#179: Not Seeing Results? You're Probably Not Lifting Hard Enough

You've been showing up. Lifting the weights. Doing the workouts. So why does your body look exactly the same as it did six months ago?

Here's the truth most women in the weight room don't want to hear. If you're not seeing results, you're probably not training hard enough. And what "hard enough" means depends completely on where you are in your strength training journey.

I also share the dead giveaways I see in the gym every week that tell me a woman is never going to get the results she wants.

If you're doing the reps but not seeing the changes, this one's for you.

Enjoy the show!

Resources Mentioned:

Learn to Lift

Strength Training Membership:

Transcript

#179: Not Seeing Results? You're Probably Not Lifting Hard Enough

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Menopause Strength Training Podcast. I'm Lin Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in by helping you get started strength training and keep going for the rest of your lives.

[00:00:22] And yes, you may have noticed that I have changed the name of the podcast, and it's because I really wanna emphasize the strength training piece because that is fundamental to fitness in midlife and beyond. But I will continue to cover topics that are relevant for our fitness because strength training is not everything that we need in midlife and beyond.

[00:00:49] But let's get into the show

[00:00:51]  If you've been working out with weights and you're not seeing the results that you're expecting, and you've been doing this for a while, so you shouldn't expect results in days or even just a few weeks, but you've been doing this for months, like properly doing this, and you're not seeing results, then probably you are not lifting intensely enough, hard enough, challenging your body enough.

[00:01:18] And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk to you about what that really means in the beginning of your strength training journey, and then as you go along through the weeks and months and years of your strength training journey

[00:01:35] and I think this is a topic that is so important to address because I see it every week, women in the weight room that are showing up for themselves, but I can see from the way that they are training that they are not going to get the results that they could, and it's simply because they are not challenging their bodies enough.

[00:01:59] Remember that change happens when we push ourselves outside our comfort zone. It's the same thing in all aspects of our lives really. We need to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones in order to grow. And it's the same with any form of exercise really. If you wanna be able to run better, you need to push yourself to your limits so that your body adapts and becomes better at running.

[00:02:31] And it's the exact same thing with strength training. One of the challenges we have with it, though, is that for so many years we women have been taught to be looking for the wrong signals, signals that are not necessary for proper progress in strength training. Things like feeling the burn or getting sore, which are completely irrelevant.

[00:02:57] Plus, we've been fed things like, "Oh, if you want lean, long, toned muscle, then it needs to be these light weights and tons of reps." Which, yes, you can build muscle with smaller weights and lots of reps, but, but the key is that you always need to be taking it close to failure. And actually, the range is, anywhere from four reps or five reps all the way up to about 35 reps that you could be doing in your sets and still build muscle if you are training intensely enough, and that is a huge if.

[00:03:43] And I'll tell you that if you're doing 35 reps, you're probably never going to be training intensely enough because you are going to get tired , bored, and start feeling that burn long before your muscles give out. And so mentally you're just gonna kinda shut down, and you're not gonna reach the point of training with enough intensity.

[00:04:09] So let's remember what we're doing here. We are using strength training as a tool to signal to our bodies that we need to be stronger than we are today. So we are gonna be pushing our bodies a little bit out of our comfort zone, out of the body's current comfort zone, out of its everyday capacity, pushing it right to the edge of the envelope.

[00:04:38] And that is going to trigger all kinds of signaling in your body. It is not only gonna get your muscles stronger, it is also going to strengthen your bones and your tendons and your ligaments, and set off a whole host of other wonderful things that'll happen in your body to start, for example, shifting visceral fat.

[00:04:59] And the latest research is also about how your skin is gonna improve, which is maybe why the lines in my forehead are not as deep as they used to be. Not sure, but that could be one of the reasons So in your very beginning of your strength training journey, this is all new to your body. So I don't want you to go at it like, full speed ahead and as hard as you possibly can and seven days a week because what I've seen time and time again is that not all parts of your body are keeping up.

