Transcript
Speaker: I'm Laurel Beaversdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt?
Speaker: Whatever that means. We're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices. Welcome to the conversation.
Speaker: Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. My name is Laurel Beaversdorf, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Sarah, what is going on? Hello. how are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. I'm signing up for three classes this semester for my master's degree in kinesiology, so buckle up.
Speaker: Yeah, good luck. that's um It always gives me like flashbacks of being in school. Whenever I hear about people taking classes, I'm like, ah. Yeah. It always turns into that, too, where I'm like, oh, my God, I've got to go there again tonight. Right.
Speaker: ah And then, you know, in adulthood with a child. Right. With a thousand other responsibilities. The evenings are kind of family time, sacred-ish, and it's a little bit rough getting home later. But ah she's got soccer practice two nights a week. So one of those nights overlaps with one of my classes. Are all your classes at night?
Speaker: They are all at night, yeah, because they're for people who are, you know, adulting. Adults, yes. it's Adults who are adulting. I'm taking sports psychology, which I'm very excited about. Probably the most excited about that class. Advanced exercise physiology, which I know the professor, he's great. And then um management of PE e and sport, not as excited about that one. but But, ah you know, i oftentimes the ones that I'm least excited about, I'm pleasantly surprised at.
Speaker: some information that I was like, I had no idea. And this is, this is somehow useful to me. So maybe it'll be useful the next time you decide to coach one of your daughter's sports teams, perhaps, or if you decide to just open your own sport franchise yeah of, I don't know, female soccer team or something.
Speaker: Yeah, we are having a free class, are we not? We certainly are. Not only is it a free class, it is the first class in our lift for longevity six-month program that we teach. So you get a little amuse-bouche of what it's like to learn from us for an hour using barbells. Or if you don't have barbells yet, that's no problem. You use dumbbells or whatever you have, a dowel, a broomstick, something like that.
Speaker: It's always a great time. And so you can sign up to attend this free class. If you can't attend, you can get the replay by going to the link in our show notes. It's September 8th. It is at 9 a.m. Pacific and 12 p.m. Eastern. Thank you, Sarah. You're welcome.
Speaker: All right, in this episode, Sarah and i will be reflecting on what we've learned about exercise over the years through making this podcast, through working together, and we hope to show you how that evolution has directly shaped our six-month Strength and Impact course, Live for Longevity, including these major updates we're unveiling in this upcoming cycle.
Speaker: We are about to run the course for the fifth time and man, we've learned a lot about what works, um some things about what maybe didn't work as great as we thought it would, which is kind of always how it goes, right? you You prep the thing and then you do it and you're like, oh, okay, this is what this is actually like. um And there's also, our thinking has changed, our our understanding, our absorption of the literature around bone density has changed So this fall, we are introducing Live for Longevity 2.0, the same course, but with some meaningful changes. So the redesign reflects both what we've learned through teaching it repeatedly, but also what we've learned from the best available evidence around building bone,
Speaker: preventing falls, preventing fracture, and longevity. And that was part of why we shifted the name of our course as well from calling it bone density course to lift for longevity.
Speaker: The major conceptual shifts that guided these changes include, no, it does not have to be heavy, although heavy works. Now we've spoken in depth about this change in our messaging in episode 107. We'll link that in the show notes.
Speaker: We recorded that back in September of 2025. And we're going to say more in this episode about it. We did not have to change our course after updating our message because our course is and always has and will continue to live in the more moderate intensity zone anyway. But we are making some further changes inspired by this in our update.
Speaker: Namely, we are going to progress to heavy in all of the same exercises, just not as heavy. And our course material more fully reflects the fact that when we exercise for fracture prevention, improving bone density is really only one side of that. Right. We also want to help reduce fracture risk by reducing fall risk.
Speaker: And the kind of exercise that can do that is specifically power-based exercises, balance-challenging exercises, agility-type movement, right? Faster feet, reactiveness, quicker speed.
Speaker: So our update highlights these types of exercises as being important right alongside strength. Strength is a big part of what we need. It always will be, but it's also not the only thing we need.
Speaker: These changes were not random or quick. They took time. We are, as I remind you, doing this for the fifth time, right? So it's been like three years since we started teaching this course. And these changes didn't happen because Sarah and I one day, you know, sat down and convinced ourselves to make this change. They happened because Sarah and I are part of a greater evidence-based exercise community.
Speaker: Sarah, I think this slow process of changing our mind and updating our teaching and evolving as teachers and collaborators started for us before we ever met. For example, you changed careers and went from yoga teacher to physical therapist. Can you speak a little bit about how and why you did this?
Speaker: Yeah. So I became a yoga teacher the same way a lot of people, a lot of women in particular become yoga teachers. It was very trendy at the time. I was naturally pretty flexible. I'm hypermobile.
Speaker: ah So it it was kind of an easy fit for me. It wasn't that hard for me to to do and to do pretty, you know, quote unquote, well, it also very conveniently dovetailed with the aesthetic that I was really convinced and attached to in my early twenties and thirties, which is this long and lean ideal.
Speaker: Um, at the time I was doing TV commercials and it wasn't the sort of like anorexic rigor of my teens when I was modeling, but there was still this general expectation that my appearance was not going to drastically change. And I still would look kind of generally long and lean if I was going to continue to work In other words, yoga won't make you bulky.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. And that was one of the key bonuses. There was also like this dieting culture in yoga, but it was like covert dieting where everybody restricted their diets. Not everybody. Let me go back.
Speaker: That was a little too sweeping of a statement. yeah ah Many people in the yoga community are known to have issues with orthorexia. Sure.
Speaker: And this is not an eating disorder, but many of them also restrict their diets in other ways, like they tend to lean toward vegetarianism or vegan, not at all like that is I'm not saying those are eating disorders, but there tends to be also this focus on food a little bit or what you what you consume or put into your body as a as a yoga teacher. So I imagine Did that play at all into your draw?
Speaker: Oh, yeah. and And especially somewhere like Jeeva Mukti, because this was the other part that I was legitimately interested in with Jeeva Mukti was like the spirituality of the practice was front and center.
Speaker: Whereas in a lot of other large schools, it is sort of over to the side if you're interested kind of thing. I mean, bless them, they were hardcore about it. And so it almost was like a church in some ways where all aspects of your life were things for you to consider. So it was your yoga physical asana practice, but it was also your meditation. It was also your speech, the way you spoke to each other. It was your food choice, right? If we practiced ahimsa, that meant we caused the least amount of harm. That means we're vegetarian at a minimum.
Speaker: Vegan would be better. And then also doing things like a master cleanse or fasting for spiritual practices, right? was a very easy place to have an eating disorder and hide it, basically. Sarah, was Jeeva Mukti a little bit culty?
Speaker: Jeeva Mukti is extremely culty. We did a whole episode about... uh somatic dominance my experience with chiba mukti it was episode number 36 if you want to hear more about that but then what happened is i just got more and more disillusioned as i saw more of like what was going on behind the scenes with you know how they treated their teachers versus how they behaved to the students and at the same time i was getting more interested in what i thought was just like anatomy but when students would come up to me and say things like, oh, I can't, it hurts my knee when I do triangle pose. I i got frustrated with the fact that the only thing I knew how to say was, well, don't do triangle pose. I had no solutions for anybody about anything. Right. So I sort of dabbled in Anusar a little bit. Thankfully, i did not dabble too hard in that as we all know. And then right around that time, I moved to Los Angeles. I met Jill Miller.
Speaker: i became interested in yoga tune-up and what she was doing. And that really dovetailed nicely with the sort of like where my interests lay at the time, which was still very yoga influenced, but interested in sort of like moving more towards this like anatomical stuff. And and anyway, sort of long story short, I became a yoga tune of teacher, yoga tune of teacher trainer. And then somewhere with that, I sort of realized there were other populations that I wanted to work with that I was never gonna work with if I didn't have a clinical degree.
Speaker: um And so physical therapy was the most sort of obvious one for me, the one I was most interested in. and so then I spent six years doing that. And now I've been a PT for almost 10 years, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker: Yeah, it sounds like your shift happened because you were simultaneously disillusioned with parts of yoga culture, or yoga culture in the United States and and more curious about the body. So you kind of found you who were hitting the limits of what you could do yeah as a yoga teacher, what you understood as you a yoga teacher. And PT school was the next step in being able to to work with the people you wanted to work with. Can I ask what populations were you initially interested in working with?
Speaker: Well, what was happening to me as a yoga teacher is because I was doing sort of as much, you know, anatomy study as I could, I kind of developed a reputation as like, well, I know this person with Parkinson's, let's send them to Sarah.
Speaker: And I was like, I am in no way trained. yeah like professionally to you know, treat someone with Parkinson's. And so it was always very like, I teach yoga. Are you cool with that? I can do some yoga with you. Like I was very upfront about what I didn't know, but I was also frustrated that I didn't know it. Cause I was like, I actually would be able to know, i would like to be able to know what to do with you and like actually help you. So I was starting to really feel the constraint of what I knew. yeah And that was the big, that was the big catalyst for, for going to PT school.
