 One of the most effective ways to work out when you're a woman is powerlifting. It's actually one of the most effective forms of strength training to boost your metabolism, help you burn body fat, and yes, sculpt the body. Powerlifting should not be avoided. It's a phenomenal way to train. I love this. Yeah. Yeah, I really do like this advice, and it's something that I didn't start giving to my female clients until later on in my career and shifting them in that direction. I think partially because I never really identified as a powerlifter, and so it wasn't like a sport that I was really into, but the part, and we talk about this on the show all the time, that I think is so valuable. And I don't think this is just to women. I think men and women get a lot of value for this, is just to focus on getting stronger. Yeah. We're marketed to so much, both men and women, women especially, that this look, you know, it's all about this look. It's all about this look. And when that drives your behaviors around nutrition and exercise, for most people, it drives them in the wrong direction. That's right. Yeah. And so I love sitting any of my clients in this direction of like, listen, we are just going to focus on getting strong because that in itself is difficult. It's difficult enough to program correctly, get adequate rest, feed the body nutritionally so it has the tools and the building blocks to go build muscle and build strength. And yet you're not focusing on the scale and getting all worried about what the mirror shows. It's like, my goal is to get strong. I love that. I love that it's more popular now. I know back when I was training clients, it was less of a thing. And it was always my favorite time to introduce the lower rep count and do like three to five reps and really show them. Like if you're focused on just getting strong and being able to like add a bit more load, it's a completely different mindset. But also too, it's just like, it was so empowering. And I got the same response from basically every like female client I had was just like what it did for them. This was my go-to for female clients towards the back of my career. And it was so effective. And a lot of it has to do with just how women are marketed to in the health and fitness space. It's all about losing weight, getting lean, maybe sculpting. Nobody talks about the benefits of strength or what that translates into. So women typically, if you ask them, why do you work out those, you know, they'll say, you know, I want to look better on be more fit. You know, maybe I want to get stronger, but they're not really chasing strength. When you chase strength, then they start to get all those other things that they had wanted. And the reason why strength is such a great pursuit is because it's hard to do a lot of things wrong and get stronger. So in other words, if you're not eating properly, you're probably not going to get stronger. If your sleep isn't that great, you're probably not going to get stronger. If your stress levels are too much or you can't manage the stress that you have, you're probably not going to get stronger. If your training program is off, you're not going to get stronger. It's a wonderful pursuit to chase because if you're consistently getting stronger, you're doing a lot of things right. Now you don't have to necessarily be perfect, but you can lose weight and do a lot of things wrong. And of course the weight that you lose on the scale is, you know, half muscle, half body fat, or sometimes mostly muscle. You can look in the mirror, which is a subjective thing. See yourself getting smaller and be happy because the scale is going down. You can ignore energy. You can ignore health because clothes are fitting looser. But if you're getting, if you're not getting stronger, then that's it. Bottom line, you have to fix something. And if you are getting stronger, you're probably doing everything right. And the other side of it was it took my female clients away from the subjective aspect of looking at themselves in the mirror, judging how they look. Like we're just going to get stronger for three months. We're not going to focus on anything else. And that was very freeing for them because they stopped. And then what was cool about it was within the three month period, they got what they wanted. They're like, oh my God, I look amazing. And part for me that I think really changed the way I started, then became like a thing that I like, oh, I didn't care what your goal was. I was recommending we go this direction. And that was also when I started to adopt this idea of like, hey, even though you want to lose 30 or 40 pounds, I'm not going to restrict. I'm going to add to your diet first. All that was all part of like the same transition for me. And so helping, you know, helping my female clients focus on that, even though they came to me and said, oh Adam, I want a smaller waist and I want to bud. I want all these things, even though that was what they came to me originally for getting them convinced to follow this. Let's get stronger protocol and do these big lifts and focus on kind of a powerlifting type of routine. They ended up getting the results that they ultimately wanted and they got it by eating more foods than they thought they ever were going. It was like such a game changer to get people to connect these dots and very empowering too. So not just great that you hit your physical goals or your