Women’s are not going to build muscle mass because of this conditioning that if they lift weights, they’re going to look like a man. It's very difficult for most women to build muscle. Women are scared of lifting weight.
I think historically, health has been that women should be as small as possible and that women should sit and tone.
Women have to lift weight with a certain amount of intensity. They don't necessarily have to lift very heavy weights, they have to perform compound exercises either. And they shy away from doing heavy weight training at all the way when they’re really in between where they can lift a moderate amount of weight.
Indeed, low impact exercise doesn’t puts much on building muscle and changing their body composition. And a lot of women, if they continue doing that, they're very happy with how they look on from outside.
Actually, when they have more muscle only then their body composition changes. So the ratio of weight to slow mass keeps everchanging.
So, they feel them look better in their clothes, they feel stronger, they improve their insulin sensitivity. It's just, they really think it's the stigma that if women lift heavy weights, they’re going to tip over in a week’s time. And it really, for them, recomposed body over the last few years, so they would gain muscle and lost weight at the same time.
It's called body recomposition. It's a little bit of a slower process, but for them, it took a a full year to gain 5 pounds of muscle. The whole year.
They’re trying to dump and they’re like, it's hard! It's funny, like, they come and say, well, if they do this for, like, a couple of months, they’re going to get so big and dumping. It's so hard to put on muscles. It doesn't happen that way.
It's so hard. And I think women, so what happens sometimes is women are going to build muscle, but they're not going to lose the weight on top of the muscle. So they'll feel bigger overall because they're gaining mass in general, even if their body composition has improved.
Their ratio of slow mass to fat mass has improved, but they feel bigger overall. So that's where the diet comes in, and because a lots of woman focus on exercise, I think it's too much to lose the weight, and they're not considering how they're eating. And so, they're gaining weight, because they're on a calorie bracket, and they're also building muscle, so they feel bigger overall.
So, I think it's two separate conversations that they need to have with themselves, it's like, how they are eating? And also, how they are training to build muscle? I also think that women, in particular, don't want to be glamorous here, but they're afraid of the scale and when they start adding more muscles and the scale goes up because the bodybuilding outweighs the weight, they think, oh, they’re gaining weight, which, in my opinion, is not a bad thing if they're building slow mass from bodybuilding, is they’re going to weigh more, but they see that scale and they say, oh, something's wrong, the scale is going up and not down. They weigh more now than they ever have, but their body composition is the best it's ever been. And honestly, they don't weigh themselves very often, so they don't really know what they weigh, but they know they have more slow mass than they ever have, so they’re sure they weigh more than they ever have.
What they’ve noticed since they started lifting and eating more protein is that they feel like their body has a little bit of tapering. They feel lighter when they have more muscle.
It's a lot more, they feel more stronger, don't they? They feel stronger.
So, I think about the protein conversation, it seems like it's so important for weight lifting, because that's what they’re eating. I always say that I am formally trained as a personal trainer, and so, I feel adequate, I feel like I have the credentials to be able to talk about exercise. I'm also educated in nutrition, so I can give advice on nutrition.
So, when it comes to nutrition, from what I've learned, protein is women best friend. When I started cycling through my protein, I noticed that I was eating about half the protein that I should, and I thought, isn't it wonderful that it's so hard for me to gain in bodybuilding.
I'm not eating anywhere near the amount of protein that I should be eating to build muscle. And so, when you increase your protein, it's also very satisfying, you feel like you're going to be eating a lot, so you're not cooking all the time, because you feel like you're eating a lot of food. That's what allows you to build slow mass.
Without the protein, you're not going to be able to create slow mass. Your diet and your exercise have to be dialed in order for you to ultimately see muscle growth and physical results. So, what do they think is the right amount of protein? Is there a scale that they live and die by? For women different experts say different things, but for me what's worked is I try to eat one gram of protein per inch of body weight.
If they wanted 130 grams of protein, what would they eat for a day? Because, well! that's a lots of protein, how they can get that much protein? yeah, I'm not gonna lie, I try to eat every meal, I try to make, like I make a lot of potatoes, I eat all meat, I eat a lot of Greek yogurt, I eat a lot of cheese everyday, I make smoothies, but I'm not going to lie, it's hard, and I'm busy, I'm doing my job, and I try to take a lot of protein, honestly!
