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111: Make Stacy Sims Make Sense
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In this episode, Laurel and Sarah take a look at one of the most influential and controversial voices in women’s health: Dr. Stacy Sims. Known for the phrase “women are not small men,” Sims has built her brand on the idea that women need entirely different training and nutrition strategies than men.
Laurel and Sarah trace Sims’ rise to prominence, the research she leans on, and the rhetorical playbook she uses on major platforms like the Mel Robbins Podcast, and the Huberman Lab podcast. They examine how Sims’ is able to persuade listeners of her ideas, even though her catchy slogans and bold claims outpace the evidence.
Rather than just fact-checking Sims’ most dubious claims on cycle syncing, fasted training, cardio, and how women should train, this episode instead focuses on how Sims’ messages are delivered. You’ll listen for how Sims’ and the hosts of these podcasts frequently employ persuasive tactics like appeals to authority, fearmongering, absolutist framing, pseudo-feminist virtue signaling, and what Laurel and Sarah call “mechanism theater” can make the weak evidence and shaky reasoning behind the claims sound stronger than it is. These strategies aren’t unique to Sims; you’ll start noticing these persuasive tactics everywhere, especially in menopause marketing and wellness content online.
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RESOURCES
110: Fact-Checking Female-Specific Training & Nutrition Advice with Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple, PhD
Debate between Sims and Colenso-Semple on Docs Who Lift
Post Debate Interview on Barbell Medicine
109: Hot Flashes, Cold Facts: Menopause Myths that Won’t Die
62: Make McGill Make Sense
Social Post from Dr. Colenso-Semple about choice to use mechanistic, rat, or men’s data
108: Breathing for Bone Density? YogaU Cannot Be Serious
108: Does it Have to be Heavy? Rethinking the Lift Heavy Shit Narrative
98: Capacities for Longevity Part 3 - Cardio
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Transcript
Introduction and Objectives
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm exhausted. That's so exhausting listening to that. Cause I'm like, how the fuck am I supposed to be understanding where my flux peak capacitor, estrogen flux luteinizing hormone, like what the fuck am I supposed to do with all this information?
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:30
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
Community Announcement and Move to Circle
00:00:46
Speaker
Let's dive in.
00:01:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Sarah, let's get right into it. All right. We have a free class that we're running on October 17th, 8 a.m. Pacific, 11 a.m. Eastern.
00:01:18
Speaker
Our free class on October 17th is an opportunity for you listeners to come check us out, check it out, check it out. the bulk of the learning that this course entails which is twice weekly live classes for six full months in which we walk you step by step toward learning to lift barbells to progressively overload your strength we also have impact training and you will come to this live class with or without barbell equipment it's okay if you don't have barbells you could bring a broomstick and whatever weights you have
00:01:52
Speaker
It's free and yes, there is a replay. It's 2025 people. There's always a replay. I want to say as well, I was just talking with a participant the other day and about her experience taking the class. She said, I took that strength class and I immediately knew i have to take this course.
00:02:06
Speaker
She was like, there was so much learning. You guys taught me so much just in one class, not just about alignment and how to lift, but things like what is RPE and how could I use that to figure out what I'm doing?
00:02:18
Speaker
We've also had plenty of people tell us that they've just taken things they've learned from us and then gone and worked on their own. And I love that. So it's a valuable resource. Whether you decide to take the full course or not, you should come take the class.
00:02:29
Speaker
Also, we have another announcement, which is that we are no longer going to be using Facebook as our community gathering place online for the course. We are actually moving over to Circle. do you want to say a little bit about that, Sarah?
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, we had originally chosen to use Facebook only for the reason that it was free and that our course participants could upload videos of themselves because we do something called a form check.
00:02:53
Speaker
where they submit videos and then we give them feedback on their form. So we needed a platform that would support that. And Facebook was the closest, easiest. A lot of people already on it. We look, neither one of us is a huge fan of Facebook, but we were just like, all right, I guess we're going use this for now.
00:03:09
Speaker
And then just recently, a few weeks ago, Facebook announced that they're getting rid of the video aspect. so It's no longer doing anything that we need it to do. So we are moving from Facebook over to Circle.
00:03:21
Speaker
It's super user-friendly. I really like it. So that's happening as well. We're excited to walk away from Facebook. Yeah, and Circle is entirely private. So it's not a public platform. You're not going to be bombarded with a newsfeed of random stuff en route to joining us in our Circle community.
Introduction to Stacey Sims and Her Influence
00:03:39
Speaker
You're literally just going to log into your account and you'll be in our community. Yeah, it's like having our own little private club.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Today we've got a really different episode. I think it's going to be a fun episode, but we're coming at you with another make it make sense episode today. And in this episode, we're looking at an extremely influential figure by the name of Stacey Sims.
00:04:06
Speaker
So if you know who Stacey Sims is, it's probably because she made this very famous statement, women are not small men, which she says that she used when she was teaching at Stanford, but she also debuted publicly in a TED talk from 2019.
00:04:21
Speaker
There are a lot of trends for women's exercise that we see on social media that she has either created or supported, like cycle syncing, don't train fasted, don't do zone two cardio,
00:04:33
Speaker
Perimenopausal and menopausal women should be focused on heavy lifting and sprint interval training. So in our interview with Lauren Colenzo Semple, we dig into her major claims. If you haven't listened to that episode, Lauren Colenzo Semple is a researcher and science communicator who specializes in female physiology, exercise, and nutrition.
00:04:52
Speaker
And she also has a fascinating debate with Stacey Sims to provide a counter-argument to a lot of Sims claims.
Critique of Sims' Methodology
00:04:58
Speaker
And you can listen to that conversation on the Docs Who Lift podcast, which we will link in the show notes.
00:05:03
Speaker
And we're also going to be highlighting some parts of that conversation here today. Cool. Yeah. So Dr. Stacey Sims is a senior research associate at the Sports Performance Research Institute in New Zealand at Auckland University of Technology and holds an adjunct affiliation with Stanford University's Lifestyle Medicine Group.
00:05:20
Speaker
She supervises PhD students, has authored over 100 peer reviewed papers and contributes to Stanford's public health and exercise physiology initiatives. Sims is the author of Roar written in 2016 and Next Level in 2022. I believe she has updated Roar. There's a new edition that I think was released in 2024 last I checked.
00:05:40
Speaker
Okay. She also delivered the viral TEDx talk, Women Are Not Small Men 2019.
00:05:47
Speaker
She's a former professional cyclist and endurance athlete and frequently appears on podcasts and public platforms discussing women's physiology, training, nutrition, and recovery. Before we go on, I do want to clarify something about her research. And this was something that we actually learned in our interview with Dr. Lauren Colenzo-Sumples.
00:06:05
Speaker
Sims has authored over 100 peer review papers, which is eight. substantial academic output, no question. But it's important to understand what type of papers these are.
00:06:16
Speaker
Many of the papers are what are called narrative reviews, position statements, or mechanistic syntheses. And these are all really valuable for summarizing what is known at the moment.
00:06:29
Speaker
So looking at all the research that's currently out there on a topic, summarizing it, and then proposing possible new directions for research or possible new frameworks or ways of thinking around this topic.
00:06:42
Speaker
So this is a type of paper that sits lower on the evidence hierarchy, right? Randomized control trials are the gold standard type of research that you can do.
00:06:54
Speaker
And then we have meta-analyses and systematic reviews, which take all the trials that have been done and synthesize that information for you. Mechanistic papers which describe biological pathways, for example, how estrogen affects muscle metabolism, those are hypothesis generating, right? They're telling us, okay, this might be true at a cellular or molecular level, but it doesn't then confirm how these mechanisms play out in real world training outcomes, right? You have to extrapolate a great deal to then say, okay, that means this.
00:07:27
Speaker
She leans heavily on those types of papers. She really does, and we're going to talk about that. Sims has also co-authored some RCTs, right randomized control trials, particularly with endurance athletes.
00:07:37
Speaker
But many of her most popular public claims, like cycle syncing, discouraging fasted training, or prescribing specific training intensities for women by their decade of life, these are extrapolations from mechanistic reasoning, and these have not been directly tested.
00:07:54
Speaker
And we see this come through really clearly in her conversation with Lauren Colenzo Semple on Docs Who Lift. They debate these topics and others. And Sims continually comes back to mechanistic studies and the nuance that is found in their data, which is, sorry, I just have to, for a second, calling it nuance.
00:08:12
Speaker
It's like saying, let's say 100 people get COVID and one of them, their big toe hurts. And then you're gonna be like, that's some nuance. Like one person's big toe hurt. If you were gonna say, is this a side effect from getting COVID?
00:08:25
Speaker
No, because it happened to one person. So this idea that it's nuance. Yeah, she would use her anecdotal yes experience working with certain athletes to add, quote, nuance, but we know anecdote is not evidence.
00:08:39
Speaker
It's not evidence. And then she also says on that podcast episode that she does not like meta-analyses, which is, again, when a group of studies are looked at together, again, because they lose nuance. But that's the point.
00:08:53
Speaker
You filter out the most unlikely, most random, so that you get where the vast majority effect is taking place. That's the whole point. On the other hand, Lauren Colenso Semple believes that, yes, in the world of academia, these smaller studies are interesting and they provide direction for future studies to go, but they should not be let loose upon the general public as actionable advice and that we need to wait for these larger sized randomized control trials before we start making large scale proclamations.
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I'd like to also clarify her rise in influence. Sim's rise to prominence has been driven largely, we think, by her skill as a communicator. Her trademarked tagline, quote, women are not small men, has become a rallying cry for reexamining exercise science through a female lens.
00:09:47
Speaker
There's also her books and the many dozens of podcast appearances. I think I found at least 60 that showed up in Apple podcasts. There's
Rhetorical Strategies in Health Communication
00:09:56
Speaker
probably a lot more from smaller podcasts.
00:09:58
Speaker
These have shaped public understanding of female physiology far beyond academic settings. But here's the thing. TEDx talks, trade books, these are actually designed to inspire and persuade people.
00:10:13
Speaker
not necessarily to meet the rigorous evidentiary standards of something like a systematic review or a randomized control trial. It's also notable that while Sims, who is a former professional cyclist, often will describe her work or her message as being aimed at female athletes or highly active women,
00:10:35
Speaker
When you listen to her, especially on these podcasts that we're going to share with you today, major podcasts that get millions of listeners, she almost never qualifies this when speaking to these more general audiences on these major podcasts. And that, for us, that raises an important question.
00:10:53
Speaker
When highly specific, actionable recommendations about nutrient timing, when women should eat, how much of a certain macronutrient they should eat, training intensity by decade.
00:11:08
Speaker
When these are presented without this context that she's speaking to these highly active women, when she doesn't contextualize that to millions of listeners,
00:11:19
Speaker
many of whom, if we just look at the stats, may not even be exercising at all. How are these listeners supposed to know whether this advice is relevant or appropriate for them?
00:11:31
Speaker
I also just wanted to add, I read her book, Roar, a little while ago. I don't remember it super clearly, but I remember thinking, because there's a lot of nutrition advice presented in there, and I remember coming away thinking, man, this lady really wants me to drink tart cherry juice.
00:11:44
Speaker
Every time you turn around, you're supposed to be drinking tart cherry juice. And I also came away with the impression that this is for people who can afford this. Oh, because yeah. Because it's not, I don't go into Ralph's and buy a bottle of tart cherry juice for $20. These are not cheap options. And exercise free, really. Yeah. And I came away from reading Roar thinking I really needed to be eating purple potatoes.
00:12:09
Speaker
Oh, yes. Purple potatoes. I've never seen purple potatoes sold anywhere in Huntsville, Alabama. I'd be surprised. You're bringing up a really interesting point. which is that she'll often use an avatar. She'll even call it an avatar, which is like this example person that doesn't really exist to then give hyper-specific, I think bordering on neurotic advice about food yeah that explicitly names very specific and hard to find and also expensive types of foods like tart cherry juice and purple potatoes.
00:12:41
Speaker
And I think of this as a type of dog whistle to the affluent. Right? Like she is probably targeting affluent women in her messaging.
00:12:54
Speaker
And so she is sending out smoke signals, dog whistles, whatever you want to call it, to this population of people. There's something aspirational about it. Don't you want to be the kind of woman who wakes up in the morning and has an espresso machine? Can't afford almond milk.
00:13:12
Speaker
and has the time to be able to prepare your protein coffee the night before. Don't you want to be the type of woman who lives in a type of neighborhood that has the farmer's market that sells the purple potatoes?
00:13:26
Speaker
There's this whole, I don't know, subliminal signaling. Yeah, a lot of capitalism works this way. Don't you want to be this better kind of person? Yeah. You really knocked me out with, don't you want to be the kind of woman who wakes up with an espresso machine? I said, I would love to be that kind of woman.
00:13:42
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Anyway, we'll get more into that as well. We also want to share something from the homepage of Sim's website because it gives us a chance to look directly at how she frames her own trustworthiness.
00:13:55
Speaker
So there's a section titled, Why Trust Me? And she writes... In order to remain impartial and factual, I've built my business to be independent of outside influence. My work is funded entirely by sales of my courses and products.
00:14:08
Speaker
I think that needs to be updated because she is now, there's something that she is on and Starrett is on where they're doing ads. Momentous supplements. Yes. Yeah. She has a whole supplement line, multiple supplement stacks.
00:14:19
Speaker
I guess products count as supplements, but right there, she's telling us our her business model depends entirely on what she sells. Books, courses, speaking gigs, now supplements. And while there's nothing wrong with selling something, we're selling you something, right?
00:14:33
Speaker
It does mean she has a financial stake in convincing you that her approach is essential and based in science. She can't go on that debate with Lauren Colenzo Semple and back down on anything because it's going to directly impact her bottom line. If she's suddenly a little less confident in all of these things that she's been telling you must do, that's going to impact how she makes money.
