Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1332: Should Women Eat & Train Differently Than Men for Fat Loss & Muscle Building?

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss whether women should eat and train differently than men. Highlighting the MAPS Macro Calculator. (2:17) The lies the fitness industry has marketed to women. (3:57) The self-selection bias surrounding the ultimate body type. (11:10) The general differences between men and women when it comes to training and diet. (15:00) Hormones. (15:19) Essential Fat. (21:35) Exercise tolerance. (28:00) Signs of overtraining. (29:53) Different goals. (35:21) The value of strength training. (42:10) It’s the individual that matters. (44:50) Related Links/Products Mentioned July Promotion: MAPS Strong ½ off!! **Promo code “STRONG50” at checkout** Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! MAPS Macro Calculator Muscle Potential Calculator Is It Harder For Women To Get Abs Than Men? - Mind Pump Blog Body Fat Loss - American Council on Exercise Comparison of upper body strength gains between men and women after 10 weeks of resistance training Mind Pump Podcast - YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Jeremiah Bair - Coach (@jeremiahbair)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pumped the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast, we talk about the differences between men and women in terms of training and diet. Should women train and eat differently to get to their goals. So we highlight some of the general differences,

everything from hormones to the essential fat that you need on your body, how they should train, maybe the signs of over training. We cover all of that, so we think you're gonna enjoy this episode. Now this podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Viori. Now Viori makes some of the best high quality, at leisure, where you can find anywhere. It's extremely comfortable.

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Here's how you get that discount. Go to vjoryclothing.com. That's v-u-o-r-i clothing.com forward slash. Mind Pump, there'll be a code listed on the page for that discount. Also, all month long, one of our most popular programs, Maps Strong is 50% off. This is a phenomenal resistance training program.

It builds great strength in the body, special emphasis on the posture of your chain, your glutes, your hamstrings, your upper back, your mid back, and your lower back. But it does work the whole body. When you roll in maps wrong, you have access to all the workout videos, the workout blueprints. Basically, everything you need to follow this full entire program. It's a three-month routine. It gets people phenomenal results.

Again, it's half off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to mapsstrong.com. That's MAPS, STROMG.com and use the code Strong50. That's STROMG50, no space for the discount. By the way, congratulations, they're gents. You have officially been on the first page of the macro nutrient calculator already it's only been live on google first page yeah that's uh... that's a pretty big deal man i was uh... i think we've only been up there for maybe two we've been live for two weeks and for it to already be ranked uh... on the first page of google is pretty awesome a lot of good content yet i was

i was actually going through, I mean, I know that you oversaw most of that as far as the content you and Katrina saw, and I haven't had a chance to actually go through like all the different blogs, and I mean, there's what, probably 50 plus blogs attached to loaded with content. Well, there's several calculators attached to that, right?

There's one that recommends how many calories you should eat and macros, then there's ones that help figure out how many calories you're burning, what your basal metabolic rate is, and then there's one that figures out what your calories burned are when you calculate in activity. Of course, these are all estimations based off of some pretty good sophisticated formulas.

And then there's one that shows, based off of hundreds of natural body builders from the past, what your muscle building potential is. If you're a man and you stay natural and you train perfectly and you're perfectly, and there's lots of content attached to all that. And so. Yeah, I was looking at Jeremiah,

one of the writers in our content. He wrote a blog that is performed really well, and I thought it would be a really good discussion for us to kind of elaborate on it. The article was, is it harder for women to obtain abs than men? Oh, yeah. And it's one of the more popular ones that's read on that pillar page. And I thought, oh, it's been a while since we've discussed the differences with training and dieting and exercise for men and women and I think that would be a really good time. Yeah, you see a lot of marketing really like pull people in that direction of like

And I think it to it's it's a pain point because sometimes, you know, I've trained a lot of women that claim that their husband gets results really fast. What's my issue? Why am I not getting the kind of results that he's getting at the same time? Yeah, this is a good topic because first off, it gets me a little riled up. By the way, before we continue, if you wanted to read some of those articles and content, the site is maps macro.com, so MAPS and then macro.com. I like this one because for me, it's a clear example of how the fitness industry takes

things and twisted them to convince people to buy gym memberships, or to buy supplements or products. You know, when gyms first opened a long time ago, when people first started working out, or especially when people first started using resistance to train their body, like weights and body weight and stuff, it was primarily men that did this. It was very, very, very rare to see a woman follow any kind of physical culture type training. Women were not involved in lots of sport, you know, way back in the day. It was considered masculine and manly, and so women were kind of, you know, they were discouraged

from doing anything like that. And then on top of it, as it became popular, as resistance training got popular, I mean, it really didn't start to hit mainstream until the 1970s and 80s, when in particular, a documentary came out, called Pumping Iron, which is a documentary, I watch many, many times. Up until that point, building muscles

and doing resistance training was like a side show. Nobody did that mainstream, nobody lifted weights, nobody worked out that way, really except for the side show freaks or whatever. And that documentary came out, you had the charismatic Arnold Schwarzenegger on that, and people started becoming more aware of resistance training. But the side effect of that was the people that you saw doing it were bodybuilders, were these huge muscular bodybuilders, and that didn't really appeal to women, understandably so.