Speaker: Cool, cool. So that was me. So what about you, Laurel? Tell me. Yeah, well, I just wanted to say, when when yoga teachers or former yoga teachers talk about learning about the body within the context of yoga, they often use the word alignment, like I wanted to understand more about alignment, or I wanted to position myself as an alignment-based teacher.
Speaker: And It just reminds me of how that word got used to mean an understanding of the body just generally as a yoga teacher. And then when you think about like, I don't know about you through Jeeva Mukti, but a lot of yoga teachers were sort of focusing on a lot, which I was when I you know started teaching for YogaWorks. was this strong focus on posture and alignment, which kind of lines up with anatomy, right? As a study of the relationship between the parts of the body, like when you align with the body. Yeah, you're interested in like the the the relationship of the limbs to the trunk and and the hip to the spine and things like that. But, you know, anatomy is like this small sliver of body science and kinesiology is the bigger umbrella term. But um I too...
Speaker: was interested in anatomy as a yoga teacher. And I started teaching alignment based yoga, I got promoted to teacher trainer very quickly, I became known as a more anatomy based yoga teacher and yoga teacher trainer. And then my mom passed away in 2011.
Speaker: I also started to develop some pain right around the time that my mom passed away. And I too found yoga tune up. And so The thing that I was drawn to most was the use of the therapy balls and was interested in this broader fascia craze that was very new and exciting and, dare I say, trendy at the time where everyone had this idea that fascia was somehow special and um and needed to be released and unlocked and and and worked with on a on a like a deeper level than like regular exercise. And so the balls were this this tool into the fascial system.
Speaker: And so my mom dies, I start rolling on balls. I have a lot of unprocessed grief. I start having, you know, this these experiences while rolling on balls that were like very much about me grieving and yeah and and and letting go of like,
Speaker: a lot of probably pent up emotions, if you can, if you can pent emotions up, I don't know. um But I felt like the balls were in a sense doing what the the fashion narrative told me they were doing, which is they were unlocking and releasing my emotions from my, from my, you know, steel trap of a body that was, you know, locking them down somehow. And, yeah and, and, and so the narrative of this, I don't think I, I just, sorry, I don't think that's totally incorrect though.
Speaker: You know, I don't think, I think the, the, perhaps the description of like, you know, a steel trap of a body, but I don't think it's incorrect that sometimes when we move, we feel emotions that are not necessarily immediately, know,
Speaker: connected with that moment. I think that's true. i had that happen. Yeah, I just definitely, I definitely reject the idea that we that our body is a container that is holding onto things that we have to dig around and find. Yes, I reject that as well. makes the body seem like ah you know a a minefield of like possible surprises that right you know you never know what's in there. right and And so I think that what was happening is, yes, I was having um experiences probably due to the balls,
Speaker: rolling on them massage, you know, and the relaxation, the relaxation that came from from rolling on balls, which allowed me to have a different thought, right to have to have a different way of being in my body. um And and that, you know, gave me a different perspective, like a different embodied perspective. And so, so, you know, the balls also temporarily took some of my chronic hip and SI joint pain away, but did not fully resolve those issues. And in fact, they they would always come back within, you know, hours or a day and, and sometimes be you know, just as bad, if not worse. So um the good news is that there were a lot of fitness professionals or movement professionals within yoga tune up that were not just yoga teachers. So in getting involved with yoga tune up, I actually left the echo chamber of the echo chamber specifically of yoga works and was exposed to different ideas and fitness professionals and their expertise. And so
Speaker: I got the idea that maybe I should start strength training. And so around 2011, 2012, I started working with Elizabeth Wipf and she taught me through a couple of personal training sessions, some of the basic lifts and barbells, she taught me kettlebells. She taught me some pull-up stuff.
Speaker: And I also met you, Sarah. den di-dada Sarah and I encounter each other. And we also met Trina, Trina Altman, who we've interviewed a number of times on this. I think she's been interviewed three times. um We hit it off and we decided that we wanted to work together to collaborate on creating courses, online courses for yoga and Pilates teachers. Trina was very much in the Pilates world. i was very much in the yoga world. Sarah was moving into the physical therapy world. She was a physical therapist or about to become one. And so we thought, well, hey, this seems like a pretty a pretty good team. So Sarah, how do you think our individual evolutions coincided with shifts happening in the broader yoga, fitness, and even PT communities, these individual shifts that we were making?
Speaker: Yeah. so You know, when i I went into PT school in 2014, we started Movement Logic in 2017, which was the year that I graduated PT school. So what I saw in those years that I was in PT school, and then when you're in school, you go out and do what are called clinical rotations, where you go work in a clinic for various periods of time. You do two medium length ones in your second year and two like 16 week or 12 week something ones in your final year. And um
Speaker: What I noticed, you know, you go into like an outpatient orthopedic, which is where you would go if you like broke your ankle and you need to rehab, or you go into like a neuro, which would be like a stroke rehab facility or a spinal cord injury, or you would go into a hospital and you see inpatient, like acute, you might see ICU, or you go work at a SNF, which what's it called? Something nursing facility.
Speaker: I can't remember what SNF stands for anymore anyway, ah but that's where you're working with the older population. And no matter what rotation i went into, it was always that what I was learning in school was not what was happening you know in the field.
Speaker: And I think this is just the problem with academia is that it's such a slow moving thing. boat that like to attempt to make any changes.
Speaker: Well, the first thing that has to change is the exam because they have to teach you so that you pass the board exam. I mean, that's the bottom line. If I can't practice with a license, then what's the point of going to school? So what's taught in school prepares you to take that exam.
Speaker: And that's kind of how it has to be. But the contents of what it is on that exam is easily, in my opinion, 20 years, 30 years it's and so We would have some teachers in PT school that were like, hey, this is old and you're going to learn what's real when do you go into the clinic, but we have to teach you this because it's what's on the exam. And then you would also have people like, this is what it is. um And I was like, what? like So I was getting cognitive dissonance kind of all over the place. Like I had gotten it in the yoga world and I was getting it here in the PT world a little bit. And once I was out of school, everything got a lot easier because then I could just do what I knew to be the most evidence-based.
Speaker: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, and and for me, i noticed that in the broader yoga community, that yoga teachers around this time, along with myself, were starting to reckon with more pain and injury that they suspected that the yoga practice was either causing or contributing to. There were a lot of hip replacements happening, it seems, um though probably, you know i suspect this was more correlational than causal, given how many yoga practitioners were also come from dance also come from gymnastics are naturally bendy all of these can be reasons that someone might.
Speaker: You know, have issues with their hips down the road, and at the same time, we were questioning yoga teachers were questioning these rigid alignment rules, at least in you know my yoga community. And as well, the repetitive sequences of Ashtanga and maybe Bikram and and also starting to get a little bit more education beyond what we called anatomy. um Yeah.
Speaker: To include pain science, right? And this is when the book explained pain, I think became fairly well known. it led to bigger shifts in thinking and questioning approaches and beliefs like, you know, how much does alignment matter compared with something like capacity, strength, right?
Speaker: Stiffness, density, right? We started thinking less about anatomy as simply, you know, where the parts are relative to each other and more about biomechanics, right? Which is also under the umbrella of kinesiology and probably much more relevant to exercise in general right if we're trying to use yoga and i hesitate to even use exercise and yoga in the same sentence because some people find that very offensive um but the fact of the matter is in the west many people do yoga as a form of exercise not exclusively many of them but some of them include like that as being one of the benefits of yoga right it's like physical
Speaker: activity, exercise. um But biomechanics is actually looking at how forces load, leverage, movement all act on our body to create change adaptation, right.
Speaker: And um i think we we started to move beyond just thinking about alignment to ask, you know, which physical capacities, which adaptations are we seeking to, you know, make our bodies not have so much fucking pain, right?
Speaker: I think a lot of us thought the answer initially at least was to stop aligning in this one way and start aligning in this better way. and then move And then we move beyond that dichotomous thinking from right and wrong to maybe the answer is to just move in different ways. So novel movement, which kind of plays into some of what we' we're understanding about pain science and how novel um movement can actually be really helpful for people, especially those experiencing chronic pain. And then we started to think beyond just movement to capacity, strength. Maybe what we need is to be a little stronger. So this is where we are at the beginning of movement logic.
Speaker: This is where Sarah and I are as individuals. So by the time we started movement logic, what had we stopped believing and what were we trying to replace that with?
Speaker: What do you think is the value of having you as a certified strength and conditioning coach, and then me as a physical therapist, as the people that are leading this course? That is two areas of expertise that are highly relevant to the material that we're delivering on in the coaching that's happening. Because on one hand, we have folks coming to us for the guided process of getting stronger. We're coaching them on exercise technique. We've written a program for them. We're helping them tailor that program to them and their equipment and their unique needs. So that's all within the realms of strength coaching, right? But then we also have folks who are like everyone living in a body that is dealing with aches, pains, injury, past conditions, future conditions that arise, future injuries that arise. Because the course takes place over six months, a lot of life happens in six months, a lot changes. And that's where we have a rehab specialist, you, that's all able to help folks navigate
Speaker: choices surrounding pain and injuries and conditions. So I think the power there is this two different highly complementary knowledge bases and skill sets coming together to make sure that everyone has support to be able to start the course, stick with the course, finish the course and benefit as much as possible from the work that they're doing with us. because A lot of people, their response to, or if they feel a tweak or they hurt part of their body is often they'll just be like, well i'm not going to do anything. I'm going to just completely stop.