weight, you know, body fat loss goal, but to see how empowered my clients felt after they went through that process. Yeah, you know, a good kind of way to understand this is even if I had a female client that said she wanted to build some muscle and usually it was in the butt, right? So usually they would say if they wanted to build, it was typically the butt area, like I want to get a bigger butt, I want to build it. If you followed that up with, well, how strong do you want to get? They always kind of confused and say, well, I mean, I don't really care if I get too strong, I just want to build my butt. The right answer is I want to get strong as possible because the strength is what translates to the muscle. As you get stronger, you will build more muscle. It's just a fact. There's no better predictor of muscle growth than strength, nothing. Now, of course, eventually that starts to slow down, but we're talking five years down the line. And that's by that point, you're pretty advanced. You've been very consistent for a long time. Otherwise, like if you want to build muscle, just chase strength. If you chase gaining muscle, then you're going to be playing this weird game of trying to figure out if I'm gaining muscle or is it, you know, water weight or what's going on. It was just, and again, it was just, it was objective. You either added five pounds to the bar or you didn't. This is why when I, back in the day, when I first started writing kind of the blueprints of the first maps program, I borrowed a lot from the strength training, competitive strength training side of resistance training because they had the best workouts. Bodybuilding workouts, fat loss workouts, they were all, there wasn't really any science involved in their programming. Powerlifting, Olympic lifting, anything where you had to actually objective, objectively perform. The coaches designed the best workouts because you hit the stage, you either lift the weight or you don't. It either worked or it didn't work. And so they have the best programming as well. Well, you're highlighting one of the things that got me so excited about talking to you before we ever really met in person about Maps Anabolic when you sent it over to me. At that time in my career, I had figured this out for my female clients and it was something that I was already implementing in their programming. And when I looked at Maps Anabolic, the thing that Maps Anabolic has in common with powerlifting in general, and I think this is the number one factor of why this is so beneficial for women to follow a powerlifting routine is it focuses on the three big lifts. And we had just came out of a decade or two of most people, both men and women, neglecting those lifts and definitely women. I did not have women squatting and deadlifting, overhead pressing, bench pressing, heavy weight. That was not common. It still isn't common in the gym today. And so I remember when I saw you sent over and that's the cornerstone of Maps Anabolic is centered around those incredible lifts because we know it builds the most muscle. It does. Yeah, that's one of the, that's the number one reason why powerlifting is a great way to train is the three exercises or the three movements that are done in powerlifting competitions are three of the best strength training exercises you could possibly do. Today's program giveaway is Maps Powerlift. If you want to win it, here's what you got to do. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Now everybody else in today's episode, we talk about why women should powerlift. So we've put Maps Powerlift on sale. It's half off. If you're interested, click on the link at the top of the description below. Or you can go to mapspowerlift.com and use the code womenpower for the 50% off discount. All right, here comes the show. The bench press, the deadlift and the squat. All three of them hit major muscle mass in the entire body. All three of them, if you get stronger, you don't just develop one muscle or two muscles. You develop entire swaths of the body. And in order to get stronger at those three exercises, because you might think if you're not experienced or you're not from a powerlifting thing, well, that's all I do is those three exercises. No, no. Competition is trying to lift in those three exercises the most weight. But to train for those three, there are other exercises that support those lifts. So you do end up doing things like pull-ups or pull-downs, overhead presses. You do end up doing exercises like, you know, stiff-legged deadlifts and leg curls and stuff like that because they support those three lifts. But the goal is they pick those three, what are called gross motor movements in competition. And so if you're, for example, if somebody added 15% more weight to, let's say, their laterals or their barbell curls, okay, or their tricep pushdown, they'll see some muscle development. Not a ton. You add 15% more weight to a barbell squat, a deadlift or a bench press. You're going to see a lot more results because it's such a big movement. So just the three best exercises, we like to talk about the top five. The top five would also include, let's say, an overhead press and maybe something that includes some kind of rotation or row. But these are the top three right here. They're all multi-joint lifts. And the greatest gain is like how much you can tap into muscle recruitment and to increase the amount of force output. And