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57: Move Over Big Boys. We Lift Heavy Too.
943 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Episode 57 of the Movement Logic podcast. In this episode, Laurel and Sarah discuss the fact that lifting heavy is not automatically a strength sport and that more people would feel invited to lift heavy if the media didn’t fixate so much on barbells as equipment for large, young, competitive male lifters and instead represented people that look more like everyone else and shared goals beyond competitive ones.
You will learn:
- The difference between powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, body-building, and lifting heavy weights.
- Why large, young men are over-represented in the media’s depiction of lifting heavy weights, and how this has been a deterrent to other groups of people (especially older women) who potentially have more to gain from lifting heavy weights than large, young men do.
- How competitive athletes often have to take their training to extreme levels, but how everyone else who wants to see enormous benefits to their health can train with a far more moderate approach.
- Sarah and Laurel’s first impression of lifting heavy weights growing up.
- How being an elite athlete can often mean sacrificing non-insignificant aspects of health.
- How when women start lifting weights they also start saying no to toxic bullshit in their lives.
- Risk of injury is often higher amongst more experienced/elite lifters.
- How women’s fear of getting “bulky” is understandable given that in our patriarchal society, women are often rewarded for a small and thin appearance.
- Ironically lifting heavy, despite what conventional wisdom might have us believe, is not typically the best way to bulk up.
- Everyone assumes that old age means getting frail, gaining weight, and becoming less capable, but it absolutely does not need to.
- Standing up out of a chair becomes a non-issue if older people are regularly squatting heavy.
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Transcript
Media's Influence on Barbell Perception
00:00:00
Speaker
I don't know that any of us have the power to control what the media highlights for us and puts in front of us. I just know that if we at least understand why we might not visualize ourselves lifting barbells and how it might have to do with the images and the stories and the ideas that we've been fed by the media, we might be better critical thinkers.
00:00:21
Speaker
when we are presented with the opportunity to do something like lift weights for strength training and go, you know what, maybe I am the type of person that could do something like that.
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up to date and cutting edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
Introduction and Misconceptions About Barbell Lifting
00:01:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court, DPT. Hello. We are still in Los Angeles. Sarah's always in Los Angeles. Pretty much. I'm still batch recording episodes with Sarah in Los Angeles. And we are today talking about the fact that lifting heavy barbells is not automatically a strength sport.
00:01:32
Speaker
Because I think these two ideas get conflated to where when we see a barbell, we immediately think that we need to be in some competition with someone very large and male.
00:01:42
Speaker
and or we just have images of large male men and I would like to large male men large men now I'm just thinking of like gigantic postal workers yeah I think that I would like for everyone to work on decoupling these two ideas so that barbells are something you if you are an older woman maybe or a woman at all envision using as well but first we're reading reviews and the title of this one is probably my favorite and it is
00:02:14
Speaker
Which if you don't know what that is, it's a very specific reference because this person is leaving a review off of an episode where I referenced
00:02:22
Speaker
a YouTube show called, uh, which has two drag queens, famous drag queens, Trixie Mattel and Katya. Uh, total aside, I love that show and people should watch it. I've tried to get Laurel to watch it and she's like, I liked it. I liked it. It is a, I don't know that I would watch it like binge watch it. It's a, it's an acquired taste. Yeah. No, it's funny, but they are very funny. And the name of this person is and one six seven.
00:02:50
Speaker
Which I also like. And 167. And 167. I'm wondering about the significance of the 167. Well, maybe they'll let us know. Let us know 167. What is the significance of 167? If you wish. So here's what 167 writes. Leaving a review because I love Trixie and Katya too.
00:03:10
Speaker
leaving a five-star review because I appreciate all the informative and thought-provoking content you share on the pod. Thanks for helping me learn and question things as I go. You are welcome, 167. It is our absolute pleasure.
Media's Role in Discouraging Non-Traditional Lifters
00:03:22
Speaker
Okay, so today we're talking about the fact that lifting heavy barbells is not automatically a strength sport. We're gonna talk about just a couple of strength sports briefly. I'm talking about strength sports not because I think there's anything wrong about strength sports. In fact, I like sports, but I think that what happens is when we conflate something like lifting a barbell for the purpose of health and longevity with strength sports, the way that strength sports often are represented in the media, make it so that when we see the strength sport happening, we don't
00:03:52
Speaker
if we're a woman or if we are someone who's a little bit smaller or if we're somebody who is an older woman or just older, we maybe don't then visualize ourselves lifting that barbell and we don't even think that it's for us because it's for competitive athletes and this can create some negative associations around something like lifting barbells.
00:04:09
Speaker
We're going to be talking a little bit about two types of competitive lifting sports, powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting. Now, Olympic weightlifting, confusingly enough, there's a lot of confusing things about these two sports, but Olympic weightlifting is sometimes just called weightlifting.
00:04:24
Speaker
which I think is so, I mean, that's the most generic word you could have chosen to mean this particular exceptionally specific way of lifting a barbell, which is very, very particular. These sports have a long and rich history. So I'm just going to tell you what I understand about what they are, the differences between them, and then how being a competitive lifter of barbells
00:04:46
Speaker
whether it's Olympic lifting or power lifting requires a different like entirely different set of goals well not entirely different but very different goals than if you were to lift barbells for health and longevity purposes and this might seem obvious but i think it bears articulating simply because sometimes i think what happens is we can just develop
00:05:06
Speaker
ideas that are based around loose associations that are based around images that were fed that we haven't really processed and develop opinions about things like lifting barbells that are really ones that have been given to us through the representation of say a barbell rather than ones that we've really sat and thought about. So we're gonna sit and think about it today. I like sitting and thinking. It's my favorite thing to do while I'm sitting.
00:05:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's the best thing to do while sitting. It's even better while walking. Yes. It's hard to podcast while you're walking though. So first of all, we're going to talk really briefly about the difference between powerlifting and weightlifting slash Olympic lifting.
Understanding Powerlifting and Olympic Weightlifting
00:05:46
Speaker
And we're gonna let Sarah tell us some of the differences.
00:05:49
Speaker
Well, one of the things that's really confusing is that powerlifting is not actually using what is called power as the definition of what is known as power. One of the things that's really confusing about it is that the capacity that we're training with powerlifting is not actually power because power is velocity dependent, right? And it involves moving something at speed.
00:06:17
Speaker
Whereas powerlifting is just looking for what is the absolute heaviest thing that I could lift, not that I could lift quickly, right? So powerlifting generally, or like in the sort of strictest sense of it, is three lifts.
00:06:34
Speaker
It's the deadlift, the squat, and the bench press. I've shifted what I'm doing slightly, but basically the program I started with when I started my lifting was a power lifting program, and those were the only lifts that I was doing. So that is the definition of power lifting, but what you have to remember is it's not training power, and incredibly annoyingly, and ironically or weirdly,
00:06:56
Speaker
Olympic weightlifting is actually training power because it's about doing lifts with speed, whatever the maximum amount that you can lift quickly.
00:07:05
Speaker
to that position. Are there only two of those super technically? Yeah, let me tell you this. The exercises you're performing or competing with in powerlifting, and powerlifting has a cool history, and you can read about it on the internet. Wikipedia is a great resource really, but it really all eventually boiled down to three lifts. The squat
00:07:29
Speaker
the bench press, and the deadlift. And those are the three lifts that you are competing with in powerlifting. It doesn't necessarily mean that people who are competitive powerlifters are only training those lifts. They're probably doing other lifts as well. And it also doesn't necessarily mean that powerlifters, like Sarah said, it's about max effort, a single max effort in the heaviest possible way you can lift. It doesn't mean that they're always training.
00:07:54
Speaker
one repetition maximum lifts in their training sessions. But in powerlifting competitions, the lifters are going to do three attempts at each of these three lifts and then their heaviest lift of all three lifts gets added together for one score. And whoever gets the highest score in the gender, weight class, and age group that they happen to be in, they win.
00:08:19
Speaker
Pretty straightforward, actually. Yeah. So Olympic weightlifting is just two lifts. It's the clean and jerk. And so the clean is when you take a barbell from the floor. There's different ways to clean the barbell. Basically, you're going to take the bar from the floor to shoulder level or the rack position. That's the clean part. Yeah. And then you're going to drive it up overhead in a
00:08:45
Speaker
what's called a jerk. So you're using velocity to help because you can move the weight from the floor to your shoulders only if you use some amount of speed because you have to actually drop your body quickly under the bar to get it there and kind of the same idea goes with the jerk. And you can easily, I'll link some images of power lifters and Olympic weight lifters in the show notes if you just want a quick visual of what these moves are.