Speaker: Yep. Whereas the actual better move a lot of the time is just to modify whatever you're doing. That way we can really figure out a way to continue to participate while you're also going through this rehabilitation yeah of whatever degree you need. And that's so important because- Again, it's this consistency that matters, not that you're doing some perfect program every day, but that you're continuing to engage in it over weeks and months and eventually years. That's our goal.
Speaker: If you'd like to learn more about Live for Longevity and experience a free class in its entirety, it's actually the first class of the course, we're offering a free class experience with us on September 8th. That would be live, but you can sign up. By time started MovementLogic, had stopped believing what were we trying to
Speaker: you can attend that live and receive the recording of that go to the link in our show notes and sign up
Speaker: by the time we started movement logic what had we stopped believing and what were we trying to replace that with Yeah, I think movement logic and the tutorials we created, because that's how we started off is creating these courses online that we call tutorials.
Speaker: I think what we wanted reflected in our work was somewhat this broader shift away from Static posture and alignment rules and this game of telephone that we found a lot of students, both Pilates and yoga were adopting, which is that they would just repeat what their teacher or their teacher training taught them and we wanted to move more toward.
Speaker: thinking about the body's movement abilities, like how can the joints of the body move right more broadly, and then starting to get people to understand a little bit more about how pain works. Because a lot of these teachers within the yoga and Pilates fields were seeking continuing education that helped them be able to help their students who are coming to them with pain.
Speaker: and and looking for them to help them within the scope of practice they're able to help them. Yeah. i mean, our main goal was to really help yoga and Pilates teachers better help their students within their scope of practice by challenging some of these outdated beliefs around posture and pain and alignment. And so we did a lot of myth busting, pain science, move in education.
Speaker: is what was in those tutorials, tons and tons of novel movements or different types of exercise, but they were each kind of presented in a vacuum. Like each exercise was like, try this exercise and see what you think.
Speaker: um We didn't create any like programming per se. And I don't think we included anything heavier than a light hand weight or a resistance band as beyond everything else was just sort of body weight because we knew we were still talking to yoga and Pilates teachers.
Speaker: who maybe weren't accustomed to lifting anything heavier than that, but also were were constrained by wherever they were teaching. So if the yoga studio you know ah didn't have hand weights and they had to lug them around, or if they're going to Pilates and they need to bring bands or who knows, right? So we we had that in our head as well.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, we started to recognize the need for strength. I don't think I said, but like as soon as I started strength training with Elizabeth With, like my pain kind of went Bye-bye. Like I felt so much better within weeks. And so we we knew this to be true. And Trina as well was strength training during this time, but we were still only delivering exercises. I think even though we were going to the gym and regularly strength training and applying progressive overload, we had no idea how to create something like that in a course format yet.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, we were seeing a lot of people just having a lot of pain and injury from this repetitive nature, what we believed was the repetitive nature of yoga. So we were still working kind of from this place of, well, you need to replace what you're doing or supplement what you're doing with these other kinds of movements.
Speaker: um I at least wasn't yet mentally in the place of like, or if you just got stronger, probably all of your problems would go away or a great number of them would go away. um And then we stopped making tutorials. We made six tutorials and then we stopped. Why did we stop Laurel?
Speaker: um Well, I just want to say something, which is that um I don't think I was in that place of thinking that, you know, if you just start strength training, all your problems will go away. um i knew that it it had worked for me, but I don't think that's even true, you know, like at all that, you know, if you just start strength training, all your problems will go away. But I did have this feeling that like...
Speaker: I said that as a joke. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I said, I meant it. I meant like, you know, just the idea of just getting like, you don't have to nitpick each, like you don't have to do an neck exercise to, you know, realign your shoulder properly or, you you know, just go do some deadlifts, some squats, you know, and your, your overall, a lot of your little niggly pains will go away. Yeah, and i I definitely didn't think that was true. I didn't think that if I had neck pain, or shoulder pain or hip pain that I could just go do some deadlifts or some squats and have it go away. Like, even though that kind of is the way it worked for me, right I still kind of believed in this idea that we had to
Speaker: target the joint specifically. And we had to think about how it was moving that was causing it pain and then try to bring in some different types of movements. And so I think what we created was this toy box of movements for teachers to kind of choose from. And then we tried to guide them toward what might be helpful if you're seeing this, this, or this. And you were definitely leading up the i didn the part of this where you know, we were making sure that this was not us diagnosing and prescribing, but that we were really providing movement options and critical thinking skills. So so we made six tutorials.
Speaker: Why did we stop, Laurel? I think we were just tired of making tutorials. I don't know. like the The reason I stop anything is because I think I've taken it as far as I want to take it. yeah This has been my entire life.
Speaker: Like I'll get to the, you know, point in something that I'm obsessed with and I'll be like, yeah, done I'm kind of done with this now. Yeah. I'm kind of done with this now, you know, or I'm done being obsessed with this and I'll keep doing it, but I'm not going to be so obsessive about it. I personally, I'll speak from, from experience. I got tired of the tutorials and I also started to it was online, right? I was hearing some of the conversations happening on Instagram and and podcasting was starting to become a thing. And I started become aware of Lauren Fishman, you know, the author of 12 daily yoga pose regimen reverses osteoporosis paper. And um this paper was making the rounds. And I noticed that a lot of people in the yoga community were we're saying that yoga builds bone. But then I also heard other folks say,
Speaker: Mastrianni- Like Jules Mitchell Arianna Rabinovich they had their podcast right. Sarah Mastrianni- Saying ah no and this paper does does not show that that is the case, and I like I started to become curious about this this other debate happening, what do you think Sarah why did we stop making the tutorials. Sarah Mastrianni- Well.
Speaker: That is all accurate and true. And also we kind of ran out of body parts. um like I just think, well, I remember there was a brief conversation around like, should we do a knee one? And we were like, oh so that was like, as far as that went, you know, at this point I felt like I was ready for something different. I didn't quite know what it was, but I think we were both maybe tired of this deconstruction approach. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And i I do distinctly remember a conversation where we talked about how we wanted to include much more strength. Like we felt that was the direction we should be taking our work. And I remember thinking or saying, it didn't exactly know what that should look like yet, but that that was the direction we wanted to go in.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think that's very accurate. It was not clear to us yet, but we were on to something. Yes, we were like, we think something is up. So it's around this time that we start to get into myth busting, right? We're already doing myth busting type work in the tutorials, but I think we get more into science misinformation and the process of debunking bad claims using research, like looking at how science is being used, and then starting to investigate whether or not it's being used.
Speaker: well, or if the science being referenced is even any good. And this is kind of bringing me back again to Lauren Fishman and this idea that his paper shows that yoga builds bone when in fact it absolutely doesn't.
Speaker: But yet yoga teachers are running around, many of them, not all of them, and saying yoga for building bone, yoga builds bone. The irony, right, of it is... is We started to hear from these different yoga and Pilates teachers who had been doing yoga this whole time and got osteoporosis and felt like they'd been lied to.
Speaker: So we we sort of had Lauren Fisherman as this like patient zero for the idea that yoga builds bone. He's also very influential and popular, I would say, or certainly at this time was in the yoga community. He still has a decent following, I believe. So we had Jules Mitchell and Ariana Rabinowich on our radar because they had recorded a podcast episode about his paper and they'd really gone through and just taken it apart piece by piece.
Speaker: and and talked about why it did not show what he said it shows. And I actually remember much later on, Laurel, when you and I were starting to interact with him, that i reached out to Jules about her experience with this. And she said, yeah, when our episode went out, he asked us to take it down and we didn't.
Speaker: Yeah. um i I personally felt very inspired by Jules and Ariana's work together. and I started to get worked up. Like I started to get worked up about the fact that here was this, hate to say this, but like, here's this older man.
Speaker: He's a doctor. He runs a study, he creates a paper, very low to no quality evidence paper and uses it to elevate his standing in the yoga community to then tell yoga teachers and their students eventually, right, because it information gets disseminated from the teacher to the lay public, that yoga builds bone. And also yoga teachers are getting osteoporosis and osteopenia diagnoses. And we can so pretty safely say at this point, no, yoga does not build bone. No research of any quality shows that.
Speaker: It's not the right type of exercise. It's not the right type of exercise. stimulus for the body. And we got worked up and Sarah and I, I don't know if you've noticed, but we kind of feed off of each other. So we decided to start a podcast.
Speaker: Do you remember how it came about the idea to start the podcast, Sarah? Yes, I remember that I got a text from you that said, we should start a podcast. I think it was literally the day before or that same day around that exact same time before you texted me, I had been thinking we should start a podcast.
