The Bossticks - Dr. Shannon Ritchey On Optimal Fitness Routines To Stay In Shape & Myths About Health & Fitness

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

#587: Today we're sitting down with Dr. Shannon Ritchey. Shannon Ritchey is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, fitness trainer, and founder of Evlo Fitness. Her career mission is to educate that exercise can be effective without wrecking you, or becoming counterproductive towards your wellness goals. Today Dr. Shannon joins us to talk about all things fitness & muscle building: from the misconceptions behind women weightlifting, to what can happen when you overtrain, & she tells us the perfect weekly workout split. She also gets into why she began Evlo, nutrition hacks, and gives our readers important insight into the best and most sustainable ways to maintain your health without it taking over your life.   To connect with Dr. Shannon Ritchey click HERE To connect with Evlo Fitness click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To subscribe to our YouTube Page click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential This episode is brought to you by Evlo Fitness Workout smarter, not harder. Visit evlofitness.com and use code SKINNY for one free month of Evlo. This episode is brought to you by Sakara Sakara delivers science-backed, plant-rich nutrition programs and wellness essentials right to your door. Their ready-to-eat meals are nutritionally designed to deliver results—from weight management and eased bloat to boosted energy and clearer skin. Go to Sakara.com/skinny or enter code SKINNY at checkout to receive 20% off your first order. This episode is brought to you by Delavie Sciences Skincare The core ingredient in Delavie's flagship product, Aeonia Age Defying Serum, Bacillus Lysate has been proven to boost hydration, reduce free radicals, and even stimulate the gene that regulates aging. Visit www.delaviesciences.com and use code SKINNY at checkout to receive 25% off your first order of Aeonia Age Defying Serum. This episode is brought to you by Branch Basics The Branch Basics Premium Starter Kit will provide you with everything you need to replace all of your toxic cleaning products in your home. It's really a no-brainer. Go to branchbasics.com and use code SKINNY for 15% off their starter kit. Produced by Dear Media    

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

Cordesal is not bad, by the way. We want it to come up and then we want it to come down. But a lot of us in our hustle culture do more, more, more. not taking charge of our emotional health, not sleeping enough. We have chronically high levels of cortisol. And cortisol's role, one of its roles in our body, is to cue up, get you ready to like run or fight. The best thing we can do following our workout

is to cue our parasympathetic nervous system to kick on so that we can recover faster so that we're not in this fight or flight state continuing on throughout our day. So one of the best things that I recommend everyone do after their workout is just some work, honestly. As you do it more, you'll find I'm able to relax easier. I'm able to switch between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches really easily.

Today is Monday, and this episode is absolutely perfect for a Monday. We are sitting down with Dr. Shannon of EVLO Fitness. This is someone that you have DMed me to have on the show for a long time. And this episode does not disappoint. I could not believe how much I learned in this episode. We are going to get to the root of weightlifting. So we're going to talk about the misconception behind weightlifting for women, nutrition non-negotiables to tone up, why fitness doesn't have to be draining, cortisol,

the perfect weekly resistance training split, why overtraining is counterproductive, the reason your body needs rest, and how to train your nervous system. Dr. Shannon is a wealth of knowledge. Her career mission is to educate that exercise can be effective without wrecking you. And she has a really incredible story to how she got to this point. She also does a gnarly giveaway at the end. So definitely stay tuned for that. You're going to learn just all about muscle building when it comes to women.

I personally am forwarding this episode to my sisters. I'm forwarding it to my stepmom, my friends. I just think it's such an important episode for women to listen to. And it's so informative and she comes from a place of knowledge. I know you're going to love Dr. Shannon. she's a doctor of physical therapy, a fitness trainer and founder of Evela fitness. With that, Dr. Shannon, welcome to the show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her.

Why are there so many women that are so scared of the word weightlifting? Or is it two words? Both the words, weightlifting. Women are scared of it. And I notice it even when I bring it up on my own Instagram stories, I get hit with resistance to it. Like, people are like, I don't want to get bulky. I feel like you're the perfect person to ask this to. There's so many things that come to mind. Number one, I think it's all marketing. I think that historically,

fitness has been women need to be as small as possible and women need to lean down and tone up. And lifting weights will make you look like a man. So I think we are trying to get away from a lot of that history behind why women should exercise in the first place. So I think that's the first thing. I think secondly, women are afraid they're going to get bulky because of this conditioning that we've had in the fitness industry, that if you lift a weight, you're going to look like a man. First off, it is very difficult for most women to build muscle. You have to have a very structured routine, which we can get into that. you have to lift with a certain amount of intensity. You don't necessarily have to lift super heavy weights, which I think is another reason why women get afraid of trying to build muscle

because they think they have to lift super heavy and do these compound lifts that they see at like, you know, in the men doing in the gym. And so they shy away from doing it at all when really there's an in-between where you can lift a moderate amount of weight. You don't have to do heavy compound lifts to build muscle. And you can approach it from more of like a gentle, total low impact standpoint and still continue to build muscle and change your body composition.

A lot of women, if they start to do that, they end up being really happy with how they look on the outside because when you have more muscle, your body composition change. So the ratio between fat and lean mass changes. So you fit better in your clothes. You are stronger. You improve your insulin sensitivity. It's just, I really think that it's the stigma that we, if we, if we, lift heavy weights, we're going to get bulky within a matter of weeks. And truly, for me,

I body recompositioned the last, like, year. So I gained muscle and lost fat at the same time. It's called body recomposition. It's a little bit of a slower process. But for me, it took me an entire year to gain five pounds of muscle the whole year. Wow. You know it's so funny, it's like as a man when I broached this subject with the women in my life and they tell me they're worried about bulking up. I'm like, you understand like, I've been training for like 20 years. You're like trying to get bulky and you're like, it's hard. It's funny. I'm like, they come out and And they were like, well, if I do this for like even a few months, I'm just going to get so big and bulgin.

Like, it is so hard to put on muscle. It just doesn't happen that way. It's so hard. And I think that women, so what happens sometimes is women will build muscle, but they won't be losing the fat on top of the muscle. So they'll feel overall bigger because they're gaining overall mass, even though their body composition has improved. Their ratio of lean mass to fat mass has improved, but they feel like they're overall bigger.

So that's where diet comes in. and because a lot of people lean on exercise, I think way too much to like lose fat and lose weight. And they're not being considered of how they're eating. And so they're gaining fat because they're in a calorie surplus and they're also building muscle. So they feel bigger overall. So I think it's kind of two separate conversations that you need to have with yourself as like, how am I eating and then also how am I training to build muscle? I also think women in particular, not to be sexist here, but they're afraid of the scale.

And when you start adding more muscle and then the scale goes up because the blood, Wessel weighs more than the fat. You think, oh, I'm gaining weight, which in my opinion is not a bad thing if you're building lean muscle mass. It's just going to weigh more. But they see that scale and they go, oh, something's going wrong. The scale is going up, not down. I weigh more now than I ever have. But my body composition is the best that it's ever. And I honestly, I truly don't weigh myself very often at all. So I don't really know what I weigh. But I know that I have more lean mass than I ever have. So I'm sure I weigh more than I ever have. What I noticed since I started lifting and eating more protein is that I feel like my body

did like a shrink wrap. Yes. Like it feels like everything like you'll feel tighter when you have more muscle. Yes. Yeah. It's way more fun in the bedroom. It's way more. You do. You feel tighter. Don't you think? Stronger, yeah. Yeah, you feel stronger. Like what are you doing in the bedroom to lift?

Well, she just went on all different kinds of things. I don't know. She knows from the fucking ceiling like Cirque to Zelle. When we're in the bedroom now, she just picks me up and carries me. No, I. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, please. Lauren's just like squatting him while. I'm not picking you off in the bedroom. You're going to have to find someone else to do that for you.

So I think that the conversation of protein, it sounds like, is just as important to this weightlifting. Because it's what we're eating. Can you talk a little bit like about that? Yeah. And I think that. So first off, I always say my formal education, I'm formally trained as a physical therapist. And so I feel adequate. I feel like I have the credentials to be able to talk about exercise.

I'm not formally trained in nutrition. So I don't have the formal training to, like, give advice about nutrition. I can say what's worked for me. And I can say, like, what I've learned over the years from talking to registered dietitians and talking to experts about nutrition and from experimenting with myself. So when it comes to nutrition from what I've learned, protein is your best friend. And if you are not, when I started tracking my protein, I noticed I was eating like half the amount of protein that I should.

And I was like, no wonder it's so hard for me to gain muscle. eating near the amount of protein that I should be eating to build muscle. And so when you increase your protein, it's also very satiating. You feel like you're going to eat a lot. So you're not like grazing all the time because you feel like you're eating a large amount of food. That is what allows you to build lean mass. Without the protein, you're not going to build lean mass. Your diet and your exercise have to both be dialed in order for you to ultimately see muscle growth and physical results. So what do you think the right amount of protein is? Is there like a scale that you live and die by?

