Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 9 Training Mistakes Holding Female Lifters Back

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

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Welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and in today's episode, I'm going to be reviewing the nine biggest reasons women struggle to reach their fitness goals. Now, I recorded this in June of 2021, which is right around the time I launched my Female Physique 2 ebook. Now, the original Female Physique and Female Physique 2 ebooks are still available, but I've created something even better or what I believe to be even better, which is my Elite Physique app. It is a female-focused training community that you can join, interact with me, my fellow coaches, and dozens of women all over the world with similar goals who are looking to

develop their best physique ever in a sustainable four to five day a week routine that they can do at the gym. So if you have not checked out Elite Physique yet, you can do that by heading over to my Instagram, by heading over to corecoachingmethod.com, or even checking the show notes today. Because when we discuss and unpack the nine biggest things holding women back from reaching their gains, you'll see how much of these get zeroed out by following a good program. So I've got a solution to a lot of the problems we're going to talk about today, but I want you guys to sit back and enjoy the episode. Hey, everybody, welcome in to another

episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, it's me, your host, Coach Danny Matrenga. And today, we're going to talk about the nine reasons women do not make progress in the gym. Now, before we get into it, a little background, why I might be qualified to talk about this and why you might be interested in listening. I've got an education in the field, plenty of experience in the field, but most of my clients over the 10 years I've been doing this in person or online have been women. Women across the lifespan. When I started personal training, when I went to university, the majority of my clients were college age women. But as I built a more robust client roster and started to kind of have

a little bit more of the ability to dictate who I worked with, I started working with many older women and even women who were in their advanced age. And one of the benefits of training women across the lifespan is it's given me unique perspective as to how women are influenced by the health and fitness space, not just by me, their trainer, but, you know, where did they get the notions that they have around diet and exercise? Where did those come from? How do women in their fifties and sixties, whose, you know, view of health and fitness was shaped in the 1970s and 80s, differ from women who are in their early 20s, who have exponentially greater exposure to things like social media and the internet when they're forming their identity of how their body looks, moves, and works. we're going to highlight the nine reasons that I really think women tend to struggle. So if you are a woman, if you're a coach, if you're a husband, if you're a partner of any kind, and you have

women in your life who you want to help live healthier, build their dream physique, perform at the highest level, whatever, I think there's a lot in this episode for you. And as my way of saying thanks for listening, when you hear this, guys, by the time this is launched, this episode has gone live, I've set up a special discount for all of you. So you can actually head over to my website, www.coachedannymatranga.com, and use the promo code 9 when checking out to get 25% off any of the programs in my online store. So women, for you, that might be female physique or the for her bundle. But if you want to get something for your boyfriend or you just want to perhaps try the foundations program or the at home programs, everything is going to be

25 percent off just for listening to today's episode and using the promo code nine. Also, if you'd like to support the show, you can head over to legionathletics.com, buy your protein, creatine, fish oil, multivitamin, all things we'll talk about in greater detail today using the promo code DANNY to get 20% off your order plus double points at checkout. So guys, without further ado, let's get into the nine reasons that women

really struggle to make progress in the gym. Starting with number one, and number one is a little bit broad. We're going to dive into some different avenues here, but I think it's the most important foundational piece, and that is that women are disproportionately targeted by health-related misinformation on the internet. misinformation. They are literally targeted by it. More, we'll talk about that in a minute. And women spend more time on the internet, particularly on social media than men. And if you're not familiar with how social medias or social media networks like Facebook and Instagram work, they're free. But the reason that they're free is because they gather data about the people who use the product, and then they sell that data in the form of advertisement space to people who have products or services. Now, the problem is there's no real vetting as to what these products or services might be. So marketers are very aware

that women do the majority of the spending in the health, beauty, and fitness space, much more so than men. They spend more money than men in this space. So marketers will spend the majority of their time crafting products, services, and gimmicks targeting women. And many of these products are crappy and they are kind of revolve around misinformation or, you know, kind of these largely debunked claims. Like if you're a woman listening to this, you can think about all of the products that you see Facebook or Instagram ads for, whether it's waist trainers, fat burners, topical creams. I mean, sometimes these things get a little bit comical, but it, and if you've been doing this for long enough that you don't fall prey to these things, that's