00:09:13
Speaker
Then there's also the snatch. The snatch is when you rip a barbell from the ground all the way up overhead in one movement. So that can't really be done slowly. It's not like lifting your carry-on into the overhead compartment. It actually has to be a fast movement.
00:09:29
Speaker
Although, I would love to see someone snatch their bag into the overhead compartment. That would be deeply entertaining. And maybe there's some way that now I'm like... That could be real. I know. Now I'm like, because everything, when you start making content, you're like, every thought you have is like, how do I put this on Instagram? Right. So I'm like, who's going to film that for us? I don't know. We'll have to workshop that one. Yeah. So I think these sports are super cool and I definitely don't want to knock them. I think that
00:09:55
Speaker
competitive athletes, especially elite competitive athletes, are working really, really hard in a very specific way to get really, really good at one thing, and I think that's admirable. What I think is problematic is that the media tends to latch on to representing a very small subset of all of the people that are doing these competitive strength sports.
00:10:18
Speaker
It's actually a pretty they're very inclusive sports in terms of like what in terms of the fact that both men and women compete in both of these sports.
00:10:27
Speaker
in terms of the fact that there's a variety of age groups that are competing and also in terms of there are a variety of weight classes that are competing, but what the media sometimes tends to latch onto are the biggest men lifting because they tend to be lifting the most total weight and sensationalism cells.
Barbells for Health vs. Competition
00:10:51
Speaker
Makes good TV. It makes for good TV. And then what happens is that the media
00:10:57
Speaker
represents big males lifting heavy weights, and people seeing barbells in action think that it's only for very large young men. In other words, the story that the media is telling is that women, older women especially, are barbell outsiders, and young large men are the barbell insiders.
00:11:24
Speaker
Meanwhile, within the Venn diagram of lifting barbells, strength sports like powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting are a tiny little circle within this larger circle.
00:11:35
Speaker
So all roads to the relevance of lifting barbells definitely do not begin nor do they end with competitive barbell sports. There's another competitive sport involving lifting weights. It could be lifting barbells or, commonly, dumbbells, maybe even kettlebells, definitely machines at the gym. You talked about this topic.
00:11:56
Speaker
in the very popular episode in season two, Hink Dumbbells and the Shrinking Female Body, where you focused a lot on bodybuilding, Sarah.
00:12:07
Speaker
And so you talked specifically about how bodybuilding, the sport of bodybuilding has evolved and the role that women have played in it, as well as this phenomenon with female bodies being represented as becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, more child-like, even more boy-like. And you refer to that as the shrinking female body, and then also where pink dumbbells kind of come into play. And there was, you're an art history major.
00:12:37
Speaker
So you often take this kind of historical perspective on things and kind of give us a history lesson, which I just love. And so you kind of did that in this episode. So what were the overall takeaways of this episode?
00:12:53
Speaker
By and large, a lot of the same things that you're saying where these spaces where weightlifting can take place have been largely taken over by younger male people. All right. Is that male men? No. And that is a space that
00:13:13
Speaker
Has a particular aesthetic of massive bulky muscles ascribed to it as sort of the only possible outcome so a lot of women in particular not exclusively but a lot of women in particular.
00:13:29
Speaker
Have looked at that space and have decided it's not for them because it's a it's for men and be it's for people who are trying to either competitively body build or Olympic weight lift or power lift either way it's for people who have a different goal than they have which is a competitive one a competitive one a one of like let's max everything out and
00:13:52
Speaker
Let's see how far we can take. Yeah, I guess it's competition. I would say let's take this to an extreme level because that's really what you kind of have to do if you're an elite athlete or a competitive athlete really of any kind. You have to kind of go all in. And most people were trying to improve their health and longevity.
00:14:09
Speaker
Not only do they not want to go all in on that activity because they have other things that they'd rather maybe go all in on in their life, like other interests, but also you don't have to. You literally don't have to train an elite athlete to see enormous benefits to your health. This is another reason why I want to create separation in people's minds between barbells utilized in strength sports versus barbells used as tools for increasing health and longevity.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think the other part of it is you want to go somewhere where you feel like you're surrounded by people that look like you or are in the same sort of skill set as you, right? So I think that's why for a lot of women stepping into a gym space that has equipment that they're not familiar with, people in there that don't look like them, people with goals that don't seem aligned with their goals,
00:15:03
Speaker
can be extremely off-putting, possibly permanently off-putting. And we've missed, like, one of the things I was talking about in the Pink Dummel episode is, like, we see all these representations of men and women, right, in terms of their bodies in this sort of, like, bulky, giant way. And we see representations of women in these, like, tiny, salad-eating way.
00:15:24
Speaker
But there's no middle ground. We don't see representations of men and women going and lifting weight, going and lifting barbells, lifting heavy even, and then also going home and putting on their suit and going to work. It's like you're either in there because you're hulking out or you're not in there. It's not for you. It's sort of the messaging.
00:15:47
Speaker
There's not a whole lot of nuanced portrayal of the use of barbells out there in the world. Not at all. Like the images really skew kind of all sort of in one way. Or if they are, like a lot of this stuff, and I love it, but a lot of the stuff that I see then on Instagram is like, check out this 70-year-old woman who's deadlifting twice her body weight. And I'm like, fucking, that's awesome. I'm so glad.
00:16:09
Speaker
It's always a sort of like ... It's all about the algorithm. Of course they're showing you that. Well, no, but also I wish that wasn't the like, oh my God, look at this. I wish it was like, and here's 25 other people doing the exact same thing right next to her. Yeah, mundane. I wish that were ... Yeah, exactly. More quotidian. Not surprising. Exactly.
00:16:29
Speaker
Alright, so this is why we're doing this episode because I want to get to the bottom of why women at baseline might feel like barbell outsiders rather than barbell insiders by looking specifically at the story society has told us about who lifts barbells and why. And I think that we can get to the bottom of that story when we look specifically at competitive sports that utilize barbells. Again, I don't want to make sport the culprit, but I think it's really about the way the media is represented, who
00:16:57
Speaker
participates in those sports and how the media has left out the variety of actually women and men sizes and age groups that have also participated in that sport. And then finally, another point that we've started making, I just want to further emphasize is that doing something competitively in general is very different from doing it for health and longevity purposes.
00:17:22
Speaker
and we're gonna take a close look at the differences between being an elite athlete and what training might look like for that person versus doing something to build, say, bone density or increased muscle mass. Okay, so here are four reasons that I see the media portrayal of lifting barbells as it represents competitive strength sports like powerlifting and Olympic lifting. Here's four ways that I feel like they mislead us
00:17:51
Speaker
and make it seem like only young large men lift barbells.
Gender and Media Representation in Weightlifting
00:17:56
Speaker
Overwhelmingly, number one, the media has fixated on the competitive aspect of these activities, which has less to do with young male barbell athletes, but just really about how barbells are for competition. Barbells are for competition, and they kind of leave out all of the health and longevity benefits of lifting barbells that you can do in
00:18:18
Speaker
non-competitive ways. Most people, here's the deal, most people, and I would say the vast majority of women, unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, are just not competitive barbell athletes. So why then is the story that's told that barbells are for competition sports? Number two, the media has fixated on male competitors
00:18:42
Speaker
And there is far fewer representations of female competitors so that the idea becomes in people's minds that people who lift weights are men, not women. Number three, the media fixates on the heavyweight male competitors rather than the competitors from the lighter weight classes.
00:19:01
Speaker
The idea becomes people who lift weights are extremely large muscular men, and no other sizes of people or body types lift weights, which makes you wonder, chicken neck style, do you have to be an extremely large muscular man to lift weights? Or does lifting weights basically turn you into a very large muscular man? You know what this reminds me of? What? Especially when I was exclusively teaching yoga, people would say to me all the time, I can't do yoga, I'm not flexible.
00:19:29
Speaker
Oh my god, totally great parallel. I've heard that a thousand times. From large young men, right? Oh, is there a space that's not for you easily? Is there a space that is not the door not open for you?