For me, I, and again, different experts say different things, and I'm never giving nutrition advice. But for me, what's worked is I try to eat one gram of protein per pound of body weight. Now, if people are trying to lose weight, that's going to be, and they have a lot of weight to lose, that's going to be a lot of protein. So what experts I've heard say is one gram per pound of ideal body weight. you can go as low as like 0.7, 5 grams per pound. But I like to shoot on the higher end because then on the weekends when I'm probably not getting

as much, I'm like a little looser with my nutrition, then it kind of evens out a little bit. But for me, I have a hard time. I know, Lauren, you've said you have a hard time building muscle. I have a hard time building muscle. So I feel like I have to be on the higher end of that protein scale in order for anything to happen. So let's say like just like a rough example of some. And I know, again, this is not your area of expertise.

but if you wanted like 130 grams of protein, like what are some examples of what you would eat throughout a day? Because I think we've talked about it on the show and people write in and say, well, like that's a lot of protein. How do you even get that much protein? Yeah. I'm not going to lie. Like I try to eat the whole foods. I try to do like I do a lot of shrimp chicken. I eat all the meats. I eat a lot of Greek yogurt. I eat a lot of cottage cheese. I do smoothies. I'm not going to lie. Like it is hard and I'm busy. I'm running a business. And I do a lot of protein powder, honestly. Or I'll do protein bars. Like, what's your protein powder and protein bar pick? Peyton just gave me this suggestion, just ingredients, protein powder. It's really good. Have you tried her? Yeah. I don't, I have never tried

her protein powder, but I like love her Instagram account. That's the one I always, good on Instagram. Oh my God. She tells you what toothpaste to have. She tells, yes, I send it to every second. Are you sure it's the same person? I'm positive. It's every single toothpaste. I changed this toothpaste. I changed your detergent. I changed every single thing that you haven't noticed. Yeah, I don't know what's going on. I still got it. Hair gel is like the most toxic thing I've ever seen. I'm still working on that. But just ingredients, amazing. Okay. And what about for bars? For bars, I'm a little bit of like, I don't really care as much. Like, it's about the convenience. So like the taste doesn't matter. So I'm looking for high protein, like relatively low calories for my protein bars. Honestly, I like the Kirkland ones. Like, I know Peyton does not like those. They, I think, are good. Because they're like 21 grams of protein and like around 200 calories, which again, that's what I've heard from dietitians is great for a protein bar. You're looking for around. on 20 grams of protein and then overall low calories.

So how much protein powder are we talking about? But it sounds like so I'll give you, okay, so I'll give an example of like if I want 160 grams, what I'll typically do is I'll have like four to five eggs in the morning, which is a lot. A lot. I'll have what is the Marxistin's collagen peptide protein, which is like 10 grams. Yeah. I'll have the yogurt, which is like 10 grams.

If you have a chicken breast, call it 50 and then a steak like 50. So you're roughly like starting to get there. But it's a lot. And if you need to supplement, then like maybe you do 20 grams of a protein scoop or a protein bar. How much protein powder do you have a day? I probably have like maybe once. And I don't do it every day. But probably what I do for dessert, which I love, because I'm a big dessert person, I have to have it like every single day. I'll do Greek yogurt, a scoop of protein powder and then just like fruit and like a little bit of honey on top. It's really good. Or a little dried coconut on top. It's really good. That sounds really good.

So I'll probably do that like once a day. Maybe sometimes I don't have protein powder if I get enough from my food. I found a protein powder hack if people don't like protein powder. Chroma Wellness has the best matcha. Like I'm obsessed with it. It's so good. I'm drinking it right now. And it has 10 grams of protein in a scoop. Oh, nice.

The matcha itself does? Yes. It's like protein matcha, but it's like spicy match. I would drink it if it didn't have protein in it. It is so good. Oh my gosh. I'm going to go get that. And if you also don't like protein powder, like just like the taste of it,

using, I like ritual protein, but you can use it and make like protein oatmeal. Yes. Because sometimes I have to like dilute the protein and to make a whole smoothie as a whole to do. It is. And then you got to clean the blender. I know. It's a whole thing. So I'm like just put it in the oatmeal like let's go. Do less oats. I mean, I try to find out. Is it like a matche flavor in the oatmeal? Not the matcha in the oats. So ritual protein in the oats and then Macha, I drink. Got it.

Got it. And the macha you guys, so good. So at what point in your life do you discover resistance training? Was it, were you always weight training or was there? So yes. So I have been weight training since I was in physical therapy school. However, that was the time where I was a more is better type of person. I was weight training.

I was doing high intensity classes or I was teaching fitness. So I was teaching these high intensity classes. I would usually go to a couple of yoga classes. I would do what I think a lot of like modern women are doing, thinking that that's what you need to do. I'm going to go to, I'm going to do class pass. I'm going to do this class and this class and this class. And far over training, breaking down my body felt horrible. I had chronic pain all over my body at the age of like 24. Remember like my husband and I would go to a restaurant and we'd be like, we'd be like, well, we can't go sit at the bar because like your back hurts too bad.

Like we got to sit at a booth. And I'm like, I'm 24 years old and I feel like I'm 85. Like, it was bad. And I remember as a practicing physical therapist when I first started and I was going through this myself, I was telling my patients who were struggling with the same thing. Like, this is just the price you pay to like look good, like to look fit. Like I would tell people that because that's truly what I believed because I didn't have the education behind less is more. Structure is actually what's going to get you far better results and you don't wear it

down your body in the process. So I was lifting weights at that time. I want you to stay on that for a minute because I think. a lot of people that are new to resistance training and they start it for the first time, they get excited about it. They start to get the endorphins. They're like, wow, there's a new feeling. And then it leads to overtraining. Yes. And I'm looking to my left. Well, I just get intense with everything. Well, because I feel like people, they get, it's like a psychological thing. They get this. No, I want you to talk about more about overtraining. You should stay on that.

At some point, I feel. And then it ups your cortisol. Like, yes. It becomes counterproductive. It's counterproductive. I think people that are seasoned weight lifters recognize like, okay, like three to four days a week is like honestly enough. Truly. Less is more when it comes. If you are giving your muscles enough stimulus in your actual sessions, you have to trust your body to come in and repair that. And you have to give your body enough recovery. Otherwise, you're just going to spiral yourself into chronic inflammation.

You're going to end up not building muscle because your body is not going to build the muscle if it doesn't have the proper recovery. So I think that's one thing that people don't understand. And they're like, I want my glutes to be bigger or I want to tone my abs or I want to tone my arms. And so they'll do arms every day or they'll do glutes every day. And that's the last thing you need to be doing because muscle grows in recovery. Muscle doesn't grow, you break it down in the workout. It's growing in the recovery. And after you stimulate a muscle in a workout, there's a process of acute inflammation that

happens. And during that acute inflammatory process, there are certain molecules that are cleaning up and trying to heal the damage tissue that you damage in your workout. And this acute inflammation causes a decrease in neuromuscular activation. So it literally causes the muscle to be weaker and at greater risk of injury. So people will not understand that thinking that they need to go do more and more and more from my glutes and their glutes don't have, doesn't, don't have time to recover. So they're undergoing acute inflammation. You're loading your glutes again when they're weaker and more vulnerable. It leads to injury. Your muscles aren't actually able to

repair because they don't have enough time. So it becomes this like chronic cycle. So if you were to have like your perfect world, what is a great workout schedule for the week? When you're looking at, there's a few things. So you want to look at your schedule as a whole and then you want to look at what's inside each workout. And so when you're looking at programming as a whole, I like to recommend working each muscle group one to two days on non-consecutive days. So working like glutes on Monday and then not working glutes again to like Thursday and then being done with glutes. And then you could do that for like every muscle group in your body. So give us from Monday to Sunday. Yes. Okay. So all say like what we did this week. So upper body on Monday. So let's say we're working like,

we usually work three muscle groups. So like chest upper back shoulders or something. And then Tuesday would be lower body like glutes and quads. Wednesday would be core focus. So like core and then maybe we throw in like triceps or something. Thursday, we'd come back to glutes again and then work some other muscle group, like maybe glutes and biceps. Friday would be we're coming back to quads again. We're working quads, abs, all the things. That's what I do.

How do I do I want you to call me out? Well, sometimes what you'll do is you'll just. I'm doing exactly the perfect description. Well, you'll train like five, seven days in a row. And I feel like it's counterproductive. Not seven days in a row. But it's counterproductive you don't get the rest in. What you're saying is if you're going to train do different areas.

every single day. You can split it. Yes. But you can train five days in a row. Yes. I do train but I do think that if you're going to train five days in a row, take off two consecutive days because those two consecutive... Sometimes I don't do that. He's right. Yeah. Okay. Because that's... That's repair time. And not only are you going to see better results because your body will physically repair the muscle that you damage throughout the week, but it really helps you stay consistent. So you take off Saturday, Sunday? Always. Always. Will you like walk or move or do cardio? Yes. I'll usually just walk or like we'll hike or I'll play golf or like tennis or something like that. We try to be active. Like I don't want to say that's total rest. But some days there's just if I'm like drinking

too much the night before. Like I don't do much. And it's okay. And it's so having this understanding that taking recovery days is actually productive makes it so much more fun because you have no guilt. What was the epiphany for you that made that switch? What was the light switch moment? Yeah, so I came upon it on accident, honestly, because I just thought this was going to be my life forever. Like, if I want to look good and be fit, even though it's so ironic, I've way better body composition now than I did then, I was like, this is just going to be my life. Like, I'll just have to be in my PT's office every single week. I'll be having to get massages all the time. Like, it's just going to be normal.

