Resistance training 101 with Dr Eric Helms

[00:00:05] Greg: ​Stronger than yesterday. Now ain't nothing but a mile away. My loneliness… 

[00:00:09] Charlie: Is that Britney?

[00:00:10] Greg: My favourite. I think Britney Spears was the first single I ever bought 

[00:00:18] Charlie: Oh, hit me, baby. One more time. 

[00:00:20] Greg: She was, I dunno how much older than us she is, but obviously her being a few years older, I was looking at her…

[00:00:30] Charlie: Oh, the Future, Mrs. Potter, Brittany Potter. Oh, it’s got a lovely ring to it.

[00:00:40] Greg: Do you think so? 

[00:00:41] Charlie: Yeah!

[00:00:42] Charlie: This is the Method, a podcast from Thriva about what health looks like in the real world.

[00:00:48] Greg: I'm Dr. Greg Potter. I'm a scientist and health and performance consultant. 

[00:00:52] Charlie: And I'm Charlie Edmondson. I'm not a science expert, I've got a regular job and a regular non-science, nerdy life, and I'm here to remind Greg of what that's actually like.

[00:01:02] Greg: On this show, we'll work out some sustainable changes to your routine that will actually make a difference to your health. And to do that, we've got a simple three-step method. First, we bring in an expert to unpack the science behind one key health question. Second, we provide some tips and habits you can try right now. And then finally, we put the practice to the test.

[00:01:24] Charlie: Each week, we hear from those who have tried and tested our recommendations to help turn a so-called ideal lifestyle into something that actually works for you.

[00:01:33] Charlie: Today, we're joined by Eric Helms, a researcher, coach, and athlete who's been heavily involved in strength and physique sports for decades. He's a senior research fellow at UTA, co-founder of 3D Muscle Journey, a competitive drug-free strength and physique athlete, and is known for bridging evidence-based research with real-world coaching

[00:01:56] Greg: Crump. How are you today? 

[00:01:58] Charlie: I am good. Thank you. Little bit tired. Busy week. Busy week. How are you?

[00:02:03] Greg: I'm well. I'm ready to hear about how we can turn you into an Adonis. I say that as if I'm already an adonis. 

[00:02:11] Charlie: I was gonna say. 

[00:02:11] Greg: I'm suggesting how we can turn both of us into adonises.

[00:02:17] Charlie: Is that the aim? Is that what we 

[00:02:19] Greg: Absolutely.

[00:02:20] Greg: What we're actually speaking about today is the importance of muscle mass, strength and power for general health. And to do that, we're bringing on board Dr. Eric Helms. He is a very impressive guy and a very experienced podcaster, both as a host and a guest.

[00:02:51] Charlie: I am actually quite interested and excited for this episode. Obviously, we are in January now. So there's probably a lot of people listening who have maybe just started going to the gym or who are looking at joining a gym. And with that, probably researching some form of resistance training. So Greg, do you want to just provide a little overview of what we mean by resistance training?

[00:03:18] Greg: Of course, resistance training involves applying effort against some sort of resistance. And when people hear resistance training, I think they default to thinking of lifting weights in the gym, lifting barbells, lifting dumbbells, using machines that provide resistance. But it can also include many different types of exercise. Things like training with rubber bands, it can include body weight exercises, we can think about things like rock climbing and bouldering, which you've been doing some of recently. 

[00:03:56] Charlie: Professional boulderer. 

[00:03:57] Greg: Absolutely. But obviously, with resistance training, we can get lots of different benefits. It can be good for economy in some activities, by which I mean the amount of energy that it takes you to complete a given task. And then it's something that's foundational for general health too. And Charlie, we've spoken before about how you fractured multiple bones in your lower limb and, 

[00:04:26] Charlie: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:26] Greg: And some of that. It might be related to a background of very high volumes of endurance exercise without an appropriate balance between that and exercise. That's better at building bones, which includes resistance training.

[00:04:43] Charlie: Yeah. It sounds quite drastic, doesn't it? I'm a lot better with it now than I was, when I was racing triathlon for a number of years, obviously you are essentially training three sports. The focus is typically on those three sports. So strength and conditioning for me, maybe took a bit of a backseat and looking back, neglecting it was definitely a mistake.

[00:05:11] Whereas now moving into the world of endurance running, it's almost like a non-negotiable for me now to build into my week. Anything to try and avoid injury really. So. I'm in the gym twice a week for pure strength and conditioning work.

