The Chain Effect Podcast

Are You Lifting Heavy?

• Chain Effect

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In this episode, we dive into lifting heavy weight! We discuss lesser known physiologic benefits such as skeletal and nervous system impacts, as well as, debunking the outdated beliefs that heavy weights always lead to bulking up. 

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Chain Effect Podcast, where a physical therapist and a dietitian married with two kids juggle the struggle of running a business, raising a family, and prioritizing our own health, all while trying to have as much fun as possible.

SPEAKER_00:

We are your hosts, Taylor Pope, doctor of physical therapy, and

SPEAKER_01:

Caroline Pope, registered dietitian.

SPEAKER_00:

Together, we own and operate a health facility, bringing together physical therapists, dietitians, personal trainers, and active recovery services to create what we call... The chain

SPEAKER_01:

effect. I am so excited about today's topic. I think everyone's wondering about it. What's going on? It's all over social media, TikTok. It's going viral. And people are talking about lifting heavy finally. And I feel like it's changed so much because back in the day, I was a fitness instructor for... Close to 10 years. Got my certification during college and taught all those crazy, more cardio-centric classes.

SPEAKER_00:

Butts, guts, and thighs.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, but I thought it was strength training. That was more strength training. And then I did kickboxing and all these high-energy classes. I was jumping up and down, probably in the best cardio shape of my life. But during that training and then talking with all of my peers who were fitness instructors and all those classes, we always focused on light dumbbells. Like, oh, we don't want to bulk up. Yeah. we just do lightweight and, you know, a bunch of reps and we won't bulk up. And so we did three pound dumbbells, five pound dumbbells, always taught those classes would be so tired. I think everyone got killed in my classes.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh yeah. From firsthand experience. I think I was 31 at the time going to that class. It was over at UNC and all of a sudden I'm in this class with I think I'm the only guy in the class.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, probably. I was the only guy in the class. Probably for butts, guts, and thighs.

SPEAKER_00:

And Caroline is up there not only talking, motivating, yelling at everyone, but doing every exercise with head high kicks every single time. She's kicking like a football punter every single time. And she's able to do the whole thing. And I'm just... you know, so impressed and she's barely, you know, she's seems like she's barely breaking a sweat.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my gosh. I was in, I was in such good shape, best cardio shape of my life. But see, we were doing, and I would get so worn out doing the dumbbells and the light dumbbells because we do them for 20 minutes, holding onto them, doing all these exercises in certain classes. But I feel like looking back, I really wasn't gaining strength. And I, looking back at pictures, I don't think my body was as tuned as it is now. And I've always been a cardio queen. Like I really don't,

SPEAKER_00:

you weren't really doing the pushups the right way. I don't even think I

SPEAKER_01:

could do a pushup back then. Right. Really? Right. Like a true, a true, like one in good form. And so over the years, of course, being married to you and having chain effect and learning more about lifting. I mean, I finally come around the last five years, I'd say doing more, uh, lifting and, uh, heavier weight progressively, but I really don't like it. Like, I don't know if anyone else is like this, but I, I rather do a thousand jumping jacks than like five pushups or I used to.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And I don't like walking around between sets and wasting time. I don't like the breaks. I like to keep going.

SPEAKER_00:

You like to get after it. And, you know, that's the same for your warmup. You don't like to warm up. No, I just get into it. It

SPEAKER_01:

just gets me in trouble sometimes.

