Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2677: Why All Women Need to Lift Weights

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Why All Women Need to Lift Weights The MASSIVE growth of the Muscle Mommy avatar. (1:06) 8 Reasons Why All Women Need to Lift Weights #1 - Its empowering. (4:51) #2 - It strengthens bones. (8:25) #3 - It helps regulate hormones. (11:35) #4 - It’s anti-anxiety and depression. (15:16) #5 - You can eat more. (17:25) #6 - You trade the scale for weights. (21:08) #7 - It’s more fun than the treadmill. (23:35) #8 - You don’t need to do a lot of it. (26:20) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Manukora for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Code MINDPUMP and save up to 31%, plus $25 worth of free gifts with the Starter Kit! ** Mind Pump #2567: Women Who Lift: Breaking Myths and Building Muscle Mind Pump #2232: Age-Proof Your Muscles, Bones & Brain With Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Mind Pump #2502: Hormone Therapy for Aesthetics With Dr. Lauren Fitzgerald Is exercise more effective than medication for depression and anxiety? Mind Pump #1547: The Hidden Benefits of Lifting Weights Mind Pump #2320: Throw Away the Scale! Two Workouts A Week Is Enough For 80% Of The Gains Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode is for women. You all need to lift weights, and we explain why and the benefits specifically for women that you can get only from strength training. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor.

sponsor, Manu Kora. That's M-A-N-U-K-O-R-A. You got to check this honey out. So it's honey, but it's the highest in M-G-O you'll find anywhere, four times higher than other competitors. What's M-G-O? This is the incredible compound in this special type of honey. That's antimicrobial, good for gut health, good for inflammation. You'll, it's the best. Try it out. I like it before my workouts. Go to manukora.com. That's M-A-N-U-K-O-R-A.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code Mind Pump, get yourself a big discount plus some free gifts with their starter kit. Here comes a show. Women are lifting weights more than ever these days, but not enough.

Look, if you're listening to this, you're a woman, you're not lifting weights. You need two. It's one of the best things you can do for yourself, and we're going to break it down as to why. Can't wait for you to man explain this, right now. It's man's plain. Man's plain. You can mess it up, dude. Oh, man.

The numbers on this is pretty remarkable. huge growth in the percentage of women that now do strength training as a... And we're here for it. As their primary form of exercise, but it's still a minority. It's still not... Is it?

I thought we're close to 50-50 now. No. No, no, no. I mean, as a percentage. It's still not the... It's not the largest draw, but it's one of the fastest growing. It's way more than when we started training people back in the late 90s.

Oh, yeah. Way more. And it's because... Well, part of the reason is there, you know, social media, you're seeing women now talk about it more. And then women are experiencing the benefit of it. And look, as personal trainers, this is just a fact in the field. A majority of the people that hire trainers are women. So a good majority is a good 60% plus of the typical client is a woman. And that was my clients. Most of my clients, I would say, were women. And many of them, especially in the early days,

were apprehensive to strength training. None of them were apprehensive. intensive after 30 to 60 days. They were all bought in once they experienced just the benefit of it. Do you think that this has anything to do with the kind of shift in marketing and the, I mean, even like the women on magazines that we celebrated, say, in the 80s versus today, like how much that has changed? Do you think this changed first and then that followed? Or did we start marketing and advertising like these fuller bodies, thicker,

looks, like more muscularly built women, we were celebrating that and putting them on covers first and then the, then people followed? Or was, you think it was the reverse? No, I think it was reverse. Some of it was driven by the, the personal trainer industry. Because the number one tool of a personal trainer in helping someone's shape, sculpt their body get fit is strength training. So most trainers will tell you this. This is like their number one exercise tool because it's so effective. So you have that. You have decades of, you know, communication. Then you had CrossFit. I think CrossFit, in fact, when I looked this up, CrossFit had a huge influence because you had these female athletes. Now, CrossFit top female athletes are very muscular. But some women saw