[00:05:35] And it's a running-specific strength and conditioning program. But then I also do a Saturday morning class, which is at my local gym. That's a lovely mix of weights and cardio and gives me definitely more of a buzz, um, and more mental health benefits than my strength and conditioning work does. I try to mix it up. I think the variety of those classes really helps. The strength and conditioning can sometimes feel a little bit samey, but I'm trying to understand the benefits and recognise them a lot more. So persevering with it. So why should people be interested in today's topic, Greg?

[00:06:22] Greg: For all the reasons I just mentioned, but what I would add to that is that we're speaking to someone who is an academic, but also a coach and a competitive bodybuilder. Bodybuilders are the masters of physique transformation. So if you wanted to learn about how you can. Build muscle mass and lose body fat. Then I would argue that natural bodybuilders, and when I say natural bodybuilders, what I mean is bodybuilders that don't use performance-enhancing drugs. They know more about physique transformation, building muscle and shedding body fat than anybody on the planet. So Eric, I would argue, is uniquely well placed to help people transform their bodies. But also if people feel better in their own skin because they're more comfortable about how they look, then I think that can have a dramatic positive effect on their perceptions of themselves.

[00:07:22] On how they carry themselves in the world, on how they relate to other individuals too. So if you are not currently doing any resistance training, then we hope that this episode sparks your interest and maybe gives you a nudge to actually make use of your new year new gym membership.

[00:07:41] Charlie: New Year, new you. 

[00:07:44] Greg: New year, new crumpet. 

[00:07:45] Charlie: New crumpet. 

[00:07:46] Greg: Should we bring in Eric? 

[00:07:48] Charlie: Yeah, let's. Let's bring him in.

[00:07:50] Greg: Dr. Eric Helms it's very nice to see you.

[00:07:53] Eric: Great to see you too. 

[00:07:53] Greg: So we are gonna start with a rapid-fire round to introduce the importance of resistance training. First question, if someone is new to resistance training, can they get stronger at any age?

[00:08:11] Eric: Absolutely. And we have a tremendous amount of data to show that, um, whether you are starting at 18 or younger or you flip that 81 or older, um, we have robust data to indicate that all populations and age groups do get stronger with resistance training.

[00:08:31] Charlie: If someone is completely new to it, you know, they're a bit anxious, is there an ideal age to sort of get into resistance training or is it just start whenever 

[00:08:39] Eric: The ideal age is as soon as possible, and whatever age you happen to be when you start.

[00:08:45] Greg: I'd love it if you could just give a brief overview of some of the ways in which our bodies respond to resistance training.

[00:08:55] Eric: Absolutely. So when you actually lift weights, um, your muscles are pulling on your bones to create movement. So the force is transferred from the muscle to the tendon to the bone. And moving on the planet Earth with gravity. That's kind of what's gonna maintain your baseline level of muscle mass and bone mass. But if you want to enhance it or prevent the decay or a loss of it even moderate load training, uh, is very effective for combating the loss of bone and muscle mass. cause it grows muscle hypertrophy, hypertrophy is muscle growth that combats atrophy, the loss of muscle, which is associated with being sedentary or a potential disease state or injury. Almost all resistance training produces compressive forces on bone because your muscles are contracting and they're pulling on that bone.

[00:09:46] Greg: And it's worth highlighting that there's a variety of benefits that come with having more muscle mass when it comes to metabolic control. For example, muscle being the largest sink into which you pour glucose each day, it's gonna be very good for things like your blood sugar regulation and therefore your risk of diabetes. So on that note, when it comes to some of the other benefits of resistance training on other organ systems, what do we know about what those effects are?

[00:10:18] Eric: There's a tremendous number of metabolic benefits and also overall health benefits from resistance training. We started with the musculoskeletal system, but to your point, the cool thing about resistance training is that it helps with blood sugar regulation. And when you have high blood glucose levels, that creates damage in your body if it's too high, for too long. So that damage can be mitigated when you are more physically active

[00:10:42] and it keeps the various organ systems better at having glucose flux in and out of them.

[00:10:49] It also prevents the muscle from having a lower quality. Less fat infiltration, lower levels of inflammation throughout the body, even though it initially creates a lot of fatigue.

[00:11:00] Because it is physical activity, although we don't think of it as like, oh, this is aerobic training, quote unquote, you're not running, you're not necessarily using the same energy systems in the same way, but if you're doing it to a sufficient intensity for a sufficient amount of volume, you're gonna see your heart rate come up, you're gonna see it come down and then recover during the, the rest intervals. Uh, and you'll absolutely get a lot of the heart health benefits as well that you get from physical activity more generally. So for either health performance strength, or if you just wanna look better, carry more muscularity, from an aesthetic perspective, resistance training is great. for that.

[00:11:39] Greg: Final question of the rapid fire round Eric, when we're speaking about training volume per week?

