The basics on how to enhance your lean muscle mass through strength training and protein consumption.
Man, I used to hate hearing personal trainers tell their clients, “Make sure you eat your protein.” It sounded gimmicky, and of course it always came from some super-muscled guy who had never in his life worried about excess calories going straight to his hips.
For a long time, I felt conflicted about giving my clients any kind of dietary recommendations. Nutrition advice always felt out of my scope of practice especially because I didn’t have an intimate understanding of the link between muscle growth and protein consumption.
Additionally, in states like New York, you need a master’s degree and have to pass a hardcore licensing exam before having the credentials to legitimately hand out nutrition advice. Those practitioners had to study biochemistry for years, and are therefore deserving of their hard earned “nutritionist” title.
And now, I’m changing with the times and current research. A long-winded story begins…stick with me.
Over the last decade, a growing movement of female clinicians has been building their research and recommendations with updated science on women’s physiology. These doctors are working to improve the quality of life and health of perimenopausal and menopausal women by providing actionable nutrition advice, exercise programming, and medical information to best advocate for themselves and offset the negative symptoms of decreasing hormone levels.
Recently I listened to this podcast episode of Unpaused, hosted by Dr. Mary Claire Haver, featuring Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, a board certified family physician and a big advocate for “building muscle, managing protein intake, and training through perimenopause and menopause”.
Drawing from her nutrition expertise and decades of research, Dr. Lyon goes into detail around the importance of muscle as a physiological organ, and how the menopausal decline in female hormones negatively impacts a woman’s lean muscle mass.
Lyon drops the knowledge bomb around the two powerful tools women have to combat the age-related loss of lean muscle:
Strength training
Eating enough protein.
Simply put, the decline in estrogen that comes with perimenopause and menopause makes the female body more catabolic – a state of metabolic breakdown that is a normal phenomenon but can be particularly destructive when chronic and without the right kind of interference. This is one reason why women in their 40s and beyond have higher rates of musculoskeletal injuries and fractures compared to younger women.
Some breakdown is good. Exercise, for example, provides mechanical stress to muscle tissue, tendons, and bones, resulting in the adaptive regrowth of these tissues, making them stronger and more resilient. BUT adaptive regrowth requires the right conditions for a beneficial outcome.
In order for a catabolic reaction to have the potential to benefit the body, there has to be a subsequent anabolic response, which is when cellular repair, regeneration, and recovery take place.
Enter the facts about the necessity for protein. Complete proteins (e.g., beef, chicken, fish, pork, etc.) are composed of 9 essential amino acids. When ingested, not only do these amino acids provide the actual components for protein synthesis (aka muscle growth), they also initiate the signaling for muscle repair and lean muscle preservation (1.).
The moral of the strength training story is that consuming protein is a requirement to reap the total benefits of the exercise.
Going back to what we know about women being in a catabolic state; my biggest takeaway from this podcast was that just eating enough protein alone has the potential to bring the female body out of breakdown mode and into regrowth.
Dr. Lyon quotes a study that shows that decreasing dietary carbohydrates and consuming more protein (125 grams a day!) can change female body composition, increasing lean muscle mass and decreasing total body fat (2.). The women in this study were between the ages of 45 and 55.
You guys, this means that eating more protein alone has the potential to change your body composition to more muscle and less fat…mic drop.
The data on protein consumption is so robust that the current dietary guidelines (updated in 2025) for protein recommendations are now .54 to .73 grams of protein per pound of body weight, per day. That means if you are 130 pounds, you should be eating around 70.2 to 94.9 grams of protein daily, with the higher range being optimal.
Since digesting all of this information I hear myself saying to my female clients “make sure to eat your protein”. Turns out the meat heads knew what they were talking about, and I’m swallowing my judgment with a side of chicken. If you were to prioritize two things in the fight against muscle loss they would be getting 2-3 days a week of strength training and eating as close to 100 grams of protein a day as possible.
Lucky for us, we live in a time where more is more when it comes to muscle, strength is beautiful, and age is just a number.
If you’re in need of more muscle and strength and aren’t sure what makes a balanced workout, I’m your girl.
To schedule your free 20 minute consultation email lexyrose@stretch.works and let’s get you scheduled. Click here to learn more about my services and what might be right for you.