so you're actually able to recruit more muscle fibers throughout your entire body. With these lifts in comparison to a lot of single joint exercises. So it's literally the difference between just one musical instrument versus the entire symphony. And I just look at it that way because we keep talking about it as the loudest signal. And it's literally the loudest output you can produce in terms of the exercise spectrum. And so this is why we always tend to program these specific lifts and different variations in all of our programming. Yeah. So along those lines, if a muscle is made up of muscle fibers and one of the things that will dictate, I guess, how well the muscle gets developed is, are you able to recruit all of the muscle fibers in that muscle? And the heavier the weight is, the more intense it is, the more likely you are to recruit more muscle fibers. Now those muscle fibers are controlled and communicated to you by the central nervous system. The central nervous system ultimately decides how many muscle fibers are going to be activated. Okay. So here's the kicker. An individual muscle will activate more muscle fibers when other muscles are also activated. This is how the body works. So if you were to squeeze something as hard as you could with your right hand, but keep the rest of your body relaxed, you would generate less force than if you squeezed with your whole body while squeezing your hand. Even though your hand is being measured, you would see a noticeable increase in the amount of power output because the central nervous system fires harder when the whole body is turned on. So what does this have to do with those exercises? Those exercises activate the entire body. So yes, a barbell squat is a leg exercise, but unlike a leg press where the rest of my body is kind of chilling and I'm just moving my legs or especially like a leg extension, I have to hold and support the bar on my back. I have to tense up my upper back, my core, stay stable. My feet and ankle have to be activated. And when I'm pushing heavy weight, all my muscles have to turn on even though the prime movers are my lower body. So what does that mean? It's going to develop my legs more than if I didn't turn on all those other muscles. This is even more important for beginners and intermediate lifters. Now when you're super advanced, you start to develop the ability to activate lots of muscle fibers without having to turn everything else on. This is why advanced lifters can do isolation exercises and get pretty good results. But if you've been working out for less than a couple years, you're not going to activate all those muscle fibers unless you turn on the other muscles. And this is why gross motor movements are so effective. That's why these three exercises in powerlifting are so effective. Well, it's crazy. The benefit is it increases that capacity now for your other exercises, your single joint exercises. So it's like you squeeze more out of those once you learn, you teach the body how to do that with the overall multi-joint exercises. You go back to your regular kind of lifting and realize how much stronger you can get at that. Totally. I also like training for powerlifting. We said this earlier because the goal is objective. One of the biggest challenges with fitness, and this is what I communicate to personal trainers all the time, is that the client is typically focused on subjective goals. Now, why are subjective goals or let's say landmarks in their training? Why is that so frustrating? It's subjective. If you've ever met somebody who thinks that they're too fat, but you look at them and you say you're not fat at all, or maybe you did this yourself. If you've ever looked at a picture of yourself from 10 years ago and you're like, oh my God, it looked amazing. And then you realize, oh my God, I thought it looked terrible back then. It looked so good, right? It's because your subjective view of yourself is highly influenced by your confidence, your state of mind, whether or not you're on social media all the time, who you're comparing yourself to, the partner you're with, whatever. It's so subjective that your subjective opinion can change even though your objective body doesn't change at all. That makes fitness something that is super ineffective. This is why people will over-train, over-diet, hurt themselves, train in ineffective ways, ignore the fact that they feel like garbage. We talk to people all the time on the show, and they're ignoring all these signs that they're doing too much and needing too little. It's because they're just focused on subjective goals, which again are in your mind, right? Strength is objective. Did you get stronger than you're doing the right thing? Oh, you didn't get stronger? We're doing something wrong. It's black or white. It doesn't matter what you think you see in the mirror, whatever. You can't imagine the way to be heavier. It's either heavier or not. And so it tends to point you in the right direction. And I love that about powerlifting because when I would get clients, I could put them on the subjective path and not have to have all these conversations around their subjective opinion of themselves, which was very challenging to do. Dude, subjective goals are extremely difficult for a super advanced knowledgeable person to gauge. I share this all the time about my journey of competing and how difficult it was to be able to make sure like, wait