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114: Barbells Don’t Lie: Inside Our Lift for Longevity Course
723 Plays1 day ago
In this episode of the Movement Logic podcast, hosts Laurel Beversdorf and Dr. Sarah Court PT dive deep into their six-month online barbell lifting course, 'Lift for Longevity.' They discuss the course structure, including linear periodization, high variation, and impact training. Laurel and Sarah also share insights on the benefits of barbell training for women, challenging societal norms about women's fitness, and emphasizing the importance of strength and self-efficacy. They underscore the transformative power of consistent strength training and offer practical advice for those considering joining their course.
Sign up for the live Q&A on Wednesday October 22nd here (or get the replay)
References:
Episode 112 Redefining what’s possible: Lift for Longevity Alums Share their Stories
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Goals
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, am I starting or are you? i don't remember. um This is, you ah I'm going to edit it Oh, am I, so is this mine? I start? I don't remember either. What day is it? What is happening? What planet are we on? Will you start it? I'll edit this.
00:00:15
Speaker
But if you start it. Yeah, absolutely. and good day cool. I'm Laurel Beversdorf, 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 Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:35
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.
00:00:45
Speaker
We're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
Course Promotion: 'Lift for Longevity'
00:00:51
Speaker
Let's dive in.
00:01:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beersdorf and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Yay! Today is the Q&A. I rhymed and I didn't even mean to.
00:01:17
Speaker
Today is the Q&A. Today is the Q&A. You can still get in there if you wanted to. We'll put the link in the show notes. We'll also put the link to our course in the show notes. CART closes November 1st.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yes. We're starting November 6th. um The Q&A your chance to hang out with us for, i don't know, however long you want, ask some questions and see, you know, inside the course, we'll share screen and show you the portal. Students have already gotten the free class. You get the free class as well, right, Sarah? They get the free class and the Q&A in one email. Do you kind of resend the replay?
00:01:48
Speaker
They get the replay of the Q&A usually, but we have free class in there. Why not? Yeah, I'm sorry to throw more work at you. Sure, it's fine. So if you want the replay to the live class that we had last week, which, by the way, I feel like went really well.
00:02:03
Speaker
It went really well. Yeah, plus the Q&A, you can sign up via the link in the show notes. The link in the show notes. yeah So this is a Q&A about our course, ah Lift for Longevity, our six-month online barbell lifting course. If you're wondering what the heck Laurel's talking about, just going give you a little context.
00:02:21
Speaker
And the course itself starts on November 6th, but we're closing the cart on November 1st because there's a lot of prerecorded content that we want people who take the course to be able to start to watch before the course starts.
00:02:33
Speaker
And the Q&A is really like a peek behind the curtain of what the course actually looks like. So when you're in it, what is it going to look like? And so we have this portal. You go into the portal that has all the content that you need there.
00:02:46
Speaker
We're going to show you as well. We have a private social group on Circle. We got rid of Facebook. Yay. Bye-bye. So now our community is just a little private community. So we'll show you that as well. And we just answer your questions that you have about taking the course. So it's today. If you hear this early in the morning, you're like, wait, I want to, then go into the show notes and you can sign up.
00:03:09
Speaker
Even if you miss the the live class, if you're a little bit late, if if you sign up, you should still receive the replay depending on when you sign up. I'm realizing I'm talking myself down at a weird tunnel of time.
00:03:20
Speaker
Time zone tunnel. Okay. I'm not sure going to be able to get out of. But anyway, if you missed it too bad for you.
00:03:29
Speaker
it's So sad. It's always next time. It's always next time. Whenever that is. Sometime in the spring
Dr. Court's Cancer Journey and Strength Training
00:03:36
Speaker
probably. Yeah. So basically if you're at all curious, you should just go to the show notes and look for the link to sign up and you'll get something.
00:03:42
Speaker
You'll get something. point you'll get something. We can't guarantee what it is that you'll get. But something will happen. Now, for those of you who have signed up for the free class and you are attending the Q&A, thank you so much.
00:03:53
Speaker
It was great to see everyone in the free class. I felt like this time around we had the most questions. There were so many questions. Many questions, which was amazing. I love that. um So, OK, what are we talking about today? We have a kind of ah a moosh booze. Is that how do you say it? Moosh booze? So close.
00:04:11
Speaker
A moosh booze. Boosh. Boosh. Yes. What does that mean? It means to delight your mouth. We're going to delight your mouth? Yeah. Well, yeah, it's not, it doesn't exactly fit the situation, but, and amuse bouche is you have it. If you go to a fancy restaurant before you have your meal, it's not even something you ordered. It's just something like that the chef decided he wanted you to have. And so it's like a little tiny something to amuse your bouche before you get into your main meal. Yeah.
00:04:38
Speaker
i feel like our episodes are more like 10 course meals. Oh, our our episodes are like- just try to stuff you to the gills. Yeah, those special restaurants that you go to where it's like an 18 course meal and you're just going to be there all day and you don't think you can eat anything more and then a cheese plate shows up or something. But for your ears. For your ears. do you say ears in French? Oh, God.
00:04:59
Speaker
Auré. Auré. Amouz. Amouz. Auré. Yeah, there you go. So for anyone who speaks French who's listening. Apologize. We're sorry. You're welcome.
00:05:11
Speaker
good Okay. So yeah, today we're just going to be talking about who who is us. We speak French and English. And English. Who is us, how we are, and how we came to make Lift for Longevity. I think today, this would also be a good episode to say, this course was originally called Bone Density Course Lift for Longevity. We are shortening the name of it and now just calling it Lift for Longevity.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah. Because we want to. And before we get into that, talking about that, I have to share personal news. If you follow us on Instagram, or especially if you follow me, you may know about this already, but...
00:05:45
Speaker
I have been re-diagnosed or diagnosed again with breast cancer. It has come back. I first had breast cancer in 2021. i had surgery. i had chemotherapy.
00:05:56
Speaker
I was clear for about three years, three and a half year, whatever the math is, four years. And then earlier this summer, I just, I started having some pain. i thought it was a musculoskeletal.
00:06:08
Speaker
I get, I just lifted too heavy or something. And then, I went to my primary care doctor and then lots and lots of imaging and lots of lots of testing. And they discovered that ah the breast cancer has metastasized into my bones. And there's a few different locations, but mostly in and around my pelvis and my sacrum and also my left collarbone.
00:06:29
Speaker
And so, I mean, it's a bummer, obviously nobody wants cancer. What's, what's funny about it now. We're not funny, but what my, my, my oncologist told me, he was like, well, now we're into this metastatic part.
00:06:42
Speaker
It's more like we're just dealing with a chronic illness. So as opposed to the first time when it's like, kill it with fire, you know, and it's just like, take no prisoners. i it was very aggressive. My, my original treatment.
00:06:55
Speaker
The treatment now is more sort of on an ongoing basis. So at the moment I'm going to chemotherapy every week, but it is a different kind of drug, the chemo that I'm getting. And so as a result, I'm much more functional than I was last time.
00:07:10
Speaker
That's where I am at the moment. I did some radiation. That was pretty brutal. I threw up on the freeway, like literally on the freeway in the middle of our traffic in LA, in LA. That was, that was a bucket list moment that I didn't realize was on my bucket list. Yeah.
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah. Have you seen other people do it? And you're like, I want that to be me. so I want that. I want to be the person opening the car door, leaning out and just hurling. Look at how much positive attention they're getting. if But yeah, that's, that's the news about what's going on with me. And, you know, Laurel and I have obviously been working through this with our current cohort of of students that we work with, and they've been incredibly patient and kind with me as I've been able to like Because I was very physically limited for a
Muscle Mass Benefits for Cancer Recovery
00:07:51
Speaker
while. It's it's all coming back, which is really nice.
00:07:53
Speaker
And there's still some moves that are difficult for me. Like a deadlift is still difficult for me to do because all bending forwards is difficult. But yeah you know I'm able to do, i got I've been lifting the barbell again, which feels really good. And as far as how it goes for for the next cohort, I mean, I'm going to be teaching as much as I can teach myself. I might have to pull Laurel in for some demos. We'll rely on, we have a lot of pre-recorded content.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, to show how to do things. So I'm confident between all of these resources that we're going to be able to take care of everybody's needs. I'm not I'm not worried about that. No, but it's a bummer. I had to shave my head yesterday or no Saturday because my hair was falling out too fast.
00:08:31
Speaker
yeah And it was it was just getting annoying. Like I would rub my hand on my hair and I would get a handful of hair. So now I'm bald, but I can still lift weights. So that's what we care about. Your most recent post on social media was pretty sweet flex.
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I just realized I was like, dang, I can only really work out four days a week. maybe four days a week, folks. She's working out only four a week. But I was like, i can I can get all of my stuff met in those four. I can do my two lifting days and get my cardio done in the other two days.
00:09:04
Speaker
Oh, 100%. So i was like, wow, it's actually not impossible to meet the CDC guidelines, even though I'm a little sicky. Yeah. what is the ah What is the draw to work out for you?
00:09:14
Speaker
What do you get from it? it different than what you used to get from it? Is it kind of the same, but it's more pronounced. It's really interesting. Like before all of this sort of popped off, it was just so much part of my felt like it was part of my DNA. Like, okay, I'm working at some point today. I'm doing whatever workout is on. Is it a cardio workout? Is it a strength workout?
00:09:33
Speaker
Like it was just sort of what I did. What I'm noticing now is how, directly my energy goes up in response to working out. So I will x exercise and I will physically feel better like right away.
00:09:47
Speaker
And so before it would, it may like take a little while to feel better or it just, it's more contrasted now. Well, before there was anything that had to feel better, i just felt fine and I would work out and I would get a little bit of that like sort workout buzz. But this is literally like, I'll work out and I'll be like, I have a, it said there's a much stronger sense of like this, having just done this makes me feel better.
Personal Motivations and Exercise Insights
00:10:07
Speaker
So, so that's exciting. Yeah. yeah And, you know, I'm going to be in chemo for the next, I've done about a month. I'm going to be in chemo for about the next five months. And it's just, it's so clear to me. Like I don't have the science behind this and I want to research this and look it up, but it is so clear to me.
00:10:27
Speaker
that the muscle mass that I have on my body that I had already built prior to this. And then the fact that I can also go in and keep working on this muscle mass and making it, you know, I've i've lost some, obviously, there was a bunch of time where I couldn't do anything, but the fact that I can, can go and keep working on this muscle mass,
00:10:45
Speaker
I have no doubt. And again, I don't know the like the and the metabolic consequences or what it is, but I have no doubt that the muscle on my body is making it, A, I can exercise and B, I am recovering faster. I have absolutely no doubt.
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah. and And there is, they call it muscle memory. There is a lot of science showing that when you start strength training, you build a foundation of strength. and then you stop for an extended period and then you come back to it, you get back to your initial levels of strength much faster than it took you to build it.
00:11:17
Speaker
right And same thing with hypertrophy and it has, I think it has come comes down to mostly coordination and how the neural learning has happened. And so that part has been kind of remembered by your body and sort of jump starts you to be able to get past all of the time you spent just learning the movements.
00:11:38
Speaker
And so much of people's initial gains as beginners are really attributed quite heavily to the coordination, the the motor learning aspect of it. so Once you have that out of the way, you know, you're getting back to ah regaining your strength, regaining your muscle mass or just building it faster than you were able to is, I think, pretty well documented.
00:11:58
Speaker
And the barbell stuff that I'm doing now is is pretty light. I mean, it's it's very light compared to what I was able to do before. But I'm going to the gym and I'm using the machines. And because my back is supported for most of the machines that I use for the lower body at least, I'm really starting to, like each time I go, I'm increasing the weight and starting to I'm really able to to build back up again. So yeah, it it feels it feels good.
00:12:21
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah. We are going to talk to you a little bit today about our course, Lift for Longevity. That's right. And we did shorten the name. But I guess I have one more question for you, Sarah, about yeah about strength training, because that's that's our thing, right? So like, do you do you think about strength training and the purpose it serves?
