You decide what's good for you and good for your lifestyle. Of course. But think about what you want to be able to do when you're 80, 90, 100 years old. As women, we are so used to hearing the messaging that we should take up less space, that we should be thinner, that we should lose weight, that we should diet and exercise, even sometimes from medical professionals when we have insulin resistance or when our cholesterol is high, we're told we just need to diet and exercise without any other guidance of exactly what that would look like.
But the data is clear and showing again and again that women need to be building muscle. And in this episode, we are talking about five huge important reasons of why we should be gaining muscle. We're talking about aging gracefully and longevity. We're talking about cognitive health and movement and moods. We talk about bone health and prevention and reversal of osteopenia and osteoporosis.
We're talking about metabolic health and weight loss. And we're talking about avoidance of injury. These benefits we're talking about are ones you do not want to miss. We have the opportunity to improve our health in this conversation about building muscle. The internet makes it look like we need to go to the gym two hours a day, every day, and that this needs to be our new pastime and our new hobby.
And the fact is, that's just not true. There are ways to do this really effectively and really efficiently. And our guest today, Doctor Keagan Tamba, is a functional medicine physician and women's exercise physiology specialist. And she is going to break down how to do this in the most effective and efficient way possible, so that you can still have other hobbies and live your life without dedicating your whole self to just building muscle.
And if we're past that tipping point, it's not the end of the world either, because it has been shown that you can put on more muscle mass with the right strength training program, it just may need more stimulus as we get older.
Thank you so much for being here, Keegan. Oh, I'm. It's my pleasure. Looking forward to this conversation. Yes. Thank you. Let me tell our listeners a little bit about you. Keegan is a board certified pediatrician and pediatric intensivist. She completed medical school and residency training at Eastern Virginia medical school, and then a fellowship at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio.
And since her life as a pediatrician, she's gained additional certification in functional medicine and with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. She also has additional training in female exercise physiology, heart math, and homeopathy. She has been the medical director at Index Health and most recently has co-founded Integrity Health, a practice focused on precision medicine and health optimization. So, so qualified to talk to us today about these really quite important matters, but also, I think matters that people have lots of questions about.
So I'm excited to dive in and kind of start breaking things down. Is that okay with you? I'm looking forward to it. Awesome. Well, if you will first, just tell us a little bit about how you became passionate about this aspect of lifestyle medicine, of strength training and exercise physiology. You used to be a pediatrician. So that doesn't necessarily seem like the most obvious transition.
Tell us how that came to be. A passion of yours for sure. Well, I've always been involved in sports and team sports growing up. And love to be active. So that's, you know, a personal passion. And as I was actually working in pediatric critical care, I was really turned on by the aspects of nutrition playing a role in our health.
And that, of course, led down the rabbit hole of what are all these other things that are helping our health. Before we have to go to the ICU, because then, you know, we're trying to catch up and instead of being proactive, and I found that's where a lot of my passion lay. And I have to say there, it's a lot of it was personal experience that kind of tipped me down there.
So again, I love the aspects of of exercise and nutrition and it was just kind of my own personal experience. I was heavy into the endurance world and did very little in the strength world. I thought I could get away with 5 pound weights and do it. You know, once every other couple of weeks, and that would be fine for me and, you know, spend all my time on my bike.
And it doesn't really work that way. And it wasn't working out well for me in the long run. And I realize that this is part of the messaging that we have been inundated with as women for far too long. That the push has always been on the cardio aspects, the aerobics aspects, and the women didn't really have a place in the gym or lifting weights.
And thankfully, thankfully, that narrative is changing. It's been slow, but it's definitely had a nice, really rapid shift in the last five years. I would say in even in the last two years, you see it more and more and more and more. So, that's kind of how I stumbled onto this kind of passion project. And I love just talking about it.
Well, good. Well, we are going to benefit from this. This area of research for you. We know that this idea of strength training, in particular, is sort of having its day on the internet right now with perimenopause. And I think that's I'm thrilled about it. But it it's also pretty confusing sometimes and pretty overwhelming of like, I'm supposed to do this and I'm supposed to do this.
So let's break down. First of all, what would you say are the key components of our, I call it movement. You know, how should we be moving as women? Any way you can. And that that's really important. I actually just, was putting this study on my social media page. Is that the greatest predictor of longevity is actually the amount of physical activity that you get.
And so movement in general, and the more ways that you can find to move throughout your day, the better it is for your overall health. I think we've heard plenty about cardio in the past. Running and walking and biking and such. But there is truly this other aspect of it too, is that you have all these muscles that we need to be using.
And so that's where the strength portion comes in. And it's very clear from the research that's being done is that one type is not better than the other. We need a both of them around. So yes, any types of movement. If you were to tell me my passion is Pilates or my passion is yoga. I love that.
Are they the the only type of movement you want to be doing? No, we want to get a variety. And even with those that use a little bit of of the strength component, they're not enough in and of themselves as we're going to talk about more, that we need to be doing some actual weight lifting. I love that you say that.
And and we are going to spend a lot of time on the strength training and resistance training. But before we go there, I like that you bring up cardio because I think also on the internet there is this big push that like, shame on you women for doing too much cardio. You know, you've you poisoned yourself. And so I've seen other people ask questions like, but I really love trail running.
Are you saying I can't do trail running? And I think that the movement that brings you joy is really what should be the the core of type of movement you do and then balancing it out so you have the well-rounded movement that's addressing our, the different needs in our body is great, but really having that core of doing something you enjoy, it's going to go a lot further than trying to create a perfect exercise regimen that you actually hate and greed.
I love that you brought that up, agreed so very much. And balance is really what it's about doing. These other aspects are going to help you do the thing you're most passionate about. I love to hike. I, I living in New Hampshire, in the mountains. I love to hike, but I know that can't be that the only piece of my program because, it's it's not enough in and of itself.
And getting these other things are going to help me hike more. Yeah. And I would never ask someone to stop doing what they're truly passionate about because, again, all types of movement are welcome in our life, for sure. We do want to be mindful that we don't want to solo focus in on just one thing without getting those other pieces.
I love it. Awesome. Well, let's do kind of zoom in on strength training. Why are we hearing so much about that? What? What is it about strength training? We're going to kind of break it down and kind of go through a list. But give us an overview, first of why why this big push suddenly for strength training and maybe including in that a little bit just briefly of the history of like, why does this seem like new information for us as women?