SPEAKER_00:

It's nice for your, your young body to be able to do that. But you know, the rest of us, or at least some of us, we really need to warm up and then maybe, you know, you won't be complaining to me, you know, after your workouts about your back hurting and all this stuff that's hurting. I

SPEAKER_01:

have an in-home PT. So, but this theory of lightweight, more reps like that, has been around a while, I feel like. To

SPEAKER_00:

create the lean body

SPEAKER_01:

look. Yeah, so that you're not bulking up. But I know a lot of people used to. I think we've really been empowered as women to be more strong, as beautiful, and having that strength and everything recently, which is great in recent years. But everyone used to be scared of doing heavier weight.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So tell us about why is lifting– heavyweight good? Or what are some things that are happening in the body when we lift heavyweight from a PT's perspective?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so from a physiologic standpoint, you know, there's a couple things I want to talk about. And the first is bone health. And lifting heavyweight has really two mechanical benefits for bone health. Bones are crystalline in nature. And Because of that, they have a vibration under load, and it's actually this vibration that attracts the bone-making cells. Those are called osteoblasts. And they're attracted to the points in the bone that are under stress. So if you imagine, you know, bending a bone in half, it's going to have a lot more pressure on one side of the bone. And because of that bending force, those osteoblasts and that crystalline nature, they're attracted. It's this ion thing, the positive negative charge. They're attracted to that, that point of bending, and they start laying down more bone cells, more osteocytes. And those osteocytes, I mean, they're incredible cells. They kind of monitor what's going on inside the bone, and they'll actually inform the body, hey, these osteocytes aren't as healthy. Let's get the osteoclasts, which are the bone degrading cells, to come in and sort of clean out and repair bone. and kind of tag some of the, um, those, um, damaged cells for removal, and then the osteoblasts will come in and lay down more bone making cells. So it's really this ongoing process. A lot of people think that your skeleton is formed when you're, you know, after puberty, when you're sort of fully grown, but we're constantly going through this process. You know, when we break a bone, the body is, you know, making a callus around that fracture and laying down all sorts of bone. And that's That's why it takes a long time for bone to heal after you have a fracture. It takes, you know, about 12 weeks depending on where the bone is and also depending on your own bone health. We actually, you know, this crystalline nature of the bone is really interesting and we actually in the clinic will use a tuning fork. to diagnose stress fractures. What is that? So a tuning fork? Uh, it is a metal device that you, I, I bang mine against my knee and it starts vibrating and we use that, you know, the vibration to kind of pinpoint areas, especially if, you know, usually with a stress fracture, you're really tender at a specific point and you can sort of use that to diagnose, you know, maybe this is, a stress reaction versus a full on stress fracture versus like a bone bruise, or maybe it's some really deep, soft tissue. But when you have, um, when you do have a stress fracture on a bone, it'll feel like a bee sting. It feels like a very sharp, like piny bee sting, uh, when you have, uh, when you have a stress fracture. And so we can actually use that to diagnose clinically before we send them off for an x-ray. Um, anyway, so. That bone making process is ongoing. And one of the ways that the body keeps making bone is from the tendon forces of the attachments on the bone. So every muscle in the body has two tendons that insert onto the bone. And that's how we gain leverage for our joints. And it's at those tendinous insertions that we get that That bending moment or that bending, uh, torque on the bone. And so really if the stronger that that muscle contraction is, the more bending force you're going to have on the, on the bone and the more of those osteoblasts are attracted to that area of stress. And so. The idea is then that by having stronger muscle contractions, you're going to be increasing the amount of stress on the bone, thus making the bone stronger.

SPEAKER_01:

So heavier weight is helping that process.

SPEAKER_00:

And then the other side of that is too, you know, when you're lifting, especially if you're lifting a weight away from your body, your bones are undergoing a certain amount of torque just from having to bear the weight of that extra weight. And so you're having a little bit of that bone making stress occurring there as well. So it's really important. And that's all besides any sort of what we call axial loading, which is just the compressive nature of, you know, for instance, you can imagine if you were doing like a back squat, you would have that weight sort of resting on your shoulders. through your pelvis, through your femurs, knees, feet, you're getting that axial load, and that also helps to contribute to increased bone health.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I've never thought about it like that. Instead of holding two kettlebells on your sides, that's different than the bar on your back, right? I've always thought that's just a different way of holding it. It

