Weights and Plates Podcast - #59 - Women and Eating to Build Muscle Mass

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Dr. Robert Santana and Trent Jones address the topic of eating to gain muscle mass for women. While the physiology of bulking, as described in episodes 57-58, is no different for women than it is for men, the degree to which women need to eat for muscle mass and the total amount of muscle gain possible is different. In general, women are not able to convert surplus calories into muscle mass as efficiently as men, so Robert and Trent advocate for a slower rate of gain for women trying to build muscle and get stronger. Additionally, women are not able to take advantage of increased leverage from gaining weight as much as men can, due to different fat distribution patterns, therefore women won't typically gain as much total weight as men (when comparing men and women of equal height).   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, indeed. It's 2 p.m. here., yeah, I'm fading, but not fading fast. You know, I still have some juice for this podcast. I see you hitting the coffee over there. You know, you're dancing with the dragon. Yeah.

You started hitting the coffee afternoon. Then you might be up until 2 o'clock this morning. Well, that's medicine for me. Remember this. Okay, yeah. My brain chemistry is all fucked up with the ADHD and real ADHD, not the fashionable shit where people just want an excuse to take drugs. You know, I don't take drugs. And I've been prescribed them in my childhood and tried it in college.

And I just, I don't like, I don't even take supplements, you know? So like I would take that and I'm like, I am not fucking handicapped. I can figure this out. tried it in college and i just i don't like i don't even take supplements you know so like i would take that and i'm like i am not handicap i could figure this out and then the last time i revisited the idea the physician and i had a psychologist as well both tell me that if you just drink coffee it has the opposite effect on your brain as it would on you know brain with normal brain chemistry whatever that is you know so i was like well you know fuck it i'm gonna do that and i've been doing that ever since you know i have you know big serving in the morning big serving in the afternoon and i sleep like a baby all right man well i'm i'm jealous i'm jelly yeah yeah i love this stuff but i gotta i gotta cut it off because otherwise i'll just be up forever. The thing with these meds, man, and this is like outside of our wheelhouse, but these fucking meds, like Adderall and shit, they're basically like meth.

And I don't want to get my heart rate up and my blood pressure up for hours of the day. I don't like the idea of that. They are amphetamines is what I understand. Yeah, exactly. One functional group difference you know do you remember did you have this at uh at your school i always remember around like finals time like midterms and finals you'd have like i'd go in the library and uh there always be like kids outside yeah like walking in they're like hey man you got any adderall jeez you know they just come straight up and hey man you got any Adderall? Jeez. Got any Ritalin? You know, they just come straight up and be like, hey, man, you got any Adderall?

Or sometimes it'd be the opposite. It'd be like, hey, man, you want some Adderall? No shit. You want to help us out with the study? You want to make A's? And yeah, they were really brazen about it. Man, I wish I was more of a crook. Flip some damn Adderall.

Yeah, there was definitely a, well, at least at the University of Texas, there was a healthy black market for Adderall. There was a, yeah, there was definitely a, uh, well, at least at the university of Texas, there was a healthy black market for, um, uh, for Adderall, especially around final time. So yeah, I never took it either. I, you know, I I've always been the kind of guy that like I took, uh, I was, I was driving back from South Dakota from, it was a hunting trip. It was a driving from South Dakota to Texas. And I took, you know, a seven hour stint at the wheel or whatever it was. And it was overnight. It was, you know, we drove all through the night and a friend of mine gave me, he was like, Hey man, I got this stuff. Modafinil, I think is what it was. I think it was Modafinil. And he's like, it's kind of like

a caffeine pill. And I'm like, okay. He's like, it'll just make you alert. And, uh, so I took one of those and man, I was just fucking wired all night, but it wasn't like the jittery kind of thing you get when you drink too much coffee or that I get when I drink too much coffee, like where it's like a physical, like kind of jitteriness. Um, this was just like, my brain was super clear, but it was also like just crazy wired. Uh, so we, he put on this like electronic music stuff that was real, like kind of deep house or whatever. And, uh, I'm just like inside the music the whole time in the middle of nowhere in like Nebraska driving at 2 AM in the morning. It was, it was intense. I know, right? I don't know. I'm like, I don't want to know

what meth is like. I don't either, man. So anyway, yeah, I stay away from that stuff. I guess I'm a lightweight. Yeah, I'm all natural, whatever that even means.

What's natural, you know? What is natural? Yeah. 50% headiness. Is eating 200 grams of protein natural? I think probably not. I think I mentioned this in another episode.

Did you go to 50% Natty's Instagram page? Oh, you know, I forgot about that. I'll have to check that out. I think he said you have to be an unvaxxed vegan. I forgot what the other thing was to be considered Natty. Oh, you know, I have some things I could say there but i'm not going to yeah um you know i might write an article about this you should at some point what's not i have an article idea what is natural what is natural i i don't even think eating 200 grams of protein a day is natural you know that is that's

far in excess of what we need to survive you know i mean i guess if you kill an animal in the wild do you i was about to say yeah you you kill a woolly mammoth and you know pig out for a week or whatever and hey you gotta eat as much of it as you can because it's gonna go bad you know store it up but uh but yeah you know probably for the vast majority of our ancestors of 200 grams of protein a day that's that would be a ridiculous luxury that would be my guess yeah but yeah so today we want to talk about we want to talk about eating some more eating for muscle gain I was about to say bulking but I think that's maybe not quite the right term I don't know we'll. Uh, but I've had a lot of requests, uh, people that

have messaged me on Instagram and elsewhere about, Hey, can you talk about this topic of eating to gain, gain weight, gain muscle, et cetera, but for women specifically. Yes. And, um, you know, we mentioned in passing on the, on the previous episodes, previous two episodes about bulking, bulking and bulking part that, that, uh, you know, really physiologically everything we talked about in the context of men is this is true for women as well. I mean, we're both humans, right? So physiologically, all the same things are true, right? So if you eat to gain weight, you will gain muscle and fat in some proportion. If you eat to lose weight, you eat in a calorie deficit, the same thing will happen. You will

lose some fat and you will lose some muscle. So physiologically, the same process happens for women, just like it does for men. However, the degree to which that happens is different, and the scale of the whole body composition change is different. And we need some different context when we're talking about women, right? I'll turn it over to you, because you have more experience with female clients than I do. Sure. Yeah. You know, I got some messages too. And last time we were going to talk about it and I got sidetracked and just kept going. Because a lot of guys just don't want to fucking eat. But we're not going to go into that again.

I'm going to get right to it. So, you know, I've worked with a lot of female clients. it. So, you know, I've worked with a lot of female clients. I've worked with a lot of male clients because I get a lot that, you know, aren't necessarily training for strength. They're, you know, they want weight loss and they want to look good, which, you know, in reality means holding on to the muscle mass, right? And then, you know, sometimes it segues into a pursuit of strength because they enjoy the process of adding weight to the bar. But irrespective of it all, if you're lifting weights, you're trying to get stronger. You can try to spin it any which way. I say this in every episode. This is my attempt to brainwash, my poor attempt to brainwash. But, you know, if you're

lifting weights, your muscles are getting stronger, you know, if you're trying to progress that. But if you're a female and you are trying to mass, you know, the process is the same. You want to create an anabolic environment and that's, you know, done through progressive overload, you know, lifting heavier and heavier weights and getting stronger coupled with, you know, sufficient calorie and macronutrient intake as well as sleep and stress management. The recipe is the same, but what are the differences? Well, it has been my experience that women don't have to gain copious amounts of body weight like men do. And there's a few reasons for this.

