Episode #365: Cycle Syncing, Fasted Cardio, The Pink Tax and More ft. Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple

24:04Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:They have GI issues. Yeah, that performance is down. Right. Yeah. So it's not like I'm a proponent of fasted training per se, but I think we should stop the fear mongering about it because you should be allowed to do what you prefer. Maybe experiment with both depending on your schedule, how you train and when you train typically. And then we can just move on. And there's nothing to suggest it's different for women than it is for men. Yeah. To me, there's like three separate claims in here. one is that fasted training in general lowers the short-term performance. And I'm like, okay, probably true, more true when it's in the short-term setting, a person's not used to it, right?

24:47They haven't like adapted or figured that out. The second claim is that if you do perform your training fasted, something bad is going to happen. You're going to somehow gain fat and not muscle, like whatever, right? Or not gain strength. You're going to have a maladaptive response to exercise and i'm like so there's no evidence showing that at all in humans so you kind of that's the second claim and the third claim is that oh and by the way it's much worse for women and it's like okay well interesting hypothesis where's the evidence and then you look at the evidence in humans you're like so that doesn't appear to be true and so then yeah it just comes back to saying that why why are you saying this if you if you guys are watching this on youtube That was a shoulder shrug emoji.

25:31That's what just happened.

25:33Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Yeah, I wish I knew because I truly don't understand it. And I think maybe there is some kind of mixed in thought about relative energy deficiency and that if you are training fasted, then you're going to immediately put yourself in a state of low energy availability. But that's not true. I mean, low energy availability is chronic, under fueling, over exercising relative to your body composition. And so it's a very different conversation. And so that's why when I hear this pushback of, well, it's only for athletes or it's only for elite performance. But you're going on the Mel Robbins podcast and saying women should never train fasted.

26:28Never. Never.

26:30Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:That's a lay audience of just women trying to be healthy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to, again, make a very charitable version of the claim, it's like, look, you have a highly active population, elite level athletes, you know, dozens of hours a week of training. And so if they don't eat before a workout, effectively they're limited on time availability to eat, which could then cause like a low energy availability status. But again, you would expect that to play out in the research and further that it would apply to a wide swath of the population if you're just saying these things generally, which doesn't seem to be the case.

27:11Low energy availability, REDS, all that sort of stuff, these are real issues. But to my knowledge, it is not based on like the time availability to eat where people are just running out of time. I can't eat because I'm exercising so much. Generally, not the proximate cause as far as I can tell.

27:30Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And if you're going to talk about a concern for very elite athletes or extremely lean individuals, clarify. Yeah, just say it. It's like saying, you know, this advice is for pro bodybuilders, but all men should. Yeah, exactly. Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that kind of brings me to the final thought here with respect to Dr. Sims and moreover to people like Andrew Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, et cetera. There's just a lot of this, what I like to call generous extrapolation of mechanistic studies despite either no human evidence to support the specific claim or intervention or evidence to the contrary.

28:12It's curious, though, like, why does this happen? Why do you think this is so common? Is it our short attention spans and incentivizing clickbait content over nuanced science communication? Or do you think, I don't want to put you on the hot seat, but do you think this is like some sort of nefarious intent here?

28:30Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Is the question why are they doing it or why are they? Okay. Well, I think when you say something no one else is saying, people take it as you have some secret. And so other people aren't saying it because they don't know what you know. And that's very powerful and that gets a lot of attention. and when you start talking about mechanisms that sound very complex and frankly no one really knows what you're talking about then you sound very intelligent it's a good narrative and people will just take your word for it because you aren't explaining things in a way that people can connect with. And that piece of it really bothers me because as somebody who can sit here with you and talk mechanisms and make things sound really complicated, I'm not doing that on a podcast.

29:31Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Why would I do that? Because ultimately, we want people to understand the why behind the what. And if you're just saying a whole bunch of what sounds like nonsense, and therefore, Therefore, here's this thing you should do. Then all people hear is here's the thing I should do. Yeah, here's a solution to the problem you don't have. But you don't know that because I'm deceiving you on some level. And yeah, thanks. I got a boat payment coming up. So I don't know that any of these people have boats, but that's that's just what I assume is happening. Yeah, no. Well, well said. And if you guys haven't checked out this particular podcast, I'll link that into the show notes below.