Yeah. So let's start with the history piece of it. It seems like it's new because we have been pushed over to the side to say cardio is is where, you know, women should spend all their time. They should do tons of cardio and they should be certain sizes, and we don't want to be too big. And there was this association between lifting up weights and being bulky.
And finally that association has been broken and disproven. And then know women based on what we were seeing in magazines and Women's Health magazine, for example. Or we're of the generation that that was just everywhere and showing these thin, lean women. And that's what everybody wanted to aim for. And the only way you get those thin, long, lean muscles is if you do excessive amounts of cardio and lift these little 3 pound weights a billion times, you know, those muscles, we have them for a reason and they need to be used.
And muscle is so powerful for us and has so many different ways that it plays a role in our health. And I think we're going to touch on here soon. But historically, if you think about it, we were using all of them. We were active outside the house. We were hunting and gathering. You know, there was more men but within the house to take care of a home if you have ever lived off the grid, there is a lot of physical work that goes into your every day.
You know, women didn't just sit there and cook. They were cleaning. They were moving things. They were picking things up and carrying them. Lifting heavy, heavy, heavy things. And so our muscles were getting a workout throughout all of evolution. It's just more in these more recent times where this was the shift, where that didn't happen as much and now are much more sedentary lives.
And then, you know, we had these the advent of the gym and there has been some women that have been in the gym for a really long time lifting weights, but it's been a small portion of it and it's finally starting to get that recognition. I'm not sure what the true switch was. I think it was just some very brilliant people just finally saying, hey, this is something that everybody needs.
Because if you look at, you know, when we get into the older ages and we're getting into our 80s and 90s, what do we need to be able to do to, to to get through the day? We need to have the strength to do that. And now working backwards, figuring out that that starts now, that starts in our 20s.
It starts in our even as children. That is foundational, especially if we learn the patterns of movement correctly. Then that helps a lot to, and that carries up through. So I think it's been a process coming, over the last 20 or 30 years, maybe even longer, but is now finally getting that recognition of the importance of strength training in our everyday lives.
I love this. Okay, so one worry. Well, one thing I want to add to that is I do think that there's also this barrier to entry. You know, I think if you can, if you go to a fitness class, you just know, like wear your leggings, wear your sports bra, you're ready. And to strength train you kind of it's a little bit more intimidating.
You kind of have to know a little bit about what you're doing. I also think you walk into a gym and you're like, oh, I don't know what to do. Treadmill, I know treadmill, I can walk, I can run, I can move it up, I can move it down the same thing, elliptical. Like I can know how to do that.
And there's this little bit of a bigger barrier to entry. So I want to come back. And at the end we'll kind of talk about like stepwise. How do we get started. And in different situations. But I do want to come back to that of like how do we overcome that barrier. Because I do think as women and men probably, but we get this brain mindset of like I don't want to look dumb or I don't want to do the wrong thing.
Or I think especially as women, this is something I've heard a lot is like, but I'll go in there and like people are going to look at me and then they're going to think things about me. And, you know, how do we how do we kind of cross that barrier to just go get it done? So we'll come back to that.
But give us, give us the reasons. Kind of the big overarching reasons why strength training, resistance training and building muscle is so important for our health. I really want our listeners to hear this part, because I think it's easy on social media to hear like, go do strength training, strength training, strength training. And unless we really are kind of converge to to that idea, it's not very easy to stay committed to it and to develop a new skill set or new habit.
So I want us to really understand where this is coming from, not just that this is the latest trend. Like this is data driven, important health information that we need to internalize so that we can get these health benefits. So review with us what are those reasons for building muscle? Sure sure sure. And these reasons I think we can go into each of them.
Let's just kind of overarching it. So strength, the the obvious one. Strength. Your metabolic health, your bone health, actually brain health. So mood and cognition are affected by strength training, injury prevention, and then also our balance and our joint flexibility and then even sleep are all incredible reasons why you would want to be doing this strength training.
So when we think about strength training there's the act of strength training, of going spending 30 minutes at the gym lifting, you know, lifting heavy weights and doing those things. And then there's actually the results of the the bulk of the muscle. How much of the benefit comes from the actual, you know, skeletal muscle cells that we get and the communications and the, you know, insulin resistance benefits from having more skeletal muscle versus that time spent in the habit.
Does that make sense? Yeah. So I one equates maybe we don't know. Yeah I think I there is how long you have to spend in the gym there. The research is actually becoming very, very clear in terms of there are minimal amounts that you can give. You can get away with to one build strength and then to maintain it, which are two very different things.
So building up the actual muscle to build the connections between the muscle cells, which is more and the neuromuscular connections, and then also the physical size of the cells. So that's strength in the hypertrophy that you hear about. And then, like how long that takes to do varies if you're trying to build up or if you're going to just look for maintenance.
So you have the cells or there you have the muscle, it's it's good strong. It's where you want it to be. What you can do to maintain that is a much lower barrier to maintain versus build it. And interestingly enough, you can actually do quite a bit on a on a fairly minimal routine of 2 to 3 times per week in 30 minutes.
But you need to be effective about it. And so there's there's working towards things like failure, which is when the muscle can not physically do another repetition, with good form. And that's failure of the muscle getting as close as you can to that is what's going to trigger those adaptations that help the muscle get bigger and stronger and if you are getting able to get that in that workout, you don't need to be in there for hours.
So this is not something that you have to go and spend two hours in the gym 60 hours a week. There. You you can definitely get away with 30 minutes three times a week with an effective program. And that kind of goes you hinted at earlier, there is some amount of learning what is going to be that effective program, and I wouldn't expect anybody new to this to to know that or understand that.
And that's where trainers certainly can become helpful. That's helpful because I do think when a lot of again, we'll get to this at the end of like how do we get started. And if you're at which phase where, where do you go from here. But I think when we're just getting started, we don't want to necessarily. If you haven't lifted weights ever or done really any significant exercise for the last ten years, I don't know that you want to go in and lift to failure and be super, super sore and and have that.
I think sometimes starting by just having the routine and saying, do you know what, I don't know how much this is doing for my muscles per se. Like, am I actively building tons of skeletal muscle hypertrophy? Right. But I'm getting there. I'm going to the gym 30 minutes three times a week. That's kind of what I recommend for that first phase, for sure.
Once you have that routine kind of getting in to then say, are you doing enough? Because I see a lot of patients that come in. And when we ask about the type of movement they're doing, they'll say, oh, I do resistance training, and then I do a little cardio and I do a little bit of this. And then they wonder, you know, why their health isn't where it should be or what else they could be doing for their health.
