#36 Holly Baxter - The Real Truth About Building Muscle

 We are SO excited to dive into this conversation. Holly Baxter is someone we look up to in the industry, and if you want information that is evidence based, you want someone know you can trust when it comes to building a body, run to Holly

In this conversation we take it so many directions! We cover:
Optimal overall sets for growth
The key factors that really matter when trying to build muscle
How long it really takes
How AI and GLP-1 medication are shaping the coaching industry and SO much more

We could not be more grateful to Holly for coming on the podcast and hope you guys love the episode as much as we did!

If you are not already make sure you are following Holly, here are her links below so you can check out her work

Follow Holly on Instagram

Check out BiaFit

As always please follow the podcast it helps us so much! Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it and follow us on instagram, we love to chat so dont hesitate to reach out!

Tash

Em

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to Mindset Meets Muscle. This is the podcast where we talk things all things physique, performance, mindset, and the realities of navigating fitness whilst actually living life.

SPEAKER_02 0:13

Yeah, and today we are joined by someone who is a massive influence on evidence-based fitness based online, Holly Baxter. And Holly is known for bringing a really intelligent and balanced perspective to physique coaching and nutrition. Holly, we are so excited to have you here. For anyone thank you. Honestly, we have been so excited a little bit started. But for anyone who is listening and may not know your background, can you just give a quick version of who you are, what you do, and how you got into the fitness industry?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Goodness, have we got a lot of time? Yes. Thank you first off for having me. Um, I think this is gonna be a really fun conversation. Um, I love talking with people that are just, I guess, inspired and motivated to, I guess, focus on intelligence and education and a science-based approach to training and all things exercise. So I think today's gonna be a lot of fun. But uh, for some background, okay, so my background is in uh nutrition and dietetics. So several years ago, goodness me, now it's been many, I went to school for uh food science and nutrition, so that was my undergraduate degree, and then I went on and did a master's of dietetics. So I spent quite a bit of time in like the clinical space and kind of quickly realized that it wasn't going to be a place I wanted to stay long term just because the type of clientele I think that I was working with in that environment were not very motivated to change. And I was, you know, I've come from a really sporty background. Um, I did track athletics, so I was a sprinter and sprinted, you know, all the way up until goodness, I was 20 years old and I played basketball, so I was just really active. And I think the people that I'd been surrounded with, you know, in that environment were all very, you know, self-motivated and wanted to change and you know do the best they can. So I think after some time working in that clinical environment as a dietitian, I kind of wanted to transition more into private practice, and I did that for several years, and I still do, so I still am a registered dietitian, or I guess I could use the technical term, I'm an accredited practicing dietitian in Australia, but I live in the US, so I can't call myself a registered dietitian because we have different terms for the different countries, but same same. So during all of the work that I've done as a dietitian, I was often exposed to different types of athlete populations. And somewhere early in my career, I started working with some competitors. I had no background, no knowledge of bodybuilding. It was like a so foreign to me. And one of my clients actually said to me many years ago, hey, like you have a really great physique, you're obviously super athletic. Have you ever thought about doing the sport? And I was like, Well, no, tell me more about it. And she said, Well, there's actually a competition that I'm doing soon that's in Dubai, which you know offers a great opportunity to travel, and you know, you kind of get to do the thing that you love and see the world. And that was kind of my motivation, honestly. Like, I loved traveling. I think a lot of Aussies love to travel. So I actually jumped into a local show in Melbourne, Australia, where I was living at the time. Um won my local show, got to go to Nationals, won Nationals, and then got to pick compete for Australia in Dubai in the Natural Bodybuilding Federation. So when I got over there, I won that show and I was like, oh, I must have a bit of a knack for this. I think I should keep going. Sorry. That kind of threw me into the sport of bodybuilding, but I've always had a bit of a passion, I think, for exercise and fitness and performance. So it's not like it just comes from one place, you know, of aesthetics and things like that, which I think is where a lot of people kind of start in bodybuilding. Um, mine certainly comes from a passion in sport and really demonstrating to the highest possible level uh, you know, what you can do, how you perform. And of course, there's that science uh, you know, incorporation as well with the nutrition and the training. So yeah, I guess that's kind of how I got into the sport of bodybuilding, and my businesses since then have kind of taken many different paths. I currently have like a fitness and nutrition app, I have a coaching team, I've written books, I've published research, um, I have a lot of different roles in my company, but right now we're working on a brand new nutrition coaching app. So I was previously part of an application called Carbon Diet Coach. I was one of the founders of that company, sold my shares in that business, uh, had a two-year non-compete, and now I'm actually in the process of building a brand new nutrition coach. So that's going to be coming out very soon. We're in the middle of uh testing or beta testing that application, but the fitness component is already live in all of the app stores. So we've got a lot of things going on over here, but it's so much fun.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

You are a woman of many talents, aren't you? You literally have your your your bow in every angle. It keeps me very busy. Yeah, I can imagine it does. No wonder you're tired, babe.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

You have absolutely smashed it. How how are you able to sort of do do everything that you do and able to fit in, I guess we would just have to know like how would you f how would you fit in training, work, competing, like how do you manage it all?

SPEAKER_00 5:16

It's a lot, but you know, I think when you love something and you're really passionate about it, it it doesn't feel like work, although, you know, when you do anything too much, you can start to get fatigued and run down. And I think I definitely ride that line of you know being balanced and probably putting the gas pedal down a little too far. But you know, and a great example of me of kind of having to step back recently. Um, I started a prep for a competition this year. So I usually like to do the Girl Power show here in Orlando, and then I love to do the Pittsburgh Pro. Like they're two great shows, really great competitors, just a good experience. And maybe about halfway through, just trying to juggle, you know, some of the commitments for the nutrition app and my coaching team and all of the work that I do for one-on-one, um, I ended up having to say, look, I don't think that I can actually do this prep because the obligation to the training and especially the cardio that kind of increases, you know, to get into a deficit and stay in a deficit, you know, that requires probably about 15 hours a week, you know, of of exercise. Yeah, you know, with all with all the commuting, you know, back and forth to the gym and stuff like that. Um, I was just burning the candle at both ends, and I'd be going to bed at, you know, 1 or 2 am in the morning and getting up again at 7. And I was kind of just starting to feel the effects of that. So I pulled out of the two competitions that I was going to do, but I ended up doing something that was a little bit more conservative, maybe more of like a lifestyle cut. I went and did a great photo shoot, but it just saw the pictures on your Instagram. Incredible. Yeah, I had so much fun doing those, but yeah, it was it was a little bit less stressful not having to do all of the posing and quite as much, you know, prep uh, you know, around the nutrition. I could still eat out a little bit more just for convenience during a really busy time of my life. So I've definitely had to put the gas pedal or pull the gas pedal off a little bit to accommodate certain things, especially when uh work gets busy. But yeah, I love what I do and I I I don't mind working many hours, especially with the great clients that we have. So it's fun.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

Yeah, that's honestly so so exciting what you've got in the works as well. I actually use carbon diet coach at the moment. So um I'm excited that you're coming out with something, something new to try because yeah, I love always always trying all of these all of these different apps that come out as well. Yeah. So very excited for that. You'll have to keep us keep us updated.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Well, this is this is going to have a lot more of a female focus. So I think one of the biggest limitations um that I had with that particular platform was that it wasn't really geared towards women. So just different dietary types. And I think my background being in dietetics, I really care about like micronutrients, not just kind of if it fits your pros. Um, so there's a lot more like coaching around micronutrients. You can set notifications for all of your health markers, um fiber goals, you can set fluid goals, and then there's that menstrual cycle integration into this new app as well. So that'll be a little bit more fun, I think, for ladies and people that care a little bit more, you know, beyond just the macros and what they're actually putting into their body too.

