SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, welcome in. We are here for episode number one of Dover Strength and Longevity Podcast. I am Coach Chris here with Coach Kelly. And today we are going to talk all about a trap or a pitfall that many people who start a strength training program for the first time fall into. And it really leads them to a place of derailing and becoming frustrated and discouraged, ultimately quitting and if not getting injured. So this is very much top of mind for us. We see it across the board from they're lifting too much weight, they are working out too hard, they are working out too often, and it really can be a problem. So we want to talk all about that today. And first and foremost, Kelly, let's talk about why we think this is happening. Why are we seeing this so often? Let's talk about that first.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

I think one big thing of why this happens is because of marketing. You see a lot of false promises out there, you know, a 30-day plan or, you know, two weeks, you know, best body ever, seven-day bikini body ready, like all of those false promises out there. So I think that's that's one big reason why.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Absolutely. I agree with you. It's everywhere, it's all over uh everything you see, every every billboard you see. I mean, it's just we're inundated, is what I would say. Inundation with with all these things. Culture, I also think is another big one. And I think that we are in a culture right now where we are very much um instant gratification, everything, you know, from things that you can order. We used to have to wait uh seven to fourteen for things to arrive to our house. And now we place an order and it is uh overnight or even even the the same day within an hour, things are showing up to our house, you know. Movies, even we used to have to go to the movies to watch movies. Now we can stream them now online, even before they even come out in the movie theater. So across the board we see this instant gratification, even now with the weight loss medications that have that have surfaced here most recently. Uh, we even see that feeding into this a little bit more too, which we can talk about another day. But yeah, what are some other things?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

I think another one is social media as well, where we see all of the uh highlight reels. Um, you know, you see the you know, their best, their best self, and you're not looking at all of the hard work or all of the bad days or all of the issues in between. So it's all of those highlight reels as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Oh my goodness. Yeah, there are before and after pictures everywhere. And, you know, we we ourselves here at Breakthrough, we have um many of those before and after pictures, but there's a there's a story behind each one of those uh before and after pictures that um that oftentimes isn't told. So um, yeah, we see that a lot too. And then one of the the biggest ones that I think feeds into this is our past experiences. I know for me, coming out of my 20s uh as a competitive bodybuilder and an athlete, I was in the gym every single day. And I was training in the gym for a better part of two to three hours every time I was in the gym. And now that I'm in my 40s, it's a completely different world. We just can't do the things that we did before. And we see that oftentimes, though, that people are bringing in what worked for them before to what they're trying to do now, not realizing that, hey, you're not the same person you were then. It's been some time. Even I see this first from, you know, maybe just five years ago or even one year ago, something that worked for them just a short time ago, relatively short, a year ago, may not work for them now. And they're they oftentimes say, Well, I know that worked for me. So they hold on so tightly to that thing and they carry that thing into a new program, uh, and it prevents them oftentimes from making progress because they're holding so tightly to that. So that's a huge one. Have you experienced that as well?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Oh, yes, absolutely. So same thing, like seven days a week, you know, signing up for all the classes, all the things, you know, a workout, you know, with spin and boot camp and this and that and boxing, and you know, I just in my 40s now can't do that anymore. My body does not want any parts of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yeah, for sure. And you know, just a little bit more on that note, I think why that occurs um is because, or where it comes from, the root of it is coming from bodybuilding. And, you know, thinking way back to, you know, um Muscle Beach and Arnold and and really when I feel like it was like the the growth of strength training back then in a big way, um, we were training body parts at that time. So we were in the gym every day because we were training body parts splits. We were doing chest on one day and biceps on another day and abs on another day. And that's really why we were in the gym every single day, oftentimes. Whereas now our philosophies are a bit different when we're in our 40s. We believe in total body training, uh, where we're not doing body parts anymore. And we think that um it's it's that philosophy that works best when we are in our 40s. So it doesn't require you to be in the gym as much as we once were. But I think that that concept of being in the gym every day has carried over many decades to now, which is also what we're dealing with today. So um, but let's talk about the problems that come from this and what we see real time here in the gym when we're working with clients. Um, you know, over the last almost 20 years now, we we've seen some reoccurring patterns that we've been able to pinpoint and then pulling that thread trace back to this false belief that more is better. Um, let's talk about some of those things first. Um, what comes to mind first things?

