ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: How to build strength from the comfort of your home | Andy Galpin

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Today we’re talking about strength. Building muscle doesn’t have to mean lifting heavy weights in a fancy gym. In fact, you can do it from the comfort of your living room. No expensive memberships, no extra long workouts, no excuses. To prove it, I asked human performance expert Andy Galpin to design an at-home strength session for someone who’s never lifted a weight before - my sister. It’s quick, cheap, and a sure fire way to add years to your healthspan.  If you’re new to strength training, this episode is the perfect place to start. 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term healthLive Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know hereListen to the full episode here

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about strength. Building muscle doesn't have to mean lifting heavy weights in a fancy gym. In fact, you can do it from the comfort of your own living room. No expensive memberships, no extra long workouts, no excuses. To prove it, I asked human performance expert, Professor Andy Galpin, to design an at-home strength session for someone who's never. lifted a weight before. It's quick, cheap, and a sure far way to add years to your health span. If you're new to strength training, this episode is the perfect place to start. I'd like to paint a

picture that this is my sister that we're helping to guide. And my sister has got into running recently. So she's got, you know, got, you know, a lot more serious about her exercise. But she's not doing any weight. She's never done any weight. She's never done weights from the day she was born as far I'm aware until today. And so it's like it's really alien. And I'm hoping she's going to listen to this and be like, you know, Andy, not only were you really convincing, but now you're going to paint, you know, me this picture of how it's something that I can do. And by the way, you know, she's like working full time and she has young kids. She definitely doesn't have the time. If I say, you've got to go to this gym, which is quite a long way

from her house, like that's probably not going to happen. What should she be doing? All right. My first question is, and this is exactly how I program and coach, by the way. How many days a week do I have? I think she'd say, well, how many, do I really need to like get some real benefit? No, it's not the question. The question is how many do you have? Oh, how many get it? Two.

Two. Great. I want to know the restriction. I'm not going to force you in a situation that's going to fail. Coaching mistake 101, trying to put them into the perfect program, not the program that's right for them right now. I'm not going to do that. If you said the answer was one, I'm going to go on one.

And I'm going to get success with one. And then you're going to buy in. I'm going to go, let me get you to two. You think that was good? Watch what can happen if I get you to two days a week. If I'm being honest. most of the time, whatever they number, they tell me, I take one off. Okay.

They say four, I go three. I know this, right? We've been on this road many times. So she says, okay, I can do two days a week. That's a believable number. I'm going to hold you, that two days a week for someone like your sister. And again, I have young children. I have a wife.

Like, I have many companies. I know this story. Okay. We coached plenty of women. We coach lots of women and moms and CEOs. No problem. Two, I can hold you two. If you're not getting two days a weekend, you've already came in, you've done this.

I can say, if we're not getting two a week, I feel good coaching you hard to get me two. Okay. If you said five and we got four, I can't really argue with you that much there. We got two. Moving on in the next one. How much time do I have per day? 30 to 45 minutes.

Okay, I'm going to go 35. Okay. Are you doing any other physical training? I'm going running a couple of times a week. Ah, okay, this is even easier. We can do it to 30 minutes now. Okay. Any major injuries we should know about?

No. All right. exercises that you absolutely hate, any types of training, any things that when you go into the gym, when you think about exercising, you do not like. I have never gone into the gym and used any weight of any sort. Cool. So fair to assume that you feel uncomfortable with the exercises, knowing what to do on every exercise, probably don't want to do complicated exercises. You don't feel a lot of confidence in lifting weights. Correct.

Okay. The main weight that I've lifted is like my children, as they got bigger and bigger and bigger until it's ridiculous how big they are that I'm going. Now her brother is answering this question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Milo, right? Walk the bull up the hill every day, a little bit stronger. Progressive Overload.

That's the original story of one of the more fundamental concepts in our field of progressive overload. Nonetheless, last question for you. What do we got, equipment-wise, the space? I haven't got anything, and I'm happy to buy some stuff if you tell me what I should have. Budget. $100. Okay, great. $100.