SPEAKER_03 8:23

Amazing. God, that's gonna be so cool. I think that definitely sort of brings us in. Oh my god, we could just literally just tangent. Oh no, I was literally going, oh, it's not a good half of that. Um, but obviously, you are someone that does wear so many hats and you look absolutely phenomenal. Like your your physique is incredible, and I think you're definitely someone obviously that has to be very careful with your time and doing things in the most optimal, like the most efficient way possible. And there is so much conflicting information online that we see around what is optimal for training, and especially for women who are trying to build a body of their dreams. We hear so many, so many conflicting debates about volume, what's the perfect split, frequency, intensity, techniques? Like it goes on and on and on, and it can become so overwhelming for women, especially for people that maybe are like just wanting to start training and like they have no idea where to start, and it almost stops them in their tracks before they even step into the gym. Um, from your perspective, what do you think actually does matter most when it comes to building a great physique and where do concepts like training volume and proximities of failure, like where do they really fit in?

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, you've hit the nail on the head on like the two critical things that we need to think about when it comes to building muscle. I know there's a lot of discussion around fancy techniques and you know, which is the best rep range, and you know, drop sets or blood flow restriction or you know, force strength. There's there's so many different techniques and training modalities that you can implement. Um, but they are all tools in the toolbox uh that all ultimately, you know, bring you back to the two primary drivers of muscle growth, which is uh your weekly volume per muscle group and your proximity to failure with your training. So I I think when it comes to volume, um we've got to look at you know who the clientele is because it does differ, like the optimal requirements are a little bit different for beginners and then more advanced lifters. So if we think about beginners, just as an example, most of the research we have that look at those that are new to resistance training would indicate that somewhere between as low as six to ten per week per muscle group is sufficient to optimally like build muscle. So that's a really great thing in my opinion. It doesn't mean that you have to be spending hours and hours and hours in the gym. You can kind of go in, get 30 minutes done a couple of times a week, um, and now you've achieved your weekly volume. However, as we start to transition more into like a steady-state resistance trainers, so people that have been lifting for maybe more than one year or two to two years, um, the volume requirements do appear to increase, but there are certainly diminishing returns. And more recently, there have been a couple of research groups that have started to look at some of these higher training volumes, and it looks like there might be some benefit, like the trend is slightly more positive, but what we see is that there's no statistical differences between like the top two conditions that we look at. You know, we're comparing really high-volume training. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the study that came out by goodness, I think it was Ennison colleagues in uh 2023. They looked at fit up to 52 sets per muscle group per week. So that was a study in trained males. It was a 12-week intervention. There were 31 participants in that study, and basically they had three different conditions. One kind of stayed, I guess we'll call it the control group, they stayed at about 22 sets per week per muscle group, and that was achieved across, I think, a squat, a leg press, and a leg extension. And then there was another group that were basically progressing every two weeks by four sets. So by the end of that 12-week study, they were up to around 42 sets per week, which I mean I I can't even fathom doing that about a training, like the about an hour that you'd have to be in the gym to do that. And then they had another group that were progressing by six sets every week. So by the final week of that study, those individuals were achieving some 52 sets on the quad muscle group per week. But what was super interesting was that there were no statistical differences between those top two conditions. So, you know, I think a lot of people have that mentality of more is better. Like, oh, if I eat more protein, I'm gonna get a better response to my training. If I do more volume, if I do more sets, um, you know, yes, that's gonna lead to better growth. But the reality is it looks like there are diminishing returns. And there was another group uh another study by that same group um even more recently in 2025, um, and they were looking at the same kinds of approaches in females. They did a study that was 12 weeks in 30 trained females, and they weren't doing quite as high, um, but basically that baseline volume was very similar. They started at 22 sets, and I think the highest set progression group made it all the way up to about 38 sets per week on a single muscle group, and again, there were no statistical differences between the groups. So, I guess all that to say, uh well then what how much should you be doing? Like, what's a good amount of volume for you know an advanced lifter? I want to pull it back to maybe some of the earlier studies that we have on this exact topic. So I've got some notes here in front of me. I love to kind of pull up some of the data and actually talk about these studies because this is where you know these uh recommendations about volume come from. So there was a paper in 2019 by a group called Hills Graven colleagues. They were looking at trained males, I think they had 47 participants, which is a really good number, and they were comparing nine sets, 18 sets, and 27 sets. And what was so interesting about that particular study was there were no differences between the nine and 27. So that's a huge degree of variability. So it's like, well, maybe we can get away with doing nine, or maybe we can do 27. There's obviously meaningful differences in the amount of time one might spend in the gym. So perhaps we don't need to be doing as much volume. And that's kind of been supported by a couple of other groups as well. So a study by Albe and colleagues in 2022, they were looking at trained people as well. They compared 12, 18, and 24 sets per week. Again, no meaningful differences in muscle thickness, which is the measurement that most of the researchers looking at changes in hypertrophy at hypertrophy as an outcome will use. And then again, another group, Amit Allingham and colleagues. Um, this is kind of the key study that was looking at German volume training. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with that where you do like 10 sets of something uh, you know, in a session, which is just crazy. But um, they basically looked at uh 20 or I think it was 19 trained males, they compared five sets and 10 sets. It was a three-day training frequency using compound exercises. And again, there were no differences at the end of this study period um between the five set group and the ten-set group. So, all this to say, I personally like to recommend for advanced lifters around 15 working sets per muscle group per week. I think that that's manageable, especially if we're doing, you know, multiple muscle groups. Again, the the way that research is conducted, it's it usually is isolating maybe one or two muscle groups. So it doesn't perfectly mirror like how you and I are actually training in a real life scenario. You know, we go into the gym, we might be training four days a week, some people five days a week, and we're training multiple muscle groups where there might be some kind of crossover. So we're not just training in isolation, you know, we might be doing a compound lift that hits the glutes and the cords and the hamstrings. So, you know, the research isn't perfectly aligned with real-world scenarios. So there's always a little bit of you know open for anticipation, open to interpretation. But I do think that around 15 sets for a trained lifter is a really good focus muscle group volume to target. And then, you know, when you kind of plug that in throughout the week, it means that there are going to have to be some other muscle groups if you're trading four or five days a week that are just sitting back at more of a maintenance volume. Like you can't trade every single muscle group with 15 sets per week, or you'd be literally living in the gym. So I normally focus on like three like focus muscle groups. Like right now, I love to train my glutes, I love to train my shoulders, and then my cords and hamstrings kind of sit just below that as like a focus muscle group. And then everything else, I just train them at maintenance volumes. So they're usually programmed under 10 sets per week, and that allows me to get those 15 working sets per week on the focus muscle groups that I'm really trying to actively grow. So, yeah, I hope that that kind of gives a bit of the background in where some of the research has come from, what we're seeing with really high volumes. It doesn't actually seem to be superior, although we've probably got less than six studies in the world right now that have even looked at those high volumes. And that's not to say that there aren't potentially, you know, a unique subset of individuals that are like hyper responders. I think I'm one of those people where if you, you know, give them more, maybe they do respond um better than somebody else. And we have got some data as well that kind of suggests that there is this concept of responders and non-respers. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I think all to say it's probably worth a little bit of trial and error to see what you're capable of, how you respond to higher volumes. Uh and if you're not recovering, then maybe pulling the volume back just a little bit, you know, might be the way to go.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

