What benefits can you actually expect in your first year of strength training? Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher continue their conversation on the benefits of strength training. In today’s episode, they unpack the real, research-backed adaptations that happen within the first one to 12 months of training. They break down what you can expect to feel after a few weeks, what continues to improve month by month, and why sticking with it pays off far beyond muscle and strength.

• Amy starts by explaining that exercise isn’t something you do once and tick off your list. It’s a habit that keeps giving back the longer you stick with it. Every session is like a small deposit that compounds into a stronger, healthier you.
• Dr. Fisher says strength training is an investment in yourself. You’re not just building muscle, you’re buying more energy, confidence, and independence for your future self. The time you put in now will pay you back in ways that go far beyond the gym.
• For Amy, a good personal trainer will remind you that the first few weeks aren’t about lifting heavy, they’re about teaching your body to move better. 
• Your coordination improves, your posture feels stronger, and your confidence starts to grow. Those early wins are what keep you coming back.
• Dr. Fisher explains what happens within the first four weeks of strength training. Your muscles learn to work together better, your flexibility starts improving, and your blood pressure can even begin to drop. You may not see big physical changes yet, but your body is already rewiring itself for better performance.
• Dr. Fisher says that after about eight weeks, you might notice your shirts fitting a little tighter around the arms or shoulders. That’s your muscles growing and taking shape. 
• Dr. Fisher shares that after eight weeks of training, your body activates a powerful cleanup process called autophagy. Old or damaged cells are cleared away and replaced with healthier ones. It’s like your body is renovating itself from the inside out.
• Dr. Fisher explains that when we don’t move or train, damaged cells hang around longer than they should. But when we strength train, we help the body recycle old cells and build new, healthy ones. You’re literally helping your body stay young and resilient from the inside.
• Research shows that after 11 weeks of strength training, anxiety symptoms go down in both healthy people and those struggling with clinical anxiety. It’s proof that lifting weights isn’t just for your muscles, it’s for your mind too.
• Amy adds that most people don’t realize how deeply exercise helps with anxiety. It’s not just the happy feeling right after a workout, it’s the long-term changes happening in your brain chemistry. You’re training your body to handle stress better and find calm more easily.
• Learn why most people fall in and out of their workout routines. The biggest benefits only come when you make working out part of your life, not a phase. T
• That’s why working with a strength coach is important. When motivation fades, your trainer keeps you grounded, reminding you why you started. 
• Dr. Fisher compares strength training to saving for retirement. You don’t put money away once and expect to retire rich; you invest steadily over time. Every workout you do is like another deposit toward a stronger, healthier future.
• Dr. Fisher says one of his favorite milestones happens around 13 weeks. That’s when people start hearing compliments like “you look different” or “what have you been doing.” Those moments make all the early effort worth it because now the change isn’t just internal, it’s visible.
• When someone notices and says you look stronger, you naturally want to keep going. It’s that social boost that turns exercise into something you genuinely enjoy.
• By the 16-week mark, your body becomes more sensitive to insulin. For some people, that means reversing type 2 diabetes completely. You’re giving your body the ability to balance blood sugar naturally, just by staying consistent with your workouts.
• Understand that strength training doesn’t have to take hours a day or feel overwhelming. Even short, focused workouts can completely change how you look and feel in just a few months.
• Dr. Fisher highlights that after about six months, your body starts burning more calories even at rest. Your metabolism naturally speeds up, and you’re using more energy just by living your normal life. You’re literally becoming a more efficient version of yourself.
• Dr. Fisher explains that consistent strength training can make your biological age younger than your actual age. You’re not just feeling younger, your cells are acting younger too. 
• Dr. Fisher breaks down research that compared strength training to yoga and Pilates. 
• Amy says the first six to twelve months of training are where the magic happens. That’s when you see big shifts in strength, energy, and even mood. Once you start feeling those changes, it’s hard to imagine ever going back.
• According to Dr. Fisher, strength training should become as normal as brushing your teeth. You don’t do it for a few months and stop; you do it because it keeps you healthy and balanced every single day. It becomes part of who you are.
• Amy closes by saying that no matter your age or starting point, it’s never too late to begin. The progress might start quietly, but it builds faster than you think. Every workout is a reminder that you’re taking care of the only body you’ll ever have.
• During that first year, there will be days you doubt yourself, but having a personal trainer or a strength coach in your corner keeps you grounded. You start realizing you’re capable of so much more than you thought.

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It’s not about losing fat. It’s about engaging in strength training and seeing the positive adaptations that they can see.

There’s a lot happening. Month one, month two, month three, month four. It starts compounding upon itself over that first year.

Each single person can make a difference for themselves.

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. Today’s episode is part two of a two -part episode series where we are discussing the adaptations that happen when one exercises. In the first episode, we talked about the immediate benefits of strength training. What happens in the body after just one single session? of exercise. And if you missed that episode, I highly encourage you to go back because it’s a lot of very exciting and significant benefits that occur immediately after one single bout of whole effort exercise.

Now, in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the benefits or adaptations that research has documented happen to people within the first one to 12 months of strength training. I want you to consider this episode in terms of an investment you would consider making in your health. If you visit an exercise coach studio and you tell the coach there that you’re interested in getting started, your coach will going to urge you, they are going to encourage you to make at least a six to 12 month investment in yourself in order to achieve the transformation that we know exercise can deliver. This episode is going to break down why that is and what happens over each of those months to set you up for the longest term success. It’s too easy to look at health, in my opinion, as like an SOS intervention.

