Welcome to the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast!

In this episode, personal trainer Jayd Harrison explains what resistance training is, why it's important, and how it's different from other forms of exercise like cardio and mobility training.

This episode was recorded during a live stream on the Jaydigains Twitch channel (https://twitch.tv/jaydigains). Join live streams every Tuesday and Friday on Twitch starting around 11:30am EST.

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What's up? Welcome to the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast. I am Jayd Harrison, a k a Jaydigains, and on today's episode, I'm going to share with you some clips from my live stream on my Twitch channel. And in this series of clips, I'm going to talk about what exactly resistance training is. If you have hung out on any of my social media platforms, on my live streams on Twitch, you've probably heard me talk about resistance training. In this episode, I'm going to break down exactly what resistance training is and how to get started with it. As a beginner, I'm hoping that this discussion will help to clear the air and give you a better understanding of what it means when we talk about resistance training versus other styles of training like cardiovascular training or mobility training. If you would like to join one of my Twitch streams, I go live every week on Tuesdays and Fridays in the fitness and health category.

My channel is twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you want to join, I usually start somewhere around 11:30 AM Eastern Standard time, and I would love to see you there. Now, if you can't join the Twitch streams, keep in mind that you can always watch the VOD afterwards, the video on demand, or I might pull from those discussions and just put them here in the podcast. Now, keep in mind that there is a video component to this podcast episode. If you're not already watching here on YouTube. At some points I may use visual demonstrations to talk about whatever it is that I'm discussing. So if you are listening to the audio, you may be missing out on some of those visuals, but don't worry, it will still make sense. But if you would like the visual component, just go to my YouTube channel, the Jaydigains Coaching Corner YouTube channel.

If you are already on the YouTube channel, keep in mind that there's an audio version of this podcast that you can listen to anywhere you get your podcasts. Wherever you are, make sure that you subscribe so that you always get notified whenever new episodes drop. And also follow me on my other social media. I'm Jaydigains everywhere. For weekly nutrition tips and training tips delivered right to your email, sign up for my email newsletter from my website jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. Without further ado, let's get into the discussion of what resistance training is. So let's go back to the very, very beginning. What resistance training is? Resistance training is a style of exercise and the goal is to train your muscles either to build muscle or build strength your muscles, they're all, they generate force, right? They move your joints, all of your muscles, they control your joints in some way for every direction that a part of your body can move, there is a muscle responsible for that, right? So for bending your elbow, the muscle is responsible for that or there's biceps. And for straightening your elbow, the muscle that does that is the triceps. And we want to be mindful of maintaining the health of these muscles because they are what hold us upright. Our muscles are what move us from one place to another. They are responsible for so much activity in our daily lives

That we don't even realize, right? Everything from reaching up in the kitchen to grab something off of the shelf, to bringing in your groceries, to moving furniture around. Anytime you move, every time you move your body, there is a muscle that's responsible for that. And as we get older, our muscles get weaker and they also get weaker when we don't use them. So our muscles, because our bodies are trying to operate as efficiently as possible, they will take away energy from things that don't get used very much. So if you don't use your muscles a lot, your body will break that tissue down and direct the energy that would go to that somewhere else. So if you want to stay strong, you have to keep your muscles challenged. And that's the principle of resistance training is that we challenge the muscles in just the right extent to keep them strong or to even improve their strength and make them grow.

So it's incredibly important the older that you get to maintain the health of your muscles and keep them strong. Also, your bone density tends to decrease over time, especially if you're a woman or you have a female body. Women, people with female bodies are really susceptible to osteoporosis, which means that your bones are brittle, which means they're more likely to break if you bump into something or if you fall and past a certain age, if you fall, especially if you break a hip and you get injured, the likelihood of you recovering from that goes down the older that you get. If you want to be able to go about your life and live independently, you need to maintain and take seriously the health of your muscles. So like I said before, your muscles are only going to stay as strong as they are stimulated to be.

