care of your body in a way that helps you hold on to independence. I would really love to demystify some myths here, because when I talk to women about strength training, there is a fear that I hear a lot, and it is that they think if they start lifting weights, they are going to suddenly look like a bodybuilder overnight. Is that even possible?

Noelle McKenzie (10:16)
No. I will agree that there are certain body types where it might be a little bit easier to put on muscle, or maybe you have a naturally more muscular physique, but you are not going to be bulking up, regardless of where you’re starting, overnight. If it were that easy, man, I’d be in love. This is a journey, we say this, this is not a quick fix, because it’s years and years and years in the making.

It is much harder to build muscle than it is to sustain it. It really takes discipline, and really training progressive overload, and really taxing the body enough. Most people aren’t even lifting heavy enough, let alone doing the reps. They’re not even lifting heavy enough to elicit that kind of change. The bodybuilder type that you’re seeing in magazines, those people are so regimented, so calculated with every little detail of their life, from every morsel that they’re putting in their body food-wise, exactly what their workouts look like, their sleep, everything, water weight, everything is extremely regimented. This is nowhere near the average person. If you’re struggling to even show up to the gym, you’re so far away from that. You have nothing to worry about.

Megan (11:27)
I mean, that really settles my mind, because this is something that I constantly talk about, and I want to have the true answer right here. You are not going to be able to be the Hulk overnight. And trust me, friends, I have tried so hard. I have done the things, I have done the gym, I have done the bulk, and all of the things, and it is exhausting. And just like you said, you have to pay attention to absolutely everything to get those gains, because it is so hard to build the muscle. But the maintenance piece that you were talking about is so important, because once we have that muscle on, we don’t have to work as hard.

Noelle McKenzie (11:39)
Right.

Megan (11:55)
And so that also gives us a little bit more bandwidth when we think about, if you fall and you hurt something and you have to have surgery or repair, or you have a baby later in life, or you do something that requires you to take a break, it doesn’t mean we’ve lost all that muscle we’ve had. So it’s kind of like building for the long haul, like you were talking about, building for longevity. It’s your investment.

Noelle McKenzie (12:04)
Right. Yeah, you’re investing for retirement.

Megan (12:21)
Yes, investing for retirement. Exactly. We want to be able to put those grandbabies up. So what do you wish that every woman really understood about the slow and deliberate process of building muscle, and how she can start thinking about that now and what that means as she’s aging with this?

Noelle McKenzie (12:32)
So the process of building muscle, it’s very simple, but there is a science behind it. You first have to decide what your goals are. Is it to put on muscle? Is it to just focus on getting stronger right now? Is it body recomp? You’ve got to figure out exactly what you’re working towards. And then you develop a program that helps you work towards those goals. And then it’s just about showing up consistently week over week, hitting that same training volume. This is the part people struggle with, it’s not the same if you show up one week twice a week, and the next week once a week, and then you skip a week. You really have to maintain your volume and frequency.

Every single time that you show up, you have to think about how do I make my workouts one percent harder than the prior week. It’s as simple as going up two or three reps, or adding five pounds to your exercises, or adding an extra set even. You just continue like that. It sounds so boring, and it really can be, because it’s like you’re just stacking bricks, but boring is what works. This is what your body really responds to. You just stick with that regimen, and over the course of six months to a year, you’ll really start to see the compound effect. And then imagine five years from now, ten years from now, it just keeps getting better. There’s no limit in terms of how strong your body can get. There’s always an opportunity to lean in, find another weak spot, make another little pivot in your programming, you can always keep expanding on what your skills are.

PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD — KNOWING WHEN TO INCREASE

Megan (13:59)
So I’m hearing that this consistency is really important, and that’s very similar with nutrition. It doesn’t mean we don’t have off days, or days where maybe we don’t eat quite the way we wanted to, or don’t hit the gym exactly the way we wanted to. But that consistency of showing back up, even when we have the off days, really seems to be important.

Let’s take a moment to think about a woman who might be in the place where you were talking about, women who aren’t really pushing as hard as they could. Let’s say she’s using three-pound weights. She’s doing a bunch of arm exercises at three pounds. She does the same thing every time she’s at the gym, she’s been doing this for years. I would say that’s probably not challenging her, like you were talking about. You need to have that challenge. For someone like that, whose relative starting point is that, how would she think about knowing when it’s time to increase weight, or knowing what the signs are that she’s ready to progress, whether it’s reps or weight?