Don't you think a lot of that has to do with just the lack of research that we had around it? I mean, back then, there wasn't a lot of study. I mean, we see so many studies now on the benefits of resistance training that that didn't really exist in the 70s and the 80s, really, you know, that didn't start getting popular. I feel like until even like the 90s, where we started seeing. No. So all we had to judge it on was, oh, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, you know, Franco Colombo and, you know, L Ferino, all these guys from Pumpy Iron.

That's what happens when you look weights. That's the result of lifting weights. Is it gonna look like that? Right, right, and so gyms grew in popularity, but they still had a big problem with attracting women. In the 80s, you had workout videos that were targeted towards women. And the way that they targeted women

is literally by saying, you're not gonna build bulky muscles. That's part of their advertising. Don't worry, you're not going to look like these bodybuilders. Jim started catching on and they started thinking, you know, because here's the other thing too, is consumers, women actually are the number one consumers in our market.

Women buy more things and shop for more things and make those decisions more often than men do. And so gyms in order to become successful realized, well, we need to attract women to our doors. One of the ways they did that was with, you know, aerobic classes and step classes, which were kind of like dance-based workouts. How do we get them though to come into our gyms

and lift weights? So what they did is they took the machines, colored them purple. Yeah, they put purple or pink. This is true. My first job as a personal trainer back in 1997 was at the 24th Fitness on Hillsdale. This is before they remodel it and moved it.

And in that gym, which had been around for a little while, you had a women's only area in there. So you had your main workout area. And then there was a women's only workout. And when you walk in there, the women's only area, it was the same machines you saw out in the general area. The difference was the upholstery on them was pink or purple. So it's like this is for women. Why? Because it's colored pink. It's the same equipment. It was literally same stuff. It was just colored pink or purple. The fitness industry also started to come up with

terminology that would attract women So you know for men you could definitely attract them to resisted training by saying build muscle But for women if you said build muscle then you would you would elicit these images of big bodybuilders So like we can't say build muscle. We got to say something else. So they created the term toned Tone and firm you long gay. Yeah, those are all invented words. Toned literally, obviously we know what they're trying to say, it means your muscles feel harder, but that's what happens when your muscles build,

initially, they just feel harder. Muscles, by the way, don't tone, they don't elongate, they don't do all that, what they do, what they do is they build or they shrink. That's it. And when they build to a smaller degree, they feel harder. And when you lose muscle, they tend to feel softer. That's basically, so your field of weights are building muscle.

Yeah. All I saw back in the day was a lot of those like Jane Fonda and kind of like jazzy-sized type programs that were in-house, like rarely did they use weights. It was mainly calisthenics and, you know, moving around with, with, with really like light weight, if any, and, and doing multiple reps. So multiple reps was the way to, to get to that tone, look as, as they would, would market it. Yes, because what you would see back then is the big body builder, muscular people that I

don't want to look like, right? I'm a woman. I don't want to look like that guy, how do they work out? Oh, they're pushing and straining and lifting really, really heavy weight. So the market would come out and say, don't worry, you're doing 50 reps and you're not doing any weight.

Therefore, you're not gonna build big muscles. You're just gonna tone your body. Don't worry, you're not gonna do those scary barbell squat exercises and dead lifts. Those build big bulky muscles. We're going to do, you know, donkey kickbacks and we're going to do, you know, exercises on one leg or we're going to do these movements on the floor where you lift your leg up because those don't build big bulky muscles. The truth is, and we've said this on the podcast now for five years, toning is just building,

and the fastest way to tone your body is the same thing as the fastest way to build your body. So reality, lift heavy, do squats, do deadlifts, you'll get to your goals much more effectively and faster. But those are the lies that were perpetrated by the industry, marketing, which is why this topic of, you know, should women train differently than men initially gets me a little while ago.

I think it's important to point out the self-selection bias too, because there's definitely people right now that are listening that are like, yeah, what about Jane Fonda? What about this my girlfriend who's got this long, beautiful body and all she does is Pilates and yoga, or all she does is these toning type exercises. It's very similar to what we see on the other side with men with these massive bodybuilder guys. There's there's a self-selection bias of people that tend to gravitate towards these types of modalities. And genetically, they're already made up this way.

