Why Your Workouts Aren’t Working After 50 And 5 Training Principles That Actually Work) [Ep75]

If you’re putting in the effort - lifting, walking, doing cardio and not seeing results like you used to, this episode breaks down why. Lisa DuPree explains that the issue likely isn’t more effort, it’s that efforts are misdirected. In midlife, your body responds best to strategic, intentional training rooted in proven fundamentals, not extremes.

Lisa walks you through five essential training principles that drive safe, sustainable progress after 50: movement quality, structured progressive overload, recovery, strategic walking, and consistency-driven goals. These are the exact strategies she used to successfully train for a physique competition in her late fifties, proving that results are still absolutely possible when you train in alignment with your body.

Key Points with Timestamps

[00:00] Why your workouts may not be working anymore

•  Effort vs. effectiveness 
•  The midlife shift in training response 

[01:30] The truth about results after 50

•  Why extremes don’t work 
•  Fundamentals + consistency = results 

[02:00] Priority 1: Movement Quality

•  Slow down your reps 
•  Use full range of motion 
•  Train with intention, not momentum 

[05:00] Priority 2: Progressive Overload (in order)

•  Step 1: Consistency 
•  Step 2: Volume 
•  Step 3: Load 
•  Step 4: Intensity
•  Why doing too much at once leads to burnout 

[09:30] Priority 3: Recovery is non-negotiable

•  Muscle growth happens during rest 
•  Signs you’re under-recovering 
•  Why you can’t outwork biology 

[11:00] Priority 4: Strategic Walking

•  Keep most cardio moderate 
•  Avoid pre-fatiguing muscles before strength training 
•  How to use incline and weighted walking correctly 

[13:00] Priority 5: Consistency-driven goals

•  Focus on weekly patterns, not daily perfection 
•  Build flexibility into your routine 
•  Small, sustainable progress compounds 

[15:00] Final message + podcast update

•  Results come from months, not weeks 
•  Announcement: Short break from new episodes 
•  Reflection questions for your training 

Thanks for listening!

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Transcript

Lisa DuPree: [00:00:00] If you're already working out, you're lifting, you're doing cardio, you are doing more walking, you're showing up, and you're thinking, why isn't my body responding the way it used to? It's probably not that you need more effort, it's that your effort isn't focused in the right places. So today I am gonna be walking you through five training principles that drive safe, consistent progress in midlife.

This is Midlife Mojo where women over 50 learn how to stay strong, energized, and truly fit and flourish. I'm your host, Lisa Dupree, exercise physiologist, health coach and MPC Fit model competitor. For more than three decades I've been teaching and coaching on what actually helps women move well, build strength, and take care of the health as they age.

So here on Midlife Mojo, we really are just gonna cut through the noise of the fitness industry and focus on the practical, sustainable strategies that help [00:01:00] you build a body and a life. Really supports you for the long haul. And I'm not, and I'm not just sharing this from the perspective of an exercise physiologist and a coach.

I use these exact principles. When I trained for my first physique competition in my late fifties and was able to really get up and confidently stand on stage next to women who were amazing, they were strong, they were lean, they were highly conditioned. And you know what became crystal clear for me was that results in midlife don't come from extremes.

They come from fundamentals applied strategically and practice consistently. So let's break down the top five things to prioritize that really move the needle after 50 priority one. And that is going to be master your [00:02:00] movement quality. And so before you increase your weights and before you increase the number of sets or reps you're doing, or you change up your exercises, .

You need to master how you move. And when I began prepping for competition, I didn't immediately start by increasing my weights. I actually scaled back at first, and you made me going like, why would you do that? Right? And it's really because I wanted to be really certain that I was doing the exercises in a way that was mechanically sound.

Effective. So when the goal is real muscle development, you are not just going and working hard, right? Movement quality becomes everything. And so here's what I see that really derails women over 50 when they're trying to build muscle. They rush through their repetitions. [00:03:00] They shorten their range of motion in the exercise, and also they tend to compensate by using other muscle groups than the muscle groups that were specifically supposed to be isolated for that exercise.

They typically involve the low back, shoulders, knees, things like that. And so the key movement patterns you want to be really strong and stable throughout are any type of squat or lunge movements. Hinge movements like deadlifts, Romania, deadlifts, push movements like a chest press and pull movements like rows, lat pull downs.

There are three things you need to focus on here to begin to master your movement mechanics. The first is tempo. Slow down. There's one thing you need to do. I am gonna be willing to bet that 99% of you need to slow down.

