#125 - Lifting Weights but Not Seeing Results? 6 Programming Mistakes Holding You Back

Are you lifting weights but not seeing results? 

There are so many moving parts when you're trying to get stronger — and sometimes it's not about effort, it's about how you're training.

This is part one of a three-part series on common mistakes that could be holding you back from getting the results you should be seeing. 

Because yes — there really are better and worse ways to strength train. And most women I work with have been doing it the hard way for years without even realizing it.

In this episode, I walk you through six programming mistakes that can slow — or completely stall — your progress.

Whether you’re following online workouts, doing your own thing at the gym, or just getting started with weights, this episode will help you spot what’s working against you so you can start training smarter.

Resources mentioned:

•  Episode on progressive overload: Episode #114
•  Join my Learn to Lift program >> 
•  Lift-Off Challenge >> 

Transcript

#125 - Programming mistakes holding you back

[00:00:00] So welcome to the show. My name is Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto and I am a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to start strength training so that we can keep our bodies strong in midlife and in the decades ahead. And in this week's episode, and actually this is the first in a three part series, I'm talking about the things that are holding you back.

So if you are like a lot of women who are doing something with weights, maybe even going to weight room, maybe even following a program online, whatever, and you've noticed that you're not getting results, it might be that you're making one of these really, really common mistakes. So I want to help you out there.

But before we get started, I have to say that I am feeling way, way better. I know a couple weeks ago I was talking about how I'm recovering, and that my body was really struggling because of such [00:01:00] high stress load. And of course, I've had all these. Not so pleasant things happened in my life recently.

And then on top of that, I decided to go ahead and create this liftoff, which was a free fitness challenge, which I mean, I loved doing it. And oh my God, I had so much fun during the challenge, but. It is a heck of a lot of work. If you have ever in your career, had to organize even a webinar. This had two webinars plus a series of emails going out every day plus a Facebook group.

And I mean, it was just a heck of a lot of. Work to set it up. And I really did not sleep during the weeks leading up to it and the weeks that it was going on. But I have to say, I'm happy to report that the last few days, ever since Midsummer, when [00:02:00] I was away with my family and oh my God, that was so amazing.

I had all my children, plus my son's girlfriend who had just lost her mom at Easter, plus my boyfriend and my parents all under the same roof, and oh, I mean, I, I just felt so blessed. Like all the people that are most important to me in my life were all there together. And I can't say it was smooth sailing because my younger two.

Well, they had a lot of con conflict over the weekend, but even so, it was amazing, amazing to have them and I really hope that we'll have times like that in the future as well. So, yeah, so I have been sleeping better and feeling better and so I think this summer is going to be a good time. Yep. But, okay, so [00:03:00] on to the content of the episode.

So mistakes that are holding you back, and I have six of them today, and let's go through them one by one.

All right, so the first one is really swapping exercises too soon, and I think there are a lot of reasons that women do this. Maybe it's that you're following some random workouts online. Maybe you're bored. Maybe you have been doing something and you notice, oh, I'm not feeling sore anymore, or, or I'm not feeling the burn, so this can't be effective anymore, and nothing could be further from the truth.

I think these are some of the myths that we have held. I know I held them dearly. I thought we have to swap out exercises a lot. I thought being sore was a sign of progress and feeling the burn meant that [00:04:00] your muscles were really, really working.

Another part is that women get bored, right? I have so many people that I know who are like, oh, strength training's just too boring for me. I need it to be social, or whatever, and so they're swapping out exercises too quickly.

The problem with that is that your body actually needs time to master these exercises that you're doing. I mean, I've been doing the same exercises. I. Well, swapping a little bit in and out, but for years, and I'm still perfecting my form, and when you're first starting out, your body needs to learn how to do those exercises.

So it's like a neuromuscular adaptation and your body starts to learn how to use your muscles in those exercises. So actually. It has been shown in [00:05:00] studies. So one of the big researchers in this area is Brad Schoenfeld, and in their study in 2019, they showed that excessive exercise variation reduces neuromuscular adaptation and impairs load progression.

So what that means in plain English is that if you're changing things up too often, your body is not getting the chance to really learn that movement. And because it doesn't really learn the movement, it is not able to use that movement to gain strength. So what to do instead is really to stick with the same exercises for eight to 12 weeks and focus on increasing the load, increasing the reps, and that is how you're going to get the muscle increases and the strength increases.

And this is one of the reasons why in my [00:06:00] programming, I really have a lot of consistency. Usually people are doing the same exercise even for 16 weeks in a row before switching out, and I don't switch everything at the same time because then everything is in the process of being learned rather than you having some things that you are still progressing on while you get kind of ramped up on other things.

So that was number one, which is swapping exercises too soon.

