2897: How to Build Glutes, Quads, and Shoulders (The Body Women Actually Want)

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0:27Adam Schafer:Way fair, 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 You just found the Fitness, Health & Entertainment Podcast Approaching over half a billion downloads That's right This is Mind Pump Today's episode We're talking to women How to build your glutes, quads, and shoulders By the way, we have a brand new MAPS program, MAPS Upper Lower. It's a four-day muscle-building split. We have a women's version in it where we emphasize lower body, glutes, and delts in the program.

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2:30Adam Schafer:We trained people for over two decades. Lots of our clients were women, and we know what they want to focus on. Overwhelmingly, women like to build their glutes, their quads, and their delts. So we're going to talk about that today, how to build those areas, essentially how to build the body that women actually want. Let's get to it.

2:49Sal Di Stefano:I would even argue it's even more popular today than even when we were training classes. It is. It was popular then, but I feel like it's even more popular now.

2:56Adam Schafer:Well, what's more popular now is that women want to build. Yeah. They would describe it in ways back then that we knew, we got to build it, but they were afraid of saying -

3:06Sal Di Stefano:I think that's the sentiment I felt was that I think that they wanted the same things, but I think it wasn't socially accepted for women to build muscle. It wasn't communicating well. And so, but the things they wanted were things like glutes and sculpted shoulders. They just didn't say it that way. Where now, I think it's, I mean, Muscle Mommy is an example of this. And, you know, CrossFit helped push this. I think that it's, you know, it's in vogue to get strong. And so now I think it's communicated this way more often.

3:39Adam Schafer:And what we're going to talk about today really is about how to organize your workout routine to build those areas the most, right? So like you're going to the gym, you're working out and you're like, look, I want to get fit. I want to look like I work out. And these are the areas that I really want to stand out the most. Like my glutes, my quads, or let's just say lower body and then shoulders for upper body, which we'll touch on because sometimes women don't realize it's they want to build shoulders. They'll say things like they want sculpted arms when in reality, it's the shoulders that give that look that they're looking for.

4:12Sal Di Stefano:Yeah, I want to make it clear too, even though that this episode is geared towards women, all these same rules apply to a guy that is trying to focus on certain body parts. And I think this is a mistake that both men and women make when programming. I think what typically happens is you decide that, oh, there's a body part or an area that I want to work on or sculpt, and we just slap more of that stuff into a already routine and don't realize that how counterproductive that can be.

4:45Adam Schafer:Yeah, it's good. I'm glad he said that. So let's take a step back. So we're a lot further today than we used to be in the sense that we used to have to convince women to lift weights to get the body they want. I don't think we need to do that anymore. I think everybody knows. In fact, I was just talking to a friend of mine. They're totally revamping the 24 Fitness on Hillsdale. It's one of the ones that we all worked in. And they're moving so much of the footprint towards weights. Yeah, weight less cardio. And so a lot of gyms are changing their footprint to accommodate for growing demand and strength training.

5:18Adam Schafer:And it's mainly because women are lifting weights. Guys always lift their weights. Yeah. But it's mainly because of the women. So when you were talking about workout programming, and I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds because we can't get in the weeds with this. But workout programming refers to the program itself and what constitutes or what the program consists of. exercises, sets, reps, tempo, and then how the interplay between all of them is. How each one affects the next one in terms of order of the exercises in the day, the days how they're organized, the weeks how they're organized.

5:55Adam Schafer:And it takes a lot of things into consideration, including recovery, balance, and how the body moves. And so what Adam is referring to is that a lot of people don't have a good understanding of programming. So they'll just say, I want more of this body part. I'm going to do more for this body part without understanding the interplay between all the other things. And so what ends up happening is they go nowhere. And so the reports that people will often come to us with is they'll say, but I'm doing all these exercises for my glutes. Nothing's happening. Or I'm doing all these exercises for my lower body.