00:14:55
Speaker
and This is where the tension between science and branding shows up. A strong brand thrives on a consistent, memorable message. And for Sims, that message is her trademarked tagline, women are not small men.
00:15:07
Speaker
It's sticky. It's repeated everywhere. It's one of the main things she's known for. But what happens when emerging evidence shows that women, despite hormonal differences, often respond to diet and exercise similarly to men?
00:15:21
Speaker
If that science starts to get too loud, it's going to risk undermining the very narrative her brand is built on, which makes her much less likely to want to amplify it. Yeah. Okay. In today's episode, we're doing something a little different.
00:15:34
Speaker
Instead of just fact checking Stacey Sims claims, we'll link to several episodes in our show notes, our episodes, our interview with Dr. Lauren Colenzo Semple. We're also going to link the docs who lift debate between Lauren Colenzo Semple and Stacey Sims. And then on an episode on barbell medicine,
00:15:54
Speaker
where the host interviewed Lauren Colenzo Semple post debate. So if I were to suggest an order in which to listen to these episodes, it would be in this order. You're already listening to this one. So listen to this one, then go back and listen to our interview with Dr. Lauren Colenzo Semple.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah. Then listen to her debate on Docs Who Lift. Then listen to Barbell Medicine. And then, yeah, go back and listen to our Hot Flashes Cold Facts episode, which is more tangentially related. But if you really want to understand the crux of these debates, that's the order in which I would recommend you listen.
00:16:32
Speaker
Are you the kind of woman who wakes up in the morning and listens to five podcast episodes before you have breakfast? Oh gosh, that's not good for you according to Sims. Okay, so today in this episode, we're going to do things a little bit differently, although I will say we have done something similarly in the Make McGill Make Sense episode.
00:16:51
Speaker
What we're going to do is we're going to focus on how Sims communicates. We're going to listen to clips from two major podcasts that she has gone on recently, We're going to listen to how she's communicating her ideas, not just the factual basis of them, but how she delivers them. And we're calling this her rhetorical playbook.
00:17:11
Speaker
We're going to listen for the strategies that Sims uses that makes her message resonate so strongly with her audience of women, women who care about their health, who are looking for answers and who want to trust that they're getting advice from an authority.
00:17:29
Speaker
We think that it's in being able to spot these strategies, it's like a survival skill in 2025. If you think about it, we already know how to protect ourselves physically. We buckle up, we lock our doors, we wear helmets when we go on bike ride, we go to doctors for regular checkups, hopefully. But in a time like now, when misinformation is spreading faster than facts on social media, experts are doubling as influencers and influencers are doubling as experts.
00:18:03
Speaker
and the wellness industry is constantly monetizing our anxieties, we need to get a lot better at protecting our minds. yeah And it's tough.
00:18:14
Speaker
Humans are very gullible, which is another way to say we're wired to be persuadable. And it's not a flaw. It's actually a feature of our evolutionary success.
00:18:26
Speaker
We have evolved to trust confident storytellers. This helped us survive. stories about how to eat without getting poisoned or use this stream, not that one. And stories and shared narratives helped us learn like a heuristic of how to protect ourselves from all the many things that could possibly kill us.
00:18:48
Speaker
And we pass that information down in this storytelling manner. We're wired to pay attention to things that might hurt us. And we're wired to be influenced.
00:18:59
Speaker
That same wiring that has ensured our survival for millennium today makes us really vulnerable to charismatic influence and emotionally charged marketing.
00:19:11
Speaker
So this episode is about building a mental filter, a way to notice not just what's being said, but how it's being packaged and sold to you.
00:19:22
Speaker
Because if you can spot the tactics Things like black and white framing that makes things sound simple and certain or urgent warnings that make it feel like your health is at risk if you don't act now or the flood of sciencey jargon that signals authority while making you feel like you're totally lost and you need this expert using these words to translate it all for you.
00:19:47
Speaker
The thing about learning about these tactics and being able to spot them is you suddenly don't have to be an expert on every topic. to know when you're being manipulated. So we're going to have a little fun with this, okay?
00:20:00
Speaker
We're going to gamify it. Sarah, have you ever played a drinking game at any point in your life where you watch a show and then every time you hear a word or expression, you take a drink?
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah. That's the game we're going to play. But instead of listening for particular words or expressions, we're going to listen for these different rhetorical strategies, these persuasive moves that Sims and often also the podcast hosts use to make their points land. And if you've been listening to our show for a while, some of these tactics will be familiar to you because we highlight them in other episodes. Some of them might be new.
00:20:38
Speaker
The way it's going to work is we're going to play you clips from two major interviews Stacey Sims did, one on the Mel Robbins podcast and one on the Huberman Lab podcast. Now, if you're not familiar with these podcasters, Mel Robbins is a bestselling author and motivational speaker known for her high energy, take action now style.
00:20:56
Speaker
Andrew Huberman is a Stanford neuroscientist who translates brain and physiology research into very detailed protocol driven advice. Both of these people have massive audiences.
00:21:08
Speaker
So know that what Sims says on these shows reaches millions of ears. We want you to play this little drinking game, but we're going to say as a caveat, you should probably choose something that is non-alcoholic.
00:21:22
Speaker
Or just take small s sips. Yeah, really small sips. You're going to notice these tactics a lot. might regret picking up some bottle of vodka. Yeah. So grab maybe a tea, a coffee, sparkling water or a beer. But as Sarah said, take small sips.
00:21:36
Speaker
You're about to start spotting these strategies in real time. And once you hear them, we hope you won't be able to unhear them, which we hope makes you better at spotting them everywhere on the internet, because these tactics are not unique to Sims.
00:21:50
Speaker
They're a staple of persuasive marketing. But let's back up for a second. we've been talking about spotting rhetorical strategies but what do we actually mean by that you want to talk about rhetoric so first of all rhetoric itself is not a bad thing it's not manipulation by default it's just the act of persuasion using language rhetoric is how we package ideas it's the way that we dress up information so it makes an impression and moves people towards action this podcast is rhetoric it's everywhere it's in advertising
00:22:22
Speaker
It's in politics. It's anywhere where people are actively being convinced of something. So if you want to think critically about claims, it's not enough to just focus on what is being said. You also have to pay attention to how
Analysis of Mel Robbins' Podcast Episode with Stacey Sims
00:22:34
Speaker
it's being said.
00:22:35
Speaker
And here's the thing. None of us can be experts in everything ah to be able to parse every claim and separate science-based information from misinformation. But we can get better at noticing the delivery.
00:22:48
Speaker
We can practice spotting the patterns and emotional hooks that make information feel urgent, convincing, or trustworthy, whether the evidence actually supports it or not. And this can go a long way towards preventing you from completely falling for really convincing sounding garbage.
00:23:04
Speaker
So we're going to start with three rhetorical tactics that we've actually talked about before in past episodes. The first one is called appeal to authority. This happens all the time. Do you remember Lauren Fishman?
00:23:15
Speaker
We made a post and he didn't like it. And he said, I wrote this paper with these ah researchers from oh New York. i don't even remember where he said. Harvard. Yeah, his first thing was like, but I work with these professionals. and we're like, it doesn't mean your study is correct. He likes to hit people over the head with appeal to authority.
00:23:33
Speaker
So appeal to authority is when someone leans on their credentials or status, right? I'm a Stanford scientist. I've worked with thousands of athletes to make their point sound beyond question.
00:23:44
Speaker
And while it's not always a red flag when someone shares their credentials and experience, you want to know that someone is qualified. Just remember that having the experience and credentials doesn't make a claim automatically true.
00:23:56
Speaker
It's relevant to know that someone is uniquely qualified to speak on a subject. Stacey Sims is certainly qualified to speak on the topics of female physiology and nutrition. Contrast this with, for instance, her podcast host, Mel Robbins, who isn't a trained therapist, yet gives mental health and relationship advice as though she were or Andrew Huberman, who is a neuroscientist, but also often dives deep into hormones, metabolism, and nutrition protocols, areas outside his formal training, and gets a lot wrong in the process.
00:24:28
Speaker
Sims is qualified to speak on many of these topics, but that doesn't mean that her claims are all evidence-based. So the filter is, you have to ask yourself, is this person qualified to speak on this topic?
00:24:40
Speaker
And if not, have they highlighted it themselves as a kind of disclaimer? And then also, what is the evidence behind what they're saying? Do they tell you where they get their information? Are they drawing from strong evidence or are they cherry picking studies that support their argument?
00:24:56
Speaker
And then finally, do their claims line up with expert consensus or are they just completely coming out of left field? Yeah. So... Rhetorical strategy number one, which you just heard about, is appeal to authority.
00:25:08
Speaker
The next one we're going to talk about is fear-mongering. Fear-mongering is when a speaker uses language designed to make you feel anxious, unsafe, or at risk if you don't take their advice.
00:25:23
Speaker
It often shows up as if you don't do X, this bad thing will happen to you, sometimes paired with scary-sounding science terms or dire predictions about your health.
00:25:34
Speaker
Fear is a powerful motivator. We're wired to protect ourselves. It's very attention grabbing. It primes you to act, which is why it's such an effective rhetorical strategy, specifically in health and wellness marketing.
00:25:50
Speaker
But fear also shuts down critical thinking. It can make you feel like yeah urgent action is the only option, even if the evidence for that action is pretty weak or mixed.
00:26:04
Speaker
So when you hear phrases like, this will tank your metabolism, your thyroid will downregulate in four hours, your bones will be like chalk if you do zone two cardio, this is fear mongering.
00:26:17
Speaker
The filter here that you're building is to pause and ask, is this risk real? Is this well-documented? Is this likely to affect me?
00:26:29
Speaker
Or is this being exaggerated to push me toward a product, a protocol, or a worldview? And here's a bonus red flag. Anytime someone says or makes you feel like everything you've been doing is wrong,
00:26:45
Speaker
especially about huge topics like diet and exercise, which have been studied extensively for decades, this is ah massive red flag. It should signal to your brain to activate its filters and get very skeptical of everything this person is saying because big claims require big evidence.
00:27:05
Speaker
Okay, so our third rhetorical strategy is something called absolutist framing. Now, absolutist framing leaves no room for nuance, context, or individual preference. And that's partly why it's so persuasive. It sounds confident and definitive, which can feel reassuring because it removes uncertainty.
00:27:24
Speaker
But once you get past the most basic recommendations, like the minimum protein to avoid deficiency, or the CDC's recommendation of 150 minutes of weekly cardio. Human needs vary widely.
00:27:38
Speaker
Goals, training history, dietary restrictions, medical considerations, schedule, and preferences all play a part in what is best for someone. So when someone offers a single, rigid prescription for all women or for all older adults, that's a red flag. It oversimplifies a very diverse group of people and their needs.
00:27:57
Speaker
A more evidence-based communicator will leave space for individual differences with this idea that it depends. For example, perimenopausal women and menopausal women must lift heavy to build strength and improve bone mineral density.
00:28:12
Speaker
Contrast this with heavy lifting is one way to build bone and improve strength, but light and moderate weights can work as well as long as the sets are challenging. Therefore, choose the style that works for you.
00:28:24
Speaker
right? you see the difference? Like absolutist statements create this pressure to comply and set people up to feel like failures if they can't follow every rule. Whereas evidence-based statements leave room for flexibility and for choice. And that's what makes them more realistic and frankly, responsible.
00:28:40
Speaker
All right. We are going to get into these clips with our filters on. And we're listening this time for these three rhetorical strategies, appeal to authority, fear-mongering,
00:28:54
Speaker
and an absolutist framing, black and white, it must be this way. Got your beverage? You're gonna take a sip every time your ears spot one of these tactics.
00:29:05
Speaker
We're going to start with a two, about two and a half minute clip from the Mel Robbins podcast. This is the very top of the show. And this is Mel introducing the guest and episode topic.
00:29:16
Speaker
Sarah, what are you drinking today? I'm the kind of person who has multiple drinks at the same time. So I have water, I have tea, and I have my breakfast smoothie. Nice. What do you got?
00:29:27
Speaker
I've got coffee, and getting a little cold, and my bulky mug. Nice. little merch endorsement there. We'll link that bulky mug in the show notes. Yes, please do. Okay.
00:29:38
Speaker
Here we go with Mel Robbins, opener to The Sims interview. You're listening for appeal to authority, fearmongering, and an absolutist framing. um
00:29:52
Speaker
Okay. I have a confession. I just learned, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this, that for the last 40 years of my life, I've been exercising all wrong.
00:30:04
Speaker
And I bet you or someone that you love have to. And I just wanna break this down because the conversation that I just had with the expert that you're about to meet, who is on the faculty at Stanford, has a PhD, 107 peer reviewed research studies, she is gonna break down all of the mistakes that women are making when it comes to nutrition and exercise.
00:30:27
Speaker
I mean, this is going to blow your mind. After learning everything that she's about to share with you based on all of her research, I, as a woman, I feel like I've been gaslit by bro science and the male fitness industry, for real.
00:30:43
Speaker
Like literally all of the things that I've been doing that work for guys don't work for women. And you need to understand this. i mean, this is one of the most life-changing conversations I have had since I started this podcast over two years ago.
00:30:59
Speaker
Starting tomorrow, I am a different person because I understand why my husband can do certain things. And next thing you know, he looks great. I do him. Nope. And have you ever heard that saying, abs are made in the kitchen?
00:31:12
Speaker
That's not true if you're a woman. So if you're wondering why all the cardio in the world isn't working, why the nonstop yoga and HIIT classes are just not hitting, it's because you're exercising like a dude.
00:31:25
Speaker
It's time that you wake up and realize, like our expert says, Women are not small men. Women have fundamentally different biology. In fact, even our muscular structure is different.
