0:16 Strength training can feel so confusing. You've got squats, you've got deadlifts, you've got hip thrusts, you've got leg presses, you've got standing isometric single-leg hamstring curls, whatever that is.
0:35 How many sets? How many reps? What even is a set and a rep? How heavy should you go? How many days a week should you work out?
0:44 It can be kind of a lot. So today, I am giving you four simple strength training foundations, so you know the time you're spending in the gym is actually building muscle and not spent just trying to figure out what the heck you're doing.
1:03 Welcome to part two of our series. Last time was Simple Fat Loss Foundations for Moms.
1:15 If you haven't listened to that part yet, I would go back and start there. We talked about a chain.
1:21 Protein protects your muscle, muscle protects your metabolism, and your metabolism protects your calorie deficit from being completely unsustainable. Today is Simple Strength Training Foundations for Moms, and this is all about how to build the muscle.
1:44 By the end of this episode, you'll know the four things your strength training needs so that you're not wasting time in the gym.
1:56 Before we get started, I want to talk first about being realistic. There's no sense in saying that you're going to hit the gym five days a week when you work full-time, your kids are in sports every night, and you still have to make dinner every night.
2:16 We have got to be realistic. I have five kids, and I had to learn really quickly, early on, when my kids were much younger, what my capacity actually is.
2:32 So I want to make sure that you understand that. If you are a mom, I'm not saying that you need to lower your standards, but what I am saying is we need to not set ourselves up for failure by expecting to do things that really aren't realistic for our current position.
2:48 Today, I am giving you the "whats." These are the foundational principles, the biological principles of strength training.
3:02 But every single one of these things needs a supporting system underneath it, or it's not going to get past, you know, two or three weeks.
3:10 You need to know when you're going to lift, what you're going to be doing when you're at the gym or at home doing your actual session, and how it's going to fit in your schedule with everything else in your life.
3:25 For most of my clients, that looks like lifting three days a week for about 30 to 45 minutes. That's it. Not two hours a day, and not five days a week.
3:37 I remember one time I was poking around on this one trainer's Instagram profile, and I looked at the application for working with her.
3:47 It said you had to be able to budget two hours, five days a week, or something like that.
3:55 Or it was like seven to 10 hours a week of training to work with her. And I was like, okay, well, pass on that.
4:02 I'm not going to the gym for two hours, five days a week. I think it is so important to have realistic expectations of what's possible for you as a mom, and a big part of that is building out the systems.
4:19 That is a huge piece of what I do inside my program, the Fat Loss Formula for Moms. If you're done being the mom who can't be consistent and you're ready to level up and get serious, I would love for you to book a free discovery call.
4:39 There's a link in the show notes. Okay, let's get into these foundations. I did group classes for years, and let me tell you, I'm pretty sure none of those classes ever felt easy. They always felt hard. I was sweaty, I was tired, and I left feeling like I'd done something.
5:01 I love the kind where you used weights. I think they were called things like Body Pump, where you're moving, you're on the steps, you're using weights, you're doing a lot of stuff, and it was tiring.
5:12 So I assumed that it was working because I was so tired. Eventually, I decided that I should start lifting weights on my own.
5:22 So I'd walk into the gym, go up and down the rows of machines, and try a few out.
5:29 I would try to remember what I did last time. I could never remember. Was it this machine? How much weight did I use that time? I don't really know. I was putting in the time, but honestly, I was not getting any stronger. I realized that I needed structure.
5:45 Once I started learning how bodybuilders do this, and they are the professionals at building muscle, I started doing what they did.
5:58 I followed an actual plan where every lift had a specific target, and my strength went up so much, and my muscle went up as well.
6:08 But one of the most surprising things that happened for me was that exercising, specifically lifting weights, which I'd always hated because I felt like it wasn't doing anything and I wasn't burning any calories, stopped being boring.
6:25 I'd walk in and think, okay, I did eight reps last week, and this week I'm supposed to do 10.
6:35 And then I'd leave the gym and be like, I just squatted with a hundred pounds on my back for 10 reps.
