8 Surprising Benefits of Lifting Weights for Women (It’s Not What You Think) | Mind Pump 2567

One of the fastest growing trends in fitness is women lifting weights. It's exploding and this is a good thing. We've been talking about the benefits of strength training for women for 10 years forever. Today's episode we're going to separate fact from fiction. What does lifting weights do for women? Is it better than other forms of exercise? Should everybody lift weights? Let's go. We're almost uh I feel like we're almost there where this is no longer going to be a hot topic. It really does and I always question the new norm. Is it my little bubble that I'm in that I feel that way or is really the general pop even privy to the the this like where if you asked a random lady on the street who doesn't already go to the gym is she aware of this or have we just done a good job so far of penetrating the fitness community that most women in the fitness community are aware of this now but we haven't quite moved our way out beyond that. What do you think? No this is real. It's a real trend. It's a real trend that's being um measured by Club Business International, by Ursha, by gym owners, gym managers. It's a real trend. Social media you now see uh this is a huge trend. I see it personally but of course that's anecdote but I see it when I go into gyms. It's very different than it was when I first uh trained clients started training clients in gyms in the late 90s. Oh yeah. It's even it's even different than it was 10 years ago when we started the podcast. Oh yeah. I'd like to say that we we've played a role in this but it's it's been it's been a massive shift. So gyms now are changing their footprint. They're putting more they're dedicating more space to free weights and strength training than they ever did before and the fastest growing uh demographic that's interested in strength training are both there's two separate ones that they're seeing women and the older population but generally strength training is growing across the board but historically it was men that were interested in strength training uh and it wasn't women and it definitely wasn't older population but now everybody seems to be more interested but in particular women because a lot of the myths that surrounded strength training have been dispelled yeah and there's enough women now that that strength training that are on social media that is to its benefits that talk about how great it is that women are seeing these examples and going oh I don't need to be afraid of this this is actually a good form of exercise then they try it and of course you know this we train clients for years yeah when you get people's strength training when you get women of strength training they're sold so as soon as they do it for a couple months the right way it's like this is amazing well I think that message is definitely penetrated the general uh public in terms of the value of strength training and you know that they should consider it I think with the emerging new sort of trend that we're seeing that we even discussed on the podcast before was the fact that you know we need to be in a surplus and we need to increase calories we need to be able to feed this muscle growth to happen uh which is something that was always a bit of a reserve because you know the thought going in is I need to lose weight I need to shed body fat I need to do like all these things to reduce calories when in fact you know a lot of times like women getting into building muscle and really building their body up and and you know increasing calories is is what's been beneficial yeah all the things that go along with strength training are growing I mean I want to I want to believe that we played somewhat of a role in this um do you guys think of what other factors have like what else has made this trend shift uh crossfit social media women uh uh the trend of wanting a bigger butt or a rounder butt I think that's yeah all of those played a role right because crossfit you can't do that without calories and strength training yeah I actually think that is an even bigger role than maybe the credit we give it because in the 80s and 90s the coke supermodel was like the look really unhealthy very thin yes super thin no muscle and you just don't hear that anymore from even young girls that are like looking looking at other girls on magazines and and or social media they're pointing to girls that are built yeah they're pointing to girls that do not look like this thin as a rail look and so I even think that and I think what what what comes with that is we've had a shift in culture on what the you know what a woman thinks looks pretty or both men and women for that matter and I think more people are realizing you can't get that body without lifting weights unless you are just genetically born with great muscularity which is very rare especially for a female and we have a lot of these these women that have these great shaped butts and bodies and legs and you just you can't get that through just running and diet you've got to lift weights and so I think that's probably played maybe one of the biggest roles yeah and they're seeing they're seeing examples of it so like female fitness influencers uh now promote the benefits of strength training quite a bit so when you see someone on instagram that looks the way you want to look and they're saying I lift weights you know I get stronger um there's more um you know social proof yeah and the more women you see who lift and the more women who talk about it the more women who are going to do it now that the the the way we've been proponents of strength training since day one like when when I started personal training clients like this was always the primary form of exercise that I use and a majority of my clients were women I mean that's just the way the personal training clientele it's for all trainers tends to skew as you tend to see more women hired personal trainers um the men and you always had to overcome the objections and the fears I'm going to get bulky I'm going to whatever and we'll get to that kind of stuff um but once they did it after it took about two or three months they were sold and it okay this is amazing I feel better I look better and the data all supports this and so I want to what I want to do is I want to sell strength training for women I want to really sell it I want to really talk about the real benefits and what makes it unique because exercising in general is good for you right movement in general is good for you regardless of the style of movement whether it's dancing running swimming biking pilates yoga strength training like if it improves your health