00:12:40
Speaker
for you any differently now after this most recent diagnosis or have you kind of just deepened your understanding of why you do it? This is more about your personal relationship to it and like why you're doing it.
00:12:52
Speaker
Well, I will say it's very easy for me to get caught up in the parameters and make it start to feel almost like a chore. like so previously it was like, well, I know, cause I was, I was working out probably five to six days a week.
00:13:06
Speaker
I was getting a little like bored by what I was doing a little bit. So it would sometimes feel like, all right, let today's a lift. All right, go do your lifting. And like, as soon as you start, like as soon as you like start warming up or pick up the bar the first time you're like, i for me, at least I'm like, okay, I'm in, I'm doing this. But there's always that pre- bit of time where it's like, oh, it's the worst, right? Really? Oh God, I got, okay, I got to go do this.
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah. Now my numbers from where I was to where I am now have dropped significantly. And that's, I was unable to, I mean, even walking was hard at one point. It got really, really bad. Yeah. I went down really hard.
00:13:40
Speaker
So I have this sort of added you know interest in getting my numbers you know back up to to where they were. it's going I know it's going to be a very slow process because, ironically, there's been a fair amount of bone damage, right? So I can't just go for it like a lunatic. I have to be thoughtful about it.
00:13:57
Speaker
Right. But you do but and question in question. Do you feel actually like good enough to go for it though? Like you actually have to pull yourself back or do you actually feel your loss of strength? Okay. No, I feel it. Like at the gym, I was doing like the lat pull down cable.
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah. I could feel how because of the collarbone on the left, like my right arm was like, let's go for it Let's make it heavier. My left side was like, no, let's not. got it so i'm still definitely limited i can't really like fully go for it but yeah it just feels it feels vital now it feels like a requirement whereas before it had gotten a little like all right you you do this because you know it's good for you and right and i eat your vegetables kind of thing and now it just feels like oh no this has to happen otherwise like this week is not gonna this day is gonna be hard kind thing. And kind of both for the short term and the long term, right? So like the known immediate benefits you get energetically, but then also like, you know, you're going to be going through chemo and you need to keep your strength up kind of a thing. Are you looking at it from both perspectives? Or is it yeah is it really just the like, I need a hit of strength training right now because I know it's going to make me feel better?
00:14:58
Speaker
It's a little bit of both. It's hard to know. My sense is that because um because the chemo is not as intense, but I'm doing it for longer, my sense is that like month five, I'm probably going to be more fatigued to than I am now. Yeah. But who knows? Like maybe being able to keep up this level of exercise.
00:15:15
Speaker
And I really do think it was because I was so, I mean, i was spending the summer just getting strong. That was my ah my main goal. I didn't have like a specific number or something I was trying to hit. I was like, I wonder how badass I can become.
00:15:26
Speaker
And that's why I was working out for me quite a bit, like five to six times a week for me is a significant amount. So yeah, well for anyone. Yeah. It's kind of like the top end of what you want to do.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah. um And it definitely took me a while to get there. i mean, that wasn't something that happened right away, but right. Yeah. Now it just feels like I'm i'm curious to see. Cause I have a feeling not a lot of people are doing what I'm doing with cancer. Like, I don't think a lot of people are like working out four days a week while they're going through chemo.
00:15:53
Speaker
So I'm going to be very curious to see how, how it does impact, you know, my, my fatigue and stuff going forwards. Yeah. I can only imagine it's going to help. Cool. Yeah. It feels nice to have something to be able to lean on like that and know that it it's doing something good and know that it's doing something helpful.
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, so it it's it sounds like the practice of strength training has taken on some some new meaning. It's serving new purposes. And yeah, you almost rely on it in multiple ways, kind of more than you did before.
00:16:28
Speaker
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I look forward to it now. Not that I didn't look forward to it before. But some you know how it is some days you're just really trying to just make it happen. Oh, 100%.
00:16:38
Speaker
The thing I do to get out of that is i I typically open up the app that I use to record my shit and just start like looking ahead to what I'm going to be doing. And somehow just the visualization of the exercises kind of gets me amped to do them.
00:16:51
Speaker
Nice. But until I do that, I'm often like, oh, God. Sloth mode. Yeah. I don't have certain workouts pre-planned like I do this on Monday and this on Wednesday and this on Friday. I just have a list of like...
00:17:04
Speaker
between 16 and 20 exercises and I sort of do what I feel like doing. And then as the week comes to a close. yeah Oh yeah, as the week comes to a close, my my options become more limited. But typically, I'm pretty good about getting the harder stuff out of the way, even if I don't feel like I'm just like, really excited to do the hip thrust, I'm like, I'm going to do it first because I'm not excited to do the hip thrust, get it out of the way.
00:17:28
Speaker
You get to the end of the week and it's like a list of things that you hate doing. Yeah. So what I try to do is I try to mix in the things that I find really hard and sort of dread doing with things that i enjoy. And then that makes it all palatable. And I like the choice. The choice part of it for me is really huge because I don't like being told what to do by anyone, including myself.
00:17:51
Speaker
That's also part of my problem. Like I would look at my program it'd be like, you have to do a deadlift today. i'm like, I don't want to.
00:17:58
Speaker
Exactly. Don't tell me what to do today. but at the same time, you run into, you know, there has to be some consistency with your lifts. You can't just do random stuff all over the place and hope for some sort of outcome, right? We know this. we want If we want to gain strength, we have to be consistent with Yeah. Muscle groups that are being exercised. So there's ah there's room for for a little bit of spontaneity, but within a certain limits.
00:18:22
Speaker
Yeah. i I think of like the exercises that I have on my weekly plan for strength training, sort of like items on my to-do list where I'll wake up and I'll have my like top five priorities for the day, but I don't have them in order in the order in which I need to do them unless there's some kind of deadline that day.
00:18:42
Speaker
And so I'll start with the thing that feels like I can ease into it the most readily. And it's the same with strength training. Or sometimes I'll start with like the thing that's the hardest on my to-do list because I know I'm the freshest now that I'll ever be for the rest of the day. And it's like totally it's now or never. Totally. So it's really very similar to to having a to-do list for the way practice.
00:19:03
Speaker
do my weekly programming, which is just literally a list of exercises. No, but I like that. And I actually, now I'm like, i need to get Laurel's list because that would be a motivating way to do it.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm trying to balance it all with running as well. And the running is also kind of a by feel, you know, so I'll be able to go, well, I want to get this kind of run in today because I know that I have the energy for that. So what type of exercises am I going to do?
00:19:30
Speaker
You know, probably not heavy lower body, right? So now'll now, now I'll just drift more toward the upper body. It's all kind of decided on the day, which is taking me several years to figure out that intuitive approach.
00:19:43
Speaker
But I really like it. The one thing I do try to keep consistent for at least a period of time is the exercise itself. and also the rep range that I'm targeting for the exercise, whether it's a ah heavy, moderate, or light load, and then just stay with that for for an extended period of time so that it's consistent.
00:20:01
Speaker
Sometimes I'll back off, you know, I'll be like couple sets of heavy and then one set of light or something like that. But for the most part, I'm i'm kind of picking ah a goal in terms of intensity and then a goal in terms of just the movement pattern itself.
Hosts' Backgrounds and Strength Training Journey
00:20:14
Speaker
So we were talking about strength training. someone yeah Someone in the free class asked us a big can of worms questions and you were like, we're about to talk about this.
00:20:24
Speaker
Let's actually talk about Well, yeah, let's talk about how we met and then we'll we'll talk about the strength training part of it. I don't actually remember like the very first time that we oh I do. You do? yeah. Okay, let's hear it.
00:20:36
Speaker
it was that It was at the Yoga Tune Up Summit. So I think that, okay, my mom died in 2011. And I think I found Yoga Tune up the level one training in 2012. And I believe we met at the summit, because I became a Yoga Tune Up teacher relatively quick, I'd certified and then I started teaching in and then I got invited to the summit, I want to say 2014 2015.
00:20:59
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. So actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I actually started strength training a year after that. So I met you at the summit. You were hiding in the room most of the time because you were studying for exams for PT school.
00:21:11
Speaker
And I think it was your first, it might've been your first year. Is that right? That sounds right. That's 2014. Okay. That sounds right to me too. So 2014, I met you and you did not take the class I taught at the summit. Sorry. Sorry.
00:21:28
Speaker
That's okay. But Trina, Trina told you that I was really good. And like, you were like, Oh, Trina thinks she's good.
00:21:39
Speaker
And I just remember you being one of the like main teachers and everybody was like Sarah, cause you were already a trainer at that time. Yes. So you taught this really awesome gate workshop that was super fun and playful. And then I don't know, we must've kept in touch.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah. And I came and assisted one of your ball trainings. And then what was that? I don't know when I saw you again, but it was all kind of through Yoga Tune Up. It was all Yoga Tune Up. I feel like there were a couple of years where we so that the Yoga Tune Up Summit, just for everybody listening who doesn't know what we're talking about, was like a gathering of all of the Yoga Tune Up sort of senior teachers and teacher trainers every year.
00:22:16
Speaker
And it was super nice for me because they would do it like in Ojai, which is a two hour drive from my house. But for people like Laura, like people came from all over the country. Some people came from internationally and it was sort of a a long weekend of just like workshops and learning. And it was always so much fun. I always really enjoyed them.
00:22:31
Speaker
And i learned a lot and got really motivated and really inspired. um So my memory is that we just sort of kept meeting at the summit every year. and then and then And then I saw you in a teacher role role And then i think I ended up going to l LA maybe to do something else for yoga. tuup There was multiple summits. I think there were at least two summits that we were at together.
00:22:55
Speaker
i was thinking about what I was into at the time. It was really still very much, you know, I was I had just become a PT. So was very much into like rehab and corrective exercise and all of that kind of stuff. I wasn't,
00:23:07
Speaker
again i i'm trying to remember at that point what kind of real exercises i was doing with weights and i would say it was probably really kind of just sporadic like i would i don't think i even had a gym membership by that point anymore so i would just sort of take classes that had weights in them or you know i had a few hand weights at home kind of thing yeah pretty much everybody at the summit was somehow involved with yoga tune-up obviously in like the yoga element of it but there were many crossfit there was like a big crossfit contingent right and so that was like the people who lifted weights were crossfitters basically in the yoga tune-up community and everybody else as far as I knew not lifting weights right and I think that was pretty standard in the
00:23:53
Speaker
early two thousand and ten s yeah where just the act of going to the gym and lifting weights wasn't really in style yet but crossfit was starting to get really really big yes and kettlebells kettlebells were starting get really really big so there was like there were kettlebell gyms there was crossfit both of which attracted women so women were starting to lift weights more but in these very kind of um niche communities i would say So at the time, were you, so you had just started lifting weights at that point? So what happened was i started lifting weights with Elizabeth Whip.
00:24:31
Speaker
She was a yoga tune-up teacher and she lived in New York. I lived in New York. I knew her through yoga tune-up. I really appreciated her. and her point of view. She's fucking strong. Yeah. And she did CrossFit, but she also was like really sharp teacher. And I knew like she would be able to teach me like the basic moves.
00:24:51
Speaker
So I signed up for one-on-one personal training sessions with her and I believe that happened in 2016 officially. And so that's when i so I took my personal training sessions with her and then I just started going to Planet Fitness because I lived right next to a Planet Fitness and I started doing a lot of the stuff I learned with her on my own but then got confident enough to try other stuff.
00:25:12
Speaker
and And that took me all the way up to my pregnancy. I lifted all the way through my pregnancy until like four days before I gave birth. And I was 10 days late. I was like super duper pregnant.
00:25:23
Speaker
And then I kept going after I i had a baby, kid got right back into the gym like a week later, was doing stuff and i haven't stopped since. yeah But I then started doing CrossFit when I came to Huntsville.