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Well, for me, I think it's the one big thing is that it's it's just not sustainable. You know, when you're going from zero to 100, you just can't sustain that. Like it's not a lifestyle. Um, I think one big question you can ask yourself is like, you know, how I have my life set up right now, can I do this for the rest of my life? Um you know, so just putting all the things in, doing too much too often, um, you can't sustain that. And it just it won't last long, you know. You end up falling off, you know, the wagon again. Once again.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think our our philosophy around here is a little bit different, and we like to say little and often over the long haul. And the important note here is like when you say it's not sustainable, I want to trace back to, well, why does it need to be sustainable? And we believe that the reason it needs to be sustainable is because results that we're looking for, whether that's building muscle or getting stronger or even weight loss for that matter, it takes a long time. Now, again, we see it everywhere, and and seemingly on the surface, it looks like we can do it overnight and instantly, but we like to say it's it's absolutely not a microwave thing, it's a crockpot thing. Uh, it takes that long-term simmer to get best results out of this um process. So for us, it really does need to be sustainable because when you're talking about building muscle and strength, it's a long-term thing. On the average, it takes about a month to gain a half a pound of muscle. So put that into perspective. You know, it's gonna take the better part of a year for the average person who's over 40 years of age to gain, you know, 10 pounds of muscle. That's a long time. What else? Problems with this.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Your recovery suffers when you're doing, you know, too much. Um you so you're you know, you're breaking down muscle fibers in the gym. Um, and so if you're not recovering, you're not able to to build muscle. Um, you need to recover to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

So yeah, 100%. So, you know, that's a big, a big myth that most people um they don't even talk about. It's not even really being talked about oftentimes. It's it's so focused on the the workouts, it's almost never focused on the recovery. And that in fact is where the growth happens. And I find it ironic that a lot of folks, they they just have never been told that. They've just been told, hey, go and do these exercises or do this program or follow this plan, with no no accounting for the recovery process, which is really 48 to 72 hours after you break down any muscle, should be in place for you to recover and for you to rebuild. Because again, just for those who might be listening or watching right now, if you don't know this, when you go to the gym and you do exercises, you are actually breaking the muscles, you are tearing down those muscles. And it's in the days that you're not in the gym, in your recovery time, in your days off, when the repair is happening, and it's over time, as those muscles repair, they build stronger and they build bigger. So that's actually the process. So if we short circuit that process, then we have a bigger problem, which leads me to my next thought. And that is we actually begin to lose muscle instead of gaining muscle. We actually start to get weaker instead of stronger. We start to see more and more problems from that as well. What are some of the problems that you've seen from that tailspin there?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Yeah. So so when we're, you know, not building or when you're not recovering, and then that's also, you know, a really good chance where you will become injured and, you know, harming yourself because you're not recovering.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, we're losing muscle. We're we're when we start to lose muscle, muscle's breaking down, oftentimes those injuries seem to begin to follow pretty soon after that. So um what about hormones? I know hormones play a big role here. What are your thoughts on hormones?