SPEAKER_00:

is, but if you think about it also, if you're holding the weight at your side, because the weight is... connected to your shoulders. It's still loading through your spine. It's actually loading through a different way. Yeah. Slightly different way. I actually tell a lot of people, you know, It's a little bit controversial, but we have a lot of patients who are older and they're wanting to do back squats. And that always makes me so nervous because they're putting a pretty heavy bar right on one segment of their cervical spine. So we tend to start with front squats most of the time. And front squats can get a lot more core engagement and still give you the same benefit of that quad loading.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. So that's about bone health. That's what's happening when you're lifting heavy weight in terms of bones. What else? What else is going on and why it might be good to lift heavier

SPEAKER_00:

well one of the things that a lot of people you know don't fully appreciate is how the central nervous system works and that is basically your body's your nerves through your body central nervous system is you know the brain and the spinal cord and then it branches out into the peripheral nervous system into your arms and legs and that system is is what is coordinating the different muscle contractions for you to lift things off the ground or pick up or move different weight. And the more that you have to lift or the more weight that you have to load, the more that system has to recruit muscle fibers in a pattern of musculature So that you can accomplish that task. So again, the heavier the load, the more recruitment has to take place. And, you know, you can do a simple experiment right now. If you, if you just take your hand and you just make a light fist and you think about, you know, what you're feeling right there, like what muscles might you be feeling just with a very light fist?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I mean, my forearm.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Perfect. Your forearm. Now take that same fist and make a tighter, make it tighter. Do you feel any?

SPEAKER_01:

My bicep?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. You feel your bicep? Okay. Now go white knuckle as hard as you can and see what muscles you start to feel.

SPEAKER_01:

bicep, tricep, delt,

SPEAKER_00:

delts a little bit in the back. I can even get my pec. Like if I really bear down, I can start to get my pec. And so you're recruiting more muscles, the harder that you're intensifying that load. And so in a way, and it's sort of been talked about recently that this might be one of the only ways progressive overload, you know, lifting heavier and heavier weight over time, uh, might be one of the only ways to keep the nervous system young.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

And you can think about it like wiring in your house. When you're plugging a bunch of different things into your house, you can kind of overload the circuit But in our body, our circuits get stronger when we overload them. Not like our house. Our brain

SPEAKER_01:

just won't explode from overload. Like sparks.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, progressive, right? You don't do too much. And that's honestly where people do get hurt. Mm-hmm. the lats are in the back kind of help stabilize the shoulder blades and help keep your spine in a neutral position, but they're not able to support the weight through their arms, which may causes them to round their upper back, which sends that pressure directly into their lower back. So really like being able to recruit all

SPEAKER_01:

indirectly form. Yeah. Like that's secondary because of,

SPEAKER_00:

yeah.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

The strength. That's interesting. This is a deeper, I mean, I don't think the general public would ever think about this, you know, nervous system bit of lifting heavier and why that's important.

SPEAKER_00:

And a lot of people are thinking about, you know, neurogenitive decline these days. And a lot of times we used to think about the brain and the body being these separate things, you know, brain health, body health. And now what we're realizing is, I mean, it makes sense, right? That everything is so much more connected to each other. And so working the body helps. develop the brain, working the body helps nourish the brain. Just

SPEAKER_01:

like with nutrition, like gut and brain, that connection, it all works together.

SPEAKER_00:

And building, you know, building that connection, building those pathways, nurturing those pathways over time with increasing load is what's thought to be sort of the fountain of youth for the nervous system.

SPEAKER_01:

And so, um, How many times should someone, if they're starting off lifting a little bit heavier, putting down those five-pound dumbbells, trying to get a little bit more in tune with this lifting, how many times a week would you suggest someone starts this program?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, I think first you really need to think about the programming that you're doing. And obviously... you know, we're going to recommend you're working with some professional, whether it's a personal trainer, whether it's a physical therapist, you know, maybe both. Uh, I definitely think you should be working with a professional because even if you're watching the videos on YouTube, you're not watching yourself. Now, if you're taking a video of yourself and you're, you know what to look for and, But it is very subtle where you can be setting. Even if

SPEAKER_01:

you're looking in the mirror, it's amazing to me when you point out, oh no, tighten this, move this.