wonderful. But you know, one of the unfortunate phrases in marketing is there's a sucker born every day and people in the fitness and health marketing space know that. And they know that women are desperate to change their bodies and the way their bodies look and that they're exposed to these societal pressures, particularly on these social media websites. access and prey on people's insecurities, then after you've seen four amazing looking bodies, and then boom, you're hit with an ad for some garbage supplement. But you don't know how to differentiate between information and misinformation because here in America, scientific literacy and our general understanding of biology is quite poor. And again, I'm not talking per se about anybody listening, but in general, right, we struggle here in America with scientific literacy. A lot of people believe things that are patently untrue. And Facebook and Instagram are in literal breeding ground for scientific misinformation. I'm not going to dive into

the pandemic. I'm not going to dive into vaccine culture, because I understand that people have emotional ties to both of those things and I don't want to trigger anyone. But again, much of the misinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic and a lot of misinformation around vaccines is born and kind of runs rampant in these spaces. And so that's just one example of how health misinformation, not even fitness misinformation, can run rampant on Facebook. But you have health fitness marketers targeting women using the ad models baked into things like Instagram and Facebook to be able to literally say, we want to target women who have an income

between this much and that much, who have an education level that's between this and that, who have recently said that they's between this and that who have recently said that they're interested in losing weight or have you know search for something related to weight loss they can very much target people with crap products and because women spend more time on social media they tend to consume more products in this space they are taking on a literal deluge of shitty information just being thrown at them. And even if they don't take it all in, even if you know better, even if you know these ads are silly, they start to form an identity. They start to kind of manipulate how it is that you look at

things and it influences your identity in the fitness and health space. And so often I'll have people asking me questions like, what's the deal with apple cider vinegar? Is it really all that? Or what's the deal with this particular product? I see it everywhere. And where people tend to see it is on places like Facebook, Instagram, when they're using Google as a search engine and the cookies are following them around. So again, the number one reason on this list of one through nine, this is not in a order of importance, but reason number one is there is just a greater exposure to crap for women. And marketers do this intentionally. And it's not

that women are unable to parse through that. It has nothing to do with that. It's just when you are exposed to more crap, that means you have more crap that you have to sift through to get to the truth. And that is just one of the very, very unfortunate truths of the fitness and health space. Number two, or number two reason is women spend too much time focusing on cardiovascular exercise. Now, there's a lot of reasons for this. Much of it, again, is just quote unquote, conventional wisdom being, and women being told that lifting weights will make you bulky, and that doing cardio is truly the key, and then, you know good tool for fat loss. And there's certainly plenty of reasons to do it. But one of the problems with women who have a body fat loss goal, or they have a body composition goal, maybe they want to look a little bit more muscular or athletic, or quote unquote, toned, right? Toned isn't a thing, but toned can be used as an umbrella

term to describe a lean athletic female physique that isn't overly muscular. We can probably agree on that, right? So one of the problems with cardiovascular exercise, if those are your goals, is it doesn't really preserve muscle if you're in a deficit. In fact, cardiovascular exercise, while helping you enhance your fat loss, will also enhance the rate at which you lose muscle if you're not making sure that you have a resistance training stimulus and adequate protein intake. We'll talk more about that later. So you look at a population of women and let's say you have 10 of them

and they're all eating the same diet and two of them are lifting weights more than they do cardio and eight of them, the other eight, are doing more cardio than they are weightlifting. But if the diet is the same, I would say that the two women who are focusing more on resistance training would be more likely to lose the body fat they want to lose and

keep it off than the women who only do cardio. While the cardio group might lose more weight, it will be very difficult for them to sustain it because of the negative metabolic implications of losing too much muscle. And that can be very problematic when we talk about just metabolic differences between men and women. Women tend to be smaller than men. They tend to have less muscle mass than men. Generally speaking, they tend to occupy more jobs that are quote unquote sedentary. So that makes every ounce of muscle and every degree of metabolic output that you can get out of your body really, really important. And if you are pounding away on the cardio and eating in a calorie deficit, you can expect to

lose some muscle. And as far as long-term metabolic kind of robustness, if you will, is concerned, losing muscle is not ever a good idea, particularly for women. So the conventional model of eat less and do a crap ton of cardio will certainly help women lose weight. And quite frankly, they'll lose weight very quickly. But the problem is a lot of that weight is going to come from muscle. And that could lead to some long term negative metabolic adaptations. And a lot of people refer to this as metabolic damage. So if you're people refer to this as metabolic damage. So if you're familiar with the term metabolic damage, you're familiar with what I'm talking about when I say metabolic adaptation. But basically what we're talking about is sending