Now the second one is program hopping. And this may happen because you know, you try something out and then you think, oh, I'm not really seeing results from this. You know, you're expecting that you will have like a month of it is enough. Like I should be seeing something in a month. And really you need to give this a chance to start working.

It can [00:07:00] take four to six weeks just to start building muscle, and if you quit too soon. Like what we were talking about in number one, you've just gotten to the point where your body has started to really learn that exercise and is starting to make those muscular adaptations, in other words, to build muscle and get stronger, and then you like throw that out the window and you start with something new and you start back at square one.

So really it is important for you to pick the exercises and then continue with them for an extended. Period of time.

And number three is no progression. So this is something that came out in the Free Fitness challenge. Several women reached out and said, oh wow, you know, I now realize that even though I've been lifting weights, I haven't been applying progressive overload. I've been just doing the same thing. So they weren't doing mistakes, number one [00:08:00] and two because they were consistently doing the same exercises for a longer period of time, but they were using the same weights and doing kind of the same amount of reps, and they weren't.

Triggering the muscle growth by progressively overloading. And so I do have episodes on progressive overload and that really in a nutshell is that over time you're increasing how many reps you do. And then when you get to the top of your rep range, increase the weight of what you're doing. And you really need to be doing that in order to, uh, build muscle and strength.

Chris Beardsley is one of the researchers in this area and in his 2023, report was talking about mechanical tension from progressively heavier loads is the primary driver of hypertrophy, which is building muscle. And this is, by the way, one of those things that if you are [00:09:00] looking, at fitness content online.

If people are talking about you gotta tear down your muscles to build them back stronger, no. That is old information, totally outdated. Nowadays, we know that mechanical tension is the primary driver for. Building muscle. At least that is the current understanding. Of course, maybe that over time we learn that there's something even more important, but so tearing down your muscle so they come back stronger.

That is not, that has been disproven. That is not the way that you build muscle. And in fact, one of the things that can slow you down is that you are causing so much damage to your muscle. Um, and then recovery is taking a long time. So a lot of this soreness, excessive soreness. You know, past the first few months that [00:10:00] you've been lifting.

I mean, you are going to feel sore when you first get started because your body hasn't been doing that before. But the kind of excessive soreness that you get after you have been lifting for a little bit of time, that's often due to you causing muscular damage, which is. Inhibiting your recovery. And really what you wanna be doing in this game is you wanna be triggering, you wanna be, uh, challenging your muscles so that they have the stimulus to grow, but you don't want to be damaging them so much that your recovery takes a long time.

So it's this fine balance that you're trying to find over time.

Okay. Then the fourth thing is bad programming, or actually more like no programming, and I've mentioned this before, I see it all the time with women who come into the gym and they're like, they just get on a machine. They're kind of like, okay, I am gonna put this [00:11:00] peg in here and, and I'll do this, and, and you don't really have a structured plan of.

How much you're gonna do today, or how much you did today, and then look at that next time you go in. Maybe they don't even understand about, you know, biomechanics, like which exercises are working, which muscles. So then their program may not be appropriate. It may be working some muscles more than others, missing some altogether.

So proper programming, really. I mean, you know, I had somebody reach out and say, oh, they would've loved to have joined my program, but the 1 97 was too much of an investment. And I think to myself, you know, I. Think about how much time you spend training and if you can invest 1 97 and a, get the information about like [00:12:00] what you need to be doing and get a program that will actually get you results, then like how, how is that a very high investment?

If you go get a program done by a personal trainer live, that's for sure another option, just make sure that they are, you know, interested in training your whole body, not just booty or whatever. So that, that it's full body training, that it is appropriate for a woman in midlife that it's not pushing you kind of too fast.

, And that even will cost you something, you will have to pay for that personal trainer to create that program for you and deliver it to you. And normally it's gonna be delivered to you on a piece of paper, so you won't have an app to track how, what you're doing. They won't give you all the information that you get in the Learn to Lift course.

So it's like, come on ladies. Honestly. Make the investment in yourself. [00:13:00] If you're gonna do this, it really is peanuts compared to the time you're gonna spend to try to figure it out on your own, or the time you're gonna waste as you follow some random. Programs that are given out by, TikTok, fitness influencers, whose goals might not even be your own.

And even if their bodies are looking really fit, the thing that they're showing you online may not be the way they got that body. Okay? So. Just some things to keep in mind, but programming is very important and if you don't have a good program and you're expecting results, well, hmm. Yeah. That is one place where you may be failing.

And this too is not just my opinion on the thing. So this has been studied as well by Schoenfeld and all in 2019 where they declared or [00:14:00] found in their research that periodized. Goal aligned programming is essential for progress, that random workouts are significantly less effective for achieving hypertrophy, which is building muscle and strength.

