Should you exercise through an injury? What’s the best way to build muscle, lose weight, and stay healthy after 50? In this insightful interview, Jill Brown, founder of Jill Brown Fitness and internationally recognized fitness expert, joins Jeffrey Snyder to explain how exercise, nutrition, and healthy lifestyle habits can help you recover from injuries, preserve muscle, improve mobility, and increase longevity as you age.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

We’re gonna welcome back to the program someone I refer to as the queen of fitness. She is Jill Brown.

She is the founder, the guns are out, the founder of Jill Brown Fitness. Jill, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks, you too, Jeffrey.

And the guns look good. I, you know, and a completely just out from the outside looking in, they look wonderful. So you clearly are exercising and you do a good job.

You know, Jill, I was remarking to you and it’s great to have you as always. And I love that you’re able to spend a little bit of time with us. But I was sharing, you know, I’ve got some creaks.

I’m getting up there in age. I got some creaks. I work out every day.

Sometimes I kind of contemplate whether or not I should work out if I have some injuries. So what’s a good rule of thumb if you’re training, should you train through injury?

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

Well, the answer is if you don’t use it, you lose it. So that goes with muscle. That goes with your mobility.

That goes with your flexibility. That goes with your agility. That’s like your speed to be able to like correct yourself from a fall.

And I have even more injuries than you. I’m a few years your senior. Over my life, I was not blessed with the genetic lucky sperm bank.

I was born with a spine condition and a hip condition that needed a couple of surgeries. So I had my hip replaced at your age of 54. I had three spine surgeries starting in my 30s, two in my neck, one in my back.

Then I just had a shoulder surgery, a wrist surgery a few years ago, and then my third spine surgery. And I had my hip replaced, like I said. So I’ve been through more than most people.

The shoulder surgery was major. Well, they were all major. But I keep training through them.

Here’s the thing. If you have what most people don’t know, and if anybody takes anything away from this, you have to know something that is called the cross-education or the cross-neuronal effect. If your right shoulder hurts or your left hip hurts or your right knee hurts, you have three other appendages that you should be working.

So even if you normally swim but your shoulder hurts, then you can be doing pedaling with your legs or lifting with your legs. You get what I’m saying. If your legs are down, you can be doing upper body and abdominal exercises or exercises where you’re seated, like machines at a gym where you don’t have to put your body weight or full pressure on the knee or the hip, for example.

When you have one side injured, I kept working the other side. So that happened with my hip. That happened with this arm.

That happened with my wrist. You work the other side, you will lose less muscle during your time that that arm or leg is down. So it’s in a cast or it just needs to rest.

You work the other side, you’re gonna lose less muscle. People don’t realize this, but your brain splits off from the same spot. It’s coming from one place and it’s going to two different sides of your body.

It is still going to send a message to the other injured side to lose less. If you do nothing because you can’t run and you normally run, you can’t swim and you normally swim, you can’t lift weights, you normally lift weights, whatever it is. If you don’t do anything, you’re gonna lose muscle much, much faster.

At our ages, it takes about, I’m making this number up, but it is somewhere in the neighborhood of four times longer to rebuild that, depending on your age, sex and activity level previous. So it’s gonna take you much longer. If it takes you three weeks when you’re in your 30s to put back a pound of muscle, it’s gonna take you like six to eight weeks in your 50s and 60s to put back that same amount of muscle, give or take, there’s a few other nuances.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So do you go, so let’s just say, I’ve got a tennis elbow right now. I had it in my left, it healed. Now, because of rowing, I’ve got it in my right side over here, this is my right.

Do you still go balls to the wall? Do you go hard in terms of your training so you maintain the cardio? Let’s just say that I’m not gonna row anymore, but I’m gonna walk.

So do I just do, work my lower appendages and maybe do something with my left arm? Because right now, this isn’t a lot of pain.

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

Yeah, so we’re talking about intensity. When it comes to cardio, whatever kind of cardio you can do, the older we get, this is like gonna be, again, something, the cross neuronal effect is counterintuitive. And then what I’m about to tell you is also counterintuitive.