Exercise is something I have to pick up and then maybe drop, right? Like I’m going to do this for two months and then I’m going to stop because I have to fix something urgently and then I’m going to get rid of it. That mindset won’t serve us. And so this episode we’ll talk about why that is. And I hope you come away from this episode encouraged and having a deeper conviction. about the benefit of making exercise a longer term investment into yourself.

All right, Dr. Fisher, I’m so excited to kind of dive into this with you and to break down some of the benefits that will occur, you know, research has shown along the way. So do you want to take this conversation kind of like from start to finish? What types of things are going to happen in month one or two? Where would you like to start?

Actually, first of all, I just want to touch on something you just said in the introduction there, and this is a really great point. So I want to reiterate it. People often think about time and about financial cost of exercise. And there’s a thought of like, how much does it cost me and how much time will it cost me? But actually, you know, we have Matt, we had Matt brisky on the podcast months back. Um, you know, people can go and look that one back up on the, in the back catalog.

And one of the things he said is exercise is an investment. Strength training is an investment. So we invest, you know, a financial investment, but we also invest our time. And it’s about the rewards that we get. So when does that investment start paying off? And that’s how I think it’s a really nice way to frame these adaptations.

So what does the research say about how that investment is going to start to pay us back in the, as you said, one to 12 month time period?

Exactly. And spoiler alert, you’re going to get a big ROI on strength training. I’m just going to tell you that right now.

Oh, my goodness. I mean, the idea that strength training could be a short term fix for anything is, you know, it’s crazy. I mean, yes, of course, people want to get a bit stronger if they’ve had an injury or if they’re about to have surgery or if they want to lose weight. That’s great. But the long term benefits, the true health span adaptations really appear. When, uh, when we engage in strength training for, for a prolonged period, you know, I passed a comment the other day you were there, Amy.

And I said, you know, four months will always be four weeks and a year will always be four months. It’s really about, uh, continued adherence to strength training as this will, this will show. One of the things that I should caveat about this is it is something of a research review. I put together a document around some of these adaptations and the timescale around these adaptations. But it’s not to say that if I say, oh, the research says this will happen in six weeks, that at five and a half weeks, it won’t have happened. It will happen at some point within that six -week period.

And of course, it might happen much sooner. But the reality is many, many studies that are done are a pre and post test intervention. So they’ll look at a strength training intervention that’s four weeks long or eight or 12 weeks long, and they might look at blood pressure or functional performance or cognitive performance, and they’ll have a pre and a post test. So they’re simply saying this eight week intervention improved such and such a parameter. But that’s not to say that you wouldn’t have made improvements beforehand.

Yeah, and that’s a really great point. And one other caveat, which if you’re listening to this, you’re going to understand is that everybody starts from a different baseline. And these adaptations are presupposing that you are strength training consistently, you know, consistently, that you’re not skipping workouts, that you’re not coming in and only giving a half effort, right? So all of these are kind of understood, you know, sort of pieces of the puzzle.

Yeah, yeah.

And many of these research studies will have used, you know, what I would consider the gold standard of strength training, you know, supervised strength training. So it’s not to say that if you were to go away and do them on your own, you wouldn’t get these adaptations. But we know that adherence is lower if you go and train on your own. We know that intensity of effort is lower if you go and train on your own. So these align really nicely with the strength training at the exercise coach where you’re doing, you know, the right intensity and you have supervised workouts and so forth, just like the scientific studies that we’ll talk about.

Okay, perfect. So let’s dive in.

So some of the shortest research studies and strength training are only four weeks in duration. And that’s a really short time to see adaptations, but we do see some, and we typically see strength adaptations. And they’re quite often neuromuscular in nature. So we see things like neuromuscular efficiency. And this is really important because it’s really about our body’s ability to recruit muscle fibers. So our muscle fibers are there.

We just haven’t been able to use them until this time. So our body’s efficiency in many processes is really, really important to our long -term health and well -being. So the fact that we see improved neuromuscular efficiency in four is great. We also see evidence of blood pressure reduction in hypertensive patients. So if you have high blood pressure and you engage in resistance training regularly, then normally within the first four weeks you should start to see reductions in blood pressure.

And then the other main one that we see within the first four weeks is that flexibility starts to improve. So as well as being able to turn on muscles to contract, Uh, it’s actually also our ability to turn off muscles. Um, so we see range of motion of joints and we see the muscles capacity to lengthen and shorten on demand is improved. Uh, and lengthen of course, is our flexibility, the lengthening of the muscle. We’re able to switch off the muscle. It’s not being tight.

It’s not being pulled. Uh, it’s not under tension. It’s being able, it’s being allowed to lengthen normally. So we even see improved flexibility and range of motion as well.

Perfect. Okay, so that’s in four weeks.

Yeah, so all those are just the first four weeks. So then the next study duration we typically see is anything around six weeks. So we often see many, many strengthening studies are just six weeks in duration. And that’s again, a really short time to see adaptations, but there are a number of key ones. So we see neurologically, we see improved motor unit firing frequency, and this links back to sort of the neurological adaptations that we’ve seen. But there are a number of neurological adaptations, and one of them is simply motor unit firing frequency.

And that’s how quickly and how efficiently our brain can send the impulse for muscles to contract from our brain to the muscles that we’re requiring. So the increased motor unit firing rate is really good. We see older adults see improvements in proprioception and functional capacity, which includes things like their gait, so their walking ability. and in their dynamic balance as well. So if you are a bit older or if you have a parent or a friend who maybe is a bit older, then if they start to engage in strength training, then within the first six weeks, they should see improvements in their ability to walk and their balance and so forth. And of course, the confidence that goes along with that.