you're going to see benefits you're going to probably look better right but what are the unique benefits of strength training versus other forms of exercise so these are the ones that are supported by some data or a lot of data but definitely by our experience training uh lots of clients and also training lots of trainers who train clients remember we've been doing this for over over two decades so here's the first point I think this is a good point to start with which is strength training really does promote a better hormone profile uh in a in a more effective way than other forms of exercise okay so anytime you improve your health and if exercise is a part of that formula you're going to see an improvement in your hormone profile but strength training is unique in that it encourages a youthful hormone profile because of the signal that strength training promotes strength training sends forth a signal that is pro-tissue so one of the primary signals that strength training sends right so all exercise sends a signal to the body that says do more of this more stamina more flexibility more strength whatever the primary signal of strength training is build muscle and get stronger and in order to build muscle muscle is active it's this it's this tissue on your body it's very active it's insulin sensitive in order to do that your body has to organize its hormones in a way to do that so if you were to look at an ideal muscle building hormone profile what you would see is a youthful hormone profile you'd see great insulin sensitivity which by the way the most effective way to improve insulin sensitivity is to simply get stronger and build muscle insulin is very excuse me muscle is very insulin sensitive it's a storage vessel for glycogen which is what comes from carbohydrate consumption or sugar consumption so when you have more places to store it you're gonna you're not gonna respond to it in the same way you're gonna have better blood sugar levels so you're more insulin sensitive you get growth hormone levels that tend to rise that's what happens when you start to build muscle you get as you build muscle you get more androgen receptors okay that's called androgen receptor density so these are the locks that the key of testosterone attaches to to activate and regardless of what your testosterone levels are if i were to to give an example if i were to double your androgen receptor density or double the amount of androgen receptors that you have even with the same testosterone you've now doubled the effectiveness of your testosterone okay because it has twice as many places to dock utilize more of it and no no is that important for women it's just as important for women as is for men there's a myth that testosterone is a male hormone it's not it's a human hormone we just have different ratios but testosterone is just as important for women as is for men and women have the same symptoms that men get when their testosterone is low so they'll have low libido more fat mass less muscle less energy less drive more anxiety more depression when their testosterone is low so building muscle increases the effectiveness of your testosterone and you also get this balancing of estrogen or progesterone as those change throughout your your monthly cycle so strength training it on its own is far more effective at promoting this youthful hormone profile that your body needs to build muscle which is the signal that you send with strength training other forms of exercise simply don't do this as effectively and you could talk to any hormone specialist you talk to any functional medicine practitioner when they're trying to balance out somebody's hormones strength training so long as it's appropriate is what is typically recommended as a primary form of exercise today's program giveaway is maps muscle mommy leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it subscribe to this channel turn on notifications and if you win we'll give you a maps muscle mommy for free also maps muscle mommy 50 off for everybody else because of this episode right now if you're interested go to maps muscle mommy.com and then use the code women 50 for the discount here comes the show and i'm glad you started to go that direction because i was already thinking of like the counter argument for somebody else that like let's say i'm hardcore into pilates or i'm a big runner and basically anything that makes you healthier than what you were before you're doing is going to improve the hormone profile that's right so how would you convince someone like me who let's say is a hardcore pilates person who's already seen the improvement in my hormone profile from doing pilates and i believe that's that my why why should i go switch over to strength training like what what is your argument for why that's better a better hormone profile that's a that is a result of being healthier is great but strength training makes you healthier so you get that effect but it also directly tells the body to create a hormone profile that is pro muscle building we need muscle okay so in other words you're sending a straight direct signal so your hormones don't improve as a byproduct of improved health alone that happens but you're also sending a specific signal direct to the hormones that say we got to build muscle we need a hormone profile that does that in the hormone building profile that builds muscle is the youthful one that you had when you were in your late teens early 20s so for a youthful hormone profile nothing beats strength training it just directly does it best also i mean a lot of those other methods have a lot of repetitive stress and don't have like distinctive rest periods where you know there's a distinctive difference between strength training and cardiovascular training and also to like oxidative stress and you know full recovery you're not gonna so think of it like this sleep is the ultimate balancer of hormones right so that's like your your body's repairing itself it's it's replenishing stores it's it's rebuilding cells and so if you look at that in your training you have to have like these distinctive rest periods in order to then you know send the right signal that this is this is literally i'm trying to get gain muscle and strength and strength is the focus it's not you know mixed signaling with cardiovascular training yeah well let me just to back you up so um strength training you need less of it to produce the result you're looking for than other forms of exercise so to build endurance requires a lot of practice training endurance to build strength uh you don't need to do a lot and so when it comes to stressing the body which i think what you're talking about justin uh