Many people walk into the gym without an idea what they are there to do other than get a workout in. As a result, they don't see the results they want. On this episode, we discuss how you can build the right fitness program for yourself.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
R
[00:01:11.230] – Allan
Hello, Ras. How are things going?
[00:01:13.440] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?
[00:01:15.530] – Allan
Going well, just kind of busy, actually. Kind of funny. I was supposed to have a call and I completely lost track of days.
[00:01:23.780] – Rachel
Oh, Jeez.
[00:01:26.650] – Allan
I switched up my workouts and I did a weight lifting workout on a Sunday. And as a result, I woke up the next day thinking it was Tuesday and did a weight lifting workout and then woke up today thinking it was a Wednesday, when, in fact, we're recording this on a Tuesday. And so it's like I was completely backwards on my thinking, fell behind, thought I was way behind. And then even though everything being what it was, I should have known different. I didn't. And as a result, kind of miss some appointments and things I was supposed to do. So if I was supposed to be on a call with you on Monday night, I apologize. I thought it was Tuesday night. I just don't even know what was going on last night when I thought, okay, it's Tuesday night, tomorrow's Wednesday. What do I have going on? And okay, well, tomorrow is another weightlifting day, and it wasn't today was a cardio day. And we'll talk a little bit more in detail about that at the end. But it was just kind of one of those things of the weather here is the same every day.
[00:02:35.170] – Allan
There's not a lot of differences. I don't really have weekends the way a lot of people have weekends. Any day could be a weekend. Everybody's here on holidays. So it doesn't feel different one day to the next, for the most part, any day here. So, yeah, just kind of lost track of days.
[00:02:54.420] – Rachel
Oh, my goodness. How crazy is that? Do you keep a calendar? Do you have a paper or a digital calendar?
[00:03:00.430] – Allan
I have a digital calendar, but it's kind of one of those things where I'm trying to condition myself to not look at things unless I need to look at things. So social media maybe not look at it all the time. Log in and check in on my clients once a day or so where I need to and do what I need to do. And then it's the same thing with a calendar. It's typically just, okay, what do I know is going on today and on the Monday, but I knew I needed to record something so we could have this call because I failed to do it on what I thought was Monday. And then again, just like, complete confusion. Didn't do what I was supposed to do when I was supposed to do it and then didn't know what day of the week it was and did other things, failed to do other things I was supposed to do.
[00:03:56.110] – Allan
So it just kind of put me in. I'm in this kind of weird juxtaposition because my weekend and the first part of next week is going to be intense because we're moving all the gym equipment. We're moving in. So the paint is late, the light fixtures are late. So those are going to be like, I had to go actually buy replacement/alternate light fixtures, not the light fixtures I want to keep. I had to pay for those just to have light fixtures because you need light the building to do what you got to do sometimes. And then the paint is not in because we were put off the paint waiting on the light fixtures because it's coming from the same source. And I'm like, no, I got to have the paint because they're finishing up now and now I don't have paint. So I told the person we were telling them, okay, look, regardless of whether the lights are ready, bring the paint, because I've got a paint because we're moving all the equipment in on Sunday.
[00:04:51.080] – Allan
So I'm hopeful I'll get the paint on Thursday, Friday the latest, and then I'll start painting where I can paint. And then I'll start moving equipment in and continue to try to paint around the equipment. That's going to be harder, but it kind of is what it is. So a lot of moving parts in my life right now, and I just completely lost track of days. But I won't lose track of days those days because those are going to be four or five really hard days.
[00:05:18.510] – Rachel
That sounds like it. My gosh, no wonder you've lost track of days. There's a lot going on. A lot of things you're balancing right now.
[00:05:25.780] – Allan
Yeah. How about yourself?
[00:05:28.690] – Rachel
Good. I'm far less busy than you are, but things are going good. I mentioned I have a trainer and I'm working on my marathon program, and over the weekend I ran 16 miles on my treadmill, and it was hard. It was a challenge.
[00:05:51.190] – Allan
When you're training on the treadmill, do you use the distraction, like watching Netflix or something like that?
[00:05:58.820] – Rachel
I can't watch anything because I feel like I have lost balance and I don't want to accidentally trip. I think I was watching something like, I don't know, the Matrix or something ages ago, and I was trying to bob and weave along with Neo there, and I almost fell off the treadmill. I prefer to listen to podcasts or on certain days, music is actually easier to listen to. So that's about my limits of my distraction. But it was just a long day and I chose that over outside, we had single-digit temperatures and double-digit wind gusts, so I chose the safer route.
[00:06:41.130] – Allan
Yeah. And those are not the conditions that you're going to be running your race in. So there's no value to pushing yourself through something like that, other than just saying, I want to be uncomfortable for what was probably about two and a half hours.
[00:06:55.180] – Rachel
Yeah. It was definitely the right guess. Exactly like that. The snow and the ice is just too sketchy, and it would have impacted my gate so greatly that I probably would have put myself at more risk than I got off the treadmill. So at least on the treadmill, I had a consistent gate, which I think is far more beneficial for that long run.
[00:07:19.910] – Allan
Day treadmills were originally a punishment.
[00:07:24.730] – Rachel
I know, I know. I could tell you. Yeah. So things are good up here.
[00:07:32.220] – Allan
Good. So let's go ahead and get into today's episode where we talk about programming for yourself.
[00:07:38.550] – Rachel
Perfect.
Episode
Hello, and thank you for being a part of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Today, I want to talk about a topic that is actually really important if you're looking to build your fitness and make it really matter. A lot of people approach fitness programs the wrong way. They try something that's generic. They don't get the results they really wanted. As a result, a lot of them give up. So today I want to discuss how to build a fitness program that's right for you. So first, let's define the problem. Now, the initial problem with a fitness program is that most people seem to have a singular view on fitness. So you either think that you need to build cardio or you think you need to build strength or you think you need to do this. And as a result, people get tied into one dimension of fitness. So they become runners or they go in and they start taking the classes. They really enjoy them. And so it's just basically you're doing classes. And then there's also things like people that just go in and do yoga and think that's sufficient for what they need, or people that actually just go in and do weightlifting and say, okay, that's all I need.
The reality is most of the time that's not enough. And when we do this, what happens is we tend to put the workouts first. So you enjoy the class. The class is what you do. You feel like you're getting what you need. And as a result, what we've done is we've effectively put the tactics in without really having a strategy for what we're trying to accomplish. So if you're going to work on your fitness, you need to ensure that the fitness is doing. The work you're doing for fitness is working for you. So why do we do some of these things? Well, the first one is if you enjoy doing something like you really enjoy running or you really enjoy your fitness classes, you tend to want to do it more. Or another thing that I've seen quite often is people are really good at one thing, so you're really good at running or you're really good at lifting. And as a result, that's why you want to do that one thing. But movement for the sake of movement is not necessarily always a good thing. Now I will be the first to tell you I'm not going to poopoo anyone who takes the time to do a workout.
If you're doing a workout, that's a thousand times better than not doing a workout. But there's a reason why the treadmills are at the front of the gym. And the reason the treadmills are at the front of the gym is because 99% of the time that's as far as most people are going to go, they're going to walk into the gym and they're going to get on the treadmill, they're going to do their time, literally, and then they're going to get off the treadmill, and that's their workout. Now, again, movement for the sake of movement, fine. But realize that won't necessarily get you where you want to be. You need to get a little deeper. You need to do a little bit more because you're not only missing modalities, you're missing key one of the ones you're doing. Okay. So it's great you're on the treadmill. It's great that you're lifting, but are you really pushing yourself? Are you really doing the things that are necessary to move the needle for your health and fitness? So how do we make this happen? Because it's so easy to get wrapped up into the I'm really good at lifting, and I really don't want to do these other things or I'm really good at running, and I don't want to do these other things or I really enjoy doing the elliptical or the treadmill.
And I'm really somewhat intimidated by doing anything further. So the first thing you want to do is you want to go all the way back to the beginning. I'm going to do this to you over and over again. You have to go back to the grounding that you did at the front of this whole process. And if you don't know what that means, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to any of the lessons I've talked about with regards to commitment. And so within commitment, we have this vision. Okay. And within the vision, there are multiple segments of fitness that you're going to need to have. I've never seen anyone who has this vision to be able to run 50 miles a day and that's their vision. That's not what people emotionally attached to. The vision is about enjoying your life. It's about being the person you're meant to be. It's about being able to do the things that you need to do, which is fit for task. So if you want to be fit for task, you've got to really pay attention to what that means. What does the future you what are they capable of doing?
Okay, so let's say, for example, you want to be able to travel and there are certain places you want to be able to go, like let's just say Europe and you want to be able to do the Mediterranean, you want to be able to arrive there and enjoy yourself and do the things that you want to do. Well, I can tell you one of the first challenges you're going to get when you get that trip going, because you're most likely going to have to get on an airplane or some kind of mode of transportation that's public and you're going to have to load your bag, you have to carry your bag, you're going to put it up over into the overhead bin. There's things you're going to have to be able to do that will require strength. If you're going to do something and go somewhere and you're going to be doing walking or anything like that, you're going to need some stamina. And if the roads are cobbled like they are in most of Europe, you're maybe going to need some balance and mobility is always a good test thing to have just to keep your body moving in the way that it's supposed to so you don't injure yourself.
So just in that one vision of being able to travel successfully, you're going to need strength, stamina, mobility and balance. Okay, so that's four different training modalities that you don't get if you're only doing one thing. Now, how much of each of these do you need? Again, we go back to the base. The base is your vision. Okay. If your overhead is not going to weigh over £30, then there's very little reason for you to train to be able to press over £30 over your head. Okay. If the most you feel like you're going to ever have to walk or run or do. If you're going to go do a tour or something would be about three or 4 miles, then maybe that's the stamina that you need to have. So if your vision is travel, then you need to be fit for that task. If your vision is to do something else, like be an awesome grandmother and keep up with your grandkid, maybe your stamina needs to be a little higher at certain points in time. You're picking up the child, maybe your strength needs to be a little higher at certain points in time.
And then the other thing is mobility and balance. Obviously if you live in locations where there is a potential for you to fall or slip, you need to have those skills too. So looking at your vision is really an independent topic, independent approach to you doing you to you being the fit that you need fit for task. So what you need to do, the work that you need to do is really should be driven by that vision. And if it is, that breaks down all the motivational problems that you would have. Yes, it can be intimidating to try something that you're not good at. I walk into a yoga class. I am like a bear in a Penguin shop. I don't belong there and I know I don't belong there. But if I need to work on mobility, that's a great place to do it. If I want to get into body weight strength, that's a great place to do it. Even if I'm uncomfortable, it's important for me to push myself through. And if my vision is a part of that, it makes it a lot easier to do. So how do we get started with all of this?
And I'll say the first step is always going to be a self assessment. Now the self assessment goes along with my GPS model, and the S is the self assessment. So how are we going to self assess? Well, the first is to look at our fitness and what our capabilities are. Okay, so what areas of fitness am I really good at? And I'll tell you generally strength. However, I did tear my rotator cuff a few years ago, and as a result, I am not as strong in my upper body from a pushing perspective as I was back then. So there are areas of fitness where I'm good, particularly leg strength and pulls with my back. But there are areas of strength that I'm not so good at. So kind of looking and saying, what are the areas of fitness I'm good at? I know that I'm good at strength. I know that I'm good at long, slow cardio. Where am I not good. I'm not good in balance, I'm not good at mobility. So those are areas that I may need to focus on. Okay, do I want to do more where I'm already strong?
And the short answer to that is it depends. If I need to be stronger, like I'm trying to work on building my pushing strength because I'm weaker, then that's something I need to consider. Okay, so what effort is now necessary for me to maintain or gain the fitness I need? For most of us over 40, that's going to require working each body part at least once per week. But probably just twice per week would be enough for most of us to maintain or gain some fitness at that level. Meaning if I want to get stronger at lifting weights, I'll probably need to do weight training for my whole body or for body parts at least twice a week. So what are some fitness areas that I'm not so good at? And I mentioned earlier, I'm not so good at balance. I'm not so good at mobility. So what effort is necessary for me to gain or maintain those? And that's some balance training that's putting myself in some positions where I might not be as comfortable. So instead of doing a two legged squat, maybe I'm going to do a one legged squat, or maybe I do some form where I'm moving side to side and then doing a squat.
So there's opportunities there for me to work on my balance. As for mobility, that's paying attention to where I'm tighter, where I'm not as mobile and working on stretching, working on some other efforts to make sure that I'm gaining that mobility. And for those types of modalities, for balance and for mobility, those are things that I could practically do every day. So if I'm lifting two times per week as a whole body workout, I now have five days left. I can focus on doing these other things and in some cases, maybe go ahead and double them up and I can do these others more often. So you kind of see how I'm beginning to do from this self assessment to build out the training things that I need to get in to build fitness, to maintain fitness based on where I currently am and based on where I want to go. So the first question is, is a predefined workout for you? Because they're everywhere. You can go on the Internet, you can do a quick search for anything you want to train on. And basically a workout is going to come in. So if you went on YouTube and you type, which is the second largest search engine in the world, and you Typed in mobility workout, you would be inundated by all kinds of videos that you could do as a predefined workout.
Now, I would say that for most of these, yes, for balance and mobility, a typical class or plan will work fine. So you can go in and say, okay, I'm going to do this basic stretching class or I'm going to work on this balance program. Those typically are fine for just about everybody. However, I'm going to say this, not all muscles need to be stretched. If you have good solid mobility in certain movement ranges, say you're almost double jointed in the upper body or in the lower body, you don't need to stretch those muscles. Those muscles are already long. They're already doing what they're supposed to do. Look for other muscles that are a little tighter and focus on those. So while basic plans and classes work, you just need to make sure that where you need to be focused, you are getting that focus. The next is stamina. Now, stamina is kind of one of these things that I think a lot of people struggle with particularly as we get older, and that's because we have physical limitations. Now, as we went through that self assessment, we talked about reasons why we were good or not so good at things.
I mentioned the shoulder problem, so you may have issues with your needs. There's a lot of different examples of where we have physical limitations that would prohibit us from doing certain activities where we're trying to build stamina. So at least knowing those ahead of time is really important. For most of us working on stamina, it's really good to try to get this done outside. Getting outside is going to be better for you. However, there are a lot of machines that can help you do this, particularly when the weather is not so nice. This episode is coming out in March, maybe it's in March, but as this episode comes out, you're going to see that the weather is starting to improve. This is a great opportunity to get outside, but in the event you can't, it's raining, the weather's not good. It just isn't conducive for you to be outside doing these things. Treadmills, elliptical rowers, bikes. There's all kinds of machines that can help you build different forms of stamina. Mixing them up, trying different things always a good thing. Get that variety in there where you can, particularly if you're trying to work around a problem like knees or shoulders or something like that.