But the older we get, the more we need to do even short bouts of high intensity of whatever it is you can do. So if you’re lifting weights, you might not be able to lift heavy, but you should be lifting quickly or you should be lifting to a lot of fatigue in that muscle, like you should not stop when it’s still easy or comfortable. You wanna get uncomfortable.

If you’re doing cardio, you definitely wanna be doing intervals, not every day, but I recommend minimum once, if not two, maybe three times a week at the very most, and here’s why. Everyone’s heard about NAD and mitochondria. You hear about this on social media all the time.

We’re losing NAD as we get older, true. We’re losing our mitochondria as we get older. Yes, where does your mitochondria live the most?

The most mitochondria, which are the organelles in the cell that are the engine that create energy. So one reason why we have less energy with age is because we have less mitochondria, because we’re losing muscle. The majority of your mitochondria lives in your muscles, and you build more mitochondria by lifting weights or doing high-intensity cardio.

So you don’t have to do a ton of it. Like, if you just have 10 minutes, do like three of those minutes hard. If you’re doing a 10-minute walk, go three minutes or one minute at a time, three times throughout a 10-minute walk at just where you get breathless.

That’s a high-intensity interval. You’re out of breath, someone’s talking to you, you go, if that happens to you three times, you’re good.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So what about, you know, I guess, you read some of the general press, the media, the walking, you talked about this before, but the brisk walking. Can you do walking several times a day, as an example, maybe for 30, 45 minutes to get the heart rate up, also to stretch the legs, but do you have to supplement that with maybe some stretching? Like I said, my hips are really tight.

I have kind of like, you know, my hips don’t really rotate. Too much information for you in the audience. But in all seriousness, should you, you know, do you have to supplement in some stretching as well?

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

Yeah, like I said, if you don’t use it, you lose it. So if you’re not working, you might, if you’ve never been flexible, you still wanna maintain what you had in your 30s or 40s as much as possible. If you’ve had some surgeries, there’s gonna be some limitations.

So for example, if you’ve had a hip surgery like I did, I can’t stretch quite to the extent, like I can’t do as much movement for safety. I mean, I can, but you shouldn’t. So if there’s an area that has been surgically impacted, you can listen to your doctor and maybe don’t stretch as much as far, I should say, to the extent that you did when you were younger.

But if you wanna maintain it, if you don’t use it, you lose it. So you’ve gotta work on your mobility. Same thing with agility.

Agility is things like doing some fast footwork or hopping up and down on one leg or some side to side jumps now and again if you can. But hopping on one leg is great. Even if you just do like five or 10 hops on one side, even if you have to hold on to something, it helps your brain create faster movements.

You can catch yourself when you fall. Also balance. Our balance gets worse as we get older.

A lot of things get better with age, like fine wine and cheese, but your balance does not get better with age.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah, let me ask you about, last time you were on, we talked about GLP-1s and we also talked about diet, the importance of protein in your diet, right? Improving the amount of protein. Let’s talk about what you should do in terms of diet.

Do you still need to cut out the, is it really the equation of food in versus food you burn? Is it that simple? Or do you need to maybe parse out or eliminate things like rice and some of the complex carbs?

Because let’s face it, even though if we do movement, I’m not as athletic as I used to be. I’m willing to admit that.

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

Okay, here’s the facts. Yes, the basics is true. It is the first law of thermodynamics.

The human body cannot override that law, which says the energy cannot be created or destroyed in a chemical reaction. All we can do is convert it. Our bodies were designed to convert energy from food into things that our body can use.

So if you take in too much energy, too much food, and you don’t burn that food, your body keeps it inside and that’s how we gain weight. We gain weight from taking in more calories than we burn. Now, it gets a lot more complicated because there’s a difference between types of calories.

There’s a difference between how you actually break them down, how much you absorb. For example, if you eat a handful of raw nuts that says 170 calories on the package, you eat them, by the time you digest them, you’ve only digested 129 calories of those nuts. So the labels are a little bit off.