And there is sort of a graduation there of like well done, well done getting to the gym, having that routine, doing any amount of resistance training that's really, really great. But what you know, and and fill in my gaps here, what data is showing is that there's kind of that next level of actually building the muscle in a challenge sort of way where we get additional benefits.
Will you fill in my gaps there? For sure? You know, something you're hinting at is some of the newbie gains. So when you're first starting out, you can actually get away with with fairly little, and you'll start to see some changes, but it will plateau because the cool thing about strength and hypertrophy, because they are two different things to different goals, is that you need to progressively overload that, meaning you need to work yourself up either in the number of repetitions you're doing or the the the amount of weight that you're doing.
When you first start out. If you haven't been lifting in the gym, there is going to be soreness, even for someone who is seasoned. I've been listening lifting for several years. When I shift my training program to move from different exercises after a, you know, a period of six weeks, I'm moved to a different exercise. I'm going to be a little sore that first week because I'm doing some different ones, and that's normal and that's okay.
But if we are so sore that we can't move the next day, then we probably went a little too hard. And that's where that progressive word comes in for these different programs. But starting out, you don't have to go to failure. You want to start actually pretty far from failure and work in. And I love what you say about just establishing that habit.
Let's just get there. Yeah. Blitz spend some time there, maybe getting to know the machines, getting to know the weights and then working our way up is, a very, very, very great way to do that. Thank you. That's that's perfect for what you filled in. I, I don't want that to be critical of people at all saying like, well, you're not doing enough.
But I do think it's important information of when we're already in the habit. And women say, like, I am working so hard, like I am at the gym 45 minutes, five days a week and I'm not seeing results. It's sometimes that, well, can you tweak it, what you're doing? So it's not necessarily that you're not in the gym long enough or that you're not even doing it right.
It's just sometimes we can do it more effectively and learning how to do that with progressive overload tracking, working with a trainer to kind of help you with that can be really beneficial to get to that next level of benefit. Yes, exactly. And there's something called repetitions in reserve, which is basically how close you're getting to that failure Mark.
The more, the fewer repetitions in reserve that you have, the lower your RA number of closer you are to failure, the more, metabolic changes to your institute and your you are you are signaling the pieces that are going to help build that muscle. And most folks straight off the street have no idea what actual failure is going to feel like for a particular muscle.
If you're doing bicep curls and you might say, oh, well, that that kind of feels hard, I might feel a burn there. That burn is not failure. That that burn may even be lactate. If you have been going for enough repetitions and has nothing to do with the actual failure of the muscle. But as you get truly close to failure, it's that physically you you cannot bring on shaky to finish your you are going to.
It's not even yeah you're going to have shaky. You're going to have it's going to burn. There's no question. But it's going to be that you just cannot bring that up all the way. That's a failure point. And most folks aren't going to recognize that. And I wouldn't expect anybody to but learning not to really kind of hit on the, the, the type of women that you were calling out there of.
I've been going to the gym and I've been doing the thing, but I'm not seeing the results. We have to look at the programing that we're doing. Are we getting close to those adaptive changes to allow them to occur? Because if we're getting if we're if we're still in that kind of 8 to 10 hour, meaning I could still do eight more repetitions of this exercise, you're not going to be triggering those changes.
But if you can get closer to that three, then you're going to be you're going to be making those changes. And, you know, failure is something that should be learned slowly, should be learned in a supervised setting that you're working with someone because, the form is going to be, a very important, especially as you learn to lift heavier weights.
So, again, I wouldn't ask anybody to just come off the street and do that, or even people that have been lifting those, those lower weights and stuff that haven't been going close to it. You want to do it slowly and progressively, of course, but that that is what you need to really make that change happen. Okay, I love that.
Let's go back a step because I kind of skipped ahead a little bit. I want to go back to those reasons that you brought up for strength training and muscle building, and just dive into that a little bit more. We won't spend too much time here, but I'll just kind of go through them and let you fill in why that's so important or any, any specifics that we need to know about this connection between why we do strength training and what this benefit is.
So the first thing that you mentioned, I believe with strength, just building, building being stronger, that seems kind of intuitive. But also when we stop and think about it, we're like, well, why does it matter if I'm not strong? Like, what if I'm a little bit strong? Is that good enough? Tell us what that benefit is. Well, the cool thing about that is you decide what's good for you and good for your lifestyle, of course, but think about what you want to be able to do when you're 80, 90, 100 years old.
Because we do lose a small, tiny percentage of muscle starting about age 40 on for the rest of our lives. And we can mitigate that loss by strength training and having as much as much muscle mass as we can at that kind of tipping point. And if we're past that tipping point, it's not the end of the world either, because it has been shown that you can put on more muscle mass with the right strength training program, it just may need more stimulus as we get older.
Yeah, but really thinking about what is it you want to be able to do? Do you want to be able to carry in your own groceries? Do you want to be able to carry groceries in both hands upstairs at 99 years old? Well, then we got to have something now in place to be able to do it. You got to be pretty strong now because your strength later on will wane.
But you can maintain more of it the more you have now. And what do you need to do day to day? You know, picking up the the laundry and you've got eight baskets of laundry that you're trying to carry up the stairs like it requires a fair amount of strength. You've got a toddler that you've got hanging around on your back and you're running around, and that's requires a lot of strength.
So deciding what in your life, what you want to be able to do is going to become your bar to aim for, of how much strength you want to have. But strength is that key to be able to do all these day to day things that involve lifting and moving muscles, pushing and pulling. Okay, so then one of the next reasons you brought up was metabolic health.
Tell us what you mean about that and why strength training helps with that. So metabolic that is things like our body's ability to regulate its blood sugar. Our balance of glycogen in our liver and fat and in our various stores throughout our body. So our metabolic health muscle is one of the keys for that. Because the cool thing about muscle is it doesn't need other help.
Muscle is muscle is, pretty selfish. And so when you eat a meal that has carbohydrates in it, which breaks down to glucose, that muscle, if you're actively using it, is going to pull that glucose in. And it doesn't need the help of insulin. It's it's entirely selfish because it's like, hey, I need that fuel first because we're physically being used right now.
And so if you have a fair amount of muscle mass, your muscle is going to be taking up that glucose. You're not going to need as much insulin. And that's going to help mitigate or even help reduce if it's already there, insulin resistance, which is the precursor to diabetes. And one of those things we worry about and also it's going to help lower inflammation.
