Why Most Women Are Working Out More Than They Need To (And Still Not Seeing Results)

There is a version of fitness culture that has been sold to women for decades that looks something like this: show up every day, work as hard as you can, feel the burn, sweat through it, earn your body. And if it's not working, you're probably not doing enough.

I believed that for a long time and I know a lot of us did.

The problem is that doing more has almost nothing to do with building muscle. And building muscle, it turns out, has almost everything to do with how well we age, how our metabolism functions, how our hormones respond, how we feel getting out of bed in the morning. It is the most important thing most of us are not doing correctly.

Here's what the science actually says…

We start losing muscle mass in our 30s at a rate of five to eight percent per decade. That sounds abstract until you do the math and realize that by the time you're in your 50s, you could have lost a significant portion of the muscle you had at your peak without changing a single thing about your lifestyle. You're eating the same, you're exercising the same, and your body looks and feels completely different.

The solution is not more cardio or more classes or a harder workout. It's building muscle intentionally, consistently, and with the right ingredients.

The word "toned" does not exist in academic literature. It was invented by the fitness industry to make lighter workouts more marketable to women who were afraid of looking too muscular. What toned actually means is body recomposition, building muscle while losing fat. The most effective way to get there is the same thing that used to be considered only for athletes and bodybuilders: progressive strength training taken close to failure.

True failure is the moment your muscle physically cannot complete another rep. Most of the workouts that have been marketed to women for the last thirty years never get us there. We finish feeling exhausted and sore and like we worked hard (and we did work hard), but the signal we needed to send our muscles to trigger actual growth was never sent.

This is why women can go to classes five days a week for years and still not see the muscle development they're working toward.

There are four things that actually matter when it comes to building muscle, and when you understand them everything else becomes noise.

1. Repetitions taken close to failure, anywhere from four to thirty reps, as long as the last couple are genuinely difficult to complete. 

2. Exercise selection that targets one muscle group at a time instead of trying to work everything at once, which prevents any single muscle from reaching true failure. 

3. Protein, somewhere around 0.75 to one gram per pound of body weight per day to give your muscles the building blocks to actually rebuild. 

4. Structure, meaning working each muscle group one to two times per week on non-consecutive days and actually allowing recovery to happen.

That last part is the one most of us skip. Recovery is where muscle is built. The workout is just the signal that tells your body something needs to change. Everything that actually happens in response to that signal occurs in the hours and days after you leave the gym.

There is also something worth saying about belly fat specifically because it comes up constantly and there is a lot of misinformation around it. You cannot spot treat fat. The burning sensation you feel in your core during ab work is not fat being burned in that area, it is just an accumulation of metabolites in the tissue. 

Fat loss happens throughout the whole body and it comes primarily from diet, not exercise. What building muscle does is give the sugar from your food more places to go before it gets stored as fat. More muscle means better insulin sensitivity, which means your body handles everything you eat more efficiently, including around your midsection.

This is the part that I think gets lost in the conversation about fitness. We treat workouts like they should be doing everything: burning fat, building muscle, managing stress, earning food. And when they don't do all of those things simultaneously, we assume we're not working hard enough. But your workouts are not your diet. They are a specific tool for a specific purpose and when you understand what that purpose actually is, you stop overcomplicating it.

I had a long conversation about all of this with Dr. Shannon Ritchey, doctor of physical therapy and strength training expert, for a recent episode of The Tamsen Show (you can watch it here). She walked me through my own Dexa scan results live on camera, explained the REPS framework she uses with her clients, and addressed some of the biggest fitness trends right now that are doing very little despite all the hype. Weighted vests, vibration plates, cycle syncing, grip strength obsession, all of it.

If you've been showing up consistently and still feeling like something isn't working, I really think this conversation is going to reframe the whole thing for you.

Listen to The Muscle Episode: Get Stronger, Look Better & Reverse Your Biological Age here or you can watch it here.