Most people really know that there are no shortcuts.

It’s just hard work.

Nobody expects you to get stronger every single session.

You don’t have to get stuck there and say, oh, well, I have obstacles in my way.

It’s really fascinating and it really helps people see results faster and optimize every second that they work out.

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 wellness being.

I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios.

My co hosts are Brian Sigan, 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.

Today’s episode is going to cover a new set of guidelines that the ACSM, which stands for The American College of Sports Medicine has recently published recommendations in regards to resistance training in 2026.

So, this episode is going to cover what this organization is.

We’re going to talk about who the intended audience is and reading these recommendations, some of the history behind this organization and how they come up with these recommendations.

Dr. Fisher is going to share kind of some of the high level findings that they’re putting out there.

And we’ll just discuss those and break those down for you as our listener today.

So, you’re going to find this episode really interesting.

Dr. Fisher, how are you doing today?

I’m doing very well.

Thank you, Amy.

How are you?

I’m doing really well, too.

So, all right.

So, the ACSM, let’s talk about them.

What is this organization, first of all?

Yeah.

Okay.

So, the ACSM is the American College of Sports Medicine, it is one of the key bodies within the area of exercise and exercise science as a whole.

They’re responsible for publishing a number of journals, they’re responsible for providing a number of exercise certifications and industry qualifications.

And they’re, you know, this big national governing body that kind of, to some extent, governs and overviews exercise methods and modalities and so forth.

They run a big conference every year that’s a big five or six day conference with everything exercise, whether it’s supplements or training methods or recovery methods, whatever it might be.

And a lot of it might relate to the lay population or young people or old adults, might be related to medical conditions.

Some of it might relate to athletes and even surgeries and rehabilitation and so forth.

So it’s a huge organization with a great breadth of really valuable information across the area of sports medicine as a whole.

Okay.

And so today we’re going to talk about their recommendations in terms of resistance training that they just published.

So, who do you believe is their intended audience?

You know, who are they speaking to with these recommendations?

And how do they come up with these recommendations?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

I’m going to pause for a second and take a step back and say, historically, the ACSM were an organization that were geared around kind of aerobic exercise, as was almost all sports science kind of pre 1990s.

So, if you’re born in the 2000s, then maybe you’re, you know, you’ve already switched off, but But bear with me.

But they made a bit of a shift in the 1990s and they started to publish these kinds of papers that were position stands on resistance training.

And one of the big problems is historically they’ve been quite heavily criticized for following kind of the typical high volume, high frequency, must use free weight approach to strength training.

And within the present paper, they even go on to say that the old paper, which was published in 2009, was quite heavily criticized.

Multiple people wrote.

Wrote published papers that critiqued those self recommendations.

So, actually, this raises a really good question of who is the position stand actually aimed at?

Well, I’m an exercise scientist.

I’ve been an exercise scientist for decades.

And I obviously, when this paper came out, stopped to read it.

But I can’t imagine that my parents have read it.

And I can’t imagine that many people in the street where I live have read it.

So, it’s probably not aimed at.

The lay population.

It’s a very heavy going academic paper.

It’s actually would be considered what’s called an umbrella review.

So it’s actually a review of reviews.

And it’s 200 and something academic references and probably 20 something pages and multiple thousand words of academic content.

So it’s probably written for academics and it’s probably written for maybe other trainers, other coaches.

Um, and it’s other coaches.

And it’s probably primarily written because the American College of Sports Medicine needs to have a position stand on a modality of training as important as resistance training.

So it’s almost a case of there should be a paper like this rather than let’s write a really important paper that everybody should read.

And therein potentially lies a problem with the whole of academia that academics write papers and only other academics end up reading them.

But that’s maybe a different narrative.

Well, that is why we have the podcast, right?

So we can hopefully deliver some of this content to the general population.

Absolutely.

Their last time that they put out recommendations was back in 2009.

You said they’ve reviewed a bunch of research since then, umbrella reviews.

So is it fair to assume they’re spanning all years?