All that said, like I said, outside is better. Outside is better. So if you can do these things outside, go ahead and do it. And then if you're going to do a program for stamina, I strongly encourage you to use one that has been proven to be effective. One of my favorites is Jeff Galloway's run walk run method. We interviewed him on episode 248, so you can go back and listen to that episode. I'll have a link in the show notes, but that's a great program about how to build your running stamina without injuring yourself. Other great programs. You can find a couch to five K program. It's going to be sort of a similar walk run kind of thing. So you can build up that stamina in a controlled perspective to try to get you ready for a five K, which is 5 km or basically 3.1 mile. So you're looking to do something specific, either just program or the five day programs. Both are great programs and it can help you start your spam in a process. And as you get a little bit more specialized or start building up to longer distances or longer periods of time, there are other things that you can use that are fixed and then always.
We had a conversation with Rachel not long ago. She has hired a running coach to help her improve her stamina even further so she can run faster and have better times on her run. So if you're looking for that, sometimes having a running coach can go a long way towards helping you build superior stamina. So now we'll talk about my favorite thing. Okay. As I mentioned earlier, it's really important for you to understand your limitations before you start a strength program. Some of those are physical limitations. As I mentioned, my shoulder, my ability to push, my ability to do shoulder exercises very much different than what it was just even five years ago. So I have to be aware of that. I have to address that as I put my training plan together, and then the other is knowledge gap. So one of the reasons that I work on getting my certified personal trainer and the different specializations that I did was just recognizing that I had a knowledge gap in what my body was capable of doing and what I need to do. I was building most of my programming for the first several years off of what I knew when I was in my 20s.
And guess what? It doesn't work and it breaks you time and time again. So I knew I had a knowledge gap. If you have a knowledge gap, you don't know the form of particular exercises. It's really important for you to get this right. Don't do an exercise right and you put load on yourself. Opportunities to hurt yourself is huge, so make sure you've bridged that knowledge gap before you leap into any kind of program. Now, when you're getting started for most lifters, as long as you do know the form and you find the right coach or you find the right website. Strong Lifts Five by Five is one of my favorites. They teach you basic workouts, basic programming, simple lifts, five sets of five reps. It's pretty straightforward and it will help you get stronger. It's a really good entry level basic workout that you can do for quite some time before you need to switch that up. And then most gyms will have a machine circuit. And while machines are not optimal from a form perspective, it's really hard to screw up. If you're sitting in the seat properly and you've got the right posture, a machine workout can be quite good.
You just have to make sure that your settings on the machine are appropriate so that it fits your body. Most machines can adjust seats up and down, back and forward. Just making sure you're in a good position to do that workout is really important. You go to most gyms, they're going to have people available to help you learn how to set up that machine and use that machine appropriately. Take advantage of that or as I mentioned earlier, hire a coach to walk you through it. But strength is probably the only fitness modality that I would say is non negotiable. You have to be training strength, and second behind that is stamina. You have to be training stamina. Mobility and balance are also important, but if you aren't building strength and you're really just focused on stamina, you're going to lose strength, you're going to lose muscle mass. And in the long run, as we age, that's not going to be a good thing. So strength has to be a part of your program. Stamina must be a part of your program. Mobility and balance will very likely need to be a part of your training.
It's just a function of how mobile and how much balance you have now and how much work you need to do to enhance that or at least maintain it, depending on where you stand. So those are the basic training modalities. Now I want to skip into something a little bit deeper about fitness that I think is probably some things that people really struggle with in the long run. First off, a lot of people will start a fitness program and then they'll get bored. And like I said, if you downloaded a program and you started it and it's not something that's progressive, then it can get kind of boring. So if your decision was that you were going to go out and run or walk the same path, and so you're going to walk around the field or you're going to walk through the neighborhood and you've got your horse, if you will, you've measured it out and you know the length and the distance that you're going, and you're maybe keeping up with your time. You know, this takes you a certain amount of time so you can get your workouts done before dinner or before you have to go to work.
So you know how much time it's going to take you to do this. But if you keep doing the same route week in and week out, other than changes of weather and other things that might be going on in that neighborhood or in that field, it could get pretty boring. So that's one thing to be very concerned about is if you get bored and you want to quit, it can be a problem. Likewise with lifting weights, you may go in and do the same basic five exercises. When I mentioned strong lifts and you do them and do them and do them, and then you kind of say, okay, I do these every two times a week, and then eventually kind of getting boring. I mean, okay, squats are great, bench press is great, pulls are great. But in the end, that can get a little boring when you're doing the same workout week in, week out. And yes, maybe you are seeing some progression on that, but it can get kind of just dry. And so don't make sure that what you're doing and the fitness routines that you're doing don't bore you. Some people are able to do the same thing over and over and over again, and they're fine with it.
Others do need some variety. So at least be aware of where you stand with some of those things. Next, some people will see diminishing returns or plateaus. Now, this is completely normal in all phases of training. Initially, you see some pretty good results because your body is not accustomed to what you're doing. Your brain and your muscles are having a conversation. It's a very easy conversation to have once they figure out the wiring, the very difficult conversation when you first get started. So you will see yourself from a strength perspective, potentially from a stamina perspective, from a balanced perspective, and even from a mobility perspective, actually sees some pretty good gains in returns when you first start. And then it kind of slows down and then it kind of Plateau. You've seen this with weight loss. You'll see it with fitness. So a lot of people get disgruntled or upset when they don't see that continued linear progression. And I'm going to tell you, you almost never see a linear progression over and over, because if you did, then the strongest people in the world would never stop getting stronger. So there's a natural limitation on what the brain muscle conversation can do.
And then there's a limited potential for when you're actually building muscle and building strength or building stamina that can continue. At some point, you will Plateau. Now, there are things we can do to break those plateaus, but just realize, don't get dismissive. Don't quit just because you're not seeing the return. And then the other thing is sometimes you're going to see unequal returns. And so maybe your stocks are not exactly what you wanted it to be. Whereas some individuals just really can't put on a lot of muscle mass, they're getting stronger, but they're not seeing their muscles get bigger. They're putting on all the stamina. They're capable of going further. Distances are going and or going faster, but they're not necessarily losing weight because they thought, okay, I'm burning all these calories, I should be losing weight. So just recognize that even though you're pushing yourself in a fitness direction, you won't always see equal gains going forward. And even within body parts, you might not see the same. So like for me, it always was the case. My legs get stronger. They get bigger very easily now. Probably not as easily now as they did before when I was younger.
But that said, I can get really strong with my legs. I'm not capable of getting that much stronger with my upper body the same way. So I see unequal returns. And I also see my legs getting bigger when I lift weights with my legs do leg strength stuff, my upper body doesn't respond quite as well. So recognizing that I'm going to have those biological limitations, I have to keep pushing through, I cannot let that break me mentally. So these are things that are really hard to get through mentally, as if your workout is boring. If you're not seeing the returns that you used to be seeing or you're seeing unequal returns a lot of times that makes it really difficult to stick with, but I want you to go back to what commitment your grounding. There's a reason why you're doing this. There's a vision of what you want to accomplish. If you want it bad enough and you know where you're going, you will still get there. It's never going to be a straight line, so you got to keep pushing through. And that takes a lot of guts, it takes a lot of mental fortitude.
But if you have a good why and you have a good vision, that makes it a lot easier, stick with it and it'll pay off. Okay. So the whole reason we're on this podcast is to learn how to program for yourself. Okay, so first, let's get into the basics of all this. Now, the first thing is you have to know your muscle groups. You have to know what you're doing and why you're doing it. I'm going to talk about this predominantly from a lifting perspective, but a lot of this will fly across the board. Okay. So first, know your muscle groups. When you're doing a certain movement, what muscles are you supposed to be building? What muscles are you supposed to be using? For most exercises, there's going to be a pro mover, there's going to be a primate mover that's causing that exercise to move. Even if it's a compound style movement, there's a prime mover for parts of it and then potentially a different prime mover for other parts of it. So knowing which muscles you're trying to work for each exercise makes it easier for you to know that you're doing the exercise.
Right. So knowing the exercise. Okay, so what muscles am I going to work if I'm doing the deadlift? Well, the deadlift is a very complex work exercise. It is a compound movement, meaning multiple muscles are working. The deadlift happens to work the entire posterior chain. So you're working basically your back, your butt and you're working your hamstrings. So all the way from almost top to bottom, you are working the back of your body, the posterior part of your body. When you do squats, you initially start by using your quadriceps, which are the muscles in the front of your legs. And then as you get deeper into the squat, eventually your glutes are going to kick in and they're the braking mechanism at the bottom, and they're the muscles, the biggest muscle, they're going to start you moving back upwards. So knowing that a squat will require you to use both the front of your legs for a period of time and then the back your butt for the rest of the movement, and then reversing that going back up will help you make sure that you're keeping good form, working the muscles you're supposed to.
So understanding the work that you're doing is really important. That starts with understanding the muscles. Okay. Next is for every exercise you can do has a particular form to it. The form is important to making sure that, one, you avoid injury. But two, understanding that form also affects the angles on the muscles. And so a couple of examples would be whether you're doing something a pull from above your head, like a lap, pull down or pull up, whether you're doing a high row, a low row or a shrub. So what I just talked through were three different angles of rows that are all intended to work a different muscle group across, mostly your back. So the laps when you're pulling down the lats are the main mover, the prime mover. It's going to pull that bar down. If you're pulling the bar, the cable potentially to your upper chest, that's a high row.
Okay.
So that's working more of the upper back, the rhomboids and the trapezes. And so there you go. There's a whole different set of muscles. When you're doing low rows, you're now working more of the middle back. And when you're doing shrugs, you're working most of the traps and larger traps there. So you can kind of see as you change the angle of something, it's a different exercise. Hand position can also be a very different thing. If your grip is wide. When you're doing something like a bench press or push up, you're really focusing on the chest. If you get your hands closer together now, your triceps are more involved in the movement and maybe less of the chest. And if you get your hands all the way together almost now you're doing well, you're doing a push up, push up. And at that point, now you're working mostly your triceps, the back of your arm. So where you put your hands also affects the movement you're doing. So as you're putting together exercises, again, knowing the muscle you want to do and understanding the form of the exercise, these are critically the next important phase of this, or at least understanding level, is to know your volume.
Now I'm not going to get into that on this episode because we're probably already going long. But on episode 506, we discussed how to increase volume and knowing what your volume is. And volume relates to the amount of weight, the amount of reps, amount of sets, and also how fast or slow you're moving the weight. And so all of those things add to your volume. And so knowing how to adjust those so that you're getting the most benefit out of the work for what your goals are is important. So you might want to go back after you get started here, go back and listen to episode 506 just to make sure you've got a grip on what your volume is as you're getting into work. Now if you're someone who's going to get bored and you start a program, the easiest way to change a program that you already have is to swap exercises. So I'll give you a couple of examples. Let's say you have a program like the five by five. And the back squat is the exercise that was in the book or on the website. You say, okay, I'm going to do this exercise.
And then you get kind of bored with your back squats or you've got toe and you want to try something different. Maybe you try a front squat. It's a very different exercise from the perspective of the angles with which the bar is going down, how your body structured. You're going to move that center of mass a little bit. That's going to change the exercise. So the front squat is a good exercise to go back to. Another one is a lot of people will work on a leg press. Leg press is a great way for you to build overall leg strength.
A lot of leg strength, actually.
You can get really strong in your legs using a leg press. But sometimes people get to a point where they're a little bit tired of the leg press. They've gotten up to a particular weight and they feel like, okay, they've done enough. They really want to change the structure of their work or they want to do something slightly different. Maybe you introduce a hip rust. So you're basically at this point, you're elevating your back maybe on the bench and you've got a weight on your lap and you're trying to do rust. So your feet are flat on the floor, your butt goes down your hips, and then your hips go up to basically try to thrust upwards against the weight. This is a great butt glute word, which again is similar to the leg press. So something you can swap. So basically, anytime you have an exercise, you get a little bored with it or you're not seeing the progress, you can swap out another exercise that works the same muscles or muscle and plug it into the work and use that as your exercise. So not the easiest thing, but every exercise that you do, particularly if one of them is bothering you, can be swapped with another exercise, typically works the same muscle groups and gives you the same effort or at least similar effort and results.
Now, if you're going to make a change, if you're going to do something, I highly recommend that you stick with something for at least six to eight weeks before making a change. You're doing a different workout every day, every time. You're not really going to get the optimal benefit of what you're doing. For one, we talked about that brain muscle, the neuromuscular connection. That's really important. If you don't do an exercise enough, you're not going to get that your brain and your muscles are not going to talk as well as they could without that communication. You're not getting enough work. So you're not going to continue to see gains. If you're swapping exercises every week, you're not going to see those gains the way that you'd like. That will be. So you're going to want to make sure that you stick with something for a while. Six to eight weeks tends to be a really good time before we make a change. Next, you got to increase the load. If you stay with the same weights. And I see this all the time, people will go in and do a circuit. They'll set the machines on exactly the same weight and they go through them time and time again and then they don't really know or see that they're getting any stronger.
The fact that they try to raise it up one weight, they don't really feel like they're able to do it. And that's the struggle. They really haven't pushed themselves, they really haven't made it progressive. So adding a little bit of load when you're using good form creates the stimulus that causes the muscles to react and get stronger and get bigger in most cases. Okay. And then when you're doing this work and sticking with it for a while, you begin to see that strength starting to kick in. So last week you were doing the pulls and you were only pulling £20. This week you're pulling. You're now up to 22 or 25. So now you're seeing the weights get bigger as you learn the exercise, there's communication between the muscles in the brain and then actually, yes, your muscles are changing, they're adapting to the stimulus and they're getting stronger. That's a huge motivation. You start realizing that the work you're doing has a positive effect of actually seeing fitness improvement. That's a great way to know. That's a mile marker to know, hey, I am moving towards my vision. I see it, I see what I'm doing and that's important.
So make sure you stick with it at least long enough. Six to eight weeks to know what you're doing is working before you start trying to mix it up. I know, boredom, boredom, boredom, right, but that's important. So find that balance between switching things up and sticking with it long enough to know that it's working. Okay. So this is how most of us got our start. Most of us, back in the day, it was trial and error. We walked into a gym much like you might, and we had no idea what was going on. There was all this equipment, all these weights. Sometimes there were really big guys back in the back rowing around big dumbbells and big plates and all that. We see that. And I agree it can be a little intimidating for the trial and error part where we just really don't know what we're doing and we're approaching it. I hope today that I've given you some ideas of how you can approach this from a little bit more upscale. You have access to the Internet, you have access to a lot of information, you have access to me. So you won't have to go through trial and error.
Another thing that we did back in the day was we had fitness magazines, so Flex and Muslim Fitness. Those were the main magazines that came out. There were a lot of other bodybuilding magazines in the day. Those have pretty much been replaced by YouTube and different websites. But the concept is the same. There's stuff out there, some of it's good.
Some of it's really bad.
