Want to get stronger, burn more calories, and age well? In this episode of the Coaching Corner podcast, personal trainer Jayd Harrison discusses these and many of the other benefits of performing resistance training in your exercise routine. She also gives tips for getting started as a beginner.

Links:

• Show Notes
• Jayd's Resistance Training Programs
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If you don't do resistance training, what ends up happening for a lot of people, especially on a long-term fat loss journey, they end up losing muscle mass. So they've lost weight, but they're weaker, and then they reach a point where their metabolism also slows down because they have lost so much muscle tissue. And muscle tissue is a main driver of your metabolism, so you can keep your metabolism high so that you're continuing to burn more calories by doing resistance training, and you can help to prevent that slowdown, which often leads to a plateau for lots of people.

Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I am Jayd Harrison. I'm a personal trainer and I've created this podcast to help you to eat better and build a body that you love. Today we're going to be talking about the benefits of doing resistance training and building muscle. We're also going to go over my tips for getting started in building a resistance training routine. This episode was recorded when I was live on my Twitch channel. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. Make sure to give me a follow there to get notified whenever I go live and answer fitness questions. Now, there are lots of benefits to doing resistance training in addition to helping your body to look more toned and also burning fat. So give this episode a listen. If you are interested in learning all of the benefits and how to get started with resistance training.

Who asked the question? Can you still get in shape when you're 57? Well, you need to define, first of all what you mean by get in shape. Personally for myself as a personal trainer, when I take on clients, my philosophy is that I want to teach them how to take good care of their bodies, specifically through getting exercise and eating the right way. Our bodies need movement. We need exercise. And especially when it comes to your muscles and your bones, these things, they get weak over time. The older that you get, especially if you're not active, your muscles decline in strength in a process called sarcopenia. And this happens to everybody, but it especially happens to people who spend the majority of their days seated or sedentary. And in fact, there was a study that showed, they did a study on young men who were 20 years old and they were healthy young men.

They had these young men basically stay sedentary and bedridden for, I believe it was a six week period. And at the end of the six week period, these healthy young men showed signs of aging. Their health markers had declined so rapidly that when they looked at their blood pressure, for instance, their blood pressure was like that of a 50 something year old man. It had aged them just by sitting still for the majority of the day. So our bodies are made for movement, and when we don't move, that's where a lot of these sicknesses can set in high blood pressure. And as you lose muscle, you also lose so many other things besides just strength. Like I said, you lose strength in your bones. Your bones become more brittle, which means that you're more likely to break them. And if your muscles aren't strong, you're more likely to have poor coordination and balance.

So you may fall more often. So this, for a lot of really older people creates a really scary situation where they're not strong enough to be able to get around by themselves, and they're also more likely to fall. And when they do fall, they're more likely to break something. And this is devastating, especially for people who end up falling and injuring their hip. The rate of decline in an overall health. And there's a drastic increase in mortality rates after an elder person falls down and breaks a hip and has to have a hip replacement because just they have to stay sedentary at that point. And so their health continues to decline. So sitting still for most of your day is a good way to age yourself faster. But if you exercise, if you give your body movement, which is what it's designed for, if you do enough of that, you can reverse the aging process in a lot of ways because it helps to regenerate your body.

You basically teach your body, you keep your body in more of like an anabolic state where it's instead of breaking down tissue, it's focused more on building new tissue, repairing, repairing damage to tissue. And that's what aging is. Aging is our tissues breaking down faster than your body can repair it. So when you do things like resistance training where you're trying to build muscle, it's not only are you keeping your bones strong and your muscles strong, but you can also just reverse the aging process in so many ways. There's just so many benefits to building muscle, but also another thing that it can help with things that people don't really think about is having more muscle or building more muscle helps with your glucose sensitivity or insulin sensitivity I should say, helps with your insulin sensitivity, which can help you to control type one and type two diabetes.

And for people who have type two diabetes or who are pre-diabetic by building muscle and improving your insulin sensitivity, some people are actually able to come out of having type two diabetes just by building muscle and getting more active and eating better. You can go into remission. It's possible it doesn't happen for everybody, but even if you don't go into remission, your sensitivity will be vastly improved if you do resistance training and build muscle. If you're interested in fat loss, building muscle is one of the best things that you can do because it can boost your metabolism and also help you to change your body composition. So changing your body composition is frankly more important than total weight loss. It's more important that a higher percentage of your body is lean muscle tissue than body fat. There's a certain amount of body fat that you do need just to stay healthy, but over a certain amount it starts to become unhealthy.