So muscle releases these little messengers when we use it. There's little cells to cell communication. And some of it is what you would consider inflammatory. But inflammable in a good way that it induces the adaptive changes that we need to see. And then a fair amount of it is actually anti-inflammatory. So one of those little messengers you hear a lot about is something called il6.
And that generally we think of it as pro-inflammatory, and bad for heart disease and diabetes and stuff. But actually the il6 released through muscle, it has anti-inflammatory properties to it. So muscle is is truly key to your metabolic health and maintaining that nice balance, throughout the rest of your life. So great. So just to recap, that with metabolic health, which is what we think of, you know, the, the, the non-medical population kind of thinks of as our metabolism or our weight loss or how we're using the food that we're eating.
It's obviously more more than that, but that's kind of the gist of it. And having those muscle cells signal the body to do all of that better. So the more muscle cells we have on board, the more your body is signaled to keep blood sugar in balance and to keep inflammation down and to protect our heart. Did I did I recap that?
Okay, definitely. Definitely. And I didn't I didn't see that piece of it. And it's a good call out is our basal metabolic rate. Our muscle does play a role in that. It's it is only a portion now. So if you were to put on 10 pounds of muscle, you're going to change your basal metabolic rate a little bit.
But the studies have come out to say it's not that, you know, you're not burning 400 more calories a day. You might burn ten more calories a day. You know, it's a it's a little amount. But it definitely plays a role in our metabolism, for sure. Okay. Let's move on through the rest of these reasons. I want to go through a little bit quickly, because there's some of the nitty gritty that I really want to get to about, like the how to, so take us through the rest of these reasons.
How does building strength relate to bone health? Yeah. So, our bone, has muscles attached to it. And as you use muscles, you're pulling on the bone. The bone itself has to go, oh, I need to be ready for that. And so it actually lays down more bone. So you improve your bone density. So we, we hear about women and lower bone density as we age, as we lose estrogen through menopause.
And so if we have if we are actively doing strength training and something called plyometrics, which is jumping, we're going to have a be able to maintain that bone density, much, much longer through our lives because of that. So for a woman who has, a family history of osteoporosis, or she may have herself osteopenia or osteoporosis, the big types of movement, will you just say that again?
What types of movement do those women really want to focus on for their bone health? They want to be lifting heavy weights and they want to be doing jumping exercises. Yep. So that can be even like a weighted vest for walking, but also just lifting up heavy weights and walking around. It can be as simple as that. Correct.
The lifting of weights. So a weighted vest then? I'm not you know, that's not going to do as much. I see women kind of walking down the street with 2 pound weights in their hands. That's not going to trigger anything. But physically moving, a weight lifting, a weight doing deadlifts or bench presses or overhead presses, those pieces are going to be what you want to do to pull on.
You want the muscle pulling on the bone. So, if you're just wearing a weight vest, it's probably not going to do as much. And then the other benefits you talked about mood and cognitive health, injury prevention, and then also with that balance and joint flexibility, anything you want to say about those. Yeah. So the I think some underrated stuff that we used to think, oh, it's mostly cardio that gives you those benefits.
And they do. But the mood and cognitive health, the brain health in general and and our ability to sleep at night are all profoundly impacted by strength training in a positive direction. So I don't think they should be, you know, forgotten in the list of reasons why we want to be doing this. Plus, when you think about it, if you haven't yet, I highly encourage go and try it, because there is a great high that comes out of going into the gym, picking up something really heavy and putting it down and being like, yeah, I just did that.
And so as you work up to that point, like that's a huge mood enhancer, you know it. We deserve to feel strong as women and that's a great way to do it. And then as far as, you know, injury prevention balance and joint flexibility, they kind of all go in that as you're doing these different exercises, you're using one side and then you're using the other side.
That's creating your body's ability to handle that, which we think about long term. We want to be able to bend over and pick the thing off the floor. We want to be able to bend over and not fall over. As we're doing these things, we want to be able to get up and out of the chair or off our bed or off the floor, and we have to have balance to be able to do that.
We have to have the strength to be able to do that. So strength training is really key for all of these. And, you know, flexibility is something that we think yoga. Right. But actually a strength movement involves a concentric, movement and an eccentric movement, which is kind of a stretching of the muscle that actually helps improve your flex flexibility.
Just as much as, you know, a stretching routine. So, like all great reasons to, to be able to do the strength training.
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Because if we just talk about the benefits of resistance training, I think some people, they just need to hear that part and they need to go get in the gym like we talked about and just doing anything at this point. Right. Like any sort of resistance training would be a really great place to start. But as we graduate from that, then there are more specifics about how to customize this for yourself.
And I think one of the ways to do that is with a trainer. And I always think that's a good idea, but but let's dive into maybe a couple different scenarios. In my patient population, I see when people think like, oh, I know I need to build muscle, I'm going to go join a gym like Orange Theory, or I'm going to go start doing high fitness, or I'm going to go to CrossFit or, you know, any or I'm going to do some videos at home and let's go through a couple scenarios and, and give them some really specific advice about what you would tell them.
One of the scenarios that I was asked about actually the other day was, what if I have let things go? You know what? If I'm out of shape? What if I haven't done really any exercise? For a long time I've been having babies. I feel like I've gained a ton of weight, but I'm exhausted all the time. Where do those people start?
I like I don't know how to. I don't have a gym membership. I don't really know what to do. If I go there, what would you give them as those starter steps? So I think for those, types of folks, it's really important to find someone to help walk you through it. And I and I truly believe there's a lot of wonderful trainers out there.
There's, there's some to watch out for. So maybe looking for word of mouth of who people have worked with. But they can help you take those very first steps. You haven't walked in the gym in 20 years or maybe ever. They can help you with those first steps, because it can definitely be overwhelming to walk in there and be like, I have no idea what I'm doing here, but we want we don't.
We want to take that away. We want to make it as welcoming. And I gotta say, there's a lot of gyms out there doing a really fantastic job of being really open arms for people that have absolutely no background or experience or haven't been doing it for a really long time. I want to give the folks that are have not been doing it for a really long time.
A little bit of encouragement in that if you've built muscle in the past, but say you haven't done anything in the last ten years or five years or even a year off, it comes back actually surprisingly quick. Those muscle cells are still there. There just need to be kind of reactivated. Reinvigorated, so to speak. So it's much easier to build strength if you already have had a base and if you haven't had a base, that's okay.
Like like I said, you know, finding a trainer is probably the first, best step. If you have no experience being in a gym, I would probably say an in-person trainer is the best way to go, because then they can watch your form on how you're doing those exercises. But there are plenty of online trainers. If you have some gym experience, the ones that are most involved, you know, really paying attention to your form, and so on are the ones you want to aim for.