6:29Adam Schafer:Nothing's happening. And we'll say, well, let's look at your total program. And then we can see the mistakes. Once we correct them, boom, the body responds again. So number one, in the workout itself, you want to prioritize the body part. What does that mean? Train it first. Okay. So let's say you're doing an upper body workout. So like a traditional, a good kind of, you know, tested and true muscle building split is an upper lower split. Like, in fact, we have a MAPS program we just came out with that's MAPS upper lower. It's very classic, tested, effective, general split, right? Where you're working upper body one day, lower body on another day.

7:10Adam Schafer:Well, an upper body day typically looks like this. If you're training your upper body, you typically start with either chest or back. And so the idea with traditional workout programming is to start with the largest body part when you have the most energy and then move down the line to the smaller body parts as your energy starts to wane. And this not only makes a lot of sense, it actually works for the most part. Now, here's where you kind of flip that on its head. If your goal is to focus on your delts, then train your delts first. Even though your delts will be fatigued by the time you get to chest, so you're not going to be as strong in your chest presses.

7:48Adam Schafer:If you're more interested in developing your delts than your chest, then you hit your delts first and the data supports this uh entirely so uh bodybuilders and athletes have known this for a long time bodybuilders have talked about this for a long time but now we have data to show that oh what you train first in the workout tends to get the greatest adaptations uh and as you go down the workout you start to get lower and lower yeah the muscle recruitment process it um it definitely prioritizes those uh body parts that you uh you signal like right away in the beginning and so then you know the rest of the workout it's

8:22Sal Di Stefano:it's definitely firing on all cylinders yeah i realized how common of a mistake this was for so many people uh again this was one of the many things that was revealed to me when i was competing again i went into competing thinking that these are the the most elite people uh when it comes to diet programming and training and stuff like that so i would i assumed would be some of the most knowledgeable people but one of the things i remember i'll never forget actually this because i came off of a show and uh shoulders were like my my focus on the next round was like okay i want to really build my delts i had from reviews from the judges i got had compliments on my chest and back and it was just like okay those were had been prior areas of focus for me and so i'd be lifting with a buddy of mine who was also a competitor and we were starting on a upper body day we were lifting and i was went straight to shoulder presses to start and he's like what are you doing like you always have to do that after yeah yeah why would you why are you doing this before we we bench press and i'm just like oh my my focus is is shoulders yeah but then you're you're gonna be so i said i don't care i'm not i'm not trying to make any more gains right now on the chest i'm trying to bring my shoulders up right to match my chest in this situation and the look on his face was just like so confused like that's no that's not what you do and it's just like well yeah you do if that's the focus you know it was like but so to me that was it was so glaring because again i'd assume that somebody at that level who is you know being judged for their physique knows the best way to sculpt it better than the average consumer but that may go oh wow okay how many

9:59Adam Schafer:he wasn't following bad advice he was following traditional programming advice it just wasn't

10:04Sal Di Stefano:hey i want to prioritize and it's not and it's not it's not something that is going to make him obviously he was competing and being judged he's still already the one percent and so he had a great physique but I've told you guys many times I think part of the thing that I had as an advantage going into this even though the big disadvantage was I didn't have a coach I didn't have a team it wasn't really into the sport I didn't know what I was doing for the first time but I understood that I understood diet and nutrition really well I understood programming really well and so at least show over show I saw all these I'd see improvements because I programmed that way It was like, okay.

10:39Sal Di Stefano:And before I'd start, it wasn't like I'd get back to a routine and the only thing that would happen would just be on a diet. It was like, I had a plan. And every show looked, after every show, it looked different. It would be feedback I got from the judges. And so my programming never looked exactly the same as the last. It was, oh, I'm making tweaks now because this is the feedback I'm getting from the judges. And so I had to try and present it.

11:00Adam Schafer:And this is why this kind of, I mean, understanding this is really training like you're a sculptor. Like you're looking at your body like it's a piece of clay and you're developing the areas that you want to focus on, which is a great thing about strength training. You can really change the way that your body looks. And again, going back to delts, delts for women, this is true for men too, but especially for women, when women develop their delts, it gives them the physique that they typically are looking for when it comes to upper body. They typically want this kind of sculpted look to their arms.

