Exercise that improves the quality and strength in our muscles changes everything.

The strength training part is the essential part. It’s the protein that can help you optimize the benefits.

Amy, we need to get like a strength changes everything mic so that we can we can drop it once in a while.

Mic drop. 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 Saigon, 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 everybody today. So today we have a Q&A episode where we are going to be answering your questions

about strength, about health, about working out. We are super excited to address these and we’re going to just go through as many as we can today and I will pose the questions that have come in to Brian and James and we’ll go through as many as we can today. I’m super, super excited. Okay, so we’ve got a first question today that we’re addressing is, why don’t I do a warm-up?

So this question came in and we’re referencing particularly, this person wants to know, why don’t I do a warm-up before a strength training workout? So James, I’m going to pose this to you. Why don’t I need to do a warm-up?

I think first and foremost, there’s two types of warmup. There’s a general and there’s a specific warmup. So general warmup is simply again, our blood to move around the body and warm up on muscles. Whereas a specific warmup is something that we might see more in athletes. And that’s more of the neurological system.

That’s maybe a basketball player taking shots before they play a match. They’re kind ofarse in that skill. Um, within strength training, if you go out and you plan to do a maximal effort in the very first repetition of the very first exercise you do, then almost certainly there’s a, there’s some, some need for some kind of warmup. But almost nobody does that with their resistance training

program or their protocol. Initial repetitions are typically sub-maximal and therefore they effectively act as a warm-up preceding the higher effort exercises and higher effort repetitions within a strength training workout and it kind of negates the need. The caveat I would add to that is that on a hot summer’s day you might feel less need for a warm-up or on a cold winter’s day you might feel more need for a warm-up and the initial repetitions might take, you might feel like you need more of those sub-maximal repetitions

to kind of get the blood moving and the muscle up to temperature. But other than that there’s absolutely no need and there’s no evidence to support any

need for a warm up in proceeding resistance training.

Perfect.

Brian, anything to add to that one?

Yeah, that was great, James. And before I touch on this, maybe just a little bit about the types of responses that we’re going to be giving in these episodes. These are going to be unscripted extemporaneous responses. I mean, occasionally, Amy, you might prepare us enough for us to show up maybe with a stat or a quote or something, especially from, from James.

But for the most part, we’re just going to be answering these questions to the best of our ability, like we would answer a client in a conversational manner if we had a minute or two to answer the question that they just threw at us in that moment. And so on this one as far as warm-up I guess I would echo what James said I think that the the very particular warm-up that is built into smart string training is the best warm-up possible. I would say that it’s better than sort of a general body warm-up for the type of activity that we’re going to engage in.

And I just think that when you think about the kinds of things that you might do in life, I mean, you know, when I come across a task that requires me to lift something heavy, I don’t say, wait, hold on everybody. Let me go grab a warm up before I come back and help. Right? It’s really about the way we use our body and the application of force. And so there are certain activities that are certainly going to expose you to high forces and invite risk.

Those are typically going to be sporting activities. And before sporting activities, I would recommend warming up your body. But otherwise, I can go and lift something heavy or attempt to lift something heavy without warm up if I just understand how to do that. And I don’t do that in kind of an explosive, jerky, ballistic manner.

Those are the types of things that we don’t do at the exercise coach and really aren’t included in our rationale. We’re not doing ballistic movements, ballistic strength type movements. And that right there minimizes risk for injury

greatly compared to actually doing explosives weightlifting.

Absolutely.

Yeah, how I like to explain it to a client is we’re not surprising your muscles with a heavy load really quickly. We are slowly and gradually building up effort. And so that slow control, gradual movement gets that muscle working hard, but in that, in that safe way. And so it’s not going to be a surprise load. Like you were talking about those explosive movements.

Um, so the muscle it’s, it adds to that safety for sure. Well that’s why

you’re here Amy, that’s just a great response. And just before we move on, I mean one more thing I’ll just say again, we’re doing literally millions of sessions per year, you know, annually we deliver millions of sessions without doing some elaborate general warm-up before any one of those. And that’s what we’ve been doing for decades. Our clients love it.

