 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health and entertainment podcast, we talk about the differences between men and women in terms of training and diet. Should women train and eat differently to get to their goals? So we highlight some of the general differences, everything from hormones to the essential fat that you need on your body, how they should train, maybe the signs of overtraining. We cover all of that. So we think you're gonna enjoy this episode. Now this podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Viori. Now Viori makes some of the best high quality athleisure wear you can find anywhere. It's extremely comfortable. You can wear it in the gym or you can wear it out to the restaurants, to coffee, to wherever you want. Looks really, really good, very, very comfortable. Has a lifetime guarantee. It's a great company we love working with. We have a discount for you because you listen to Mind Pump. In fact, we'll get you a full 25% off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to vioriclothing.com. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com forward slash Mind Pump. There'll be a code listed on the page for that discount. Also, all month long, one of our most popular programs, Maps Strong, is 50% off. This is a phenomenal resistance training program that builds great strength in the body, special emphasis on the posture of your chain, your glutes, your hamstrings, your upper back, your mid-back, and your lower back. But it does work the whole body. When you enroll in Maps Strong, you have access to all the workout videos, the workout blueprints, basically everything you need to follow this full entire program. It's a three month routine. It gets people phenomenal results. Again, it's half off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to mapsstrong.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-T-R-O-N-G.com and use the code Strong 50. That's S-T-R-O-N-G-5-0, no space for the discount. By the way, congratulations, they're gents. You have officially been on the first page of the macronutrient calculator already. It's only been live. You mean on Google first page? Yeah, that's a pretty big deal, man. I think we've only been up there for maybe two, we've been live for two weeks and for it to already be ranked on the first page of Google, it's pretty awesome. It's got a lot of good content. Yeah, no, I was actually going through, I mean, I know that you kind of, you oversaw most of that as far as the content you and Katrina saw and I haven't had a chance to actually go through like all the different blogs and I mean, there's what, probably 50 plus blogs attached to it. It's loaded with content. Well, there's several calculators attached to that run, right? There's one that recommends how many calories you should eat in macros. Then there's ones that help figure out how many calories you're burning, what your basal metabolic rate is. And then there's one that figures out what your calories burned are when you calculate in activity. Of course, these are all estimations based off of some pretty good sophisticated formulas. And then there's one that shows based off of hundreds of natural bodybuilders from the past of what your potential muscle building potential is. If you're a man and you stay natural and you train perfectly, need perfectly. And there's lots of content attached to all that. Yeah, I was looking at Jeremiah, one of the writers in our content, he wrote a blog that is performed really well and I thought it would be a really good discussion for us to kind of elaborate on it. And the article was, is it harder for women to obtain abs than men? And it's one of the more popular ones that's read on that pillar page. And I thought, oh, it's been a while since we've discussed the differences with training and dieting and exercise for men and women. And I think that would be a really good talk. Yeah, you see a lot of marketing really like pull people in that direction of like. And I think it too, it's a pain point because sometimes, I've trained a lot of women women that claim that their husband gets results like really fast and what's my issue? Why am I not getting the kind of results that he's getting at the same time? Yeah, this is a good topic because first off, it gets me a little riled up. By the way, before we continue, if you wanted to read some of those articles and content, the site is maps macro.com. So MAPS and then macro.com. I like this one because for me, it's a clear example of how the fitness industry takes things and twists them to convince people to buy gym memberships or to buy supplements or products. You know, when gyms first opened long time ago, when people first started working out or especially when people first started using resistance to train their body like weights and body weight and stuff, it was primarily men that did this. It was very, very, very rare to see a woman follow any kind of physical culture type training. Women were not involved in lots of sport way back in the day. It was considered masculine and manly and so women were kind of, they were discouraged from doing anything like that. And then on top of it, as it became popular, as resistance training got popular, I mean, it really didn't start to hit mainstream until the 1970s and 80s when in particular, a documentary came out called Pumping Iron, which is a documentary I watch many, many times. Up until that point, building muscles and doing resistance training was like a sideshow. You know, nobody did that mainstream. Nobody lifted weights. Nobody worked out that way really, except for the sideshow freaks or whatever. And that documentary came out. You had the charismatic Arnold Schwarzenegger on that and people started becoming more aware of resistance training. But the side effect of that was the people that you saw doing it were bodybuilders, were these huge muscular bodybuilders and that didn't really appeal to women, understandably so. Don't you think a lot of that has to do with just the lack of research that we had around it? I mean, back then there wasn't a lot of study. I mean, we see so many studies now on the