So just kind of knowing that, okay, I have to learn and I can't just try to apply this thing because I can tell you, I read magazine articles where guys were doing 100, which means they're doing 100 reps for a muscle group. A little muscle group at that. I tried it. It hurt. Did it give me additional muscle gain? No, not at all. It was probably a wasted workout because it was too much and it really wasn't set for what I was trying to accomplish at the time. But it looked cool, it sounded cool. And the bodybuilder that was touting it in the magazine was someone that I respected, but again, not necessarily the right thing to do. So take what you see online with a grain of salt, spend some time doing some research, asking questions, and put together a program that's going to get you to your vision. All things considered, being over 40 does add some challenges. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I went to NASM and got certified. And yes, there was a good bit of expense to that. I can't even tell you how much money I have spent on my education, my fitness education over the years.
And so there are ways for you to get around that. Hiring a trainer is a great way to do that. And along the way.
I've done the same.
I've hired coaches to program for me and to push me because when you have someone there, you work harder. So every time I've hired a coach, I've never regretted it. I've never regretted having someone there who wrote a program. I could look at the program and say, this is reasonable, this makes sense. And then I could push myself. And they were there to help. They were there to encourage, they were there to critique. And so my form was better, my work was better, I worked harder, I got more results, and it was well worth the investment. Now, if you want to fast track your fitness and weight loss, I'd encourage you to go to 40 Plusfitness.com. I have an application there had some problems with that website up until I today, but I will have a link to the application there. Go ahead and complete that form. And then we can go ahead and connect and see if 40 Plus Fitness Online training is for you. Programming is not rocket science, but it's also not something you can just pull something off the Internet and do and know that you're optimizing your health and fitness. So if you're still stuck and you need help or you want help or you really want to fast track what you're doing, go to 40 Plusfitness.com and there you'll see a link for an application.
Go to the application. It's not long. It won't take you long. But then we'll get on a call, I'll get on the call and we'll come up with a plan just for you. And it may not be 40 Plus Fitness online training. And that's cool. I really want to help you get where you want to go. And if this training program isn't the right thing, I will help you find the thing that is and get you started and get you moving in the right direction. So thank you so much again for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Post Show/Recap
[00:46:38.750] – Allan
Welcome back, Ras.
[00:46:40.290] – Rachel
Hey, Allan. What a really great and timely podcast. I think the tips that you've given about developing your own training program could not be more perfectly timed. I'm seeing a lot of questions on the Internet about why do we do this or how do we do that? And right now it seems to be revolving around strength training. That's an important modality that people just don't know how to fold into their current training programs. But I like what you set up here for the listeners because there's a good way to go about developing your own program.
[00:47:14.800] – Allan
Yeah, well, first it has to align with what you're trying to do. And that can be an event or that can just be a lifestyle you want to have or both and probably should be both. Me, I get highly motivated by having an event in front of me. I think I posted something this week in the group about how even the most elite athletes are not what they would call optimally fit all the time. They have their ebbs and flows, their seasons and off seasons. And so they're going through those things themselves.
[00:47:48.480] – Allan
But that said, they're hiring the professionals. They're doing little things that they're supposed to do. And yes, you can do those things yourself. And when I work with clients, I think the thing that sometimes just it kind of frustrates me a little bit is to have a client that really just wants to work out in front of them. They don't want to think about it. They don't want to learn anything about what they're doing. It's just like make me skinny is sort of the mantra. And I'm like, well, okay, skinny doesn't mean healthy. Lifting weights will get you stronger.
[00:48:24.560] – Allan
If they're asking questions. Well, how strong do I need to be? And I'm like, I don't know, what do you want to do? And so they're not able to answer that question because they haven't really done the initial homework. So to them, it's the workout is. And I hate to say this, as we said earlier, the punishment for being unfit. I'm not healthy and fit. I'm not the weight I'm supposed to be. So I have to effectively punish myself. So I've got to do this running. I've got to get on the treadmill or elliptical and they're not really planning out what they're doing. And then even if they do pick up a program, they don't know why they're doing the exercises they're doing. Other than that's what the program says. So they're following a program.
[00:49:05.880] – Allan
And while I said in my talk, that can be great. But at the same time, it's really hard to stay motivated. When you get to the end of that program, it's like, okay, well, I just do it again. Is there something else? And a lot of people get stuck at that. And so I'll work with someone for a number of months, maybe even a couple of years, and at the end they're like, okay, I'll see you. And I'm like, okay, cool. And then they just keep doing what I gave them until they stopped because they get bored or something gets in the way, and then they just don't know where to start back. They're like, well, I was doing this weight and doing that exercise, and now I don't know, should I lower it this amount do that, or should I just go back in and do what I was doing?
[00:49:51.610] – Allan
And that fear keeps them from starting again. And then they're out. And so I talked to him a couple of months after that, and they're like, how's it going? It's like, well, kind of fell off with the exercise. I still run and they still do the thing they enjoy doing. So they're still doing the cardio stuff, if that's what they enjoyed, or the hiking or whatever, the biking. They're still doing some of that stuff. Not all the time, but some.
[00:50:17.030] – Allan
But their eating completely falls off because again, the exercise kind of drives eating. And I don't mean that you can exercise out of bad diet, but what I found is almost implicitly 100%, someone who works out, puts time in in the gym, pays the trainer, starts eating better, and when they stop paying the trainer and then they stop working out, they go back to their old habits. So just realize that there's more there than just doing a workout.
[00:50:49.390] – Rachel
Well, I think you mentioned the very first place to start is to have your vision, to have your long term goals. And it's not necessarily like for me right now, I'm training for a marathon in April or the ultra, maybe I'll do in the fall, but I've got good role models in my life. My great grandparents didn't leave their farm property until they were in their 90s, their late 90s at that.
[00:51:14.080] – Rachel
So I'm looking that far forward. I want to be active and able to live independently well into my 70s, 80s or 90s if I'm so allowed to do so. So lucky. But that's the thing is that I've got these long-term goals and then in the medium, I've got these short-term goals about running, and I think that's what people might forget about. Sure, you can do a couch to 5K program. That's a great place to start. Absolutely. But what are you going to do after that? What is going to keep you motivated to stay active and to stay healthy and fit for the long-term? And some of these tips, like having a vision is a good place to start.
[00:51:56.800] – Allan
Yeah. When you have that vision, then everything seems to make a little bit more sense. You know, that okay, I could have all the stamina on the world, but if my grandchild comes running up to me and I can't pick them up or I have to sit in a chair because I can't kneel down and tie their shoe, those are things that are going to emotionally affect me in a way that I don't want to experience. I want to be able to get down on the floor and tie their shoe and roll around with them in the grass and not feel like, okay, now someone has to come help me up. I want to be able to do all this stuff. And so, yeah, there's this long-range plan.
[00:52:34.090] – Allan
And then for me, the short run is okay, I'm doing another Tough Mudder. And what I found is these particular obstacle course races are requiring me to be more fit in more direct ways, meaning I have to have more stamina than I think I would ever need with a grandchild.
[00:52:54.290] – Rachel
Sure.
[00:52:56.810] – Allan
Grandchild is not going to make me do 15K running in addition to 25 obstacles in a given day. Now over the course of a month, maybe. And then the other side of it is just the physical strength and being able to do the things that I'm going to have to be able to do without knowing what some of those things are because they don't broadcast all of their obstacles. You know, some of them, but you don't know all of them unless you've already done a race that season. And then generally maybe you do. But for most of us going into the race, they don't broadcast and tell you what all the obstacles are. So I know I'm going to need strength, I need grip strength, and then I'm just going to need grit.
[00:53:38.570] – Rachel
Yes.
[00:53:41.730] – Allan
One of the things I can say my training is that my cardio came back really quickly. I've taken a break I've taken a break from training and everything to kind of just say, okay, I'm off. I'm going to take an off-season. Good long off-season. And then I said, okay, now I'm back in and I'm going to work really hard all the way up until the race. But my cardio was right back there. I'm hitting anywhere from ten to twelve and a half miles easy. I'm not doing the run the way you are. I'm literally just doing a good Huff walk. But doing that today, I think I did a little over 7 miles, but the terrain was hilly so some of the grades were up to I would probably say somewhere around 15% in places that I was going so…
[00:54:29.380] – Rachel
Good.
[00:54:31.170] – Allan
It was a good walk, particularly considering it was just the 7 miles. And I know I say just the 7 miles. Oh my God, 7 miles. I'm like, I didn't start with 7 miles, I didn't start with 7 miles. It was a progression that I did over time and then your body has some memory to it and you're able to take a break and get back at it at some level and work your way back up. And that's part of fitness. It's the ebbs and flows of working your way through.
[00:55:01.490] – Allan
Now, same way with strength. I'm back in the gym, I'm working with weights that are in my opinion pathetically low. But at the same time I know for other people I'd be like, oh my God, if I could actually do that, I would be really happy. So this is not about evaluating where you are relative to other people, it's about evaluating yourself relative to those vision. What do I need to be successful for this Tough Mudder/ and a couple of things we've talked about is I've got to lose body weight. I talked about that, what is it, two or three weeks ago? Okay, well, I've already shed 12 pounds.
[00:55:40.760] – Rachel
Good for you.
[00:55:41.600] – Allan
Okay, great. And that was again, I got into ketosis and one of the cool things is a good long walk really strikes up your ketosis levels. It's kind of insane. A good long walk for you and I that's two to 3 hours or so. And so I tell you, if you check your ketones before and after doing one of your events, one of the things your trainings, particularly the longer trainings, you'll be surprised at the change in your ketones. Now if you do a weight lifting, it's actually going to increase your blood sugar and you might not see that. So just kind of knowing that and knowing where I'm going and having the experience, which is great, but you don't get the experience without the experience.
[00:56:31.020] – Allan
So if you're going to put something together, know why you're doing what you're doing, have a plan, pay attention, do some research. And above all, if you're going to hire a coach, which I encourage a lot of people to do like you've done like I do, is ask why. Have those conversations learn from it. Because that's your ability in the future be able to do some of those things for yourself.
[00:56:58.750] – Allan
I just wish I had a coach on this island that could be in there for my workouts because I know physically if they were there, I would work a lot harder. Other than the fact that I have my way of eating and my way of doing things, I don't know of another coach for people over 40 that would know how to treat me like I was 20 when I needed to be 20, because there's things I can do that I was doing when I was in my 20s.
[00:57:28.610] – Rachel
Wow.
[00:57:28.910] – Allan
Some people in their 40s can't. Okay. But also know when to treat me like I'm in my 40s and be cool with the fact that I have a way of eating that is different than what they would encourage people to typically eat. You got to have your carbs before you work out. And I'm like, well, no, if I had carbs, I just go to sleep. I'd be in a coma. So no, I don't need the carbs before and I don't even need them during literally I can take a liter of water and I'm good. That's my 3 hours of go, go, go. A liter of water.
[00:58:07.190] – Rachel
That's awesome.
[00:58:08.630] – Allan
And I do hydrate a lot after, and I've hydrated a bit before. But all I need to have with me as I go is that liter of water and I don't bonk. There's no bonk if there's anything that's going to stop me, it's just the fatigue and the legs.
[00:58:27.630] – Rachel
Sure.
[00:58:28.510] – Allan
At that point where, OK, you push yourself to the line, which is where you need to be for this training session. Good. But I know that again, from experience, from being a coach and coaching myself. So as you're putting your programs together, I think it's just really important for you to take those lessons. Realize you're also you're bio-unique. So downloading a program off the Internet works for 80% of the people. That Bell curve. But if you're an outlier, you're out of luck. You're going to have to figure something else out. And that takes experience and time and effort and paying attention to your body and doing those things.
[00:59:09.000] – Allan
And so I just encourage people, if you don't know what you're doing, ask for help. It's not that hard. And I am opening up five slots in my training. And for these five slots, I'm particularly looking for people that want to up their fitness game. So in the past, I've really focused on the weight loss. I think I've gotten those clients in that want to really work on weight loss. And if you still want to work on weight loss, you can reach out to me.
[00:59:37.960] – Allan
But right now, for at least the next six months or so because of what I'm doing for myself, my brain has really turned on to the fitness aspects of it. So if you're looking to up your game in fitness, and that can mean starting from zero and wanting to get to level one or that can be being at level five and wanting to be level seven wherever you are, I'm able to meet you there. And we can put together training programs. You can learn why we're doing what we're doing, and we can help you get that fitness together. So if that's what you want, go to 40plusfitness.com, not 40plusfitnesspodcast.com, but 40plusfitness.com and I'll have an application link there. You can fill out the application. We'll get on the phone and we'll figure out what you need. If it's my training program to get you there, it's not a fixed program. It's custom. So like I said, if you're starting from zero and just want to get to one, we can do that. If you want to ratchet it up a little bit more, we can do that too. So do reach out if you're interested in that.
[01:00:42.330] – Rachel
And then of course if it's running that you're interested in really getting good at then Rachel?
[01:00:49.940] – Rachel
I'm here. Just ask me any questions.
[01:00:52.500] – Allan
Where should they go? You've got a website, too.
[01:00:55.100]
Strong-souls.com. You can just reach out for me there or even on my socials. I'm on Facebook and Instagram. Just shoot me a message and I'll be happy to help you out.
[01:01:05.730] – Allan
All right. And we'll have the links in the show notes for this one so if you have any questions, please do reach out to us.
[01:01:12.440] – Allan
Also, again, we're trying to put together a Q&A episode. So if some of these questions you would rather just ask and have answered on a podcast then I do want you to reach out Allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com and just email me there. Allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com. We'll take those questions. I may reach out and see if you want to record and ask your question vocally and be on the podcast that way. Or I can just read your question from your email on the podcast. But if you have a question you'd like for us to answer on an episode, we do want to try to accumulate some of those so we can get those questions together and have a duo episode with Rachel and I answering your health and fitness questions.
[01:01:58.420] – Rachel
Sweet. That would be fun.
[01:02:00.320] – Allan
Great. Rachel, anything else you want to get into?
[01:02:02.910] – Rachel
No, this is great.
[01:02:04.460] – Allan
All right guys, have a great week and we'll talk to you next week.
[01:02:08.080] – Rachel
Thanks.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
On this episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we sit down with Dr. John Jaquish and discuss his book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time.
Sponsor
This episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast is sponsored by Let's Get Checked. Let's Get Checked makes it easy for anyone to get professional testing and consultation from the comfort of their home. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/LGC and use the code Allan20 to get 20% off.
Transcript
[00:02:48.530] – Allan Rachel, how are you doing?
[00:02:50.250] – Rachel Good, how are you, Allan?
[00:02:51.500] – Allan I'm doing really good, doing really good. This is an exciting week for us here in Panama. You know, up until this point, we've been on a curfew and a weekend quarantine. And so what that means is from 7:00 at night till 5:00 in the morning, you're not allowed out. And if you get caught out, they arrest you. And then over the weekend, it's complete quarantine. So you're supposed to stay home and not go out on Saturday and Sunday. So from seven o'clock Friday night until Monday morning at five o'clock, you're not supposed to be out.
