73. "Am I Too Old?" The Question That Breaks My Heart

A gym member asks if she is too old to deadlift, and we unpack why that belief is so common and so wrong. I share four practical steps to start lifting safely, build confidence, and track real progress.

• the “too old” myth and how social media fuels it 
• why muscles respond to training at any age and what hypertrophy means 
• how fitness marketing sells insecurity and fake body labels 
• why the deadlift is functional and confidence building 
• what actually gets in the way: coaching gaps, too much too soon, fear, mobility needs 
• four action steps
• the deeper reason strength matters:

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Transcript

Why Age Myths Stick

Marketing That Sells Insecurity

Why Deadlifts Build Confidence

Real Barriers And Beginner Mindset

Four Steps To Start Lifting

Fear Reframed And Tracking Progress

Strength After Trauma And Why It Matters

Share The Episode And Send Messages

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Unbreakable Mind and Body Podcast. I am your host, Tiana Gonzalez, a multi-passionate creative, storyteller, and entrepreneur with a fierce love for movement. This is our space for powerful stories and actionable strategies to help you build mental resilience and elevate your self-care practice. Together, we will unlock the tools that you need to create an unbreakable mind and body. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Tiana, and on this episode, I'm going to share a story with you about a conversation that I had recently with a member at the gym where I work in person. Now, we're going to keep coming back to this story, but the main takeaway is that she asked me about age and if she was too old to start doing something for her body, for her health, for her longevity. And by the end of this episode, you'll walk away with four things that you can do immediately. If you are in a similar situation where maybe you think it might be too late for you, or you're a little too old to learn something. I will tell you, it's never too late to start. And these four tips are going to help you get organized, have a strategy, and an easy way to implement so that you can start to lift and start to feel better in your own skin. So this woman approached me in the gym last week. I have no idea how old she is. Maybe she's in her mid-40s. And she says to me, Am I too old to start deadlifting? And I had to pause for a second because I could tell that that question came from something she had heard. Maybe something she saw on social media or something that she heard people talking about in a class or on the fitness floor. And I'm here to say it right now. If that is a belief that maybe you carry about something that you want to do, you're not too old. You're exactly the right age, you're in the right place, and it is the right time. Now, this isn't the first time that someone asked me if it was too late for them or if they're too old to start lifting to see any sort of measurable gains and to feel any sort of positive impact. And I'm sure it won't be the last. Because due to the age of information in which we live in, it's easy to get caught up in a rabbit hole of information on pretty much any topic. And so if you start to watch a few pieces of content on any platform that have to do with strength training or strength training for women, or what lifting weights can do for women, there is no limit to how much information is out there. But it can be very confusing, it can be incredibly disheartening, and it could be discouraging for someone who is just looking to get started and make even just a small impact or a fraction of a gain and not necessarily compete in a powerlifting meet or to create a social media account where they get a ton of followers that are just based on looking at them work out. But really, the people, the women specifically, who are looking to feel better in their own skin, it can be very overwhelming and very confusing. And I feel like there are a group of women who believe that they've missed their chance or they've missed their window or it's too late for them, or perhaps that their body is past its prime, that maybe they should have started doing this 20 years ago, but now that they're in their 40s, 50s, 60s, it's too late. And that's just not true. It's possible to make a lasting change, it's possible to catalyze muscle and to grow it. We call that muscular hypertrophy. And it doesn't matter how old you are. Are there things that you need to consider that you should take into account depending on where you're at? Yes, absolutely. But the idea that you've missed the boat is absolute hogwash. Now, I am very lucky. I grew up with very physically active parents. My dad was a karate instructor, he had his own dojo, my mom was a dancer, and after a few years of us living with her, I don't know if you guys know this. I've talked about it in previous episodes, but I did switch households. So I moved in with my mom and my stepdad full-time around the age of 12. And it wasn't too long after that that my mom left her job. She used to work at Macy's and Herald Square in the cosmetics department, and she became a group fitness instructor and a personal trainer. And this was in the early 90s, way back in the day. My mom was so ahead of her time. So I have an advantage because I started young. I saw these female physiques from magazines, from fitness books, from videos that my mom was collecting that she would sometimes do in our living room. I was seeing women go to the gym and exercise, not only in classes, but also lifting weights. And I was introduced to it so young. I never really considered if there was some sort of cutoff or if there was an age where it might be too late for someone, because that idea just was not something that ever crossed my mind. In fact, it sounds insane to me even now. So considering that that was back in the 90s, and here we are in 2026, and I'm still having to have this conversation with people, you can only imagine how frustrating it could be for me. The fitness industry sells insecurity. They sell this idea that youth is strength. They sell this idea that you have to look a certain aesthetic. We're even in this age of people talking about like a Pilates body or