#172: 5 Tips to Finally Get Consistent with Lifting

You know you should be strength training. You've maybe even started. And then life happens, and three weeks later, you realize you haven't picked up a dumbbell since.

I get it. 

This came up again in my group program just last week, and it's the thing I hear more than almost anything else.

So in this episode, I'm sharing the exact tips I gave one of my own members who was struggling to make it happen week after week. The same things that allow me to never miss a session, even with three kids and a calendar that made my head spin.

so if you've been struggling with this stop-start phenomenon or haven't even been able to get started, this is the episode for you.

Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned:

Lift-Off! My free 7-day strength challenge >

Lift-IT! Your 10-Day Strength Training Kickstart >

Transcript

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Welcome to 40 Plus Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sedderloff Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to start strength training so they can build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. And actually, kind of funny, I sometimes also inspire men to get started. As I recently discovered, as I had a first conversation in about three years with my ex-boyfriend. So from yeah, we broke up three years ago. And he has started strength training, which really actually blew me away because he's somebody I never thought would actually get started. And now he started strength training. And it turns out he's also a fan of the podcast and has been recommending it to other people. Well, I should say to women in particular that he has met in the past three years in his single life. So just a reminder that if you are enjoying the podcast, then please recommend it to a woman that you care about in your life. This episode actually comes out the day before Liftoff Kicks Off. And that is really exciting because this topic is so relevant for people who are joining Liftoff. So today I am going to share some tips for how to get consistent with strength training. This came up once again in my group program. Someone in the group program is having trouble getting consistent with the strength training, like actually picking herself up by the bootstraps and making sure that it happens every week. I know life gets super overwhelming. And so I'm going to share some of the tips that I shared with her to hopefully help you to finally do it, to finally get started. And of course, if you haven't gotten started yet, then join Liftoff. It is my free challenge that I run two, three times a year. So this is your opportunity right now to hop in. And even if you're listening to this after our kickoff date, you will have time to get it done. So it's a seven-day challenge, but I give you access to the challenge materials for 14 days. All right. So my first tip is to really make it easy for yourself. Okay. That may seem really obvious, but if you start saying, oh, I gotta drive to the gym, I gotta go into the weight room, which is super intimidating, I need to be facing all these machines and everything that I've never been in before. That may be an insurmountable hurdle. So what I want you to do is to get started at home. And all you really need is enough space to lay down one yoga mat and a couple pairs of dumbbells. Okay. I started with just some dumbbells that honestly had been laying around my house. If you're watching this in video, there are some of them right there. Some green dumbbells that I had laying around my house, gathering dust. A friend of mine had given them to me years before and I just hadn't thrown them out. So I started with those. But I'm not gonna lie, if you have a proper program, those are not going to be enough for long. In fact, usually by the end of eight weeks, you will notice that you are strong enough that you need to start buying heavier dumbbells. And this is also a tip for you who might already be doing something with weights at home and you've been using the same dumbbells for months or even years. Something is wrong with your program because you're not getting stronger. If you're getting stronger, you should be buying more dumbbells over time. But make it easy for yourself. Start at home. Yoga mats worth of space, set of dumbbells, and you're ready to go. That way you can just sneak over to that spot. And from in my case, it was in the basement, in my basement bedroom. So I would just be like, kids, mom's gonna go work out now. And I would run downstairs and I would do my workout. And it was so much easier than having to hop in the car, all the things. Okay, make it easy for yourself. The second thing is don't go crazy with this. Twice a week is more than enough. Okay. It's not more than enough. Twice a week is enough. So start with a two times a week program. I know when you get started with something, you may have this feeling like, oh, I want to go all out. I am gonna dive into this thing. I'm gonna be seven days a week doing it. Actually, in strength training, I do not recommend that, especially if you are over age 40, if you're in perimenopause, menopause, and especially if you're postmenopause, because your body has weakened as estrogen has left the building. And not only your muscles, we're