When we moved, we moved from Kansas to North Carolina. My husband went to Duke for grad school. I stopped my routine, just like with moving. Sometimes it's like you just fall out of your routines. and so I stopped exercising for like two weeks, not on purpose, just like trying to get settled, whatever. And after those couple of weeks, I was like, I feel amazing. Like my body feels so good and I'm not exercising. Like what's going on here? This shouldn't exercising make you feel better. I was like, my energy feels better. My joints don't hurt. Like what the heck is happening? And so at that

time, it was kind of the perfect catalyst for me. I started to dive in more into like biomechanics and like the physics of exercise and understanding. I honestly. studied some bodybuilding stuff because honestly, bodybuilders know how to build muscle. Yeah, they do. They do. I take and leave things, obviously, from bodybuilding, but I started to study some of the physics behind exercise and learn some of that stuff. And I was like, oh, my gosh, my body feels so much better. I'm training way less and I'm starting to see better physical benefits. Well, there's like a lot of things that we accept as norm. That is just, that makes no sense if you were to like pull the microscope back and look like if you're a young adult and you have back

pain, that's not normal. No. Like people, so many people have it and they think, oh, this is just normal. I'm supposed to have back pain. It's like, no, you don't have any muscle. You have no muscle in the lower back and probably none in your glutes either, right? It's like, it's a hard truth to face. But people like running around being in sedentary positions all the time and doing training

that doesn't build muscle. Like that's why most people are in pain. A hundred percent. Nobody's telling them that. They're just like, oh, no, I have back pain. It's like, no, you just have no muscle. They have no muscle because they have no structure around their workouts. they think that a hard, sweaty workout that leaves them in a pool on the floor is what they need

to do to be fit. Or the music's playing so loud that you can't, you can't even concentrate and there's bright strobe lights and someone's yelling at you. To go faster and lift heavier. Oh, my head off. This is like the cortisol that is, I can't. I mean, I want like, I want Baza Nova playing with like outside calm, like energy. I don't want a ton of people in the gym. I feel like the curation of the experience of how you're working out is equally important. A hundred percent, because if you are so distracted, you're not thinking about, okay, this is my deltoid. It does. It moves this bone to this. And I need to contract it more. I need to improve my neuromuscular awareness to this muscle so that I'm, A, not going to hurt myself. And B, I can recruit

more what's called motor units within the actual muscle and get more out of the exercise that I'm doing. So it's just so counterintuitive. People think that like, I need to go faster. I need to get like more reps in, it's like, slow down. Let's be more intentional with how you're moving. Because a lot of times, a lot of those fitness classes, too. I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but someone's phone keeps vibrating. You got to turn it off. Sorry. I don't want it to be pick up on the mic. I remember my first beer. Yeah, I remember. Seriously. Come on, man. I've only done 700 episodes. Yeah, what the fuck. I'll get it on the seven, on the 800. Tell your girlfriend, you'll call her back. Listen, they keep, they keep calling. They're relentless. Sorry, go ahead. Okay, where was I? So, in

that neuromuscular connection is going to allow you to recruit more motor units within the muscle and actually get more stimulus out of what you're doing. And what a lot of people do is they'll go, they want more in each exercise. So they're like, I want this exercise to work my glutes and my shoulders and my abs. And so they'll be doing like burpee, overhead press, squat, burpee, back, squat, overhead press, like all these complex movements that are hard for sure and going to, their heart start pumping out of their chest. But it's not stimulating any one given muscle, very significantly. So you're really not going to see much change in your body. It's going to be good cardio, but there's other ways to get cardio that are probably less damaging on your body.

Are you referring to like boot camp-esque workout? Yeah. Yeah. And everything I see on Instagram, which is like, this exercise targets everything all at once. And it's like, when something's too good to be true, it probably is. And if you're trying to target everything at once, you're spreading your workout so that nothing is really getting very significant stimulus. So it's actually not very productive to do it like that. I also notice as people age, if they're not building muscle, they almost look, how do I say this nicely? They almost, you start to look like crepe your skin because your skin and you can explain

the science behind this. This is just what I see. Creepier skin. There's like it's not that the word isn't fat. It's just like they start to sort of look like a dementia. center sucked. Yes. Like from Harry Potter, like sucks something out of them. Can you talk a little bit about that as you age why it's so important to build muscle? Yes. And this is, it depends on like why they're looking that way. A lot of people will look that way because of like just overdoing the

cardio and this might just be overstress on their body that's causing oxidative stress and oxidative stress leads to increased aging. Physically you will see increased wrinkles, gray hair, all those things from actually doing too much and stressing your body out too much. And then there's the other side where it's like people are just too stationary and they're not doing anything at all. And obviously that can cause insulin resistance and all the things that lead to aging. So when it comes to muscle, I think one of the muscle obviously has so many metabolic benefits in our body, improving insulin sensitivity being one of them, which I don't know if you guys have really talked about like in detail what that means.

But you do. Okay. We've touched on it, but not in detail. So I'll try to go all the way to the basics. And if I'm being too basic, let me know. If you're like, yeah, yeah, we know this. So when you eat, everyone hears about like insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance. Like, what does that really mean? When you eat, you have molecules that get broken down from your food and travel throughout your bloodstreams called glucose.

And this elevates your blood sugar. And this elevation in blood sugar is fuel for your cells to do their thing. And when your blood sugar increases, your pancreas secretes insulin. So this insulin is kind of like the gatekeeper that lets glucose into the cells, so the cells can use the glucose. So when you have increased blood sugar, you also have increased insulin. And what happens is when you have chronically high blood sugar levels due to overstress, eating a lot of processed foods, different, certain things can keep your blood sugar elevated for chronic periods. Then you have chronic levels of insulin.

And this can cause insulin resistance. So your cells, there's too much insulin around. Your cells start to become desensitized to this insulin. They're not able to use it as well. And so it can cause all sorts of metabolic issues in your body. Well, one way that muscle can influence your insulin sensitivity and make you more insulin sensitive and therefore improve every single process in your body because insulin touches every single cell in your body.

It's one of the rare hormones it does. When you can gain muscle, you can improve your insulin sensitivity. And insulin sensitivity. Are you guys following? Yeah. I'm following me. When I got pregnant, I gained so much weight with Zaza. Like, I gained 60 pounds.

And when I went to a specialist afterwards, she's like, your insulin sensitive, like, it's off the charts. Yeah. Then I started lifting weights. Yes. And it's gone. And the reason for that is because muscle is a great source of glycine. glycogen storage, glucose storage.

So when you have more muscle, you have more places for that circulating glucose to go. So instead of that circulating glucose going to fat, it now is able to be stored in the muscle and the muscle is able to use it. So that's how, like, indirectly gaining more muscle can improve insulin sensitivity. And if you have, but tell me if I'm wrong. I'm probably wrong. If you have your insulin sensitivity that's not managed, it gives you greater chance for diabetes. Is that correct?

Yes. Insulin resistance can lead to. all sorts of metabolic diseases, including diabetes. You know what is so annoying, though? When they told me I was insulin resistance, instead of saying a doctor, instead of saying go lift weights, this is something that you can manage yourself, they said, here's metformin. Of course. And my intuition told me, I looked at the bottle.

I remember like picking it up and everything. I was like, this is, what am I going to take this for the rest of my life? I didn't have the tools to know that lifting weights and adding more protein. I could solve it myself. It's so crazy that they're just like, here's a drug. The critics of this show, which there's only like one or two in the entire world, they sometimes are upset when we will call out like, I believe I'll just say this candidly.

There is a place for medicine in the world, of course. But if your first step is to jump directly to the medicine before you fix your diet or fix your exercise routine or fix your sleep or all of those things, if it's just like jump to the medicine first, then you're doing yourself a disservice. And I disagree with practitioners that go to that as the first, as the first result, right? Without educating their patients. Yeah, because let's, maybe this will be a band-aid for now to get you through. But like, let's also do the lifestyle things to so that maybe you can get off this medicine. Yeah, like, if my buddy comes to me and he's got a big beer gut and he's like, oh, I know,

I'm like sad and I'm depressed and like, I can't get laid and I can't like, you know, I got into medicine. I'm like, I'll just look and be like, listen, dude, you're fat and you're sucking. You got to get in the gym and get your sleep together. That's how. we talk to my friend, but I have to come on this pod, like, oh, well, you know, sensitive, take the medicine. It's like, no, like, you got to do the shit. You got to get your life together. And some people need to hear that.

No, but, but this, like, we have the kid gloves on with everyone. It's like, oh, just the medicine. It's like, no, you got to get your shit together. If people want to take the medicine, take the medicine, but know all the knowledge before you do that. Understand what's going on in your body. And the reason of, like, I don't think anyone explains this kind of thing. Like, I didn't, we weren't taught this stuff.

Like, I had to go research this and learn what insulin resistance is. And because I was also insulin resistant when I was going to, through this over you. And I looked like thin and lean. And so many people that like look good on the outside can potentially have some form of insulin resistance. So building muscle is it's not the only way to improve insulin sensitivity. I want to say that. What are some other ways? Diet and nutrition. And I think like overall, no one wants to hear that. But I also think managing your overall stress too because cortisol and insulin resistance are related. So when you have high levels of cortisol in your body on a chronic level, cortisol is not bad.

bad, by the way. Like, we just want it, we want it to come up and then we want it to come down. But a lot of us in our hustle culture do more and more, not taking charge of our emotional health, not sleeping enough, not doing all the things. We have chronically high levels of cortisol. And cortisol's role, one of its roles in our body is to key you up, get you ready to like run or fight. So when you need to run or fight, you need to use your muscles. And so what cortisol does is it pulls blood sugar out of the muscles and the liver so that your cells have more available fuel to run or fight. So this increases blood sugar and therefore increases insulin. So this is how stress and insulin resistance can be related. If I have learned anything in the last two years

from so many podcast guests, it has been the importance of building muscle, especially for women and especially as you get older. But a lot of women don't want to do heavy squats and they don't want to swing around kettlebells. And I get it. You don't want to fry your nervous system. I, for one, like, don't want to raise my cortisol. And on that note, I have something that you can do at home

that is absolutely amazing. It combines Pilates yoga and weightlifting into every single class. So you're building muscle, you're melting fat, and it is called EVLO. First of all, the instructors are all doctors of physical therapy, and they give you such specific cues and instruction on which muscles you're targeting and how to intensify the work. I also love that everything is built around your nervous system,

so while you're building muscle, they're also being really strategic about not pumping cortisol into you. So it's not like some boot camp crazy class. You can do it from the comfort of your own home. And everything they do is gentle consistency. And this, to me, is where you really see the effects of fitness. Finding a program, too, that doesn't overstress your system and also build muscle at the same time is super rare in the fitness industry. But this one is online.