a second, I swear I look like I'm putting weight on or I'm not losing, it's not moving. And I'm like measuring, tracking, weighing, everything. So just to map, because I'm looking at the mirror. I'm looking at the mirror or I'm looking at the scale, which both those things are subjective. The scale can stay the same, go up, go down, and it could mean the opposite of what you think it is. And that's somebody who I would consider myself an advanced lifter who's very knowledgeable around the subject. You had to go back to your numbers. I mean, I remember you talking to me about this where you look in the mirror, you're like, I don't, I look different, but then you go back to what I ate, what I drank, and you were so meticulous that you could override your subjective opinions. You're like, no, no, no, these are numbers. I must be holding water or less water or whatever. Yeah, and even though I saw that, I'd go like, what the conversation would go like this would be like, okay, I need to adjust though. I'm looking, this is not looking right, but everything I'm doing, I know I've written it down and I've tracked it, this is right. Okay, let me give it three to four days and let's see what happens. Yeah. And so I would be patient, stay the course, and then in three to four days, I'd see my, the mirror change or the scale would change and there would be enough to be like, okay, I'm all right, stay on the course. But my point is that you're talking about somebody who's really advanced and yet still is a mind fuck for me. So having a client that you have focused on something that is as clear as it can get, just telling them, okay, did we get stronger or not as your North Star is the simplest way to keep them and you brought it up as we opened up and started this. I mean, good luck getting stronger having, you know, poor sleep and not eating enough calories or hitting protein intake. Like if you consistently miss those marks, you're not going to get stronger. You're going to feel it see in the gym. So constantly trying to tweak all those things in order to get stronger really puts you in the right path of getting to whatever your goal is. Even if you have a subjective goal, like I want to look cute in this bikini, like still focusing on getting strong is the better path to get you there long-term because ultimately we know if you get stronger, you build muscle. If you build muscle, you speed up the metabolism. If you speed up the metabolism, it makes it that much easier to slim down and lose your body fat. You mentioned nutrition. One of the biggest challenges with women, for me, when I used to train women, was getting them to eat enough to support and fuel the type of things that we were working for in the gym. They were constantly trying to eat less, constantly careful with how much they were intaking because their goal oftentimes was fat loss. But what would happen is they would go too low. It would make it very hard for us to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish. And we didn't get the metabolism boosting. We didn't get the muscle building. We didn't get the sculpting. And so it's kind of this kind of battle. Well, training for strength encourages eating in a surplus. It encourages eating enough protein. In fact, it's so effective at doing this. I learned this from a therapist. I used to train this couple, and I trained them for a while. Then they brought me their daughter who was recovering anorexic. And before I trained her, I remember I called the parents and I said, okay, I'll train her, but I'd like to talk to the therapist first because I want to know what I can and can't talk about. And I want to make sure I help your daughter and put her in the wrong direction. The therapist told me, don't talk about body weight. Don't talk about body fat percentage. Don't talk about any of that stuff. Just focus on performance. And a light bulb went off. Of course. If we just focus on getting stronger, not only is it not triggering for her in terms of restricting or eating, it's going to encourage her to eat more because if she's not getting stronger and if she wants to get stronger, which eventually I convinced her to want to get stronger, she knew she had to eat more. And it got her to eat the right amount of protein and appropriately. This is one of my favorite reasons. It's kind of liberating. Very liberating. It's one of my favorite reasons why this type of training is so effective because especially when I'm trying to get someone to build muscle so we could get the metabolism boost and all that stuff, if somebody's afraid of gaining weight and they're constantly watching the scale, it's such a battle back and forth. This was such a hard one. I mean, because that mentality of coming in and always having to be a certain amount of calories per day, a lot of my clients knew, if I eat a little bit more than this, my body's going to change and I'm going to have this and that happen to me and to be able to go through and really trust the process that I'm lifting different, my mentality's different, my body's requiring more nutrients and to see them go through that process and see it actually change them for the better and how liberating that was for them, it was fantastic because now we're not worried about the scale on a day-to-day basis. We're just focused on one objective and that's just to get strong and then all the benefits you receive and it reveals itself through