strength training tends to be less of a stress on the body because the dose tends to be less that's required now you can overdo strength training you can overdo anything right but appropriate strength training tends to stress the body less than appropriate levels of other but if you're doing it right and you're actually moving forward you have to have adequate rest right so i want to i want to stay here because i really want to drill this point home because i really think that when we think back to all the clients that we train and again primarily female clients the the probably some of the most life-changing stories came from the clients that i my female clients that i got to adopt strength training and one of the reasons why it was so life-changing was because of what you're talking about and a lot of times i they these are clients that did pilates already or did running or they were active they weren't i'm talking about somebody who i got that was obese and then also i got up strength training and i about i'm talking about people that were already active people they were doing other forms of modality and then i got them to strength train and it radically changed massive difference so if you were if i and i know this is putting you on the spot to give me like a generic answer but i again trying to drill this point home because i know i have listeners right now that have a mobility modality of training that they love to do they go to their class they've been comfortable doing that for 10 years it's like you know why do i want to switch over to this kind of training so if you had to score on a scale of one one being terrible ten being the best or awesome uh as far as balancing the whole hormone problem and we look at i'd say probably the top five forms of exercise running swimming uh pilates yoga and strength training maybe top five yeah somewhere around there on there yep how would you score those and compare them so there's always an individual variance it has to be applied appropriately of course okay so i'll say all that first yeah let's let's pretend uh but but if it's if it's applied appropriately and properly for the for the individual uh strength training is in a different universe so you have hormone profiles improve because my health is better and then you have the effect of i'm directly telling my hormones to become youthful because they need to build more muscle it is above and beyond that so you talk to if you talk to any female hormone specialist you can talk to male hormone specialist talk to any female hormone specialist these are doctors that specialize in hormone therapy so they actually put people on hormones they put people women on testosterone they put women on thyroid or they manage the hormone by the way we just had one of the leading experts in menopause and perimenopause on the podcast and one of the first things that she said is like strength training they will all tell you strength prescribed they will all tell you that's the primary form of exercise and walking would be a really close one just for overall activity yeah and in fact what they'll also tell you when you talk to them is many times they tell these women to stop doing the crazy cardio do the crazy circuits so maybe then you would you would score like this and again correct me if i'm wrong here's like all the other ones i named besides strength training would probably hover around somewhere of getting a five or a six yeah and then strength training is 10 that's right like all those you could argue oh swimming could be pretty good for health and pro home because they all the other ones all can make you healthier which then improves your hormone profile but nothing directly impacts let's talk about the like the main hormone um some of the big issues that women will can suffer from like pcos very strong connection between that and insulin resistance okay strength training building muscle directly uh combats insulin resistance better than any other form of exercise look at thyroid build muscle your thyroid becomes more effective thyroid issues are very common with very common yeah and i'm not talking about all the other hormones cortisol like you build some muscle you get a natural you get a much uh a good profile of cortisol starts to develop because of the muscle building process right and then i mentioned that so uh yeah so when it comes to hormone profile in in promoting a youthful hormone profile by the way you this is anecdote okay but we see this in the gyms you can talk to any gym owner gym manager you see the the the women in their 40s 50s and 60s that that that are good at strength training versus the ones 40s 50s 60s that do lots of group classes lots of cardio they look younger the strength training wouldn't look younger because of this hormone profile uh situation which i think leads to your second point correct which is going into the have better skin have better skin and i'm assuming this is a big part of that like because i think one of the number one things a dermatologist would tell somebody who has got really bad skin a lot of times their hormone profile is all over they normally prescribe them things to try and control also this though so here's the other thing so there was a recent study i brought it up on on other episodes where they compared the effects of strength training to other forms of exercise to skin health right the collagen production elasticity right the the the visible lines and wrinkles all that stuff strength training was superior uh because it promoted the rebuilding or the building of the collagen matrix matrices okay now now why is that because all by the way in the study all forms of exercise improve skin right so anytime you improve your health your skin is going to look better okay but strength training it promotes something called muscle protein synthesis or the building of tissue all tissue is uh protein is the the building block of all tissue including your skin so when you're lifting weights and you're sending this direct signal to your muscles to build you're also sending this systemic signal to the rest of your body that says build more everything and so you see stronger bones and you see skin skin uh in the data in the and again we've seen this anecdotally but yes the studies show that strength training promotes the building of skin not just the health of it but the building of skin and so when it comes to skin this is the best form of exercise and again we have the studies to support and you broke it down the way i wanted you to because i feel like so many other forms of exercise use similar arguments on how because getting healthier makes a lot of all these markers improve that's