So if you don't use them, they get weaker, they get broken down, your body will break them down over time. If you want them to stay strong, you have to use them. And this is why I, and many personal trainers and coaches are big proponents of living active lifestyles try to move as much as possible. If you stay sedentary and you sit in a chair for hours and hours and hours every single day, your body is going to decay and break down at a much faster rate and you're going to lose muscle and other thing, your heart will get weaker. And there's so many other health problems that will come with that. So by living a healthy fit lifestyle, meaning an active lifestyle where you're getting up and you're moving a lot every day, you're stimulating your muscles. And that's a great way to keep them healthy and to keep them strong, but at the same time, if you want to make them stronger and help to combat against that process of sarcopenia, which is the word for when muscle breaks down with age.

If you want to combat sarcopenia, you need to incorporate resistance training into your exercise routine or your activity routine. And the recommendations for that is minimum two times a week, two to five days a week is sort of like the average recommendation. And with resistance training, what you do is you challenge the muscles to do their job, whatever their job is against resistance. So for example, the bicep manipulates the elbow, the bicep makes the elbow bend, right? For resistance training, we add some kind of resistance that makes the bicep have to work harder to bend the elbow. So the most common form of resistance training, the most common way to add resistance is with weights. So in order to challenge the bicep to bend, we're going to add a weight so that the bicep has to work harder against gravity to do its job and bend the elbow.

So that's the essence of resistance training. You can add resistance with weight, you can add resistance with bands, you can do body weight resistance and just use your body against gravity to make your muscles have to work harder to do their jobs. When we are doing things like squatting and deadlifting, we are making the leg muscles work. We're forcing the quadriceps and the glutes to push and engage the knee, extend the hips against resistance by making our bodies heavier. For example, when I squat, when I squat, my quadriceps, my glutes, they have to engage the quadriceps, they extend my knee, the glutes extend my hip, and when I squat, they have to do that at the same time. And for some people squatting with just their body weight is hard enough, they'll feel challenged in their muscles and their muscles will get enough challenge that it stimulates muscle growth.

But after a certain point, your muscles doing this is not hard at all, right? And so that's when you need to add more resistance to make it harder for them to do their job. And so we add weight to the body so that the muscles have to work harder. So now I'm 10 pounds heavier, my legs have to push against 10 more pounds of resistance. You can also use machines. Machines that like with cables, they work very similar to the tube bands, but basically all resistance training is getting the muscles to contract and extend and do their job, but be pushed against some kind of resistance. So the goal here when we are doing resistance training is to challenge the muscles to work against more resistance than what they're used to. So this is what's super important to keep this in mind because I see so many people when I used to work at a gym, I would see so many people who for months would use the exact same weights, do the exact same workout routine with the same number of reps in each set.

At a certain point, if you do the same thing with the same weights, the same number of reps, the same routine, your body is eventually going to adapt to that because as your muscles are stimulated, they grow, they get stronger, and they do that so that your body doesn't have to spend as much energy on doing whatever the thing is that you're asking them to do. So for example, if I were to squat with a 10 pound medicine ball and do this two times a week, do three sets of 10 with the medicine ball at the beginning, that might be hard for me. That might be really difficult and I might feel my muscles burning. And then after my workouts, I might feel really sore and tired because I've challenged my muscles, but eventually my body will adapt and I will get stronger to the point where squatting three by 10 with 10 pounds is not going to be hard anymore.

At that point, if I were to continue to do that same workout, same nerve reps, same amount of resistance, I would not be pushing my body enough to keep the muscle or to get the muscle stronger, and I wouldn't be pushing enough to burn more calories either because my body's goal is to make everything more efficient. So if I want to continue to get stronger and if I want to continue to build muscle, once it becomes easy for me to do that three by 10 with 10 pounds, I'm going to have to make the exercise harder by adding more weight or adding more reps or adding another set. So that's called progressive overload. As your body adapts to whatever type of workout you're doing, you're going to need to keep it challenged with some kind of new stimulus or novel stimulus by adding more weight, adding more reps, right?