30:13It's pretty, pretty well done. Although, again, I wish you guys had more time. And I also wish that it was really set up more like an official debate where it was like, do you concede this point before moving on? Because I think holding somebody's feet to the fire would be just to me and my nerdy sensibilities. I would have preferred that, but hard to put. I agree.

30:33Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And I mean, if it were up to me, then there are many other ways that I think we could have done it. But I just was I was going to take the opportunity to do it in any capacity. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to her agreeing to it, at least because that was surprising to me. I'm like, oh, this is not going to go well. This is not going to go well for you, at least at least to people with scientific training, because you just instantly recognize you're like you're talking about rat data. This person's talking about human data. So levels of evidence, hierarchy of evidence. This is it's not really close. So what do we do?

31:08Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And I don't know if you caught that at one point she said she doesn't like meta-analyses. Yes. I was like, wait, what? I've literally never heard any scientist or physician or like, what? Yeah. What do you mean you don't like them? Yeah, I think it's fair to say something like, look, if you combine a bunch of data together, Depending on the quality of said data, you can have concerns about how that is sort of, you know, the outcome there or what's being concluded from that. So if it's garbage in, garbage out, sure, that's a reasonable concern. Also, combining a bunch of data tends to prefer the null, just generally speaking.

31:50But that's not a bug. It's more of a feature because only if the effect or the outcome was very, very strong would it turn up when you combine many, many studies together. again assuming that the inclusion criteria and the analysis is done correctly but yeah saying that you don't like meta-analysis to use a term of the youth is crazy i don't understand

32:12Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:yeah no i mean i think uh you bring up a good point and it's true that in the exercise science field there are some people who will do a meta-analysis when it's way too soon to do a meta-analysis like we got seven papers everyone calm down we don't need to be doing a meta-analysis this podcast is brought to you by factor eating well isn't a willpower problem for me and it's probably not for you either it's a setup problem there's something healthy in the fridge that i should be making and then it's 8 p.m i've been at the track all weekend or the workout went too long and then the gap between should cook and will cook is roughly the size of the grand canyon so if left to my own devices i'll order something for delivery and feel great about it for approximately 11 minutes that's the gap that factor closes fully prepared meals designed by dietitians made by chefs delivered to your door and they're ready in two minutes no planning no grocery run no cooking they've got meals built around whatever you're after whether it's weight loss more protein overall healthy nutrition glp1 support and a muscle pro collection if you're training hard and you care about recovery the food's fresh never frozen with over 100 meals rotated weekly so you're not eating the same chicken and rice until you hate it lean proteins whole foods, only the stuff you want, and it's pretty good too.

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36:14Yeah, yeah, that's that's well said. So another thing I wanted to talk about is what I somewhat jokingly, but sometimes in a sad way, refer to as the pink tax for women in the fitness industry. Many things are marketed directly to women, such as specific types of exercise like Pilates or walking with weighted vest, testing of various hormone levels and specific like creatine supplements. You got to take this pink gummy, whatever. Let's talk about a few of these things. So I wanted to start with a topic. I recently published a podcast on walking with a weighted vest. What's your take on this? Because on TikTok, it's all over the place.

36:50Oh, you can get more out of your walking. It's basically like resistance training. It's good for bone mineral density, muscle, et cetera. What's your take on walking with a weighted vest?

36:58Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:I think anything that gets you physically active is good. But - Cool. We'll end the podcast. That's it. Um, but I've spoken out about weighted vests a lot because the people who are promoting them are using science quote unquote, that doesn't actually support the message they claim it shows. And so it was goes back to what we were talking about with, with the fasted training or the cycle syncing, you know, if we're going to say going for 30 minute walks with a weighted vest increases bone mineral density or increases muscle mass or promotes fat loss. We actually need to see that happen over time.