We also see that at this stage, cardiorespiratory fitness starts to improve. So most people think that strength training is to build strength and build muscle size, and traditional cardiovascular exercise is to build cardiorespiratory fitness. But actually six weeks of strength training is evidence to show improvements in cardiovascular fitness. So you might find that when you go for those long walks, you’re finding it easier, or you might find that you’re walking up and down stairs easier, or so forth. Or you might find that your normal day -to -day tasks just don’t get you so hot, or so out of breath, and so forth. And of course, that’s a really important one for our day -to -day activity, as well as for athletes looking to improve their fitness.

We can then talk about seeing reductions in something called C -reactive protein, which is a pro -inflammatory cytokine. So CRP, or C -reactive protein, is basically a chemical marker that’s often measured in blood assessment. And it’s representative of chronic or systemic inflammation. Now, that’s a pretty bad thing. The last thing we want is systemic inflammation. We’ve talked about it previously on the podcast.

But after six weeks of strength training, we start to see our CRP levels come down. And to be honest, CRP is pretty much a good marker for overall health. Uh, when we talk about inflammation, it’s worth kind of clarifying acute inflammation. If you, you know, bang your elbow and it swells, or if you bang your shin and it swells, uh, or hurt your knee and it swells, that’s acute inflammation cystitis. is that our body is constantly thinking that there’s some kind of infection or some kind of injury that it’s having to fight against. And so it prompts these pro -inflammatory cytokines.

Our body doesn’t want to be fighting against itself. So, you know, knowing that they come down around the six -week mark or before the six -week mark is really beneficial. Finally, at six weeks, we also start to see some muscle fiber hypertrophy. So, that basically means the muscle is starting to get bigger. Um, now it might be happening at kind of a micro or ultra structural levels are happening within the muscle, but we do start to see these changes and it’s really important. We often talk about the importance of muscular strength, but muscle mass and muscle size can be key markers for our longterm health and wellbeing and reductions in, in all cause mortality as well as other noncommunicable diseases and comorbidities.

So the fact that we are starting to see changes at a muscular level is showing that our strength training is really paying off.

Right. And an oversimplified way to understand this, by the six weeks, your muscles are getting better at working hard. They are better able to recruit muscle fibers to perform the tasks. They are getting a little bit stronger. They’re changing, um, and a very subtle level to be able to benefit from maximally from your exercises. Not only that, but your inflammation is starting to decrease, your flexibility is starting to improve, your blood pressure is starting to lower, which are pretty exciting.

And so a lot of this is sort of behind the scenes, right?

I would say, not visible yet, but you’re starting to feel a little bit different by this point. Yeah, I think that’s a great point. And many of the adaptations that we’ll talk about are things that we don’t see. We just don’t see on a day -to -day basis. You know, I don’t see my blood pressure and how it changes.

I don’t see some of the markers around cognitive function. But if I feel better and I’m able to move more and so forth, then obviously that’s a great marker for our quality of life, which we’ve talked about previously. So as we move into studies that have been eight weeks in duration, we see continued reductions in blood pressure. We’ve already talked about that starting to come down, but we can see it come down further at the eight -week mark. One of the key ones that we see from strength training studies that are eight weeks is a reduction in HbA1c levels. So that’s our basically our resting blood sugar levels.

And that’s key because it’s starting to reverse diabetes. So we’re starting to see improvements in our body’s ability to manage our sugar within our blood. So many people that are insulin resistant or that have diabetes will have an incorrect management of blood sugar, so they won’t be able to take in the insulin, either the insulin won’t be released to allow the sugar to go into our muscles and be stored within our body, and so it will stay within our blood, which is very, very bad. But in this case, we’re seeing that after eight weeks, our resting blood sugar levels are starting to reduce, so our insulin response is far more normal, or is becoming normal. We start to see things like reduction in pain, improvement in physical function in people now with osteoarthritis. So we said improvement in physical function in older adults, but now in people that maybe have a painful medical condition such as osteoarthritis.

And we also see improved posture. So reductions in sagittal spinal curves. So basically the way our spine might not be straight or might not be aligned. We should have a normal lordosis curve. in our spine, but we shouldn’t have shifts sagittally, which is laterally. So we can start to see posture improves and pelvic tilt, which is where our pelvis might tilt forward.

If we have tight hip flexors from spending too much time in a sitting position, well, we now start to see our posture is now in a more level tilt while we’re standing. Our hip flexors, we talked about flexibility, our hip flexors are probably lengthening better and our posture is better overall. So, absolutely key. We started to see It further increases in muscle hypertrophy. This is almost a continued thing from sort of six weeks onwards. We’ll see this continued sort of adaptation of muscle hypertrophy, but it starts to become evident at a whole muscle level.

So you might find that your t -shirt is starting to fit tighter around the biceps after eight weeks of strength training or, you know, or so forth. So we’re starting to see that those, those really sort of more notable physical adaptations. And then the last one, and this is my favorite one for the eight week mark, is autophagy. And this is one that we’ve actually not really talked about on the podcast. So we have a natural cell death and kind of cell recycling process called autophagy and apoptosis. Most people, we generally don’t think about it day to day, but the cells have a certain lifespan and then they effectively die or they’re cleared away through autophagy.

And then they’re effectively recycled. Any good bits from the cells, any good bits are used to form more DNA. And what actually happens, and this is interesting, what actually happens is cancer is a product of improper cell death and improper cell replication.

So basically, cells replicate with a mutation to

them. And a lot of that is thought to occur because if we don’t have appropriate autophagy and apoptosis, if we don’t have appropriate cell death and cell recycling, then we allow mutated cells to replicate, or damaged cells to replicate. Um, one of the problems is when we don’t exercise, when we don’t strength train specifically, we allow that to occur. Whereas when we do exercise and when we do strength train, we encourage autophagy. So we encourage appropriate cell death. Damaged cells are basically cleared away from our body and newer cells can be rebuilt, uh, using any good bits from them.

but also they’re not allowed to replicate.