We're going to get a couple of kettlebell. If you can get four kettlebells, I don't know if we can do that for a hundred bucks, but we'll try. I want two kettlebells that are, I want to say, five kilos, and then I want two that are 20 kilos. So two, five kilos and two that are 20 kilos. Yeah, something like that. And then I might save out actually $10 for some resistance bands, something like that. I don't know if you can actually pull that off anymore, but we'll work with that in that neighborhood. Okay, great. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to focus on compound movements. We're going to do whole body. We're not doing body parts splits. There goes back to the old idea of bodybuilding, right, where it's like arms Monday, legs Tuesday, biceps Thursday. We're not doing that stuff. We're doing full body movements and full body workouts, right? Which means we're going to get as many body parts working every day. But we're going to get as many of those done in every single exercise that we can. We're going to do a combination of high efficiency.

high effective, but pretty simple exercises, right? Because you don't have a lot of experience and we have some trepidation there. And we're going to start pretty slow and easy so that we don't get insane amounts of soreness. There's actually very little relationship between how sore you get and how effective the workout is. Is that right? I have always felt like particularly pleased with myself when like two days later I'm really sore. I figured that I really did work hard and do something really valuable and that was like all of this. And you're telling me now that's not true? You're pretty pleased in that moment about yourself, but it's not necessarily how you feel

the next day doesn't predict how healthy something was for you. So there's very little association there. Now, there's a point when if you don't do anything that actually challenges your body, we're not going to get that many adaptations. But I don't care about that right now. Okay. It's not like you should be feeling really quite, like with that sort of muscle sorenness the next day.

And if you haven't done that, you haven't. I would say anything more than two or three out of 10 on a scale of sore would be too much. So if she wakes up the next morning and goes, yeah, I'm a little tight. I feel it a little bit. We won. If she wakes up anything more than that, I'm probably going to back off. Here's why. It's not that I'm concerned that if she wakes up at a four or five out of ten, that we tore our muscle or we overtrained her, that would not be happening.

But I'm very concerned with somebody who doesn't have a passion for this thing yet, that we go, oh my God, I got to go training again and be so sore. And last time then I had to pick the kid up and all that, my shoulder hurt. I slept weird because my back. I want wins, wins, wins, wins, right? I wanted to work and I want to feel positive about when I worked hard. It sucked a little bit, but I actually felt pretty good afterwards. And I don't have to feel smoked in the workout.

Another thing that you'll see in probably the last 10 years is it's very clear the evidence on going to maximum failure. What that means is if we're doing, you know, pushups or pull-ups and you take it all the way up to the last possible rep, if you would have stopped one or two reps earlier, you would have gotten probably the same amount of muscle growth. And there's a lot of research on that. It's called repetitions in reserve. How many did you leave in the tank? One to two in the tank is absolutely actually going to have the same amount of muscle growth. Caviot there, most people don't really know what true failure is. So that one to two is probably a lot harder than most people think. It's not like, I kind of felt a little burn that I stopped. Like, no, that's, that's like six or seven reps left. Probably too short there. But I'll take that.

For your sister, I would take, I would rather her stop five or six reps early than too late or than one late for this point, right? We just want wins. We want positive associations. We have to train her harder enough to where she sees results. But if you're going to ask me like shed a little bit on, I'm going to that side. habits habits habits habits habits right get past that initial fatigue so we're going to pick a couple of exercises um we're probably going to do an active body weight movement initially without the kettlebells just to get her going and i'm probably going to pick lower body exercise i don't know your

sister but on aggregate women like to train their legs and their glutes and they like feeling that stuff they don't have as much interest always in upper body pushups and things like that again not Not every person's this way, but men sometimes are the opposite. They kind of like to start with bench press and things like that. So I'm going to pick exercises she's probably more familiar with. We would probably wrap a band around her knees and do something like lateral walks. You're just going to kind of walk sideways, if you will. Monster walks or things like that where it's easy, you'll feel a little bit of a burn,

and we're getting a lot of your core, actually, a little bit, and a lot of your leg muscles going. So you can kind of move up and back. You can literally just walk with them, walk sideways. all kinds of staggered walking, we would pick one or two exercises like that. And Andy, I think a lot of people listening might be surprised that you're saying that you're using a band, so that's not a weight, and that that is strength training? Well, not to get us way off topic here, but what is strength training?

What is resistance exercise? I don't know that I can define them either, right? It's like, okay, does it have to be a weight? No, pull-ups. Pull-ups are strength training, and they don't involve any weight whatsoever besides your body weight and gravity. well so is a body weight squat then. So if I had a band that's more resistance than your body, how's that not?