00:19:47
Speaker
I don't know whose voice that was. Don't either. I'm not even sure what I was saying. It's OK. I know where you're going with that, though. Like, oh no. The only space that exists probably in the world for which white males are not given an open door is maybe the flexibility space. That's hilarious. Number four, the media fixates on younger athletes rather than the older, quote unquote, masters, which is what older athletes are often referred to. Nice. The older masters athletes.
00:20:15
Speaker
The idea becomes only young people lift weights. Okay, we're gonna unpack these one by one, but Sarah, what used to be your impression of lifting heavy barbells and then when did you first learn about this activity as an activity people like you engaged in? So my kind of like movement background is that
00:20:39
Speaker
Some of it is influenced by the fact that I grew up in London in a relatively posh way, which meant that barbells were not part of that. I was being raised to be a lovely young English rose of a lady. Good marriage material. That's right.
00:20:57
Speaker
But let's be fair as well these are things that I gravitated towards naturally cuz I was pretty good at them so I started doing ballet age five and I did ballet as really my main form of I mean not even form of exercise just like activity I loved it from like age five to about age
00:21:15
Speaker
13. I also rode horses because I was a proper young little British lady and so I did that for that similar amount of time. The ballet I did longer and then you know what's I mean what's really funny because you know god forbid there's an episode that goes by where I don't talk about motorcycles but riding the motorcycle is very similar to riding a horse. I didn't first of all didn't know you rode horses as a child but gosh I love how it all fits into your like young English girl
00:21:45
Speaker
My rebellion is ballet dancing, like now a new persona that I have of you. But yeah, this connection.
00:21:51
Speaker
That you're about to make is so cool. And actually, a lot of women who ride motorcycles also have a history of riding horses. Amazing. Because there's so much similarity. You're holding on with your legs, and you're trying not to do more than absolutely necessary with your hands, because your hands are sending information to either the motorcycle or to the horse about what you want it to do. And if you're doing too much inputs, like too many different things, the motorcycle gets confused, and so does the horse.
00:22:19
Speaker
So in terms of when was the first time I saw someone lifting barbells? I'm sure it was on TV in competition. It may have been some sort of Olympics or something like that. It was not something that I was surrounded by in any way growing up. My dad played golf. Mine too. My mom played tennis. The gym was not a space that my family was in.
00:22:37
Speaker
And then I was trying to think like when was the first time I was really like not just going into a gym and getting on a stair climber or a treadmill and then like lifting a five pound weight and doing some biceps curls and leaving when I was actually like, oh, let me try to interact with some weights in a way. And so it was when it was after college was when I was living in New York.
00:22:54
Speaker
And I went, I lived in Chelsea. I mean, I think it still is at the time, but at the time it was a predominantly gay neighborhood. And I would go to this gym that I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was something like Hammer or like it was something. It was something very sort of like, you know, it was like.
00:23:10
Speaker
muscles or something. So not like posh little English girl. No, not at all. I think by that time the posh little English girl was like fully gone. But so I would go to that gym because it was the closest one to where I lived. But what I also really liked about it was that there were very few, it was like a few women and then mostly gay male clientele. I don't, there weren't a lot of like straight men in there and a lot of the
00:23:37
Speaker
men who were there were actually bodybuilders. I believe not weightlifters, bodybuilders, because I do specifically remember.
00:23:44
Speaker
I remember one time when I was there and there were several men sort of talking like seem to be friends, associates, colleagues and they were kind of comparing the little like speedo trunk and like how effectively it showed off this muscle or that muscle. It was a very serious conversation around like a tiny piece of clothing. So that I think that's a lot of the men that were there but what I liked about it was
00:24:09
Speaker
because this was an overwhelmingly gay population, none of them were looking at me. So I was free to faff around in the background and I was not being given unnecessary or unsolicited advice or being eyeballed or anything like that. It was a safe space. It was a totally safe space. Fantastic. Yeah.
00:24:25
Speaker
Cool. I remember probably the first time I saw someone lifting barbells, like heavy barbells, was again on TV. And I'm pretty sure it was the Olympic Games. And I'm pretty sure it was powerlifting. And I just remember there were these huge men. I didn't remember, or maybe they weren't televised, like the women. And I'm sure the women were powerlifting at that time because it was the mid 80s. And by that time, yes, women were powerlifting. But it was like huge, tall, just very big men.
00:24:54
Speaker
in tight spandex overalls with a lot of chalk everywhere and they were definitely like
00:25:01
Speaker
really turning very red in the face and the barbells were just inhumanly huge. The bar on the barbell was bending a lot. And I was like, these are freakishly strong people. And I was like, these are not people who are like me in any stretch of the imagination. I had never even crossed my mind that I would ever be lifting heavy
00:25:30
Speaker
barbells, and by the way, my bar bends now too. I was going to tell you, because I remember watching a video of you doing deadlifts. And freaking bends. It bends. I was like, dang, girl. Yeah, so it's kind of cool. High five. Yeah. So that then was when I was young, maybe nine, 10 years old. I was an athlete in high school.
00:25:54
Speaker
but the only athletes that were really ever invited into the gym until senior year, like something changed in the athletic program for women senior year, where finally,
00:26:04
Speaker
the volleyball team was told that we're going into the weight room now and you are going to lift weights. So, okay, can I ask you a question? Was that something that like, it was whatever year it was, they decided that all students or was it that once you reached the age, once you became a senior, then you were allowed in the weight room? I think what happened, and I'm not sure, I think that my coach, who had been my coach from freshman year on, went to some type of coaching seminar
00:26:33
Speaker
and learned about strength training and learned about the importance of strength training. That's amazing. And then she was like, okay. And she had to, I'm pretty sure given like the politics of how sports were treated in my high school, which was that it was all about football, which is all about male football, right? The women didn't play American football. You were a cheerleader. And it's all about men's basketball. And then everybody else was just kind of like, whatever, a little bit.
00:27:01
Speaker
I mean, not according to me. I loved the sports that I played and I loved the teams that I was on and it was like a really big deal and a really important part of my life. But in terms of how sports were treated at my high school, and I don't think this is at all unusual, it was all about the male sports and it was all about basically basketball and American football.
00:27:20
Speaker
So we kind of had to like wrestle, not wrestle. We kind of had to elbow the football players out of the way. But I don't think they were too mad to have us in there, honestly. I think there's a lot of flirting going on. It was high school. When the school I went to turned full co-ed, nobody was complaining. Yeah. So we go into the weight room.
00:27:40
Speaker
And I mean, everyone is freaking making it up. I don't even think the men's basketball coach knew anything about lifting weights. I mean, they're just lifting weights up and down. Actually, it's not that hard. You know what I mean? You really don't need an advanced degree to learn how to lift a weight. But we went in and we started lifting weights, and that was my first time. And I'm a competitive person, so I immediately go over to the leg press machine. I'm like, let's get this fucker going.
00:28:03
Speaker
And so I remember actually lifting weights for a number of weeks and noting measurable increases to my muscle mass. And I liked it. I was like, damn, and I felt stronger. And I don't know how it translated to my performance on the volleyball court. But anyway, it was just a really interesting switch where suddenly I was in the weight room.
Personal Experiences with Barbell Training
00:28:25
Speaker
And that was my first taste of lifting weights, and it was a very positive experience.
00:28:41
Speaker
You've heard us talking a lot about our upcoming bone density program, Lift for Longevity, which is a six month course of live weekly strength training classes, along with bonus courses, Strength Training 101 and all about osteoporosis and a ton of other prerecorded content showing you all the techniques that you want to review, any safety concerns, all of that good stuff.
00:29:09
Speaker
And the reason why we made the program six months long is because that is the point where you can actually see change taking place in bone density. So if we are training heavy and attempting to improve our bone density, we need to do it for at least that long before we'll see any results. The big thing with our program, it is properly programmed.
00:29:34
Speaker
which means you start where you are and we focus on technique in the beginning with moderate or maybe even lightweight on your barbell and eventually progress as appropriate for you to get you to the point where you are lifting heavy.
00:29:52
Speaker
This is a barbell program, but if you don't yet have barbells, you can still do it. You can take the information and apply it to using dumbbells or kettlebells. But from our perspective, we believe ultimately that the barbell is the tool that is going to let you lift progressively for life. So we think it's actually the most economic choice long-term. And this program, it's really just us helping you get started over a long course of time. You're going to get lots of learning around
00:30:21
Speaker
how to use weights, how to strength train, how to progressively overload, how to progress to heavy lifting, the best techniques for your barbells, because we want you to keep going and we want to give you ways to continue to use our program so that it's not just you lift for six months and then you give up on it, but you learn how to lift for the rest of your life.