that and said, whoa, that's really interesting. I would attribute a lot of this to CrossFit because I think it actually normalized that body type and celebrated it. These girls were winning. They were badass. And they definitely had very muscular physiques. And before that, I don't feel like that body to women was marketed or celebrated like it was in CrossFit. I think too, a big point with that is it was co-ed. So like your normal commercial gym, it's like it's almost like you siphon off. Like there's a lot of cardio machines. There's machines that were even back in the day were like just tailored just for women. And so it was like very like segmented whereas like CrossFit was really just this class, and, like, everybody was after, you know, just getting strong and going through

these, like, uh, core lifts. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting. So the, the main, the first reason why this is such a valuable form of exercise is because it's incredibly empowering. You mentioned strong, Justin. In the 90s, when I started training, if I told a woman, I was going to make her strong, you could almost see her face change.

Like, uh, yeah, like, I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to do that because they, they thought that that looked like, uh, broad. shoulders or you know like like a guy um and the truth is strength is empowering i i remember years ago years ago one of the i heard women say this to me all the time my clients where they would they would train with me and after about 60 days it's oh god i feel so i feel so empowered in my body i feel so empowered i really understand what that meant fully it's like okay well you're stronger like what does that mean until i had a client that explained to me that uh she used to travel a lot for work. And she came back from one of her work trips. She was a very petite woman. She was like five

foot, very small petite woman. And she came back from a work trip. And she was so, I mean, she was so excited. And she told me, she said, Sal, this is the first time I put my luggage in the overhead compartment by myself. And I'm like, what do you mean? She goes, every time I travel, because I travel alone, she was a CFO of a tech company, I have to ask some guy next to me to do it. And then I realized what, what these women meant by being empowered. Yeah. Women, naturally are, have a lot less upper body strength than men. And so when it comes to doing things that require strength, you know, the old, you know, the classic meme of the opening the jar or whatever, having to depend on someone else to do something for you, that can feel a bit disempowering.

Suddenly, you want to move the couch or the coffee table or lift your luggage again in the overhead compartment. Now you can do it yourself. That's a great feeling. It's a very empowering feeling. And it's very empowering to feel strong in your body. To feel weak in your body is the opposite. Like you need to depend on other people to do things for you. Yeah. Another way to say this, I think, too, would just say it's a confidence builder. Totally. And I think that this carries across both sexes that there's nothing like, you know, going to the gym, working towards getting stronger and then feeling that apply to your real life. Like male or female, you feel that. attractive. Exactly. And I think the first time you notice it in your real life application,

like lifting the luggage, you go like, oh, well, that's cool. Yep. That feels good. Yeah. And I've had women explain to me like this as well where they feel more empowered walking because when you strength train, by the way, if you're a beginner and you're watching this right now and you haven't done consistent strength training and you're about to get started, it is totally within the realm of, you know, being reasonable. Like, this is very achievable. You could double your strength within a year, many times in six months, double your strength. So now imagine what it must feel like to walk around in your body.

First off, how is your posture going to change? How is every step going to feel? How does every time you sit down and stand up going to feel when you're twice as strong? And this is, again, this is quite reasonable. You take a woman who's never strength trained, having her squat with, you know, 30 pounds on her back would be pretty difficult. It's totally reasonable to say she'll be able to do 60 pounds by the end of the year, much more for most women. So imagine being twice as strong and what that's going to feel like in your body. And that is, that is, it's not just reasonable.

It's expected if you do things properly. And that's an amazing feeling. Huge confidence. Huge. Next up, it strengthens bones. osteopenia, osteoporosis. This is a real risk for women. It's far less of a risk for men than it is for women.

But it's an actual real risk. The percentages are relatively high, especially if women are petite and, you know, as they get older. What is the ratio in people that as they age, like women to men? You know, maybe Doug needs to look that up. Like, what's the rate of osteopenia in women as the age? Is it significantly more? I didn't realize it. Oh, versus men?

Oh, yeah. Way more anticipated is. It's way more. I knew it was more. I didn't realize it was way more. It's relatively rare to see a man with osteopenia. Oh, interesting. Unless they're really sick and frail.