the stimulus to your body to do a ton of in doing a lot of cardio, that stimulus will basically say, hey, look, you know, if we're going to be doing this running or stair mastering or whatever, and we want to be aerobically as efficient as possible and improve our aerobic economy, all this heavy muscles weighing us down. So let's lose some body fat, let's lose some muscle, right, because we're in a deficit, and we're not getting a resistance training stimulus to really help preserve the muscle. So that can be a very, very big problem. And one of the more common problems I see with women who are struggling to really achieve the physique they're after is they've just put a little bit too much weight into the importance of cardio compared to resistance

training. And so as a general rule of thumb, I recommend women really prioritize resistance training. So if you're going to go to the gym three to four times a week, I might say, you know, hey, look, we want all of those sessions to incorporate resistance training and do a little bit of aerobic work to warm up, but do not make it the kind of bulk of what it is you're doing for your exercise. So number three, moving on, is women tend to be afraid of lifting heavy and building strength. And I use the phrase tend because, again, this is not universally true of all women. And there are plenty of men who are, quote unquote, afraid to lift heavy. This is not a gender-specific thing.

These are behaviors that I've noticed that are semi-consistent and are influenced by outside sources. that I've noticed that are semi-consistent and are influenced by outside sources. But it is pounded into women's head from very early on that lifting heavy is masculine, that lifting heavy will build too much muscle, and that lifting heavy will lead to a bulky or more masculine physique. And this is not true whatsoever. In general, if you put a man and a woman on the same training program and the same relative nutritional protocol, I'm using the term relative here as relative to their size and activity level, the differences in their hypertrophic or muscular gain outputs or where they would be at the end of the program isn't necessarily going to be influenced by much more

than things like testosterone, growth hormone, and genetics. And so, you know, unless you're a woman who has equivalent testosterone to a man, you can't expect masculine results. And even if you are a woman who has a genetic predisposition to build more muscle, muscle growth is a slow process. So you can always pump the brakes. If you feel like lifting heavy and lifting with a progressive overload structure in your programming is making you gain weight more fast than you would like. And I totally understand that, you know, not all women or not all men or just people in general aren't necessarily as interested in getting as muscular as maybe I am or maybe some of my friends are. Everybody has different goals. as maybe I am or maybe some of my friends are. Everybody has different goals. But whether you want to just build a little bit of muscle or a lot, muscle growth is going to be a slow enough process that you can pump the brakes. And taking the time to focus on lifting heavy and getting strong is extremely effective for all lifters or anybody who wants to perform at a high level.

And even if lifting weights and getting strong isn't your primary performance goal, it will help you if you have a physique goal or if you have a, you know, sports specific goal, or even if you have an aerobic goal, being strong is always a good idea. And progressive resistance training, particularly for women, will pay metabolic dividends by helping you have more muscle, better strength, better coordination, as well as setting you up for long-term success by helping you build better bone density, which can be a huge problem for women over time. And being strong, working on building strength is not going to masculinize your physique, meaning if you were to lift weights but keep the weights lighter and focus on quote-unquote toning, you're not going to be any more likely or less likely to build muscle because you can build muscle at any

rep range if you are training hard enough if you do sets close to failure at five reps a set 10 reps a set or 20 reps a set you're going to see some muscular growth because one of the things that really helps build muscle is mechanical tension and training close to failure. So both of those things are going to make a big, big difference. Lifting heavy, though, is particularly beneficial for building strength. And lifting with a program that focuses on progressive overload is as well. That's why when I put together the Feet For Her bundle on my website, I put power build and female physique together, because I love the idea of a woman doing a 12 week strength focused block that's

going to allow her to develop strength, power and coordination, and then going into that hypertrophy block, or I shouldn't say block that hypertrophy program, right, you do the 12 weeks of power build, you build a wonderful foundation of strength, coordination and competency in the gym, then transition to female physique. And in female physique, we have that same 12 weeks, but the volume's a little higher. The library of exercises is a little bit more diversified, if you will. And you're going to take that strength and then apply it to some higher volume training and hopefully stimulate some muscle growth. And I find that a focus on strength first for women is one of the best things you can do for driving long-term performance outcomes,

preventing injury, helping with bone density, and building a relationship with training that is constructive. Everybody likes to be strong. Men, women, you name it. Everybody benefits from being strong. Literally, there are myriad benefits to just having strength that expand way beyond what you're doing at the gym or in your workout setting. So a focus on getting strong and a focus on lifting heavy is something that I think women would benefit from being more comfortable with. And it's unfortunate that women have been told for so long that lifting heavy and lifting with progressive overload is going to have these masculinizing effects on their body