a bar body. Um those things are not real. That's marketing terminology. This idea that you are going to look a specific way solely because of the activities that you participate in, and don't consider your biology, your genetic predisposition English, your genetic predispositions, any um risk factors or health risk factors that run in your family, what your lifestyle looks like. Those things are all incredibly important. But here is the most amazing thing: your muscles respond to stimulus at any age, and they respond to all kinds of stimulus. So you could mix in Pilates and bar and group classes and running and lifting weights. And even within lifting weights, there are so many different ways that you can do that. You can focus on a powerlifting type of training. You could think about preparing for a bodybuilding show, even if you don't get on stage, but working out in that manner where your focus is on muscular hypertrophy, which is to grow your muscles. You could also think about doing something like functional fitness, where you know, CrossFit is one form of functional fitness where it's mixing all of these different things together, or perhaps training like a Hyrux athlete, which is similar but slightly different from CrossFit, where you have running as well as some other events like uh lunging with a sandbag, pushing and pulling a sled, burpees, and so on and so forth. But here's the thing all of the marketing in the world may lean towards a certain narrative, depending on what it's marketing for. So people who enjoy promoting a certain modality of fitness may discourage you from doing something else. It's kind of like looking at beauty products or hair products. And yeah, there are specific products for anti-aging, there are specific products that are made for oily skin, there are some made for dry skin, there's hair products made for thick, uh coarse hair texture or curly hair, but then there's also products for fine hair or oily hair. So you see where I'm going with this, but the possibilities are endless. And so you have to figure out what's going to actually work for you. My recommendation is to start where you're at. If you're in your 40s, that's okay. If you're in your 50s, that's fine. If you're in your 60s, that's also fine. What you do and how you do it may be slightly different, but ultimately you want to build muscle. And so a deadlift would be an amazing exercise. And this is kind of why I was so taken back when this woman asked me if it was too late for her to start learning how to deadlift, because it's one of the most functional and confidence-building movements that a person can learn. You're literally practicing picking something up off the floor and standing up within. And here's uh a little news flash for you. That's something we do every single day is pick things up off the floor and stand with them. So when you are about to do something like a deadlift, you show up, you get on the platform, you have an intention, you can't fake it or tiptoe around it. You load the bar, you get nice and low, you stand up with it, and when it comes up, your entire body knows that you just did something incredibly powerful. And I've had so many clients tell me that the first time they PR'd their deadlift, and then the next PR, and then the one after that, it changed how they showed up in other areas of their life. Because it just proved that they can do something that they once thought they couldn't do, that their body sort of commanded this inner strength, that their body had been training, that their body had been doing difficult things, that you had been choosing hard things, which prepares you for real life out in the real world. So if you're in your mid-40s and you're just getting started, you have to remember that you're not really starting from zero because you've survived hard things. You've lived a certain amount of time, your body understands certain stimuli, and you're gonna know what you can handle and what you can't, what you need and what you don't. And of course, with the assistance of a professional, that becomes a little bit easier. Not as much guessing in the beginning, not as much doubt in the beginning, because you have someone there who can be outside of you and watch you perform these things and give you encouragement and cue you properly and give you just the right dose. Maybe younger people come to the gym with more enthusiasm or a little less patience. But a woman in her mid-40s, she's gonna understand what consistency actually means. She may not be as enthusiastic, but she has the discipline. She understands that she doesn't have time to waste. She doesn't have time to try all these different things. She wants to do what's going to be the most beneficial for her in the pursuit of learning a specific thing like a deadlift or growing muscle. Now, even in my own social media content, I've talked about why strength training is so important. And then then I've realized everybody knows this stuff. And maybe they don't know all the nitty-gritty and the details, but I don't think the information is what's going to really motivate someone to get up and go join a gym or to get up and hire a trainer or to follow a program. It has to be deeper than that. The inspiration and the motivation at the start has to be something much more powerful than just information, because information alone is not enough. And having something to follow is also not enough, believe it or not. Because guess what? You could go on any website, you can go to AI, you can go to YouTube, you can type in a few things and get a complete workout for free. So why would somebody want to pay for something? Because they need to understand how to implement that information and that program into their existing lifestyle and how to do it in a way that leads them to success and not into overextending themselves or doing too much of the wrong thing and not enough of the right things, or to having an imbalance. See, that's where just getting a workout and following along is simply not enough. So you have to have a beginner mindset, even if you are a little bit older, and recognize that just because you may know how to do something by watching a film or a video or someone showing you pictures how to get from A to B to C, you need to