15 years of research, then, since the last time they put recommendations?

Or is this sort of even beyond that when they come up with these guidelines?

Yeah.

So, what they kind of go on to say is that if you do a PubMed search, we’ve talked about PubMed previously on the show.

I’m not expecting everybody to remember, PubMed is public medicine or public medical database of research studies.

And they actually say in the paper that since the 2009 recommendations, there have been 30000 papers published on the topic of resistance training.

So that’s obviously a lot of research.

Now, they don’t claim to have read all those papers, but what those papers have led to is different review articles that maybe synthesize the topic of volume of training or load or methodologies or so forth.

So, and hence it’s an umbrella review.

It’s not trying to review all of the studies, it’s trying to review all of the reviews.

And I think they talk about having cited 157 different review articles that cover 137 different review articles, excuse me, that cover 30000 participants.

So, you know, a large number of people and a large number of studies, which should give them a, you know, a good understanding of this methodology.

So, okay.

So, with all of that work that they’ve done, you know, what are the top three to five takeaways after you’ve read this?

You know, their recommendations now that they’ve come out in 2026.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that’s kind of the key point, right?

And this is why we have this podcast, as you said, is to deliver this kind of academic information and research to the lay population.

Well, it’s worth mentioning the guys on the research paper, Brian Schoenfeld, Stu Phillips, are kind of colleagues that I’ve worked with in the past.

There’s a number of other phenomenal academics and researchers.

So I’m to some extent already aware of their personal positions stands on resistance training.

And I can really see the tone of their perspectives coming through in the paper.

So, the primary thing and the primary sort of take home of the paper, believe it or not, is that resistance training works, is that doing something is better than doing nothing.

They talk about multiple adaptations within the paper.

They talk about increases in strength, increases in muscle size, they talk about increasing power, increases in physical function, which includes gait speed timed up and go chair stand, which are all tests that we’ve mentioned previously.

But really, the key thing that they say is that there’s different statistics around the number of people that aren’t currently engaging in resistance training.

But it’s that they sort of say that around 60 of US adults are doing no resistance training at all, and only about 30 are engaging in muscle strengthening activity twice per week.

So, really, the emphasis of the paper is something.

Anything is better than nothing.

You know, I realize there are a lot of barriers to resistance training.

We might talk about those in a second.

But the idea that we could all promote strength training of some kind is key.

A second takeaway, kind of aligned with that, is they go on to say it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, that anything is better than nothing.

So they talk about, you know, use of resistance machines, use of free weights, use of resistance bands.

Body weight exercise and so forth.

And they say, again, if you’re currently doing nothing If you start doing some body weight strength training, that will benefit you.

That will make you stronger.

It will increase muscle size, which reduces sarcopenia.

It will increase bone mineral density, and it will have all the health benefits we’ve talked about.

They actually don’t talk extensively about the health benefits.

They’re very clear on kind of the physical elements of physical function and muscle function, but the timed up and go and sit to stand and so forth.

So they kind of say, hey, Doing something is good, and that something can be anything.

That’s great.

They kind of talk about the idea that consistency beats perfection.

It doesn’t matter what about refining the training methods or having the perfect program if you don’t do it.

It matters that you just turn up and do something.

And the idea of some degree of regularity is obviously a win with regards to strength training.

And what are their kind of comments one of their kind of comments that the ACSM have published on their infographic is this idea that the best plan is the one that you’ll stick with.

And this is something I’ve heard Stu Phillips say previously the best resistance training program is the one that people will do.

And of course, academics have talked about this extensively what’s the best way to do this or the best way to achieve that?

And actually, it doesn’t matter if people won’t do the workout.

What matters is engaging people in strength training.

Now, from there they do talk about the specific adaptations of strength or muscle size or muscle power.

And they talk about being able to make, you know, sort of fine tune a strength training program to optimize those adaptations.

And there’s a big bulk of the paper devoted to that.