00:25:36
Speaker
um But what brought me to Elizabeth was I had that SI joint pain and that hip pain that just would not, nothing was working. Yeah. and And strength training worked like immediately worked, which is not always the case. But in my case, it really was like a miracle cure, like the kind of thing that you want to have happen happened. happened I started strength training and literally immediately my pain went away and it really hasn't been back.
00:25:58
Speaker
If it has, it's like a whisper and then goes away again. Yeah, that's right. That's how i got into it. Yeah. I mean, I look back at where I was then, if we're saying like 2016, 2017-ish, and everything I do has completely changed.
00:26:12
Speaker
You know, I mean, that's practically 10 years ago at this point. And so you would sort of hope that you would evolve and learn new things and let go of old ideas, but which I i definitely have. I would say for me and my work, both with Lift for Longevity and also just as a PT, it was when I started lifting barbells.
00:26:34
Speaker
which was after my first chemo diagnosis. So 2022, that's when I really got into like barbells. And that's when I really got serious about lifting. Yeah. Whereas before, you know, I would take, like I said, I would take classes. I would, I would sometimes go into the gym and pick up like what felt like a really heavy kettlebell and do like three sets of 10 squats and then kind of like look around and be
MovementLogic and Women's Empowerment
00:26:56
Speaker
like, okay. And then leave, you know, you came to some of my kettlebell classes with the virtual studio as you you were recovering from cancer. That's right.
00:27:05
Speaker
i remember actually showing up to one of not a kettlebell class, but you were doing it like a gentle yoga class and I did it virtually with you. And I remember, my little My arms felt like noodles. And I remember even this gentle yoga class where we're literally on the ground most of the time. yeah Halfway through, I was like, I got to go. I'm too tired. This is too hard. This is too hard.
00:27:26
Speaker
I can't do this. that was ah that was a a big road back. But yeah, I did. i was part of your online studio for a while and you would take those classes a lot. That was like, that made my whole life when you were there. It was so fun. when Showing up to the live classes was really fun. that I was like, oh my God, Sarah Kortstain.
00:27:46
Speaker
We were already working together too. So so we started MovementLogic in 2017. That's right. And that came out of you and I and Trina Altman wanting to do something together. just side And I think in the beginning, we didn't even exactly know what we wanted to do together. We just knew that we all three of us liked each other and felt like we could like create something cool. And we sort of synthesized it into understanding that we wanted to make some decent continuing education content for movement teachers, because yeah a lot of people would take their yoga teacher training or their Pilates teacher training and then come out of it and be like, well, I don't know what I don't know.
00:28:23
Speaker
They would don't know certain things and and constantly rely on those certain things that they knew, but didn't have a better understanding of like why they might be assigning someone a certain pose or a certain exercise beyond like, well, this is what you're supposed to do for this kind of a thing.
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, there's all kinds of mixed messages, i think in, or it's getting better, but back then there were a lot of mixed messages about what the role of a yoga teacher or Pilates teacher actually was in terms of a student's like rehabilitation process.
00:28:53
Speaker
And so I think what we wanted to do is we wanted to create a within scope. set of tools for those teachers to be able to use with their clients where they could confidently say like I am approaching this teaching within scope of practice and these are exercises that actually make sense based on what the student is telling me versus just kind of being confused about whether or not you should give them anything in response or just immediately like have you seen a doctor or refer them out or you know Not and really knowing what your role was or what you had to contribute because none of that really got covered in those teacher trainings right back then. Do you know the band postal service?
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah. So when I contacted you and Trina and I was like, I want us to create courses, some type of continuing ed for teachers, and I don't really know what it is, but I just know that we should work together.
00:29:45
Speaker
I don't know if you remember, but I was like, I want it to kind of be like Postal Service. Do you know how Postal Service creates their, or at least their first album that they created? Do you know how they did it? and They recorded bits and sent them to each other? Yeah, so that's right. they They're musicians from across the country and they never actually recorded their first album, which I can't remember the name of their first album, but but they recorded all of their parts separately and then put them together.
00:30:08
Speaker
And that's kind of what I thought we should do with these courses. I was like, obviously getting us all together to film is expensive and we don't even know if these are going to do well and we don't even know what the fuck we're doing, but let's try to create our parts separately and then put it all together.
00:30:24
Speaker
and see what what happens. We did that for how many years? Like we did six tutorials? Yeah. I mean, we did it for a while. We started in 2017, I want to say up till 2022. We did two tutorials with Trina and then Trina wanted to move on and work on some other things. So then we had guest teachers come on with us.
00:30:44
Speaker
Anuola Mayberg did two with us. She did two and then Jaisal did two as well. And then And then we were like, we don't want to do any more of these. Yeah, we were kind of felt like, well, we had a system and we proved it. It worked. And we made six of them.
00:30:58
Speaker
I mean, to me, it started to feel like we were running out of body parts because they were body parts specific. So it was like, oh, we I guess we could do a knees one. But like right well half of that's going to be hip related. We could do. We did feet. We did neck. We did shoulders.
00:31:10
Speaker
We did pelvic floor. We did hips. We did it low back. It sort of it was start to me. it was starting to feel like we were done here. could slap hips and feet together and call it knees. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So then you and I were talking, you know, at that point when we were like, okay, we've done six of these.
00:31:26
Speaker
Are we going to do a, are we going to, what are we doing? And we both sort of realized that we wanted to do something that was like more serious about strength training.
00:31:38
Speaker
Because we had had in our, in the tutorial videos, there were some exercises that had small hand weights involved, but but basically it was mostly like body weight or resistance bands. It was not strength training, any of it.
00:31:50
Speaker
It was not until we start we did some strength training and shoulders but it wasn't a program. It was like you should be doing some pushing and some pulling and here are some pulling exercises and here are some pushing exercises but there was No prescription around how many reps, how many sets, RIR, RPE. Like we weren't talking about that at all.
00:32:10
Speaker
There was no progressive overload. We weren't doing any those. There was strength training in everything from shoulders on. So four of the six have that component to them.
00:32:21
Speaker
And hips and neck is actually where we we it very gradually started pushing more and more strength content, but not in a program form. right Here's some exercises to load your neck.
00:32:33
Speaker
Totally. Kind of a thing. But then I think what happened for me is we started our podcast in 2022. Mm-hmm.
00:32:41
Speaker
And we started then talking about creating a course for me, I knew at that point in 2022 having been strength training for six years consistently that like the thing that mattered most about strength training was doing it for a long time and following a program.
00:32:57
Speaker
And I was like okay i'm done sharing strength exercises in a tutorial I want to teach a whole program mm hmm. but what i was seeing around me was that women were doing resistive exercise like they were doing body weight exercise or they were holding some kind of external load like a band or a small wait, but they weren't ever following, and somewhere, but like most weren't following a structured program.
00:33:26
Speaker
For example, kettlebells were kind of ramping up in popularity in the lead up to the pandemic. They really like got super popular during the pandemic. But people were starting to go to one-off kettlebell classes as well.
00:33:39
Speaker
And I felt like I wanted to be a part of people's journey using a long-form structured progressive program. because I knew that when you do that, you make changes to your body that are profound and completely unattainable until you really start repeating the same movement patterns and adding load as you get stronger. Not to say you have to follow a structured program to do that. Like, I think if you went regularly to the same kettlebell classes week after week, a lot of the same movements are repeated.
00:34:14
Speaker
if you've got an eye on increasing the challenge as your strength increase increases, like you can see the same type of progress. But all too often, what I think I noticed more than anything, especially with women our age was this jumping from class to class, jumping from format to format, jumping from mode to mode, never really committing to a long form process that would walk them through This kind of cyclical repetition of doing the same types of exercises, the same exercises, the same types of exercises again and again and again.
00:34:48
Speaker
But making the challenge harder as strength increase like progressive overload right. and And to get organized around what it is you're doing how much of it you're doing and then what type of results you're seeing from that yeah.
00:35:04
Speaker
in the form of tracking your progress, writing that shit down, as we say. I really wanted to do something like that. And at the same time, I was starting to learn more about bone density and about the loss of bone accelerating around the menopause tri transition and beyond and around fracture risk. And all of this made me really want to provide some type of exercise stimulus that would not only make women stronger, but also ensure that their bones
00:35:37
Speaker
remained as strong as possible. Yeah. I think that was something that we both started to started to see. And one of the frustrations that I always had like as a PT was what you get in a lot of PT is is people getting rehabbed back to sort of where they were. So like you come in with a shoulder injury, we use whatever sort of quote unquote rehab level resistance. So it might be like different bands or different you know hands small hand weights, things like that.
00:36:03
Speaker
To rehab your shoulder, now it's back to where it was. But there was never any discussion of like, and now could we also make you even better and even stronger than you were when you came in? There was never a discussion around how do we improve what's going on for you as a whole, separate from this injury or this this thing that you came in with.
00:36:23
Speaker
And one of the things that I liked about Align where I used to work was that we had a full gym. And there were also personal trainers. So for some people, it was a very easy, like, well, let me introduce you to the trainer and let's get you like, cause you know, people who had natural interest, but for women in particular, there was always a a bit of reservation around that.
00:36:42
Speaker
i would, I would see that, you know, especially if we were talking about getting them into barbells. And so I found myself kind of sneakily, maybe it wasn't that sneaky. I thought I was being sneaky, just starting, starting the conversation around strength early on in the rehab process and, and that kind of became my MO where it was like, well, I know you're here for this, but I'm going to start to just introduce the idea that maybe you could be like a lot stronger than you are overall once you like better than you were before kind of thing.
00:37:11
Speaker
Yeah. Do you find yourself as a physical therapist trying to talk to your clients who come to you with their acute injuries, right? They come to your you with their fires that they want you to put out for them. Do you do you spend time talking with them about these other bigger, broader, bigger picture lifestyle changes that they might also consider making strength training being one of them, right? It's part of the physical activity guidelines, right? Strength training is maybe not as important as drinking water and eating food, but it's like kind of right up there. And so is cardio and so is diet and so is sleep. And so is maybe mental health care, like how much of your time as a physical therapist do you spend
00:37:54
Speaker
having those types of conversations with people? Because obviously they want you to put out the fire, but the fire came from somewhere, right? Right. It would depend a lot on the person. Like some people were very open to like hearing about what more they could be doing, or, you know, they just didn't know enough about the importance of regular exercise and things like that.
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah. Some people you could, I mean, you know, you get, you get sort of spidey senses about all this stuff. And some people I could tell, like this person, I'm they cannot hear me. Like there's, it doesn't even matter. It's not even a question of like, am I using convincing language? This person just is is not able to be here for this right now of fire The fire is too hot. Yeah, exactly. they their Everything is on fire, but it it definitely became a lot of what I
Course Design and Focus on Barbell Training
00:38:39
Speaker
would focus on. And in particular, if I had a, ah you know, I would look out for my ah demographic of like, okay, it's a woman.
00:38:46
Speaker
she's above 40 and under 70, I'm going to start talking to her about getting really strong because it's such an important thing to maintain. And it's not, you know, ah people still to this day have this idea that like aging means you just get more and more frail and then something terrible happens and then you die. Like, yeah there's no understanding that you can actually change that trajectory. Yeah. I was sitting, I'm sorry. I was at dinner with some friends last night and they're they're about 10 years younger than us.
00:39:16
Speaker
And um he, so he was talking about how he was with his friends that are presumably his age. And they were all talking about how their bodies were falling apart and, you know, was all kind of going downhill and they're 10 years younger than me. right And I was like, yeah, my body's doing pretty fine. Really fucking well right now. ah of Considering, right. And so I don't think that there's a strong,
00:39:41
Speaker
culture around exercise anywhere in this country for most people, honestly. But anyway, sorry to interrupt. No, just just that those were the people that I would kind of keep an eye on and and and really want to introduce this idea of like, you know, it's not an inevitable decline. yeah You could do a little bit of strength training. It would go a long way. And most of the women you know were interested and they would their ears would perk up a little bit. And convincing people to do the barbell was is always a bit was always a bit tricky.
00:40:11
Speaker
Or I had to like sort of, you know, slowly suggest that maybe because they're doing their squats with two 15 pound dumbbells that they could actually just hold one 35 bar and would be that much harder.