37:41Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And the only paper I'm aware of that we have that's remotely similar to that, meaning one group walked on a treadmill with a vest and the other group did not, it was exactly the same. There were no differences in adaptations between groups. And so the studies that people are using instead are studies where a group was wearing a weighted vest, but doing squats and lunges and jumping exercises compared to a group of people who were doing nothing. And what that tells us is that exercise is better than no exercise. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's also studies, and I'm sure you've seen these, where people are wearing weighted vests for eight hours, 10 hours.

38:19They're supposed to wear them all day just to see like, oh, what would happen? Is this a viable way to get people to either lose weight or better maintain weight or have more bone mineral density, more muscle mass, whatever? And then relatively long-term data on this that shows, again, no significant difference. And that's statistically significant difference, which is much smaller, generally speaking, than a clinically significant difference. And so I'm open to the idea that weighted vests might be a way to level up a person's workout or at least improve their fitness adaptations. I just want to see data to support that.

38:52But to my mind, and you can comment on this, the biggest issue with the weighted vest as far as it like supercharging somebody's results from a given amount of exercise. Let's just say both groups are going to exercise, but one person's with the weighted vest, one person's not. And we're talking about conditioning in this particular case. The issue really is that if the weighted vest is heavy enough, most people are going to move more slowly and do it for a shorter duration. So at the end of the day, if we're just talking about like energy utilization, it tends to be, you know, not that much different for a pretty significant weight.

39:25And then even if they did the same amount, again, you're looking at outcomes and you're like, why is this not different? Well, instead of rejecting that the weighted vest is some unique way to increase the adaptation from your workout, you should revise your hypothesis and say maybe it's not heavy enough. Maybe it's something else is going on. At least that's my understanding right now.

39:46Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Well, I think it can be viable for squats, lunges. Maybe if you have grip issues and you want to work out at home, you don't have dumbbells, maybe there's a use case there. Sure. But often what I hear people say is, well, it's getting my heart rate up. Or, okay, well, why do you want to get your heart rate up? Why are we tracking heart rate? What's your goal for which heart rate tracking is meaningful? because a lot of people are just tracking these things to track them. And when, let's say you're training for a marathon, then sure, I understand we want to train in these different heart rate zones and hopefully that will be the optimal method for improving your endurance running performance.

40:32Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:You know, we're going to do a lot of the zone two and then we're going to throw in some sprint intervals and maybe we should track your heart rate for that. but to just say i'm like a my heart rate is higher with a vest than it is without a vest well you could also walk up a hill you could also walk faster sure you could also use cocaine you could also be scared you could also have some sort of arrhythmia like there's a lot of ways to get your heart rate up and the way no it's not that's not it's not like a carte blanche good thing no Oh, no. It matters why your heart rate is elevated. And then what's the purpose?

41:09As you as you mentioned, that's, you know, yeah, your heart rate's higher. But like, is it because you're requiring your muscles to produce more force? And if that's the case, like, does it actually signal the adaptations that you want? Yeah, I do think you're right, though, with the use case for weighted vests for like resistance training applications at home, for example, if they don't have, you know, you could use a weighted backpack for that. But yeah, when I see people strap, I see people on the treadmill at the gym with the backpack on and they're like – and I'm like, yeah, you're expending more energy a little bit compared to if you were walking at the same pace for the same duration, whatever, without the backpack on.

41:47But I don't know that that is net good, meaning that, oh, you're going to lose more weight or you're going to gain more muscle mass or preserve more muscle, something like that. To date, the studies don't seem to show that anyway. it.

41:59Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:They don't. And I think it's also important, and this is often really misunderstood, is that if you just start exercising and then you're saying, well, I'm burning more calories and maybe you're tracking them on your wearable. First, wearables are horrible for tracking that. So I would suggest nobody use that data for anything ever. But even if we do sort of map out the expected weight loss over time from the expected energy expenditure with all of this exercise, we see if you aren't really monitoring your nutrition, a lot of people will end up eating a little bit more. They just compensate. And if yes, you're exercising more, but perhaps you are moving less the rest of the day and And there's some sort of shift there where you end up losing about 20 to 50 percent of what you would have anticipated if you really modeled it all out.