Slow down, and control the movement, [00:04:00] engage the muscles intentionally. The second is go through your full range of motion. And this is a lot easier to do if you are slowing down and having a nice, comfortable tempo, right? So go through your full range of motion, use the joints and the muscles in the way that they were designed to move through that whole range of motion to really fully activate the working muscles.

And then third is intention. Really focus in and work the muscles that the exercise is meant to target. So if you're using momentum or you're using too much weight, you are no longer training the muscle. Effectively.

So if it doesn't feel stable and controlled, there is opportunity for you to adjust the tempo, adjust the range of motion.

And really focus on intention and your body will reward you [00:05:00] for focusing on those things and respecting that. All right, so the second priority is progressive overload, but in, in a very strategic order. You know, we cannot build muscle or increase strength without progressive overload. You have to ask your body to do more or it won't adapt.

And so that overload though, really needs to be structured. And so during my preparation for my competition. Again, I didn't jump from like moderate weights to heavy weights quickly or overnight. So progression followed a sequence and it's, it's like a four step sequence, right? So the first one is consistency.

This is what you have to nail first. And consistency means doing your workouts consistently on the days that they're scheduled, not skipping workouts. That is going to allow your body to adapt and it's going to [00:06:00] allow you to build the neuromuscular pathways like that brain body connection to be able to fully perform the exercise.

But you gotta do it consistently. You gotta do the same exercises over and over and over. Until it feels pretty easy, it's no longer challenging. Then the next step is volume. Volume is increased by increasing the number of repetitions that you're doing. Like say if you've been doing eight repetitions per set, go to 10 or go from 10 to 12.

That gives you more volume or you can increase the number of sets. If you're doing one set of 10, then you may want to go ahead and add another set. You may need to do eight repetitions in that set, but you see how it works, right? But you need to do that once your movements are solid, uh, you know, you've got your movement mastered and you've been consistent.

The [00:07:00] next thing is load. And so that is when you add weight gradually. So you've increased your reps and you've increased your sets and where do you go from there? When it starts feeling easy, you add more weight, but you wanna do it gradually in small increments, not big increments. If you can increase the weight on an exercise by like two and a half pounds, five pounds, sometimes 10 pounds, depending on what it is, like you wanna do it in smaller weights, not big jumps.

And then the fourth thing is intensity. And this is things you can play around with like that. This is where you can actually manipulate the tempo of your exercise. Focusing more on the centric phase, or sometimes focusing more on the e eccentric phase, right? And so that changes up. That just kind of like helps prevent boredom, but also it changes up the exercise.

So it changes the intensity. And so you want to be able to. Increase that effort strategically, [00:08:00] but you wanna do it one variable at a time. And so this is where I see, you know, women in midlife, they end up sabotaging themselves with this because they increase a lot of different things at once. You go from, you know, not doing your workouts consistently to like trying to work out every day and then you haven't been in a while, so you wanna do heavier weights, you wanna do more cardio, you wanna let rest less.

And so. You know, it ends up like, you know, they come to coaching and they wonder why they feel inflamed and exhausted or are getting injured, and, and that's really because your muscle and your connective tissue adapt more slowly than your motivation. That's just physiology. It's not lack of discipline.

It doesn't mean that you don't desire it or that you're not going to, you know, be able to get to your goal. Like your workouts are not going to deliver overnight results. And you know, I like to always say your body's not Amazon Prime [00:09:00] adaptation, , physiological adaptation takes time.

It takes at least four to six weeks to see some real sustainable changes for any training phase that you're in. And so when I really, held that at the forefront when I was training. During my competition prep and really focused on that kind of timeline, I was able to really continue building muscle while at the same time losing fat instead of getting burned out or getting injured.

All right, so going on to priority three, that is recovery. Recovery is an integral part of your training. Recovery is. Not optional. And that is the one thing that I think changed a lot for me is during prep, there were weeks when I felt really strong. I had a lot of energy. I wanted to do more, I wanted to add more, right.

But I didn't [00:10:00] because, even though I had that energy, my muscles, you know, they were still being challenged. And your muscles don't grow during your workout. They grow when you are resting and when you're not working out, like. All of this kind of works together. Sleep also became non-negotiable for me during prep because your hormones, like cortisol, muscle repair, all of those things hinge on recovery and, and that's really just what our bodies require at this point in life.

Like, you can't out motivate your biology. You cannot just push through the timeline for tissue adaptation. And so when I respected my, that recovery as really part of my training, my strength was really improving steadily. When I kind of pushed the boundaries and tested those edges a little bit too much, my body just pushed back, and so things that you wanna take note of. Do you have soreness lasting more than 72 hours? Like that's [00:11:00] a sign. Is your performance declining week to week? Uh, that's a big sign. And then, you know, do you dread workouts? You know, have to drag yourself through the workouts that you once could easily do or you really enjoyed.

