The Amazing Benefits of Strength Training
Welcome to the one day at a time podcast with your host and the future leader of The Republic Of Wales, Sveldfjer. Now this might be the only podcast in the world where you actually have to reduce the speed instead of increasing it. However, what I wanna get over to you is that the past is gone. The future doesn't exist. So if you wanna make the most of your life, you've gotta make the most of these moments every single day.
Speaker 1:And this podcast is gonna help you live a healthier, more fulfilled life, hopefully, giving you some wisdom to take away every single day. So I'm gonna shut up now so you can get on with listening to the next episode. Guys, guys, sorry. I missed yesterday's voice note. I woke up two days as the the worst sore throat I've ever had, not ill, just sore throat, and then it gradually went over the day and it disappeared.
Speaker 1:I don't know what's going on. I've been on a journey, guys, since since going on holiday a month ago. I've been on an up and down journey. And, actually, when I'm thinking about it, I've not even complained or said arm or whatever, but I've I've accepted it. Like, I've only been I've only been able to train, like, a few times in the last four weeks.
Speaker 1:Like, I definitely feel, like, fluffier. I don't feel as strong or full, but I'm quite surprised at how little actual muscle you do lose if you don't train for just a few weeks. So I think if I started if I didn't train now for another four weeks, I think you'd start seeing a difference. So I think anyone here that's injured or worrying about losing gains and stuff, I think we do worry a bit too much about how much we can lose. If if you know, make sure you eat enough protein and stuff.
Speaker 1:And I know muscle building and muscle retention is about the stimulus we give to it. So you do need to train, but you can retain on a little training. So if I did one or two workouts a week just to retain high protein diet, I probably would have been better off. But that's just some just a lesson. Like, don't worry if you are off training for a bit.
Speaker 1:Just hit your protein. Try and maybe do one workout a week, two workouts, maybe just get some blood flowing into the muscles, get some stimulus going. But, yeah, it's not as bad as you think. So anyone who's trying to get back into things, you pick things up quite fast, get back into training for a week or two with good nutrition, and you feel on top of the world. That's all I'm gonna say.
Speaker 1:And that's my plan. Get on top of the world before the new strength challenge starts. But this voice note, before I go into the benefits of strength workout, backed by research, new research, old research that I wanna cover, I wanna talk about something I read in Epictetus' discourses, so the stoic Epictetus. Now he talks about why the stoics put logic at the head of their curriculum of teaching. Because what he says is he says, before quantity of grain can be measured, we must settle on a standard of measurement.
Speaker 1:If we don't begin by establishing standards of weight and volume, how are we gonna measure or weigh anything? Similarly in the present case if we haven't fully grasped and defined the instrument of which we analyze and understand things how can we hope to understand them with precision? Right. And then he finishes off by saying, the beginning of education is the examination of terms and we know from Xenophon, Socrates routinely began his talks by analyzing terms in order to forestall any uncertainty as their meaning. So really what you're saying here is first of all we must grasp what we're trying to measure and we must have a tool to measure accurately and once we've got that we can actually improve what measuring with precision.
Speaker 1:Now the goal isn't the measurement itself, the goal is just to measure so we can precisely know where we're going and actually we can define the success. So most people define, they measure only success by total scale weight. That's what most people do. So before they start a fitness journey, they basically accept in their mind what I'm gonna under what I'm going to use to measure my results is total weight, and that's it. And that's massively flawed.
Speaker 1:So as Epic Data says they're like, we must first start with the logic, we must start with what we're going to be measuring and then once we go that we can know what success looks like. And when it comes to strength training and general fat loss and strength training combined, total weight is a tool to be used but it's not the end goal. We must have many scales of measurement when it comes to strength training and results. Strength, how you feel right? Strength and how you feel, muscular development, muscular endurance, energy levels, confidence, right?
Speaker 1:The feeling you're getting somewhere with your training technique, how the exercises feel, mind body connection, do you feel more in tune with your body? There's a lot of these ones and we'll define them but the purpose of the strength challenge we're doing is to have clearly defined measurements and then clearly defined path to improving them and the end result isn't, you know, 5% strength gain. It's just the the the what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be focusing on getting stronger. So we're gonna do this by measuring a few important things for example total load. How many so if I did 10 reps of 10 kilograms that's a hundred kilograms of load so the easiest way to look at this thing is to look at total load total volume each workout and then the next time we do the same workout we want to increase the total load so with progressive overload so as we can do this via increasing the the set.