and their physiques. I just feel that that's largely untrue. And like I said earlier, a lot of those masculinizing effects of resistance training that you see in men are driven by genetics and testosterone. And even women who have a greater potential to build muscle because of their genetic makeup, or maybe they do have slightly more testosterone because everybody's a little different, or they'll be able to pump the brakes and you won't necessarily just wake up and be like, oh shoot, I overshot. I got way more muscular than I wanted to. And now I have to walk

it back. Like even if, let's just paint the hypothetical where you're like, okay, I'm actually more muscular than I would like to be. This is a rare thing, but it does happen. And I have to walk it back. Like even if, let's just paint the hypothetical where you're like, okay, I'm actually more muscular than I would like to be. This is a rare thing, but it does happen. And I have worked with women who build muscle very easily, but want to temper how much muscle they build because they have a goal for their physique. And that goal does not include them getting any more muscular.

So what you can do is you can walk and dial back that training volume. You can focus more on intensity and lifting heavier, but keeping reps further from failure and keeping volume down. So you're not having such a hypertrophic or muscle building stimulus. You know, there's a million things you can do to really just modify the way or how you're driving results. And I think the idea that you'll just wake up one day and get way too jacked, and it'll be irreversible is somewhat silly. So don't be afraid to lift heavy. Moving on to number four, and this is a big one. And that's that women simply don't eat enough to make the progress in the gym that they need, or they don't eat enough to meet the demands of their training. And again,

most of this influence is societal and driven by health misinformation or just a general lack of nutritional competency at a national or even global level. We don't teach children how to eat. We don't teach children the benefit of getting adequate protein and adequate dietary carbohydrate. I challenge you to pause really quick, close your eyes and think, don't close your eyes if you're in the car, but think about when it was that you first were exposed to the way that nutrition influences your body. Was it at home in a nurturing environment where you learned the benefit of healthy foods? Or was it maybe in your more formidable years in young adulthood where you learned the benefit of healthy foods? Or was it maybe in your more formidable years in young adulthood where you were told

that these foods make you fat or that you shouldn't eat this or that and that you should eat a certain way if you wanna look a certain way? Most of which of course is bullshit. But what I found with women is that a lot of their understanding of how nutrition works comes from the diet industry

and the diet space, not necessarily any of the different avenues of nutritional science. So there isn't a particularly good working relationship with anybody in America, not just women, but just most Americans don't have a functional understanding of how food interacts with their performance, their body composition. And so when women go to the gym and they start layering on different stressors, whether that be cardiovascular exercise or resistance training, that is often paired with really clamping down on the calories and really restricting intake of important nutrients or even macronutrients like protein and carbohydrate,

right? Women are told eat less to get small. Don't eat too much. You'll get too big. You don't want to eat that. It'll make you fat. And so you go to the gym, you bust your butt and you lift and you have these goals perhaps of maybe developing some muscle or building your glutes, whatever your goals may be. And those extra stressors, the stressors in the gym that break down muscle, particularly lifting weights, require more raw materials to repair and build and help you recover and flourish, right? Because what can happen when you layer on a bunch of these stressors, but don't meet them with adequate nutrition, is you can end up in a worse place than you started.

And we touched on that a little bit when we talked about doing too much cardio and the metabolic impact of too much exercise with inadequate nutrition to recover. The same is certainly true of resistance training or just not eating enough in general. And one of the areas where I see this is quite prevalent is with carbohydrate.

Women tend to be very scared of carbohydrate, but carbohydrate is extremely valuable for training. We use carbohydrate as our primary fuel for resistance training. The type of pathway that we use to perform most of our resistance training is called the glycolytic pathway. And glyco usually means sugar or carbs.

When you hear glyc, G-L-Y-C, you can think carbs, sugars. And lysis means to break. And so the glycolytic pathway functions by breaking down and using carbohydrate to fuel muscular contraction. And if you don't have adequate carbohydrate, unless you're totally keto adapted, which is very rare, it's quite difficult to perform at a high level, even cognitively. And so we're not just talking about the way that nutrition impacts your gym performance. We're talking about your total performance. And so women being afraid of food can have ramifications that impact them with how they manage stress, with how they perform in their relationships and at work. And it's disappointing to me that a lot of this comes from

what I think is a very noble goal of improving their health and fitness. Hey, I want to get in better shape. I want to feel better. I want to look better. I want to be more confident. I'm going to go on the internet and see what I have to do. Oh, okay. I just got hit with a bunch of misinformation. I'm going to cut all my carbs out. I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to train seven days a week. And I tried that for three weeks and then I just felt like absolute dog shit. And I don't know why it's so hard for me to lose weight or to change my body. These are very, very common pitfalls that women run into. And I don't think it's particularly their fault. That's why I made this episode, because I wanted to give people the ammunition

