Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2180: Is Powerlifting Beneficial for Women?

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover seven reasons why women benefit from powerlifting. Powerlifting should NOT be avoided! It’s a phenomenal way to train. (1:55) Seven Ways Powerlifting is Beneficial for Women. #1 - Powerlifting focuses on the big 3 lifts. (8:42) #2 - The goal is objective. (14:38) #3 - Encourages eating in a surplus. (19:05) #4 - Speeds up metabolism. (25:39) #5 - Discourages overtraining. (31:52) #6 - Is empowering. (34:59) #7 - Is a fun and supportive community. (38:26) Related Links/Products Mentioned Create a Living Trust for free – in minutes! Dynasty Trusts | GetDynasty Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Promo code MINDPUMP23 at checkout for 15% off your first order!"  Special Promotion: MAPS Powerlift HALF OFF! **Coupon code WOMENPOWER at checkout** Mind Pump #1057: How To Get Stronger For Fat Loss & Muscle Building Mind Pump #2105: How To Become A Muscle Mommy Mind Pump #1647: Ten Female Fitness Lies Mind Pump #1565: Why Women Should Bulk Mind Pump #1915: How To Re-Ignite Your Metabolism Mind Pump #1142: Nine Signs You Are Overtraining Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Melissa Wolf (@meliwolf34) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk all about why women should power lift. That's right. Even if your goal is to lose body fat,

powerlifting training is some of the most effective type of strength training you'll find anywhere. In today's episode, we explain why. Now, this episode is brought to you by some sponsors. The first one is dynasty. You can literally create a living trust online for free. This is the first time ever in history you could do so. Create it for free.

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Use the code mine pump 23 for 15% off. Also, in today's episode, you hear us talk about powerlifting. We have a program called Maps Powerlift. It lays the whole workout plan out for you. It's got exercise demos, videos, sets, reps, the whole deal. If you're interested, it's half off because of this episode. Go to mapspowerlift.com, but then you have to use the code Womenpower for the 50% off discount. One of the most effective ways to work out when you're a woman is powerlifting. It's actually one of the most effective forms of strength training to boost your metabolism,

help you burn body fat, and yes, sculpt the body. Powerlifting should not be avoided. It's a phenomenal way to train. I love this. Yeah, I really do like this advice. And it's something that I didn't start giving to my female clients until later on in my career and shifting them in that direction.

I think partially because I never really identified as a power lifter and so it wasn't like a sport that I was really into, but the part, and we talk about this on the show all the time, that I think is so valuable. And I don't think this is just to women. I think men and women get a lot of value of this, is just to focus on getting stronger.

Yeah, we're marketed to so much both men and women, women especially, that this look, you know, it's all about this look, it's all about this look, and when that drives your behaviors around nutrition and exercise, for most people it drives them in the wrong direction. And so I love sending any of my clients in this direction of like, listen, we are just going to focus on getting strong because that itself is difficult. It's difficult enough to program correctly, get adequate rest, feed the body nutritionally

so it has the tools and the building blocks to go build muscle and build strength. And yet you're not focusing on the scale and getting all weary about worried about what the, with the mirror show. It's like, I'm just, my goals get strong. I love that. I love that. I love that it's more popular now.

I know back when I was training clients, it was less of a thing and it was always my favorite time to introduce the lower rep, count and do like three to five reps and really show them like if you're focused on just getting strong and being able to like add a bit more load It's a completely different mindset, but also too It's just like it was so empowering and I got the same response from basically every like female client

I had it was just like what it did for them. This is my go-to for female clients for the back cover my career And it was so effective and a lot of it has to do with just how women are marketed to in the health and fitness space. It's all about losing weight, getting lean, maybe sculpting. Nobody talks about the benefits of strength or what that translates into. So women typically, if you ask them, why do you work out, they'll say, I want to look better, I want to be more fit. Maybe I want to get stronger, but they're not really chasing strength When you chase strength then they start to get all those other things

That they had wanted and and the reason why strength is such a great pursuit is because It's hard to do with a lot of things wrong and get stronger. So in other words If you're not eating properly, you're probably not going to get stronger if your sleep isn't that great You're probably not going to get stronger. If your sleep isn't that great, you're probably not going to get stronger. If your stress levels are too much, or you can't manage the stress that you have, you're probably not going to get stronger. If your training program is off, you're not going to get stronger. It's a wonderful pursuit to chase because if you're consistently getting stronger, you're doing a lot of things right. Now, you don't

have to necessarily be perfect, but you can lose you're doing a lot of things right. Now, you don't have to necessarily be perfect, but you can lose weight and do a lot of things wrong. And of course, the weight that you lose on the scale is half muscle, half body fat, or sometimes mostly muscle. You can look in the mirror, which is a subjective thing. See yourself getting smaller and be happy because the scale is going down. You can ignore energy, you can ignore health

because clothes are fitting looser. But if you're not getting stronger, then that's it. Bottom line, you have to fix something. If you are getting stronger, you're probably doing everything right. The other side of it was it took my female clients away from the subjective aspect of looking at themselves in the mirror, judging how they look. Like, we're just gonna get stronger for three months. We're not gonna focus anything else.