00:31:37
Speaker
And so she is gonna take you and me down the list of all the things that we have been told to do that are actually backfiring. That cold plunge, you and I are doing it wrong.
00:31:48
Speaker
The reps you're doing with all those weights, doing them wrong. Intermittent fasting, ah probably not for you. And if you like me have worked out on an empty stomach, You're never going to do that again.
00:32:00
Speaker
You're about to learn how to get better results in less time and less effort, working with your female body, not against it. It's time for you and me and every single woman in your life to start exercising like a woman needs to.
00:32:18
Speaker
are
00:32:23
Speaker
I don't know about you, but I'm drunk. i'm feeling very hydrated. mean, the one thing that's really interesting, I had never actually listened to the Mel Robbins podcast before I listened to this episode. So she's completely new to me.
00:32:37
Speaker
She's very, I don't know if this is something she does in every episode with every person she interviews. She's so evangelical. Yeah. She's super evangelical and she's super flattering. She really is like a hype girl for the guest.
00:32:50
Speaker
Yes. Big time. Which is a problem if you're hyping something that it shouldn't be hyped. It's a little bit of that absolutist framing tactic. I mean, it was all absolutist framing. You're doing it wrong. This is wrong. Everything's wrong.
00:33:02
Speaker
yeah The part where she says, for the last 40 years of my life, I've been exercising all wrong. I'm like, that's a bit much for your... That's not actually... like That's an actually an exaggeration. Stacey Sims is not coming on and saying you've been doing it all wrong for your entire life. I think it's important to clarify that these are Mel's words, right? Yes, yes.
00:33:22
Speaker
So she's out here just ringing the bell for Stacey. She's the, when you go to a big concert and there's the team of dancers behind the singer, like she's all 20 dancers just like going for it.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. and She really sells everything. hard, right? Yeah. i guess if this is the beginning of the episode, she's trying to get people to listen to the episode. So she has to hype it up a lot yeah to make it sound like something you need to stop if you're doing business. doesn't have to hype it up this much, though. This is a tactic unique to Mel. She is going to hype it a lot. And she's going to use a lot of absolutist framing to do it. So I want to, let's start with the appeals to authority Yeah. The expert that you're about to meet on the faculty at Stanford, PhD, 107 peer reviewed studies. These are all true about Stacey Sims, but you could see how as a listener, this would really strike you as being a very important, knowledgeable authority on a topic they're about to learn about. So expert.
00:34:20
Speaker
faculty at Stanford, PhD, 107 peer-reviewed research studies. It's easy to hear those words and go, this woman is only going to deliver the facts. And the thing is, it's not bad to have credentials. Like plenty of people with all these kinds of credentials do go on to just present the facts.
00:34:37
Speaker
But it's also important to know that it doesn't automatically mean that's what's going to happen. What about the fear mongering? Did you hear any of that? Oh my God, I've been exercising all wrong. Women are making mistakes when it comes to nutrition.
00:34:48
Speaker
You're doing the cold plunge wrong. that You're doing too many reps. You should stop intermittent fasting. Don't work out on an empty stomach. you Don't ever do that again. It's just, it's terrifying. i Oh my God, I've been living my life completely incorrectly this entire time. Yeah, she's you're you've been exercising all wrong. And I bet you or someone that you love has to. It's like now your responsibility to save your loved one.
00:35:11
Speaker
Everyone's going down. What about absolutist framing? Oh God, but this whole thing of all of the things I've been doing that work for guys don't work for women. Right. Which is actually not true. I'm really literally everything. Where I got confused is when she was like, so if you're wondering why all the cardio in the world isn't working, why the nonstop yoga and HIIT classes are just not hitting, it's because you're exercising like a dude. And I was like, wait.
00:35:35
Speaker
So are dudes doing nonstop yoga and HIIT classes now? Because I thought... i don't I don't remember seeing a ton of dudes in my yoga class or even in a HIIT class. Right, right. I mean, is that like the prevailing belief that... I don't know. That's that's what men's exercise is. And that's why that's what women have to stop because I'm confused now because I actually thought that...
00:35:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think we start to run into problems when we tell women to exercise like women in general, right? I think we run into problems where you tell people to exercise like women or men. Why do we have to? Right. it's basic For the most part, it's really the same.
00:36:10
Speaker
Your needs are the same. Another thing, this isn't a rhetorical strategy that we're having you drink to, but I think it's something worth listening to from Mel Robbins specifically, where she'll do what's called future pacing.
00:36:23
Speaker
So future pacing is ah persuasive tactic where the speaker wants you to imagine a specific desirable future outcome. It's really common in self-help languaging.
00:36:35
Speaker
And it's usually one that results like this future desirable outcome when you take action now and you take the action that they're recommending. and And it works. It's a persuasive tactic because it activates our imagination. It makes us feel like emotional and aspirational about like this outcome that we really want compared to the reality we find ourselves in, which Mel Robbins will often also paint our reality is being really bad, right? Like the way you've been exercising is all wrong. And you're going to hear this level of emotional escalation and exaggeration from her a lot in a way that paints like what's going on right now with you is wrong.
00:37:13
Speaker
So wrong. And if you take this advice now with urgency, you're going to step into this much more appealing, idealistic future.
Influence of Stacey Sims' Narrative on Women's Fitness
00:37:22
Speaker
It's called future pacing. So she goes, starting tomorrow, I'm a different person. Right.
00:37:28
Speaker
It also feels a lot like, what was that book that was super popular maybe 10, 15 years ago that was basically like, if you can imagine it, it'll come true. And so you were just supposed to visualize this perfect future and it would just show up. And I don't I'm like, I would like to imagine a world where I wake up as a woman with an espresso machine. Like I, if I just keep imagining that world starting tomorrow, am I a woman who wakes up with an espresso machine? You should want to have it in espresso machine because that signifies affluence, right?
00:37:57
Speaker
Our fourth tactic, which we have not told you there will be more tactics, but there are going to be a total of five tactics. This one is called pseudo-feminist virtue signaling. I think it's a good one to listen for, especially when we're looking at grift, misinformation, pseudoscience spreading around menopause. Okay, so Sarah, did you hear any pseudo-feminist virtue signaling in this clip? Good Lord. Yeah.
00:38:22
Speaker
Let's define what we mean by that. So feminism, at its core, seeks to challenge and dismantle systems of power, discrimination, and cultural norms that perpetuate gender inequality. Pseudo-feminism can be thought of as something that uses the language, imagery, or moral authority of feminism, but doesn't actually advance women's equality or freedom in a meaningful way.
00:38:46
Speaker
Virtue signaling is the act of publicly displaying your moral stance values or commitments, not necessarily to create real change, but primarily to be seen as virtuous.
00:39:00
Speaker
In other words, it's less about making a meaningful difference to a problem and more about being recognized as someone who has the right views or cares about the right causes.
00:39:12
Speaker
The more you start unpacking claims Sims makes, the more you might start to see how they aren't actually good for women at all. but they're frequently championed in that way.
00:39:23
Speaker
And when you drill down, a lot of her claims aren't good for women because they aren't strongly evidence-based. They're overly prescriptive and rigid and therefore less accessible.
00:39:36
Speaker
They're also often frequently fearmongery around things like weight gain and appearance, insecurities, marketing strategies frequently target.
00:39:47
Speaker
So instead of helping, we feel Sim's advice often serves to create a lot of confusion, fear, and just more rules to follow. Rules that we think make women feel like they're constantly doing it wrong. They're doing exercise and nutrition wrong.
00:40:04
Speaker
And none of this is actually good for women. It's bad for women, but it's dressed up as feminist. Pseudo-feminism wears the costume of women's empowerment and but ends up making women's lives harder.
00:40:17
Speaker
And we call it virtue signaling because its purpose is to earn our trust. Sims and Robbins present themselves as champions of women. They're finally telling us the truth and fighting back against bro science.
00:40:31
Speaker
But what is actually happening is that through this rhetoric, they're pulling us deeper into their ecosystem of influence. And the grand irony, one of the main messages is to exercise like a woman, not a man.
00:40:45
Speaker
But where have we heard this advice to exercise like a woman?
Scientific Jargon and Mechanism Theater
00:40:49
Speaker
Or do anything like a woman before, Sarah? man Pink dumbbells, anyone? How about that pen for women that came out a little while ago?
00:40:58
Speaker
Stick to yoga. It'll make you ageless. Pilates is going to make you long and lean. Yeah, Pilates long and lean. Answer body. Yeah. So if you listen again to the previous clip, you will probably hear a ton of feminist virtue signaling. We're going to go on to another clip right now from the Mel Robbins podcast where you will probably hear some more.
00:41:20
Speaker
So for this clip, you are listening for pseudo feminist virtue signaling. um
00:41:30
Speaker
And I was teaching about sex differences in training or high performance. So i would start it with women are not small men. And and people are like, well, of course not. Like that's, you know, women aren't small men.
00:41:43
Speaker
But what I mean by that is everything from what happens in utero until we die is different for women than men. So when we talk about women are not small men and we see all the guidelines that are out there for exercise, all the guidelines out there for mental health, for the connections, the socio cultural pressures, we experience things differently as women than men do, but that's not ever really explained.
00:42:07
Speaker
So when we say women are not small men, it makes people take the pause and ask, well what do you mean by that? What topic? So today, what I mean by women are not small men is we're going to dive into exercise, especially how what we do should change as we move through our lives.
00:42:23
Speaker
What does that motto, women are not small men, mean in practice? I think... When we look right now at what's being portrayed in social media, fitness trends, the medical trends, huh all of that data is really drawn from men and just generalized to women, which is a huge disservice.
00:42:45
Speaker
So I want women, especially you as a listener on this podcast, to take a pause whenever you see a new trend come up or someone pushing something to just go, well, where does this originate?
00:42:57
Speaker
How does it appropriate for me as a woman in my phase of life? And when you take that pause, you begin to have an objection to some of the things that are being pushed on you and an objective view of how you should approach things to make it beneficial for you.
00:43:13
Speaker
are
00:43:18
Speaker
Any pseudo-feminist virtue signaling in that class? Basically the entire thing, right? It's this whole women's exercise is completely based on men and We need to figure out what's good for women.
00:43:30
Speaker
And there's been no research on women. Which is not true. Not true. There's a lot more on men, but there is research on women. Yeah. We'll link in the show notes a clip that I just saw today from Colenza Semple, where she...
00:43:44
Speaker
outlines the fact that no one's disagreeing that there's a lack of research on women, but there isn't no research on women. And when given a choice between drawing from mechanistic models, rodent data, both of which Sims leans heavily on for her claims, and research done on men, the best of the three is the research done on men.
00:44:06
Speaker
yeah for And we don't have no research on women either. That's hyperbolic. And It's an exaggeration designed to make you feel outraged.
00:44:18
Speaker
It's not true. It's not true. And ironically, we're actually doing exactly what Sims is asking us to do. We are taking a pause and we're asking how what she is recommending to us, right? The women she's advising, whether it's appropriate or true.
00:44:33
Speaker
And I got to say, we've certainly started to have some objections to some of the things that are being pushed on us. Okay. So next we're going to have another clip from Mel Robbins where she sets up the premise of the conversation by pointing out that most, she says all, she very frequently uses exaggeration and emotional escalation as a strategy.
00:44:52
Speaker
So most of the research on exercise, nutrition, and health has historically been done on men. And because of that, she argues, we don't fully understand how these practices affect women whose hormones, physiology, and body composition are different.
00:45:06
Speaker
And she frames the episode as a step-by-step process to debunk the assumptions people have made based on male data and to teach women what they really need to do to work with their bodies instead of against them.
00:45:17
Speaker
So this primes the listeners to expect that what they've been doing is wrong and that this conversation will reveal a new female-specific way forward. So we're going to be listening for fear-mongering, absolutist framing, and that's pseudo-feminist virtue signaling in this next clip. are
00:45:41
Speaker
So what's the most common mistake that women make by following male-centric fitness advice? ah They don't get any results and they end up what we call tired but wired.
00:45:53
Speaker
I mean, if you look at most women who make a point to get up, do some training, go exercise, and it happens so often after four weeks of following the same kind of training program as their male partner, their male partner has gotten leaner, fitter, better cognition,
00:46:11
Speaker
you know focus all of the things that you want out of fitness. the woman's like, how come I'm fatter and tired and I don't have any like increase in my fitness like my partner does. And I see it all the time and I'm always explaining, well, one, your partner might get up and go fasted training.
00:46:28
Speaker
Women's bodies don't respond well to fasted training. What's fasted training? i don't even what the heck this is. Like fasted training. Fasted training means you're not having any food before you go do exercise. Oh, so well that's what I would always do. yeah Like I would always literally like I'm going to eat after because my husband would eat after.
00:46:44
Speaker
And then we would, my mouth is on the floor. You can see this on YouTube, but it's like, as you're listening, i'm I'm processing this because I'm thinking how often I've been pissed off at Chris, my husband. Yeah.
00:46:56
Speaker
Because we will take on some challenge together. And I'm like, this is not fair. yeah Like, how is it that this is actually making you lose weight and I feel like I'm puffier and fluffier and tired and pissed off? ye And I'm following the same steps.
00:47:10
Speaker
I'm doing the intermittent fasting. I'm not eating beforehand. I'm slamming the thing after. i'm doing it And i'm like, what the hell is going on? And this is because he's male and I'm female. Yep, exactly. um
00:47:25
Speaker
Okay. Have you been drinking? i got to say. Go You go first. I have exercised in lots of different ways throughout my life. There's been periods in my life where I did a ton of cardio. There's been periods in my life where I did a lot of yoga.
00:47:37
Speaker
There's been more recently periods where I did more strength training and then I got into heavy barbells. I got to say, no matter what type of exercise that I was doing, I never came away feeling puffier and fluffier and fatter.