they needed to navigate this space because it's very frustrating. And these are things that I've learned from talking with hundreds of women over the course of the last decade that I've been doing this. So keep in mind, if you're going to be resistance training, if you're going to be looking to change your physique, even if you want to lose fat and you're going to be in a calorie deficit, it becomes quite important to monitor and make sure that you're getting adequate carbohydrate to perform, adequate dietary fat to're getting adequate carbohydrate to perform, adequate dietary fat to take care of your reproductive system, your brain health, and of course adequate protein to fuel and help you recover from the hard work that we're doing in the gym. And we'll talk more about protein in a minute when we get to point number six. But guys,

I think it's very important that we acknowledge exercise is a stressor in a world that's quite stressful And while it is extremely valuable at helping you build muscle build metabolic, you know robustness I don't even know if that's a word, but I love it Helping you build bone density and it can help you manage other stressors and reduce anxiety and depression It does add to the allostatic load or the cumulative amount of stress and so if you're pairing that exercise with malnourishment or inadequate nutrition you'll pay the price for that in the long run and I think we can say just succinctly to put a bow on this if you're gonna train like an athlete you need to eat like an athlete and I don't

think that there's anything wrong with that just because you're a woman. And I think that women get punished for this and they often get exposed to too many ideas about what a woman's diet or how a woman is supposed to eat that are just not aligned with the amount of exercise and the amount of, you know, resistance training a lot of women are doing. So we need to kind of shift the paradigm and change the narrative here. Hey, guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting

the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Number five is there isn't a lot of dialogue around the ways in which the menstrual cycle influences training. So every woman is different and it's not as simple as every woman being on the same 28 day cycle. And not, again, not everybody has the same response physiologically, even if you have two women in the follicular phase or two women in the luteal phase, hormonally with what's going on with estrogen, progesterone, all of these different things, they're not the same. So one of the things that I tend to recommend for women is getting in the habit of tracking your cycle. Find out when you're in the follicular phase, which is usually from the first day of your period until ovulation stops. Find out when you're in the luteal phase,

right? Which generally coincides with PMS and needing to maybe back off on training. But, you know, I'm planning on doing an episode in the future with Lyle McDonald or an episode with just myself or someone else who I think is qualified to talk about this, where we really unpack how to handle and how to juggle your cycle so that you can optimize performance. But, you know, if you have hormonal fluctuations as a woman, with these really vital hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, and you have an expectation that you need to be able to go to the gym and kill it every single day, you're going to find that you might be mildly disappointed when you run into a hormonal wall. Maybe you hit that luteal

phase and you're like, my PMS is killing me and I'm really struggling here. And like two weeks ago, when you were in the follicular phase, when things tend to be easy to kill it, you're like, my PMS is killing me and I'm really struggling here. And like two weeks ago when you were in the follicular phase, when things tend to be easy to kill it, you're like, I was killing it. I don't understand what's wrong with me. And so even something as simple as just tracking your cycle and being like, wow, you know, I trained really, really well for the, you know, 14 days from my period to when I finished ovulating. And then I struggled a little bit. That can be a consistent pattern that you'll see. You'll know when it might, you might need to back off and then you'll be like, Ooh, you know, next week I'm going to be back in that sweet spot. So I'm going to make sure that my programming is aligned with really killing it in the gym on those two weeks.

You know, there's a lot of things that you can do to really enhance the way you respond to training. Do you simply track and learn about how your menstrual cycle works? And again, this is a nine-part episode. So I think that this in and of itself is its own episode or even a series of episodes. So I don't want to go too much into this now. But one of the reasons that I think women really struggle is because they aren't taught the ways in which their unique physiology impacts their training and their training recovery. Men are pretty fortunate. We have testosterone that just slowly, slowly, slowly declines as we age after we hit about 30. But other than that, you know, with the, of course, there are things that can influence testosterone, like lifestyle, environmental exposure to different chemicals, all kinds of stuff. But in general, men have a much more consistent hormonal profile than do women. And that's part of what makes us different. There's

nothing wrong with having hormonal volatility. If women did not have these cycles, we would not exist as a species. And learning how those affect your body, how your body is going to respond to those, particularly how those cycles influence your training is a really important thing to do if you want to train for the long run. And I think it's a dialogue that I'm seeing a lot more. There's a lot of women and awesome female coaches in the space who have really kind of taken the torch on this and run with it. And I think it's wonderful. I think what I would say is that every woman is different. Everybody responds differently when they're going through their unique cycle. And so take it into your own hands to track and learn how your body responds to these things. And you will be very, very happy

in the long run. What's going on guys, Coach Danny here taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company core coaching method, and more specifically, are a one on one fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for Core Coaching Method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan.

Somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years. Whether that be via phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need. With custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym, around your limitations and your goals. Nothing cookie cutter here, as well as easy to follow macro nutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email, or they'll text you, or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals, as well as provides you with the accountability and the

expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked-in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option. And if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today.

com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. Number six is women are particularly scared away from things like protein and creatine. And protein as a macronutrient or protein powder as a supplement and creatine as a supplement are two of the best things that you can incorporate into your daily routine if you want to build muscle, burn body fat, or perform at a high level. Why it is that women are constantly told that these two things are problematic, I'm not entirely sure. I'm pretty sure that it extends from just this kind of subculture within the bodybuilding community, particularly around creatine, and that creatine has generally been a supplement that men start taking when they start working out or when they're playing sports in high school as a means to

gain water weight, put muscle on fast, recover better. And these supplements are entirely fluid. You know, they can go men, women, otherwise, and everybody can take them. They're going to get almost the same effects. Of course, if you're pregnant, breastfeeding, or you have secondary health conditions, you should check with your doctor before you take any supplements. But creatine has no masculinizing effects in men. It's non-androgenic. It's non-anabolic in that, or non-androgenic in that it's not going to impact your testosterone. Creatine works to improve performance using non-hormonal pathways.

Steroids work to improve performance using hormonal pathways. But creatine is not a steroid. It's an amino acid derivative. It helps pull water into your tissues. It tops off your intramuscular creatine stores, which are vital for the first like 10 to 12 seconds of rigorous exercise. Creatine is valuable for explosive performance. And supplemental creatine can help you regenerate ATP a lot faster, whether you are a man or a woman. And as for the kind of new, big, scary elephant in the room of does creatine cause baldness? The evidence is incredibly inconclusive, and I'm inclined to say no, it doesn't. And protein is a wonderful macronutrient, whether you lift or not. And just because I find in general men like to eat more meat doesn't mean that protein

is only for guys. You know, I know plenty of women who eat a ton of red meat or fish or plant-based protein, and they really love eating dietary protein. I do know more men who like crave steak and red meat and burgers. And I don't know what that is. Could be, you know, it could just be a societal thing. Could be a genetic thing. Who knows? But it doesn't mean protein is going to have a masculinizing effect on women. And I probably get, and this makes me, this really makes me sad. I probably get about 10 messages a week from women who tell me something almost exactly like this.

My boyfriend says I shouldn't take creatine or my boyfriend says too much protein is going to make me too big. And, you know, I'm, I'm not going to sit here and, and say that I have not made, uh, you know, silly recommendations to the partners that I've had over the years, the girlfriends that I've had over the years, about how they should handle things, and not have had any fucking clue what I was talking about. I'm certainly far from perfect. But these things seem to be quite prevalent, and they tend to, and from what I've seen, come from men who have zero fucking understanding of nutrition and supplementation. And so if you're a woman and you're listening to this and you have a partner who is dissuading you from eating dietary protein or taking certain supplements, if that partner is not an expert in these subjects, you can just respectfully say, hey, I appreciate your input. I'm going to do my

own research on this. Or hey, I appreciate your input. I'm going to link up with somebody who's an expert in these areas. And if you get pushed back on that, I'm not a relationship coach, but you're probably dealing with somebody who's insecure. And your partner is probably somebody who's a little bit controlling. And you might want to examine that privately as an extension of your relationship because I find that for women, men who are controlling around the way that they eat or the way that they train, and again, I've seen this a lot because I've trained many wives, many girlfriends, many fiancés, and there's always a couple, you know, demonstrative in-your-face boyfriends who want to know how you're training their wife what you're doing and again some of this is born from just the way that trainers are depicted in media as people who pretty much solely exist to fuck your wife while you're gone on vacation um and that i understand but you know a lot of these guys uh are just insecure men who are concerned about their wife looking better and getting attention from other guys. And I don't think that that is their wife or their girlfriend. Um, and it's obviously not

exclusive. I know I have worked with same sex female couples who have extremely, um, rigid communication around nutrition and it creates friction in, in those couples, men and women. So I think that one of the things it's important to do, and again, this is a big time departure from what we were originally talking about here, which is the importance of protein and creatine and why women are scared away, is to not let your partner influence your decisions too much if in fact they're not an expert in those areas. And that it's more than okay to say, I'll find advice. Thank you very much for your input. Okay, moving on to number seven, we're moving on to some of