Every type of calorie, for example, fast food, you’re gonna absorb almost every single one of those calories. Raw food, whole foods, proteins, you’re gonna absorb less of those calories. So it gets very nuanced, but the answer is the more calories that come into your body that you don’t burn get stored as fat, and then there’s a lot more nuance to that.

I can get way into the weeds, but I won’t waste your time with all of the biochemistry. But then you ask specifically about carbohydrates. You cut down on rice.

The cold hard fact is, as we get older, we need less calories because we’re losing muscle. Like I said, we have less energy because we have less muscle on our bodies, right? So we just don’t need to take in as much energy through food, and most people make this mistake.

I hear this every time I go into a TikTok Live Q&A. People say, I haven’t changed a thing. I’m still doing the same workouts and eating the same as I did in my 30s, and now that I’m in my 40s or 50s, I’m gaining weight, and I’m doing everything the same.

And I’m like, that’s the problem. Your body’s changing, and so you need to be changing too. We just don’t need as many calories the older we get, period.

Then I was gonna say something else about protein. We do need more protein as we get older. So yes, you can cut out things that don’t give you a whole lot of benefit.

Like rice doesn’t have a whole lot of benefit other than just some quick energy.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

It’s good, it’s good.

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

That’s important. If you love it, then you’re gonna keep it in your diet. The first thing I do with a client is I ask for your non-negotiables.

Tell me the things that we absolutely cannot cut out. For me, it’s pizza, sushi, and French fries. No one’s taking that out of my diet.

Some people, it might be a Heineken beer. Whatever it is, you can keep in the things that you love, but you’ve taken too many calories of them. They’re gonna get stored as fat.

Protein is a bit of an outlier. But here’s the other thing. People say, well, should I change my diet?

Should I go keto and eat mostly like meats and fats and cut out all of those starchy carbs? Or should I be plant-based vegan and have that health halo of everything that I eat is organic and it’s all plant-based and I’m not hurting any animals? You can lose weight either way.

Somebody can be on an almost all-carb diet, like a plant-based vegan, and lose weight. Somebody can be on an all mostly fat and protein diet, like a keto diet, and still lose weight. The answer came down to how many of those calories did you absorb?

Did you absorb more calories than your body burned? Then you’re gonna gain weight whether you’re doing plant-based or keto. Did your body burn more than you absorbed?

You’re gonna lose weight whether you’re doing plant-based or keto.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

I’ve got about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you about aging and longevity. There’s a lot of talk about quote-unquote solving aging. Right now, people are living, unless they have a catastrophic event or something happens where they get a disease, they’re living into their 90s.

Do you think we eventually solve the, I mean, I don’t think we’re gonna live forever, but do you think we’ll be able to extend life into the triple digits?

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

Well, having an uncle that lived to 102, even with diabetes, yeah, with the right care you can, did he eat the healthiest diet? No. What did my uncle do?

The only one in my family who lived to over 100, he had insulin-dependent diabetes. So rarely do people make it to anywhere near 100 with that. How did he do it?

He exercised 90 minutes a day. So the number one longevity drug that we know about, whether it’s not NAD injections, not red light therapy, not all the sauna in the world, none of those are going to work according to all of the research that we have as much as exercising, as much as you can. And again, not overdoing it to where you get injured and then you’re gonna be down for the count for a while or get yourself sick because you’re overtraining, but the more you exercise consistently and regularly, the longer you will live, hard stop.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

You know, it sounds really easy, but, and it’s just about doing, executing, and I think that’s where people probably, Jill, fall short. Jill, we’re gonna leave it there, but look, people can certainly follow you on Instagram. They can follow you on TikTok, et cetera.

You’re a treasure trove of information. And I love that you brought in the laws of thermodynamics. I think that’s great that we were able to somehow, that’s the first time I’ve ever done that on the show.

So that was great. Great to see you as always. Thanks so much for stopping by.

We look forward to having you back again very soon.

Jill Brown, @JillBrownFitness

All right, thanks, Jeffrey.