Yeah. I think anything you can do to make it not a terrible experience for you, kind of getting back into the exercise game to not have it be terrible and having someone there to cheer you on and to say, hey, you're actually doing great. Like, look at the progress you've made. That progress can be really slow, can feel really slow if you're not being really attuned to it.
And I think then it's really easy to quote, fall off the wagon, right, because you don't feel like you're making any progress. And I think having a trainer is there as your advocate to say, I am going to make sure that you make progress. We are going to track and keep numbers in and teach you how to track, so that you can really see the progress that you're making.
I also think another, good option for those folks is a functional assessment, even with a physical therapist, although some trainers will do it as well, just to say like, how are you walking? How are you bending over? How are you standing up? I think for people who are have gained a lot of weight or maybe quite out of that fitness, routine.
Even if you can do those things right, then you start building those muscles in the everyday activities you do at home. So having someone kind of watch and say, let's walk this way, or let's go up the stairs this way and make sure that the everyday movements you're doing are normal so that you don't have injury. When you start going back to exercise.
This this is another scenario I see a lot, is a woman who says, like, I run 30 miles a week or 50 miles a week. And, you know, I've counted my macros. I'm I'm not eating that much and I just can't seem to lose weight. What what would be your your advice for them? So my first thought actually doesn't go to strength training.
My first thought goes, are we eating enough? Yeah. Oftentimes women especially just it's because of everything we've been told that we, you know, eat less, be smaller, be less, that, you know, still sticks with us. That message sticks with us. And we hear the messages about people that are, needing to, you know, be in these deficits or diets or whatever.
And it's just it's a it's a culture that needs to just kind of go away. So my first thought for those types of women are, are we eating enough? Are we getting enough fuel to do all of those activities that we really want to do? Because oftentimes what I have found is that those women are not eating enough.
And then when they eat enough and they maybe, you know, if they still have weight, they want to lose the eat enough for three, six months solid, put their body back into a safer place. Then they can find that they are able to do a deficit of some type. For a little bit. I always put a caveat on that.
I recommend not more than something like 12 weeks, because I think then after that point, we start talking about these metabolic adaptations that are negative for us. But the other piece of that is we're doing lots of running. What are we doing for strength training? What are we doing to support those muscles that are doing all that running?
Because when you're running, you are not building active muscle. You are using a lot of your type one and type two fibers, the inner in the more endurance series. But we're not using the fast twitch fiber fibers as much as we could be. With a combination with the strength training piece of it. And again, building up those physical muscle cells and you're not as women, we're not going to get bulky.
Let's throw that myth out the door. It's not going to happen. And in fact, the only way to get those quote unquote leaning long muscles is to have muscle in the first place. And you can't do it without strength training. So for for that type of, of, female kind of profile, are we eating enough? And then what are we doing for the strength training?
Because again, that's going to be what's metabolically active for you and in helping you to do that. And there's some nice studies that show like kind of the best combination when we are aiming to lose some weight is a combination of strength and cardio. So when that is the goal and we are, you know, all those other things have been kind of teed off.
Sleep is in a good place, stress is in a reasonable place. And we're in a in a place in our life where we can do a deficit. Having strength and cardio together seems to be the best of both worlds. To get rid of the types of fat on our body that we're that are most dangerous for, specifically the visceral fat, which is that fat.
It's in the midsection, but it's not, you know, what's visible. It's deep, deep, deep in the deep layers of your abdomen. And that's the stuff that's most, attributed with cardiovascular disease. And so that combination seems to be the best. So we want to make sure we have that piece in there, too. Is there a ratio of that or an amount of that per week that's recommended in terms of the strength training and the cardio?
Not not in a ratio. It is going to depend on what are your overall goals? Are you training for something? Are you trying to do a marathon? Your ratio is going to shift and be in and be more on the endurance side and less on the strength try, but you're still going to have at least two days in the strength world, if not three, because you could do two days of upper body in one day of lower body in that scenario.
So you're still getting three lifting days in there. Or maybe depending on the load, you're only doing two days in the gym and it's going to end. That is one of those seasonality pieces to it too. You know, we shouldn't have the exact same goal all year long. You're kind of thinking through the seasons. There's going to be varying goals.
Even our Olympic athletes are enduring. Our pro athletes have seasons off. They have seasons where they go and do things. Jesse Diggins, as our world class cross-country skier, I she's she's fantastic. If you haven't seen her on, the Instagram and stuff, but she goes super hard during her seasons. Super, super, super hard. But then when she gets to the end of the season, she doesn't go on her skis for at least a full month.
And so there's there's seasonality to our life. And that's really important too. And so if you do have something where you're doing the hybrid, you're doing both cardio and, strength training, having some seasonality to it, where one push it, we push more of one side than the other is very reasonable and very healthy way to kind of approach these things.
I, I love that you brought that up, and I'm going to bring a couple attention to a couple things that you said. Number one, I love that idea of seasonality, because I think in a lot of women I help, they come to me saying, I've been doing XYZ for five years. I've been doing this exact thing for five years.
And really, the body doesn't really work well that way. Like, the body really isn't meant to set it and forget it. Like I figured out my one plan that's going to serve me the rest of my life. And, you know, in our brains, that would make it easier for us if that was the case. Like if the lifestyle that we lived was exactly the same from the time we were 17 to 78, like, but really, it's not that way.
And I think as we recognize that that gives us permission as women to say like, well, I'm trying to have a baby. I'm, I'm pregnant, I'm postpartum. I'm, I'm, you know, my kids are grown and I want to get back to it, or I'm aging and I want these other goals, like, constantly not constantly, but, you know, through phases of our life, reassessing our goals and and reevaluating.
Is this working or is it not? Do I need to change it? Because I think we do need to go through seasonality in a year and also seasons of life. And I think just allowing things to to kind of have times where we lift heavier and then times when we don't and times when we eat more and then times when we don't.
And that's in my experience working with women. That's where the body starts to really flow or have that healthiest rhythm to it is when we listen to it and respond to it, instead of trying to force the body into, into submission. Right. I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that or not. No, I couldn't agree more.
And truly, we you know, a great example of this is, is it kind of around the middle time of our life or our body as women goes through this hormone, all change that can hit us like a train and, that that change is really stressful on the body. And at the same time, we, we may see the weight gain.