00:30:45
Speaker
You'll get a live class once a week as well as demo videos of all the exercises, so you can choose if you want to take a class with us, like a yoga class, Pilates class style, or just watch the demo videos and do the workouts on your own. Other things to think about, the course is yours for life. You get it forever. There is no other guided, live, and recorded follow along class six month program out there. There's just not. We looked, people. We looked.
00:31:14
Speaker
This is the first year that we're doing this, which means next year the price is going to go up. Either way, this is way cheaper than working with a personal trainer. Not the same, of course, we acknowledge, but it's a lot more affordable if that's been a barrier for you. Now, here's the thing. The cart is closing soon on this, October 8th.
00:31:35
Speaker
is the last day that you can sign up and we really mean it because the course itself starts on October 14th and we're going to give everybody who is enrolled enough time to preview some of the videos and watch any of the stuff they want to before we get started. So if you want to join us and we really hope you do, it's going to be such a good time you guys. I can't wait for it to start.
00:31:57
Speaker
You can go to the link in our show notes to sign up, or you can go to our website and click on Bone Density Program Lift for Longevity.
00:32:13
Speaker
All right, so let's talk about point number one.
Redefining Athleticism and Health
00:32:15
Speaker
The media tends to fixate on the competitive aspect of lifting with barbells. So actually, let's talk about what an athlete is. I think we sort of had a real philosophical conversation about this in our very first episode of this podcast. Also a very popular episode. A very popular episode.
00:32:33
Speaker
And so we looked at the difference between sport, movement, and exercise. Not in that order, but anyway, I thought it was an interesting conversation. So athlete gets, this word athlete gets used a lot. We introduce our friend Roz the Diva, and she uses the word athlete very freely. Like basically, she's like, if you're breathing, if you're in a body, if you move your body ever doing anything, you are an athlete. And she is a very inspiring and uplifting and inspirational figure.
00:32:59
Speaker
who trains people in bigger bodies and people who are not white and thin and privileged and or whatever the sort of norm that you see represented as like being the people who lift weights, right? She's training folks who don't get very much media attention as lifting barbells and she's strong as hell. Personally, my relationship to the word athlete is such that you don't love it. I used to be an athlete and that's when I was an athlete. Now, I consider an athlete somebody who does
00:33:28
Speaker
a sport for competitive purposes, and I currently do not consider myself to be doing any type of sport for competitive purposes. I exercise, I strength train, I run for enjoyment, first and foremost. I consider it fun, and also for health and longevity. Sarah, what do you consider to be an athlete? Who is an athlete? Yeah, it's an interesting question.
00:33:52
Speaker
From your perspective, having been a competitive athlete in high school, but still, you know, you played against other teams, right? You entered competition in some way.
00:34:04
Speaker
then the name athlete for you is very much associated with competition. I think because the word athlete, like in CrossFit, they call everybody an athlete, right? And that's the thing that can kind of make your one ear end up in your shoulder or depending on how you feel about it. But what I like about it that they do that, honestly, is that it's inclusive for the people who were not included in
00:34:30
Speaker
group sports in high school or in college. I like the idea that you are then being encouraged to think of yourself differently, right? So we develop these ideas of like who we are pretty early on and some of that we're developing in high school and college, right? So if you, I never in high school would have thought of myself as an athlete because I wasn't on any team for any sporty thing, right?
00:34:53
Speaker
Nowadays, people would call dancers athletes. But back then, they weren't, even though it is a very, very physical thing to be doing. But it's not a competition, necessarily. Auditions are competitive. But the act of dance itself is not a competitive thing. Although, that would be hilarious. There are dance-offs, actually. I take it back. I mean, there was a dance team in high school. They were state champions. Went into competitions. They were very competitive. But I mean, the Swan Lake is not an active competition. But anyway.
00:35:23
Speaker
The idea of like you are now allowed to think of yourself that way because I also like it in the sense of you're kind of taking yourself more seriously, right? And you're taking your relationship to your body more seriously and you might think, you know, oh well, if I can think of myself as an athlete now, well maybe I'm going to pay better attention to how I sleep and how I eat and my whole lifestyle because this is something that I do now. I think you're making excellent points actually. Like it's inclusive to call everyone an athlete and it specifically speaks to the people who are excluded.
00:35:56
Speaker
and their performance seriously. And in so doing, you're probably also helping yourself health-wise. 100% you are. Yeah. But here's the thing, though. It's like no one's looking at elite athletes and going, wow, those people must be so healthy. I mean, maybe they are. No. But here's the thing. A lot of elite athletes are not that healthy. Because being an elite athlete means sacrificing non-insignificant aspects of your health on a regular basis.
00:36:17
Speaker
I really like that point. And I also like the point that athletes take their bodies and their
00:36:26
Speaker
They train harder than is probably healthy a lot of the time. And when you get into the sport of body lifting, there's food restriction, also power lifting. Any sport that has a weight requirement that you need to meet, there's going to be some maybe additional restriction on eating. So the wrestlers in my high school would be like,
00:36:52
Speaker
wearing layers and layers of clothing, running the halls, spitting into cans, not drinking all day and not eating in order to make weight. And there's, you know, we could argue about what the long-term consequences of that are and there might be none, but you know, it's getting a little eating disorder for me. And so I start to wonder about that. And then there's obviously a long history of steroid use and steroids are incredibly disastrous for human health. So I think that,
00:37:21
Speaker
Elite athletes are pretty much doing their sport for reasons that are not fully aligned with health and longevity. And so then when we're looking at media's representation of the use of something like a barbell and seeing elite athletic performance of different lifts of the barbell, we're looking at something that, you know, may have made these people a lot healthier than they would have been.
Barbells and Safety Misconceptions
00:37:50
Speaker
but we're also looking at a person who has sacrificed a lot to be doing what they're doing. Competitive athletes in any field, I mean, I've worked with a few of them in the rehab setting and across the board, they come in and I'm like, you have the weirdest, most effed up mechanics for doing this I've ever seen, but it seems to be working for you because you're an Olympic medalist or something like that. So yes, the goal is often
00:38:15
Speaker
is something like winning the Olympics, or maybe it's you're a football player, and it's like, well, I have to stay on the team because I get money for being on this team. And the second I don't, my family doesn't get this money. So is it OK that I injured myself, and then they just taped it up, and I ran back out onto the field? Is that optimal for my health? Probably no. Or that I'm taking steroids, or that I'm doing. CT? Yes. Oh, my god. Well, that's a whole other thing. I have dementia at age 40. Right. So none of it's not.
00:38:44
Speaker
Being an athlete doesn't automatically mean I'm really, really putting my health first. No. In a competitive sense. But thinking about yourself possibly as someone who could be athletic, and maybe that even means just like you're running a 10K or a 5K for the first time, then that is, I think in that sense, gives you the opportunity to flip and get
00:39:09
Speaker
start to make healthier choices for yourself about your entire life. And it might even mean, I mean, one of the things that we talk about for women lifting weight is that it is a self-esteem booster. And maybe you start lifting weight, and then you start saying no to a lot of the toxic crap in your life. I did. Yeah, me too. The other thing about being an elite athlete means you are probably training for hours almost every day. Meanwhile, people lifting for health and longevity goals can get away with training minutes every week.
00:39:38
Speaker
Some research shows that you maybe only need to be lifting weights 30 to 60 minutes a week to reap most
00:39:47
Speaker
or all of the health and longevity benefits of strength training. I think that really high level competitive power lifters, for example, might be in the gym upwards of three hours a day, maybe one day off. I don't know. I'm sure everyone's plan is different, but there's just a way different time requirement and energy requirement.
00:40:12
Speaker
that can also become really confusing because I think overwhelmingly people tend to think that they need to be lifting weights a lot more than they actually do to get the health and longevity benefits. Maybe because what they're hearing, the stories they're hearing are really the stories of the athletes who are actually putting in a shitload of time in the gym. And they think that that's what they have to do too, even when their goals are not competitive. Well, and I think the recommended
00:40:41
Speaker
amount of times to exercise per week has been two to three times. That's just talking about exercise generally. That's not talking about weight lifting. I don't know why I said weight lifting so weirdly like that. The CDC recommendation is one to two bouts of weight lifting per week. I think it's two. Is it two? Yeah, but they don't tell you really anything about how much. They don't, but let's just ... I'm happy that it's on there at all because it never used to be.