00:40:25
Speaker
yeah So yeah, I distinctly remember when we first started trying to design the course, we were like, we were putting everything in it. So we were putting barbells and kettlebells.
00:40:36
Speaker
and dumbbells and a landmine detachment, because I love the landmine. I think it's really fun. We were making this impossible course, basically. Because we wanted to catch all the fish. Everybody, yes.
00:40:48
Speaker
And we thought like if we just did barbells, it's going to put too many people off. People aren't ready for it. you know it's too big of a ask the leap but It's too big of a leap to ask people to make the e equipment purchase or to join a gym.
00:41:03
Speaker
or all that kind of thing. But then we were also like, how the F are we going to teach four different variations depending on your equipment for every single exercise? Like, how are we going to film this? How are we going to, like, it became, became like a monster.
00:41:15
Speaker
Yeah. And, and what in your mind made barbells the equipment of choice? Like I have my story about that, but you know, what went through your mind when you were like, it it actually has to be barbells i think when for our course. Yeah. When you first started writing the the course content and i I just remember looking at it and being like, oh, ah fuck me.
00:41:38
Speaker
This is a huge project that isn't going to be that good because it's too many things. Too many things, too many options, too many different paths for people. It would just be too hard to try to herd everybody. It was like trying to herd cats. Yeah. Yeah.
00:41:53
Speaker
my What am I supposed to be doing right now? who's supposed to what? I've five options for this exercise. Like too much. And I, at the time I remember that our goal was really about like the the purpose of including the dumbbells and the kettlebells was because we were trying to get people to barbells.
00:42:11
Speaker
And so I think there was a point, right? I'm not like, I just remember there's a point where was like, why are we making our lives so difficult when we don't have to? Mm-hmm.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yes, we're going to be the only people out there doing this as far as we can tell, but why don't we just make it a barbell course and just go yeah all in on barbells and why they're great tool, why they're the tool that you want, you know, why it's important because you're going to be able to continue to progress progressively overload ways that you're going to run out of upper body strength. That's going to inhibit then how much lower body strength.
00:42:46
Speaker
you can build if you're only using dumbbells and kettlebells, stuff like that. But what was your what do you remember about that? There were a couple of things. One, I knew who our audience was. They were the people who are already in our tutorials, buying our tutorials. They're the people who are already following us online. There are people who are already on our mailing list. like And I knew who these people were.
00:43:07
Speaker
They were like me. They were like you. They were, you know, women about our age. And a lot of them yoga teachers more and more were Pilates teachers. And I knew that most of these women would like nothing less than to go to the fucking gym.
00:43:24
Speaker
Like they weren't gonna go to the gym. They wanted to practice at home. yeah At the same time, I taught live classes for four years via my virtual studio online and saw exactly what these women were willing to put in their homes.
00:43:44
Speaker
in order to strength train with and it was a couple of kettlebells a couple right not not heavy ones actually I spent many years working with the same students in programs progressive programs where we were tracking parameters and doing the same exercises week after week and progressing to different exercises after four or six or eight weeks right noticing that they were always lifting the same amount of weight and I would have conversations with them and it just wasn't landing, right? So they were benefiting, but I feel like many of them were plateauing. And I knew that in order to get past that mental block,
00:44:30
Speaker
of I don't want to go to the gym, I don't want to purchase heavier weights because I'm not ready for them. Let's just start off by having them buy equipment that's already substantially heavy. Like,
00:44:46
Speaker
now you're starting with a 22 pound bar or a 35 pound bar. And you've got some 2.5 some fives and some ten Okay, so now if you bought the 22 pound bar you've got my math is terrible but you've got at least 57 pounds to work with at the top end, which is about three times heavier than the kettlebells I saw in these women's living rooms. Okay, so now and not only that, but we can
00:45:21
Speaker
take weight off and now you've got a 37 pound weight and now you've got a 27 pound weight and now you've got a 22 pound weight so we have in other words we have options additionally my my second reason is that i felt in my own body how my lower body until i started lifting barbells my lower body plateaued in strength because there's only so many fucking times that I'm going to do a goddamn goblet squat holding a 53 pound kettlebell before I set that fucker down because my shoulders are tired from holding it for a minute and 10 seconds because I can do 23 reps, right? So you know what I'm saying? And like,
00:46:07
Speaker
Then if I want to hold on to more weight, right, I've somehow got to get those weights from the floor up into the rack position to be able to squat them. For deadlifting, I noticed how my grip somehow I just couldn't hold on to heavy dumbbells the way you can hold on to a barbell.
00:46:27
Speaker
Like a barbell for deadlifting, you can use what's called a mixed grip. The one hand under, one hand over, and that seriously improves my personal ability to hold on to the bar with dumbbells.
00:46:39
Speaker
You can only hold on to it in this overhand position. Then the dumbbells actually move around a lot more because they're two moving weights instead of one and so that decreases stability and so now you've got this moving weight in addition to this heavy moving weight and it makes just the ability to get the weights up in a deadlift harder if you use a single weight like a barbell it's so stable.
00:47:04
Speaker
It's easier to hold on to. You can arrange your body very advantageously relative to it because it's so there and like fixed on the floor and you can really get over top of it and like pry it up.
00:47:17
Speaker
I knew that bringing barbells to our course and suggesting that women should lift barbells was also going to be for many of the people in our audience.
00:47:29
Speaker
kind of a challenge that they wanted. We are basically suggesting to you that you're capable of this. We expect you to be able to do it.
00:47:41
Speaker
We've created an entire course around it. We're confident that you're capable of this. And I think that there was something attractive to a lot of women about that. we weren't handing them you know another course that used dumbbells, another course that used smaller weights.
00:47:58
Speaker
And not that these courses necessarily do this, but I think for many women, there's just been this assumption over time from others and from themselves that they're just not able to lift bigger weights. They're not able to lift something like a barbell. And so it's kind of out of the question.
00:48:12
Speaker
We kind of made it a question for them. we We challenge them to think of themselves as people who could take a course and learn how to lift these really big weights. Yeah, those were those were like the main things in my mind. I was like, I was kind of done with the wheel spinning that I saw so much spinning of wheels.
00:48:30
Speaker
Yeah, so much like, you know, you're capable of more, you need heavier weights eventually. this is No, let's let's actually eliminate the need for that type of persuasion and just start you with something that is going to give you something to aspire to.
00:48:46
Speaker
Yeah. I feel like it was once we decided that we were that we were just going to do barbells, it was it made everything suddenly kind of like snap into place and it made everything make sense suddenly. Because we were we were like, oh, we've got a vision here now. We've got a vision for women that is different than what they're being told and sold currently, which is you can get strong as fuck.
00:49:10
Speaker
And especially in the beginning, we were focusing a lot on on getting to heavy lifting because at the time that was our understanding of how you built bone density was was heavy lifting, which we have now modified our understanding of.
00:49:23
Speaker
And we know that you can build bone density with moderate and in some situations even lightweight, but most likely moderate as well. But it gave us a totally different laser focus around not just like, hey, we're challenging you in a new way about getting stronger, but also what that lack of challenge in the past has been, like what was the cause? What was the reason why nobody's challenged you up until now? And we got ah we got a lot into understanding The patriarchy and understanding, you know, societal messaging to women and and talking a lot about that and and how much we continue to see that everywhere in messaging around, you know, what women's bodies should look like and what faculties women should have. You know, you should be this amount of strong, but not that amount of strong. Yes. You know? Yeah.
00:50:10
Speaker
And so it was it was a bit scary at the time because we we looked around and we were like, oh, there is nobody else doing this, but we're going just like everything. We're all in on this, right? We like took all the chips and pushed them over to barbells and we're like, all right, maybe this is going to work.
00:50:27
Speaker
Maybe it'll go. and And it did. Like we got... we got 90 something people in that first cohort. And so we were like, well, I guess we were right.
00:50:39
Speaker
We did it. Yeah. the The podcast is a huge part of our strategy just in that conversation around the patriarchy, that conversation around internalized messaging.
00:50:53
Speaker
Women have internalized the message that they don't belong strong, that they belong toned or sculpted or lean or long, but not strong. That strong is a look and it's not feminine.
00:51:08
Speaker
me um And we wanted to really unpack this messaging. We also wanted to talk about what is interesting to us about strength training, what is inspiring to us about strength from both the science and cultural and sociological sociologically informed perspective. The other thing I want to say about barbells is i think you and I are both really serious about teaching.
00:51:35
Speaker
We're serious about when we sell a course We're serious about students coming out of it being able to do something they couldn't do before. We're serious about students coming away with usable skills that they feel like they have established some like substantial form of mastery over.
00:51:51
Speaker
And I think you and I as teachers for many years in perhaps you know formats very different obviously very different from strength training, knew that if we try to teach everything, we wouldn't teach much at all.
00:52:04
Speaker
If we try to teach dumbbell technique, and kettlebell technique, and barbell technique, and bodyweight technique, and resistance bands, stick like we still have students sometimes reach out and be like, could I do it with resistance bands?
00:52:15
Speaker
I think we knew that by trying to teach everything, we would not be able to teach one thing really, really well. And I felt such a huge relief when we decided to just go all in on barbells because I knew we would teach the fuck out of barbells.
00:52:31
Speaker
yeah I knew that people were going to come into this course knowing most of them nothing about barbells. And they were going to leave the course knowing a fuck ton about barbells, such that we get messages all the time from women like I just went to the gym on vacation never done that before walked right up to the squat rack was like in there with the guys and got so many compliments and they're they're actually kind of nice.
00:52:56
Speaker
and And I felt like we had to pick a lane. We had to pick a point of view. And I think this is, we see this again and again and again in so many different aspects of communication, of art, of expression, which is that when you water down your message by trying to please everyone you end up with a really weak message yeah but when you choose a point of view and you really go all in on it you're not going to catch everybody right you're not going to be everybody's favorite but some people are going to see you and really understand what you're about they'll understand what they're going to get and they'll i think be much more confident in aligning themselves with you in some way right
00:53:40
Speaker
So I think that that is a huge, another huge part about why we chose barbells, because we had to choose something. This is not personal training. We're not able to tailor every single thing to every single individual like you can in a one-on-one session.
00:53:55
Speaker
We needed to have a lot of really solid content around this one piece of equipment, knowing that, of course, some people do take with us and use other free weights because that's the more appropriate weight. Or they are literally like, this is, I'm going to do the course with dumbbells. Okay, fine. We don't say no to that.
00:54:11
Speaker
But we just knew that the bulk of our content wasn't going to try to teach every single implement because we knew that that was just going to be way too confusing, way too much work. Yeah.
00:54:23
Speaker
And it wasn't going to allow us to have like a really strong commitment to this point of view, which is barbells, barbell technique, getting good at lifting barbells, getting really comfortable with barbells, which is really what we wanted people to leave with.
Course Structure and Methodology
00:54:36
Speaker
And the most practical aspect is like, you're going to leave this course knowing what the fuck you're doing with barbells. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. you're not going to leave this course as a certified personal trainer because that's not what it is, but you're going to really understand barbells. And interestingly, we had a personal trainer in our last yeah cohort who had been previously discouraged from using barbells, which I found wild.
00:55:01
Speaker
i think it's one of those subliminal messages that you just, it's in the air, it's in the water. yeah You know, it's kind of a boys club, right? And you pick up on that. You don't ever get invited to the party.
00:55:12
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Because you just assume that you're just not going to want to come. Parties are for you. Yeah. And so, yeah, she talked about how she it was sounded like a great personal training searcht in that there was an in-person like component to it for a long time, which I thought was super impressive.
00:55:27
Speaker
But every time they would do barbells, the guys would all run over to the barbells. And I guess like there was choice about if you don't want to do barbells, you can do machines or you can do free weights. And she's never went over to the guys at the barbells because there's just this unspoken sort of assumption that like, this is a guy thing. This is for men.
