there's two things I hate in this world terrorists and pink dumbbells do not lift weights to burn calories we lift weights to build muscle and build strength and please don't use these pink dumbbells this Leaf is the only exercise programming guide you'll need now I'll explain this Leaf a little bit later want to thank orange theory for making this educational series possible remember back in the very first episode muscle equals health and excess body fat equals sickness well in this episode I'm going to be focusing on the muscle piece of this puzzle building muscle is extremely important it will not only make you stronger but the more muscle you have the more bone mineral density you'll have as well a lot of people believe that if you're a woman and you lift weights it will make you build huge muscles well let me tell you lifting weights will not turn you into the incredible hawk it's just not how the process works we lift weights to get stronger and to build muscle now when we have this as our guiding principle it requires an intentional mindset on how to lift now something else I want to say and I want you to look into my eyes when I say this we do not lift weights to burn calories burning calories is fine but when people use lifting weights to burn a lot of calories what happens is it leads to bad programming and bad programs that are not focused on building muscle and getting stronger some people would say that I'm shaming pink dumbbells and I am now let me give you a general example if you can lift a weight more than 20 times it's too light now I know that there's research in premenopausal women that says that above 30 rep petitions is not ideal but I'm going to say if you can lift a weight more than 20 times it is not ideal so in my research lab that's exactly what we do we program a lot of resistance training and we never let our subjects go above 20 repetitions in one set now there's nothing magical about 20 reps I'm just giving that as general advice so that we're in the neighborhood where we want to be so let's recap what we've discussed so far resistant training is the best form of exercise that you can do particularly as you're going through menopause and we know that you're going to lose muscle let's be strategic about how we're going to prevent that from happening and lifting weights resistance training is key to this strategy we know we want to lift relatively heavy weights to build muscle and strength we do not lift weights to burn calories if you do lift weights you're not going to need a new wardrobe building muscle is a slow process let's pretend I'm wrong and you're building these huge muscles because you started lifting weights well you know what you could do you could stop lifting weights your muscles will get smaller but again I've been doing this for 25 years I've never seen that happen I want to also give a little bit of context if you can lift weights you're healthy you're feeling good you need and should be lifting weight but if you're not at a good place currently let's say you're one of the train wrecks that we described earlier then our focus is going to be getting you to a healthy place where you can lift weights so in that sense everything I'm going to talk about in this episode is aspirational I want to get you to the point where you are lifting weights and you're doing it with all of the steps and strategies that I'm going to talk about in this episode how do you make a resistance training plan well what I like to do is look at this from a body part or muscle group perspective so what we do is we divide the body into the lower body and upper body so the lower body what are the big muscle groups there well we have the glutes the quadriceps the hamstrings and the calves in the upper body we have chest back muscles shoulders biceps triceps and abdominal muscles and what's great about resistance training it allows you to shape your body if you want to shape your body in One Direction or another you just focus on exercises that will Target that body part if you were or are an athlete I wouldn't train you from a body part or muscle group perspective I would train you for movement patterns that are relative to your sport my Approach is we know you're losing muscle mass during menopause so let's focus on building muscle mass throughout your entire body and I want to give you a warning before I get into the details of structuring an evidence-based resistance training program and the warning is that a lot of unqualified trainers will try to over complicate this they'll use fancy words like triphasic periodization or microcycle planning that's just an attempt to over complicate something that doesn't need to be complicated so everything we're going to do in this episode is giving you evidence-based strategies to create your own resistance training program and doing it in a manner that is simple and effective your entire program can be comprehensively designed with the simple acronym L e leaf L stands for load e stands for effort a stands for amount F stands for frequency so let's start with l or load load is simply how heavy is the weight that you're LIF lifting now remember just to be in the right neighborhood we've already said that if you can lift a weight more than 20 times it's too light and if I were to lift this pink dumbbell which you know I hate I could lift it I don't know 50 times 100 times 140 times we know this is too light for me so here's some general recommendations you should generally find a weight that you can lift between six and 12 repetitions now sometimes you'll lift weights that are heavier three reps four reps five reps especially if you're doing squats or deadlifts other times you might choose a weight that you can lift 15 to 20 times more often than not we're going to be lifting a weight between 6 and 12 repetitions so that's where we're going to end with load now we go to effort a lot of people will call this intensity so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to lift this earlier I said um 6 to 12 times so I'm going to go ahead and lift this six times great I follow my own advice and I lifted it between six and 12 repetitions I just did six I did good right wrong there's nothing magical about six when we're lifting weights we also need to lift with high effort meaning that as we approach 10 reps or six reps in this case lifting the weight becomes difficult so here's a principle of your program effort is the most important attribute of your program the effort you put into each set is based on a concept called failure if you can't lift a weight for one more repetition we call that failure do we need to train to failure on all sets no we do need to