talking about bones, but also tendons and ligaments. So if you go all gung ho, then your tendons and ligaments are not going to be able to keep up. So twice a week is really, really an excellent starting place. And the beauty of twice a week also is that it is way more manageable for you to be able to achieve that consistency if you're doing it twice a week than if you're demanding that every day you do something or five days a week you do something. Twice a week, start with that. And that's not to say that you can't expand from that twice a week over time. I have women who start out with twice a week and then they've gotten it under control. They're like, huh, I've been able to fit this into my routine very nicely. And then they contact me and they're like, okay, I want to shift to doing three days a week. And they do that. Now, what the difference is between twice a week and three days a week is that you're able to do some more like isolation exercises. All right. So if you're working twice a week, you're doing a full body session on both of those times. So if you imagine that you're gonna do a 30 to 60 minute session and you've got to hit all of your major muscle groups, then you are not going to be doing a lot of, you know, one muscle focused exercises. But as soon as you add a third training session to your week, then you have more bandwidth in your training schedule to do a little bit more focused work. For example, doing a little bit more work to focus on your shoulders or your arms. Because I know with women, we want to look nice in tank tops. We want to get rid of those bat wings, right? We want that when we wave, our arms don't wave. So for women, you know, once you move to the three days a week, then you're able to do a little bit more focus on your triceps, for example. Men, if they're training more, they probably are gonna be training their chest, right? Their pecs. That's that's their favorite muscle to train. Anyway, so that's really the difference. You would still be hitting each of your major muscle groups twice a week. So that doesn't change between working twice, three times, or four times a week, but that you're able to add more sets of hitting different muscle groups. And that will increase the speed of your progress. But honestly, when you're starting as a person who's doing no strength training, and I don't count cardio with weights as strength training, when you're starting from no strength training and you go to twice a week strength training, that is like a huge bang for your buck, that jump. Then when you move to three or four times a week, it's not going to be as big a bang for your buck. So you can do that eventually. I'm not saying don't do that, and that could be worth doing. And if you enjoy strength training, but you know, start with the two days a week and start getting the results there. Okay, and please, please get yourself a program. That is the thing that is going to make this easy. Even I, if I don't have a program when I go into my session, I'm scattered all over the place, right? One of the wonderful things about group fitness classes is you just show up and then there's an instructor there in front of you, and you just follow what they tell you to do, and you can just like, you know, relax your mind. You don't have to think about that. You just follow what they're telling you to do. Well, it's the same thing when you have a proper program, somebody else is telling you what to do, and then you just do it. All right. So the program is going to be essential. Plus, unless you know all about biomechanics and what exercises hit what muscles, all those things, then you're not going to be hitting all your muscle groups if you're coming up with your own programming or just going in there and doing a little bit of something. Okay. I see it all the time. Women who are doing redundant exercises, you know what that means? It's when you've just done an exercise to train a particular muscle in a particular way, in other words, with this a particular movement pattern, and then you do another exercise, which is essentially the same thing, except for you, it's a little bit different. So if you don't understand that actually those two things are doing the same thing, then you don't realize that this doesn't really help you at all. So get yourself a good program and get those into your calendar. So if you are somebody with kids or a job, you probably have a calendar you put your hair appointments in, your parent-teacher meetings, people's birthdays, whatever, where you organize your life. And if you've been doing group fitness classes, for sure you've had to put them in your calendar because otherwise you're not going to make it to them. Treat it the same way. Find those times in your week where you are going to do it. Don't just think, oh, it's Monday. I'll just do them at some point this week. No. Pull out the calendar and calendar them in. I remember when I first got started, I still had three kids at home and their nine hobbies. And oh my God, the calendar was crazy. I would sit down on Sunday and I'd be like, okay, I need to be driving this kid here and this kid there, because I was divorced, right? So I'm handling everything, three kids and all their hobby driving. And then I would be like, hey, okay, I'm gonna ask somebody if we can carpal