what I would describe as the emotional barriers. And this is, I find women more so than men tend to pour from an empty cup. I've worked with a lot of women in the demographic between 50 to 70. And so these are generally moms or grandmothers or heads of household, matriarchal figures in many ways. And what I find is this consistent putting other people first, this consistent behavior of putting everybody else first. I can't go to the gym today because I have to pick up my grandson from this. I can't go to the gym today because I have to take my friend to the airport. And again, this is not universal in this demographic, and this is not exclusive to this demographic. But I find much more so than men, women have a hard time putting themselves first and doing the work that they need to do to keep themselves healthy. And I think that it's wonderful that we have a culture where women are so selfless and so

family oriented and so invested in their friendships and helping people out. I would never change that. But one of the things that I have found is that it's in that desire to help friends, to help families, to put other people first, to be caretakers, to be nurturers, to be providers. They skip steps with the nutrition. They fall short on the workouts. I didn't get to the gym today because I had to take care of other things. Oh, I ate a little bit too much

because I didn't have time to do things for me. And I think it's important when you have a fitness goal or a health goal that you make an agreement with yourself that it is more than okay to put yourself first. And it was working with the older demographic that I really saw this more become more prevalent. When I worked with younger women who didn't have perhaps, let's say the pull of a professional, professional pull, they didn't have a career yet they didn't have a family

yet um a lot of the women that i worked with who were younger were basically just students who wanted to look good for spring break or you know wanted a quote-unquote fat ass that's that was often something that i got in consultations how can i help you today what are you looking to do with your fitness i want a fat ass okay well a fat ass you shall get, honey. Let us go to the Bulgarian split squat and we'll hit bias that bitch and we will fucking take it for a ride. And you know, that's all fine and good. And then you go on to, you know, go back to your dorm room, pound back some protein, you have a class, and then you go out drinking. A lot of those women were putting themselves first and they made wonderful gains. But they also had youth and, you know, the advantage of not having so much on their plate on their side. And it wasn't until I started working with women who were mothers, who were busy professionals, a lot, in taking care of everybody else, it is extremely challenging to take care of

yourself. And so it wasn't an issue of they didn't want it bad enough. It was a genuine issue of, holy crap, there truly is a limitation on how much time and energy you can put into your health and fitness. So how can I as a trainer help support you? And how can you have a conversation with your family, your spouse, your partner, your children, your boss, whoever it is that, hey, these health and fitness goals that I have

are really important to me and I need to be able to make time for myself to get to the gym even three times a week, even two times a week, whatever it is. And so I find that a lot of women really struggle to see results because they are so overextended in so many areas of their life.

And so if you're a coach or you're a trainer listening to this, try to take this stuff into account when you onboard new female clients or look at the clients you already have who are female through this lens and ask them, you know, hey, what are the extracurricular non-workout things that are on your schedule? And I bet what you'll find is that these women are busy. They are stressed. They put a lot of other people first. And it's really important as coaches, as trainers, as spouses, as boyfriends, as girlfriends, as partners, whoever, that, you know, the women in your life who are overextended, who are doing whatever they can

to help the people around them, that you support them and you remind them, hey, why don't you go ahead and go to the gym? I'll take care of the kids. Hey, can I make you dinner tonight while you do that thing? Do you want me to put some protein in there? What can I do for you? You know, we can all help each other out a little bit more. And as coaches, reminding these people that their health and fitness goals matter. And one of the things I've had to have as far as a discussion with women is saying, hey, I know that you're an incredibly integral part of your family. You're the linchpin. Everything revolves around you. You hold it all together and it's for that exact reason that you need to put your health at the forefront of what you do because this family, this business,

this corporation, whatever it is, does not function without you. And we can't afford you to get sick. We don't want you to get burnt out. We want you to be fulfilled. We want you to be healthy. And that's going to take taking good care of yourself. So can you commit to XYZ number of workouts a week? And that's what I'm asking you guys to do, which is to just acknowledge the fact that some people out there, maybe you listening, are going to have a very hard time making progress. If you have a hard time putting your health higher on your list of priorities. Okay, number eight, the comparison trap, who and this goes back to social media, right? And I find that women have a particularly hard time navigating and part of the reason I find

this is because men do too but they don't fucking talk about it and that is one thing that you'll find if you work in this industry long enough men have many of the same body image insecurities or issues that women do they just don't talk about it women are exponentially better at communicating these things but they're exposed to a lot of content on things like instagram social media or the fucking hell spawn that is tiktok which is literally just teenage pornography the way i see it and you're looking at these bodies that are there the algorithm is sending them at you it makes you feel insecure in many ways it's almost impossible for it not to at least skew the way you look at yourself then even the women who i know who buffer this stuff wonderfully who don't let it not to at least skew the way you look at yourself. And even the women who I