6:45 It was amazing. And then people started commenting on my lifts, and that felt even more amazing. What I really noticed was that in the past, when I was doing those other workouts, the running and the Insanity videos with Shanti, do you guys remember those?
7:09 And the YouTube workouts and the group classes and those things, I realized that I'd been measuring whether or not something was working by how hard it felt.
7:21 And feeling hard and making progress are actually not the same thing. I want you to absorb that into your entire body.
7:33 Feeling hard and actually making progress aren't the same thing. Progress is something that you can actually measure. So many of you are already active. You're going to classes, you're running, you're doing the workouts. And I do want to say, I'm not against classes. I think they're great for community and aerobic fitness, and they're fun.
7:55 I love them. I have clients that do them, it's just not the foundation of their workout. So you're doing all those things, and let me remind you that you are not starting from zero.
8:10 Most of the people that I work with are doing some form of exercise, but being active and building muscle are two very different things.
8:20 And I want to show you today what makes that difference. Before we get into the foundations of strength training, I want to make sure that we're all using the same language.
8:33 I'm going to use two words a lot today: reps and sets. A rep is one complete movement. So you squat down and stand back up. That is one rep. A set is a group of reps that you do back to back without resting. You can kind of think of that as stairs.
8:53 A rep is one stair, and the whole set is a flight of stairs, and then you have the landing. So if your workout says three sets of eight reps, that means you're climbing three flights of eight stairs and you rest on each landing.
9:11 I hope that you're understanding this. Let's get into the foundations now that we know the vocabulary. The first foundation is compound movements.
9:21 A compound movement is a lift that works a bunch of muscle groups all at the same time. Your whole body has to work to move the weight.
9:29 When you do a squat, you're using your thighs, you're using your butt, you're using your core, and even your arms to hold the weight in place.
9:38 Compare that to something like a bicep curl, which is just holding a dumbbell and moving it up and down. That works one muscle. Bicep curls aren't bad. I am not anti-bicep curl, but they are not the foundation. Isolation movements are not the foundation of our workouts.
10:00 Compound lifts are. They're a big muscle-building bang for your time buck. It's like running a full load of laundry instead of washing one sock at a time.
10:10 Would you ever wash one piece of clothing at a time? No. If you only have 30 minutes, you want every single one of those minutes working as many muscles as possible.
10:21 This means shorter workouts, you build more muscle, and your body gets better at moving the way that it has to move in real life.
10:28 We use so many of these movement patterns in our day-to-day. There's also research showing that compound lifts can protect your bones and can even help build bone.
10:44 And as we get older, that's a big deal. So I'm going to share my core lifts with you, and these are the foundation of every program that I write for my clients, especially in the beginning.
10:57 You'll do a lot of them if you work with me. Two of them are technically the same movement pattern, which is called a hinge, but they do different jobs, so I'm just going to talk about them individually.
11:14 The first lift that is foundational is the deadlift. A deadlift is a hinge, and that means you're bending at your hips and pushing your butt back. You're not bending at your back. That's a mistake that a lot of people make. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen teenage kids come into the gym and just muscle up a deadlift with their back. And it makes me hurt.
11:38 When you think about a deadlift, the functional part of that movement is like when you go to pick up the laundry off the floor or pick up your kid and hold them. That is a hinge movement.
11:54 The deadlift works almost every muscle in your body, and it's honestly so good at building strength in the back side of your body, which is called your posterior chain.
12:12 A lot of women are intimidated by deadlifts, and I can understand that, but with good form, it's a very safe lift. When I start my clients, we start with very light weights and high reps so that we learn the movement pattern.
(Ad)
Are you a mom who's been working out consistently, but your body isn't changing, and you just want to know that the time you're spending in the gym is actually working?
I want you in my Fat Loss Formula for Moms program. It's 12 weeks of one-to-one coaching with me. I build your workouts around your equipment and your schedule.
I help you set up your nutrition so that it works with your kids and your real life. And I check in with you twice a week for accountability.
When something stops working, you're not left staring at an app trying to figure it out by yourself. You have me.
If you're tired of wondering whether you're wasting your time, let's figure this out together. Book a free discovery call on my website at EffectiveFitnessForWomen.com/fatlossformula, or tap the link in the show notes.