You can go to EVlo and you can start learning from their instructors and you can feel the difference. It's so popular on Instagram. So many people have had incredible results. I think you guys should check it out if you want to do something that builds muscle but doesn't fry your nervous system. EVlo is giving our listeners one month free. So no excuses. You can use code skinny at checkout.

Visit evelofitness.com to learn more and try their membership for 30 days with code skinny. Workout smarter, not harder. Go to evelofitness.com and use code skinny. You get a free month. We are in San Diego for half the summer and I had to pick very thoughtfully, what supplements and wellness essentials that I was going to send out here? And one of the things that was like a no-brainer was Sakara's wellness drops. They have two that I love.

It's the detox drops, their chlorophyll. I put them in my water. Michael always says I have 800 drinks. One of them is chlorophyll water, always. And the chlorophyll is just so good for the blood. I think it helps with cravings. It like gives me energy. I just love these drops.

And then they also have these other wellness drops that are beauty drops. And these are minerals, which is such a great way to start your day. If you want clearer skin or boosted energy, minerals are so important. And we've learned about minerals throughout so many episodes of these podcasts. And we've learned all about minerals through the him and her show. You've seen so many people from Andrew Huberman to Organic Olivia to Robert Slovak, come on here and stress the importance of minerals. So those are the two wellness drives.

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The Skinny Confidential, him and her podcast, is brought to you by BetterHelp. We've had so many high performers on this show talking about multiple facets of life and how they find performance, longevity, health, wellness, to live, happy productive lives. And in that toolbox for many of these high performers, if not most of them, is therapy. The problem is therapy has not always been accessible to everybody. You have to go find a doctor. You have to drive to an office. And sometimes it can be really expensive. Why I love this platform so much is you can do this all from the comfort of your own home, which means you're already in a comfortable state of mind. You're already in a comfortable place.

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questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Skinny today to get 10% off your first month. That's better, HELP.com slash skinny. Again, go ahead and visit betterhelp.com slash skinny today to get 10% off your first month. That's better. HELP.com slash skinny. Check it out. I keep this journal, and it's like not a lot. I'm not like dear diary every day, but I keep the thing just to kind of figure out like how I'm thinking at different periods of my life. And I was going through the day and I was like, oh, the times of my life where I've been the most stressed or the most panicked are the times when I've taken the longest breaks from exercise.

And I think like we're talking about mental health here and so many people struggle with it. But it's like I have a feeling if the high majority of people had a strong fitness routine or a weightlifting routine that would do so much to combat mental fatigue or stress or depression. But again, we go straight to the medicine and we don't go to it. So I guess what I'm saying is those periods of time when I was looking back. I correlate. I'm like, oh, those are the times when I haven't been training. I've been the most stressed, the most anxious, like all of those things. I think that the conversation of nervous system regulation is just so not talked about enough. It's not. And it's not understood very well either.

And it's it is a big when you, I think we talk about a lot. Like we're training our muscles for sure. We're training our cardiovascular health. But we can also train our nervous system, which is really cool. And that's something that I like to talk about and educate about. I think it's super interesting. Please do. Please. So, okay. So you have, again, going to go back to the basics here, but you have your nervous system, your body. And within your nervous system, you have your autonomic nervous system. This is your sympathetic, your fight or flight, and your parasympathetic, your rest, digest, and heal. And we want these two systems within relative balance to be nice and healthy. And a lot of people are high on the sympathetic end, like what I just talked about

with all the circulating cortisol and overly stressed, not high enough on the parasympathetic end. And so they end up having all these symptoms like tired all the time, mood issues, mental health issues, they can't sleep, they can't connect to people in their relationships, all of these things. There are certain tools that you can use within your actual workout to help train your parasympathetic nervous system, train the side of your nervous system that will come in and heal the damage from your workouts that's going to make you feel better, that's going to help balance certain processes in your body, help with cell cleanup so that you don't have chronic inflammation, all of those things. So one of the best ways to do this and something that I

think everyone should be doing after their workout is a workout, even if it's like low intensity, will spike sympathetic drive a little bit. Will spike that fight or flight, just a little bit. Just the nature of exercise is what it does. Not bad. But the best thing we can do following our workout is to cue our parasympathetic nervous system to kick on so that we can recover faster and so that we're not in this fight or flight state continuing on throughout our day. So one of the best things that I recommend everyone do after their workout is just some breath work, honestly. Easy breath work. We include shavasana, which is like where you just lay there at the end of every single workout.

How long is it? It doesn't have to be long. And you'll find that the more you practice, like sometimes it's 30 seconds. Sometimes it's three minutes. I mean, you'll find that the more you do it and the more you practice it and you guys both do, you both meditate. It gets easier as you practice it because you're training your parasympathic nervous system. So you'll find that once you practice it more, first there's like a lot of resistance to it. You're like, I don't want to be here.

I don't want to be still like you get anxious. And as you do it more, you'll find I'm able to relax easier. I'm able to switch between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches really easily, which is really cool. That is such good advice, I think, to have that balance. I think that I was just telling Michael, I do this thing called floss. it's like where you get your fascia stretched, but you meet it with resistance stretching. So you're pushing when she's stretching your fascia. Interesting. This woman is amazing. Her name's Kada. She's at the road. And I go there twice a week. And the second I go in and she like touches me,

my body completely relaxes. And it's probably because it's such a good what you were just saying. It's synergistic to weightlifting. Yes. But I totally agree with you. I like crazy. it because it balances out the lifting. Yes. But some people just get so accustomed to being in that sympathetic drive state all the time that they don't even know how to get out of it. They don't even know they're in it. Oh my God. Michael Lawsing telling you. For people that are listening to this and they're overwhelmed and like easy for you guys to say you're weightlifting, you're doing this. It's not to us. It's maybe a natural conversation, but they've never done it before. You work with a lot of, I'm assuming mostly women, but men as well. How do you start easing people into

this form of exercise? How do you start easing people into this form of exercise? How do you? you get people comfortable and not overall? Because I think from the outside, I can imagine you come into a gym with all these weights and there's all these people slam around and it becomes really intimidating and overwhelming. I'm never coming back again. I think for a lot of people, going back to the conversation that we had initially, a lot of women are thinking that there's going to be a heavy barbell on my back and I'm going to have to do squats. Not that I'm saying that those are bad or that you shouldn't do those, but that's not the only way. Our workouts like we're on the floor a lot or we're using a wall or we're using external support, which you can talk about how that

affects the nervous system here in a moment if you want. But it doesn't have to look like I'm doing PRs and grunting in the gym. Like people think like Gold's gym, that's intimidating. I don't want to do that. You can do it at home. You can get a set of dumbbells and you can start working your muscles and you can build muscle. I haven't done a heavy squat in years. So if you were to prescribe to everyone in the world five things to do, like five pillars, what would what would you say? could wave a magic wand. Yes. Oh, my gosh. I have, it's so funny, it's like you know my content. I literally have five basics that I talk about. And they all do revolve around building muscle because I think that when you have more muscle mass, everything else kind of falls into place.

Right. This is why we wanted to have you on. Yes. I truly do believe that cardiovascular health is obviously important. But if you have to pick one thing, have it be your strength training sessions because you can't separate cardio and strength training. Like, you're going to get cardiovascular benefits from strength training as well. So because your muscles don't know the difference, whether you're sprinting at 100 percent effort or whether you're lifting a weight at 100 percent effort. They just know there's increased demand for blood and oxygen. So your heart and lungs have to work harder. So that's people think that they have to do all of it separate. And at some point, you do want to add cardio to your routine, but you can get benefits from strength training.

So the five things, the five kind of pillars that I think about when it, when we're talking about how to build muscle. The first is programming. We talked about this, getting really specific with which muscle groups you're working on which day and giving yourself enough recovery. I think just one of the biggest mistakes people make is just bouncing around to all these different workouts. They're going to one workout on Monday that's working their glutes and their core and their arms and they're turning around and doing the same thing on Tuesday, same thing on Wednesday. So having structure in your routine is one of the most important things for building muscle. So that's programming. The second is exercise selection. So this is looking at getting really specific with how

how you're loading muscles. And this is kind of a lot of what I took from bodybuilding principles. And when I started applying it, I was like, oh my gosh, my joints feel so much better. Because I'm someone that I can't do heavy squats. It just kills my back. I've tried for years and years and years. And I was like, I just can't do it. It just hurts my, I can't do heavy overpress hurts my shoulders. So when I found that there's other ways that you can choose exercises that load muscles really specifically and result in muscle adaptation, I was like, oh my gosh, my body feels better and I'm seeing results. So that's exercise selection. It goes back to another thing we were talking about with like, if you're going to a class

and they're filled with just random exercises, like that's not really going to do much for your body. You have to be really specific with the exercise that you're choosing. So there's that interrupt me at any time if you have any follow. No, keep going. I love this. And then, okay, great. And then the third is, so programming, number one, number two, exercise selection. Number three is nutrition. Okay. Number four is, we're recovery. And then number five is progressive overload. Progressive overload means that you're slowly adding more resistance or volume as you get stronger. When you talk about nutrition, dive into what a day looks like for you. I don't want to say a perfect day, but an ideal day.