42:56Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And so that's why I think so often when people just rely on exercise for weight loss, it ends up being pretty disappointing. And so to throw in this example of weighted vest and burning more calories, think we're we're missing the mark here. We shouldn't be doing it for that reason. Yeah. Are you familiar with the gravitostat model of energy? Yeah. So this research group out of Sweden for the listeners who didn't listen to the Weighted Vest podcast that we did, they implanted these small weights in rodent abdomens. And what they found was with this implanted weight, the rodents actually lost an equivalent amount of body mass in response to that, thinking like, oh, maybe the bones are sensing this added load.

43:41And it's like, ah, let's lose some additional weight so that we can maintain homeostasis. Hasn't played out in humans, but that's kind of what prompted the idea. Hey, what would happen if we had humans wear weighted vests all day? Would that do the same thing? It turns out, even if you wear a weighted vest for like 10 hours a day, that unfortunately is not going to be the solution to the obesity epidemic, as it were.

44:03Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And it's another example of, you know, we study rodents because they're simpler systems. They're very easy to tightly control, but ultimately they have different metabolisms. They have different reproductive systems. And often what we see in this simple model doesn't play out in a more complex and dynamic human model. Nope. Nope. That's never happens. Never. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big surprise for people again, because do your own research, whatever you see this thing, oh, it's in rats. So that probably transfers over to humans. Most of the time it doesn't. Unfortunately, we've seen it time and time again with fasting, with artificial sweeteners.

44:41Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And we we've seen it yet people. But but and going back to a lot of the kind of popular credentialed influencers or science communicators, they rarely say, I've changed my opinion on this. And I was really heavily relying on this rodent data. And now that we have a couple years of human data, I realized that I maybe shouldn't have been making recommendations in all of my books and podcasts for you guys to fast for three days. Can you imagine? When has that ever happened? And, you know, yeah. Well, you know what? It'd be funny. Interestingly, if someone did that, right, they'd be like, and I wrote a new book about it.

45:23There you go. There's your there's your there's the incentive to do so. Yeah. Yeah. It's unfortunate. The next thing I wanted to talk about was creatine. I've seen, obviously, on your social media, you've been posting about that, especially because it's become topical with respect to cognitive function and, quote, brain health and such. So should women be taking creatine? And if so, do they need a specific type of creatine?

45:47Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:No, and this is an excellent example of pink tax because the creatine that is now marketed to women is pink. And it makes all sorts of crazy claims like it's going to build muscle, build your glutes specifically, eliminate cellulite, restore energy. I mean, it's so, so sad. And it's also twice the price, sometimes three times the price than if you just get the tried and true creatine monohydrate from wherever, which we know works. And everything that's more expensive isn't better. It just isn't. It's just more expensive. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, I mean, it's cool, I guess, that people are paying attention to creatine, but creatine has been around forever.

46:40Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Creatine is not new. And so the way that it's being kind of repackaged and marketed specifically to women is part of this wave of push to especially perimenopausal women that is extremely supplement focused and hormone focused and really neglects to mention the really important basics like lifting weights, like regular physical activity, like a nutritious diet. And so then you get people really, really focused on these kind of small potatoes where it's like if you're not exercising, don't take creatine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can. It's just probably not going to do anything. Right. And even if you are exercising, what it will do is minimal.

47:29Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:You probably won't even notice that you're taking it. It's so weird. I feel like sometimes I'm like the killer of joy because people are like, I'm going to take creatine. And I'm like, great. Probably had a modest effect. but generally safe. Here's the dosing, go forth and prosper. And they're like, what do you mean modest improvements? I'm like, well, it's not going to change your life. A little bit of strength, a little bit of maybe extra hypertrophy at the end of a long training term, some other benefits. But they're like, what about like brain health? It's good for my brain, right? I've been reading all about this that can improve cognitive performance after sleep deprivation and this, I'm like, well, maybe.

48:09But the outcomes that have been measured and the changes from placebo compared to the intervention arm are not like earth shattering. But people see these reports, the studies that look published in these journals that are to their mind highly reputable and such. And they're like, I got to take this for brain health. I'm like, I don't know that creatine is a nootropic so far.