I actually think I'm definitely one of those high responders. Like you will, I think Tash will agree with me when I say that, because I feel like I can take quite a lot of volume. Um, and I'm like, no, let's go again, we can keep going, we can go to that other that next level. But I it took me a few years to find that out, actually, because I think I was touching base with having a lighter volume, thinking what I had to do on paper to say, or to someone else, or to someone who was doing that I thought I needed to demonstrate. And then you start to get to know your body a little bit better. And obviously, you've just completely demonstrated the fact that you are so evidence-based, which we absolutely adore, but we also love the fact that you do it for a practical, like general population. You don't just do it for that higher sort of athlete type vibe, you also incorporate a general population. And I think something we've all noticed is that women can generally sometimes underestimate how hard they might need to push during their working sets to create that meaningful physique change. Do you think that that's something that's apparent?

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Yeah, I spent a lot of time with my clients in person training them, and I think everybody's always surprised because you know, I'll encourage them to keep going, like they'll get to the number of reps that we'll prescribe for the program, and they'll be able to knock out like five or six more reps while I'm standing there, like giving them a little bit of motivation. And I'm like, is this the weight that you usually use? And they'll be like, Yeah, it is. I'm so surprised, like I can do more reps. And I'm like, exactly. And you know, you really need to be training at that rate of perceived exertion somewhere between seven and ten, consistently for all of those working sets, to really optimize and drive home muscle growth. Otherwise, if you are training, you know, at a slightly lower rate of perceived exertion, so let's say you're coming in and hitting, you know, a five out of ten, it doesn't mean that you're not getting some signaling from muscle growth, but you're probably leaving a lot of gains on the table. And I even just look at that like you're going into the gym to burn calories, and that's not a bad thing. I think we train and everybody goes to the gym for different reasons. I've really had to take a big step back over my career and just think about movement for health, not just the aesthetic. Because of my strong interest in bodybuilding, and then also kind of having to navigate an eating disorder many years ago. Um, I realized, hey, I've got to find some balance in all of this. So, you know, you can still go into the gym, be having a terrible day, and you'll feel a lot better when you finish a session. And it's okay to have those lower RPE days, but they might serve a different purpose. And for me, that's like more of a recovery style program where I'm just getting in to maybe take my mind off something as a stress reliever or just to move my body. Maybe my GI is feeling a little crappy, and I'm not really well willing to push an RPE 9 today because I'm just tired and feeling cranky. So, you know, something is better than nothing in many instances, but you know, like you girls have kind of alluded to, that proximity to failure is really critical to optimize muscle growth.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

We had Hatti on the podcast not that long ago, and she said something that's really interesting. I think we've both used it with clients now is asking yourself, can you do that one extra rep is do I have another one in me? Do I have that extra rep to go? And if you fucking do, forget what your programming says, you go for that rep. You know, you push yourself to that next level, and that's where the sweet spot is. I think going to the gym and training and exercising is something that early beginners probably can't. Differentiate at the start, but over time that that progression comes in. And if we look at maybe busy mums, for example, or people with you know limited time, they've got their careers, they've got kids. If we look at the minimum effective dosage, and you kind of touched base on it just a minute ago, but what would you say just for beginners? How many training sessions maybe per week? Without the set side of things, but if we look at minimum effective, what would you say the training set or the training amount that they need to be going into the gym is?

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Yeah, I think for beginners or even just for somebody like you said that's having a really hard week, they've got so much on their plate, maybe they're used to doing a five-day split. I think three days is still fantastic. And you know, if the quality is there, if you're doing maybe a six to eight exercise type of routine, and you know, you're able to train, you know, as a bare minimum RPE 7, that is still fantastic in my mind. And I think if you're intelligent with your program design, and what I mean by that is again focusing on the muscle groups you really care about, then you can still have a very productive week if you look back and reflect on your volume for focus muscle groups. When I am busy and I'm not able to get in and do all of the prescribed work, you know, for the week, I'm very selective in what exercises I end up doing. You know, I'm probably going to bypass my calves, my biceps, and my triceps. I might pass off on, you know, my chest exercises on a really busy week and just make sure that I get the bulk of my work done on the muscles that are of more importance, which to me again is the glutes, the shoulders, you know, bigger muscle groups, quads and hamstrings. And you know, they're also the muscle groups, at least from my perspective, that are important for the competition that I do as well. So as a bikini competitor.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

I think we've all missed out on calves, that's for sure. Yeah, they'll I'll pass those ones.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

I feel like I missed out on calves for too long, and now I'm like, I actually need to prioritize my calves because my pods look too big and I feel like I'm gonna be with a peg leg situation going on. So those are definitely a priority for me at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

You know, it's funny. I always joke and I say like I hate calf training, they are arguably the most painful. I have to wonder whether there are more pain receptors in our calves because I would much rather go like leg extensions to failure than do a calf extension to failure. It's so much more unpleasant. At least that's my experience.

SPEAKER_03 24:24

I don't know if you're no, I agree. I completely agree. And the DOMs that you get in calf, one day I literally had to take the next day off work because I couldn't walk because my calf DOMs were so bad.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

It's funny you say that. So um my partner is actually a researcher at the University of South Florida. So he specifically studies muscle growth and strength, and they did a training protocol um that used the calf muscle. It was basically like a training to failure kind of approach using BFR training, so blood flow restriction.

unknown 24:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

And he said that they basically had to end the study early because most of the participants were pulling up so sore, they were basically getting rhabdo from this calf protocol that they were trying to study using the BFR calf. So yeah, I think the calves are super sensitive. And oh my gosh, the days if you do too many, you're almost cat walk.

SPEAKER_03 25:13

So you definitely want to be careful with uh with that. You do. I think um I think what you said about sort of like a for a beginner hitting sort of like a three-day split being being quite optimal, I think that is really important for a lot of people to know because I definitely feel like a lot of the time women, especially the girls, the girls that we train are very busy and always probably coming from sort of like a restrictive diet culture, always thinking, I need to do more, like what more can I do? And even sometimes I'll have clients that will have had a really good week, we're seeing progress, everything is going at the right rate, and they just think, okay, things are working, like what more can I do? Like, what more do I need to add? And sometimes we need to actually just reassure them actually, this is like what you're doing is enough, and just keep going, and you'll continue to see results that you don't need to add more. But sometimes women who feel like they are doing everything right, and maybe specifically if we're looking at fat loss, because that's obviously what a lot of a lot of women want to want to prioritize, especially at the beginning, is they want to see fat loss results. Um maybe they're already eating quite low calories and they feel like they've tried everything, but they're not seeing the results. Like, why do you think that this happens so often?