benefits of resistance training that didn't really exist in the 70s and the 80s really. That didn't start getting popular, I feel like until even like the 90s when we started seeing it. No, so all we had to judge it on was, oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Colombo and Lou Ferrino, all these guys from Pumping Iron, that's what happens when you lift weights. That's the result of lifting weights is you're gonna look like that. Right, right. And so gyms grew in popularity, but they still had a big problem with attracting women. In the 80s you had workout videos that were targeted towards women and the way that they targeted women is literally by saying, you're not gonna build bulky muscles. That was part of their advertising. Don't worry, you're not gonna look like these bodybuilders. Gyms started catching on and they started thinking, because here's the other thing too, as consumers, women actually are the number one consumers in our market. Women buy more things and shop for more things and make those decisions more often than men do. And so gyms, in order to become successful, realized, well, we need to attract women to our doors. One of the ways they did that was with aerobic classes and step classes, which were kind of like dance-based workouts. How do we get them though to come into our gyms and lift weights? So what they did is they took the machines. And colored them purple. Yeah, they put purple or pink. This is true. So patronizing. My first job as a personal trainer back in 1997 was at the 24 Hour Fitness on Hillsdale. This is before they remodeled it and moved it. And in that gym, which had been around for a little while, you had a women's only area in there, okay? So you had your main workout area and then there was a women's only workout. And when you walk in there, the women's only area, it was the same machines you saw out in the general area. The difference was the upholstery on them was pink or purple. So it's like, this is for women. Why? Because it's colored pink or it's the same equipment. It was literally the same stuff. It was just colored pink or purple. The fitness industry also started to come up with terminology that would attract women. So for men, you could definitely attract them to resist the training by saying build muscle. But for women, if you said build muscle, then you would elicit these images of big bodybuilders. So like, we can't say build muscle. We got to say something else. So they created the term toned. Tone and firm, elongate. Yeah, those are all invented words, toned. Literally, obviously we know what they're trying to say. It means your muscles feel harder. But that's what happens when your muscles build initially. They just feel harder. Muscles, by the way, don't tone. They don't elongate. They don't do all that stuff. What they do is they build or they shrink. That's it. And when they build to a smaller degree, they feel harder. And when you lose muscle, they tend to feel softer. So that's basically, if you lift weights, you're building muscle. Yeah, all I saw back in the day was like a lot of those like Jane Fonda and kind of like Jazzercise type programs that were in-house like rarely did they use weights. It was mainly calisthenics and, you know, moving around with really like light weight, if any, and doing multiple reps. So multiple reps was the way to get to that tone look as they would market it. Yes, because what you would see back then is the big bodybuilder muscular people that I don't want to look like, right? I'm a woman. I don't want to look like that guy. How do they work out? Oh, they're pushing and straining and lifting really, really heavy weight. So the market would come out and say, don't worry, you're doing 50 reps and you're not doing any weight. Therefore, you're not going to build big muscles. You're just going to tone your body. Don't worry, you're not going to do those scary barbell squat exercises and deadlifts. Those build big bulky muscles. We're going to do, you know, donkey kickbacks and we're going to do, you know, exercises on one leg or we're going to do these movements on the floor where you lift your leg up because those don't build big bulky muscles. The truth is, and we've said this on the podcast now for five years, toning is just building and the fastest way to tone your body is the same thing as the fastest way to build your body. So reality, lift heavy, do squats, do deadlifts. You'll get to your goals much more effectively and faster. But those are the lies that were perpetrated by the industry, marketing, which is why this topic of, you know, should women train differently than men initially gets me a little riled up. I think it's important too to point out the self-selection bias too, because there's definitely people right now that are listening that are like, yeah, what about Jane Fonda? What about this, my girlfriend who's got this long, beautiful body and all she does is Pilates and yoga or all she does is these toning type exercises. It's very similar to what we see on the other side with men with these massive bodybuilder guys. There's a self-selection bias of people that tend to gravitate towards these types of modalities and genetically they're already made up this way, right? So Jane Fonda has this great, not that she didn't work hard for her body. I'm not taking the credit away from how amazing she is. She still looks amazing at 80-something years old. But her body type, a lot of that is genetics. We talk about that all the time, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger. No matter how hard I train, no matter how much steroids I take, I don't have the genetic potential that Arnold Schwarzenegger has. So I'll never look like that. And so you have to understand that there's that on the other end of the spectrum too. There's body types that tend to gravitate towards a certain way of training and you can't compare your body to what you see them and make use that as a proof. Well, just to support what you're saying, right? It's like the belief that if you swim a lot, you're gonna get a broad shoulders. You're gonna get a flat rib cage and you're gonna look like a