2677: Why All Women Need to Lift Weights

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1:16Shop the sale July 23rd through 27th at the Wayfair Store at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews.

1:37Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode is for women. You all need to lift weights, and we explain why and the benefits specifically for women that you can get only from strength trainers. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Manukora. That's M-A-N-U-K-O-R-A. You got to check this honey out. So it's honey, but it's the highest in M-G-O you'll find anywhere. Four times higher than other competitors. What's M-G-O? This is the incredible compound in this special type of honey that's antimicrobial, good for gut health, good for inflammation.

2:15Adam Schafer:It's the best. Try it out. I like it before my workouts. Go to manukora.com. That's M-A-N-U-K-O-R-A.com forward slash Mind Pump. Use the code Mind Pump. Get yourself a big discount plus some free gifts with their starter kit. Here comes the show. Women are lifting weights more than ever these days, but not enough. Look, if you're listening to this, you're a woman, you're not lifting weights. You need to. It's one of the best things you can do for yourself, and we're going to break it down as to why. Can't wait for you to man-explain this right now. It's man-explain. You messed it up, dude. Oh, man.

2:50Adam Schafer:The numbers on this is pretty remarkable. Huge growth in the percentage of women that now do strength training as a - And we're here for it. As their primary form of exercise, but it's still a minority. It's still not - You said I thought we were close to 50-50 now. No. No, no, no. I mean, as a percentage. It's still not the largest draw, but it's one of the fastest growing. It's way more than when we started training people back in the late 90s. Oh, yes. Way more. And it's because, well, part of the reason is they're, you know, social media. You're seeing women now talk about it more. And then women are experiencing the benefit of it.

3:29Adam Schafer:And look, as personal trainers, this is just a fact in the field. A majority of the people that hire trainers are women. So a good majority, a good 60 % plus of the typical client is a woman. And that was my clients. Most of my clients, I would say, were women. And many of them, especially in the early days, were apprehensive to strength training. None of them were apprehensive after 30 to 60 days. They were all bought in once they experienced just the benefit of it.

3:58Sal Di Stefano:Do you think that this has anything to do with the kind of shift in marketing? And even like the women on magazines that we celebrated, say, in the 80s versus today, how much that has changed? Do you think this changed first and then that followed? Or did we start marketing and advertising like these fuller bodies, thicker looks, like more musculately built women? We were celebrating that and putting them on covers first and then people followed? Or do you think it was the reverse?

4:30Adam Schafer:No, I think it was reverse. Some of it was driven by the personal trainer industry. because the number one tool of a personal trainer in helping someone shape, sculpt, their body get fit is strength training. So most trainers will tell you this. This is like their number one exercise tool because it's so effective. So you have that. You have decades of communication. Then you had CrossFit. I think CrossFit, in fact, when I looked this up, CrossFit had a huge influence because you had these female athletes. Now, CrossFit top female athletes are very muscular. But some women saw that and said, whoa, that's really interesting.

5:04Sal Di Stefano:I would attribute a lot of this to CrossFit because I think it actually normalized that body type and celebrated it. These girls were winning. They were badass. And they definitely had very muscular physiques. And before that, I don't feel like that body to women was marketed or celebrated like it was in CrossFit. I think, too, a big point with that is it was co-ed. so like your normal commercial gym it's like it's almost like you siphon off like there's a lot of cardio machines there's machines that were even back in the day were like just tailored just for women and so it was like very like segmented whereas like crossfit was really just this class and like everybody was after you know just getting strong and going through these like

5:49Adam Schafer:core lifts yeah and it's it's interesting so the the main the first reason why this is such a valuable form of exercise is because it's incredibly empowering. You mentioned strong, Justin. In the nineties, when I started training, if I told a woman I was going to make her strong, you could almost see her face change. Like, uh, yeah, like I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to do that because they, they thought that that looked like a broad shoulders or, you know, like, like a guy. Um, and the truth is strength is empowering. I, I, I remember years ago, years ago, one of the i heard women say this to me all the time my clients where they would they would train with me and after about 60 days it's oh god i feel so i feel so empowered in my body i feel so empowered i don't really understand what that meant fully it's like okay well you're stronger like what does that mean until i had a client that explained to me that uh she used to travel a lot for work and she came back from one of her work trips she's a very petite woman she's like five foot very small petite woman and she came back from a work trip and she was so i mean she was so excited.