48:33Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:yeah and i i think we need to acknowledge the populations in which this has been studied are at some sort of deficit and so we're talking about alzheimer's patients or as you said 24 hour 48 hour sleep deprivation uh or uh clinical depression in combination with an ssri and so this isn't like healthy people getting some brain boost yeah the way that it's like oh yeah you know I'm going to grab my cup of coffee and then I'm going to feel more awake. It's not it's not that. And importantly, these studies that are that are using really high doses, people need to be aware that a lot of people experience GI issues when they start taking 10, 20 grams of creatine per day.

49:18Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:So I don't think we were there yet to be recommending it to the masses. This is kind of an aside, but like invariably, and I'm sure if you've ever done some sort of talk on creatine, do you publicly face and you're like, look, it's one of the most studied supplements that we have, if not the most studied supplement, which that happens to be true. But there are still gaps in our knowledge there. Like, for example, if you wanted to feel confident in, well, how many people are responders to creatine with respect to like musculoskeletal outcomes, or in this case, cognitive outcomes, you don't really have great data on like, who's a non-responder, who's a responder or whatever.

49:52And like, how are we ascertaining that? There's some evidence there. It's not zero evidence, but it's not like as much evidence as we have on strength performance, for example. And so if you really wanted to feel confident, I'm going to give a thousand people creatine and a third are going to be responders and a third are going to be pseudo responders and a third are going to be non-responders. It's like, that's based off a trial on seven people. So we should temper that. Again, it doesn't mean you can't take it, but like there are some gaps in our knowledge base here.

50:20Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Yeah. I mean, what hasn't been done and done well is to say, okay, coming in at baseline, what are your actual creatine stores either in muscle or brain. And then once we start supplementing and that is saturated, you know, your proverbial cup is full, then what did it take to get you from baseline to there? And what are the performance effects, if any? Yeah. We see the same thing in vitamin D research. It's like, okay, we need to measure the vitamin D levels prior to intervention, then we need to apply the intervention, like a supplement, for example, and then remeasure vitamin D levels to show, okay, it did improve that.

51:00And oh, by the way, that's correlated with these specific improvements in outcomes. And when that's been done, it's like, oh, vitamin D actually doesn't really change the course here so much. And people want to hear that. They're like, so you're saying not to take vitamin D? My doctor told me to take it or this public health agency told me to take it. And I'm like, I'm not saying don't take it. It's dangerous, whatever. I just am not confident it's doing anything based on available evidence. And I suspect that these individuals recommending it, if they were aware of the evidence, they'd probably concede that they're like, this is mostly a hedge because we see abnormal value.

51:33We want to treat the value, but we don't really know if it works. That's that'd be the honest take, I think.

51:38Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And I think depending on what we're talking about, sometimes it really only matters that we achieve the outcome that's intended. Right. So when you think about menopause hormone therapy, you're not actually treating to a hormone level, you're treating to alleviate those symptoms. So that's an example of, well, it's not actually important, those before and after numbers necessarily, what we're really focusing on is that outcome. And I think given the safety and price of creatine, I would probably say, well, you know, if you want to, then kind of sure. Go off. You can do it. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it also comes back to your kind of personal feelings on supplements in general.

52:27Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And are you somebody who is just going to take it because why not? or do you actually want to make sure that you're taking it for a reason? And I think in this whole discussion about supplements, we often forget the word supplement. Why are we taking that? It's not that everything is going to make you better. It's maybe, oh, you are lacking something, and then we're kind of bringing that up. And I think that gets lost because people are just obsessed with wanting to take supplements. Totally. Yeah, huge industry. as it turns out. The next exercise trend on trend, again, as the youth would say, is Pilates.

53:10And again, I did a podcast on this as well. And I saw that you get some content on this too. So this isn't the shit on Pilates section, but like the shoe fits. Are Pilates really sufficient for resistance training in women?

53:27Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:I think it's not just Pilates. It's a whole host of exercise programs that have been marketed to women for a very long time. So it's the bar classes, it's the spin classes, holding the dumbbells where you're supposedly intermittently doing some upper body work, Pilates and yoga. And I think just the theme is women have been marketed ineffective exercise programs for as long as I can remember. It's just the flavor of that changes every few years. Pilates is fine. Again, all physical activity is good. If you love it, do it. But what people misunderstand is if you actually want to build muscle, then we need adequate resistance and adequate force production such that we are able to contract and stimulate muscle growth over time.

