Something’s hurting. That, in Zoe Modgill’s experience, is what actually brings a woman in her forties or fifties to a trainer. “Either they’ve had a scare at the doctor, which is what people will end up having, or they have an ache and pain that isn’t going away, and the physio has told them that they need to strengthen this area. I would be really surprised if anyone came to me just randomly, unless they’ve read about how important muscle is in ageing.”
Modgill ran Studio 60 in Delhi for a decade before moving to Goa and taking her practice online, where Stronger With Zoe is built around the stages of a woman’s life rather than a single generic body. She has lived most of those stages herself, training through two pregnancies and recovering from abdominal separation twice, and she is now in her forties, lifting heavy and eating accordingly, which makes her a fairly persuasive exhibit for her own argument. What follows is her order of operations for starting again at this age, and it is not the order most women expect. The diet comes nowhere in it.
Start with a blood test, not a training plan
There is no point programming exercise for a body running short of raw materials.
“Our blood work actually tells us a hell of a lot about what’s happening inside of the body. You can do a hell of a lot of face treatments; you can do so much stuff to yourself externally, but your blood work will tell you a lot about what you’re eating, and whether that’s really helping your system. So, for women in their 40s and 50s, we are looking to have their blood work analysed. What are the missing links? In most cases, vitamin D will be there for India. That is a big issue when you are trying to recover well and find good energy in the system. If you are lacking some of those things in your blood work, no matter how much coffee you drug yourself with, you are not going to be able to lift heavy. You’re going to have to sort that out first.”
She is not exaggerating about the vitamin D. Depending on the study and the threshold, somewhere between half and three quarters of urban Indian adults test deficient; women consistently worse off than men, and it shows up as fatigue, poor recovery, muscle weakness and bone loss, all of which tend to get filed under getting older. A panel costs less than a facial, and someone will come to your house to draw it.
Then eat more, which is the instruction nobody wants
“You’re going to have to sort out your nutrition, and that isn’t going on a diet. That isn’t just cutting out carbohydrates. It is not just fasting. Another one, everyone’s favourite, is if I just eat less, I’m going to be smaller. That’s the mindset that most people have. And the problem with that is, at that age, your hormones need food.”
On fasting, she is measured, and her objection is practical. “It’s got benefits, but at that age where your hormones are fluctuating, and things are changing, you need to be able to make sure that it’s getting enough nutrition in the windows that need it. So what happens is, starving themselves means then eating whatever they want during the window they eat, which might not be enough, because how much can you eat in that small window? People who are on a 2,000-calorie diet and trying to exercise makes no sense to me. Where do you get the energy to then lift or push your body?”
This is the collision most women in their forties are living inside. The habit of eating less is decades old and has been rewarded at every turn, and it arrives at precisely the point in life when the body needs more, more protein and more total food to hold on to muscle, not less.
Then build muscle, deliberately
The word she reaches for is sarcopenia, the progressive loss of muscle mass and strength that begins around the fourth decade and accelerates through menopause, when falling oestrogen removes some of the protection women had been getting for free. “This is such a big deal for so many people now, because you just can’t build muscle unless you apply a good amount of resistance to your body.”
She is sceptical of the stalled-metabolism story that usually arrives with the ache. “At this age, a lot of them think that their weight has stalled. Like, my metabolism is stuck. That is one of the most common messages I get at this age, and it’s actually that you just stopped moving enough. That is what happens as we get older. We get more scared; we want to be more careful. We’re told that more things can happen, and that’s really difficult to persuade people to understand that you’re going to have to give in order to get. You’re going to have to go through some pain in the gym, take a chance, and then build that muscle so that it will protect you when you need it.”
On yoga and Pilates, which is where most Indian women over forty are currently doing their movement, she is generous and unambiguous at once. Both build strength, and the difficulty is purely one of progression: advancing in yoga means learning harder shapes over months, while advancing with a dumbbell means picking up a heavier dumbbell. “Anything that adds some load to your body is going to build muscle. But it is a safer, more easier way to monitor and take a record of when you do something like weight training, because you can measure how much more you’re changing… you’re going to have to advance in the positions or the poses quite dramatically for you to be able to really start to see some muscle change happen in things like yoga, in things like Pilates.”
And she has a view on what a session ought to feel like. “It is not like, let me go and chill on the treadmill for 40 minutes. You want to go and push your body for 40 minutes, maybe three or four times, and then the other times do a chilled 40 minutes. I get it, but there’s got to be that pushing that happens two or three times a week.”
What to do with all of this
Blood panel first, and expect vitamin D on the list. Nutrition second, in the direction of more food rather than less, with enough protein to build what you’re about to build. Then load, two or three times a week, progressive, meaning the weight goes up over time, because a programme that never gets harder stops producing change. Keep the easy days genuinely easy, keep the yoga if you love the yoga, and add weight somewhere else in the week. Aim for 80% rather than perfection, which is the number Modgill sets for every client because it is the only one that survives real life.
The case for all of it is not the mirror. Muscle is what holds your skeleton in position, what absorbs a fall, what carries the shopping and the grandchild, and what gets you off the floor unaided at eighty. The women who will be doing that are deciding it now.
Zoe Modgill is a trainer, nutritionist, pre- and postnatal specialist, Corrective Exercise Specialist and Diastasis and Core Consultant, and the founder of Stronger With Zoe. Read part one, on pregnancy, postpartum and the research that mostly isn’t there, here. Nothing here is a substitute for advice from your own doctor.
1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com