Right. So Jane Faonda has this great, not that she didn't work hard for her body. I'm not taking the credit away from how amazing she still looks amazing at 80 something years old. But her body type, a lot of that is genetics. We talk about that all the time, just like an Arnold Schwarzenegger. No matter how hard I train,

no matter how much steroids I take, I don't have the genetic potential that Arnold Schwarzenegger has, so I'll never look like that. And so you have to understand that there's that on the other end of the spectrum, too. There's body types that tend to gravitate towards a certain way of training, and you can't compare your body to what you see them and make use that as a proof. Well, just to support what you're saying, right? It's like the belief that if you swim a lot,

you're gonna get a broad shoulders, you're gonna get a flat rib cage, and you're gonna look like a swimmer. Well, the reason why we think that is because the top level swimmers look like that because they were born to swim well. When you get to that level of swimming, if competition, you're not only trained hard,

not only do you swim a lot, but you are also born with long arms, short competition, you're not only train hard, not only do you swim a lot, but you are also born with long arms, short legs, flat ribcage, wide shoulders, right? So that's kind of to support a lot of what you're saying. Now, someone like Jane Fonda, or these people who did a lot of these videos, they also lifted weights, a lot of people don't realize that. They also lifted a lot of heavy weights.

They didn't market that, but they marketed their videos, but they did lift a lot of weights. And also, they're still exercising, they're still eating right, and they're still doing it very, very consistently. So, they're still gonna look a lot better than if they didn't do that kind of stuff. But the truth is, and we know this now,

I don't have to make, and I love it, because I don't have to make this case like I used to. I think people are more aware of this. Oh, this was a major hurdle, 20 years ago. Huge. If we, when you first. Oh, this was a major hurdle, two, 20 years ago. Huge. When you first got a client, especially a female client,

I would say I spent the first three to six months from my time. Educating them, yeah. Yeah, trying to overcome all of this because for how long it's been marketed to one. Oh, they used to say, like, please don't train me like a linebacker. Yeah.

Yeah, like that was the big thing. Like I came from a football background and it's like, that was a big fear. Like, I came from a football background and all this stuff. And it's like, that was a big fear. I don't want to get bulky. I don't want to gain those types of muscles, you know, that where I look a little bit more boxy and manly. And I'm like, that's just, that's not going to happen. Like, I had to educate them. No, no. I mean, the truth is, if you want to get a toned, sculpted physique as a woman, the fastest way to get there is the same way

that you would build the fastest amount of muscle because that's what gives you that look. Here's the other end of it. Nice to tell my clients this all the time. Look, here's the worst case scenario, which is actually not a bad case. Worst case scenario, you are a hyper responder to lift to weight training, which is like,

we're talking about 0.1% of the population. But let's just say that's you. Lucky you. Okay. You're still not gonna wake up tomorrow after we did our workout, come into the gym and freak out because all of a sudden you look like a man or whatever.

It's not gonna happen. Worst case scenario, we get you to where your goal is very quickly because you're a hyper responder. Then you come in and say, hey, I don't wanna build any more muscle. What a wonderful problem to have. Now we can scale back, we can kinda go easier and just maintain, so no matter which way you slice it,

the ways that women have been marketed to train differently and do all that stuff than men, totally, totally false. Now that being said, of course, there are some general differences between men and women, and there are probably a few things that we want to consider maybe in terms of training and diet and whatnot. Now, the first big one, of course, is hormones.

The hormones are very different in men and women. Mainly, men have a much, much, much higher level of testosterone. Of course, women have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone. Now, what does that mean in terms of training and diet? Well, testosterone fuels muscle growth. Now, there's a lot of things in men that drive more muscle growth than for men than for women. One of them, though, is the big one is testosterone. And if a woman took testosterone, she would also notice more muscle growth.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that if you're a woman, you can expect to build strength and muscle at a slower pace than the average man and that your ultimate potential for muscle and strength is lower than that of a man. Really that's a big, big thing that you need to understand and consider, but I think most women kind of understand, I don't think, I think most women don't, that's not something that they're not unaware of. Would you think that there is a, the few exceptions of the rule where there's a female

that has extremely high potential and a male that has extremely low potential. And so there are women that could potentially outbuild or get stronger than some men. Oh yeah, look at the top level female power lifters. And then grab like a, your average, you know, super inactive, you know, whatever computer. Yeah, whatever your stereotypical computer.

Yeah, she's gonna be way stronger. So there's, of course, there's exceptions. So we're talking kind of generally speaking. Here's another one. Estrogen, progesterone, the female hormones. They tend to make a woman more, have a higher propensity for water retention. on the female hormones, they tend to make a woman more, have a higher propensity for water retention.

This is something that you do want to consider because if you have a, and I used to have to talk to clients about this all the time, if you have a woman that eats that had a day where she had a lot of sodium, a lot of carbohydrates, and then she would freak out because she'd get on the scale and oh my God, you know, 120 pound woman all of a sudden gain five pounds in a day, which would be,

I understand why that would be scary. And then we would talk about water retention. Women just have a higher propensity for that kind of water fluctuations or retention. Men's weight doesn't tend to fluctuate because of water retention, whereas a woman, as much I should say. Well, yes, let me percentage wise.