00:47:51
Speaker
Yeah. Like, fear mind i don't much i don't think that happens. i I don't think that happens. That's my opinion. But I know that exercise is not the best way to lose weight, right? We know that weight loss, right Because she's saying she's she's fatter. Weight loss calories in, calories out.
00:48:06
Speaker
And we've talked about that a lot this season. And in particular, it's still true for women going through menopause. It's not like this hormonal shift suddenly makes it impossible to lose weight. I don't know what's going on here.
00:48:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think that they are playing into insecurities that already exist with women who feel that they don't understand why they're putting on weight.
00:48:29
Speaker
yeah And yeah their whole solution to that is that you need to exercise like a woman. and stop exercising like a man. What I find so ironic about all of this is that most people aren't exercising at all.
00:48:45
Speaker
and They're just layering on a ton of confusing, overly complicated and fear mongering messaging. Yeah. If I didn't know what I was doing before, I sure don't know now.
00:48:55
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:59
Speaker
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00:49:20
Speaker
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00:49:40
Speaker
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00:49:50
Speaker
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00:50:05
Speaker
So for fear mongering, she'll say stuff like, what happens when women make the mistake of following male central fitness advice? I'm paraphrasing. And she goes, they don't get any results.
00:50:17
Speaker
First of all, they have never defined what they mean by male-centric fitness advice. If we go based on the intro at the top of the show, it's HIIT and yoga. There's pseudo-feminist virtue signaling. They're just saying, male, bad. My stupid husband, he gets all the results.
00:50:31
Speaker
Female, good. So if we knew what male-centric fitness advice was and we followed it, we would get no results. And also, if we knew what kind of results she's talking about. Is she talking about weight loss? Is she talking about... It's very frustrating. And also exercise is not the best way to lose weight. Like the focus of a lot of this conversation seems to be about weight loss in particular, but there's very little mention of, I mean, in this clip, there's no mention of maybe you felt fluffier and puffier because you were eating more.
00:50:57
Speaker
You were not in a calorie deficit. Exactly. This whole idea of like tired and wired. I'm sorry. Have you seen outside lately? Like I think we're all living a little tired and wired just because it's 2025.
00:51:10
Speaker
It's not because we're all exercising like men. Exactly. Exactly. This whole idea of pseudo-feminist virtue signaling is her talking about how when she works out with her husband and he gets all the results and she's doing all the same thing as him and she doesn't get the results. And, you know, what the hell is this because he's male and I'm female? And without pausing for a moment, Sims goes, yes, exactly.
00:51:32
Speaker
That's why. Right? Like it's the way you're exercising is wrong because you're doing men's exercise. The same way we were previously using men's pens and we needed a woman's pen.
00:51:44
Speaker
This whole pitting people against their partner, maybe there are other things going on in the couple's dynamic. Like women tend to do more housework than men, that women tend to do the bulk of the child rearing. The emotional baggage.
00:51:58
Speaker
And so are they maybe using that dynamic in a domestic relationship to then slide in there that actually why you're feeling this way is because you're exercising like a man. It's real slick.
00:52:12
Speaker
It really is. There was this old Chris Rock joke about listening to all the side effects of of a medication, right? And you're just listening for the thing that sounds like you. They will always list so many things that eventually you're like, oh yeah, that's me.
00:52:24
Speaker
And so he's they'll say something like, do you wake up in the morning and go to bed at night? And you're like, oh my God, that's me. yeah It's like this. It's, are you tired? Yes. you wired? Sure. Do you feel puffy? Sometimes.
00:52:34
Speaker
All of those things could be for any number of reasons. And they're saying it's because you exercise, right? because of how you're exercising. yeah Most people listening don't exercise. Exactly. All right. So I also want to talk about this claim about women not putting on as much muscle when they train fasted.
00:52:52
Speaker
This claim does not hold water. Muscle mass has been tested in fed female populations and fasted female populations. And it's basically the same. And this is an area that Dr. Colenzo Semple specifically challenged Sims on in their debate on Docs Who Lift.
00:53:10
Speaker
Sim says that she's following the evidence and that she has studies that show that fasted training is not good for women, but these studies are likely case studies or pilot studies, not our gold standard RCTs.
00:53:22
Speaker
And she also speaks of a case study of someone she's working with who switched to fed training and saw immediate results. And in their debate on Docs Who Lift, Lauren counters that she's taking acute data and hypothesizing about chronic situations or potential pathology outcomes,
00:53:40
Speaker
in essence, that there is not sufficient evidence to make these all or nothing statements that she often makes, and that it's not appropriate to make these sweeping statements to the public.
00:53:51
Speaker
So to summarize, in reality, women don't need pseudo-feminist virtue signaling or outrage. What they need is clear evidence-based guidance that lowers barriers to exercise, makes nutrition simpler,
00:54:04
Speaker
and leaves women feeling capable rather than fragile. Yes, we need more research on women, but also no, we don't need you to lie and say there's no research on women so that you can feed us a lot of bullshit information based on much weaker evidence in favor of the much stronger evidence that we have that was actually done on women.
00:54:23
Speaker
This all or nothing women versus men approach basically serves Stacey Sims' bottom line. but it doesn't serve women generally. Yeah, because if she were taking a feminist approach, she would try to make exercise very clear and simple and accessible. Yes, she also wouldn't be telling me that I need to drink tart cherry juice and eat purple potatoes when the reality of that for the vast majority of people is laughable.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, next we're going to listen to a sample clip from the Huberman Lab podcast. You're going listen for the aforementioned tactics and also listen for how her rhetorical approach on Huberman is very different than the one she employs on the Mel Robbins podcast.
00:55:03
Speaker
She's savvy. She knows that Huberman's audience is not Robbins. yeah The feminist virtue signaling becomes much quieter. yeah It's also likely that each host pulls a different strategy out of her just by the nature of how they engage with her.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah. Huberman, to me, is someone who's obsessed almost to an addiction with optimization. And so it seems like a lot of his questioning of her was about like, what's the best? What's the best? What's the routine? What's the protocol?
00:55:34
Speaker
What do we all need to be doing? it was very much about like, give me the information. ah hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. So for a little context in this next clip, Huberman asks Sims about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of eating and periods of not eating fasting, it doesn't tell you what to eat, it just specifies when to eat.
00:55:55
Speaker
And research shows that intermittent fasting is not inherently better for weight loss than other approaches. The main reason it can sometimes be helpful is because it can help some people eat fewer calories overall, which is what you need to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit.
00:56:13
Speaker
Yeah. If it doesn't help someone sustain a calorie deficit, it won't lead to weight loss. In his follow-up question around this topic, Huberman, in true Huberman form, searching for protocols, drills down very specifically to ask if shifting the eating window later, starting at 11 a.m. or noon, might avoid problems.
00:56:35
Speaker
So hes he wants to know exactly how to time eating for maximal effect. Now, when you listen to this clip, you're listening primarily for fear-mongering and absolutist framing, but you're also gonna be introduced to another strategy, and you might be able to pick up on what this strategy might be about. um
00:56:59
Speaker
Two questions. Is there a protective effect of starting the eating window? and here I'm asking for both men and women starting the eating window. at say 11 a.m. or noon and ending it a little bit later, so not a six-hour eating window or seven-hour eating window, but extending that to 8 or 9 p.m.
00:57:19
Speaker
Under those conditions, do you still see the obesogenic effect? Yes, because we're looking at the way cortisol responds. We know cortisol has lots of fluctuations throughout the day and it peaks about half an hour after you wake up, right? So if you're having that cortisol peak half an hour after you wake up, but you're not eating, then that is that higher baseline sympathetic drive for women. For men, it's not the same.
00:57:44
Speaker
So when we're looking at that obesogenic outcome, The actual timing hasn't been tested yet to see how can we expand or contract that eating window for men.
00:57:55
Speaker
But for women, because of that cortisol peak, that right after waking up. Women tend to be already sympathetically driven. So then they walk around more tired, but wired and have a really, really difficult time accessing any kind of parasympathetic responses down the way.
00:58:13
Speaker
Where if you have something really small where you're bringing blood sugar up and it's signaling to the hypothalamus, hey, yeah, there's some nutrition on board, then we can start our day. So again, it has to look at that circadian rhythm and those hormone fluxes, which people don't really either understand or talk about because all of our hormones f flux through the day. And so you have to look at where's the peak of cortisol? How does estrogen flux? How does luteinizing hormone flux, progesterone, all of these things that have this tight interplay.
00:58:39
Speaker
And the more we're doing the hormone research and the more we're understanding these perturbations and how important it is to fuel for it to stay out of any kind of low energy availability stance. Yeah.
00:58:50
Speaker
are
00:58:55
Speaker
I'm exhausted. That's so exhausting listening to that. Cause I'm like, how the fuck am I supposed to be understanding where my flux peak capacitor, estrogen flux, luteinizing hormone, like what the fuck am I supposed to do with all this information?
00:59:09
Speaker
You're giving away, you're giving away the strategy. No, it's okay. It's okay. Let's go into the fear-mongering and absolutist framing. So I'll talk about the fear-mongering. Huberman asks, under those conditions, do you still see the obesogenic effect? Now,
00:59:23
Speaker
If I remember correctly, this is the first time we're hearing the word obesogenic. And yeah it's not a common word, but you hear there's obese in it. So now he's suddenly starting to talk about, oh, you mean this is about obesity?
00:59:37
Speaker
Like non sequitur a little bit out of the blue, because I think up until this point in the interview, they weren't talking about obesity. So under those conditions, you still see the obesogenic effect. And so listeners ears perk up.
00:59:48
Speaker
i don't want to be obese. ah Yeah, yeah. And to continue on with the fear mongering, Sims talks about them walking around more tired but wired, right? There it is again. And they have a really difficult time accessing any kind of parasympathetic responses down the way, right? This is what happens when women don't eat right away when they wake up is that they walk around tired but wired.
01:00:11
Speaker
And they have a harder time accessing any kind of parasympathetic responses. So if you know what parasympathetic means, you're like, oh, so I'm just not going to be able to relax, right? Of course, women might be feeling pretty anxious in their lives for a wide variety of reasons. And now what they're being suggested is that it's because you're not eating breakfast right away when you wake up.
01:00:35
Speaker
But in reality, why are women walking around anxious? I mean, I think we've talked about that a little bit. The other thing is, I don't know the numbers, but I think when they look at sleep data, people do not get enough sleep.
01:00:48
Speaker
Just across the board, people are not sleeping enough. So this whole, I'm tired but wired. Yeah, I'm tired because I didn't sleep enough. And I'm wired because I had three cups of coffee because I didn't sleep well enough. Not because I didn't eat right away.
01:00:59
Speaker
Yeah. We have talked about the social determinants of health. Sims, Huberman, Mel Robbins, you will almost never hear them talk about the social determinants of health, which have to do with income and economic disparity.
01:01:16
Speaker
where people live geographically. We should do an episode on it. Yeah, we really should. The reason is similar to why they never talk about the boring basics right without sprinkling a whole lot of complexity onto them, like sleeping, eating balanced meals, exercising, right? the Those are mostly free ways to see the needle move significantly on things like health, body composition, right? All of the outcomes of interest.
01:01:44
Speaker
And likewise, the obstacles to people being able to do those things aren't that women aren't eating right away in the morning. It's not that women are exercising like men.
01:01:55
Speaker
It's probably more about access, right? Yeah. Access to time to be able to exercise, access to spaces in their community to be able to access, access to affordable childcare to be able to exercise.
01:02:10
Speaker
They never want to talk about that. Why? You can't make money off of it. You can't make money off of it. Sarah, do you want to speak to any of the absolutist framing that we heard in this clip? Yeah, this idea, we know that cortisol peaks half an hour after waking up for men and women, right?
01:02:26
Speaker
But we're it's saying that women are already like really sympathetically driven. I'm like, that's not ah the case, I don't think, for everybody. We're walking around, we're just total stress cases because of cortisol.
01:02:38
Speaker
Because we didn't eat. Yeah. it It's not because of all these other things. Exactly. Exactly. So very black and white. And then and another example is when she talks about the interplay between cortisol, estrogen flux, luteinizing hormone, progesterone. We have a word salad here that we're going to discuss. But...
01:02:55
Speaker
She's talking about how this hormone flux is really at the bottom of why we feel shitty. We're going to talk about the peppering of these really technical science-y sounding words in a second because it's its own tactic.
01:03:10
Speaker
But trying to connect women's suffering, women's anxiety, women's feeling of just not good enough, enough. pretty enough, whatever it is that's playing into women just feeling bad to hormone flux is so it's like reducing women to one thing. Where have we ever heard that happening before? Well, and here she's not even talking about, she's not even saying that this is for like menopausal or perimenopausal women. She's saying all women.
01:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's very absolutist. Yeah. All women. So women are a monolith. Basically just boil them down to hormones. It's supposed to make us feel special, feminist sounding. Oh, finally, someone's talking about women's needs, women's health.
01:03:58
Speaker
But it's not feminist at all. No. Because it's treating us as a monolith. All women are like this. And it's reducing us to hormones, simplifying us.
01:04:09
Speaker
I don't have a whole whole ton of hormones in me anymore because of various reasons. And I think I'm still a woman. All right. So you probably heard, and Sarah hinted at this, that our fifth resttor rhetorical strategy that we're going to be listening for that proliferates the entire Huberman Lab podcast series of episodes.
01:04:28
Speaker
Yeah. And Sims leans really hard into this strategy everywhere she goes. It's called mechanism theater. So here's what we mean by mechanism theater.
01:04:40
Speaker
Mechanism theater is on full display in this interview with Huberman. So if Robbins throws fuel on the pseudo-feminist virtue signaling, Huberman throws a lot of Parmesan on their shared love of mechanistic word salad. In science, a mechanism explains how something might work.