00:55:47
Speaker
If you want to hear her, by the way, she's in the most recent alum episode where we interview four alums for Live for Longevity. It's episode 112, Redefining What's Possible. Nice. So let's talk a little bit about how we ended up designing the course.
00:56:02
Speaker
It's a six month course. There's sort of three main components that, that make up the course. he um We have linear periodization. We're going to talk about all of these. We have high variation and we also have an impact part that starts partway through.
00:56:19
Speaker
so Laurel, can you explain what linear periodization means and what it looks like? Periodization is just a fancy way of saying, how do we organize our training? And there's literally an infinite number of ways to organize training.
00:56:32
Speaker
But when we say linear, typically what we're talking about here is that something is going up in a fairly linear fashion. So in our course, the thing that's going up in a fairly linear fashion is load intensity for about 25% the exercises.
00:56:49
Speaker
So we start with a moderate load. That's just like saying we start by lifting um in the compound lifts in a rep range of between eight and 12 reps. And then as we progress through the six months, each block, which is four weeks long, each block, there's a very small jump in load percentage.
00:57:10
Speaker
So whereas you might start off with 10 to 12 reps in the strict press, you're gonna move to eight to 10 in month two, possibly. And then maybe in month three, you're going to go from eight to 10 reps to six to eight reps, right? And then in maybe in month four, it's going to be five to seven reps, right? And then maybe month five, it's four to six reps.
00:57:35
Speaker
And what this means is that the loads are getting heavier because the load you can lift for 10 to 12 reps is lighter than the load you can lift for four to six. And by lighter, I mean,
00:57:46
Speaker
It's a weight further away from your maximum capacity at that particular time. Whereas the four to six rep load is closer to your maximum capacity at that particular time. This is different, this type of increase in load moving closer to your maximum capacity.
00:58:03
Speaker
is something that you can do in a week, right? So you could start off on Tuesday lifting in a 10 to 12 rep range for a given exercise. And then on Thursday, you could lift in a four to six rep range for the same exercise.
00:58:17
Speaker
Your strength is about the same. you know, Tuesday to Thursday in that week. So there's confusion sometimes around what it means to lift heavier. Okay, and so I wanna clarify that.
00:58:28
Speaker
When we say ah higher intensity, we mean closer to your max. But inevitably over time, over the course of several weeks, several months,
00:58:39
Speaker
within a given rep range, you could stay with the 10 to 12 rep range for three months in a given exercise and the weight should get heavier right. But it's getting heavier at that same proximity to your Max it's just that your maximum is increasing because your strength is increasing.
00:58:59
Speaker
So there's that kind of lifting heavier, right? Where we increase the challenges, our strength increases within a given rep range. But then there's the kind of heavier where we're literally picking up a weight that is closer to our maximum capacity for fewer number of reps.
00:59:16
Speaker
So when I say linear periodization, that's what I'm talking about is that as the monks months progress in some exercises, 20, I think 25% of the exercises in the compound lifts We gradually turn the dial up on load intensity all the way to month five for some of them. And we dropped back to a lighter weight for month six.
00:59:40
Speaker
And then some exercises got taken all the way to month six at their heaviest, closest to max level. Now, all the while this is happening, people's maximum strength is going up. So that we saw happening in as short as four weeks, right? If we're working in a 10 to 12 rep range,
00:59:57
Speaker
for the bench press. Okay, people start with whatever weight, maybe it's the empty bar. And they're doing, you know, however many 10 to 12 reps with the empty bar for the first week.
01:00:10
Speaker
And then in the second week, they're like, oh I think I could add five pounds. And then in the third week, they're like, I think I could add another five pounds. And that's kind of how it goes when you're a beginner to strength training is you see these rapid improvements to your strength, mostly because of the coordination component. From week one to week four of a block, they'd see that the load on the bar goes up for that 10 to 12 rep range. Then in the next block,
01:00:33
Speaker
i we might take that current level of strength and have them actually lift a slightly heavier load closer to their max at that particular level of strength. And then it would kind of work like that through the six the six months. So when we say linear periodization, in this case, we are taking you from lifting moderate to heavy weights relative to your max over the course of six months.
01:00:57
Speaker
And it's pretty, i think, educational. and also in many ways profoundly perspective shifting Oh yeah. To do this.
01:01:08
Speaker
Oh yeah. For, for people in the course to see the numbers going up, I think is, is really wild. And they, they all, most of them that come to us are, are brand new beginners and, and there are what they call newbie gains. Like you tend to progress a lot when you're new, partly because you probably are underloading a little bit, which is fine at the beginning, right? We're learning technique. We're figuring it out.
01:01:32
Speaker
But it's a very different feeling. The feeling of lifting something that is so heavy, you can only lift it four times, maybe. It's a physical experience that you don't get with a moderate load, with a light load, like with with ways that women, for the most part, have encountered resistance training before. It's a totally different feeling.
01:01:51
Speaker
And, you know, we don't start there obviously, because that would be insane. But by the time we get to month five and month six, where they start to experience that heavy lifting and what that feels like, who it's just such an eye-opening experience and and a life-changing experience for for people and very eye-opening.
01:02:09
Speaker
We started running some rep max tests this season. And I think to very good effect. Yeah. A rep max test is like a one rep max test, but in reverse so instead of maxing out the load on the bar for a single rep you max out your reps.
01:02:27
Speaker
At a given load on the bar and typically we would choose to rep max a lift where the rep range was in the moderate intensity. So for example, the hip thrust, I think, um, I remember very clearly one woman did a rep max test where you basically, you go until you literally feel like you couldn't lift the bar another time.
01:02:50
Speaker
So it's, it's really important to choose exercises where that's, you know, feasible, right. And you're not gonna have to drop the bar or whatever, but also you can make it a one rep in reserve, make sure you can come up one more time before stopping.
01:03:02
Speaker
and leave a little bit of room there on the failure end of It's like, don't go right up to failure, but get pretty close. Like stop leaving two reps in reserve and instead try leaving one.
01:03:14
Speaker
yeah And there's a fair amount of coaching happening during it where we're like, okay, could you do another rep? Could you do another rep? If you could do one more rep, right, with one in reserve, do another rep. And when people applied this rep max test, they were able to do like 10 more reps than what they had been doing.
01:03:32
Speaker
And it's just a real eye opener because when you then take those 10 reps at the given load and you do a little calculation, we have a one rep max calculator, we have them use.
01:03:43
Speaker
They find out that actually they could put like 20 more pounds on the bar. So then for the third set, they put 20 more pounds on the bar, sometimes just 10. A lot of times I say like, just make a jump in 10 pounds. Don't make a jump in 20 pounds. Like let's just jump by 10 maybe.
01:03:56
Speaker
And then maybe to you know next week when you do the workout, start there and then maybe see if you could add 10 more but they're like oh my god I was able to do the same exact exercise that I did in the first set with 10 or 15 more pounds on the bar by the third set and it was probably more than anything what they're learning there is they're learning that proximity to failure they're learning what it actually feels like Because in the beginning, when you're learning the exercise, everything feels new.
01:04:28
Speaker
The equipment feels new. And we don't run these rep max tests in the first two months. And we start running them, yeah, maybe toward the end of month two. And then month three. And then, you know, whenever we feel like it might be necessary to check in with these certain moving patterns. And they start to recalibrate what two reps in reserve actually feels like.
01:04:47
Speaker
They get a little closer to failure. And this is just a part of many things they're learning, but I think it's probably one of the more important things they're learning in the course, which is what is ah difficult or a moderately difficult, doesn't have to feel feel like the hardest thing you've ever done, but what what is like the hardest thing all week you've done, feel like? definitely you know And then do you want to talk as well about what is ah a high variation approach?
01:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, so there's many, many as many different ways to approach strength training as there are individuals on the planet. Okay, so there's so many different ways to change the program to fit the individual, but some broad brushstroke changes you can make as you can decide, am I going to have this person a limited number of exercises multiple times a week?
01:05:41
Speaker
Or am I going to have this person do a wider variety of exercises multiple times a week? And then the second question would be, am I going to have this person stay with this limited number of exercises long term for multiple months?
01:05:57
Speaker
Or am I going to have them change out the exercises, maybe not completely replacing them with totally different movement patterns, but maybe trying a different variation periodically every four to six to eight weeks?
01:06:10
Speaker
Okay, so we decided to go with a high variation program. So what that means is that every four weeks, we change out the compound lifts for a very close cousin variation to the compound lift. For example, we might change out the back squat for the front squat.
01:06:34
Speaker
We might change out the conventional deadlift for the Romanian deadlift. We might change out the hip thrust for a hamstring bridge variation right so not exact same muscle groups trained the exact way at the exact same range of motion but very similar muscle groups trained in a slightly different way and so what i think this does for beginners specifically is it avoids overload issues of doing too much of the same type of movement
01:07:05
Speaker
for too long. It also, and I think this is probably the more important piece, is that it expands their movement repertoire. It orients them around a wider variety of exercises so that their movement vocabulary is enhanced around strength training and they're able to acquire more movement skill in the program. And so we spend each block, which is one month long, focusing on 12 different exercises.
01:07:33
Speaker
And then for the next block some of those exercises are traded out for different variations, some of them aren't some of them like will go from like a back squat sit to stand to a back squat to box, which is a little bit different to just a back squat.
01:07:46
Speaker
Same exercise we're just not hitting a target potentially. um But some of them, you know, we would for the accessory exercises those isolation exercise we just completely swap out one for a different one right.
01:07:59
Speaker
and kind of almost completely different muscle groups in some aspects as well just give you a little a little taste of something completely different but typically there'd be like more stability exercises mixed in there and some more core you know focused exercises and as well as single leg exercises and and things like that but the other reasoning behind a high variation program is that We know our audience, we're attracting people who are used to going to a wide variety of different types of yoga classes, a wide variety of different types of Pilates classes where they're used to showing up and doing something completely different every single class.
01:08:35
Speaker
So we're kind of meeting them halfway and going like, look, or we're asking you to stay with these exercises for a full month. But we're not asking you to stay with these exercises for six months.
01:08:46
Speaker
you're Right. You get to try some new stuff next month. Right. And I think ultimately what you learn from this process, if you stay with the program for six months, is that sometimes you're glad to change things up. And sometimes you're like, actually, i was making progress. And I want to actually stay with that particular exercise for a little bit longer.
01:09:04
Speaker
And a lot of students who come out of the program, they make that jump to then, you know, becoming kind of their own captain of the ship. in a sense and go like, I'm not going to change out pushups every month. I'm actually going to keep doing pushups for multiple months until I stop making a change. And then maybe I'll go back to the bench press. Right. Right. But for our purposes, what we're, I think really trying to do in that first six months of introducing people to some of them, strength training, some of them barbells is give them a really strong foundation And exposure to 22 different strength exercises that utilize not just barbells, but sometimes we use plates as weights and sometimes we just use body weight, and so that they come out of the program they have a really.
01:09:46
Speaker
well rounded movement repertoire to draw from yeah and multiple multiple ways to train the same muscle groups that's another thing too is. When you just do the same exercise over and over and over again you're strong in that one way.
01:10:02
Speaker
Right, but when you change it up and keep training that muscle group, but in a different range of motion in a different relationship to gravity in a different direction of movement. Now you're strong in a different way right, and so you get a little bit more mobility benefit from that.
01:10:18
Speaker
And you potentially get more versatility in your strength from that as well. Definitely. and i And I think it helps. I mean, when I first started lifting barbells, I did so like a year and a half where all I did was deadlift back squat bench press because I thought I was some kind of power lifter.
01:10:33
Speaker
That's a low variation program. And it's very common with power lifters. Yeah. And, you know, I got strong as heck in all of those. But I mean, somebody find me some pulling exercises because like there were, you know what i mean? Like there was, there was, it just,
01:10:48
Speaker
After a while, I was like, all right, I think I should probably do something else. Not just this, right? And was like, you've been doing that for a year and a half. And I like, yeah. And so, you know, part of it is we don't want to just make them strong in these, you know, traditional barbell exercises. We want them to be sort of like strong circumferentially, right? All the way around. So we include a lot of lateral movements, different core exercises, um pulling and pushing for the upper body, right? All all of those categories are included.