12:28 The second foundational lift is the squat. I want you to think about sitting on the toilet. That is a squat. You're squatting down when you sit on a toilet. Squats are challenging, but they are very rewarding. I usually start clients with a box squat, where you squat down to a box or a bench and then move back up. Then we move on to a back squat, usually with dumbbells, or different kinds of squats like sumo squats, just to help them learn the movement.
12:55 A lot of people have not been taught how to squat properly, but it is so important for you, especially with aging, to know how to squat well.
13:10 The third foundational lift, which I program a ton for my clients, is the hip thrust.
13:19 This is our other hinge movement, but instead of lifting something off the ground, you're driving your hips up with your upper back on a bench. You can have weight across your hips, or they even have hip thrust machines. You could do them bodyweight. There are lots of variations.
13:37 But the hip thrust is one of the best lifts for targeting your glutes, and you can move a lot of weight with it, which means more strength and more muscle over time.
13:50 It's also relatively spine-friendly. You have to use good form, obviously, so it's a good one that I like to use for beginners.
14:00 I built my entire booty on hip thrusts. I had a pancake butt, such a pancake butt, and now I don't.
14:10 And if you're wondering how long that took, it took several years. You're not going to do somebody's booty builder workout and then in two months grow five inches on your butt. If someone did, they probably got surgery. I'm just going to say that.
14:38 The fourth foundational lift that I think is so important is single-leg and balance work. Real life happens on one leg more than we realize. Single-leg work helps you build strength on each side of your body and helps you stay steady as you get older.
15:01 We do a lot of variations with this, so you're not just going to do these exact exercises. We use these main groups. You can think of the squat as a group, and we pull exercises from that group. So I'm not just doing squats, and just hip thrusts, and just deadlifts in the traditional sense. We pull from the groups, so we do lots of variations.
15:27 We might combine them, for example, in a single-leg hip thrust. We're using single leg, and we're also doing a hip thrust.
15:35 I want to add that when we think about foundational movements or lifts, core work is built into every compound lift. When you are deadlifting, to support your spine you have to be bracing your core, which is working your core. When you are doing a hip thrust, you have to be bracing your core. Same thing with the squat.
16:02 So all of that is built in. I do typically add some additional core work for my clients that's more specialized or more focused, but the basics are built into all of these compound movements.
16:20 The second foundation to building strength is progressive overload. If you take one thing from this episode, I want it to be this.
16:32 Progressive overload means consistently challenging your muscles so that they have a reason to grow stronger and bigger over time. Your muscles do not know they need to grow unless you give them a reason.
16:47 Strength training is how you communicate with your muscles. What you're saying is, hey, we need to be stronger than you were last week.
16:58 I want you to think about this like teaching your kid how to read. If she reads the same book every single night, she's going to get really good at reading that one book, but she's never going to move up to the next reading level if you just keep reading that same book.
17:14 Your muscles are the same way. If you do the same workout with the same weights week after week, your body is going to adapt to that and then it's not going to change anymore.
17:24 There are a few key ways to do progressive overload, but I want to focus on the two easiest ones. You can add weight or you can add reps.
17:34 Here's what that might look like if you were doing a squat. Let's say week one, you squat just the barbell, which is usually 45 pounds, or maybe you're just doing bodyweight. Let's just do the bar for ease of this example. So you're going to do the barbell, 45 pounds, for three sets of six.
17:59 It feels pretty easy. So next week, you add a little weight, and those same three sets of six suddenly feel harder.
18:09 You stay at that weight and work your way up to eight reps, then 10 reps, then maybe 12 reps. Once 12 reps feels strong, you add a little more weight and drop back down to six reps. Then you start climbing again and repeat the process.
18:21 So you're always either adding weight or adding reps, and that steady climb is what keeps your muscles constantly challenged.
18:34 This is the missing piece for a lot of classes. They feel hard, but there's no system in place for making sure that each lift is harder over time. That is why I spent years sweaty and tired doing workout classes without ever seeing results.
20:59 So we've talked about two big pieces of strength training foundations: the core lifts and progressive overload. I actually think this is going to be a part one and part two.