train close to failure on all of our sets if you're not training close to failure you're not stimulating that muscle for growth in an efficient manner when you lift a weight you want to keep lifting it until you think you can do one or maybe two more repetitions before you can't lift it anymore when you first start you might be off by more than two or three repetitions but the more you lift the better you'll get at this all right so that was load and we' looked at effort and I'm actually going to I don't know why I held this so long as much as I can't stand pink dumbbells I'm just going to throw it away now we're going to move to amount the amount of lifting you should do and this is usually categorized as over a weak basis now some people will refer to this as the volume of training that you're doing for the first time I want to say that this concept the amount or volume that you're doing is very individualized to you now volume is a little different this depends on your goals your time and what are you currently doing what's your resistance training program currently comprised of so this this is why I recommend working with an evidence-based Fitness professional who can help guide you on an appropriate amount of lifting volume so how do we calculate volume this is where it's so simple as long as you can count you can calculate volume you simply count the number of sets that you do for a muscle group or body part and this is referred to as set volume for example let's say you go to the gym and you do five sets of uh dumbbell curls and five sets of leg presses so what you've just done was five sets for your biceps and you did five sets for your quadres you just count the number of sets where you went to near failure and you add them up if you repeated that workout twice per week five sets one day five sets another day that's 10 sets and let's take it one step further let's say you worked out three days of that week and you did five sets Monday five sets Wednesday five sets Friday you did 15 sets of work so whatever muscle group you're lifting where you take the set to your failure just add that to your weekly set volume and this system by the way is science-based it's referred to as the set volume system and this is how most exercise scientists prescribe their resistance training programs it's how I prescribe all of my programs in my research lab now I want to also give you a little bit of context into what's considered a low a moderate and a high amount of training volume so if you're doing less than 10 sets per week for a body part that would be considered low volume training if you do between 10 and 20 sets per week that's considered moderate volume training and if you do 20 sets or more for a body part that's considered high volume training now if you can picture a bodybuilder these men and women who they have pretty big muscles and they step on stage what they're typically doing is high volume training they're doing 20 or more sets per week for each of their body parts now that's fine but I want to make sure that we're aware you can make a ton of progress with low volume resistance training as long as your effort is high you don't have to be spending hours and hours in the gym you can do low volume even less than 10 sets per week and still build muscle and strength we're on to our last acronym the letter f for frequency frequency is simply how many days should you lift well the range of possibilities are from one day per week up to I'll I'll say six days per week and I always like to give one day per week where you have complete rest so I don't advise lifting seven days per week so the range that I'm going to present to you one to six days per week and what research has informed us is as long as you're volume or the amount of training is equated it doesn't matter how you divide up that training over the course of a week for example training a body part three days per week is not better or worse than two days per week likewise training a body part six days per week is no better or worse than training a body part 3 days per week now we do want to avoid putting all of the volume all of the amount of training for a particular ular body part on only one day of the week for example let's say you decided you were going to do 15 sets per week for your shoulders what we would want to avoid is doing all 15 sets on only one day per week it would be better to divide this up into two or three or more days per week let me give an example let's say you're lifting on Tuesday and Saturday you would do eight sets for your shoulders on Tuesday and seven sets for your shoulders on Saturday there's your 15 sets likewise let's say you're going to lift Monday Wednesday Friday five sets Monday five sets Wednesday five sets Friday still 15 sets but you've divided it over three days per week research has shown avoiding one day per week is not ideal two or more days per week as long as the volume is the same it really doesn't matter so here's how my personalized coaching company determines your training frequency what we we do is we start with your schedule in terms of how many days per week you can train how many days per week can you go to the gym so once we have that information from you we reverse engineer that and design the best program for you personally if you're interested in getting information from my coaching team just send me an email Bill at Bill Campbell phd.com in the next episode we're going to look at some Advanced strategies to address muscle loss during the menopause transition here's how my personalized coaching company determines your training frequency what we do first is get your schedule and your availability of how many days per week you can train and how long you can train for each session then what we do is we reverse engineer that into prescribing the best training program for you it would do me no good and you know good to give you a program that's 5 days per week if you can only be in the gym 3 days per week I would love to hear from you tell me what you're currently doing in the wa weight room what works for you what have you found that has built more muscle or strength for you in the next episode we're going to look at some Advanced strategies on how to help address the loss of muscle mass that women will typically experience during the menopause transition big shout out to hone health and orange theory for making this series possible check out both of their links Below in the next episode we're going to look at some Advanced resistance training strategies to help maintain muscle mous and hopefully build extra muscle mass during the menopause transition oh and don't forget subscribe to my YouTube channel