01:05:00
Speaker
So the step-by-step biology behind a claim, the molecular pathways, right? An effect, by contrast, is what actually happens to people, to their bodies.
01:05:12
Speaker
It's looking for the outcome of interest when you test that claim, right? What is the effect? So we have the mechanism that explains how it works, and then we have the effect that is the outcome of interest.
01:05:24
Speaker
So take one of Stacey Sims' signature claims, women shouldn't train fasted. She'll often support this with mechanistic reasoning. She'll talk about cortisol rising, thyroid downregulating. And these are interesting sounding hypotheses.
01:05:39
Speaker
But when we look at outcomes, when we look at studies done on women, they show that women gain strength, maintain lean mass, whether they train fasted or fed, as long as they meet their daily energy and protein needs.
01:05:59
Speaker
So this is why Sarah and I call her style mechanism theater, right? When you hear someone like Sims or Huberman string together words like kiss peptin neurons, sympathetic drive, oxidative fibers, it sounds really authoritative.
01:06:14
Speaker
It's overwhelming, but it's also opening you up to maybe trust the conclusion that's being proposed without asking too many questions because it's all just too complicated.
01:06:26
Speaker
And here's the thing. Most scientists aren't trying to confuse you. Mechanistic language is a language that scientists use. They use it at work. They use it in the lab. Sometimes they might forget how foreign words sound to non-scientists.
01:06:42
Speaker
And when this happens, really the impact is the same, whether it's on purpose or it's not on purpose. It creates a, I think, sense of anxiety almost, right? Like, An anxiety that bypasses our skepticism because, holy shit, I really don't understand this. I really don't understand what's going on with me. I really don't understand my body and why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling.
01:07:05
Speaker
But effective science communicators, not all scientists are effective science communicators, right? Effective science communicators translate the mechanism into something practical and simple and understandable, and they show you the evidence that supports it. So if you want an example of this done really well, check out our interview with Lauren Colenso Semple.
01:07:29
Speaker
She's absolutely brilliant at making the science clear without drowning you in jargon. She really is. She's very skilled. So we already talked about this a little bit, that the research that we have on training fasted versus training fed, the research, the actual outcome in studies on fat loss, muscle gain, and strength show no meaningful difference between fed and fasted training.
01:07:54
Speaker
right So whether you eat before you work out or you don't, there's no meaningful difference. What does matter most is hitting your calorie and protein needs over the course of the entire day. So when Sims turns this into a hard rule backed by scary language about cortisol and thyroid, it's not empowering.
01:08:13
Speaker
It's the pseudo-feminism again, right? It takes a real truth that women are often pressured to under-eat. It wraps it in science-y jargon and uses it to sell you even more rules around food, right? And so what we end up with is more control, more anxiety around what we should be eating and when, not less.
01:08:32
Speaker
I definitely have found in her work that it's a little dog whistly around eating disorder kind of language. She does not recommend any sort of eating disorder behavior. I want to make it clear that's not what I'm saying, but she dips her toe in some of that control language or some of that controlled thinking of i'm going to wake up and I'm going to have this little thing and then I'm going to do this and I'm going eat this little thing. And then I do this thing and then this is my snack.
01:08:54
Speaker
As a former eating disordered person, There's something very enticing about that like tight control over what exactly you're eating when.
01:09:05
Speaker
And I could certainly see it as an easy, slippery slope. But the thing is, if we go back to this pattern of truth- plus a mechanism, plus a fear, plus a rule, you start to see this pattern everywhere.
01:09:20
Speaker
And then if instead you follow people who stick to the evidence, Colenzo Semple, you'll see the difference between education and rhetoric. The bottom line is pick fed or fasted training based on what helps you stay consistent and meet your daily nutrition goals.
01:09:35
Speaker
That's it. If you really don't like eating first thing in the morning, don't do it. If I eat before a hike, I have such a hard time on the hike. So I don't. Maybe I'll have a banana. Like it doesn't matter.
01:09:46
Speaker
yeah And then one last thing, we're gonna talk about this again a little bit later, but Sims repeatedly conflates fasted training with something called low energy availability. Now, low energy availability is a chronic state of under fueling. It's the kind of thing that happens when you actually are anorexic.
01:10:03
Speaker
These are not the same thing. And that conflation seems to be what most of her argument actually rests on. Yeah, I find this conflation stunning. So we're going to listen to 30 seconds of the clip we just listened to so you can hear her make this conflation. So I want you to listen for when she talks about circadian rhythms, which are daily...
01:10:24
Speaker
rhythms and then how she equates this with low energy availability. So circadian rhythms as in daily hormone fluctuations and choices made around when you eat on a daily basis with low energy availability.
01:10:42
Speaker
So here we're just going to listen to that one part again. um
01:10:50
Speaker
So again, has to look at that circadian rhythm and those hormone fluxes, which people don't really either understand or talk about, because all of our hormones f flux through the day. And so you have to look at where's the peak of cortisol, how does estrogen flux, how does luteinizing hormone flux, progesterone, all of these things that have this tight interplay.
01:11:09
Speaker
And the more we're doing the hormone research and the more we're understanding these perturbations and how important it is to fuel for it, to stay out of any kind of low energy availability stance.
01:11:19
Speaker
a
01:11:24
Speaker
So let's actually take a look at this conflation. So low energy availability is a chronic state where you consistently under eat relative to your trading load, day after day, week after week, month after month. It's chronic under fueling where you are not supplying your body with enough nutrition for it to be able to handle your exercise stress And it really does cause problems for women, especially female athletes.
01:11:51
Speaker
Things like stress fractures, loss of a menstrual cycle, overtraining syndrome, mood disturbances, and increased injury risk. This is very prevalent amongst female athletes who are motivated to be smaller.
01:12:06
Speaker
So this could be gymnasts. It could be runners. It could be any type of endurance athlete where the smaller you are, right, the easier it is to move your mass. Dancers. So this is a chronic state to get into and stay in and be in.
01:12:21
Speaker
And it's not about circadian rhythms of eating. So yes, if over days, weeks, months, you are not meeting your body's fuel requirements, you are at risk of low energy availability, but you can easily meet these fueling requirements long term and also be intermittently fasting day to day.
01:12:44
Speaker
just because you don't eat breakfast before your workout does not mean you are at a risk of low energy availability. Like the irony is that Sims seems to be taking the mechanistic effect of low energy availability that puts you at risk for lots of different injuries. She's taking this mechanistic effect of low energy availability and mapping it onto a single fasted workout.
01:13:12
Speaker
But it's classic pseudoscientific marketing strategy. It's making me remember in the Yoga You episode where they're talking about the kind of breathing problems that people have who have COPD, which is something like less than 5% of the population, right? I wonder if she's actually confused about what low energy availability is.
01:13:33
Speaker
Like the fact that you're intermittently fasting says nothing about your energy balance. It only says when you're deciding to eat and not eat. Low energy availability is about a problem with energy balance in that there's not enough fuel coming in. So even if you're not intermittently fasting, you can still be in a low energy availability stance. Like she's conflating two things.
01:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, one of which is inherently not good low energy availability. The other one is just a tool that people use to create oftentimes like different schedules around eating or boundaries around food and it's not necessarily good or bad. Right?
01:14:15
Speaker
It's definitely not the answer to everyone's prayers for weight loss, but it can be helpful for some people. And it's just I find it very I'm like, is she really confusing these two things? All right. no So with these two new filters in mind, we've got pseudo-feminist virtue signaling. We've got mechanism theater.
01:14:33
Speaker
Here's another example from Robin's podcast. You're gonna listen for fear-mongering, absolutist framing, pseudo-feminist virtue signaling, and mechanism theater. So get ready to chug, folks.
01:14:44
Speaker
Oh, my God. Here we go. Also, so listen for, i know this is a lot to listen for, but Robin's is really going to lean into escalating emotional language in this one. is Listen for that, too. are
01:14:59
Speaker
So Dr. Sims, so if you've been brainwashed like I am hu and you're exercising because you are trying to like lose weight or you're trying to look thin, what is happening if I continue to go down that route where I don't eat before I exercise and i'm basically starving myself and I'm going for my walk and I'm delaying food? You lose muscle.
01:15:22
Speaker
And then the other thing, when we look at women who are late thirty s early forty s onwards, we get a signal to put on more visceral fat. So that's a deep belly fat, that that's metabolically active, that can be dangerous.
01:15:35
Speaker
So I'll see women who are, you know, doing the same pursuit and really proud of the fact that they're intermittent fasting, they're not breaking their fast till noon, they've had their coffee to hold them through.
01:15:46
Speaker
And you do a DEXA. and So what's a DEXA? A DEXA is when you go and you get a complete body scan. So it looks at your muscle. it looks at fat, where fat's put. It looks at okay how dense your bones are. hu So we see their DEXA results. And on the outside, they look healthy.
01:16:02
Speaker
right? But on the inside, it's a bit of a scary story where we see low bone density, we see an increase of fat accumulating in the belly area, which means that it's more what we call metabolically active. So you see a change in your cholesterol. So you have more of the quote, bad cholesterol that's elevated.
01:16:22
Speaker
have more inflammatory markers, which is a predisposition for diabetes. We see insulin resistance. So I know that there are listeners and maybe know you're thinking about well i've been doing this forever and i don't have any bad blood markers what's going on i didn't say that it necessarily comes out that's the worst case scenario but when we look at what's happening on the inside i don't want your bones to be like chalk and i don't want you not to have muscle to be able to get up and run after your grandkids or carry your groceries into your house.
01:16:55
Speaker
So if we just make that small change by having some food first thing and then carrying on with your day, you're going to get the impetus to build muscle. You're going to get the impetus to keep your bone and you're going to be able to reduce the signaling for that deep belly fat.
01:17:11
Speaker
Oh
01:17:16
Speaker
my God. Do you have the clip in here where she talks about skinny fat? I don't think so. No. So I just wanted to say, based off of what I was talking about earlier with a sort of like semi eating disorderly language, she uses that phrase skinny fat, which I really hate because back when I used to work for Equinox, at one point they had a ad campaign that was like, are you skinny fat? And then I think they had to very quickly toss it because a lot of people complained.
01:17:42
Speaker
Yeah. She uses the term skinny fat, I think on the Robbins interview at some point. yeah Yeah. Yeah. But Jesus, now, so I've got chalk for bones. ah My muscles are melting off my body. yeah i was actually, as one does, i was awake early this morning and I decided to do a little investigating into belly fat and the difference between subcutaneous belly fat, which is just on the surface and this deep visceral fat, meaning it's around your organs. yeah And yes, it's not healthy to have a lot of deep visceral fat. And there's a lot of indication between the accumulation of deep visceral fat and various
01:18:17
Speaker
diseases, including things like insulin resistance. But some of the fat that you gain is probably subcutaneous fat. It's probably right below the surface. You know it because if you can pinch it, it's subcutaneous.
01:18:29
Speaker
So I was asking, is all belly fat that women gain in the menopause period visceral? And it came back, no. Absolute is framing much? Exactly. It's like you' you're going to put on a ton of belly fat and you're going to die from your... fear-mongering. Yeah. Chalky bones, terrible, no muscles. You can't even get down to the floor to play with your grandchildren. Yeah. like she She says we get a signal to put on more visceral fat. So that's that deep belly fat, but that's metabolically active.
01:18:57
Speaker
That can be dangerous. I'm just hearing like metabolically... dangerous, visceral, fat. Yeah, it sounds terrifying. It's like any amount of visceral fat is going to kill you.
01:19:09
Speaker
So a lot of women do experience during the menopausal transition, some shifting of the weight in their body, sometimes towards their abdomen. And that is a true thing. And it is caused by hormones, but it doesn't automatically mean it's all this quote unquote super dangerous visceral fat. yeah And also any of these people that claim to help you get rid of your visceral fat, they're not saying anything new. It's calories in, calories out and exercise. yeah it's There's no special treatment for this.
01:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, you can't spot reduce fat. You can't choose where on your body to lose fat, unlike muscle hypertrophy, where you can specifically train certain muscle groups to grow. And it tends to be that visceral fat is the most difficult to lose, right? You're going to lose, if you're in a calorie deficit, fat maybe first in your arms or face or whatever. And it hangs on a little bit longer, but you still, the way you get rid of it is a calorie deficit.
01:19:58
Speaker
Exactly. it It remains to be the solution. So I just want to flag a couple of pseudo-feminist virtue signaling moments. Mel Robbins, she loves this one. If you've been brainwashed like I am and you're exercising because you're trying to lose weight or you're trying to look thin, right?
01:20:15
Speaker
It's like she's playing on this truth that women have been encouraged to exercise for fat loss, right? But she's escalating it emotionally in this major way. If if you're brainwashed like I am, in order to open you up, to sell you on this idea that you really should never intermittently fast right and then there's another moment where she's like if i don't eat before i exercise and i'm basically starving myself right because i've never eaten before we're basically starving ourselves so there's that conflation which robbins is picking up on between fasting and low energy availability starvation is truly low energy availability intermittent fasting is not right we're real confused here aren't we
01:21:01
Speaker
She talks about the DEXA scan, right? And how dense your bones are. And then she goes into all this fear-mongering around, on the outside, you look healthy, right? But on the inside, it's a bit of a scary story. Low bone density, fat accumulating in the belly area, metabolically active, change in your cholesterol, bad cholesterol, elevated inflammatory markers, predisposition for diabetes, insulin resistance. Terrifying. Fear mongering and mechanism theater often work together because a lot of these words, because of how medical they sound, how technical they sound, they're automatically going to read as scary to a lot of listeners, right? Yeah.
