JJ Virgin
speaker
1,112 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 1 Mar
JJ Virgin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what's fun is rather than focusing on the scale, you're focusing on, I used to be able to do one pull-up, now I can do six. I used to be able to do 10 air squats, now I'm doing air squats with weights. Now I'm jumping at the end of my squat. So the feedback you're getting is really, what am I able to do? which is the whole point of this anyway. It's not a number on a scale.
Why I worry about focus on body composition is I know that if I'm improving muscle and losing fat, it's meaning that I can do more everywhere. And that's the point.
You know, being a little old lady. It's like, I'm never going to be a little old lady. Actually, I've never been little in my life, so the chance I'm going to be a little old lady is slim. But I think it is interesting because we're focused so much on muscle, and that's important.
But when you really look at what happens as we age, and again, I'm really unpacking right now how much this is aging and how much of this is the habits that we get into as we age. And I'm starting to think it's a lot more of our behaviors now. than actual physiological aging. And so we lose muscle, but that isn't really what's scary here.
And as you start to unpack it with muscle, we have two different types of skeletal muscle. We have slow twitch, and those are all the things like right now we're sitting up, our slow twitch muscle fibers are keeping us upright. If we're walking, if we're standing, those are all our slow twitch muscle fibers.
fast twitch muscle fibers and they can they can get bigger but the ones that really tend to do more of the hypertrophy are the fast twitch muscle fibers. So as I started to look at this I went it must be that we're losing more fast twitch as we age which is clear.
As we age while we're losing muscle what we're really losing is two to three times more strength but what the biggest thing we're losing is power. So muscle hypertrophy is your muscle size and you want to think of that but you also want to think of quality. Like having a big muscle doesn't necessarily mean you're strong.
A lot of those guys over there at Gold's Gym weren't that strong, they just knew how to build muscle. Strength is how much you can move something one time and it turns out to build strength it's a little different than how you actually build muscle. There's crossover but they're not the same.
Power is how fast you can do something and I think when we think of power we also have to think of agility because As we age, it's that ability to catch ourselves, you know, move quickly, run up the stairs. That's what we lose. But again, we don't have to.
But I think we start to look at it and you look at the, you know, adult exercise classes and they are standing there with the chair and doing chair exercises. And I think, you know, that's not going to help us in life, sitting, doing our exercises in a chair, because in life we have to get out of the chair. And so, yes, your knees might hurt, your back might hurt.
That's not the reason why you shouldn't do something. That's actually the reason why you should. I blew out my knee at 17, and they were like, you're gonna have to have a knee replacement. And... But you want to put it off as long as possible because these things only last like 20 years. And so I just strengthened everything around it.
And I thought, all right, all the things they tell you couldn't do with a blown out knee squats and lunges. I did all of it. And I put off a knee replacement for like till I was 52. And I remember when I walked in, they go, we don't know how you're walking in here. Wow. I go, I've just kept everything super duper strong.
Again, think of your reason why not is probably your reason why that we have to train to get better at life. And in life, we're going to have to get out of the way of something fast. We're going to have to pick something up off the floor, catch something, grab something.
And so train for that in a controlled environment so that when you get out of that controlled environment out into the wild, you don't get hurt.
Right. I mean, it's time to be the matriarchs here. This came out of me starting to talk more about, okay, build muscle. I have been focused on muscle building since my early 20s as I started to work with clients and everything was focused on cardio back then. This was in the 80s. Everything was vegetarian, vegan, and cardio. Lots and lots of cardio. And what I realized was it didn't work.
My clients were 45 plus and it wasn't working. And I went, well, they're not going to pay me to get worse, I'm pretty sure. And I discovered resistance training and I was taking people to Gold's Gym and I saw people in their 60s and 70s that were amazing. I went, this is it. This is how you change everything. If you have more muscle, you change your metabolism.
If you're doing cardio, you have to keep doing it all the time. It's like you're making money and spending, living on paycheck to paycheck versus having a great bank account and you're just living off the interest. having the great bank account is having a lot of muscle. Living paycheck to paycheck is just doing cardio. So it's been really clear for a long time that this is the way to go.
And I have been fighting this silliness for now 40 years. And I cannot believe it's still out there that when you talk about muscle, the biggest thing I hear is I don't want to get big. And I'll tell you, I mean, for years I've been saying, hey, you know, do you know what it takes for a woman to put on one to two pounds of muscle a month? It is a fight. Even a man.
Right. So you look at it and go, you know, lose up to 1% of your body weight, body fat, body weight, really, a week, and putting on one to two pounds of muscle a month. That's like Herculean. And people are afraid they're going to get too big. And the only time I've had a client get big is when they quit and decide to sit on the couch and eat. That's when you'll get big.
Muscles, metabolic spanks, it holds everything in tighter, boosts your metabolism. It's not going to make you bigger. And by the way, if you did say, oh my gosh, I'm getting bigger, you could stop. That would be it. But they'll say, I want your arms. I go, do you know what I do? Like, this is a lot of muscle. This is not toning. Like this idea of toning.
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