Let’s look at the strength training that we engage in and let’s embrace it. Let’s treat it with a degree of enjoyment. It’s about process rather than outcome.

And it’s so, so true. Strength changes everything, but it doesn’t change everything until enough time passes with that consistency. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios.

My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. We are here to wish you a happy new year. This is 2026, and we hope that you had a wonderful holiday season. And we are here to kick off 2026 with you.

Super excited to dive into a brand new year. It’s a fresh start. And we thought we would kick off this year with an episode all about some challenges that we have for you. Today’s episode has five reframe challenges for you. on how to think about your health this year. Sometimes the way we think about something really can influence our motivation to take action on it, how we feel about it, how we feel about ourself.

In the new year, many people set resolutions related to their health and related to exercise. And sometimes the resolutions that we set can inadvertently set us up for failure. And so we’re going to discuss some reframes, some paradigm shifts for you and challenge you to think a little bit differently this year when it comes to your goals. and hopefully this will enable you to live your healthiest 2026. So, Dr. Fisher, welcome to a new year, first of all. Happy New Year to you.

And to you, Happy New Year, Amy.

Yes.

Okay, so we are going to challenge the listeners today with five paradigm shifts. So let’s dive into the first one and discuss each one.

Yeah, absolutely. So I love this idea. I love the idea of kind of you know, deliberate thoughts and kind of focusing on kind of goals for the year and plans for the year. Um, our first reframe is to think about process versus outcome. So we often, I think we talked about this to some extent last year and I’m kind of bringing it back a little bit with a little bit more focus on this. Um, but it’s the idea that the goals can be about, about doing the task themselves, not the outcome of the task.

Before we just started this podcast, I mentioned a colleague of mine who said he tried mindfulness but struggled with it. So he couldn’t do it anymore. And I sort of said, I think that the point of doing mindfulness activities is to do the activity, not to feel like you’ve completed the task of mindfulness. So it’s about process. And if we think about that in terms of maybe some goals, maybe our goals are achieving a certain number of workouts in the year. Um, you know, if you, if you complete 78 workouts per year, that’s one and a half workouts per week.

So set a longer term goal of, of that process rather than, you know, I want to lose 10 pounds because if, if we just. If somebody sets a goal of losing 10 pounds, they’ll try and achieve it as quickly as possible. And once they’ve met that goal, you know, do they move on to the next one or do they just go back to their previous eating or exercise habits and put the weight back on? So it’s about process rather than goal.

Yes. I think this is so powerful because if we can change our daily habits and the process of how we look at our health, that will set us up for long -term success, not just hitting one bullet point or one target on one spreadsheet. People who win are those who repeat the same thing over and over as a habit. And so, yes, that might look like this year challenging yourself to complete 78 workouts or just stay consistent being your goal versus add a certain amount of strength or a certain amount of weight, right? It is developing habits. So challenge number one, process versus outcome.

Excellent.

I think we can also add to this a little bit because we can, we can, you know, be cognitively aware that A year’s worth of training will always be six months of training, or six months of training will always be a month’s worth of training. And even if our strength, our physical performance on a task might begin to provide diminishing returns or even plateau if it’s a year long. The health benefits that we’re seeing, or more importantly, that we’re maybe not seeing under the surface, our blood pressure, our cognitive health, our cardiac health, and so forth, all the things that we’ve talked about previously, bone mineral density, they’re continuing to improve. So maintaining that regularity of strength training over the course of a year, I think is key.

Absolutely.

I mean, it’s so, so true. Strength changes everything, but it doesn’t change everything until enough time passes with that consistency. Really, really powerful reminder. I love it.

All right.

What does that mean? paradigm shift challenge?

Yeah, so our second paradigm shift is exercise as enjoyment versus punishment. I think one of the worst things that we’ve ever seen is the idea that exercise or physical exertion should be punishment. It’s absolutely not. It’s a reward. It’s something that we should be grateful for, that we can be grateful to engage in. I always say that if you spend any time around older adults or somebody with an injury, they’re jealous almost of the ability to engage in tasks, you know, to go for a hike or to go for a long walk or a run or a cycle or to lift weights and to feel strong or to get up off the floor.

All those things that maybe sometimes we take for granted. So let’s look at the strength training that we engage in or any other exercise that we do and let’s embrace it, let’s treat it with a degree of enjoyment rather than punishment. It’s not punishment, it’s a reward for our health and our ability to perform that task.