Like, that's a sign too. Like that feedback is not a weakness. It's critical information that you need to pay attention to and then adjust your training, which is part of that is recovery accordingly. All right. So priority four is walk strategically. So walking was a huge part of my prep, but it was really structured.

So most of it stayed in the aerobic range. Uh, it was really just done at a, an easily conversational pace. There was also some more inclined walking and that was used intentionally. And that is more intense, right? Um, but it wasn't like a daily max effort. Uh, I also used weighted vest sessions, but they were controlled [00:12:00] and progressive.

I started really light around like 5% of my body weight, and then it went up to about 10% of my body weight. And this is because walking should support strength training, not compete with it. And when you're trying to lose body fat at the same time that you're trying to build muscle, the high intensity cardio using really high incline.

Uh, on a treadmill or something like that, right? It can be counterproductive. 'cause if you do a high intensity cardio session right before, uh, a heavy leg day, what you're doing is pre fatiguing your muscles that you're actually trying to grow. And that is not a good strategy. That's just interference.

That's counterproductive. So instead. Keep walking, but keep your walking at mostly like a moderate intensity. And then include some low intensity walking just for movement, for active recovery. And then in smaller doses use your [00:13:00] higher intensity cardio, but make sure it's placed carefully within the structure of your overall workout plan so that you're gonna be able to, give a hundred percent for your strength training.

And also give a hundred percent for your cardio sessions. So that balance is really what enhances fat loss and conditioning without compromising strength gains. And so last but not least is priority five. And that is set goals, that build consistency. 'cause during prep. I, I wanted to do things right but I never really obsessed over getting things perfect.

What I ended up focusing on was repeatability, for steps. I ended up looking at weekly totals, not sticking with rigid daily numbers because realistically this is long term, right? You're not just gonna do this for a couple of months [00:14:00] and reach your goals and then be able to stay there.

Life is going to happen and so on days that I had a heavy strength training leg day, my steps were lower. On the days that I had recovery days and I didn't work out, my steps were higher, but it wasn't at a high intensity. And so instead of having a rigid control as well. I really built flexibility into my workout structure, and that is because I needed that flexibility to continue to be consistent because consistency beats that perfection and intensity every time and, and small sustainable increases compound.

Whereas if you're doing like big jumps and things like that, it creates burnout and. The physique that I brought to the stage for my competitions last year, it really wasn't built from a couple of extreme weeks. It really was built from [00:15:00] months and months of consistent focus on the fundamentals. I'll say that again, like there is in no way that you're gonna be able to lose fat and build muscle at the same time by doing a few weeks of something extreme.

It is gonna take few months of consistent focus and focusing on the fundamentals to do it safely and sustainably. And so those are the five priorities. Movement, quality, progressive overload, but in the right order recovery, strategic walking, and having consistency driven goals. And I wanted to share a quick update with you.

This is episode 75, so if you have hung in for all these episodes and you are still here with me, thank you so much. When I started the podcast, I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would actually have enough [00:16:00] to say or be able to keep going for 75. Episodes. So I'm so grateful to have made it to this point, and I'm super, super grateful for all of you all who tune in and, you know, over the past few years, midlife Mojo has become a really meaningful space to share ideas, lessons, real life experiences, you know, and all about being fit and flourishing over 50.

And you know, just like in training, sometimes the smartest move is to step back, assess and decide what the next phase should look like. And so I'm gonna be taking just a short break from publishing new episodes while I focus on coaching clients and. I have some new projects behind the scenes going, but the entire library of episode is gonna be here for you to access.

And if you ever wanna reach out, I'm definitely still around. And if you're working out but you're frustrated with your progress, just take a couple of minutes today and, and reflect on your [00:17:00] training within these five priorities. And so are you moving well? Are you progressing strategically? Are you recovering intentionally?

Is your walking and your cardio structured to support muscular gain? And then are your goals sustainable? And if you want expert eyes on your training or need a well-designed program to get started, reach out. You can email me directly at lisa@lisadupreecoaching.com, or you can connect with me on Instagram at Lisa Dupree Coaching.

I'd love to connect with you and I'd love to help. I just wanna leave you with midlife. Fitness is not about punishing your body. It's not about doing more. It's not about going harder. It's really about working with your physiology and training in a way that your body can respond to, and it absolutely will. So until next time, get out there and keep your mojo rising!