know who buffer this stuff wonderfully, who don't let it get to them, for every one of them, there's 10 women who are influenced heavily by the things that they see and compare themselves to on social media every single day. And that is a motivation killer. And so even though I don't think motivation is that important, and I think it's really important to be able to continue on working towards your goals, whether you're motivated or not, you've got to understand that constant exposure to things that make you feel shitty or inadequate is going to set you back. So don't be afraid to hit unfollow on the pages that you find yourself comparing yourself to. The only person that you should compare yourself to

is yourself. And so just bear with me on this one. I know that it might seem a little bit like, oh, well, you know, I don't want to unfollow people on social media. They're motivating to me. I find those physiques inspiring. If that's you, that's wonderful.

But if you find that every time you open the app, you feel shittier about your body, you might want to check who you follow. All right, guys. And the last one in the list of nine reasons why women struggle to make progress in the gym is they're convinced that progress is supposed to happen faster than it should. And I want to rephrase that is part of the reason why women struggle to make progress is because they don't fucking know that it's okay for progress to be slow. There's no such thing as slow progress, only impatient people. Okay. Building muscle is slow. As far as processes go, losing fat is going

to be slow as far as physiological processes go. And that is totally okay. The idea that things need to happen fast is what really drives a lot of the program hopping, diet hopping. I tried this. It didn't work. I tried that. It didn't work. I tried this. I didn't work. I often say to those people, did you try trying or did you try sticking with it? Because all of these things happen slow. And if you get fast results up front and then things start to slow down, the answer isn't to pivot to something new. The answer is to say, things are slowing down. This is normal, because a lot of these processes are influenced by the way in which my body adapts. So I either need to change my deficit, change my training stimulus, right? So just a general departure from the idea

that things need to happen fast for them to be worth doing would really help women and men and anybody with a fitness or life goal achieve them and accomplish them a lot more quickly. So there you have it, guys. Those are the nine reasons that I think women particularly struggle to make progress in the gym. And we'll go over them again together. Number one, they are targeted more by health-related misinformation on the internet and on social media. Number two, they've been told for a long time that they need to focus on cardio. Number three, there is a fear around lifting heavy and building strength. Number four, they don't eat enough to make progress. Number five, the influence of the menstrual cycle and the ways in which female physiology differs from male physiology

is a very new concept for a lot of women and something they would benefit strongly from understanding at a deeper level. Number six, they are scared away from things like creatine, protein, and other supplements that might help them by small subcultures of the fitness community that don't know what they're talking about. Number seven, women tend to be more often than men in my finding, overextended and helping people out, helping family out, and pouring from an empty cup. And it's very hard to put yourself first in a world that tells you

everybody is more important. And a lot of people feel that push and pull regardless of their gender. And so just remembering not to pour from an empty cup. Number eight, the comparison on extent we're exposed to or the desire to compare ourselves to people on social media can be very defeating and demotivating. And lastly, we have a extremely pervasive myth in our space that things need to happen fast. And that's just simply untrue. And lastly, I just want to finish with kind of a blanket apology. If I came across in any way misogynistic, if I came across as some bro who's preaching to a bunch of women who doesn't understand the struggle, I think it's very important that I understand and acknowledge that I have some degree of authority in this space.

And I have every reason in the world to communicate with integrity and communicate with tact on some of these sensitive issues. So if you felt like in any way, shape, or form, I could have improved my delivery on some of these topics, I'm more than open to hearing how it is that I could do that. So guys, if you don't mind, do me a favor. If you're loving or enjoying the podcast, share it to your Instagram story. There are so many women who could benefit from hearing this. Tag me in it so I can say thank you. Consider subscribing on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and leave me a review on iTunes. If you're listening on your Apple device, leave me a five-star rating and written review. It helps other people find the podcast, and it makes a really big difference in me getting my message

out there. And again, like I said, most of my audience is women. And all of the reasons that I listed today are, I think, things that we can work together to fix. And I think that we will all live happier, healthier lives. If we do that, we all have women in our lives that we love, that we want to be happier, that we want to be healthier, that we want to be more confident in helping creators who make content that drives that narrative forward and drives the shifts, the paradigm in the right direction is one of the ways that we can do that. So I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode.

Please consider subscribing and enjoy the rest of your week. Bye-bye.