Mm-hmm. And it’s good news. It keeps your workout shorter, right?

That’s right.

All right. Next question. Let’s go into the next one. So the next one that came in is, do I need to eat before or after a workout? So, Brian, I’m going to pose this question to you. I mean, I think we should address what benefit there would be to eating before a workout or after, and then what should we be also trying to eat?

Sure, that’s great. Yeah, I think whether or not someone needs to eat before the workout might actually vary. What I would say is you don’t want to come to a strength training workout in a fasted state. You don’t wanna show up for your workout,

you know, saying, I haven’t eaten since yesterday. You know, if you’re working out early in the day, it probably is a good idea to make sure that you do get in a small healthy meal about 45 minutes before that workout. If it’s later in the day and you haven’t eaten for, you know, eight or 10 hours, then again, yes, it’s probably a really good idea to make sure you get in a small healthy meal or snack,

maybe 45 minutes or an hour before that workout. And the reason is when we work our muscles in a really meaningful manner, all kinds of things happen in the body that cause your blood sugar to lower, your muscles, the type of work that they’re doing

just causes the burning of all kinds of stored glucose, which is called glycogen and your body’s having to make sure that it can put those stores back together and your blood sugar can drop. And so when you get a blood sugar drop, then you could feel, you know, lousy or in an extreme case, you know, potentially even pass out from getting blood sugar that’s that low.

So that would be very rare. And again, the risk of that would just be increased if you were to, you know, be fasting, not eating anything for a very long time and then going into a hard workout.

Yeah.

And then how about after a workout then? So how should we think about eating after a workout?

I think after the workout, there’s probably some evidence that you just want to consume some quality protein, maybe 20. If you’re a larger man, maybe up to 30 grams of protein within an hour of that workout, along with a moderate intake of carbohydrates. And I’ve just seen the suggestion and some evidence that that might enhance protein synthesis as a result of that stimulus that we just applied.

Can I jump off the back of that a little bit? It’s historically it’s been served by this. This was what was phrased an anabolic window immediately after strength training, where you should kind of take in as much protein as you can. And, um, More recently in the academic literature that’s been called the anabolic bond or, uh, it’s simply not a window. So within an hour, immediately after the workout that you have to get this protein in. Really, there’s an opportunity within a number of hours post-workout to get a good balance

of protein in and this can be, yeah, as Brian said, 20, 30, up to probably about 50 grams of protein and yeah, that increases muscle protein synthesis and that will really optimize the adaptations that you get from the stimulus of strength training

in as far as strength adaptations and muscle hypertrophy and and so forth.

Well so it sounds like what you both are saying is that yes when we eat after a workout we need to prioritize protein because we just did a challenging strength training workout. We have stimulated a bunch of adaptations in the body where our muscles are trying to repair and protein, especially, especially those amino acids are important for that muscle repair and growth and change that we’re looking for after the workout.

And so finding a way to get high quality protein in after your workouts, you’re doing your muscles a favor in the recovery that they are trying to do as a response to the workout you just did. And so at our exercise coach studios, we really promote high quality, pure proteins that are,

we have protein powders, we have whey, grass fed whey proteins, we have plant-based, we have animal bone broth options, and they’re a great way to really make a smoothie or a shake right after the workout as well to give your muscles what they need in that pure high-quality way. But it does sound like the recommendation is find a good high-quality protein source

after that workout. Is that what you guys are saying?

Yeah, you bet. And by high quality, I think we’re saying, you know, one aspect of that is just a very bioavailable protein. We won’t get into the processes that lead to good bioavailability, but that’s what we’re talking about. Just protein that your body’s going to actually be able to take up and utilize because as you said, it’s high quality. Another thing I might mention is, James, maybe you can comment on this. I think there’s also some evidence that after a workout consuming just a large amount of carbohydrates can actually blunt some of the positive hormonal

responses that we’re looking for from the string training session. Have you seen anything like that?

