391: Ask Me Anything About Lifting

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 391.

Hello and welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, and today I'm doing something fun. We are doing a Ask Me Anything and this is going to be all about lifting. So, I posted on my Instagram and said, Hey, what questions do you have about lifting? I like to do, you know, ask me any things on Instagram. I put up a question box and people ask me questions and those are always really fun. But sometimes I get these questions that cannot be quickly answered in like one slide, right? There's more nuance to it. There's, we have to talk about all the different elements of it. And so I thought doing something like answering these questions on a podcast would give me a format to be able to dive a little bit more into the nuance, a little bit more into some of the different aspects of lifting that are not just like cut and dry, because there are some things that are cut and dry with lifting. And there's a lot of things that are nuanced. I think, that's like a lot of things in life. And so this Ask Me Anything. I think I tried to pick questions that were a little bit more nuanced that I wanted to speak about, that I think will be really helpful regardless of if you're at the very, very beginning of your journey or if you're someone who's more in that intermediate to advanced level of lifting.

Free Live Class on Effective Workouts 02:04

Now, before I dive in, I do want to let you know that I'm going to be hosting a free live class coming up in the next couple of weeks where I'm going to be talking about some of the biggest mistakes that I see people making when they go to the gym and want to build muscle. There is a scientific process to building muscle. There are elements that need to be checked off and I see a lot of women wasting a lot of time and energy going to the gym and doing the thing that they think that they're supposed to be doing, but they're not organizing their workouts in a way that's actually going to bring them the results that they want when it comes to the fat loss they want and to the muscle building that they want to be able to have. And so I put together a class, it's about an hour long and I'll dive into the five aspects that need to be included in your workouts and how they need to be included in your workouts to be able to make them the most effective and the most optimized so that the time you're spending at the gym actually translates into fat loss and muscle gain. So I'll be teaching this class in the next couple of weeks. You can go to bicepsafterbabies.com/workouts with an S, and you can come sign up for that live class. There'll be a Q&A, you can ask me questions and it will be a really good time. Now, if you're listening to this, you know, in the future, and the live classes passed, there will be a replay option for this class. So you can still go to bicepsafterbabies.com/workouts and you can get a replay of that class or you can come join us live if you're listening to this in real time.

Losing Weight While Strength Training 03:34

All right, question number one, when you need to lose weight but also strength train, how do you do that without gaining weight? And I love this question because I think for so long weight loss has been synonymous with just eating less and doing more cardio. And I believe that we're starting to understand that strength training needs to be included regardless of what phase you're in. So in MACROS101 when I teach clients, I talk about four different phases. I talk about being in a cut, which is basically where you're prioritizing fat loss, being at maintenance where you can be building muscle, we're prioritizing longevity, we're prioritizing metabolism, being at in a bulk or a surplus. This is where we're really prioritizing building muscle. And then there's also a reverse diet, which goes in between a cut and brings you back up to maintenance. So there's four different phases. And the thing that is the same regardless of which phase you're in should be your strength training. Cardio will go up and down depending on the phase you're in. Calories will go up and down depending on the phase that you're in. But the thing that should be a constant in all of those phases is weightlifting. So I love that this question recognizes how important strength training is, especially if you're trying to lose fat, like that should be a constant in any phase that you're in.

But I want to focus in on how this question was asked because specifically this person said, when you need to lose weight, but also strength train, how do you do that without gaining weight? And we have to be able to separate, if you want to answer this question, we have to be able to separate weight from fat because they are not the same thing. And I understand where this question is coming from is because if you're gaining muscle, that's going to be weight, but that is very different than fat. And so a lot of times I see women who come to me and they want a certain aesthetic. They have an image in mind or they have a picture or they have somebody that they look up to online and they say, I want to look like this individual. And most of the time people recognize that in order to do that, they need to lose some fat. What most people don't recognize is that you also likely need to add muscle mass. So our goal is to change your physique, not to change your weight. Now, I'm not saying that weight loss won't happen, but I'm saying we got to separate those out because they are not the same thing. And the way that you know this is I could get you to lose weight really, really easily. I'd just give you a diuretic. You would lose a whole lot of weight. You'd pee it all out, pee out all the water and you would lose weight. But that's not actually your goal because your goal isn't to lose weight. Your goal is to improve your aesthetic. It's to improve your body composition. It is to lower your body fat percentage. And we don't necessarily have to lose weight or you don't have to lose a certain amount of weight to lower your body fat percentage. In fact, there's two ways to lower your body fat percentage. Of course, yes, you can lose fat that will lower your body fat percentage, but adding muscle and making a higher percentage of your body muscle will also improve your body fat percentage or lower your body fat percentage. 