[00:11:49] Eric: That's generally, uh, the best way to look at that is the number of actual working sets or hard sets that you do for a given muscle group or exercise, depending upon if you're, uh, focused or performance focused. And for strength, the most important variable. Here's how heavy it is, the loads.

[00:12:16] Greg: So there's a big range of different benefits to be had. And just to emphasise a couple of points, one of the things you mentioned early on is the effect on how people look. People often look past that, and they think of that as being something that's just a narcissistic consideration. But the effect on self-confidence can be massive for many people and meaningfully improve their lives. So a couple of things that you didn't mention, for instance, are that you get improvements in skin elasticity. And then it's very good for the brain. We now know a lot about the effects of resistance training on white matter in the brain in particular, which is very important to long-range communication, sending signals quickly within the nervous system and so on. Finally, you mentioned public health guidelines there, and I think that nicely tees up the practice section.

[00:13:07] So, how to actually get these benefits because pretty much all major bodies worldwide, including the World Health Organisation, advocate for resistance training for all major muscle groups at least twice a week. But before we get there, Charlie, is there anything that you wanna pick up on that we've mentioned so far that's not clear? 

[00:13:26] Charlie: Yeah. So one of the subjects that, we're trying to look at on the podcast is around, um, male-female split and previously, there was a time when it wasn't deemed as acceptable for women to look muscular, and now there's definitely a real shift in perception and an increase in women who are strength training. So my question is around how quickly do women actually build muscle compared to men? And what does that mean visually for someone who's training maybe only just a few times a week? 

[00:13:55] Eric: Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that not all women necessarily are afraid of gaining muscle mass. There's plenty of women who their explicit goal is to gain muscle mass, and that's definitely a societal change that I've seen in some sectors, uh, since I've started. But on the flip side, I always have had a chuckle as a trainer in the past when I've had some women. Um, so, I'm worried about getting too big too quickly. And I tell 'em, well, you know, I've been trying for 20 years to get too big and I, I haven't done it yet. So if you figure out how to turn into an Olympian in the first 12 weeks of casually training with me, three hours per week versus the 12 hours per week that I train, let me know your secret and we will, we'll, we'll, flip it. You'll be the trainer. I'll be the athlete. You know, now with that said, men do have more muscle at baseline and are, on average, bigger. And that's just 'cause when we went through puberty, we got exposed to more testosterone. So our baseline starts higher.

[00:14:56] And in general, men are bigger and more muscular than women when you look at averages. However, a really cool thing is that the actual relative increase in muscle mass that men and women experience when they start resistance training. Is the same, so in general, there's gonna be far more differences between two individual women just based upon their general genetic makeup, psychology and environment than there is between the average man and woman, believe it or not. So I think it's important to recognise that volume is still volume. Intensity is still intensity. And there are far more similarities between the sex, the sexes, and there are differences. But of course, there are important differences. whether you're looking at muscle thickness, lean body mass, whichever metric is your, is your one of choice. And that means that if a woman goes all out, has great genetics and does everything in their power to get as big as possible, they're gonna look great, but they're probably not going to look like something quote unquote unnatural or have a huge amount of muscle mass. Um, it's hard to get huge. That's why there's actually a sport of bodybuilding rather than like accidental: ‘oops. I, I, I turned into Arnold Schwarzenegger overnight,’ you know?

[00:16:19] Greg: And just to add to that, if someone is not consuming more calories than they expend, they're not gonna gain weight. So if you are doing resistance training and you are in energy balance, then it's not something that you should be concerned about, regardless. 

[00:16:35] Charlie: So we've just heard all about the science of how resistance training actually works. Now we want to move into the practice section and look at how we take all that science and turn it into something actionable and helpful for you.

[00:16:52] Charlie: So Eric bodybuilders often speak about so-called training splits. So for example, you could train all major muscles each time you do resistance training, so whole body training. Or you could train the lower body one day, upper body the next day, or you could split the body into even more segments than that. So what do you tend to recommend for time crunched beginners?

[00:17:13] Eric: The beauty of being a beginner is that you don't need to do a tremendous amount of volume to see pretty robust gains. So for a beginner, I think the best way to do this is to start and just look at your schedule. How many days per week do I have to train and how much time can I dedicate within those time slots? So someone who has four hours per week to train could very easily do say Monday, Tuesday, an hour upper, an hour lower, and then the same thing repeated on Thursday, Friday. But for someone only has two hours per week to train, they might be better suited doing two sessions of full body training and trying to use some time-saving techniques. Like alternating between lower and upper body movements that don't train the same muscle. But you're gonna be constantly moving. So this is what we might describe as circuit training. Doing two different exercises, back to back, before you rest of two non-competing muscle groups. So you wouldn't do say bench press and then tricep push down. Because in both cases you're using your triceps, but you might do bench press and calf raise, for example. Or you could do an antagonist-paired set, which means there's not a bad guy involved. It just means that kind of the opposing muscle groups, if you will, are trained back to back before you rest. So you might do a bench press followed by a row. But you're not actually doing an actual rest period until you complete both.

