Low impact workouts have become all the rage over the last several years, and the reasons why are very understandable! And yet, the pendulum has swung from the extreme force and hustle of working our bodies into the ground to a fear of stress from workouts. In this episode, I dive into why this “trend” is so popular and what to consider when making your own decisions about the ways to move your body!
I cover:
What HIIT training really is & why it’s misunderstood
The impact of life stress on exercise considerations
Why so many women are turning to low impact training
The common side effects of “overtraining”
The benefits women experience from low impact workouts
Important things to consider when making your own workout routine
And more!
Feedback? Questions? Comments? Head on over to Instagram and let me know in my DMs!
FREE TRAINING
COURSES
Follow me on Tiktok: @jessiemgolden
Subscribe to my Youtube channel
Low impact workouts have become all the rage over the last several years, and the reasons why are very understandable! And yet, the pendulum has swung from the extreme force and hustle of working our bodies into the ground to a fear of stress from workouts. In this episode, I dive into why this “trend” is so popular and what to consider when making your own decisions about the ways to move your body!
I cover:
What HIIT training really is & why it’s misunderstood
The impact of life stress on exercise considerations
Why so many women are turning to low impact training
The common side effects of “overtraining”
The benefits women experience from low impact workouts
Important things to consider when making your own workout routine
And more!
Feedback? Questions? Comments? Head on over to Instagram and let me know in my DMs!
FREE TRAINING
COURSES
Follow me on Tiktok: @jessiemgolden
Subscribe to my Youtube channel
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Jesse Golden podcast. We are chatting all about low impact workouts. These. Are all over the damn inter net. Interwebs social media. And so we need to talk about it. Why are they so popular? Firstly, what the hell are low-impact workout? So technically or what. There's a technical definition.
And then I would say there's somewhat misalignment and what I see in social media, but more or less causes, less pressure on joints and more slowly elevates your heart rate rather than things I go, Hey, let's just dive right into CrossFit. For example. Things like walking, swimming, Pilates, yoga, et cetera. Pay so things that are more slow gentle on the joints or so the saying goes, the reason I was a little confused about this definition. In the beginning is people would say, oh, heavy lifting is not low [00:01:00] impact.
And for me, when I was thinking low impact, okay. That's like pounding the joints because there is certainly stress on the joints with heavy lifting. But. We'll get into why I think that's a good thing here in a little bit now. Of course. I'm talking outside of injuries. Right. And certainly as you age, typically, what works best for those who are elderly? Is higher rep. With less intensity, less weight, but for the majority of the people, the women in my audience that would not apply. Again, There are plenty of outliers.
So if you are an outlier, I'm not speaking to someone who has some obscure injury or health condition, right. And it's become massively popular, low impact workouts in the last several years, specifically due to COVID, we saw this blow up and for somewhat obvious reasons, right. People were working out at home.
They didn't have access to weights. And also why I think this happened is for many [00:02:00] years prior, we had a huge craze of quote unquote hit. High intensity interval training, which is actually a misnomer because true hit workouts are things like sprints, where you were all out sprinting, and then you were resting. Hey, and no one is all out sprinting for, you know, five minute circuit. But so technically the workouts that most women are talking about when they say hit is circuit training exercise.
So things like orange theory, berries, even CrossFit. That's what we're talking about. Circuit training, where you are moving nonstop. You're going, let's say from running on the treadmill to then lifting weights, doing overhead presses, and then immediately going into another exercise without rest. Which is not inherently bad at all. And I do in my lifting.
Supersets oftentimes where I'm moving from one exercise into the next to save time. But it's very methodical because I'm making sure that I'm using opposing muscle groups or [00:03:00] completely unrelated muscle groups while doing that. I also am still rusting in between that along my heart rate to come down and allowing my muscles to be prepared and ready to go for that next session, because the intention behind. Lifting weights with the goal of gaining muscle. Is different from someone who's doing circuit training. And that's a big misconception too.