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yeah, look, I I think there's something to be said for like the history and like duration that someone's been training for. And perhaps it just comes back down to maybe an unclear or unrealistic expectation around like how much muscle or how long it takes to build muscle. So maybe that's a good place to start. Let's talk about that. So, again, when we refer to all of the research papers and what um kind of changes we might expect to see over like a three-month period, it is unbelievably underwhelming. Like so slow. So, like typical rates of muscle growth, and again, I refer back to what we use in the lab, and B-mode ultrasound is the typical like measurement tool that we use to measure somebody's changes in muscle thickness. So that'd be like imagine if you put like an ultrasound probe up to someone's bicep or their quad or their glute, uh, and kind of imagine looking straight down at that thickness of the muscle. So it's kind of where the subcutaneous fat meets the muscle, where the muscle then meets the bone. So those changes are typically somewhere in the realm of two to three millimeters over an eight to twelve week study intervention. And again, this is under almost pristine conditions where every single training session you've got a researcher encouraging you, giving you support. It's like having a PT every time you go in the gym. So I would arguably say that's better than maybe being in a regular environment, a training environment where you might train on your own. So that's the kind of change we might expect to see. And I think a lot of women, you know, they're looking to their favorite their favorite fitness influences and like their amount of muscle growth and thinking, well, how come I'm training like them? I'm doing all the work and I don't feel like I'm looking like them yet. And the reality is muscle as a natural athlete takes a really long time to grow. Now, there are going to be unicorns, perhaps like you, or I would again say myself, like I probably grow a little bit faster than the average. And I've got all of my muscle growth measurements to kind of validate that as well. I've been measuring my muscle since goodness, 2019 here at the USF lab. But for the average person, it doesn't happen quickly. And from my perspective, I usually try to give, you know, very realistic expectations. I think, you know, the first one to three years, you're probably not going to look in the mirror and go, wow, I look so different. At least not from a muscle perspective. But around the five-year mark, I think that's when somebody's had enough time to make meaningful or significant changes to the amount of muscle they have across their entire body, and then how that influences somebody's ability to lose body fat, that's when we start to kind of take a step back and go, wow, I'm actually seeing those results in the mirror. And I know that you girls know this, but perhaps for those that are perhaps new to the resistance training space and just learning about nutrition and um, you know, aesthetics in general, that muscle is so important for your ability to not only lose a significant amount of body fat, but it's also critical for you to be able to maintain that fat loss as well. Because the more muscle you have on your frame, the more energy like demanding your body is, and it allows you to I guess burn more calories throughout the day, incidentally, and when you train. So, for a five-year time span, if you are doing the exact same training program, that program that you did five years ago, you are now burning significantly more calories during the session, and you're also burning more calories just going about your day-to-day exercise. So it makes it a lot easier to lose body fat when you kind of jump into those fat loss sessions, which is why a lot of people early on in their you know aesthetic career as they're trying to change and improve their body composition, they don't get huge amounts of fat loss because they always evidently run out of calories. There's nowhere to go, they hit their calorie floor, they're at a number that feels really unsustainable. And paired with that, they're having to do a lot of cardio as well. Because in order to create a deficit and to lose body fat, they have to do all of the movement and they have to get really aggressive with their calories. Whereas that more mature advanced lifter who's taken many years to grow their muscle, their muscle's doing a lot of that work for them now. You know, it's supporting those um, you know, sustainable processes. So I think it's really important just to think about, you know, muscle does grow slowly, and if you are still within your first two or three years of consistently lifting, even if you're following an evidence-based program, you still need to have patience, and that's something that none of us really have.

SPEAKER_02 31:13

I actually think social media has a massive impact on why people think these results are overnight. And I think like even just things like we have, you know, 75 days hard and like our six and eight-week challenges, and these are all great, they're like gateway drugs to get people to go into the gym and get exercising. But I think this perception of oh yeah, I'm gonna give you my dream physique in three months has like really like span like most people. Like, they're like, oh yeah, that's where I'm gonna be in three months. I'm gonna look like my favorite, you know, influencer because that's what she's selling. So I'm gonna believe it. And I think that is also why people are like, they give up because they think I'm not getting where I want to be, you know, and so it's that quick fix mentality. And balance is if we look at balance in general, it's in almost a perception, right? What is your balance into someone else's balance? And it's this huge word in, I guess, the fitness industry. And obviously, balance matters, but sometimes it almost feels like it can be used to avoid the work that we need to do and the consistency behind what we need to get the physique goals that we actually require. Where do you think people misunderstand balance when it comes to body composition goals?

SPEAKER_00 32:26

Yeah, so I feel like I'll use myself as an example here because I'm just an easy target. I have been personally lifting weights and using an evidence-based approach for about 12 years, and I've been lifting for probably two decades. So, even as part of my track sprinting when I was young, like we were in the gym doing like a lot of plyometric explosive style. I remember doing like explosive leg press like when I was 15 years old. So I've been lifting for a really long time. So, again, for me as an advanced lifter who's kind of taken many years to accrue a lot of muscle, and I'm probably 12 kilograms heavier than what I was, you know, back when I was a late teenager coming into my early college years. So, um, you know, for me, I am now able to take what I'd call a more balanced approach, you know, and I have more flexibility because I've got a slightly higher BMR, like my metabolic rate is higher than what it was 10 years ago. And I don't have to do as much training as I used to do, at least from a cardio perspective. But when I'm dieting, you know, I think about the differences in what I used to do when I first began, you know, bodybuilding shows. I would have to do an hour of walking, you know, six or seven days a week. Um, and then I would probably do three or four HIT cardio sessions as well for 30 minutes, maybe even longer, on top of that, plus my five days of lifting. And even still then, I was not always satisfied with you know my end result because I didn't have the muscle yet, you know, I was just still small. And my calories got really, really, really, really low. So, you know, that was then, but now it's a very different conversation, and I have the flexibility because I've done the work for 10 plus years to take a bit more of a balanced approach. So people will often say to me, Well, how come you can eat out all the time and you appear to be living like the best of both worlds? And I'm like, trust me, this did not happen overnight. You know, I look back to those years, uh, the early years of my training, and it was a very different outcome. Like every time I go into a building season, I was consistently regaining, you know, 15 to 20 pounds of body fat to kind of optimize growth. I wasn't always comfortable in my off-season physique, but I did the work anyway. You know, you show up and you do the uncomfortable things because it's the short-term sacrifice for the long-term gain. And this is where I think a lot of people, again, aren't necessarily being told the right thing because they're just seeing the now version of that person and thinking that the results that they're going to get are going to be exactly the same and instantaneous when it really does take a lot of time. So I think the big picture message here is that balance is obtainable. You can, you know, have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, but you've got to be prepared to do the work over a number of years. And like I said, I think that five-year mark of consistency, you know, eating a high protein diet, training with optimal volumes, and you know, doing so under proper energy availability. And maybe we can touch on, you know, what I think the optimal rates of weight loss are and how we can do that by protecting our muscles. But you know, doing all of that in a positive uh positive energy balance and not doing it dieting all the time. You know, all those things are so important. So balance does exist and it can be obtained, but it's not going to happen overnight, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_03 35:56