So I very, very much encourage you, and it doesn't have to be from me, but to get a program that is designed for your goals. Which most likely, if you're listening to me, it is to build some muscle, look more toned, get your bones stronger, to increase the muscle amount that you have so that you can fight off, um, pre-diabetes, and so that you can be strong to do the things that you want to do with your life in the decades ahead.

So get a program, a proper program, and then follow that. It's an investment in yourself and you are worth it. I mean, really, you are worth it. Think about how much money you [00:15:00] spend on makeup or whatever, or coffee. I mean, this is so much more important.

Number five is very much related to the programming thing, and it's something that I have seen unfortunately with women who have come to me and then they show me the programs they've been following. And this is about junk volume. So junk volume is basically doing extra sets that aren't actually stimulated.

Stimulating muscle growth because either they're not taking you close enough to failure or because fatigue has already set in. So let me explain that a little bit more. The thing is that you need to be training with enough intensity for the muscles to be triggered to grow stronger and bigger. And that means getting close to failure.

Now when you're first starting out, progressive overload, you are pushing yourself in that direction. So you don't [00:16:00] need to worry about failure yet. When you've gotten the hang of it, when you're feeling comfortable with strength training, then that's sort of the next progression of what you need to be paying attention to.

But if you're doing. A lot, a lot of sets training the same muscle and it might be different exercises, so maybe you don't even realize that you're training the same muscle in three or four exercises. 'cause I've seen some of these programs where you've got like 10 exercises, 12 different exercises that you're doing in one session, and maybe you've got like three exercises there that are working your glutes or four.

It's like your glutes only have a certain capacity for those muscles to really be working hard, and after that, your body just can't re recruit those muscle fibers very effectively. And so that becomes junk volume and that kind of junk volume is the kind that will make you pretty [00:17:00] darn sore and will hinder your ability to recover.

So then you're not ready to go for your next workout, or you might need to take a longer time before you can train again. So, I mean, I mentioned this a little bit earlier. So one of the, the kind of balancing acts that you do. For example, you know, if you're somebody who really wanted to , grow her glutes, and you go into a program that's like, I wanna grow my glutes.

You're trying to maximize the stimulus for your glutes without hindering your recovery. And the maximizing the stimulus would be to try to. Stimulate your glutes three times a week. Three times a week means you only have one day of recovery in between. So you do need to be very careful about kind of not putting in junk volume, because then that will hinder your recovery.

For my programming that I do, I really aim to hit your muscle groups twice a week, which for sure gives you enough [00:18:00] time to recover. Before you train them again, I recommend always having the one day off. I personally find two days off is even better because I, I like to train pretty close to failure, I know mean that I need a little bit more recovery, but I enjoy that.

So there's this junk volume aspect here. So that again comes to good programming

and I see these young girls in the gym and they're really intent on doing their glutes and then they're doing hip thrust. And there are also young men that do this with their chest exercises, for example.

I mean, I'll show up and , they're like on the bench press, and. Halfway through my workout when I've already done like three different exercises. They're still on the bench press doing sets eight, nine, and 10 or whatever that they're doing. And I'm just thinking to myself, man, you know, you would have better results if you would just cut out the junk volume because you're, [00:19:00] you're just increasing the amount of time that you need to recover and you're wasting time in the gym.

So,. There is a science to this, and it's a whole lot of different things you need to think about as you're doing the programming, but to get effective and efficient programming out of it. Then junk volume is one of the things you need to watch out for. And again, this goes to the previous point, which is that.

It actually is a good idea to get a program from somebody who has studied this stuff and can take all of these factors into account and come up with a good program. And when you see the program, you're gonna be like, huh. That's not very complicated, but actually coming to the hardest thing in the world is to simplify,

and I find the most challenging programming to do is for people who are training twice a week because you have so many limitations as far as how many sets you can do and everything. So you really need to think about it

All [00:20:00] right. And again, since I've been quoting a little bit the research this time, so Chris Beardsley and Lee and All in 2022, in their research they said building muscle requires sets taken near to failure. And that fatigued or sub threshold sets contribute little and may even impair recovery due to sense central nervous system.

So CNS or calcium related muscle fatigue.

So that's the soreness that shows up there. And also the fact that your body is no longer able to stimulate those muscles and get that contraction when you go on like set after set, after set after set. It's really your first set that is the most effective.

And for example, when I went training. Two days ago I went training and I was very kind of tired [00:21:00] from the weekend and I thought, oof, maybe I don't even wanna go, but. Actually, the session went really well, but what I did was I just focused on my two main lifts and then I did one set each of my other four lifts so that I did stimulate those muscles and had my most effective, you know, set that I do have for those muscles.