When I say, let's say a tech doc, I've talked a lot about this and this ruffles, a lot of feathers. The difference between low impact workouts and lifting weights. People automatically associate a lot of women, associate lifting weights in their brain with circuit training. And circuit training is different from progressive overload lifting. And these both are different from low-impact workouts.
We just need to make sure we're all talking about the same thing, working with the same definitions. So you have low-impact workout, things like plays, yoga, swimming, walking, cetera. Well, you're not sprinting. Then we have hit or circuit [00:04:00] training exercise, which is where you're not taking rest or typically very little rest.
And you're moving from one thing to the next there's often rowing's running. Some. Form of cardio interjected in there, or you're moving so quickly from one thing to the next, like in CrossFit that it turns into cardio. And then we have progressive overload weightlifting, which is you are lifting with the intention of progressively stressing our muscles to get stronger and, or grow. And there's a lot of rest involved in that process. So those are three different things. We also saw the popularity of CrossFit for a long time.
I was definitely in that world. I was actually talking to my friend, Julie, who many of you know, paleo, M G the other day about this, how we're wondering if CrossFit is just as popular as it was when we were doing it, or if we're just not at all involved and not bubble on social media, that circle, if that's died down, if it's still as popular, but. I think it is still as popular.
We're just not in [00:05:00] that sphere anymore, but there was certainly huge, huge surge in the early 2000 tens. And that's how you would refer to that decade. We also saw a huge surge in heavy lifting, right. With women on social media, getting a big ass. No other way to put it became a trend. With physiques for women.
So a lot of women started getting into the gym and oftentimes not really being sure. And I certainly would include myself in that category years ago. Not being sure what they were really doing in terms of a, what is required to build muscle and the most effective way to do that. And the recovery. Required for building muscle. How the whole ecosystem works. So we had all these crazes, right?
Just if you're looking at the exercise alone, heavy lifting for women, all of a sudden came on the map, populated CrossFit, hit circuit, training, exercise. All of these things blew up. We also very much had that [00:06:00] mentality of more is better. With little, if any understanding of the impact that this can have on the body and brain, if we're not also including adequate rest. And it's funny because people will say, well, look at these professional CrossFit athletes or these professional athletes, they do this thing all the time.
Those are the people who've always understood the importance of rest and proper recovery, proper nutrition, sleep, stress management, taking rest days. Because it is their job. They know how important those things are to their performance, to their overall lifestyle, to bringing home a paycheck. So it's very different.
If you are around professional athletes, they understand the importance of these things. It's just not brought into mainstream media nearly enough. So people just go balls to the wall, apeshit with these things. And then, and again, I was this person. Pay the price because it's too much for the body too much for the nervous system.
And eventually things get squirrely. And then. The pendulum has swung [00:07:00] the other way. And often another layer of this with high-achieving women who may or may not have been actively trying to eat in a deficit while doing all of this high intensity exercise, not resting, not prioritizing recovery. And they were eating at a deficit, whether they wanted to or not. And then just a general high stress lifestyle. Which so many women are just moving from one thing to the next, trying to hold a super, super high bar for themselves. Not letting themselves feel their emotions.
It's the, when people talk about soft life or masculine versus feminine, this is the wounded masculine of everyone just bulldozing through life. Not taking any time or consideration for rest. It can feel very unsafe for a lot of women as it did for me. Because we've been taught our whole lives. That productivity and performance is the most important thing. Then you add on the additional layer of us as women.
That the way we look is also the most important thing, and you have a recipe for [00:08:00] so much fucking stress for women and an impossible standard to live up to. And our bodies and brains can only take so much. So, what are the side effects of this, this way of living? It's way of exercising and eating and simply just being. Often, what we see is you'll hear women describe themselves as feeling puffy. I remember that feeling where I just felt swollen.
My face felt swollen. My fingers, my rings were always super tight on my, my hands. Not in my fingers. Some people feel their ankle swelling. You might just feel like you're retaining water, right? It's that chronic inflammation feeling. Trouble sleeping. Brain fog, low mood, low energy menstrual cycle irregularities, needing to pound coffee to even get things going in the morning to get your brain remotely functioning.