Oh, interesting. But for women, it's definitely a problem. And you guys know this, like all the bone strengthening supplements and calcium also it's always advertised to women because, and weak bones is scary. You know, you break a bone, fall down and break something. Like, that's a massive risk. What does that show there? Yes.

So osteopenia is 20. 6.5% in premenopausal women to over 48.5% in post and up to 54%. In comparison to men, though. Yeah, well, look up men too. That's what I'm just curious about. But let's just consider this for a second. Paramenopausal women are typically between 35 to 40. One out of four. Yeah, that's a lot.

One out of four, they're going to have some. At that young of an age. Osteopinia. Yeah, wow. You, in menopause, almost half, almost half suffer from bone weakness. which is insane. I mean, that tells the story for sure that it's going to be a huge discrepancy.

It's four times that of management. Oh, is it four times more? Yeah. Because I, you know, I had clients in the stories of the, even the male client, falling down the stairs and breaking his hip and doing things like that. But, and so I guess I just never really realized

how much more common it was. A lot more. Part of it is just our bones are bigger and stronger. We have different hormones. But yeah, like more muscle mass. Nothing builds bone like strength ring. There is no, there is no form of exercise. In fact, when they do studies on other forms of exercise, you see some bone

strengthening. For example, running, you'll see some bone strengthening the lower extremities, nothing really in the upper extremities. And it's not a huge percent increase. Strength training, who? I said you could double your strength strength. With how much you lift, that's what you can do with your bones, just through strength. By the way, the other part of this, I have to say this, because women who strength train regularly but also under-eat will also fall in that category of osteopenia. You can get osteopenia even if you strength train if you under eat. So the other side of this is if you're lifting. Well, that's where you see it a lot, under eating and also the running,

the cardiovascular preference with that. And you get the, you know, the repetitive injuries that occur as well. From running more so than, yeah, you're going to face it. So if you strength train and feed yourself properly, your rate of osteopenia is almost zero. In fact, if you look up the data on this, it takes it down from, you know, a fourth impairment. menopause to 50% in postmenopause to almost nothing. So you can pretty much eliminate that risk by just lifting some weights. Next up, strength training has this remarkable ability to regulate hormones more so than any other form of exercise. Now all forms of exercise, if they're

applied properly, will improve your health. Improving your health generally improves your hormone profile. So that's a fact. Strength training, however, is unique because of the signal that it sends to the body. What's the main signal of strength training? Get stronger, which leads to more muscle. When your body is trying to build muscle and get stronger, and you feed it properly, what it starts to do is it starts to organize its hormones in a way that does this. So it tries to create a more, what's known as anabolic hormone profile. So what does that look like? Testosterone becomes more effective. Yes, this is true for women as well. Women also have testosterone, also important for women, just as it is for men. It's just a different ratio. You get better

balance of estrogen and progesterone, and you become more sensitive to insulin. And growth hormone becomes more youthful. So in essence, you get this youthful hormone profile because your body's like, okay, we want to build some muscle. Let's start to organize our hormones in a way to do this. This used to be one of my favorite things to point out to my female clients, especially as we first started our journey, because many times we would start to see this and notice this before we saw the weight loss or the physical change that much in the mirror. It was like, But right away, if we had done our blood work before and saw where we're at, one of the things I could lean on was like, hey, let's go get that checked again and how often they would see positive impact from that, which I think can be really encouraging when you have a big journey ahead of you or you're just getting started into weight training. And it takes a long time to build a lot of muscle.

It takes a long time to burn a lot of body fat. But right away, when you start eating better and strain training, you start to see these hormones get optimized relatively quick. and tends to also impact their life. They notice energy going up. They notice sleep is better, mood is better, libido is better, which is such a cool thing. And for all the coaches and trainers that follow and listen to us, this is like a really important thing to pay attention to

with your clients when they first start out because I do think it's so important that when people are first starting off that you, they have encouraging reasons to keep going. And sometimes people can be so drawn to the scale in the mirror. And when that's not moving fast enough, they get discouraged, but that's already showing positive benefits. That's right. Yeah, you think of perimenopause.