[00:18:37] And this can cut down the amount of time you have to spend in the gym by a third to a half or sometimes even more. That's a way you can save time and the way you can accommodate doing a fair amount of volume with a limited or more flexible schedule.

[00:18:54] Greg: And then one more idea for people is that if they're very short on time, there's a training method called escalating density training, where you basically take a given exercise and you give yourself a time zone. For example, five minutes, and then the goal is to do as many repetitions of the exercise within the five minutes. That you can record the number of repetitions that you do in total, and then your goal next time is to beat that number of repetitions. But returning to volume, if someone was completely new to training though, could they potentially get stronger with a single set per week if they were really short on time?

[00:19:32] Eric: Absolutely, they can even get bigger on a single set per week um, it might take longer to visualize those changes, but the strength gains will actually be quite robust. The amount of volume that I would generally recommend for a beginner is probably somewhere around five to 10 sets per week per muscle group now that's if your goal is to put on muscle. If someone has explicit performance based goals, you need to focus more on giving yourself a little more rest times and specific tasks. Because it's a little more like baking or farming. You kind of have to create the right environment and you watch it happen over time, while you could see quite rapid increases in strength as you get good at a given skill. So for someone totally new, especially to free weight training, absolutely. You can get a lot stronger, for probably multiple months before it started to slow down and you needed a little more exposure. Um, of course you could make faster gains if you were also inducing structural changes.

[00:20:35] Greg: So on that subject, if someone's starting out and they're doing the same set of exercises, would you recommend that they just carry on doing those sessions until they've stopped progressing if they're not bored?

[00:20:49] Eric: To be honest, the decision of how long to stay on a given program and when to change things is very much going to be keeping yourself from making a mistake and also keeping yourself engaged. So one thing you don't want to do is to constantly change exercises so that you're never getting to actually learn the skills of lifting.

[00:21:17] Um, the reason why over a eight to 12 week period, you can sometimes see a 50, 60 or even a hundred percent increase in strength is because you're just learning how to do the thing. If you take someone over 12 weeks and you teach them how to ride a bike, it's gonna look very different over in week one versus week 12.

[00:21:36] And the same thing is true of a barbell squat, and the actual number of plates on the bar are gonna change dramatically as well, you won't get many of those structural adaptations without getting that baseline skill developed if you constantly change the exercises. With that said, variety is the spice of life, and depending upon someone's personality, they might like a lot of variety. But what I would encourage is to keep kind of a basic stable of movement patterns with only one or two variations of each, which you can swap in and out

[00:22:10] so that you continually do get exposure over these similar skills. So something like a shoulder press, a chest press, a lap pull down in a row, and then a hinge pattern and a squat pattern. Just rotate through them, and just make sure that you keep improving. And that is a totally sufficient way for a novice or a beginner to stay engaged. And so long as you're actually seeing your loads and your reps go up, or being able to do more reps with the same load in a shorter time period if you want to use the escalating density protocol. So long as that progression is there, you're gonna see great results.

[00:22:43] Greg: And certainly that approach is gonna target all major muscle groups. But for someone who has been training that way for a while, are there a few muscles, that aren't necessarily gonna be that well targeted just by those six movement patterns. And if so, what are a couple of additional exercises that they could plug in?

[00:23:03] Eric: now we're talking about my people, Greg. All right. So yes, absolutely those compound movement patterns are time efficient, effective, great from a functional perspective, and will be very sufficient to grow 80 to 90% of the muscles in your body.

[00:23:19] However, like you said, there are some muscle groups which do relatively isolated tasks, so you might want to do something like isolated knee extension and isolated knee flexion. And it wouldn't be a bad idea to do some things like pressing at different angles as well as moving, uh, and also pulling at different angles of the upper body, if you are really interested in every single muscle group in your body, doing some isolation exercises for your arms or even things like shrugs or core work, like active flection of the trunk, like, uh, training your abs. If you're really looking to get every single muscle to grow, uh, you're probably looking at not just six exercises, but maybe more like 20. If we really want to be super inclusive and take a bodybuilding perspective. 

[00:24:05] Charlie: Just on that, if we were to look at it from not just, um, obviously growing muscles, is there benefits for more of a strength and conditioning perspective? So I'm thinking more for an endurance athlete I mean personally myself, marathon training, um, you know, to actually look at really isolating some, um, joints that are gonna be taking a lot of impact as opposed to purely looking at muscle growth.