So, and that links longer term, that links to a reduction in multiple types of cancer. Wow. That is pretty cool. You can think of that in a very simple way as kind of like, um, internal house cleaning is right. You’re like, you’re, you’re resetting yourself internally or regenerating the right, the right type of cells internally and, um, helping, you know, sort of what shouldn’t be there to move out. And so, yeah, that is pretty awesome.

I did not realize the connection between strength training and autophagy. I have heard of it, and I know it’s really good, but that’s pretty exciting that strength training can trigger that. Yeah, a lot of the time when people talk about autophagy, they make reference to it in terms of intermittent fasting, and they talk about or longer term fasting. If you go for 18 hours without fueling your body with food, then you kind of program this cell death for appropriate cells. It’s interesting because of course, once you’re at 18 hours, your body is going to require some nutrients.

It’s going to require fuel.

So it will start to break down the things that are already kind of damaged and broken.

But the idea that we can kind of preempt that by engaging in strength training to clear away the ones we don’t want, clear away the weaker cells, as I like to think about it, then then we can ultimately improve our body’s efficiency and strength.

Awesome. OK, so that’s the eight week mark, eight week mark, like two months. All that’s happened within the first two months of strength training, right? So we’ve seen some phenomenal adaptations already. Um, so there’s some studies that are only nine weeks that are nine weeks in duration. And a lot of these are linked to kind of the eccentric component, which is definitely worth talking about in terms of exerbotics, because there’s a greater eccentric load.

Eccentric is the lowering of the weight. So of course, there’s no weight stack on the exerbotics devices, but it’s where. A chest press or a leg press is the pressing out, it’s the coming back. So of course on an exerbotics device, it’s motor controlled because it’s technologically enabled. It’s far more advanced than many exercise facilities. But because of that eccentric load, which we are 40 % stronger in, we also see different adaptations within our sarcomeres.

So we’ve started to add sarcomeres in series as well as in parallel. So without getting into too fine a detail, We have some of the smallest levels within our muscle, and I think we have touched on this briefly in the past, are our sarcomeres. Typically, when we engage in strength training, we add sarcomeres in parallel. So we kind of build up this level of sarcomeres, and that adds to our kind of muscle hypertrophy. But actually, when we have a very heavy or very forced eccentric component to our strength training, such as exerbotics, we actually add sarcomeres in series as well. So we add sarcomeres next to each other, and that allows

for greater flexibility as well.

So we’re kind of optimizing this muscular adaptation.

It’s not just increases in parallel, it’s increases in series as well. That’s awesome. So as we move to 11 -week studies, we see things like reduced anxiety symptoms in both healthy and symptomatic participants. And this is, we can’t understate this. I was at a social gathering a few weeks back and I was talking with a number of friends and I asked after their children who were all grownups now, sort of late teens, early twenties, and Almost every other person that I spoke to said that their children were doing great. They all had a good job or they were doing great at college, but they were struggling a bit with anxiety.

And I thought there’s a real prevalence in society right now of anxiety, of sort of trait anxiety that is kind of ingrained in them. It’s not the state of them. It’s not the situation they’re in. It’s built into their person. Well, But 11 weeks of strength training has shown to reduce anxiety symptoms, both in healthy people, so people who really aren’t showing any evidence of clinical anxiety, and in symptomatic people who are showing clinical anxiety levels.

And then the other one is continued static and dynamic and reactive balance as a product of strength training in combination with balance training. And that’s really nice because of course many of the exercise coach studios now incorporate balance training into their programming. That’s pretty awesome. I don’t think that a lot of people realize that exercise can physiologically help them reduce anxiety. I think people understand at a very basic level that exercise produces endorphins.

I feel good immediately after, but looking at exercise as an intervention at a very physiological level to set you up for reduced longer -term anxiety is kind of another level of understanding and I think just sort of an icing on the cake to you know that boost of and mood that you get immediately following your workout knowing that you’re doing something for yourself longer term if that’s a struggle for you? Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of talk about how the cognitive functions or the cognitive benefits of strength training work. And there’s a lot of talk about how we cross the blood brain barrier or myokines. You know, we’ve talked about brain -derived neurotrophic factor in the past as well.

And we’ll talk about other cognitive benefits as we move on.

But they’re certainly the most, you know, underappreciated, in my opinion, as far as adaptations to strength training. Absolutely. So moving on to 12 weeks then, we start to see, well, we now see continued reduction in blood pressure and we start to be able to see some of the mechanisms associated with this. So it’s not just that we can say, okay, blood pressure has gone down, we start to see changes in nitric oxide metabolites as well. which link to blood pressure. So it’s not just a short -term response, it’s now that our body is functioning at a far more efficient level to maintain normalized blood pressure levels.

And we also see continued reductions in low back pain. So, of course, some studies will have been shorter and some studies will have been longer, and some people will have had chronic low back pain for longer or shorter or it been more serious. But in this instance, there are studies that are 12 weeks in duration showing that once weekly lumbar extension strength training can reduce low back pain. And then go back to our brain health and our cognitive function, we see that there’s a great study that shows 12 weeks of resistance training recovered cognitive function in elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment. So elderly patients who were showing some decline in their cognitive function, and this was actually saying that some of that decline was actually recovered after 12 weeks of strength training.

And this links to the next one, which is that strength training or strength increases, I should say, is correlated with the neurochemical markers associated with long -term brain health.

So I spoke about this at a conference a few years back and somebody asked me what I thought was the most exciting research that I’d read that year.

