Personal Trainer Tips: Guide to Weight Loss for 30s & 40s

Upon entering your 30s and 40s, you may have noticed that losing weight and getting in shape has become a lot more challenging than it was during your younger years. Gone are the days where you could eat whatever you wanted, stay out all night and drink with your friends, and still be able to hop out of bed to go about your day like nothing happened.

As we grow older, our metabolism begins to slow down and bodies start to hold onto fat like a vise grip, but this doesn’t mean that weight loss is impossible for you. With good planning, putting fitness first, and remaining committed to a healthy weight loss diet plan, you will find success in reaching your weight loss goals.

First thing to remember when you begin a weight loss journey when you’re in your 30s and 40s is that you’re no longer a kid. You need to be sure that you find the best workout plan that can help you. Remember that the best weight loss exercise for you might be different than others, which is why you need to take your time in discovering the best workout that keeps you excited.

Being someone in his/her 30s and 40s, you might want to take a lot of the weight loss tips you find on TikTok and Instagram with a grain of salt, especially when it’s coming from a 20-something fitness influencer. After 30, your body starts to change, so weight loss workouts for you are not going to be the same as a 20-year old’s. Not only that, going back to the gym after 30 doesn't give the same vibe as it used to offer.

After you start growing a family, you will notice that sticking to a weight loss diet plan can seem far more difficult, especially as your kids are growing older. Trying to impose upon your kids the foods you want to eat for weight loss may seem like an impossible challenge, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Introducing healthy foods to your family can be doable with the help of a good cookbook and a variety of herbs and spices. Also, since you're not a stay-at-home mom or dad, doing a little meal prep can help you save a lot of time, instead of trying to cook everything fresh. In other words, adopting a weight loss diet plan doesn’t mean that you are doomed to eat nothing more than boiled chicken and broccoli.

Do you feel like you’re clueless whenever you walk into the gym? You are not the only one in his 30s and 40s that feels this way. Working with a personal trainer can be an immense help in guiding you with each weight loss exercise and developing the best workout program that can help you make real progress. You want to ensure that your strength and conditioning program involves improving upper and lower body exercises, as well as improving your cardiovascular endurance. While some gyms might not be blessed with educated and experienced personal trainers, using an online personal trainer can be the best option for you. For example, with my online personal training program, I make sure that I have a clear understanding of my client’s goals and tailor the workouts to their needs (while keeping tabs for accountability purposes) because the best workout is the one that is made for you.

For the longest time, it was believed that the best weight loss exercise was to do heavy cardio because this burns calories at a much higher rate than weight training. The best advice I can give you is to put more thought about the future than the now. We know now that weight training is just as effective as a weight loss workout as doing cardio because it helps maintain and build muscle mass, which has been shown to help make weight loss last longer.

Back when I started lifting weights in high school in the late 90s, it was suggested that high repetitions and low weight was good for burning fat. The fact is that pretty much any type of resistance training can be an effective weight loss exercise. Your muscles are still going to grow to a certain extent, whether you do high repetitions or low repetitions. The best workout for those that want to lose weight when it comes to resistance training should include training for gaining strength, building muscle size, AND improving muscle endurance.

It is important to know that as you enter your 40s, muscle mass begins to decrease each year, at approximately 0.5% per year. This muscle loss increases to 1-2% per year in one’s 50s, and keeps depleting at a rate of 3-5% each year after age 60. A consistent resistance training program can help to slow down the rate of muscle depletion, which is what makes a person’s 30s so important because the amount of physical activity one partakes in their 30s tends to resemble how active they are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

Is it possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time? What we know is that a weight loss plan must result in a caloric deficit, which means more calories are burned than consumed. Since burning calories strictly through exercise is actually pretty inefficient, the weight loss diet plan must be well-designed to be effective. For muscle to grow in size, it must be well fed with protein and resistance trained, so the weight loss diet plan has to be adjusted to do this. While there is some research showing that a weight training novice can gain muscle during weight loss, there is not much evidence for the same regarding more experienced lifters, therefore, it may be more effective to first train and eat for weight loss, then move towards building muscle.

Ultimately, the weight loss diet plan ought to be appetizing for the individual, otherwise, there is almost no chance that he would stick with it. A weight loss journey needs to be viewed as a long-term process, and one that puts just as much importance on maintaining the weight loss as losing the weight in the first place. When you’re in your 30s and 40s, understand that losing weight is more challenging each passing year, so it would behoove you to keep the weight off to avoid having to redo the process.

To best keep from regaining the pounds lost from your weight loss transformation, people in their 30s and 40s can adopt an 80/20 strategy to allow them to indulge with the foods they love with moderation. The difference between a weight loss diet plan versus a weight loss maintenance diet is that the maintenance diet is no longer seeking a caloric deficit. In other words, you can allow yourself to eat a bit more, but you still have to remember, keep the indulgences in moderation.

For more information on healthy weight loss and weight loss maintenance, schedule a free introductory consultation with Coach Julio at www.365physique.com/bookonline.