swimmer. Well, the reason why we think that is because the top level swimmers look like that because they were born to swim well. When you get to that level of swimming, of competition, you're not only train hard, not only do you swim a lot, but you are also born with long arms, short legs, flat rib cage, wide shoulders, right? So that's kind of to support a lot of what you're saying. Now someone like Jane Fonda or these people who did a lot of these videos, they also lifted weights. A lot of people don't realize that. They also lifted a lot of heavy weights. They didn't market that, but they marketed their videos, but they did lift a lot of weights. And also they're still exercising. They're still eating right and they're still doing it very, very consistently. So they're still gonna look a lot better than if they didn't do that kind of stuff. But the truth is, and we know this now, I don't have to make this, and I love it because I don't have to make this case like I used to. I think people are more aware of this. Oh, this was a major hurdle 20 years ago. Huge. When you first got a client, especially a female client, I would say I spent the first three to six months of my time trying to overcome all of this because for how long it's been marketed to me. Oh, they used to say like, please don't train me like a linebacker. You know, like that was the big thing. Like I came from a football background and all of a sudden it's like, that was a big fears. I don't want to get bulky. I don't want to gain those types of muscles, you know, where I look a little bit more boxy and manly. And I'm like, that's just, that's not gonna happen. Like I had to educate them. No, no. I mean, the truth is, if you want to get a toned sculpted physique as a woman, the fastest way to get there is the same way that you would build the fastest amount of muscle because that's what gives you that look. Here's the other end of it. And I used to tell my clients this all the time, look, here's the worst case scenario, which is actually not a bad case. Worst case scenario, you are a hyper responder to weight training, which is like, we're talking about 0.1% of the population, but let's just say that's you. Lucky you. Okay. You're still not gonna wake up tomorrow after we did our workout, come into the gym and freak out because all of a sudden you look like a man or whatever. It's not gonna happen. Worst case scenario, we get you to where your goal is very quickly because you're a hyper responder. Then you come in and say, hey, I don't wanna, I don't wanna build any more muscle. What a wonderful problem to have. Now we can scale back. We can kind of go easier and just maintain. So no matter which way you slice it, you know, the ways that women have been marketed to train differently and do a lot of stuff than men, totally, totally false. Now that being said, of course, there are some general differences between men and women. And there are probably a few things that we wanna consider maybe in terms of training and diet and whatnot. Now the first big one, of course, is hormones. The hormones are very different in men and women. Mainly men have a much, much, much higher level of testosterone. And of course, women have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone. Now what does that mean in terms of training and diet? Well, testosterone fuels muscle growth. Now there's a lot of things in men that drive more muscle growth for men than for women. One of them though is the big one is testosterone. And if a woman took testosterone, she would also notice more muscle growth. So what does this mean? Well, it means that if you're a woman, you can expect to build strength and muscle at a slower pace than the average man and that your ultimate potential for muscle and strength is lower than that of a man. Really, that's a big, big thing that you need to understand and consider. But I think most women kind of understand. I don't think, you know, I think most women don't, that's not something that they're not unaware of. Would you think that, do you think that there is a few exceptions to the rule where there's a female that has extremely high potential and a male that has extremely low potential? And so there are women that could potentially outbuild or get stronger than some men. Oh yeah, look at the top level female power lifters and then grab like your average, you know, super inactive, you know, whatever computer. Yeah, whatever your stereotypical right computer. Yeah, she's gonna be way stronger. So there's of course, there's exceptions. So we're talking kind of generally speaking. Here's another one, estrogen, progesterone, the female hormones, they tend to make a woman more, have a higher propensity for water retention. This is something that you do want to consider because if you have a, and I used to have to talk to clients about this all the time. If you have a woman that eats, that had a day where she had a lot of sodium, a lot of carbohydrates and then she would freak out because she'd get on the scale and, oh my God, you know, 120 pound woman all of a sudden gained five pounds in a day, which would be, I understand why that would be scary. Then we would talk about, you know, water retention. Water, women just have a higher, you know, propensity for that kind of water fluctuations or retention. Men tend, a man's weight doesn't tend to fluctuate because of water retention, whereas a woman, as much I should say. Well, yes, let me, percentage-wise, because technically my water weight would fluctuate a higher amount of pounds compared to Katrina's. But you're a 200-something pound guy. Exactly, so percentage-wise, I agree with you, but you can't compare that head-to-head because someone's probably listening and going, wait a second, that's not right. My husband fluctuates this much, I fluctuate that much. So there's that. And then of course women have hormones that distinctly fluctuate throughout the month. A man's hormones are relatively stable. Now of course they fluctuate also based off of lifestyle, so a guy can get a testosterone to go up and down if he lacks sleep or he's stressed or he's not eating right. But