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Hello and welcome to The Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. So today we're having the first in a series about resistance training or weightlifting. And if you almost skipped this episode because you really want nothing to do with weight training, you're absolutely in the right place.
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And if you have started some weight training. and it hasn't turned out exactly the way you'd like it to be, you're also exactly in the right place. See, weight training or resistance training has a tremendous amount of evidence showing how important it is for us, especially as we age.
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But there's a lot of conflicting information out there. There's a lot of current information being pushed that really make it difficult. for someone who wants to get started. And so this is part of our Getting Started series.
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So if you're absolutely new to weight training, or if you've dabbled with it in the past and gotten injured or had some bad experiences, this is a really good place for you to start. So let me give you a little bit of a backstory.
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And I don't talk about my backstory a whole lot in the podcast. I usually try to get right to the information, but I think It's very relevant here. So I spent many, many years, I spent years as a nurse, and then many years in the corporate world in regulatory affairs, working with medical devices.
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And then after that, I wanted to get back to working with people, working with individuals and helping them. I didn't want to go back to the hospital. I worked in cardiology and a vast percentage of my patients were repeat customers.
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We would call them frequent flyers. Probably not the most respectful name, but if I explain it, you probably will understand. And that would be someone who would not take very good care of their health and would become ill, and they would come into the hospital, and we would get them all tuned up.
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We'd get their medications back on board, we'd get their fluids back on board, their electrolytes balanced, whatever we needed to do, and send them home looking and feeling great. And then they would stop doing everything that we told them to do.
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Stop taking their medications, stop taking the exercise they needed to, stop eating the way that they needed to to stay healthy with their particular diagnosis. And in a few months, they would be right back. And we would repeat the cycle over and over again.
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And I'm sure it was frustrating for them as the patient, but it was really frustrating for us as caregivers because you felt like the teaching and really everything you were doing was for nothing. So I didn't want to step back into that role, but I did want to help people.
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And I did want to make a difference in people's health. So while I was still working in the corporate world, I started doing Pilates and decided I wanted to teach. So I went through Pilates training, excuse me, and started teaching.
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And along with that, because Pilates is a wonderful tool, but it's not a complete toolbox for people, especially people with injuries, which is who I've typically worked with and attracted into my practice, I went and got my personal trainer certification so that I had a complimentary set of tools in order to progress or regress the exercises that my clients needed.
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Well, I came to a bit of a quandary when I started getting clients that had more and more injuries and they wanted to lift weights because they wanted to get stronger. So they would sign up for some sessions. They'd come in they'd want to start a weight program and there's some pretty typical patterns, protocols, series that you start with someone who's just, just getting started lifting weights. But as i looked at these people with their injuries or with the accumulated wear and tear on our bodies as we age I didn't feel comfortable loading them or that's the term we use for saying adding weights to their motions Because I didn't know how well their body was going to tolerate it.
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And I didn't know how well their body was working. So if I saw someone come in walking with a limp, I knew that I didn't want to just blindly add weight to a part of the body that already wasn't working properly.
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And that's what led me to MAT or muscle activation techniques, because it was a way to assess muscle balance or muscle imbalance, one side compared to the other, ranges of motion, one side of the body compared to the other. And it is a really great tool because it uses the client's own body or patient's own body for the control.
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So rather than saying that a knee joint should have X number of degrees of motion, we simply compare one side of the body to the other. And what's been known for many, many years and what I find always with my clients is when we're balanced, even if we don't have the biggest range of motion, especially as we age, if we're balanced if muscles on both sides of our body are working similarly, we're pretty comfortable.
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We're pretty pain-free. So through MAT, I learned that muscle assessment. I learned to treat specific ranges of motion that weren't working properly. And then when I knew that the body was actually functioning, that the muscles were actually firing when they were supposed to, then I felt comfortable adding weight, adding an extra stressor in order to build those muscles.
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So I still find it challenging to listen to folks who are developing online programs to really say, how do you know you aren't doing more harm than good? Because we certainly know that clients...
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are coming to experts because they don't know what exercise to be doing or how much or how to get started. So people come, they expect some expertise, and many of the online programs and many even of the programs that they have running in gyms take very basic exercises and then apply them to the person without a lot of individual assessment.
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If you're operating fine, if your body's operating optimally, that's great. It's a great place to start. But if not, we want to do some pre-work. And this is work that I'm going to talk about today that you're going to be able to do on your own.
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If you don't have access to someone who practices MAT, if you don't have someone in your area who can do this kind of work and help you out with it, then these are some ways that you can get started first with the assessment before you add load.
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The other reason that I think this is really important is the messaging now around weight training, especially for women, has become lift heavy, lift heavy, lift heavy. Go out and lift heavy. Get rid of the mamby-pamby pink weights.
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And if you've been online at all, you've probably heard that a lot. And that's just not appropriate. It's not appropriate to add heavy weights to a body that isn't functioning properly. It's not appropriate to add super heavy weights to a body that is already maybe carrying 50, 60, 70, 80 pounds of extra weight.
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There's work that needs to be done before that. So today we're going to talk about that work. And then in subsequent episodes, we're going to talk about some of the fine tuning, some of the differences in what happens in your body when you're using free weights compared to machines.
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We can get into some of that nuance. But right now I want to stick with the absolute basics, what you need to get started, some things you can think about. And maybe it won't have weight training be such a scary thing in your mind anymore. So the first thing that we want to do is a very good assessment of our range of motion.