I remember that feeling where I realized something was wrong with my, my health crisis, which I won't discuss on here. I have several podcast episodes on that, but. I remember the feeling [00:09:00] of, oh my gosh, I need like three cups of coffee to even get my brain remotely functioning in the morning. And that's when I started to think, okay, this is not normal. Something is wrong here.
And. The safest way back then for me to handle that was just to keep moving, because to sit with how deeply tired. And fatigued. I felt and how unwell I felt underneath all of that caffeine and stimulation. Was too overwhelming for me. So I just kept going until I literally couldn't go anymore. You might also notice really low or really high appetite.
So complete dysregulation there. I noticed a lot of blood sugar issues. That might be something that you notice as well. We see a lot of injuries and, or poor exercise performance. So you're just constant nagging injuries. Your. Hurting yourself. Your performance starts to decline. You're like, God, I used to be able to run. You know, Three miles.
No problem. And now I just get through one mile and I'm fatigued, or I used to be able to [00:10:00] lift.
25 years, 25 pound dumbbells. And now those feel like 50 pounds when I'm lifting overhead, right? Something like that. And CrossFit, I remember being like, oh my God, two minutes into this workout. I'm completely gassed.
I feel like I've been working out for 30 minutes already. So these things start to decline and it seemingly comes out of nowhere. But it's been a slow build. It's just most women ignore it. Waterweight or this feeling of weight gain. Now. There's an important distinction here because some women will say the believe that they're under eating.
I believed I was under eating. I was not under eating. I just had so much stress that I felt like shit. And I thought I was under eating. I was not. So that could be an element that you are under reading that you are not. So I said the feeling of weight gain intentionally here. Because often what we're seeing, some women certainly are overeating.
They're just in a calorie surplus. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. But often what women are saying when they [00:11:00] feel like they've gained weight is just a lot of that water retention. Which goes back to that puffy feeling that chronic inflammation. And then what happens is. A lot of women switched to, okay, I'm going to do Pilates dance, like workouts. And they start to feel a lot better. I, you guys may have seen Melissa Wood health.
She's a really big one that has blown up, or there's a lot of these dance. I'm drawing a blank on some of the other that I've seen that are really popular, but just kind of body weight. They're former dancers, some of them. And I think it's a wonderful form of movement. I did a lot of Melissa Wood health during the pandemic.
I was coming off of injuries from being hit by car and also my own burnout. And so I did a lot of those workouts and I loved them. Because they were movement. I would differentiate those from exercise for me personally. They were movement that allowed me to feel really connected to my body. And I think that's such a beautiful [00:12:00] side effect of this type of movement for so many women is it's getting them connected to their bodies.
And that's so good for the nervous system. That mind, body connection and moving the body, which is so important for us and our brains. We need to move. Our brains perceive a lack of safety for just stuck, still we're sedentary. Right? So we need to move. And as a result. A lot of these women are noticing, oh my gosh, that water weight has dropped. I'm not experiencing that sense of inflammation.
My digestion has improved. I'm sleeping better. The brain fog is going away. I feel like I have more energy, right. From switching to this form of movement. But we need to address why. This happens. And it's not because there's this magic to low impact. Workouts. But it's rather the lack of balance and proper recovery rest and eating to support the exercise they were doing before. [00:13:00] Like I said with professional athletes, they've always been able to do this because they were prioritizing rest recovery, their nutrition. They were treating themselves like professional athletes. These women again, I made this mistake too. Going balls out, not understanding the importance of those other elements, so that we're training really, really hard. Which is great if that's what you enjoy doing. But you, if you're going to train that hard, you need to take responsibility for the other elements. You need to support your body and your brain, your, which is your nervous system. Ian those activities, you can't just expect your body to be a machine without supporting. Okay, so this is what happened. It's not the low impact workouts that have magically led to these women. Losing 20, 30 pounds.