Yes. So I will say that I like to view nutrition as the weekdays, I'm pretty, it's pretty easy for me to like be in a habit on the weekdays. The weekends, I mean, my life has kind of changed recently, but the weekends, I'm a little looser. Like, I don't really track. I like, we love to go out to eat. I like my margaritas, the speck of agave. I, I sound like me. This is, I know, literally. I got the same fucking thing every single day until it hits Saturday. And then Saturday, you go buckwound. I know. I know. I mean, it's like that. I, listen, we got one life to live, and I want to enjoy the foods and we're fun cocktails. So, although I didn't drink for like two weeks up to this interview because I was like I wanted to be fresh and clear. And I cannot tell you,

my anxiety has been so much more manageable. I know. It's so annoying. It's so annoying. Well, we just got back from a bender. So we just literally, are you guys jet la? Seven days. Oh, seven days of drinking all day long. No, we're not. I mean, I'm just starting to feel better after. But you know, that's what we'll do is a similar thing. It's like, we will go like have nothing for a month or two. Yeah. And be like super disciplined. And then just let the fucking wheels fall off. Yeah. I mean, I like to live my life like that. Yeah. If we go to a fun place and a bunch of our friends are there, we're not going to be like,

no, we got to like stay. Yeah. We were up until four in the morning the other. I know a lot of. Oh my gosh. You guys are just such fun parents. No, we never do that though. It's like not a lot.

It's here and there. So once in a while, we got to remind ourselves that we can like still hang even though we can't. I love this. But I think like, you know, I say this on all the time. Like I've met a lot of very successful people in different walks of life. That could be in business or in health if it is. But like, I would say the high, high majority of those people,

are people I would never hang out with socially because they're fucking boring as hell. Yes. And like you can't, you have to have fun in life. Like, you don't want to be the richest guy in the room or the fittest guy in the room at the expense of being the most boring guy. Like, you have to have fun. Thank you for saying this because I've been really like struggling with this with alcohol because like, been the less I drink, the better I feel in all facets.

The more productive I am. I'm like, what am I doing with all this time? Like I'm so productive. Now I have all this time. What the heck? But then I'm like, man, I'm kind of struggling. socially. Like, I feel like it's just, for me, alcohol is like a, it's a ritual that, like, it's time to like relax. And I think I need to work on that. Not even alcohol, but I can't be

at a dinner table when someone's like, ooh, I can't have that. I guess. Listen, in food. You're not invited, buddy. You're not invited. It's over. I'll see you in the podcast studio. But like, we can't, we can't hang. Yes. If you're not going to have a bite of the dessert, because you're like worried about it throwing off your macros. Like, no, thank you. So go back to what you're eating on an ideal day. Weekdays. I, and I've, and I've gone back and forth with like fasting. And again, not nutrition advice, but fasting is super contentious. Like, I feel like there's, it's some people swear by it. Some people think it's the worst. For me, it really works for me. Like, because I like to eat big meals. I like to eat a lot when I

am eating. I don't like to just eat small meals. So a lot of times I'll all fast in the morning and then I'll have a big lunch. You guys are going to be like, what is this? No, I love it. It gets so weird. I get weird too. My followers know this and literally they're like, you need to be sponsored by big sardine because you love the amount of sardines. They're so good for your skin. They're so, and they're a superfood.

It's like, I swear by sardines. What do I say when I get a Caesar salad? Extra anchovies. Yes. And anchovies too. I thought they're the same. Are they the same? No, no, they're different.

Caesar salad is anchovies. I like both. Yeah. Small fatty fish are. like supposed to be really good for you. It makes your skin glow. Yeah. Alex Stern did a whole thing years ago where he's like his dad was like healthy and thriving and living for a long time. It was like blueberries and a bunch of sardines every day. Really? That was like his thing. I don't give a shit if I smell like fish either. Deal with it. Like my skin's glowing.

Okay. So, you will love this sardine salad if you don't already eat it, Lauren. It is sart canned sardines, which by the way, you don't even have to cook. You literally just like them into your bowl. celery, apple, pecans, and I do Greek yogurt. Is that everything? How much sardines? A whole can. And I get the ones from Costco. They're so good. I mean, I think they're wild caught and panic, all the things. It's high protein, super satiating. It's an acquired taste. But I always say if you like tuna, you're probably going to like sardines. And it's so easy. I am like the worst cook, like the worst cook. And I also am a little bit of a

garbage disposal, I'll kind of like eat whatever. So it's like super convenient and super healthy. I will eat dog shit if it makes my skin grow. I really will. If you told me dog shit. Well, Lauren, if you start doing that, we might have other problems. I will eat anything. Sardines are one thing.

And I mean anything, anything to make my skin glow. And you know what? You're right. It is an acquired taste. Yes. But once you start eating it, you're like, and then you see the benefits of the skin. It like comes out in your skin. I know.

I'm all for you doing while. exploratory stuff. You start eating shit. We're out. I'm out. Me and the kids are packing up. We're out. You can just package it in pill form and just take it like that. Okay. So go on. So it's an ideal day. You're you eat lunch first because you're fasting. Yeah, I usually are you drinking coffee? Are you having lemon water? Are you drinking tea? Talk to me. Oh, no, Michael. No, Michael. Everyone wants to know what she eats for a day. Yes. But when you say you're fasting, this is like a morning. You're not like doing days. Yeah. Give us. No, no, no. Sorry. I'll eat at dinner and then I just 20 until lunch. And this isn't always, sometimes I wake up and I'm really hungry. So are you drinking

coffee before this? Yes. I'm a big coffee. What are you having milk in it? I usually do either black coffee or I'll get a latte with like skin milk, which is high in protein, which is great. Another way to like sneak your protein in is milk. There's certain people that say like milk breaks your fast. I'm not so concerned about like holding the fast and like do it perfectly fasting. It's more just like convenience for me. And like usually I'm just not hungry until lunchtime. Again, not saying that this. This works for everybody. Then you have your sardine salad. And then I have my sarding salad a lot.

Like I'll have about four times a week. I'm not going to lie. Dinner is like I, we do a lot of bowls like shrimp bowl with like rice. We do a lot of rice and then a protein and vegetables and in bowls. And then sauces. Everyone like. We do we do both brown and rice and white. I'd like a rice bowl.

You could make that one. They're really good. Like a salmon rice bowl with like some saratia. I'd like that sounds good. A rice bowl sounds good. What do you guys do for dinner? Oh my. God. I do a hamburger with no bun all the time. Yum. No bun. Like cheese and like or just hamburger.

Full hamburger like with fucking pickles and mustard and all the things, but no bun. We're doing a lot of chicken lately. A lot of chicken with hot sauce. We switch it up. We got some Frank. Dan Bolzarian gave us some chicken with Franks hot sauce on it. And I saw that meal. I was like, is that good? It was really good. It was really good because of the Franks hot sauce. Yes. And the sauce is everything. And I ate it because I'm not a big chicken. eater. I ate it and we had had dinner afterwards. The sauce has no calories. At an Italian restaurant that I was so excited to go to and I couldn't eat the Italian food because the chicken filled me up so much. So I was like, fuck, this is why everyone eats chicken. But speaking of bodybuilders, like, I mean, this is, you know, it's boring, but it was, it's like a protein source. Chicken and rice.

Broccoli. Some broccoli. That's just like, that was the thing. And it's like, it works. I love my burger with no bun. It's like, I got to like live a little. Oh, totally. And in like, and like, You're not going to stay consistent with something if you absolutely hate it. Right. And I think like we do a lot of sauces, which I think is the secret. Yes. Like bitch and sauce. Have you guys said bitch and sauce?

I love bitch and sauce. Bitch and sauce is awesome. We do a lot of like hot sauce or like Greek yogurt. And then if you're going to drink on the weekends and let loose and pop puss, what are you drinking? Margaritas. Margaritas. I do the and I do the Casa amigas tequila and lime juice and. I'm always say this wrong. Contrao. Contrao. Coin trow. What is some pushback that you get on

Instagram? Because we all get pushed back. What are people say when they're pushing back? People get really upset that we don't, that we don't do heavy compound lifts. Why? Like squats and deadlifts and stuff like that? Like squats and deadlifts. Why do they get upset or why do we not do it? Both. I have found through my experience as a physical therapist, as a practicing physical therapist, I'm no longer practicing and myself that a compound lift is sometimes hard for people to do correctly, especially at home and they end up hurting themselves or it hurts their back with no trainer present. It hurts their back. There's a lot of moving parts in a compound lift. And so and when you start adding a bunch of weight to that and people just have a hard time, it, for a lot of people,

it doesn't feel great. And so what the research with the literature is saying about muscle growth is that you can do heavy compound lifts, but you can also do what they call isolated lifts. You can't technically isolate a muscle, but more targeted lifts, like targeting one specific muscle at a time instead of trying to work everything at once. And both of those routes can lead to hypertrophy or muscle growth. So choose the route that you can stay consistent with and that feels better on your body. For me, I like to do targeted lifts because I feel like I get more out of each lift because I'm like, okay, all I'm focused on is my deltoid right now. All I'm focused on is my glutes right now. all I'm focused on is my quads or whatever, and get that muscle close to failure, which is