Right. Because technically my water weight would fluctuate a higher amount of pounds compared to Katrina's. But you're 200 exactly. So percentage wise, I agree with you, but you can't compare that head to head because someone's probably listening going, wait a second, that's not right. My husband fluctuates this much, I agree with you, but you can't compare that head to head because someone's probably listening going

Wait a second. That's not right. My husband fluctuates this much. I fluctuate that much. So there's that and then of course women have hormones that distinctly fluctuate throughout the month. A man's hormones are relatively stable. Now, of course they fluctuate also based off of lifestyle. So a guy can get his testosterone to go up and down if He lacks sleep or he stressors not eating right but naturally speaking if a man's diet and activity and lifestyle We're the same all month. He should see very minimal

fluctuations in comparison to what a woman will see especially you know because women have a period and you see And the woman will see, especially, oh, because women have a period, and you see progesterone estrogen, excuse me, flipping with each other, which can cause changes in how you feel, how you sleep, maybe cravings is another big one. Now, it's ways that I would coach my female clients through this, and this was not all of them,

but some of them would tell me things like, hey, at certain times of the month, I find it way more difficult, and they tied, by the way, they tied this to their period, because sometimes people say this, and then you actually, you boil it down, you realize, oh, you're just stressed out, work that day or whatever.

But so these are women that were tracking, my clients that were tracking, and we could see distinctly, I am more hungry, way more hungry at this time of the month and I am at this time of the month, like, what do I do with that? So that's different than when I would train a man, one piece of advice I would give them that say, okay, eat more, but make those good food choices.

So make sure the food choices are good, but go ahead and feed your body more when you are hungry during the day. Well, the most important point to make right here is though that you're making is that you're not adjusting their exercises here. It's just the conversation is different. Yes. And I think that's going to be the common theme as we go through all this is 100% there is a difference

with a man and a woman. There's a lot of differences between us. But how you train the body isn't that different. But the conversation as a coach or as a trainer, I would have to have a different because their bodies would respond to things differently. And so therefore, getting them to understand why you're holding on water or why you feel this way is different than maybe a male. But as far as the programming that I'm doing for a female that wants to lose body fat and quote unquote lean or tone,

is very, very similar to the man who says to me, I wanna build some muscle and get shredded. Right, right, right. Yeah, those same training applications have benefits for both sexes. It's, you know, even though there are those differences, it's still gonna benefit, you know, that same training process will benefit both parties equally.

Yep, totally. So back to, you know, when appetite would change, here's something that I also noticed with these clients was, yes, they got hungrier at certain times of the month on a regular basis, but that also would balance out with other times of the month when their appetite would actually drop. So not only would they would get hungrier,

but then they'd have other times when their appetite would go down. And not only would they get hungrier, but then they'd have other times when their appetite would go down. And so I tell them is, if your appetite's down, go ahead and eat a little bit less. And if your appetite's up, go ahead and eat a little more. Just make good food choices. That strategy was very effective because here's what happens sometimes when your appetite

goes up because hormone changes and you still restrict, it tends to turn into a rebound in the opposite. You start to binge when you finally do give in. So this was a strategy that I found with some women that worked really, really well. Another big difference, and this one's, this is a big one, this is one that I had to talk a lot to female clients about, was essential fat.

Essential fat represents the amount of fat on your body that your body needs to have in order to function in a healthy place. For a woman, this is much higher than it is for a man. A man can technically be healthy at, you know, 7% body fat, 8% body fat all the time. Now I'm not saying it would be easy, they probably stuff to watch what they eat and train really well, but they could maintain that. Some men can maintain this and they're okay. I believe essential fat for a man is like under 4%

or something like that. Now a woman at 8% body fat, not good. She's gonna have, she's probably gonna lose her period. She's going to have some serious health, negative health effects. So in terms of getting lean and being shredded and staying that way, that way women need to have more body fat on their bodies than men do. Now the theory on that evolutionary is that it's because of having a baby, right? Of course, that's the reason the body is preparing needs to know, okay, if we're gonna have a child,

we need to always have extra amount of energy left on the body in order to support potentially having a child, right? Absolutely. And here's the other part of it. That's why they also lose their period if they go below that. Yes, yes, so here we go. So I got the, this is according to the American Council

on Exercise for Women Essential Fat. Remember, this means like the minimum you need to kind of, you know, have normal health or whatever, is for women at least 10 to 13%. By the way, that's shredded for women. If you're a 13% body fat for women, you've got really good definition. I know women were 13% is too lean also. I know, I've known women where they get down to that percent. Most of my female trainers that worked with me that were in great shape, average between 15 to 19%.