know how it feels in your body on whatever day of the week it is, with whatever footwear you have and whatever clothing you're wearing, and whatever headspace you're in that you showed up to the gym at. You see, that's where the real difference lies. Now, the real obstacles. The real obstacles are gonna be a couple of things. A lack of proper coaching, maybe doing too much too soon, listening to too many people giving you advice, and maybe that inner voice that's telling you, I don't know, maybe I'm too old for this, maybe I should just quit. This is too hard. I don't know if I can keep this up. I don't know what I'm doing. Is this the right weight? And another thing, as we get older, we may need to work on our mobility a lot more than someone 20 years younger than us. That's okay. You may have a history of pain in a certain area of your body or stiffness and tightness. You may be trying to work through hormonal shifts and changes. These are real. So it's not necessarily the age as a barrier, but more specifically where your body's at, what it's been through, and understanding that you have to explain this to someone that you trust and feel safe with a coach, a mentor, a trainer, who can then take all of these things into consideration and then give you the proper plan and then help you execute it. So you see where I'm going with this? So it's not that the age is the excuse or the reason, it's being a little bit more patient in the beginning. It's doing our due diligence in the beginning, it's understanding that there is a lot more information to be exchanged up front so that we can come up with a program or a plan that's going to be highly effective for the specific individual in front of us. I hope that makes sense. So I'm thinking about this woman in the gym, and I'm really hopeful that my words to her were not too harsh because I had suggested to her the first thing she should do is to get a coach, hire a trainer, get a coach for a couple of months. Everyone believes that they can learn something in a couple of weeks. You might be able to learn it, but there is a huge difference between learning it and doing it, and then learning it and implementing it and embodying it. And I know you've heard me talk about this on other episodes before. There's a huge difference there. Even now, thinking about some of the business education that I've gotten over the years, I've invested in mentors and coaches over the last six years. And even now, I will hear a piece of information and it's repetitive. It's something that I've heard before or something that I've learned before, but yet it lands differently now. And the reason for that is because I'm at a different place. And so the lesson didn't change, but how I received it and what I was able to get from it is completely different than let's say five or six years ago, because I'm a different person. So that first thing, get a coach, get a trainer, get somebody that you can meet with on a consistent basis that's gonna hold you accountable and that you're gonna show up for. Someone who can watch your form, give you cues, build your confidence, help you to feel safe, to then take risks, calculated risks. For example, putting a little more weight on the bar the next time you're gonna squat, or maybe trying a mobility exercise that you've only seen people do on YouTube, but you were always scared to try yourself without supervision. Now, the next thing you could do is when you are starting to lift weights, make sure you're using weight that feels like almost too light. And I'm saying this intentionally in the beginning, because we want to make sure that we get the correct movement patterns locked in. And it's not just the movement pattern, but it's also the internal sequence of events, the firing of the various parts of your body internally so that you execute a clean lift from start to finish, so that you know what it's supposed to feel like, so that you can see yourself and feel yourself doing the lift flawlessly. I hired a trainer in 2020 to work with me towards the end of 2020, and we were doing in-person sessions once or twice a month, and then he would write my programs for me. And the primary focus was on my Olympic lifting. So the snatch and the clean and jerk, and these are highly technical lifts, there is a lot of skill involved, and the goal was for me to hit a specific number on the snatch, and then to just see how far I could get with my clean and jerk. And when I tell you that it took me literally years, not weeks, not months, but years. Took me about two years to hit my goal with the snatch. I wanted to be able to snatch 95 pounds and to do it flawlessly and from the floor all the way down into the bottom of the position and stand up. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I apologize. But for my lifters out there, you know exactly what I mean. And there is this amazing weightless moment where the bar is kind of floating in the air and you are moving your body around underneath it. And it took me about two years to get there. Imagine working on one thing for two years over and over and over and over again, undoing bad patterns, breaking old habits, and working through tight areas, stiff areas, getting through your mobility, and then also building strength and courage. And most of the time, this was a remote relationship because I was working out by myself and sending him recordings of my lifts. That was a lot, and it was also a lot of fun. I learned so much about myself through that. But getting back to the action items for you. So the third thing here, I want you to reframe what. Too old really means, and if you're not someone who considers yourself too old, the next time you are about to say, Well, I'm too old for that, stop yourself. Because if you what you mean to say is you're afraid, that's a different statement, and it actually has nothing to do with your age. Fear is just something that your brain is processing, and nine times out of ten, your brain is protecting you, which is why you feel fear in the first place. But fear is a truth, it it means that something's important to you. It means that you're nervous around it. But we're not gonna let that stop us. We're gonna keep going in spite of the fear. Now, the fourth thing is that tracking