that process. This is why I don't like the law thermodynamics type of conversation that so many fitness professionals have about, oh, you just got to eat less and move more because one of the things that I experienced in my career was starting to break down these diets and look at, because the first thing I'd have to do is show me where you're at and these people were struggling, not only these people were struggling with weight loss but they were malnutrition. They weren't getting enough of these nutrients. We were not getting enough fiber. We weren't getting enough protein. We weren't getting enough healthy fats. We're missing on all these things that your body wants and needs. For me, that was the first kind of light bulb that went off. Here I'm switching my clients over to getting stronger. Oh, look, they're missing all these macro and micronutrients. Let's start thinking of ways to add to the diet. Let's add to the diet and then the way we measure if we're on the right track is performance in the gym. Let's not worry about the scales, ups and downs about that. Let's speak to health and being stronger and sleeping better and more energy and so the conversation started to shift in that direction and then as I would add things in the diet, that would be the feedback I wanted from my clients to see are we heading down the right path and ultimately what was so great about this was if you did this correctly, they're slowly building muscle and it's getting more and more difficult for them to eat more food and naturally they would start to lean out. So it's amazing how effective this is for coaches and trainers to focus on this aspect versus what you think you're supposed to do, which is cut calories, cut, cut, cut. It just naturally makes you want to limit it. Yeah, this person's 40, 50 pounds away. I understand if you're a new coach right now listening to this, it has to be like, what? You need to tell me you get someone who wants to lose 40, 50 pounds and you're telling me I should put them on a powerlifting routine and add things to their diet. That sounds so counterintuitive but it's so the right strategy for long term success for this client. It is, you're building the engine so they could, look by the way, there's obviously more to this than just eating in a surplus. I have my clients that go eat junk food and garbage to do this. We're aiming for protein. I'm aiming for whole natural foods and I'm telling them to eat more. I'm adding to the diet. Now what happens when this person who normally eats fast food at this time of day, I tell them to eat. No, I want you to eat 8 ounces of steak. I want you to cup of rice, whatever. They're not going to eat both. They tend to eat what I tell them to eat. It's very satiating. It's complicated than just that encourages eating in a surplus but it definitely discourages eating too little or not getting enough nutrients. If you're not eating enough you're not going to get stronger and if this is you and you're scared and if you're constantly saying I know they say to build muscle but I'm really scared don't weigh yourself, just try and get stronger. It'll push you in that direction. It's also really important for coaches and trainers psychological hurdle you help your client get over. Totally. They have Yoyo dieted and Extreme dieted their whole life and you kind of flipping it on its head saying we're going to add things into this diet. I'm not going to focus on cutting from you and restricting from you. I'm going to focus on putting you in a diet. It really helps them with that mental hurdle because I don't know about you guys but many of my clients that were suffering and they had this super slow metabolism is because they were scared to death to ever eat because every time they did it felt to them like they just piled it all on so over time they'd go on these benches and then they'd see it go on and then they'd go with these hardcore restricts for long periods of time and so then you have to and if they're going to have long term success you've got to help them break through that mentally and one of the best ways is right out the gates teaching them we're going to get strong we're going to add things to the diet and that's a huge, huge part of their long term success. Right, now the next point this is just one of the side effects of getting stronger is it speeds up your metabolism. You know burning calories manually is hard it's first off it's obvious work like if I want to burn more calories by moving well I got to move a lot well that could be hard to do it could be inconvenient I got to schedule time to do that and moving more my body eventually learns how to adapt and burn less calories in other ways either by paring muscle down reducing activity in other ways so that my calorie burn this has been proven in study after study trying to burn calories manually for fat loss there's nothing wrong with moving more moving more is good for you but doing it to try to lose weight it's a losing strategy every study Donna has been shows this I've experienced this with clients myself a much more effective strategy is to get your metabolism to burn more calories on its own how do you do that? Well you build muscle that's it what you're doing is you're literally losing a lot of calories the beauty of this by the way for somebody who's listening right now who's like oh god I got to put size on my body I'm trying to get smaller muscle is very