01:11:20
Speaker
One of the most common things we hear from women is, I know I need to strength train, but I don't know where to start. At the same time, many worry about balance, falling, losing strength, or an osteoporosis diagnosis.
01:11:35
Speaker
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01:11:52
Speaker
You'll get personalized feedback to make sure your technique is solid and your weights are appropriately challenging. You'll also learn how to safely implement impact training, scaled to your ability, for even more bone building benefits.
01:12:05
Speaker
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01:12:36
Speaker
So then this other aspect that we we don't do it right at the very beginning of the course, because people have enough, they're dealing with enough in the very beginning, just figuring out like, what is a barbell and how do I how do i put the plates on and all that kind of stuff. So ah month three, we introduce impact training, which is Slightly different from like pure plyometrics in the sense that we're trying to do plyometrics. We're trying to do some sort of like jumping activity or jumping related activity, but we're trying to make the landing for want of a better word, more impactful.
01:13:07
Speaker
So we're not absorbing the the impact of the land. You're not landing like a ballerina and bending your knees. You're so you're landing a little more stiffly because There is research around impact training and bone density building bone. Right. And so we offer things from just heel drops, which you can do standing or sitting. It's like the most gentle kind of an impact because there are some people who have concerns. They're like, well, well i don't know if my knees can handle it or my back or my whatever.
01:13:33
Speaker
And we go all the way up to like drop landings, which is when you drop down from a height and try to land stiffly. We do broad jumps, which is sort of like ah a long jump kind of a thing. We do pogos. We offer all kinds of different impact versions, but we really, we tell them how many to do. We tell participants, okay, we want you do this many impacts this number of days per week, but we leave it entirely up to them which ones to select because there's so much individual variation in people's bodies and what they're comfortable with. and And I will say as well, like landing a bit stiffly is awkward.
01:14:06
Speaker
It doesn't feel as nice as landing and absorb, you know, it doesn't feel as like it it might rattle your teeth a little bit. and And it definitely takes a little getting, it feels almost like you've done something wrong, right? And so it takes a little bit of getting used to that feeling.
01:14:20
Speaker
And so that's why we have that kind of ramp up from month three all the way through month six, where Month six, we have them doing it six days a week. And and I think we get up to like 50 impact, 50 hits, something like that.
01:14:33
Speaker
And it's just another evidence-based way to work on bone density. It also starts to give them a little bit of an introduction into a capacity called power.
01:14:44
Speaker
which is strength at speed, which is something else that we tend to lose more because we just stopped doing it, I think, more than anything else. Like what when was the last time you saw 40 year old playing double dutch or like hopscotching, right?
01:14:58
Speaker
A lot of this stuff that we do as kids involves a lot of jumping and bouncing and bounding and leaping. And we just, we stopped doing movements like that. yeah And so getting that power capacity back in as we get older is really, really important for things like fall risks,
01:15:14
Speaker
you know catching yourself or your fall, the ability, you knock something over, can you reach out quickly and grab it before it's a mess on the floor? Or is it is it a goner kind of thing? um And so that's that's part of the capacity that we're building there as well.
01:15:26
Speaker
Yeah. And strength is a part of power. So they're building power while strength training, but they're not specifically working on their ability to produce force quickly, which we do have multiple different we're calling them impact exercises, but they are indeed plyometric exercises within the program that work both the receiving of impact, but also the production of force with velocity. So um broad jumps, vertical jumps, right? At the very, very end of the course, some students might start doing drop landings.
01:16:02
Speaker
um There's pogos right which are more reactive jump landings and there are single leg hops which bring a very.
01:16:15
Speaker
very palpable balance component into the work that they're doing and trying to stay on one foot so. I like this aspect of our course for more than just the impact training. I like it for the, and I use this word sparingly, but functional benefits, right? Which the more I'm learning about fall risk and fall risk prevention, the more I'm understanding that The ability to produce force quickly power is ah really important capacity to maintain is anything about when you lose your balance, you have to correct quickly. And that is going to come down a lot of times to how fast, you can move your feet under your Center mass so and how and how actually explosive you can be pushing yourself back up right we.
01:17:01
Speaker
I think are going to be talking more about power probably in the next a couple months. Who knows? i could imagine we might. Maybe. I could see reasons why we would. But ah the other thing about impact training is that it is definitely something like Sarah said people haven't done for a while, many
Training Concepts and Safety
01:17:16
Speaker
of our students. So we have this roadmap.
01:17:18
Speaker
um in the form of lots of progressions and regressions for each and every exercise. And some of those regressions look like landing softly, right? Sometimes we're going to trade out a harder, stiffer landing for some soft toe, some soft toe landings and some skipping and some um quieter landings instead of, you know, going right into those stiff sparky pogos or those stiff drop landings, right?
01:17:43
Speaker
um And we have for each month from three to six when we introduce it in three and then all the way through six a separate PDF of a different you know group of exercises because again it's high variation with the with the impact training as well.
01:17:56
Speaker
And ah stepwise you know roadmap for how to you know start where you are and progress from there, you know, like like everything our bodies adaptable in all of the ways that we can train it and so it's also adaptable when it comes to being able to.
01:18:10
Speaker
receive impact, generate force quickly. And the key is to start where you are, right? And to do enough, but not too much, right? So we have this all mapped out for each person. And then of course the coaching makes it far more far more easily tailorable when people run up against questions and need problems and solution, need their ah problems met with some sensible solutions for them, so.
01:18:39
Speaker
ah Sarah, do you want to talk about RIR and RPE and how that parameter, those parameters, or they're kind of the same? How that, how, what role this plays in our course? Yeah, so...
01:18:50
Speaker
RIR and RPE are two ways of figuring out, are you lifting the right weight for what you're supposed to be doing? Right. And as Laurel said, you know, it's not just a matter of, oh, I do the number of repetitions and I pick up whatever weight and it's done, like figuring out what the weight is to make something an actually a moderate lift versus a heavy lift, you would use these tools. So RIR stands for reps in reserve. And it's basically a parameter that you would be given.
01:19:19
Speaker
For example, you're gonna lift this barbell and you're gonna lift it between eight to 10 times and you're gonna leave two reps in reserve. Meaning you could in theory lift it 10 to 12 times, but you're gonna stop when you feel like you could still do two more. And we use that in particular because we want to make sure we're not having anybody going to failure.
01:19:43
Speaker
it just allows for for a kind of consistency in your lifting where you are still able to progress, but you're not going into you know potentially injurious areas, right? it just kind of keeps a lid on it.
01:19:54
Speaker
And so what would happen though is like, if you, let's say you did your, the set, you did your eight to 10 repetitions, but you're like, you know what? I had way more than two repetitions left in the tank. I could have done six or seven more. If that's the case, you know then that the load on the bar is too light.
01:20:12
Speaker
yeah So that's gonna indicate to you, okay, hang on, let me put five more, 10 more pounds on the bar and try again. So you put more weight on the bar, you try again, you get to eight reps and you feel like you could do two more.
01:20:24
Speaker
Now you know you are hitting a moderate weight for you, right? And it's it's so useful because it's such an, end what is moderate to me is a different thing than what is moderate to, you know, a student of mine or what is moderate to Laurel, right? We, we have different capabilities and, and histories of lifting and, you know, our bodies are all in different places. So it's not, it's never a question of like, this equals something that is moderate. Like that's just not
01:20:55
Speaker
how it is. It's that the weight, the actual number is always completely subjective. so Excuse me, not suggestive, subjective. The weight is always what the weight ends up being is a subjective thing.
01:21:07
Speaker
And then RPE is is looking at the same thing, but a slightly different way. So RPE stands for rate of perceived exertion. And there's a whole nerdy thing where I could talk about the Borg scale and whatever, but essentially RPE is measured from zero to 10. Zero being like you're lying down, you're not doing anything. And 10 is, as Deadpool would say, maximum effort, right? Hardest thing ever.
01:21:33
Speaker
And so we might say, OK, we want this lift. this this set to feel like a seven out of 10 on your rate of perceived exertion. So again again, this is a very subjective measurement because you're having to go in and compare, okay, compared to like the heaviest thing I've ever done and compared to nothing, where does this feel like it sits in that level?
01:21:57
Speaker
Now, the nice thing is that the RIR numbers and the RPE numbers end up kind of mirroring each other. So an RPE e of eight is the same as leaving two reps in reserve.
01:22:10
Speaker
So there's kind of an equivalency that starts to happen. So either whatever way makes more sense to you and your brain, you just use that that tool. Yeah, and when you're using barbells or even body weight, it's two reps in reserve with good form.
01:22:24
Speaker
Yes. If your form has started to break down, then then those no longer count. Yeah, you can just stop. You've done enough. Yeah. And so that's that's how we we use that. And certainly in the beginning, I think it's can be a little challenging to feel like, well, do I have, could I do one more or could I do two more?
01:22:44
Speaker
What's the difference between feeling like I do two more and feeling like I could do three more, but it is something that you get better at with experience. And so as people go through the course, they get better at, at really understanding what that feels like for them. yeah And then towards the end of the course in month five or month six, we do a, a buildup. We do a one rep max test.
01:23:03
Speaker
yeah And so that's really fun. So everyone comes who comes to take it comes in and you've decided ahead of time, which lift you're going to test. So whether it's your deadlift or your back squat or, you know, one of the others, and we basically have you, you know, start with a certain weight and then you are reducing the repetitions systematically as you go, which then means you have to increase the weight. So if you're starting with like, okay, you're going six reps at this weight,
01:23:30
Speaker
And then, okay, now we want you to only do four. So if you only had to do it four times, how much more weight do we can we put on the bar? And you might try that once and realize, you know what? I still could have done it six times. All right, let's do it again.
01:23:40
Speaker
Put more weight on the bar. Let's see. And eventually we get up to two reps and then eventually we get to that one rep max. And it's always really fun because people discover that even at that point, six months in, they're probably still under loading a bit.
01:23:59
Speaker
So we've had some some big discoveries for people where where they're like, oh my God, I could say 20 more pounds on the bar. I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really People like, i just added 25 pounds to my back squat or my deadlift. was like, holy cow.
01:24:13
Speaker
And then all of that helps to recalibrate future training loads because they're never lifting 100% of their max in training. They just did that for the test, right? But for training now, they realize, oh, so now when I'm lifting in a six-day rep range, I actually have to put quite a bit more weight, not 25 pounds more, but I have to put quite a bit more weight on the bar than I have been. right And I'm fully capable of handling it. So it's it's really fun. And
Program Offerings and Support
01:24:38
Speaker
the rep max test that we were talking about earlier is just another way to do this that is actually a lot more practical.
01:24:43
Speaker
Yeah. Because you don't have to do this big buildup to it. Right. But it's it's also some somehow not as exciting because you're like, I just did 20 reps of hip thrust. Well, and again, not really. It's not quite the same as like, I just did a 200 pound hip thrust. Right. Exactly. Exactly. and there's something about getting to that like.
01:25:05
Speaker
thing that is so heavy, you could only lift it once or it's so heavy, you could only lift it twice. Again, that's that, that feeling of really heavy lifting yeah that you don't get otherwise. And even though we know now that you don't have to only be heavy lifting for ah benefits to your bone density, I'm still a huge fan of, of getting people and women in particular to feel what heavy lifting feels like absolutely because it just,
01:25:33
Speaker
it it engenders a ah kind of confidence or something about the way you walk through the world where you're just like, I could pick up anything. Because you prove to yourself that you can, right? And sometimes life calls for a single max lift.
01:25:49
Speaker
Yeah. Not often, but sometimes it does. Yep. And you look at that single max lift that you have to do in your life and you maybe feel a little bit more confident in your ability to do it because you can deadlift 170 pounds or whatever, you know what i mean, and you did that you did that once so you know like i'm capable of this amount of.