Speaker: Oh my God. And so I like within seconds of seeing that message wrote back and was like, fuck yeah, we should, or something like that. And I think it surprised you how quickly and how forcefully I was into the idea.
Speaker: thought i might I think you thought I might be like, well, I don't know. Is that what for? And I was like, yes. I mean, i i thought you would maybe at least be like, tell me more about what you're thinking. But it's like I had already won you over just by making the suggestion, which makes sense since you you also had the idea at the exact same time. So.
Speaker: You know, our first episode wasn't make Lauren Fishman make sense. ah Welcome to the first ever episode of the Movement Logic Podcast. Let's talk about the bullshit Lauren Fishman is saying. No, no, no. We we needed to get some less controversial topics under our belt first before we started down the road of naming names. um We knew we wanted to talk about topics that interested us and that we thought would interest students of Movement Logic. So our first episode was movement versus exercise versus sport.
Speaker: much more philosophical than controversial. I think we're planning to do a separate episode down the road about our whole podcasting evolution and how our approach has changed. It very clearly has us going from focusing on ideas to including a focus on the people having them and spreading them and not just the good ideas. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So we start the pod.
Speaker: And then what, Sarah? Well, then we encountered the LIFTWAR trial, which probably a lot of you have also heard about. Certainly if you've spent any time listening to this podcast, heard us talk about it. LIFTWAR is a randomized controlled trial in post-menopausal women with low bone mass that compared a supervised program of high intensity resistance and impact training with low intensity exercise.
Speaker: The high intensity group improved bone density, strength, and physical function. And the study was probably the first to challenge the idea that women with osteopenia or osteoporosis had to avoid heavy lifting, that it was too dangerous. So we were inspired by this message that postmenopausal women with a history of fracture, with osteoporosis or osteopenia, actually improved their bone mineral density by lifting heavy weights and by engaging in impact training.
Speaker: And this was the biggest piece of inspiration for us to create our six-month barbell course that we called Bone Density Course at the time. We now call Lift for Longevity because it showed us that lifting heavy you know, ah correctly, obviously you don't just start heavy under the right conditions, could be safe and beneficial for this demographic.
Speaker: So, Laurel, is this how we had the idea to make our course? Yeah, I mean, I do. I think it was a combination of us becoming incensed by what we knew at the time to be misinformation around ineffective bone building exercise being marketed to women and the harm that misinformation causes.
Speaker: I think this fueled our anger. And then i think we were at the same time really inspired to find out that older women with osteoporosis and a history fracture could fucking lift barbells, heavy weights, and benefit.
Speaker: Like, Liffmore basically found there there were no downsides. I think maybe one person had a kind of minor injury of the I don't know how many it was over a hundred. I know believe yeah it was no downsides, all upsides.
Speaker: We were like, holy shit. But, but Sarah, our course was not modeled after lift more. Right. Right. We did not model it after Liftmore because a couple of things. ah Trial protocol, a research study protocol like Liftmore, it was three lifts and then stiff-legged drop landings. That's very much because you need these constraints to be very specific for research. We believed that it probably needed to be heavy, most likely needed to be heavy. We also knew that you don't start anybody at heavy. So we were going to take this six-month course as sort of like an on-ramp
Speaker: to getting to heavy lifting and also an on-ramp of impact training, you know, more and more challenging variations for people to try. I will say this. We understood that LiftMore used heavy weight and it built bone.
Speaker: We did not understand the nuance of the difference between something being necessary and being sufficient. That came later. And we hadn't encountered at that point, any other good research showing that weights that were lower than heavy did anything useful to build bone.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think I got really excited about the part where it was possible, like this population can do this and didn't take into account that while it's possible, it might not be the only way to roam, right?
Speaker: You know, heavy might not be the only way to do it. And it it wasn't easy for us, given the tools that we had, we did quite a bit of digging up of research around this time, we were looking for information around bone building and Liftmore was the cream of the crop. It was the best we could find.
Speaker: Yeah. And also there is some messaging that was like, you have to lift heavy. We weren't so certain as that, but our messaging did lean towards, you probably do need to get to heavy lifting and we're going to show you how to get there.
Speaker: Yeah. And after our talk with Dr. Gian Gregorio, which we had just like a little bit ago and that episode just published, he you know, it does seem like heavy is a better bet than light. And, you know, ah yeah again, while we knew that our goal was to get them to the point where we could lift heavy, they were always going to have a ramp into this process. And that meant we spent some time at the beginning in, I would say, light moderate or like the top of light weight. We spend a lot of time in various categories of moderate, whether it's like 10 to 12 reps, 8 to 10 reps, you know, and then making our way into heavy as the months went on. And the fact that this was how we had set it up actually proved to be like incredibly be useful later on when we changed our thinking.
Speaker: So- Just to sort of go back to what I mentioned, were we the first people to start encouraging women to lift heavy shit as it goes, Laurel? No, ironically, Stacey Sims beat us to it. Yeah, our our our message was not a standalone phenomenon, even though I think we felt like we were one of the first people saying it. um It was part of a growing message to women around this time to put down the pink dumbbells and start lifting heavy weights, the lift heavy shit narrative.
Speaker: In episode 107, Does It Have to be Heavy, where we change our message, we go into depth about the logos, the pathos, and the ethos around this lift heavy shit. narrative. Although we don't frame it that way. But you know, thinking back, I think we we really do unpack all three. And I don't think that the lift heavy shit narrative is all bad. I think it's just incomplete. Can you just real quick define logos, pathos, ethos for people? Yes. One second. I want to make sure that I don't fuck this up. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah. So logos is your reliance on data, on facts, on proof, on evidence. And pathos or pathos is more about feeling or emotion.
Speaker: It's when you tap into an audience's feelings. It's it's very it's very much where rhetoric lives. And then ethos is about appeal to authority or about establishing trust.
Speaker: It shows the listener that you know this information is coming from an honest, fair, or reliable speaker or person. um So I think the lift heavy shit narrative can be looked at through through these three lenses. So like the the logos of lift heavy, right, is I think reasonably corrective to chronic underloading, especially if you realize that you don't so go from underloading to just lifting heavy, right? If you realize that your goal is to to lift heavier or to get to heavy eventually. But the problem
Speaker: with this inside the lift heavy shit narrative online was that it got really oversimplified and became an incomplete message, which is that heavy is uniquely necessary.
Speaker: It's not, it's enough, it's sufficient, but it's not the only way that it that it's like uniquely necessary for for for bone, but also some people are saying that it's uniquely necessary for for building muscle as well.
Speaker: And then the pathos or pathos is that emotional feeling of, you know, we're saying put down the pink dumbbells and lift heavy shit. It feels for women rebellious. It feels empowering.
Speaker: It pushes back against the message that has always existed, that women should be small and delicate and afraid of getting bulky or muscular and should only use the small weights so that those things don't happen. It was the long and lean ideal that I subscribed to for a long time. It gives women permission to take up space, to go get in a squat rack.
Speaker: And then by doing that, discover that they're actually capable of a lot more than they originally thought they were. Yeah, and I actually think that this is the part of the message that's probably the best, right? Like, it's good to shine a light on the ways in which women have been put in a pillow fort, for lack of a better word, you know, with with exercise, like ineffective exercise programs. And I think it's also valuable to look at, like, how this is part of a bigger pattern with the way that women are
Speaker: treat it, you know, differently than than their male counterparts. And so I think where it kind of goes off the rails is with like, I'll go back to Stacey Sims and her message that women are not small men.
Speaker: There is no research in women. um i this amazing phrase from Jen Gunter, I was reading one of her blog posts today, which is the grievance economy. Like, basically, there's an entire economy created around grievances, around this idea that women have been victimized, which there's some truth to that, but then the shared sense of victimhood amongst women that like,
Speaker: There's no research in women and we've been lied to. And it's the same kind of thing you hear about big pharma and the doctors want to keep you sick. And there's this shared sense of victimhood that arises around what are often entities that are trying to sell you something. They want to create, you know, a feeling, right? That's the pathos in you that then kind of ripens you up to be able to sell you the solution. Um,
Speaker: That's one way we could look at the pathos of the lift heavy shit narrative. And I think it's one of the ways that it went off the rails, but there's another way you can look at it, which is that it's absolutely true that women are sold ineffective exercise programs, that they are promised things that are impossible, like spot reducing and long and lean. Like these aren't real things that happen to the body. And yet women are manipulated into thinking that they are,
Speaker: so that they can make their bodies appealing by social standards, which often means making their bodies smaller. So I think it's worth looking at the... dark side and the light side of any narrative, really. There's a lot of nuance there.
Speaker: And then finally, the ethos of the Lift Heavy Shit narrative is about the credibility of this message. And it definitely sounds credible when you hear it coming from researchers, doctors, coaches, exercise physiologists, women who are themselves, you know, clearly visibly strong,
Speaker: Stacey Sims is a good example. Her credentials, her explicit focus on women gave this message a particular authority. She has published many papers. She has very ripped arms. She is older and she looks quite fit and she's also well-spoken and she's saying lift heavy.