SPEAKER_00:

And the body's really adaptive, so it can adapt motor programming for benefit. For instance, you make a free throw, you practice that same form over and over again, you're more consistent at making free throws. Well, we can also lay down bad muscle memory and develop poor memory. neuromuscular control and those bad motor habits as well. And that's usually what happens after injury actually, is that we get injured and then all of a sudden we're laying down bad motor control because we're compensating for that injury. We're offloading that tissue and something else gets hurt. And then a long time after that injury has healed itself, we're still laying down that that bad, we're still using that bad motor program. And so that's where we have to really focus on the details of doing these. And what we're gonna talk about is compound lifts, functional movement patterns, doing these with perfect form every rep.

SPEAKER_01:

Is that what new lifters should focus on?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, definitely. Compound movements? Yeah, so these new lifters, and to answer your question, how often should people be doing this and sort of what regimen? At Chain Effect, we recommend that people take a functional approach and we're going to sort of break up the lifts into the different functional movement patterns. So how the body was designed to move and then perfect those movement patterns and then load those movement patterns progressively over time. What's so interesting is You know, we both have kids and, you know, I've been like geeking out about this since Bennett was a little baby.

SPEAKER_01:

Crawling and moving

SPEAKER_00:

or how he develops. I mean, these are all the functional movement patterns. Crawling. he performs, he performed, I have a video of him at like one and a half years old, lifting up his little toy bike. And he performed the most perfect deadlift I've ever seen. You were so proud. I have it on video. He just picked it up and farmer carried it over to point, you know, V put it down with a perfect hip hinge. And it was just like, Oh my God, you know, he's just doing it totally naturally. And then when he interacts with the ground, he's got a perfect squat. I mean, you've seen him like squat down on the ground. It like kills me that I, you know, I can't do that. You know, it hurts me just to watch him do that, but he's playing with his Legos in a deep squat for, you know, 15, 20 minutes at a time. And he doesn't even think about it. And so hip hinging, knee hinging, those are two of the sort of primary ones. And we'll use those as sort of cornerstone lifts to, um, separate your days. And so having one day of And so this is basically for a new lifter, maybe doing a two day a week program is plenty and separating your days into a hip dominant day and a knee dominant day. And on that hip dominant day, you're doing more of a deadlift program. So that's where your deadlifts, hip thrusters happen. Um, single leg deadlifts, things like that.

SPEAKER_01:

The backside of your body working out a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00:

Working that posterior chain, right? So with the hip hinge, you're going to be working a lot more hamstrings, glutes, back, et cetera. And then with the knee dominant, um, you're going to be working more quads core and that anterior chain. And so really breaking and that's the knee dominant exercises are squat, step ups, lunges, things like that. And so. we're sort of separating our days with those compound, those big compound lifts and then incorporating, uh, the poles into horizontal poles and vertical poles and and then presses, horizontal presses and vertical presses. And so developing those patterns and then starting to build weight on top of those progressively.

SPEAKER_01:

So not what we've always heard, leg day, arm day, core day, it's different.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and that has a place, you know, particularly if you're working out, you know, if you're working out five days a week, you can silo those muscle groups and usually be pretty fine. But if you're anything like me, when I was first lifting, I'd start the week off and I'd be like, okay, it's bench and tricep day or chest and tris and then the other one's back and by, shoulders, legs. And so I'd hit the chest and tris and I'd hit that hard and then a couple of days later, I'd have another workout and I'd, I'd hit the, um, let's see, chest and tris, back and bis, right? Backs and biceps. I'd hit that hard and then something would happen and I wouldn't, Yeah. And then I'm back to a