And I had a woman on Tik TOK say, well, technically it was those workouts that did it. If that's what led to their appetite, being regulated. And that is incorrect. Just logically incorrect. It's an indirect. [00:14:00] Costs. It is not the direct costs. Right. So the direct cause of someone losing body fat is they end up in a calorie deficit. And what we're often seeing with these women is that their appetite regulates a lot.
So it's either they lost the water rate. And, or their appetite regulated because they're no longer stressed to the nines. They can tune into their hunger and fullness cues. Our nervous system is more calm. It's not in that constant fight or flight where they're trying to self-sooth and they find themselves eating a lot. In order to get that fixed, to feel that sensation of connection and self soothing. And so they lose weight. So indirectly the low impact exercise movement. Has allowed them to achieve the bees benefits that led to a calorie deficit. That led to them losing water, weight, or losing body fat.
Some other things that is important to understand with this transition and any woman could do whatever the fuck they want.
I don't care what you do with your body. I'm just pro informed consent. [00:15:00] So having muscle on our bodies is incredibly beneficial for our health. If you have issues with insulin resistance, blood sugar, having muscle is going to be so vital not to mention just day-to-day functioning. Especially as we age, it's very, very important for women. Putting stress on our joints and soft tissue is also really beneficial for aging, a daily life. But context always matters here.
Right? So notice I said, putting stress. But not too much stress. And that is the missing piece of this puzzle. Is the pendulum has swung from one end of the extremes to the other. When the magic is in the middle. As it is with most things. We want some stress, the amount of stress that we can actually recover from. Because if we're not putting stress on our bones, And our joints, our soft tissue. Tendons ligaments. They're not going to be resilient. When I was missing my period for years due to stress and [00:16:00] disordered eating. My doctors was so impressed by my bone density because of lifting weights through, from the point I was 16, I've been doing resistance training. And that's allowed me to have above average bone density for a woman, despite that. And as women age, that is something that is important.
And the way to do that is resistance training. So this not to say at all that low-impact movement is something that you should not prioritize again. I think it's so wonderful and I enjoy doing it myself. It's just, I would recommend or invite you to consider also adding heavier resistance training and you don't need to be going balls out, trying to put on as much muscle as possible.
You don't need to go to that end of the spectrum either. If that's not what you want to do. But I would invite you to consider putting more stress on your body. Stress is a good thing. Because it allows us to adapt and be more resilient. It's how the human species has survived up to this point. We need to adapt otherwise [00:17:00] we're atrophying.
That is going to be so beneficial for the rest of our lives. I don't want to get to 80 and say, oh my gosh, all I've done is low impact workouts for 50 years. And my bone density is decreased. My, the resilience of my joints and my soft tissue is not what it once was. I want to be resilient. So if you can think about exercise as a means of becoming more able-bodied. That will allow you to shift and help you determine what kind of exercise that you want to be doing. And again, I would focus on exercise versus movement.
There's certainly some overlap. But thinking of exercise as more of something that is helping you achieve a goal, whereas movement is just simply taking care of yourself. And exercise. I don't mean achieving a goal as in looking a certain way, although that can certainly have some overlap too. But just achieving a goal for your health and wellbeing. Because the truth is that there are certain forms of movement that will give us more health benefits versus others. As [00:18:00] long as we are prioritizing rest and recovery. So we don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to everyone having gone so far in one direction, no pain, no gain.
David Goggins more is better. Never skip a Monday. I've never regretted a workout. I've certainly regretted a workout. We don't need to go from that end of the spectrum to let's not stress ourselves at all and be afraid of lifting weights and be afraid of breathing heavy. Afraid of getting on a treadmill and running everyone's situation is going to be different, but interacting with those things from a place of fear. Is just not smart longterm. I had to take periods long periods months. Of. Very slow movement in order to get back to a proper baseline.
So if you need to do that for yourself, absolutely. I'm not asking you to override what you intuitively know is best for you. But I am inviting you to just zoom out and look at this [00:19:00] thing, these things from a bigger picture perspective. And consider that may be what's best for you. Long-term is to have a balance of all these things.
So, what do I recommend?
