2680: The Fitness Obstacles Women Face and How to Solve Them

0:00Hi, I'm Jake Rez, also known as Nurse Jake. As a travel nurse, I've worked in all kinds of places, different settings, cities, and climates. Every assignment brings on a new challenge, which is why I always bring my figs. These scrubs are built for whatever the job throws at you. They're breathable, flexible, and comfortable in any environment. No matter where I land, I know they're going to keep me looking and feeling my best. And don't sleep on the details. The pockets, the features, the finishing touches, everything has a purpose and it makes a real difference when you're moving nonstop. The fit is clean, tailored, and super polished, and they come in a huge range of colors.

0:34In other words, they feel great throughout a 12-hour shift, and they always look good. See every healthcare professional on Instagram. If you work in healthcare or know someone who does, check out Figs and get 15 % off your first order at wearfigs.com with code FIGSRX. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. 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 Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.

1:07Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. In today's episode, we talk about the fitness obstacles that women often face, and we're going to help you solve them. By the way, if you go to musclemommymovement.com forward slash quiz, you can see which avatar you fall under. Most of you will fall under one of them, and then you'll get some tailored advice. It's a free quiz, musclemommymovement.com forward slash quiz. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Masszymes by BiOptimizers. These are digestive enzymes. They're especially helpful if you have a high-protein diet.

1:44Adam Schafer:They help break down your food for better digestion and better assimilation. What does that mean? Better recovery from your workouts, maybe more muscle growth. Digestive enzymes can make a big difference for some people. Go try them out. Go to masszymes.com. That's M-A-S-S-Z-Y-M-E-S.com forward slash Mind Pump. Use the code Mind Pump 10. Get yourself 10 % off. All right, here comes the show. When it comes to fitness, especially when you're trying to do this for life, when you're trying to build a lifestyle around becoming fit and healthy, there are a lot of obstacles. It's difficult. That's why most people don't do this.

2:21Adam Schafer:That's why most people have trouble making it a consistent thing. When it comes to women, there are common obstacles. We're going to talk about those common obstacles and how you can solve them with the right workouts. And by the way, at the end, we're going to point you to a free quiz that's going to help you out even more. So let's talk about these obstacles, especially the ones that women face. Let's go.

2:41Sal Di Stefano:I was listening to Dr. Gabriel Lyon in an interview and I heard her say a stat that said that nine out of 10 people that lose the weight, so actually people that actually do go lose the weight, will not be able to get, only one out of 10 will keep the weight off or keep themselves in shape. That's a bismal number.

3:00Adam Schafer:Yeah. Losing weight or getting into shape as hard as it is, right? Because it is challenging. You have a fitness goal. It's real challenging to try to accomplish it. It's not nearly as challenging as maintaining it. So the first challenge or obstacle is getting there. But that's actually a small, it's a small bump in the road in comparison to the maintaining how do i keep it how do i keep this going now a big reason for that

3:29Sal Di Stefano:though sal though isn't it because of the method they got there that's a big part of it a lot of

3:33Adam Schafer:setups that led a big part of it is the setup uh the mentality around it like the root of why they're doing it you know am i hating myself through this process is it really based in shame or is it self-care uh of course am i doing this in a way that's so ineffective that uh after you know five months i'm asking myself why i'm doing this in the first place i got some results but you gotta enjoy it i mean you're not gonna stick with something that long of term i mean we're all capable of like um enduring something for a certain amount of time and i think people have proven that that they could you know literally stick to the plan and just stick to the plan but then when you you have to do this indefinitely that's a whole nother conversation yeah that was

4:14Sal Di Stefano:I was going to say, I feel like we're very resilient creatures by nature, but when you, when, so you can white knuckle your way to losing 30 pounds or getting in shape, but when you do it through that method of just restriction and, you know, sheer hard work to get there, it just rarely ever lasts because you get there and you're just like, okay, I did it. And it's like, okay, But this seven days a week, hour-long cardio sessions, eating 1 ,300 to 1 ,500 calories is just not sustainable long-term. And so it's the approach that I feel like really needs to be addressed on getting there that is so important.

4:54Adam Schafer:You also have to consider that the odds are stacked against you because modern life is one where activity is not common. It's actually far more common or easy to be sedentary. Our lives tend to be organized in a sedentary way. We've done this now over the last few decades. And food has been engineered and designed to be so palatable and accessible and, or should I say convenient, that you're battling all these different things. So your approach has to improve the quality of your life so much that you then can live differently. And also, this is the other part of it is, it has to be a process that you actually value and enjoy to an extent.