21:14 In the next episode, we're going to talk about the next two foundations, so come back and listen to that episode.
0:35 How many sets? How many reps? What even is a set and a rep? How heavy should you go? How many days a week should you work out?
0:44 It can be kind of a lot. So today, I am giving you four simple strength training foundations, so you know the time you're spending in the gym is actually building muscle and not spent just trying to figure out what the heck you're doing.
1:03 Welcome to part two of our series. Last time was Simple Fat Loss Foundations for Moms.
1:15 If you haven't listened to that part yet, I would go back and start there. We talked about a chain.
1:21 Protein protects your muscle, muscle protects your metabolism, and your metabolism protects your calorie deficit from being completely unsustainable. Today is Simple Strength Training Foundations for Moms, and this is all about how to build the muscle.
1:44 By the end of this episode, you'll know the four things your strength training needs so that you're not wasting time in the gym.
1:56 Before we get started, I want to talk first about being realistic. There's no sense in saying that you're going to hit the gym five days a week when you work full-time, your kids are in sports every night, and you still have to make dinner every night.
2:16 We have got to be realistic. I have five kids, and I had to learn really quickly, early on, when my kids were much younger, what my capacity actually is.
2:32 So I want to make sure that you understand that. If you are a mom, I'm not saying that you need to lower your standards, but what I am saying is we need to not set ourselves up for failure by expecting to do things that really aren't realistic for our current position.
2:48 Today, I am giving you the "whats." These are the foundational principles, the biological principles of strength training.
3:02 But every single one of these things needs a supporting system underneath it, or it's not going to get past, you know, two or three weeks.
3:10 You need to know when you're going to lift, what you're going to be doing when you're at the gym or at home doing your actual session, and how it's going to fit in your schedule with everything else in your life.
3:25 For most of my clients, that looks like lifting three days a week for about 30 to 45 minutes. That's it. Not two hours a day, and not five days a week.
3:37 I remember one time I was poking around on this one trainer's Instagram profile, and I looked at the application for working with her.
3:47 It said you had to be able to budget two hours, five days a week, or something like that.
3:55 Or it was like seven to 10 hours a week of training to work with her. And I was like, okay, well, pass on that.
4:02 I'm not going to the gym for two hours, five days a week. I think it is so important to have realistic expectations of what's possible for you as a mom, and a big part of that is building out the systems.
4:19 That is a huge piece of what I do inside my program, the Fat Loss Formula for Moms. If you're done being the mom who can't be consistent and you're ready to level up and get serious, I would love for you to book a free discovery call.
4:39 There's a link in the show notes. Okay, let's get into these foundations. I did group classes for years, and let me tell you, I'm pretty sure none of those classes ever felt easy. They always felt hard. I was sweaty, I was tired, and I left feeling like I'd done something.
5:01 I love the kind where you used weights. I think they were called things like Body Pump, where you're moving, you're on the steps, you're using weights, you're doing a lot of stuff, and it was tiring.
5:12 So I assumed that it was working because I was so tired. Eventually, I decided that I should start lifting weights on my own.
5:22 So I'd walk into the gym, go up and down the rows of machines, and try a few out.
5:29 I would try to remember what I did last time. I could never remember. Was it this machine? How much weight did I use that time? I don't really know. I was putting in the time, but honestly, I was not getting any stronger. I realized that I needed structure.
5:45 Once I started learning how bodybuilders do this, and they are the professionals at building muscle, I started doing what they did.
5:58 I followed an actual plan where every lift had a specific target, and my strength went up so much, and my muscle went up as well.
6:08 But one of the most surprising things that happened for me was that exercising, specifically lifting weights, which I'd always hated because I felt like it wasn't doing anything and I wasn't burning any calories, stopped being boring.
6:25 I'd walk in and think, okay, I did eight reps last week, and this week I'm supposed to do 10.
6:35 And then I'd leave the gym and be like, I just squatted with a hundred pounds on my back for 10 reps.
6:45 It was amazing. And then people started commenting on my lifts, and that felt even more amazing. What I really noticed was that in the past, when I was doing those other workouts, the running and the Insanity videos with Shanti, do you guys remember those?