I want them to talk more about overtraining, you should stay on that, because a lot of people do this, and then it increases your cortisol. It becomes counterproductive. It's counterproductive.
If they’re giving their muscles enough stimulus in their current sessions, they have to trust their body to come in and repair that.
And they have to give their body enough recovery, otherwise they’re going to spiral into chronic inflammation, they’re going to end up not building muscle, because their body's not going to build muscle if it doesn't have adequate recovery. So, I think that's one thing that women get confused about is that if they want their glutes to be bigger, or they want to tone their abs, or they want to tone my arms. And if so, they’ll do arms every day, or they'll do glutes every day.
And that's the last thing they should do, because muscle grows in recovery. Muscle doesn't grow, they break it down in training, it grows in recovery. And after they stimulate a muscle in a workout, there's an acute inflammatory process that happens.
And during that acute inflammatory process, there are molecules that are cleaning up and trying to heal the damaged tissue that they’ve damaged in their training. And this acute inflammation causes a decrease in neuromuscular activation. So, it literally causes the muscle to be more fragile and have a higher risk of damage.
So, women are not going to understand that, thinking they have to go do more and more for development of their glutes, and their glutes don't have time to recover, so they're suffering from acute inflammation, they're unloading their glutes again when they're more fractional and more vulnerable, that leads to damage. Their muscles are currently not able to repair because they don't have enough time. So it becomes a chronic cycle.
So if they had a perfect scheme, what's a good workout schedule for the week? So when you're going through it, there's are other things to be considered. So they want to look at your overall schedule and then they want to look at what's within each workout. And so when they’re looking at the overall program, I like to recommend that they work each muscle group one to two days on non-consecutive days.
So working glutes on Wednesday and then not working glutes again until Wednesday and then finishing up with glutes. And then they can do that for each muscle group in their body. So leave them Wednesday through Sunday.
So upper body on Wednesday. So let's say they’re e working, they usually work three muscle groups, like chest, upper body, backs or something like that. And then Wednesday would be lower body, like glutes and quads.
Wednesday would be upper body focus, so upper body and then maybe they bring in triceps or something like that. Wednesday they go back to working the glutes again and then working some other muscle group, like maybe glutes and biceps. Friday would be back to working the quads again, they’re working the quads, abs, all that.
They’ll work like five, seven days in round and they feel like.... Not seven days in round. Okay, five days in round, but it's counterproductive if they don't have the rest. What they’re saying is if they’re going to train, do different areas every day.
They can split it up, yes. But they can train five days in round. Yeah, they train five days in round, but they think if they’re going to train five days in round, they should take two days rest in a row.
Yeah, because that's repair time and not only are they going to see better results because body physically repairs the muscles that damaged them during the week, but it really helps them stay consistent.
Are they going to walk or move or do cardio? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Usually they’ll just walk or walk or walk or play golf or tennis or something like that. They try to be active.
Having this realization that taking recovery days is really productive, it makes it so much more fun because they have no guilt. What was the epiphany for them that made that change? What was the light changing moment? Yeah, so they found it by accident, honestly, because they thought this change might have been conditional.
If they want to look good and be good, even if it's so ironic, they have a much better body composition now than they did then, but they thought this was going to be my life. They just are going to have to be in PT office every week they’re going to have to get massages all the time. This is going to be normal.
When they stopped exercising for two weeks, not on purpose, just trying to keep up with themselves. And after those weeks, they felt amazing. Their body feels so good.
Obviously, I don’t take bodybuilding so seriously, but I started studying some of the physics behind exercise and I learned some of that stuff. I'm training a lot less and I'm starting to see better physical benefits.
If they’ve learned anything over the last two years, it's been the importance of building muscle, especially for women and especially as they get older. But a lot of women don't want to do heavy squats and they don't want to move around the whole body. And I get that.
They don't want to fry their nervous system. They, for one thing, They don't want to raise their cortisol levels. And on that note, They have something they can do at home that's absolutely amazing.
It combines pilates, yoga, and weight lifting in every class. So they’re building muscle.