would be incredibly beneficial here. Not just tracking your metrics, like the number of weight on the bar, the number of pounds, or the dumbbells that you use and what weights they are. Yeah, that's really valuable. You've heard me mention this many times on the show. But what about tracking how you feel? Doing a little check-in with yourself at the end of the week and just taking note. Like, how did you feel each morning of the week when you woke up? How did you sleep? What's your appetite like? How are you managing stress? How do you feel when you go out in the into the public? So I explained to a different person who I met with, a different woman. Um, we were looking at her numbers on the in-body, and I explained to her, like, you know, the amount of pounds of muscle mass that she has on her body worked great, especially for someone who was kind of uh in the beginning stages of strength training. She had always done classes in the past. And when I explained to her, I only had a few pounds more of muscle than her, but I've intentionally put myself through bulks and eaten in a surplus on purpose and lifted extremely heavy on purpose and have tried to get more muscular on purpose. I took my zip-up jacket off. I said, Do you mind if I take my jacket off? I just want you to look at my body for a second. And she said, Okay. And I had a black tank top on and, you know, black tights, plain tights on. And I did a little spin for her and I said, Do I look really muscular and manly to you? And she's like, No, not at all. And I said, I only have about two pounds more of muscle on my body than you. And I push myself incredibly hard in the gym on purpose because I'm never gonna be skinny, and I don't even want to try to be skinny anymore. So I want to be as strong as I possibly can be. And she asked me, why? Why do I want to do that to myself? And when I shared with her the story about how I went through a very serious trauma in 2006, um, one that really changed how I see the world permanently, um it it was just a deliberate choice that I am not going to be weak ever. And I think that because of my strength training and my willingness to push myself and to seek out those challenges and to get stronger intentionally helped me survive this traumatic event in 2006. It was really bad. And I survived it. And it took me a long time to recover. But I'm okay, and I know for a fact that I was able to minimize the damage because of the fact that I was strong and because of the fact that I could fight somebody off of me. But not every woman gets that opportunity because she doesn't either have the skills to try to, you know, fight someone off of her or to get out of a dangerous situation or to evade trouble in the first place, or she doesn't have this the spidey senses like I do, to sense that you know, danger is nearby, or to look over her shoulder when she's walking to her car at night in a dark parking lot, or to be alert, or to be strong enough to wrestle somebody off of you. And lifting weights is not going to necessarily give you all of those skills, but it's going to help you be more robust and to have the strength so that if you find yourself in a dangerous situation, your chances of getting out of it, of surviving it, of evading it are much higher. Now that's my motivation for why I go to the gym most days of the week and why I push myself so hard. And that doesn't necessarily have to be your motivation, but it was very telling as I shared and glossed over some of the details while explaining to her, just like I did right now to you, that I went through something and I never want to find myself in a dangerous situation again, that was enough. And I could see the wheels turning in her head, realizing that, yes, it may sound a little fanatical, but if you're ever found, if you've ever found yourself in a situation like that, or you felt like you were at risk, you're gonna wish that you had certain skill sets. You're gonna wish that you had trained for something, that you had prepared for something. And you hope that you never need it. I mean, that's really the big takeaway. So when I see women in the gym who think maybe they're too old to start doing something, or when I think about that specific woman who asked me if she's too old to start deadlifting, the answer is 100% absolutely not. Here's the thing the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the second best time is today. And that's the same with strength training. You're exactly the right age right now to find out what you're capable of, to go get that strength that you desire. So if you're contemplating it, again, get a coach, invest for the long term to give yourself time to really learn and absorb and test things and then implement and then embody them. To go from guessing every decision out on the floor to just knowing what's next for you and making those calculated decisions on the fly. Starting with weight that's light so that you can perfect your form, reframing how you think about yourself. You're not too old. There's no such thing. And then tracking your progress in more ways than just the strength metrics, but also how you feel day to day, week to week, month to month, how you show up in the world, how you present yourself at work or in meetings or on calls. How do you carry yourself through the world? I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know we got a little deep towards the end, but I'm an open book and I live my life this way because I know that I can help you. I really hope you found this episode helpful. And if you have someone in your life who's questioning if maybe they're too old to start strength training, please send them this episode. Now, as always, check the show notes. And by the way, I know I tell you every week you can send me a text, but now you can also send me a voicemail, and I'll be able to listen to it. And if you have a question for me, that's the best place to send me your questions. So you'll see in the show notes, it'll say, Send me a message. You can do a text message or a voicemail. I will get the message, and then I can answer you anonymously on a future episode. I appreciate your time and attention as always, week after week, showing up here for yourself to better yourself. I'll catch you on the next one.