7:09 And the YouTube workouts and the group classes and those things, I realized that I'd been measuring whether or not something was working by how hard it felt.
7:21 And feeling hard and making progress are actually not the same thing. I want you to absorb that into your entire body.
7:33 Feeling hard and actually making progress aren't the same thing. Progress is something that you can actually measure. So many of you are already active. You're going to classes, you're running, you're doing the workouts. And I do want to say, I'm not against classes. I think they're great for community and aerobic fitness, and they're fun.
7:55 I love them. I have clients that do them, it's just not the foundation of their workout. So you're doing all those things, and let me remind you that you are not starting from zero.
8:10 Most of the people that I work with are doing some form of exercise, but being active and building muscle are two very different things.
8:20 And I want to show you today what makes that difference. Before we get into the foundations of strength training, I want to make sure that we're all using the same language.
8:33 I'm going to use two words a lot today: reps and sets. A rep is one complete movement. So you squat down and stand back up. That is one rep. A set is a group of reps that you do back to back without resting. You can kind of think of that as stairs.
8:53 A rep is one stair, and the whole set is a flight of stairs, and then you have the landing. So if your workout says three sets of eight reps, that means you're climbing three flights of eight stairs and you rest on each landing.
9:11 I hope that you're understanding this. Let's get into the foundations now that we know the vocabulary. The first foundation is compound movements.
9:21 A compound movement is a lift that works a bunch of muscle groups all at the same time. Your whole body has to work to move the weight.
9:29 When you do a squat, you're using your thighs, you're using your butt, you're using your core, and even your arms to hold the weight in place.
9:38 Compare that to something like a bicep curl, which is just holding a dumbbell and moving it up and down. That works one muscle. Bicep curls aren't bad. I am not anti-bicep curl, but they are not the foundation. Isolation movements are not the foundation of our workouts.
10:00 Compound lifts are. They're a big muscle-building bang for your time buck. It's like running a full load of laundry instead of washing one sock at a time.
10:10 Would you ever wash one piece of clothing at a time? No. If you only have 30 minutes, you want every single one of those minutes working as many muscles as possible.
10:21 This means shorter workouts, you build more muscle, and your body gets better at moving the way that it has to move in real life.
10:28 We use so many of these movement patterns in our day-to-day. There's also research showing that compound lifts can protect your bones and can even help build bone.
10:44 And as we get older, that's a big deal. So I'm going to share my core lifts with you, and these are the foundation of every program that I write for my clients, especially in the beginning.
10:57 You'll do a lot of them if you work with me. Two of them are technically the same movement pattern, which is called a hinge, but they do different jobs, so I'm just going to talk about them individually.
11:14 The first lift that is foundational is the deadlift. A deadlift is a hinge, and that means you're bending at your hips and pushing your butt back. You're not bending at your back. That's a mistake that a lot of people make. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen teenage kids come into the gym and just muscle up a deadlift with their back. And it makes me hurt.
11:38 When you think about a deadlift, the functional part of that movement is like when you go to pick up the laundry off the floor or pick up your kid and hold them. That is a hinge movement.
11:54 The deadlift works almost every muscle in your body, and it's honestly so good at building strength in the back side of your body, which is called your posterior chain.
12:12 A lot of women are intimidated by deadlifts, and I can understand that, but with good form, it's a very safe lift. When I start my clients, we start with very light weights and high reps so that we learn the movement pattern.
(Ad)
Are you a mom who's been working out consistently, but your body isn't changing, and you just want to know that the time you're spending in the gym is actually working?
I want you in my Fat Loss Formula for Moms program. It's 12 weeks of one-to-one coaching with me. I build your workouts around your equipment and your schedule.
I help you set up your nutrition so that it works with your kids and your real life. And I check in with you twice a week for accountability.
When something stops working, you're not left staring at an app trying to figure it out by yourself. You have me.
If you're tired of wondering whether you're wasting your time, let's figure this out together. Book a free discovery call on my website at EffectiveFitnessForWomen.com/fatlossformula, or tap the link in the show notes.