11:27Adam Schafer:It comes from delts. They want to have a smaller looking waist that comes from delts. It gives them better looking posture. So it's delts before back, Delts before chest. It's delts before anything on an upper body day. And so you prioritize it in the order of the day.

11:41Sal Di Stefano:Just to touch on that again for the men, I know this is a very female-focused conversation, but this was also very surprising to me because I was so heavily focused on arms for most of my life. I think for both men and women, the delts are what make the arms look better. Those are the lines you're looking for. Somebody who says, I want better arms, build your delts. because the delts create this beautiful separation. Because we all have muscle, right? There's not a single person walking around that doesn't have a bicep, doesn't have a tricep, unless something was removed or lost or whatever, right?

12:15Sal Di Stefano:For the most part, we all have them. If you get lean enough, it'll reveal them. One of the best ways to have great looking arms is to have great developed delts because it separates the bicep and the tricep and it gives it that illusion and that look. And so I highly recommend somebody who wants nice arms, whether you're a female saying, I want toe nice arms, or you're a dude who's saying, I want big, you know, I want big arms. You know what? I got the best, the most big arm compliments when my arms were an inch and a half smaller than what they were at their peak, but it was when my delts were the best and most revealed.

12:52Sal Di Stefano:100%.

12:52Adam Schafer:All right. Now that's not the only thing. So work it out, put it first in your training day. Okay. But that's not the only thing. Here's the second part everybody screws up on. Shift the volume. That's right. Here's what you don't do. Got to take from somewhere. You don't take your normal workout that you've been doing with your total volume and then just add more volume to a body part that you want to train. That's a great way to get no progress. That's a great way to overtrain your body. Your body can only handle so much volume. And volume is how many sets you're doing, reps, and the total amount of weight that you're lifting.

13:25Adam Schafer:You have to shift the volume. Now, people are afraid of doing this because they're like, well, if I take volume away from my back and from my chest and move it towards my shoulders, or if I take volume away from these other areas and move it towards my lower body, I'm going to lose muscle in those areas. Not true. And the data is incredibly clear on this. The amount of training volume required to build a muscle is significantly higher than the amount of volume that's required to maintain. It's way different. you guys. In fact, the data, it's crazy.

13:59Sal Di Stefano:It's so much you could reduce way more than we even normally do.

14:03Adam Schafer:It's like, it's some studies show one fourth the volume. Other studies have showed as little as one ninth the volume. So in other words, take all your training, cut it down to 25 % and you'll keep the muscle that you've already built. And that's the, some of the data, some of the, some other data says you can cut it down even more. I've experienced this myself. Like I can cut it way down and I'm training way less and I don't lose any muscle. So shift the volume. So if you're a woman and you're listening right now and you want to build more glutes and quads and shoulders, will you take volume away from the other areas and move it to these?

14:36Adam Schafer:But don't just add training volume. Don't just add more on top of more because that's how your body gets overwhelmed, doesn't progress.

14:43Sal Di Stefano:Well, yeah. And somebody might be asking, why is that? And it says every bit of this, right? We always talk about how exercise is good for you, but it still is a stress. That's right. And every bit of volume of training that you do, so every set and rep and amount of weight you move, adds stress to that bucket. And once it gets to a point where it's completely filled and you overspill, it becomes counterproductive. The body is now stuck trying to just recover from all this volume and stress. It doesn't allow it to recover adequately and then adapt and build and strengthen. And so you want to make sure that that's balanced out.

