 If we could just take our seats for our last session in here today. How you guys feeling? Are you excited for our last two speakers? Alright, well hold tight and come up closer if you can here, alright? But we're very excited, let me have them introduced. So I'm very excited to present to you, Stephanie Godoro and Stacy Toth. So this is what happens when stupid, easy paleo and the paleo parent collide. Two very strong women who are about to bring everything that we've learned, the practical sense from theory to practice. So I'm looking forward to the talk. Alright, kick it. Thank you. You're starting right. Alright, so we're going to talk today about some specific requirements and health benefits of strength training for women. So earlier on today, Jamie Scott talked a lot about the role of muscle, mass and why that's really important. Today we're going to, in our presentation, put more of a feminine spin on everything for you guys. So, oh does it automatically go, oh it automatically goes, oh. I got your back. Alright, so this is our general overview. We're going to go into some general known factors, some specific training requirements to get the benefits of strength training and to talk a little bit more about health benefits versus appearance, how those are similar and different, and then talk a little bit at the end about a survey that we did, which I think you guys are going to like. Okay, so just a quick little bit about me. I've been pretty much a lifelong athlete, but spent a lot of time thrashing myself doing endurance training. For about 10 years I raced bikes, and about four years ago I found CrossFit and have transitioned now into weightlifting. So that combined with paleo has really changed my life and I'm really, really passionate about strength training and just recently qualified for the American Open in weightlifting. So, I'm a very passionate strength-based athlete. And I am also a very passionate strength-based athlete. I have not been an athlete my whole life. I lost over 100 pounds when I went to paleo four and a half years ago and I have several autoimmune disorders and have been working on figuring out how to manage those over the last couple of years. And in January of 2013 I also found CrossFit and after several months realized that the thing that I really liked about CrossFit was lifting heavy things. So I have since transitioned to the sport of lifting heavy things, which is strong man or strong woman in my case. And I too was recently invited to my equivalent to the Open, the NAS Nationals. So, thank you. With that said, Stephanie and I want to tell you that we are very biased. We have a lot of references and information to back up what we're about to share with you, but without a doubt we are drinking the strength training Kool-Aid and we're going to pour it down your throats for the next 20 minutes. Okay, so just to go over kind of the list of generally known health benefits for women who strength train. This is just like if you talk to your primary care physician, I would like to think that that primary care physician would be supportive of these kinds of health benefits when you talked about it. What we're going to talk about is kind of a little more detail about that and what the science behind those triggers are and how you can optimize these health benefits by going into the type of activities that you should be doing to optimize it. Specifically, you've got osteoporosis and bone density. Specifically, this is really helpful in women as they age and their metabolic rates deteriorate and they start to lose muscle mass. They also start to lose bone density, which makes them more likely to have brittle bones and prone to injury, often death if you break a hip or something like that when you're older. Increased muscle mass is really great. I know there's been at least one or two talks here at the symposium about really focusing on the increased muscle mass as being a measure for health rather than decreasing fat as a measure of health. When you're doing these sort of things, you're also going to get your hormones regulated and get some increased energy who doesn't like energy, right? You've been here for how long? Look, you guys got no energy. You obviously did not work out today. So, Stephanie, we're here, man. We're rocking. We've got our energy and mass. So, in addition to kind of the bone density issue, you're also going to experience improved balance, coordination and flexibility as you age with that increased muscle mass and with that strength that you have on your body, which helps, again, with not breaking bones and not dying and all those sort of things. Nobody wants that. Sarah, Valentine and I talked earlier today about hormone regulation and the benefits that that has of your overall health. Strength training in general helps contribute to hormone regulation, both blood sugar reproductive hormone regulation, which is really important in women, obviously, and growth hormone, which is generally helpful for your entire person. And lastly, your metabolic rate increases with strength training. So, as your muscle mass increases, you're also helping your metabolic rate, but with the training itself, you're allowing your body to burn more calories in a rested state, not just when you're working out. So, getting into some specifics for training requirements, we talk a lot in the strength community about the minimum effective dose, and a lot of the training that we do is very potent, but we're going to just mention a couple of things here. You know, in terms of a more ancestral point of view on strength training and what it means to be strong, you know, we can think about what we would do in terms of long, slow walking, occasionally sprinting, getting away from a predator, having strength to perform daily tasks, like