naturally speaking, if a man's diet and activity and lifestyle were the same all month, he should see very minimal fluctuations in comparison to what a woman will see, especially, you know, because women have a period. And you see progesterone and estrogen, excuse me, flipping with each other, which can cause changes in how you feel, how you sleep, maybe cravings is another big one. Now, ways that I would coach my female clients through this, and this was not all of them, but some of them would tell me things like, hey, at certain times of the month, I find it way more difficult. And they tied, by the way, they tied this to their period because sometimes people say this and then you actually, you boil it down, you realize, oh, you just stressed that work that day or whatever. But so these are women that were tracking, my clients that were tracking. And we could see distinctly, I am more hungry, way more hungry at this time of the month than I am. At this time of the month, like, what do I do with that? So that's different than when I would train a man. One piece of advice I would give them is I'd say, okay, eat more, but make those good food choices. So make sure the food choices are good, but go ahead and feed your body more when you are hungry during those times. Well, the most important point to make right here is that you're making is that you're not adjusting their exercises here, it's just the conversation is different. Yes. And I think that's gonna be the common theme as we go through all this is 100%, there is a difference with a man and a woman. There's a lot of differences between us, but how you train the body isn't that different, but the conversation as a coach or as a trainer, I would have to have a different, because their bodies would respond to things differently. And so therefore getting them to understand why you're holding on water or why you feel this way is different than maybe a male. But as far as the programming that I'm doing for a female that wants to lose body fat and quote unquote, lean or tone, is very, very similar to the man who says to me, I wanna build some muscle and get shredded. Right, right, right. Yeah, those same training applications have benefits for both sexes. Even though there are those differences, it's still gonna benefit, that same training process will benefit both parties equally. Yeah, totally. So back to when appetite would change, here's something that I also noticed with these clients was, yes, they got hungrier at certain times of the month on a regular basis, but that also would balance out with other times of the month when their appetite would actually drop. So not only would they would get hungrier, but then they'd have other times when their appetite would go down. And so I tell them is, if your appetite's down, go ahead and eat a little bit less. And if your appetite's up, go ahead and eat a little more. Just make good food choices. That strategy was very effective because here's what happens sometimes when your appetite goes up because hormone changes and you still restrict, it tends to turn into a rebound in the opposite. You start to binge when you finally do give in. So this was a strategy that I found with some women that worked really, really well. Another big difference, and this is a big one. This is one that I had to talk a lot to female clients about was essential fat. Essential fat represents the amount of fat on your body that your body needs to have in order to function in a healthy place. For a woman, this is much higher than it is for a man. A man can technically be healthy at 7% body fat, 8% body fat all the time. Now I'm not saying it would be easy. They probably stopped to watch what they eat and trained really well, but they could maintain that. Some men can maintain this and they're okay. I believe essential fat for a man is like under 4% or something like that. Now a woman at 8% body fat, not good. She's gonna have, she's probably gonna lose her period. She's gonna have some serious health, negative health effects. So in terms of getting lean and being shredded and staying that way, women need to have more body fat on their bodies than men do. Now the theory on that evolutionary is that it's because of having a baby, right? Is that the reason the body is preparing needs to know, okay, if we're gonna have a child, we need to always have extra amount of energy left on the body in order to support potentially having a child, right? Absolutely. And you know, here's the other part of this. Which is why they also lose their period if they go below that. Yes, yes, so here we go. So I got the, this is according to the American Council on Exercise. For women, essential fat, remember this is, this means like the minimum you need to kind of, you know, have normal health or whatever is for women at least 10 to 13%. By the way, that's shredded for a woman. If you're a 13% body fat for a woman, you've got really good definition. I know women where 13% is too lean also. I know, I've known women where they get down to that percent. Most of my female trainers that worked with me that were in great shape, average between 15 to 19%. Yes, yes. Personal trainers, great shape. Some of them competitors even, they kind of walked around with a 15 to 19% body fat percentage and looked phenomenal. That's where most people, most women listening right now would be very happy with a body fat percentage. And this is a fitness audience too. So most of you listening who are into fitness, you'd be happy in the high teens, maybe even low 20s body fat percentage with good muscle underneath. The way that'll look is you'll have good curve, you'll have good firmness, you'll have decent definition. You'll look really good based off of, and I'm basing this off of what most women's goals are that I've trained. Most of you would be happy with that. But essential is like 10 to 13% for a woman. For a man, it's two to 5%. So it's like half. Well, so they gotta worry when they get below that hormonally, because there'll be a lot of changes. Like I had a client too that was, was a bit under that, let's say like 9% or so, and started to notice a bit of hair