I love that. We always say we kind of you have to be rigid to be flexible, and it's always like if we if we're everyone's striving for balance, actually, balance is 50-50, like you're not really making any progress. So that's kind of we have to make sure we we're okay with actually you have to put in a lot of work, and you probably have to put in more work than the work that you're not putting in, or like time that you're taking off, and you also have to make sure that your your expectations align with that with that effort that you're putting in. And I think a lot of people, as you say, they just they want what they see now without putting in that initial work, and definitely for myself, I'm someone that I would not consider myself a hyper responder. I'm probably the opposite to you both, much to my upset. I mean, like you have the most phenomenal glute, so I wouldn't I wouldn't say that that's genetics, but I've been consistently following a proper evidence-based structure programme for about six years now, and I would really say probably only in the last year have I really seen a difference in like okay, now I can actually I look like someone that has muscle, but like it was not that was not the case for a very, very long time. And yeah, it's just taken six years of showing up every single day and not just going to the gym, but as you say, like really prioritizing all of the other areas, making sure that I'm eating enough protein, making sure that actually you're giving your body enough food. And I think yeah, I would love to dive into the the dieting side and sort of looking at energy availability because I do think a lot of women where they just stay stuck is they just want fat loss and they live in a deficit, and then they just as you say, like they exhaust all of their options, like there's their body has nothing else to give, and then they just think, okay, well, I can't do this, like I may as well give up, I'm never gonna look how I want. When potentially they probably should just spend more time eating out maintenance, maybe in a little bit of a surplus, and things would look totally different for them.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Yeah. Oh my goodness, I love how you said I think most women are spending your time tracing fat loss and not spending enough time in muscle building. Yeah, look, I I think even for me, I mean, I was just as easily influenced by the influencers back in the day, you know, when I was first coming into I guess social media and just seeing what was happening in in this landscape. And I I definitely spent more time in fat loss. And I can also very honestly admit now, like I wasted a lot of time in fat loss because for every week that you spend chasing like caloric restriction with the ultimate goal of losing body fat, that is taking away from the weeks you could have been spending building muscle, which is the only way that you are going to get to your long-term goals. If you do not add more muscle, you will never get ahead. It will always be this hard. Um, you'll always run out of calories, you'll always run out of hours in the day. So at some point you just have to commit to the muscle building process because that's what's going to allow you to get you know further ahead. But yeah, speaking of you know, women doing whatever it takes to kind of achieve their dream body, I think it's really important to know that you know, faster isn't always better. Uh, and especially obviously when it comes to building muscle naturally, we also know that that's simply not a realistic expectation to have. So I think again, referring back to research, okay, what does it actually tell us about, you know, how to do fat loss successfully? If we look at a lot of the studies that compare different participants under different states of energy balance, sorry, when we start to push calorie deficits below 30% of somebody's known maintenance calories, then that weight loss is no longer just coming from out of hose tissue. Then we start to see some pretty significant um, I guess, decreases in lean mass. And those differences in lean mass aren't just changes in glycogen and skeletal and water, which is often what kind of shows up in like a DEXA scan. We're talking differences in organ mass and uh skeletal muscle tissue, and those two things which we've just talked about before are really important to preserve because they are the greatest drivers of our metabolic rate. So if you want to have and maintain a robust metabolism, then generally, as a rule of thumb, when I'm thinking about fat loss for a client, and again, that should be just a small fraction of the year. I'm thinking maybe, you know, 15 to yeah, probably 15 weeks is a maximum. The rest of the year I really like to try and focus on building muscle. But trying to stick to weekly rates of weight loss less than 1% of your total body weight. So that absolute number is going to be very different for me than it is very different for you than it is for you and anybody else listening, because we all have different body weights. So less than 1%, I think, is a more realistic target. But even still, when you calculate the math to do that, even like trying to target a 0.2%, so just under 1% of your body weight loss per week, the deficit that I have to create to do that with my known maintenance calories where they are, because I'm quite sedentary. Um I train hard, but I am sitting in this chair for about 16 hours most days of the week. I'm super sedentary. So for me to be able to create even an a 0.8% you know weekly rate of weight loss, I have to drop my calories by like five or six hundred every single day. So that's a big ask. So when I diet for shows, there's no way I can do that. I have to give up half of my job. I would end up, I end up training, I'm sorry, I end up targeting a weekly rate of weight loss that is much, much more conservative. So it's probably closer to 0.4% of my body weight per week. So, you know, a lot of women when I'll calculate their initial calories for them and I'll tell you tell them what their goals are going to be, they're like, oh, I'm only losing like less than a pound per week. And I'm like, and then I'll say to them, okay, well, here's what the numbers would look like if you want to go at this this rate, and they're like, like that doesn't seem sustainable at all. So I think uh it's really important to kind of be strategic in how we we tackle that. And then another question that I think comes up quite a bit for a lot of women that might have a little bit more body fat, they will say to me something like, Well, can't I just rely on you know my body fat that I have to kind of fuel my training? Like, why do I need to eat all of those calories? And I think that's a really important conversation because I think a lot of people just think, well, I can just get away with eating very little, it's gonna be fine. I've got plenty of fat on my person to kind of fuel you know my training or even you know fuel muscle building. And it doesn't quite work like that. Because when it comes to exercise, especially resistance training, it relies on readily available and readily accessible energy, not slow lipid metabolism, which is obviously what we're talking about when someone says, Oh, can't I just use my own body fat, you know, to drive training. Resistance training is very glycolytic, meaning that your body prefers to use carbohydrates. So unless you are somebody that is keto adapted, and that usually takes, you know, maybe someone wants to entertain that, it's about a two to four week process to become keto adapted, and then your body is less like reliant on carbohydrate, it can use ketones for fuel. But outside of that, that can then start to have a number of negative effects on your training and your performance because fat is not a good substrate for any of the explosive exercise that you and I are doing when we're trying to do high-volume training, like we've just talked about. And the other thing, just thinking beyond performance, low energy availability also negatively affects your central nervous system. So that starts to downregulate and it starts to send signals to our brain that energy is scarce. So then all of our non-essential functions start to slow down. So we start to see things like decreases in our motor unit recruitment, so we become a little bit more clumsy, we're putting ourselves at increased risk of injuries when we train. We also experience a decreased drive to train. So training drive goes down, which again is one of the reasons why if you diet in an extreme way, who wants to get up and go and train? Like you're exhausted, like you're so fatigued, and you're perceived. Rate of exertion also changes. So, I mean, there are so many like practical reasons not to go at you know a diet phase with a really aggressive weekly rate of weight loss. And then thinking about recovery, that's also really expensive in terms of energy. When we think about muscle protein synthesis, which is again the the primary driver of muscle growth, all of these building processes start to become affected even when we have sufficient protein intake. So a lot of people will talk about making sure that you've got enough protein in your diet. Oh, well, that'll cover me, you know, I'm eating my protein, you know, I don't need to have a lot of calories. That starts to negatively affect muscle protein synthesis because that process is energy dependent. So if we think about some of the systems that are necessary for from a recovery standpoint, things like transcription, things like ribosomal activity, and all of those repair processes, they are all those cellular functions require energy or ATP. So if you're dieting too aggressively, all of those systems are blunted. So that anabolic signaling and mTOR activity, they all go down. So this is where we really start to see a breakdown of some of that muscle protein tissue, which we definitely do not want when we're going into fat loss. So again, just to reiterate, I think trying to diet at a conservative weekly rate of weight loss is so important. And I could go on and chat about like hormones, how those are affected, what that does to the body, but I think I would be chatting here all day. So I might hand it back over to you girls. You probably comments about that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 45:43