Speaker: She's also saying science says women specifically need to do this, which is not true. But when it comes from Stacey Sims, it doesn't matter as much if it's not true. It matters that Stacey Sims is saying it, right? And insert whatever other doctor or researcher you, you know,
Speaker: want that is also saying this, the ethos of this message, you know, it it elevates this message for people. So yeah, on our podcast, we start to look at the language used in the types of exercises that are aimed at women and how all these modalities, some more than others, but most of them focus on things like long and lean body type or the yoga body as the ideal.
Speaker: and the goal and how the flip side of this is the messaging that like lifting heavy weights was not only dangerous and therefore not for women, but would make you bulky, which was code for make you look like a man and looking like like a man is considered undesirable in the cis heteronormative world, right? it's It's associated with being unattractive and not feminine anymore. This ideal of femininity has physical weakness baked into it.
Speaker: so that the hetero man has something to do, which is take care of the woman. Have you seen that meme that's been going around where it's a little clip that's been going around that I love so much where this man asks, like, you know, if you get rid of all the men, who's going to protect the women? The woman answers from who?
Speaker: ah hu In any event, a strong woman is kind of a threat to this world, right? Because she's no longer as weak and helpless. She can, from a male perspective, be kind of emasculating.
Speaker: So we came up with a hashtag bulky girl summer and that took the world by storm. Yes, it did. It sure did. No, we made a few t-shirts that you can still buy in our shop. So so we created the bone density course, Laurel.
Speaker: um what were to us the big, new, and maybe even like risky feeling choices we made when we built the course? All right. So up until this point, we're creating two to five hour tutorials.
Speaker: We decide instead to make this long form six month guided course. So that right there is a really big shift in the type of service we're providing.
Speaker: And I think the biggest risk of all that we took was deciding that this was going to be a course about barbells. Why did we choose barbells? Well, we decided that we were probably going to be working with mostly women and probably women around our age and older.
Speaker: And we knew that there were probably going to be a lot of yoga teachers and Pilates teachers in the mix because these are people that we're working with currently. And we thought, well, where are they going to be training? And we're like, they're going to be training at home.
Speaker: We're going to be doing these as Zoom classes. These women are going to be training at home. And we were thinking, you know what? um If we have them training at home, they need to have heavy enough weights. And I don't think we want to ask everyone to get like eight different kettlebells, I think it's got to be barbells. yeah And we got kind of worked up about this choice too, because it felt it felt kind of rebellious, like like a subversive rejection of the pink dumbbell exercise advice. We were like, oh yeah, take your pink dumbbells and shove them. Like, let's get some fucking barbells. Okay, how about that?
Speaker: And we kind of really resented this advice that women should tone and sculpt and use little weights to do it. And we also really hated the advice that yoga and Pilates were all that you needed because we saw what was doing to women. And and we started to call a spade a spade. And and we were like, no, you know what? Barbells.
Speaker: Yeah. The equipment choice felt like it was a commentary on a lot of exercise advice that gets repeated to women that repeatedly under loads them.
Speaker: It also felt to me, I hadn't seen anywhere else online that was teaching barbells. So our message was like, get in girls, we're lifting barbells.
Speaker: And it was, you know, as I kind of hinted at the most practical equipment choice for people training at home, because eventually if you have one or two kettlebells, you're going to run out of having enough weight for the type of course that we were creating.
Speaker: Yeah. And as much as we were like, yeah, we're going to be the only people teaching barbells. It did also feel like, like, should we be the only people? Is there a reason why nobody else is doing this? So we had a moment of like, okay, well, we're going to teach this exercise and we're going to show how to do it with dumbbells and then with kettlebells and then with a barbell. And then we were like,
Speaker: this is how the F are we going to do that? Like it just got way too complicated with all these different variations for all these different exercises and dah, dah, dah. And so we realized that what we needed to do was just kind of like shove all of that aside and plant our flag in barbell land for want of a better way to say it. And that our job was going to be to convince women that barbells are for them. And luckily we had this podcast and I think we had like a good six month run up before we were going to launch the course where we could just start doing like education, education, education, education you know, myth busting, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, really making the case for barbells. yeah We also, you know, decided this is not going to be an eight week, eight weeks to a beach bod PDF with hyperlinks to YouTube videos, right? This is going to be a six month fully guided.
Speaker: Here's how you're going to make meaningful change to your strength, but your bone specifically, right, which we need. more time to make change to bone than we do to muscle. And you're actually going to learn how to strength train. You're going to not just be given the fish, but you're going to be taught how to fish. And so we were like, this is going to be a whole big, enormous Yeah.
Speaker: And we also decided that we were going to teach live group classes because that's what Laurel and I have done for a long time. And also that is what our potential students were used to, right? These are women who have come from the yoga world, the Pilates world, the group class world, right? Bar.
Speaker: kettlebell classes, that kind of thing. So we wanted to have that sort of group dynamic. And then we also knew that more likely than not, not everybody was going to be able to come to live classes. So we made sure that the recordings were then also going to be available. So you could take the class at the time that it was offered, or you could just take it at the time that worked for you. And Also that we wanted to be coaching live. So that's a big part of what's in the courses. Like each time you take a class, the people who are there live are getting live coaching. The people who watch it on the recording often tell us that they get a lot out of hearing the coaching cues that we're giving to other people.
Speaker: yeah yeah Yeah. We also knew that our course was going to include impact training. We knew from Lift More that this is an osteogenic exercise type. And it seems that combining impact training with lifting weights is kind of the cocktail that we need for for optimal bone building stimulus. Also in talking with Dr. John Gregorio, it looks like this is still where the research is pointing that strength and impact combined have some of the best evidence for making changes to bone mineral density, especially for our demographic of interest, kind of like strength training and balance training combined have the best evidence for fall prevention. It's not just strength training and it's not just balance challenging exercise, but they kind of go together like peanut butter and chocolate to make
Speaker: for the best possible fall prevention exercise. So we knew we were gonna combine with this initial release of the course, we were gonna combine strength and impact training. Because our course was called Bone Density Course, we were like, we are going to build bone, bitches.
Speaker: That's right. And then there was February, 2025.
Speaker: Laurel, where were you when Stu Phillips posted his reel that changed everything for us? I was at my dad's house. I think it was, yeah it was February. might've been March. I don't know. We had been pelted with this reel for like a month. And then finally, i think, you know, that exercise scientists reached out to us in our DMs while we're keeping him anonymous and he started to talk to us. And I was at my dad's house when he started to engage with us. And this was around the time that we had kept being forwarded this reel from Dr. Phillips and we were like, oh shit, we we're going to have to deal with this. We're going to have to deal with the fact that basically there's a really big name scientist dropping a science bomb on us.
Speaker: I hope we survive.
Speaker: I hope we can make it out of this. Well, and at this point in time, we had done, we were in the middle of our second cohort. So I remember when I heard about it, my first reaction was like, I just got to get through this cohort and then I can think about this. Like, i was like, this is, this is going to mean something. um And I'm not sure i have the bandwidth to think about it right now. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I was at my dad's, it was spring break, I think. I don't i don't know. I was like, oh shit. Yeah. So in February, 2025, we interviewed Belinda Beck, who was the senior author of Lift More.
Speaker: And then shortly after that, Dr. Stu Phillips posted a reel talking about research that he himself did not do, but talking about the forest plots of the 2021 Kistler-Fischbacher review.
Speaker: which is a review of trials involving bone density, including Liffmore. And our interview with Professor Beck implied that heavy was what was necessary to build bone and that we should combine heavy with impact. But then the Kishle Fisbacher systematic review and meta-analysis where Beck is the senior author, she's involved in this, suggests that the moderate loads build bone as well, or possibly better, or it might just be that we have more research on moderate, right? And so in this post that Stu Phillips made, he is highlighting the fact that moderate works and that even light works in some cases.
Speaker: Yeah, and he also highlights a single study written by ah lead author, Korpelainen, which tracked falls and fractures in addition to it being a bone building intervention, I think it's like secondary research question was something about falls and fractures and that their intervention not only built bone, and I believe it was moderate intensity, not only built bone, but also ended up having a positive effect on the incidences of falls and fractures and incorporated power-based movement. If you read the exercise intervention description,
Speaker: And this gave me some inspiration and push to base my master's degree research for a class I was taking on a lit review. I had to write a literature review on exercise for fall prevention. And I looked into exercise that was more strength-based versus more power-based. So Sarah and i start to talk about that more.
Speaker: And we realized that we needed to change our message away from it has to be heavy. And that what appears to be the driver of the change that's happening is not so much the specific load as it is the effort used at that load.
Speaker: That's what's driving the changes that we see from resistance training. Yeah. Like how many reps you're leaving in reserve at the end of set. How hard it feels at the end of the set. coming of yeah So we then changed the title of the course from bone density course to lift for longevity.