[00:05:37] I mean, we are not 20 anymore. Back in college and in high school, if I just, took the whole summer off and then went into training and added three, four hours a day of training, and that was actually quite realistic for me to add in that much volume of training, strength training, running, practice, all the things.

[00:06:01] Yeah, I'd get sore, and then after about a week, my body would adapt. Our bodies are not 20 anymore. That's not happening like that anymore, and I think you know that, too, if you have been living in that body. It has changed significantly from what it was when it was younger. So in the beginning of your journey, you wanna give yourself some grace and really let yourself shift into this way of working.

[00:06:28] So intensity at this point is going to look like applying progressive overload. So that's the thing that I want you to be thinking about when you first start. Now, what is progressive overload? It means that you are adding a little bit of resistance, so that means weight, over time as your body gets stronger.

[00:06:54] And the easiest way for us to make sure that's happening is that we track what we've been doing. We write down on a piece of paper, in an app, what is the weight that we've used for a particular exercise and how many reps we were able to do when we did that exercise. And we should be aiming for a particular rep range.

[00:07:19] I really like the 8 to 12 rep range, especially for your first year or two of strength training. That is a nice rep range for several reasons. Well, I guess I can get into them here. But the reasons that I like that is that- A, That's like you're picking up a weight that's not super-duper heavy for you.

[00:07:44] For you to be able to do eight to 12 reps, like, it's not gonna be the heaviest thing you've ever seen. So the first reps are gonna be fairly comfortable, easy. You're gonna be like, "Yeah, I can do these first five, six reps no problem." And that gives your body a nice warm-up. It ensures that you can double-check your technique as you go, all those things.

[00:08:08] That's why I like that. And then as you're heading into your seventh rep, your eighth rep, and all those, then it starts to get harder, but you already have a little bit of practice under your belt before you get to those. And still, like, 12 reps is not an enormous amount of reps, so a 12-rep set takes about a minute to complete, so you don't get, like, super-duper bored.

[00:08:38] You don't get super-duper tired of doing that exercise by then. So that's why I like that rep range Anyhow, so what you wanna be doing in the beginning is working in a reasonable rep range, I would recommend the 8 to 12, and then increasing your reps each time you go in, or at least aiming to increase your reps.

[00:09:02] And then when you reach the top of your rep range, which is that 12 reps, then you would increase the weight that you're using. So I think that already you see what you're doing is you are continuing to increase the load that you are asking of your body, because your body is actually getting stronger week after week in the beginning.

[00:09:28] , it also is not necessarily about how much your muscles are growing. A lot of it is about how your body is able to recruit your muscles. So you will be stronger just because you're able to make use of the muscle fibers that you already have on your body, where they've been just kinda hanging out there before.

[00:09:51] And at the same time, this kind of slower progression in the beginning and not worrying about things like training to failure, we'll talk about that in a minute, but in the beginning I don't want you to be thinking about killing yourself, going as hard as you can go, going to failure. I want you to simply be progressing.

[00:10:11] And a big reason for that is that your muscles are going to get stronger faster than the rest of your body, and if you start too fast, if you start, like, from 0 to 100 right away, you may end up with tendon issues, elbow tendonitis, wrist tendonitis, and you really need to nail down your form.

[00:10:35] That's what you need to be focusing on, your form, learning how to do strength training. But the thing that I don't want you to do is to get stuck at, "Oh, I'm doing 12 reps with this weight at, on all three or two of my sets, and then next time I'm again doing 12 reps, and the next time I'm again doing 12 reps."

[00:10:59] Don't get stuck there. Okay? It's fine if you do, one or two, , workouts or sessions where you hit the top of your rep range and that feels good and you feel like, "Okay, I, it's still feeling pretty tough to hit number 12. I don't know if I'm ready to l- increase my weights yet," you can do another session, aiming at the top of your rep range.