But personally, I think that that’s almost kind of secondary information because it’s about getting people to engage in regular strength training rather than getting people to fine tune an existing strength training program to maybe get an extra 2 strength increase or an extra 1 bicep size or things like that.

So, you know, and I personally even would say that that’s still a Little bit debatable.

You know, one of the things they clarify within the paper is they included studies that were between six and 52 weeks, you know, between six weeks and one year.

Well, even within a year, most people may not have achieved all of the adaptations they’re going to achieve.

So if some people have maybe achieved greater adaptations by training at a higher frequency or a higher volume, that doesn’t mean that.

The other group who are training at a lower frequency or a lower volume won’t achieve the same end result.

They might just take longer to get there.

So, to say that one group or one method can achieve greater strength or greater hypertrophy, I think is still a bit of a gray area, in my mind at least.

Okay.

So, that was a good summary.

So, basically, what I hear is something is better than nothing.

These are sort of the summary of the findings here that they’re putting out.

Consistency, just find something that you’ll stick with.

The best workout is the one you’ll actually do, right?

Yeah.

Make it something, it doesn’t need to be complex.

It doesn’t need to be complicated.

It doesn’t even matter the modality with which you strength train.

It just matters that you strength train.

And basically, continue to work hard.

Basically, like continue to work hard to progress.

Those are the kind of bottom line findings.

Yeah, absolutely.

And in fact, you’ve taken one that I mentioned before the podcast and added it in, which you’re absolutely right to do.

You mentioned progression there, and they do talk in the paper about the idea of progression.

I think one of the big concerns with people advocating strength training is that if they have a client and they say, okay, you should lift this weight for 10 repetitions for two sets and you should do it twice per week, then the worry is that that client or that person will just go and carry on doing exactly that for the rest of their life.

And of course, as they get stronger, that load effectively becomes lighter for them because they’re stronger.

So they will stop making adaptations.

They will make some adaptation, but very limited adaptations.

So I think the idea of progression is really important.

For many people using free weights or resistance machines, that might be increasing the load that they use.

So, once they can do more than a certain number of repetitions, they increase the load.

For, of course, clients with the exercise coach who use exbotics devices, I think what’s really nice is this emphasis on continually striving to achieve higher force values or higher strength index values with the workout.

We’ve talked previously that strength and muscle size are not infinite in their adaptation.

So, nobody expects you to get stronger every single session, but to try to get stronger every single session is maybe the goal.

And of course, we know the exercise coach clients work really hard and have that high degree of effort, which is key.

And in the paper, they talk about, you know, effort being a key driver for adaptation.

And a lot of people admit without a trainer or without a coach Or somebody supervising their workout, it’s just very easy not to progress.

I’ve heard all the time, you know, it’s just too easy to go to a gym and do a few exercises that I know how to do and put the same exact weight in there every time and do the same number of sets every time.

And is that progress?

Well, no, right?

And that’s where having somebody else who actually will ensure that you’re doing that, whether that’s through a Technology and a software available at an exercise coach studio or a trainer or both.

It’s built right in, and we do need that because our muscles will plateauing, we’re no longer challenging them.

And so, to continue to build strength, there’s no other way to do that than to continue to work at a higher level.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

And one of the things that we talked about before we came on air was not just the contents of the paper itself, but some of the things that I felt were omitted from the paper.

And I mentioned to you the idea of supervision or coaching or personalized training is omitted from the paper as a whole.

There’s absolutely no mention of people engaging in supervised strength training.

And you know, you asked me.

Why that was.

And I think it’s important that we kind of broach that for the listeners.

So, you know, my response to that was that I think that one of the things that they’re trying to do with this paper is say that, you know, anyone can do it and anyone can engage in it.

And you don’t need, you know, fantastic tools.

You don’t need to be at a gym.

You can do it at home with body weight, or you can do it, you know, using bands or, you know, even heavy objects lying around the House.

The next step from that might be to get into a gym environment or you start to use some of the more appropriate tools.

But actually, I think that even that transition and even the idea of doing things around the house can be limited by people’s understanding of what to do.