Speaker: Laura, what was our rationale for this? um Because we realized that we could no longer say that, you know, our course was a bone density course and attach because we build you up to lifting heavy, even though it still possibly does build bone density because but basically moderate and heavy, moderate being the bigger portion of our course are both the intensity that you probably need to build bone. But I think what we we started to recognize is that actually,
Speaker: Our course was so much more than that. yeah And people were getting benefits that went beyond just changes on their DEXA scan, which we were you know definitely getting this great news from students that they were seeing improvements quantitatively on DEXA scans. But we were like, you know, this is kind of limiting to just call this bone density course. I think we also wanted to distance ourselves from This false narrative that it has to be heavy, even though we weren't just teaching a course about lifting heavy weights, we didn't want to be perpetuating the idea.
Speaker: I think because we also started to recognize that the the idea itself is is limiting to women. Ultimately, we want to help women. We want to give them evidence-based exercise advice, right? Not not exercise advice that fits our brand narrative. um or that supports a product that we sell.
Speaker: ah But again, we'll say like, we did not have to change our product. We we did not. In fact, we we taught it like three more times, almost exactly as is.
Speaker: and we just called it live for longevity because our course had so much more than just heavy weights it had moderate weights but we also had the impact training right which is power-based a lot of it and it had some balance challenging stuff in there as well in the impact training and the barbell work so we were like you know what this is this is less about just building up a tissue of the body And it's actually more about ensuring our own strength, our own agility, our own ability to manage load and basically prevent the types of life shortening things that can happen when you don't have enough strength, when you don't have the agility, when you don't have balance. we' We're like, you know our course does more than just build bone and we need to actually highlight that.
Speaker: So we we we were bone density course, colon, lift for longevity. We just took off the first part and we're lift for longevity. and We also created power play. Sarah, do you remember why we did that?
Speaker: Well, you know, we've been spending a lot of time focusing on the value of strength for so many aspects of your life, not just your bone density, but, you know, really everything as you get older. Yeah. But we're starting to learn more about power separately from strength. The two impact each other, but they're not exactly the same thing. So we wanted to create power play so that it wasn't so much about the focus of that impact, which was what we were thinking about more in terms of building bone density.
Speaker: but more about the ability to produce power. And so we built this course that teaches you nine different progressions of a movement, starting from the absolute least amount of effort, impact, power, all the way up to like super dynamic, very challenging versions.
Speaker: And then we teach you how to assess for yourself where you should be working along that continuum. And we even give you little workouts to do that are you know between three and seven minutes long, because we really wanted to give people an adjunct training module for want of a better description. A lot of them were brand new exercises that were not in Lift for Longevity.
Speaker: And it was sort of this lower price point around a hundred dollars. We just wanted to make sure we were including this power component as well. So at this point, we've changed our message away from it has to be heavy.
Speaker: And we've also now created a shorter course for people to work on power. We had taught bone density course now live for longevity four times. And then we decided after this past fourth cycle that we wanted to make some changes and some pretty big changes to Lift for Longevity.
Speaker: And so that's what we want to share with folks now. Laura, why did we feel like Lift for Longevity needed like an edit and an upgrade? It was about teaching the course now for children.
Speaker: separate times that gave us experience and taught us, you know, what was in fact working and did need to change and what we probably could change to make the course even better. Ultimately, not that it wasn't working, but that it was presenting some friction that we didn't need to be pushing people through. I think we wanted to lower some of the barriers to entry that we found were presenting obstacles to students, not that they were insurmountable obstacles, but that they did provide just enough friction to slow us down a little bit. We looked at like the value of the exercise versus how much friction it was causing to teach it. And we were like, is this worth keeping for the amount of friction and for several exercises? We were like, no, it's not. There's this. is It could be something else than this. It does not need to be this. You said that so much more concisely than I did.
Speaker: So we used a linear progression where over the course of six blocks, and every block is four weeks, that certain lifts would get objectively heavier, not not just because people got stronger and now they could pick up a heavier weight, but like the rep ranges got smaller. Okay, so most of those exercises now Their heaviest is six to eight reps, whereas we went as heavy for a few exercises as three to five reps.
Speaker: That's considerably heavier than a six to eight rep range. Some were four to six reps, three to five, but a lot of the exercises that went that heavy now stop at six to eight reps.
Speaker: And now... Only the deadlift and the back squat get truly heavy in that four to six rep range. We don't do anything to three to five anymore. It's four to six. The rest of the exercises live in this six to eight rep range. What do you see as the benefit of this choice? You know, it's just technically less challenging to work in a more moderate to heavy rep range than it is to work in a truly heavy rep range.
Speaker: The 68 rep range is kind of my favorite rep range. It's moderate into heavy. So if you're hitting eight reps, you're still moderate. And if you're hitting six reps, you've just drifted into to heavy. And I frequently train in this range for my compound lifts because I find that it is a heavy enough weight to wear weight.
Speaker: You probably sense very early on in the set that you've got to give it your all to get through the next five reps, but it's not so fatiguing that you need such a long rest afterwards and it's easier to warm up for and to have your form and technique ready and dialed in after a short warmup, because again, you're not getting that close to your maximum. That's why I like it. And I think I like it for our group as well, because I think they're gonna get the feeling of heavy without having to spend so much time warming up. And and then also to have kind of that option to have it live even more moderate.
Speaker: You know, like today you may not wanna take the weight that gets you to six reps. You might wanna take the weight that gets you to eight, right? It's a great starter, heavy rep range. Yeah, I agree. um Yeah.
Speaker: So what else did we change, Sarah? Well, we also shifted towards some more of the strength exercises that are also balance challenging. We had some already, but we now have some more.
Speaker: We now take it to a back rack, step back lunge.
Speaker: We added the kickstand. Romanian deadlift. It's a less stable base of support for sure. Sarah mentioned about the lunge, like the lunge is going to take you from plates being carried close to your center of mass to plates coming up to chest level and then a bar on your back. And then we decided to include more intentionally power exercises in the course. We already had a couple, but we've added exercises that are really full on power-based exercises, like a thruster sit to stand, which is going from sitting to standing and then also pushing the weight overhead.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly, with a barbell, but also we're giving them options to use their plates, yeah dumbbells, or or kettlebells. But yeah, this is a great whole body power exercise where you're working lower body muscles, you're working upper body muscles in one big movement. Think of it like a goblet squat to a box and then standing up as quickly as possible and driving the weight overhead as quickly as possible and then just starting that all over again. It's great exercise, yeah. Yeah, it'll get your heart rate up.
Speaker: We also added the push press. So we used to teach pike push-ups. A lot of students really struggled with the technique of a pike push-up. It always just evolved into a push-up. yeah So we're like, yeah, screw it. There are other ways to load the overhead position. So we're going to do a push press again. You can use a plate, you can use a barbell, you can use dumbbells, kettlebells. And this is basically using your legs to help push ah a weight over your head and to make that movement fast and come from the ground. You think ah a push press is basically in some ways a prep for your thruster sit to stand, but you're learning at least the like the speed of pushing overhead and using your legs with your arms. Yeah, there's definitely a relationship for sure.
Speaker: We also took out some exercises that were too time consuming or futsy in the setup. um These are the ones I'm happy to say goodbye to. or Or exercises that just presented significant mobility challenges, right? And we took these out to reduce friction.
Speaker: you know recognizing ultimately that consistency is most important long term we felt it important to make the work more doable less friction while keeping it high yield right with the current exercises i think there's a bigger return on investment of the exercises we removed sarah which are you happiest that we got rid of um Well, this one wasn't ah a super frictiony one, but we had an exercise called a plate pinch ah where you're bent over and you're pulling a plate to your chest and then you just stay there. I like that it's spelled pinch like pinche in Spanish, like pinche plate pinch. That's right. I spelled it the Spanish way for you. Yeah.
Speaker: um Or wait, what's, isn't there like some arm balance position called a pinche or something? Oh, pinche mireasana? No, no, but um not in yoga, like in gymnastics. Oh, I don't know. I'll go look. Planch, planch. That's what it is. My, my plate planche. Anyway, I'm, I'm glad to be rid of those only because I always felt a little bit like,
Speaker: What's this for? i mean, I know what it's for, but in terms of like our you know return on time investment, if we're like, we're giving you this hour, this did not seem like it had a super high return. Let me guess. Students would ask, where should I be feeling? Where should I be feeling this? Which is the dreaded question. The question I hate the most. because that that Not that I don't want to answer that question, but that tells me that like, this is not coming across correctly. um And then also the fiddliness ah And it's fiddly because it requires a lot of range of motion or like we also taught a lot of variations to get around the range of motion that you need for a front squat. Oh yeah. There was just front squat, which just got super fiddly.
Speaker: Yeah. So, so we've, we've basically taken the front squat out and now that muscle group gets worked in the lunge progression. My favorite that I'm saying goodbye to is the hip thrust.
Speaker: I, I never liked teaching it, even though I do it, but I do it on a machine at the gym. It is a hundred times better when you use a machine at the gym because there's none of the futsy setup, but hip thrusts are kind of a nightmare, especially when you're teaching a group of people that all have different size plates and And that are different shaped bodies and that have different sensitivities and have different height benches and boxes. yeah It's like you got to get the measurements right to get the bar over your hips to be able to drive the bar up from a bridge position where your back is against a surface. And I was like, oh, make it stop. stop You know, um I would like to say just as an aside, i recently upgraded my home.