The first reason is women in general have higher body fat percentages than men. We are leaner than you are. Sorry, that's just biology. If you get down to essential fat, which means you can't get below that, there's a lower limit of how much body fat we can get to. So they say for men, it's somewhere in the low single digits, and for women, it's in the low double digits. So men tend to be leaner than women. We tend to have more muscle, more testosterone.

There's a more favorable hormonal profile to promote anabolism of skeletal muscle. Doesn't mean that women can't build muscle. They obviously do it all the time. We see it all the time. We see some very strong women. I've trained several that have pulled over 400 pounds and, you know, it's pretty damn heavy deadlift. I've trained others that have pulled over 300. So women can get strong. They can build muscle, just not to the same extent as men. So as a result, you know, the common complaint that I get from women is that they aren't happy with how much body fat they're carrying. Well, you know, this tends to be the fact that you're not leaner is an advantage. You don't have to sit there and gain a bunch of weight. On top of it, the distribution pattern is different. Usually, you know, most men tend to

store body fat in the midsection. It's a classic male fat storage pattern. And most women tend to store it in the hips and thighs. The first one, while worse for cardiovascular disease, having an apple shape is much worse from a cardiovascular disease risk management standpoint, is favorable in terms of trying to get your squat press and bench press up. Not so favorable for the deadlift. If you look like Santa, you're probably going to have a big squat. Yeah, you'll probably have a big bench too, maybe a big press. Presses hit or miss, I've noticed. But with the bench and the squat, it's pretty consistent.

Big belly, big bench, big squat. Most women don't want a big belly either, but a lot of them can't necessarily get that. They keep eating and their lower half gets bigger. Right, yep. And they might bitch about a muffin top or something like that. But, you know, with exceptions, of course, because, you know, I've worked with everybody, most women won't look like Santa Claus if they just keep eating. You know, a lot of the time it goes to the lower half and other places. Arms tend to be another storage place. And then, of course, you know, in their chest.

Yeah, right. Yep. You know, so, but the big giant, you know, power belly isn't as common in females. So they don't, they aren't able to leverage the body fat the same way the men are, but you still have to eat and you still can't be painfully skinny. So, you know, one end of the spectrum, most of the time I get women that are somewhere in between. They're not morbidly obese. They're not painfully skinny, you know, somewhere in between. And they don't like that they have fat in certain places and they want to get in shape. That's my typical female client. And then sometimes I just get some girls that want to get strong.

You know, they want to get strong. They're like, I've tried every diet in the world. I'm 55 now. I'm done with that shit. You know, just help me get strong and clean up my diet, you know, and that's right. You know, when you have dieted so many times, you're going to arrive at that place one way or another. So, you know, that's the other type of female client that I've gotten. Sure. And sometimes younger, sometimes younger too, you know, it doesn't take to 55. Sometimes they're 42 and they say, you know, I've tried a million diets. I'm, I'm over it. You know, I like lifting. It makes me feel better. You know, how do I make the diet work well for it? Yeah. I want to, I want to function better. The focus is on function over overlooks. Yeah, for sure. And that's, that's most of the women that I've coached are women looking for function, not, not to,

you know, drastically change their body composition. You know, we all want to change our body composition, of course, you know, I do too. Yeah. But, um, but yeah, I, you know, I, I, I tend to work with women who favor function over form with their training. So yeah, well, I want to talk about that, though. So you said at the beginning, if you want to gain mass or if you want to mass as a verb, right? Well, I think there's probably a lot of women out there who are like, well, I don't really want to gain mass. I just want to get toned. Right. Okay. I think we should hit on that really quick. So what do you think of when you hear the word toned?

I think of muscle mass. Always, I mean. Right. Exactly. always i mean you know right when i was exactly when i was 18 or 19 i remember reading bodybuilding forums and you know we're men and women typically train for different reasons or get into training for different reasons i should say men women get drawn to the weight room for different reasons in general um occasionally you know we get somebody who's been lifting their whole life you know then competitive situations but you know if you go to a typical commercial gym, the reasons are different. And I used to sit in bodybuilding forums. And my conclusion,

even as a teenager, was mass is the answer. And what I mean by that is, you know, I would see these guys talking about how, oh, when you have more muscle mass, one guy said, I think it was on bodybuilding.com or one of those places, when you have more muscle mass, one guy said, I think it was on bodybuilding.com or one of those places. When you have more muscle mass, you can get away with a lot more. And like I believed him because I'd look around the gym sometimes. I'd see these big guys that did not have abs, but I can see definition everywhere else. And I started thinking to myself, I'm like, how is that possible? Well, their muscles are big, spreading out the fat.

It's not burning the fat people. It spreads it out, you know, a pillow versus a sack of rocks, right? And they'd walk around at like 20% body fat, defined elsewhere. And I look at myself, I'd be like, man, I'm not really defined except in my lower body. You know, I had naturally pretty developed legs from a young age because I cycled a lot. Part of it's genetics as well. And I have good calf insertions. So up top, there was no evidence i trained you know they just right either skinny or if i bulked and gained a bunch of weight with shitty training well we're going to come back to this uh i just i put on a belly i look chubby you

know i look chubby or i would yeah i look chubby in clothes i look skinny in clothes there was never any evidence that i trained so i'm looking at these guys and I'm like, you know, they're probably just as fat ratio wise as me, but I can see their muscles, you know, why are they more quote unquote toned? And that's what those guys meant. You can get away with more mass. You can get away with a lot more when you have more mass. So mass was the answer. And it took me a long time to figure out how to leverage that because I would gain weight and lift weights. Notice I'm using the phrase lift weights, not train. And I just get chubby, you know, and all of my trunk and my arms wouldn't really grow. My shoulders wouldn't really grow. And a lot of that was just no pressing, no deadlifting was a big part of it. Then also no microloading. But, you know, the female client that wants a tone typically doesn't understand that that is a size problem.

Size of the muscles are often too small. And the amount of body fat deposited is sometimes too large. You know, there's a lot of body fat deposited combined with not a lot of muscle mass. Or they just have a normal BMI and a high fat percentage because they are under-trained, right? Right. Yeah. And that was my girlfriend, Christy. She was 97 pounds at 28% body fat, and she was 5'3 1⁄2".

I think she's 5'4". She says she's not 5'4", but 5'3 1⁄2". Yeah. She was 97 pounds. So normal height,. Very small frame. Very petite frame. Her BMI was, that might be underweight or it's low normal, I think. BMI calculator.