You think of, like, having a child, and you think about these major shifts in hormone swings, like, you know, how necessary it is to weight trained to be able to kind of counter and balance that back out. It is. Yeah, and a lot of hormone imbalances of women are closely connected to insulin, insensitivity or resistance, right? Like PCOS, for example, as an example of this, strength training, as muscles get strong they become far more insulin sensitive.

I mean, your muscles are a storage vessel for glycogen. This is what your body turns sugar and carbohydrates into. So now you have a bigger, you know, essentially gas stank to store it. So it has somewhere to go. And muscle, I mean, building muscles is one of the fastest way to improve blood sugar or insulin sensitivity. This is well established. So you get that.

You get thyroid becomes more effective. So your thyroid hormones, a lot of far more women than men suffer from thyroid issues. Well, your thyroid becomes more effective. because muscle plays a role in that. And then you have increased in what are known as androgen receptors. These are the receptors that your testosterone attaches to. So even if your testosterone stays the same, it becomes more effective because there's more places for the testosterone to dock on. So it's really this unique form of exercise when it comes to hormone regulation.

No other form of exercise does it as directly as strength training. Next up, it's anti-anxiety and antidepressive. All forms of exercise, by the way, are this way. strength training seems to edge them out just a bit in some of the data that I've seen. But the most recent data on exercise in general shows that exercise is about one and a half times. So 1.5 times more effective than medication and talk therapy. Which is crazy. For the common forms of depression and the common forms of general anxiety.

So great we have that data now because it's something we all suspected. It's so wild though because it's not even the first form of defense for us. Yeah. It's like you would think the thing that is not. just a little bit better significantly better is the third option or below for our like for people people suffer from these things and we want to throw medication or talk therapy at them when strength training actually trumps both of those it it shapes the brain in a way that looks more like because you can actually see with people of chronic depression you can actually see with MRIs that they

have differences in their brain strength training exercise and it's generally strength training in particular, shapes the brain to look more like a brain that's less anxious and less depressed. Muscles also produce feel good chemicals and peptides. So as muscles develop and get stronger, they shoot out these compounds that make you feel good. So it's just this wonderful remedy for these things. There's also got to be like a psychological side to setting a goal to go do something, following through and doing it, then executing that. I mean, you know, one of the cycles you can get in depression is feeling like I can't do anything at all, like talking, having that self-talk that's negative, where you start to go do

something like that and you accomplish that. And then you see positive change in your life. You can actually see it and feel it. That's got to do, play a huge role. And it also points to the first point, which is that one of the hallmarks of anxiety and depression is feeling like you're disempowered. feeling stronger, lifting more weight. I'm doing twice as much in my deadlift as I did four months ago or six months ago.

That plays a huge role in those things. Next up, this is probably one of the reasons why it's getting more popular. Women get hammered far more than men on trying to look a particular way. This is just general for everybody where we're told we need to look a particular way, but women in particular get hammered by media, by marketing. And so what this creates with a lot of women, girls, and as they grow up, is that they're afraid to eat. They're afraid to eat. So eating disorders are far higher, much more prevalent in women than in men.

They're not non-existent in men, but they're definitely less prevalent. And strength training, it boosts your metabolism. Like, you can eat more and stay lean. So when you do eat more and enjoy your meal or whatever, you're not suddenly gaining all this body fat. why muscle is metabolically expensive it burns calories so you know you gain a little bit of muscle and you feed yourself appropriately it's again within the realm of reasonable to be able to boost your metabolic rate by 500 calories i've done way more than that with female clients 500 calories by the way you know much cardio you have to do you know how much running you have to do to burn five that's like an

hour hour a day every day every day it's an hour of running to burn that many calories and that is that's nothing i mean and anybody's who's, any woman that's listening that has experienced this will tell you that this is life changing. I mean, I, I remember being with Katrina for the first few years and watching the way she approached exercise with running high intensity, just cutting calories like crazy. And then when she, and she would swing, her weight would go up like 10, 15 pounds. And she'd get to that point. She's like, oh, God, I got to fix this. Cut calories hard, run like crazy. And like, I remember just kind of standing back and letting her do it until finally she came to me and said, like, okay,