Yes, yes, that's exactly. Personal trainers, great shape, some of them competitors even, they kind of walked around with a 15 to 19% body fat percentage and looked phenomenal. That's where most people that most women listening right now would be very happy with a body fat percentage. And this is a fitness audience too. So most of you listening who are into fitness, you'd be happy in the high teens, maybe even

low 20s body fat percentage with good muscle underneath. The way that a look is you'll have good curve, you'll have good firmness, you'll have decent definition, you'll, you know, you'll look really good based off of, and I'm basing this off of what most women's goals are that I've trained. Most of you would be happy with that. But essential is like 10 to 13% for them. For a man, it's 2 to 5%. So it's like half. Well, so they got to worry when they get below that hormonally, because there'll be a lot of changes. Like I had a client too that was, you know, was a bit under that, let's say like nine

percent or so and started to notice a bit of hair loss in some other like stress signals in her body that was going on. Yes. And now, why is this important to know? Well, besides the fact that you don't want to get leaner than what I just said, is that pushing to get lean can cause problems for you if you're a woman. If you're already at 16% body fat and you're like obsessed with going lower and lower and lower, I mean, you're a few percent above what's considered essential body fat.

That would be like a guy at 7% body fat, keep pushing, keep pushing to get leaner. Probably, I mean, if you do it for a week, okay, but if you do that consistently, not a good idea. And again, you'll just notice your health will start to decline. And women, this looks like bad skin, hair loss, and hormone fluctuation. If

you lose your period, then that's a big sign right there, because remember, that means your body is saying not safe enough for us to pro-create. This would be like a man not being able to get an erection or something like that, right? Your body's basically telling you we're not healthy enough to pro-create. I find it interesting that that's even a desire, right? Like how that has changed over, you know, hundreds of years. Like when you look back at paintings of women that was, you know, done over a hundred years ago, they were like this very voluptuous looking.

I mean, that was attractive and sexy and how much that has changed when you look at covers of magazines and what we look at runway models like that. Men haven't changed that much. If you look at old statues of, you know, people that were gladiators and things like that, they look very similar to the build that most men aspire to today, but it's crazy how much that's changed for women. For women, it was this fuller looking body that was desired and painted

and looked at as and admired. And now it's turned into this very skinny, lean, lean look, which is unhealthy for most people. It is, you know what's interesting is that there's some truth in our standards of what we consider to be to look good, some truth, because it's based off of, it's evolutionary, right? We consider something attractive because it means good fertility and good health. Now of course we've

we've distorted that by pushing it too far but when scientists boil it down and break it down really what they find is that it's the hip to waist ratio that is considered what will consider attractive so you have some like Marilyn Monroe who's much bigger than what by be considered attractive today but the average man if looking at Marilyn Monroe would say, no, that's still attractive. And when you compare the two, what you find is the hip to waist ratio is really what a boil's down to.

But I've never trained a female client ever that wasn't really happy in the high teens low 20s body fat percentage. That's lean. But it looks really good. Every female client I've ever trained, I've trained some pretty hardcore ones. All of them are really happy in that body fat percentage range. Getting low into the mid teens and low teens, that's when it starts to not look healthy. It's like a guy at three or four percent body fat.

Maybe it looks okay on stage, but if you ever see a man at four percent body fat and you meet him and look in his face, they look gaunt. They don't look very healthy. I've gotten down pretty lean and that's, I remember looking at the mirror being like, oh man, I don't like the way I'm standing. Just hungry. Yes, yes, like you're starving.

Like you're starving. Now there are some general differences that they found in studies in terms of exercise tolerance. Men seem to generally speaking, seem to have a higher tolerance for high intensity exercise. And what I mean by high intensity is shorter about, but higher intensity type of workout. So that would be taking like a set of squats

to total failure, or doing like an hour super ridiculous intense, you know, workout, balls of the wall, or whatever you wanna say, you know, beast mode type of workout. Women, believe it or not, in studies, they show that there's a, maybe a higher tolerance for volume and frequency. So some studies show that women may actually do recover better from longer

or more frequent workouts that have a bit of a lower intensity. As far as sports are concerned, once we start to get into the higher endurance type sports, women catch up to men, and in some cases, I know that I think that the top distance swim in water, I believe is held by a woman. Yeah, and the margin between men and women, I think for like running is like really, really close. For distance, yeah. Yeah, it starts to, starts to shrink, right?

Sprinting, it's big. Yeah. But then it starts to break. Yeah, endurance sports, that's where you can see, like, both sexes are pretty close in terms of, yeah, like, who comes out on top. Yeah So now what does this mean for you as you train? Well, I guess it would mean if you're a woman be a little bit careful with super high-intensity workouts more so than than maybe a man would and

if you're really advanced rather than pushing even harder with your workouts, maybe add a little more frequency since studies show generally speaking, you know, women might do a little bit better of that. The next thing would be, I guess, the signs of overtraining, right? The signs of overtraining are very similar in men and women, but there are a couple differences. What were some that you know, you noticed? We said hair loss. That was a real common one. Well, not only just like what we see, but it's all, I think women are more susceptible to it.