[00:24:36] Eric: Absolutely. So there are very few sports in which resistance training are not arguably a key component to enhance performance. Um, endurance athletes specifically. Might need to have a higher intensity. Bout like if a little, a short sprint going up a hill, coming around a curve, getting around somebody from being in a position of drafting, you might need a burst of speed, and things like running economy, uh, seem to be enhanced by resistance training because effectively you're making every single one of your efforts through your legs slightly easier because your overall strength capacity is higher. So essentially doing some resistance training, probably focused more on power and strength development you're not looking to actually increase muscle mass a whole lot 'cause you gotta carry that around with you. But actually making yourself a little more resilient, uh, to, joint stress, like you mentioned from an injury prevention perspective. It can have benefits and these benefits become progressively more obvious the more of a power-based sport it is. Like you go from let's say running to football, to American football or rugby to something like track and field. Being a jumper or a sprinter. You see this progressively more important contribution of resistance training. And then on the far left, you get crazy folks like me who are actually competing in, in lifting itself.

[00:26:10] Charlie: Eric, I'm aware that there can be a concern amongst Some women , around tolerating higher volumes of training. So just want to touch on that really, and also specifically if you've noticed any, periods in the month, during cycles of when would be particularly beneficial to increase, load, decrease, load, and any of the effects on that.

[00:26:33] Eric: Yeah, so sex differences are a really interesting topic and they're one that are very hot right now. Um, and there's unfortunately a lot of misinformation around it as well. I think one of the key important things to realize is that while we have less research on women, it doesn't mean we have no research on women, and also importantly, we need to consider which types of research on men are likely to be extrapolatable to women and which ones are not. So one really interesting thing, is while the percentage change in muscle mass, when men and women start training is very similar, women generally gain upper body. Strength faster than men. 

[00:27:17] Charlie: Yes.

[00:27:18] Eric: Now, it's probably due to systemic societal differences in the sports that men and women participate in youth and the overall rates of sports participation in women, which are still lower even today in 2026 than they are of men. So the woman is getting more robust, newbie gains to kind of make up that difference quite quickly. now, that is more of a societal difference in most cases. but it doesn't Mean there are no sex differences. Every menstruating person I know has some experience related to different phases of it. They may have stronger or lesser, PMS symptoms, uh, and they might sometimes notice that they perform better or more motivated to perform at different times or that it's just more of a hassle or cramps are, are impacting them. But another thing I've noticed when we actually survey women as to, , as to how does their menstrual cycle impact their training, while it it very consistently does, how it affects it is incredibly inconsistent. There are some women who feel better during different phases. There are some women who have debilitating PMS symptoms, others who don't. More. So when we look at actual interventional research where people try to manipulate training around the menstrual cycle, it hasn't yet re resulted in better outcomes. Now, this isn't because the mechanisms in theory are completely wrong, but primarily because you can have a 21 day. Or you can have a 35 day menstrual cycle, and those are both normal. In fact, the same woman in two consecutive cycles can have two different lengths. So predicting when you're in the follicular phase or when you're in the luteal phase, there's a big amount of guesswork that's going on there. And even when we do individualized studies on women to try to sync up their cycle with the training protocol, things like say temperature tracking or just written cycle tracking, are imperfect tools to accurately gauge when you're actually in these different hormonal states of progestin and estradiol being at different levels. So cycle tracking is incredibly challenging. Women are different to one another. They're different between each other. They're different cycle to cycle. And half of women are actually, if they're menstruating using birth control and now they're technically not even having a a, a menstrual cycle. Right? So ultimately, you kind of need to autoregulate this based upon your individual symptoms. But any protocol, and this is the one thing that I am quite. Bullish on, I, will say that asks you for half of the month to basically just do light yoga or stay away from hard training is already a non-starter 'cause there's not a single athlete on the planet, strength and conditioning coach or anyone with any kind of experience as a trainer who thinks they can make good gains by basically only training half of the time that they were intending.