And that was very freeing for them because they stopped. And then what was cool about it was within the three month period. They got what they wanted. They're like, oh my God, I look amazing. That was the part for me that I think really changed the way I started. Then became like a thing that I like, I didn't care what your goal was. I was recommending we go this direction. And that was when I sort of do adopt this idea of like a you know You want to lose 30 or 40 pounds. I'm not kind of restrict. I'm gonna add to your diet first all that was all part of like the same

transition for me and so helping you know helping my female clients Focus on that even though they came to me and said oh Adam I want a smaller waist and I want a bud I want all these things even though that was what they came to me and said, oh, Adam, I want a smaller waist and I want a bud. I want all these things. Even though that was what they came to me originally for, getting them convinced to follow this, let's get stronger protocol and do these big lifts and focus on kind of a powerlifting type of routine,

they ended up getting the results that they ultimately wanted. And they got it by eating more foods than they thought they ever were going to. It was like such a game changer to get people to connect these dots and very empowering too. So not just great that you hit your physical goals or your weight, you know, body fat loss goal, but to see how empowered my clients felt after they went through that process. Yeah, you know, a good kind of way to understand this is

even if I had a female client that said she wanted to build some muscle and usually was in the butt, right? So usually they would say, if they wanted to build, it was typically the butt area, like I want to get a bigger butt, I want to build it. If you followed that up with, well, how strong do you want to get? They always kind of confuse you, I mean, I don't really care if I get too strong.

I just want to build my butt. The right answer is I want to get strong as possible because the strength is what translates to the muscle. As you get stronger, you will build more muscle. It's just the fact, there's no better predictor of muscle growth than strength, nothing. Now, of course, eventually, that starts to slow down, but we're talking five years down the line.

And that's, by that point, you're pretty advanced. You've been very consistent for a long time. Otherwise, like, if you want to build muscle, just chase strength. If you chase gaining muscle, then you're gonna be playing this weird game of trying to figure out if I'm gaining muscle or is it, you know, water way or what's going on.

It was just, and again, it was just, it was objective. You either added five pounds of the bar or you didn't. This is why when I, back in the day, when I first started writing kind of the blueprints of the first mass program, I borrowed a lot from the strength training, competitive strength training side of resistance training because they had the best workouts, bodybuilding workouts, fat loss workouts, they were all, there wasn't really any science involved in their programming, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, anything where you had to actually objective, objectively perform. The coaches designed the best workouts

because you hit the stage, you would have lift the way you don't, it either worked or didn't work. And so they have the best programming as well. Well, you're highlighting one of the things that got me so excited about talking to you before we ever really met in person about maps and a ball. When you sent it over to me. At that time in my career, I had figured this out for my female clients. And it was something that I was already implementing in their programming. And when I looked at maps and a ball.

The thing that maps and a ball has in common with powerlifting, or powerlifting in general, and I think this is the number one factor of why this is so beneficial for women to follow a power of 13, is it focuses on the three big lifts. And we had just came out of a decade or two of most people, both men and women, neglecting those lifts. And definitely women. I did not have women squatting and deadlifting overhead pressing, bench pressing heavy weight. That was not common.

It still isn't common in the gym today. And so I remember when I saw you sent over and that's the cornerstone of Maps and a Balkist centered around those incredible lifts because we know it builds the most muscle. It does. Yeah, that's the number one reason why powerlifting is a great way to train is the three exercises or the three movements that are done in powerlifting competitions are three of the best strength training exercises you could possibly do. The bench press, the deadlift, and the squat. All three of them hit major muscle mass in the entire body. All three of them, if you get stronger,

you don't just develop one muscle or two muscles, you develop entire swaths of the body, okay? And in order to get stronger at those three exercises, because you might think if you're not experienced or you're not familiar with power, if you think, well, that's all I do is those three exercises. And no, no, competition is trying to lift in those three exercises the most weight, but to train for those three,

there are other exercises that support those lifts. So you do end up doing things like pull ups or pull downs, overhead presses. You do end up doing exercises like stiff leg and dead lifts and leg curls and stuff like that because they support those three lifts. But the goal is they pick those three growth motor-gross motor movements in competition.