right and so there's an argument to be made about going swimming or going running or doing pilates or doing those things to improve this but it's like it's almost like yes all those things are good and yes all those things make you a healthier but nothing is even on the same level as what strength training is no and i want to be very clear like i'm not trying to discourage somebody to stop doing the form of exercise that they love doing but what i am trying to do is and this is true for most most people or most women that work out they have a set amount of time that they work out three days a week or two days a week or four days a week they don't have all the time in the world they're not going to do 15 different forms of exercise and they're like which one do i pick which one do i pick because they're all whatever i enjoy them all i guess i just want the one that gives me the best results um and many women are are they they move away from strength training because of the the myths that surround it or because they don't know that in comparison to other forms of exercise they're probably gonna get more of what they're looking for right um and that's by far and to that point so this is how i always took a client like that i would never tell my client right and i could never do this with these clients that love pilates love swimming love running one of those things okay stop doing that let me show you improve you what i would do is just give me one day a week give me one day a week of full body strength training let's keep doing your pilates the other two days let's keep doing your running like you're saying and let me show you what one day a week will already for somebody who's already been doing these things that's always how i got him because then they would be like oh shit this one day a week i added all i did was let go of one day of my running or one day of my swimming or one day of my pilates picked up one day of this strength training like this trainer told me and i've already seen more improvement than i ever have and i think and then now they're bought it that's right the next this next one is one of the things that i think now women are becoming more aware of one of the components of strength training which is it allows you to eat more and stay leaner because it it builds the lean tissue that burns calories now i know that there's some debate around this but the evidence is clear with those of us who've coached and trained lots of people yeah when i have women that i strength trained with primarily and i have them do what's called the reverse diet where we slowly increase their calories increase their protein to feed the muscle tissue we see this dramatic change in their metabolism i mean i mean it's not this is it's common it was common to have a female client be able to eat 500 more calories a day and be leaner all day that that was common less common but still i would see this would be women who could eat a thousand calories more a day and be able to keep up and be able to stay lean and i'm talking about two days a week of strength training we're not doing anything else yeah and they were doing before tons of cardio every that's i mean that that was what was common too is that not only did they were they able to eat more but this is what sold katrina yeah i've told the story before when we first met i didn't tell her anything about how she was training i allowed her to do her thing and i just i know better than to come in and new boyfriend come in and start telling you how to lift or telling you how to eat even though i knew all this stuff that she was doing i'm like man that used to be so much until she finally came to me and the first thing we did cut out all that running reverse dieter build muscle let's get strong long rest periods so different than how she'd ever trained before and you look a year later after that she looks back and was like this is crazy i'm eating more than i've ever ate before i'm training less frequently as far as the time that i'm doing that and i have the best body i've ever had at this point in my life like blue and then forever she was converted yeah muscle burns calories at rest uh and that that's not the full answer by the way there's some mystery as to how the metabolism gets so fast through the strength building process and through feeding that muscle but it really is it's a real effect and it's traumatic and it's awesome meaning you do less work you eat more and you stay leaner and i think i think that really resonates with a lot of women especially women who've tried to lose weight that resonates with everybody so cutting calories lean and have flexibility who does that not sound good who does the idea of like you get to work out less you get to eat more and stay in better shape who does that not sound good that's right everybody otherwise you're cutting you're getting to a certain point where you just add a little bit of oh i'm just gonna have a little bit on the weekend and it's like you know 500 extra calories you feel that yeah you don't have that flexibility it's it's it's a rough place muscle is great uh for the flexibility to eat more more food um next up you have better curves i think this is another reason why women are starting to strength train it started with the build a bigger butt or get a bigger butt uh you know kind of trend and then you know women are like well how do i get a bigger butt we're like well your butt's a muscle so you got to build it so they started training and strengthening and they saw their butt get rounder then they saw their hamstrings get a little better curve and they started doing upper body exercise my posture gets better my arms look leaner everything looks better even though maybe i'm at the same weight even this is what's crazy about this muscle looks good uh on your body it just does now can you get too muscular yes is it is it likely you'll get too muscular no it's extremely unlikely it's extremely extremely extremely unlikely that you're going to strength train and build too much muscle okay that's just a fact period end of story so every single woman listening to this right now train like a bodybuilder as hard you want eat like a bodybuilder as much as you want none of you are going to come to me and say oh i got i built too much muscle it doesn't happen the women you see who look like this are so rare uh it's it's more rare than a seven foot tall person it's extremely rare to have the kind of genetics that build that kind of muscle and then many of those women are also on yeah they're on male levels of hormones okay they're on testosterone or anabolic steroids you're not going to build muscle the the women that look the