54:28Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And when we are in this sort of unstable position, that inevitably compromises the force we are able to produce against a given load. So even if you're doing something like a reformer Pilates, and you have a weight attached to your ankle or a weight attached to your wrist, you're in that unstable position. And it's the same reason why unstable surface training, like standing on a BOSU or doing a chest press on a stability ball, isn't as effective as the traditional resistance training. And it's also much more difficult to progress over time because even something like a reformer isn't going to have the resistance options.

55:11Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And often these exercises aren't set up in a way where progressive overload is really the method, part of the method. Yeah. Yeah, I think also people conflate if something is hard, it's going to be useful, like proportional to the difficulty, right? The harder it is, the better it is for me. There's maybe some kernel of truth to that. Like you do have to work adequately hard during exercise to get the most out of your training. But just because something is, quote, harder doesn't make it better. We don't need more difficulty. We just need more better as far as it being appropriately programmed to the individual.

55:46Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Yeah, I mean, I think a great example of that is if I were to hold a one pound dumbbell and bring my arm out to the side and just hold my arm up straight out like this in a sort of lateral raise position, my shoulder is going to start to burn. But am I building muscle mass in my shoulder by just holding it here? Not effectively. No. Yeah. Maybe strength endurance, you know, in that particular position being specific. But it's like, is that that's what you want? Like, I could imagine if there's a sport where that's involved, if you're a strongman competitor, you know, maybe doing that, you know, for the Iron Cross or whatever the event is, it might be specific to your sport.

56:25But like, it's hard. It just doesn't mean that it's actually useful for what you're wanting to get out of exercise.

56:31Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And I think that goes back to what we were discussing before with the vests. It's what is the goal here? You know, what are we measuring and what are we programming? What are we implementing? And the problem is that the way a lot of these classes and methods are marketed, it's, oh, you're going to get ripped abs in 12 weeks, or you're going to have these long, lean lines, you're going to look like a ballerina. It's all these promises about dramatic changes in body composition. And you aren't getting those with a group fitness class. You're just not. And so it's really that's the mismatch between what people are expecting to get out of it and then what they're actually getting out of it when there is a more effective option out there.

57:15Yeah. No hate comms against Pilates. Like, again, as you mentioned, any exercise is good. 10 out of 10 would recommend. But I would also I would recommend that to be like an adjunctive sort of exercise modality to traditional resistance training and obviously some conditioning as well. Do it all. But yeah, probably not going to get there with just Pilates. OK, so this is maybe the one. I don't know what the women's fitness market is, but I'm sure it's in the billions of dollars. Why do you think that women are such common targets or like even unfortunately victims of all of this messaging and direct marketing?

57:51Like as a woman, you need to do this or this is geared directly towards you. Why does that happen?

57:56Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:I think women are constantly I think people, but but women are looking for that next thing. And so what I see just sort of anecdotally is that while men will be happy kind of going to the gym and doing the same thing for an extended period of time, women will be looking for that next program or that next class or that next piece of equipment or and so we're switching things up to our detriment because if you actually want the results if you actually want to accomplish the goal you need to stick to something for long enough to actually experience those adaptations and I think midlife women are a very easy target because you're getting people who are experiencing changes in their body composition, are experiencing perhaps menopause-related symptoms and sleeplessness, and they're confused, and they're desperate, and they want to prioritize their health and fitness, and they have some income to spend.

59:01Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And so then it creates this perfect storm of grift. Yeah. No, that's well said. But I am in agreement, especially because, you know, when you look at the fitness landscape at large, predominantly men, there's a lot of, quote, subject matter experts, even if they're not real experts, that are male and are talking predominantly to male-centric audiences. You know, think about the competitive powerlifter, competitive bodybuilder space and the spaces adjacent to those. Mostly dudes, right? And that market is saturated with other dudes trying to say, hey, look, do this method, do this thing. Women are, in my estimation, a more vulnerable or ripe market because there's not as many subject matter experts, particularly legitimate experts, generally underserved with respect to the actual research in women.

