10,000 Steps a Day Not Working? What to Add After 40

Nikkiey: If you're a woman over 40, hitting 10,000 steps a day, and the scale just won't move, you are not broken and you are not lazy. You're just missing one half of the equation. My name is Nikkiey Stott, and after coaching over 100,000 women in their 40s, their 50s and their 60s, I can tell you that walking is one of the best things that you can do for your body. Your doctor is not wrong there. But for fat loss after 40, it was never meant to carry the whole load, and nobody told you that.

So in this video, I'm going to show you where the 10,000-step number actually came from, what is happening inside of your body after 40 that walking alone can't fix, and the four-pillar framework that my clients add to their routine to actually start dropping the fat again. So let's get into it.

Before I show you what your body really needs, you have to know where that number, the 10,000-step framework, came from, because it'll reframe everything for you. It didn't come from a doctor or a researcher. It was a marketing campaign from 1965 in Japan.

Now, I actually only learned this not too long ago, and my first reaction was, interesting. Are you kidding me? A pedometer brand in 1965 needed a catchy number to sell a product, and 60 years later, women are still chasing it on their Apple Watch like it's a piece of medical advice. This is wild to me.

But here's the thing. Walking every day is generally a very good habit. The problem was never walking. The problem is that a step count isn't an overall fat loss strategy. It was a product marketing tagline, and somewhere along the way, it became this big piece of advice for every woman to follow. And when women follow this type of advice and they're not getting the results they think they're going to get, almost every time it's the same thing that I hear: "Well, since I'm not getting the results from walking, I must just have a slow metabolism, or my body just doesn't respond." They are blaming themselves for a strategy that was never designed to do what they needed it to do.

So if walking is good, but it's not enough on its own, what is your body actually doing after 40 that requires more of you? Three things are going on. And once you see them, I hope the whole picture is going to snap into place for you. These three things can't be fixed by walking alone, but they can absolutely be addressed once you know what you're dealing with.

Reason number one is muscle loss. After 40, women naturally lose between 3% and 8% of their muscle every single decade if they are not deliberately doing resistance training or strength training. And that has a massive impact on your body. Ladies, your muscle is your metabolism. It is the engine that determines how many calories your body burns at rest. When you lose it year over year, your resting metabolic rate drops with it, meaning your body needs less and less to maintain, which is exactly why the scale stops moving even when nothing in your diet has changed.

Walking does not challenge muscle enough to preserve it. You need resistance. You need the load that you get from strength training. That is the only signal that tells your body to hold on to the muscle.

Reason number two is cortisol, your stress hormone. And this one is sneaky. It's a hot word in the fitness industry. In perimenopause and menopause, your estrogen declines, and one of estrogen's jobs was buffering your cortisol response. So when estrogen drops, cortisol runs hotter as a baseline. That elevated cortisol is then what drives fat storage right around the midsection.

And here is where walking falls short. It is not making your cortisol worse, but it is also not doing anything to bring it down. Walking does not trigger the hormonal response that actually helps regulate cortisol over time. Lifting does. Resistance training lowers your cortisol long term, it builds muscle that supports your metabolism, and it sends a completely different signal to your body than steady-state movement does.

We've had women in WarriorBabe walking two hours a day and still gaining belly fat. Not because the walking was the villain, but because it was never addressing the real driver. Once we added lifting and strength training, things started to shift.

The third reason is hormones, specifically the ones that drive body recomposition, and walking doesn't trigger them. When you pick up a heavy weight, your body releases growth hormone and testosterone, both of which are already declining after 40, and both of which are directly responsible for changing your body composition. Walking does not trigger that response. Body recomposition, in plain English, means losing body fat and building muscle at the same time. And that only happens when your body is under enough tension to demand that adaptation. That is going to come from strength training.

So let me pull all three of these together for you. You're losing muscle every year. Your cortisol is working against you. Your hormones aren't getting the signal that they need. And walking alone was never equipped to address any of that. That's not a character flaw. That's just an incomplete strategy, and it's fixable.

Take Amy, for example. She is a WarriorBabe who is over 40. When she first came to us, she was having joint pain from Achilles tendonitis, and knee arthritis had shut down everything that she used to do to stay in shape. She wasn't lazy. She wasn't unmotivated. She just needed a system built around where her body actually was, not where it used to be. She didn't spend hours in the gym. She didn't starve herself. She built the complete overall strategy: movement that she could actually sustain, doing both lifting and walking, nutrition that dialed in her hormones, and real recovery. And she dropped from a size 10-12 to a size 4-6. She got back to her school weight, and her menopause symptoms were significantly reduced. Her medications were even reduced or eliminated almost entirely.

Now what I want to do is show you the framework that got Amy those types of results. So if walking is one piece, what are the others? This is the complete framework, the complete picture, and walking still has a role in it. It's just not the lead one. Walking is good for you, let me just say that. But there are other things that need to be put with it to complete the picture.

Pillar number one in this framework is strength training, three to four times per week. This is the non-negotiable foundation that everything else gets built on, especially for women over 40. It is the foundation because it is the only thing that addresses all three of the reasons walking stopped working. It builds muscle. It triggers the right hormonal response. And when it's done correctly, it actually manages your cortisol better than cardio will.

So inside of WarriorBabe, when you work with one of our coaches in our VIP program, if you are a beginner to strength training, we will do beginner exercises like hip thrusts and dumbbell rows, compound movements that work multiple muscle groups at once. And to the women worried about getting bulky, hear me out. You will not. You do not have the testosterone levels for that. What you will get is lean, defined and strong.

Pillar number two is NEAT, which means non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This is all the movement that you do outside of your structured workouts. This is where walking lives, and this is where it generally shines the best. NEAT is all the movement outside of lifting, like walking, taking the stairs, moving around your house, cooking dinner. It absolutely counts and it adds up.