01:26:09
Speaker
force production. i got this shit. Totally. So what is in our online portal? We have the live classes. Yeah. One hour Usually they're, they usually always go to an hour, but sometimes we're done training within 40 minutes and then it's Q and a There's a lot of Q and A throughout and then Q and A at the end. And So there's two hours of contact time per week for six full months, which is absurd. It's a lot. It's absurd. It's a lot.
01:26:39
Speaker
um But there's also an entire portal. yeah What's in there? So the portal, I'm so glad you asked. The portal has, so that's where you access all the live class recordings. And you have access, by the way, to the portal forever. So people at the end sometimes are like, will I still be able to watch the recordings? I'm like, yes. Remember when we said in the beginning forever?
01:26:58
Speaker
You keep that. And then there's also so much prerecorded content. There's a whole series of ah demonstration videos. of each exercise that you're going to do. So you always have that to refer to whether you're taking a live class or not, as well as Laurel and I, you know, coaching and teaching how to do the lifts in the live classes.
01:27:18
Speaker
There's also an entire course called strength training 101 that Laurel made that is so fricking thorough. That's really interesting. gives you a deep dive into a lot of this language, why we're going after different kinds of things that we're going after.
01:27:32
Speaker
a little bit of what Laurel just talked about today, programming, periodization, things like tempo. you know it' It just covers, it's it's incredible. There's so much information in it. I also made a little PowerPoint presentation called oie about all about osteoporosis, which is just getting a little bit more into the background of what is osteoporosis since a lot of the people who join us are concerned about bone density. So I talk about that and how all that is. We also...
01:27:58
Speaker
Was it just last summer we made music videos for your impact training? Because frankly, you know standing in one spot and doing 50 heel drops can get a little dull. So we made what we call music videos where we we choreographed jumps and hops and skips and landing things to four different songs that we thought you would enjoy. the eighty s From the 80s. From the yes.
01:28:20
Speaker
Each class has a warmup, but we also recorded some just standalone warmups in case you were just working off of the program sheet and weren't gonna watch ah a recording. And we also have, what else?
01:28:31
Speaker
There's also some wrist work and some ankle work because we found that those were areas that people were sort of consistently coming back with like, my grip isn't strong enough or I'm feeling some you know tightness through here or resistance in my ankles kind of stuff. So we have those as well.
01:28:47
Speaker
ye And yeah, you get access to all of that forever and ever. You also get to be part of what is now Circle, which is a private social media, or there's no real media, it's just a private social community group.
01:29:01
Speaker
In that group, you ah get to contact us directly. That's where when you're taking the course, you can submit information. If you're not able to come to a live class, you can submit video of yourself doing the lift in question, and then you upload it.
01:29:14
Speaker
And we give you feedback on the video, looking at your form, giving you suggestions of what we think you might want to adjust, or if we think it looks too light or too heavy, or if you're doing, it you're like spot on all of that stuff. So you get a lot of detailed feedback that way.
01:29:26
Speaker
And then we also have our accountability buddy finder where you can go in and say, Hey, I live on the East coast and I'm looking to lift on Wednesdays and Fridays at this time, is anyone else available? And you could find somebody to help keep you accountable with your practice, either as you're going through the course itself, or for a lot of people, it's once the course has ended and they wanna keep going.
01:29:47
Speaker
They want someone to to help them stay accountable. Yeah. Laurel, what would you say, like, what's the vibe? Month one, week one, what is the vibe from people taking classes and then how does it change as they as they go through the course?
01:30:04
Speaker
Well, not to toot our own horn, but people are often really shocked at how thorough the portal is because they get in there and they take strength training 101 and they start looking at the demo videos and the calendar and all that. And they're like, holy fucking shit, like this is amazing. And I haven't even started yet.
01:30:26
Speaker
And then also, on the other hand, people can feel just like there's a lot to learn and like any big learning curve, it can feel a little overwhelming in the beginning. So we do field, you know, lots of questions that are still coming up for people around lots of different topics, one of which is the equipment. so So some some people are still getting their equipment right there, making do with broomsticks and cattle bells and dumbbells and they're barbells are on the way um some people are wondering about some of the concepts covered in strength training 101 and how they apply some people are unsure that they're doing it right and that comes up of course when you start anything like it is this am i do i really have two reps in reserve or is it 12 uh who can say right and it takes people a little while to get oriented around like the feeling of that big learning curve yeah and then
01:31:21
Speaker
They just keep going. They keep showing up. And the good news is that the workouts stay exactly the same every single week. So you're not like next week is just a totally different collection of exercises and you're starting all over again. And like, I haven't seen this one yet.
01:31:35
Speaker
So you you go through the first week, you do all of the ah workout A and workout B, maybe you came live, which is a really good idea. Maybe you watched the recording, also great.
01:31:46
Speaker
And then you're like, okay, that was the first week is over. And then second week is a little easier because it's all a repeat of what you did the week prior. Third week gets a little easier, fourth week gets a little easier.
01:31:58
Speaker
And at by that point, people were like, okay, I think I understand the equipment. I understand the flow of these workouts. then we Then in month two, some of the exercises change. Some people are really happy about that. some people are like, okay, more learning, more exercise.
01:32:13
Speaker
When month three rolls around, yeah we go back to all of almost all of the same exercises in month one. So it's not like every single month for six months, we're throwing completely different exercises at you.
01:32:26
Speaker
It's that we might take a break from like the bench press for a month and do pushups instead, and then come back to the bench press um in month three. So the... Learning just gets deeper and deeper and deeper. And then also what's happening while all of this learning is happening is they're getting fucking stronger, which is yeah the part about this that you cannot fast track.
01:32:49
Speaker
You literally just for a long period of time have to continue to show up and do the work. And that in and of itself is its own kind of learning.
01:33:01
Speaker
right? That happens as a form of physiological change to your capacity. So Sarah, that was the vibe for like the first half of the course. What's the vibe the second half of the course?
01:33:15
Speaker
Well, second half of the course, ah our jobs get a lot easier because people are becoming much more, you know, they're fluent in what they're doing. They don't need as much immediate correction for like every single thing.
01:33:27
Speaker
We're seeing big breakthroughs in how much people lift. Sometimes people, they're like, I got into triple digits on my deadlift or something. And that's like a really fun milestone. Some people are like, I ran out of plates. I got to get some more plates.
01:33:39
Speaker
yes um they've They've stuck with it enough that now it's become a thing they do. Right now it's become routines, become part of their habit and and they've ridden some ups and downs. Like life gets lifey for everybody. It doesn't matter what it is, right? So maybe it's a holiday season that then threw everything off track and you had to like climb back on and you know, pick back up again kind of thing. Maybe somebody got, maybe you got sick or you got an injury or something happened in your family. You know, there's always stuff that comes up for people. And so what the, having a course that's six months long really allows people to do is
01:34:20
Speaker
get back on and and continue the habit and not just be like, well, that was a thing I tried and then life happened and I i stopped. Right. Right. ah And they've, you know, had support from us and from the other people in the community the whole way.
01:34:34
Speaker
They know that it'll, that there will be things that get in the way. It's not going to be a ah straight line of just progress for the rest of their life. And, and they haven't maybe experienced that personally, or they're sort of starting to understand it and recognizing that, that regardless of whatever happens, they, they will come back to, to their lifting. Like now it's just something that they do.
01:34:56
Speaker
Right. They, they're, they've had support through the ups and downs to learn that they're the type of person who doesn't give up on strength
Adapting Training to Life's Demands
01:35:04
Speaker
training. Yeah. who doesn't at the first sign of adversity say, oh this isn't for me because they signed up for six months.
01:35:12
Speaker
So maybe in month two something happens, but they still have four months left. So they're like, I better get back to it because this course goes on for another four months.
01:35:24
Speaker
And they rejoin and they're like, I'm back. I missed a month. I missed two weeks. What should I do? And we give them the best, you know, most logical entry point to get back into it. Sometimes they don't have to really do anything differently. They can just start up again and ah adjust their weights down a little bit maybe but um yeah I think that that from my perspective and tell me what you think that probably is the single most life-changing aspect of the course is the fact that it is six months long and it is long enough for people to learn that regardless of how lifey life gets
01:35:57
Speaker
they're able to stick with something. They're able to restart to get back into it. And they drop that perfectionist all or nothing mindset that I think a lot of us have internalized somewhere along the way that like, if it can't be exactly how I expected it to be, which is perfect, of course, then I should just quit, right? People, i think you have enough time in this course to move beyond that, that really counterproductive mindset.
01:36:25
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. Sarah, how do we support people with injuries in the course? Well, you know, things happen. People will sometimes come into a course with an old injury that then starts acting up again.
01:36:39
Speaker
Sometimes people injure themselves. I'm trying to think of people who injured themselves like with a particular lift, the way we sort of imagine the worst case scenario. Like you pick something out and then you suddenly have to go, oh, and grab your back. And I don't think we've actually had anything like that. We've had people...
01:36:55
Speaker
where they're like, you know, my lower back has been bothering me. And i we sort of have like a few different like ways of of helping people. I do a lot of, ask a lot of questions around what's going on to try to get a better clinical picture of like why the thing is happening that is happening, what might have caused it.
01:37:12
Speaker
You know, sometimes people are like, I was chopping wood and I threw my back out. What do I do with my lifting now? You know, where it's like, okay, wasn't anything in the program. it was something else you did, but now now you're injured and we have to figure out how do we get you safely back to lifting. Like what's the time plan for that?
01:37:26
Speaker
yeah Sometimes with people, I will get on a zoom call. I've done that with a few people where it's like, you know, there's something more going on here that I don't quite know because I need to watch you do some movement.
01:37:39
Speaker
There's someone in our current cohort that I did that with, who was having back pain with like squats and dead. Like it just was, I was like, well, something's up. Like there's something. And, and we figured out something that she was doing with her ribs. It was suddenly like,
01:37:53
Speaker
changing everything. and And that was the issue. It was just ah like an alignment or a form issue. And once we cleared it up, it she was fine. Awesome. Yeah. so So sometimes it's just something like that that's very easy to figure out. Sometimes it's you know old things coming back up again. We've also had people take the class where they're like, you know what? I know that I am not going to be able to, I'm coming back from XYZ kind of surgery.
01:38:16
Speaker
I'm probably not going to get to some like maximum personal best in this course, but I really want to take it. And we work around whatever they're dealing with. We had a person in the course who had just had a knee surgery and she took the course fine. And a lot of the time she was working with dumbbells, but towards the end, she was able to get into barbells and she was like, you know, strength training as part of my rehab made such a big difference. And I don't know why my, my PTs weren't giving me any of this. And yeah I know why, but ah yeah, we just, I mean, that's, that's part of, of why we have me as a clinician in the course is that we're not, it would be ridiculous for us to imagine that nothing would ever happen. Nobody would ever get hurt or injured, whether during the class or something else, or
01:39:03
Speaker
Uh, and so we want to have me as a clinician on board to then guide the sort of next steps that we have people do. And I, I'm not prescriptive at all. Cause I can't be for a lot of these things. I don't, I don't see the person, so I don't know what they're doing, but if it feels like, like this is a bigger thing, I might redirect them to like, I think maybe you need to go get some imaging done or you something like that, but that's sort of rare, rare instance. It's a lot of like,
01:39:31
Speaker
aches and pains kind of things that that sort themselves out. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the times too, when I'm fielding questions about stuff is, comes to light that there has been an introduction of something new on top of the barbells, right? Like, oh, and I also did this really long hike or right just moved houses or you know things like that where, or work is really busy or I haven't been sleeping very well.
01:39:59
Speaker
And we start to understand that like loads are happening to us, mental and physical all the time in all aspects of our life. And when we talk about overload, when things arise, it's likely not just because of the loading you're doing in the strength training, but all of the loads that are upon you. And sometimes we don't realize until we step back and reflect that like,
01:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, you know life is kind of stressful for me. right And maybe I don't need to be doing three sets of every exercise, maybe I can drop it to two.