We, we tend to see the weight gain around that time period. And women automatically just want to force the weight loss rather than kind of sitting there with it and saying, okay, my body is not feeling safe right now. I need to put it back into that safe piece, and work with that before we try and push, you know, the weight loss of it, accepting that at the moment that may not work for us.
And going back to the body wants to be safe. I always say this with my patients is that, you know, evolutionarily, as women, our role is to make a baby, and our body is designed to do that, and it's going to do everything it can to create an environment that safe for that baby. And when it's not safe for the baby, it's going to put on the brakes on everything.
And that oftentimes times putting those brakes on creates a lot of what we don't love to see about our bodies, whether that is weight gain, or even injuries and such, there tends to be more inflammation. Our body throws, you know, the brakes on the ability to make a baby. And just because we go through menopause, that doesn't change is the only thing that changes there is that you physically cannot do that because your estrogen and progesterone are too low and you don't have any more eggs.
But that doesn't mean that the rest of the machinery has changed. And I think that's something we forget to, or maybe don't don't realize that that's happening. That's great. And that was one of the things I wanted to go back to is this idea of safety and food. You I've heard you speak about this in the past, but will you talk about this idea of if we're in a calorie or caloric restriction for too long and people say that, right?
Like I'm eating so little, how could I possibly still be gaining weight? And then half of the internet tells us we're dumb because there's no way you can gain weight if you're actually in a caloric restriction. And then also the piece about sometimes we need to actually feed and fuel the body before we go back into a calorie caloric restriction.
And that's kind of what I see in my patients who are really restricted for a time, is actually pulling back on cardio, boosting strength training, boosting fuel like good quality fuel, vegetables and fruits and, meats and proteins and leaving them in a state for a minute, calming down inflammation and then coming back into a caloric restriction is then when the body actually responds the way that you feel like it's going to respond, will you give us your take on that and fill in some of those gaps?
Absolutely. So you're very much hitting the nail on the head when it comes to the strength training piece of things. Or the, the, the safety piece of things. Right. So there's this neuropeptide in our brain. We have two of them. They're called kiss peptide. And what they're doing is kind of acting like a rheostat in our brain.
They're sensing the temperature of the environment, that temperature being how many calories are coming in. And just like I just talked about with the is it safe for baby? There's kind of this, this threshold trigger that seems to go along with that. And so if there's not enough coming in with that threshold sensor, the Kiss peptides sets lots of the series of changes in our physiology that are going to say, oh, it's not safe for baby.
Let's put the brakes on. And what that's going to include is if you're premenopausal, it's going to include a downturn of the estrogen and progesterone. And at the extremes, that's when we see in things like anorexia, women have amenorrhea and they lose their periods. That's because of the turning down of those hormones. And what are the other things that happen there.
We look at the syndrome of red. So relative energy deficit, where we have we can have more injuries, joint ligament injuries, tendon injuries, bone injuries. We tend to see stress fractures creep up more and more. And it's not necessarily that we're overdoing the exercise, but we are under do in the future there. And I fully understand at some point, you know, women want to achieve a certain weight.
We we often have weight set as, in our own brain. This is the weight I'm supposed to be. That's probably a whole nother talk for us. But if we're at the point where. Okay, I want to lose a little bit of weight, we need to be in a safe place to do that. We need to have been fueling our bodies appropriately.
And if we say January 1st. All right, I'm going to start this deficit, and I'm going to go in and I'm going to be in there for six months. You can guarantee you're going to plateau. And you're going to get to this point where you physically can't eat less because, you know, you're just going to be too hungry and your body actually is metabolically adapting down when you cut calories.
Anytime you cut calories, it's starting to metabolically adapt down. And it's very slow. It's it's really unnoticeable at first. But then it starts to really kind of crank in. And that's where you're like, okay, I gotta drop my calories again. Oh, I'm going to drop my calories again. And meantime you're depriving yourself of more and more and more nutrients.
So you're you're losing your nutrient. Nutrient stores, vitamin D, B12, B6, all those different zinc, magnesium you're depriving your body of those energy sources are these these sources, by not eating enough, and oftentimes we don't eat enough protein. And protein is so key for not just muscle. Protein is the building block of the body carbohydrate and fat or fuel sources.
Protein is the building block. And I think we forget that it's more than just muscle. And so if we turn that down, then we're we're setting ourselves up. And so we get to this point where we're metabolically adapted down. And that's where that women often will be like, I can't, I can't lose the weight. And I'm eating so little and I'm exhausted because my body is under fueled.
I'm not sleeping well, I'm cranky, I'm moody, etc., etc., etc. and what I have found works best is limiting that time that we try to do this deficit. Again, I'm not against them. I think they have a role, but limiting the amount of time over the course of a year that we're in that deficit. So maybe 12 weeks total, the rest of your time should either be spent in a build, meaning eating above our maintenance to build muscle, or at least eating up our maintenance and fueling our day to day activities we want.
That's where our body is happiest. Evolution. That's what allows us to make a baby. That's where our body's going to be happiest. I think women are going to see that those deficit times are more effective when they've been fueling their body. Okay, I love all of that. I just agree with all of it so wholeheartedly. And I think for a woman who's listening, who's like, what do I do?
Where do I start? I am usually starting by asking them exactly what are they eating in a day, how are they moving in a week? And then also that stress component and really thinking about that equation of if you have tons of psychological stress, right, your teenager is being a punk or you're, you know, your marriage is difficult or whatever that stressor is.
If you have a ton of stress in your life, that's going to change that other equation a little bit. So frequently I have women come in who are like, I watch what I eat, I end, and I can tell when I say, what are you eating in a day? And they say, I have one egg and two egg whites for breakfast.
And then for lunch I have six ounces of chicken breast with this. If they're doing that and then they're they're exercising a ton and then they're super stressed. Everything about that is going to say danger, danger, danger. And the body's going to clamp down and say, let's not be flexible. Let's not be adaptive. Let's not be resilient. Like now we stay steady to survive whatever's coming.
Whereas if you take someone who is fueling, they're getting adequate protein, adequate vegetables and nutrients and adequate fiber. You know, to decrease inflammation. And then their strength training and they're doing some cardio, or they're doing joyful movement and they're stresses in a in a toned down phase, that body will be resilient and it will respond better to everything, not just stress, but it will respond better to stressors, physical and otherwise.
So that's going to be the body that is easier to lose weight in it and it responds. It's a little more forgiving. So if you, you know, have Christmas holiday and you eat a bunch for a week, that body in my opinion now I'm not I'm not getting into the data of this. So you you correct me. You're further into the research than I am.