Yes, I think this one is so powerful because to me, if I’m thinking of something as a reward, as a pleasurable activity or as something that it’s like self -care, I’m going to want to keep that appointment. Kind of like going to get a massage or getting my nails done or something like that. that would fall under that self -care category or something I enjoy, if I can really learn how to enjoy exercise and whether that enjoyment comes from finding a place where you love staff that you work with and the coaching team there, or it comes from just your mental shift, or it comes from believing in the benefit and the magic of every single workout, understanding myokines and what happens every second that you work out and that connection. Whatever your motivation comes from or however you can tap into that, exercises and enjoyment and self -care activity can really benefit you in terms of sticking with something. You’re going to stick with what you like.

Right.

And we all have the feeling that we get after a workout, the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of achievement, the feeling of how worthwhile it was. So going into the workout, knowing that we will feel that going into the workout, embracing everything that we’re going to experience, I think is so important.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I know we’ll touch on that concept a little bit more too, later on.

All right, what’s our third one? So our third one, it seems quite obvious to me, but maybe that’s from my background. It’s to reframe our thinking of fat loss versus weight loss. So throughout most of my life, we’ve talked about reducing fat intake with a view to maintaining weight or managing weight or losing weight and so forth. So it’s always been one kind of dietary component, but with a view to weight management. And actually, we now know that the fat intake is kind of not the whole picture.

And when we think about that in context, our weight is not the whole picture. Our weight is a number of factors. It’s our bone density, it’s our muscle mass, it’s our body fat, it’s our organs and so forth. So to think about, I want to lose weight, I want to lose five pounds, I want to lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, whatever it might be. That’s not the whole picture. And in fact, it can even be negative if we’re losing bone mineral density or if we’re losing muscle mass.

So we’ve talked previously about things like GALP -1, receptor agonist medication, where people can kind of go through rapid weight loss or if somebody goes through an extreme calorie reduction, then they might experience rapid weight loss. But if we go back a year in the podcast to Wayne Westcott, and since then we’ve talked about the concept that a lot of time, that rapid weight loss is 50 % of the weight that’s lost is actually muscle. So it’s about reframing weight loss as fat loss. We’re not interested in losing weight.

We might be interested in losing fat. Yes. And if you can adopt that mindset, you know, the way we lose fat is to maintain muscle mass. So part of getting a better body composition is strength training. That will be your key to get you there. But like Dr. Fisher said, listen to his words, what he’s saying.

There is a phenomenon called yo -yo dieting. If you’ve never heard about it, basically what it is is where people calorie restrict and they’re losing weight, including muscle mass. And what happens is once they stop that diet and go back to eating normally, like we were just talking about, because we’ve lost muscle mass, our metabolism is slowed down. And so we end up regaining all of the weight and more. We don’t want you to do that this year. We want you to become a healthier individual, which includes a healthy body composition.

Your fat mass is in a good range, and your skeletal muscle mass is in a good range.

And that’s why strength training is an important part of fat loss this year. Yeah, and when you talk about yo -yo dieting, you’re exactly right with this, that people lose weight, and then they maybe return to old habits, and then they put the weight back on. But one of the big problems is, as you said, the weight that they lose might be muscle, but the weight that they regain is almost exclusively fat. So after a year of dieting and regaining weight their net fat mass has actually increased and their muscle mass has actually decreased. And that’s the opposite for what we want to see for health, for quality of life, for longevity.

So we want to see that strength go up and that muscle mass go up and that fat mass come down. As you say, strength training is such a big component of one, retaining, but two, adding muscle mass, which is you know, metabolically so beneficial in losing that body fat that we might want to lose. We can also think about this if we start to reframe it. There’s so many tools now that are available to us with regards to measuring more than just our weight. So, you know, bioelectrical impedance analysis, where you stand on scales or you stand on scales and you hold a handle, is a relatively simple way to measure our body composition. And they’re not the most accurate as far as validity.

As far as comparing to say a bod pod or a DEXA scan or so forth, but they are pretty reliable as far as day to day variation.

So if you’re really interested in, in looking at your health from that perspective, a tool like that can be, can be a worthwhile investment. Yeah. This, this idea said one, one other way, maybe this will resonate with you too. As a listener is, you know, if weight loss has always been your goal year after year at the new year. Instead of this year thinking about how I can make myself smaller, think about how I, how can I rebuild myself from the inside out?

I like that image because it’s, I’m creating a healthier individual from the inside out this year.

I hope that helps.

Yeah. I love that image because it talks about everything that we can’t see as well as then everything that we can.

I know.

Yeah. So, okay. Perfect.

So, so far we’ve done process versus process.