carrying children, moving your camp and going out and foraging for food. So, when we're talking about the frequency of training, what we see a lot is the more is more mentality. And with strength training, we don't think that fits with an ancestral point of view, but it also doesn't really fit with what we know physiologically. So, when it comes to women in strength training, it seems to fall into one of two camps, right? We get ladies who are afraid to lift heavy. Raise your hand if you're afraid to lift heavy. Okay. Okay, you can be honest. We're here to help you. So, afraid to lift heavy or lifting too infrequently, or the opposite end of that spectrum, which is just really hammering yourself with training. So, not only do we want to avoid this more is more mentality because of burnout and overtraining, which significantly increases the risk for injury. When it comes to actual physiology, what we see is if you're truly working in type 2 muscle fiber, which is your fast twitch, explosive power generating type of muscle fiber, these types of muscle fibers require more recovery time, especially if we're going to add in an eccentric movement to that particular strength training lift. So, anywhere from 6 days plus, if you're really working those muscle fibers pretty hard. So, when it comes to getting a benefit from strength training, we don't need to see the more is more mentality, and I think that's really important for folks to understand. However, you need to provide enough of a stimulus that it's actually going to recruit a large portion of your muscle fiber, and we'll talk about that in an upcoming slide. You know, when it comes to physiological differences for chronic cardio versus strength training, it's pretty well known that chronic endurance training is going to lead to chronic oxidative stress, and when we're talking about, you know, at the cellular level, that's definitely not a good thing. So, if we're able to back off of that and do strength training where we're still providing strong stimulus and getting some kind of gain and benefit from that, but having to do it less frequently, then it's a pretty win-win situation. I think that last line is on the wrong slide, so I'm just going to skip over that part for now. There it is. So, the difference in slow versus fast fiber recruitment, if you're going to be doing kind of a slow, long, low-force production type of exercise or movement, you're going to be recruiting more type 1 fibers, and so these are things you can do all day. You could walk all day, right? It's not really a big deal. The fast type of fiber, and there are several different types of fast twitch fibers, but the fast type of fiber is really going to be that force production fiber that takes a lot of, you know, you need to lift a lot of weight to actually activate that, and that's the type of requirement that you're going to need activating those fast twitch fibers to really produce a significant metabolic change, and Stacey kind of alluded to that earlier. So, you know, we do want to see moving away from the chronic cardio, moving into the strength training. Hormatic stressors, so obviously a hormatic stressor is the way your body can adapt to certain stimuli, but again, when we're comparing kind of long, slow distance endurance training with strength training, we see that with strength training, there's less stress on the adrenals, so the HPA axis. Cortisol will be lower, testosterone higher, and especially in females, we tend to have 5 to 10 percent of the testosterone of the average male, so if we can maximize that by doing the right type of training and actually not suppressing that, we're going to see better gains. And then of course, because cortisol response is lower, we're not seeing as much of the taxation on the immune system, so in endurance training, in non-strength training, we tend to see a lot of infection, chronic illness, and things like that because we're suppressing immunity. Okay. That's still the same one. So we're going to... Oh, this one's still mine. Yeah, so we get a lot of questions, what type of lifting do I have to do, right? And we've kind of alluded to it, the lifting net needs to be heavy and somewhat low rep, so what we see a lot of times is females coming into the gym, they're lifting up very lightweight and doing it lots and lots and lots of times, and again, that's going to be more parallel to working those type one types of fibers. It's a low-force movement, you're not recruiting as much muscle fiber, you can do tons and tons of reps, but you're not necessarily going to see the same benefit. So we want to see the type of exercise, the type of training, the type of strength movements that are heavy enough that you have to actually produce force and you just physically can't do that for a lot of reps. So higher rep... sorry, higher weight, lower rep movements are going to give you the better benefit as opposed to more of like a bodybuilding style training, which is where we see lots and lots of reps at low weight. Because the type of heavy weight type of training is going to require more fiber types to be recruited, we're seeing that that has those, especially those type 2X fibers, there's a very potent effect on the metabolism of other body tissues, not just muscle. So we alluded to this kind of like increasing metabolic rate at a resting state. This is really important. So if we want to positively affect metabolism, we have to recruit as much muscle fiber as possible, and we're not going to get that by lifting really low weight. Okay, so now we're going to move into kind of the health benefits versus appearance of strength training for women. This is kind of one of my platforms. As a woman who lost a lot of weight, people always ask me all the time, well, you're working out, are you losing