[00:30:14] Charlie: It's definitely not a one size fits all approach and just looping back to the menstrual cycle. on how that then changes moving. I know you mentioned perimenopause, but the female who are training during the menopause and if there's any specific, um, adaptations that they need to make or they should be considering during the menopause

[00:30:40] Eric: menopause symptoms can last for a variable amount of time and have a variable degree of impact on the person. Um, some people have pretty extreme, uh, and long lasting perimenopausal effects, and the main thing I would give as a hopeful message to women with menopause, you know, right now you're getting a lot of messages around, Hey,

[00:31:03] you're gonna be having a reduction in estrogen that's gonna have knock on effects on bone. And you're at greater risks of osteopenia and sarcopenia and you are in a uniquely precarious position and you need to do resistance training and it's gotta be heavy. If someone is willing to do that, that is great. However, the data is actually quite clear that if you start training. During, or even after menopause, you can build muscle, you will get stronger,

[00:31:30] and even moderate load training is also quite effective for combating and mitigating any losses in bone mass, and will also result in gains in muscle mass in most cases. So the main message I would give to perimenopausal women or menopausal women is that there is no greater time to start than right now, which is true for everyone but especially true if you are concerned about, uh, losses in bone mineral density or losses in muscle mass.

[00:31:59] And it absolutely will have a major impact if you do start resistance training and you are far less constrained than maybe some content creators would indicate.

[00:32:09] Um, yes, you want to focus on strength training. Yes, you want to try to get stronger, but you can do that just like Greg mentioned. And like I mentioned earlier, with moderate loads. Which is good news because the largest barrier is consistency and adherence. And I am hugely against any message which limits the option of people, so long as you are pushing yourself and you are seeing the weights progress over time, which is one of the biggest things that beginners struggle with, or why they get stuck as beginners, then you're gonna be fine. Just focus on progression over time. 

[00:32:42] Charlie: Perfect.

[00:32:43] Charlie: So this section we call our experience section. So we take questions from our listeners, either on voice note or that have been sent in by email and yeah, just ask you to, to provide some advice.

[00:32:56] So first we've got questions from someone called Lincoln from London.

[00:33:03] Lincoln: Hi. Um, so I really like to do resistance training. I really like to go to the gym and try to be healthy and build a bit of muscle. Uh, however, I have an eight-month-old baby, and so my sleep is, is really poor. Uh, what can I do to maybe minimise some of that, and how can I go to the gym and build muscle and get strong, but also kind of deal with the fact that I won't be getting very good sleep?

[00:33:32] Eric: Well, the good news is that your baby will not be eight months old forever, and it will eventually let you sleep. And the even better news, and this sounds like someone who is training for a bit, so, uh, you know, Lincoln is interested in staying healthy, going to the gym, and is basically concerned like, is my sleep gonna wreck my gains? Um, I won't lie to you. It's not ideal to be only getting three or four hours of sleep,

[00:33:58] but. It's not a huge game-changer. It's not gonna be something that completely prevents you or even makes you lose gains. Um, we're incredibly robust survival machines, or we wouldn't be here talking on the internet today like we are if we couldn't adapt and do things like hunt and forage and survive and actually get better at physical activity in pretty suboptimal states like famine, war plague, et cetera, uh, ice ages, all that good stuff that our ancestors had to deal with for us to be here today. So what you can do is go to what I would describe as a minimum effective dose protocol. This will be helpful because a, it takes less time and I would imagine as a young parent you might have less time, but also you're just not recovering as well. And the balance between stimulus and recovery is key.

[00:34:50] So you can, uh, like we talked about earlier in this podcast, simply get in, say. Three to five sets per muscle group per week. If your focus is a little more on performance or even a single set at a reasonably high load, and what I would advise you to do is take a bit of a flexible approach to that. If you only have to spend a couple hof ours per week training, you can pick your spots. So you can have some variable training days or protocols that you would use based upon whether or not you're feeling underslept or undercovered. Uh, and you can have maybe make like your strength day, and you can do that strength day when you feel relatively refreshed, 'cause it's nothing like being underslept and barely awake and trying to get under a heavy squat that is potentially even dangerous.

[00:35:41] But you can absolutely jump on some machines and do some rep work on that day. And then if, surprisingly, you're like, hold on, I slept through the night, or it was my partner's turn to get up in the middle of the night, not mine. Well, today I actually got decent sleep, and I don't feel like death, and maybe it had some caffeine as well. I can do a little bit of strength training today. 

[00:36:03] Charlie: Amazing. Thank you. So another question that we've got is from Bill, who's based in Canada. So Bill's asked. As a 53-year-old who has experienced both good pain and bad pain from a rotator cuff tear, that's definitely required me to stop, to arthritis type aches that actually improve with strength training, I struggle to navigate the gray zone.

[00:36:25] Harvard Medical School often notes how strength training can be protective as we age, but also how important it is to respect warning signals. Access to a doctor or physio isn't always easy and most of us don't have a personal trainer watching our form. How can someone my age safely interpret pain when planning workouts, performing exercises with proper form and managing recovery? What practical cues should we use to tell the difference between the pain that means stop and the pain that means adjust? It's quite an in-depth question.