Okay.

Exercise is enjoyment versus punishment and fat loss versus weight loss.

Those are our three so far. All right. What’s number four, Dr. Fisher? Okay. Well, so the before it is really the embodiment of what the exercise coach is all about. It’s about quality versus quantity.

So we know that the more is not always better. But better can always mean more. So, you know, we talk about strength training for 20 minutes rather than for two hours. We talk about hard cardio for, you know, two to five minutes or concentrated cardio, I should say, for two to five minutes. But, you know, not 20 or 30 or 40 minutes and so forth.

So it’s about the quality of what we do. And that can be in everything that we do, not just in exercise. So it’s about reframing what we do. to provide quality over quantity. Yeah. I love the idea of working smarter, not harder, right?

If we are going to engage in something, why would we choose something that takes so much more time when we can get the same result, if not better results, in less time? I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this. before but I have this distinct memory when I was maybe in my younger 20s of sitting in a parking lot in a car with my husband crying because I was frustrated that I had gained weight recently and I didn’t know how to strength train and I didn’t know about the power of strength training for 20 minutes and what that could mean for me. I thought in order to lose weight or change my body I would have to make exercise a part -time job build a bunch of expertise around it, and make that all of my free time. And I wasn’t willing to do that, but then I felt stuck because I didn’t, I believe that

was the only way.

And so that’s why I was crying, right?

I was frustrated.

And not until I learned and experienced firsthand about the power of quality exercise over quantity and saw the changes that happened, that I, you know, is when my mind shifted and I was so relieved to realize like I could achieve this without the sacrifice that I thought it took.

And so if you’re like that or if you’ve resonated with anything like that before, I hope you’re encouraged that you can get much better results in far less time. Wonderful.

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely. So. All right. So that’s number four, quality versus quantity.

What is our last one? Okay, so our last one is active versus passive exercise. And when I say that, I don’t mean passive as in somebody else is going to move our limbs for us. I mean, active as far as being present or being mindful, being tuned into our performance, being engaged in what we’re doing rather than being passive over it. And being passive might be doing something but with a distraction, something that kind of takes the taste away of the exercise. So we talked about treating exercise with enjoyment rather than as punishment, and this very much connects with that, that we’re not putting exercise as the elephant in the room that we’re trying to ignore.

We’re engaging with it mindfully, knowingly, consciously. Yeah, if you can stay present in what you’re doing, You know, we’ve talked in the past, we have an episode in season one, muscle burn is your friend. I think there’s a subtle tendency in our brain to resist hard work.

But if we can go into a session knowing this is going to be hard work, but this hard work is good for us. there’s power in that. It helps you stay present in the session and maybe work harder versus resisting working. And, you know, working to your maximum gives you the maximum results, right? And so I love this one. Mentally staying present also kind of makes the time go faster in my mind.

Don’t you think? Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is something that’s made so much easier with supervised exercise because a coach is there by your side. They’re talking you through contracting certain muscles. They’re talking you through how things feel and the movements that you’re making. There’s an entire body of research geared to this in resistance training.

And it’s talked about this in terms of attentional focus.

And it’s quite literally, what do we think about while we train?

And there’s something called internal attentional focus, which is where you physically think about the muscle contracting, or external focus, where you think about the movement arm on the machine moving. And of course, the research says that actually at the highest end of effort, it doesn’t really make much of a difference which you think about.

But at the lower end, internal focus, when we’re focused on the muscle, when we’re thinking about the muscle contracting, there’s good evidence around this supporting really good technique, because we’re thinking about using the right muscles, we’re not just, you know, blindly pushing as hard as we can against something, we’re thinking about contracting the right muscles to do so.

And there’s good evidence around the muscle growth associated with that internal attentional focus as well. So this kind of mindfulness and this mental connection to what we’re doing, or a mind -muscle connection, as we might say, you know, thinking about our recruitment of muscle fibers and connecting our brain to the structure training that we’re actually doing can be really important. Awesome.

Yeah, that may be a new concept for some listeners, that active versus passive mindset when it comes to their exercise.

So awesome. All right. So just to summarize for you today, we have process versus outcome. We have exercise as enjoyment versus punishment, fat loss versus weight loss, quality versus quantity, and active versus passive exercise. So I hope one of these resonated with you this year. Think about which one of these you can really adopt and take on as your own, because I think that it can help you tap into the motivation that you need to continue to make 2026 your healthiest year.

Awesome. Well, thanks for breaking these down for us, Dr. Fisher. And we will see you next week on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend.

You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything . com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.