[00:11:24] But let's not do that for a month , unless you happen to have a month where you're off for two weeks of it. But what I mean, like, you don't wanna do that for four weeks in a row. You, at that point, are ready to increase your weights because you need to be challenging your body. You don't want to just end up in this plateau,

[00:11:44] I mean, if you were running, you wouldn't be like, "Oh, I can run a mile in 30 minutes, and I'm gonna do that for a month." No, because way sooner than that, you're gonna get in better shape, and you're gonna be able to speed up your pace. And you should speed up your pace, right? If your goal is to become a faster runner.

[00:12:07] So the same way, if your goal is to make your body stronger, then as you get stronger, as the workouts are no longer challenging your body so much, you need to increase your weights.

[00:12:21] So that is . how you make sure that you're training with e- enough intensity and lifting hard enough, heavy enough in the beginning.

[00:12:30] And by the way, your weights are gonna be different from my weights, are gonna be different from your sister's weights, even your twin sister's weights, okay? This is very individual, and this is why strength training is so beautiful because you start where you are, and you work from there at your own pace, at the pace that works for you, okay?

[00:12:59] Now, then, when you've been doing this progressive overload for a while, and you are starting to feel really comfortable with strength training, you know your form is good, your body's started to get stronger, your wrists are strong, your grip is strong, you're able to handle the strength training, when you're starting to feel comfortable.

[00:13:21] I know it's really hard for me to kind of describe, like, what that feels like, but I see it when people in my programs, they send, form videos to me, and they send them way in the beginning of their journey where they're kind of, looking a little hesitant, how, ooh, this is so new, and, ah, their bodies are not, so comfortable with the movements yet.

[00:13:41] And then they send one, months later, and they're back to doing, for example, RDLs after it's been out of their rotation. They come back to doing it, and it's like, wow, okay, now they've, like, got it together. And maybe you take form videos of yourself. I mean, I even look at videos of myself when I first started, like, on a hip thrust, and oh my God, I was, like, shaky, trembly.

[00:14:04] There was no smoothness to my movements and all that kind of thing because I was just starting out. I was just learning, and at that point, the progressive overload was absolutely the only thing I needed to really think about. 

[00:14:18] Now, the next thing to look at when you are starting to be more of an intermediate lifter, I would say, is thinking about training to failure and close to failure.

[00:14:31] And this is where the research comes in very strongly that, your rep range doesn't really matter. What I talked about at the beginning, like you can be doing, five reps in an exercise or you can be doing 35, that doesn't matter as far as building muscle goes. But what does matter is that you get close to failure.

[00:14:54] So what is failure? So failure, muscular failure is when you cannot do another rep with good form. You just can't. Okay? So I think maybe an easiest way to envision this is, 

[00:15:09] If you were to hang on something and you tried to do a chin-up, and you were like, oh my God, you, if you could do a chil- chin-up, I would pay you a million bucks, and you're, like, hanging there... And by the way, I'm assuming that you've never done a ch- chin-up as I'm telling this example. But anyway, you're hanging there, and you're, like, doing everything you can to do a chin-up, and it just ain't happening, okay?

[00:15:40] Like, that's the kind of feeling you get with failure, that you just cannot do it. Your muscles are just not able to perform that anymore. All right, so obviously .. If I was doing chin-ups to failure, I would have gotten, like, one, at least one before, before I ended up in that situation where I couldn't get the second one.

[00:16:02] But just to give you an idea of, like, how that feels that you actually literally, no matter how hard you try,, with good form, you can't do it. That's failure.

[00:16:14] So you want to get close to that point. It used to be believed that you need to get to actual failure, like where, let's say you were doing those famous chin-ups that we're talking about.

[00:16:28] Like, let's say you could do three chin-ups, and then on the fourth one you're like pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, and you're able to get up, like, a third of the way, and that would be when you would end your set. Nowadays, the research has shown, and I mean, hey, this may change over the years, but the research has shown that getting, like, one or two or three reps away from that failure is good enough, okay?