Well, to be honest, I don’t think, and the research that I’ve read, or the consensus of research, suggests that the protein is the most important part after a workout, after a strength training session. But some carbohydrates can be great to replenish energy and so forth. I think it’s important to remember there’s a lot of nutritional approaches by people

and we’re not immediately advocating that anybody change their diet drastically, but I think that protein intake is the key answer. But of course, that’s not the answer in and of itself. The strength training part is the essential part. It’s course, that’s not the answer in and of itself. The strength training part is the essential part. It’s the protein that can help you optimize

the benefits of stroke training.

Perfect, perfect.

Okay, so this next question that came in is a hot topic. A lot of people wanna know this. So it’s about spot reduction or body sculpting. And the question is, what is possible in body sculpting at different points in life? So this person really is asking, is it possible to tone various parts of my body and how does

that change at different phases of life? I’m going to pose this one to Brian.

Yeah, that’s a great question. We get that type of question a lot. I think when we’re answering this question, it’s really important for us to define terms. That’s half the battle in this conversation. Often the term tone is used by people to describe a state of body leanness, where our muscles are more visible and we have less body fat.

That’s fine, we understand what people mean by that. You can also use the term tone just to refer to the residual tension that exists in a muscle at rest. All muscles have tonus or tone, they should anyway. When it comes to body sculpting, shaping, people tend to be asking,

can I really improve visibly what’s going on in this area of my body? And so our ability to improve the aesthetics of our physique certainly is something that we possess throughout life. And it just occurs by improving the condition of our muscles, making them more apparent, firmer, more visible,

because we’ve built them, we’ve optimized their health, and at the same time reducing body fat levels to make them more visible. What we can’t really do is affect the loss of body fat in a specific area in kind of a

prioritized way that we choose. The way that body fat comes on and off the body is sort of pre-programmed and it occurs according to a principle that we refer to as the first-on-last-off principle. And so if someone says, I want really to see my abdomen, you know, the body fat in my abdomen loss. You can do that, but you might have to go through other parts of the body first. You might have to lose 20 pounds of body fat before you start seeing abdominal

body fat really be impacted in a way that’s visibly noticeable. Whereas at the extremities, like your arms and your face, at the extremities, like your arms and your face, at the extremities, you might see body fat lost, likely you’ll see body fat lost much more rapidly and more noticeably. So first people will tend to see, you know,

my shoulders and my arms are looking leaner. I’m building muscle and I’m losing body fat, but that body fat’s coming off first in those areas of the body before it’s lost in sort of these deeper spots of the abdomen and maybe the hips, buttocks, thighs.

Yeah, absolutely. We actually do have an episode about this, if you scroll back as well, called, What’s the Best Way to Lose Belly Fat? Where actually, Brian, you gave a really helpful analogy of a swimming pool.

Can you repeat that in a minute or less? I think that’s super helpful.

Yeah, it’s just kind of a visual for people. The swimming pool analogy just says this, in a swimming pool, you’ve got a shallow end and a deep end. And if the pool is completely full, I can’t spot reduce the deep end. I can’t walk down to the deep end with a bucket and pail water out and just remove water from the deep end of the pool. If I walk down to the deep end, and say that’s analogous to say, you know, my abdomen, and

I start pailing water from the deep end, water’s coming from the entire pool, right? But we’re going to notice first that the shallow end has dried up or looks really lean. That’s kind of like your face or your arms. The shallow end of body fat storage is going to dry up and be emptied first. The good news though is this, once that’s happened, no matter where I’m at, right, every bit of water now is coming from the deep end. And that’s again, analogous to those last on, those first on, last off areas.

And so for men, that tends to be the midsection. And then for women, it tends to be more like hips, thighs, maybe lower abdomen. That’s the deep end. And it’s unfortunate. Many people get derailed because they’re doing exactly what they should.