00:41:05
Speaker
But so I think we have this idea that the way you work out is you do it at least three times a week, whatever it is. And if you're not doing that, you might as well not waste your time doing anything. But that's unequivocally not true. Yeah, and that's a lot less than what a competitive athlete would be training. Right. Like half. Right. They'd be in there six days a week, probably. The other thing about being a higher level competitive athlete
00:41:29
Speaker
or even someone that's just more experienced as something is that there's some evidence to suggest that the injury, that your risk of injury is actually going to go up. Like your risk of injury as a competitive, especially an elite competitive athlete is higher than it is if you're a recreational athlete. Your risk of injury, there's some research looking at crossfitters, for example.
00:41:49
Speaker
and they compared novice versus experienced crossfitters and found that actually the more experienced crossfitters counterintuitively had higher injury rates than the beginners. And this is probably because when you have more buy-in, you've been doing it longer, you decide that this is something you really enjoy. Maybe it starts to become a part of your identity. You start to train a little bit more seriously, maybe at a higher intensity, more aggressively.
00:42:16
Speaker
To a certain extent you kind of have to to continue to make changes and this is where the room for error maybe gets a little narrower where it does become a little bit more likely that you are going to sustain
00:42:30
Speaker
in injury, this all to say that CrossFit's actually been shown to be very safe for everyone. But if you're more experienced, you're actually, ironically, you'd think you'd be less injury prone, but you might actually have a higher risk of injury. But here's what I wonder about that, because I'm wondering if what it actually has more to do with is the amount of time you're spending doing CrossFit. And not recovering? Well, yeah.
00:42:58
Speaker
If you drive a car 10 minutes a week, you're probably way less likely to get in a car accident than if you drive a car five hours a week. So there's got to be some component of that where it's like they're just doing more of it. But the difference though is also that if you start off doing CrossFit once a week, your body gets used to that and it becomes able to adapt and positively change from that input such that you're now able to do it twice a week
00:43:28
Speaker
such that then you're soon able to do it three times a week. So the idea is that yes, you're in the gym, you're doing more CrossFit, but presumably because your body has positively adapted to be able to handle more CrossFit, and if you are going to adapt it to be able to handle more, you have to do more, right? That's how progressive overload works. But I know what you're saying, though, is you're just in there more, so it's more likely shit's gonna happen.
00:43:57
Speaker
totally true. Had a bad night's sleep and you trip over something and you twist your ankle. Oh absolutely. You know like that kind of stupid thing. No absolutely. 100%. And then also there's this idea that and we talked about this in our episode last season about relative injury versus safety in strength training and yoga and noted that strength training using weights to get stronger is a very safe thing to do. It's in
00:44:23
Speaker
incredibly safe thing to do, much safer than field sports, but there's also this idea that lifting with barbells is dangerous, and I wonder how much of that is wrapped up in the story told about competitive barbell athletes getting hurt, for whatever reason, because those are the stories being told. I just wonder, do you know what I mean? Do we hear more about injury with strength training because we're hearing more about athletes who strength train? I don't know.
00:44:53
Speaker
I'm kind of making that up with my inside of my imagination, like trying to draw connections here that I don't know are actually true, but it doesn't seem unlikely that that could be the case. Yeah. I mean, you know, plenty of soccer players have real bad injuries. And if you don't believe that, just go on YouTube and Google soccer injuries and then prepare to try to scour out the inside of your brain. After you've seen all of them, images you can no longer unsee.
00:45:20
Speaker
Yeah, and you know what? I don't hear people talking all that much about how dangerous soccer is, so isn't that strange? Field sports are certainly more dangerous than strength sports, and this is definitely borne out.
00:45:31
Speaker
in the research. And then also, beside being incredibly safe when comparing the dangers of chronic disease from not exercising enough, we see that doing field sports and strength training are incredibly good ideas to avoid stuff like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and of course osteoporosis. So there's a lot to gain by lifting weights and actually not a whole lot to lose, especially if you're doing it
00:45:57
Speaker
for just the purpose of, we could say recreationally, right? For the purpose of increasing your health and
Barbells Beyond Athletics
00:46:02
Speaker
longevity. All right, so we've been parsing out lifting competitively with lifting for health and longevity so that we can understand how lifting barbells has become an us versus them activity. Athletes do it, people who don't consider themselves athletes or who have no desire to compete, don't do it. I don't think many older women lift barbells and I don't even think they can visualize themselves lifting barbells. And I think this is
00:46:26
Speaker
One of the reasons, but I think there are more, I want to understand where this outsider mentality comes from. So here's the second reason I think we might have a small number of women lifting barbells. The media has fixated on male competitors and it's rarely fixated on female competitors. So the idea becomes that the people who lift weights are men, not women, especially barbells. Why do you think that the media focuses more on male sports than female sports, Sarah? Why do I think that? Yeah.
00:46:54
Speaker
I don't know if you've noticed, but we live in a patriarchy. The end. Yeah. I agree. I think it's also objectively the case. I'm not going to play devil's advocate because I agree with you. Thanks. But I'm going to say that men are objectively stronger and faster than women. And I've heard men in my life who I love. I'm not mad at them and they say things that
00:47:21
Speaker
I don't agree with all the time, but I've heard them say that they just like watching men play basketball more than women. Because the things men do on a basketball court, they have a wow factor to them that they don't get as much with women. However, I've also heard that it depends on the sport. So for example... Tennis. Yeah, I won't name names because I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but one man in my life who I love told me that he would prefer to watch women play volleyball.
00:47:47
Speaker
because there's something about the way women play volleyball that is just more entertaining okay no look it doesn't have to do with the fact that i was a volleyball player like we're speaking in terms of like oh i wasn't even thinking about that what is this look i was thinking about beach volleyball and the teeny tiny little outfits you know he he he doesn't watch beach volleyball all right we're talking about court the court
00:48:08
Speaker
There's something about the flow of the game that he thinks is a lot more fun to watch. It's probably the fact that women aren't hitting the ball as hard to the other side, so there's going to be more volleying, more returning the men.
00:48:21
Speaker
They get up there and they just slam it down so hard. No one can return it. It's like watching, I don't even know, tennis. Tennis. No, it's a lot like watching tennis. It's like watching baseball as well, where the pitcher is throwing the ball so fast that the batter can't even hit the ball. And that's not fun to watch. I'd much rather watch softball, like high school softball. Do you know what I mean? Right. Tennis is like that. Men's tennis, they're just hitting incredibly hard serves over and over again a lot of the time. In the women's game, you get more volley. You get more game to watch. It's more entertaining to watch. Right.
00:48:48
Speaker
So it depends on the sport, but I think one of the reasons that male sports are represented more in the media, there's more male sports on TV than female sports, they get more coverage, but also there's like so much more research on men, and specifically male college athletes, is that there's a lot of money in male sports, for whatever reason. And the reasons are probably multifactorial. However, I feel like maybe if the media focused more on female,
00:49:14
Speaker
athletes, specifically if the media would focus more on female strength athletes, because that's kind of what we're talking about today. I think this would have a really positive effect on the way all women, even the ones who have no desire to compete, which is me, I don't, maybe I'm wrong. Okay, I'm often wrong about what I'm going to be doing with my life in the future. I have no idea that I would be lifting barbells or recording a podcast. Maybe someday I'll do a strength competition. I kind of doubt it, but
00:49:40
Speaker
I feel like more women, even if they were like me and really had no desire currently to be a strength athlete, would at least see themselves lifting the tools of strength training like a barbell. I don't know that any of us have the power to control what the media
00:49:55
Speaker
highlights for us and puts in front of us, I just know that if we at least understand why we might not visualize ourselves lifting barbells and how it might have to do with the images and the stories and the ideas that we've been fed by the media, we might be better critical thinkers when we are presented with the opportunity to do something like lift weights for strength training and go, you know what, maybe I am the type of person that could do something like that.
00:50:25
Speaker
Right? Maybe the story I've been told is not the whole story. Right. Yeah. Number three, the media fixates on the heavy weight male competitors rather than the competitors from the lighter weight classes. So this is, again, kind of I think at the heart of where this idea that lifting barbells will make you massive. The media wants
00:50:45
Speaker
Of course they do, the most sensational story a lot of the time. So instead of being amazing that a lightweight lifter or a lightweight female lifter or a lightweight older female lifter lifts three or four times their body weight, it's actually more sensational that the heavy weight pulls a 1,000 pound deadlift.