loss and some other like stress signals in her body that was going on. Yes, and now why is this important to know? Well, besides the fact that you don't wanna get leaner than what I just said, is that pushing to get lean can cause problems for you if you're a woman. If you're already at 16% body fat and you're like obsessed with going lower and lower and lower, I mean, you're a few percent above what's considered essential body fat. That would be like a guy at 7% body fat, keep pushing, keep pushing to get leaner. Probably, I mean, if you do it for a week, okay, but if you do that consistently, not a good idea. And again, you'll just notice your health will start to decline. In women, this looks like bad skin, hair loss and hormone fluctuation. If you lose your period, then that's a big sign right there. Cause remember that means your body is saying not safe enough for us to procreate. This would be like a man not being able to get an erection or something like that, right? Your body's basically telling you we're not healthy enough to procreate. I find it interesting that that's even a desire, right? Like how that has changed over hundreds of years. When you look back at paintings of women that was done over a hundred years ago, they were like this very voluptuous looking. I mean, that was attractive and sexy. And how much that has changed when you look at covers of magazines and what we look at runway models like that, but men haven't changed that much. If you look at old statues of, you know, people that were gladiators and things like that, they look very similar to the build that most men aspire to today, but it's crazy how much that's changed for women. For women, it was this fuller looking body that was desired and painted and looked at and admired. And now it's turned into this very skinny, lean, lean look, which is unhealthy for most women. It is, you know, what's interesting is that there's some truth in our standards of what we consider to be, to look good, some truth, because it's based off of, it's evolutionary, right? We consider something attractive because it means good fertility and good health. Now, of course, we've distorted that by pushing it too far, but when scientists boil it down and break it down, really what they find is that it's the hip-to-waste ratio that is considered, what we'll consider attractive. So you have someone like Marilyn Monroe, who's much bigger than what might be considered attractive today, but the average man, if looking at Marilyn Monroe, would say, no, that's still attractive. And when you compare the two, what you find is the hip-to-waste ratio is really what it boils down to, but I've never trained a female client ever that wasn't really happy in the high teens, low 20s, body fat percentage. That's lean, but it looks really good. Every female client I've ever trained, I've trained some pretty hardcore ones. All of them were really happy in that body fat percentage range. Getting low into the mid teens and low teens, that's when it starts to not look healthy. It's like a guy at three or 4% body fat, you know? Maybe he looks okay on stage, but if you ever see a man at 4% body fat and you meet him and look in his face, they look gaunt, they don't look very healthy. I've gotten down pretty lean and that's, I remember looking in the mirror being like, oh man, I don't like the way I look. Just look hungry. Yes, yes, like you're starving, like you're starving. Now, there are some general differences that they found in studies in terms of exercise tolerance. Men seem to, generally speaking, seem to have a higher tolerance for high-intensity exercise. And what I mean by high-intensity is shorter bout but higher-intensity type of a workout. So that would be taking like a set of squats to total failure or doing like an hour super ridiculous, intense workout, balls of the wall or whatever you wanna say, beast mode type of a workout. Women, believe it or not, in studies, they show that there's maybe a higher tolerance for volume and frequency. So some studies show that women may actually do recover better from longer or more frequent workouts that have a bit of a lower intensity. As far as sports are concerned, once we start to get into the higher-endurance type sports, women catch up to men and in some cases, I think that the top distance swim in water, I believe is held by a woman. Yeah, and the margin between men and women, I think for running is really, really close. For distance? Yeah, it starts to shrink, right? Sprinting it's big, but then it starts to break. Endurance sports, that's where you can see both sexes are pretty close in terms of who comes out on top. Yeah, so now what does this mean for you as you train? Well, I guess it would mean if you're a woman, be a little bit careful with super high-intensity workouts, more so than maybe a man would. And if you're really advanced, rather than pushing even harder with your workouts, maybe add a little more frequency, since studies show generally speaking, women might do a little bit better of that. The next thing would be, I guess the signs of overtraining, right? The signs of overtraining are very similar in men and women, but there are a couple differences. What were some that you noticed? We said hair loss, that was a real common one. Not only just like what we see, but I think women are more susceptible to it. And the reason why I think that is, is because they typically eat lower amount of calories than this. I remember reading a study way back when that, you know, the average female today gains weight on like 1600 calories, which it's almost impossible for you to even get all the macro and micronutrients your body needs in just 15 or 1600 calories. So you're already kind of at a nutrient deficiency coming into a training program or wanting to lose weight or change your body composition. And then on top of that, because you're so low and then you start to push the body, I think that they're more susceptible to some of these things that we see, like hair issues, headaches, lack of sleep, things like that that would come up. It's not a great combo. Right. And it's very common within clients