Speaker 1:So if you did three sets so if you did one set, 10 kilos for 10 reps, that's hundred kilo of load per set. You did three sets, that's 300 kilo of load. Okay so if you did squats 300 kilo of load. The next workout you might want to do four sets which gives you 400 kilos of load or you want to do two extra reps which is going to be just 20 kilos extra of load or we can look at time under tension the amount of time of the muscle is actually under the tension of that weight. You know, you might have 300 kilos of load under tension total for fifteen seconds per set.
Speaker 1:Right? Which is forty five seconds of tension of 300 kilos. So maybe you wanna increase out to sixty seconds. So we add five seconds of time and attention to each rep or each set, Does that make sense? So we want to progressively overload slowly increase total volume via certain metrics.
Speaker 1:We're all going to learn this, we're going to go to basics and once you understand this, you understand training much better because when we go into training, most of us like with track and nutrition, that's when we get the biggest results. Most of us don't track our training. Right? We just go on to do a session, how we feel, we do our best with how we feel, and that's fine. Okay?
Speaker 1:Like a lot of people get away with getting results by going week in, week out. They do get stronger because there is adaptation when you do lift weight, but it's not optimal. But once you follow a plan and you start tracking the reps, the sets, the weight, how you felt, and you slowly progress the overload in in a structured manner, which is exactly what we're gonna be doing on the strength challenge, you will see results skyrocket. And actually, it becomes more motivational. Like, you start going to the gym with purpose instead of going, oh, shit.
Speaker 1:Just going through the movements. You go, I'm gonna try and beat my total load, total volume or whatever the word you wanna use from the last session. And by doing that, when you do repeat a workout, it's not boring because you've got a goal for that workout instead of just doing the same thing. That's why people get bored of strength training. They don't go in with a goal of increasing total load.
Speaker 1:They go in with just like, well, we're doing the same workout again. Well, can't be right. That's boring as shit. And actually, no, it's not shit. No, it's not boring because it's getting you closer to your goal.
Speaker 1:Might be you know, might get boring, but is it boring to get close to our goal? I don't know. Follow athletes. Follow successful entrepreneurs. They do things the same things day in, day out.
Speaker 1:But do they do they throw away the end result or the goal or the person they wanna be just because something's boring, but it gives them the results? Of course, they don't. Pros and cons, everything. Nose went down. There's pros and cons to everything.
Speaker 1:So let me just like go through the 10 points of strength training. Sorry. Can hear this. Did it did it did it in the background. Let me get it up for you now.
Speaker 1:And I think that you can learn from this. These are recent studies so why you should do strength training. Okay so it lowers your body fat okay so a 02/2009 study found that the average woman who strength trains two to three times a week for two months will gain nearly two pounds of muscle and lose 3.5 pounds of fat. Okay. Women typically typically don't develop big muscles from strength training because with men they have way less testosterone.
Speaker 1:Testosterone causes muscle growth and, hypertrophy, but it doesn't make you bulky. Okay? And obviously considering this, you've gotta be in the deficit, to lose fat. So on the deficit, they were still gaining muscle and losing fat. Okay?
Speaker 1:On the average woman. So that's important. Second thing it increases or improves your mood and increases confidence. Strength training and exercise in general right, decreases depression because of the act of exercise produces mood improving neuro transmitters such as endorphins so intense excitement and happiness, dopamine for pleasure, norepinephrine for alertness, serotonin for mood and satisfaction and one study found that people who did three strength workouts a week reported an eighteen percent drop in depression after ten weeks. It decreases the stress hormone cortisol as well, and has potentially relieving relieves the feelings of anxiety and agitation.
Speaker 1:Now look. Does this mean that someone who's severely depressed starts doing stress work is definitely gonna drop to lower than depression? No. It doesn't. This is more so like low to moderate depression.