way that most women want to look like on social media or whatever it's fitness women they lift weights like bodybuilders that's what they that's primarily what they do you have to if you want to sculpt and shape a body there's no way around doing that without strength training that like we cannot listen we cannot change someone's morphology if somebody is six foot five comparing them to five two person and saying i want my body to look exactly like that structurally they'll never but you can take these body types that are very different and you can build attributes on on this person to create the illusion and shape them to look like that i mean again this reminds me of the overcoming this with katrina when we first got she did not like lifting especially stuff for her back because she felt like i had a broad had a broad back and if i touched any weights like that it just got worse and i'm like listen we i can sculpt your physique through lifting back exercises and weights to give you this more hour and she just was so hard to get her to believe that but it's like watch what happens when i build your delts watch what happens when we lean out and your waist comes in and we build it's like it'll create more of that so even technically her back might have been bigger as far as the actual circumference looks the way it looks the way she wants because we created that sculpt and you have to do that through weights you can't do that through any other form of exercise to get the look that people are trying to obtain and that is the coolest part about lifting weights is you can sculpt a physique to damn near do anything you kind of want that's right you could literally pick body parts you can develop more you could shape more it's it's it's focused body sculpting other forms of exercise you don't focus you're you're doing you're running a lot you're moving your legs a lot you're swimming a lot you're just but but strength training i can say i want more this more of that i want less of this so i'll focus less on that and you can literally shape and sculpt your body and build the kind of body you want the curves that you want next is uh you feel empowered like one of the most empowering feelings in my experience for my female clients one of the most empowering feelings that they would express to me would be when they got strong uh and the first time this really occurred because i would hear this all the time from female clients oh my god i like lifting weights i didn't realize how much i'd like it i feel so empowered i feel so empowered i don't know what they meant by that empowered you hear that with women feeling empowered all the time like what does that mean like exactly like okay you feel empowered but then i had a female client explain to me a situation uh that happened to her where she was traveling for work and so she comes in to train with me she's super excited i'm like hey what's going on she's like i gotta tell you the coolest thing happened to me uh over the weekend when i was traveling so what happened she was like well i'm flying it's flying to china she worked for a tech company and she goes and she was petite woman she said for the first time in my life i put my bag in the overhead compartment by myself and then she says i felt so empowered and then i got it i understand i never understood this as a man because i if i need to i never have felt like i needed someone else to do something for me to carry something for me but women often to do certain things they look to a man to hey open this jar hey carry this thing hey move this thing for me but what if you could double your strength which is reasonable if you're not lifting weights now and you start lifting weights it's reasonable to double your strength you could do that within a year or two how empowered would you feel twice as strong as you are now i think it's the most underrated thing that happened yes that my clients didn't ask for or think they even wanted it was like i have so many stories like that that i can tell of the the female client who came in wanting like let's say a look or to get healthy or whatever and as a byproduct didn't realize how much they fell in love with the strength part because maybe they just like you didn't think about all those those things it's just a second nature hey if i gotta lift my bag above my head i gotta find someone to help me oh if i gotta carry that big 50 pound bag of dog food i gotta ask the kid to walk me out to load it up in the car like they had all these situations that we take for granted that they feel like i gotta ask somebody else that they no longer had to do because they had the strength to do it easily compared to what it was like before and they end up then they that was like my favorite was to take someone like that who didn't even realize how much they loved or would like strength give them that strength and then they saw all the things that it affected and it was like oh my god i love this hey sorry to interrupt are you struggling to get a flat midsection a flat tummy we have a free flat tummy guide in there we give you strategies techniques exercises nutrition tips on how to get a flat tummy you can get it right now it's totally free by clicking on the link in the description below by the way what i said what i said a few minutes ago it isn't is totally reasonable and realistic okay most women right barring injury or mobility issue or some health issue most women who go from not really strength training to proper like real strength training like you lift you know weights you rest you do sets you're trying to get stronger right women who go from not lifting weights to properly lifting weights it is reasonable to expect that you'll probably double your strength within a couple years i would argue i would argue way more i i'm giving the most conservative that's what i mean i'm giving a very conservative answer here like think about this right now if you're listening right now you're you're whatever you're doing you're sitting down you're walking whatever you're listening to us talk how do you think you would feel if you were twice as strong as you are not and we would see it all the time where they're they're all their lifts would go up double in weight and i'm being very conservative and by the way i could triple someone's there's you feel what it's like to be 10% stronger imagine yeah you can feel like you go you get 10% stronger any male or female you feel that you notice the difference you're 10% stronger you're double that's right that's it's what it's life-changing that's right that's right next up you sleep better so again this is backed by data they've done studies comparing different forms