And that's super important to do if you want to continue building muscle or burning fat. So if you want to continue getting your muscles stronger, then you're going to need to progressively overload your muscles over time. And the way that I typically when I'm training clients, I recommend that we do this is by adding more reps. Initially, I like for people to start with a weight that feels challenging at somewhere like eight reps, and then over time try to add more reps when they work out. And rule of two, if you can do the same amount of weight for the same number of reps for two workouts in a row, then add more reps and I'll have them add more reps until we reach where they're doing sets of 12, and then we'll increase the weight to the point where if eight feels challenging again, and then we'll start back adding more reps every two workouts until they can do 12 reps on that same exercise and then we increase the weight.

So that's a great way that you can keep your body challenged with novel stimulus. Is it no longer resistance training if you go above a certain threshold of exertion? What makes something resistance training versus not? Typically, the contrast that we see with a question like that is when is it cardio versus resistance training? And I want to say that the distinction lies in the focus. If your goal of your training is to build muscle to get the muscles bigger or to build strength, then it's resistance training. And there are recommendations for how to train that, make that resistance training versus cardio the goal of the workout for a cardio exercise. For cardio workout, the goal of cardio is to get your heart rate up and to keep it up for a certain amount of time. Cardiovascular training is an emphasis on the heart and keeping your heart pumping.

So you'll get some cardiovascular benefit from doing resistance training because especially if you're doing high volume sets when you're doing sets of 6, 8, 10, even more than that, when your heart gets pumping a bunch, you are training your heart. You're going to get some cardiovascular benefit from that. But a cardiovascular workout is one where the focus is on getting the heart rate up and keeping it up. So you may see resistance training exercises like squats or pushups in a cardio focused workout like an interval training, and you'll get some muscular benefit from that. But the primary adaptation that you're going to get from a workout like that where you are staying moving the whole time is going to be your cardiovascular system and maybe some muscular endurance as well. Muscular endurance is slightly different from cardiovascular endurance, so you'll get both. That's I think of training.

I categorize it in three main families. You have your resistance training, which is what we're talking about. You have your cardiovascular training, which the focus is on the heart rate and keeping the heart rate up. We're not necessarily trying to build muscle or build strength or power. You'll build some power in a lot of plyometric style cardio training. But the goal is on the heart, I'll say the goal of resistance training is to improve some aspect of your muscular health. And there's four different kinds of muscular health. We typically separate it out into four different ways like the muscles adapt. One is hypertrophy muscle growth, which is what you should focus on in your first year or two of resistance training, muscle growth, hypertrophy and technique like learn how to do the thing. But the specific adaptation that you want to achieve is hypertrophy. And hypertrophy is just the size of the muscles.

Strength is the amount of force your muscles can generate. So it's like in one go, how much weight can I possibly lift? How much force can my biceps generate strength? That will improve in the first year or two of your resistance training as well as you, your muscles get bigger. Your're also going to improve your strength. Strength is kind of a function of both the muscle size of what the raw mechanical structures are that are there in your muscles with also the consideration of your nervous system because how you fire up your muscles, it doesn't matter how big your muscles are if your brain is not connected to them. And we have to spend time programming our nervous system to fire up all of the muscle fibers that need to be fired up in order to make a movement happen. And if you don't exercise and if you don't move your body a whole lot, that mind muscle connection is not going to be very strong.

So one of the things that you want to spend time on in your first year or so of resistance training is forming those motor neuron pathways and fortifying those motor neuron pathways. That's the energy pathways, the electricity pathways from your brain to your muscles, and that's your muscle control. So it's like how big are your muscles and then how well are you able to control them? There's many motor neuron units throughout a muscle. You don't just flex the muscle in one spot and that makes the whole muscle go right. There's actually a network of web of nerves that activate different parts of the muscle for each bundle of muscle fibers. There's a motor neuron unit that tells that fiber to shorten when that happens to a lot of them at the same time, when a lot of fibers, a lot of bundles of fibers are being told to shorten at the same time, that's when you actually see the joint move.