[00:03:24.840] – Allan And so, yeah, they will arrest you, but they're giving us back our Saturdays and they're raising the curfew from seven o'clock to 11 o'clock. So now the curfew will be 11 to five, which I'm already, I'm asleep then. Anyway, I do wake up sometimes before 5:00 but I'm not rushing out the door. Then I'm having some coffee,
[00:03:48.210] – Rachel Oh good.
[00:03:48.290] – Allan But I'm happy I got the Saturdays. It's going to make hitting my goal of 100 miles a month a little easier.
[00:03:54.990] – Rachel Oh yeah.
[00:03:56.010] – Allan When you add a whole extra day and it's a 20 percent increase in days and I'm pretty excited about that, I don't have to spend my Saturdays in my apartment.
[00:04:06.300] – Rachel Oh, that's fantastic.
[00:04:07.940] – Allan So what's going on in your world?
[00:04:10.770] – Rachel Same old. I don't have quite the strict curfew as you guys have, but not a whole lot new here, trying out some new planks or with your traditional planks. So I've tried some new variations this week. I've done the the walk down where you get up kind of in a push up position and put your forearms down and get back up and couple of reaching ones and side planks and yeah, it's been entertaining.
[00:04:38.590] – Allan OK, let me give you a couple more.
[00:04:40.630] – Rachel Ok.
[00:04:41.460] – Allan OK, so this one is called a three tap plank.
[00:04:45.320] – Rachel OK.
[00:04:45.540] – Allan OK. And so you get into the regular plank with your arms extended. So it's the push up style position. OK, and what you're going to do is you're going to take your you're going to take your right hand off the floor and you're going to touch your left shoulder.
[00:04:59.610] – Rachel Oh…
[00:04:59.910] – Allan Then you're going to touch your right shoulder
[00:05:02.050] – Rachel Oh…
[00:05:02.140] – Allan And then you're going to put your arm back on the ground.
[00:05:04.220] – Rachel OK
[00:05:04.670] – Allan And you take your left arm, reach up and you touch your right shoulder and then touch your left shoulder and put your hand on the ground. That's one repetition.
[00:05:13.880] – Rachel That's fantastic.
[00:05:15.260] – Allan OK, so that's a good one. And then if you're struggling with the standard plank, you know, some people will do them on their elbows, which is fine. Are you do it with your hands up, whichever works better, your shoulder strength, your upper body strength, both of them are fine.
[00:05:33.900] – Allan But if you struggle with both of those, or you just you just don't feel like you have the abdominal strength to do that. I recommend people do. And it's basically a yoga move. It's called the bird dog. Are you familiar with the bird dog?
[00:05:46.150] – Rachel I don't think so.
[00:05:47.290] – Allan OK, with the bird dog, you get on your hands and knees.
[00:05:50.430] – Rachel OK.
[00:05:51.040] – Allan OK. And then you want to raise your right arm and point it straight forward.
[00:05:55.110] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:05:55.560] – Allan And then you want to raise your left leg. You try to hold that position. Now, once you get really good at it, you should be able to hold that position for a full minute.
[00:06:04.730] – Rachel Oh, boy.
[00:06:05.430] – Allan You'll shake. You'll shake. It happened. I was I was using this in a class and the shake, shake, shake song came on and they were all kind of laughing because it's like this is appropriate. And then after you get on the right side, then, of course, you switch sides. So left arm out and then your right leg up and you hold that. So that's called the bird dog. So those are two planks that you can add to your repertoire.
[00:06:25.740] – Rachel I absolutely will give that a try. Thank you.
[00:06:28.170] – Allan Good deal. All right. So let's introduce our guest.
[00:06:31.770] – Rachel All right.
[00:06:32.750] – Allan Our guest today approaches health and fitness problems as a scientist and inventor, he invented the Osteo Strong to help fight osteoporosis, the X3 bar to help optimize strength training, along with several other products to help you optimize your health and fitness. With no further ado, here's Dr. John Jaquish.
[00:06:52.160] – Allan Dr. Jaquish, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:55.160] – Dr. Jaquish Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:06:56.960] – Allan You know, when you write a book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time, so is cardio. But there's a better way to have the body you want. You're going to get some personal trainers, hating at first until they actually take the time to read the book, which I did. And I agree. When I first saw it, I was like, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not, that's not entirely true until you actually start looking at some of the science behind what you're talking about and why you're saying the way we're doing weightlifting today is a mistake, the way we're doing cardio and what we're doing it for is a mistake. There are better ways to get the same results. And that's really what your…
[00:07:34.880] – Dr. Jaquish Better results.
[00:07:36.100] – Allan Yes. Yes, absolutely. You know, it's it's sometimes it's really hard. I'll talk to a woman. I'll say, OK, look, I want you to do some strength training because you want to get stronger. And their initial response is, but I don't want to get big and bulky and, you know, I just want to lose weight. I just want to lose weight. And in the book, you cite some studies which I think are critical, but you also go a little bit deeper to why doing strength training is important for weight loss and waist circumference and things like that, better so maybe than even cardio. Can you get into that?
[00:08:10.940] – Dr. Jaquish So. cardio, like your central nervous system, is going to make changes to your body to a degree based on your environment. Now if the environment you're putting your body in is to go long distances, run long distances or bike long distances. It's going to try and find a homeostasis that's going to give you some advantages and it's going to adapt to that environment. Well, if you adapt to that environment, you have to think about and let's just use the analogy of an economy car versus a Formula One car.
[00:08:51.910] – Dr. Jaquish So let's say you're a weightlifter, so you're more like a Formula One car. You're built for short distance speed explosiveness. So what do you have? You have a powerful chassis, very high bone density. Now, weight training is actually not heavy enough ever for bone density, but that's beside the point. And that has to do with a lot of its drawbacks. But so powerful, Chassy, bigger engine, more muscle, that bigger engine is going to draw more fuel and it's going to disable you from going as far even burning the same energy. When I run up a flight of stairs and like I was in the Munich airport recently out of the Munich airport, but it's up and down, running up. You run down, running up you run down, especially if you're like you have a tight connection because you've got to go through immigration.
[00:09:50.610] – Dr. Jaquish Like, I'm winded. And then my friend a guy I do some work with we're going to Moscow and and he says oh your, cardiovascular is terrible and I'm like, no it's not. It's better than yours. I just one hundred pounds more than you in that weight is muscle. I'm not just like taller and bigger. Like so my quadriceps are probably three times bigger than yours. And when they contract they draw a lot of blood.
[00:10:16.590] – Dr. Jaquish So I am not efficient for distance. It doesn't mean I have bad cardio health. The health of the heart and the distance you're able to run are two totally different subjects. So when when you look at what the body is going to do, when you start running long distances, it thinks that it needs to give you that output with the least amount of fuel used. So you lose bone density. Plenty of research on this. You lose muscle, cortisol gets up regulated, cortisol does two things. It lessens your muscle, it gets rid of muscle, and it protects your body fat so that you don't metabolize body fat, so cardio in essence, keeps you fatter longer.
[00:11:05.050] – Dr. Jaquish And sacrifices muscle tissue. So last I checked, unless you want to be a distance runner, it's giving you the opposite of what you think you're getting. Completely the opposite, and then you can look at marathon runners versus sprinters, the marathon runners are what's called skinny fat. So yeah, they don't weigh a lot, but you can't see much visible musculature. You see kind of slumped shoulders, exaggerated kyphosis, because they don't even have the muscle to keep their bodies upright. They've lost so much of the muscle, but then they're still soft like still kind of mushy, you can see cellulite in various places and then on these athletes. So cardio is just not the answer unless you just want to be a distance runner.
[00:12:00.380] – Dr. Jaquish And that's the thing. And that's fine. But if you're not going to be that, you got to know what that activity will do to you is not what you want at all, it'll do the opposite. So when it comes to strength training, muscle is an engine that's running all the time and influences your metabolic rate. So, you know, as I have gained muscle, I'm burning more calories all the time. And and so that's big. But also, as I lift I up regulate growth hormone. I up regulate testosterone, so to ensure that I have the building blocks for muscle growth and the growth hormone, is anti catabolic.
[00:12:51.760] – Dr. Jaquish So even if I go on a caloric deficit, which I frequently do, I'm not losing the muscle at all. And so when you do weight training and like I do push the point, variable resistance is more powerful in the weight room, but weight training in the most efficient way. Let's call it resistance training because it's not really weight training.
[00:13:14.590] – Allan That's the word I use.
[00:13:16.590] – Dr. Jaquish Right, right. Like I didn't say, resistance training is a waste of time. But weight training is a waste of time. So so when when you apply the resistance in the most scientifically proven way, you will have all kinds of anabolic effects, build muscle. And if you have your nutrition right, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
[00:13:42.220] – Allan Yeah, now you were working on a problem. It's kind of what started you down this whole path your mother was dealing with with bone density issues. And so you started saying, what can I do to help her improve her life? And so you started working on a product to basically work on bone density that's been quite successful. And while you were doing that work, you not stumbled upon, but you started noticing the strength curve and you started noticing some things about the strength curve that I think we're missing in the past.
[00:14:16.930] – Allan So, for example, you know, novelists back in the 70s put these cans on their equipment so that you got a variable style of resistance as you worked. If we work with most of the resistance bands that are out there today or even like a Bowflex in the old days, I assume they're still using some form of band. As the band got longer, the resistance was variable. So I think that the concept of variable training has been out there for quite some time.
[00:14:44.290] – Allan But you've kind of come across something that says, look, we don't understand. We didn't understand the strength curve well enough to design that equipment well enough. Can you talk about the strength curve and why it's so important for resistance training?
[00:14:59.050] – Dr. Jaquish So what I what I documented in in some research that I ended up doing in a London hospital and this was for the bone density was going to be able to hear me a little bit better if I do this. But you have when you're back here, you have X amount of weight you can hold. When you're out here, you have seven X. So why would we ever work out with weight that's the same when we have different capacity?
[00:15:31.460] – Dr. Jaquish So the weights heavy and the weakest range of motion and then it's really not that heavy at all in the other range of motion. So I just. You know, like I said to myself, wow, weightlifting is so inefficient as a muscular stimulus. And then the next question was, well, maybe, maybe I should just train with bands, but then once you look at a band and what a band can do to you, once you get to a band that will deliver load that's relevant to strength.
[00:16:09.200] – Dr. Jaquish This happens, your wrists get twisted. And when the wrists and ankles, most specifically wrists and ankles get twisted. So now you're just causing a different type of injury than you would normally get from weight training. So the band's by themselves are totally useless. There is a couple of hucksters out there who see the success of my product and then they launched a different one. That's just like a bag of bands and it's like, OK, you can't get a workout from that, but you can certainly charge people money for it, but you're just not going stimulating growth.
[00:16:45.350] – Dr. Jaquish So what I did was I developed an Olympic bar that can hold as much or more than a regular bar. Solid steel on the inside connected, I'll show you this. So, you know, there's a solid steel core and you can see both hooks rotating. So the risk is always kept neutral, and then the exterior is anodized aluminum mill to the million like an iPhone, because I want people to grab it and realize that this is not just some other fitness product made out of cheap plastic or whatever like this is this is it. This is like the iPhone of fitness equipment.
[00:17:29.450] – Dr. Jaquish And now I have over 40 professional athletes using X3 as their main main strength development tool and a joint protection tool. Now, of course, professional athletes, they have to do like their drills and stuff like like skill training has become a lot more important with athletes. I was just on a podcast talking about this with a former NFL guy. And so, like they do their skill training but then X3 is their strength.
[00:18:00.380] – Allan And I think some of the things that you went into are really, really important is, one understanding, yes. I think anyone that's done just something as simple as a push up, they notice that as they go down and get to the bottom position, it's a lot harder than it was when they were up at the top because they can't recruit as much muscle. So they're much weaker there. And that's why a lot of people that that struggle with push ups just do half pushups.
[00:18:24.560] – Allan You mentioned that in the book, that that's the strength curve. That's our recognition of the strength curve and thinking if we go down any further, we're probably not going to come back up. That's just our mind turning off because it says you can't do this. So, you know, that's the one thing. The other thing I think that's really important is you've taken the time to think about how band work can be improved by making sure that the bar does what Olympic bars do, which is rotate. If you've ever had one of those screw cap kinds and they don't rotate, you feel it when you're trying to move that bar because the weights are static.
[00:18:57.860] – Dr. Jaquish You can't really lift, you have neural inhibition. It makes the joints very uncomfortable and muscles start to shut off. So your body's protecting yourself. Yeah. So it's you can't you can't exercise in any serious manner.
[00:19:12.590] – Allan Yeah, and then you have the footplate, which I think is also critical because that's going to keep the ankles from feeling that resistance, whereas a normal band set, you know it just like the handles. Someone's going to stand on the band and use their ankles and try to press overhead. Well, as they start getting stronger with that, that's that's basically going to start turning their ankles. So this gives them the capacity to work as hard as they want to and I think I saw the bands go up to 600 pounds. So there's there's not anyone I can think of that's not going to get a good workout with up to 600 pounds of resistance.
[00:19:48.110] – Dr. Jaquish Anything you do is high reps. So it's like six hundred pounds with, you know, thirty repetitions. Like, you're not going to bump into anyone, in fact, the NFL guys of the NFL guys, not a single one, uses the heaviest band. And it's not and it's really funny because there are fans of the product who do like you're supposed to do 15 reps minimum, but then they get the heavy band and they'll do maybe like 10 sloppy kind of reps or they're like twisting their body and stuff like that.
[00:20:22.190] – Dr. Jaquish And then they're like, oh, I'm stronger than guys in the NFL. That's a lot of attitudes online is it's not really about. How you perform, it's about how you look on or how you think you look on the video you post on Facebook.
[00:20:41.200] – Allan Yeah, and that's just that's just ego. And I'd say if you're over 40 and you're doing strength training, you're doing resistance training, you need to leave the ego at the door. You need to do work that's efficient and effective. You need to make sure that you don't enjoy yourself, because once you enjoy yourself, you're out of the game until you recover. And when you're over the age of 40, that's just much more difficult to do. So this checks off a lot of really good boxes. So I'm pretty excited about this product.
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[00:22:39.850] – Allan Now, you also got into the topic, which I think is really important, because I think when a lot of people want to build mass, they're thinking, oh, I've got to, you know, I've got to hit the carbs, I've got to hit the protein. And, you know, I go low fat. So, you know, I'm eating chicken and I'm eating rice and I'm just, you know, tuna and pasta and I'm just going after it. But you actually follow a plan of ketosis and intermittent fasting. Would you talk a little bit about your protocols and how you're able to build the mass that you have. Because I'm looking at your massive build, the mass that you have while still practicing ketosis and intermittent fasting.
[00:23:20.380] – Dr. Jaquish So the conclusion I came to had mostly to do with realizing protein recommendations and understanding protein quality. So like whey protein, it's easy to get your protein if you count whey protein. But the problem is only 18 percent of the whey protein is of the proper amino acid ratios. So, you know. 82% goes through you as waste. So it's really not worth it to just even bother with whey protein.