00:51:02
Speaker
It just is, according to the masses. Well, it looks dramatic. It looks really fricking dramatic, like almost freakish, right? You would say. I really like it when I see like small older women like pulling a 300 pound deadlift personally a lot more. Totally. Anyway, I'm not like everyone else. I think I've also learned about myself. So the thing is that the number on the bar gets focused on rather than the relative strength, considering like the gender, the size, and the age of the person lifting.
00:51:31
Speaker
Also, what gets conflated is strength with hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is muscle size. And yes, lifting weights will increase muscle size, but volume actually, not magnitude of load, volume is the bigger driver of hypertrophy. You can get bigger muscles by lifting light weights as long as you take your sets close enough to failure and as long as you are meeting the minimal effective
00:52:01
Speaker
dose or reaching that minimal threshold that you need to reach every week in terms of volume, you're doing enough sets close to failure of a particular lift that works a particular muscle group. Bodybuilding is about hypertrophy. It's a hypertrophy competition.
00:52:18
Speaker
Yeah, power lifters got muscle because muscle's really important for strength, but power lifting is much more about getting as strong as possible. If you are neither, you're just trying to get stronger so that your bones get stronger so that you don't lose muscle, so that you have better balance since your tendon stiffness improves and you're less at risk of injury, you could take
00:52:43
Speaker
a moderate to heavy weight and achieve that in about 30 to 90 minutes a week. Now, if you're really trying to build bone and you're older, it's probably a good idea to work toward a more heavy weight, and that's where the barbell becomes of great interest. But if you're lifting heavy, and here's the thing that a lot of people don't realize, and it's really, I think, an important thing to realize,
00:53:08
Speaker
Because here's the deal. Lots of women don't want to get big. They don't want to have a whole bunch of muscle on their body. And the reason for that is probably that they're afraid that if they do start to look different than they currently look, society will stop rewarding them as women for looking
00:53:27
Speaker
like quote-unquote women, or being smaller, being thinner, leaner, longer and leaner, however you want to say it. Specifically though, that is people who are concerned about the male gaze, which is typically straight women. Yeah, and because we live in a patriarchy though, men are in positions of power.
00:53:46
Speaker
men are making a lot of decisions for everyone. And so it kind of, it makes sense to me why some women are afraid of putting muscle on their body because this has to do with the fact that we're tribal animals and the way that we fit into our groups and the roles that we play largely impact how well we will survive, right?
Societal Pressures and Body Ideals
00:54:06
Speaker
So everyone's got a role to play and they want to play it well. And so if women think that putting muscle on their body is going to make it so that they can't play that role,
00:54:12
Speaker
and can't be successful, that's a threat to their survival. 100%. I mean, the other thing is, whether we think of it, I mean, I think the bigger issue for a lot of women is that it's not something, it's an inside job. They're not necessarily walking around thinking like, I want to be thinner because that's what the male gaze is telling me. They're just thinking, I want to be thinner because that's what I want.
00:54:34
Speaker
Right. Right. And, you know, I think about things like, I don't know why this is what came to mind, but maybe it's because it's sort of famous. I think about, like, the Victoria's Secret show when all the women, like, tall, skinny women are walking around in underwear. Like, how fucking cool would it be if you got some bodybuilders in there or some middle-aged, regular-looking people in there or something? And the fashion industry has started to do that. It has started to do it more with, like, plus-size models and things like that. You're not getting a lot of, I mean,
00:55:03
Speaker
Yes, of course. This is a separate episode. These are plus size beautiful people. These are not just random everybody on the street kind of folks. They're still idolizing beauty. But the messaging for women so much is about be smaller, be thinner, don't take up space, just know your place kind of thing. But can I tell you something? Tell me. That a lot of people don't realize. What's that? Is that when you lift heavy, you're probably going to do less total volume in a week. Right.
00:55:33
Speaker
which means that you're probably not going to build muscle as successfully as you would if you were to lift a moderate weight. You're still going to build muscle. But if you want to bulk up or if you even have a chance in hell of being able to do that, you should probably actually pick up a moderate weight and go really close to failure and do that for upwards of five to seven sets a week.
00:55:58
Speaker
And then, you know what, that would probably be the best way to do that. If you're trying to get strong as fuck, which means you're going to make your bones as strong as possible, make your tendon as strong as possible, get really good balance, you're going to have to do less volume because volume's relationship to load is an inverse one. The heavier the weight, the fewer the reps, the longer the rest times. There's just not enough time in the workout.
00:56:21
Speaker
to complete as many repetitions. This means that your muscles are not subjected to as much time under tension. And this is why volume is the key driver in hypertrophy because hypertrophy depends on mechanical tension. The muscle fibers generate mechanical tension that then sort of sends the muscle fiber a message that it needs to make itself bigger to be able to generate more and experience more and handle more mechanical tension.
00:56:49
Speaker
Strength relies on hypertrophy, but strength is the outcome of multiple adaptations in the body. And I would say probably the big, most important adaptation that takes place in our body with strength training is called neural drive. It's the ability of our brain to send bigger signals. Now, hypertrophy also relies on neural drive, but like I said, you can make your muscles bigger with light weights
00:57:15
Speaker
as long as you take those sets close to failure. You are not going to do as good of a job of increasing your total maximum force production with light weights, though. You are going to do a much, much, much, much better job of doing that by lifting heavy weights.
00:57:32
Speaker
It doesn't need to get complicated, but know this. If you're lifting heavy weight, truly heavy weight, which is dependent on you, it's not a number, it's not a fixed number, it means that you are lifting a weight that is heavy so that you couldn't probably lift it more than six times. And if you're lifting a weight that is that heavy,
00:57:54
Speaker
you're doing a three to five sets of that lift in a workout. You're lifting that weight six times per set. You're probably resting at least two minutes per set. You're doing that for maybe a couple of exercises, right? And then maybe a couple of other exercises you're doing a more moderate or even lightweight, right? You're probably not going to get in the amount of volume that you would need to get in to make the biggest possible change to muscle size. So I just wanna say that if your goal is not to get a whole bunch of muscle on your body,
00:58:23
Speaker
First of all, I think it's a good idea to build muscle, and we'll talk about that in a second. But if your goal is not to get a bunch of muscle on your body, but rather just to get super, super strong, then absolutely 100% lifting a heavy weight is the way to go. You're better off lifting a heavy weight than you are lifting a moderate and certainly a lightweight. Can I tell a story about my patient at the clinic? Yep.
00:58:45
Speaker
I started working with someone recently and you know I is not across the board but often one of the things I'm thinking about in my head for my patients and in particular for my female patients is when do I get to have the conversation about lifting heavy with them it's kind of always percolating the back of my head for some people it never happens.
00:59:03
Speaker
for various reasons, but for a lot of women, I at least try to sprinkle in the education around why lifting heavy is important. So I have this client who's not new to the clinic, but new to me, and I really, really like her, and she's one of those people, you know sometimes when you really wanna, there's certain people that you wanna have them like you, like some clients, I don't care if they like me or not, some clients, we hit it off immediately, we're like besties, and then so there's some people where I'm like,
00:59:29
Speaker
This person is like, cards close to the chest. I have no idea if this person thinks I'm good at my job, likes me, is enjoying this. Sometimes they just give you nothing. And there's something about that that for me is like catnip. I'm like, oh, make this person like me in some way. I'll be funny. Oh, they didn't like that. I'll be serious. Oh, they didn't like that. And so I wasn't sure how much I was. And this is, again, for some context, is actually a sort of somewhat famous person.
00:59:59
Speaker
A lot of the time, people who are in that realm, they've worked with a lot of different people. They're used to a certain amount of... There's just kind of a like, don't waste my time energy. Of course, they're busy. They're busy people. Her goals are just about getting... She wants to get stronger. She wants to feel stronger in her body. She had surgery a few months ago and she doesn't feel as strong as she used to.
01:00:23
Speaker
She's approaching 60. So we've been doing some work and the second to last session that I saw her, I said, you know, one of the things that's going to make you stronger really quickly is lifting heavy weights like barbells. And she looked at me.