One of the reasons why so few people engage in resistance training as a whole is perceived complexity.

So people Aren’t really sure what they should be doing and perceived time, perceived time barriers.

So there is a swing towards minimal dose resistance training, which obviously is part of the philosophy of the exercise coach two times 20 minutes per week.

And this paper goes on to talk about exactly that the idea of minimal dose training, low volume, low frequency, low time commitment strength training.

But actually, the idea that People who aren’t already engaging in strength training will suddenly hear this information and go out and start doing something that they don’t necessarily understand is almost a little bit naive.

Now, the rationale for excluding it might be the perceived expense attached to engaging in strength training or attending a gym or any of those things.

And maybe they want to avoid that, adding that barrier or adding that barrier or perceived barrier.

But we’ve talked about supervision before, and I’ve published a number of publications on the topic of supervision.

And the understanding is very clear as far as the variables that we can improve.

We know we can improve safety, so reduce our risk of injury.

We know it improves our effort level, so people will work harder when there’s a coach there.

We know it can enhance adherence, so clients are more likely to turn up when they’ve made that commitment, whether it’s a financial commitment or a time commitment, or even just said to a coach, Hey, I’m going to be there.

They now have that, I’m going to let somebody down if I’m not there.

So, there’s a lot of different factors.

And then, of course, we talked about progression.

So, a coach is there to help you move that program forward and add that intensity as you progress, or maybe add more exercises or vary the program and so forth.

There’s a lot happening within the topic of supervision, which maybe isn’t quite within the scope of this paper.

And if Stu ever listens to this podcast, then maybe he would hear this and say, no, that was never our intention.

And that’s absolutely fine.

But I definitely think it’s worthy of note to say that it’s great to say, hey, everybody should go off and do this.

But until we give people the tools to do it, that’s still a hard sell.

Yeah.

I think about, you know, everybody knows that they should eat healthy, but they don’t always, right?

Or knowing that you should strength train is sort of this like nagging thing in the back of your mind, like, I should do this, I should do that.

But 80 to 85 of people are not doing it.

And that’s just what the facts are.

And we, and there are reasons, like we talked about before, and you just mentioned time, perceived complexity, motivation, don’t like it.

And so there’s a solution though to that.

So we don’t have to get stuck there and say, oh, well, I just have obstacles in my way.

You know, that’s where a solution is needed for some people.

And that’s totally fine.

But it is, I would agree, you know, the best workout is the one you would do.

You don’t need anything fancy.

You don’t need a gym, but most people do need it in order to actually do the workout and succeed.

Right.

So that’s where it becomes a cycle.

We meet people every day.

And we ask people, what are some of the obstacles you’ve had to participating with exercise in the past?

You know, the reason they come in is to say I’m here because it’s been 10 years since I’ve really done something for myself in the area of exercise and I really need to get back into my fitness and I just don’t, I’m not doing it.

Why not?

And the two biggest reasons they’ll cite is motivation.

They just can’t seem to stay motivated to do anything that they set their mind to, right?

They might do something for a week or two and fall off the bandwagon.

So they just lose that.

Or two is just perceived complexity.

They feel like they don’t know how to do it safely.

So, you know, we want to acknowledge that those are very common and that that is in the background.

So, what do we do with that, right?

Well, we can help people overcome that if those people are interested in actually taking action on this.

You want to make strength training easy.

And I definitely agree, strength training needs to happen, it needs to happen with consistency.

It needs to happen in a way that you’re progressing.

You should like it, you know?

And so that is what it is all about.

I would also say one other thing about the simplicity of strength training by nature, it’s simple and it’s supposed to be simple.

It’s a little bit repetitive, you know?

But that doesn’t mean it has to be increasing in complexity, you know, month after month and year over year to get the same muscles stronger is you do that in the way that you got them stronger at the beginning.

You’re still going to keep getting them stronger, right?

And so it doesn’t mean you’re plateauing, it means that you’re continuing to get the muscles stronger.

So simple is a good thing.

It’s a good thing.

I’m all for simple.