So all of this to say weight loss and fat loss are not the same thing. And I want to make sure that you're very intentional about the goal is not weight loss. The goal is fat loss and the goal should also be gaining muscle. And that might mean the scale might not change as much as you think it should, or you have in your idea that it should in your head that it should, but that doesn't mean that anything's going wrong. So yes, we want to lose fat, but my MACROS101 clients will know this. We cannot just tell if we're losing fat by one data point, which is usually the scale. And so that's why I encourage my MACROS101 clients to take multiple data points. We're taking measurements, we're taking progress pictures, we're taking qualitative measurements, like your sleep, your stress, your hunger levels. All of those things are really important and play together in figuring out how your body is responding when you go into something like a deficit. So to come back to this question, when you need to lose weight, but also strength train, how do you do that without gaining weight? Again, the goal is not losing or gaining weight. The goal is improving your aesthetic. It's improving your body composition and we have to throw out scale weight as the end all be all when it comes to body composition and utilize some of these other metrics that give us a better idea of what's actually going on with our body. Are we losing fat? Are we gaining muscle? If those two things are happening, who cares what the scale says? That's a success. 

Is Building Muscle the Same as Building Strength? 08:28

All right. Number two, is building muscle and strength the same thing? The short answer is no, they are not the same thing. The more nuanced answer is that they are a little bit like, if you imagine a Venn diagram, right? You have two circles and there's overlap with those two circles. That is how I would explain building muscle and building strength. There is overlap in the two, but they are not the same thing. You can build muscle and not necessarily be the strongest, and you can be the strongest and not necessarily build muscle. And the way that you know, this is because if you take this to the extreme and you look at people in each of the extreme sports, they look different and they lift different. So for someone who building muscle is, is the most important thing. I would look to the bodybuilding world, right? We look at how the bodybuilders train and look at what their body looks like. And they have these gigantic muscles and yes, they are strong. I'm not saying bodybuilders are not strong, but they are not as strong as strength athletes, right? So you look at your Olympic lifters or your power lifters and you look at their bodies. Yes, they have muscle, right? So there's overlap. I'm not saying there's not, there's overlap, but they do not have as much developed muscle visually as a bodybuilder does, but they are super, super strong. So there is overlap. If you're building muscle, you're probably also building strength. And if you're building strength, you're also probably building muscle, but they are not the same thing. And training for a bodybuilder looks very different than training for a power lifter. Their, their, their training is, is very different. What lifts they do, how many reps they do, how many sets they do, the volume, the intensity that they train at is very, very different. 

And so both of those are really important. We do want to be building muscle because muscle is our metabolic currency. It allows us to stay strong. It allows us hormonally to perform really well. Like muscle is very important for preventing against insulin resistance and for, you know, basically giving us the muscle mass that we are going to be going into our older years with when we know that muscle mass is going to decrease. So we're going to build enough reserve for that muscle mass. That's going to be really important. And strength is also really important. Again, as we think about getting older, strength becomes not just about like, can I lift a barbell, but can I get off off the toilet? Can I take care of myself? Can I continue to walk up the stairs? Um, you know, activities of daily living. So both building muscle and strength are important and they are not necessarily the same thing. Again, if you build muscle, you will likely build strength. If you build strength, you will likely build muscle. But if we're wanting to bias towards one or the other, you do need to train differently. And I'll talk about that during class. 