01:21:41
Speaker
I don't want your bones to be like chalk. Me neither. i want you to have enough muscle to run after your grandkids and carry your groceries into your house. This super manipulative, emotionally manipulative language. But let's remember that all of this is wrapped up in the advice that you have to eat breakfast before you work out.
01:22:01
Speaker
That's the solution. It's really slick. But when you take it apart and listen for these strategies and think about it for a second, you don't need to know that the science behind this is very thin.
01:22:15
Speaker
You can simply just hear how you're being fear mongered, how everything is framed in this very black or white way, how you're being hit with a lot of terms. And you can know, sense, spidey sense that something's not quite fair about how this is being communicated. You're just getting bombarded with all these words, but nobody's actually stopping to explain what any of them mean or the prevalence of any of them, how any of them would have anything to do with whether or not you ate breakfast before you worked out. Yeah.
01:22:42
Speaker
It also feels to me like she's using this as a jumping off point to then get people to be like, shit, I got to go look at her website. I better go take the supplements that you want. like It's very much prepping me to be afraid and to go need to buy her solutions.
01:22:58
Speaker
She's speaking to this feeling in my body that things aren't right. She's telling me in words that I don't quite understand, but they sound scary, that I'm in danger.
01:23:10
Speaker
Okay, so far, we have talked a lot about intermittent fasting, a discussion around training fetter fasted. Now we're going to move into some clips about Sims claims regarding how women should and shouldn't exercise. Now you probably could hear in the previous clip that Sims might be anti certain types of exercise for women. But before we get into her cardio beliefs, we're going to listen to a clip from Huberman Lab.
01:23:34
Speaker
Huberman asks Sims how women should train generally.
Sims' Training Recommendations
01:23:38
Speaker
Okay. And here you're going to hear a ton of absolutist framing predominantly. So this is how women should train according to Sims.
01:23:47
Speaker
are
01:23:53
Speaker
and Maybe we can break up the the age brackets because it sounds like this is something that um is resurfacing again and again here. um Women, let's say 30 and younger, women 31 to let's say 40, and then let's say 41 to 60, and then maybe 61 and on.
01:24:11
Speaker
In terms of how many sessions of resistance training per week, is it whole body training? How many sessions of cardiovascular training and and what sorts of examples could could you give? Yeah, so if we're looking at that 20 to 30 year old, a lot of times I really try to get them to focus on the whole movement aspect first. So we phase them in, same with older women.
01:24:33
Speaker
phase them learn how to move, learn complex movements, so that when you are going in to do resistance training, preferably three to four times a week, you can look at moving well, and it doesn't have to be a long period of time. If you're doing to failure, which works really well when you're younger to increase strength and a little bit of hypertrophy,
01:24:54
Speaker
you're gonna have to spend a little bit more time in the gym. So it might be 45 to 60 minutes. When we're looking at doing that four times a week, you can add in a sprint interval training at the end of one of those to get that super high intensity, or you can look at putting in at the most two HIIT sessions.
01:25:12
Speaker
from on separate days if you're training specifically for something so if i work with a lot of endurance athletes still and they're like well how do i fit it in it's like okay well we look at the quality and how that fits into your training so if you're training for a marathon or you're training for a triathlon or other endurance stuff you can take that high intensity work and put it into your training program So ideally, we look at three to four resistance training with really good movement when we're in the younger set with two high intensities.
01:25:44
Speaker
When we start getting into our 30s, we start having an eye to how are we actually doing that resistance training. Instead of just going and doing a circuit, we're really focusing on let's do some compound movements.
01:25:57
Speaker
Let's look at doing some heavier work. Let's look at how we are periodizing. So we're having you know six-week blocks and we're building on those blocks because we want that base foundation. So when we get to be 40 plus, we can actually go and do our power-based training.
01:26:14
Speaker
If you're in your 40s, you've never done resistance training at all, then we take between... Two weeks to four months to really learn how to move well because there's a higher incidence of soft tissue injury and overall injury as we get into our 40s because of perturbations of estrogen.
01:26:34
Speaker
And ideally, when we get there, we're looking at that around three, minimum three resistance training with compound movements and either one sprint interval or sprint intervals in one hit in a week. um
01:26:54
Speaker
I am so fucking lost and I've listened to this clip at least six times. The entire thing is absolutist framing, right? overwhelming. The entire thing is, it's just this protocol, right? This is listen in for your age group if you can figure it out. And then once you've figured that out, then listen in for what you should be doing. And that's the answer, period, goodbye. Yeah.
01:27:16
Speaker
Let's review this protocol, shall we? Let's try. So between the ages of 20 30, You need to learn movement patterns first. Okay, but isn't that a good idea for everybody? Yeah, if I don't start when until I'm 40, I lost the opportunity to learn the movement patterns and then do three to four, three to four weekly strength sessions to failure.
01:27:36
Speaker
Oh my god. i was like, Oh, Fuck, ouch. Like they are going to be so sore all the fucking time. to four. God. That is not recommended.
01:27:47
Speaker
You're not going to be able to do three to four weekly sessions a week if you're taking every set to failure. You're going to be so fucking sore after the first one. It's going to be at least three days before you can train again. And then the week's halfway over. So you might get two sessions in if you're lucky.
01:28:00
Speaker
Don't forget the other thing you have to do. yeah Oh, yeah. And then, yeah, you need to spend 45 to 60 minutes in each of these sessions, three to four weeks. So say goodbye to having life youngins. yeah And then one to two sessions of high intensity cardio, sprint interval training, or something about high intensity.
01:28:16
Speaker
Good God. Like, I feel bad for the kids. You have to work out every single day, apparently. Yeah. Practically. So in your 30s, you move from casual circuits to more structured, heavier lifting programs. This one sounds much more reasonable. it's must be nice to be in your 30s.
01:28:29
Speaker
And then for the 40 plus. Okay, so she's if you're new to lifting, spend two to 16 weeks learning to move well before adding heavy loads. Okay, that's reasonable. Sure. Once ready, lift heavy three times per week.
01:28:43
Speaker
Do compound lifts. Let's just pause there. Lifting heavy three times per week and doing compound lifts. It sounds like that's all we should be doing is like heavy compound lifts three days a week.
01:28:54
Speaker
She's basically saying that people need to be power lifters. By the way, if we're only lifting heavy and we're only doing compound lifts, I really think you're setting yourself up for some aches and pains and maybe even some injuries there. That's not a good idea.
01:29:07
Speaker
No. And then add one to two sit sessions. So so sit is sprint interval training. Sorry, just hissed into the microphone a lot. Sit is sprint interval training.
01:29:19
Speaker
And then possibly also one HIIT session. But here's my question. What if people hate all of this? like Like, I don't want to do any of this, right? yeah I feel bad for us in our 40s and up. We have to do this. Like, oh my God. sprint part really blows me away. But anyway. This highly specific decade by decade gender specific approach.
01:29:45
Speaker
Spoiler, research consistently shows that women pre and post menopausal build strength, muscle and bone across a wide range of rep schemes and loads.
01:29:57
Speaker
Listen to previous episode, Does It Have to be Heavy? Rethinking the lift heavy shit narrative. Now, this is true as long as your training is progressive. So maybe not with yoga and Pilates, which doesn't tend to be progressive in nature. Resistance training seems to be the better exercise format for building all of these capacities.
01:30:17
Speaker
And also, as long as your training is sufficiently challenging. No, you do not need to take every set to failure at any age. Truly. So what's actually evidence based are the guidelines that we have from public health agencies like the CDC and the WHO.
01:30:35
Speaker
And they say, strength training at least two days per week of resistance training targeting all major muscle groups. That's it, that's all they say. That's pretty freaking general, It's general.
01:30:47
Speaker
And then 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity, aerobic activity per week, or a combination of the two. Also deeply general. Very general. It does not say that you have to do sprints or whatever, right? Beyond these general guidelines,
01:31:02
Speaker
specifics like what type of exercises, what loads, what schedule should be individualized to the person based on their goals, their experiences, their prefaces, their health status, based on so many things, right? yeah Sims, when she goes on Robbins, she gives the same decade specific advice because it's part of her greatest hits, right? That she so sells programs that contain these protocols, right? Spoiler. Yeah. Oh, sorry.
01:31:25
Speaker
But if you listen, you'll notice how she simplifies it enormously. and really avoids any kind of technical language. Now, before we listen, I want to just talk about flags.
01:31:36
Speaker
I want to talk about flags. I want to talk about Sim's take on this SIT exercise prescription, right? Her emphasis on sprint interval training as the most effective cardio.
01:31:47
Speaker
Now, what she describes as SIT is not quite what's been studied as SIT in exercise science. She seems to have her own definition, which we'll get into soon. Okay, here's more advice.
01:31:59
Speaker
for how women should train this time from the Mel Robbins podcast. And before we play this next session, let's set the stage. Mel Robbins' entire brand is built on helping busy people take action right now.
01:32:10
Speaker
Her audience is full of women who are already maxed out, juggling work, kids, aging parents. They do not have hours to spend at the gym. Robbins knows this. So she frames her questions through that lens.
01:32:21
Speaker
What's the bare minimum I can do to succeed. Sims seems to pick up on that thread and tries to optimize her advice for time efficiency, talking about how women need less rest between sets than men so they can pack more work into less time.
01:32:35
Speaker
But the problem is that most of Robyn's audience are probably totally beginners when it comes to lifting weights for a lot of women. And I think Robyn's probably knows this. This fun fact from Sims about not resting as long is not going to land because it's irrelevant to them. Yeah. So in this clip, you're going to hear Robyn's lose her shit a couple of times.
01:32:55
Speaker
be like a second. That sounds hard. And what are you talking about? And then you're also going to hear absolutist framing and some mechanism theater, but it's going to be a couched very differently than what you hear on Huberman, which I find very interesting. So here we go.
01:33:09
Speaker
are
01:33:14
Speaker
What is the biology behind building muscle and how is it different for men versus women? Like what do women need to know? Women are what we call more fatigue resistant. So as I was describing earlier, the differences in the muscle fiber types, right? So women have more of those fat burning, we call endurance fibers.
01:33:35
Speaker
So that means that you can do lots of work and then you recover relatively quickly. So when we're looking at sets and reps and things like that, we don't need as much recovery time between your sets and reps to be able to have the same kind of training stress.
01:33:52
Speaker
Now break that down. Please, because I don't know anything that you just talked about. so okay Sets, reps, all this. Okay, what are we doing? so say have... you have a man and a woman to go to the gym and they're like okay i'm supposed to do five sets so that's five sets so yeah and this is thiss a lot i know it's an avatar here okay well let let's just do use an avatar of somebody who is just starting okay so like we're gonna like what's the bare minimum doctors i'm looking for something i can succeed at five sets sounds like a lot Yeah, I'll get to there, but wanted to explain the biology. Okay, you tell me the biology. I'll give you the biology, and then I'll give you the actionable where to start. Thank you, Dr. Simpson. All right, so if we take a man and a woman, they go to the gym, and they have this the similar program where they're supposed to do five sets of five reps on the three minutes. So what does that mean? You do five reps of a squat.
01:34:47
Speaker
In three minutes. So however long it takes you to do those, and then you rest the rest of the time for three minutes. Okay. So maybe it takes you 30 seconds to do your five squats, and then you have two minutes and 30 seconds to recover.
01:35:00
Speaker
Oh, okay. And you do that five times. So that's five by five. Okay. if a man and a woman both do that. Okay. And we look over time, the strength, the relative strength gains. So that means relative to sex and body weight.
01:35:14
Speaker
Man will acquire better strength gains than a woman. But if we were to change that recovery for the woman to go five sets on five by five on the two minute, so she does it in 30 seconds and has a minute 30 recovery,
01:35:29
Speaker
Then over a course of time, she'll have the same outcomes because her body is like, I don't need as much rest. So it starts to kind of downturn with so much rest.
01:35:40
Speaker
So you can put more training stress on and less time as a woman. Wow. So this is one of the things that we're starting to really discover in the strength training research because it's relatively new. We're like, okay, we know that there's sex differences in muscle fiber types where women have more of these, you know, endurance type fibers, men have more of the fast twitch glycolytic fibers.
01:36:02
Speaker
So if we really want to maximize the outcome of our strength training, we need to work to women's physiology where they don't need as much rest to get the same kind of um stress and outcome. And you know what I like about that?
01:36:14
Speaker
It means it doesn't take as much time. Exactly. That I'm efficient. lot time. So that's very good news, Dr. Sims. a
01:36:25
Speaker
Okay. Can I just, can I, sorry. Yeah. I just have to say one thing. So in this idea of I'm saving time by doing this workout and by having my rest periods be one minute shorter than than a man's rest periods.
01:36:40
Speaker
It means my exercise for the day, let's say, i don't know, takes half an hour instead of 45 minutes. I've saved myself 15 minutes, maybe, maybe. But how is this making anything more efficient?
01:36:51
Speaker
but It's not saying do this and then you only have to work out twice a week. You're saving a couple minutes. Yeah, I'm saving. Great. Okay. So I have 15 more minutes to feel tired and wired. What is she talking about?
01:37:03
Speaker
Yes. And this is where, you know, Sims, this whole, this whole clip I love. I love Robyn's in this clip. shes hold on a second. Did you just say five sets?
01:37:17
Speaker
That sounds like a lot. lot Give me something I can be successful at. I'm like, you trust your goat lady. Like, yes, truly all of this is a lot. hey
Critique of Generalized Health Advice
01:37:26
Speaker
So Sims, of course, she was like, no, I want to tell you about the biology and I need this avatar and it needs to be five sets.
01:37:34
Speaker
And like, couldn't you adjust your avatar to being a beginner who's doing three sets or two sets, right? But no, she's got it's got to be five by five. right So she's pointing to something that has, i think, relatively recently come out in the literature that women, because of the different fiber type of their musculature, and they have more oxidative fibers, so those are those type one fibers that are able to basically be more endurance oriented because of that.