what would you have me do? And it was like, okay, well, we're going to stop the running. We're going to reverse diet at you. We're going to strength train. We're going to get strong, you know, rest periods, all this stuff. And then to watch her go from somebody who probably averaged around 1,800 to 2,200 calories and kind of fluctuated in their weight-wise to be eating 28, 2,900 calories, no running whatsoever, better physique than she's ever had in her life. Like, what that does, confidence-wise, the metabolic flexibility that she can enjoy a Friday. night pizza night or a glass of wine here and there and not feel like it's going to pack all the weight on like I this is one of my favorite things to and this is again this is men and women

but women in particular I think to your point have been scared into eating so low a calorie so often that they under eat so much and then they chronically yeah yeah and then their then their metabolism adapts to that low calorie and then they get stuck in this place where either one they end up putting a ton of weight on or they have to manage themselves so long low just to keep their weight down and to, boy, allow someone to have that flexibility also very empowering. Right. And, you know, you live in a modern society.

We're surrounded by food. Having a metabolism that's faster is definitely an asset. You know, maybe not 50,000 years ago when food was scarce. But now you've got a fast metabolism. Like, this actually keeps you healthy and allows you to enjoy life. And other forms of exercise don't do this. They don't speed up your metabolism. Like, we talked about running.

Other forms of exercise, like running actually teaches your body. to burn less calories. You actually teach your body become more efficient with calories. You don't need a lot of muscle. You don't need strength for endurance. And endurance is great. If you're an athlete and you want endurance, it's nothing wrong with that. But if that's what you're doing and that's your goal, your goal is to stay lean and you do lots of running, your body learns how to burn less calories through that process. You actually can slow your metabolism down, whereas a strength training, the opposite is true. You're actually directly affecting your metabolism in a way to make it faster, which again makes things a lot easier

for you. Next up, this is one of my favorites is, and you see this with women, and it's just so cool, is they learn to trade the scale for weights. What do I mean by that? Look, a woman that is 150 pounds at 17% body fat looks way different. And 17% is lean. Let's even go 20, 20%, which is great. Looks very different than a woman that's 150 pounds and 30% body fat. Same height. Huge difference. They look very different. I'll even say this, a woman that's 165. pounds at 20% body fat looks smaller, leaner, and more sculpted than a woman that's 15 pounds lighter with higher body fat percentage. Muscle looks different.

Muscle, death still weighs something, but what ends up happening through this process is you start to see yourself, you start to feel yourself. You're like, man, I look good, I feel good. And I really don't care what the scale says. I'm more interested in how much weight is on the bar. And you get rid of that scale. You break those chains. And now you're lifting weights in the gym.

You look great and the scale doesn't matter anymore. Also another thing that I think is so freeing. I can't tell you how many clients, female clients that I've trained that all had this like arbitrary number in their head, you know, that either somebody else put in there or they attach to a point in their life. And I always remember like getting started with them going like, that number means nothing. Like I can have you 20 pounds heavier than that and looking better than you've ever looked in your life. You can be five pounds lighter than that, not look so good. You could be like that number is so irrelevant. You have no idea when it comes to building muscle on your body.

so like throw that out the window and that takes a long time sometimes for people to let go of that because they've attached a number to maybe a time in their life or how they felt when they were at that number and it's like you when you put on a lot of muscle muscle weighs a lot and it and it looks way different on a body and then you when you start to realize like oh my god the 10 or 15 pounds north or south doesn't really matter it has everything to do with how much muscle I have muscle takes up less first off it takes up less space than body fat on a pound for bound base It takes up something like a fifth less space. So it's just smaller because it's denser.

And muscle looks different because it's firm. And you can choose where you can build your muscle. You can't always choose where you gain your body fat, right? You get more body fat. Some people would like to go on their boobs. It tends to go wherever it wants. Muscle, I can choose to build on my butt, build on my legs, add some shoulders, nice back. And so you gain 10 pounds of muscle.