[00:16:55] To trigger muscle growth that is. 

[00:17:00] So if you're thinking about bicep curls- Which is an exercise that probably all of us have done in a group fitness class or somewhere. So if you're doing bicep curls, you wanna get to the point where you just cannot bend your arm anymore. Like, or you can do it part way, but you can't get it all the way up.

[00:17:20] That would be failure, when it just stops and you just have to give up and, and, and say that, "Psh, can't do this." Now, when you are practicing going to failure, then it is a good idea to actually understand what going to failure feels like. And so on exercises like bicep curls, which is not dangerous to go to failure, I mean, what's gonna happen to you if you can't raise your arm all the way up?

[00:17:47] Like, nothing. You're not gonna break your back. Your knee isn't gonna go out. Nothing like that's gonna happen to you. So that's an exercise that's safe to practice going to failure on just so you see what it feels like. And when you've practiced going to failure a few times, you start to understand when you're getting close.

[00:18:06] And it's like that moment or that rep where you feel like, "Okay, now this is getting heavy," or, "Okay, now I'm s- this is slowing down. I'm not able to do this as quickly." You'll start to notice that kind of thing. so you need to be getting to that point of close to failure in order to trigger muscle growth.

[00:18:29] So obviously, if you are doing what I talked about a little bit earlier, which is that you're using the same weight and you're getting your 12 reps each time, and you're stopping at rep number 12, and you're doing that for weeks on end, your body is just getting used to doing 12 reps. But you could probably do 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 even, after a while.

[00:18:52] So you need to just keep challenging your body , and that's how you're going to get stronger

[00:18:59] And let me just point out a few ways that I know in the gym that women are not getting close to failure. One is if they're chatting while they're doing their reps. They're chatting with their friend, they're doing their reps. Yeah, you're not going anywhere close to failure because at the point where you're going close to failure, your whole attention, your body, everything, your mind, everything needs to be focused on moving that weight.

[00:19:32] You do not have any extra attention or energy to be holding a conversation at the same time

[00:19:38] And the other way that I know is that people are doing things that are so light that it, it really... I can see from looking at them that the last reps are not a struggle at all. They look like they could do another hundred reps.

[00:19:55] Women who come in and they're doing hip thrusts with just body weight. They're lying there on the floor in the warmup area, and they're doing hip thrusts, glute bridges, and, they could just grab a dumbbell to make it a little bit harder for themselves. So if you are one of those, and you're noticing that, "Hey, I'm doing all these strength training exercises, and yet I'm not seeing any changes happening," then you need to visit whether you're doing them with enough intensity.

[00:20:29] And one more thing that I will say is that you also need to be repeating the same exercises week after week for at least eight to 10 weeks, because how else are you going to build up your competence in doing a particular exercise? And how else are you gonna do progressive overload if you're only doing that exercise once a month, every now and again, when it happens to come on YouTube, in the random workout on YouTube?

[00:20:59] No, no. Strength training to get to the goal of building muscle, building strength, it is a very systematic process to follow to get your results. And that's the kind of programming that I create in my Learn to Lift and in my strength training membership. So if you are looking for a program that's gonna allow you to do this progressive overload and allow you to start training in a systematic, effective way, and learning how to train to failure, having somebody check your form for you, all the things, then come join one of my programs.

[00:21:41] All right. So I really hope that helped you to understand whether you are s- training hard enough to get results from the workouts that you're doing. Let me know in the comments or send me a message in Instagram, at my DMs. I would love to hear whether you had an aha moment that, "Whoops. Okay, now I see why I'm not getting results," or whether you had the moment that, "Yes, I'm doing the right thing. Great. I'm just really happy to get this reinforcement." I'd love to hear from you. 

[00:22:17] And with that, I leave you until next week and wish you happy training.