dense if you lost 10 pounds of fat but gained 10 pounds of muscle you'd be smaller about a quarter of the size you would lose almost a quarter so it's so dense that gaining 5 pounds of muscle you're not going to look bigger you'll feel tighter with your metabolism 5 pounds of muscle on your body done the right way and I mean real muscle not just water glycogen like actual contractile tissue right gaining 5 pounds of actual real lean body mass the right way I mean you're going to boost in my experience I would have someone's metabolism boost by 500, 600, 800 calories depending on the person that's like an hour of cardio every day just sitting there thinking about what flexibility a meal you could eat or you just get leaner eating what you're currently eating it's like investing money I can put my money somewhere where it makes money for me and I just sit at home while I make money or I can go try and work more hours you can go ahead and try and work more hours by the way your body learns how to tax you more when you do that just like you would with taxes but with this it's tax free think of it that way and it builds for you speeding up the metabolism is the most effective strategy for fat loss this is why when you hear me say fat loss this is why it's the number one reason I'm so glad you said that because somebody's going to clip that and they're going to do a counter argument to what you just said so I want to arm the trainers and clients out there with this discussion because it's one of my pet peeves is the research around how many calories more your body burns for every pound of muscle you have is there's massive debate around that I've seen it as low as like 5 or 10 calories a day to as high as like 60 calories a day and arguing over the science of what we have on what exactly is that is not the whole story the metabolism is far more complex than you be able to measure just the metabolic rate of one pound of tissue so don't allow some dork who just got out of school who wants to take that clip and argue it and say like that's not true even if you had a 5 pounds of muscle it would only equate to about 75 calories and 75 calories is insignificant because one we still don't know everything about the metabolism we're still trying to figure it out two there's also huge behavioral changes that happens to somebody who adds 5 or 10 pounds of muscle to their body yeah they don't measure any of that they're right I guarantee anybody listening right now nothing else changes in your life but you add 5 to 10 more pounds watch how much more you move you know and watch how much more effective you are when you move inside the gym and how much stronger you are and there's this effect better decisions you make nutrition there's a rippling effect of positive benefits that happen to you metabolically physically physiologically from adding 5 to 10 pounds of muscle on you that is cannot be measured in a lab and compared to fat burns this muscle burns this and unfortunately our community in space will take a clip that I guarantee someone's gonna clip that cell you know what and they'll try and make this argument that you're full shit you don't know what you're talking about trainers and coaches that do reverse dieting with competitors or work with people they know we know this by the way there's a range of calories you could burn within the same with the same lean body mass so your body can become more thrifty or less thrifty whether you gain or lose a single pound or not doesn't matter your body can decide to burn more calories less calories and there's it's a very complex system but if you're training to build muscle you're in the process of building muscle you're feeding your body to do so all those things point towards becoming less thrifty with calories means you have a fashion metabolism I've had people's metabolism boost even more the story I share about Melissa will find her on Instagram and ask her if this is a true story or not it's the last person that I train if you based it off of what the research says on pounds of muscle it would be impossible for me to have increased her calories to what it did but not only did we do so we did so and then want to show by doing that and when I got her she was at like 1900 calories or less we worked her all the way up to like 27 2800 calories little tiny little thing and we did that in a relatively short period of time she most certainly did not put on 50 pounds of muscle in that period of time so what did all that extra calorie burning go from and it wasn't me increasing your activity like crazy because before prep I had her doing zero cardio so go explain that to me it's like we don't we haven't quite fully wrapped our brains around exactly all the different mechanisms that it's affecting and how it works I can tell you from firsthand though I've done this hundreds of times with clients it's extremely effective and I have seen metabolisms roaring and even myself because I've heard me share the journey on here that there's been times on this podcast in the last eight years when at 5500 calories I would lose weight yeah 5500 calories right now pile on like crazy I can't even eat over 3000 right now because I'm a total different person right now so that's how much you can radically shift the metabolism so don't let some dork tell you that's not okay calm dorks it also look powerlifting training or training for strength also discourages over