of exercise to its effect or impact on sleep quality by the way women uh suffer from sleep disturbances uh more often than men do when you look at some of the the data on this it may be due to hormone fluctuations or maybe whatever but women tend to suffer from sleep issues uh more than men do um so this is i think an important one but when they compare strength training to other forms of exercise strength training wins when it comes to which one improves sleep quality uh you know the ability to fall asleep the ability to stay asleep like the different stages of sleep strength training is the best one now again to be fair all forms of exercise improve your health will make you sleep better but if you want to pick the one that's the best again the data supports strength training now do you think that the reason why the strength training because i would i would the first case i would make is just our bodies were meant to move we were meant to move we were meant to do things for the day we have very sedentary lifestyle so any sort of form of activity is going to greatly improve your sleep now would you say the whole thing back to the like hormonal cortisol it's the balancing of hormones and and is what really makes the strength training trump everything else because like like you said i i think exercise period daily makes a tremendous difference on almost on all my clients sleep but then strength training did seem to surpass it even better is that because of cortisol and what's going on hormonally that would make you make that argument we're in speculation territory now because we don't they don't know uh why it's better for sleep so this is pure speculation but i think it has to do with the hormone i think it has to do with insulin sensitivity too um you know improved insulin sensitivity tends to impact sleep positively and strength training does it very well i mean the strength listen there are studies on obese individuals where they have them build muscle and lose no weight like i'm talking about really overweight people all they have them do is build muscle they don't lose a single part of all their health markers and well not i mean in particular their insulin sensitivity so it's really really effective for that so that's speculating as to why but again the data shows it's the best for for improving your sleep and next up it's it's great for reducing pain it's here's here's how good it is when applied properly for pain the primary form of exercise that rehab specialists or physical therapists use when trying to help somebody with back pain shoulder pain hip pain knee pain ankle pain whatever the primary form of exercise they use is some form of strength training it is not cardio it is not yoga it is not because the majority is related to weakness that's right and the weakness is is really causing the dysfunction which is the pain signal that you know there's something there's something that's unsupported here and therefore your body's job is really to limit uh you know furthering an injury uh so you know you have these natural limiters and so if we strength train we build up that support system we build up that uh that support uh signal that that feeds back that's like okay this is accounted for and it's strong enough to now you know go through these types of i feel like this is another one we really have to hammer home because i think it's one of the most important points i remember when like i realized this for myself like i always struggle with kind of low back pain so that it's very much so related to posture issues my posture issues are related to weakness into like my core hip stability and that and so i would not think okay even as a trainer i didn't think this way early on like that hey my low back is bothering me i need to get better at squatting i need like that yeah that doesn't people don't make that connection they think that oh lifting weights is hard i'm gonna do less yeah it's stressful if i have bad knees i have bad back i have bad shoulders uh lifting weights that could that puts me at risk and so that's not a good idea when i'm so glad you said that justin that most chronic pain that people deal with is result from weakness somewhere that's right and strength training is the best way to combat that and can't stress that enough that i don't know how many clients uh that i helped that suffered from chronic pain we got to the root cause of what it was where the weakness lied that was causing the downstream effect of chronic pain somewhere else because that's normally what it looks like by the way like bad knees is not normally bad knees it's normally weak hips or weak ankles right i have i have instability or lack of mobility in the ankles i have instability or lack of mobility in the hips therefore i feel the stress in my knees now as a client i perceive that as i have bad knees i shouldn't squat and it's like no no no this is what's beautiful about strength training you don't have bad knees like i'm not talking about somebody who broke their knee or had something made like most people have chronic knee pain don't have bad knees they have poor mobility and strength in their ankles or their hips and that is causing the stress in their knees and the best thing that we can do is get strong mobile hips strong mobile ankles that results in good knees and that is like crazy and that is most people that i had to train barring injury or some kind of autoimmune inflammatory disease okay barring those two main things strong joints okay and why are they strong they're they're they're supported by strong functional muscle right joints don't move on their own it's the muscle that moves the joints keeps the tracking properly so strong muscles that support the knee the ankle the hip the spine the neck the shoulders the wrists the fingers right all the muscles that control the movement in these joints if those all are strong and functional your joints are fine they don't hurt in other words a strong body doesn't have pain now injury different chronic inflammatory disease of some different but most pain a majority of pain comes from weakness uh at the root it's dysfunction so when you look at the way a joint moves there's an optimal way it moves and there are sub or less optimal ways that they move the less optimal ways are result of muscles that can't move the joints properly either because a lack of strength or stability they're not working well together and so that joint starts to tear down you start to create pain so strong bodies don't hurt again this is why when you go to a physical therapist with pain and they realize okay there's no major injury here whatever you got frozen shoulder you have a little bit