Understanding Intensity for Muscle Growth 11:25

Okay. Question number three, help me understand the intensity needed to actually grow muscle. I love this question because it, there's so much nuance with this question. And so this might be a long answer, but I think hopefully that it will be insightful and help you in making sure that your training to the level you need to be training that to actually produce the result that you want. So if I'm backing up, it's important to understand that there are different phases of lifting and different phases of growing muscle. The first phase, and this would be like someone who's brand new to training, brand new to lifting, comes into the weight room untrained. The first thing that we have to be able to get the body to do is coordination of the movements, right? I need to get you to be able to squat without weight, without a barbell. I need to be able to get you to squat and to teach your body those motor patterns. Because if you think about it from a physiological perspective, your body has to, there's a lot of contraction, relaxing and coordination that has to happen for you to go from a standing position down into a squat and back up. Like your body, your brain has to send all of these messages down to your muscles for them to contract in a certain sequence. Not too much over here, just enough over here to be able to get you down into that position and then back up.

So the first adaptation that tends to occur or that we need to train and occur is a neuromuscular adaptation. That means the brain says, I want to do a squat and then sends a message down through the central nervous system out into the peripheral nervous system that then terminates at the muscle and it sends a message and it says contract. So that like whole process, right? It has to go from the brain all through the nervous system down to the actual side of the muscle, down to the muscular cells, and then those cells need to contract. But not all of them, right? You can't not contracting every single muscle in your body. You're only contracting certain muscles and in a certain order because as you go down, different muscles contract, right? You start to see how it's complicated. It's a complicated sequence of events to get someone down into a squat. And that's what we have to train first. So someone who's brand new, we're not focusing on intensity. We're not focusing on load. We're not even really focusing on volume. We're focusing on training with very low intensity to learn a new skill and to acquire that skill and to create that neuromuscular adaptation. So that's why we don't want to put someone who's brand new and has never squatted before underneath a barbell with a heavy amount of weight, right? We want to start with body weight. We want to start with form. We want to start with, you'll hear mind muscle connection. That's that idea. Like when I say I want to squat, my brain is able to send those signals down to my muscle and coordinate, in a coordinated effort to be able to get me down into that squat. 

So here we're not training with intensity. We're not training with it. Like it's not going to necessarily feel “hard” from a physiological standpoint because we're not training the muscles so much as we're chaining that neuromuscular adaptation. And that has to be first, right? That has to be the first thing that we do. Then when we get past that, that newbie stage and we start to, okay, we can coordinate. We have that neuromuscular connection. We have, you know, reasonably good form without any weight. Then we can start adding weight and start working on that muscular adaptation. So we have that neuromuscular adaptation, at least for beginning form. Now we can work on actually adding load and adding intensity. And this is where I think people start to get a little bit confused of how much do I need to be pushing to actually grow muscle. And there one, okay, I will say from a research perspective, there's a lot of research that suggests that training, this is very general. Okay. I'll get into more nuance in just a minute, but very generally, training within one to two reps of failure is enough to be able to stimulate muscle growth. 

Understanding Failure 15:28

The problem is, okay, first of all, let's define failure because there's different types of failure. We have technical failure and we have mechanical failure. So technical failure is when you cannot complete any more reps without your form breaking down. Okay. So technical failure is different from mechanical failure, which is that like you, you cannot lift the weight anymore. Like you're physically incapable of contracting those muscles to complete the desired repetition. So that's mechanical failure. So you can already start to see that those are different. Those are different things. Your form is going to start to break down before you actually hit mechanical failure. Um, so anyway, going back to the general premise that training within one to two reps of failure and we're talking mechanical failure here is enough to be able to build muscle. The problem is most lifters, especially newer lifters or even some intermediate lifters have no idea where failure is because they've never gone to failure. And this can be a whole, for a whole lot of reasons, right? Nobody ever told you to do it. You're scared. You don't want to hurt yourself, right? There's the mental, there's a mental aspect of like how much you think that you can do and you're usually wrong with that. But we get held back by like this is how much I think I can do. And so then that's all we do. So training within one to two reps of failure is the goal oftentimes. But for a lot of lifters, you actually don't know what it feels like to train to failure. So when you think that you're one to two reps within failure, you're actually still five to seven to 10 reps away from failure. 