And so if you're, for example, if somebody added 15% more weight to, let's say, their laterals or their barbell curls, okay, or they're trying to set push down, they'll see some muscle development, not a ton. You add 15% more weight to a barbell squat, a deadlift or a bench press. You're gonna see a lot more results

because it's such a big movement. They're just the three-bex exercises. We like to talk about the top five. The top five would also include, let's say, an overhead press and maybe something that includes some kind of rotation or a row. But these are the top three right here. You're all multi-joint lifts.

The greatest gain is how much you can tap into muscle recruitment and to increase the amount of force output. You're actually able to recruit more muscle fibers throughout your entire body with these lifts in comparison to a lot of single joint exercises. It's literally the difference between just one musical instrument versus entire symphony. I just look at it that way because we keep talking about it as the loudest signal. It's literally the loudest output you can produce in terms of like the exercise spectrum. And so this is why we, we always tend to program these specific lifts and different variations in all of our programming. Yeah, it's so along

those lines, if a muscle has, is made up of muscle fibers and one of the things that will dictate, I guess, how well the muscle gets developed is, are you able to recruit all of the muscle fibers in that muscle? And the heavier weight is, the more intense it is, the more likely you are to recruit more muscle fibers. Now, those muscle fibers are controlled and communicated to you by the central nervous system. The central nervous system ultimately decides how many muscle fibers are going to be activated. Okay, so here's the kicker. An individual muscle will activate more muscle fibers when other muscles are also activated.

This is how the body works. So if you were to squeeze something as hard as you could with your right hand, but keep the rest of your body relaxed, you would generate less force than if you squeezed with your whole body while squeezing your hand. Even though your hand is being measured, you would see a noticeable increase in the amount of power output

because the central nervous system fires harder when the whole body is turned on. So what does this have to do with those exercises? Those exercises activate the entire body. So yes, a barbell squat is a leg exercise, but unlike a leg press where the rest of my body is kind of chilling and I'm just moving my legs or especially like a leg extension,

I have to hold and support the bar on my back, I have to tense up my upper back, my core, stay stable, my feet and ankle have to be activated. And when I'm pushing heavy weight, all my muscles have to turn on even though the prime movers are my lower body. So what does that mean? It's gonna develop my legs more

than if I didn't turn on all those other muscles. This is even more important for beginners and intermediate lifters. Now when you're super advanced, you start to develop the ability to activate lots of muscle fibers without having to turn everything else on. This is why advanced lifters can do isolation exercises and get pretty good results.

But if you've been working out for less than a couple years, you're not going to activate all those muscle fibers unless you turn on the other muscles. And this is why gross motor movements are so effective. That's why these three exercises in powerlifting are so effective. Well, it's crazy. It's the benefit is it increases that capacity now

for your other exercises. You're still joining exercises. So it's like you squeeze more out of those once you learn, you teach the body how to do that with the overall multi-joined exercises, you go back to your regular kind of lifting and realize how much stronger you can get at that. Totally.

I also like training for power lifting. We said this earlier because the goal is objective. One of the biggest challenges with fitness, and this is what I communicate to personal trainers all the time, is that the client is typically focused on subjective goals. Now, why are subjective goals or, or let's say, landmarks in their training? Why is that so frustrating? It's subjective. If you've ever met somebody who thinks that they're too fat, but you look at them and you say,

you're not fat at all, or maybe you did this yourself. If you've ever looked at a picture of yourself from 10 years ago and you're like, oh my God, it looked amazing and then you realized, oh my God, I thought it looked terrible back then. It looked so good, right? It's because your subjective view of yourself is highly influenced by your confidence,

your state of mind, whether or not you're on social media all the time, who you're comparing yourself to, the partner with, whatever. It's so subjective that your subjective opinion can change even though your objective body doesn't change at all. That makes fitness something that is super ineffective. This is why people will over train, over diet, hurt themselves,

train in effective ways, ignore the fact that they feel like garbage. We talk to people all the time on the show, when they're ignoring all these signs that they're doing too much and eating too little, it's because they're just focused on subjective goals, which again are in your mind, right? Strength is objective.