[00:23:55.000] – Dr. Jaquish People get so upset, probably because they have six months of whey protein in their in their pantry.
[00:24:04.720] – Allan Yeah, it's cheap, it's the most, it's the most cost less product you could have relative to actually eating some whole food. It's actually a little cheaper. Like if I look at and say oh I can get 30 grams of protein with this two dollar scoop of protein powder or I can go buy, you know, a steak and pay, you know, maybe four or five, six dollars for that at the store, you know, so, yeah, it's it appears cost effective.
[00:24:34.630] – Dr. Jaquish Well, whey used to be the byproduct of well, so it is the byproduct of pasteurizing processing milk and then it was thrown away. It was garbage. And so it was Dandi Shane who started buying it. And say, hey, can I have that trash of yours and I get like a buck every chemical drum or whatever, and then that's where that's really where protein whey protein supplements came from. It was garbage.
[00:25:12.170] – Allan There you go. But but you do follow ketosis, but you're just making sure that the quality of your protein is such that you're able to get the protein you need and that helps you maintain your muscle mass and continue to maintain strength.
[00:25:26.720] – Dr. Jaquish Right. I don't use the word I mean, I'm in ketosis all the time. But what's interesting is I don't use the word much because there's a lot of confusion around it. Like people think to get in ketosis, you need to eat fat. That is 100 percent not true. To get into ketosis, you need to not eat carbohydrates. Now your body turns to fat for fuel, but it could get that fat through what you're eating. This is true.
[00:26:07.060] – Dr. Jaquish But it could also get the fat from the Krispy Kreme donut you had when you were eight years old, which is in your gut. So let's get it from there. So that that's that's really where I want people to focus.
[00:26:25.950] – Allan Well, you definitely do a lot of research, and when you want to solve a problem, by God, you solve it.
[00:26:34.700] – Dr. Jaquish And then I document it because I tell people, people, and sometimes they get like a DM or something. And it says, what's your opinion on this or what's your opinion? And then I'm like, I don't have any opinions. I'll tell you, there's research on that. And what and how we could view that research and what the weaknesses and strengths of that research are, but there are no opinions. Like I wont volunteer my opinion on really anything from a biological standpoint.
[00:27:06.150] – Dr. Jaquish Like I can say, there's no research. Hearing things that might be happening. But I won't wait those one way or the other because, you know. So I guess my point is I'm always trying to be is referenced or I'm trying to reference other research as much as possible. So because I'm saying so many controversial things, nobody would believe it if it were just like this is what I think. If I can I can site a bunch of studies and go, well, you know, these researchers that Dr. Jaquish doesn't know. You know, and years before he launched his products came to these conclusions so they can kick and scream about it. Unfortunately, people are dogmatic about it. I actually get trolled for nutrition even more so than my product.
[00:27:58.720] – Allan I mean, I can understand that because and I was actually thinking about this, I'm working on another book, a little e-book that I'm going to put out. And I was actually thinking about, you know, why why does someone get so mad when you you have a food approach or a way of eating approach that is so different than theirs that, you know, they literally almost like politics, want to come to blows about how wrong you are. And it is just dogma.
[00:28:26.470] – Allan It's just they're tied married to their idea. You know, sometimes when you're looking at research even, which is cool because, you know, you made the comment that most of the research you're following, these guys just never figured out how to productize what they were finding. You have so, you know, boo-hoo on them if they feel bad about it. But you did. You're taking the time to think about it and come up with solutions, which is huge because that's what we need.
[00:28:54.520] – Allan We don't you know, science is great, but if it sits in a journal unread for 20 years, it's not really doing us a ton of good.
[00:29:02.570] – Dr. Jaquish Right.
[00:29:03.340] – Allan Occasionally something will come up, you know, like like Louis Simms at West Side, you know, put bands and cable and chains over the bars and his athletes got really freaking strong and everybody's like, what's he doing? And a few people went in there and basically spied on what is what he was doing, this conjugating method. And it got out. It's like, yeah, this is what he's doing. This is how his athletes are getting really, really strong. And all you've really done is take some of that same. You figured out exactly what the optimal strength curve is and said, OK, if we have an appliance that allows them to work out with this kind of strength curve, or at least as close to it as we can approximate with what technology we have today.
[00:29:45.210] – Dr. Jaquish Oh, I'm dead on. I measured.
[00:29:47.920] – Allan Yeah, I saw the curves online. I was like, yeah, he's right there. You know, it's not there's not much, much, little bit to get in there, but it's there. And so, you know, and you took the time to think about what are the other problems we're going to have with a piece of kit like this if we one, don't think about turning ankles and we don't think about the wrists and we don't think about the bio mechanics of how this is all going to work so that we're, you know, in a way optimizing without the injury. So, again, I'm really I'm really pleased with your product. I think it's I think it's really, really cool.
[00:30:20.980] – Dr. Jaquish Thank you.
[00:30:22.150] – Allan Now, if someone I'm sorry I jumped ahead. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:30:33.400] – Dr. Jaquish Well, so the easiest one is you grow when you sleep. You repair cells when you sleep. So don't compromise your sleep, which really means don't drink alcohol. Thats not the answer a lot of people want to hear or, you know, drink it at the minimum, but it really affects your sleep if you sleep monitor like a motion detector next to you in the bed and like you can use your phone to do this. There's a couple different sleep analysis apps and you'll notice you thrash around all night when you have a lot of alcohol in your system. When you don't, you don't. And you sleep much better and you can have a much better repair of damaged cells.
[00:31:25.290] – Dr. Jaquish And then, you know, the growth, just the muscle protein synthesis that comes with proper strategic strength training. Yeah, so like, that's the easiest one getting getting better sleep by cutting, cutting down or out alcohol. So the other two really have to do the two pieces of information we have that lead to long life, so the two greatest drivers of long life, despite what you read on, you know, nutritional facts.com, which should really be called nutritional lies.com, the two greatest drivers are high levels of strength and low levels of body fat.
[00:32:15.050] – Dr. Jaquish So if you want to live a long time, focus on those two things. So that means strength training or cardio. That means focusing on things like ketosis if you want a low body fat. Animal protein, because it's going to make you leaner, like a vegan nutrition plant based nutrition. From a vegan perspective, you know, there's not a lot of data on the pure vegan, but you notice their weak with a lot of body fat, so they have two things going on that are going to cause them to live shorter lives, longer lives.
[00:32:55.130] – Dr. Jaquish And then and then, you know, when you when you look at the Western diet, like right now, people are practically vegan. 70% of the Western diet is plant based because remember, vegans are not necessarily eating vegetables. Bread is vegan, right? So they're having all kinds of pastries and little nut bars that have nuts from every continent in the world that, by the way, if you want to talk about destroying the environment. There we go, sourcing ingredients from every corner of the world to make some little fake health bar. Like that's a stupid decision, so like some of the vegans I know, they brag about how Oreos are vegan and they eat like sleeves of Oreos for dinner or at dinner time, I'm sure they would call it dinner.
[00:33:56.830] – Dr. Jaquish But like, you're just getting fatter, like you're just getting fatter. That's all you're doing. And you're worsening your cellular health, your metabolic health, your hemoglobin A1C score all the things that they're saying on the news to do the opposite of. But then, of course, like the American Diabetes Association gives out cookies at their events. Like, that's like going to an AA meeting in pouring free shots. It doesn't make any sense at all.
[00:34:31.790] – Dr. Jaquish But, you know, like you can tell somebody they smoke too much, you can tell somebody, they drink too much, you tell somebody they eat too much, and it's like you insulted their ancestors. So unfortunately, that's the situation we live in.
[00:34:45.000] – Allan I've been doing I've been doing this for five years. And I can just tell you, it's like I have a guest on and we don't exactly see eye to eye on the nutrition front. It's never a pleasant conversation for either of us. So, you know, I don't push my own out there. You know, I'm like I'm agnostic generally. I say eat what I'm going to eat because it doesn't matter what I tell you to eat, you're going to still eat what you eat. But I'm just saying, you're right. If we're not paying attention to the quality of our food quality of our protein, we're not paying attention what we're putting in our mouths. It really doesn't matter what else we try to do for our health. It's just not going to happen.
[00:35:20.510] – Allan Dr. Jaquiss, thank you for being on the show. If someone wants to learn more about you, the X3 and the protein supplements and things that you have (Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time), where would you like for me to send them?
[00:35:31.660] – Dr. Jaquish Yeah, I made a landing page with all the links to everything, you know, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. So go to doctorj.com.
[00:35:45.780] – Allan Cool, well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/454 and I'll be sure to have a link there. So Dr. Jaquish, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:35:56.120] – Dr. Jaquish Allan, thanks for having me. This was great.
[00:36:03.340] – Allan Well, Rachel, that was that was a really interesting talk. It's kind of interesting to see John on video. I took some videos and I'll be posting those promos for this episode. So I encourage you guys to go check those out on our Facebook group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and that'll take you to a Facebook group. I'll have a couple of videos posted there of John and we're having this conversation.
[00:36:27.650] – Allan Now, the interesting thing is that when you see John, he looks like a bouncer. You quite literally looks like a guy. If you walked up to the club, you got the guy who's got his arms crossed in front of his chest. And you're kind of like, I'm not going to mess with that guy. He also is bald, but he just looks like a bouncer. But he's a really, really smart guy. He's an inventor. He's a scientist. He looks at data and he solves problems. And so his piece of equipment X3, I'm not I'm not joking. You know, right now, I'm not getting any money from John to say this, but I'm going to buy one and I'm going to check it out because I think it is important to optimize what you can get if if you're not lifting weights at all, or you're not doing any resistance training at all. Shame on you.
[00:37:13.510] – Allan Your bones and your muscles are not happy. I can tell you right now. And you're missing a big pillar of our health and fitness by not doing resistance training. But to start with something, you know, the resistance bands that you can buy on Amazon and I'll have a link in the show notes to some. Those are really great little tool for you to get some exercise at home and they fit in your in your suitcase so you can carry them anywhere you are.
[00:37:40.780] – Allan You can get your resistance workout done. And resistance bands are just a great adjunct to body weight movement because it just gives you an opportunity to do things you can't do, with just body weight. So but he has a specialized process, specialized tool. And I like gadgets and I like playing with stuff. So I'm going to I'm going to probably buy his equipment. So understanding that we can we can do better with science. I mean, in a lot of times I pooh-pooh supplements.
[00:38:09.640] – Allan I pooh-pooh. It's Arjuna's ketones last week. Forgive me, Dr. Lori and I pooh-pooh a lot of other stuff, but there's a time and place when those things matter. You know, I talked about the guys that were lifting at West Side and how they were using chains and bands to maximize their effort. They had a specific task to get really freaking strong. And you might not want to get that strong. But if you if you want your deadlift to get heavier or you want your squat, get heavier, training your body the right way will help that happen.
[00:38:45.850] – Allan And so what's going to happen for someone that does both. You're going to you're going to fatigue your muscles to the full range of motion a lot better than you would if you just did the exercise itself. So I see the tool as a great tool. And again, these were a tool and I like to use the same word twice in a sentence, but it is a tool and it's a tool for allowing you to get stronger. He put a lot of thought into how it's designed and how it's built.
[00:39:13.150] – Allan So it's it's a pretty cool thing and it's something that weighs like seventeen pounds. So it's something you can actually carry around with you. And like I said, just the same convenience you kind of have with bands, although these are probably and likely much better, is going to give you a gym in your hotel room and give you a gym at your house in a time when people don't necessarily want to get out and about around a lot of people and like in the gym, because our gym still closed here.
[00:39:41.770] – Allan Yeah, they basically lumped us in with discos and casinos and concerts and movie theaters. So, you know, we're just that important. But no gyms here. So if I want to do something at home, this is a pretty cool piece of kit to have.
[00:39:57.130] – Rachel Yeah, I'm actually really intrigued by his results with bands. Usually when I think of a big bulky guy, a bouncer type guy, I'm thinking big heavy weights, big Olympic bars, big fat plates. Yeah, serious weight lifting. And I'm pretty intrigued that he can get some really good results with this program or this tool.
[00:40:19.140] – Allan Yeah. And the interesting thing is he's got he's even got professional athletes working with it. So, you know, it's it's not a toy and it's not the little bands that you're buying on Amazon.
[00:40:28.130] – Rachel Right.
[00:40:28.300] – Allan Again, if you're not doing anything there is the start, that's where you go. You get those bands, you do body weight movement. And if you have any questions about it, email me. I'm here. You know, I'm here to help you figure that out. But if you're getting into the training and, you know, scary to get under a lot of weight when you're doing a bench press, it's scary to get under a lot of weight when you're doing squats and there's opportunities for you to injure yourself when you're moving a lot of weight.
[00:40:56.710] – Allan So here's a band that's going to work within your strength curve so that you're getting stronger through the full range of motion and he's built it to be generally safe. So again, I think it's really cool toy.
[00:41:09.930] – Rachel That's something I can see having in our gym, too, especially when if I'm working out by myself, I don't want to be crushed by some heavy Olympic bar.
[00:41:19.320] – Rachel But I'm also interested in the strength curve and the kind of the specificity behind using bands to get kind of a different workout than your basic dumbbell, barbell type move?
[00:41:33.450] – Allan Well, the the equivalent, because, you know, I'm kind of been in this lifting mode for a long time in my life. But one of the core things that comes out is when you do push ups, you can watch someone doing push ups or watch someone doing pull ups and you'll notice how they don't go all the way down.
[00:41:50.850] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:41:51.330] – Allan And the reason they don't go all the way down is because it's so hard.
[00:41:54.120] – Rachel It is.
[00:41:54.870] – Allan You know, it's like I go to the bottom. I might not make it back up to the top. You know, I'm not going to take a deep squat like I'm supposed to. I'm going to take those little half squats and risk my knees because it's hard to get back up. Whereas with this piece of equipment, you're working that weak part hard enough for that weak part and you're working your strong parts as hard as your strong parts can work. So you can find that equilibrium where you're getting the best work.
[00:42:23.340] – Allan So, you know, understanding that having that variable resistance is going to help you get a better workout is, like I said, really, really cool. And there are, the way we used to do it as bodybuilders would be this. Is we knew that we could lift a lot more weight within that strong zone. So we would do partial reps there. And we knew we couldn't lift as much in those weak ranges. So when we found our sticking points, we would work lightweights through heavier, heavier but lightweights there.
[00:42:53.060] – Allan You know, lightweights, but not as heavy as our strong. So you would do these partial reps, you know, and that's cool if you're trying to build muscle. And, you know, look, Buff, you know, once when I was doing it was kind of the goal. But, you know, that's not practical for a lot of people to say, OK, I'm going to do, you know, partial reps in this zone and then I'm going to go change the weights and do more reps in this zone, and then I'm going to do more weight in this zone.