So that, that, okay, so that's the general premise.You'll hear that in a lot in the training world that, you know, how many reps you lift is less important than are you training your proximity to failure? Are you training closer to failure? And this is, this is even more important, the lighter the load is. So when you're doing a lighter, let's say squat, getting close to failure is more important than when you're doing a heavier squat. Um, when you have higher loads, you can get away because of the tension and the force that is created by having a heavy load on your back. Um, I'm never going to do heavy squats to failure. We want to stay quite far away from failure. Maybe I'm getting to an RP of 10, which means I don't feel like I could do another rep, but that's different than like sinking down in the hole and actually failing the lift. Um, so heavier loads, we don't necessarily have to go all the way to failure, but the lighter the load is and the more reps you're doing, the closer you need to be getting to that failure to actually be able to stimulate, you know, muscle growth. 

Progression and the Role of Neuromuscular Adaptation Beyond Beginners 18:16

So going back to the question, which is how much intensity is needed to actually grow muscle? The answer, so first of all, intensity has a very specific meaning in the weight training world. So intensity is usually referred to as weight. So when we talk about increasing the intensity, we're talking about increasing the weight, whereas volume as is looked at the number of reps times the number of weight. That's the volume that you're lifting. So we increase intensity by increasing weight. We increase volume by increasing weight and or reps and or sets. Those are ways that always that we can increase the volume that is trained. So I don't know that there was this person who says, help me understand the intensity needed to grow muscles, actually referring to intensity in that way, meaning like the weight. But what I think they're getting at is how much effort, how close to failure do I need to be getting to actually be able to stimulate muscle growth? If you are a newbie, you don't need to be training with as much intensity as you need to. The more progress you get in your weight training. If you're a newbie, we're not getting anywhere near failure. We're working on that neuromuscular adaptation. And to be clear again, more nuanced neuromuscular adaptation doesn't just occur in the newbie phase to be very clear. We train, especially if we're training heavy loads, there is a neuromuscular adaptation that occurs to being able to lift a very high intense, something like a squat, right? So a very heavyweight squat. There's a lot of neuromuscular adaptation that has to occur in order for your body to be able to handle that heavy load. It's not just building muscle to be able to handle that load. It's actually there's a neuromuscular adaptation that has to occur as well.

So I don't want you to listen to this and think that neuromuscular adaptation is only something that happens at the very beginning. It isn't. It's happening all the time. And especially as you're training with higher loads. However, it is the first thing that needs to be trained with someone who is new. That neuromuscular adaptation, that form, that coordination is the first thing. So if we're in that newbie phase, we're not training with high intensity because that's not the goal. The goal is neuromuscular adaptation. Now as you start to move away from being quite a beginner and moving into more intermediate, now you're really focusing on making sure progressive overload is occurring. That's something I'll talk a lot about during class. So we really want to be making sure that we are progressing with our lifting, that the reps are increasing, the weight is increasing, the, you know, volume of training is increasing. That's really where we want to be focusing. And if that's occurring, then that's a really good sign that what you're doing is going to be enough to be able to build muscle. At some point you become more of into that like late intermediate, more into that advanced lifting. And this is where intensity becomes even more important. And I'm using intensity the way that this person is using intensity, meaning your proximity to failure. As you become more trained, as you have good form, as you're lifting heavier, as you're hitting the tops of some of those, you know, you're progressive overloading to the point where you're hitting some of those peaks in terms of like, you can't easily linearly keep adding weight. This is where it becomes really important to start to manage your intensity, your volume, your frequency in order to get your body to continue to adapt beyond those first newbie gains.