SPEAKER_01 10:41

So with hormones, when your hor your hormones are off the charts, like you don't feel like yourself, you don't feel well, your cortisol levels are, you know, elevated. Um, a big thing too is that we don't realize is working out is actually a stress on our body. Um so with that being said, you add that on top of all the other stress that we have in our life, you know, with at home or, you know, with work or finances or whatever that may be. Um so I mean that just that plays a factor with your hormones.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Yeah, for sure. So we obviously from just these few things of many more that we could share here, it it becomes problematic when we have this mindset of more is better. When it comes to strength training specifically over the age of 40. So let's talk about some of our philosophies here and how we do things based on what we've learned really in the trenches over almost 20 years now, working with people and seeing what works, what doesn't work, and um and applying it to our strength training programs here for our folks. The first thing that I would mention is in terms of workouts, you know, I think that I understand why somebody would think, well, if I go more, that is going to be better, right? I will get more results out of going to the gym more often. And as we just discussed, that's not always the case. So, well, what is the best starting point? Where should we start? So, what we believe is that we should start with a full body training program. And we believe that it should be two times a week as a starting point. For somebody coming in who has no training history, uh, no real training experience, especially, or maybe it's been many years since they've started a training program, we should we should start there. Two days a week in the gym is a great place to start, and then see how the body responds. Allow the body to tell us whether it needs more or not based on the recovery that we are seeing or not seeing. So we like to start at two times a week and then over a period of 30, 60, 90 days, evaluate and then maybe move them to three times a week. Again, 30, 60, 90 days. How's the body recovering? Are we making the progress? Do we need to add another day? And then by necessity, we we may or may not add in additional workouts. So that's where we like to start with um with our training. And that allows that maximum recovery that we talked about, that 48 to 72 hours to be built into our training as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Yeah, so another thing that we focus on here too is with intensity is um allowing that to build up over time as well. Um, so meaning like the effort that we put in um at our workout. So like if you're thinking about a scale of one to ten, you know, starting out at, you know, about a five or a six for a couple of weeks and then moving to six or seven out of ten, and then seven to eight out of ten.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Um, you know, and not ever going over eight. So Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, I love that. For I would say duration too is another one, um, or meaning like the amount of time that you spend in the gym when you first start out. Again, uh, we see so often I hear it constantly. People will say, I went to the gym and I was there for three hours. I hear that all the time. Almost like it's a badge of honor. So I actually believe that you should start with smaller, smaller uh periods of time, maybe 30 minutes just to get started, depending on how long it's been since you've been in a gym, and then build on that. Again, over time, we add 15 minutes. Maybe we're at 45. Uh, maybe we're at 60 after you know, 90 days into this thing. But we slowly over time build it uh and add a little bit more as the body is adapting and um in telling us that okay, it's uh it's appropriate to add more, not just adding more, just to add more because we think that it's gonna give us better results. So the other part of that is, you know, and I think this is where we um we can get ahead of that, is we we do custom programming here. So in our programs, we do six-week programs, and this within the six weeks that we have in place, the recovery is already built in. So we build in two weeks of recovery and then we ramp the intensity and the volume, all these things we just talked about, we ramp those up controlled by us, and then we bring that back down into another recovery time. People might know it as a deload period. We allow that body to recover again, then we go into another six-week training phase and we ramp it up again. So we control, we call those longevity cycles here, we control their cycles of training so that it is sustainable, so that we've actually done the work for them, taking taking all these pitfalls away from them and taking care of them on the front side. So um yeah, volume makes a big difference, training intensity makes a big difference. What else comes to mind?

SPEAKER_01 15:48

I think another thing too is the is the quality of your workout versus the the amount of times that you're there that week. So quality over quantity, you know, really focusing on mastery first, um, you know, is your how you know, what is your form and technique look like? Um, you know, what about your, you know, do you have full range of motion? You know, are you able to um repeat them throughout all of the sets with the proper form, proper technique? Um and then big thing too, you know, are you um completing the exercises pain-free? So that's you know, those are all the things that we look at here, you know, with the quality of the client's workouts.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Absolutely. You know, one of the biggest lessons that I learned is when I was in my twenties, I was in the gym and I was doing doing my best and I was absolutely lifting a whole lot of weight. And um a guy came up to me and he said, you know, if you would just drop that weight down and go a little lighter and focus on the quality instead of the quantity, he said, you'll get a lot more out of that. So I took that to heart. And I actually asked him to be my workout partner. And he said yes. And that was a game changer because for the next, I want to say, three years or so, him and I were workout partners every time we hit the gym, and we took this understanding of quality and mastery to another level. It was every rep was perfect, every single thing we did was to the letter. And I'll tell you that a year later, now this was having having already trained for the better part of probably seven or eight years up to this point. Okay, one year later from that point, I had gained more than I had in the previous like seven years of training. I was stronger than I ever was in one year from that one thing alone. Just going back to mastery, focusing on quality, not quantity. So I can't um recommend that enough for anybody who's listening here today to start there and focus on that. And don't add intensity or complexity, or in other words, don't add more weight or more reps or difficulty if first that foundation of mastery is not there, that form, that technique uh is not there first. And of course, you know, if you don't know what those things are, how do you know? And of course, that's where consulting with a professional is gonna help with that as well. Well, that wraps up most of what we wanted to share tonight. But um I think to kind of sum it up, what what would you say to these folks to just kind of wrap things up if we were to put it all into a nutshell for them?