And this was certainly the most exciting research because while I’m well aware that physiologically I’m helping my body as I age and I’m giving myself the best opportunity to function physically well, the idea that as I maintain my strength, I maintain that relationship with some of the neurochemical markers that are associated with long -term brain health and cognitive function is obviously really important to me and should be important to everybody. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, and then the final one for the 12 -week marker is combined strength and balance program is showing significant reduction in the risk of a number of falls in older adults. you know, something like 60 % of people over the age of 60 will have a fall at some point. And for many people, that will produce some kind of injury, or it will become debilitating in their engagement in social activity, because they may feel less confident in their day -to -day activity. And oftentimes, it leads to second or third falls as well.

So the idea that a strengthened program now could reduce risk and number of falls in older adults is really important. Yes, we see a lot of people come in with that goal, right, as fall reduction or they saw a parent fall and they don’t want that for themselves, right? And so there’s several components you’ve already mentioned about that make up somebody’s balance and fall risk.

And some of those that you mentioned were, you know, the proprioception and flexibility and physical strength and stamina, and they all are building up together to reduce this fall risk by roughly three months. Is that accurate, 12 weeks? Yeah, absolutely. And there was also gait and dynamic balance. So their ability, their walking control and their proficiency, if you like, maybe their confidence in walking, but yeah, flexibility. A lot of the times, a physiologist I worked with a number of years back once said that flexibility is so important in balance because we often trip.

But flexibility might be the ability to catch ourselves before we fall because of our ability to get our leg forward and plant our foot again and things like that.

And of course, the strength and the stability to do that. So, so, yeah, all of those things are building up to this point where we can now say, hey, there’s there’s definitely evidence of a reduced risk of and number of falls.

Wow. OK, so all of this has happened up through 12 weeks, right?

That’s where we’re at.

Yeah, so three months and we could have had a diabetic, overweight, high blood pressure person at risk of falls with some degree of cognitive impairment and weakness in their muscles and, you know, almost a dependence. And after 12 weeks of strength training, they could have seen improvements in every single one of those parameters. So, you know. But Dr. Fisher, here’s a question for you. Here’s a question for you. Let’s say that was me.

those were all of my goals that you just mentioned, and I hit the 12 -week mark because I was exercising faithfully and I achieved all of those. Does that mean I should then stop? Can I stop now then? Well, no, because the problem is that at the 12 -week mark, we may have set ourself up for a higher position, but ultimately that decline is almost inevitable. That’s part of our life. We’ve talked previously that our body is in an anabolic state when we’re young and is in the catabolic state as we age.

So we have this building phase when we’re young. And we know that because we grow through our early years and through puberty and so forth. But from our late 20s, 30s, we’re really on a decline, our catabolic state, our catabolic mechanisms increase and our anabolic mechanisms decrease. So we lose bone, we lose muscle, we lose strength, we lose cognitive function, we lose efficiency in our mechanisms around blood pressure and blood sugar control and things like that. And hence why we see such a high prevalence of those medical conditions. But the idea that we can reverse them is great, but we can’t engage in strength training for 12 weeks and say that that’s it for the rest of our life.

That’s our start. That should be us back on a healthy life, but we want to maintain that healthy life. So at that stage, it’s now about continued adherence to strength training. I’ve said it before, but You know, twice a week, 20 minutes is not, it’s not a huge investment, um, for the rest of your life, but really for the best quality life to thrive, not just to survive, but to thrive. That’s what it is. Uh, we want to be doing the workout that I did today on my, the last day that I’m alive, but with the same cognitive function and the same strength and the same

blood pressure. So I don’t take any medication up to that point. And I can engage with all my friends and family and, and my social groups and my, you know, physical activity right up to the final day. I know it’s so inspiring. And you know what, if you’re listening to this, and you self admittedly, would confess that you have a short -term mindset when it comes to exercise, that you have a tendency to pick it up and drop it, or have a little bit of a short -term mentality. Just, if you’ve ever seen the image of a cartoon of a man pushing a big boulder up a hill, we all understand that you’re pushing this boulder, big boulder up a hill ahead of you, and you’re making traction, but as soon as you stop pushing that boulder, what’s gonna happen?

You’re going to just fall right back down the hill and it’s going to flatten you. And that’s kind of how like aging is, is that we, um, with our guidance of a supervised strength training workout, conveniently, we are pushing this boulder up a hill with help. It’s not that hard.

It’s not that long, but we’re making a lot of good progress.

If we stop though, what’s going to happen, it’s going to roll right back down.

And so that’s what we want to avoid. Right. Yeah. There’s a couple of healthcare providers I’ve worked with in the UK, and we talked about it in terms of a pension. And obviously in the US it’s a 401k, but you spend so much of your life paying into your 401k so that when you retire, you have this benefit, you have this financial freedom. Um, to sustain the life you want.

Well, that’s exactly what you’re doing with your, with your body.

You’re paying, you’re investing in your body so that it will always be there to function for you.

And in this case, it’s not just your body, but your mind as well. Absolutely.

Okay. So that was a little aside, a little rant, and now we’re going to hop into what’s going to happen after. three -month mark. To be honest, it’s amazing I don’t go on more tangents. I’m renowned for going off on tangents, but I’ll stay on point for the rest of the podcast now. So we’re at 13 weeks.

This is one of my favorite adaptations. It says that muscle size increases become visible to friends and family. So there’s clearly evidence, there’s research studies that say that not only have we started to make physiological adaptations within our muscle, but that those adaptations to our muscle are now visible to the people around us. So, and I think that’s a great adaptation.