So you'll hear this term newbie gains, which is usually in reference to like the first six months to a year that someone's lifting where you will see like linear progression, right? Like every time you go back to the gym, you're able to lift a little bit heavier. You're able to, and you're keep adding weight to that. Keep adding weight to the bar, keep adding reps. Like it seems like it's going to go up. And then there's a point where you kind of max out on these, those newbie gains. And now we have to start working a little bit harder. And we have to start working a little bit smarter in order to continue that those muscle gains beyond just that first six months to a year. And that's where I'm really speaking to. This is where we really start to get into like your proximity to failure. This is where we really start to have to manage intensity versus volume versus frequency versus how much you need to rest and recover. Because the closer you are to failure, the harder it is for your body to recover. And so especially for those of you who are getting older, we have to be really mindful of, yes, we're wanting to push our body, but if we're pushing so far and so close to failure that we're not able to recover from that and come back and do it again, or we're starting to get injured, then we have to manage that intensity and that volume with our ability to recover from it.

Balancing Intensity, Volume, and Recovery 23:00

So in short, if you're in that more intermediate to advanced stage of lifting, there needs to be a lot of intensity. You need to have proximity to failure. You need to know what it feels like to go to failure. You need to know what that mechanical failure feels like of where I literally, you couldn't, if you pay me $10,000 to do another rep, I physically could not do another rep like that. That is mechanical failure. And learning where that is is something that's really important in your lifting journey and your lifting career. Not for a newbie, not for someone in those like for six to a year long of lifting. I'm talking to someone who already has decent form, who's already lifting, you know, fairly heavy, who like is feeling very fairly confident in the gym. Now we need to understand where mechanical failure is. And then we need to maintain proximity to that mechanical failure as we continue to come back to the gym while also balancing our ability to recover outside of the gym. As I've gotten older, that has been the variable that I've had to play around with the most. I can go hard in the gym. I can have a very intense lifting session. I can have proximity to failure. I can lift with heavy loads. What I've started to notice is I don't recover from that as fast as I used to. And so there's a couple of things there. I can either take more days off so that I'm able to go hard and then take those days off to recover. Or I can pull back on the intensity and the volume a little bit and be able to train more frequently. So these, these variables are all, they're trade-offs with each other. Intensity, right? How much you're lifting, the weight, the tonnage that you're lifting. Volume is the weight times the reps times the sets. That's the volume that you're lifting. And then frequency, how often you are doing that. And those kind of need to be played with a little bit to be able to figure out how much you can recover from. 

Machines vs. Free Weights: Understanding Their Purpose 24:58

All right, next question. Are weight machines like at Planet Fitness as good as free weights and barbell lifting? So I want to be really clear. This is not a like good, better, best scenario. They dumbbells, barbells, and machines all have a place in training and they all have different purposes. So machines, first of all, machines can be really good for newbies because machines require less stabilization. If you think about, let's think, let's think about a bench press. So if you have a barbell bench press, and then you compare that to a dumbbell bench press, you can already start to see that a dumbbell bench press is going to require more stabilization, more stabilizing muscles to be able to keep that in the plane of lifting versus a barbell, which is because it's all connected in one, one piece, there's less stabilization that is required, which is why you're always going to be able to lift heavier when you do a barbell bench press, then a dumbbell, your, your, your dumbbell bench press will always be lighter than your barbell because it requires more of those stabilizing muscles to be able to perform. 

Now take that over to like, let's say a Smith machine bench press, which is going to be, you know, a barbell, but it's now anchored and it only has one plane of movement that requires even less stabilization than a barbell, which at least, you know, it's a free weight. So we have to do some stabilization with it. So for newbies who are just learning, starting to learn form, who are just starting to, you know, train their muscles, machines can be a really great way because they limit the plane of motion that you're working in. So something like, um, you know, a Smith machine doing a bench press is going to limit that plane of motion. Same thing with like a leg press machine, right? There's only one plane of motion that you're going in in a leg press versus a barbell squat, where we have more, um, you know, more planes and more stabilization that is required. That's why, again, most people's leg press is way higher than they're able to squat because you don't have to do as much stabilization when you are lifting with a machine. 