01:00:41
Speaker
Right with this. It's a very intense gaze and she goes Why should I do that? And I was like, oh boy, here we go. This is it This is my moment and I looked at her and I said for your bones and she had a moment Where she was like not dumbstruck, but she was not expecting me to say for your bones Yeah, right at all. No one's thinking about their bones. Won't anyone think of the bones? so
01:01:07
Speaker
Then, the next time she came back in, she goes, you know, I've really been thinking about what you said, and I was like, yes!
01:01:13
Speaker
And she was like, yeah, I am. I'm getting closer to 60. I should probably get one of those scans. But she was like, I really thought about it. And it was like, that's not something that I'm considering. And so all I was doing was paving the way for me to make my own life easier, because the next time I see her, I'm pulling out our technique bar. And I'm going to make her learn that deadlift with a 15-pound barbell, because that's how I start all of
01:01:38
Speaker
people I see in the clinic and then they all progress and it's fantastic but this idea that lifting heavy equals lifting a thousand pounds is just not true and that the idea that there is no space in between is not true and that you know I there's not one person that I've introduced the barbell in the clinic who's been like
01:02:00
Speaker
Yeah. Not for me. Like across the board. I have one patient who now has built her own whole thing at home. That's amazing.
Overcoming Misconceptions About Muscle Gain
01:02:06
Speaker
You know? The thing about the barbell, it's so simple. It's so simple. It's not like a kettlebell. I've had tons of people be like, nah, kettlebell, not for me. That freaking thing is hard to learn to use. The barbell is never at any point hard to learn to use. It's
01:02:20
Speaker
Hard to figure out how to progressively overload if you don't know about strength training and you need somebody to actually create a program for you. But as an implement, the barbell is so simple. And I've said that to so many people, and they've sort of believed me or not believed me. And then they try it, and they're like, oh, this is simple. Yeah, because they've been seeing a lot of high-level athletes doing things that they know that they would never be able to do, nor do they want to do. The way that it's represented is so inaccessible. Right.
01:02:49
Speaker
I have someone who I've worked with who in one of our sessions, one on one, it was early on. She said, you know, I'm 60 and I want to get stronger, but I don't want to put on too much muscle. And she's a very.
01:03:04
Speaker
Small woman. And I said, you know what? I didn't lecture her at all. And I listened to her. And we had a long conversation before this even came up. But then I kind of circled around toward the end. And I was like, because I felt like we had established trust. And we were having a really nice conversation. And I said, you know what? You want my opinion? She's paying me for my opinion. She's like, yeah. I was like, I think you should try to build as much muscle as possible going forward. I said, you are not.
01:03:33
Speaker
you're just not gonna get bulky. It's not gonna happen. And also the thing too is we can take a step back and go like, if someone can't do a single pushup, if someone has never held a weight and done a squat, do they need to be thinking about getting too bulky? What is required to get bulky, Sarah? Well, a couple of things. First of all, the amount of work lifting that you need to be doing is a lot more than you ever would do as a beginner, or even as a non-beginner potentially.
01:04:02
Speaker
You have to eat a lot. And that's the other part. We haven't spoken about this really. But to put mass on, you've got to give your body the building blocks to do it, right? You had to be in an energy surplus. Yeah, which I remember hearing. And all the movie stars get bulky for their roles, and then they go on talk shows and talk about how they did it. Yeah.
01:04:24
Speaker
miserable. Right. They're just shoving food into their face all the time. Remember Hugh Jackman telling a story of like sending an alarm for 2am so he would wake up and eat like a chicken breast sitting next to his bedside table and then go back to sleep because he had to always be eating calories.
01:04:40
Speaker
it's always be protein calories. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so it's not like fun eating. It's not like pizza and ice cream. It's like plain chicken, lots of protein, lots of protein. And for women, you know, we do not possess the amount of testosterone in our systems that men do. And as a result,
01:04:56
Speaker
we are not as prone to building as much bulk on our body. It's not to say you can't build big muscles as a woman, just that you would have to be doing some number of these things that it's highly unlikely that's where you at least are starting. You may decide that's something you're interested in doing. Yeah, absolutely. More power to you. Yeah, but as a beginner, it's just not happening. Yeah, absolutely. Let's not put the cart before the horse.
01:05:21
Speaker
Yeah. Let's put the horse before the horse. No. Let's put the horse in front of the cart. In front of the cart. What about the carrot? Where does the carrot go? Oh, that's a donkey and a carrot. In front of the horse. So it goes carrot, horse, cart. That's right. What's after the cart? Poop? Probably a lot of it, yeah. All right. So to summarize, if your goal is to get stronger, but not necessarily much bigger, ironically, despite what conventional wisdom might have you believe, lifting heavy weights might be the better way to strike that balance.
01:05:49
Speaker
At the same time, I will say if you are approaching menopause, postmenopausal, perimenopausal, and you're a woman, you might want to reconsider not wanting to put muscle on your body because the rate of muscle loss has accelerated whether you realize it or not. And you're going to want to have some savings in the bank, shall we say. Another thing I'll say too, and this relates back to the fact that when we see people lifting barbells, oftentimes they are competitive athletes.
01:06:19
Speaker
One of the things, one of the biggest determinants of how much muscle you're actually gonna be able to put on your body is genetics. And the reason that a lot of the really super gifted female power lifters have so much muscle on their body is because they're genetically advantaged in this particular sport. This is why they're so freaking good at power lifting is because they can build muscle and that muscle is what allows them to lift that heavy weight. They also put in a lot more hours and their goals are totally different. So, all right.
01:06:49
Speaker
This one is related to the differences between men and women, but also the differences between like different sized people.
Age, Gender, and Strength Training Myths
01:06:57
Speaker
The media tends to fixate on heavy weight lifters, usually the men, and it doesn't tend to feature the lighter weight men or women lifters. So the idea then, again, related to what we just discussed is that lifting barbells is going to make you massive. And then
01:07:14
Speaker
Our last and final point, the media fixates on younger athletes rather than older athletes. And the idea becomes only young people lift barbells. I think that this sends two messages. One, that barbells are a young person's tool. And two, that older people are too frail or fragile to lift barbells. Sarah, you focused on this in your episode in season one or two.
01:07:41
Speaker
stop fragilifying older people about how there's just a really ageist tendency to take everything that could possibly help make somebody who's older and age stronger, build their capacity, make them more capable to live independently and just kind of want to take it away from them. Yeah. I mean, it goes across the board. It's from the rehab world all the way into just how we treat older people
01:08:06
Speaker
generally, right? And I see a lot of older women in particular in the rehab setting not being pushed enough. And I in fact had a patient a while ago who became my patient because they had been going to PT somewhere else and they were actually getting weaker at the other place because the person never handed them anything bigger than the five pound dumbbell. But also it is, you know, I, I, there's a patient I'm working with currently who really needs to get a lot stronger and I adore her. It's just super ornery.
01:08:36
Speaker
She comes in the door, and the first thing she says is something like, I'm tired. And I used to, when I first met her, I'd be like, oh, she's tired. And now I'm like, all right, well, let's get on the bike and warm up. I basically ignore her. And then I'll be like, let's do another set. And she'll be like, I don't see you doing anything. And so it's very funny. It's very entertaining. But so the person who drives her to the clinic and back, there was something my patient was doing, I think they were going
01:09:04
Speaker
sit down and put their shoes on or something. They were done. And the person who was helping them started to move the chair or move the shoes or do something to help them. And I said, don't help her. Which sounds like really mean or whatever, but the person was kind of like, oh. And then she realized she was like, oh yeah, because we're trying to make her more resilient. It doesn't make her more resilient if I move the chair to her. She got to back up to that chair. So really across the board, it's something that we do societally.
01:09:34
Speaker
We were concerned that older people are going to hurt themselves, and so we just take any sort of effort away from them. I mean, my 97-year-old landlord who lives upstairs and who's been stomping around in his shoes, God bless him. I love him. But he goes up and down a flight of stairs every day to open the back door.
