#105: Is Lifting Weights Not Your Thing? Too boring? Doesn't work for you? Let's chat...

This is a different kind of episode. I am sharing my frustrations about women who tell me that strength training is 'not their thing'.

Strength training should be everyone's thing. 

There is no substitute. 

Yes, there are other forms of exercise, but none that build muscle & strength and confer the health benefits that weight training does. Plus those muscles are essential for keeping us out of the nursing home. 

In this episode, I address the common statements I hear from midlife women who don't lift. 

• "Weight training is not my thing"
• "I tried it and it doesn't work for me"
• "Weight training is boring"

If any of those statements sound familiar - this is the episode for you. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:19 The Importance of Strength Training
• 2:23 Common Misconceptions About Weight Training
• 6:15 The Science Behind Effective Weight Training
• 8:38 The Importance of Having a Plan
• 9:37 Tracking Your Progress
• 11:56 Proper Exercise Techniques
• 17:12 Consistency is Key
• 18:55 Special Offer for Podcast Listeners
• 20:37 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Transcript

#105: Is Lifting Weights Not Your Thing?

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach. Now, my mission here is really to help women to understand how to work with their perimenopause and postmenopause bodies. And one of the things that I've learned in my training to become a menopause fitness coach and what I've learned in my own experience And the experience of my clients and customers is the importance of strength training.

And today, I guess I'm having a little bit of a rant because I was at the gym yesterday and I was stretching after my aerobics class. So yes, cardio is important as well. , and there were some women [00:01:00] standing around me who are my age, maybe a little bit older, and they were talking about exercise and I recognize them all.

They're avid goers. They're regulars at the gym and have been for years. So clearly, health and fitness is important to them. And their discussion was like, Oh, yeah, weight room. Yeah, it's not fun. It's not for me. Yeah, let lifting weights thing, you know, and every time there are women who have those kinds of conversations, it, it makes me so upset because I feel like they are just missing the whole point.

It is not like, Oh yeah, I don't really like golf, so I'm not going to do golf or. I'd rather play tennis than [00:02:00] play badminton. I mean, it's not, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about something that is so fundamentally different. It's like having the discussion that, Oh, yeah, I don't really like to brush my teeth.

So I'm just not going to do that. Like, okay, yeah, you can decide not to brush your teeth and you can let your Oral hygiene, just go to crap and your teeth start falling out. And I guess, yeah, you can do that, but you're an idiot if you're going to do that, right? I mean, that's how I feel. Sorry. Maybe that's a little bit strong .

Because it is so important. We are not dying at age 50 or even at age 60 like we used to way back in the day, you know, before modern medicine. We may be living into our 90s and we do become frail. [00:03:00] Women do become frail. Our loss of estrogen as we go through perimenopause and into menopause, when estrogen just flatlines, it walks out the door, it causes Fundamental changes in our body, HRT can help with certain things, but honestly, the way that you are going to keep your body in good shape, functional, so that you can live the life that you want to live.

So you can be there taking care of your grandkids so you can travel the world, whatever it is. Or even if you just want to live at home rather than a nursing home, weight training and keeping your muscles strong and keeping your bones, your joints, your tendons, your ligaments, all those things is going to make a huge difference.

Plus they're coming out with more and more research data every month [00:04:00] about the benefits of weight training like stopping Alzheimer's or improving brain function and the aging brain. I mean, exercise in general is excellent for that, but weight training. In particular as well, so I always when I hear these things, I just want to be like, wake up.

 You cannot not choose weight training if you are actually serious about your fitness and health. Okay, guys? Like, you just can't. All right, so that was my rant. That is something that drives me absolutely crazy. And the thing is that a lot of these women feel like they've given it a shot and it hasn't worked for them.

And I want to address that , because I think the thing is that they just, they've tried to wing it. It's like saying, Oh, I tried ballet, you know, and I did it in my room [00:05:00] using some free ballet classes and it didn't work. Any of you who have. Any idea about ballet is it's like, it's a precise art. You do things a certain way and there's a method and they teach it and they have ballet schools and it's very disciplined.

It's kind of the same thing with weight training. There is a science to how you are going to get muscle on your body. And just winging it at this point in our lives is not going to really work very well. It works great for my 16. Okay, he just turned 17, my 17 year old son, whose body is filled with testosterone, right?