It's got to be for her height. I think so. Like I said, she's got a very small frame because I've met Christy a couple of times. So, you know, she's never going to be, you know, 135 pounds. Oh, yeah. She was underweight. She was 5'3". But she was.

Yeah. She was 16.9 BMI. That's underweight. Yeah. And the woman has an appetite and it has her whole life. You know, her mother will tell you she's always been a happy, good eater, you know. But it's interesting. Yeah.

Age 26, she had an underweight BMI, you know? And I think even when she had her child, let's see, she got up to 130 was how heavy she got. She had BMI in the low normal while pregnant. Her BMI was 22.7 while pregnant. Gain 20 to 30 pounds during pregnancy. I think that's kind of an average. That's what she gained, yeah. She went from 130 back down to 97 because that 97 BMI was while she was a doctoral student after she had her child. So she dropped about 30 pounds like that, you know, and did her PhD. And we have that DEXA still. 28% body fat, you know. So thankfully, you know, she wasn't involved with fitness or any of this shit, you know.

She didn't think in these terms, you know. It was just like, well, whatever, I'm skinny, you know, she wasn't involved with fitness or any of this shit. You know, she didn't think in these terms. You know, it was just like, well, whatever, I'm skinny, you know. My dad's skinny, you know. Right, yeah, yeah. And, you know, when she met me, I got her into lifting, and she gained – by the time I had met her, that was six – probably five or six years after that dexa so she had think about it five to six years she gained uh eight pounds eight or nine pounds because she was 105 106 when i met her yeah um yeah so eight to nine pounds over a five-year span a lot of people gain a lot more than that you know so she you know she's what i would consider a fairly hard gainer um although

you know lifting's really stimulated her appetite. Now she gains and loses, you know, like everybody else that does this. But I met her, she had been running marathons, and she said that she was so under-muscled that running marathons put muscle on her calves. You know, it's kind of funny. Sure. So then I started, I ran her through linear progression. She gained 15 pounds. She got to 120. And then, you know, she stayed around 115 for a while. Now she sits at about 120, looking the way she used to look at 115. But anyways, the cool thing is she did her fat percentage again, you know, post-linear progression. Her abs became more defined. So her abs became more visible from squatting and deadlifting. And her fat percentage went from 28% to 20%.

Yeah, sure. And because the problem wasn't, like most people in this business, they see, I'm 28% body fat. I'm fat. I've got to lose it. The fat percentage needs to be lower. It's like, well, there's two ways to do that. Well, you can't gain muscle without gaining fat. If you're that fucking skinny fat, yes, you can. You're going to gain both, but you're going to outpace the fat

gain. That's right. Yeah. So that, yeah, there's a, yeah, there's a few important concepts there. Number one is that the, the rate at which that happens changes as you train, you know, when you're a novice and especially if you're like Christy and had no prior exposure, you know, like you and I, we've talked about many times, you know, there was a time where we found the starting strength linear progression and finally trained in a progressive manner correctly. But it's not like that was our first rodeo either. We had spent a lot of time in the weight room

prior to that point. And even though we were still novices because we had never trained before, we still had a lot of prior exposure, which means that our results from that novice linear progression onwards, we're always gonna be a little bit slower because we already had some sort of adaptation, right?

But if you are a true rank novice and you really don't have any sort of athletic adaptation that you've gone through, then yes, your rate of muscle gain can be much faster in the very beginning. And it will slow down like everyone else does. But yeah, we see that all the time. People that gain a large percentage of that body weight as muscle up front. Yeah. And this is probably a little bit more common with women because, you know, at least when I played high school sports, the men's football team, basketball team, I'm not sure about the baseball team, maybe. But the football team and the basketball team lifted weights in the gym. One of the girls' teams lifted weights.

It might have been volleyball, maybe basketball, but I don't remember the soccer team ever lifting weights. I don't remember tennis. I don't remember any of the other sports. Yeah, not at our school. I don't remember them lifting weights. And so that's probably,

depending on your age, that's probably true for a lot of women that some just don't have the weight room exposure that a lot of guys did just because of high school and, you know, like the just the culture of high school sports at the time when you went through that. So I have certainly run into more women who are rank novices as it relates to strength training than men. Absolutely.

Absolutely. You know, we and so, yeah, a lot of cases. I think that's an important distinction. And a lot of cases we can't wait to get in the weight room you know or and i was too young to do it and i couldn't wait to be 16 so i can go in the weight room you know i think that was the age yeah same here well and like you know tell me the last time you've you've met a guy who comes in your gym and they are a novice um in terms of adaptation right there they are in they haven't run a novice linear progression before.

But like, when's the last time you met a guy who had never bench pressed? Yeah, it just never happened. In their life. It doesn't happen. Everybody at least bench presses. So there's some exposure, right? Even if they've never run a linear progression.

Yeah, so going back to the tone thing, I think you said it right. That muscle mass is what I think of when I think of a toned body. Shape, right? So you've talked about how muscle mass will spread out existing body fat and create more definition because the body fat's now spread over a larger surface area. Well, you know, another way to say that is it gives the body shape. And I think when we're looking at somebody at a physique, and we think of like, what makes someone look athletic and youthful? I think of, you know, do they have a set of traps? You know, do we see on the shoulders? Is it just kind of a, you know, kind of a dive from the neck down into the plane of the shoulders? Or is there kind of a muscular curve where you can see the definition of the traps? And then same thing with the shoulders. Are the shoulders filled out so that it creates a little bit of a taper from the

shoulders down to the waist, right? If the shoulders have no muscle mass on them, it's kind of just a straight line from shoulders down to waistline, right? And with women, maybe a line that's curved outwards, right? Because the hips are wider on women than men, generally speaking. So when you add muscle mass to that equation, the shape of the figure changes. The traps now create shape to the shoulders, the delts fill out and they create shape to the arms and they also create an illusion of a drop, right? And in men's clothing, when you talk about suiting, for instance, suits are sometimes described as the drop between the jacket size and the trouser size. So if you have a 10 inch drop, that means you might wear, let's say, a 45 jacket, so that's your shoulder size,

and then a 35 pair of trousers, 35-inch waist for the trousers. That would be a 10-inch drop. Well, a 10-inch drop is considered an athletic cut because that indicates a taper from the width of the shoulders down to the waist. And when I think of an athletic figure that looks youthful, that's what I think of for men and for women. Now, of course, it's a little bit different with men. You're going to see a much harder taper because again, men tend to put more muscle mass up top in the arms and they tend to have smaller hips. So you're not going to see quite as drastic of a taper with women because a lot of women have wider hips, but the point is still there. So when you add muscle mass to your body,

yes, you do, your muscles get harder. They do spread that body fat over a larger surface area, but they also give shape and outline to the body that wasn't there before. You know, talking about the butt, right? You know, women that don't have much of a butt naturally, all of a sudden they do, right? I've seen this with guys too, you know, the guys that actually, they actually fill out like a pair of shorts with their jeans.