And the reason why I think that is is because they typically eat lower amount of calories. Yeah. I remember reading a study way back when the average female today gains weight on like 1,600 calories, which it's almost impossible for you to even get all the macro and micronutrients your body needs in just 15 or 1600 calories. So you're already kind of at a nutrient deficiency coming into a training program or wanting

to lose weight or change your body composition. And then on top of that, because you're so low and then you start to push the body, I think that they're more susceptible to some of these things that we see, like hair issues, headaches, lack of sleep, things like that that would come up. It's not a great combo. Yeah, having this, and it's very common

within clients that I've had coming in and through was addressing the fact that they're probably not eating enough calories while they're training. This is something that I noticed, even within my wife and everybody else, I was trying to help out. It's just a common thing that if I eat more, I feel like I'm holding on more weight. I feel like I'm going to get fat.

It's always in the back of the mind. It's like, I gotta keep my calories down in order to then get to the fat loss where building themselves up with muscle would really have more benefit to them, but that's a really hard sell initially. Yeah. And when men over train testosterone levels plummet

and you can reverse that relatively quickly in comparison to women, when women would over train, and I'd see their hormones would be off, I had doctors I worked with that would test hormones and do that stuff, took a little longer to bring that back into balance. And I think it's just more complex,

whereas it's a guy's, oh, let's get the testosterone up with the women's, it also changes through the month. So I feel like it took longer, maybe because of that. I'm not a hormone specialist, but generally speaking with my clients, took a little longer to balance out those hormonal effects of over-training that it did. I wonder if it's that or it's more like what I was saying, which is just because they're more often than not already low and already deficient a little bit on nutrients. Probably part of it.

And then you're pushing the body like that versus very rarely ever did I have to really push my men to eat more. Pretty easy to tell my male clients consume more and then not have a problem with it. Now here's a weird one that I noticed much more with women than men as a potential sign of overtraining was constipation. Now constipation is generally more common in women than men anyway. So I don't remember what the numbers are, but women, a larger percentage of women, if they have digestive issues, will suffer from bloating and constipation than men. Men can also suffer from those things, but it's at a much lower rate. I noticed with my female clients, when we were, if they were over training,

when they would come to hire me, and they and these are typically women who are already working out, and they come to hire me because they couldn't figure out why their bodies weren't responding, and usually I'd look and say, oh, it looks like you're overdoing everything. Constipation was a common part of that. So that might be something you pay attention to. If you're training too hard,

and you're noticing like your gut is off, and it looks like bloat and constipation, that for women seems to be more of a sign of overtrain than it is for. Well, I also found this again connected back to kind of the low calorie thing. It seemed to be common that, and I've talked about the show before,

like the common offenders. And fiber was one of the ones that was under-consumed a lot. Very many, many times would I be training a client, assess their diet, and see that they were, you know, getting 10 grams of fiber in the day. It's hard, if you're only in the day. It's hard. If you're only eating 1500 calories, it's hard to get a good 35, 40 grams of fiber every

single day. So I would have to prescribe a bowl of berries in their diet or a big thing of salad and spinach to try and bump their fiber up. When I do that for a few days, right away, they'd be regular again. But again, I don't know if that's more of the overtraining or the combination of training hard now, already eating low calorie, because they're eating such low calorie,

they're also having a hard time getting in the fiber intake. Another one is skin. And maybe this is because, I'm speaking again, generally women pay more attention to this than men. But when women were overtraining, I would also hear from them, my skin isn't the same. It feels less, it feels less plush, it's more dry.

I'm noticing that it just does look more old, I would hear from them. I never really heard that from my male clients. Not sure if it's because women's skin reacts more to over-training than men's do, or because women tend to notice it more than men do, but this was just something that I would hear from women that I wouldn't necessarily hear from men.

Now, most of the signs of over-training are the same. You can't sleep good. Joint pain. Joint pain. You know, your mood is depressed. Dips in energy. Dips in energy, your sore and stiff, you know, you're not, your strength is declining.

That is across the board. We're just trying to, you know, pick the ones that we heard more from female clients versus men. Now, the last point, this is where I'd say 98% of the differences between men and women occur. Okay? It's really because generally speaking, men and women tend to have different goals and they're marketed too differently.

And if they have insecurities, they tend to be different. So I'll start with the first one, okay? Different goals. When I train my male clients, if they ever missed a workout or skipped a workout, eight at a 10 times, it was leg day. Yeah. So eight at a 10 to,

this is back when I used to train clients on body parts blitz. I didn't do this, the back half of my career when I realized that you're never gonna skip chest. Yeah. That was more effective to do full body, but you're right, Justin. They would call, it was funny.

Like, oh, I'll see you Wednesday. What do we work at Wednesday? Oh, Wednesday we're doing legs, and if they were to do full body, but you're right, Justin. They would call, it was funny, like, oh, I'll see you Wednesday. What do we work at Wednesday? Oh, Wednesday we're doing legs. And if they were to miss a workout, it would be the one that was legs. With women, never, never miss the leg workout. If they were going to skip a workout, it was arms. Yeah. It was, in fact, when I started training full body, clients full body,

because it was more effective, that I effective that if the guy was like, oh, I don't have much time. Can we skip? Would they always want to skip legs? And for the woman, I was like, hey, how much time? We don't need to do curls in press downs today. So let's just do the leg and the back stuff. So that's where you see, that's one of the big differences. The goals.