inflammation whatever work what they use is strength training correctional exercise is just a form of strength training whether they use bands or body weight or or isometrics it's all strength training so strength training is the best way to solve pain issues by the way regardless of what the kind of athlete you are if you're you could be an endurance athlete you could be a you could be whatever athlete you are when you have pain the form of exercise you use to correct that pain or make it away strength training that's how effective uh it is and then finally you'll look better you'll look better because strength training changes your body composition it's not about your weight it's about your body composition okay a a i'll use a male example right a six foot tall 200 pound male at 10 body fat looks very different than a six foot tall 200 pound male at 20 body i mean very different 10 body fat you got six pack abs yeah 20 body fat you look squishy same body weight the same is true for a 130 pound woman at 30 body fat versus 20 body fat they could be the same height same weight they look very very different so in other words what's so awesome about this is your weight doesn't matter as much as your body composition which is great if you're a slave to your scale which i know a lot of women become slaves to so so in terms of changing how you look it's the best form of exercise i mean i can't i can't tell you how many times too i had somebody come in who initially wanted to lose weight and at the end of our programming we were the same weight or higher yet we were 10 body fat leaner so and many times you have to show somebody that before they realize that weight is so irrelevant it's like it doesn't even matter i can take anybody whatever their current weight is and make them dramatically look better and never mess with the the weight on the scale in fact we do a really good job we shouldn't see major swings on the scale for the most part obviously if you're hundreds of pounds overweight the scale is eventually going to come down and it needs to come down but for most people who think they just need to lose 20 to say even 40 pounds most of the time that person i can take their exact weight never move it and completely radically change the look of their body by their body composition this episode is brought to you by legion they make some of the best supplements around click right here on this link use the code get 20 off got a few questions here the first one is how many days a week should a woman lift weights okay so of course there's a different answer from individual but individual but i'm going to say like this is a hundred percent ladies most women are going to get most of the results they want from strength training with about two or three days a week of strength training okay that's it not five days a week not six days a week but two three days a week four days a week if you're super advanced is right around the amount of strength training that you're need to get incredible results that's about it one of the beauties of strength training is you send the signal to build muscle and then you let it recover and adapt you don't need to do it all the time in fact doing it all the time tends to give you worse results so the vast majority of female clients that i've trained who were advanced well i was i was training them three days a week that's it you i mean i would really want to know who's asking this question because i do know how hard sometimes it is to get somebody to switch over modalities i brought that up earlier like if someone that was asking this question was the three-day-a-week you know yoga person that loves it doesn't want to let go of it or the swimmer the runner i normally would encourage this person just let me show you one day a week yeah let me show you one day of strength training give me give me a few months of you trusting the process and just trading out one of your other active days of the other modality did for one day training and i can show you enough results that i could probably get you to do two or three times and then by the time i get you two to three times we can damn near do anything i mean damn near do anything from sculpting to performance goals to looking a certain way to building a body part i mean you name what you want to do through weight training and three days a week i can do all of them yeah and you know this brings up a good uh kind of side point here uh which is the with strength training the programming is very important so programming is what exercise i do when i do the exercises how i perform how much of it how much of it in the order i i do them makes a big difference so you know all forms of exercise you need good technique like running cycling swimming yoga they all need good technique so does strength training definitely but strength training like running is like as long as i got good technique i just run okay or cycle or whatever strength training there's so many different exercises so many different ways to do them good programming makes a massive difference versus just lifting some weights i have a lot of weight to lose should i lift weights or lose weight first no a lot of people say lift weights lifting weights can make the fat loss easier period speed up the metabolism improve your hormone profile feed the muscle feed the muscle so don't go and cut your calories like crazy but allow yourself to kind of build some muscle and set yourself up some for some really good fat loss yeah you avoid plateaus and hitting the wall that way so if you set yourself up for the long term you get flexibility as a result i want to be clear on this too because we had a caller one time that made a comment that like oh i feel like you guys speak to those people that just you know need to lose the last 10 or 20 pounds all the time but not addressing those of us that need to lose 50 or 100 pounds it is the same answer so if you're listening to this and you're asking the question like that and even though you need to lose 100 to 150 pounds the beginning process is the same so if someone hired me and they only needed to lose 20 pounds versus the person who needed to lose 150 pounds the beginning of my programming the beginning of what i had that person to do is to reverse diet and build muscle doesn't matter it just makes the it makes both those people's journey to getting to their goal much easier than the opposite way which is i'm going to try and lose this weight first then i'll go build muscle not a good strategy i don't want to get bulky i want to look lean should i skip lifting there's that myth again you know i'm going to illustrate this a little more right so if you look at the