so that I can fit in doing my workout session on this day and that day. And that is what it took. If I had just woken up Monday and thought, oh yeah, it'll happen at some point, it would never, ever, ever had happened. So, same way as you fit in all those other things that you have to do, your hair appointments, your group fitness classes, you know, you have to calendar them in to calendar in when you're gonna be doing your strength training workouts. One of my group members said she calendars in her first workout. So she knows it's either on a Thursday or a Friday. And then depending on when that first one is, then the second one is two days later because she has the recovery day in between. And that's how she does it. She just knows she has to calendar in that first one, and then the second one absolutely has to happen two days later. So that is the kind of discipline that we need to make this happen. And then habit stacking. This can be an amazing tool. So if you haven't heard of habit stacking, it is where you already have one thing that you do regularly, and then you add another thing either before or after it, hence the stacking. So for example, if you want to do balance exercises, you know you brush your teeth every night. So maybe you build the habit of brushing your teeth standing on one foot. That's habit stacking, the balance exercise with your toothbrushing. So, with strength training, if you're already going to your gym to go to a group fitness class, maybe yoga, Pilates, whatever, then habit stack the strength training. Do it before your class. Show up half an hour to an hour earlier and do your strength training workout. This is something that the cardio queen at my gym does really, really well and it has kept her consistent. She's coming anyway. So before that, she does a quick strength training session and then she goes into her beloved cardio class. And that works really, really well. Instead of having to go a separate time just for strength training, she has habit stacked it with her group fitness class. And at home, I loved it. One of my 1-1 clients, she was making it part of her morning routine. So she was doing her strength training workout in her kitchen. And between sets, she would do some little task in the kitchen. She'd set up the coffee machine, she'd water the plants, feed the dog, right? So she made it a part of her morning habit. Plus, it made it much less boring for her to wait those two minutes between sets because she could do something useful with that time. And another client of mine, she started working out in this office room that they didn't use very much. And she started organizing the books on the bookshelf. I mean, that's not habit stacking, but that at least makes the time go much more quickly between sets. And I want to say that really a consistency is key. That is what is going to get you the results in the end. Twice a week, strength training, that will take you so, so far. So build that consistency and make it consistent, even on the days where it needs to be imperfect action. So if you don't have so much time, you can shorten your training session. Just do your key few exercises, the compound lifts that you have in your program. That way you can still train, but it won't take up as much time if you're really, really, really busy that week. Or if you're really tired, then give yourself like the goal of I will do one set of each of my exercises, or one set of three of my exercises, and then stop after that. But a lot of times what you'll notice is that once you get going, you keep going. And then there are the days where once you get going, you realize I really am pretty exhausted. So after these three sets, I am gonna stop. But at least you're building the consistency. And then the other thing I will say that don't think about like, okay, I can't get started now because during the next 10 weeks, I actually have a vacation week. And oh, that's gonna mess it all up. So I better wait until I have 10 weeks of uninterrupted time. Like, come on, come on, ladies. When is that ever gonna happen? 10 weeks where you're not gonna get sick or go on a trip or you know, have a business trip or whatever. Just get started now. And if you have a week or two weeks of vacation coming up where you can't train, so what? Okay, build the habit in the other eight weeks and then keep going because that is life. It is never gonna be that you can absolutely do something every week, you know, for the rest of your life. No, that's part of building the consistency, is that you can take that two-week vacation, go on that business trip, be sick, and then get back into it when you're back. All right, so that's what I had as far as tips go. If you have some other things that have helped you to build consistency, please let me know. I would love to hear in the comments, or if you're listening to this in audio, you can actually go into the show notes and send me a message. I would love to hear what you have to say. And with that, I leave you until next week, reminding you that if you need help getting started, then join my free challenge liftoff, which kicks off June 17th. Or if you're listening to this later, then I always have Lift It, which is my Kickstarter that is available anytime. And with that, I leave you till next week and wish you happy training.