Now, maybe that’s the ego in me and the vanity in me that thinks it’s important for people to think that I’m muscular. And let’s be clear, I’m certainly not as muscular as many people out there. But I think the idea that you can engage in strength training and other people will notice the difference in you is so important. I’m sorry, but honestly, that’s probably one of the biggest social motivators because as soon as somebody sees you and says, what do you, what have you been doing? You look good. Great.

That, that really is.

Wow. That’s motivating.

Who wants to quit after that point? Right. They just are like, yeah, this is working. Yeah. That’s a good one. Okay.

So 14 weeks, we see continued improvements in blood pressure. And again, this time it’s mechanisms called endothelial functions. That’s our arteries and our veins ability to contract and relax. So when we’re young, our arteries have this great elasticity to allow more blood to flow through or to shrink down when there’s not so much blood flowing through based on our exercise demands. But our endothelial function, our artery’s ability to do that, changes with time. We lose that level of elasticity.

And at 14 weeks, the research says, we’ve now got improvements in our endothelial function. So we’re continuing to see these mechanisms that improve the function. improve our reductions in blood pressure or our normalization of blood pressure. At 15 weeks, we see studies where healthy people see reductions in LDL. So, LDL is low -density lipoproteins. That’s considered, often termed, the bad cholesterol.

Cholesterol is actually a hormone. It’s something produced by our body, so it’s not necessarily bad on its own, although we don’t want too much of it. But LDL is certainly the bad of the low -density, of the density lipoproteins. We often see increases in high -density lipoproteins in accordance with that reduction in low -density lipoproteins, so that’s also good. And we see reductions in total cholesterol, which is overall often what medical professionals, physicians, and GPs are looking at. And again, continued reductions in C -reactive protein, which we talked about earlier, linked to systemic and chronic inflammation.

Okay. So 16 weeks. And you can imagine now, I just kind of want to paint a bit of a picture. This is one of those tangents, Amy, forgive me. I paint a bit of a picture that, you know, I’ve run many of these studies. And or many studies like these, I should say, and you recruit participants and then you take them into a gym or a laboratory environment and you engage them in strength training, you know, twice a week to 16 weeks. So 16 weeks, we’re now at nearly four months.

So this is people that haven’t typically trained before. So you can imagine that if they weren’t encouraged to already go and do strength training, it’s hard to get them to stick with a program like this. And so The idea of making it more palatable by using a low volume, short duration, 20 minutes, twice per week approach is really, really important. And certainly they’re a lot more feasible to get people to adhere to those kinds of programs than of higher volume or time commitment. And I say that in part really just to give a shout out to a lot of the researchers that have done this kind of study that we’re talking about.

There’s a lot of time and money and effort goes into these studies. So kudos to the scientists behind this. So at 16 weeks. Older adults are seeing increases in bone mineral density. Wow, this is a really big one. We’ve talked about anabolic and catabolic stages of our life, and our bone density does start to diminish as we get older, and especially as a product of certain hormones within the female population specifically.

but our bone density just decreased, we can become osteopenic and osteoporosis, which quite literally means porous bones, makes them very brittle, puts us at a great risk of fracture if we fall. And after 16 weeks of strength training, we’re now seeing that our bones are increasing in density. So they’re not just, it’s not just our muscular system that’s becoming stronger, but it’s our skeletal system as well. We’re quite literally reversing aging with that. That can’t be underrated in what we’re talking about. You see improvements in muscle quality and insulin sensitivity, and we see the reversal of diabetes in many people.

So, I spoke with somebody not long back and they were saying, is it true that diabetes can be reversed by strength training? And my comment was, not necessarily in everybody, but there is absolutely evidence to show that some people go from being a fully blown diabetic to a pre -diabetic to having normal blood sugar levels and no longer having to look at their insulin levels and no longer being on the medication for being a diabetic. So strength training can absolutely reverse diabetes. We see improvements in cervical and shoulder angles, so our posture improves further. probably see improvements in our upper body control. So all the things that we are doing to make our posture worse by sitting at a desk, by leaning forward or by driving or, or so forth, we’re now seeing all of those things are reversing.

Uh, and we’re seeing our neck angle is here. So you can imagine with age, we’ve talked about catabolic state, but we also are kind of prompting this hunch back. kind of leg forward, neck forward, head forward approach. But we’re now seeing all of that start to be reversed with strength training. We see further psychological benefits. So self -perception is significantly improved.

Self -perception is how I think of myself. So many people will, of course, have low self -worth and self -efficacy, their perception of their ability to perform a given task. So the idea that strength training can help people feel better about themselves, about their engagement in their day -to -day activities and their capabilities is hugely important. And then in accordance, we also see reduced depressive symptoms in people undergoing treatment for depression.

So many people who have depressive symptoms may be put on medication or will be undergoing some kind of medically ensued treatment. Well, we often use the phrase exercise is medicine or strength training is medicine, and it’s absolutely medicine. We’re saying that strength training reduces depressive symptoms in people undergoing treatment for depression. So a few really big ones at that four -month mark. So if you were thinking of quitting at three months, at 12 weeks, these are all the things that we’re seeing beyond that time. You know what?

I mean, four months, you’re starting to become a different person. These are pretty big and significant ones, the bone density changes and the diabetes. Those are pretty concerning states of being for people to be in. they find themselves at various stages of their life in. And with intentionality, you know, it’s documented and research shows that in four months of intentional strength training, you can really, really combat those.

And it may not even be as much of a concern. You can see yourself fighting that and changing the numbers that you’re looking at and seeing that you’re on the right direction, that you’ve actually shifted your trajectory in a different direction than your body wanted to go or was going in. And I can see how that would improve your self -perception, too. I mean, even if those two weren’t your main things, who doesn’t want to feel better about themself, right? And by then, I think you’ve hopefully solidified more of a habit of exercise too, and you identify as that healthy person by then, which would be the goal. Yeah, I love your first comment there, that after four months, you’re really a different person.