But in my intuition and what I see in my patients, that body can be more forgiving. It handles those sort of, changes in routine, whereas you have those other bodies that are like, I just went out to dinner one time and I gained 5 pounds. You know, those those bodies are just rigid and they're not going to adapt as well.
Any thoughts or anything you want to add to that from now you're angle, you know, you're hitting the nail on the head. And I will say there's a large piece of that that is gets focused on scale. The scale we have on the day to day and your body is going to fluctuate. You're going to have changes in sodium content.
You're going to have changes in water content. You're going to if you're still menstruating, you're going to have changes in your your water weight with your cycle. And so if you look down and you see the scale went up 3 pounds, step back a second and say what was different over the last couple of days? Oh, I went out to eat last night.
I had a huge sodium load because I had the ramen. It's kind of flush out. If you go the next day, you check it again, it's going to be flushed out and that's normal. But we fixate on that. And especially, you know, I'm not I think you can weigh yourself every day and make it into data instead of an emotional response.
But if that's not comfortable for you, there's absolutely no reason you have to be weighing yourself. Focus on how your clothes are fitting, because if you do go out for that, you know a Christmas holiday and you eat a whole bunch for a week. If you go back to your normal routine after that, you're going to find that just disappears.
You know, you're not going to gain that fat mass over a week. It doesn't work like that. Your body can't physically do that. Yes, it's going to store a little bit during that time, but there's a fair amount that's going to go into your muscles going to be glycogen stores in your muscles, which is going to fuel you to do your exercise, is so, you know, it's if you've never done a build, for example, through a strength training and you're trying to put on muscle, that's actually a really fun time because you're eating a little above and not and we're not talking a whole extra thousand calories.
We're talking maybe 100 extra calories. You find that you're actually able to hit heavier and heavier weights. You're hitting personal records on those weights every time you get in the gym because, hey, your body's been fueled to go into that. Exactly. And that's a really cool feeling, too. So yes. Yeah, exactly what you said. It all comes down to safety again.
Once our body is in that safe place, it's definitely going to be much more amenable to doing these things. Yeah. And that context matters. And if you've been doing something for a while and it's not working, then you should do it differently. You should try going the opposite direction. You know, if you've been in a big restriction and you've been exercising really hard, maybe you don't restrict for a while.
Maybe you you'll fuel for a while and pull back on that amount of exertion that you're doing, or switch it from cardio to strength training. I think just when your body feels stuck, be empowered to recognize that and not to shame yourself or say, I must be broken because my body's stuck, but rather to turn inside and say, what is stuck here?
What? What am I doing that I've been doing the same for so long? And how can I create more of this picture of safety, of I have enough to eat, I have enough time to move. I'm not running from tigers all the time. That context is just so important. I want to cover just a couple little quick points.
Before we wrap up, will you just comment on, menstrual cycles and working out for the menstrual cycle? I think there are influencers who are really making a really big deal about this, and I think you and I are about on the same page. So will you just comment on that? Yeah. No, it's so there was this time where it was thought that, okay, we have the cycling of estrogen and progesterone for our menstrual cycle.
Therefore there must be a way that our body is responding differently. And the there's been many, many studies out there now and that's just not the case. There doesn't seem to be a happy time to be doing the strength training and a happy time to be doing your high intensity and and a happy time to do rest and relax.
Truly, the message that has very, very clearly come out of the research is you have to go by feel. And so if you are a woman that has a very, very painful first couple of days of their menstrual cycle during that bleed, then that might be a time to back off. And that's totally reasonable. And take that rest and relax.
But if you're if you're not bugged by that or sometimes it's actually can be helpful, you go out and get that movement in during that time. And it doesn't have to be a specific strength. It doesn't have to be a specific cardio. It is very clear that you can progress both of those types throughout the entire menstrual cycle.
It does not have to be cycle. There is no phases to the moon. There is no phases to the menstrual cycle of. This has to be gentle in this. This can go harder at this time. It's it's it's not borne out in the research. I personally never experienced that. I go by feel myself and that works out really well for me.
I listen, in that listening, it goes beyond the strength, the menstrual cycle to. If you've done a couple of hard days in a row and your body's like, it is just not coming around today. And that doesn't matter where I am in my menstrual cycle, I'm going to listen to what my body's telling me and say, let's take a break.
And so that the menstrual cycle stuff, it's a hot topic because it's a really easy way to pull people in onto your Instagram and get more followers because, hey, you have this bold message that you're saying the research just isn't there. There is a little bit it's a little bit that, you know, depending on the type of contraceptive that you use, if you're an oral contraceptive user, there does seem to be some influences about your ability to have hypertrophy in muscle cells, but not in strength.
And so that that is something to be aware of. It's still overcome. Well, it's just that's one of the few things that has actually come out to, to have a relative influence on what our body is doing with exercise. But you can hit a PR at any point in your cycle. You can strength train at any point in your cycle.
You know, I think that some of the guidance that came out, this is it's been trendy over the last. I don't know what it what would you say two years at least. Maybe five years. Yeah. And I think on one hand it's like, oh my gosh, do not give me more rules of what it means to be a woman.
Like, I can only do this at this time of my cycle. That part I really reject, I think the part that the good part that's come out of it is people like you're describing being more in tune with their cycle and just listening to your body in general. But if you can learn that, like, hey, the first half of my cycle, I feel like this and I'm going to plan around that, then by all means do that.
But I don't think there's any rule, and I don't think that everyone has that response to their cycle. I don't really I do whatever I want during whatever part of the cycle, and I haven't really seen much of a difference. Sometimes I feel good and sometimes I don't, and you just keep going. So I just want to give people, encouragement to to be in tune with their bodies.
But let's not make more rules about this is the way you have to do it. To do it right? You want to go workout during your luteal phase, workout during your luteal phase. You want to chill out during your follicular phase and do that. You want to do it the way that the internet says that we should do it as being more energetic during our follicular and calmer during our luteal do that.
But I don't think there's data to support that. You have to do this or you're doing something bad for your health. Correct. Zero data. Okay, I think we are just about out of time, but I can't I, I need to cover one more thing because as we talk about this, I think that it would be amiss to not address the idea of disordered eating patterns.
The more that we focus on using food and movement to shape our bodies right? To do good things for our body to to get the outcome that we want, it's really easy for us to go too far and say, to become obsessed with it or to become fixated on it. I have so many women. I will say as an ObGyn, I've taken care of women for almost two decades now, and I rarely asked my patients if they have any history of disordered eating.