5:43Adam Schafer:If you plan on, if this is something you're going to do for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, the rest of your life, it has to be those things. Otherwise, it's just not going to happen. You're not going to be able to maintain this. And again, the data is very clear on this. The odds are that you won't unless you approach this properly. Now, just to give people some hope, because you might at this point want to just turn this off. Like, okay, well, why should I even try? The odds that you're going to be able to maintain this if you do things right are astronomically higher. Yeah. Okay? So when, you know, we all trained clients for a long time.

6:18Adam Schafer:We were all trainers for two decades. and when we got really good at this process, the majority of my clients were able to do this forever afterwards. So it was not a 10 % can maintain it. It was more like 10 % dropped off and it was more like 90 % were able to maintain it. Now, the truth is, this is a journey of fumbling and stumbling and setbacks and that's just the way it is because it is difficult. So a big part of this is giving yourself grace as you go through this process. but the odds are so much better when you do this right. We've experienced it time and time again with people. We built an entire business and podcast around helping people do this.

7:00So don't be discouraged,

7:01Adam Schafer:even though the data shows that you should be. It's because most people approach this the wrong way. And the fitness industry doesn't do people any, doesn't help them in any good way because it's geared around selling products or the information that's being communicated is coming from people who have figured this out for themselves in a way that doesn't apply to most people. In other words, they're fitness fanatics or they're body obsessed. And that's dysfunction in and of itself. And they're communicating to you, somebody who's like, I don't wanna be a fitness fanatic. I don't have a desire to live in the gym.

7:38Adam Schafer:It's not my favorite thing in the world to do. I want this to improve the quality of my life that I do enjoy. And they just don't know how to connect and communicate that properly. whereas experienced really experienced trainers know this because this is what you work with

7:51Sal Di Stefano:these are the kind of people you end up training do you think a large part of the success that you had or we had with training clients are is your ability to hear somebody out understand their past history and what they're telling you their goals are their availability and then to really customize a plan like for them individually like versus like oh you want to lose weight well this is what's best for you or oh you're a woman therefore this is what's but it's like taking into consideration all the variables of lifestyle their current habits their past history like all those things and then going like okay like i know you're willing to do all these things right now but based off of what you're telling me i think this is a better your odds

8:35Adam Schafer:substantially and there's also how to navigate the roadblocks that end up popping up right because that's what's going to happen you're going to stumble you are going to have setbacks you are going to have challenges, how do you navigate those? And that's very different from person to person. And this is very complex. It's not as easy as, it sounds easy, right? Eat right and move. Well, a lot of times you have to literally build new associations and reframe a lot of things that you may have, you know, a different perspective on coming in. Like, oh, this is work, this is grueling. Or you start to learn to enjoy it based on shaping that association and what it's doing for you.

9:10And you have to communicate that a lot. And this is where

9:13Sal Di Stefano:a coach like really helps with that process well i really feel like my early years you know a failure as far as a coach was just looking at everybody so similar as far as their you know oh if oh i've seen that goal before you want to lose 30 pounds this is what we do here's a formula yeah here's the macros here's the diet here's the plan let's go you know then it was just purely motivation it wasn't until way later did i get better at asking a lot of the right questions and really listening to the client and go like, oh, okay, this client's probably going to struggle with this. And I know they're not going to like this.

9:46Sal Di Stefano:And okay. And then being able to hear them out and then go like, I think this is the proper plan. Even when they're in the most motivated state, maybe at that time, because a lot of times when clients are ready to make change, they say things like, I'll do whatever. I'll seven days a week, I'll do this. But then when you start asking questions like, well, have you ever gone five days a week consistently? Like, okay, well, why would we start at seven right now? That makes no sense, right?

10:08Adam Schafer:For most people, what a good fitness routine and a good kind of diet should look like is it should improve the quality of your life dramatically. It should not become your life. Okay. Again, this is the mistake many people in the fitness industry will communicate is that they're communicating to themselves. And so what you hear is this becomes your life. This is your life. It's about hardcore discipline and structure. And this is what you should do and never do this kind of stuff. And it's beast mode and all that stuff, which is great if this is your life. Look, if you want to work in the fitness industry and want to be a trainer, this is what you want to do, then that might be your approach.