And then if you already have a big butt, because a lot of women do, my wife is one of them. Guess what? You get much more definition the the gluteal fold right the definition of the glutes and the hamstrings gets much more defined right so you know you're wearing a pair of shorts and you just you look better in that pair of shorts it actually gives shape to that area of the body yeah i mean at the end of the day you're building muscle and that's what you're seeing when you see quote unquote tone in fact the that's right yeah uh definition of muscle tone means how contracted

the muscle is at rest so right if you want it to look more contracted dense or hard whatever word you want to use at rest then you have to grow it has to grow larger has to be stimulated right there's the muscles only do a couple of things. They contract, they relax, and how elastic the skin is. There's a lot of other factors there. So I've said this many times. Everybody who trains is going to look better than they did when they didn't train almost 100% of the time. Absolutely. And at the start, my precise phrasing was a fat guy who trains looks better than a fat guy who doesn't train. And, you know, you can extrapolate that to any demographic. You're going to look better training.

Oh, I don't want to get bulky. I'm afraid of getting bulky. And I think probably everyone has a little bit different idea of what bulky means. I think my conception is probably different from your conception, you know? So, you know, my wife, again, she's a good example. She is naturally a fairly square physique. So her, well, I should say her frame is pretty square. So she's, she's a small person. She's five foot three, um, with a fairly small frame, but she's got wide shoulders. She's got a fairly large rib cage and And she naturally, for a smaller female, she carries a lot of muscle mass, especially in her upper body. Her mom's just the same way. And, you know, compared to, like, say, her sister, her sister's built very similarly, but doesn't have that muscle mass in her upper body. So, you know, I guess some people might say that my wife looks, you know, quote unquote

bulky. I guess some people might say that my wife looks, you know, quote unquote bulky, but I can tell you that as she's trained and gained muscular body weight over the years, her upper body looks very defined now and it didn't before. And it doesn't look the overall shape of her. The, she's not any bigger looking than she was before. Right. Even though she's gained a lot of weight in, you know, from when we got married, she was 125 pounds when we got married. Now I think she's 155 pounds. She's gotten up to 170 pounds, you know, in just in the course of her training, right. She's cut down a little bit cause she's, you know, had a baby and you know, it's not training as hard. So it doesn't need as much as she did when she was competing and all that kind of stuff. But so she doesn't look any bigger as

like in terms of her whole total frame than she did when she was 125 pounds, but she did get more muscular and she has a lot more definition. So my point in all this is to say like, she didn't change her, change her genetics. She doesn't look like a different person, but she looks like a much more defined version of herself from 10 years ago. Sometimes people, when they're worried about becoming bulky, they think they're going to change in a person that they're not. As in, like, I'm going to get different genetics and I'm going to look like a professional strong woman. Right. And it's like, that's not going to happen.

You can't do that. No. Just like you can't get bone skin either. But you can gain a lot of weight. Yeah, that's right. You can't go the other direction. You can't, you're not going to look like, you know,, a supermodel that's, that's real thin if you're not already that, but you can gain a lot of weight and muscle mass and look more defined and with better shape than you do now. Um, and so that's, that's the reason I wanted, I wanted to bring that up. Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, typically when people talk to

me about bulkiness, cause you know,, I get guys that get into that too. The general, you know, if you surveyed a bunch of people, I think the most common response you're going to get is the short, stocky look. You know, you're going to have a lot of body fat, be wide, no muscle definition, et cetera, you know, like you said. Sure. And kind of the dwarf look. Yeah. And, you know, there's some people that are built that way, you know like you said sure and uh kind of the dwarf look yeah and you know some people that are built that way you know and some of them can lean out and you know work around that that's fine because there's people that you know talking about attracting the opposite sex which is why people care so much what they look like usually everybody there's a market for everything

people you know that's what i always say absolutely there's a market for everything, people. You know, that's sort of how we say. Yes, absolutely. There's a market for everything. So that's a whole different topic. But, you know, since we're talking about, you know, you mentioned how your wife's body changed. So Christy, she stores all her body fat in the most favorable places. It's on her butt, her legs, then nothing in her trunk. You know, back's defined, abs are pretty defined, you know. And her arms, she doesn't carry a lot of body fat in her arms either. backs defined abs are pretty defined you know and her arms she doesn't carry a lot of body fat in her arm no that's where she carries it it's her arms and legs right she does not like a ton not a ton of body fat but she has not a ton in like in her

in her tricep area not not a lot no she just has smooth arms with no definition so she started doing she did a silly thing of you, began competing in women's bikini, which it's not even what it sounds like. These women now are looking more and more like mini bodybuilders, you know. So it used to be the division for the more petite women. They didn't want a lot of definition. They didn't want a lot of size. a lot of definition. They didn't want a lot of size. And now these body dysmorphic piles of shit

that are assessing these women want to see delts. They want to see these big delts. Not huge delts, but they want round, defined delts and the person who wins really belongs in the next division.

If we're being honest. They should be in figure or physique, you know, but they want these capstone delts now. And I'm like, I thought this was bikini. Why do we want capstone delts all of a sudden? You know, they just keep moving the goalposts. Like they did with bodybuilding, you know. Like then that classic physique came back, you know,

the old 70s golden era bodybuilding looking physique like Arnold. And then now that's starting to change back into bigger, bigger, bigger. It's like, you know, I can go on and on. I am not involved with these contests myself because they are not sports. They are contests. You know, it's not the same thing. But anyway, so she needed delts. And she has long muscle, kind of like me.

So she has long delts, long triceps, long biceps, and long arms overall. That's why she's good at deadlifting. So, you know, they're all telling her to do all this shoulder isolation fucking bullshit. It's doing nothing. I just had her press four times a week and then voila, there's that lateral delt they're all obsessed with, right? And then later on, I started adding in an arm day. And then when her, as her biceps and triceps developed, got bigger people, they grew, they are larger than they were. Her deltoids became more defined. I had to have her bench a lot too, because nothing builds, builds the front delt like

a bench press. That's the best exercise for that. You know, you're not going to front raise your way to a nice, well-developed front deltoid. It just doesn't work that way. You can do front raises, but they're not going to do that. So she had a shitty bench. We got her bench up.

I don't know what she can max now, but I had her do a ton of bench pressing because later on we got the lateral deltoid to pop out more through lots of pressing. So from the side, from the lateral aspect, you could see it more. From the front, her deltoids disappeared because she wasn't benching. So then I had her bench a whole bunch, and that brought it out. Now this last run, I've done a lot of arm work,

and that pretty much completed the trifecta. So now she has this well-defined arm that she did not have before, and this is before getting lean enough for the contest, right? So this is just at the top of her quote unquote mass. She is now more defined than she used to be near the bottom of her quote unquote cut. And guess what people, most of that was done with benching, pressing, and then later on we added in some bicep curls. I don't even know that the tricep work was that necessary for her purposes i think she's developed triceps or benching and pressing

but she had to start doing curls because the chins she has a very strong back so the chins were just not stimulating the biceps as much same problem i have at this point i have to curl if i want to grow mine yeah but yeah you know and how do we program that? Add a little bit of weight each week, you know. She just gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Muscles get bigger. The appearance becomes one that is more defined. So, yes, this woman grew larger muscles, but she looks more defined, toned, whatever you want to call it, right? She doesn't look like a bigger person