weight? And I personally am no longer interested in working out. I find that I have health benefits from strength training that has nothing to do with weight loss anymore. I'm interested in trying to lean out and lose fat, but I'm more interested in gaining muscle. And we're going to talk a little bit about why that is. So it's important to understand that women are specifically predisposed to have a higher body fat percentage than men. Just period, end of story, even if we're both at our ideal leanness and ideal health, men are going to be naturally lower body fat than women. And specifically, where the fat deposits on women who are healthy is around what they call the pear shape. So I can tell you from personal experience that as I have begun to strength train, my body has changed. Has anybody heard of the CrossFit booty? Right? Yes. Okay, so that's because you're building not just muscle, but you're changing where your fat's depositing as your metabolic system and everything is changing. You're getting those fat deposits in the place where your body wants them to be. And what research has indicated is that women who have adipose tissue or fat around that pear shape are actually preventing long-term diseases such as diabetes in their future. This is how women's bodies want to be. Therefore, if you live in that state and you're maintaining health, then you're going to have lower risk of metabolic derangement instead of what you would think of, oh, I have fat on my hips, I need to lose it because I'm going to get metabolically broken. Isn't necessarily the case. So just with regard to muscle mass, again, the rebuttal that we hear a lot from females is I don't want to get bulky. And I was talking to Keith Norris earlier today and he said, you know, I tell females that come into my gym and say that I will double your money back if you get bulky. And this is a huge thing. Women will say, like, oh, I just, you know, I'm not comfortable with the movements and a lot of the time they're just afraid to get big. But we know from research that GDF-8 is a gene codes for myostatin which is essentially like the brake pedal that prevents this great anabolic response leads to a significant gain in muscle mass. And in women, that gas pedal or that brake pedal is being pressed. So in most males, in fact, it's also not quite as... is not quite as active. So the actual physical capability of building what would be a very bulky amount of muscle mass is just not possible for most people and for women it's even harder. So despite heavy loads, most women don't bulk up even though the amount of force that they're able to generate by lifting heavy loads tends to increase. And we've covered some of this already really quickly. The thing I wanted to point out there is the increase in type 2 muscle fiber research shows now in animal models at least is that increasing that fast twitch muscle fiber has significant implications on fatty acid oxidation in distant tissues to just muscle. So by increasing muscle mass we're able to more effectively decrease fat mass. So a lot of times we see females come into the gym all they do is strength train but they improve body composition without doing a lot of long slow distance or endurance type training. So the next thing that we want to try to cover is the emotional benefit. So we talked health benefits physical. What we're going to talk about next is emotional health benefits. We actually did a little informal survey that we want to share the results with you but it's been proven in medical literature as well that as women strength train there's hormonal response and dorphins and all kinds of things that are great and help your emotional state but it's also empowering for women to kind of feel strong and so Stephanie conducted the survey and the results are kind of more than powerful. We did an informal survey online and asked women to participate. We ended up getting over 600 females that participated in this and we asked questions ranging from age to type of training but really the answers that we got on the psychosocial benefit were I'm not that kind of person but I had to reach for a box of tissues because it was actually pretty powerful. So we asked how long have you been lifting or strength training? There's a significant amount of the respondents were two plus years which is actually very surprising to me. We see kind of a bell shaped curve here with age with most of the respondents being 30 to 40 years old but again a significant number of women in the 40 to 50 category and even one lady she was like super proud she was 60 plus she's like hey I answered on 60 plus but hopefully I'd like to see that eventually we can get more people in those later ages because again trying to protect bone density and muscle masses predictors of longevity. So do you train at home or at a gym? Most at a gym? And then this is the one that was really poignant the middle bar there I had to actually delete that question or that option and I rolled it into the top so increased confidence slash it's empowering what do you like about lifting? Building strength pushing my limits and obviously they could choose more than one here building muscle losing fat I thought that was pretty telling like I like building muscle technically more than I like the fact that I'm losing fat and then we had some other that were fill in the blank so the next slide and you can't see all of these here but we tried to ask for free responses from women about what they liked I mean mental toughness muscle definition being able to focus on a specific muscle stress release increased energy and so we kind of tried to find a common theme here so commonly cited things improvements in body composition overall and again many many women said that they liked that they were gaining muscle they didn't