important for muscle growth, and then move on to the next muscle instead of doing an exercise that just has too many moving parts. So that's why we prefer to do more targeted lifts instead of compound lifts. But there's a lot of like, you know, there's a lot of dogma in the fitness industry and people think that you have to do that. And if you're not doing it, it means you think that it's evil. And I'm like, I'm not saying heavy squats and dead lifts won't work. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that there's other ways that might be more comfortable and might be more sustainable for you. But you're right. If you do do those movements wrong, you could potentially really put yourself out. Yeah. I herniated a desk doing a heavy school. When you walk into a gym

and you see all these people working out, what are little things people are doing that you're like, oh my God. It's like cringy. Where do I start? Tell us all the little pet peeves you have because I bet you walk in, it's like, it's like as a content creator, if I go and like look some, like, you see things that maybe like it's not a normal person wouldn't see. What do you see? Yes. So, first off, it's been like so freaking long as I've been to a gym. Like I can't even remember. Okay, let's put it this way. The gym's on Instagram. The gym's on Instagram. There we go. There we go. Where you're like, fuck. Oh, this trend is driving me insane. The whole like core stability will snatch your waist. Have you guys seen this? No. Okay. So,

maybe. I'm going to see it now. I'm probably being targeted because I'm like, this is driving me up a wall. First off, it's clickbait. People are like, this exercise snatches your waist. You can't spot treat fat. So people think, but that's what it sounds like. It sounds like if I do this exercise, I'm going to like look lean and tight. And it's like, well, leanness is mostly diet. That exercise might improve your muscle mass there, but it's not going to like snatch you necessarily. And so there's this whole movement on Instagram about like do course stability and stop doing crunches. And that's just kind of driving me crazy because I think it's just a trend and I think it's clickbait. What else on Instagram?

Cycle syncing is an interesting one. Cycle syncing. Yeah. We've had someone come on in the podcast to talk about this. I've been multiple people. I need to listen to it. Say your real opinion, please. Okay.

So I think I like the premise of it. I like the idea that you're leading with your intuition and how your body's feeling. and you're not just doing a workout because it's on your schedule even though you feel like ass. And even though your hormones are like all, you know, doing different things to your body. So I like the idea of kind of grading your workout depending on how you're physically feeling. Because I think as soon as you start wedging yourself into workouts that your body is like screaming, like, I need a rest day or I need to do less today or I need a delode day. That's when you get hurt or you burn yourself up. I like the idea behind it.

However, I do think it's a little bit misguided because when we're talking about it, about building muscle. Like we said, routine and consistency are the two biggest things that you need to have with a muscle building routine. So if you are doing cycle syncing and let's say during your period, you are just doing yoga and Pilates. And then week two, you add in lifting and you add in hit. And then week three, you do only hit. And then week four or whatever. And also like, oh, fuck, I can't even track when my period's coming. You want me to like track all the, it's so much information. It's so much. It's so much. And it's also like you're not, so then you're not lifting half the month. Like you're not, you're not progressive, progressive overload is one of the basics. That makes total sense what you're saying. So you're not. So can you use cycle sync while still continuing to progress? Yes. But I would say when you just listen to what's going on in your body. So that's the first thing is like you can still cycle sync by just grading it back like pulling back a little bit on the days where you feel like I don't have a ton to get. today still lift the weights, but maybe you just don't, maybe you do less sets or maybe you do

less reps or maybe you drop the weight a little bit. But you're still showing up and that way you're at least maintaining what you have. And then number two, I think the other problem I have with it is that people think that during your period is when you actually need to scale fast. Sorry, Michael. I'm talking about period girl stuff. Not the first, another first one. He won't be the last. During your period. I told him that he's not a real man if he doesn't have sex with a girl on her period. I actually think that just like, yeah, I think if a guy is scared of a period, like you, you go back to sixth grade. I use it as war paint, Lauren. I go down there right. That's immature. Oh, I don't want to have sex with you because you're on your period. It's just like,

you're so immature. Don't you think that's immature? No, I completely agree. Like, grow up. I completely agree. Okay. Who cares? Also, like, I told him, when I first started dating him, I said, I find it really immature when a guy's grossed out about it. When has it been an issue? No, it hasn't been an issue. I'm just saying, in my past with other guys, I think it's so immature when they're like, Oh my God, you have your period. I, but it's because men don't understand really what it is and what's going to happen. Like, they think it's going to be a crime scene.

It's like a baby. They're like feigning at blood. Yeah, grow up. Totally. I'm the one that has to deal with it. Yeah. If I get the calls. Close your eyes and stick it in and like, go cry to your mom.

Turn the lights off. Whatever. Put some towel down. If I get called to the majors, I don't care what's going on. I'm ready to play. That's how I, that's the energy I need. Yes. Go ahead.

Okay. So when you're on your. period, the mainstream advice is to like go hug a tub of ice cream and sleep on the couch and do yoga and Pilates and do nothing. But ironically, when you're on your period is hormonally when you're closest to a man because your hormones are dropping during that time. So for a lot of people, we've been conditioned to believe that we're like more fragile and we're on our period. We're more tired. We're more lethargic. We need to do less. But in reality, it's actually a great time to lift. It's a great time because you can recover faster because your hormones are lower.

But not everybody, but again, it goes back to like, just take out what you've been taught about and like how you've been conditioned about like the female cycle. And how do you feel? Like, I feel amazing when I'm on my period. The week before, I feel freaking awful. Like, and I'm a moody bitch. And is cycle thinking just like a word that people made up? Do you know what I mean? Like is it totally a trend. It's, this is trend. I think people make it more overwhelming than it has to be. It's like more protein lift weights. Get your left or light. Totally. Totally. Totally. It's like, to me, it's like, it seems like we've overcomplicated something that's actually pretty simplistic if you break it down. Well, the fitness industry is hyper commercialized. So everybody's looking for a way to differentiate themselves. Right. And so it's like, okay, well, this is the new trend. Like, let's, and it's like, honestly, it's not that complex. Just take care of yourself. If you need to scale back a little bit one day because you feel awful, do that. Everyone in the whole world, correct me if I'm wrong, needs muscle as they age. Yes.

Okay. Like, so there you go. So let's train. Now, that said, you can do what's called, we call them reset weeks. So every eight to 12 weeks of consistent training, you're showing up and you're doing your program for eight to 12 weeks consistently, more or less. You can take a week off or four to seven days off exercise. Look at me. We just took a week off and blacked out for a week.

But you know, like picture of wellness. No, but that's good advice because when I went back to the gym. You're stronger. I feel. yeah, it was like on fire. Even though I was jet lagged, I'm like, feel great. The joints recover. So that actually makes a lot of sense. There's some science behind this. When you take time off, science has shown that for some reason, when you're consistent with exercise and lifting, your body gets desensitized to certain anabolic pathways. Anabolic means

like the building process. So for some reason, and I don't know if the research knows why this happens, but with some consistency, you start to get desensitized to certain anabolic pathways. So when you take a week off, four to seven days off about every quarter or so, that time off helps to resensitize those pathways so you can come back feeling stronger. A lot of times what people do is after they've been on vacation and they haven't exercised, they come back and they're like, whoa, I feel way stronger. Or like I can feel my muscles contract like in the first rep. Like what's happening and people think that's weaker? And it's like, no, you've actually probably just resensitized your neuromuscular connection to the muscles that you're actually targeting and recruiting. We recently had this top scientist on the podcast. His name was Kyle, and he is the president of Delivey Sciences. And this is a brand that was created by a very famous Harvard biologist and longevity expert, who also is the co-founder, David Sinclair. I'm sure that you guys have heard of him. He's very popular on Instagram. But they created this company. And it's a skincare company, but they combine technology and natural elements.

to create really elevated skin care. I got the chance to try it. It's like this age-defying serum, which is wild, and everything about it is proven to boost hydration, reduce free radicals, and even stimulate the gene that regulates aging. So it's like very high-level stuff. Basically, Kyle, the scientist, came on and talked about

Bactelius Lysate, and this is the first biological cosmetic to be certified by the Space Foundation. And I personally learned so much about reducing fine lines and wrinkles, protecting the skin's moisture barrier, and even improving elasticity and firmness. But mostly what I got out of it most as a skincare fanatic is I learned about fighting the impacts of aging and what you need to do. And I think that this is like a very high level brand of skincare. If you want to take your skin to the next level and you want to mix technology with science, this is the brand for you. I'm currently testing out their products. I'll let you know how it goes.

meantime, you can visit delavisciences.com to receive 25% off your first order of Elonia age-defying serum. You can use promo code Skinia checkout to receive your discount. Okay, this is how I know that Branch Basics works. I have been traveling. So I traveled last month and now we are in San Diego. And what they have been cleaning with in the places that we've been in is not Branch Basics. I'm not joking you. I got in bed the other night. I got in bed the other night. and I had a rash. And I honestly think it's because of the products that they're using, because when I'm at home in my house using Branch Basics, I never get a rash. Here's the deal. If you want non-toxic, hypoallergenic, free of fragrance, free of hormone disruptors and harmful preservatives,

you've got to check out Branch Basics. I changed my entire home in Austin to a non-toxic environment by switching to Branch Basics. I like this brand so much that the house that I'm at, I ordered branch basics to the house and I'm only cleaning now moving forward with that. I literally harassed them and was like I need branch basics in San Diego. So I'm obsessed. I like their premium starter kit. It will provide you with everything you need to replace all your toxic cleaning products in your home. I feel like this is a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer for me now even when I travel. Like I want to bring it with me. I just have noticed such a difference in my well-being and my kids' well-being and even my pets. Everything is baby and pet safe. If you suffer from eczema,

rashes, allergies, asthma, make the switch to Branch Basics. I am so in love with this brand that I'm even asking the founders to come on. So you can save 15% and get free shipping when you use Code Skinny at checkout. That's branchbasics.com, use code skinny. That's branchbasics.com, use code skinny. What are your thoughts on steroids, hormone replacement, OZempic, peptides? A lot of things there. We could do a whole other podcast. No, I just want to know maybe they're all separate. I'm not an MD, so I try to like...