You lose 10 pounds of body fat. The scale says the same. You don't look the same. You look very different and you feel different. you have a faster metabolism. Next up, it's definitely more fun than the treadmill. You get on the treadmill. There are a lot of different exercises you can do with strength training.

There's so many different ways to progress. There's so many different movements you could do. A treadmill is a treadmill. You get on there and you just go. Okay, I'm going to go run for 45 minutes. It's a hamster wheel. It's the same thing over and over again. Versus I'm going to go in the gym and I'm going to do five different exercises.

These are the body parts I'm going to work on. And next week I'm going to try a couple different exercises. And wow, I'm seeing my weight go up. And this is, it's a totally different experience. And when you talk to women that finally embrace strength training and they do it for 60 days and they stick with it, they all say the same thing. This is way more fun than running on the treadmill. I think part of that too is that there's so many different, like, specific attributes or goals that you can have that training different ways can give you. You know what I'm saying?

So like if you all said you want to have agility, you know, or you need to work on stability or you want to be able to jump higher or like there's, there's, there's, there's. a lot of things that you can do with the way you use strength trained to get different results. And that in itself is, I mean, it's the only thing that's been able to keep me going for over 20 years is switching up the goals. It becomes, okay, switch up the programming. Like, if it was the same five exercises, the same way, all of, which is what a treadmill or any sort of form of cardio is the same thing, the same way all the time. Oh, man, that would be tough to keep it going. But the fact that you can be changing goals and going after different attributes and simply modifying changing exercises or doing them in a different manner gives you a different outcome. That's a lot more

fun. I was just talking to one of my friends. She's a runner and had switched over to strength training and just, you know, her overall energy levels, first of all, you know, through the roof and strength really, you know, helping with that. But the elimination of pain in this chronic, like, low level pain that sometimes is, you know, big, loud signal of pain. It's like when you get strong, you don't get that type of a signal anymore. No, you go to a physical therapist for pain. They use strength training. It's correctional exercise, but it's strength training. That's the primary form of exercise they use for pain. And then here's this. You can spot, you can't spot reduce, so I can't just burn body fat from wherever I want, but I can spot shape and sculpt with

strength training. So I can literally, like a sculptor, go in the gym and say, I want this to look a particular way and develop that muscle and move towards that. That is, to me, that's such a cool thing that you can look at your physique and you can actually go and you're like, hey, you want more of this or less of that and you can go build that look with weights. You cannot do that any other way. No, it's as close as being a sculptor as you can get with exercise. And then finally, this is the best part. This is the best one. You don't need to do a lot of it. Here's what the data shows, everybody. Two days a week, two days a week of consistent strength training will give you about 80 to 85% of all the results you get from strength training. Pretty good return there.

Now, the bulk of the results you'll get from strength training happen with about two days a week. There's diminishing returns after that. So yes, you'll get more if you did three days and four days and five days so long as it's appropriate because you could also overdo it. But it becomes diminishing. Now you're squeezing out the extra five, 10%, but 80 to 85% from two days a week, Tell me a form of exercise that will do that. There isn't. Almost every other form of exercise has to be practiced on a very regular, consistent basis. You go to the gym two days a week, 45 minutes to an hour.

You do some strength training. You're getting most of the results you get. All the stuff that we talked about, you'll get most of it, which is two days a week, which makes it this incredible ROI. Well, even too, like the way atrophy sets in and, like, because muscle, you don't get just the benefits from the weight lifting when you do it. You can also get all these added benefits metabolically, and it's stays on the body for a period of time, even if you fell off and didn't train it for a week.

So one of the cool benefits around. Yeah, like when we get on a treadmill and we run for an hour, the entire benefits happen in those 50 minutes or whatever it is you run. The minute you get off of it, like there's extra benefits, stop. And so with weight training, you don't only get the benefits of the movements that you're doing out there, but then also the benefits of the muscle. And then it even stays with you, even if you don't do it for a week or two. And so that in itself makes it so beneficial.

Totally. Look, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram. We'll see you at Mind Pump Media. 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 Pumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes Maps Anabolic, Maps Performance, and Maps Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin, to see. 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-back 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

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