because of it because she's not a big person she's a petite woman right yet she's still she's still a yeah she's still a very petite woman with us with a small frame now she gonna get capstone Delta it's not gonna happen she's got long deltoids you know the only way she can offset right competition is by bringing up other muscles that these people look at although they're all fixated on this fucking lateral delt which really has no place in women's bikini in my opinion well I was gonna say like I mean my extremely limited knowledge of women's bodybuilding in general in any division is that you know

the the women that I see with with very visible delts look like they are on a fairly high amount of anabolic steroids. A lot of them are. I don't even know if you'd call it a capstone delt, but it's like a delt that extends like a peak diagonally up and away from where their natural shoulder joint is, from where the bony part of the joint is. It's like the delt grows up and away from there. And it's like you took the delts off of, who was that we were talking about all the time? The Witcher guy, Henry Cavill. It's like you took his delts and then pasted them onto a much smaller female bodybuilder. It just looks strange and out of place to me. And it makes me think like, ah, they're probably on some virilizing hormones. You know, they're, they're on anabolic steroids that cause them to a high

enough dose that cause them to acquire male secondary characteristics. And, um, yeah. And that's, that's a pretty extreme thing, you know, that's, yeah. I want to be clear in and that's that's a pretty extreme thing you know and you know yeah that's i want to be clear in saying that's fine if you want to be a female bodybuilder if you want sure yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not casting a spurs with that it's just that like that is the result of hormonal manipulation beyond what you can like you you got to get on steroids to do that a hundred thousand percent yeah yeah well let's uh let's pull this back a little bit for the person who's interested what you can, like, you, you got to get on steroids to do that. A hundred thousand percent. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's, uh, let's pull this back a little bit for the person who's interested in, um, you know, getting stronger, building some muscle mass, but also like improving their body

composition along the way. So for the women that need to gain muscle mass, which is, which is most of them that I run into just like guys, most of the guys that I run to need to add muscle mass. There's very few that I meet that I'm like, yeah, no, you're good there. Actually, let me really revise that. There are no people that I meet where I say, oh, you know, you got plenty of muscle. You don't need to worry about that. No, everybody needs to gain muscle mass. But let's talk about like, what are kind of some typical caloric surpluses that you advise for women, right? So keeping in mind that women are generally, they're smaller people, so they're eating fewer calories at baseline than most men. And like you said before,

they're not able to turn those excess calories into muscle as efficiently as men can. So what kind of surpluses do you typically advise for women? Typically, you know, women are more metabolically efficient than men as a general rule, because think about it, they have higher levels of body fat for a reason. It's more advantageous to their survival and survival through a pregnancy. So yes, you are going to gain fat easier than us. And you have less muscle mass, so you're going to burn fewer calories than us. And you're lighter, usually, as a general rule.

You know, if you compare apples to apples, a thin woman is lighter than a thin man. A fat, you know, overweight, obese woman is going to be lighter than an overweight, obese man on average. You know, obviously there's women that are heavier than men and vice versa, but that's not what we're talking about. So you need fewer calories, less muscle mass, less body weight, less testosterone, and a tendency towards metabolic efficiency, which means you store energy efficiently. You don't burn it off, which would be metabolically inefficient, the skinny guy that needs 8,000 calories. So, you know, I've seen a variation anywhere from 1,500 calories to have had women that eat 3,000 calories, you know, and it just depends. You know, I had a highly athletic

female with a high vertical jump who put away 3,000 calories a day and had a hard time gaining the weight and she pulled it off, but she had to eat 3,000 a day. Christy's baseline is 2,500, I think, somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500. To maintain. Yeah. More metabolically efficient women that are even more metabolically efficient than your average woman that tend to gain fat easy,

it's somewhere under 2,000. Could be 1,500. Could be 1,800. 1,800. Somewhere around. These are just ballpark figures. I know if somebody's going to call in or send us a message, I maintain on 1,200 calories. All right. Well, you know, more reason to train if that's actually true.

In my experience, when I hear about that shit, I maintain on 800 calories. I maintain on 1,200 calories. There's often a mismatch between what they're saying they're eating and what they're actually eating. So that might mean you're eating 1,200 calories Monday through Friday and then eating 3,500 calories Saturday and Sunday. These are gross exaggerations, of course, you know, but, or you're eating 1,200 calories and sneaking in another 500 throughout the day that you're not counting because it's like a handful of this and a handful of that. We're not very good at reporting things.

The point is you're trying to undereat, and you're probably being unsuccessful because you've been doing it for so long. This is a common issue that I have with female clients is that there's a lot of under eating going on, but then it's also there's compensatory behaviors that are either being minimized, not reported, or there's, you know, they're just not, you know, they're not even noticing they're doing it, you know, and the men are guilty of this, too. This is not, you know, behavior crosses the sexes, but the reasoning is different, you know? Yes. But most human beings aren't good at reporting things. You know, I get obese men that are like 300 pounds that swear to me they have to eat 1,200 calories to lose.

And if you really get to know them, you find out that they're eating 6,000 calories once a week, or they're adding in another 2,000 calories to the 1,200 they think they they think they're eating you know um we're just not good at reporting shit you know so you know i don't i don't subscribe to the idea that a woman has a thousand calories to maintain unless they're trying to maintain an unreasonable weight that happens to where you got a woman that thinks she needs to be 20 pounds skinnier than her body wants her to sit at and right one way or another i know you want to fight this, ladies. I know some of you are out there and there are 10% of audience that's women. I know one of you wants to be some arbitrary weight. You want to be 100 pounds when your

body wants to be 130. And you can't figure out why you keep going back up to 130 it's biology you're not supposed to be 100 pounds you know right yes you know i've had women that you know are taller and they want to be like 130 or 140 because the muffin top i'm sorry right yeah you know i know you hate your muffin top but your body has other ideas and if you keep fighting it it's going to make you eat one way or another always happens oh right you you, you will eat the food one way or another. I have noticed this too, with, with women who are taller. So, you know, five, seven, five, eight, five, 10, six, over six feet, you know, work, work with some women who are over six feet tall. And, um, yeah, you know, it's like, I don't think you said before, you know, women tend to be lighter than men, you know, across BMIs. Um, well, it's the same thing's true, but you got to scale it up for height. And I find a lot of times women, um, that are, that they struggle to scale body weight up with their height. So yeah, you know, if you, if you're a six foot tall woman, you're going to weigh more than a five foot four average

height woman. Like that should be a duh. Right. But I think a lot of times they're kind of like wanting to, wanting to have a average body weight of someone who's much shorter, but they're not counting for the fact that they're taller, you know, and, and kind of my, my sort of very rough, you know, finger to the wind estimate of, of body weight is that when you add an inch of height, you add about 10 pounds of body weight. So if a trained, muscular female that's 5'4", 150 pounds, if she was 6' know, you would probably expect her to weigh closer to 200 pounds, right? You know, maybe a little bit more, right. Just depending on frame, you know, it's always a plus minus, because if you've got a bigger frame, you're going to carry more, more body weight. If you've got a skinnier, smaller frame, you're going to carry a little