Speaker: equipment, I now have a wall rack. It's attached to my wall and the and the arms fold in. So then you fold it out to use it. It's phenomenal. But this only works if you have two barbells at home, but I've started doing hip thrusts over one barbell in the rack with my shoulder pad on it. And then the other bar in my lap. Wait, wait, say that again. Okay. So it might visualize a rack, like a, like a cage, whatever you've got a barbell at like shin height.
Speaker: sitting in the rack. Yes. And then that also has my neck pad that I use or my clients use when they're doing their squats. So then I put my back on that. Oh, nice. I sit on the ground or I sit on a pad. I put my regular barbell across my lap and then I hip thrust over that. And what's actually really nice about it is because it's a bar, it rotates with you. Oh, wow. So it feels like it's a much more natural movement. So if you have the ability to do that, this is a big aside.
Speaker: That's also quite a good home version, but certainly nobody in our course or maybe one person could have done that. And we weren't teaching that. So yeah, no, but I'm definitely going to try that. That sounds that sounds yeah it's genius. Yeah, I love that. Laurel, what are your favorite exercises that we added? I think calf raises.
Speaker: Of course, I think that. Yeah. ah We did not have calf raises as an official exercise in our course. And now it's an exercise every single block.
Speaker: And I think it went from not an exercise to one of our you know most featured exercises because we realized that We want to prepare people's feet and ankles and calves for the impact training.
Speaker: Calf raises are a phenomenal way to do that. The calves turn out time and time again in the research to be important when looking at things like sarcopenia, when looking at things like balance. Ankle mobility ends up being important for balance, but also for squatting. The the squatting that we're asking people to do requires a certain amount of ankle mobility. Calf raises turn out to be an amazing exercise for just getting more flexibility in your ankles. um I'm a member of the Church of Calf Raises because I am a runner and all runners are members of the Church of Calf Raises. And if they're not, they should be converted because the calf is an exceptionally important muscle in in running. Strength training the calves as a runner is, is in my opinion, a non-negotiable. Um, but anyway, I think that there are just so many longevity reasons that you want to be training the calves that play into this idea of fall prevention, right?
Speaker: In addition to let's prep you to be able to tolerate impact training. Yeah, absolutely. I, I am not really a member of the church of calf raises, but I am a, um,
Speaker: ah only because I don't especially enjoy them, but I do think they're incredibly valuable and absolutely should be included for all of those reasons. You know, the reality is when I go and work with my less mobile clients, I have them stand at a kitchen counter and do heel raises.
Speaker: As part of it, because it's like, yeah, we got to get your ankles moving better. If you're going better at not falling, your feet got to get it, you know, they got to get moving. So yes, it's a great series of exercises. I'm not going to say it's my favorite exercise. Okay, fair. how that fair what is your What is your favorite exercise that we're adding?
Speaker: I'm excited about the bruster. Oh, yeah. Okay. I like that one. It feels good. It's fun to do. i thought you were going to say back flies. Oh, really? Yeah. Like I'm so obsessed with getting my first chin up right now that everything I do that's shoulder related has to be pointing towards that. So like that is helpful for that. So sure. Yes.
Speaker: Back flies. Why not? You don't have to change your answer just because I expected you to say back flies. No, no. Overall, I would say the thruster, but like that's a great one for shoulders as well. Nice. And actually this, which is not a specific exercise, but a practice that we've been doing all along and we're providing like a lot more of it are AMRAPs.
Speaker: Laurel, what's an AMRAP? AMRAP stands for as many reps as possible, sometimes rounds as possible. but We're using it to mean in as many reps as possible. You've probably heard us talk about a one rep max test, which is the maximal amount of load you can lift one time and one time only. An AMRAP is a rep max test. If you do an AMRAP in place of just a set leaving one, two, or three reps in reserve, if you instead do as many reps as possible, you're basically testing your repetition max for a whatever load you're lifting. So we used to actually set aside an entire special class to do a one rep max test. That's that maximal load test toward the end of the course. And it was learning opportunity, but it was also a kind of a celebration for a lot of folks about how ah strong they actually were. And we would build the people who attended this this special class up to lifting
Speaker: one rep max in either the back squat or the deadlift. They got to choose the exercise. Pretty cool. A lot of people had a lot of big breakthroughs in these one rep max tests. But we found that when you test a maximal amount of weight, someone can lift one time and one time only, that is a whole process that takes more than just a couple minutes because you have to warm up. You have to do multiple warm-up sets. It's also something that you have to have like some...
Speaker: time under your belt, like actually having lifted in practice this lift for months, right before you start trying to lift your heaviest weight in it. I mean, I think that's probably a good idea, right? Whereas this new approach, right? So we're not going to do the one RM test anymore.
Speaker: We're going to do AMRAPs. And we're going to start doing these early on in the course. We're going to start in month one with an AMRAP of one or two exercises. In month two, we're going to do a few more. And then starting in month three, we're going AMRAP and exercise every single workout. So students are going to have the option, always an option, to AMRAP a particular exercise that we select out for that workout. And what they're going to do is that instead of looking back on what they lifted last week and seeing how many reps they lifted for a given load and then maybe picking up that same amount of weight and you know lifting the weight and leaving two to three or one to two reps in reserve they're going to pick up that weight and they're going to kind of let go of the rir that's written that's prescribed like how many reps are supposed to leave in the tank and they're going to try to lift that weight
Speaker: pretty much as many times as they can. And this is often also caveated with, okay, if you're confident with this lift, if you feel like I got this, I'm going to see how many I can do, like go for it. Go until you can't do another rep.
Speaker: For those of you who are maybe a little bit wary or concerned, you can skip it entirely. You can choose a different exercise to AMRAP for this workout, or can still leave your two reps in reserve, but make sure that you're leaving only two reps in reserve. And so what we're doing is we're kind of elevating the experiment to create almost a gamification of it to where we're like, we're not going to go through the motions and do the set that we expect to do. We're actually going to see what am I capable of here? And I often use this analogy when i'm working with clients one-on-one, which is like, if someone were going to hand you a thousand dollars,
Speaker: there's money on the line. Like imagine that there's more than just completing the set at stake here. How many reps do you think you could do? I think it it elevates the experience in people's minds where they're like, I'm gonna really tune into the fatigue I'm experiencing at the end of the set. And I'm gonna start to ask myself,
Speaker: Do I have another rep? Do I have another rep? Do I have another rep? And we've been using this approach, this rep max test more and more every time we teach the course. So this is not a new thing, but it's going to become a more prominent thing in this fifth round of Lift for Longevity. What we have found happens is that people will double the reps that they did the week prior.
Speaker: So they will have lifted like 20 pounds, 10 to 12 reps the week prior. And they'll do this AMRAP test and they'll lift it 20 times. And what it tells us is that people are still very much working out how to interpret fatigue at the end of a set and very much working out what it actually means for the set to be high effort. And we want to give people more regular opportunities to be working on this and learning this.
Speaker: Yeah. couple of things I was going to add is certainly when you're doing your AMRAP, you don't have to go all the way to failure. If you don't yet feel confident enough, right? You can still do your AMRAP and leave two in the tank, right? And still discover that actually, oh, wow, I was really still under loading.
Speaker: The other thing I think that is so different for women in particular is we're accustomed to taking a lot of the time, either group fitness classes, or we work with a trainer or someone and, you know, they just tell us what to do. And they say, you're going to lift this weight. They're going hand you the weight. I say lift this, you know, 10 times or something, or, you know, you're in a group class and there's whatever limited options of weights to have, and you just pick one. And that's what you're working with.
Speaker: This idea of actually tracking your own fatigue is a very new concept for a lot of women in particular, but what we know. is that more important than how heavy the weight is that you're lifting, how many repetitions you're actually doing is how close to failure are you getting?
Speaker: Is it getting challenging enough? That's what's gonna make change. So learning to actually track that using this AMRAP test is so, so useful and you can do it.
Speaker: I mean, just people listening to this episode, take an exercise that you do regularly, do it with the weight that you usually do it with and just keep doing it until you feel like you could only do one or two more and see what that is. Because let's say your program has you doing 10 to 12 reps of squats, let's say with your 20 pound kettlebell.
Speaker: And you just keep doing 10 to 12 reps. And it might be 10 on a day. You feel a little more tired. Try unwrapping that. And maybe you discover that actually, if you just keep going, you could do 25 reps, which happens all the time. yeah When I was trying to convince my mom to change her deadlift from like 30 pounds to 35 pounds.
Speaker: And she didn't believe me that she would still be able to easily do 10 reps of it. I was like, well, let's do this. Take your 30 pound barbell, do as many as you can. And she did like 37 repetitions. And I was like, okay, do you see how, if we just add five pounds, probably you'll still be able to like squeeze 10 of these out. So we just don't have this, this, um, skill, this, um,
Speaker: expertise in what fatigue actually feels like and what it then means. Right. So, you know, there's a very big difference between just sticking to what the spreadsheet tells you to do and actually paying attention to what your body is telling you in that moment and actually going much closer to fatigue, which is where we now know the value is a lot of the value is, I should say.