So in changing your body fat percentage by building muscle, you can accelerate your fat loss. And it's also just will help you to burn more calories too, because muscle is calorie expensive to build, and it's also calorie expensive to maintain new muscle. So it's a great tool that you can use for your fat loss journey as well. And keep in mind that when you lose weight, if you're just doing diet and cardio and you're losing a bunch of weight, but you're not doing resistance training, keep in mind that some of that weight loss is going to happen from your body breaking down muscle in addition to the body fat because your body is just breaking down tissue to access energy because you're not getting the energy that your body needs through food. So if you don't do resistance training, what ends up happening for a lot of people, especially on a long-term fat loss journey, they end up losing muscle mass.

So they've lost weight, but they're weaker, and then they reach a point where their metabolism also slows down because they have lost so much muscle tissue. And muscle tissue is a main driver of your metabolism. So you can keep your metabolism high so that you're continuing to burn more calories by doing resistance training, and you can help to prevent that slowdown, which often leads to a plateau for lots of people where there's just not burning fat anymore. And another thing, this is another thing that I always forget about until my clients tell me they come in after they've been training with me for a month or two and they're like, when I first came here, I had so much chronic pain in my back or in my knees. Doing resistance training can help relieve chronic pain. A lot of chronic pain is a factor of holding yourself in poor posture or straining your muscles to hold yourself in a position that maybe is poor posture or your muscles are tight from being in a position like a seated position like this, like here, my hip flexors, my hamstrings are in a shortened position, and if I spend enough time like this, those muscles get tight, and then as they're tight, they start to pull on wherever they insert, they pull on the joints that are related to them.

So tightness in your hip flexors may be experienced as back pain, lower back pain, tightness in your hamstrings can sometimes become plantar fasciitis, which is pain on the bottom of your foot, on the sole of your foot. A lot of that is due to tightness in your whole posterior chain, your hamstrings, your calves, et cetera. So when you do resistance training, you can offset the effects of sitting with that type of posture all day because you're putting your body back into alignment and you're practicing holding yourself in good posture, but you're also strengthening the muscles that are weak and stretching out the muscles that typically get shortened and are tight, so it can help with that chronic pain. Another thing that a lot of my younger female clients also tell me is that since they started doing resistance training, their period pain and their PMS symptoms improve, their periods are not as bad as they used to be, which I'm so happy to hear.

Now that's not been the case for everybody. Everybody's period is different and each period is different from the one before. But I have noticed with a lot of my female clients, they say that since they started specifically doing resistance training that their PMS symptoms are not quite as horrible as they were before. Also, if you do resistance training, it can improve your quality of sleep and the amount that you sleep, which can also help with chronic inflammation. Another cause of chronic pain is inflammation, and inflammation happens for a lot of reasons. Stress, it can also be poor diet, but also not exercising. So you can help reduce inflammation in your body by doing resistance training as well. And also cleaning up your diet, which is another topic for another day. Better mental health. Yes, better mental health. This is one, especially for me, this is one of my favorite benefits because as a person with A DHD and autism, I find that when I consistently do resistance training, I just feel like I'm able to focus more.

My mental health is so much more improved. My self-image is also improved, which helps with my mental health. I like the way that my body looks as I get stronger as I put on more muscle, and that improves my mental health too, because I like what I see in the mirror more or less on most days, of course, I still have a little bit of body dysmorphia, but overall it's improved. But by getting better sleep, by getting your body, the movement that it needs, you will just feel better overall. So there's lots of benefits to doing resistance training and building muscle, and I know a lot of people are afraid of lifting weights and getting bulky, but in reality, that's not what happens for most people. That's not what's going to happen. The people who end up with really, really big muscles are people who are bodybuilders, who work out, who have worked out for many, many years in a specific way and who eat a lot and it's, it's actually really, really hard to get big muscles.

Most of us, it's not going to happen. Even if you want it to happen, it's really, really hard to get big muscles. So if that's something that kind of holds you back from starting to do resistance training, you're afraid that you're going to get muscley or bulky muscle is not going to make you bulky. What makes your body bulky and makes your body take up more space is body fat. And so if you're concerned with being bigger, one of the best things you can do is do resistance training in addition to cleaning up your diet and just doing an overall wellness program where that's izing burning fat, but also keeping your metabolism high, which resistance training can do. It's not the resistance training that's going to make you big. Those are some common concerns, but yeah, it's definitely worth doing. That's why it's such a cornerstone of all of the programs that I do for my clients.