the what's happened on social media is you have these extreme examples of people with muscle building genetics that are incredibly rare to the point where there are men who see you know Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 70s or maybe bodybuilders today they think well if i lift weights hard enough long enough i'm gonna look like them and there are also women who on social media just look crazy muscular and so women are like oh my god i'm afraid of lifting weights because i'll look like that the truth is the the genetics required to build that amount of muscle is so rare it's it's it's probably more rare than someone who's seven foot tall or maybe just as rare as someone who's seven foot tall so in other words when you walk around in the real world you're not at the NBA you walk around the real world how often do you see someone that's seven foot tall never if anything you remember the time but one time you saw someone seven foot tall because it stood out and was so rare that's how rare these type of this Arnold Schwarzenegger or pro bodybuilder that chick that's got the veins in her neck muscle building genetics are they're super rare they're on top of it they take anabolic steroids but it's super super rare so if you are the person if you're a woman listening to this and you're always the buffest strongest person at your school in your family you're bigger and stronger than every male family member and you don't lift weights you have those genetics if that's not you don't worry about it you're totally fine i also think that this is a bit exacerbated at the beginning process of anybody's kind of weight loss or weight lifting journey that doesn't want to get bulky is is understanding what's happening too right one you're at a body fat percentage that you're not happy with you eventually want to get leaner we're in the process right now of reverse dieting and building muscle well when you lift weights there is there's a little bit of inflammation water retention carbohydrates everything gets flooded in the muscle and so it has this temporary look of like you looking bigger it's more feeling i think it is the feeling of the tightness that's what i mean and that and that that feeling even a little bit of that perception your shirt's a and it is part of the process of building muscle building the metabolism sculpting the body to get to that point and so it's kind of think of it like this is like if you were to tell someone to make this beautiful sculpture out of clay like you've got to give me the clay to pack on there so i can sculpt and do it if and you not going through that process you're not allowing yourself to sculpt you're not like you not allowing yourself to go through those temporary moments of fluid nutrition inflammation to look a little bit like that to temporarily get to the place we can have the clay on there to carve away to get to look what you want like we have to go through that process you have to be okay with it it's not a forever you're going to look big and bulky it's temporarily right now where we're at but don't worry where we end up the final sculpture that is going to look amazing and you'll be happy with it but you get to learn to go through that process i heard that a i heard that higher reps are better for a feminine look is this true yeah another myth solved by the fitness industry so any rep range between 1 to 30 done in a traditional strength training format is muscle building okay so all those rep ranges are muscle building okay but the myth is that the 30 reps is going to give me this feminine look and that you know doing two you know reps or three reps with a little heavy weight to make my muscles explode and look bulky that's false they all build muscle all of them build muscle uh all of them are going to give you the look that you're looking for but don't be afraid of low reps so one of my my you know trade secrets as a personal trainer a lot of trainers know this by the way uh when you train long enough one of my trade secrets with female clients was to introduce them to low reps because i know they never touched them i know they never did five reps because they were afraid of them so the first thing i do is train them on five reps and because it was so new they weren't used to it their body responded like crazy and they got amazing results and then they were clients for life so all those rep ranges are effective but the most effective rep ranges are usually the ones you're not used to because there is a knowledge of that okay so there's another way to say this to this question is uh you know the high reps for a better feminine there is one example of where that works for that lady it's the lady who trains three to five reps so if you're asking that question and all you train is three to five reps then absolutely training high reps is going to make you look more feminine because you'll build more muscle you get leaner and you get more tone that's the only person that's of it the opposite is true for the female who trains high reps all the time the best thing that you could do to look more feminine to look leaner to look more toned to build more muscle is to train three to five reps it's the novel stimulus that's going to be so important to sal's point anything between one and 30 builds muscle is good for the body wherever you spend the most time the opposite side of the spectrum is going to give you the most amount of results in a good workout program or goes through both program yeah it tends to shift you and phase you through uh different uh you know rep ranges which you know look we have workout programs that we designed we have one for women it's the only one we've ever made specifically for women it's called muscle mommy and it's a fully programmed workout it's three months long or a little longer exercises sets reps video demos a whole deal because of this episode it's 50 off we're going to make it half off for women who are listening to this episode you got to the end of it you want workout programming go to maps muscle mommy.com use the code women 50 and you'll get it half off all right i know you like that episode if you did check this one out walking it's one of the best things you could do for your health bar none but there's a better way to approach it yes you can just walk but if you follow the right protocol it's far more effective let's talk about walking i can't wait to hear walking protocol well there is well there is a protocol so and i'll start with the first thing right because just first off uh let me start with this one of the reasons why walking um is such a great form of just activity is because it's low risk of injury now some people say