Dr. Layne Norton

It's not something you can control.

So I'm not saying it's your fault.

But there are things, lifestyle interventions, you can do to help correct for that.

I mean I'm always going to encourage people to lift weights in some form or fashion, right?

But again, it kind of goes back to like practicality.

If they love spin and they hate lifting weights, well, spin is going to be better than nothing, right?

But if I can get people to lift weights, definitely one of the lift weights.

I mean the research shows relative to your starting lean mass, regardless of your age or sex, you can build the same amount of muscle.

So what that means, people – just to put it practically –

So there's studies showing that women build the same amount of men as a percentage of their starting lean mass.

So what I mean by that is if your starting lean mass as a woman is 50 kilograms, and my starting lean mass as a man is 70 kilograms, and we both resistance train, we both put on, let's say, 10% lean mass, the woman will gain five kilos, the man will gain seven.

The man gained more absolute lean mass, but they both gained the same percentage of their starting lean mass.

So

The potential for growth is actually similar, again, as a percentage.

And we actually see that even with like strength too, that women kind of as a starting percentage of the one rep max gain similar strength as men.

In fact, it might be a little bit better to be honest.

But that also could be that women have a lower baseline because they're not on a population level lifting weights as much.

And so –

In elderly, we see that too as a percentage.

Now, if you take somebody who's 70 years old and never lifted weights before, they're going to not have very much lean mass.