And we even see this sometimes and we have to help people fight against this and support them psychologically, essentially, because they’ve started the strength training program. They’ve improved their metabolic health. They’ve even started to see visible changes in body composition. So this means they are, they’re on track and set for that massive body transformation that they, that they want.

And they see in their mind. It’s just that they started to see that occur in the shallow end. And they might be eight or 12 weeks down the road. And they’re saying, but I haven’t really seen it in my stomach yet or in my, my hips yet. And so they think it’s not working and they were so close.

You just need to continue and stay with it so that the work that you can do over time now has you working on the deep end. I think that’s a really important point and I think the, you know, the, the, the, the cost of the spot reduction is, you know, has really been kind of thrown out to some extent now. I think Brian had a really good point that I just want to make more of if that’s okay. And that’s the, there’s a process that’s attached to this and we have to have conviction in the process, not, not, not a focus on the outcome. If we’re focused on 10 or 12 weeks of kind of body recomposition of, you know,

fat reduction and muscle building, then whatever happens in those 10 or 12 weeks, we often see we lose it in the subsequent months because we return to a bad diet, we return to bad habits of exercise and so forth. So the reality is to play the long game.

And of course, we do look at strength training and exercise from an athletic perspective, but we can also be focused on the health benefits that we get from strength training beyond the aesthetics. And if we do that, and if we maintain positive, you know, nutritional habits as well, healthy dietary habits, then not extreme dietary habits, just healthy habits, then ultimately we see these changes over a long time

and we maintain these changes as well. So we maintain that body recomposition or that body

transformation that we’ve wanted. Yeah, one way we explain this to our clients is you can set yourself on a positive metabolic trajectory, meaning you’re always either on a decline or moving upward, right, and doing the activities that are going to keep you on a positive metabolic trajectory. And what that’s a function of is consistency and time and effort in your workouts, right? And so over time, combining those workouts with proper nutrition, including adequate protein intake, including anti-inflammatory

eating will keep you on that positive metabolic trajectory and over time will lead to that leaning out, right, and what people are really going for. One encouraging story is we’ve got a client at one of our southwest Minneapolis studios who she texted the studio pictures of her at her son’s wedding, complimenting how good her arms looked. And a lot of times women will come into our studios

and wave their arms up in the air at a 90 degree angle and point to the lower part of their, underneath their elbow there. And they call those chicken wings and they say, can we get rid of these? I wanna get rid of this.

And the answer is yes. I mean, with consistency, prioritizing those workouts, working hard and keeping your nutrition on track, which is going to affect that body fat, is the way to do it. And it definitely is possible.

But like we said, that’s not the first goal and that’s not the outcome we’re looking for. When we focus on the metabolic trajectory, it delivers that as a by-product, right? And that really is what we want. So it’s awesome.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, those are great points. You know, committing to, summing it up just as whole effort exercise and whole food nutrition as a process, as a lifestyle, this absolutely is the path. It’s, there’s, there’s no question at this point.

This is the smartest, most productive, safest, most efficient, most enjoyable path. Evidence-based strength training, whole food nutrition, consistency. Start it, stick with it, you know, get support to hang in there.

Awesome.

Are you, what questions have you got?

What else have you got?

Okay.

Well, here’s another question that came in about aerobic activity, which I know we’ve done episodes on cardio in the past. So if this is a topic that you care about as a listener, please do go back and listen to those. What about cardio episodes? There’s two of them at least with Dr. James Fisher.

But the question is, the American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity in addition to two days of strength training. What do you recommend to your heart conscious or heart aware or high cholesterol clients?

That’s really loaded. There’s several questions in there and it’s a really loaded, that’s multiple episodes to dissect that one. So I’m going to say that, but I’m also going to just go ahead and throw it over to the

researcher for him to touch on this public policy type statement question. I read before, Amy said to you, can you give us the simple analogy in a minute? Uh, I’m going to try and do this in as short a time as possible. So first of all, I would never disparage or discourage anybody from doing cardiovascular exercise.