bit less body weight, the same height. But, but that's the thing, you know, this sort of like, and that's, that's something that I've seen come up too with, with some women that 200 pounds is like a big thing. It's like, I can't weigh more than 200 pounds. And you're like, well, I mean, but what are we comparing to here? You know, if you're, um, if you're, if you're a muscular, well-trained woman and you're over five foot 10 or nine or whatever, like, yeah, 200 pounds is a very realistic body weight. Absolutely. And the same thing is true with like that we said before, right? It's like, where are you going to get the shape of a, of an athletic youthful looking body? Well, it's going to come from muscle mass and you might weigh a lot more than you think. I think people,

when, when, when my wife weighed 170 pounds, um, I think people would be shocked at her body weight. Oh yeah. If they met her, you know, when she weighed that, I think they would be utterly shocked that she weighed that. I think most people would probably guess, I don't know, 135, 145 and would have no idea that she was carrying an extra 30 pounds. People always think you're lighter when you have more muscle on you. that she was carrying an extra 30 pounds. People always think you're lighter when you have more muscle on you. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, that's just something I've noticed that, you know, just that's why we said before, we did a whole episode on this, throw out the damn scale. It's not useful. The scale of like, you know, what your body weight is, that's just like one of the least useful metrics at the end of the day.

You just, you weigh what you weigh. You know, if you you want to build muscle the number needs to go up on the scale but you know it's we don't really care what that number is in a vacuum let's talk about that because i think people i think people want to hear about this and i haven't really addressed it but okay you know if you know just like we have for the men. If you're a big fat guy, we say, okay, you got to do this. If you're a skinny guy, you got to do this. Then the in-betweeners, that's my bread and butter, the skinny fat guys. I give advice there. overweight or obese and you have weight to lose, you're going to gain muscle mass and lose body fat and you're going to look more defined at the end of that. So pulling back calories, if you're an overweight or obese novice, you know, going on a low calorie diet and, you know, for women, this could be 1200 legit calories for some women, you know, I've had women do it before where they're eating what us men would see as like starvation. Because, you know, we're

men, we don't, you know, can't even comprehend eating 11 or 1200 calories. But I've had women do it run the linear progression and get strong, you know, while losing body fat. So you know, if you're somebody who's overweight or obese, and you're brand new to this, you're novice, or you're coming off of a layoff, you could do both, that's probably going to happen. You're going to lose body fat. You're going to build muscle mass. And the change in leverage doesn't affect women nearly as much as it affects men because of what I said earlier, you store body fat in different places. When a man has a big belly and he loses body weight, he's going to lose weight off the bar. Not because his muscles got weaker, because he has less leverage to move the weight. And, you know, as I always say, nobody will say it out loud, fat helps you lift more

weight. There's a reason fat guys start off stronger than skinny guys, you know, as a general rule. That's not always the case, but that's generally the case, you know? So, yeah. So, you know, if you're an overweight, obese woman and you got weight to lose, you're going to lose weight, you're going to build muscle mass, and you're going to look more defined and you got weight to lose you're gonna lose weight you're gonna build muscle mass and you're and you're going to look more defined and you shouldn't have a problem with performing the exercises because of the loss and body fat and you know same then it's done the same thing kind of applies the more advanced you become the more you run into trade-offs I noticed with intermediate and advanced women it's less of a

problem than intermediate or advanced men. They tend to be able to cut weight a little bit easier without seeing so much loss off the bar or weakness, et cetera. It seems that cutting body weight for women doesn't affect them as much as it does men, but I have seen it affect them. Don't get me wrong. It's just, again, I think the leverage has a lot to do with it. If you're a guy losing 20 to 40 pounds, you're changing the size of your body quite dramatically in places where it helps you move the weight. I don't, that's usually not the case for women for reasons I've kind of repeated myself on in the last five minutes. So that is, you know, my general assessment for the overweight or obese novice female. Then you get your skinny female. I mean, that's pretty simple.

You've got to mass. You know, like if you're in Christy's case, you know, she has an underweight BMI or slightly normal weight BMI, you know, by the time I met her. You know, she had to gain some weight. Then her body fat percentage went down and her muscle definition went up and her body weight went up. You know, she gained 15 pounds. If you're a skinny woman, you need to eat more, just like the skinny man

does. You don't need 5,000 calories, but you might need 2 to 3 depending on your level of activity, your athleticism, etc. And don't gain the weight super fast. We tell the men, gain 70 pounds yesterday. A woman didn't need to do that. weight super fast. I mean, you know, we tell the men is, you know, gain 70 pounds yesterday, woman didn't need to do that. You know, it's just the leverage, a lot of the time, you're not going to get the leverage out of having the extra body fat, it doesn't help you as much. So right, you know, gain it steadily, eat enough train, if your lifts aren't going up, eat more, you know, that's kind of my approach to everybody, you know, except the real skinny guys, I'll let them get real

fucking fat because they need to get strong. But in general, you know, if the real skinny guys. I'll let them get real fucking fat because they need to get strong. But in general, you know, if I get like a skinny fat person or overweight, obese person, I'm going to, you know, steadily work on those calories, right? Versus doing dramatic stuff. You know, like if it's the big person that needs to lose weight, I'm going to cut calories slow so that they can continue to progress under the bar. If it's a skinny guy who needs to gain weight, well, that guy's going to eat as much as he can and gain weight yesterday. If it's a skinny fat guy, we're going to go nice and steady. And that's kind of how I approach women that are thin and women that are skinny fat. I kind of approach it very similar. But with the

women that are skinny fat, I might start lower. Like, whereas, you know, I take a girl like Christy, okay, you're eating quite a bit, you know. I know because I was hanging out with her all the time. You know, she ate quite a bit, you know. I know because I was hanging out with her all the time, you know. She ate quite a bit. She has a good appetite. So I knew her calories were over 2,000, you know. And a lot of the time that tends to be the case when you're dealing with a woman who's a metabolic furnace. Somebody who's metabolically inefficient can eat more calories.

So, you know, that's how we approach that. Now, the skinny fat woman, typically it's the same as the skinny fat man. If she eats copious amounts of calories, she's going to start storing body fat, and it's going to grossly outpace the muscle mass, and she's going to get frustrated and not want to lift, which is what happens with the skinny fat male as well. So I take a more gradual approach. Typically, I take the Bo Bryan approach.