15:20Sal Di Stefano:And you would rather be on the lower end of that stress bucket than to risk overfilling it and overspilling because then that's where the results are. And so even like the way we've programmed the upper lower, like you're still getting decent volume on that. You could even go lower if you wanted to based off of what all the studies are saying to your point that it takes – once you've built it, it takes very little to maintain that muscle. and so you're always better off like okay pulling away from some of these other muscle groups that you're like okay i know that that's developed on me i really want to develop this other well then really scale back on that and put the energy and focus on the thing that you yeah when you look at

16:00Adam Schafer:how volume affects muscle growth uh it's it's kind of like a bell curve so you'll increase volume get better gains then there's this really short peak and then you do more and you get less gains so sometimes people like well i added volume i still got more gains you didn't get as many as you could of. You're on this side of the curve. And many people go so far as to they work out, they get sore, they work out, they get sore, they work out, they get sore, no progress. What's going on? Way too much. Your body just can't adapt. Next up, this is an important thing to understand. And it's still a message that I need to communicate more consistently to women, which is this, the key to building muscle is getting stronger.

16:41Adam Schafer:It's the best correlate to building muscle, especially in the first five years of your training. So what does that mean? If you're training your glutes or your quads, or you're focusing on your delts, the compound lifts that work those areas like barbell squats or hip thrusts or overhead presses, get stronger in those exercises. Don't even worry about getting stronger in other exercises. In fact, remember, we're shifting the volume. I don't care how much stronger you get in your barbell row. I don't care how much stronger you get in curls. I don't care how much stronger you get in some of these other exercises.

17:14Adam Schafer:what I would care about if glutes, quads, and shoulders was your focus is how much can you hip thrust? How much can you barbell squat? How much can you overhead press? If you get stronger in those, those areas will build. It's like clockwork. Yeah. And you're mentioning the biggest movers, the big compound lifts in those categories. And so if you really emphasize what's going to get me the strongest for that particular muscle group, and it's usually those compound lifts and you're going to prioritize that. That's what you're going to focus on. I think too, like I can't help but think of like group training classes as well, where, you know, a lot of the emphasis is like the entire body.

17:50And then, you know, people will add into your earlier point, they'll just add in the volume of like, well, I'll just add some like, you know, lateral raises, I'll do something for my shoulders at the end. When in fact, if we shift our focus, we do, you know, those compound lifts, and then we trade out volume, you're gonna have much better results.

18:06Adam Schafer:Think about it this way. What's the heaviest lift you can do for the body parts that you're trying to develop, that's the one you should focus on. So if you're a woman listening right now, I guarantee you, you could hip thrust more than you can for any other glute exercise. You could do all kinds of abduction and glute kickbacks, but the hip thrust is where you'll be lifting the heaviest weight. You can do lateral raises and rear laterals and all, but you're not going to be able to lift as much as you can overhead press. Focus on the heavy lifts, get stronger in those, watch those body parts develop.

18:36Sal Di Stefano:Getting strong beats the pump, the burn, the feel. Yes. And I think that's where the mistake is made. There's this idea that when you do exercises for a body part, and because you feel it more in that area, it's working more of that area or it's a better exercise. This is where I think people make the mistake. This is why glute kickbacks and laterals. Yeah, because they burn. because they burn and they feel it in the spot in the area where somebody might go do a barbell back squat with 185 pounds on their back and be like, I don't really feel much in my butt. But let me tell you, that is putting way more muscle on your butt than your 50 kickbacks are doing all day long.

19:23Sal Di Stefano:And so that's what it is. Getting strong in those core lifts is far better than the burn, than the pump, and feeling it in that muscle. 100%. And so that's how your workout should be prioritized is starting the workout with those big lifts, caring about what did I lift last time I did this? Can I stack on another five or 10 pounds and continuing to progress?

19:45Adam Schafer:You know what's funny about that, Adam? It's so funny because you have a lot of, just to back up what you're saying, you'll have a lot of women that lift weights and then you'll have some women that power lift. You know, consistently speaking, who has better developed glutes? The women that power lift. Of course. And they're not even, they're not trying to feel the muscle. They're trying to just get strong. They could care less about filling a muscle. They're just trying to squat more. And female power lifters tend to have incredibly developed glutes because they're strong. Which brings us to the next point.