12:28 The second foundational lift is the squat. I want you to think about sitting on the toilet. That is a squat. You're squatting down when you sit on a toilet. Squats are challenging, but they are very rewarding. I usually start clients with a box squat, where you squat down to a box or a bench and then move back up. Then we move on to a back squat, usually with dumbbells, or different kinds of squats like sumo squats, just to help them learn the movement.
12:55 A lot of people have not been taught how to squat properly, but it is so important for you, especially with aging, to know how to squat well.
13:10 The third foundational lift, which I program a ton for my clients, is the hip thrust.
13:19 This is our other hinge movement, but instead of lifting something off the ground, you're driving your hips up with your upper back on a bench. You can have weight across your hips, or they even have hip thrust machines. You could do them bodyweight. There are lots of variations.
13:37 But the hip thrust is one of the best lifts for targeting your glutes, and you can move a lot of weight with it, which means more strength and more muscle over time.
13:50 It's also relatively spine-friendly. You have to use good form, obviously, so it's a good one that I like to use for beginners.
14:00 I built my entire booty on hip thrusts. I had a pancake butt, such a pancake butt, and now I don't.
14:10 And if you're wondering how long that took, it took several years. You're not going to do somebody's booty builder workout and then in two months grow five inches on your butt. If someone did, they probably got surgery. I'm just going to say that.
14:38 The fourth foundational lift that I think is so important is single-leg and balance work. Real life happens on one leg more than we realize. Single-leg work helps you build strength on each side of your body and helps you stay steady as you get older.
15:01 We do a lot of variations with this, so you're not just going to do these exact exercises. We use these main groups. You can think of the squat as a group, and we pull exercises from that group. So I'm not just doing squats, and just hip thrusts, and just deadlifts in the traditional sense. We pull from the groups, so we do lots of variations.
15:27 We might combine them, for example, in a single-leg hip thrust. We're using single leg, and we're also doing a hip thrust.
15:35 I want to add that when we think about foundational movements or lifts, core work is built into every compound lift. When you are deadlifting, to support your spine you have to be bracing your core, which is working your core. When you are doing a hip thrust, you have to be bracing your core. Same thing with the squat.
16:02 So all of that is built in. I do typically add some additional core work for my clients that's more specialized or more focused, but the basics are built into all of these compound movements.
16:20 The second foundation to building strength is progressive overload. If you take one thing from this episode, I want it to be this.
16:32 Progressive overload means consistently challenging your muscles so that they have a reason to grow stronger and bigger over time. Your muscles do not know they need to grow unless you give them a reason.
16:47 Strength training is how you communicate with your muscles. What you're saying is, hey, we need to be stronger than you were last week.
16:58 I want you to think about this like teaching your kid how to read. If she reads the same book every single night, she's going to get really good at reading that one book, but she's never going to move up to the next reading level if you just keep reading that same book.
17:14 Your muscles are the same way. If you do the same workout with the same weights week after week, your body is going to adapt to that and then it's not going to change anymore.
17:24 There are a few key ways to do progressive overload, but I want to focus on the two easiest ones. You can add weight or you can add reps.
17:34 Here's what that might look like if you were doing a squat. Let's say week one, you squat just the barbell, which is usually 45 pounds, or maybe you're just doing bodyweight. Let's just do the bar for ease of this example. So you're going to do the barbell, 45 pounds, for three sets of six.
17:59 It feels pretty easy. So next week, you add a little weight, and those same three sets of six suddenly feel harder.
18:09 You stay at that weight and work your way up to eight reps, then 10 reps, then maybe 12 reps. Once 12 reps feels strong, you add a little more weight and drop back down to six reps. Then you start climbing again and repeat the process.
18:21 So you're always either adding weight or adding reps, and that steady climb is what keeps your muscles constantly challenged.
18:34 This is the missing piece for a lot of classes. They feel hard, but there's no system in place for making sure that each lift is harder over time. That is why I spent years sweaty and tired doing workout classes without ever seeing results.
20:59 So we've talked about two big pieces of strength training foundations: the core lifts and progressive overload. I actually think this is going to be a part one and part two.
21:14 In the next episode, we're going to talk about the next two foundations, so come back and listen to that episode.