Did you get stronger than you're doing the right thing? Oh, you didn't get stronger? We're doing something wrong. It's black or white, doesn't matter what you think you see in the mirror, whatever. You can't imagine the way to be heavier. It's either heavier or not. And so it tends to point you in the right direction. And I love that about powerlifting because when I would get clients,

I could put them on this objective path and not have to have all these in the right direction. And I love that about powerlifting because when I would get clients, I could put them on this subjective path and not have to have all these conversations around their subjective opinion of themselves, which was very challenging. Subjective goals are extremely difficult for a super advanced knowledgeable person to gauge. I share this all the time about my journey of competing

and how difficult it was to be able to make sure, like, wait a second, I swear I look like I'm putting weight on or it's not losing, it's not moving. And I'm like measuring, tracking, weighing, everything. So just a map, because I'm looking at the mirror, I'm looking at the mirror or I'm looking at the scale, which both those things are subjective. The scale can stay the same, go up, go down,

and it can mean the opposite of what you think it is. So, and that's somebody who I would consider myself an advanced lifter who's very knowledgeable around the subject. So, you had to go back to your numbers. I mean, I remember you talking to me about this, where you look in the mirror, you're like, I don't, oh, I look different,

but then you go back to what I ate, what I drink, and you were so meticulous, that you could override your subjective opinions. You're like, no, no, no, these are numbers. I must be holding water or less water or whatever. Yeah, and even though I saw that, I'd go like, what the conversation would go like. This would be like, okay, I need to adjust though.

I'm looking, this is not looking right, but everything I'm doing, I know I've written it down and I've tracked it, this is right. Okay, let me give it three to four days and let's see what happens. Yeah. And so I would be patient, stay the course, and then in three to four days, I'd see the mere change or the scale would change and they would be enough to be like, okay, I'm all right, stay on the course. But my point is that you're talking about somebody who's really advanced and yet still is a mind-flop for me

So having a client that you have Focus on something that is as clear as it can get just telling them Okay, did we get stronger or not as your nor star is the simplest way to keep them and you brought it up as we opened up and started this I mean good luck getting stronger, having poor sleep and not eating enough calories or hitting protein intake. If you consistently miss those marks, you're not going to get stronger. You're going to feel it's eating the gym. So, constantly trying to tweak all those things in order to get stronger, really puts you

in the right path of getting to whatever your goal is. Even if you have a subjective goal, like I want to look cute in this bikini, like still focusing on getting strong is the better path to get you there long term, because ultimately we know if you get stronger, you build muscle, if you build muscle, you speed up the metabolism, if you speed up the metabolism, it makes it that much easier to slim down and lose your body fat. You mentioned nutrition. One of the biggest challenges with women, for me, when I used to train women, was getting them to eat enough

to support and fuel the type of things that we were working for in the gym. They were constantly trying to eat less, constantly careful with how much they were intaking because their goal oftentimes was fat loss. But what would happen is they would go too low. It would make it very hard for us to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish. And we didn't get the metabolism boost thing. We didn't get the muscle building. We didn't get the sculpting. And so it's kind of this kind of battle. Well, training for strength encourages eating in a surplus. It encourages eating enough protein. In fact, it's so effective at doing this.

I learned this from a therapist. I used to train this couple and I trained them for a while, then they brought me their daughter who was recovering anorexic. And before I trained her, I remember I called the parents and I said, okay, I'll trainer, but I'd like to talk to the therapist first because I want to know what I can and can't talk about.

I want to make sure I help your daughter know, put her in the wrong direction. The therapist told me, don't talk about body weight, don't talk about body fat percentage, don't talk about any of that stuff. Just focus on performance and a light bulb when off. Of course, if we just focus on getting stronger, not only is it not triggering for her

in terms of like, you know, restricting eating, it's gonna encourage her to eat more because if she's not getting stronger and if she wants to get stronger, which eventually I convinced her to wanna get stronger, she knew she had to eat more. And it got her to eat the right amount of protein and appropriately.

That's this is one of my favorite reasons. Can I liberate? Very liberates. One of my favorite reasons why this type of training is so effective, because especially when I'm trying to get someone to build muscles so we could get the metabolism boost on all that stuff,

if somebody's afraid of gaining weight and they're constantly watching the scale, it's such a battle back and forth. This is what it was such a hard one. I mean, to, to, because that mentality of coming in and always having to be a certain amount of calories per day, a lot of my clients knew, if I eat a little bit more than this, my body's going to change. This and that happened to me, to be able to go through and really trust the process that,

I'm lifting different, my mentality's different. You know, my body's requiring more nutrients and to see them go through that process and see it actually change them for the better and like how liberating that was for them. It was fantastic. Because now, you know, we're not worried about the scale on a day-to-day basis. Like, we're just focused on one objective

and that's just to get strong. And then all the benefits you receive and it reveals itself through that process. This is why I don't like the law of thermodynamics type of conversation that so many fitness professionals have about, oh, you just got to eat less and move more because one of the things that I experienced in my career was starting to break down these diets and look at, you know, because the first thing I'd have to do is just show me where you're at. And okay, these people were struggling, not only these people struggling with weight loss, but they were malnutrition.