Strength training. So the band itself can act sort of like a weight because it's making it harder and it will have that benefit that you're describing. So is your body. We could do this entire thing. If you gave me a scenario and said budget is zero, we can't buy any equipment. I could have done this whole thing with just body weight. Now we would be limited eventually, but for someone like this, we could absolutely start body weight only if we wanted. So anything could be used here.

There's the old stories of people using milk jugs and filling them with water, which are super effective, right? We could get household implements and items, lots of ways we can do this. Those are not the details that should be overly concerning for someone like your sister. We can get a lot of work done with her with just these minimal equipment or none at all. I think I'm just thinking that like a band already feels less intimidating than using a like a weight, because that's, somehow already seems less outside maybe of what you've done before. Yeah. You can do some serious resistance training with the proper type of bands.

So kind of going back to the direct example, I'd probably pick an exercise like that. Then I might pick an exercise that is more like lower body, but a back squat may be difficult because I don't know what her technique and movement is. So I might pick something like a step-up. And I might do something like a counterbalanced one. So you imagine she's stepping up onto a stool or a bare. bench or anything she wants, something ideally like 12 to 18 inches. Again, sorry about using the American units here.

I know. I think we've got people all over the world. We'll just do a mix. 12 to 18 inches. So that's like 30 to 40 centimeters, depending on which country you're in as you're listening to this. And she's going to, let's say when she's stepping up on her left leg, she'll have the kettlebell and we'll probably use the lighter one on this particular case in her right hand.

So her left foot is on the bench stepping up. Her right hand is holding it. What that's going to do is her left leg, her left quad, hamstrings, and glute are going to be working. Her core is also going to be working so that she doesn't rotate left to right. It's also going to stop her from folding, bending side to side. Because remember, that right dumbbell is in her right hand. It's going to be pulling her to bend to the right side. But she's going to be keeping her posture neutral.

Her shoulders remain perfectly in line with each other like a, like I could hang a painting on her shoulders so they don't tilt. So her core is actually going to be doing most of the work so she doesn't rotate nor tilt while her left leg produces force. We have now transferred force from her right shoulder through her right hand to her left hip to her left toe.

This is going to really help connective tissue. This helps transfer force. This keeps you balanced. This gets your range of motion and a lot of muscles got moved there with a very simple exercise. As long as your knee is staying remotely over top of your toe.

By that, I mean, you can go way in front of your toe, but you just don't want your left knee coming way inside towards your midline so that it is, you know, 20 centimeters to be really exaggerating here, inside of your left foot, right? It should be up and down.

It can go forward in front of it or behind it. There's different options there. Both are acceptable, but generally you don't want them coming way inside of there. So we pick an exercise like that, and we probably are going to be doing something like, oh, well, let's say two sets of eight per leg. So eight repetitions in the left leg,

switch the dumbbell, switch the foot, eight repetitions, we call that one set. What I'd probably do based on her time is use a technique called super setting. So you're going to do two or even three exercises in a row so that you don't have, when you're resting, say, your legs, her upper body is moving.

So we did our banded walks. And then we're going to go ahead and go into these step-ups. And she finishes one set. So eight repetitions, one side, eight repetitions, other side. and then while she's kind of resting from that, we might go into something like an overhead press. Same exact implement.

And in fact, what I would do here is, I'm doing this real time here, so what you're hearing me is I'm going to thinking through something like this. I would let her stay in the same position. She already has her, let's say, left foot on the bench. Right? So she's in a staggered stance like that. And now she'll keep that dumbbell in her right hand

and she'll press that right hand directly over her head. What that does is it allows her to press her shoulder her triceps are going to get going a little bit and she's going to get working with some pressing, but it keeps her low back in a friendly position because that left foot is elevated. A lot of times when people press overhead, they tend to arch their back really hard.

This can put some undue or unnecessary strain in the low back. You have to really work hard to keep your ribs down. So don't let the space between your ribs and your hips open way up. That would mean your low back is contracting kind of backwards. By putting her left foot on the bench, it rotates her hips backwards, and it keeps her low back in that neutral position more likely. So probably eight repetitions of the step-up, eight repetitions of the overhead press, and then switch sides. Rotate through that whole thing probably twice, and now you're off cooking in a pretty good position.

You're probably now easily under 10 minutes into our workout. And we've gotten a lot of stuff done. Core's been touched a couple of times. Legs have been touched a couple of times. We got one movement for our upper body. Then I'd go into another set. I'll end this episode with something I think you'll like, a free Zoe gut health guide.

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