I think it can be great. I think it should be secondary to strength training and most governing bodies and natural health care guidance is now seeing the benefits of strength training and even prioritizing that above and beyond cardiovascular exercise. Of course, the accessibility of cardiovascular exercise or cardiorespiratory exercise has made it far more popular in the long term. Anyway, 150 minutes of moderate or higher intensity cardiovascular exercise, I think the first thing is we can still really actually achieve it. Well, the aim is really to move blood around our body,

to raise our heart rate, to raise our breathing rate and so forth. And the reality is we’re already doing that from strength training. And in fact, if we jump straight back to the research, which is a problem that I’m the reality is we’re already doing that from strength training and if we jump straight back to the research which is a problem that i’m probably gonna have cuz i’m gonna look at research. Those are big metal now since 2016 from the journal of the american heart association so big organization. Something like two hundred two thousand five hundred participants around that, pre-hypertensive participants, and it showed that strength training reduced blood pressure and they actually

reported blood pressure reductions from this resistance training comparable or greater of those reported from cardiovascular or typical aerobic exercise. So, and hence why I would say that strength training is the priority above and beyond cardiovascular exercise.

There was a mention of collateral in there as well, so let me try and touch on that really briefly. First of all, cholesterol is often bandied around as if it’s the big bad wolf, you know, it’s the villain. Cholesterol is not a villain, it’s an essential part of our body and it’s used in the production of a lot of hormones, including things like estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol.

When we talk about cholesterol, what we actually mean is lipoproteins. We could talk about high-density lipoproteins, which is often termed the good cholesterol, and low-density lipoproteins, which is the bad cholesterol. And strength training studies show that strength training can reduce, our LDLs can reduce our bad cholesterol and increase or stabilize our HDLs or our good cholesterol. There’s a really nice study from University of Uvascula by Simon Walker a few years back and he looked at strength training frequency over a six month period, a group training

once, another group training twice, another group training three times per week. It was a low volume workout, seven to nine exercises, something like that, and they showed reductions in LDLs and increases in HDLs purely as a product of strength training. So I think that we can definitely look at the 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise. I think that should be supplementary to strength training and of course that can be moderate, can be go for a brisk walk. It

doesn’t have to be that you have to go running for 150 minutes a week, maybe swimming, walking, cycling, different modalities that effectively just raise your heart rate and your breathing rate, help to move blood around the body. Amy we need to get like a strength changes everything mic so that we can we can drop it once in a while. Mike drop. Mike drop, yeah.

Let’s do it.

Maybe we can get that that was great James and maybe we can also get in the show notes some of the past episodes, things that we’ve we’ve shared before, but I’ve got I’ve got nothing to add really today. That was that was great.

Perfect. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the takeaway is, is that strength training is going to accomplish a lot of what people are trying to accomplish when it comes to heart health in general. And again, those other two episodes are a deeper dive on this topic, but yes, you can, you can take walks, you can do all that.

Um, as far as moving the needle on your fitness and on your overall health and longevity. Obviously, strength training is first and foremost.

Now you gave me a thought, Amy.

I do have something to say now.

All right, shoot.

Well, yeah, I just, it’s the idea that, like you said, these things that we’re aiming for and exercise, our approach to exercise is that exercise is a means to an end. And so, you know, in this case, the specific end we’re talking about is cardiovascular, the health of the cardiovascular system. And so, what James just said is that string training can bring about the adaptations in the body that we’re looking for

that are believed to be good indicators of cardiovascular health. And strength training can do that in a manner that simply doesn’t require And, you know, a terribly oppressive time commitment,

joint pounding activities. It can be done in a manner that’s gentle on the joints, gentle on the schedule. You know, very effective. It’s a very effective means to the end of cardiovascular health as evidenced by

these various metrics placed on, metrics placed on these metabolic markers.