Noelle McKenzie (14:55)
It’s important to remember that when you’re training, your body is always looking for the path of least resistance. As soon as you introduce a movement pattern into your body, the very next time you do that same exercise, your body has already figured out a way to do it requiring less effort. And if it’s requiring less effort, it means it’s also less effective.

So I always like to think about training near failure, which an easy way to think about is you want to be pushing yourself enough so that at the end of your set, you have only about two to three reps left in the tank. If you can easily bang out 10, 15 more reps and you’re not struggling with those reps, that is the first sign that it’s time to go up in weight or increase the complexity of the exercise. But something has to get harder there. If you’re doing the exact same exercise with the exact same load week over week, even two weeks out, let alone if you’re doing this for years, your body has already figured out a way to get away with doing that with less effort.

The whole goal is we need to tax the body enough to elicit change. If the demand is not there, your body’s not going to naturally change. That demand actually comes from pushing near failure. The process of building muscle happens in the recovery process. The soreness that you feel post-workout is the tiny microfiber tears in your muscle tissue that your body now has to work to recover and repair. And then as it does, it builds it back up stronger. That’s what we’re shooting for, those little micro tears that are a little uncomfortable at first, but that’s how we get our body to adapt and respond the way we want it to.

MESOCYCLES — WHEN TO CHANGE YOUR PROGRAM

Megan (16:28)
So as we’re building and putting a little bit more challenge on our body, does it make sense that we also rotate through? So if I’m doing a bunch of bench presses, and I’ve done my two reps in the tank, and I’ve progressed, and I’ve gotten up to the point where I can do 15, and maybe I’ve added a couple more pounds, and I get to a point where it just feels like I’ve done too much, is there a point when I would think maybe I should move on and do something other than that bench press, or is it enough to keep changing the cadence, the volume, and the weight, and rotating through the same exercises?

Noelle McKenzie (17:02)
That’s a good question. A lot of times we work in what’s called mesocycles, meaning we stick with a series of movements, we train them, we work on those progressions each week before we think about introducing something new. We have to give your body a chance not only to get good at doing the exercise, but then to get good at doing the exercise under load and then increasing that load.

But there does come a point where your body needs change, and it varies. Some people have a longer threshold. The first sign that you need to start introducing something new is if you start to feel any discomfort in the exercise, like some joint discomfort, or if you feel like you’ve maxed out load and don’t have anything else to work with, or if you just feel like you’re ready for something new. Like you’ve been doing this now for six, eight weeks, or maybe three months, that could be a sign. It varies. There’s a specific window of time you should stick with the same exact cycle of exercises, but you want to give it enough time to get the response you’re after. I would say at least six to eight weeks before you make a change. And when you make a change, you want to think about how do I target these same muscle groups differently. It’s not about doing something completely different, it’s about, okay, I still need to hit these muscles, so if I’m doing bench press, how about doing a push-up, or some other variation of a push, maybe an overhead press, maybe a windmill, whatever the case may be. You want to be thinking about how to retarget those muscles differently.

STRENGTH VS. MUSCLE — THE DIETARY DIFFERENCE

Megan (18:22)
Within that context, thinking about progressing, switching out, doing maybe a windmill or an overhead press instead of a bench press, what does it look like to differentiate between what you said earlier, getting stronger versus building muscle? What is the difference between those two?

Noelle McKenzie (18:36)
Getting stronger is just looking at your workouts. If you’re training progressive overload and showing up consistently, you will get stronger. Your body is going to respond to that consistency and the effort you’re requiring from it. But if you’re trying to build muscle, this is where the dietary part comes into play, because you cannot build muscle from an extreme calorie deficit. So I always tell people that if you’re trying to build muscle, you have to also be ensuring that you’re eating for your goals. That means calorie intake has to be sufficient, protein needs to be where it needs to be. For most people, that’s more than 100 grams per day, which is unfathomable for most, but it really is not that much protein.

Megan (19:13)
I agree. A hundred percent agree.