10:47Adam Schafer:But this is not your life. Your life is not working out and thinking about what to eat and what not to eat all the time. That's not going to work. This is a way to improve the quality of your life. That's how it works. And so it's actually more simple than a lot of people make it sound, although the individual variances can vary quite dramatically. We're going to talk about some of those common ones that we ran into with our clients and kind of how to work around them. And again, this is a journey. That's one thing I want people to consider here. You may have a goal. You may have a time frame.

11:23Adam Schafer:But the time frame that you really want to work with is the rest of your life. Okay? Because think about it this way. If you exercise consistently and you didn't hurt yourself, right? It was an appropriate workout and you were able to maintain this forever. Do you think you get good results? Like, do you think you get an improvement in quality of life? Yes. If your diet got somewhat better, but stayed that way for the rest of your life, do you think over time you would get great return on that? Yes. Yes. So it's not about perfect. It's about how do I do this forever? So we're going to talk about some of the common challenges.

11:59Adam Schafer:I'll start with the first one. And you would hear this, especially from women who were coming back after a layoff. And the layoff typically looked like either I took a break because of whatever. I just lost motivation. It wasn't working for me. I was overdoing it, I think, or whatever. Or I just had a baby. That's a common one, right? You have a baby. And that first, by the way, the fitness industry will have you believe that three months postpartum, you're ready to go and it's going to all happen. that is that was never the case with clients i worked with you'll you'll see that you'll see people posting that but that's never the case in my experience it was typically one to two years postpartum when when women were feeling like they could get back into a rhythm that's right

12:43Sal Di Stefano:especially if you've had more than one that's right because it's not just about how long it

12:48Adam Schafer:takes your body to heal which there's time your body dramatically changes it's also you have a child. You have a young child, which is very demanding and sleep is off. And there's a lot of things to juggle. Recovery is not what it used to be. That's right. So, and it's usually around, you know, a year or two after when things get back into a rhythm, we're like, okay, I can devote some consistent time to exercise. I'm getting sleep again. It's not super broken up like it, like it has been for the last year or whatever. My body's starting to feel like it's back to normal. Now I think I can get back into a routine.

13:18Adam Schafer:But when you come from that, that place, typically energy is low. This is the big challenge. You would hear this from moms. It's like, or again, people after layoffs, it's like, I don't have a ton of energy. I just feel like I'm already spent doing all this stuff at home and at work and managing all these different things. I don't have a ton of energy to devote to this. Like, what do my workouts look like? So the thing I want to, you know, focus on with this is that exercise itself is not where you get the progress and results. What exercise is, is a stimulus. It's a stressor on the body that causes the body to adapt and change.

13:57Adam Schafer:So the body doesn't actually change in the workout. It changes after the workout in the days off in between where your body senses the stress. If it's appropriate, it's important, right? If you overwhelm your body with too much stress from the workout, and this is determined by lifestyle, genetics, diet, your current fitness level. And it doesn't take much to overwhelm some people. Sometimes people are like, I used to work out like crazy. It's like, you haven't worked out in two years. It doesn't take much. You send the right stimulus and it's appropriate and your body will start to change. So it's an important thing to consider.

14:29Adam Schafer:And what this typically looks like is two short workouts a week, strength training, strength training. With all these people we're going to talk about, there are many different forms of exercise, but the one that's going to give you the most ROI, in other words, the most results for the time spent doing it, it's going to be strength training. It sends a muscle building signal. It tends to organize hormones in a positive way. It tends to speed up the metabolism. It shapes and sculpts the body, makes you stronger, generates energy. It's not energy expensive. So you're not out there burning tons of calories and sweating a lot, which you may think is a good idea, but it's actually more effective to teach your body to burn more calories, which is what strength training does.

15:09Adam Schafer:So it's two short strength training workouts a week and you're going slow. You're doing a set of 10 reps and then you're sitting on the bench or a chair and you're resting for two minutes and doing it again. Yeah. And I think everybody kind of inherently knows like when you take time off and your body starts to adapt and it starts to just get used to that path of least resistance. So it's like just even getting up and providing extra movement becomes more of a struggle. And so to introduce a new environment and new stimulus, like we don't want to overwhelm it we want to invite it and be able to kind of start that ball to slowly start to roll for you

15:48Sal Di Stefano:we've all now done um three series on the youtube channel and they're very different series and i really feel like this was a lot of the the message that i was trying to send with mine because i had just came off of a layoff i hadn't been in consistently and really the what i was trying to show people was how little i had to do the the how moderate the workout was how minimal a time that I spent in there was a couple exercises, less than 30 minutes. And even for the first couple months, it wasn't like, oh, I did that for a week. And then I was right back to training like hardcore. And the point was to show people that when you have been laid off like that and you haven't been sending any sort of a stimulus like this, it doesn't take much for the body to start to adapt and make change.