And he's His recovery is amazing. He eats like a horse and, and also he's very consistent with his strength training, but oh my God, he's transformed his body in a year. It's a pretty amazing [00:06:00] anyway. , But, you know, we can't just do random stuff anymore. So if you feel like I've tried it, but it just doesn't work for me, well, 

a lot of women think it should be entertaining, and they want to just go into a class and they want to. Switch off their brains and just follow what the teacher tells you. Well, hey, that is what a program is for. Honestly, that is exactly what a program is for. So, if you think about, for example, my programming. Every time you go in for a training session, you open your training session, and it has listed there the six things that you're going to do that session, and some sessions it might be five things, some might be seven, but anyway, it has the five to seven things you're going to do that day.

Okay, you want the instructor up there showing you how to do it. Every single one of those has a little [00:07:00] video showing you where I explain how to do the thing so you can watch that video and do it while the video is rolling if you really need the instructor up there at the same time you want the music stick some earbuds into your ears and play your favorite song list and just follow the program I completely get it that if you don't have the program, it is a totally different thing to walk into the weight room and be like, Oh, what should I do today? Well, maybe I'll do this one. I've heard that I should do a pull and a push and maybe something for my biceps and my triceps. No, you, you have to plan it in advance.

Even. Even I who do this, for a living, I understand your, body and all the muscles and how to combine the exercises so that you're hitting all your muscles. I [00:08:00] always go in with a plan. It would never occur to me not to go in with a plan because that would be so stressful to try to come up with it in the moment, so you go in with the plan and you just execute on the plan. And it's very, in that way, easy, mellow if you have the plan.

So I think that is like the number one thing that I see people go in without a plan. They're just, Oh, I'll do a little bit of this and I'll do a little bit of that and I'll do a little bit of that. And really coupled with this idea of not going in with a plan is that you're not tracking, 

even if you were to go in each time and you do the same exact exercises each time, so you think, I don't need a plan because I know the four exercises that I'm going to do, or I know the 10 exercises I'm going to do, 10 being too much, but anyway, you know, the exercises you're going to do, you still should be tracking [00:09:00] because a lot of this Progress is going to be because you continue to challenge your body over time.

Progressive overload is critical, and tracking is the key to that. It's also a mental thing and by the way, performance is mental. Think about, , all the, I, I don't know if it was decades, but like there was a significant period of time where nobody believed that you could run a four minute mile.

And so nobody ran a four minute mile because it was like ingrained that nobody can do it. Once the first person did it, that started getting broken over and over again. Just goes to show this is between our ears. And the same way you and I, when we go into a training session, If we don't know what we're aiming for and what is possible for us, then we have a little bit of a mental block.

So if you have your tracker, so you [00:10:00] have your program, and you've been tracking your weights and your reps, you look at what you did last time, and you know, you know that I am capable of that, that I did last time. And in fact, because I know that I'm going to get stronger over time. For like the next 10 years that I can do better than that, and that sort of sets them. bar that sets the expectation for yourself when you go to do that set. You're like, Hey, I used five pounds last time and I got eight reps. So today I'm going to try for that ninth rep. 

 If you haven't written it down, then even if you remember what your weight is, you're winging it and you're like, Oh, this feels hard. And then you stop. And , you're not applying the progressive overload. So you need some systematic way of doing this to really get the [00:11:00] results.

And by the way, you need to be doing the exercises correctly. So make sure that you have good instructions on how to do the exercises. It's so depressing when you see somebody come into the weight room. I mean, they've made that huge, huge, huge step into the weight room and then they're doing completely ineffective things.

They. spending their time so much better in the weight room.

She came in there and, and she was all the time in like the warm up area and she had a couple of dumbbells and the mat and then she was doing some body weight exercises and then doing some feel the burn, low weights, high reps kind of thing and I felt like, okay, she's come to the weight room so maybe she does want to build strength and muscle, but the things that [00:12:00] she's doing are a, you know, she's not weight training.

She's doing aerobic with weights. And then the other thing is some of the exercises she was doing, she's clearly trying to, you know, get her muscles stronger because she was doing, for example, tricep kickbacks. Now, tricep kickbacks are Not a very effective, , exercise for your arms. Yes, if you're training at home and you have no other options, then yeah, you're going to do tricep kickbacks, because you don't really have so many options at home.