SPEAKER_01:

little imbalance

SPEAKER_00:

and then I'm back to the start of the week and it's chest again. Another chest. I don't want to miss chest day.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. That's true. Yeah. If there's certain days you fall off or busier in your week and you don't get to it.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And then what you have is, you know, you're just being pulled more and more. protracted in your shoulders, rounded in your upper back because you're developing those pecs and you're not balancing it out with the rear delt and the shoulder exercises. And so, yeah, you can just create a lot of imbalances by doing that. It's called a bro split where they're really siloing those. Of course, for bodybuilding, where you are working out almost every day, six days a week, it can make a lot more sense for you to sort of silo those days. But for the new lifter, someone who's just trying to build a base level of strength, lifting those two days is enough and doing more full body.

SPEAKER_01:

So would you say lifting heavy is good for anyone?

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And are there particular groups that you found more difficult to getting this message across to, like different age groups, different types of athletes who may be

SPEAKER_00:

a

SPEAKER_01:

little turned off or think it's not going to help their sport?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's coming around, but traditionally, I think more of the endurance athletes... golfers too, honestly, like, you know, golfers think that putting on any amount of muscle is going to like affect their swing. But luckily we have guys like Shambo out there who look like the Hulk right now, just hitting it, you know, 400 yards. But, um, I would say, you know, runners, um, a lot of runners in particular think that doing any sort of weight training is going to add mass to them and affect them. And what I try to tell people is, you know, when you are running, um, you are loading 250% of your body weight every time you strike the ground. Man, that much? Yeah. And so if you're not able to stabilize that weight with really good core strength, with really good posterior chain, really good anterior chain mechanics, then you're setting yourself up for an injury, an overuse injury. And again, you meet a runner. They got some... sort of thing going on usually because it's a repetitive exercise. They're doing so many steps every time they're working out and so many loads. And so, you know, if I can get them to build up even just like a base level of strength by doing some heavy lifts, then, you know, you're really improving their ability to maintain their sport. And a lot of times, you know, again, going back to that misconception about, you know, gaining, you know, where does strength and you know, where does sort of that hypertrophy or that like really increase in muscle size come from? It really comes from doing a lot of reps, lots of sets, lots of reps to gain muscle, to gain that bulky, big muscle. And really you can do, you know, five reps, six reps, and you're really working on what I was talking about, which is that neuromuscular control and building strength. So you can improve the efficiency and the coordination of your muscles and that through that neurological system by doing heavy rep, heavy loads of like five, five reps, five sets.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's not going to take a while either.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It's not going to take as long. I mean, technically you're supposed to have breaks, but, um, you know, a lot of people will superset. So they'll do like their deadlift and then they'll do like a horizontal pull and then they'll do an anti-rotational core exercise and then go right back to the deadlift and do sort of sets of three different exercises, sort of bouncing back and forth. And then. hit another group.

SPEAKER_01:

So runners, definitely maybe some other fields for athletes that cut

SPEAKER_00:

fields for athletes. Yeah. Those, those forces go up, you know, when you're doing sprints, cutting, jumping, you know, that 250% load just starts skyrocketing. I mean, you're getting huge multiples of that. And so anyone trying to, you know, suffering from different joint problems, injuries or, you know, hamstring injuries are big one. And, you know, people aren't developing their posterior chain. A lot of people think they're doing a deadlift, but they're really doing more of a squat pattern and they're just hitting a lot. They're developing their quads and they're under developing their hamstrings and they're under developing their glutes. Um, so yeah, definitely those field sport athletes. Another one, another one that's interesting is the older population, you know, has this, you know, sort of inherent mindset that As they're getting older, they should just be winding it down. Maybe they're