So when we talk about different types of exercise, like cardiorespiratory and resistive training, we often dichotomize them. We say, well, one exists on one end of the spectrum and one exists on the other. And that’s not untrue. The cardiovascular exercise typically uses what’s called the AMPK pathway and the resistance training typically uses what’s called an mTOR pathway and we often think of them with regards to the adaptations that they make. One improves cardiorespiratory fitness, one improves

muscular strength and muscle size. But actually we started to challenge this a number of years back myself and a colleague and challenge this a number of years back, myself and a colleague. And we wrote a number of papers to say that actually we should think about exercise in terms of effort level rather than modality. And there was a number of papers that showed that if you do sprint interval training on a bike, then you can also improve your strength and your muscle size, as well as your cardiorespiratory

fitness.

We know that strength training on its own can improve cardiovascular fitness. We also know that if you do very very low effort cardiovascular fitness you don’t increase strength and you don’t increase muscle size. So I think we should think about exercise based on intensity of effort like how hard you’re working rather than am I doing cardio or am I doing strength training? If you were to sit down on a resistance machine and use a very, very light

weight and do a rep every few seconds with a pause in between, that’s quite akin to typical cardiovascular exercise. And you would find that you could sit there and probably do that for 10 or 20 minutes, maybe. I literally, that becomes a cardio workout. Whereas if you get on a bike or a treadmill or a skier or a cross trainer or a pool, and you sprint as far as you can, it’s going to be over pretty

quick and that’s far more akin from an energy level and from an effort

level to resistance training. So, it’s interesting to dichotomize exercise into those two formats, but it’s not strictly true that cardio, running, cycling, swimming is only cardio.

Does that make sense? Yes.

We, at our exercise coach studios, feature something called concentrated cardio. It’s interval training. It’s two to five minutes. And it accomplishes, in effect, the same as like 50 minutes, five minutes to 50. And I mean, interval training is, it’s more brief, right? And it doesn’t need to be longer duration, because it’s about the effort that we’re requiring and the metabolic effect that that produces, in conjunction with the strength training, that really becomes a great one-two punch to deliver that stimulus to the body from that whole workout as a whole.

And so I just wanted to mention that that is, that’s how we approach it in our studios.

Yeah, awesome. And from the string training alone, I mean, you probably noticed that your clients respond to that, you know, with amazement when they’re first exposed to it because they’re saying, wow, I did not expect to feel my heart beating and my respiratory rate increase. I’m, you know, it feels like I’m, it feels like I’m doing aerobics and I’m doing strength training.

I mean, from their first set of leg press, right, they notice, wait a second, what’s what’s going on here? My cardiovascular system is actually being exercised Doing this this strength training modality

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. We have to separate out mentally our Our heavy breathing and heart working hard with just specific certain activities

right

Because it’s like you said it’s it’s achievable through lots of different modalities. And so we don’t want to separate those out mentally into good, bad, or otherwise, I don’t think.

And so James, to maybe come at it from another angle, ask a different question. Are you saying that as a scientist, that just engaging in 150 minutes a week of let’s say accumulated activity like walking and gardening or something, would you say that is insufficient to guarantee the optimization of health, fitness and longevity across a lifespan. My goodness, yeah, absolutely. That’s not adequate. I’m going to go on the record here right now and say,

a single strength training session of around 20 minutes is infinitely more beneficial than 150 minutes of low to moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise. And if you add that up to a couple of strength training sessions, you’re probably going to do so much more for your quality of life and longevity. From an organ point of view, from a muscular point of view, from a functional point of view, from an illness, an amusement point of view, is so much more beneficial. I mean, if we pause and look at the numbers for a second,

that I know on this podcast, I’m massively gonna overshare information. So it’s gonna have to shut me down at some point, but I’m not a guy that wears a heart rate monitor when I exercise because I track it, because I’m interested in the data.

I’m not really interested in it for me. But if I go out, I go out occasionally and I do a run. And that’s why I don’t discourage people from doing cardiovascular exercise. Uh, and if I do a run, I might do it in K and I’m running in a 10 K in around about 50 minutes right now. Average heart rate of maybe 155 beats per minute, something like that. So it’s not super high.