[00:43:22.890] – Allan That's not a practical workout for most people. And it's not strength training. It's that's bodybuilding. It's very different kind of lifting approach. But what he's allowing to do is within the strength area for you to use that same concept and just work the whole range of motion. And you don't even have to change bars or change weights. Just just do the work. So I think it's a great adjunct to a normal weight lifting program. I'm not going to go as far as as John went as to say lifting weights is a waste of time, cardio too. I'm sorry John.
[00:43:58.930] – Rachel Bold. It's a bold statement.
[00:44:00.780] – Allan As I told him. I said, you know, of course I'm getting you on this podcast because I've got something to say to you. But he's a big guy, so I probably wouldn't say it. I would just say good job. But anyway, it's you know, I feel good moving weight, you know, and I don't get the exact same satisfaction moving band. So, you know, there is a motivational factor for me to to get under a bar to to pick up a bar from the ground.
[00:44:31.190] – Allan I love deadlifts, love, love, love, love, love, love deadlifts. It is my favorite thing. But besides steak and oysters and a couple of other things. But it's it's up there anyway. So yeah. I love I love moving way. I love about the feeling of being able to functionally do something and so bands can be a great adjunct if I, you know, maybe I, I don't want to move that much weight or want to know, maybe I'm sticking in my tall, you know, sticking at the right and, you know, sticking at the bottom and I'm just not getting a good start on my left.
[00:45:04.940] – Allan I'm like, OK, I know I can get this weight, but I just got to be able to build strength in that zone. Now, there's ways I could do that. You know, I could put it on rack and I could lift partials. I could do boxes and I could elevate my feet and I could do some things to kind of change those angles and change that weight within those angles. But again, not my favorite thing and too much time dedicated to something like that.
[00:45:27.650] – Allan And it means not adding a tremendous amount of value to my life other than just feeling good about what I'm doing. Bands are going to be a great adjunct to what I'm doing.
[00:45:36.550] – Rachel Yeah, I think so. I think it'll keep things interesting in the gym and give you something different to do and you won't be stuck in a rut or doing get bored doing the same thing all the time.
[00:45:46.990] – Allan All right. Well let's go ahead and call it a day and we'll see you next week.
[00:45:53.700] – Rachel All right. Take care.
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[00:02:49.220] – Allan Alana, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:02:51.930] – Alana Thank you for having me.
[00:02:53.970] – Allan So, you know, I did a little survey asking listeners, what do you want on the show? What do you want me spend more time doing? And I put in a weight loss and, you know, fitness and some other topics in there. And there are a few people wrote a couple of things. And overwhelmingly though, I was pleasantly surprised that they wanted to talk about strength training. They wanted to talk about training a lot more.
[00:03:18.480] – Allan And as a personal trainer, most of the time when we see someone walk in the door and the first thing in their head is that they want to lose weight. So it's kind of surprising. But it's also why I reached out. I want to make sure I had had you on the show. Your book is called, Strength Training Over 40: A 6-Week Program to Build Muscle and Agility. And as I went through it, I was like, you know, this is this is very well done because it's simple.
[00:03:42.570] – Allan You've got complete body workouts whether you want to do at home or in the gym. You explain every exercise very, very well. And I work with some blind clients and so when I'm working with a blind client you have to be very specific about how a movement looks and feels. And you really captured that in the book with your description. So great job.
[00:04:05.070] – Alana Well, great. Thank you so much for that. And you know, it's when I see clients, one of the first things that I, when we first sit down, I talk to them about the fact that we're not going to get bogged down with numbers. I don't want to even know what they weigh. I'm not going to pull out the measuring tape. We focus on getting strong. And that's kind of my mantra. And I say, you know, if we focus on getting strong, everything else kind of falls into place and it does. And so they're thrilled to hear that.
[00:04:37.710] – Allan Yeah. You know, one of the core reasons I think people over the age of 40 feel like there's this uphill battle when they start trying to maintain their muscle mass or get stronger is it just seems a lot harder than it was when they were in their 20s. And it is harder. I won't belittle that at all. A big reason, though, is our hormones. But the good news is that resistance training has a lot of benefits for us, including helping us improve our hormones. Could you talk about that a little bit?
[00:05:09.150] – Alana Oh, absolutely. Yeah, hormones are really complicated and can't be discussed in isolation. They all work together. But basically hormones are chemical messengers in the body that regulate things like metabolism and growth and our mood and our physical response to stress. And interestingly, the body perceives strength training at first as a stressor which can elevate cortisol levels which we don't want to have elevated for long periods of time because they can wreak havoc on the body. It cortisol, the hormone that's responsible for that fight or flight response, and also the accumulation of retention of body fat, belly fat primarily.
[00:05:59.340] – Alana So one might ask why strength train of it stimulates cortisol. And in my research, I've learned that strength training also stimulates human growth hormone, which helps the body to adapt to strength training and human growth hormone helps to reduce cortisol levels as well as helps us with insulin sensitivity. And so we know the other side of insulin sensitivity is insulin resistance, which we don't want because that can lead to Type two diabetes. So we know there's a close relationship between cortisol and insulin that's positively affected by the elevation of human growth hormone, which is stimulated by lifting weights and not just going through the motions of lifting weights either, we want to really challenge ourselves with those weights.
[00:06:59.700] – Alana And so basically, we're training the body to deal with stress in a healthy way by putting that added demand on our muscle. And also, there is strong evidence that strength training not only increases human growth hormone in both men and women, but it also increases testosterone in men, which helps to build muscle and bone mass. And and and it increases estrogen in women, which helps stave off heart disease and osteoporosis. So that's just a very small snapshot into the hormonal response to strength training.
[00:07:40.740] – Allan Yeah, you know when we're getting to this age, I'm in my mid 50s now and our hormones are not our friends and at least they don't feel like they're our friends, but they actually are our friends if we take the time to understand that balancing the resistance work is going to signal and it's the hormones that are going to do that signaling for you. So the release of growth hormone, this temporary increase in cortisol, which is catabolic, is then going to stimulate that muscle to change and insulin is going to play its part by replacing some of the glycogen that's come out of the muscle.
[00:08:18.390] – Allan So whole training aspects of it gets those things working a lot better together, which is really where the key is. And then with regards to insulin and estrogen, if we don't have those right you don't feel energetic. You don't feel strong. You don't feel all the good things we felt when we were younger. So in many ways, your sex hormones are your stay young hormones and the better you do at balancing those out, keeping those where they need to be, the longer you're going to feel young.
[00:08:48.090] – Alana Absolutely. And I think when insulin and cortisol are out of whack, it can create estrogen dominance, which I think for women in menopause is really the guilty party. And so many of the complaints that women have with menopause. And regarding menopause as well, I get a little bit fatigued by hearing women blaming everything that's going on with them on menopause and when the fact is that it's and I believe an accumulation of sort of not so wise choices.
[00:09:38.980] – Allan And thats a really nice way to say it.
[00:09:42.790] – Alana And then we hit sort of because we do we start to lose muscle mass at about the age of 35, called Sarcopenia. It's a fact. And but we don't really notice it until we hit about 50 and we've lost so much muscle by that point that our metabolism has slowed down because our muscle mass is directly tied to our metabolism. We lose enough muscle, our metabolism becomes sluggish. And so I find that many women, and men as well, hitting middle age, they've just lost so much muscle that their metabolism has slowed way down. So yet another another reason to get on strength training and the earlier the better. But it's never too late.
[00:10:35.860] – Allan You know, a lot of times I'll have someone and they'll tell me, look, I know I need to work out. I know I need to, but then they don't. And in the book, you talked about the difference between inspiration and motivation. Could you take just a minute to go over this? Because I think it's I think people have it backwards sometimes when they're thinking, I need somebody, you know, to motivate me. Get me going. And so they kind of want a trainer or they want to work out body or something, someone to walk with them even when they're going to do their walks or something. But I think we're looking at that wrong. If we get those two words mixed up.
[00:11:15.580] – Alana I think so. I did a little video the other day on this very topic and it was really well received. And one of the things that I discuss with my clients, again, when I first sit down with them is about finding their why, what's going to get through them through the door. And it's going to be different for all of us. And I see inspiration as looking outward, such as Instagram and magazines or Facebook groups or whatever. Inspiration and motivation truly comes from finding your why.
[00:11:57.490] – Alana What is important to you? For me, I had a baby a week away from my forty fifth birthday, so my why is wanting to be really active for him and when he he's 17 now, so when he has children I want to be active for them. And so again and I say to people whatever it is that gets you through that door. That's your why and you have to deeply internalize it, but not every day that motivation is going to be there.
[00:12:30.950] – Alana And when that motivation sort of goes on vacation, that's when we need to tap into discipline. But motivation itself will help carry us through for the most part. Yeah. So in some people, I'll ask them what to think about their why. And to them it's just wanting to look good in a bathing suit on the on the beach. I said, that's great. If that's your motivation right now, that means you don't have a lot of aches and pains in your body and you're wanting to look good if your reasons are purely aesthetic, whatever it takes to get you through the door and keep yourself strong.
[00:13:09.320] – Allan You know, I think as we get to this age that we're at that point where we really need to start thinking about what our lives are going to be like for the next 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 years or so. And and if we're losing muscle, we're not doing this and we don't do this. We can't get ourselves motivated and can't get ourselves doing this work. We're going to lose more muscle. Eventually you're not going to be able to open up jars and you're going to lose your independence eventually.
[00:13:36.050] – Allan You're not going be able to get up from the seated position. You're going to lose your independence. And so one of the core ways I like to look at it is I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105.
[00:13:45.470] – Alana Yes, absolutely.
[00:13:46.850] – Allan You know, that gets me up in the morning. You know that that gets me thinking. If I don't do this, then I'm you know, I'm setting myself up for that. When I first got into this, it was it was also my daughter. My daughter was starting to get into CrossFit and she was starting to do this obstacle course races and just that kind of fun stuff. And I was thinking, and I want to go see her do this, but I don't want to just sit there and watch her do it.
[00:14:14.750] – Allan I want to be on the obstacle course with her. I want to be doing across the work out with her. But at the time, I was in no physical shape to make that happen. I needed to be a lot stronger to carry my body through a Tough Mudder or any kind of thing like that. So that's that was my motivation, is wanting to finish those races and spend that time that way with my daughter doing the things she loved. So many times we have our kids around us doing the things we want to do. I wanted her to be doing the things she loves and I wanted to be a part of it. So, you know, finding those ways to have that internal motivation to show up every day to do the work that's necessary to be that person that can open your own jars, that can wipe your butt at 105 or finish a Tough Mudder at 47 years old.
[00:14:57.980] – Alana Yeah, absolutely. And I give a little example in my book. About one day I came home with groceries and it was dark in the middle of the winter and my boys had inadvertently locked me out of the gate and I didn't have my phone with me to call them and I didn't want to start shouting and bothering the neighbors. And so I thought, well, I'll just climb up over this fence and it's a really high fence. And then I was on top of the shed and then I had to lower myself down.
[00:15:27.950] – Alana And that's, as you know, where the real strength comes in. And I got to the top and I thought, OK, it's like, you know, the down portion of a pull up. And I could do it. And I felt like a young girl scrambling up that fence and over the shed and down and opened the gate and grabbed my groceries and I was in the house and I remember thinking I couldn't do this if if I hadn't kept myself strong.
[00:15:56.900] – Alana Not that it's a huge deal. I could have eventually gotten through the gate. But just the fact that I was able to do that, I was so proud of myself. And, yeah, losing muscle you know, for as far as aging goes is the the fastest way to lose our independence. And I'm like you. I want I want to be able to take care of myself for a really long time. I want to be able to do the things that I love to do for a really long time and not have to just look at pictures from other people that walk to the top of the hill and and looked down. I want to be able to do that myself. So those are also my whys, you know, to stay independent. I don't think any of us relishes the fact of, you know, going to a home and sort of deteriorating there.
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[00:19:07.830] – Allan My grandfather lived into his 90s, and that's where he spent the ending of his life, because he couldn't get himself up and down, he couldn't do the things he needed to be able to do. He lost big parts of his life. I remember sitting there at the golf course with him when he was 80 and he said he was going to quit playing golf because he just couldn't do it anymore. His balance wasn't there, his strength just wasn't there. And I just felt that you lived your whole life playing golf. You love the sport, you live on a golf course and now you're not going to play golf.
[00:19:37.210] – Alana Right. And that that brings up a good point, too, because the one thing that people say to me is, well, I walk a lot, so my legs will be strong forever, but it just doesn't work that way. Eventually it'll slide backwards if we're not doing purposeful strength training to strengthen those muscles. And so that's, to train for our sport, whether it be golf or anything, hiking, you know, train the sport of life and we have to do it.
[00:20:13.540] – Alana And just quickly, I was a competitive figure skater growing up and I had these skinny little legs. But soon I wasn't able to compete with the girls that had the genetically strong legs. And in those days back then, we didn't train for our sport. And I remember thinking, oh, if there was only a way, if there was only a way to be strong. And I had to eventually in my late teens give up skating. But I discovered the gym soon after that.
[00:20:43.870] – Alana And I was just so happy because there is a way there is a way to keep ourselves strong. And and I've done that ever since. And I can honestly say at age 62, I'm in better shape, I just I keep getting better and stronger and people that boggles people's mind. They don't understand it. And also they say it must be such hard work. You must have to be doing this constantly and no, I might spend three hours a week in strength training because I've done it for so long. I'm now just maintaining so it's never I like to say it's never too late to start because as the saying goes, muscle knows no age. But the sooner you start, the longer you will have to reap those benefits of a strong body.
[00:21:47.530] – Allan One of the things I was really glad to see in the book was that you spent a good bit of time talking about stretching and showing some stretches that we would do. And you included both the dynamic and the static stretching. Could you take some time to talk about both and then when one is appropriate, when the other isn't?
[00:22:07.810] – Alana Yeah, sure, dynamic stretching is not stretching as we know it, per say, they're sort of more dynamic movements such as leg swings and arm rotations and high knees and marching in place, jumping jacks even, mountain climbers. And so if we're at home and we don't have access or jumping rope is good, but that's also cardio. If we don't have access to cardio equipment, doing these dynamic movements is a great way to not only warm up our joints, but get our heart rate up as well.
[00:22:47.150] – Alana So those are to be done prior to strength training and then static stretching, which is the kind of stretching that most of us are familiar with are the longer holds the well where the hamstring stretches and the quad stretches and those sorts of stretches. But one thing, most of us don't hold those stretches for long enough. You know, people will hold them for three or four seconds. That's it. And go to the other side. But we really should be holding those stretches for 15 to 30 seconds.
[00:23:25.700] – Alana But, and those should be done after strength training, it shouldn't be painful either. And I'm I'm believer in that we really shouldn't be stretching beyond our natural range of motion. And I think it's really, really important to maintain our our natural range of motion. But I think the studies are showing if we have very flexible joints without strength, that creates unstable joints and unstable joints are joints that are prone to injury. So that's been interesting to me because I grew up in through the 80s, 70s and 80s where it was all about stretching, and we really pushed ourselves way beyond our natural range of motion.