training one of the the the biggest hurdles for anybody starting a fitness program especially women because they tend to want weight loss more so than men even is that they over train they think if some exercise is good more is better that's not true at all the right dose will give you the best results more than that will give you worse results less than that will give you rest less results so how does powerlifting discourage over training if you over train you're not going to get stronger you'll get weaker if you're training hard and you're not getting stronger and then you add more training and then you start to get weaker oh I must be over training I got it back off if you're training for strength this is one of the times look if you're training for the mirror if you're just doing subjective right it'll be very hard for me to get you to back off when you're training and even realize you'll look at the mirror like I think I look better I'm not sure but I am training less but if I have you back off your training and you go up 15 pounds on your deadlift it's right there oh you were over training look you got stronger from training less because you were over training before and just to put it more clearly training for strength encourages proper workout programming you can't train improperly you can't have a crappy workout program and consistently get stronger you can't fool the body when it comes to strength for too long maybe initially when you first get started for the first few months you'll get stronger doing almost anything but then you'll stop and you'll not get stronger unless you have a well written well planned workout and powerlifting encourages it because again it's objective the reason why this is such a strong point is because one I think this is extremely common across the board I think a lot of people especially fitness enthusiasts think a lot of women over train in relation to the calories they consume because the most common move is to cut calories and increase activity and when they don't see the body moving or changing they just keep increasing yeah they just keep increasing the activity and reducing the calories and have no idea they're getting further and further in that direction of over training and to your point about getting stronger it's it's so objective that even if you got a little bit of newbie gains training and under eating eventually that kid catches up really quick and you have to solve that in order to see yourself get strong well and one of the other things I love about the style of training is it just highlights the importance of rest and how a lot of these other programs that most women that I would train would basically they were doing cardio with weights in every single session every single workout they've ever done and that's just because of what's going on there in the marketplace it's this busy do more more more in order to keep leaning out and get to your desired outcome where this just shows you how you can increase strength and you take longer rest periods in between completely different mindset shift and then hopefully that then translates going back in the importance of rest in between sets right now you guys mentioned this earlier but I love talking about the empowering feeling that getting stronger produces for women this was one of my favorite comments that I would get from female clients is they would come in and they would say something like you know I had one woman that I trained she was this really petite executive and she would travel a lot and I remember she came in this was after maybe four or five months of training she's like oh my god the craziest thing happened I'm like what she's like I didn't need to ask she was real small she's like five foot I didn't need to ask anyone help for the whole time and I kind of chuckle that was a young trainer she said you have no idea Sal she goes I travel all the time for work I always have to ask some guy or flight attendant to help me she's like it's almost like I'm dependent she's like I did it myself and it's because I'm so much stronger and I thought about that like what would that feel like right I've had other female clients say things like oh my god I was holding both my kids all day long and I didn't get tired or I was I picked them and I didn't have to wait for my husband I picked it up and did it myself to feel stronger is to feel more able bodied it's empowering it feels incredible when you get when a woman can squat her body weight or more than her body weight for the first time and she looks at that bar and you say you know that was 135 pounds and they're like oh my god I just lifted 130 I remember I had a female client lift her husband's body weight I asked her and her eyes she's like oh my god I squatted my husband like that's insane it's an incredibly empowering feeling to get stronger and a lot of women don't experience this because workouts that especially designed for women don't talk about strength like it's this it's almost like the side effect like oh burn body fat sweat get sore you'll get a little stronger too it's not the primary effect training for powerlifting it's the primary effect and let me tell you it feels amazing yeah I think it's important that the women trainers learn to highlight this and point this out more I know you're going to get a lot of clients that come in and tell you that they need to lose weight they want to do that but shifting helping