You stopped working out after your knee surgery in 2016. You were really fit. You went back for the first time the other day and cannot believe how much muscle you lost. You also gained a lot of weight. You're determined to get back in shape. Just a little shocked. It is shocking. It's hard. It's hard, but you're not alone. It's a really common problem. I've trained tons of clients who've had a very similar issue. I have a client, my gosh, I have one of my favorite clients. He came to me after he had an ACL tear. He had an ACL and meniscus tear, and he had to have surgery, and he gained a lot of weight from that, and he lost a lot of strength. But we've been working together for now, let's see, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, may, about eight months.

And we just tested his maxes after doing a couple of programs for muscle building and strength gaining, and he just bench pressed 300 pounds yesterday. He deadlifted 320 pounds, which is a huge deal for him because back when we first started working together, just anything, any load on his legs would cause knee pain. So we had to start really, really slow with a lot of isometric exercises. But eventually he got to the point where he got strong enough and now he's squatting and deadlifting and he's doing great. Yesterday was the first day you were able to barbell squat in six months pain-free, your knee is finally back to 100%. Let's go. You were able to squat, you were able to do 145 pounds back squats and front squats just to test it out. Amazing. I bet that feels so good. Okay, so now, do you want to know how to build muscle?

Have I convinced you Rufuss would like to say it's true? You should build muscle, become a little meathead like me. Rufuss is fricking muscly. He's a strunk boy. So now that we understand why it's important to do resistance training and why it's important to build muscle, and it's for everybody, okay, men and women, there's not really a difference between the way that men and women should train overall. There are subtle differences, which we can talk about another time. But in general, just to get started, it's easy peasy across the board. The same rules apply for everyone. So the first thing to do is to set aside some time for yourself to do some resistance training between two and three times per week. And I would recommend setting aside between 45 and 60 minutes during those two to three days. So on two to three days, set aside 45 to 60 minutes to do some resistance training and try to make it an ongoing or recurring event.

Put it in your Google calendar or write it in your agenda. Set it as a recurring event two to three days a week at a time that's going to be convenient for you or make time if you need to. But try to make it consistently the same days, the same times on the same days, on a week by week basis because that's going to help you with consistency. And when it comes to making gains, consistency is key here. Staying more or less consistent is super important. So try to find some days or carve out some time for yourself. Two to three days a week for 45 to 60 minutes. Now, when it comes to what you do during your workouts, first off, when you're doing resistance training, if you've never done resistance training before, I think it's a really good idea to work with a personal trainer and learn how to lift with good technique first because it's generally safe and generally safe for everyone of all body types to lift weight or to do resistance training.

You don't necessarily have to do resistance training with weights, but eventually weights are kind of the best way for you to build muscle after a certain point or using machines. But it is best to work with a personal trainer, at least for I would say the first three months of your resistance training journey. That way you can learn technique, you can learn what you need and get into a nice program. If you can't afford a personal trainer, what I would recommend is getting on a program, a resistance training program for beginners. Even if you used to be really fit back in the day and you used to lift, if it's been more than a year or two, start with a beginner level program two to three days a week hitting total body. Or you could do push pull legs. But honestly, I think total body is a probably better option because when you are out of shape, when you haven't lifted or you haven't done resistance training in a long time, a little bit is going to go a long way.

Your muscles probably don't need you to spend an entire training session on your arms or on your legs. You're probably going to be fine with one or two exercises for each muscle group. So I like to do some legs and then do some arms and then some legs, and then some arms, and then some core. That's a generally good rule of thumb pattern to follow for getting back into it. You also, you want to focus on technique first, learn to perform the exercises with good technique. I do post some technique tips on my YouTube channel and some tutorial videos on how to do different exercises, and I'm going to get back to posting more on that. But check out my YouTube channel because I have some breakdowns of how to do different exercises. Learn how to master the technique. Focus on the technique first before you pop a lot of weight onto the barbell.

Learn how to squat with no weight first, and then gradually add more resistance over time with each time that you try a new exercise or an exercise that you haven't done in a long time. Start with no weight or very, very lightweight and focus on rehearsing the movement for a couple of warmup sets. And then get to a point where you can perform the exercise with good technique with that lightweight or no weight. And then when you're ready to challenge yourself, then you can start to gradually add on more resistance using a heavier band, using heavier weight or putting more weight on the machine. Now, this is really important. After you master the technique, it is also important that you keep in mind that your muscles are only going to get stronger if they get challenged, and over time, they're going to need more of something to stay challenged.