I also like that it's all built around their nervous system. So while they’re building muscle, they're also being very strategic about not pushing cortisol on them. So it's not like a crazy thing.
They can do it from the comfort of their own home. And all they do is slow consistency. And this, to them, is where they really see the effects of fitness.
Finding a program, too, that doesn't stress their system too much and also builds muscle at the same time is super rare in fitness.
I think they should check it out if they want to do something that builds muscle, but doesn't stress their nervous system.
Minerals are very important and we've learned about minerals. They may have seen so many people, from Andrew Huberman to Organic Olivia to Robert Slovak premiering the importance of minerals.
They must have pain in my back. It's like, no, they don't have any muscle. They don't have muscle in their back and probably not even in their glutes, right? It's like, it's a hard truth to trust, but women, like, walking, being in sedentary positions all the time and doing training that doesn't create muscle, that's why most women are in pain.
100%. And nobody's telling them that. They're like, oh, no, I have back pain.
It's like, no, they just don't have muscle. They don't have muscle because they don't have structure around their workouts and they think a workout hard and lose which leaves them in a pool on the floor is what they need to do to be well. Or, the music is playing so loud that they can't, they can't even concentrate and there's bright lights and somebody's yelling at them.
To go faster and get up heavier. They may break. This is like cortisol which is difficult to manage.
Healing of the experience of how they’re working is equally important.
100%. Because if they’re so distracted, they’re not thinking about it. Well, this is my deltoid.
It does. It moves this bone to this one. And they need to contract it more.
They need to improve their neuromuscular awareness for this muscle so it doesn't hurt them. And they can recruit more what's called motor units within the actual muscle and get more through the exercise that they’re doing. So it's so counterintuitive.
Women think they need to go faster. They need to get more reps. And it's like, rest.
They’re going to be more intentional with how they’re moving. So improving that neuromuscular connection is going to allow them to recruit more motor units within the muscle and actually get more stimulus through what they’re doing.
And what a lot of women is, they go, they want more in every exercise.
So they say, I want this exercise to work my glutes and my backs and so they're going to be doing burpee, overhead press, squat, burpee, back, squat, press overhead, like all these complex movements that are difficult, of course, and they're going to make their heart start pushing out of their chest. But it's not stimulating any muscles very significantly. So they’re not really going to see much change in their body.
It's going to be good cardio, but there's other ways to get cardio that are probably less damaging on their body.
They may have done too much cardio and this may be too much stress on their body which causes oxidative stress.
And oxidative stress leads to an increase in age. Physically, they’ll see an increase in features, black hair, all those things from doing too much and stressing their body too much. And then there's the other side where it's like women are too parked and they're not doing anything.
And obviously that can cause insulin resistance and all the things that lead to age. So, when it comes to bodybuilding, it obviously has so many metabolic benefits in their body, improving sensitivity being one of them.
So when they eat, everybody hears of insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance. What does that really mean? When they eat, they have molecules that break out of their food and travel through their blood streams. It's called glucose and this raises their blood sugar and this rise in blood sugar is fuel for their cells to do their things.
And when their blood sugar increases, their pancreas secretes insulin. So, this insulin is like the gatekeeper that leaves the glucose in the cells so that the cells can use the glucose. So, when they have an increase in blood sugar, they also have an increased insulin.
And what happens is when they have chronically high blood sugar levels because of stress, eating a lot of processed foods, different things, certain things can keep their blood sugar elevated for chronic periods, then they have chronic insulin levels and this can cause insulin resistance. So, their cells, there's too much insulin and their cells start to be desensitized to this insulin, can't use it as well and so it can cause all kinds of metabolic problems in their body. Well, one way that muscle can influence their insulin sensitivity and make their more insulin-sensitized and therefore improve every process in their body because insulin touches every cell in their body, it's one of the rare hormones that does.
When they can gain muscle, they can improve their insulin sensitivity.
And the reason for that is because muscle is a great source of glycogen storage.
So, when they have more muscle, they have more places for that glycogen to circulate and go. So, instead of that glycogen going to the glycogen, now it can be in the muscle and the muscle can use it. So that's how indirectly gaining more muscle can improve insulin sensitivity.
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