01:09:51
Speaker
and while the stairs themselves make me slightly nervous because they are wooden and slick and i've tried to get like some carpet on them and he doesn't he doesn't like that idea but anyway he's 97 he's climbing a flight of stairs every day i'm not i'm not saying don't do the stairs i'm just saying the stairs themselves maybe we could make them a little less slippery right right right yeah you know i think the question is like is is it that older people are portrayed as fragile because they are because they tend to be deconditioned because we tend to want to
01:10:20
Speaker
protect them slash do everything for them so that they can slow down or whatever. Or is that just the fate of getting old? No matter what you do with your body, just get more fragile and more frail as you age. And I think, of course, the aging process is real. You're definitely not going to be as strong as you were when you were 90, as you were when you were
01:10:44
Speaker
40, but you can build a crap load of strength, a crap load of muscle, you can get faster, you can get more coordinated and improve your balance at any age relative to when you were younger and I am.
01:11:00
Speaker
Living proof. I'm 42. I am way stronger than I've ever been in my entire life by far. Me too. I'm 48. I'm way stronger than I was at 30. And I plan to be stronger than I am now when I'm 50. Yeah, 100%. And that's something else that I see with my older patients a lot of the time is they will marvel at the fact they're like, well, I sort of thought that I could help my pain, but I didn't think I could actually get stronger than I am, like actually improve my athletic ability. But they are.
01:11:29
Speaker
There's a lot of misunderstanding around what happens to women around menopause. Everyone sort of just thinks like, this is it. This is the end. Now I get weak. Now I get frail.
01:11:41
Speaker
Now I stop enjoying my life. Now I gain weight. I mean, specifically that one. There's this idea that our metabolism slows down when we hit menopause, which has been shown to just actually not be true. It may be true that women gain weight around menopause, but that has maybe something to do with the fact that when two things happen around the same time,
01:12:06
Speaker
consider that there's, we assume there must be a relationship between them. Sarah, can you say anything about this idea that metabolism slows down around menopause?
01:12:16
Speaker
Where does that idea come from? Is it true? Does research bear that out? I haven't read the research on it, so I'm going off of it. I'm going to link something in the show notes. We talk about this with my episode with Dr. Ben House in season two. Briefly, we don't spend a ton of time talking about it. I think we could talk about it more. There's a great article in the New York Times that basically goes into how it's just actually not true that your metabolism slows down around menopause.
01:12:39
Speaker
it slows down it slows down slightly around age 60 which is well after menopause for most women yeah so what tens you know a lot of women mention how they hit menopause and then suddenly they gain 10 pounds or they get soft around the middle or they they
01:12:54
Speaker
There's you know, whatever and so it's it's blamed on things like the changing hormones and all that kind of stuff But there's also a bunch of other things that are often happening for women around that time like their children are going to college they you know for some women it's a time that they might be starting to work and
01:13:14
Speaker
Less and maybe do more recreational things or or conversely, you know women in their for example their late 40s early 50s might actually be working more Because they've achieved a level in their career where they're now in charge of things Maybe they're the boss now or maybe they're the CEO or maybe they are just in charge of more people and therefore there's more responsibility and therefore they're working more there's any number of reasons why
01:13:42
Speaker
women might gain weight around the time of perimenopause and menopause but what's not happening is your metabolism is not slowing down in any way shape or form and if it does slow down it slows down around the age of 60 and only slightly.
01:13:59
Speaker
You know n equals 1 my personal experience of going through menopause in a very accelerated way over the past year is that not only have I not gained weight and it also I can't say if it's about menopause or not because I also started lifting weights really significantly I Somehow seem to have lost some weight. I don't know. It's weird I can't quite tell what's going on but but you know, I would think like, you know, all of my other symptoms of menopause are
01:14:23
Speaker
intense and accelerated I would assume that if weight gain was one that would have also happened in an intense and accelerated way and it just hasn't. Yeah and so I think sometimes too like people think that their their window of opportunity for starting something like strength training or lifting with barbells especially is kind of closing as they approach menopause or especially if they're post menopausal like it's too late for me right but we've discussed this and it's you know evident if you do follow
01:14:52
Speaker
Accounts on on Instagram that are platforming older women Lifting heavy weight that you can become stronger at any age you can build muscle at any age You can increase your skill of movement in your capacity at any way age therefore it is never Too late to start in the words of Luther Vandross. Oh, wow. It's never too late. It's never too late now unfortunately though when women are older
01:15:22
Speaker
stuff like standing up from a chair becomes more and more challenging. Like in a nursing home, that is one of the things that is focused on basically, which is that can we get this person to be able to stand up out of their chair so that they don't then sit down and never stand up again. And so standing up from the chair becomes like this one repetition, like max effort event.
01:15:47
Speaker
Do you think we'd be having this discussion if, well, I'm sure we would in some cases, but would the movement goal of being able to stand up one time out of a chair become a single max effort event for most people in assisted living or nursing homes or even just after menopause, would that even be a concern?
01:16:09
Speaker
if someone could say easily squat half their body weight. Like if they were lifting with barbells and progressed up into the point to where they could squat half their body weight, all of their body weight, somewhere in there that they could squat an external load heavy, would be having this conversation about their ability to stand up from a chair? No, not at all. Yeah. So what happens is like people stop living before they die because they lose access to their ability to move. And I say that very,
01:16:37
Speaker
you know, metaphorically, they're still living, but they stopped being able to live in the world and do the things that they were doing that gave their life meaning because they can't get up from a chair. You don't have to have that be the case. No. And eventually it will, right? We're all dying. We're all going to die. But you could prolong your ability to live in the world and do the things that give your life meaning. Why would we and why should we relinquish that access
01:17:04
Speaker
through inaction when we know very clearly that there's something we can do to prevent it and it's relatively low cost and it is available to everyone at any age despite what you might have gleaned from the media. Why not preserve that for as long as possible? Absolutely.
01:17:22
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, again, it's this thing of like, oh, you're older. You should sit down now. Take a break. Take a rest. Don't work so hard. And I think the reality is actually the exact opposite. You've gotten older. Work harder. Don't rest as much. Don't sit down as much. Stand up and walk around. Go garden. Go for a walk listening to your book. Go to a social dance club. Get your body moving more because that's what it needs. Amen.
01:17:47
Speaker
All right. Well, I think we can wrap this episode up as a review synopsis summary as a short way to say what we just said, despite how the media portrays lifting barbells. They are just tools. Yep.
01:18:00
Speaker
In this case, very effective ones for getting very strong. And older women, ironically, in my opinion, have much, much, much more to gain from the habit of lifting them than their younger male counterparts, their younger, large male counterparts, who tend to be spotlighted and platformed predominantly in the media. 100%. For this reason, I think it's crucial we critically examine dissociations
01:18:26
Speaker
that we may be making with lifting barbells, especially for women. If we understand these negative associations better, or at least if we understand why we consider ourselves outsiders to using barbells, they may have less power to influence our behavior or our choice to not pursue strength training.
01:18:45
Speaker
and
Barbells for Everyone: Health and Longevity
01:18:46
Speaker
they'll have less power to prevent women from doing the thing that could be very good for their health and longevity that might extend their life and extend the meaning they're able to make with their life, but maybe most importantly, that could give them access to that more quality living and the self-confidence that comes with that. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and that it's helped you understand that barbells are not just for competition,
01:19:11
Speaker
They're not just for men, they're not just for large people, and they're not just for young people. Inside of the Venn diagram of lifting heavy barbells is this very tiny circle called powerlifting or weightlifting or Olympic weightlifting. And I hope you understand that it's very tiny, despite what the media shows you. I'm not disrespecting the sport itself. I think it's a great sport.
01:19:32
Speaker
I just think that we need to understand that it's a smaller topic than the one of barbells, strength training in general, and health and longevity. Hopefully you're able to spot some of these loose associations, root them in the context of some of what we've discussed today, and think critically for yourself so you can make the best possible decision for yourself and the actions that you could take to preserve your capacity.
01:19:55
Speaker
and age in a way that allows you to stay involved in the meaning of your life, in the movement meaning of your life. Check out our
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:20:04
Speaker
show notes for links to references we mentioned in this podcast. Visit the Movement Logic website where you can get on our mailing list. You can also do that in the show notes as well.
01:20:13
Speaker
to learn more about what's on offer, including cart closing soon. Four more days. Yeah, this is it. It's going away. We'll do it again, but it's going to be next year. You're going to have to wait. It's going to be more expensive. It's our barbell course. It's called bone density course lift for longevity. We've been talking about it all season. Lincoln show notes to sign up for that. And thank you so much.
01:20:40
Speaker
for joining us. Finally, it helps us out a ton. If you like this episode, you want to support Sarah and I work on this podcast, please subscribe right in review and do that wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right. See you next week.