Noelle McKenzie (19:18)
But you’ll notice as soon as you dial in your diet and continue with that same workout regimen, so nothing changes about the workouts, it’s just that now you’ve also added the dietary part into your regimen, you’ll see how quickly your body starts to put on muscle. Aesthetically, your body comp changes. So you do need to have the energy and reserve there. Remember, muscle is the most metabolically active tissue in the body, so it cannot sustain itself or build if there’s not enough energy in reserve. If you don’t have enough chemical calories in the tank to get through your day-to-day regular activities, and then you try to go to your workout and utilize what’s left, your body’s just not going to allow that. So you have to have, dare I say, a bit of a surplus of calorie intake to really prioritize muscle growth.

FUELING MUSCLE, APPETITE, AND HUNGER CUES

Megan (20:04)
I feel like you just painted this picture of so many perimenopausal women who come through my door, where they have spent all this time and they do the exercise, they do the workout, but they haven’t been eating to support it. We get into this picture where they’re metabolically unhealthy and they’re actually putting on weight, fat, the mobile savings account, but they’re not building out this muscle. It’s this weird dichotomy where they’re like, I’m working out and working out and I’m not getting any better.

When you dig into the details, they’re doing exactly what you said. They’re not eating enough. They are restricting, restricting, restricting. And that muscle recovery doesn’t have a chance to grow, because there isn’t enough calories and resources to do it, because the body is prioritizing other things. It’s like, well, we’ve got to grow hair, we’ve got to keep walking, we’ve got to sleep, we just don’t have time or energy to put into building out this muscle. So it’s nice to know there’s a difference between building out muscle and being strong. We can still be strong, and we can change the way we’re training and build out the muscle mass. And the muscle mass is really building that metabolic organ, like you were talking about. It’s driving that metabolism, and it’s what’s helping us with the insulin resistance, what’s helping us process and metabolize blood sugar. And that piece is so important as our hormones start to shift in perimenopause.

Noelle McKenzie (21:20)
Yeah, and I think people don’t recognize how much energy our bodies need just to survive. The basal metabolic rate is what your body needs just to do basic functioning. All your cells have to turn over every day, all your organs have to repair themselves every day. You need energy to think, so any critical thinking. So forget about exercise, they don’t realize how much they’re burning just existing. That’s where the calorie intake becomes something people get confused about.

I feel like we should also talk a little bit about appetite, and how that’s not always a good indicator of how many calories you need either. I have a lot of clients who will say, well, I don’t know why I have to eat more, I don’t feel hungry, so I feel like I’m eating enough. And it’s because of these patterns we’ve fallen into. We need to be eating on a schedule. We need to be eating because we need to eat, not just because we’re hungry or because we have time to sit down and enjoy our meal. Your body needs to do the same processes every day, so we need energy regardless of what’s going on in your life. It’s really important not to fall into that trap of only eating when you feel hungry, because most times we don’t feel hungry and we still need to eat.

Megan (22:24)
And to your point, if you’ve been doing this long enough, we can train our bodies. Humans are just resilient creatures, we can do all sorts of things. So if you tell your body for a decade that there are no more calories, that’s it, you get that thousand calories, your body’s going to figure out how to operate and keep you alive on that thousand calories. Part of that is adjusting appetite and adjusting how you feel, so we do have to work on rebuilding that connection, relearning it, not suppressing it, and learning the difference between hunger and thirst. Those are such important pieces of this picture.

CLOSING — PART 2 SETUP

Megan (23:02)
We’re going to pause right here, because I want you to actually marinate on everything Noelle just broke down. That muscle is a longevity organ, that building it is slow and deliberate on purpose, and that showing up consistently and eating to support that work matters just as much as the lifting itself.

If you have ever felt like you were doing everything right and still not seeing results, this could be why. In part two, we are going somewhere I think you’re going to want to hear. We’re getting into the Swan study, insulin resistance, and exactly how building muscle helps your body handle that shift in perimenopause. Plus, the scale conversation, training for the life you actually want, and Noelle speaking directly to two different women. The first who’s never set foot in a gym, and the one who’s been doing cardio and yoga her whole life but never touched weights. I’ll see you there.