that I've had coming in and through was addressing the fact that I'd probably, they're probably not eating enough calories, you know, while they're training. And this is something that just, I noticed like, you know, even within my wife and everybody else, I was like trying to help out. It's just a common thing that, you know, if I eat more, I feel like I'm holding on more weight. I feel like I'm gonna get fat. And so it's always in the back of the mind is like, I gotta keep my calories down in order to then get to the fat loss where, you know, building themselves up with muscle would really have more, you know, benefit to them. But that's a really hard sell initially. Yeah, in when men over train, you know, testosterone levels plummet and you can reverse that relatively quickly in comparison to women when women would over train and I'd see their hormones would be off. We, you know, I had doctors I worked with that would test hormones and do a lot of stuff, took a little longer to bring that back into balance. And I think it's just more complex whereas it's a guys, oh, let's get the testosterone up with the women's. It's the, it also changes through the month. So I feel like it took longer maybe because of that. I'm not a hormone specialist, but generally speaking with my clients took a little longer to balance out those hormonal effects of over training than it did with men. I wonder if it's that or it's more like what I was saying, which is just because they're more often than not already low and already deficient a little bit on nutrients. Probably part of it. And then you're pushing the body like that versus very rarely ever did I have to really push my men to eat more. You know, pretty easy to tell my male clients consume more and then not have a problem with it. Now here's a weird one that I noticed much more with women than men as a potential sign of overtraining was constipation. Now constipation is generally more common in women than men anyway. So I don't remember what the numbers are, but women, a larger percentage of women if they have digestive issues will suffer from bloating and constipation than men. Men can also suffer from those things, but it's at a much lower rate. I noticed with my female clients when we were, if they were overtraining when they would come to hire me and these are typically women who are already working out and they'd come to hire me because they couldn't figure out why their bodies weren't responding and usually I'd look and say, oh, it looks like you're overdoing everything. Constipation was a common part of that. So that might be something you pay attention to if you're training too hard and you're noticing like your gut is off and it looks like bloating constipation. That for women seems to be more of a sign of overtrain than it is for men. Well, I also found this again, connected back to kind of the low calorie thing. It seemed to be common that, and I've talked about on the show before like the common offenders and fiber was one of the ones that was under consumed a lot. Very many times would I be training a client, assess their diet and see that they were getting 10 grams of fiber in their day. It's hard if you're only eating 1500 calories, it's hard to get a good 35, 40 grams of fiber every single day. And so I would have to prescribe a bowl of berries in their diet or a big thing of salad and spinach and to try and bump their fiber up. And when I do that for a few days right away, they'd get regular again. But again, I don't know if that's more of the overtraining or the combination of training hard now, already eating low calorie because they're eating such low calorie, they're also having a hard time getting in the fiber intake. Another one is skin. And maybe this is because, I'm speaking again generally, women pay more attention to this than men. But when women were overtraining, I would also hear from them, my skin isn't the same. It feels less, it feels less plush. It's more dry. I'm noticing that it just doesn't look more old I would hear from them. I never really heard that from my male clients. Not sure if it's because women's skin reacts more to overtrain than men's do or because women tend to notice it more than men do. But this was just something that I would hear from women that I wouldn't necessarily hear from men. Now most of the signs of overtraining are the same. You can't sleep good. Joint pain. Joint pain, your mood is depressed. Dips in energy. Dips in energy, your sore and stiff, your strength is declining. That is across the board. We're just trying to pick the ones that we heard more from female clients versus men. Now the last point, this is where I'd say 98% of the differences between men and women occur. It's really because generally speaking, men and women tend to have different goals and they're marketed too differently. And if they have insecurities, they tend to be different. So I'll start with the first one, different goals. When I train my male clients, if they ever miss the workout or skip the workout, eight out of 10 times it was leg day. So eight out of 10, this is back when I used to train clients on body part splits. I didn't do this the back half of my career when I realized that. You're never gonna skip chest day. That was more effective to do full body. But you're right, Justin. They would calm, it was funny. Like, oh, I'll see you Wednesday. What do we work on Wednesday? Oh, Wednesday we're doing legs. And if they were to miss a workout, it would be the one that was legs. With women, never, never miss the leg workout. If they were gonna skip a workout, it was arms. In fact, when I started training full body, clients full body because it was more effective, that I would, if the guy was like, oh, I don't have much time, can we skip, would they always wanna skip legs? And for the woman was like, hey, I don't have much time. We don't need to do curls in press downs today. So let's just do the leg and the back stuff. You know what I mean? So that's where you see, that's one of the big differences, the goals. It's just we, men tend to value more upper body development, bigger arms, you know, that kind of