It’s it would probably be moderate. If I go to the gym and I do a 20 minute strength training session, my heart rate will peak probably around 173, 176 on, on even something like a leg press or a standing tricep press down or something like that. Uh, so my average heart rate will be higher in that 20 minute workout. As long as I’m moving from exercise to exercise, as long as not wasting time, updating my Instagram and my Twitter and you know, which I know a lot of people do when they when they may go into the gym. But if it’s productive,

20, 30 minutes training session, my heart, my average heart rate is higher on that than it is when I go for a run. Now, if we look at the numbers from that point of view, I’m getting more benefit from a cardiovascular and a cardiorespiratory point of view by doing that, but I’m also getting the benefits of muscle strengthening exercise, of the myokine release. I mean, I’m sure we’re going to get into this in future podcasts, but we know that there are hormonal responses to muscular contraction, whether that’s the

release of human growth hormone by the pituitary gland or release of myokines, which is effectively a metabolic marker that’s a signal that’s not from around the body to positively impact other organs and cells and can fight cardiovascular disease and obesity and diabetes and types of cancer and so forth. And we’re just not seeing that to the same extent from the muscular contractions we get in cardiovascular exercise. Yeah, but there’s this mindset that’s based on a myth that more is better, and in fact that the amount of time that you spend exercising is really, really important and has everything

to do with the results or the benefits of that exercise. It’s almost like you’re saying it has very little to do with the results or the benefits of that exercise. It’s almost like you’re saying it has very little to do with the results or the benefits of exercise and that it’s certainly not about hours and hours and hours per week, but I would argue it’s not even necessarily about minutes. It’s not about the time, it’s about the, you know, what is the stimulus, what is the metabolic experience?

It’s about moments really. I mean, if you think about effective strength training like you’re describing, we’re working our muscles in this sort of systematic way to get them to the point where they’re exerting at a really meaningful, near maximal or even maximal level

to serve as this powerful stimulus throughout the body. So even in this 20 minute workout, we’re not saying, this is what I think is confusing for some people, we’re not even saying that, oh, there’s something magic about engaging in something we call exercise for 20 minutes.

No, it’s about this format of exercise that allows you to experience these moments, these moments in which you are exerting muscle groups at a near maximal or maximal level that serves as this powerful stimulus and draws upon all these bodily resources in a way that bring about all of these benefits that we’re talking about that no amount of exercise can replace. Hundreds and hundreds of minutes of exercise can’t replace these few moments in terms of

the benefit.

Right, right.

And if you think, you know, we’ve often used the phrase exercise as medicine, and if we make the medical analogy, if you’ve got a medical condition, you take a given dose of a given medicine, that’s the stimulus, you don’t get the same benefit if you micro-dose throughout the day. But that medicine, you’ve got to take it in sufficient quantity to have a stimulus, to have a cause, to have an adaptive effect.

And that’s essentially what exercise is. We’re looking for providing a stimulus. And then of course, we need to have that time post-workout to allow our body to adapt, to recover from the stresses.

Inside of our exercise coach studios, we have this banner. And at the top of the banner, it it has it’s like a huge infographic and at the top it says you know our point of view is that what the research shows us is it’s not about spending more time taking more steps right it’s about exercise that improves the quality and strength in our muscles is the type of exercise that then changes everything. You know, strength changes everything means as we

focus on adding strength and improving the quality of our muscles, every physiological system in our body improves right along with it. And so it’s really great news for people who don’t like to spend a lot of time on this, right? It is the best news in the world actually right that I can accomplish more better more Get stronger faster in less time. So I love it. I love it. I’m super inspired by that

I really want to go do a 20-minute workout right right now So perfect. All right. Well, thank you for all these fine answers to the Q&A. We look forward to seeing you next time. Remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening to today’s episode.

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