Like they weren't getting enough of these nutrients. We were not getting enough fiber, we're not getting enough protein, we weren't getting enough healthy fats. Like we're missing on all these things that your body wants and needs. And so for me, that was the first kind of light bulb that went off. Okay, here I'm switching my clients over to getting stronger.

Oh, look, they're missing all these macro and micro nutrients. Let's start thinking of ways to just add to the diet. Let's add to the diet and let's, and then let's, the way we measure for on the right track is performance in the gym. Let's not worry about the skills, ups and downs about that. Let's, let's speak to health and being stronger and sleeping better and more energy. And so the conversation started to shift in that direction. And then as I would add things in the diet, that would be the feedback I wanted from my

clients to see, are we heading down the right path? And ultimately, what was so great about this was if you did this correctly, they're slowly building muscle and it's getting more and more difficult for them to eat more food and naturally they would start to lean out. So it's amazing how effective this is for coaches and trainers to focus on this aspect versus what you think you're supposed to do.

Which is cut calories, cut, cut, cut. Because it naturally makes you one of those. Yeah, this person's 40, 50 pounds of away. That sounds, like I understand if you're like a new coach right now listening to this, it has to be like, what, you need to tell me you get someone who wants to lose 40, 50 pounds and you're telling me, I should put them on a powerlifting routine

and add things to their diet. Like, that sounds so counterintuitive, but it's, it's so the right strategy for long term success for this course. It is. You're building the engine, so they could, look, by the way, there's obviously more to this than just eating in a surplus. I'm not encouraging my clients to go eat junk food and garbage to do this. We're aiming for protein. I'm aiming for whole natural foods,

and I'm telling them to eat more. I'm adding to the diet. Now, what happens when this person who normally eats fast food at this time of day, I tell them to eat, no, I want you, you know, eight ounces of steak, I want you to cup a rice, whatever. They're not gonna eat both. They tend to eat what I tell them to eat. It's very satiating. They're getting the protein that they need.

Then they go to the gym and it fuels their performance. So it's much more complicated than just they'd encourage us eating in a surplus, but it definitely discourages eating too little or not getting enough nutrients if you're not eating enough You're not gonna get stronger. Yeah, and if this is you and you're scared Yeah, and if you're scared if you constantly say I know they say to build muscle and I know that's I'm supposed to do that but I'm really scared don't weigh yourself just try and get stronger It'll push you in that direction. It's also a really important for coaches and trainers.

Psychological hurdle, you help your client get over. Totally. Most of these clients that they have yo-yo dieted and extreme dieted their whole life, and you kind of flipping it on its head, saying, we're going to add things into this diet. I'm not going to focus on cutting from you and restricting from you.

I'm going to focus on putting you in the diet. It really helps them with that mental hurdle, because I don't know about you guys, but many of my clients that were suffering and restricting for you. I'm gonna focus on putting you in a diet. It really helps them with that mental hurdle because I don't know about you guys, but many of my clients that were suffering and they had this super slow metabolism is because they were scared to death to ever eat and because of every time they did,

it felt to them like they just piled it all on. And so over time, they'd go on these benches and then they'd see it go on and then they'd go these hardcore restricts for long periods of time. And so then you have to, and if they're going to, if they're going to have long term success, you've got to help them break through that mentally. And one of the best ways is right out the gates teaching them, we're going to get strong,

we're going to add things to the diet. And that's a huge, huge part of their long term success. Right. Now, the next point, this is just one of the side effects of getting stronger is it speeds up your metabolism. The next point, this is just one of the side effects of getting stronger is it speeds up your metabolism. You know, burning calories manually is hard. It's first off, it's obvious work.

Like if I want to burn more calories by moving, well, I got to move a lot. Well, that could be hard to do. It could be inconvenient. I got a schedule time to do that. And moving more, my body eventually learns how to adapt and burn less calories in other ways, either by pairing muscle down, reducing activity in other ways so that my calorie burn goes back to where it was.

This has been proven in study after study. Trying to burn calories manually for fat loss. There's nothing wrong with moving more. Moving more is good for you. But doing it to try to lose weight, it's a losing strategy. Every study done has been, it shows this. I've experienced this with clients myself.