Yeah, I think it's so imp I think it's so important. I love how you stress honestly, just how important it is to diet slowly and conservatively, because especially in in today's world where we can just have everything like that, like so instantly, we we want the same and we expect the same with our bodies, and that's just that is just not the case. And yeah, we can end up doing some crazy detrimental things to to our health if we just try and go the fast way. Like, like we always say, the slow way is the fast way, and actually just doing things a bit more conservatively, not only is it much better for our body, but actually it's so much more enjoyable as well. And then likely we're able to stick to it for longer, and ironically, we probably end up getting the body that we looked for in the first place, but we've spent ages going around in circles trying to get, and probably took you longer than if you just try to do it conservatively.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

Yeah, absolutely. I also think about the clientele that we're probably working with for the most part. I know for me that's like women age 35 to 70. So it's kind of this era as well where a lot of women are starting to go through menopause. So I think to make matters worse, that's dieting in an extreme way for young women is already difficult and you know unsustainable, like you just described. It's not very enjoyable. But we also have other considerations, you know, once we start to go through menopause. I personally have seen a pretty big shift in my own hormones and I'm only 37. And yeah, in efforts to kind of prevent some of those symptoms that start to arise as we go through the menopausal journey, even more of a reason to not diet aggressively and to focus more of your time throughout the year in a building phase than pursuing fat loss. And I think a lot of women in that age bracket may not have had the same experience that maybe you or I have, kind of coming through just because of the timeline of when resistance training became popular. So I think a lot of the ladies that I work with, they didn't grow up doing resistance training. They haven't done a whole lot of sport. So they are under-muscled going into menopause. Whereas you and I, you know, we're we've been maybe lifting for a lot longer. So at least we're kind of setting ourselves up for a little bit more success, you know, as we go through that journey. So I think, you know, in efforts to prevent, you know, significant hormonal changes and some of the other negative things that can happen with our estrogen levels and our bone mineral density, even more of a reason to minimize the frequency that we're in a deficit and the I guess speed at which we do it, and to really focus on, you know, most of the year, I'd say three quarters of the year of you you're open to it, to really solidifying like a great resistance training program with the outcome of muscle and strength.

SPEAKER_02 48:23

My my mum was a bodybuilder. She so my mum, even though obviously she's a lot older than me, no shit. She she uh she came from a background, obviously, was one of the only women in the gym. She was literally old as a bit in the sore dust, a type of gold gym, back in Covent Garden in in London. And she was definitely one of the only females, and people looked at her like she had six heads because it wasn't usual for women to go into a gym. You know, it wasn't you don't see the women lifting up a dumbbell. She was the abnormal person. So she had a good amount of knowledge, but obviously, as time changes and evidence becomes more apparent, all of this science, I guess, changes as well. But it's a little bit more accessible now, I guess, because we have social media and it's we give them more information. Do you think it's made a benefit, or do you think it's almost made people a little bit more confused? Because I've got clients that will come to me and they'll be like, yes, but I should be losing a kg a week, and you know, I should be on this and I should be taking this supplement, but then I'm like, no, no, let's just go back to the basics. Let's start again. Do you what what's your thoughts on that? Goodness.

SPEAKER_00 49:33

I think just social media in general, it has a lot of positives, and there are some negatives too, but I think from a positive perspective, I'd say, first off, I mean, it's so great to have that daily inspiration. So, you know, with so many people and so many accounts like on social media that are focusing on fitness and just health and well-being, I think that's really beneficial and inspiring for a lot of a lot of women. I think that social media has also been great in terms of its ability to increase your like access to nutrition and like education. So I mean, I think about when I was kind of coming through in my, you know, when I was going through my master's degree as a dietitian, social media was not what it is today. Like Instagram didn't exist. I think Facebook was maybe just coming to the surface. So I think I was still on MySpace when I was MySpace.

SPEAKER_02 50:21

That was MySpace and my friend would be Tom. Do you remember Tom, the top friend?

SPEAKER_00 50:26

Did you have Tom? Yeah. I didn't have it, but I know what it is. Yeah. So, you know, back then to get information, you were reading magazines or you're on forums, or you might happen to have stumbled across somebody on Facebook that, you know, was kind of putting out information. But nowadays, you know, every second person online is a social media influencer and sharing nutrition education. I also think just the rise in AI is terrifying. Um, but you know, there are some potential pros there as well. So I think there's a lot more awareness, there's a lot more access. So I think it's making it easier for people to, you know, be healthy and to get into shape. I think the downside is probably again, depending on who you follow or what your algorithm starts to spit back to you, there's a heavy influence on diet culture still. You know, it kind of just continues to reinforce this idea that our worth is tied to the way that we look. And I think that is really a struggle for women, especially with all the filters and you know, just contouring of the body and stuff that you see online. Like it's all there's a lot of fake stuff that isn't real. And then I think quick fixes, instant results, again, if people aren't being transparent and honest, you know, about what they're sharing. I even saw transformations just recently that were completely AI, not even real humans. I saw, I saw something. I was watching, I think Lauren Simpson posted something out for uh the other day, and I'd seen the very Yeah, I was like, I saw that two days ago, and you know, then I looked at it again and I'm like, wow, that was literally an AI, you know, generated video, and I didn't even think twice of it. And I remember thinking, wow, what a really amazing transformation. So I think we're kind of seeing a lot of like mistruths, which is really deceiving and can lead to some of that, like you know, uh body image issues and probably driving a lot of prevalence of eating disorders. And again, that's a lot of the people that I'm working with, given my background. We're trying to move them away from that, and I think you know, this is where knowledge does become important and knowing science is important, and having you know an appreciation for balance is really important too. But uh, yeah, I think the frequency of like coaches, like the bar the barrier to entry is so low, so there's a lot of competition, and I think that it's making it very difficult for people to know truth from like something that's false. But with the generation of AI, and maybe even we can talk about GLPs, I think it is going to force a lot of people out pretty quick, people that don't have the lengths for social media because it's hard work. I mean, you girls know as well as I do, like, so much of my week is just spent like filming and reading and making sure that I'm putting out like high-quality stuff. But there's also a lot of people that aren't doing any of that, and it's all misinformation, and uh yeah, I think it's very confusing for people. So I I think ultimately there's a lot of positives about social media, but I I think we very much need to be careful about who we are following, um, and even you know, helping people understand like who to follow and how, like, why should we follow these people? Um, and I I did a video recently on social media just pointing out even some of the prominent fitness influences and their reliance on um something that's called preprints. So this is when an I guess a PhD or somebody that's done research basically allows their research to be published publicly before it's gone undergone any peer review. And what's happening is they're getting posted on very popular, prominent platforms, and it's kind of leading to a lot of discussion and almost like dissemination of well, here are the results, here's what we found, and like scientific consensuses are being made on social media before they've even gone through the rigor of you know the academic process and being evaluated by you know peers. So there were so many people that were listening to the video that I put up and said that they had no idea that a preprint hadn't actually gone through any form of peer review. So these things are being disseminated by the the guns online and they're not really kind of seeing the the potential harm, you know, that that's so yeah, I think people do need to take you know some of this into their own hands and you know seek clarification, ask questions, use critical thinking. But yeah, it can certainly be a problem.