What was challenging for you with five pounds in the first week of your training program is going to feel like a warmup with five pounds a couple weeks down the road. So in order to keep your muscles getting stronger over time, you're going to need to either do more repetitions in each set or you're going to need to add on more weight or more resistance. Okay? This is called the principle of progressive overload. And by this we mean that as you get stronger and you're not feeling as challenged anymore, you're gradually adding on more repetitions or more weight or different variations of the exercise to keep your muscles challenged with some kind of a new stimulus over time. How do you know if you're challenging your muscles enough? I like to recommend that people start to pay attention to their bodies when they're training. And whenever you do an exercise, first of all, you need to know what muscle you're trying to feel and where that muscle is and what it feels like when it's working.

Okay? So for example, if you're doing leg extensions on a machine, leg extensions where you're extending, you would have both legs going at the same time or one at a time. The leg extension, the focus is to work the quads. So if you're doing a leg extension, you want to feel the quadriceps on the top of your thighs beginning to burn towards the end of your set. And I usually recommend between 10 and 15 reps for each set. Repetition is one time out and in or down and up. So this would be one rep, two reps, three reps. I usually for beginners and for muscle building, recommend 10 to 15 reps before resting because that's a good chunk for you to get some repetition in with using a pretty lightweight, by the time you get close to 15 reps, you should feel whatever the target muscle is, you should feel that burning.

It should start to get really tired. You don't need to go to muscle failure though, especially as a beginner. I'd like to say stop when you feel like you could do maybe two or three more reps before your muscles give out. That's a good general rule of thumb when you're just getting into muscle building, leave two or three reps in the tank. As you get stronger over time, you can push yourself a little bit more and leave maybe just one or two reps in the tank. Okay? Generally, we don't necessarily go all the way to muscle failure unless you're specifically doing what's called an amrap set as many reps as possible. We usually do AMRAP sets to try to figure out what the right weight is that you should be using, but you don't need to do AM wraps every time you train. Leave one or two, at least one or two reps in the tank at the end of your set, and then rest the muscles actually allow them to rest and recharge somewhere between 30 and 90 seconds, and then you do another set or you switch to another exercise and then come back later.

So generally speaking, I like to keep my new beginner clients doing a straight set of exercises, meaning you're going to do the exercise for a set and then rest for 30 to 90 seconds, and then do another set of the same exercise, then rest for 30 to 90 seconds, and then do one more set. I like this because it gives you the opportunity to master the technique. You're just focusing on that technique, that muscle group, and learning how it feels for that muscle group to work and to get tired. So I like to have my beginners work with straight sets, at least for some of their exercises.

So that's the goal. When you're doing a set of an exercise, make sure that you know what muscle it's targeting. If you're following one of my YouTube videos, or if you're doing one of my training programs, and I use videos to teach my clients, listen closely in the video, I say what the muscle is that this exercise targets, and so you can pay attention to your body while you're doing the exercise and make sure that you're feeling that muscle working and you want to push it until you feel like it's getting tired. It might feel like it's burning, and then stop when you feel like maybe you could do two or three or maybe just one more rep and then rest. Oh yeah. And when I post this to my podcast, the show notes that go with this episode are going to have a downloadable muscles chart that you can download as a freebie.

I would use that. I would download that if I were you. If you're following me on twitch, I'll post about it in my discord when this episode goes live. So you can use that downloadable muscles chart as a reference. So when you're doing an exercise and it says, this is for the quadriceps, you can quick reference, look, where are the quadriceps? Or you can just look it up on your phone too, to return back to the idea of progressive overload. You always want to be feeling like the muscles are burning and they're getting tired, but stopping when you feel like you could only do two or three more reps in the tank, or maybe one at the most, unless your program specifically says to go to failure. But usually for me, the way that I program, I'm only going to recommend going to muscle failure when we are testing something, trying to figure out what weight you should use.

But you can also just sense for yourself, this feels like it's challenging. I feel like I could probably only do two or three more reps. If you're having trouble judging that, if you're like, I don't know what it feels like for my muscles to fail, or for me to only be able to do two or three more, that's when you can do an am wrap just to kind of go until your muscles give out and don't cheat. Don't cheat the weight up. Just go until you can't do anymore, whatever that number is. Next time you do that exercise, use that same weight and then stop one, two, or three more reps before whatever that number was that your muscles failed at. So that's how you can use an AMRAP to figure out what weight you should be using to train, but keep in mind that you're going to get stronger, and eventually that weight is not going to be enough for you to get your muscles challenged and to benefit from it.