SPEAKER_01:

afraid of getting hurt,

SPEAKER_00:

a little scared. I'm too old for that. I should be doing less and less and lighter and lighter. And they get in this mindset of, we should be doing lighter and lighter and lighter. But all the research, again, shows that you can develop strength at any age. I mean, they took this group of deconditioned 90 year olds and they got them on a fitness program and they were able to show incredible strength gains in just six weeks of like doing things like getting up and down from a chair, repetitiously doing wall sets, very basic stuff, but they were able to show huge increases in balance, you know, limit their falls risk. And I, I have a lot of older athletes who get after it in the gym and they're increasing their weight. They're doing more in their seventies than they were doing athletically in their fifties. And, you know, it's all about, you know, building it up slow and doing it with a professional so that you know that you're going to be safe and doing it the right way. But those are definitely some groups. And then the last one would just be, you know, some kids and younger athletes. Yeah, should

SPEAKER_01:

kids be, or yeah, how young? Can we start lifting or doing heavier weights with kids?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think the older prevailing thought was that you were going to, you know, stunt your growth if you're, you know, lifting heavy. But I think you really see that, you know, the sort of classic is that like gymnast, right? But you got to think if we're going back to those forces that, you know, you get with running. those forces that you get with sprinting and cutting. And then you multiply that by what it takes to like jump off a beam or do like a backflip or a double backflip or 10 back handsprings into a double backflip. I mean, those are incredible compressive loads. So I do think that there probably is some, you know, compression of the growth plates in those athletes, but for, you know, your field athletes, for a lot of your you know, more, uh, sports specific athletes, basketball, football, soccer, ultimate Frisbee, all of those sports. I think, you know, especially getting, uh, you know, a baseline understanding of the different patterns of movement as a young athlete and sort of building that strength up slowly over time. So making sure your movement quality is on point is really giving them incredible toolkits that they can use for the rest of their life.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And so starting them off young before they get in the gym anyway, and they're just like, I don't know what to do. Let me do some curls. Yeah. Let me do some bench press. Just like with any

SPEAKER_01:

life skills. It would be good to learn, I think. Right. as they get before they go into college. But I imagine posture realignment and working on kids posture could be helped with weightlifting just because of screens.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, tablets.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's only gotten worse. I mean, do you see

SPEAKER_01:

that just all the time with your younger clients?

SPEAKER_00:

Incredible. And I mean, a lot of these athletes are in pretty significant. Is that

SPEAKER_01:

what it's called? Technic and

SPEAKER_00:

bent over. Yeah. Their thoracic spines have a tremendous amount of kyphosis. They're not really able to hold themselves upright, straight, let alone under load. And that's when their bodies are the most pliable. When your skeleton is developing, you are developing the alignment of your body. if you think, you know, you have someone with scoliosis, the best time to attack that is when their skeleton is still developing. And, you know, I know we said that the skeleton continues to, you know, grow over the course of the life of the lifespan. It's, it's an active process, but you are developing, you know, the sort of building blocks of your skeleton as you go through, you know, you're, you're growing as a younger person. So that is the best time to attack it. And you can really work on a lot of those imbalances then. So

SPEAKER_01:

it sounds like. Like any of our listeners, whatever age you are, if you are not lifting, please start safely by about twice a week would be a good starting point.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, one of our heroes in functional fitness, Pavel Tatsulin, you know, I remember, you know, he was the sort of Russian kettlebell guy, but, you know, he brought a lot of this stuff. And I remember listening to a podcast where he was talking about his father in his, you know, started weightlifting in his seventies and was, you know, after doing it for just a few years was doing a 400 pound deadlift. I mean, that is an insane amount of weight for anybody, but it's incredible for someone, you know, in their seventies developing that from scratch,