SPEAKER_02 54:39

I don't know it I find it quite triggering. It pisses me off, if I'm honest, because I've I I I love my job. I'm passionate about what I do, and I want to give people the best of the best. I don't want to do it, you know, with sprinkles. I want it to be fucking phenomenal and everyday every day. And so when I see someone coming on social media and they're like, I don't know why they've got this accident, but all of a sudden it's really like it. But you know, and again, I get a little bit of my backup about it because I'm like, this is the way our society's gone. And you know, it's it's it's for it's for likes, it's for clicks, it's not based on anything other than where can I get more followers? And it it's the coaching industry in general. Anyone's a coach and everyone's an expert. Where does it stop? You know, where does it finish and where do we go? But the GLP1 situation, I know Tashew wanted to touch base on this.

SPEAKER_03 55:33

Yeah, just just quickly on the on the the coaching and sort of like how there's just so much information out there. That's that was our main reason for starting this podcast because we would have clients come to us and show us reels or videos and be like, oh, what do you think of this? And it was sort of like, I don't know, some crazy like eat this food to lose weight, or this person's done this diet, or this specific glute exercise. If you've got this pear-shaped glutes, so many wild things, and it's so easy to fall into the trap of if someone talks with a little bit of authority, you believe what they're saying. Um, and that was why we were like, we want we need to do something where we can help educate our clients, bring on amazing people like yourself that we know do the work are in the research, and we can fully, fully trust completely. Because otherwise it's just there's just so much and and like it's so easy to to just get lost and get and get confused in in everything that's out there.

SPEAKER_00 56:31

Yeah, and I I think this is where maybe it is the people with higher education's responsibility to kind of even point out like the differences between you know a certification versus a bachelor's degree versus a master's degree versus a PhD. And then there are even differences in like between countries with you know how a PhD is acquired. And I actually did a video on this just recently as well. But there are there are a lot of people that I think once they get their PhD, they're not really committed to ongoing research, and it's almost just uh a ticket to status and authority, and you know, I think a lot of people end up respecting those individuals, and it's a it's a tricky, a tricky space, especially when they start like venturing into this the landscape of social media because you know, like you said, I think a lot of folks are are in it for attention and they're trying to, you know, grow a business, and people do eventually start to speak out of tone. And I get asked all the time about things like peptides or it's probably just peptides for the most part, or co-plungers, like kind of random techniques about that. And I as much as I potentially could do a little bit of a deep dive into some of that research, it is amazing like the the breadth of knowledge that a true expert and researcher has on a specific topic. And I I really find it frustrating when you know we see prominent PhDs, and I I won't name names, but there are a lot of I guess female focused PhDs right now that have a certain unique set of skills, and you know, when they when they came through and they got their their PhD, they might have been focusing on like endurance running or like the female athlete triad, and it was a very specific area of uh of knowledge, and because they've got that PhD, they've kind of felt compelled to keep talking on areas that are well outside their their area of expertise, and it actually makes them no different in terms of their knowledge to maybe you or I, um having had you know read a couple of papers. Um but because they've got those letters in front of their name, you know, it's almost taken as gospel. So I think even just recognizing that you know a PhD doesn't guarantee expertise across, you know, 20 different subjects, they might be able to interpret research well. But you can't possibly know the breadth of all of the studies under one umbrella and to be able to speak authoritatively across all of those. So it's really important to even have an understanding when you're listening to somebody, it's like what did they do their research in? Are they still active in the academic space? Are they still publishing research? Because that's really important because you can get out of touch really quick. I mean, there are some people online right now that did their PhD 20 years ago, they did their one dissertation, and that was it. Since then, they've gone straight to social media, they've never been in the lab, they haven't continued to do any research, and again, they speak very authoritatively across a range of topics where they have no business speaking. So I personally just try to stay in the one little lane where I feel like I know the research really, really, really well. And uh yeah, and that's it. So I would just encourage people at home listening to make sure that they are doing their due diligence on who they're getting their information from. And anyone that speaks with you know, like strong yeses and absolutes, I think that's probably someone to be cautious of. I think there always needs to be a little bit of caution in the interpretation, um, hesitation. I think that's how a good researcher would probably conduct themselves.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:07

Yeah, I love that. I think that's that is so important. And obviously, sort of like as as you touched on before, the barriers to coaching being so low now, like we do definitely need to do our do our own research and and think about who we're gonna consume, their their information they're putting out, who we trust. And what we would love to know for you diving into the GLP side of things, because obviously this is everywhere at the moment, that obviously they are becoming a huge topic in the fitness space. And we would love to know how you see these impacting the coaching industry over the next few years, and potentially, obviously, as you said, like we might see it might be make or break for some people and them actually exiting the industry because of this for the ones that stay and the ones that are really like us, like we're so passionate about this. We want to be able to use these in the best way that we can to help our clients if our clients are coming to us using GLPs. Um, yeah, where do where do you see the how do you see them impacting the industry and from like a coach's perspective? How do you think coaches are best equipped to to use them?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:20

Yeah, so I I personally think that like I'm all for them. I have several clients that I work with right now who are using them concurrently, you know, with nutrition and training recommendations. So I think that they are a fantastic tool and a life-saving tool for many individuals. But I I think from how this actually impacts a coach, well, for years I think fat loss was really positioned as the ultimate proof of coaching value. So with the introduction of GLPs, I feel like that's kind of disrupting that narrative a little bit because people now have this ability to change and modify their body composition without the need for traditional coaching. And I will be really transparent, and I think I've spoken to a number of coaches that have been in the game for a long time, and I think it has affected everybody's business. I'd say, like, even for us from a one-on-one coaching standpoint, like in our business, we've seen maybe a 10% drop-off in the overall like coaching revenue because of the introduction of GLPs. You know, a lot of even a lot of our clients in terms of like the longevity for how long somebody stays with a one-on-one coach, that timeline, as we're seeing as evidence of like the the all of the data that we collect on our clients, you know, that timeline is shrinky because a lot of them are now jumping off to okay, well, I think I know the basics now, thank you so much. I'm gonna go and use these these drugs to kind of help with sustainability. So it's definitely going to have an impact on you know the coaching industry at large. And I think that will probably weed out a lot of the ones that aren't able to provide a whole lot of value. And I think you know, knowledge is obviously going to shine through in this. So if you are a really well-educated individual, um, you know, and you're a practical science-based coach, your results are still going to be better than you know somebody that hasn't got a degree or something like that. But I think it's going to force coaches to really level up, otherwise, they're not going to survive. I even said to some of my colleagues just recently, like, even as a dietitian, I feel like AI is replacing us. So it's not just GLPs we've got to worry about, like, it's the use, frequent use of AI to generate, you know, coaching and health messaging. So I think there's a lot of um ways that people can get healthy, and I'm genuinely all for that. I think it's fantastic. Is it great for me and my business? No, but I think they can be really supportive of one another, and you know, we we just have to kind of level up. So yeah, I I don't know that there is a I don't have a short-term solution, but what I can say is I think a lot of people are jumping onto GLPs or they're giving a go at using AI. And I I think what's probably going to happen is that they're not going to have lasting results, or if they do, you know, do the co do the the GLPs without nutrition guidance and they do it in an extreme way because they're excited by the scale, there's probably going to be some downstream negative health consequences, whether it's oh well, I'm actually not looking how I thought I'd look, I'm just skinny fat now. Yeah. Because they did it in a way where they lost all their muscle, they've had significant hormonal changes and they feel exhausted. So these drugs are effective at suppressing the appetite, but they don't change your fatigue, they don't change your sleep disruption, they don't change and they don't have a positive effect on your libido. Like all of the normal symptoms of dieting are still going to be present. It's just taking away the hunger. And I think as a result, people will eventually probably cycle back to getting a coach where they're able to do it in a more sustainable way and one that is healthy and preter preserves their their health, it preserves their hormonal function, it preserves their lean mass, you know, and so on and so forth. So yeah, I I think AI is not going to be the answer. But I think seeing like a tr maybe it's a transitional effect where a lot of people are kind of exploring these other alternatives. Some might have success, but I think majority of people probably won't, or at least not long term, and might end up coming back to you know the coaching environment to get real, you know, human responses.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:27