Then, adding walking after meals specifically is one of the most powerful blood sugar tools available to women in perimenopause and menopause, because it clears glucose from the bloodstream before insulin has to do the heavy lifting. My recommendation is about 15 to 20 minutes after your largest meals of the day, most importantly after dinner. That is intentional, purposeful walking. That is different from chasing a number on your wrist all day.

Pillar number three is strategic conditioning. This is what most women either skip completely or do way too much of. When it's done right, it works with your body. Done wrong, it puts more cortisol on a system that's already overloaded. What I mean by this, in short, is intense bursts of effort. Not 45 minutes of HIIT on an elliptical or some type of HIIT workout. Think 15 minutes of circuits that get your heart rate up and bring it back down, like sprint intervals. That kind of work spikes cortisol the way that it's supposed to: acutely, with a clear endpoint, and then it drops back down.

Pillar number four is nutrition, and in my opinion, one of the most important ones. I'm going to keep nutrition high level in this video because I feel like it needs a whole video of its own. But you cannot build a complete fat loss strategy without it. The number one mistake that I see is under-eating, and under-eating protein. Women are eating what feels like a healthy amount and landing at 60 to 70 grams a day when they need closer to one gram per pound of body weight. You cannot walk your way out of a nutrition problem, and you cannot lift your way out of one either. The training and the food have to work together. That is the whole foundation of the macro method inside of WarriorBabe.

So those are the four pillars of this framework. But the question I get almost every single time is, "Nikkiey, what does that actually look like in a week, and how can I apply it?" So I'm going to show you.

This is what it looks like in a weekly structure: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. For strength training days, I would put Monday, strength train; Tuesday, strength train; Wednesday, rest; Thursday, strength train; Friday, strength train; Saturday and Sunday, rest.

Then for the conditioning elements: for me, this would look like a push day, a leg day, a pull day and a leg day, right? So on my push and pull days, I'm going to do conditioning, which is sprint interval training, SIT. And then on Thursday is when I would do another round of this conditioning, sprint interval training.

For the post-meal walks that I was talking about, I would put them on five out of seven days of the week. And I would pick whatever days work best for you, when you feel like, man, that was a heavy meal for dinner, let's rally up the troops, the family, and get outside and go for a walk. So I'm just going to put it as post-meal walk on Monday and Tuesday. Actually, let me rewind here. We have conditioning on this day, so I'm going to leave that one out. Post-meal walk on Tuesday, post-meal walk on Wednesday. But again, work this around the way that you want to work it around for you.

I'm also looking at it and thinking, okay, strength training, conditioning, I don't know that I want to do a post-meal walk afterwards because I've already done a lot. But this is just how I would plan it out. And then post-meal walk, post-meal walk, at least five out of seven days, like I said.

And to anybody looking at this thinking, man, I just don't have the time, I can't make that happen, I'm going to tell you this: you have the time. I've seen over 20,000 women successfully implement this type of structure into their day, whether it's four days of training or three days of training, and they get incredible results. So instead of saying, "I don't have enough time," tell yourself right now, "I'm just not making it a priority." Maybe that's because you haven't laid it out like this, and it seems kind of all over the place in your head. So take this type of structure and implement it after you're done watching this video.

I'm also going to leave this mistake here, because you're going to go and try to implement this, and you're going to realize that on some of these days you're going to have to move things around, and that's okay. You don't have to be perfect. Be willing to adjust things as you go.

Now, there are even more objections that I hear when it comes to this overall concept. One that I hear is, "My doctor told me to walk more." Listen, your doctor is not wrong. Walking is genuinely great for cardiovascular health, for your joint mobility, for your blood sugar and stress. It is overall amazing in that regard. I'm not arguing with that. What I am saying is that walking was never a complete fat loss strategy for women whose hormones have shifted. Those are two different conversations. And most doctors are not trained in the body composition side of this.

Another one that I hear is, "Cardio burns more calories than lifting does." You're not wrong either. Per session, maybe slightly, yes, while you're doing the activity. But muscle burns calories 24 hours a day just by existing. A woman who builds five pounds of muscle over a year is burning meaningfully more at rest every single day, including while she sleeps. The math of that compounds in a way that no amount of cardio ever could.

And the last one that I hear a lot, and it breaks my heart, is, "I'm too old or too out of shape to lift weights. I can't start now." The oldest client that I have worked with us in her late 70s, and she deadlifted for the first time at that age. Resistance training is one of the only forms of exercise that scales to literally every level. You start where you are. We meet you where you're at, and then you progress from there. I have never found a WarriorBabe who was too far gone. Not once. You haven't missed your window. You are not too old. Change that narrative in your mind. You are not too far gone. Trust me. I will believe in you more than you believe in yourself right now. So just take that for what it is.

Now, here's what I want you to take from this video. Walking is not the problem. Your body is not broken. Your metabolism is not finished. It's not completely over and done with. The advice that you've been given was just incomplete. You were handed one piece of a four-part strategy and told it was enough. It wasn't, and it's not your fault. But the four pillars that I just shared with you are what a complete plan actually looks like for a woman in her 40s, her 50s, her 60s. And walking is still in there. It just finally has the support around it that was always missing.

So if you are somebody aiming to hit 10k steps a day, and you're like, I can't finish my day without hitting 10k steps, stop, and just focus on hitting 8k to 10k, falling in that range, and implementing this type of structure into it. Naturally, by implementing this and just having normal lifestyle activities in your day, you will.

If you are ready to build that full strategy around your body, we can do this for you inside of WarriorBabe, including your hormones and everything in that category. Click the link to work with my team in the description below. Guys, thank you for watching. Go put this into effect, and I'll see you in the next video.