So machines are really great for newbies. It's great for building confidence. It's, you know, you can sit down and you can look at a image of what you're supposed to be working. It can start to build mind muscle connection. There's a lot of great reasons that somewhere like Planet Fitness has a lot of machines because they are really great for newbies, but that doesn't mean that machines are only good for newbies. Machines are actually really good also for more advanced lifters because you're able, especially if you're doing more hypertrophy training or you're, you're specifically trying to train a certain muscle group because they're able to allow you to train a smaller muscle group. 

So for example, if we're doing squats, squats are great. They're going to train the quads. They're going to train the hamstrings. They're going to train the glutes. They're going to train the core. Um, you know, it's a full body work, but they're not going to target, you know, very small specific muscles that we're trying to build out. And then when you're a bodybuilder, you're trying to take certain muscles and make them, you know, just target this one little muscle and make it bigger or grow it without growing some of the other muscle. A good example of this would be something like the abductor machine. That's the one where you sit on it and you put your outer thighs against a pad and you're opening your legs. It works. The glutes works the outside of the legs. So that can be a way that you're able to target those smaller muscle groups in a way that yes, they're going to be targeted with squats, but you're not going to be able to take those smaller muscle groups to failure because like the other muscle groups are all working together to make it happen. Right? That's the beauty of a compound lift. A compound lift is where multiple muscle groups are working in connection with each other to be able to lift the bar, which is great. They're really great for lifestyle training. They're really great for building strength, but they're not necessarily really good for like, I want to target this very specific small muscle group.

Comparing Barbells, Dumbbells, and Machines 28:57

That's where machines can really be great. Um, you're able to, to, you know, like you have a rear delt machine, which is like there's a small muscle in the very back of your shoulder called the rear delt. And yes, you can target it with dumbbells, but sometimes I find that people have a hard time isolating the rear delts. They're hard to feel, they're hard to isolate. And so something like a rear delt machine or a peck deck and reverse peck deck can allow you to target that very small muscle group with a lot more precision than you're able to do with something like a barbell or a dumbbell. So there are usually two groups of people that I see in the free in the weight area, the machine weight area, you have your newbies and then you have your more advanced lifters who are like, I want to target this specific muscle or I want to really build my quads. So I'm going to go use the leg extension because yeah, are you going to build your quads doing squats? Yes. You know, could we bias the quad more by doing something like a front squat or a goblet squat? Yes. But even so you're still recruiting other muscle groups. What if I just want to train my quad and that's the only muscle groups that, not a muscle group that I want to hit. Well now we can go to a leg extension machine because now we're not recruiting any hamstrings. We're not recruiting any glutes. We're not recruiting any, you know, even abs or like calves. We're just targeting just the quad. And so you'll see a lot of more advanced trainers when they know exactly what muscle group they're trying to target going and utilizing machines to be able to do that.

So the TLDR is that there is a place in training for dumbbells. There is a place in training for barbells and there's a place in training for weight machines. Um, you know, moving on to like more barbells and dumbbells, barbells are really great for maximum strength. Okay. You're going to be able to develop a maximal strength with something like a barbell versus something like a dumbbell because we can load more onto a barbell and it's maximum strength with this, with stabilization. So it's like lifestyle training, right? I need to be able to do a squat and do it by stabilizing myself. And so having a barbell trains you to be able to do a squat, train maximum load because I can, I will always be able to squat more with a barbell than I will be able to with dumbbells, be able to train maximal loads, but in a free weight style versus doing it with a machine. So barbells are really great. They require more stabilization, um, less stabilization than, than a dumbbell, but they require more stabilization and we're able to load them a lot heavier than we can with dumbbells. 

So dumbbells are great. They provide some load. They require even more stabilization than a barbell. If you've ever done something like an incline chest press, you will notice that when you have dumbbells, it's harder. It requires more stabilization work than if you have a barbell. So dumbbells require more stabilization than a barbell, which often means that we can't lift quite as heavy and they become unwieldy. Right. Have you ever, I mean, you can do a 200 pound back squat. There's no way in God's green earth that I'm going to be able to pick up 200 pound dumbbells and squat them. So when we, when we keep increasing the load, there becomes a point where dumbbells become really unwieldy and that's where barbells can be a really good transition. Um, you know, same thing with like a row, we can do rows with dumbbells, but at some point you're going to be lifting heavy enough that you're probably going to want a barbell to be able to add more weights. So again, TLDR, they all have their place. Barbells, dumbbells, machines all have their own place in a good lifting program. 