A much more effective strategy is to get your metabolism to bore more calories on its own. How do you do that? Well, you build muscle. That's it. What you're doing is you're literally building the machinery that burns a lot of calories. The beauty of this, by the way,

for somebody who's listening right now, who's like, oh God, I gotta put size on my body. I'm trying to get smaller. Muscle is very dense. If you lost 10 pounds of fat, but gained 10 pounds of muscle, you'd be smaller. About a quarter of the size you would lose, almost a quarter. So it's so dense that gaining five pounds of muscle,

you're not gonna look bigger, you'll feel tighter, you'll feel like much firmer, but you have to have a faster metabolism, five pounds of muscle on your body, done the right way. And I mean, real muscle, not just water, glycogen, like actual contractual tissue, right? Gaining five pounds of actual real lean body mass, the right way, I mean, you're gonna boost,

in my experience, I would have someone's metabolism boost by 5, 600, 800 calories depending on the person. That's like an hour of cardio every day, just sitting there. Thinking about what flexibility that just created for you. Oh my God, it's another meal you could eat or you just get leaner eating what you're currently eating.

It's like investing money. I can put my money somewhere where it makes money for me and I just sit at home while I make money or I could go try and work more hours. You can go ahead and try and work more hours. By the way, your body learns how to tax you more when you do that. It's just like you would with taxes.

But with this, it's tax-free. Think of it that way and it builds for you. Speeding up a metabolism is the most effective strategy for fat loss. This is why when you hear me say power lifting is great for fat loss, this is why. So number one reason. I'm so glad you said that because somebody's gonna clip that and they're gonna do a counter argument

to what you just said. So I wanna arm the trainers and clients out there with this discussion, because it's one of my pet peeves is the research around how many calories more your body burns for every pound of muscle you have is there's massive debate around that. I've seen it as low as like five or 10 calories a day to as high as like 60 calories a day and arguing over the science of what we have on what exactly is that is not the whole story. The metabolism is far more complex than you be able to measure just the

metabolic rate of one pound of tissue. So don't allow some dork who just got out of school, who wants to take that clip and argue it and say like, that's not true. Even if you add to five pounds of muscle, it only equate to about 75 calories and 75 calories is insignificant. Because one, we still don't know everything about the metallic, and we're still trying to figure it out. Two, there's also huge behavioral changes that happens to somebody who adds five or ten pounds of muscle to their body. Yeah, they don't want to. Because you're into that.

They're right. I guarantee anybody listening right now, nothing else changes in your life, but you add five to ten more pounds. Watch how much more you move. And watch how much more effective you are when you move inside the gym, and how much stronger you are. And there's this effect. That decisions you make, yeah, nutritionally.

There's a rippling effect of positive benefits that happen to you, metabolically, physically, physiologically, from adding five to 10 pounds of muscle on you, that is cannot be measured in a lab and compared to fat burns this, muscle burns this. And unfortunately, our community in space will take a clip that I guarantee someone's gonna clip that cell.

You know what? And they'll try and make this argument that you're full shit, you don't know what you're talking about. Trainers and coaches that do reverse dieting with competitors and work with people. They know. We know this. By the way, there's a range of calories you could burn

within the same, with the same lean body mass. So your body can become more thrifty or less thrifty, whether you gain or lose a single pound or not. It doesn't matter. Your body can decide to burn more calories, less calories, and it's a very complex system. But if you're training to build muscle, you're in the process of building muscle,

you're feeding your body to do so. All those things point towards becoming less thrifty with calories. Means you have a faster metabolism. I've had people's metabolism boost even more than I'm listening. The story I share about Melissa Wolf, you can find her on Instagram and ask her if this is a true story or not. It's the last person that I trained. If you'd based it off of what the research says on pounds of muscle, it would be impossible

for me to have increased her calories to what it did, but not only did we do so, we did so, and then won a show by doing that. And when I got her, she was at like 1900 calories or less. We worked her all the way up to like 27, 2800 calories, little tiny little thing. And we did that in a relatively short period of time. She most certainly did not put on 50 pounds of muscle in that period of time.

So where did all that extra calorie burning go from? And it wasn't me increasing your activity like crazy because before prep, I had her doing zero cardio. So go explain that to me. It's like, we haven't quite fully wrapped our brains around exactly all the different mechanisms that it's affecting and how it works. I can tell you from firsthand, though,

I've done this hundreds of times with clients. It's extremely effective, and I have seen metabolism's roaring. And even myself, you guys have heard me share the journey on here that there's been times on this podcast in the last eight years, when at 5,500 calories, I would lose weight. If I ate 5,500 calories right now,

I'll pile on like crazy. I can't even eat over 3,000 right now, because I'm a total different person right now. So that's how much you can radically shift the metabolism. So don't let some dork tell you that's not true. Okay, come dorks. It also look, powerlifting training or training for strength also discourages over training.