So those have to be, it's kind of like the hypertrophy helps with the hardware of your muscles developing strength is kind of developing, like developing your software, the actual programming that takes place where your brain tells the hardware to do what the thing is that it needs it to do. And then there's power, muscular power, which is strength, but also how fast can you go. So it's not just how much force can you generate, how much of your muscle can you activate and how much can that push? It's also how fast can you push or pull that? So it's like, oh, I can deadlift 245 pounds, but considering power is like, how fast can I get that weight up? So power is force and speed together. And then endurance. Endurance is how much time can your muscles continue activate again and again and again or just stay activated?

So if I'm holding a weight and I want to see how long can I hold this weight to make my bicep work and I'm going to let it go until my biceps are burning and I'm trying to push myself so that I can hold the weight longer, or I'm going to just keep doing reps and let my muscles burn and I'm going to keep pushing until I'm really close to the point where I can't push it anymore. So all four of those are parts of your muscular health and they're all four things that can be developed through resistance training. And whenever you do any kind of resistance training, all four of those aspects get some benefit. You'll improve in some capacity in all four aspects, but if you are specifically trying to really maximize your muscle size, there's ways that you can tweak your training to lend itself more towards developing more size versus endurance or speed and power.

Same thing with strength. You're going to get some strength. You're developing the mind muscle connection with muscle building style training, but when you're doing power lifting, for example, you're really forcing your muscles to all fire at the same time. That is going to lend itself more towards being able to move more weight. It does depend on what your specific goal is. So there's ways to tweak your resistance training that are going to give you more of one adaptation versus another. And it's not like one is better than the other. And a lot of times people will alternate between working towards building muscle and working towards building strength, working towards building endurance or power hypertrophy, strength, power and endurance. Where does mobility fit in? If we have a Venn diagram of training styles, we have a circle that is resistance training. We have a circle that is cardio.

We have a circle that is mobility training because it depends. Mobility training sometimes includes resistance training. It also sometimes includes dynamic stretching, static stretching, myofascial release, and these are not resistance training. So it depends on the type of mobility exercise that you're doing. These are all general categories that help us talk about the things that we're doing, but if you try to force any of them into a strict box, you're going to hurt your brain. Okay. Like I said, it depends on the goal. So if you have a mobility workout that includes some exercises where you're trying to build muscle within a certain range of motion, that's resistance training, but it also is mobility. It's both. And it's okay that it's both just like doing box jumps, it works as resistance training. It also works towards cardio. It can be both.

They can be both. You'll get a little bit of everything the first time that you do any kind of workout, but as your body adapts, as your body adapts, certain adaptations become harder to achieve. And that's why when you see people who are more advanced in the gym, that's why they have to focus their training because as their bodies have adapted, it's harder and harder to get the body to change. In the beginning when you haven't been doing any activity and you start doing resistance training, your cardio is going to improve. You're going to see your resting heart rate drop, your heart's going to become more efficient, your muscles are going to grow, you're going to get stronger. You'll have better mind muscle connection. Your endurance will go up as well. Everything will increase across the board. But then after a certain point, it gets harder to keep your body advancing and you have to start focusing your energy on one thing or just a handful of things and the other things get some benefit, but you're going to get a lot more growth in one area. And then you can switch if you want to switch your focus, and then you focus your energy on this area and you bring that up if you want it to continue to grow at a decent pace, that is what resistance training is. I hope that that makes sense.

Thank you so much for watching. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and that now you have a little clearer understanding of what resistance training is. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already, and follow me on my socials. I'm Jaydigains everywhere. I will see you next time. Don't forget to drink your water, eat your veggies, and eat your protein, and I'll see you next time.