59:53There's less of them actually being physically active also. And so, yeah, between that and then like experiencing these actual changes that happen in their life. Yeah, you're right. It's a perfect storm. And so they're like. More apt to accept the stuff that's being marketed to them directly, even if it's not not great.

1:00:13Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:I think the other issue is that so many women grew up in this sort of era of prioritizing thinness. And so it's very, very difficult to sit down with someone and say, you know what, let's just maintain your weight and really focus on crushing it in the gym and building some muscle. And then we'll worry about fat loss in six months. Yeah. That's a hard sell. Try selling that. I was going to say, I was like, are you trying to go bankrupt? What are you doing? Yeah. But what it means is that people say, I want to prioritize my bone health and my muscle health and my longevity. but they're really saying, I want to lose 20 pounds.

1:00:53Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And these are divergent goals. And so it's very, very tough because you end up kind of spinning your wheels. You say you want this, but you're not actually doing everything you can in order to optimize your progress towards those goals because you keep coming back to the number on the scale. Yeah. Yeah. Social pressures, the current cultural climate, all sorts of stuff. I mean, obviously, this changes over time. But yeah, it is a tough road to navigate, especially for someone who's not already a fitness expert. How do you discern fiction from fact? How do you, you know, make sure that you're doing getting the most out of your efforts?

1:01:36It can be challenging, especially, again, like I said, if you're not already well versed in this sort of stuff.

1:01:42Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:And there are so many conflicting views. There's If you if I were to say, OK, you know, how should I work out as a woman? I will get 25 different recommendations, whereas in the bodybuilder, powerlifter or even just kind of general physique focused male space. I feel like, you know, you're going to have these arguments about a tenth of a gram of protein at the margin on the margins rather than like everyone's in agreement. Like, OK, you should lift relatively heavy weights, use compound exercises, predominantly some isolation stuff. Get kind of close to failure on a number of these efforts. Try to progressively load that over time as your fitness improves, you know, all sorts of stuff like that.

1:02:24You know, the dietary patterns outside of like very fringe carnivore, you know, type type stuff, fruititarian. It's very similar, right? People, as you mentioned, argue on the margins. When it comes to women, that's not the case. It's like.

1:02:38Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:It's like, oh, you want to power lift? Stop squat benching and deadlifting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's wild. So actually, it's a perfect segue to like maybe the most important question I'm going to ask you. What women specific considerations for exercise and nutrition are actually legit, if any? controversial opinion there aren't any we need to be and understand that when i got into this space i wanted to know these sex differences but i'm a woman i would be doing the things if they were out there and i would be telling all the other women to do that too so it's not that i'm being contrarian for the sake of it, what we see is, yes, in the mid 2000s, there was a really big gap with a lot of this stuff when it comes to male and female focused data.

1:03:37Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:But we have come quite a long way since then. And we now have examples of a lot of studies that were originally conducted in men and have now been conducted in women. And when we think about some of these questions about muscle growth or programming variables like rep ranges or questions like changing your body composition and fat loss. These outcomes that people really care about. What we see is when these studies are replicated, there aren't differences. What works for men works for women. Now, what works for you as an individual might be different than works for another individual, but that is not based on your biological sex.

1:04:20Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:It's based on a whole host of other factors, some of which we might not be able to identify. I think there are plenty from a scientific perspective about inter-individual differences that we don't fully understand, but from a practical perspective, it really needs to come down to you. What are your goals? What is your background? What is your training history? What are your health and injury considerations? What are your preferences? What equipment do you have access to? And then we kind of go down the line. And nowhere on that sort of initial questionnaire would I say, and should we give you the program for men or the program for women?

1:05:03Yeah. The inter-individual differences, just as an umbrella term for all the things that make a person a unique biological organism. So not only their genetics and their anatomy and anthropometry, but also their psychology and social environment and everything else. All of those differences collectively are far, far greater than any sex-specific differences, age-specific differences, ethnicity-specific differences. And to my mind, those latter three, age, ethnicity, and sex, don't really play a factor in how I would program for somebody unless it otherwise influenced those individual factors, like you mentioned, current fitness levels, goals, access, preferences, so on and so forth.