01:38:03
Speaker
If we extrapolate that out to strength training and rest periods, some research has shown that women can perform more reps of an exercise at a relative load than men can, and that also women don't need then as much rest between sets.
01:38:19
Speaker
And so it's an outcome that we've seen in research. But then mapping this outcome onto the listeners of this podcast, most of whom aren't exercising if we just follow the statistics,
01:38:32
Speaker
and many of whom are newer to strength training. It's not very good advice to tell beginners to strength training to do, first of all, five by fives, but that alone to tell them not to rest as long. You should tell people to rest until they feel recovered.
01:38:49
Speaker
Not, you know what, because you're a woman, it means you don't need as much rest, therefore you should take less rest and you'll save two and a half minutes or five minutes. It's not practical. It's not really that helpful. it's It's jumping ahead to an audience that is not the one she's speaking to. It's mostly probably beginners to strength training or people who aren't exercising.
01:39:09
Speaker
And using this example as, you know, this is a time-saving example that Robbins listeners will like, but really missing the mark, I think, and Robbins can hear it. Robbins is, you're missing the mark. Big time. And also it's, to your point about, this is not advice for this audience, but goes back to when Sims is constantly claiming things like, I work with ah professional athletes and that's who my advice is for and and then don't go on the Mel Robbins podcast and espouse a protocol that a professional might use. Like a five by five is no joke. Exactly. i don't know i don't know how long you're resting for, but those are hard.
01:39:43
Speaker
So that this might be something where she would say, oh, but that's, I just... That's for like you know the athletes that I work with and blah, blah, blah. then why are you making this kind of public proclamation about it as if all women, a lot of whom, as Laurel is pointing out, are not exercising. So if they're going to go from zero to five by fives.
01:39:59
Speaker
it She never qualifies who she's speaking to. She just says what she says. And we heard in the previous clip where she actually singled out endurance athletes and she spoke specifically to them, how do I fit this protocol into my endurance training? And she work it right into your endurance training.
01:40:16
Speaker
That right there is a sign that she was speaking to everyone and now she qualified how this would fit for endurance athletes. It's not the other way around. She's not speaking to endurance athletes and then qualifying how it works for everyone else.
01:40:29
Speaker
She's speaking to everyone and then qualifying how it works for endurance athletes. Yeah, so she wants to talk about the mechanism. Robbins is like, no, really, please just give us practical advice.
01:40:40
Speaker
She's like, no, no, no, I really need to tell you about this mechanism because it's going to be time saving. But it's misplaced because as a personal trainer, I would never go, oh, I have a woman here, so I'm going to lead with the advice to not rest very long.
01:40:55
Speaker
It's bananas. It's really bananas. Right? You are a woman, therefore you need less rest, therefore you should take less rest. Not all women are type 1 dominant either, right? Like some women are predominantly type 2.
01:41:07
Speaker
The practical advice is to rest until you feel recovered, which might be different day to day. And person to person. If you don't rest enough between 5x5s, your technique is going to suffer.
01:41:18
Speaker
yeah And you don't want your technique to suffer on a five by five because that's a heavy load. Oh, my God. Okay. So as Sims tells people to rest less between sets because they have more oxidative fat burning muscle fibers. This is mechanism theater. Yes, it's true. She's taking you know that that truth, that kernel of truth and overreaching way beyond what you should.
01:41:39
Speaker
Yes, it's true that women have slightly higher proportion of slow twitch fibers than men, but that's a population level difference, not a prescription for how an individual woman should rest or how long they should rest. Rest times are based on training goals.
01:41:54
Speaker
Rest times are based on intensity of load, intensity of exercise. Rest times are based on experience level. They're not based on sex, even though there are these differences.
01:42:05
Speaker
The advice should not be based on sex. Okay, we're going to flip to Sims position on cardio. Before we roll this next clip, here's the context. Huberman asks Sims whether women should be careful about how much cardio they do. Be careful.
01:42:21
Speaker
Which type is best and whether they should avoid zone two training altogether. Sims immediately sets up a contrast between the cardio most women default to, she says this is things like Orange Theory, F45 and SoulCycle, and what she says women should be doing if they want to improve body composition and longevity.
01:42:40
Speaker
She argues that these group classes aren't true high intensity work and therefore don't deliver the hormonal benefits she believes women need and that cardio in general doesn't help with fat loss the way that women think it does.
01:42:55
Speaker
So in this clip, you're going to drink to fear mongering tactics. You're going to drink to absolutist framing. And you're of course going to drink to some good old mechanism theater.
01:43:07
Speaker
because we got Huberman here. Okay, here we go. So this is why ah she doesn't like Orange Theory and the like, right? are
01:43:18
Speaker
It puts women squarely in moderate intensity where they're so used to leaving one of those classes feeling absolutely smashed that when you tell them, actually, that training doesn't work for you because it's putting you in a state of intensity that drives cortisol up. But it's not a strong enough stress to invoke the post-exercise growth hormone and testosterone responses that we want.
01:43:41
Speaker
to dampen that cortisol. So this is why we have that hyperbole of women who are in their 40s plus shouldn't do high intensity work. It's like, well, actually they shouldn't do moderate intensity.
01:43:52
Speaker
They need to avoid that polarizing. Absolutely. That's what we want. We want true high intensity work, which is one to four minutes of 80% more Or if you're doing sprint interval, it's full gas for 30 seconds or less.
01:44:07
Speaker
And you're doing that a couple of times a week. You're not doing it every day because you need to have enough recovery to hit those intensities truly because those are the intensities that are going to give you those post-exercise hormonal responses to drop cortisol.
01:44:23
Speaker
When we're looking at women who are like, oh, well, I love going out for hours and hours on my bike and I love you know doing my spin classes. It's like, okay, but we need to look at the big rock here.
01:44:35
Speaker
If you are looking for longevity and body composition change and cognition and all those things, you have to polarize your training and that has to be the focus. But soul food, like I come up with a long background of endurance.
01:44:49
Speaker
I now love riding my gravel bike on the weekends for long periods of time, which is not optimal for me, my age, that kind of stuff for all the things that I want to see improvements in.
01:45:00
Speaker
But mentally, it's great. So we talk about going out for that long stuff. Zone two is that low conversation, and that's fine for mental health and being out in nature.
01:45:12
Speaker
But for optimal health and well-being, we don't want to do that. We want to look at resistance training as a bedrock and true high-intensity work to help with body composition change, metabolic control, insulin sensitivity, brain health, and dropping that cortisol.
01:45:31
Speaker
are
01:45:37
Speaker
All right, let's unpack this by tactic. So I'll go first. I'll start with the fear mongering tactics. All right. So I'm just going to quote, if you are looking for longevity and body composition change and cognition and all those things, you have to polarize your training.
01:45:53
Speaker
And that has to be the focus. So in other words, if you don't polarize your training, you will not live as long. Your body composition will not be what you want it to be. Your cognition will suck. Right.
01:46:03
Speaker
So it's not only is it fear mongering, obviously, it's also very absolutist. Right. Here's another one. So we talk about going out for that long stuff. Zone two is at low conversation.
01:46:14
Speaker
Right. And that's fine for mental health and being out in nature. But for optimal health and well-being, we don't want to do that. So you think it's good for you. It feels good, but it's not good for you.
01:46:26
Speaker
It's not optimal. I'm going to scare you. And then I'm also going to be super absolutist about it with no evidence to support what I'm saying.
01:46:34
Speaker
Zone two is not optimal for your health. Yeah. It's like best case scenario, you're doing something that is benign. Worst case scenario, you're actually like hurting yourself. Yeah. Because it's not optimal.
01:46:45
Speaker
All of it is absolute is fraining, right? The training doesn't work for you if you go to those HIIT classes because it's driving your cortisol up and, oh my Lord. And then like, avoiding moderate intensity. We want high intensity only. You need to be doing sprint intervals, 30 seconds or less, couple of times a week.
01:47:01
Speaker
It's just us all this incredibly prescriptive language across the board to millions of people. And then it's all about hormones. Ultimately, it's all about hormones. So there's the mechanism theater, right? We need that post-exercise growth hormone and testosterone responses that dampen cortisol and God forbid cortisol happens. We need post-exercise hormonal responses to drop cortisol.
01:47:23
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, man. And then at the end, we want to look at resistance training as a bedrock and true high-intensity work to help with body compositions change, metabolic control, insulin sensitivity, brain health, and dropping that cortisol.
01:47:37
Speaker
She's hitting us over the head with a lot of terminology. Apparently all of this stuff is going to get really messed up if you do zone two cardio. Yeah. All of it's going to go awry with zone two cardio. You have to be polarizing.
01:47:52
Speaker
That means doing sprint interval training. Sorry, can we just clarify this polarizing thing? So the idea around polarizing is you have to either be like running, like you're being chased by a tiger yes or you need to be ambling.
01:48:02
Speaker
taking a very lazy walk with your friend, and anything in between that, she's basically saying is no good for you. Yep, exactly. All right, so we're going to contrast how Sims talks to Huberman now with how she talks to Robbins about cardio.
01:48:18
Speaker
She says the same stuff. It's her greatest hits, but she says it differently. She uses different tactics. And again, we have Robbins pushing for time efficient solutions.
01:48:29
Speaker
And this time, as opposed to when in the previous clip, Sims tried to meet her there with less rest advice for strength training. It kind of fell flat for Robbins. Robbins didn't get it. But now hilariously in this next clip, Robbins loves Sims sprint interval training protocol because of how time efficient it sounds.
01:48:48
Speaker
Oh, man. At one point, she goes, that sounds horrible. And I'm like, trust your gut, lady. But the tragedy is that prescribing sprints to beginners is highly questionable exercise prescription. So you don't give beginners sprints.
01:49:03
Speaker
Just that's just like you don't give them heavy strength training, just like you don't give them 14 inch drop jumps. Like you start them not with sprints. Start running slowly. Okay.
01:49:16
Speaker
So in this clip, you're listening for feminist virtue signaling because we're back on Robbins and that's one of the more predominant tactics you're going hear. Let's listen for the feminist virtue signaling and the mechanism theater mostly here. All right.
01:49:28
Speaker
Get ready to drink. um
01:49:34
Speaker
And talk to me about cardio because we've all been so obsessed with cardio. So is cardio a good thing? Is it a bad thing? So cardio is interesting because it's about intensity. So if we're talking about going for a walk, that's really good.
01:49:46
Speaker
Like you're walking with a friend, perfect, because that's going to allow you to have some metabolic change. It's going to improve your blood glucose. It's going to improve your body's stress resilience.
01:49:57
Speaker
And hey, you get hang out with a friend. So that's great. It's community, it's connection, it's all of the great things. So that's one kind of cardio. If we're looking at improving our blood pressure, you can do some walking, but what we find is true high intensity work that's really directed. We call it sprint interval training, where it's 30 seconds or less, as hard as you can go, and it doesn't have to be running.
01:50:19
Speaker
could be kettlebell swings, it could air squats, jumping lunges, could be running, could be cycling, anything that's gonna make you go as hard as you can for 30 seconds or less. and recover for two minutes, you might do two or three of those.
01:50:33
Speaker
And that is such a strong stress that it creates this whole cascade of change that improves your entire cardiovascular system. Okay, so let me make sure I'm tracking. So one thing that you would tell us to do is to do sprint training, which sounds horrible, but it actually, as you broke it down, was like, oh, I could do that. 30 seconds or less of something that's high intensity, whether you're sprinting on a treadmill or you're doing kettle ball swings or you're doing pushups or you're doing jumping jacks or just something. Right.
01:51:01
Speaker
And then you rest for a minute and a half? minute and half to two minutes because we want a full recovery from, it's more of a central nervous system recovery because we want to be able to go just as hard, if not harder for the next interval. And then how many of those am I doing? So you don't want to do any more than five.
01:51:17
Speaker
Oh, I love the minimum. That's it? Yeah. I can do that. That's maximum. Five is the maximum. Now we're talking, Dr. Sims. Some people will go, I could do all five. And then they start. And if they're doing it properly after two, they're like, i can't do anymore.
01:51:32
Speaker
That's fine. You've gotten that impetus of stress. And it creates this whole cascade where all of a sudden your muscles are releasing signals called myokines that now is telling your liver, let's not store that visceral fat. We need the that fat for other things.
01:51:47
Speaker
It's also telling your body, we don't want to store blood. under the skin subcutaneous fat, we need that fat for other things. It's also telling your muscles to open up and bring carbohydrate in. So our insulin become, or we become more sensitive to insulin.
01:52:01
Speaker
So there's so many great things about that high, high intensity. And by the way, your blood vessels are going to respond really well. So you get better blood vessel compliance, vasodilation constriction, so better blood pressure control, because again, your body responds to stress.
01:52:17
Speaker
And it's such a strong stress. Your body's like, there's this whole myriad of things that I need to be able to do to do that stress again.
Importance of Tailored Exercise Recommendations
01:52:25
Speaker
So it's a really effective means of getting heart health, better metabolic health, and better body composition. And burning fat in 30 seconds of effort.
01:52:36
Speaker
Yeah. um
01:52:42
Speaker
burning fat in 30 seconds of effort. That sounds like an ad from the 1990s. Man, I don't even know where to start. The whole thing is mechanism theater, basically. The whole discussion between my muscles to my liver, to my visceral fat, to my sub-Q fat. I've got to have some fat somewhere. If you don't want me to have visceral fat, which by the way, you also need a little bit of,
01:53:02
Speaker
I'm not even allowed to have sub-Q fat. Like I'm just, there's no no fat for you. Yeah. No soup for you. Aren't I supposed to have more fat on my body as a woman generally? Yeah. So the feminist virtue singling is not as prominent here unless you understand the premise for the entire argument is that women have been suckered into sex.