A lot of other coaches probably don't remember this, but in the 2015 coaches conference, when I first met him, first met a lot of you guys, he said, I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a diet guy. You know, I'm just a strength coach. And I tell my women, eat 1800 calories a day and don't worry about anything else. And I heard him say that. And I thought about my own experience as a diet coach. And I'm like, you know, that's pretty simple fucking advice, you know? And he's not saying that to the skinny women, because the skinny women are asking him, why can I gain weight? And he's probably giving them a different set of advice, you know? That's just not the problem we tend to run into. We don't, you know, we don't get beanpole females lining up at the door of most

gyms, you know? Typically, we get females that are either skinny fat or overweight obese. That's the more common demographic. And it's the same with men, actually. In the strength business, we do get a lot more beanpulls that want to put on muscle, but it's still much more common to get a skinny fat or a overweight obese person. But I'm with Beau on that. I think for your average skinny fat woman 1800 calories is a good baseline to start getting strong so if you're like five seven you know 160 untrained and you think you're soft and squishy everywhere then that's probably a good place to start and then do your linear progression and you know start getting strong and then you'll start to see

your body change over time if you give it time. But the main thing is you don't wanna ramp the calories up too fast because then your fat gain is gonna outpace your muscle gain. You're not gonna like the way it looks and you're probably gonna quit, which is what we do not want you to do.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I love that advice. I think that's great. If you're older too, if you're over 40, I think about the exact same approach. You don't need very much. Yeah. When you're, when you get to be over 40, 50, 60, you know, wherever you're at, um, yeah, slower is better. So you might be in the same thing where you just like, Hey, I need to gain weight slowly, but you know, if you need to gain 10 or 20 pounds, that doesn't need to happen in three months. That might happen in a year, right? Um, what would that be? A year would be one pound of gain a month, you know,

it'd be 12 pounds. Um, it might happen in two years when you're a little bit older and that's fine. That's fine. As long as there's, as long as the scale is going up gradually over time, then, you know, you know, you're going to put yourself in the right environment to, to build muscle and keep your lifts going up. I want to say one other thing about appearance that I think is underrated and something I see a lot. I agree. I see a lot of women who are skinny fat and under eating. It's very common. And they're under eating because they can't perform.

They miss, if they get into lifting because they can't perform they they miss um if they get into lifting they miss lifts earlier than they should so it's not a programming issue but it's just a recovery issue and um i i see a lot of women that under eat and they're also like have very busy lives they've got a lot of stress. Maybe they've got children, young children in particular, that are very demanding, working jobs, managing a household on top of all that, very demanding lives and a lot of external stressors. And then when it comes to their fitness, they try to work out hard and then also under eat and really limit their calories because they're afraid of getting, of gaining fat. And man, that's just a, it's just a terrible cocktail because you've got a lot of external stressors. And then when you train hard and you don't eat to recover from

that, you're adding another big stressor because now training is digging. It's, it's taking more out of your bucket, you know, of energy that you've got to handle life. And, um, and then the stress just starts piling up. So the gym all of a sudden becomes another stressor rather than something to be a, you know, to be a relief from, from life stress. And that has a big effect on your appearance that I think is underrated. When you don't eat enough and you've got a lot of stress, your skin doesn't look as good. You have duller skin. You have more wrinkles in your skin.

Your demeanor, just the way that you carry yourself. If you're carrying a lot of stress and you're stressed out and anxious all the time, you don't carry yourself as confidently that that's, that appeared that that shows up to other people. They may not know why, but they see it when you eat more food and you fuel yourself and you give yourself lots of extra calories for your body to build up. It's not just muscle and fat we're talking about, but there's also like the rest of your body, you know, your skin looks healthier. It looks, it has more color to it. It has more glow to it. Um, you carry yourself more confidently because now all of a sudden the gym is a, it's a relief from stress, not another stressor in life. So, you know, this goes beyond the just hard physiology of like muscle and fat

and, you know, lean mass. But, uh, when people are talking about changing their appearance, I think that's really underrated. But people pick up on that. And I notice it. I see women that run themselves on the ground and are trying to train because they want to improve themselves. But they don't eat enough to handle the training and everything else that life throws at them. And they, they, they look run down because they're not feeding themselves enough. And, uh, I hate to see that because, um, you know, cause they're really trying to improve themselves, but they're, they're cutting, they're pulling the rug out from, from all their progress by just not eating enough. You know, and part of that, part of that is that there's this association with appearance and health you can look great and be in shit health come on you know

plenty of right but I mean this one kind of makes me sad but you know take a look at Ronnie Coleman you know yeah he won eight mr. Olympia's I know the ladies here may not be familiar with who he is some of them may some of them may not he was you know he won the Some of them may, some of them may not. He won the most bodybuilding championships in terms of the most competitive venue out of any other competitor in the last, what is it, 50, 60 years since the Olympia started. Yeah, he's the king. He's King Ron, right? And he power lifted before that and he played football in high school and he'd been hurting his back periodically since high school. And part of it, you know, we get to say it.

We're coaches. We analyze lifts. You know, he squatted like shit. You know, he squatted wrong. Yeah, he had dog shit technique. Dog shit technique. That's risky. You know, like he got the weight up. He was strong as fuck and he looked great, you know, but he kept fucking up his back. Then he hired a shit surgeon, that's my understanding, and got back surgery, which, you know, he did try to avoid it for a long time.

I don't know. I'm not I'm not his physician. I can't comment on whether he should or should not have gotten back surgery. But one back surgery led to another back surgery to fix the first back surgery. And the long story short of it, he's had double-digit number of surgeries on his back, hips, and neck. And now he's in a wheelchair. But he looked, if you just looked at his appearance back then, I mean, some people listening might think

that he looked like a mutant, but he was super lean, super muscular. He was 300 pounds and ripped. And, you know, he was in really bad physical health. know yeah or right or you just take take a bunch of jerk offs at the globo gym that are taking a bunch of steroids and drinking and doing illegal drugs on top of them but they look great you know so you got to break away from this idea that appearance and health are the same thing you can make yourself look real good through some

very unhealthy means and uh this uh, this is, this is bringing up something. Um, another coach we know, um, Jillian Ward and, um, she's a elite athlete. She's competed in a number of different sports at a very high level gymnastics, um, powerlifting. She's an IFBB pro, uh, bodybuilder. Well, she, she actually had a post a while back about her bodybuilding days. And this was, you know, maybe five or six years ago, she was, you Well, she, she actually had a post a while back about her bodybuilding days. And this was, you know, maybe five or six years ago, she was, you know, she was doing magazine shoots, super lean. I mean, she just had that like super jacked lean, but feminine physique that's really coveted by, you know, fitness mags. Um, she had that body and she, she admitted, she was like,

that was the best I've ever looked. I kept getting, you know, compliments on how I looked and, you know, I was getting attention from media and I felt awful. I felt terrible. I was depressed. I was just mentally the lowest I'd ever been. Um, you know, she's talked about that and, um, you know, so man, there you go. She's, she's, she's done it. She, you know, she's done it at the highest level. Um, I think she still looks great. You know, now she's in her mid forties, I think. Um, and, but she's relaxed from that. She's like, you know, the, she, she looks like a much more natural woman in terms of, um, leanness now, but she's still really muscular. mean she looks like a she looks like a

professional athlete you know which is which is what she is she was a highly athletic woman absolutely and so you know um but i thought that was really interesting i want to say that was on her instagram i saw that um she had a nice post about that kind of just comparing her body now versus when she was um at her peak bodybuilding physique and her mental state. So, yeah, that's very true. There's lots of ways to look good that are not very healthy. And sometimes you can't do both depending on your genetics and what you're working with. You cannot be healthy and look quote-unquote awesome,

whatever that means, right? So we're just going to define that as very lean, very muscular at the same time. Yeah, you may not be able to do that because your body's set points don't allow for it. If you're naturally 5'5 or 5'6 and you're 150 pounds and you sit healthy there, but you're starving like a child in a third world country, you know, trying to get below that, then, you know, look, quote unquote, looking good or looking leaner may not be healthy for you. You may be able to do it, but it may not be healthy or sustainable for you. So it's understanding that, right? This is why a lot

of people go through unhealthy means to look a certain way people do plastic surgery people take steroids uh people starve themselves people take a bunch of supplements people do street drugs like that are stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine probably i mean i don't know anything about that but i know that like you know in the hollywood circles a lot of cocaine going on you know and marlon Brando talked about it in, I don't know if it was an interview or in his biography. He said, yeah, when actors need to look good for a movie, they just don't eat. I think he said they do coke. Yeah.