[00:24:13.100] – Alana And we don't do that so much anymore. So just maintaining our natural range of motion, I like to say I'm as flexible as I need to be, meaning my joints, every joint in my body can do what it was meant to do.
[00:24:26.630] – Allan Now, sometimes you're talking to a potential client or talking to someone and they hear the word gym. And immediately there's the palms get sweaty and they're thinking about going into a building that they're not going to recognize 90 percent of the stuff in there. And there's people in there. In many cases, they're in the corner over there with the heavy weights, grunting and carrying on, maybe even yelling at each other just to seem to get motivated or sitting around on the phone, sitting on the equipment that you want.
[00:24:55.510] – Allan And so there's you know, there's this this environment that for a lot of people, they're just not quite comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits, why we might want to go to the gym, but also if we really can't or don't want to go to the gym, there's ways we can do this at home so we can go through that.
[00:25:14.700] – Alana For sure. The gym is is a motivating place or because you see other people doing what what you're doing, they're interested in the same thing, which is keeping their body strong. One thing that I will do sometimes if I have a say, a sixty five year old lady who has never been in the gym before, I'll take her over to the buffest guy in the gym and introduce her. And then she sees that these guys are just so sweet and and they say, yeah, if you need any help, just, you know, I'm here.
[00:25:52.160] – Alana And so I think that has has always helped. But being around your your tribe, you know, the people who are interested in doing the same things that that you're doing is very helpful. And I sometimes will start older clients out on the machines, which are great. We can't have those machines at home, most of us. And it's a great way to start some people who have never done strength training before. And so there's that aspect, the machines and the being around other people who are interested in the same things you are no matter the age.
[00:26:37.070] – Alana And I think people will really be surprised at how helpful the fit buff guy, you know, is when asked a question. People are always surprised by that. And and they they say to me, I'm so intimidated. You know, they're not looking at you and they're certainly not judging you. The only thing that they're thinking is good for you, good for you, for walking through that door. So that helps too.
[00:27:05.140] – Allan Well, the core of is this, the more members the gym has than the gyms making money, it's going to stay there. So we want our gym to stay and we want our gym memberships to be reasonably priced. If it's just us in the gym, suddenly it's not that reasonable priced because we want all that equipment in there. And so they're happy to see a new person walk in the gym. That's a net positive for the whole environment.
[00:27:30.870] – Allan And I had a client. His name's Trent. And he told me he said he he doesn't really know the names of anybody, but he goes to the gym at the same time every day and the same people. So not at each other, they'll see each other. He doesn't know their names, doesn't really talk to him, know him that well from that perspective. But he said any day that he's thinking he might not want to go to the gym. He's imagining those guys in there working out, and it's like even if they're not really holding him accountable, accountable, he's holding himself accountable because he knows they're in there and he's not.
[00:28:05.890] – Alana Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great point. And I have a very competitive nature, as many people do. And if, you know, you're sitting at home on the couch there, those other people that you see every day are in the gym, you know, getting ahead of where you are. So you know that that's a good point as well. The gym is a very I don't know. I have been to so many gyms during the course of my life, and I have never, ever, as a small little female, ever had a negative experience in the gym. So I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage for some people to take that first step through the door. But it gets easier and easier. And so I tell them that the first time we sit down together.
[00:28:50.080] – Allan And I know some people say, well, let me lose a little bit more weight, let me get a little bit more comfortable with this, and then I'll consider going to the gym. And so there are ways that we can get this done at home as long as, again, we got that we got that whole motivation, inspiration thing working for us. Many of us can have a home gym and get the same results.Can you talk a little bit? If I'm going to set up a home gym, particularly do your six week program, what are some of the equipment that I would want to have?
[00:29:18.730] – Alana Yeah, well, I think we've proven this during this covid time for sure that we can work out at home. And so I suggest resistant bands of various strengths and you can get the bands with handles or that are continuous loop. Any kind of many bands are also great. Maybe two or three sets of dumbbells to have at home are great. And if you could get a bench, that's great, but you can use your coffee table or even the floor for some exercises if you don't have a bench, a stability ball is awesome to have. You can do all kinds of exercises with a stability ball. Those are some people call them swiss balls or exercise balls and a mat and maybe a pull up bar, which I have.
[00:30:16.720] – Alana And and if you can't do pull ups, you know, you can attach a resistant band to it and put your foot in there. And it's like an assisted pull up and maybe a medicine ball and certainly don't have to do all of that. You can get away with just the resistant bands at first and then just kind of add to it as you go. But you can get a really good workout in with those pieces of equipment.
[00:30:45.670] – Allan And you can often find these used their resale shops in some towns and then can going on something like Craigslist almost always are. Some of the markets, like on Facebook, you'll find used fitness equipment at a cheap, cheap price so you can get these things without breaking the bank if you take your time and shop wisely.
[00:31:07.600] – Alana Oh, absolutely. Although I will say right now people are hard to find because people have snapped a lot of this up right now, but you just keep looking and and you'll find it. In the mean time we shouldn't forget about bodyweight exercises as well. There's a lot we can do with just our body weight, although that's not going to carry us through forever because we do need to continuously you know, we want that progressive resistance. But body weight is a great way to start out.
[00:31:43.510] – Alana Also, I should add, TRX straps, you can buy and hook to the top of your door and those come in really, really handy.
[00:31:54.850] – Allan Alana, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:32:03.940] – Alana OK, well, these might not be your typical responses, but first of all, I would say our state of mind is really important. So be mindful of the words that we say to ourselves, like, for example, I'm sick and tired, or I hate or I'm having a seniors moment or I'm old, or I'm X age therefore I'm supposed to be in pain and lacking energy or be carrying extra fat and growing old sucks. You know, so I never say those words to myself.
[00:32:36.970] – Alana I'm really, really conscious of of how I speak to myself. And so be kind and gentle to yourself and treat yourself how you want others to treat you and also to stay. This is part of of this of the first one is staying connected with others and don't isolate during this this time that we're in right now, be kind to others and be of service, you know, it's all about that state of mind. And second, keeping our brain stimulated by learning new things and getting outside of our comfort zone, which might be going to the gym or taking up something new.
[00:33:18.770] – Alana And outside of our comfort zone is where the best things happen. And stay informed. But don't get bogged down by the negative news today and find solace in knowing that we're all in this together. And third, exercise your body because you love yourself not as punishment for something that you ate. And strength train and maintain your your natural range of motion, as we talked about, challenge your heart in some way, you know, at least three times a week.
[00:33:54.170] – Alana And, you know, just just stay strong and agile so that you can do the things you love for a long, long time. So that's kind of a long answer. But those things, I don't think we can stay well without addressing the state of mind and our brain as well as our physical bodies.
[00:34:16.610] – Allan I completely agree. So Alana if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Strength Training Over 40, what would you like for me to send them?
[00:34:27.470] – Alana Well, Strength Training Over 40 is available now on Amazon.com and I'm in Canada, so it's available here in Canada on Amazon.CA and through my website as well, which is AlanaCollinsfitnesscoach.com. And I have a pretty large following on Instagram. There's my two handles are Aging Fearless and Aging Strong. And so you can check me out there.
[00:34:58.610] – Allan All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com forward/445 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Alana, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:35:08.610] – Alana Thank you so much for having me. It was it was really fun.
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Kiki asks, “Should I focus on strength, flexibility, or both? I answer her question and get a bit deeper into the various fitness modalities providing a way for you to decide for yourself.
Allan: Hello, and thank you for being a part of the 40+ Fitness podcast. Today’s show is going to be a little bit different. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately. In fact, I was just looking at this – up to today I‘ve interviewed over 175 authors and experts, so quite a fit bit of interviewing going on on the show. I thought I would mix things up, particularly because I received a call through the SpeakPipe app on the Contact Page. A listener had a question and she asked me to do a podcast on a specific issue. It's actually a very important issue and it is something that I think everyone should know. So I wanted to take a little bit of time to go over her question, and it was a good question. So if you have some questions, I do want you to reach out.
You can go to our Contact Page. There’s a couple different ways to contact me there. If you’d like to potentially have your question answered via audio, on the show, then do use the SpeakPipe. I can also do that in email, so you can email me at allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com, and I’ll be glad to answer any and all questions. I do answer all of my emails, so if there’s something going on and you have a question, please do take the time to reach out. I am here to help you and I want you to know that if you’re needing something and you don’t know the answer to it or know where to look, I’m your guy. Send me an email or contact me on the SpeakPipe, which is through our Contact Page on the website 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com. So, the question today comes from Kiki, and I’m going to go ahead and play her audio section. So here we go.
Kiki : Hi. I have been listening to your podcast and I was wondering if it would be possible maybe to do a podcast about flexibility and muscle strength past the age of 40. My physio said that women over 40 should be concentrating more on muscle building than flexibility, but I always thought it should be a balance of both. So I was wondering if I’ve got it. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening.
Sponsor: Before I answer Kiki’s question, I just wanted to remind you that this podcast is sponsored by Teami Blends. You can support the podcast by going to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Tea. And when you’re there, if you use the promo code 40plus, you can get a 15% discount on a purchase of $30 or more. They have great tea products so I could get to know them. I’ve actually ordered some more. I really do enjoy their teas and I know you will too. Go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Tea.
Allan: Kiki, thank you so much for that question. When my clients come to me, they come to me from many different walks of life, different age ranges, obviously over 40, but I have clients in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. So, it can vary from time to time as far as what fitness modality you should focus on. I agree with your doctor somewhat that strength is important, but I also agree that the answer is probably both in your case. So, let me go through each of the fitness modalities. There are five of them that I think my clients should spend most of their time focusing on when we’re over 40:
Strength
Flexibility – which I also define as mobility, so I use those words interchangeably
Total body composition – which includes weight loss and muscle mass, so I include those together
Balance; and
Life-specific. With life-specific, that can be things like speed, agility, hand-eye coordination. Let’s say within your life you want to be able to play tennis or you want to be able to see the ball or see the child and be able to move around with the kid. There are different things that you’re going to want to be able to do as you age, so there’ll be different fitness pieces that you’ll want to put together. We’ll get into a lot more detail in a minute on that.
When we talk about strength, the reason that strength is so important is that we tend to lose muscle mass and strength once we’re over the age of 35. It’s a process called sarcopenia. Now, the doctor could have said, “I want you lifting weights so you can retain or gain muscle.” In talking to a woman, a lot of times you see them kind of deflate a little bit because they don’t want to get bulky. Of course, they believe if they’d go lift weights, they’re going to look like a bodybuilder, and that’s just not so. You don’t have the testosterone to do that. You actually don’t have the physical capacity, the energy that it would take for you to put on a significant amount of muscle. You may be able to add a few pounds of muscle, but again, if you’re so onto your weight, obviously you’re going to be, “I don’t want muscle”. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Strength is a good way to have that open conversation with someone because they can see a need for strength. If you can’t open a jar, if you can’t pull yourself up from your chair, if you can’t reach down and grab something off the ground, like a bag of groceries – then that’s going to be something that’s going to be debilitating later. It’s going to keep you from having liberty, it’s going to keep you from being independent when you get older. If you don’t lift, you’re only going to get weaker. There’s just no other way around it. You can’t live your normal lifestyle and not lose strength. You have to do resistance exercise to retain or gain strength. So, I encourage all of my clients to strength-train. I think it’s very, very important for everybody to strength-train.
Now, mobility is also very important. You can’t reach down and pick up that bag of groceries if you can’t get the full range of motion in your hips, knees, ankles. Having good mobility is important because if you move incorrectly, you have the potential of injury. So, I agree with you that flexibility and mobility are very important modalities for us to maintain. There can be good reasons for you to want to improve beyond what you’re doing now, particularly if there’s an activity that you’re interested in doing. So if maybe you want to go canoeing, there’s a lot of mobility that’s required for you to be in a canoe and operate that canoe. So having the ability to get in and out of that canoe, you’re going to need good working knees, good working ankles. And as you’re rowing, you’re obviously going to need good rotational mobility. So yes, flexibility is also very, very important. So those are the two, what I would call the prime ones that most people should be doing.
I’m also going to talk about total body composition. Rather than just talk about weight loss, because I think every one of us can probably say, “I’d like to lose a couple of pounds of fat or more, but I don’t want this to just be about weight loss because if I lose weight, I might also be losing muscle, and that’s not a good thing.” You might lose two pounds, but if that two pounds is muscle, then you’re actually in worse shape. You’re actually less healthy, because now your body fat percentage has gone up. So instead of thinking about what the scale is telling you, you should think of body composition as a percentage of body fat, or a percentage of muscle mass. Whichever way you want to think about it – cup half full, cup half empty.
Most of us are going to go by body fat percentage – those are things that can be measured. They can be measured with a caliper at a gym. So you can go into a gym and a trained personal trainer can go through a process with the caliper. You can use electrical impedance, although those tend to be off a good bit, and a lot of that will depend on your hydration. If you stay hydrated, they work pretty well. But it could help you give a trend. So you can use them on a consistent basis and see if there’s a trend, but don’t think that’s actually what your body fat percentage is. There’s also the liquid submersion and the BOD PODs that use air. I prefer the DEXA scan. There’s a price to it. I do it probably about once every other year, just to know. But in a general sense, I can tell by looking at myself, measuring my body circumferences around the waist, stomach, hips, neck, arms and legs – I can generally tell how I’m doing on my body composition.
So, total body composition is important because if we allow ourselves to have a little too much body fat, that leads to issues like cardiovascular disease, we can get diabetes. There are other things going on there. You do want to focus on your body composition, but if you’re doing appropriate strength training, then you’re maintaining your muscle. The rest of that is going to be done in the kitchen. So eating good whole foods is actually going to help you lose that body fat. That’s what we want to focus on there – not so much the weight as to make sure that we’re eating good foods and we’re losing body fat.
Balance is important, because particularly as we get into our late 60s, 70s, 80s, there are lot of falls, and most of the falls are sideways when they happen, that someone gets really, really hurt bad. So if you fall sideways and particularly if you haven’t been lifting the weights for strength, you have the potential of breaking a bone. So having good balance is one of those things that can help prevent you from falling in the first place. The strength will help because when you do the resistance exercise, you’re also helping to strengthen your bones, not just your muscles. You’re strengthening your bones. So, a good strength training regimen and then having some balance work, and I prefer to do balance work in a couple different planes. It’ll be one foot or the foot, so you get used to that. You mix that up a little bit. And then you can also work on it from the perspective of moving side to side, being comfortable with your feet side to side and not tripping up as you move from side to side. So shuffles and what I call with karaokes – those types of movements will help you maintain lateral balance, which will prevent falls. So knowing those things, you do want to make sure that you maintain balance, and as you notice that your balance is getting worse, that’s when you want to say, “Okay, I need to focus a little bit more attention to balance.”