Just your personal thoughts. My personal thoughts. I think OZempic is an interesting one because I interviewed an endocrinologist on the podcast, on my podcast recently. And this was, it was really a great. She prescribes OZempic like every day, all day, day because her patients are diabetes or those with obesity. And she was saying, for those who need it, it is like a miracle drug. It's really changing their lives. But what's happening is a lot of people

who don't need it are getting on it. And not only are they seeing rapid weight loss, but they're also losing muscle. So that's, I think, my lens on it is that I worry about people taking it and losing muscle. Because when you're in a severe calorie deficit, you don't just lose fat. You also lose muscle. So if they get off that weight loss drug, their metabolism is going to drop because they've lost all their lean mass and potentially other issues down the line that comes with losing muscle. You don't just lose it on the outside. You lose it internally too around your organs. People don't think about that. Yeah. I mean, it's it's not good. And then the second thing that I think about with OZempic from my lens, from my non-MD lens, is I think people are, we're going to see people

taking it and then like trying to sell you something like look I lost a bunch of weight doing this fitness program or I lost a bunch of weight using this supplement like you should use it too when meanwhile they're just doing ozempic huh I'm for sure going to do steroids when they get older I'm too vain about my skin in my face and I just don't want to lose fat from my face yes and that's what I've heard ozempic yeah I have a friend who took ozempic and she lost weight like feels great yeah but she lost it from her face too, obviously. Yeah.

And now she has gained some weight back, but the weight has not gone to her face how it was. So now she, and I talked to her for like an hour the other day. She has to do a bunch of filler in her face because she's lost all this fat from her face. Oh, geez. So for me, I just feel like I'm too vain to fuck with my face. Yeah. Because I don't want to fuck with my skin. It's your money maker.

No, I know. I just like, I just don't want fat from my face. Yeah. Yeah. But again, it goes back to what we were saying earlier. It's like, if if there is. is a medical need and you've done all the other things. And like many of these things could be good solutions. But again, like if it's your first stop, you know, on the track, like that's, you know,

like we had Mark Sisson on here and he was talking about TRT and he's like, listen, he's like, as a 70-year-old man, him doing it, him and his wife, well over their 60s, like makes a lot of sense. Costs reward. Yeah. If you're like a 30-year-old young man or woman and you're like just trying to get in shape, like maybe that's not the smartest thing to do. And I'm not joking. Like, probably as I get older, especially with all the information coming out with the oversight of a physician, like it probably will make sense at some point in your life. But again, like, these are things and tools that you should use after you've done everything else. Yes. And spend your youth building muscle. Like women get to be 40, 50 and they start to hit menopause and they see their body

composition changing. And it's like, had you spent, it's so sad because there just wasn't the awareness 10 years ago, 15 years ago. We have a friend that just text us and she's like, oh my God, I just gained 12 pounds out of nowhere through menopause. and both, you know, she's like, what do we, what do you do? And both of us, like, text her at the same time. And it was like weightlift and protein. Yeah. And she's like, I do lift weights. But the weights she's lifting are like two pound, like step up. Like that's, that's the thing. It's like weight. People say I'm lifting weights or I'm strength training or they go to like a bar class or Pilates class and they think that that is enough to build muscle. And I'm telling you the most important thing when it comes, as far as like exercise selection and what you're doing, the most important thing is that you're choosing. You're choosing. You're You're using your resistance, and it can be body weight sometimes for some exercises. It doesn't have to be a heavy weight, but you're choosing an exercise where you get close to failure within five to 30 reps. Science shows it could be low, low reps, it could be high reps, up to 30 past 30. It's shown that you're probably not doing much for the muscle.

But anywhere in between there, if you're getting close to failure, which means your last couple of reps, you are struggling. You're probably making ugly faces, you're breathing heavy, your velocity decreases, so you slow down. But a lot of times when you have these like two pound weights and you're just like circling her arms around for like 60 repetitions, you're like, oh, that burns. But like you're not getting close to that failure point. So that's not really going to be very effective for building. When you talked about earlier progressive overload, if you're doing that week over week, like you're not getting progressive overload. No. Right.

Here's what I would tell everyone to try. If you have a really shitty day, like the worst day ever, like having anxiety, you feel depressed, whatever. Go lift weights for 30 minutes and see your mood change. I cannot believe it. sometimes. I will be like so annoyed at him in the morning. And we'll go lift weights and then I'll be like zippity duda in the car. Zippity doodah. No, I mean, I like, I'm not joking.

Like someone, I was talking on this panel the other day and people brought up something like something about stress or in the workplace or that. I was like, for sure I would fall victim to all of those things that people talk about stress and anxiety and depression, all these things. if I didn't do these kind of things to offset and balance all the chaos that hits me every day. Yes. Right? Like that's, it's just the truth.

And like the reason I do it outside of being vain is I also want to like be able to have a strong mental fortitude and feel good and have all these. Like you can't. You get addicted to it once you start to see how good you feel. And once you start to see the physical results, then you're like, there's a reason that people start weightlifting and then they don't ever do anything else. Yeah, the physical results. They just do that forever. To me, are honestly a byproduct of all the mental stuff. Yes.

Like it's actually like not the physical much as is the mental. Oh my gosh. Amen. Like I almost got to come first. Yeah. Because I don't think there's a lot of things you can do to offset a lot of the stress that hits us every day besides like move your body. Yeah.

I totally agree. And I think people often overeat because they're trying to. It all cycles together, right? They're not managing their emotional mind. So they overeat to try to buffer and try to like dole out emotions that they don't want to deal with or whatever because they don't have their mind managed. And then they go over exercise, try to burn that off or whatever it might be when it's like, it all really does start in your brain first. I know we're joking about like steroids and muscle building and all this stuff.

We're not joking about it. But if you look at guys, like I just watched this documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger on Netflix. It just came out. It was really good. It was a good. Yeah. And I saw this new show with Sylvester Stallone that was on Paramount. Like both of these guys are well over 75. Yeah. And they are still acting. Look at Robert Kennedy. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Running around. I know. But they're like they have their mental faculties. They're working. They're in shape. You guys are even better in person, by the way. I don't know if people tell you that. But like, if you look at some of the other actors that are in their same generation that maybe didn't take a similar path to training. Yeah. They just don't look like. They don't look like that. They don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger does not look like almost an 80 year old man and either does Sebastian Stoll. They're still like, you know, jacked dudes. Yeah. Totally. What does your morning look like? You're going to be like. You're going to be like. like, what? You don't have a... I am the biggest sleeper. I'm like, I'm not going to judge. You tell me what you do. I know you guys are big morning routine people. And I guess I do have my morning routine. It just doesn't look like what I think a lot of other health people in this space, what theirs looks like.

So I like to sleep as much as possible. I personally believe that if you're not sleeping, nothing else really matters. You can't, you can't compensate for lack of sleep. So I try to sleep as much as I can. However, I don't want to wake up and, like, feel frasical and feel rushed. So what does that look like? What's the time to the time? I sleep. I usually wake. I usually am in bed by like 930. And then I sleep till I'm usually reading to like 10ish. And then I'll sleep until like 630 or seven. So I'm getting like a solid nine hours, eight, nine hours, whatever that works out to be. I'll wake up. I'll, I have coffee and water. I will, one of the things that I've been doing recently is I'll take a long time to do my makeup. It's like this weird ritual with myself,

skincare and makeup. And then I'll teach for Evel. And that ends up being around like nine-ish, eight, nine. And then I'll go about my day. So it's really not complicated. Anything you do to wind down, any brands you like supplements, like anything specific that you just love right now. You know, I listened to your guys' podcast way back about the red light, about how you replaced all your lamps in your room with red lights. And I did that. And my husband, my husband walked in was like, this looks like a strip club. Like what is happening here? And now he loves the red light. Like he, he's always the one turning on the red light. He's like, this makes the big, all our lamps have red lights in them. That's great. It's the best. And my daughter, when he turns on the closet light,

we'll be like, turn that off right now. We have blue eyes. That hurts our eyes. We, she knows. She's trained in early. Papa, you have poo-poo brown eyes. So you don't know. I have hazel green eyes. She says you have poo-boo-boo-brown eyes and that we have blue eyes and that hurts our eyes. So I've trained her to think it's disgusting to turn on the late at night. But I think it was Ben Greenfield who originally came on and told us about that. It's a good hack. That's how we still go to sleep with that every night.

Swear by it now. I got all my friends on it too. Because if you start doing it, you realize how jarring it is to be around artificial life as you're trying to wind down. Yes. And I sleep so much, I fall asleep so much faster now. It's so much easier to fall asleep. Yeah. And then you got to put your phone in the other room because people are like on their phone

in the red light. And it's like it's counterintuitive. So do you wake up to a regular alarm? I don't wake up with an alarm. You know, we don't even have an alarm at this point. We just wake up. Wake up. Well, we also have a three-year-old and a one-year-old.

Yeah. But they wake up at seven. They wait. They come in your room and wake you up. I've gotten in bed last night at 7. Okay. I didn't go to sleep at 7.30. I went to bed at 8.30.

There was a hearing. Oh, my gosh. I love this for you. I sleep. Trust me. I like sleep too. I get the sleep. If I don't sleep, I don't look the same. Same.