One of the biggest hurdles for anybody starting a fitness program, especially women because they tend to want weight loss, more so than men even, is that they over-trained. They think if some exercise is good, more is better. That's not true at all. The right dose will give you the best results. More than that will give you worse results,

less than that will give you less results. So how does power lifting discourage overtraining? If you overtrain, you're not gonna get stronger. You'll get weaker. If you'rerain, you're not gonna get stronger. You'll get weaker. If you're training hard and you're not getting stronger, and then you add more training, and then you start to get weaker, oh, I must be overtraining.

I got it back off. If you're training for strength, this is one of the times, look, if you're training for the mirror, if you're just doing subjective, right, it'll be very hard for me to get you to back off when you're training and even realize the benefit. You'll look at the mirror and be like,

I think I look better, I'm not sure, but I am training less. But if I have you back off of your training and you go up 15 pounds in your deadlift, it's right there. Oh, you were over training. Look, you got stronger from training less because you were over training before.

And just to put it more clearly, training for strength encourages proper workout programming. You can't train improperly, you can't have a crappy workout program and consistently get stronger. You can't fool the body when it comes to strength for too long. Maybe initially, when you first get started for the first few months, you'll get stronger doing almost anything, but then you'll stop and you'll not get, unless you have a well-written, well-planned workout. And powerlifting encourages it because, again, it's objective.

The reason why this is such a strong point is because, one, I think this is extremely common across the board. I think a lot of people, especially fitness enthusiasts, grocery overtrain, I especially think a lot of women overtrain in relation to the calories they consume because the most common move is to cut calories and increase activity. And when they don't see the body moving or changing, they just keep increasing. Yeah, they just keep increasing the activity and reducing the calories and have no idea

they're getting further and further in that direction of overtraining. And to your point about getting stronger, it's so objective that even if you got a little bit of new beings because you just started by overtraining and under-eating, eventually that catches up really quick and you have to solve that in order to see yourself get stronger. Well, and one of the other things I love about the style of training is it just highlights the importance of rest in how a lot of these other programs that most women that I would train

would basically they were doing cardio with weights in every single session, every single workout they've ever done. And that's just because of what's out there in the marketplace. It's this busy do more, more, more in order to keep leaning out and get to your desired outcome where this just shows you how you can increase strength

and you take longer rest periods in between completely different mindset shift and then hopefully that then translates going back in the importance of rest in between sets. Right. Now you guys mentioned this earlier, but I love talking about the empowering feeling that getting stronger produces

for women. This was one of my favorite comments that I would get from female clients, is they would come in and they would say something like, you know, I had one woman that I trained. She was this really petite executive and she would travel a lot. And I remember she came in, this was after maybe four or five months of training. She's like, oh my God, the craziest thing happened. I'm like, what? She's like, I didn't need to ask.

She was real smush like five foot. I didn't need to ask anyone help for help putting my suitcase in the overhead compartment on the plane. And I kind of chuckled. I was a young trainer. She said, you have no idea, Sal. She goes, I travel all the time for work. I always have to ask some guy or flight attendant to help me.

She's like, yeah, it's almost like I'm dependent. She's like, I did it myself. It's because I'm so much stronger. And I thought about that. Like, what would that feel like, right? I've had other female clients say things like, oh my God, I was holding both my kids all day long and I didn't get tired or I was, I picked up four grocery bags

or the water delivery came. And I didn't have to wait for my husband. I picked it up and did it myself. To feel stronger is to feel more able bodied. It's empowering. It feels incredible. When a woman can squat her body weight or more than her body weight for the first time and she looks at that bar and you say, you know, that was 135 pounds and they're like,

oh my God, I just lifted. I remember I had a female client lift her husband's body weight. I asked her how much she's a husband weight. She's like 185 pounds. And like that, we just squat it. And her eyes, she's like, oh my God, I squatted my husband. Like that's insane. It's an incredibly empowering feeling to get stronger.