16:35Sal Di Stefano:And any more than that is less optimal. And it's hard for people to grasp that. And so that was the point of me showing that is like, listen, even with my experience of lifting for many, many years, I don't need to do that much. This is such a new stimulus and watch the body will progress and it'll change.

16:51Adam Schafer:I remember I had one woman that I trained who hired me. Uh, I think her child was a year and a half. Now she used to be an athlete, but this was years before, right? So this was like maybe six or seven years before she had her child. So she didn't work out for six or seven years, got pregnant, had the baby, ended up finding me, hiring me. This was about a year and a half after. So baby was about a year and a half old, years old. And I had this conversation with her and we did our first workout. And remember our first workout was something like, it was real minimal, right? It was like, it was like two or three sets of squats, a couple sets of bench press and like a couple sets of rows.

17:32Adam Schafer:Okay. and in between the sets we were resting a lot a little bit of mobility we were talking about fitness and stuff so it's very minimal workout and i remember her looking at me and she's like am i going to get any results because she remembers she was an athlete years years years before so she remember how she used to train and so i was trying to explain this to her and then finally i said to her i said well let me ask you a question when was the last time you did bench press she's like oh uh eight years ago it doesn't say 1990s you just you just did something you haven't done in eight years, that's going to send a signal.

18:02Adam Schafer:Yeah. You know, when was the last time you did rows? When was the last time you did squats? So, and she was like, I can't believe, and by the way, I started training her once a week. I can't believe that I'm going to get results with once a week. And I told her, I said, here's how you'll know. Next time you see me next Monday, a week later, uh, we just did whatever, eight reps with the squat. If you do more than eight reps, you just progressed. And I wrote it down and sure enough, she came in and she progressed and she progressed consistently. And eventually we moved up to two days a week, but, and her body responded the whole time.

18:31Adam Schafer:And she was shocked because she goes, I thought I had to beat the crap out of myself to get my body to respond. I said, no, you just have to do a little more than what you're used to essentially. So if you have low energy from a long layoff, it's not much like two short lifts a week. You go real slow. You do exercises you haven't done in a while. Your body will respond. You will get stronger.

18:53Sal Di Stefano:My favorite part of taking a client through this process also from a layoff and introducing it back like this too, is the lesson they learn from it too of like, oh, wow, I can actually just do that and see some positive results and change. And so I find that after I would take a client through this process, that that would then become their new floor. In other words, them being off after we've gone through the whole progression of just one time a week and then months down the road, we've progressed to two or maybe even three, and then they're at where they want to be and they realize like wow even when i when sal first started me or adam first started i was only doing one day a week i was seeing positive change like i guess even when i have a rough week or tell me if i can just get one workout so i felt like that it it would teach the clients that like because you have a lot of people that are and i was definitely one of these people guilty of all or nothing either i got to be all in training every day or going super hard or I don't do any of it at all because I thought that I'm not going to see hardly any results or what's the point?

19:56Sal Di Stefano:I'm not going to see anything from it. Where you start to realize like, oh my God, this one day a week and two day a week and what it ends up doing, it does way more than I expected. Now I start, then I have a different conversation because it's inevitable. Life will happen again. You'll get busy. Something will happen. Have another kid, who knows? But this time you go, but man, I got great results just one time a week. Maybe I just at least do that now or sneak one day in and then now that becomes their new floor.

20:19Adam Schafer:Just to add to that, I'll use the same example. She did, let's say, eight squats today. Next Monday, she comes in, she did 10. And then she would ask me, well, don't I need to do more? I said, you did. You just did more. This is a new stimulus, which is going to continue your body moving forward. Now, this doesn't mean you're not active every day, by the way. I want to be clear. Movement daily is good, but that could be the form of walking. What we're talking about is structured exercise. And strength training is so powerful because it really organizes your body in a way to have more muscle and less body fat.