6:51Adam Schafer:And she told me, she said, Sal, I, this is the first time I put my luggage in the overhead compartment by myself. And I'm like, what do you mean? She goes, every time I travel, cause I travel alone, she's a, she was a CFO of a tech company. I have to ask some guy next to me to do it. And then I realized what, what these women meant by being empowered. Women naturally are, have a lot less upper body strength than men. And so when it comes to doing things that require strength, you know, the old, you know, the classic meme of the opening the jar or whatever, having to depend on someone else to do something for you, that can feel a bit disempowering.

7:28Adam Schafer:Suddenly you want to move the couch or the coffee table or lift your luggage again in the overhead compartment. Now you can do it yourself. That's a great feeling. It's a very empowering feeling. And it's very empowering to feel strong in your body. To feel weak in your body is the opposite. Like you need to depend on other people that do things for you.

7:47Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. Another way to say this, I think too, would just say it's a confidence builder. And I think that this carries across both sexes. There's nothing like, you know, going to the gym, working towards getting stronger, and then feeling that apply to your real life. Like a male or female, you feel that. It's attractive. Exactly. And I think the first time you notice it in your real life application, like lifting the luggage, you go like, oh, well, that's cool. Yep. That feels good.

8:16Adam Schafer:Yeah, and I've had women explain to me like this as well, where they feel more empowered walking. Because when you strength train, by the way, if you're a beginner and you're watching this right now and you haven't done consistent strength training and you're about to get started, it is totally within the realm of being reasonable. This is very achievable. You could double your strength within a year, many times in six months. double your strength. So now imagine what it must feel like to walk around in your body. First off, how is your posture going to change? How is every step going to feel?

8:53Adam Schafer:How does every time you sit down and stand up going to feel when you're twice as strong? And this is, again, this is quite reasonable. You take a woman who's never strength trained, having her squat with 30 pounds on her back would be pretty difficult. It's totally reasonable to say she'll be able to do 60 pounds by the end of the year. Much more for most women. So imagine being twice as strong and what that's going to feel like in your body. And that is, it's not just reasonable. It's expected if you do things properly. And that's an amazing deal. Huge confidence boost. Huge. Next up, it strengthens bones.

9:29Adam Schafer:Osteopenia, osteoporosis. This is a real risk for women. It's far less of a risk for men than it is for women. But it's an actual real risk. The percentages are relatively high, especially if women are petite as they get older. What is the ratio in people as they age, like women, to men? You know, maybe Doug needs to look that up. Like, what's the rate of osteopenia in women as they age?

9:52Sal Di Stefano:Is it significantly more? I didn't realize it. Oh, versus men? Oh, yeah. Way more. I don't anticipate it.

9:57Adam Schafer:It's way more. I knew it was more. I didn't realize it was way more. It's relatively rare to see a man with osteopenia. Oh, interesting. Unless they're really sick and frail. Oh, interesting. But for women, it's definitely a problem. I mean, you guys know this, like all the bone strengthening supplements and calcium. It's always advertised to women because, and weak bones is scary. You know, you break a bone, fall down and break something like that. That's a massive risk. What does that show there? Yes. So osteopenia is 26.5 % in premenopausal women to over 48.5 % in post and up to 54%.

10:35Sal Di Stefano:In comparison to men though. Yeah. Well, look up men too. That's what I'm just curious about.