I recommend that you incorporate full body resistance training two to three times a week. This is recommendation per the CDC is two times per week. Two to three times is typically what most women, especially in my audience. Can. I shouldn't say can do, would benefit from doing. Has most women, especially if you're following a true progressive overload resistance training program, most women have not been doing that.
They've been coming from a background of orange theory, berries, or low impact type of movement. And so when they get into a progressive overload resistance training program, they're technically a beginner. With hypertrophy gaining muscle. And so they can see results very, very quickly for a pretty significant amount of time around one, maybe two years. [00:20:00] Just doing two to three times a week. I do two to three times per week. And see just fine results with that.
And then over time you can add more if you want to as needed, depending on your goals. So you can absolutely include more than two to three times a week if you're more trained and can handle it. And when I say can handle it, right, we're going back to paying attention to your recovery capacity. Take a look at your other life stress. Are you overwhelmed with your career with maybe your new parents, you have other familial issues.
You're having stress in a relationship. All these things can compound and impact your body's ability to recover. Are you supporting yourself with proper nutrition? Are you eating well as are the foods you're eating? Are they mostly whole nutrient dense foods? Are you filling your body with a lot of foods that are going to cause you to feel unwell?
Long-term are you prioritizing protein? Are you eating enough calories? Are you drinking a lot of alcohol? [00:21:00] These are things to consider. Are you taking time to rest and recover and I'm not just referring to the body. I'm referring to the brain as well. This is something I missed for very, very long time. And the brain is the nervous system.
Right? So if we're constantly shoveling information into our brains, That is stressful. We need to give our brains time. Away from technology away from social media. To simply. Digest all the information that it has been input into it. Otherwise, it's going to start to perceive it as a threat potentially. So make sure that you're prioritizing rest and recovery for both your body and your brain.
This is not mean sitting on the couch all the time. Go out in nature, communicate with other human beings. Take some time to prepare a meal. You can do things while resting and recovering. Again, just sitting and staring at a screen is not going to be. Recuperating. [00:22:00]
Do as much low impact movement as makes your heart sing. I want to be very clear. I have nothing against low impact movement. I love it. I just want you to be doing it with eyes wide open and understanding why these women are seeing these types of results so that you are an informed consumer.
And you can absolutely incorporate this. If you don't want to be losing muscle while losing fat. I mean, that's referring to the resistance training. So in order to ensure that most of the fat, excuse me, most of the weight that you were losing, if you are in a calorie deficit is coming from fat versus muscle, or if you would like to take advantage of body recomposition, which is gaining muscle and losing that fat at the same time, or you can actually gain and most women are beginners, so they can absolutely do that. Then you will want to be resistance training. It's just. To me, it's a no-brainer for the health benefits.
And if you want that, quote-unquote [00:23:00] toned. Look as long as you're managing your restaurant recovery properly resistance training, progressive overload training is just chef's kiss. I mean, just get on that, but I respect whatever you want to do. And of course, any kind of movement is better than nothing.
Like I said, there's a season for certain things. I took months off from doing anything remotely intense, even a 20 minute walk was too much for me at one point. So I had to ease my way back into it and no way my asking you to override this, I had a woman on tech talk say, well, lifting heavy weights makes me a panic attacks.
It was like, well then good grief girl. I do not. Lift heavy right now. I, you shouldn't have to be asking a stranger on the internet for that kind of permission, right? So honor, but your body is telling you. And understand the season that you are in. So any movement is better than nothing, but at the same time, many women are leaving a lot of health benefits on the table for both their current selves and their future selves. And should be aware of it.
If you're only doing low impact [00:24:00] workouts. And I'm pro informed consent. So in the end, do whatever the hell you want, but just go into it with your eyes wide. But. Okay. So I would love to hear your thoughts on this one. I know this one gets very heated on social media and a lot of people are, uh, emotionally tied to this one, which is fine.
I get it. I have been there myself. So let me know your thoughts, head on over to Instagram and pop in my DMS. Let me know what you think. And I will see you all in the next episode