01:40:35
Speaker
Maybe I don't need to do you know all of workout a and all of workout be maybe i'm going to cut a few exercises out and make my workouts a little shorter or really, you know you can maintain your strength with just one good set. you know And we are a lot of times spending our energy coaching students to shift their mindset around it being all or nothing.
01:41:01
Speaker
right Like when life gets busy and when the loads get heavy in other aspects of your life, like maybe your strength training doesn't need to completely disappear, but maybe it can actually reduce this stress that you're applying to your body in strength training can come down a little bit for a week or two while you handle all the other loads in your life.
01:41:23
Speaker
And it'll be there for you to pick right back up full steam when your life lightens up a little bit. you know Right, right. um It's okay. It's okay to do less.
01:41:34
Speaker
Actually, you can do so much more in your life long term with strength. When you recognize the flexibility of being able to toggle down your workouts and the stress you're experiencing your workouts, however much you need to, to be able to maintain that like balance.
01:41:57
Speaker
And yeah instead of just throwing out the baby with the bathwater and going, I just can't fit strength training into my life because I don't have a full two hours every week.
01:42:08
Speaker
to push myself to an RPE e of seven, eight in every single exercise. It's like, it does not need to equal that to be effective. Right.
Empowering Women Through Strength Training
01:42:20
Speaker
Sarah, what's our end game? What is the bigger thing we're trying to do with live for longevity? World domination. Of course. And then, no, we our end game is making as many women as possible as strong as they possibly want to be, right? where Our end game is is ah broadening and expanding women's understanding of how they can exercise and to kind of show them like, yes, this whole area that seemed off limits, it was for a boys club,
01:42:54
Speaker
It was not something for you because you don't want to look a certain way. And all the various you know stories we've all heard that we're trying to show women that none of that's true. And that in fact, you need to completely flip your idea of why you exercise at all.
01:43:12
Speaker
Because for so many women, exercise is about maintaining a particular size and shape of their body. And so it's, you know, changing the way you think about your body is from what it looks like to what it can do. And that's a really profound change for for a lot of people. Yeah.
01:43:31
Speaker
We want them to get excited about being strong so that it's something that they go after for themselves. They start to feel the benefits of of what being strong feels like. And then they start to want it without us, right? Without needing us to push them along and be there every week.
01:43:49
Speaker
Ultimately, bigger picture. we have heard from so many participants that it's just completely changed how they feel about themselves just going through the world. Their sense of self is stronger, their sense of self-efficacy, their ability to say no to things that they don't want to do. like they're you know The strength really changes you inside and out. It's not just about having more muscles and being able to pick up you know increasingly impressive loads. It's also about how you think of yourself as a person and whether you think of yourself as sort of at the mercy of the world around you. You need someone to help you with that bag. You need someone to come over and
01:44:30
Speaker
put the thing up on the shelf, right? Whereas instead now you feel competent and and confident in your own abilities to just live your life independently. And and those are all things that we are we want to instill in and in as many women as possible. And and I, you know, if only it could be done by just explaining it.
01:44:54
Speaker
Right. But instead people have to go through the process and really feel it for themselves. yeah You know, it doesn't happen without you experiencing it for yourself. So, yeah so yeah, that's, that's our big, big picture. Yeah. My thought is if we can just get them to stick with it for two to three months and just be consistent, they're going to be completely won over by the feeling of strength, but not just the feeling of strength, what that means for what they can experience in their lives and what they can do.
01:45:28
Speaker
And I think that it ultimately starts to shift what they think is possible and to have a completely, not completely different, but perhaps um an enhanced idea of their physical abilities, but also like why they the exercise it all, right? Which is, it's not for you.
01:45:55
Speaker
It's not for your ah pleasure that I exercise. It's for my own fucking pleasure. Right. Because I like living life strong. I really do think that life is better when we're strong.
01:46:09
Speaker
Yeah. Undoubtedly. You know why? Because it's fucking easier. Yeah. That's why.
Participant Advice and Engagement
01:46:14
Speaker
All right. All right. So, so Laurel, what advice would you give people who are looking to take the course with us?
01:46:24
Speaker
So if I'm honest, And I want to be very concrete. Please be honest. street Yeah. No. So like I could be honest and sort of sound harsh because it's abstract, which is, this would be my harsh, honest and abstract advice, which is take responsibility.
01:46:44
Speaker
Be a fucking grownup. So by signing but yeah signing up for the course, you've started to take responsibility for your strength, but it's, it's gotta entail more than that. It's gotta entail you engaging with the education,
01:46:57
Speaker
that is this course and it's at its root and our roots, Sarah and I are educators above everything, right? She's a therapist, but I think below that she's and not below, but beneath all of that, the root of that is that she's an educator.
01:47:12
Speaker
I'm a strength coach, but beneath that I'm an educator, right? So taking responsibility, Amy Sure, signing up for the process of course that's step one, if you want to take responsibility by taking this course but two is like.
01:47:24
Speaker
Batallones, Learn the material that's going to take some investment of time and energy, but the most important is show up show up for the workouts, whether live or if you you know can't make it live carve out the time and show up and do the work, and if you can do that consistently for two to three months.
01:47:49
Speaker
you're going to become almost addicted, not in the like drug sense of the word, but in the, I like my life strong.
01:47:59
Speaker
I like this feeling of being strong sense of the word, and it's gonna get so much easier to show up, right? It's fun to be strong. Like lifting weights is funner when you're stronger too, right? yeah um Fitness is fun when you're fit.
01:48:16
Speaker
i it's It's kind of hard in the beginning because you're not, you don't have it yet, but then you get it and you're like, oh, this is kind of fucking nice, you know? um So the abstract side of that is take responsibility, but the the concrete advice is show up, do the work.
01:48:33
Speaker
And when you can't do the work, don't just give up. There's a million ways to change it so that you can continue to do something, right? Right now my foot is injured.
01:48:43
Speaker
I can't run. But I can do other things, right? I can do upper body strength training, which is I'm gonna do the fuck out of that, right? And I can do some lower body work and I can do some cardio that doesn't involve running or probably walking for a while, because my foot is fucking injured.
01:48:59
Speaker
So there's always a way, i I couldn't get there in my mind 10 years ago. But I can get there now very easily. In fact, i this is the least stressed out I've ever been about an injury.
01:49:10
Speaker
And I don't even know what it is because I haven't seen the PT yet. I'm going tomorrow. But I don't even know what the fuck is wrong with my foot. I just know it's injured. And I'm the most relaxed I've ever been about it because I know it's not the end of whatever...
01:49:22
Speaker
amazing thing that I love doing with exercise, it's just a little blip. It's like a tiny little blip in this lifelong habit that I've built and will continue to to build.
01:49:33
Speaker
And there's always a way to continue despite that injury. um So that's my number one piece of advice. Do the work. can Be as consistent as you can and In the inconsistencies, know that it's just a blip.
01:49:50
Speaker
It means nothing long term. 25 years from now, if you've been pretty consistent for 25 years, it will mean nothing that you missed two weeks in some random December of 2026 or whatever, right?
01:50:05
Speaker
What will matter is that when you miss those two weeks, you continued again. You got back into it and you tried to be as consistent as you could. That's my advice. What's your advice? That's really good.
01:50:17
Speaker
I would say, you know, if you're, I'm going to take a step back and say, if you're someone, if you think you might be interested in it you're dipping a toe, you should get our barbell mini course and check that out because you're going to learn a lot of some of the same information or a lot of similar information, not as much, it's not, we're near as much detail, but you'll start to get a sense of what we're talking about,
Community Support and Long-term Benefits
01:50:40
Speaker
you know,
01:50:41
Speaker
If you have access to barbells already, great. If you're, if you have the sense that like when, when I started lifting heavy, it was when I still worked at Align. And as I said, they had a, they have a full gym.
01:50:53
Speaker
And so I remember distinctly saying to Laurel, I'm just going to use the gym at Align. It's fine. I don't need to buy my own equipment. And she was like, okay, if you think so. And then it turned out it wasn't fine. It was a huge hassle because I would have to figure out like an hour when nobody was using the gym and it was never, it would be, I would have to like, be like, well, I either I eat lunch today or I work out. Right. It was just never, it never, was never a time that I wanted it to be, or I would try to go on the weekend, but then like the cleaning lady was there. And, and it was like, I had to figure out what time. So it wasn't bothering her work. and
01:51:25
Speaker
So I finally was like, oh, and I broke down and I, and I bought my own equipment. And of course, like it was made a huge difference. So get access to the equipment sooner than later, figure out what it's going to be. Plenty of people do this course from the gym and they have no problem with it.
01:51:39
Speaker
Yeah. um So, you know, but plenty of people are also like, I don't like the gym and I don't want to go. And that's why we give you that option for buying your own equipment. And, you know, when you're in the course, it is obviously so valuable to be able to come to the live classes to be able to get immediate feedback that way. But even if they don't work for your schedule, it's fine. We have plenty of people who take the whole course and never show up or maybe show up to one or two live classes.
01:52:04
Speaker
You get feedback by submitting your videos in the forum feedback box. little chat that we have in circle. So you can still have us look at how you're doing and, and give you feedback that way. So this course, I mean, I think of the, the maybe nicer way to say what Laurel was saying is you get. your responsibility for yourself. Yeah.
01:52:29
Speaker
um I would say you get out of it when put into it. Yes. That's always the case. yeah The other thing I would ask you to do is if you are having a mental block about,
01:52:41
Speaker
investing in yourself. I have no idea what your financial situation is. No clue. But think about the types of investments that you make that you kind of jump at. You're like, well, yeah, we're going to do that because it's really important.
01:52:58
Speaker
And then put strength into that perspective of like how much less important is strength for me? How much more important is strength for me compared to these things that I rarely balk at or bat an eyelash at?
01:53:16
Speaker
And it might be the case that like strength is not a priority for you because it cannot be. But it might be the case when you run this little thought experiment that for some reason in your mind, you find it challenging to invest in yourself in this particular way. And I think it's just something to look at, something to wonder about.
01:53:36
Speaker
Like where is that mental block possibly, if it's a mental block, where is it coming from? Yeah. Yeah. i mean, there's so many women in the course who've spent their lives, you know, with a focus being on their children, that's for example.
01:53:52
Speaker
And, you know, not that you should suddenly not pay attention to your children, but the idea of spending money, spending time on on yourself might be very foreign at this point, but yeah it's um it's really vital.
01:54:08
Speaker
yeah It's really vital to be strong. There's really no no two ways about it. And it's easier to get strong when you have the equipment that will support you in that goal. And it's easier to get strong than it would be to do it next year.
01:54:22
Speaker
So do it now. Yeah, that's a really good one. The younger you are, the easier it's going to be. That's actually a really good one. Might as well do it now. Yeah, might as well start now. Now is the best time. That's right.
01:54:34
Speaker
Okay. Well, I think that's, ah that is, that was the Amouge ears. The ears Amouge. Amouge oreille.
01:54:45
Speaker
Amouge oreille. About us. It was like a little check-in. it was a like, hey, y'all listening to our podcast, who've maybe been here for a while listening to us talk about these things.
01:54:59
Speaker
concepts that are not 100% related to Sarah and I and who we are and what we do together and the work that we put out there. And this one was, this one was like, we're just, we're going to talk about ourselves.
01:55:14
Speaker
We're going to talk about. And you're going to listen. What we really do together, which is an addition to podcasting. We run this course. Yeah. All year long. Yeah. um So hopefully, ah hopefully you enjoyed it.
01:55:28
Speaker
Yes. Every moment. And the cart is open for our current cohort until November 1st. Yes. Please rate, review, subscribe, all that jazz.
01:55:41
Speaker
we do We do appreciate ah ah follow on Instagram as well. And so there's so many different ways to stay in touch with us in between episodes. Yep.
01:55:53
Speaker
All right, y'all. That's all we have for you. We've got one more episode for you this season. Oh, that's right. All about how to get abs.
01:56:03
Speaker
but Until then, I want abs. We'll go talk about it. Bye. you next week.