I now ask every one of my patients that and I'm I'm stunned and and amazed at how many women say that. You know, I, I did have disordered eating patterns, I recognized it, I did something about it. It is extremely common. So will you just give us your take on how do we really tune in on our movement and our intake and our fuel and all of this, but also watch for becoming fixated on it or having it be an unhealthy relationship where it's all we can think about.
Because now there's this balance of like empowerment of I know what to do to get my body to respond. But then with that also then can come shame or I'm not doing it and I know better. How do we navigate that imbalance that I wish I had a magic wand that we could just to reach at all? Of course.
And I think this is something because women are so innately more in tuned, I think that it's a little bit more prominent, but it's not nonexistent in many either. So I definitely want to give that that recognition. But it is something that is I plagues us and will continue to plague us. And so I don't put this out there as a rule, but usually as a, as a rule of guidance of just regular check ins, you know, thinking through what I've been doing, how I've been feeling, and, you know, by the what I've been doing, you know, thinking about what are my ends of my out.
So what's my exercise been? What's what's my food intake then. And just kind of regularly attuning ourselves to it, maybe having a friend that you can regularly check in with to keep yourselves accountable, or maybe, you know, even working with a coach on occasion to have some accountability or a therapist, I, I personally think every single one of us out there needs to be with a therapist, like we should just have one on our shoulder or something.
And, you know, just just to run things by and be like, hey, here's my check and here's, here's what I did this week. And they may say, hey, the let's let's think about that a little bit more. You know, just someone enough to some of us are into it, a, awareness, that we can handle it, you know, within our circle or within ourselves to say I need to take a step back.
I think I went a little too. I, you know, I need I need to let some let some more, you know, unsafe foods in, and that's why I'm very clear that I would never expect anybody to do anything 100%. Exactly. I am very much in 8020 rule. Yes. The the there you're not going to get as much benefit about eating that cookie or having that pack of gummy bears.
But if that would helping due to maintain a balance, then that's more than okay. I have a I am not afraid to say that they are very much a part of my life, and I will never. I have no intention to give them up. I would never ask somebody else to give them up. And I think that that is one of the best ways we can help kind of keep ourselves on a level playing field of are we tipping too much into that disordered piece of it?
But if you are someone that has that path, have somebody around that you can lean into, whether that is the therapist, whether that's a friend or, sibling or somebody that you can have a training partner that can kind of just check in and poke on you, and you hold each other accountable. Because a lot of times we it's not that we can't do it alone and just we may not see it.
We may be too into it to, to see it. And if you don't have that history, fantastic. But it's okay to have somebody that's checking in with you on a time, you know, your, your, your spouse, your significant other. Is that person great. You know, if they know they they if you tell them that you want them to be aware, or to pay attention or maybe poke you and say, do we do we have to put that on the scale to let you know?
Do we really have to know that? I think that's a very reasonable way to kind of help with this accountability through, because those are the signals that are coming out from like social media and stuff in that world are there's so much disorder out there. You have to eat this way. You have to do this particular diet.
There's only one way to do it, and you have to do it this way. Crash the second somebody says that to you or says something along those lines, please continue to swipe along because they are just selling something most likely. Or they're just they themselves are so disordered they're trying to bring everyone else down with them. So yeah, I'm so glad you bring that up because that is it really is so many of the people that we see most readily, like on social media, those are the ones we're trying to model or feel like we should be modeling our lives after.
And take a second and really listen to your gut and say it like they're doing this quote unquote well or successfully. But it is it you know, it. There's there are so many of them that really do have bless their hearts. Like, I'm not trying to be critical, but so many of them do have disordered patterns. And I think before we say like, oh, please teach me all of your ways to really take a step back and say, do I want this?
Like, is am I in alignment with the end goal here? Because if the end goal is a certain number of pounds, is that really my end goal and what metric are we going after? Are we going after a weight? Are we going after a specific look or are we going after function? I don't think there's any anything super wrong with going after esthetics.
I mean, we all kind of look in the mirror and we all have a certain look that we want, but having that be the only metric or the number on the scale being the only metric I think is problematic, I think we need to kind of open it up and remember what you said earlier of, do I want to get off the toilet when I'm 90?
If so, this is what I do. Do I want to go for a hike with my my my husband? Then this is what I do. Do I want to keep riding my bike? Then this is what I do. Having those ideas is the metric that we're judging ourselves by and to say, do you know what? I'd like to ride a little further.
I'd like to ride a little harder. I'd like to see if I can be a little faster, like those metrics are going to get you to such a safer place. Then I just have to look a certain way, because a lot of people who look I if I'm being completely honest people, women who look a certain way very frequently have pretty significant medical problems gut disturbance, poor microbiomes, hair loss, nutrient deficiencies, skin abnormalities.
Like if you are really driving yourself to a certain look, you don't see the whole picture that comes with it. And I'm not saying I'm not villainized for anything here. I'm more just bringing awareness to like, really take a good picture of what it is that you want and what feels right to you. And if weighing everything you eat doesn't feel right to you, there are other ways.
There are limitations on whatever way we do this, because there is just an equation that goes into it. But, but I, I'm yes, I agree with everything you said. It's such an important side of things. I agree wholeheartedly, it's what is your end goal and and what do you want to be able to do? Because you can chase those esthetics all day and all night, but you probably won't feel great in doing so.
And that probably won't let you do a lot of the other things that you really enjoy in life. Yeah, yeah. As a final wrap up, will you give us any sort of, recap or summary statement or just last little message that you want to share with this group of women? Who's listening? Yeah. So first, thank you. This has been really fun.
Thank you. But so don't fear the strength training piece of things. The piece of life that is going to help you be stronger both physically and mentally. Because if you can, if you can do the strength training you mentally are building strength to and you know, if you can do that in the gym, just imagine all the things that you can face in your day to day and vice versa.
If there's a hard day in the gym coming up, think about what you deal with on a day to day basis, and it'll make it feel like nothing. And don't be afraid of it. Embrace it. To help you be able to live the most full life that you can for as long as you have it, we only get this one.
So let's make the most of it and be as our strong of ourselves that we can love it. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a really important conversation. Really enjoyable to kind of dig into the nuts and bolts of it. So thanks so much. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode.
A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their insights and time with us. We are grateful for the incredible support from our sponsors and to all of you listening. We couldn't do this without you. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your favorite platform. You can find us on our website uplift for her.com, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you love to listen.
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