stuff. Women tend to want the lower body development, the legs and the butt. So really it's about the personal preference. Do you think it also is just because you gravitate to what you're good at and because women can handle more volume on their lower body than their upper body and that's why they? I think that's part of it too. And like you said, the self selection bias, like I feel like women do better in high rep situations where that style of training and hypertrophy, I feel like, you know, they enjoy it more. And so whatever you enjoy more initially and like your body, you know, likes and responds to, like that's what you're going to kind of live in. You ever look at group exercise classes that are obviously targeted, targeting women, right? You ever do this like full body resistance training, group exercise class or whatever. And it's, you could tell that they're marketing towards women. Butts and guts. You watch the class, they'll do two arm exercises and 15 lower body exercises. Three for glutes, four for quads, five for hamstrings. But isn't it, so I thought I read this somewhere a long time ago that women have the, almost the same potential to build muscle in their lower half as men do. It's their upper half that is so different than ours. There's a difference in the lower body, but it's much smaller than it is in the upper body. I mean, I definitely saw this training clients. I had, in fact, my strongest client with legs, squatting and leg pressing were actually women. So I, and probably because they also gravitated to training that way. They trained that way with me, they do it on their own. So they handled and they did a lot more volume for their legs. Therefore they ended up building a ton more muscle. So some of my strongest clients were actually female clients when we were talking about leg pressing, squatting, lunging. So I mean, I think that has a lot to do with that too. It does. Gravitate towards what you're doing. But a lot of it is just, they just, when they want to work out, when you ask them what the areas they really want to, you know, sculpt tone or whatever, it typically tends to be lower body. Whereas with guys, they're like, I want bigger shoulders. I want a bigger chest. I want a bigger, you know, bigger back. I've never had a woman come to me and say, I want to build bigger pecs, for example, right? Yeah, that never happens. Yeah, so that's a big one. Another one is the, you know, in terms of diet. You know, having a woman, telling a female client that we want a bulk, using the word bulk is a big no-no for a personal trainer with a woman. Like I learned that, you know, I don't say that word. Even though that's what we're trying to do with the diet, I'm not going to say to a female client, hey, we're going to do a six month, excuse me, a six week bulk with your nutrition. That's like, she's never going to come back again. No way I don't want to get bulky. I could say that to a guy and he'll be happier than hell. Like, yeah. We're trying to speed up your metabolism. That's our, yeah, selling point, half the time. Same thing though, if you were to tell a guy, like, hey, we're going to work on you getting skinny for the next cycle. You don't use the word skinny. Yeah, yeah, you would do that. That's right. For a man that's getting shredded or lean, you never say skinny, right? So that's another big difference is women tend to resist increasing their calories. They tend to resist wanting to eat more to get to their goals, whereas men tend to sometimes resist the opposite because they don't want to necessarily, like when a guy would tell me he wants to lose weight, he would almost always follow it up by saying, oh, but I don't want to lose muscle. I want to lose weight, but I don't want to lose muscle. Yeah, it would be skinny. I don't want to be skinny. So that's another big general difference between the two of them. Another one is that if a female tends to overdo any type of exercise, it tends to be cardio. For sure. They tend to over, and why? Because cardio has been marketed to us as the way to get skinny or to lose weight. Now we all know. It's also less intimidating to start. Sure, sure. So I mean, going into the gym environment, you've already touched on this, right? It was male dominated for decades. So that's already intimidating for a female to come in there. Then if you don't know how to train the exercises that everyone's lifting and doing, even if you do believe the science or you've heard someone tell you that you should be, it's a lot less intimidating to go get on a treadmill and go for a run than it is to go over and try and squat for your first time. Right, right. And so, you know, overdoing now for men, sometimes I'd have to talk them into doing just a little bit of cardio. I don't wanna do that. I just wanna lift weights. Now, if you've listened to Mind Pump for more than a few episodes, you know that just doing cardio is a terrible way to burn body fat or get leaner because it causes metabolic adaptations that slow down your metabolism, all that stuff. But if you are a woman and you're listening, keep this in mind and say to yourself, like, okay, I've been marketed this way. I may have these preconceived notions about cardio. If I'm overtraining and overdoing my workouts, maybe I should look at my cardio first and then later maybe look at resistance training. Strength training also is something that I'd have to convince women to do more often than men. I mean, at the end of the day, the big, big, big differences between men and women, generally speaking, are all about preferences and how they've been marketed to. All the other stuff we kinda said, those are such small, general differences, but they really don't make a huge difference. It's really about the goals and the differences between what you want and the marketing that you've gotten. Well, you need to elaborate a little bit too on the women downplaying strength training because it's probably, everyone listening right now, it's probably the single most important thing that you can do right now if you wanna lean out or you wanna get toned or firm up is to strength training. And that is