Speaker: Yeah. In episode 62, we did an episode about a research paper and the title of the episode is you don't know how strong you are says research and this paper that we look at as a scoping review and exploratory meta-analysis that investigated whether or not lifters were under loading and on average found that people when they self-selected loads to lift for a given rep range, they would select loads that were about 53% of their 1RM, but they were only lifting these weights for like 10 to 12 reps, which should be more in the range of like 70 to 75% of your
Speaker: So that's an example of underloading where these people were leaving too many reps in reserve. They needed to pick up a heavier weight. And at least one of the studies in this meta-analysis, they essentially did an AMRAP test, right? They did exactly what we're going to do in the course, pretty much every workout, which is a test to failure.
Speaker: After participants chose the weight they thought was appropriate for 10 reps, the researchers told them, okay, once they got to 10 reps, do you have another rep? Continue.
Speaker: And they had these people continue the set to failure where they couldn't lift the weight one more time. And they averaged about 16 reps. More than a quarter were able to do more than 19 reps. wow And this is what we see in Lift for Longevity all the time. yeah So although they thought they had selected a 10-rep weight, many actually had been stopping roughly six, some of them 10 reps shy of their of their actual potential. um and And Dr. John Gregorio
Speaker: in our previous episode also hints at how lifting light weights can cause you to kind of peter out and end the set too early, not because you're experiencing fatigue of the muscle, but because you might be actually experiencing other types of fatigue, like mental fatigue, you're just fucking bored. Or um some people experience cardiovascular fatigue, right? They start their heart rate is elevating and they feel like they're breathing heavy and that's why they stopped the set. So it's ah another good case for picking up a weight that is moderate at the very least and and maybe, you know, moderate into heavy. So we're going to use AMRAPs a lot more in Lift for Longevity to help people calibrate whether they're using the right load for the rep range that's written in the spreadsheet. So instead but of just doing the reps listed in the spreadsheet, they're going to listen to their body, right? We love that.
Speaker: And they're going to keep going until they feel like they probably couldn't do another rep or as Sarah said, if they need to leave more than that, but we're going to elevate the experience for them, gamify it in a sense, and they're going to test. We're going to test every, every workout. And hopefully the outcome of this is that people get better at using the tool of RIR and they take their sets close enough to failure to make a change, all the changes we're trying to make.
Speaker: And they see that the loads they're lifting for given rep ranges, go up a lot more over the course of six months because they have actually correctly calibrated what load to select.
Speaker: And then finally, Sarah, we've made big changes to our impact training. yeah what What are they? Well, our previous impact program, there wasn't a clear place to track what you were doing. There wasn't a clear and coherent progression from this exercise to the others. And then also, you know, we were recommending that people got up to eventually doing impact training every day of the week.
Speaker: But, you know, if we're talking about friction, maybe that's not realistic. So yeah. we've just really organized it much better and cleaned it up. So in the new version, and actually I should say, Laurel has organized it and cleaned it up. i didn't do any of that. So i don't know why I'm saying we, Laurel has cleaned it up and organized it better.
Speaker: And so in the new version- You talked through it with me. I was or her sounding board. Okay. So part participants are now tracking both of their impact variation, which one they're doing and the number of contacts right alongside their same sheet where they're tracking their weights and sets and reps that they're lifting.
Speaker: And then as the impact intensity increases, the volume comes down, right? Because we know when we're doing certainly power exercises that the harder the thing is you're doing. the fewer you can do where it remains a power exercise and before it turns into like just endurance. And frequency now we're saying just like four days a week.
Speaker: And then we've also added more no impact and low impact options for people who aren't ready for that higher impact work or need more time to just build some tolerance in their tissues.
Speaker: These still train speed and power and they rehearse a movement pattern that will then prepare you for more impact later. So our impact is now sort of like an impact and power combined.
Speaker: as well as we have more power-based exercise in the strength part. The reality is at the moment, there's no one perfect evidence-based formula for exactly how many days, how many ground contacts, how many jumps everyone should do. So our goal is to give people a really practical, structured way to start where they are and progress over time with their tolerance for the level of impact, for their ability to increase some speed and for power.
Speaker: So we have made a lot of changes, but what is staying the same, Laurel? It's still us. Yeah, we're still teaching a six-month course. It's still fully guided. There are still two live classes per week for six months. That's 48 live classes. We still have the circle community.
Speaker: I love our circle group. There's celebration around breakthroughs and DEXA updates and everybody encouraging everybody. It's also a great place for submitting form check videos for asynchronous review of your form and technique. If you aren't able to be in the live classes and get that synchronously, you can film yourself and give it to us in circle and we we'll give you some tips. And then, you know, you still own the course forever. So you buy Lift for Longevity. Over the course of six months, 48 classes are uploaded to the portal in addition to the existing pre-recorded material, and you get access to that forever. That is all the same.
Speaker: And we're keeping it with barbells because we still think that they are one of the best long-term investments for strength training, especially at home, because they take up less space. They cost about as much as accumulating multiple kettlebells, but give you a lot more options.
Speaker: And it makes it really easy to keep adding load as you get stronger. And the other thing that stayed the same is our big overarching thesis, which is, you know, we originally chose six months because it takes roughly six to eight months to see any meaningful change happening to bone.
Speaker: But over the years of teaching this, we've realized that there's also a bigger benefit to working with people for that long because six months is a really good chunk of time to start changing habits.
Speaker: And even to maybe start to take on a new identity, right? The goal for us since the beginning, the goal for us has always been not just for people to like buy and take the course and complete it and say, I completed Lift for Longevity.
Speaker: The goal for us was to have women come out of the course and think now, i am somebody who strength trains. I'm somebody who lifts weights. And so that at the end of the course, maybe like a lot of people do, that person might just go back to month one and start again. But now with these heavier loads, because they're stronger than they were six months ago, continue the training on their own and then just keep going, you know, long after that initial six months are over. Yeah. And as you put it yesterday, you become a bad bitch who lifts barbells. That's right.
Speaker: All of these changes we made to lift for longevity reflect what Sarah and I have learned from running the course and noticing how we might be able to further reduce friction, further support participants' consistency. It also reflects where we see the evidence going and what our learning curve has has undergone for not only building strength and building bone, but also preventing falls.
Speaker: right So it means no more of these FUTSI exercises. We're bringing more lower friction exercises again. We're adding more power-based exercises. We're incorporating more strength exercises that actually challenge balance.
Speaker: And we've given our impact training a lot more structure and a clearer way to track it and progress with it. wo who Yeah. I'm excited for round five. Are you? I am too. I'm excited.
Speaker: It's, this is silly, but like in some ways I'm excited to teach our free strength class on September 8th because it's actually different. It is the first class of Lift for Longevity, but because we've made these changes, it's a bit different than the one that we've been teaching for the past, I don't know how four years or whatever. So I'm excited to go teach that class as, as our free strength class that you too can sign up for if you would like to come try it out.
Speaker: Yes. And with that, don't forget to head to the show notes and get on the list for the free class. You will be given the Zoom link to join. And if you don't join via Zoom, you can always watch the replay.
Speaker: Yeah, you'll get the link for the replay after the class. either the same day or the next day, and you will have that link for the next 30 days. So lots and lots of people message us and they're like, I can't make it live. Will there be a recording? Yes, there will be a recording. There's always a recording. It's 2026. If there wasn't a recording, that would be just ah archaic. So yeah.
Speaker: Telling you right now there's a recording. You'll get it if you take the class. You'll get it if you don't take the class. You'll get the recording. And then also, I just want to mention, two days following the strength class, we also have a Q&A. It's sort of like a ask me anything where we sit down and answer your questions about the course.
Speaker: And you get to look at what the portal looks like from a previous course. So you get two opportunities to try this out. One where you take the class with us and one where we sort of talk you through the structure of it. And you get to ask any questions that you might have like, I have XYZ injury. Is it safe for me to do this kind of thing? That's just two days later on Thursday the 10th.
Speaker: tenth So you'll get both of those just by signing up for the strength class. What a deal. What a deal. All right. That's it, folks. If you could please also leave us a rating, a review, forward to a friend. Maybe you know somebody who's possibly interested in taking the course. It's been...
Speaker: Another great episode, Sarah. Thank you for sitting down with me and reliving the past a little bit putin and and getting excited about the future. Yeah, a little trip down memory lane where we've been, where we're going. I'm very excited to teach this upcoming cohort.
Speaker: Me too. And I think, you know what, this is kind of how it is with Sarah and I. We're just going to continue to adapt and change as we learn more. And we're going to continue always to try to make it better, to make it more possible for you to get just fucking strong as you possibly can.
Speaker: and And thanks for joining us. thanks for Thanks for being a part of this community, Movement Logic community. effort and We'll see you in two weeks. All right.
Speaker: Peace out.