So over time, you'll need to do more reps. I think when you're able to do a certain weight or a certain level of resistance easily for 15 reps, and you can do that two times in a row and it's easy, then it's time to go up and wait. In practice though, when I'm watching my clients do an exercise, if they are able to pump out 15 and it doesn't look like it's that challenging, I'm not going to make them do the same weight next week. I'm going to go ahead and bump up the weight. I think they can handle it, but if you're unsure and you're a little bit nervous about bumping up the weight, should I bump up the weight? You can go ahead and stay at the same weight for two weeks or two times that you do that workout and just follow a rule of thumb, that's okay.

You can go slow with your progression. But in general though, if you're using the same weight at the beginning of your program with the same exercises, and then six to eight weeks later you're using the same weight, you're not helping your muscles to grow or to get stronger, you're not doing what your muscles need in order to get stronger. So over time, make sure that you're increasing the weight or increasing the resistance and then bump the reps back down. When you add on more weight, you're probably going to struggle to get to 15. That's the point. If you can only get 10, then you know, okay, this is my challenge weight right now, at least for the next couple of weeks, and every time I train, I'm going to try to get more reps out. So that's how we want to train. We want to progressively add more reps over time until you get to the point where you're able to do 15 easily and then you add more weight.

So make sure you're practicing that progressive overload. So that's it in terms of how to get started with resistance training. You don't have to do hours and hours and hours in the gym doing resistance training can be, you can keep it super, super simple. You don't need to do, especially as a beginner, more than two to five exercises in a workout. You can start with two or three exercises if you just want to get started and just do maybe two or three. You don't have to make it super complicated. You don't have to use every single machine in the gym. Okay? Pick a couple of exercises for your lower body. Two, you're going to do for your lower body, two you're going to do for your upper body, and then one or two that you're going to do for your core, your abdominals, okay? Keep it super simple for yourself.

Get into a routine and prioritize just consistently showing up. And if you need help, of course, I'm a personal trainer. I'm here to answer your questions. You can always ask me questions in the Discord. You can check out my training programs that I've written and used for my clients on my website, and you can also apply to work with me. I do write custom programs for people, and I coach people one-on-one, and I am taking on clients. So if you're interested in personal training, you can also check out my website and scroll down and click on personal training. So lots of options, but it is, again, very worthwhile doing. No matter how old you are, no matter whether you're a man or a woman, no matter whether you have old injuries or not, if you have muscles, if you have a body and you are alive, you can get stronger and it will improve your life if you work on your strength.

Now, there's another conversation that we could have in terms of what are the best exercises to do for resistance training, but that is a discussion for another day and another episode that we'll return to and talk about soon that I just want to make sure to kind of give you guys just to start thinking about. This is something that you can do, okay? And it's something that you should do. It's going to help you to feel better, to feel stronger, to reverse the aging process and just to be healthier. And it's just two or three times a week, dude, that's all it is, is two or three times a week. You don't have to be going to the gym five, six days a week and doing tons of high intensity HIIT workouts or whatever to achieve the body that you want. You actually can get more bang for your buck by doing resistance training.

You'll get your body closer to that toned look that everybody talks about through resistance training. And this traditional method of strength training is enough as long as you're also eating healthy and following a generally healthy diet and eating generally the right amount of calories. So I hope that you find this helpful, and I hope that this is encouraging for you. And we will talk more about how to do resistance training and coming streams and episodes. But in the meantime, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel where I post my podcast, as well as exercise tutorial videos. You can also join my Discord server, the Coaching Corner Discord Server, where I share information and hang out with me here on Twitch, Twitch TV slash JD Gaines. And if you are a subscriber and you want me to look at your technique for a resistance training exercise or any kind of exercise, you can post in the Technique Reviews channel of my Coaching Corner Discord server, and I review these videos and I give feedback on my Twitch channel.

On Tuesdays, we call it Technique Tuesdays. Make sure you just post those into the Discord and the Technique Reviews channel in the fitness and health category. You need to make sure that you mark that you're interested in the fitness and health stuff, and then you can post your videos and I'll review them. So I'm here to help, and you also have lots of other people in this community who are very helpful and encouraging, and you can do it. I believe in you. So yeah, go out there and get some muscles and get stronger. It's good for you.

Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, aka Jaydigains. If you would like to join me live when I am live on my Twitch channel, you can follow me at twitch.tv/jaydigains. Also, if you're interested in doing one of my training programs, check out my website, jaydharrisonfitness.com. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you drink your water, eat your veggies, eat your protein, and prioritize your self-care. Have a great rest of your day.