And a lot of women don't experience this because workouts that are especially designed for women don't talk about strength like it's this, it's almost like the side effect, like, oh, burn body fat, sweat, get sore, you'll get a little stronger too. It's not the primary effect, training for powerlifting, it's the primary effect, and let me tell you, it feels amazing. Yeah, I think it's important that the coaches and trainers learn to highlight this and point this out more. I know you're going to get a lot of clients to come in and tell you that they need to lose weight and they want to do that, but shifting

the helping them, shift their mindset in this because it's nice. You have a client who's got to lose 30, 40, 50 pounds and you got a journey ahead of you. And one of the things that you can hang on to or celebrate with them are these strength gain wins along the way. And if you teach them and help them understand how impactful and important that is and how much that's a signal that you're doing the things right, right? You're going to let them know that. Like listen, if we are eating, like we were supposed to, we're taking care of your body, stress management wise, you're getting good rest, we're feeding the body, the nutrients it needs to grow and build, you're getting

stronger. And if you're not getting stronger, it's because we're missing on those things. So even though I know we have this 40-pound journey we got to get to, we're hitting some really important milestones right now. I want you to know that. So make sure you celebrate those wins and communicate that to them because it's incredibly empowering to let your client know even if they have this big journey ahead of them that they're already starting to compile wins. Yeah, getting stronger just translates to so many things. I mean, it's this confidence builder. It's it bleeds and everything. It's it's overcoming any kind of other adversity that you're going to face, you know, at work or relationships or anything else. It's just one of those factors of training. I don't think people put enough emphasis on it. It's just one of those factors of training. I don't think people put enough emphasis on it.

It's all weight loss. Agreed. All right, this last point, I love because one of my favorite things to do with female clients who struggled with eating issues, dysfunctional eating, body image issues, female clients that just had challenges with the way I was trying to train them because they always had worked out a particular way. They needed to get sore and sweat a lot, otherwise it wasn't effective.

Is that what encouraged them to sign up for a local powerlifting me? Now why would I do that? Because they had a date that was set, they were training for it to help them become objective and single-minded with hitting their goal. And then when they got there, the powerlifting community is so supportive and fun. It's one of the best,

if not the best, strength training community that exists. Now bodybuilding, physique, bikini, very subjective. It can definitely be fun and supportive, but boy do people really sacrifice themselves and their health going into it because the metrics tend to be very subjective, right? How you look, powerlifting is very different. They're very, very supportive, it's very fun.

And you don't sacrifice, I mean, of course, at the extreme levels health is sacrifice. I'm talking about like, you know, local level type of deal. But training into a powerlifting meat, you're your healthiest, the day of the meat. You're your strongest, the day of the meat. And again, it's a wonderful community. And I've had a few clients do this and get the support and they couldn't believe it. Like, my God, people were cheering for me.

I'm not even competitive. I just did it for myself. But all these people were like so excited, you know, for me to lift the weight off the floor. It was so awesome. I mean, community is always important and I think in training, right? I think just think that whether you find that community within your family and your close friends or you go outside of that and you look for it and your comparison of bodybuilding, well, what's so accurate about that is that you're right. Like, I don't care what anyone says, bodybuilding is not healthy.

There's a very healthy aspect to strength training or powerlifting, right? There's a very healthy. Is there extremes and where it becomes unhealthy? Of course, there's extremes. But generally speaking, the sport of powerlifting, getting ready for that, prepping for that all the way to the day of your competition, you're probably at your healthiest, you're strong, you're well fed, you're not depleting yourself, you're like that, healthiest, you're strong, you're well-fed, you're not depleting yourself, like that, bodybuilding a little bit different

in that case. But I mean, this is also what I think, what CrossFit, why CrossFit was so big, like they nailed this. They figured this piece out of this building community around the big lifts. I mean, it's literally that. It's literally these boxes all over the country are these little hole in the wall garage-type gyms that focus on all the major barbell lifts and they have incredible community.

And it's why it's so successful. Well, I really, I really, I got it. I wish the trend was not a group of female friends getting together and saying, let's do a bikini contest together. So we could all get in shape for summer. I wish it was like, hey, let's sign up for a powerlifting competition.

That'd be awesome. You know what's funny about that? They would look generally speaking, they'd get better results. More women would get better results, working out together for a powerlifting competition than the bikini or physique or bodybuilding competition. A lot of people have developed more body image issues, eating disorders or gotten worse through the get on stage and look and have the judges judge you type of sport versus I go to go lift to heavy weight. I would love to see that trend of women getting together and saying we're all training for this competition coming up in August or whatever. It's the bunch of muscle mommies out there.

It would be super amazing. Now, if we've convinced you, look, here's a deal, I'm glad. Also, we have a program specifically designed for powerlifting training, and it literally will take you to the day of competition. If you decide to do so, it's called Maps Power Lift. And because of this episode, it's half off, 50% off. You can find it at mapspowerlift.com.

Use the coupon code Womenpower to get that 50% off. 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.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic.

Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review

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