The Maintenance Phase: Lifting Without Progression 32:41

All right. Next question. Does lifting always need to be progressive overload or can you just get to a good amount of muscle you want and then maintain the weight on the bar? Yeah, you totally can get to that point where you're just maintaining muscle and the frequency, intensity, and volume you need to maintain in order to just maintain the muscle mass that you have is way less than it is to actually build muscle. So you can probably get away with one to two training sessions per week where you're doing, you know, more compound lifts, more full body work, and you're not necessarily pushing the weight and our reps every single time. You're just kind of maintaining. And like I said, you don't need a whole lot of intensity. You don't need to hold a whole lot of volume, a whole lot of frequency to be able to maintain muscle mass. It's much, much, much easier to maintain muscle mass than it is to put on muscle mass.

Understanding Muscle Soreness and Adaptation 33:28

All right. Question. Next question. I'm always sore. I lift heavy. If I lift heavy, I'm sore. If I lift light, I'm sore. I walk and I get shin splints. I do hit and I'm sore. I eat a good amount of protein. I must be missing something. I've worked at it my whole life. Okay. So soreness. Let's talk a little bit about soreness. Soreness is usually because of novelty. Meaning it's something that your body isn't acclimated to. And I share this experience a lot, but it really kind of speaks to my own personal experience with soreness. I have experienced training as a power lifter. I did about three years of power lifting and then I transitioned from power lifting into CrossFit. When I was doing power lifting, I was lifting very heavy loads, very high intensity. Um, you know, on a frequent basis, I was squatting two to three times a week. Same thing with bench, deadlift and overhead press. Those were like my four lifts that I just did over and over and over again. And even though I was lifting very high intensity, very high volume, um, I wouldn't say high volume, but I was lifting, you know, five, five-ish reps at a very high intensity. I was very rarely sore. Even though I was training hard, I was pushing my limits, high weights. I was very rarely ever sore. 

And then I transitioned into CrossFit. And in CrossFit you do something different every single day. Like you, maybe you do front squats one day and you may not do front squats again for three weeks. And then the next day you're doing bar muscle ups. And then the next day you're doing, you know, hang cleans and you're doing bench. And right. It's like, that's a whole stimulus of CrossFit. It's like just changing it up all the time. And I was so much more sore when I started CrossFit, even to this day, if I do a whole lot of CrossFit, I'm way more sore than I ever was when I was powerlifting. And it is because when you change it up and you do something different that your body is not as acclimated to, that is often where soreness comes from. 

Now that is in general. It is also true that some people just get more sore than other people and that there may not be much that you're able to do about it. My husband is one of those. He gets so sore training legs and he has tried it all different ways. He's tried high rep. He's tried high rep, you know, lower weight, high weight, lower rep. He's played around with frequency. Should I squat one day a week? Should I squat every other week? Should I squat three times a week? Should I squat five times a week? Like he's played around with all of those variables and it does not matter what he does. If he does a leg day, he is sore. He's tried two sets. He's tried five sets. He's tried one set. He's tried staying far away from failure, getting close to failure. All right. He's played around with the variables and it sounds like you may be very similar and that doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with you or that you're doing it wrong or that you need to change something or that there is even a simple solution. I wish I could give you one, but some people just get more sore.