It's just we, you know, men tend to value more upper body development, just we, you know, men tend to value more upper body development, bigger arms, you know, that kind of stuff. Women tend to want the lower body development, the legs and the butt. So really it's about the personal preference. Do you think it also is just because you gravitate to what you're good at and because women can handle

more volume on their lower body than their upper body and that's why they? I think that's part of it too. And like you said, the self selection bias, like I feel like women do better in high rep situations where that style of training and hypertrophy, I feel like they enjoy it more. And so whatever you enjoy more initially,

and like your body likes and responds to, like that's what you're gonna kind of live in. You ever look at group exercise classes that are obviously targeted, targeting women, right? You ever do this, like full body resistance training, group exercise class or whatever. And you can tell that they're marketing towards women. Butts and guts.

You watch the class. That's what's good. They'll do two arm exercises and 15 lower body exercises. Three for glutes, four for quads, five for hamstrings. But isn't it, so I thought I read this somewhere a long time ago that women have the almost almost the same potential to build muscle in their lower half as men do.

It's their upper half that is so different than ours. There's a difference in the lower body, but it's much smaller. Yeah. And I mean, I definitely saw this training clients. I had feme, in fact, my strongest client with legs, squatting in leg pressing were actually women. So I, and because, and probably because they also

gravitated to training that way, they trained that way with me, they do it on their own. So they handled and they did a lot more volume for their legs, therefore they ended up building a ton more muscle. So some of my strongest clients were actually female clients when we were talking about leg pressing, squatting, lunging.

So I mean, I think that has a lot to do with that too. It does. It's a gravitate towards what you're doing. But a lot of it is just, you know, when they want to work out, when you ask them what the area is they really want to, you know, sculpt tone or whatever, it typically tends to be lower bodywares with guys. They're like, I want bigger shoulders, I want a bigger chest, they really want to, you know, sculpt tone or whatever, it typically tends to be lower bodywares with guys. They're like, I want bigger shoulders,

I want a bigger chest, I want a bigger, you know, bigger back, I've never had a woman come to me and say, I want to build bigger pecs, for example, right? So, that never happens. Yeah, so that's a big one. Another one is the, you know, in terms of diet, you know, having a woman, telling a female client that we want a bulk, using the word bulk is a big no-no as a personal trainer with a woman.

Like, I learn that, you know, I don't say that word, even though that's what we're trying to do with the diet, I'm not going to say to a female client, hey, we're going to do a six month, excuse me, a six week bulk with your nutrition. That's, she's never going to come back again, excuse me, a six week bulk with your nutrition. That's, she's never gonna come back again. No way, I don't wanna get bulky. I could say that to a guy, and he'll be happier than hell. Like, yeah, I'm trying to speed up your metabolism. That's our selling point, half the time.

Yeah, if you were to tell a guy, like, hey, we're gonna work on you getting skinny for the next slide. You don't use the word skinny. Yeah, you would do that. That's right, for a man, it's getting shredded or lean, you never say skinny, right? So that's another big difference is women tend to resist

increasing their calories. They tend to resist wanting to eat more to get to their goals. Whereas men tend to sometimes resist the opposite because they don't want to necessarily. Like, when a guy would tell me he wants to lose weight, he would almost always follow it up by saying, oh, but I don't want to lose muscle, you know, I want to lose weight, but I don't want to lose muscle. Yeah, I don't want to be skinny. So that's another big general difference between the two

of them. Another one is that if a female tends to overdo any type of exercise, it tends to be cardio. For sure. They tend to over, and why? Because cardio has been marketed to us as the way to get skinny or to lose weight. Now we all know. It's also less intimidating to start. Sure, sure. So, I mean, going into the gym environment, you've already touched on this, right?

It was male dominated for decades. So that's already intimidating for a female to come in there. Then if you don't know how to train the exercises that everyone's lifting and doing, even if you do believe the science or you've heard someone tell you that you should be, it's a lot less intimidating to go get on a treadmill and go for a run than it is to go over

and try and squat for your first time. Right, right. And so, you know, overdoing, now for men, sometimes I'd have to talk them into doing just a little bit of cardio. I don't wanna do that, I just wanna lift weights. Now, if you've listened to Mind Pump for more than a few episodes,

you know that just doing cardio is a terrible way to burn body fat or get leaner because it causes metabolic adaptations that slow down your metabolism and all that stuff. But if you're a woman and you're listening, keep this in mind and save yourself. Like, okay, I've been marketed this way. I may have these preconceived notions about cardio.