SPEAKER_01 18:33

I think a big thing here is um is focus on all of the small wins. You know, it's not it's not these big huge wins, like focus on all the little small wins um and just one person improvement every day. Like just focus on that and and baby steps. Like think about them as baby steps and um just that daily improvement and building a lifestyle, really. Habit, you know, all those habits that build this lifestyle, and you know, you get lasting results.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Absolutely. Well, let's take notice that the shirt that you're wearing today actually we didn't intend for that to happen, actually. It was not planned. Um, but that that shirt says it all stronger every day. So you can you can see there that you know we we live that around here, uh obvious by the the shirt that we have there. Um that's our philosophy, that's our belief system around here. Um it's it's everything for us. So I think that to wrap it all up, my last point would be that the real magic is consistency over time. You know, when you take everything that we've talked about today, uh everything I've learned in in the years that I've been doing this, if somebody were to ask me, what's the one thing that you could tell somebody, the one ingredient that they need to know that would be, if there ever was a magic bullet, what is that magic bullet that they can take away from uh from everything you've learned and everything you've seen, it would be that one thing. I wouldn't even hesitate to tell you that one thing is consistency over time equals results. Whenever we talk with somebody, whether somebody calls me on the phone or somebody stops in, or you know, maybe it's a new client or something that we chat with, we always have conversations about what they've done in the past. And always ask a lot of questions about what they've done and how that how did that go because I'm trying to learn, you know, from them as well and find out how I can maybe help them along. And when you pull that thread, every single time it comes back to it, wasn't that the program itself wasn't necessarily a bad program or the program didn't work, it was they were not consistent in their efforts over the long haul. Most times it's two weeks. Well, how long did you do that for? Um, about a month. How long did you did you stick with it? About six weeks. How long before that stopped? Um, about three months. And that's usually about the top end of what people tell me. I'm sure that's not the case for everybody, but I would just say, you know, uh the largest majority of people that I talk with over the years, that's what it comes down to. So we can really trace back to the consistency over time. And I think a real reason why people are not consistent is what we talked about today. They're trying to do way too much, way too soon, way too often, instead of what you said, just focusing on doing a little bit better each time they come in, 1% improvements every day. And that's something that everybody can do, which is pretty cool. That being said, we actually um we have a couple books to recommend here as well that speak to that very concept. We we love um ongoing learning here uh with our team and with our clients, and we've done book studies here as well. And um this philosophy is not not you know new, it's it's a philosophy that's been around for however long, but there are some amazing books that speak directly to this that we've done studies on. One is the power to change. So if you want to really have like a deep dive into this understanding of how to break this down into this 1% improvements every day, The Power to Change by Craig Groschell is a great one. Uh and another amazing one is Atomic Habits by James Clear. Atomic Habits by James Clear. Phenomenal, phenomenal book. And then a third one that I don't actually have a copy in front of me right now, but it's the whole book is this concept we're talking about today. It's called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. And the entire book is literally all of these. It's strategy and tactics. It's not just theory, it's actually strategy and tactics, how you can take what you want to accomplish in your life, break it down into these 1% improvements that we're talking about, and then get the results that you're looking for. All right. Last but not least, client spotlight today. So we're excited and uh and pumped to just celebrate one of our clients today. So Telea is our client spotlight of the week. So we we Taleia, we we love you. If you're watching this, we are uh just super, super impressed with you and and all that you've achieved during this period of time. Um I can't say enough great things about you and all that you've done just in the short time that I've known you. You have been just amazing. Um Kelly, I'll leave it to you to share a little bit as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Yeah, I just think um I just really have always been impressed with like her strength and her confidence. And you know, she's just shared a few things with how it's transferred like into her everyday life and like ziplining with her daughter and things like that. So it's just really cool to hear her stories and her improvements.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

So the thing I love about her most, and I think is uh another secret ingredient, if you will, it's her attitude is just amazing. She really just has a phenomenal attitude. She is just uh just a joy to work with. She really is. Um, she's always almost always smiling and just very pleasant all the time. And uh and she's a very, very good student as well. Um when we're talking about training, she we really believe that the the all of these skill sets um need to be learned over time, just like a new language or a new instrument. And and and and she embraces the student understanding. So we're super proud of you, Telea. So keep up the good work, and that wraps up this episode. We'll see you guys next time.