Like this past week, you were like dating someone different. It was like schmigel from the ring. No, there was. I love Lord of the Rings, so I loved that reference. It's not cute if I don't sleep. So I'm a big fan of sleep too. When we shut the hell up, I'm trying to talk. I'm sorry.

There was a period of time when we tried, like me specifically, try to do like, okay, you're going to do the 430, the 5, wake up and do all that. And I just like over the years realized like getting the proper amount of sleep or whatever the body needs is like I'm so much more effective. Right. 100%. Let your own body heal itself when you sleep. Who wants to be woken up by the sound of their phone? Shoot me. I'm sorry. At least if you have to do an alarm, get a hatch that wakes you up slow like a cat. The phone is so jarring to be woken up. The last thing on earth that I want to do is be woken up out of a sleep by an electronic. I don't know why. It seems like so off putting to me.

This is inspiring to me. So what do you do in the winter when there's no sun? You still wake up? I just, like, go to sleep early. I wake up at seven. I don't know. Wake up with the sun or or at seven. Well, we also have this shade. We've never talked about this. We have this shade that at seven o'clock goes down. So what happens is at seven. This was a good investment. The shades all go down. She bitched at me on. I was like, listen, it's going to be good. No, the shade opens at seven. So automatically, it's like the sun's waking you up besides an alarm. No, but we time it with when the sun goes now. So like in the winter, you would time it to when it goes. But the idea is like at night, it's blackout. But in the morning, it lets the bright sun in.

So like you don't need a jarring alarm. I need that in my life. But if you have to use an alarm, I heard they're not bad. The hatch, if you have to use an alarm. Yeah. I would use the hatch. Yeah. I would use the hatch. Yeah. It's like sun. Right. Right. But the phone is there's also if you have to, there's a bedtime app instead of the alarm. Do you know what I'm talking about? That's what I use. And so the alarm like isn't that bad. It's not as bad.

It's like little twingles. Right. My husband's like, but he still uses his. So it wakes me up and it's like, like, get him on the hatch. So if you have a woo. I need to.

The whoop has an alarm. Yeah, he has a woo. You know what? I'm giving a lot of our sponsors. There's some free. You know what guys? Seriously. Whoop.com slash skinny.

Hatch.com slash skinny. Just come on. Keep going. Those are some freebies. Enjoy. You really are. What are some beauty products that you love skincare products? I have been on a skincare journey the last like month or the last year, the last six months.

Because again, you're going to cringe. I never really did much with my skin. I just would wash it with like soap and water and that was like it. Yeah, it sounds like your less is more approach is working for you. I do think that it, like I do think that taking care of yourself a lot of times from the inside and what you're doing physically will. will manifest in skin care. You're eating sardines every day. I mean, that's skincare.

You want everyone wants like skincare to eat. Go eat your sardine. I think the best. I mean, I don't, I'm again, not an expert in nutrition or skincare for that matter. But I truly took the approach of like what I'm eating because your skin will show what's going on inside of you. I don't get breakouts. When I was over training all the time, I got breakouts all the time. Like my skin didn't look.

I looked old. Like it just was not good. So I've been on. I get facial. now and like I've been doing vitamin C in the morning and like I'm not I don't know I don't really have any like this I don't have any good products to plug I got you pink balls so you can roll balls on your face in the morning I cannot wait. Evlo fitness if someone wants to start this program let's say they've never tried to build muscle before what can they expect is there a specific schedule

do they get to work out with you give us like a walk through of what this really is what's the Yes. So we always say we're not a weight loss program that's got to be your nutrition. We are a muscle building program. And so that is our ultimate goal. And when you join our membership, we have three different tracks. You can work out three times a week, four times a week or five times a week. Every single week, there's brand new classes. So either I'm teaching them or our other teacher trainer, Peyton, who's also a doctor of physical therapy, she's teaching them. Or we've got two other doctors of physical therapy who are also teaching. So it's one of us and each day you'll have a new class that you haven't taken before, which helps keep people consistent because they're not doing the same workouts over and over. So you can either choose three, four or five days a week, depending on how many times you want a strength train. And each class, each day is different muscle groups, different class. And what do you need? Mostly dumbbells. And then what are the sizes that we use. I like to say get a variety because as you get stronger, you're going to go up. So I use between five pounds for some of the

the like for some of the smaller muscle grips like shoulders and then I use all the way up to like 40s for legs. Oh, Jesus. Oh. So I was bicep curling 20 pounds today. It's good. It was we're getting up there. But it's taken, I will say it's taken me three years. And you have the rest of your life to work out. You cannot rush it, especially when it comes to building muscle because your body wants to stay the same. Your body wants to stay in homeostasis. So if you're going to rush it, you'll hurt yourself and burn yourself out. So dumbbells, do you need a mat? You need a mat. You need a mat. You need, we do a lot of like stuff up with a chair. So or a bench. So we'll do like a lot of stepups, like things like that. And then a small Pilates ball, you can use a pillow. Everything

else like is like household items. Like if you have gliders, great. If not use paper plates. And how long is each class? Between. So our bread and butter classes are strength training classes. And those are between like 30 and 45, 50 minutes is. And this is my thing. If you don't have 30 to 45 minutes for yourself, you don't have a life. I'm sorry. You have. You have. You have to create carve out time to have time for yourself like that. It's an investment. Like it is, it is the best investment you can make in yourself is your life's, your lifespan, your health span. Let me just get this straight. Is it you actually live teaching the classes? Like explain because you said that you go and you teach in the morning. Yes. That's so cool.

I will be teaching the classes. They're not live. We pre-record everything. So we love it. Everything the week. But I'm big and like I just do our classes. I don't do anything else because I want to feel what our members are feeling each week. So all the classes that you see on one week, I've done all those classes before, the week before. Really smart. So it's fresh material. Fresh material. I'm feeling it in my body. You have your finger on the pulse, too, of your business. That's very smart. Yeah. So we used to do everything live, and it was just like a nightmare of time zone. So we just, now we pre-record and we're just a week ahead of the membership.

Yeah, you show up and it's me teaching. Every workout you'll have, we are big on the nervous system. So we'll start with breathwork. It kind of feels like a yoga class when you're first starting and mobility. And then we'll get into our circuits. We'll do lift weights, depending on the muscles that we're working. And then we end with a cool down, which is mobility. And we're really trying to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, shavasana, relaxation. And then you end your workout and you don't feel like you got hit by a truck. Like the whole thing is we want you to feel your muscles, but we don't want you to feel so depleted that you're like, I need to go take a nap.

What are some stories that you've heard from people that have done your workout? Oh my gosh. Most of our people are like, why didn't I find this sooner? because so many people think that it has to be super intense. And our motto, we literally got this trademarked because we just believe in it this much. Our motto's gentle consistency. So showing up and doing the thing doesn't have to be all out. But if it's more gentle on your body but consistent, that is where the magic happens.

And that's where you're going to see the biggest changes. So we've heard a lot of our members are like, this is the first time I'm able to stick to something. Like I've never been able to stick to something. I bounce around because it burns me out or I get bored or it's too hard. or whatever, and that's what people say. Because we try to educate. I am a biggest believer. The more you know about your own body, the more likely you are to adhere to that. And also, it seems like it's not overwhelming. Yeah. No. There's so much content coming in every single direction all the time from so many different influencers and online figures. And it's like everyone has an opinion.

You can't even get on social media. It's like it's content overload. I totally agree. And also, So sometimes some fitness apps, like, they'll be like, what class do I take today? There's so many options. Like, what do I do? And we're like, nope, it's all there for you. We know exactly what you're going to do on Monday. You know exactly what you're going to do on Tuesday. You just press play on the class and get your equipment and go.

So smart. Can we do a code for our audience? Yes. Okay. Just skinny. Skinny. What can they get? Usually what I'll do is they can get a month, their first month free.

So they can try it. And I would say if you're going to try it, like, go all in for the month. Don't try to do like a bunch of other stuff at once. Like, just do our program because. I think you're going to feel, you're going to see the best results. Like I would say go all in, do the month. There's really no excuse because you got a free month. Yeah.

I mean, that's amazing. That's so generous. And you can do it from home. Yes, from home. Just need some dumbbells pretty much. Or just get wine bottles. Yes. Anything.

Get dumbbells. Anything's a backpack. No, but dumbbells on Amazon are cheap now. Yeah, they are. And you can finally get them again after the pandemic. Do you want to also do a giveaway for people to follow? Yeah. Okay.

How do you usually do that? What do you want to give away? You pick. Should we give away like a year? That would be amazing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Let's do a year of EVlo. Where can everyone follow you to win? Should we do Instagram? Yeah. Let's do Instagram. How do they, do you do like comment on a post or how? Yeah. You can comment on my latest post, your favorite takeaway from this episode and then follow.

Dr. Dr. dot Shannon. D.P. What can they find on your Instagram? Like what are you known for? What are your highlights? Like, what are you,

doing on Instagram? I'm really trying to educate. You're not going to get on my Instagram and find like workouts. You're going to find education because I think it starts from there. Amazing. Yeah. Where can everyone sign up find you all the different things? So evelofitness.com is our website. And then I have a podcast. If you like the nerdy stuff, we get it really deep into the nerdy stuff. It's called Fit, Body, Happy Joints. And then Instagram, kind of on TikTok, not really. I feel like that's the struggle. Mostly just Instagram website and podcast. Thank you. much for coming on. I learned so much. I'll never stop building muscle. Never stop. Yeah. Lucky you, Michael. Be sure to enter code skinny at checkout for one free month.

All you have to do is go to eblofitness.com and definitely enter the giveaway. It's a good one.