So the best advice that I can give you is to play around with those variables, play around with how often am I doing the lift, play around with intensity, training, volume, reps, sets, all of those good things. And make sure that you're doing something consistent, right? Sometimes people say that they're lifting weights, but every single time that they're lifting weights, it's different. That's not the same. That's not, that's not the consistency that we're talking about. It's like you're doing the same leg workout this week that you did last week that you did the week before that you did the week before that you did the week before, right? That's what I'm talking about with like how we build that consistency so that it's not novel for your body anymore. So if you're already doing that and you're still sore, play around with those variables. And if you're still sore, you might just be someone who deals with more soreness. And again, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong or that you're doing anything wrong. Some, you can also play around with supplements. Some people find that things like BCAAs or having a post-workout training supplement can be helpful for them. Again, there's no guarantees with that. It's just a little bit of experimenting and figuring it out. But in general, soreness is usually because of novelty, but that doesn't mean that some people don't get more sore than others. And those are the variables that you'll want to play around with to see if you can figure out something that works for you. 

Trap Bar vs. Barbell Deadlifts 37:49

All right, last question. Should I use a trap bar instead of a barbell for deadlifts? So it is not either or when it comes to a trap bar or a straight barbell, they are different lifts. They're basically variations of the deadlift, right? There's lots of variations. You take the standard deadlift and then we, from there can create all sorts of variations. We can do a standard deadlift with a pause. We can do an elevated standard deadlift. We can turn that into an RDL. We can do a straight leg RDL. We can do a hex bar deadlift or a trap bar deadlift, right? There's variations of the same movement pattern. So for those people who don't know what a trap bar is, it's basically, it looks like almost like a octagon with like posts that stick out of the side of the octagon. And then you step inside of the octagon. Okay. So you're like inside of the octagon, the octagon bar is around you. And then you grab the handles and are able to like lift and stand up versus a straight barbell, which is positioned in front of your body with your hands in front of your body gripping that straight barbell. 

So they're just different lifts. And there is purposes behind each of the lifts. In a trap bar, uh, you're going to be able to be more upright. Your upper body is going to be more upright than you are in a conventional deadlift. And so some people like the trap bar more because it reduces some of that stress on their lower back. Their lower back doesn't have to work quite as hard. Now on the same breath, training your lower back to get stronger is one of the best things that you can do to keep your back healthy and strong and not get thrown out. Like a lot of people are like, Oh, I have such a bad back. And it's like, yes, yes. And getting your back stronger will allow you to not throw out your back quite as much. So, um, we want to train her back. We want to train her lower back. We want to train it. So that is strong. Uh, so I, I don't suggest never training your lower back, but a trap bar will have less lower back impact, like less training of the lower back because of the bars placement. So, and because it keeps you more upright, the trap bar can feel a little bit more intuitive, I think. So for someone like a beginner, it can feel a little bit more intuitive to lift than a barbell.

And then if you're trying to target more quads, again, the more advanced you get, the more you're like, I really want to be targeting X, Y, Z with this lift. If you're like, I'm really wanting to hit more of a quad dominant day, the trap bar deadlift is going to be more quad dominant because of that uprightness than a regular deadlift is. So then conversely, if we're using a conventional deadlift with a straight barbell, you're going to get more, um, of the lower back emphasis. We're going to get more hamstring. So you'll notice more hamstring tension, uh, on that, that, um, straight bar deadlift. So it's not, it's not really, which is like better or which should you choose? It's just what, what are your goals? What do you want to get out of this lift that you're doing? And does the trap bar deadlift, you know, work that more or does it something like a conventional deadlift work that more? They're both great lifts. They're both really valuable compound. You can lift a lot of load with both of them. So it's not really an either or, it's just which one fits whatever your goals are in that particular training session.

Closing Thoughts 41:19

All right. These were great questions. And I hope I was able to stimulate some thoughts, ideas, a little bit of nuance into this topic. If you want to look more critically at your current workout and kind of see if it checks the boxes of, Hey, is my workout plan actually driving the results that I want? I invite you to come to my free class. That's coming up, go to bicepsafterbabies.com/workouts, and you can come and register. Come hang out with me for an hour. We'll talk about lifting. We'll talk about how to structure your workout so that they're actually working for you and that they're actually producing the results that you want, that fat loss, that muscle growth that you actually desire. And if you're listening to this after the fact, the live class has already ended. You can still go to bicepsafterbabies.com/workouts, and you can go and snag the replay of that class. That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm Amber. Now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything. 

Outro

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