Hi —

October in Whitestone is the best training weather of the year.

Use it.

Over the last year or so, a number of you have started on one of the newer weight-loss medications — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, whichever one your doctor landed on. Most of you haven't mentioned it, which is completely your business.

I'm not bringing it up to have an opinion about it. I don't have one. That's between you and your doctor, and for a lot of people these drugs have done something that twenty years of effort couldn't.

I'm bringing it up because there's one piece of this that lands squarely in my department, and I'd rather you hear it from me.

When weight comes off on these medications, it doesn't all come off as fat. In the big trials, roughly a quarter to a third of the total weight lost was lean tissue — muscle. That's not a scandal, by the way. The same thing happens with any fast weight loss, dieting included. It's just how the body sheds mass when it's short on calories.

Here's the part that matters for us specifically. That ratio appears to get worse with age. Researchers call it anabolic resistance: past about fifty, your muscle responds more sluggishly to the signals telling it to stick around and rebuild. So the same medication and the same twenty pounds off costs a 62-year-old more muscle than it costs a 32-year-old.

And muscle is the thing we've spent all this time building, because muscle is what gets you off the floor, up the stairs, and through your seventies on your own terms.

The good news is genuinely good. This is one of the few problems in health where the fix is well established and entirely in your hands. The American College of Sports Medicine made "exercise for weight management" its third-biggest trend for 2026 — its highest ranking ever — largely because of these drugs. Their summary is blunt: people who keep training while on the medication preserve meaningfully more lean mass, and hold onto their fat loss better after they stop.

Translated: the shot handles your appetite. Your job is to give your body a reason to keep the muscle. That reason is lifting something heavy enough to matter, two to three times a week, and eating enough protein to build with.

Your one thing this week

If you're on one of these medications, tell me. Just say it — before a session, in a text, however you like. Not for the record, and not so I can ask you about it every week. I need to know so I can do two things.

One, hold your load steady. The instinct when you're eating less and the scale is moving is to go lighter. That is exactly backwards. The weight on the bar is the signal that keeps the muscle.

Two, talk honestly about protein, which is the harder half. These drugs work by taking your appetite away, and protein is the first thing to go when nothing sounds good. The research target for someone losing weight on one of these is roughly 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight a day — for a 170-pound person, about 95 to 125 grams, spread across the day rather than crammed into dinner. That is a lot of food when you're not hungry. There are ways to make it manageable. We'll find yours.

And if you're not on one of these medications, the same two levers apply to you anyway. Keep the load. Eat the protein. Nothing new there — it's just louder when there's a drug speeding up the clock.

Reply and tell me where you're at. Or don't reply, and just come in Tuesday. Either one works.

— Nino

Sage Personal Training
Whitestone, Queens

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