And I think that speaks volumes about the people that do engage in strength training for a long -term, about their long -term goals, their long -term plans, their long -term health and the importance of their health. And like you said, you know, bone density and diabetes and psychological health and depression and self -perception, you know, are huge things. The idea that you can take somebody and make them into a different person that’s not osteoporotic or osteopenic, that’s not diabetic anymore, that doesn’t have a negative self -perception, that doesn’t have poor posture or weakness or dependence. You know, I often say, you know, we can see weakness everywhere because it exists in frailty, it exists in dependence, it exists in all the care homes in our society. What we want is to be independent. out of those care homes and keep our independence as long as we can.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with this time duration. And this is only 16 weeks. This is only four months. Four months in the grand scheme of things is really a drop in the ocean. But it’s then the conscious decision to sustain that and to sustain that health span. You know what, if you’re an exercise coach client, that is 32 workouts.

Again, here’s one other point, is that people sometimes, I’ve been guilty of this before I discovered the exercise coach, they look at fitness and health overhauling as this gigantic, all -consuming lifestyle shift that is a little bit daunting and requires a full -time job level of participation at the gym. and extreme nutritional changes and whatever else that you think is involved in this.

And to think that anybody can do 32 workouts. How many total minutes is that? If they’re only 20 minutes each, that’s not that many minutes of time to achieve all of these things. And so just putting this into perspective, if done correctly and if done right, you are really, really, really collapsing this timeline to meaningful and drastic change.

I just hope that encourages you if you’re listening to this today.

Yeah, fantastic. I love it. When you put that in perspective of 32 workouts, I can I have in my head somebody almost ticking them off, you know, and seeing these benefits as they as they go through this duration. Who would want to quit strength training if they were seeing these benefits? So, yeah. And then, OK, there’s a few more.

There’s only a few more to touch on. So if you’re listening, thank you. much for sticking with us this long. So at 26 weeks, so we now jump to the half year for six months. After six months of strength training, the evidence suggests that your resting energy expenditure has increased by around 7%. So, we talked on the previous podcast about the acute responses to strength training and we said that resting energy expenditure is elevated for up to 24 to 48 hours or even up to 72 hours in some studies.

At this stage now, your body has got that into this rhythm that your body stays healthy, it stays fit, it engages in this with some degree of regularity. And so your energy expenditure day to day is higher. And this is partly a product of the amount of muscle mass that you’ve added, whether it’s muscle density or whether it’s actually physical muscle size.

But you’re now burning 7 % more calories just just by being you, not by exercising, not by eating a certain way, just by being you, just by having six months of strength training under your belt.

So, and I love that. I think that’s, you know, why wouldn’t you want to do that? Why wouldn’t you want to keep going with that and keep adding muscle and keep elevating your energy expenditure? Amy, you called me out last week on eating a bag of peanut M &Ms. Yes, I did. Um, and I often joke about what people say to me, Oh my gosh, you’re this like health guru and, and, you know, PhD, and why would you eat that?

Something that’s so bad for you. And I always turn around and say, Hey, first of all, I love peanut M &Ms. So that’s my treat.

But second of all, I do all of those things so that now and then I can eat a bag of peanut M &Ms.

I think that’s okay. So, you know, knowing our energy expenditures increased gives us that, that freedom to maybe have a, have a, uh, you know, a cheat, a cheat day. now and then. Not a cheat day, not a cheat meal, but just a little snack now and then. Absolutely.

You know, put your critics to bed. Put them to rest, Dr. Fisher. Don’t let them talk to you like that. And I think it’s helpful to know, like, my body is working for me now, on my behalf, behind the scenes, if I make it to the six -month mark. I’ve done something that is setting my body up work in the background for my benefit, for my metabolic health, without me even doing anything, like that’s a win. Yeah.

So the next one is also a six -month study, and this was the drastic improvements in strength are associated with improved mitochondrial density and genetic expression. And basically what that means, and this was a phenomenal research paper, we could do a whole podcast based on this paper by Simon Milov, and Mark Tarnopolsky.

But basically what they did is they had older adults and they had younger adults and they looked at them at a cellular, a genetic level. and they put the older adults through six months of strength training. And then they reviewed their genetic expression and their mitochondrial density. They looked at how they were functioning at a cellular level, and they found that they were much, much closer to the 21 -year -olds now. And in fact, the title of the research paper was Strength Training Reverses Aging. So at this six -month mark now, you are Literally, a different person, your body internally at the cellular level is functioning like you are much, much younger than you are.

Holy cow. I like, it’s pretty fascinating to consider genetic expression. Just consider the fact that your genes are a certain combination of genes. and sequences of information, but how you look, feel, and function is highly variable based on that set of genes. way up there is the degree to which you participate in strength training. I mean, skin elasticity, energy, cognitive function, physical appearance.

There are like a hundred possible variations of the same individual that could exist in reality. And some are extremely unhealthy and some are fantastic. And it’s interesting because you can, to some extent, influence what that is. And so if that’s important to you, it’s really cool to understand that just the one behavior, just the one behavior of strength training can highly, highly influence your genetic expression for the better. Not only physically, not only externally or appearance, but also like internal with your health and what diseases you develop and what diseases you don’t develop. I just think that’s life changing information.

When I think about it, I create this kind of image in my brain that As you engage in a lifetime of strength training, as you engage in a strength training career, I often call it, you are quite literally reversing your body. You’re creating a biological age younger than your chronological age. Your cells and your genetic expression is different. Your bone density is improved. Your muscular system is improved. Cognitive function, endothelial function and blood pressure, insulin response and blood sugar control.