Smoke a lot. Yeah. Smoke a lot. Lots of stimulants. Then you watch them on screen and they're the most beautiful people in the world, right? So you've got to decide what you're trying to do here. You know, if it's purely look good at all costs, now you're like an athlete, you know, where it's a win at all costs mentality, right? If your goal is to achieve a specific look by any means necessary, now you're more like, I wouldn't say you're an athlete, but you're a competitor now, right?

Whether you're competing in an arena is completely irrelevant. Just like I'm a competitor, but I am not in powerlifting, I'm not in strengthlifting, and I'm not a bodybuilder. But I go in there and I try to lift more to get stronger, to get bigger, to get more muscular, right? So there are inherent risks with that. Just like, you know, you may never dance around on stage and spray tan and you know, wear the bikini, you know, if you're a female board shorts or speed off your mail. But if you're just purely showing up to achieve a specific look, whether your body likes it or not, by any means necessary, if it's a

win at all costs mentality, then it's no longer about health, you know, and I'm in the business of trying to help people find balance and make it sustainable. And at that point, you're a competitor, you know, and you need to connect with other competitors that are going to, you know, that are willing to take higher levels of risk that, you know, may not be so great for you long term. I was listening to a podcast episode on this. It was the RP Strength podcast. I subcontract for them. They send me business. And this was a good podcast because

this is something they're experienced in that I'm not. These guys are contest bodybuilders. And I think I mentioned this in the last episode. They said steroids are not a shortcut. They're a long cut. And when I was younger, I would have have said bullshit, they're on drugs and look at how they look and all that. And you know, now I'm older, and I know more about this. And what he meant was that you are basically subscribing to a lifestyle at that point, that's very high maintenance and very risky. And that was one of the things that they were saying was, you know, outside of, you know, hormone replacement therapy, they weren't talking about that. But if you start taking steroids for performance enhancement, and to be competitive with how you look, whether it be on stage, or, you know, just at the gym, because you're trying to impress gym bros, or

gym bunnies, or whoever the fuck you're trying to impress, if you're trying to look a certain way, by any means necessary, you're taking steroids to do that. It's always unhealthy. He said, they always make you meaner. He's like, what did he say that, you know, with alcohol, there's happy drunks and angry drunks. And there's a variety of different personalities that come out. But He said, they always make you meaner. He's like, what did he say? That, you know, with alcohol, there's happy drunks and angry drunks, and there's a variety of different personalities that come out. But he said, with steroids, everybody gets meaner. I have no comment on that because I have no experience with it, but that was a part of that episode that I found funny. But where they really hit home was that, you know, you're agreeing to a high maintenance and very risky lifestyle when you do that. And, you know, again, those

guys are competitors, you know, Mike Isra tells a competitive bodybuilder, you know, he does shows and he has a business and he makes a lot of content about this. So he, you know, he's accepted the risk. And he mentioned that in the episode, you know, he's accepted these risks and this lifestyle. And he knows that it's taking years off his life. He addressed that too, you know? So it's understanding, what are you doing this for, you know? Are you doing this because you want to look a certain way by any means necessary? And if that's the case, it's no longer about health. But are you doing this because you want to be healthy, be functional, and have longevity in what you're

doing, you know, diet, exercise, you know, other parts of your lifestyle? You know, that's kind of what we promote here, you know. We're competitive. That's what I'm all about. I'm competitive with my lifting, you know, and that's about where that ends, you know. I'm modestly competitive with my business, not like highly, you know, but those are the two things that where I'm, you know, a competitive person, you know. I want to grow my business. I want to get stronger and build muscle, and that's where I put a lot of my energy. And there are trade-offs with those things too. Like I know I can get hurt. I fucking hope I don't, you know, I hope, pray every day that I don't get hurt, you know, but I could get hurt. I'm pushing my body to its limits. I think because I'm not on drugs, it's less likely to happen because I have shutdown

mechanisms that don't let me push harder than I need to. And then, you know, with work, you know, sometimes I don't sleep the fucking best you know or i'm just stressed out more than the average person you know because i'm trying to push past push limits you know anytime you try to push limits there's more risk involved but you know these things pale in comparison to you know being a walking pharmacy you know like there's a lot of fucking physical psychological and shit economic risk it's fucking expensive what they say? Liver King, 10 grand a month on steroids, you know? Now imagine women that are, you know, keeping up with,

you know, other, like taking drugs in addition to like, you know, Botox and all these other fucking things they do and plastic surgery. I mean, there's economic risk too. You can end up subscribing to an expensive lifestyle that suddenly you lose your job. You can't afford it, or you get a divorce, you can't afford it, you know, or you get a divorce, you can't afford it, or whatever happens, you know? So, you know, you can go down this rabbit hole a million different ways, but the point is, if it's looks at all costs, it is no longer about health. So, looks and health are not the same thing. It is no longer about health. Just like getting stronger at all costs is no longer about health, and getting bigger at all costs is no longer about health, you know, now you are a competitor. But health, longevity, that's what we deal in.

And that may mean you're carrying a little bit more body fat than you want to. That means the muffin top may be there to stay. And you got to find ways to accept that, you know. Yep, totally agree, man. That's what I'm here about. I'm here to help people get healthier, get more functional. They're going to look better in the process. Absolutely.

But it's not, yeah, definitely not looks at all costs in my camp. So, yeah, I'm glad you made that distinction. I hope the ladies listening appreciated it. You know, I promised that I would do an episode on it. Absolutely. I hope that was helpful. And it was good to hear your perspective since you do work with so many female clients. All right. Well, let's close out. I don't know where we're going next time, but I'm sure we'll have a topic for you.

So thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. You could come visit me at the gym if you're in Metro Phoenix. I am about 10 minutes South of the airport in the South mountain neighborhood, weights and plates gym. We have an Instagram page that I fail to update. I keep saying I will at some point I will it's weights, double underscore and double underscore plates. All right. You know where to find me on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream, or you can email me with any coaching questions. Jones barbell club at gmail.com. All right. You know where to find me on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream, or you can email me with any coaching questions, jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right. We will talk to you all again in a couple of weeks. you