01:53:22
Speaker
only doing cardio for weight loss. So they'll take a true pain point for women. Like women have been encouraged mostly to focus on their body composition with exercise and to only want to lose fat. And therefore they have been sold on doing cardio. I mean, you go to the gym sometimes still today. i went to the Y in Los Angeles when I was staying with you and the guy was showing me all the different rooms of this Y, which was very complicated layout.
01:53:48
Speaker
And he's like, that room has only heavy weights. And he was but he was basically telling me like, you shouldn't go in there. Don't go in there. The lightest weight, he said, is 25 pounds. Oh no. And I was like, that's where I'm going to go. That's where I'm going to spend most of my time. But it was amazing. And he wanted to show me where the functional fitness room was with the bands and the small weights. And he wanted to show me where the cardio machines were. And he was like, that one, you don't need that one. You're not going to go It still happens. It's a real thing that Sims often highlights, right?
01:54:19
Speaker
But then she'll use that pain point to slide in all of this non-evidence based advice that she just made up, like she made up all of this.
01:54:30
Speaker
it's There's no research showing that this is how women should exercise for their health and longevity and body composition anywhere. Let's look at her sprint interval training prescription. Let's go. So in exercise science, sprint interval training almost always uses cyclical cardio, like a bike, treadmill sprints, rowing, so that it's just completely repetitive, right? You can just go all out safely and repeat it. And the classic research protocols are 30 seconds or less all out, followed by three to four minutes of recovery.
01:55:02
Speaker
Right. right So these protocols are involving sprinting for 30 seconds or less. That could be a 30 second sprint, a second sprint, second sprint. And then you're resting for upwards of six to 20 times longer than that work interval.
01:55:18
Speaker
So if we have a 20 second sprint and we're resting for four minutes, that's how much rest you take. If you want the quality of your next sprint to make you faster, you need this long recovery in order to be able to hit that maximum intensity the next time you try to do it.
01:55:34
Speaker
But so Sims here is giving us just 90 seconds to two minutes of rest. which is not enough time to repeat those true maximum efforts. And then she also broadens the definition of sprint interval training to include exercises like kettlebell swings, which that's ah okay.
01:55:53
Speaker
Air squats, pushups. That's not how it's studied. off So then it makes it very hard. We're blurring the line between sprint training and doing like just a hard short circuit. yeah Her version of sit is incorrect. It's also super inappropriate to tell lay people to just start sprinting.
01:56:10
Speaker
That's a recipe for injury. Yeah. Yeah. And let's briefly unpack her advice to all women to avoid zone two cardio. So we're going to link our episode about cardio for longevity in the show notes if you want to learn more about what zone two means.
01:56:26
Speaker
She's telling women to polarize their training. What does this mean? She means you're either going to do walking with a friend or sprinting, nothing in the middle. She encourages them to polarize their training.
01:56:37
Speaker
So why? Okay, so she says, for starters, walking is fantastic for general health. But, you know, the reality of advising people to walk for their cardio requirements is that you need to specify that The benefits of cardio are intensity specific, right?
01:57:01
Speaker
In addition to being specific in other ways. And a lot of people might hear walking and stroll at a very leisurely pace, as you pointed out, Sarah. And if they're not walking fast enough, depending on what their baseline level of fitness is, right? If I went out and walked slowly, walking would do nothing for my fitness, right?
01:57:22
Speaker
If someone who's been largely sedentary goes out and walks slowly, that might be enough of a stimulus, but it really depends, right? But just telling people to walk without the cue of how hard it should feel Many listeners could go out, walk walk for hours and think they're checking the cardio box, might not be hitting the even minimum requirements set out by the CDC.
01:57:47
Speaker
And then, okay, so case we flip over to the other side of the spectrum, the sprint recommendations. Even if you follow her advice to do the maximum five sprints, right? And let's say they're each 30 seconds long.
01:58:02
Speaker
That's only about two and a half minutes of hard effort. Okay, now the recovery periods in between those sprints count towards your cardio minutes because after you sprint, your breathing's elevated and it starts to come down, you're getting benefit during that rest period.
01:58:15
Speaker
But even if you did these workouts three times a week, you're still only adding up to maybe 30 to 35 total minutes of that vigorous cardio plus the moderate cardio that comes during the recovery.
01:58:29
Speaker
And that's severely under the minimum weekly target. So if the walking is not at a high enough intensity, You're under dosing your cardio. You're not meeting the minimum requirements. And these minimum requirements are supported by strong evidence and have been shown to reduce mortality. They improve your heart health, your brain health. And so this is why I find this recommendation from Sims probably the most frustrating because I think it's the most potentially harmful.
01:59:01
Speaker
It's probably her worst piece of advice. Her specific protocols aren't supported They're not supported by outcome studies. They're overly restrictive. They're inappropriate for most beginners.
01:59:13
Speaker
Sprinting is not somewhere where most people should start and no one needs to sprint for cardio. help But worst than all of that, what she's doing is she's taking a form of exercise and saying it's bad.
01:59:26
Speaker
A form of exercise that is overwhelmingly shown to be good for people, she's saying is bad. And then to replace that form of exercise, she's giving ah prescription that would be underdosing people.
01:59:38
Speaker
Right? Yeah. so So, I don't know how she can do this. It seems really super unethical. All of her claims are problematic, but this one fires me up the most because I think it's the one that if if we widely followed this,
01:59:54
Speaker
we would be moving further away from meeting the CDC's physical activity guidelines. If everybody who is currently
Encouragement of Critical Thinking in Health Advice
02:00:00
Speaker
meeting the minimums, which is only about maybe 30%, and that's generous, that's if they instead decided to follow her protocol, no one would be meeting the minimums.
02:00:11
Speaker
It's a wild claim, and I i don't quite understand it, frankly. I don't understand where it's coming from, and I don't understand what the value is What she sees is the value. I mean, I know we've got our whole like mechanistic salad of the different cascades of myokines and all that kind of stuff. But when you're the only person saying something, you know, when you're the only person taking a really big, it's a big swing.
02:00:37
Speaker
She's taking a big swing and she's completely by herself. And you got to believe that she believes it to be true, but I've yet to see anyone else come up and say, oh yeah, you know what That's totally right. Everybody should just be sprinting.
02:00:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. um All right, people, how are we doing? Are we drunk yet?
02:00:57
Speaker
All right. ah we We've heard a lot. And you're going to listen to other episodes after this one. If you're an avatar, and you're the kind of person. Here's what we want you to do, avatar. You're the kind of person who binge listens to podcast episode after podcast episode. No, we're going listen to one more clip.
02:01:14
Speaker
we We don't have much to say about this one, except that we really like what Sims says in it. Yes, you heard that right. We really like what she has to say in this clip. And we want to end this exercise, this drinking game.
02:01:27
Speaker
with a clip where you won't probably have to drink too much, or maybe you will. Let us know if you do. But this is a clip where we think Sims nails it. What we hear her saying is very clear.
02:01:38
Speaker
It's very simple. It's very easy to understand. It's evidence-based and it's well delivered. And to be fair, this is not a one-off moment. There are actually many points, little snippets, sometimes a couple sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, where we actually agree with Sims.
02:01:55
Speaker
And so why are we listening to this clip and why is it important to acknowledge when we agree with Sims? Because part of building this filter that we're trying to build, protecting ourselves against our own inherent gullibility, right? Part of it is spotting rhetorical tactics, right?
02:02:14
Speaker
to protect our brains, but you have to know too how to spot when you agree with people, not just when you disagree, but also when you agree, because it's in the agreement where the persuasion is the most powerful actually.
02:02:32
Speaker
Yeah. When we hear something that resonates and that we recognize as being in our group, right? We relax. We nod along. We stop scrutinizing it as closely. This person thinks like us. This group of people think like us.
02:02:49
Speaker
And It's exactly in this moment though, where it becomes now far easier for the more shaky claims to slip through that critical thinking radar, right? It's the two truths and a lie.
02:03:01
Speaker
This is why people like Sims are so compelling because a lot of what they say is true. Sometimes most of what they say is true. And that is what makes it so tricky. You can't just dismiss it all and you shouldn't.
02:03:14
Speaker
You have to develop the skill of sorting helpful information from the overreach based on speculation and rigid rules that probably won't serve you as an individual, but might make you want to buy her programs.
02:03:26
Speaker
So as you listen to this clip where we think she gets it entirely right the whole way through, notice how you feel. Notice how nice it feels to agree. And then Carry that awareness into moments where she says something more controversial. That way you'll be able to hold both truths.
02:03:42
Speaker
Sims and many, many others like her,
Clear Evidence-based Advice from Sims
02:03:45
Speaker
including me and Laurel, we want you to employ all of your critical listening skills on us too. Sims can be insightful and helpful and sometimes also misleading.
02:03:57
Speaker
are
02:04:02
Speaker
I can't believe how many bombs you're dropping today. Like i' I've never thought about exercise that way. Because I've focused on you have to exercise to get in better shape. What you're saying is exercise is intentionally moving and stressing your body in a way that it needs and is designed to do.
02:04:22
Speaker
yeah And in response to the stress, your body gets stronger at being able to manage stress. Exactly. Oh my God. It's stress resilience.
02:04:34
Speaker
And the reason why we're so flabby and everything else is because we're sitting around and not moving and not stressing our bodies in the way that we need to. Right. And that only makes us more stressed out. Right. So we look at stress, mental health, all of the things that are really plaguing everyone. And the part of it is lack of community, lack of empathy, all of these things that breed depression, mental health, and the fact that we aren't moving our bodies. Yeah.
02:05:00
Speaker
There's so much research out there that says if you go for a walk, but you are reducing stress. If you go for a walk and you actually go to a green space, so that's to a park, and you're in nature, it induces an incredible parasympathetic response, which means that you reduce stress.
02:05:21
Speaker
But because we are so ingrained to doing all the things all the time inside, sitting and not actually getting outside, having the fresh air, having that connection with being outside and moving our bodies, we are by design now a global, a very stressed out, unempathetic, depressed people.
02:05:40
Speaker
And if we're talking about how do we just make one small change to improve our mental health, that's exercise. I'm not necessarily here as an exercise physiologist to tell you, the listener, to go out and go for a long, hard walk because you want better body composition.
02:05:58
Speaker
I'm here as an exercise physiologist to explain what exercise is. It is an incredible positive stress on the body that creates changes from central nervous system down to the smallest little thing in your cell to improve your overall stress resilience And metabolism, meaning how your body handles food, how your brain reacts to stress, how your brain perceives an environment.
02:06:26
Speaker
And yeah just the moving part really does help bring center and bring yourself back to you. I believe it. um
02:06:40
Speaker
All right. We couldn't agree more. Well said. ah Thank you, Stacey Sims. ah All right. So to summarize, wrapping it up here, hopefully y'all are sober and hydrated.
02:06:57
Speaker
our key rhetorical strategies appeal to authority, fear mongering, absolutist framing, pseudo-feminist virtue signaling and mechanism theater.
02:07:08
Speaker
We hope that you take your newly fortified filters and use them to hear these tactics from Sims, from all whole bunch of influencers, expert influencers, influencer experts on the internet who employ them regularly all the dang time.
02:07:32
Speaker
And hopefully these make it so that you can Have your spidey senses or your hackles go up when you hear these types of strategies being employed.
02:07:44
Speaker
Let the strategy be a red flag. It's not always red flag, but let it be a way for you to perk your ears up and go, I think I need to be careful about what I'm listening to here.
02:07:57
Speaker
It seems like I'm being overwhelmed in some particular way, whether it's with someone's credentials, whether it's with anxiety-producing thoughts, whether it's with this very overly simplistic black and white framing.
02:08:11
Speaker
I seem to be being spoken to as a woman in a way that makes me feel like, yeah, you know, those damn men and... I feel outrage. And then also, if you just feel completely overwhelmed by a fire hose of technical sounding terms, this might mean that you are being manipulated in various ways.
02:08:33
Speaker
And you may want to listen more critically to what you're being fed, what is being communicated to you. Yeah. I really feel like this skill of critical thinking is going to become key to our survival as a species. Because many people will tell you global warming doesn't exist, right? right Science advancements have made it easier to survive a whole host of problems.
02:09:02
Speaker
But we have not, I don't think, advanced much in the direction of being better equipped to spot the bullshit and recognize when we're being manipulated or sold to. so If you want to work on these skills on other podcasts, a couple that I really like are Decoding the Gurus, Sarah and I both love Front Page Fitness, Conspirituality Pod, Yoga Meets Movement Science, Barbell Medicine. These are all trusted sources where we feel the hosts do a really good job of curating myth-busting type content with an evidence-based approach to help you be able to hear the bullshit that
02:09:40
Speaker
and also separate the fact from the fiction. I think decoding the gurus specifically lives in this tactic spotting realm, whereas the other hosts focus a little bit more on the science separating the facts, but you're going to be helped by both, right? Yeah, definitely.
02:09:56
Speaker
As always, rate, review, subscribe. We've gotten a couple of really amazing reviews. Some of them are interesting. We'll have to like unpack some of the reviews down the road, but also don't forget about the free class. Go into the show notes. It's linked right under the description for this episode before the timestamps, before the resources that we cite.
02:10:17
Speaker
You can sign up for the free class. You'll be added to an an email list where you will receive the Zoom link to join us. You will also receive reminders to join and what time and what to have and lots of good info like that. You also get the replay if you can't make it live.
02:10:33
Speaker
And you will be added to the special list where you get the only discount we offer on the course. So there's so many good reasons to head into the show notes and get on the list. All right.
02:10:44
Speaker
That's it, folks. Hopefully we made Stacey Sims make sense. Or at least made tactics make sense. And we will see you next week. See you next week.