10:39Adam Schafer:But let's just consider this for a second. Perimenopausal women are typically between 35 to 40. One out of four. Yeah, that's a lot. One out of four. At that young of an age. Osteopenia. Yeah, wow. You, in menopause, almost half, almost half suffer from bone weakness, which is insane.

10:58Sal Di Stefano:I mean, that tells the story for sure that it's going to be a huge discrepancy.

11:02Adam Schafer:It's four times that of men.

11:03Sal Di Stefano:Oh, is it four times more? Yeah. Because I had clients in those stories of even the male client falling down the stairs and breaking his hip and doing things like that. And so I guess I just never really realized how much more common it was.

11:16Adam Schafer:A lot more. Part of it is just our bones are bigger and stronger. We have different hormones. Or muscle mass. Nothing builds bone like strength training. There is no form of exercise. In fact, when they do studies on other forms of exercise, you see some bone strengthening. For example, running, you'll see some bone strengthening in the lower extremities, nothing really in the upper extremities. And it's not a huge percent increase. Strength training, whoo. I said you could double your strength with how much you lift. That's what you can do with your bones, just through strength training. By the way, the other part of this, I have to say this, because women who strength train regularly but also under eat will also fall in that category of osteopenia.

11:56Adam Schafer:So you can get osteopenia even if you strength train if you under eat. So the other side of this is, Well, that's where you see it a lot, under eating and also the running, the cardiovascular preference. Super high. And then you get the repetitive injuries that occur as well. That's right. From running more so than, yeah, you're going to face it. So if you strength train and feed yourself properly, your rate of osteopenia is almost zero. In fact, if you look up the data on this, it takes it down from a fourth in perimenopause to 50 % in postmenopause to almost nothing. So you can pretty much eliminate that risk by just lifting some weights.

12:36Adam Schafer:Next up, strength training has this remarkable ability to regulate hormones, more so than any other form of exercise. Now, all forms of exercise, if they're applied properly, will improve your health. Improving your health generally improves your hormone profile. So that's a fact. Strength training, however, is unique because of the signal that it sends to the body. What's the main signal of strength training? gets stronger, which leads to more muscle. When your body is trying to build muscle and get stronger and you feed it properly, what it starts to do is it starts to organize its hormones in a way that does this.

13:11Adam Schafer:So it tries to create a more, what's known as anabolic hormone profile. So what does that look like? Testosterone becomes more effective. Yes, this is true for women as well. Women also have testosterone, also important for women, just as important for women as it is for men. It's just a different ratio. You get better balance of estrogen and progesterone. And you become more sensitive to insulin. And growth hormone becomes more youthful. So in essence, you get this youthful hormone profile because your body's like, okay, we want to build some muscle. Let's start to organize our hormones in a way to do this.

13:42Sal Di Stefano:This used to be one of my favorite things to point out to my female clients, especially as we first started our journey. Because many times we would start to see this and notice this before we saw the weight loss or the physical change that much in the mirror. was like, but right away, if we had done our blood work before and saw where we're at, one of the things I could lean on was like, hey, let's go get that checked again, and how often they would see positive impact from that, which I think can be really encouraging when you have a big journey ahead of you, or you're just getting started into weight training.

14:13Sal Di Stefano:And it's like, it takes a long time to build a lot of muscle. It takes a long time to burn a lot of body fat. But right away, when you start eating better and strain training, you start to see these hormones get optimized relatively quick and tends to also impact their life. They notice energy going up. They notice sleep is better. The mood is better. Libido is better, which is such a cool thing. And for all the coaches and trainers that follow and listen to us, this is a really important thing to pay attention to with your clients when they first start out. Because I do think it's so important that when people are first starting off, that they have encouraging reasons to keep going.

14:49Sal Di Stefano:and sometimes people can be so drawn to the scale in the mirror and when that's not moving fast enough, they get discouraged, but that's already showing positive benefit. That's right. Yeah, you think of perimenopause, you think of having a child and you think about these major shifts in hormone swings, like how necessary it is to weight train, to be able to kind of counter and balance that back out.