1:05:47And so when I see like a woman's specific program, I'm like, this kind of is a red flag. Like if this is really geared to like, you know, capture people to get a, you know, underserved population more active. I don't know that you need to phrase it in this way, but I'm less of a red flag, maybe more of a pink flag there. But if it's like this, you know, you got to do this specific stuff because you are XX. And I'm like, not to say that that's the only way to be a woman. But in any case, that's another podcast we can talk about. To me, that's a red flag. I'm like, that tells me you don't really understand this sort of stuff.

1:06:23And there's some sort of grift that's going on. And that doesn't sit well with me.

1:06:29Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:It also really ignores a key point, which is when you start exercising, we experience adaptations based on the way that we're exercising. So if you look at things like fiber types or molecular signatures or fuel utilization, those are going to adapt depending on how you are training. And so when I hear people say, well, you know, there's differences in fiber type composition, and therefore you should be doing more of this type of training or more of that type of training. That makes no sense to me because we are going to adapt accordingly depending on the training we do. Therefore, the training we do should be specific to the goal.

1:07:10Yeah. Yep. How you exercise will determine the nature of the adaptations that you get and then how much you exercise will influence the magnitude thereof. So, yeah, the program has to be appropriate, but probably unrelated to you being a woman or a man, older, younger, or a particular ethnicity. I think that's well said. All right. A little lightning round question, a series of questions. thing one, I like to ask people that are guests on the podcast, what is their particular fitness modality of choice? What's your exercise routine look like these days?

1:07:44Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:I'm currently doing a split upper body pull, upper body push, lower body. Kind of a bro. You're just doing bro stuff. I am. I'm doing bro stuff. I like it because I prefer shorter sessions. I like to go more frequently, but for a shorter period of time. And I do a mix of free weights and machines. I'm a fan of machines. It's a women's specific program, if I've ever heard. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I only go on the pink machine. That's right. Yeah, yeah. There you go. And then I like to ask our guests also for either what they're currently reading or a book recommendation, if you have one.

1:08:23Anything come top of mind?

1:08:27Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:Oh, I'm currently reading so many papers that I haven't read a book in a very long time. That's fair. I'm embarrassed. I will interject and make a recommendation then in place. Herman Ponser's new book, Adaptability, is very, very good. Unless you just want to read all the papers that Dr. Lauren Klins of Semple linked in her debate with Stacey Sims, and you can read those because those are listed in that podcast show notes either way. Interestingly. That's right. That's right. And then last question here is if you get to put a message out to the Barbo Medicine listenership who may be unfamiliar with you or kind of your your ethos or whatever, what's one thing that you'd like to communicate to everyone listening to this episode?

1:09:15Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:If somebody tells you there's only one way to accomplish your health and fitness goals, they don't understand exercise-induced adaptations and they don't understand people. I like that. Man, we got so many sound bites here. This is great. The algorithm is going to love this. Last but not least, where can people find you? I'm going to link all of this in the show notes, but this is the time where you're at on social media platforms and otherwise. I'm active on Instagram, DrLaurenCS1. I am the co-owner along with Eric Chexler, Eric Helms and Mike Zordos of the Mass Research Review so if you're interested in long-form breakdowns of the latest fitness-related research that kind of bridges the gap to from research to practice then you can check that out Mass Research Review and I also have a podcast with my friend Eric Chexler it's called Front Page Fitness and And it's very light.

1:10:11Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple:We look at the latest sort of absurd headlines related to health and fitness, and we laugh about it, and we give you a little bit of information along the way. I love that. All of those things are going to be linked in the show notes below. Thank you guys for tuning in. Special shout out to Dr. Lauren Colenzo-Semple for joining us on the Barbell Medicine podcast. Before you guys go anywhere, please leave us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps drive traffic to our podcast so we can keep bringing you all the latest nuance in health and fitness. From everyone here at Barbell Medicine, I'm Dr.

1:10:39Jordan Beigenbaum. We'll catch you next week and every week right here on the Barbell Medicine Podcast.