Speaker 1:So this I'm not claiming that this is going to help people with severe depression. They will need special specialised treatment just as a note. Most of us who feel we go through periods of depression, I'm sure many of us have been through similar periods. We know right and I think it's New Zealand now Canada maybe Australia. The first prescription the doctors now give to people with mild depression is exercise.
Speaker 1:Not pills, not you know what they call antidepressants okay, it's exercise. It's walking in nature, it's training, it's doing things good for the body and for the mind. So bear that in mind. If you're not doing these things and you're feeling low it might be a simple fix. Getting the exercise in.
Speaker 1:And I know a lot of people say, look, when you're really, really depressed, the last thing you wanna leave house, I get that. That's why I'm saying for those people, it's separate advice that I can't give, but I'm saying you need to go and get that advice one to one. For people moderately mild depressed it does help. So doing strength training, maintain your muscle. So resistance training has been proven actually to optimise fat loss and muscle maintenance when you lose weight.
Speaker 1:This is very important if you want to keep your fitness levels up physical activity overall function strength feeling good and the research showed that between the ages of 30 and 70 women loses on average twenty two percent of their total muscle a lot. Okay. What's more upset and all is that muscle lost is the void lost is usually filled with fat. Okay. One pound of fat takes up about 18% more space than one pound of muscle.
Speaker 1:So muscle is denser. So thus so even if the number on the scale goes down your measurements might go up. Okay strength training lowers the risk of injury. One study including you know including seven seven thirty eight athletes from strength training programs reduced the risk of injury by thirty three percent. It was found to lower the risk of injury in a dose dependent manner meaning every ten percent increase in strength training volume, there was a four percent reduced risk of injury.
Speaker 1:Again, we're gonna be doing increasing our strength training volume. So every time we increase that, we're gonna reduce the risk of injury by four percent, which is awesome. I might convince you, yeah, guys, you need to start doing strength training. Hopefully. Strength training helps you develop better body mechanics.
Speaker 1:So a 2017 study published by AGEN Clinical and Experimental Research concluded that doing at least one resistance training session per week performed alone or in a program with multiple different types of workouts produced up to 37% increase in muscle strength a 7.5% increase in muscle mass and 58% increase in functional capacity. Okay, in frail and elderly adults. So strength training benefits, balance, coordination, posture. Okay? And the important thing about this is to understand the reason this happens is if you think about it, if you sit down all day working on the computer and you go to bed, you watch TV.
Speaker 1:Okay? You're not be you're not being how humans active in nature. That's where we get energy in nature outside. We feel more active in tune, but you're using more of your muscles. You're using that mind muscle connection.
Speaker 1:Your brain sends signals to your muscles to move things. And if you're not sending any signals to move things and trying to improve them, well, it's not gonna improve anything. You're gonna go backwards if anything. So by the fact that we can get our own mind to train our full body, so think about training every muscle in your body, you know, you're sending those signals to the muscles. You're getting them to be alive again.
Speaker 1:And there's a benefit to that, of course, and you feel more balanced in tune, posture, strength of these muscles improve. You just feel stronger as a you're more like a it sounds like a warrior. Do you mean you're more, like, strong all around as opposed to just letting slowly, you're only using a few muscles a day, and then your body doesn't even need the use of muscles either because you're hardly moving them. Does that make sense? That's why there's a study.
Speaker 1:I haven't put in this one, but there's a study on older people with dementia and Alzheimer's, and it's shown to decrease Alzheimer's dementia and even some people reversed it. But I'll get that back up and explain it. I think that's one of the reasons in mind muscle connection. Strength training helps keep the weight off for good. A 2017 study from the journal of obesity found that compared with dieters who didn't exercise and those who only did aerobic exercise like running, dieters who did strength training exercises four times a week for eighteen months lost the most fat which is about 18 pounds compared to 10 pounds for non exercises and 16 pounds for aerobic exercises.
Speaker 1:We gotta remember this as well. The people doing only aerobic, whilst they would have lost 16 pounds and only two pounds less than people doing strength training, they likely would have lost a bit of muscle as well. And the ones done, you know, losing 18 pounds with a strength exercise would have maybe increased muscle mass in eighteen months, maybe a few pounds, or maintained it so actually there's more than two pounds of fat loss happening there. Strength training protects your bone health and muscle mass. According to Harvard Health Publishing at around age 30 we start losing as much as three to 5% of lean muscle mass per decade due to aging.