But at the gym, you have machines, lovely machines. cables and all these kinds of things that will give you so much more effective stimulus for those triceps than doing tricep kickbacks. So I, you know, I watched her and I just thought, , if your goal is to get strong and it looks like that is what you're trying to do because you're doing things like pushups and [00:13:00] whatever, I could tweak what you're doing right now and you would get so much more out of this.

So. Anyway, anyway, sorry.

And by the way, she's not the only woman that I see come in and do that, and the ones that really, really kill me are the ones that are doing the combo exercises, because they think that, hey, if I combine these exercises, it's more efficient because they've seen it online and whatever, and really, if they just Detached the two exercises from each other, they would see so much more progress than what they are seeing there now.

Okay, and then the other things that women complain about is that they don't have time to go to the gym. Really, this muscle thing is so important that, you can find time for the things that you prioritize. You just don't maybe understand how important it is. To to prioritize it because these [00:14:00] same women have time to go to three yoga classes and six, , combat and spinning classes, and they don't have two times a half an hour a week to go into the weight room and and that would already get them so much farther.

You do not need to live in the gym or Be lifting weights, you know, excessive amounts of time to get results from it. You really, really don't if you have a good program and the exercises are picked out correctly for you and you're applying progressive overload. So. There are a lot of ifs but the less amount of time you want to spend in the gym, the better your programming needs to be.

In fact, my two times a week programs are the hardest ones to write because I have to be so careful about optimizing everything I choose for them.

And then there are those that go in and they do it a few [00:15:00] times and they're like, Oh, I'm not really noticing anything. You're not building muscle takes a long, long time, and it's going to take even longer if you are doing sub optimal things while you're in the gym. Okay. So for that reason, I feel like it is such an amazing investment in yourself to get your hands on a real program from somebody who understands what you need to be doing there to make a difference.

, I spent the first year really building muscle before I went into my first calorie deficit to reveal my muscle. It does take time. It comes like little by little by little by little by little. It doesn't come in, you know, a month or two months or even three months. You'll notice you're stronger.

Yes, you will notice you're stronger. Strength will increase if you're doing the right kind of things. Um, but these before [00:16:00] and after pictures that you see in the weight loss groups, they're often people who have been strength training. And then they drop the fat and reveal the muscle. It's not that they built that muscle in 12 weeks.

I mean, honestly, like, let's be real here.

And then finally, you need to be consistent about doing the strength training. It can't be that, Oh, I've been going in the weight room for months. And then when you look at their calendar, they're like, okay, they went once on that day and they did legs. And then three weeks later, they went in and did arms.

And sure, you've been going there for a year, but actually how many sessions have you had? You do need to be consistent. hitting those muscles, preferably twice a week, and that will allow them to be stimulated enough to start to grow. So, anyway, so that's my rant [00:17:00] is that really, guys, if you want to really see results, please get a program.

I'm so frustrated with the women who are like, it doesn't work for me. It's too hard. I, you know, I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'm not going to do it because it is so, so, so, so, so important. And go back a couple of episodes where I was talking about the benefits of. having muscle, the benefits of lifting weight, and start to understand that it's not cardio or weight training.

 You need cardio and weight training. Okay, both of those are important. And the thing that 95, well, I think closer to 99. 9 percent of women is missing is the weight training. They may be doing some cardio classes that use weights. It's a different thing and I have plenty of podcast episodes around that.

[00:18:00] So to end my rant, I am going to challenge you to start strength training consistently and to help you do that, I'm going to offer you a discount on my learn to lift Program,

this is not something I'm going to put on my website or anything like that. It is for you who listened to this podcast. If you want to get started, I will give you 25 percent off the learn to lift programs. When you use the discount code podcast. All right.

Take advantage of it.

I've never done anything like this before, but since I know there are so many of you that listen to the podcast and you're kind of trying to piece it together and maybe you're having some success, maybe you don't, I worry that do you have videos showing you how to do the exercises correctly?

Is your programming [00:19:00] efficient? Have you been able to piece from all the information that I have the most critical things? And that is what I offer in the Learn to Lift program. Plus you get a community of women to join. Plus you get my support in the community. Plus accountability. So, so it is more.

So I'll run this through the end of February only. February 28th at midnight, that shuts off. So get started. And even if you have started, the program is not so easy that it wouldn't be. useful for you if you've been weight training before. Okay. Okay. I hope that I can help at least a few of you start this journey in a way where you're actually getting results and start feeling great in your body and preparing it for the decades ahead.

And with that, I hope to see you [00:20:00] in the program and I wish you happy training.