[00:36:57] Eric: It's great. No, it's a great question, Bill. And having, I'm turning 43 this year, I've been lifting for over half my life, and I've accrued, well, let's say a fair number of dings and niggles over the years of training. So I think the best way to view pain is that it's kind of like a very effective car alarm, but with all the limitations of a car alarm.

[00:37:24] So it will reliably go off when someone tries to break into your car, which would be the kind of pain that results in an injury or could, but it's also gonna go off when a bus drives by, right? It's also gonna go off when there's a car alarm or, or a dog decides that it's very interested in your in, in your door now. Those are gonna feel pretty similar, and without necessarily being overly or overly cautious, it's difficult to have a one-size-fits-all. 

[00:37:53] But the thing I can say is that just because you're experiencing pain doesn't mean you're actually creating structural damage or making something worse. And you can let pain be your guide regardless of whether it is an actual person breaking into your car or just a really excited dog, because even some things that we experience as chronic pain are actually not injurious or dangerous. So if you're getting shoulder pain when you're training, regardless of whether it's causing damage, you're gonna need to train around it.

[00:38:26] And I think being flexible in your exercise selection, your range of motion, your load and your rep range is the best way to do it. And if you can modify a given movement and experience less pain, you're probably good to go. So I think that's the general message I would get across, is to not strictly think that if I'm experiencing pain, I'm making something worse. 'Cause in most cases you probably aren't. Uh, and you will know it if it's the case, either if not today, the next day. Pain, unfortunately, is a little more complex than even a car alarm. It actually gets more or less sensitive, depending upon what's going on. Like, imagine a car alarm that, if you didn't sleep very well, goes off when not just buses drive by, but also any car. That's kind of what the, the human body is like. It gets desensitised or more sensitised. It can be primed by expectation effects, things that clinicians do or don't tell you, et cetera. So we have a very strong psychological and biological response to pain, and they interact. So if you're experiencing acute pain in a training session, the first thing is just to take a step back and remind yourself that pain is not a perfect correlate with injury or damage. And then think about what I could do to not feel the pain? And is there a way to modify it? That would be my advice. 

[00:39:49] Charlie: Our next question is actually from Lee. So Lee, do you wanna come out of the, uh, out the sidelines and ask you a question on, I believe yoga. 

[00:39:57] Lise: Hi Eric. So I'm the producer of the show. I sometimes have questions that come up, when we prepare these episodes. My one is about yoga because I've done yoga for many years. Um, and I won't give you a full picture. A little bit hyperflexible. So sometimes I have to really force myself to work on the muscle side, and what I found is that I kind of plateau after a while, so I'm not able to access some of the sort of more intense lifts or inversions that require. Stronger muscles because I have built up to a certain level and then I'm not able to kind of break through. So what do you recommend? I do. And also is your gut actually interesting for building muscle or is the, is it just limited? 

[00:40:43] Eric: That's a great question. Liz and I actually have a, a, my, my very first graduating PhD student, Dr Alyssa, Joyce Spence, who is now, uh, one of my colleagues at UT. Um, she did yoga for many years as a yoga instructor, did her PhD on stretching, but she's also a national champion in power lifting. And that's pretty cool. So, just a completely fun aside, which I know you will appreciate, there's actually a fair amount of research on highly intense stretching that showed that it does increase strength and hypertrophy. Stretching can induce hypertrophy. And even a moderate amount of relatively robust stretching, like it sounds like you do in your yoga protocols, is pretty effective. But it's not uncommon to kind of hit a limit because you're always limited by the amount of tension that you can induce using your body weight and your own ability to stretch yourself. So if you actually look at some competitive yogis, and there actually is competitive yoga out there, which you may be aware of, and they do adjunct resistance training. And what you can do is progressive, uh, strength-focused training, especially emphasising longer muscle lengths, but being careful because you're hypermobile and making sure that you start reasonably light and build up. And you might find that it does indeed positively impact your performance with actual yoga. So that has been shown, and there are also experiences of competitive yogis and people who are able to use resistance training as an adjunct to that, that they would at least self-report as effective. And I've met them, which is kind of cool.

[00:42:22] Charlie: Lee's gonna take up competitive yoga now. This is it.

[00:42:27] Greg: So, Eric, in closing, I think we've got, uh, the majority of things that we plan to speak with you about today. One exception may be concurrent training. So people who are doing resistance training and endurance training within. The same session. So that's something that we will return to at some point in the future. But Charlie, at this point, I'll hand over to you to ask the final

[00:42:51] Charlie: Yeah, it's the killer question for the podcast. Um, so we like to sort of end each episode with one key takeaway for our listeners,, that if they could implement into their lives, what would that be? What would be your one piece of advice?