SPEAKER_01:

right? Probably feeling better than ever, you know, not, not getting hurt, but feeling better than ever. So back to this concept of why will people not bulk up from the act of lifting heavy itself? There's a lot of factors. Um, but basically to bulk up, you really, To get bulky, quote unquote bulky, you really have to work at it, right? You're going to have to eat way more. And we'll talk about kind of the division of macronutrients. But eat way more. And like you said, do tons and tons and tons and tons of reps.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I heard somewhere, I think it was probably Andy Galpin on the Huberman podcast talking about, you know, 15 to 25 or 30 working sets of reps. eight to 12 reps in a week, which is a lot for one particular muscle group. So you're doing a lot of high reps. You're, you know, you're still lifting weight, but you're like really tearing up the muscle to get that regrowth versus what we were talking about earlier, where you're really working on the coordination of your muscle groups to lift heavier and heavier weight, which builds strength versus building size. Now, at some point, you're going to need to build size in the muscle to keep building strength. And that sort of happens naturally, but this sort of idea that you're just going to start lifting weights and balloon out into the hole is, you know, definitely a misconception. And, you know, you talk a lot with your clients about, you know, the nutrition behind, you know, building that up.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I mean, that can do with it a lot too. Like if you, you know, if you're trying to lose weight, you could lift and preserve your muscle, but you might have to be in a calorie deficit and then you're going to burn fat. So oftentimes I think the mistake is in the nutrition and what someone's eating. So if you're trying to lose weight, lifting heavy can be great along with cardio as well. You're going to preserve your muscle, which really revs up your metabolism, and then you can burn fat if you're in a calorie deficit. If you come home from your workouts or if you're finding you're lifting heavier and you are starving, which some people tell me, Well, maybe you come home and eat the wrong sorts of stuff and then you're actually increasing your calories. Then you're not in a calorie deficit. You're not going to burn as much fat. You're building muscle. So that could lead to maybe more of a bulky look or not what you're looking for. If you're really lean and you're lifting heavy, you're going to put on muscle. and you're not going to look bulky. But I think the problem is a lot of times we may not be eating as much protein as we need, eating more carbs, eating more fat, depending on the sport. There's lots of variations depending on how many times a week they're lifting, what sports they play. But ultimately, you can't outrun a bad diet. We've all heard that, right? Right. Increasing your calories. Absorbing in the kitchen. Yeah, absorbing in your kitchen if you're eating more carbs, if you're eating the wrong types of food, maybe you're eating more processed food. And really, we're learning more and more that our protein needs are... much lower than they should be. And the older research is, you know, those guidelines, the national guidelines and everything are much, much lower than the average person needs. Most people I see are not getting near enough protein

SPEAKER_00:

and that's going to help you build muscle. Most of your clients, they just come into this nutrition counseling and they're getting half or maybe a third of the amount of protein that they should be getting, you know, just for like a daily, um, losing weight or improving their health, let alone building a lot of muscle.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, it's hormone health. It keeps us full. It stabilizes our blood sugar. But to build that muscle, if you're doing all these things in the gym, say you are lifting heavy already, but you're not seeing that, you're not getting stronger and you're not feeling that your body composition is changing, there could be a lot of things. But most of the time, you may not be getting enough protein because We're seeing some of our patients need, the recommendations are the older ones, 0.8 grams per kilogram. Wow. It's kind of like even on the higher

SPEAKER_00:

end. What is that? That's like a gram per pound, right? Or something like that or close?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I don't know. 2.2 kilograms per pound. Oh, we don't have to do that. But we're finding your protein needs could be, 1.1, 1.6 would be the norm for a lot of some of my patients, a range like 1.6 to 1.8 grams per kilogram. Some people who are lifting athletes could need upwards of 3.1 grams per kilogram of protein. So if you do the math, and it all depends, and this is why meeting with a dietician could be a good idea to really break this down and do all the calculations, but People are not getting enough protein. I mean, a lot of women, especially because I see a lot of women come in, they're not seeing results and they might be getting 50 to 60 grams of protein. And so I usually try to bump them up to at least 80 grams starting off a day in baby steps. Right. And then we go up to 100 grams a day. I find that works well. stabilizes hunger, appetite, and actually helps them see that muscle growth so they can burn fat at the same time. And some of that also is protein fills you up. Yeah, I was going to say, when I'm eating a lot of protein... It's going to push out space where you can't eat as much carbs, processed foods, other things. Your appetite might be a little more curbed. So if you think about... that visual like one pound of muscle versus one pound of fat, like those visuals some doctors have and some clinics have, your weight, We know weight is not indicative of health because you might build a lot of muscle. Your weight might stay the same, but you're losing fat and your body composition is changing by lifting heavier, eating enough protein. I

SPEAKER_00:

had a patient just the other day. She says, you know, since I've been doing the weightlifting with you, my weight hasn't changed at all, but my pants are much looser. Yeah. Right. And it's like, that's perfect. I mean, that's what you're looking for. And that's why

SPEAKER_01:

we really don't think about weight. All the time, there's so many different factors.