You know, all of these things are happening like a much, much younger person than you physically are. So, you know, it’s just phenomenal to think of these adaptations. So the very last one, which is a year -long study, and it almost plays down everything else that’s gone ahead, but the very last one is continued strength training shows improvements in executive function, which is cognitive function and neuroplasticity, above other exercise modalities.

And so the only real reason I bring this up, because we’ve talked about improved cognitive function at different time points, but this is a really nice study that’s one year long.

And what they did is they compared strength training to other exercise modalities, to things like just engaging in stretching, to things like yoga or Pilates.

And I’m absolutely not against yoga or Pilates at all. I think they’re great, but I think they’re secondary to the importance of strength training. So at this stage, it’s very clear strength training improves cognitive function and executive function to a greater degree than other exercise modalities. So at this stage, strength training is really winning out compared to any other exercise type you can choose. Amazing. Wow.

So, I mean, the benefits you just listed over this timeline. If you were listening and you caught this, I mean, there are different categories of things. And so whichever is most significant to you, you’re going to have some that matter more to you than other people. But you’ve covered neural changes and adaptations, cardiovascular, blood pressure -related adaptations, flexibility and function adaptations, musculoskeletal, metabolic and inflammation, pain and posture, and then psychological and cognitive. adaptations are sprinkled in at various points.

Some occur quicker than others, but really no matter what your goal, all of these are appearing within your first 6 to 12 months, which I think personally is a sweet spot because that is going to encourage you to keep going. If all these benefits took 24 months to happen, right? it’d just be too easy to get discouraged and decide that what you were doing isn’t working, right? And what you’re saying is there’s a lot happening month one, month two, month three, month four, a lot of it behind the scenes, but then you start, it starts compounding upon itself over that first year. And if you stop strength training at the two month mark, there are like triple the amount of benefits possible to you that you’re missing out on. And the boulder is going to roll back over you.

Yeah, I mean, there’s no doubt that every strength training session counts. So doing something someday is good, but it’s all about that long -term adherence, that long -term engagement. It’s all about this as a lifestyle habit. You know, the analogy that I often make, and I’ll do it again, so forgive me, is brushing your teeth. You know, we don’t brush our teeth for the first six months of our life and think, well, that’s that done.

Uh, you know, we, we get up when we do it every day, twice a day, and it’s, it’s routine.

And we don’t even think about not doing it. And the reality is that for my goodness, if everybody on the planet engaged in strength training twice a week, uh, for the rest of their life, I just, I look at the, the, the state of society economically, socially, uh, you know, road rage and depression and anxiety and things like this, and I’m physical ill health. And we would just live on a completely different planet. Um, but of course it’s not so easy, uh, global level, but each single person. can make a difference for themselves. Yes.

I, it’s, um, it is achievable. And, um, you know, one, one final frame for you as we wrap up this conversation. When we talk to clients, we talk about the journey they’re, they’re about to take. And, um, you know, if you lump some of these adaptations into sort of what happens in the first few months. one to two months, you could describe that as acclimation. So your coach may have talked to you about an acclimation phase, which is in general where your body is shifting and your muscles are waking up and they’re learning and they’re adapting initially on a lot of levels to the exercise stimulus you’re giving it.

And then eventually after that acclimation phase, you move into what’s called transformation or what you could call a transformation. You are transforming yourself from the inside out to become a different person. And our mission at The Exercise Coach that we talk about is to transform the way people age. If you’ve never heard us say that before, what we mean by that is we have a choice in the way we age and we can transform the usual aging process And with a short amount of time, two 20 -minute workouts per week, that leads to a transformation in the aging experience itself and in our lives. And that’s why we say that strength changes everything. It’s because it changes the amount of time and the trajectory of our life if we do it regularly.

And so I hope This information was encouraging to you. I hope that no matter what you’re after when it comes to exercise, that you have understood and absorbed at a deeper level what is really going on in your body. backed by research and that these are things that are going to continue to compound as you stick with it. Remember, every single bout of exercise you do produces positive adaptations. Every workout matters. So we’ve talked about every workout.

We’ve talked about this first year, one to 12 months. And, you know, think about a long -term approach to exercise, like Dr. Fisher said. Picture yourself 10 years from now, a healthier, stronger, more vibrant, younger feeling and functioning version of yourself. That is what you can achieve through this repetition. I just can’t emphasize that enough. Any closing comments, Dr. Fisher, about this?

You know, I have one closing comment and, uh, and I do appreciate that. I’ve gone on quite a lot about all the content here, but one of the things that we haven’t talked about is weight loss and many people will engage in exercise and strength training because of weight loss. We’ve been focused on the wrong tissue for decades. Throughout my entire lifespan, people have talked about weight loss and fat loss and dieting and things like that. And it’s not about weight loss. All of these things are in spite of weight loss.

All of these things are in spite of your adipose tissue or your body mass index. We should, we’ve been focused on that and we should have been focused on muscle all this time. And we’re now starting to see it. The data is there and it’s just, it’s really important that we get that information out to the people. Um, so they can know that it’s not about losing fat. It’s about engaging in strength training and seeing the positive adaptations that they can see.

Excellent. Yeah. Thank you for that point. We want you to feel and function decades younger than you are. And so if you could use help with that.

I hope that you will check out an exercise coach studio near you.

Visit exercisecoach . com to figure that out. If you ever have a question for us about strength, fitness, health, please visit the show so you can connect with us at strengthchangeseverything . com. We will see you next time on the podcast and 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.