always say that they were losing fat increased confidence self-discovery of strength or physical capacity like wow I didn't know that I could actually do this and I'm shocked I feel like I can go out and conquer these other things now acceptance of body size this is really kind of one that I know we both personally feel strongly about but as somebody who's always been a little bit more well muscled than other females I'm like hey now I get to do something really awesome with that gift I was given losing the weight loss mentality so again what can we gain from it we're gaining strength, gaining confidence not necessarily just focusing on weight loss and the one that kept coming up a lot too was finding community and really taking like taking that to heart that there were other women who were it's like this secret society that we don't want to talk about we're like yeah I feel like I'm the only one strength training and then people come out of the woodwork and they're like oh my gosh yeah I love strength training too and it's this automatic bond I think that you form so we found that to be very powerful so just in conclusion to remind everyone women are more likely to have lean muscle mass and improved long-term health with the effect of effective doses of strength training and we kind of defined what those effective doses were as women were predisposed to be pear shaped and the thickening of the hips and thighs are actually healthy and not necessarily something to be concerned about and lastly as women if we become more comfortable with the power of our bodies and the idea of using it as a tool will be more empowered and reap the emotional benefits of that as well as the physical you have to give them the mic so I'm sold welcome to the secret society but I need more concrete guidance so I'm kind of thinking something like eight to ten reps to total depletion once a week am I on the right track how could I get more information to guide me as I get into this I would definitely seek the help of a professional that could give you a programming at least in the beginning to start I have varying movements from one rep max to five by fives to two by tens it really depends on what day of the week and what kind of movements I'm working and I think yours is the same I would also echo that especially if you're new to strength training finding the correct range of motion and finding the way to perform the lifts safely but effectively enough and using weights that are going to challenge that type 2 fiber usage are really important but if you're very new to it finding a reputable facility programming is really going to be probably your best bet and is there a difference between free weights and machines we don't really like machine that's I mean the type of effect that you're going to get from using something like a barbell movement or free weight movement like if you don't have the mobility to have the bar on your back maybe a goblet squat something like that those compound movements if you think about the type of force you have to produce in the size of the muscles you're working it's a much different stimulus than using a machine that's going to isolate a particular muscle so we're very big fans of compound movements squat, deadlift, press, bench press power cleans things like that that are going to require you to use a large muscle groups in the body and not just isolate to one specific thing I know that the free weights in the gym can be really intimidating especially if you don't have a gym buddy or a trainer to kind of show it to you so that's why really finding that community some place where you feel comfortable to not be afraid to ask you know what is this and how do I use it is really important when you're starting hi and I just wanted to add to the comment I did used to lift I took a break for a year and a half but I'm back because of you two or I will be back next week but the mental effect that I got from doing free weights was so stimulating and I had to think and I had to concentrate and so if you're at a machine and just doing a rope movement you don't get that so you have to use balance and your mind is I mean it's amazing how much your mind comes in play when you're doing these physical movements so that's a huge benefit I found from doing it as well thank you so how do you get over the mental block of the weight looking too big like when I do a tire flip every time I'm like this is too big it's actually taller than me it's not actually too heavy but I have a really hard time getting over the mental block okay you lift more kilos I never say I can't do anything I think that's the biggest thing and especially when new people start in the gym it's the thing that I'm telling them over and over again is people say I'll try or I don't think I can and if your mentality is this thing is intimidating me you're not going to succeed just like anything in life if you tell yourself you can't do something you are likely not going to do it if you tell yourself you can then you'll figure out a way to do it and whether it takes three weeks like you know or what we do in our gym is when a tire is too heavy for someone a trainer will be kind of training wheels on someone and have like one hand on it and then eventually they pretend like they're lifting the tire with them and take their hands off and then it's like hey wrote a bike you flipped a tire and it's really exciting alright well we'd love to have you guys stick around for any of the last minute questions we have here but thank you so much another round of applause you have concluded our day and if you'd like to stick around here we do have one more talk in Wheeler but the book signings will be here with some of our speakers and authors alright so thank you and waters in the back restrooms are down the stairs