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And we can do this standing, start out standing in front of a full-length mirror, in front of your bathroom mirror, and move your body in very natural ways. Go ahead and lift your shoulders up to your ears and drop them back down.
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And watch your body do those movements. And does it look the same on your right side and your left side? The same with raising your arms overhead or out to the side or twisting or moving your neck and head. These are gentle movements that you're going to use.
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Because you want, first of all, it's important to put your body through its ranges of motion every day. And if you did nothing else but a good full range of motion every day, that would be a great start if you're starting from the couch, so to speak.
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When we add weights to a body, our range of motion is often extended just a little bit. Because when, for example, when we're going to do a bicep curl, and you extend your arm and the weight goes down, the weight is going to pull a little bit more on that muscle and it's going to make that range of motion a little bit bigger.
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And that's not a bad thing and we strive to control weights through the full range of motion, but the reason we want to know what that range is in the first place and to know if one side is having a little bit more trouble than the other side with range of motion is because we would want to make adjustments.
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If part of our body is already struggling, we want to assist it. We don't want to add more stress to it. And when we talk about stress, we talk about weight training. It is stress. It's intentional stress put on the muscles.
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And the purpose of lifting weights, the purpose of lifting something heavy, is that we actually do tiny little bits of damage to our muscles tiny little bits of tiny little micro tears and that's good that's the purpose. It's a positive stress put on the body so then the body goes in heals that tissue and we become stronger that's how our muscles actually get bigger but we don't want to add that stress to a system or to part of a system that already isn't functioning properly.
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So my first recommendation when we absolutely start, and I'll say again from the couch, is that we go through full ranges of motion with our body before we add any weight at all. The other purpose this serves is to help you move back into your body.
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Very often we spend time in our heads. We're at work. We're doing. We're thinking. We're planning. Actually looking at our body as it's moving helps us move back into that space, helps us make more aware, make ourselves more aware of how our body feels.
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Not just where we have aches and pains, but how far, where things move, where things don't move as well, where we would like to see some motion. And by doing this prior to adding weight, we aren't adding a lot of extra stress.
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Here comes the interesting part, because this is contrary to everything that you're probably hearing in the media right now regarding weightlifting. I then want you to do these ranges of motion with small weights.
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And it's not because I think this weight is going to impact the muscle in the way that weight training is supposed to. It's not going to cause the tiny micro tears. It's not going to cause healing, but it's going to make you more aware of that range of motion.
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So even if people have a lot of trouble moving an area, if their mind isn't real connected to their body, and I can see that they aren't. paying attention, I'll add a very small amount of weight, like a pound or less, like a soup can amount of weight, so that you actually have something to focus on, something to watch in that movement, something that feels just a little bit different than just lifting your arm or than just extending and bending your arm.
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So tiny weights. Those little pink weights that are so much maligned can be very helpful in re-establishing the mind-body connection that you really need when you're going to be lifting weights. Because it's important to pay attention to how your body is responding and to how it feels.
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Weight training for our health is not about performance. on a stage. It's not about getting as big as you can. Those are all different practices that don't have anything to do with health.
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And in the same way we've talked about marathon running, for example, it's an activity that takes a lot of training. But you actually have to recover from it to be healthy. So bodybuilders achieve their gains.
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They get their measurements. They get the look that they want and are competing for. But they are not healthy when they're doing it. And if you ask any of them, they'll absolutely tell you that. It is not a healthy activity. It is an event.
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It is a performance for which training is done. But I think that those things often get confused when it comes to the world of movement and exercise, what's done for an event, what's done for a performance, as compared to what we do to maintain our health in the long run.
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And that's what this podcast is all about, maintaining health in the long run. So I don't want to go too long here. I really strive to keep these episodes easily consumable. but first we want to focus on range of motion, mind-body connection.
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Adding small amounts of weight may help with that. If we're lifting our leg, bending our knee, we can do this lying down someplace for a mattress or lying down on the floor. Pulling our knee up to our chest.
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Just any kind of range of motion, any sort of motion that your body normally does. It can help with the concentration and the mind-body connection to add a small amount of weight to that. Again, very small. It's not about building the muscle.
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It's not about performance. It's about creating the mind-body connection. So, full range of motion, observation, mind-body connection, potentially small amounts of weight. After you've done this for a period of time, or if you're sort of...
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partway through this process already on your own. Once you've established these things, then I want you to select a workout routine that you'd like to do. Many of us have them, have favorite things that we like to do.
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You might have tapes or videos that shows how old I am, DVDs that you've done in the past. Pick something beginner that you want to work towards and start with just body weight.
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So again, not adding any weights at all and complete the exercise routine. So even if the favorite routine that you have has you using weights, has you using dumbbells, even if it says it's a beginner, start with doing all of those movements.
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And that's what these weightlifting exercises, that's what weight training is, choreographed movements. Start by doing them without weights first. Now, I know this is not glamorous. And I know if somebody's watching you, you think you probably look ridiculous.
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But starting this process actually helps you to learn to work with your body and not against it. All right? We aren't lifting weights to punish ourselves. We're lifting weights to get stronger and healthier. In the next episode, we'll take the next step in how to add weight and progress it at your own pace, at a pace that's going to make you feel and look better.
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So, as always, happy to hear from you. If you have any questions or comments, email, or give me a call. And until next week, let's go out and own it.