SPEAKER_00:

And if you're really, you know, if you really want to get into the nitty gritty, getting some sort of body composition scan before you start is a great way. Getting a DEXA scan, getting, we have the Fit3D scanner, you know, getting something like that as a baseline before you start your journey is super important. I highly recommend

SPEAKER_01:

that. So you don't get, you know, disappointed or burnout from working hard.

SPEAKER_00:

A lot of people will just lose weight just by managing their diet, right? But I saw something where, you know, if you're you know, a lot of, you know, what I tell my patients because they feel stronger right away, I have to tell them that is the neuromuscular control that you're feeling your muscles, you know, after just a couple of weeks, haven't really gained any size. That's really taking like 10 to, you know, eight to 10 weeks over the course of consistent lifting to get that, to get that actual cellular turnover. And so a lot of what, you know, people are when they're just doing a crash diet or they're really changing their nutrition behavior, if they're not strength training, they could be losing a lot of muscle that's hard to get back.

SPEAKER_01:

For sure. And we need muscle. This is another area where I see a lot of women, perimenopausal, postmenopausal, just really having a tough time losing fat. And we also need to work on strength because having more muscle in our body revs up our metabolic rate, like I said earlier. So our metabolism, that is one natural way to increase our metabolism, our resting energy expenditure, which is like what our body, just to survive, like if we just laid on the couch all day, how many calories would our body burn to breathe, to digest food? And if we have more muscle... is how you can also increase your metabolism. Along with getting more steps in and different foods you eat and stuff have different thermic effects of food, which burn calories. And that non-exercise activity thermogenesis, that's like how much you move in a day, that's not planned exercise. But having more muscle is a great way to naturally increase that basal metabolic rate.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so just having more muscle burns more calories. So again, it's

SPEAKER_01:

lean, it's very compact, so your weight might be the same, but you could have more muscle and be losing fat and be increasing your metabolic rate, which is going to help you keep up losing fat or maintaining that weight.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. Love it. Well, that's awesome. So, you know, I think one of the things, you know, people, you know, sort of start to think as they get older and older, they're just, they know that, you know, there's a strength decline as they get older. And I heard someone say, you know, if we have a 1% decline year over year, then that's why it's so important to build that base in midlife, right? Let's elevate that strength foundation in midlife so that as we do see that decline, and that's not to say that you can't maintain strength, you can't still gain strength as an older person, but that top-end potential starts to decline as we get older and older. I think for men, it's after 50. In general, for women, I think it's a little bit younger. Classic. But we really want to start from a super solid foundation, and then we can really age more gracefully. And plus, you'll feel better, you'll feel tighter, and you'll be able to do more. It's very

SPEAKER_01:

empowering, building strength and getting stronger. Yeah. I hope that was enlightening. Thanks for filling us in about all that, Taylor. I think that was really educational for people. And so if you're not lifting already. Please start no matter your age. We've talked you through, you know, anyone could benefit from it and you're not going to bulk up. And so don't be scared of it. Like I was for so long.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And do it, do it with some professionals, you know, have a team, have a dietician, have a personal trainer or a physical therapist with you to help coach you along the way. And if you want to reach out to us to have any questions about what we talked about or get a little more information, please do Taylor at chain effect and

SPEAKER_01:

Caroline at chain effect. And

SPEAKER_00:

we'll see you next time. All right. See you later.