because you've been marketed to for so long that high reps is the way to go for you to lean out. And most women especially gravitate towards high rep training and very few, it's very, very rare. In fact, I can count on one hand how many female clients I ever got that when I asked them about weight training, if they had a background in weight training at all, said they would lift three to five repetitions. They never trained that way. Even if you were an avid gym goer, five, 10 years straight before you got to me, most all of them followed the 10, 15, 20 rep range type of exercise. And knowing that as a coach, I would know that man, the best thing that I can do right now for this client is to get them started on strength training and their body is gonna respond like crazy. What you wanna consider with working out is, because we always consider the calorie burn of the workout, that's the most important thing. It's actually not at all the most important thing. The most important thing with exercise is how does it get your body to adapt? Because your body, what you do a lot of, your body tries to get good at doing. So if you do a lot of cardio, your body aims to build lots of endurance and stamina. It also aims to become efficient with calories. So it pairs down muscle and it learns how to burn less calories over time. So you actually slow your metabolism down with lots and lots of cardio, which is not a bad adaptation, it's perfect. It gets you better at cardio. But if you want to have a faster metabolism so that you have to work out as much to maintain your fat loss or to burn body fat, then it's a terrible approach. Strength training, the adaptation is strength. I gotta get stronger. In order to get stronger, you have to build more muscle. Your body prioritizes more muscle over being efficient with calories and so you get a faster metabolism. A faster metabolism makes fat loss easier and it makes it easier to maintain because now you're just burning more calories just sitting there doing nothing. So strength training, the irony of all of this is that women have been marketed with tons of cardio and kind of pushed away from resistance training when in fact, especially if you live in the modern world, the thing you should probably focus on most if you want to get lean, if you want to have a sculpted tone body, you don't want to have to work out seven days a week is literally to lift weights. Now at the end of the day though, here's the big thing and here's why we do such, why we talk so little about the differences between men and women and why we tend to, why we write programs for everybody and we don't write programs just for women or just for men because at the end of the day, and this is something you learn as a personal trainer, none of that matters. At the end of the day, it's the individual that matters because you can be a man, you can be a woman, doesn't matter, all the general stuff we just said, all that matters is how is your body responding? What are your goals? I mean, I just talked about how women tend to have different goals and they tend to like to work out their legs with orange but if you're a woman that you just want to build your arms, it doesn't matter than what I said, right? What if you're tolerance for a high intensity exercise is high, does it matter that you're a man or a woman? No, if you don't care about getting below 10% body fat, does essential fat matter for women versus men? No, none of this stuff really matters because it all boils down to the individual and as a personal trainer, what made us effective was not looking at people generally, that would be silly, would be looking at them and saying, is this working for this person? Because I can tell you right now, generally speaking, I had men that I generally would train more like what you think you're supposed to train a woman like and a man and a woman the other way all because of the individual at the end of the day. I'm glad you pointed that out because I know we're sitting here, we're talking a lot towards or to women right now but the same truth applies to a male. If I got a man who came in and he wants to build muscle, he wants to build muscle and he comes in and all he ever did was lift five repetitions all the time. One of the best things I could do is to put him over on what would be quote unquote a female type of program where he's doing 15 to 20 reps because it's novel to his body. His body will respond to that and he'll build muscle. So it's the same thing for both male or female. What we look at is what is this person doing? What are they currently doing right now? What are their goals? And then you build a program around that and sure there's some general truths or like common themes between the sexes but how you program and train to build muscle or burn body fat is the same. It's the same and listen to your body. The individual differences between you and the next person and the next person can be so big and so broad. That's all that matters. It doesn't matter your sex or your gender doesn't matter. It's really all about you as an individual. So again, at the end of the day that's what you should pay attention to. Listen to your body, how your body responds, what's working for you particularly and don't worry about the rest of it. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. So if you like listening to Mind Pump you're gonna love watching us too. Especially Justin, he's very handsome. Go to the Mind Pump podcast on YouTube. Also, if you wanna get some more free information on exercise, lifting weights, burning body fat, diet. Go to mindpumpfree.com. Check out some of our free content. And finally if you wanna find us on Instagram you can find all of us. You can find Justin at Mind Pump. Justin, you can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. You know, cause you'd be shaking because of the noise and would pee. In the meantime, in the middle of the night it was like all this thunder and lightning and everything jumped on the bed and was like on top of me and started peeing on me. It was the worst to wake up to a dog. Are you serious? Just taking a leak right on top of you.