But, 'cause I was tired, I wanted to, you know, kind of just do a little bit less.

All right. And that brings us to the last. Thing that may be inhibiting your progress. And that is relying on group fitness classes instead of structured strength training. And here I group in any kind of instructor led follow along program, I have yet to find one that can offer proper structured strength training in a follow [00:22:00] along format.

I myself have been thinking, could I create such a thing? Because I think it would honestly be something women would be happy to do because they're used to following along. But in essence, what that would be is me doing a workout with you for eight weeks, you would watch the same video, right. And just do it at the same time.

And that would be pretty, I don't know how fun that would be. It's not the same thing as having a group fitness class, but in any case. Any of these are not gonna be as effective because, uh, when you are doing like a circuit class bootcamp body pump, and that's your only form of strength training or weight training, you are missing doing the progressive overload and ensuring the intensity in your sets.

And those two things are really, really. It essential for building muscle, and [00:23:00] those are two of the main things that I taught in my free fitness challenge was what is progressive overload and what does it mean to be lifting heavy? Because those are key ingredients for getting results out of your training.

So again, research from Schoenfeld. This from 2016, is that structured progressive resistance training, outperforms, varied or high rep lightweight classes in both strength and hypertrophy. Outcomes. So even if you are feeling the burn when you're in the class, even if it feels really hard, it doesn't mean that you are getting stronger.

If your weights are staying the same and the workouts change each week, you are not. Progressing. You're not truly strength training. You're exercising for sure. You are exercising, you're burning calories, you're moving your body, and exercise [00:24:00] is a good thing. But please don't mistake that for you doing real strength training okay.

All right, so that was basically the first part in a three part series about the things that you might be doing wrong that are hindering your ability to progress and actually see results from the work that you're doing with weights.

And just a quick recap is. Number one was swapping exercises too soon because you wanna feel sore, you wanna confuse your muscles because you're bored. All the things.

Number two was program hopping. So a lot of times that's because maybe you feel like you should be seeing results faster. And I'll just a little note for this is that women do. See results fairly quickly. So in the 10 weeks that they're in my Learn to Lift [00:25:00] program, women know they're stronger.

They see they can pick up things more easily. They notice a difference in their strength. So it doesn't take years to start noticing a difference in your strength and even to be able to see a little bit of muscle tone developing. For some women, it depends on how much body fat you're carrying and all these things.

It's very individual, but. This is the truth, and that's the difference between having a structured program and then doing it in the right way versus just, you know, doing something with weights.

And number three, progressive overload. I talk about this so often, so you need to be progressing and, challenging your body as you get stronger.

And then the bad programming, honestly. Ladies, invest in yourself. You are worth it. You are worth the couple hundred dollars. That getting a really good [00:26:00] program costs you. Because think about it, time or money, if you're gonna spend the next three months spending two hours a day training, and that would be like the minimum.

So what's that? That's like 24 hours. And if that's just like doing something that's not gonna get you results. Like what's the point in that? Okay. So I think in most cases, if you think about what you are getting paid per hour and also how important getting stronger, like actually solving this problem is for you, then please just get a proper program.

Then the junk volume, that becomes a problem when you don't have a proper program. And I really would emphasize like get a program, like the person that you're buying it from, like be it a personal trainer. Um, make sure that they understand where you're coming from, that you are a midlife woman who wants to [00:27:00] strengthen your body.

You wanna get some muscle tone, you want to get your whole body stronger.

Booty is great. I mean, of course, I, I mean, definitely I train booty because it's super important for our hips and, and our lower body to be strong. But you need to train everything. Also your upper body, both halves of your body.

then please don't rely on the group fitness classes instead of a structured strength training program. Group fitness classes with weights are generally. I'm gonna put it that way. They are always, and please, if you've found one that's different, then let me know because I am super curious.

But they are all about muscular endurance, and what we need is strength and power. That's what we need to preserve as we get older. That's what we're losing as we get older. We're not losing those endurance muscle fibers. We're losing our strength and power, Even if you're feeling sweaty and sore after class, it doesn't mean you're getting [00:28:00] stronger.

I know how, it's hard to believe that because I was doing body pump for so long and I actually looked amazing for so long. I was really happy with how I was looking until all of a sudden I lost my muscle tone and it was because I was doing muscular endurance exercise, not strength and power.

All right, so I hope these were helpful. Let me know what you thought. You know, please do reach out to me in Instagram and my DMs. I actually don't get that many messages and I would love to hear your thoughts about the program. You know, if you disagree with me or if you have any questions and whatever, because I would love to have that discussion and also be able to answer questions if you have questions, especially answer questions in podcast episodes or in my social media content.

And with that, I wish you all the best and happy end of June. I can't [00:29:00] believe it is this late in June already. And of course, happy