[00:43:07] Eric: Since the listeners are people who have clearly made it this far, that means they're gonna commit to actually starting resistance training. I won't say that the most important thing is to just get in there and actually start. I will say, since you've already done that, dear listener, the most important thing is that over time you are actually seeing progression. So you really want to not be that person in the gym who's doing the same routine 10 years after they started. Especially not in the beginning phases. There's nothing wrong with maintaining the adaptations you've got, but within the first few months, you hit a plateaued state, you probably haven't made the lion's share of the initial gains you can make. So make sure that you are actually pushing yourself, respect and listen to your body, but also challenge yourself. 'Cause so many of the benefits you're gonna get and the enjoyment you will get from lifting weights is gonna come from realising, oh wow, I'm a lot stronger than I ever thought. And that will also help you stay in the gym. It's just like playing a video game or participating in some of these online games where you get that dopamine hit from seeing progression and completing the next task, the next task, the next task.

[00:44:16] So view it in that way. It's an opportunity each day to level up a little bit, and that's gonna keep you in the gym and most importantly, it's gonna optimise the adaptations you get from resistance training.

[00:44:28] Charlie: Amazing. Thank you. I feel like I could chat to you all day, Eric. We could, we could do a, a marathon podcast episode with questions. I am sure, uh, in fact, I have no doubt that we'll be speaking again on, uh, the method about 

[00:44:41] Eric: was a pleasure. Thank you so much. For having me. 

[00:44:44] Greg: Thanks, Eric.

[00:44:44] Greg: Crumpet. What are your main takeaways from this episode?

[00:44:49] Charlie: Um, I think there are actually quite a few. I found Eric very, very interesting. Probably, I mean, you can get strength, benefits and adaptations from just one single set per week. I know when I was racing triathlon, I definitely thought that. Pavement pounding was probably going to be more beneficial, but in reality, I probably should have been in the gym a little bit more. And also just what Eric touched on around training, um, join your menstrual cycle and the impacts on women. I think it is being so unique to individuals. What about you, Greg?

[00:45:27] Greg: Lots of things come to mind. So one is that everybody can benefit regardless of their age. Another is to start somewhere. Lots of different types of activity. You can qualify as resistance training and can give you some of the benefits that we've discussed today.

[00:45:42] So find something that you enjoy. Reiterating what you said. Just a single set per exercise per session can benefit you if you do it with enough effort. So work hard and push yourself. And initially, the specifics don't matter so much, but I don't think you can really go wrong. If you are going to the gym and you're lifting a weight that you can lift maybe eight to 16 times.

[00:46:08] Until fatigue and then see consistency, as Eric said, progress gradually. That can be very empowering, and just mix things up as much as is necessary in order for you to stay interested. Because the key thing is that you show up each.

[00:46:25] Charlie: I love that.

[00:46:26] Charlie: You've been listening to the Method Health in the Real World. A podcast brought to you by Thriva. 

[00:46:32] Greg: If you don't know about Thriva, it's a health tracking platform that helps you see exactly where your health is heading. People use Thriva like a compass, testing every few months to help steer their health to where they'd like it to be. It's a great tool to start feeling more empowered about your health and to get the information you need to make progress, even when life is a bit hectic. 

[00:46:53] Charlie: Thriver also has some great content out there that can help you get to grips with complex health questions exactly like what we try to do on this podcast. And all of that is free to access. So if you want to learn more, just head over to thriva.co. That's thriva.co.

[00:47:08] Greg: And of course, if you loved the show, subscribe. It takes just a few seconds, and you won't regret it.

[00:47:16] Charlie: You can also leave a review or send us an email with your own health questions. We want to cover the topics on your mind, so go grab our email in the show notes, and please do get in touch.

[00:47:27] Greg: A special thanks to the Thriva team and to Lower Street for helping us bring the show to life. Content Direction by Rich Cousins, Hamish Grierson, Tamar Loach, Vishal Shah, and Katie Yockey, production from Lise Lovati with the help of Sam Datta Paulin and Daria Lawson, and sound designed by Alex Rose. 

[00:47:46] Charlie: We are your hosts, Charlie Edmondson and Greg Potter, and we'll see you next time.

[00:47:50] Charlie: Thanks and bye to Eric. Thanks and bye from Charlie. Thanks and bye to Greg.

[00:47:54] Greg: Oh, Lise. Thanks and bye to Lise, too. Special cameo appearance. 

[00:47:59] Charlie: She waited one episode, and she was like, get me on the airwaves.

[00:48:04]Greg: She couldn’t help herself. Just wants to talk about being a champion Yogi.