Because I think it's really interesting you say that because I've actually got three new clients that have signed up that have been on GLP ones and they lost weight and they've put it back on and they've come back and they've come to coaching. And so it's and now they're not on GLP ones, although they're they find it more challenging, I think, because of the food noise, they've realized they need that communication, they need that accountability, they need someone on the other end, not just a needle. It needs to be an actual person and not just AI, it needs to be a human being.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:59

Yeah. A hundred percent. So I think there's multiple reasons to have a coach, you know, all beyond, you know, just some some dietary advice. I mean, we can get education from a lot of avenues these days. But you're exactly right. I I think having the validation, having that weekly support, um, and you know, a a trajectory or a strategic plan. I haven't seen anything from an AI standpoint. And you certainly aren't going to get that from a clinic where you can purchase GLPs to kind of map out, okay, here's what we're going to do for the next, you know, 12 to 24 weeks with a cut, here's what we're going to do, you know, with a building phase, here's how we're going to implement all of those things. I mean, that really requires like that's an art form that you know that's a strategy. And I think that that is really important in the long-term sustainability of your results. So I definitely still think there's so much value in a good coach.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:52

Even from the mindset side, like obviously, what we are super passionate about the mindset piece. And a lot of our clients come with us to really to obviously look a certain way, like they have their aesthetic goal. But when it comes to actually being able to maintain that long term, which is what we all really want at the end of the day, we need to go a little bit further. We need to make sure that we we're looking into is our mindset working behind that because otherwise we're not going to see that long term. And obviously, that's not something we can get from ARGLP.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:24

Yeah, I mean, I feel like most of the conversations that I'm having with my clients are really about mindset. I think a lot of the people that I'm working with have backgrounds of disordered eating or are actively working through an eating disorder. So there's so much psychology there. Now you can read a lot about it, you can get self-help books, you can probably ask chat about some of these things, but I think to have that real-time, you know, personable experience. And also, like, I think there's something to be said about like if you follow somebody that's maybe overcome something really significant themselves, and you've you've watched their journey, like you know, that really like pulls you in. It kind of gives you hope. And I think that that that connection that you have with somebody is perhaps even just as power or more powerful, really, than just going to get that information, you know, from a book or someone that you don't have any kind of connection with. So yeah, I I think having the capacity to to help change somebody's perspective or like gradually, you know, massage it back towards neutral, especially if they're coming from a really negative or like overly restrictive place, is is so critical. I think I used to struggle with perfectionism, and I think again, having I had an eating disorder for 15 years, and the the difference in like my mindset today than 15 years ago is night and day difference, and I'm such a happier person for it, and I've got better results because of it as well. Um, so I think being able to talk with a coach about you know your perspective on things and you know have a second set of eyes and an opinion, you know, on your long-term goals is is really important.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:02

Yeah, yeah, we completely agree. Holly, I'm conscious that you are incredibly busy and we've already taken up so much of your time. This has been such an amazing conversation. We could we could go for hours and hours. I just want to do a little quick fire, one question to finish. If if someone only focused on three things in the gym to build a better physique, what what would you pick?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:27

Goodness. Okay, I think find out, like, or pick your favorite muscle groups and make sure that your volume is optimized for those.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:34

And there is a bazillion ways you can slice and dice a training program. You know, you can do full body splits, you can do single muscle groups, however you want to structure those throughout the week. That's kind of all secondary information. But volume is the most important thing. So make sure that if you are in the gym, take a look at your programs, work out how many sets a week you're doing, like that is key. I think protein is obviously super important. Everybody probably finishes on this one, but it's not as important as you think. I think that the resistance training is actually even more important. So yes, eat a high protein diet, but you've got a nice little range that you can work within. It does not need to be perfect every single day. Work out what your range is, and then you know, plan to stick within that. You don't need perfection, and that's going to give you a lot more flexibility with the rest of your food, different meals, and I think from a sustainability standpoint, that was so important for me. I know I used to get told like I had to stick to exact macros and stay within very tight ranges. That kind of drove a lot of that food noise and then binge eating and just feeling really unsatisfied, you know, as a whole. So just know that you've got some flexibility there with your nutrition. And goodness, I think self-compassion is so important. If you are like me or historically like me, and someone that's kind of been like the all or nothing black and white mentality, you don't need perfection to get really great results. And I think a lot of people end up kind of dumping jump uh jumping into that self-sabotage mindset when they can't execute everything perfectly every single day. You do not need perfection to get fantastic results, but you do need consistency. So if you're contemplating a workout because you've got limited time or something stressful's come up and you're thinking, well, oh well, I can't do the program exactly the way that I wanted it to. Well, I'm not gonna worry about it at all. That's not the right mindset to have. Like go in and do 20 minutes, do 15 minutes. Like something is always better than nothing. And I used to be the person that would just go, well, stuff it, I'm not gonna worry about it. And you know, when I had that mentality, there was a lot of inconsistency, there was always extremes, pendulum swings with food. A balanced approach is always best. So um I think give yourself compassion and grace. You don't always have to train at 100%. Uh, we know based on all of the research that you know training at an RPE is still just as good as an RPE 9. So, you know, give yourself some grace on those challenging days and do a little. And I think that that's a really important mindset to have it certainly improved my long-term outcomes as a result.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:04

I love that. That's incredible. This has been such a valuable conversation. I know. The listeners are gonna take so much away, and we just we really appreciate you for giving us your time and coming on, and we've we've learned so much as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:18

Yeah. Holly, thank you so much. Just before you go, where can everyone find you, follow you, and learn more about what you are doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:28

Yeah, so if you go to my Instagram or YouTube, they are both exactly the same. It's just my name, Holly T. Baxter. And then all of the links to our products, our apps, our books, our everything is on all of our sites. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:43

Amazing. Thank you so much, and thank you so much everyone for listening to today's episode. Please don't forget to rate and review and share this episode with a friend if you liked it. Make sure to follow Holly, and we will see you in the next one.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:58

Bye guys.