If I'm over training and over doing my workouts, maybe I should look at my cardio first and then later maybe look at resistance training. Strength training also is something that I'd have to convince women to do more often than men. I mean, at the end of the day, the big, big, big differences between men and women, generally speaking, are all about preferences and how they've been marketed to. All the other stuff we kind of said, those are such small, you know, general differences,

but they really don't make a huge difference. It's really about the goals and the differences between what you want and the marketing that you've gotten. Well, you need to elaborate a little bit too on the women down playing, strength training, because it's probably, everyone listening right now, it's probably the single most important thing that you can do right now if you want to lean out or you want to get toned or firm up, is to strength training. And that is because you've been marketed to for so long that high reps is the way to go for you to lean out. And most people, most women especially gravitate towards high rep training

and very few. It's very, very rare. In fact, I can count on one hand, how many female clients I ever got that when I asked them about weight training, if they had a background in weight training at all, said they would lift three to five repetitions. They never trained that way. Even if you were an avid gym goer, five, 10 years straight before you got to me, most all of them followed the 10, 15, 20 rep range

type of exercise. And knowing that as a coach, I would know that, man, the best thing that I can do right now for this client is to get them started on strength training and their body is going to respond like crazy. What you want to consider with working out is because we always consider the calorie burn of the workout, like that's the most important thing. It's actually not at all the most important thing. The most important thing with exercises, how does it get your body to adapt? Because your body,

what you do a lot of your body gets tries to get good at doing. So if you do a lot of cardio, your body aims to build lots of endurance and stamina, it also aims to become efficient with calories, so it pairs down muscle, and it learns how to burn less calories over time. So you actually slow your metabolism down with lots and lots of cardio, which is not that bad adaptation, it's perfect, it gets you better at cardio, but if you want to have a faster metabolism so that you have to work out as much to maintain your fat loss or to burn body fat, then it's a terrible approach. Strength training, the adaptation is strength.

I got to get stronger. In order to get stronger, you have to build more muscle. Your body prioritizes more muscle over being efficient with calories. So you get a faster metabolism. A faster metabolism makes fat loss easier and it makes it easier to maintain. Because now you're just burning more calories just sitting there doing nothing. So strength training, the irony of all of this is that you know, women have been marketed with tons of cardio and kind of pushed away from resistance training. When in fact, especially if you live in the modern world, the thing you should probably focus on

most, if you want to get lean, if you want to have a sculpted tone body, you don't want to have to work out seven days a week, is literally to lift weights. Now, at the end of the day though, here's the big thing, and here's why we talk so little about the differences between men and women and why we tend to, why we write programs for everybody and we don't write programs just for women or just for men.

Because at the end of the day, and this is something you learn as a personal trainer, none of that matters. At the end of the day, and this is something you learn as a personal trainer, none of that matters. At the end of the day, it's the individual that matters, because you can be a man, you can be a woman, doesn't matter, all the general stuff we just said, all that matters is how is your body responding? What are your goals?

I mean, I just talked about how women have, tend to have different goals, and they tend to like to work out their legs with arms, but if you're, what if you're a woman that you just wanna build your arms, it doesn't matter than what I said, right? Right. What if your tolerance for a high intensity exercise is high?

Does it matter that you're a man or woman? No. If you don't care about getting below 10% body fat, does essential fat matter for women versus man known? None of this stuff really matters because it all boils down to the individual and as a personal trainer, what made us effective was not looking at people generally, that would be silly, would be looking at them and saying, are you, is this working for this person? Because I can tell you right now, generally speaking, I had man that I, you know, generally

would train more like what you think you're supposed to train a woman like and a man and a woman the other way, all because of the individual at the end of the day. I'm glad you pointed that out because I know we're sitting here, we're talking a lot towards or two women right now, but the same truth applies to a male. If I got a man who came in and he wants to build muscle, he wants to build muscle and he comes in and all he ever did was lift five repetitions all the time. One of the best things I could do is to put him over on what would be quote unquote a female type of program where he's doing 15 to 20 reps.

Because it's novel to his body. His body will respond to that and he'll build muscle. So it's the same thing for both male or female. What we look at is what is this person doing? What are they currently doing right now? What are their goals? And then you build a program around that and sure there's some general truths or like common themes between the sexes but how you program and train to build muscle or burn body fat is the same.

It's the same and listen to your body. The individual differences between you and the next person and the next person are can be so big and so broad. That's all that matters. It doesn't matter. Your sex or your gender doesn't matter. It's really all about you as an individual. So at the end of the day, that's what you should pay attention to. Listen to your body, how your body responds, what's working for you particularly, and don't worry about the rest of it.

Look, mind pump is recorded on video, as well as audio. So if you like listening to mind pump, you're going to love watching us too, especially Justin, very handsome. Go to the mind pump podcast on YouTube. Also, if you want to get some more free information on exercise, lifting weights, burning body fat, diet, go to mindpumpfree.com, check out some of our free content. And finally, if you wanna find us on Instagram, you can find all of us, you can find Justin

at Mind Pump Justin, you can find me at Mind Pump Sal, and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media dot com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming

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