I think that, again, we’ve talked about this previously that some people engaging in resistance training appreciate the simplicity of a basic workout.

And some people feel like they’ve mastered it and now they should progress to something else.

And often it’s a case of bringing them back down and saying, no, actually, you don’t need to go and do complex things.

You don’t need to stand on a balanced ball and you don’t need to do these pseudo functional exercises or these high risk exercises and so forth.

What you’re doing is everything that you should be doing.

There’s an academic I’ve worked with out of Old Miss, about the University of Mississippi, and he gives very simple guidelines on life.

I think he once said to me at a conference, he tries to sleep well, he tries to have green things on his plate from time to time, and he picks up heavy objects occasionally.

And that’s really what strength training is picking up a heavy object or doing something that stresses the muscle.

And that’s all it ever needs to be.

It doesn’t need to be complex.

That’s good advice.

It’s good advice.

I think it’s just so easy to overcomplicate and look for the next secret and look for the next hack.

And it’s always been that easy, I would say.

I think a lot of people, you know, especially now there’s so much information and misinformation out there, a lot of people are looking for biohacks or hacks on how to improve their life or how to do something, are looking for shortcuts.

And I think most people really know that there are no shortcuts, it’s just hard work.

But actually, once you kind of have that mindset, you can say, well, it’s hard work.

But it doesn’t have to be a lot of hard work.

It can be short quality hard work, not a high volume of hard work.

So, less but better, right?

Yeah.

I love that.

Great.

So, well, so this was really helpful to go through, Dr. Fisher.

So, I mean, overall, what are your like kind of concluding remarks about this for our listeners today?

Yeah.

Actually, there’s one final Thing that I really briefly wanted to touch on from the paper, and that’s that they mention eccentric overload.

And this is something that’s become more and more a topic in the academic literature, really in the last 20 years.

So, probably, you know, since the last progression models in resistance training or ACSM position stand.

And eccentric overload is effectively built around our understanding.

That the muscles are 40 stronger in the eccentric phase compared to the concentric phase.

So, just for clarity, the concentric phase is normally the lifting of a weight or the shortening of a muscle.

So, it would be the pushing out of a chest press.

And the eccentric phase would be the lowering of a bar or a chest press exercise where our hands are moving back towards our chest.

And as I said, they place, you know, they talk about eccentric overload multiple times within the article and of course that is exactly what is being accomplished by the exobotics devices at the Exercise Coach.

So if you use a free weight or if you use a barbell and you lift 100 pounds, it’s 100 pounds on the way up and it’s still 100 pounds on the way back down.

There is no eccentric overload.

And if you are using exobotics and isokinetic technology, then the weight is matched to your biology on the way up on the concentric phase, but then it’s also matched to your biology on the way down.

The strength and the resistance naturally can be higher, and the force that you achieve can be greater in that eccentric phase.

So you’re getting that eccentric overload.

Now, we’ve talked about this previously, so I’m not going to get into huge detail on this, but we have highlighted that can preferentially recruit type 2 muscle fibers, which are the ones that we normally lose as we age.

They’re the ones that can be most adapted for strength and they’re the ones that can be most adapted for muscle size, you know, as well as physical function and so forth.

So, the ACSM kind of recommendations do highlight that, I think is worthy of a mention, especially because it in part aligns with what we do with the exercise coach.

So, it reminds our existing clients one of the real benefits that they’re getting.

Right.

And if you missed our episode on that, we will put the episode link in the show notes of, uh, where we talk a little bit more about the eccentric activation that we can experience during a strength training workout and how that helps us progress that much faster and really capitalize on the fact that we are stronger.

Most of us in that eccentric portion of the movement.

It’s really fascinating and it really helps people see results faster and optimize every second that they work out.

So it’s another piece that makes it all the more optimized.

I appreciate all that.

Awesome.

Well, thank you for bringing this to bear, Dr. Fisher, today.

And it was good to talk through it with you.

Thanks very much for letting me go through it.

Thanks for tuning in today.

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