15:11Adam Schafer:It is, yeah, and a lot of hormone imbalances of women are closely connected to insulin insensitivity or resistance, right? Like PCOS, for example, is an example of this. Strength training, as muscles get stronger, they become far more insulin sensitive. I mean, your muscles are a storage vessel for glycogen. This is what your body turns sugar and carbohydrates into. So now you have a bigger, you know, essentially gas tank to store it. So it has somewhere to go. And muscle, I mean, building muscle is one of the fastest way to improve blood sugar or insulin sensitivity. This is well established.

15:44Adam Schafer:So you get that. You get thyroid becomes more effective. So your thyroid hormones, a lot of, far more women than men suffer from thyroid issues. Well, your thyroid becomes more effective because muscle plays a role in that. And then you have increase in what are known as androgen receptors. These are the receptors that your testosterone attaches to. So even if your testosterone stays the same, it becomes more effective because there's more places for the testosterone to dock on. So it's really this unique form of exercise when it comes to hormone regulation. No other form of exercise does it as directly as strength training.

16:17Adam Schafer:Next up, it's anti-anxiety and anti-depressive. All forms of exercise, by the way, are this way. Strength training seems to edge them out just a bit in some of the data that I've seen. But the most recent data on exercise in general shows that exercise is about one and a half times, so 1.5 times more effective than medication and talk therapy. Which is crazy. for the common forms of depression and the common forms of general anxiety.

16:44Sal Di Stefano:Which is so great we have that data now because it's something we all suspected. It's so wild though because it's not even the first form of defense for us. Yeah. It's like you would think the thing that is not just a little bit better, significantly better, is the third option or below for people. People suffer from these things and we want to throw medication or talk therapy at them when strength training actually trumps both of those.

17:09Adam Schafer:It shapes the brain in a way that looks more like, because you can actually see with people with chronic depression, you can actually see with MRIs that they have differences in their brain. Strength training, exercise generally, strength training in particular, shapes the brain to look more like a brain that's less anxious and less depressed. Muscles also produce feel-good chemicals and peptides. So as muscles develop and get stronger, they shoot out these compounds that make you feel good. So it's just this wonderful remedy for these things.

17:42Sal Di Stefano:There's also got to be like a psychological side to setting a goal to go do something, following through and doing it, then executing that. I mean, one of those cycles you can get in depression is feeling like I can't do anything. Having that self-talk that's negative where you start to go do something like that and you accomplish that and then you see positive change in your life. You can actually see it and feel it. That's got to play a huge role.

18:09Adam Schafer:It also points to the first point, which is that one of the hallmarks of anxiety and depression is feeling like you're disempowered. Feeling stronger, lifting more weight. I'm doing twice as much in my deadlift as I did four months ago or six months ago. That plays a huge role in those things. Next up, this is probably one of the reasons why it's getting more popular. Women get hammered far more than men on trying to look a particular way. Like this is just general for everybody where we're told we need to look a particular way, but women in particular, uh, get hammered by, by media, by marketing.

18:43Adam Schafer:And so what this creates with a lot of women, girls, and as they grow up is that they're afraid to eat. They're afraid to eat. So eating disorders are far higher, much more prevalent in women than in men. They're not non-existent in men, but they're definitely less prevalent and strength training. It boosts your metabolism. Like you can eat more and stay lean. So when you do eat more and enjoy your meal or whatever, you're not suddenly gaining all this body fat. Why? Muscle is metabolically expensive. It burns calories. So you gain a little bit of muscle and you feed yourself appropriately. It's, again, within the realm of reasonable to be able to boost your metabolic rate by 500 calories.

19:25Adam Schafer:I've done way more than that with female clients. 500 calories, by the way. You know how much cardio you have to do? You know how much running you have to do to burn? That's like an hour. hour a day every day every day it's an hour of running intense to burn that many calories and