them shift their mindset in this because it's nice you have a client who's got to lose 30 40 50 pounds and you got a journey ahead of you and one of the things that you can hang on to or celebrate with them are these strength gain wins along the way and if you teach them and help them understand how impactful and important that is and how much that's a signal that you're doing the things right right you got to let them know that like listen if we are eating with we're supposed to we're taking care of your body stress management wise you're getting good rest we're feeding the body the nutrients it needs to grow and build you're getting stronger and if you're not getting stronger it's because we're missing on those things so even though I know we have this 40 pound journey we got to get to we're hitting some really important ways to do you celebrate those wins and communicate that to them because it's incredibly empowering to let your client know even if they have this big journey ahead of them that they're already starting to compile wins getting stronger just translates to so many things I mean it's this confidence builder it's it bleeds in everything it's it's overcoming any kind of other adversity that you're going to face you know at work or relationships or anything else it's just one of those types of training I don't think people put enough emphasis on it it's all weight loss agreed all right this this this last point I love because one of my favorite things to do with female clients who struggled with eating issues dysfunctional eating body image issues female clients that just had challenges with you know the way I was trying to train people who always had worked out a particular way they need to get sore and sweat a lot otherwise it wasn't effective is that would encourage them to sign up for a local powerlifting me now why would I do that because they had a date that was set they were training for it and help them become objective and single-minded with hitting their goal and then when they got there the powerlifting community is so supportive and fun strength training community that exists now bodybuilding physique bikini very subjective it can definitely be fun and supportive but boy do people really sacrifice themselves and their health going into it because the metrics tend to be very subjective right how you look powerlifting very different they're very very supportive it's very fun and you don't sacrifice I mean of course at the extreme levels health is sacrifice I'm talking about like you know local level type of deal but training into a powerlifting me you're your healthiest the day of the meat you're your strongest the day of the meat and again it's a wonderful community and I've had a few clients do this and get the support and they couldn't believe it like my god people were cheering for me I'm not even competitive I just did it for myself but all these people were like so excited you know for me to lift the weight off the floor it was so awesome I mean community is always important and I think in training right I think just think that whether you find that community within your family and your close friends or you go outside of that and you look for it and your comparison of bodybuilding well what's so accurate about that is that you're right like I don't care what anyone says bodybuilding is not healthy there's a very healthy aspect to strength training or powerlifting right there's a very healthy is there extremes and becomes unhealthy of course there's extremes but generally speaking the sport of powerlifting getting ready for that prepping for that all the way to the day of your competition if you're more healthy you're strong you're well fed you're not depleting your software like that bodybuilding a little bit different in that case but I mean this is also what I think what CrossFit why CrossFit was so big like they nailed this they figured this piece out of this you know building community around the big lifts I mean it's literally that it's literally these boxes all over the country are these little you know hole in the wall garage type gyms that focus on all the major barbell lifts and it's a very vulnerable community and it's why it's so successful I really I really I wish the trend was not a group of female friends getting together and saying let's do a bikini contest together so we could all get in shape for summer I wish it was like hey let's sign up for a powerlifting competition that'd be awesome you know what's funny about that they would look generally speaking they'd get better results more women would get better results working out together for a powerlifting competition a lot of people have developed more body image issues eating disorders or gotten worse through the get on stage and look and have the judges judge you type of sport versus I could go lift a heavy weight I would love to see that trend of women getting together and saying we're all training for this competition coming up in August or whatever just a bunch of muscle it would be it would be super amazing now if we've convinced you look here's a deal I'm glad also we have a program specifically designed for powerlifting training and it literally will take you to the day of competition if you decide to do so it's called maps powerlift and because of this episode it's half off 50% off you can find it at mapspowerlift.com use the coupon code womenpower to get that 50% off