Finally, I go into life-specific. So, you have a grandchild, and the grandchild wants to run around, so you’re going to need maybe some additional cardiovascular fitness just so you can keep up with that little bugger. Maybe you want to play some tennis, so hand-eye coordination and agility are something that you want to keep up with. Or maybe in your younger days you were on the track team and you want to try some Masters track, so some speed work might be something that would be important to you. It’s really about your lifestyle and what are those other little bits and pieces that are going to make you better at being that person? That’s where the last piece comes in.
I’ve gone over five different fitness modalities – they’re strength, flexibility, total body composition, balance, and life-specific. Those are the five that I would spend most of my time on. Now, it’s really hard to do all of those at one time and it’s really hard to know which one matters most, which is why I want to take a few minutes to go back over the GPS model that I talked about in episode 296. GPS stands for grounding, personalizing, and self-awareness. If you do those three things, then you’re going to know exactly what your body needs now.
Let’s walk through the GPS model. Grounding is where we’re going to take our “Why”. It’s the grandchild – you want to be there for your grandchildren. The vision – what does it look like? Where do you want to be with the grandchild? Maybe you want to be the grandmother that can get down on the floor and color with them and also run around the park with them and keep up with them, be able to pick them up from the ground and walk with them. If that’s your vision of you with your grandchild, now you have this idea of what you need to look like, what your physicality needs to be. The type of human, athlete effectively, that you need to be to be that grandparent.
If you take your “Why”, which is your grandchildren, and what that vision is, you now have a commitment. You can make a commitment to be that person, and you make that commitment out of self-love, just like you would make any other major commitment in your life, like when you get married or when you profess your faith at your church or your synagogue or your mosque or whatever. When you go into this and say, “This is who I want to be and this is why I want to be it, and I believe it in my heart, and emotionally want this”, and through self-love, you make that commitment – a strong, emotional, deep commitment to make that happen – that’s your grounding. Now you have a center, now you have a reason to do this, and now you know what you need to do because you know what it looks like.
The personalizing is where you start thinking about, if you’re going to take a trip and your GPS says, ”Go up to the next intersection and turn left.” So, just like your GPS would tell you what to do, now you’re saying, “I want to be able to lift up my grandchildren and I want to be able to keep up with my grandchildren.” Those are two fitness modalities – strength and cardiovascular conditioning. At this point, now you’re saying to yourself, “I know I’m going to need my strength and I know I’m going to need to be able to keep up with them.” So putting together a program or a set of goals now that says, “I want to be stronger” – how do you measure that? Maybe you go in and you get your baseline. So you go do some work and say, “I want to be able to deadlift and squat and bench press. Maybe that’s the three lifts that I’m going to measure myself on.” And those are what most weightlifters call “the big 3”. We test with those in high school, we use those as athletes. So the deadlift, the squat and the bench press is a good metric to know that you’re building strength.
Maybe for you it’s pullups and pushups. You get the idea that you can come up with some baseline, and then you can start working on your overall body strength using compound movements. And then as you do that, you should notice improvement in those baseline exercises. So you’ll set smart goals; you’ll say, “I can bench press 100 pounds”, or maybe it’s 50 pounds or 20 pounds. Whatever it is, you have a max strength. You say, “I want to improve that by 10% this next month.” Early on that 10% is possible. So it is one of those stretch goals; it’s attainable though. So part of the smart is attainable. If you try to keep going 10%, 10%, 10%, there’s going to be a point where that’s just not attainable because your strength curve just won’t allow you to get that strong. But you can early on particularly see very large improvements in your strength as you get more comfortable with these exercises. Setting a smart goal that pushes you and making it time-specific – within a month or within a quarter or within a year – those are very good. I prefer the smart goals to be shorter term. Saying you’re going to do something within a year is really hard to keep you focused. Saying you’re going to do something within a month, six weeks, eight weeks – those are probably a little bit more appropriate to ensure that you have consistency and you really work towards them.
So set some smart goals. You know you want to work on strength – you set some smart goals for strength. You know you want to work on cardiovascular – so maybe it is, “Right now I can walk for 30 minutes without getting winded. I want to be able to add maybe another 100 meters to that 30 minutes by the next time I walk.” So I’m walking faster and I’m building speed. Or maybe you’re going to turn that into some interval running. Maybe there’s a little bit of jogging in there, so I’m going to jog to the signpost. Over time your expectation is either you get the distance done faster, or within the 30 minutes, you get more distance. You can choose how you put those goals together, but you can set smart goals for your running or your walking and cardiovascular fitness, in the same realm.
So you get involved. Now here’s the thing – nobody’s perfect. We have physical limitations. But we also have capacities, and many people don’t understand that their capacities often far exceed what their brain believes. Unfortunately, our body is never going to do more than what our brain believes. If you had a child trapped underneath a car, you’ve heard the stories of women and men that had been able to pick up a car to get that child out. How did they do that? Where did that strength come from? They inherently had it in them all the time, and when their brain turned off as to what limitations they had, their capacities kicked in. So taking some time to understand what your mental and physical limitations are, is a very important step because you don’t want to break yourself. Don’t go out there thinking you’re going to be able to double your strength in a few days, therefore you’ve got to work out every day. Be thinking in terms of, “I know when I work out I get really sore, and I’m sore for a day or two, so maybe I’m going to work out every other day, and I’m going to work out different body parts.” Maybe you’re going to do a full body workout one day, next day is going to be your running day or walking day, then you’re going to do another workout, and then another walking day, and maybe then take a day off to rest and recover. And now what you’ve thought of is, “This is what I think my limitations and my capacities are right now from a physical perspective.”
And then you’ve got to think about the mental perspective. I know when I go to work and I work all day and I get off at 6:00 and I go to drive home, and it’s turn right to go to the gym or turn left to go home and have a glass of wine – I have to make that decision. But I’m tired and I know in the evenings I’m so tired that that’s a very hard decision to make. So what do I do? Maybe I should do my workouts in the morning before I get tired, before it’s really that hard. And I fix up my gym bag in the morning, I put it right in front of the door, I put my gym clothes right there on my dresser, so as soon as I get up, I see my gym clothes, I put my them on, I grab my bag and I go out the door. If for whatever reason I don’t get up in the morning – because maybe you’re not a morning person, then I still have my gym clothes there, I still have my gym bag. So I take my gym clothes, I fold them up, I put them in my gym bag and I dedicate myself to say, “My commitment, based on my grounding – I need to do this.” So this gym bag is going to sit in my car on the passenger seat. When I come out of work, I’m going to see that gym bag sitting there, just like I would see a wedding ring on my finger and say, “I committed to myself through self-love to do this thing. So tonight I turn right and I go to the gym.” So I know it was a little while I went onto the GPS model, but I wanted to take a time and talk about it again because I think it’s really important for us to get our minds right first. This GPS process that I’ve laid out here is really about making sure you know why you’re doing this, knowing what you should look like, and from that perspective it really does open up to, “These are the fitness modalities that are going to matter the most to me.”
I’ll give you another quick example for myself. My “Why” is my family. I want to be around for my family, I want to be around for my children and my grandchildren. And as I put together the vision of that, it was not just be there, not just be the cheerleader sitting on the bench, watching them do what they do. I wanted to be engaged with them while they were doing the things they loved. My daughter was into CrossFit so I wanted to be able to do CrossFit. Then she wanted to do mud runs, I wanted to be able to do those obstacle courses with her. That meant I had to work on the fitness modalities to do that.
Also, I want to have a lifestyle that I enjoy. I want to enjoy my life so I’m a better person, I’m a happier person to be around. One of the things that was missing from my life at the point in time where I made that commitment was that I wasn’t playing volleyball anymore, and it was really bumming me out that I wasn’t capable of playing volleyball the way that I had been. I knew that that was a cardiovascular fitness thing, it was a mobility thing. So, to do the mud runs, I needed the cardiovascular fitness and I needed the strength. For me to do the volleyball, I needed the mobility and the cardiovascular. You see how now I have three modalities that were very, very important to me because they tied in directly to my vision, they tied in directly to my “Why”. By tying those all in, I now had a baseline, and it was a commitment, self-love, and now I know which of the fitness modalities matter most to me.
I’m still going to go back and tell you, I think strength, mobility – which includes flexibility, and total body composition are things that we should all always be working on. The others become important to us and we want to focus on those when they matter. So the question then is, if I’ve got all these fitness modalities, I can’t do 18 different workouts a week to maintain or build all of these at the same time. How do I go through a process of methodically building myself where I need to build myself, and then figure out how I can make all that work? There are only so many hours in a day, we’re mostly all working. We’ve got to get things done, and then we have a very short window of time to get this fitness thing done. So how do I do all of them? There’s a couple of different things you can do.
One is called cross-training. Obviously, if you get into a cross-training program, maybe it’s a circuit for strength, therefore you’re working your cardiovascular system and your strength at the same time. Maybe it’s a process where you do something like a bootcamp, where there’s a little bit of all of it going on. And you’ll see improvements. Particularly early on, you will definitely see improvements with anything that you do. So just know that early on – yes, work on all of it. But as you get a little bit stronger and as you mobility improves, as your cardiovascular fitness improves, you’re going to find it very hard to do these cross-training things that are going to be sufficient for you to do all the time. You’re going to want to focus on one thing at a time, at points in time, just so you can improve those more.
That is a process that we call “periodization”. With periodization, what you do is you figure out one or maybe two modalities and you say, “For a period of maybe the next six or eight weeks, that’s my thing. I’m going to focus on that.” Periodization is basically where we’re going to take one or two modalities and we’re going to focus on it for about six to eight weeks. That might mean I want to start really working on my strength and I’m going to take about a six-week period of time and I’m really going to bear down on my strength training. I’m going to get those compound movements that I want to do, I’m going to put in maximum effort for my strength, and I’m going to really bear down on that. Then after I finish that six to eight weeks, I’m going to mix up my program. So maybe body composition is also something that I’m very interested in building, so I do a period of time. Like I said, for strength, I get done with that six to eight week period and I say, “Now I’m going to change up my programming to make it work a little bit more for building muscle mass.”
And there are slight tweaks and variations of those. For the most part, if you’re working strength, you’re going to see some muscle mass improvement. If you’re working muscle mass improvement, you’re going to see some strength, but they’re not in complete overlap. There are ways to maximize and optimize one over the other. As we were talking, for me, I want mobility, strength, and cardiovascular fitness. So what I may say is, “I’m going to do a strength period and with the strength period I’m going to work mobility. And during my cardiovascular period, I’m going to go ahead and work mobility.” So I do a big strength push and I’m doing mobility on the side. And then I do a big cardiovascular push, and I build mobility on the side. And then I can alternate and go back into strength. So you see where you can get these things all improved and then as you do that, you’re going to see optimal improvements in that particular modality. So I would never really say just do one modality, particularly if you notice doing multiple ones together gets you the results. But if you find that you plateau and your strength is not really improving, your mobility is not really improving, your cardiovascular fitness is not really improving – then that might be a time for you to really bear down on that certain modality.
So the answer, as you said, is really both. And I would say it’s even more all-encompassing than both. It’s really all of them. You should be aware of how all of them impact your vision, how they’re going impact your life, and you should dedicate the appropriate amount of time to each of those five modalities that we talked about.
I hope this has been helpful. Again, if you have any questions at all, please go to the Contact Page and leave me a message on SpeakPipe. I get back to those immediately with the short answer. If it makes sense for me to do a podcast on, I will in do one. Otherwise you can email the question to me and if you’re comfortable with it, I’ll read your email and do the same thing with a podcast episode. Please do reach out if you have questions. I love that interaction, I love that opportunity. I want to take your question because you are not the only one with that question; there are others out there. I want to take the questions that you have and I want to teach others with that.
That all said, I am going to somewhat change up the format here. I haven’t really done a lot of solo episodes since the year started. It’s been a lot of interviews. I might not even have done a single solo episode since the year started, so I’m going to actually start mixing in a few more solo shows as we go. It might be something like a three to one ratio, sometimes maybe two to one. We’ll see how that works out, but I do want to have some more solo shows and I do want to continue to bring on experts on topics that matter to you. So just know that I am out there. If you have topics, issues, things you’re concerned about, I’m available. Reach out to me. I do want to make this show important to you. I want to make it as valuable to you as I possibly can, so please do reach out to me so I can do that for you. Thank you.
Resistance training with weights or body weight is a key component of one’s fitness routine. This involves taxing the muscles through a range of motion so they are pushed to a point where they will regrow stronger and bigger. Here are 11 great reasons why you should lift weights:
Strength – As we age, we lose strength. If you don’t have the strength to perform basic functions, you may lose your independence. Lifting weights builds this strength.
Mass – Lifting weights will allow you to maintain and build back any muscle lost over time. Don’t worry, you won’t get bulky!
Body composition – Building muscle mass through lifting weights will protect you from building body fat, which will lead to a better body composition.
Makes you better at other things – Lifting weights could make you a better runner, athlete, or it may simply give you the ability to play with your grandkids.
Resilience – You will build the right muscles, leading to appropriate muscle balance. Make sure you have a balanced program through a full range of motion.
Can boost testosterone – This will help maintain lean muscle and promote a healthy libido.
Satisfaction – Lifting weights makes you feel that you have done something good for yourself and boosts your confidence.
Community – You may form lasting bonds with others at the gym. This is a great support network to learn from and encourage.
Longevity – Studies have shown that the more muscle mass you have, the longer you may live.
Stress reduction – Vent some frustration, relieve stress, and get rid of some of that cortisol.
Variety – Mix weight lifting with modalities such as speed or cardio. This will allow you to work your muscles in different ways.
Lifting weights offers many benefits throughout your health and fitness journey. Get started today!
Looking for a how to of mass and strength? It’s only natural that many people will be interested in building muscle mass and also gaining strength, but these two do not always go hand in hand.
Interestingly, the overall process for building muscle and strength is the same basic process. There is a level of work required to break down the muscle and build new muscle. To do the work, consider using your body weight, elastic bands, or other items around the house if you don’t have actual weights. However, the body also needs to be fed building blocks in the form of protein and water to build new muscle. Another critical component is rest, which refers not only to the time between exercises, but getting quality sleep each night. This cycle of work, feeding, and rest is what allows for muscle growth.
To build mass, you will do three to four sets of eight reps each. Between exercises, you will rest for about 60 seconds. To build strength, you have to add more weight to your reps, though you will be doing fewer reps than you would when building mass. Strength building can fatigue the muscles faster, so you will want to add extra rest time in between sets, allowing for a greater rebuild. In either case, when you can complete all sets with up to 10 reps, you know it’s time to add more weight. Keep stepping up the weight to advance your progression.
You can choose to work on building mass and strength at the same time by alternating your focus on different days. Though you will see gains over time, you may see greater gains by following a periodization approach. In this approach, you will focus on each individually for a period of three to six weeks, and then alternate back to the other—mass or strength.
Incorporate this how to of mass and strength to optimize your workouts. Doing so will ensure that you are maximizing your opportunity to add muscle mass, strength, or perhaps both.
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[00:19:07.830] – Allan