Speaker 1:A 2017 study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research found that just thirty minutes twice a week of high intensity resistance and impact training was shown to improve functional performance as well as bone density structure and strength in post menopausal women with low bone mass and had no negative effects. In a 2014 journal of family and community medicine study just twelve weeks of strength training with squats increased lower spine and femur thigh bone mineral density by 2.94.9% respectively. And strength training improves your mental health and resilience strength training provides an opportunity to overcome obstacles in a controlled predictable environment increasing mental resilience according to findings from Harvard Medical School. A UK study involving 150,000 participants found that subjects who were classified as having low combined cardiorespiratory fitness and muscle strength had ninety eight percent higher odds of experiencing depression and sixty percent higher odd of experiencing anxiety. It's quite a lot.
Speaker 1:And a 2014 review published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology showed that even just using low to moderately heavy weights lighter than 70% of what you can live for one rep max has anti anxiety effects. Okay and that's a lot of benefits of strength training, a lot. And the beauty is we're gonna be going through the program together for five weeks. We're gonna be progressively overloading every week. We're gonna get stronger.
Speaker 1:We're gonna build muscle mass. And if you wanna lose fat if you're gonna maintain or focus on muscle building and just weight gain in general, great. Those goals, we can, you know, you can you can follow on this plan. And the important thing is we're gonna learn together. So every week we're gonna learn from the expert David Nolan and doctor Paul Rimmer about the programming why we do things.
Speaker 1:So at the end of the trial, it's not just you're gonna follow a workout and be blind, you're gonna understand exactly why we're doing what we're doing, exactly why we're doing this in the next week. We're gonna gradually build the knowledge. If you've been a turtle member or done our challenges, you know we love the education side. We're like a school. We don't want you to just walk away with a bit of fat loss, bit of strength.
Speaker 1:I wanted you to walk away with decent amount of fat loss, big increases in strength and also even more important improvement in your mental resilience. But on top of that, understanding of this entire programming. So in the future, you don't need to rely on people to give you a program. But when you do follow programmes, you can see why things work and why don't. And when you go into training session then with more understanding of what the metrics are to improve, they become less boring.
Speaker 1:And you're like, again, you're your own data scientist. You're a scientist of your own body, your own mind, your nutrition, and you see this all as a way to improve. You're in control. Okay. You're in control.
Speaker 1:So that's it. Hopefully, that was helpful. Hopefully, that's got you revved up to do some strength training starting November. I'm pumped up. I've been out of action doing my illness and stuff.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to get into it. I'm gonna be following the program. I'll be doing the live workouts every evening. Doctor p will be doing them every morning. Hopefully, Ryan will be joining me every evening when he can.
Speaker 1:Obviously, the baby's on the way, so sometimes you won't. Sometimes you will. But when Ryan does join, he will be coaching me, giving you amazing pointers here and there as well. So, yeah, happy days. If you have any questions about this, let me know.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, good. Focus on today. But, yeah, ultimately, what are gonna do today? What's your plan today? You training?
Speaker 1:Going for a walk? Any steps in? Track any macros? What is it? Get it done.
Speaker 1:Write it down. Get it done. And I'll speak to you all tomorrow with a bit of a shorter version, don't worry. And that is it for today's episode, so hopefully you took something away from it, if you didn't here's what you need to take away, stop wasting time on social media, stop wasting time gossiping, You've only got a day to live. Today's the only day you ever have.
Speaker 1:So if there's anything to take away from this podcast, even if you can't understand the word I say, even if you didn't resonate with the wisdom I try to deliver, this is a reminder of you daily to live one day at a time. Give your moments meaning today and don't be fooled by thinking you've got unlimited amount of days but if you can make the most of today I'm telling you you'll have a fulfilled life so enjoy your day and hopefully I'll see you back tomorrow. Do daily to live one day at a time. Give your moments meaning today and don't be fooled by thinking you've got unlimited amount of days. But if you can make the most of today, I'm telling you, you'll have a fulfilled life.
Speaker 1:So enjoy your day and hopefully I'll see you back tomorrow.
