The Women Series Holly Sinclair How women differ to men in the gym with Luke Leaman

Hey sis, welcome to the Women's Series podcast. I'm your host, Holly Sinclair. This is a show where period talk is celebrated, feminism is the driver, and fertility doesn't just equal baby making. Join me and my colleagues as we explore health, wellness, and womanhood. we're back tws podcast i'm very uh excited about today's conversation because i have what i would call this person a bit of a brainiac when it comes to training and so forth but i've got the amazing luke lehman with me today welcome man hey hello nice to be here um so i've had i've been really fortunate with my podcast to have lots of sort of functional medicine prackeys on talking about, you know, that side of health and nutrition and all of that sort of stuff. But I haven't actually had anybody on specifically talking about the training side of things, which we're going to get into today, which I'm super pumped about. But maybe let's just start with who you are, who Muscle Nerds is, where that came from and what your origin story is. oh man you asked me before we got on is there anything you won't talk about I should have said please no or just sorry uh but but I do I recognize too that your audience may be different than a lot of the other podcasts I've been on so yeah I mean how far do you want to go back we could go back to like 1886 when I was on the frontier and you know that chopping wood and that type of thing. But I mean, for me, it all started, I was, I think it was like, man, it was like the mid eighties and Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Conan the Barbarian. And I saw that movie and I went, that's a man. That's, I, that's the, I want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan and I want a sword and I want to ride around and I want to slay villages. And it was that type of thing, like little kid stuff. But yeah, I kind of got into bodybuilding at that age before the internet when we only had bodybuilding magazines and like books from the 1970s at the library, that type of stuff. So, but I started lifting at that point and was really doing it for that And also Texas football because that where I from So like every male who born is required to play football in Texas Even if you don play you almost required to be on the team, right? Especially in a small town like I'm from. So my town was less than 7,000 people. So if you've ever watched like Friday Night Lights, or if you've seen the movie Varsity Blues, which not a lot of people have seen anymore, I actually did stunts in that movie. So a lot of the big football stunts. I did that. Yeah. But that's how it was. Like the whole town like shut down and everybody's at the football game. So we were lifting for that reason, purely just for sports and things like that. And then I started powerlifting when I was 14. I did that until late 20s, got tired of that. I went into bodybuilding, went into strongman, did a bunch of other stuff. So that was kind of where it started as far as me lifting and competing and things like that. And I started reading about Charles Poliquin, Charles Poliquin, Paul Cech, like all these guys back in the day in muscle media, and then saw them on online when we got the internet in 1992, which sounds insane now, because there's a lot of people that'll be listening to this that don't know what it's like to not have the internet. Oh, there's my dog. I'm putting them down. So, yeah, so I started kind of studying that stuff and then saved up a lot of money and went to a seminar, did a lot of seminars with Paul Check, with Charles Poliquin, then eventually ended up working for Charles and kind of taking over some of his roles when he left the company. and the Muscle Nerds came about in 2015. So I'd met Zoe while I was on tour. We were talking, she flew over to America and then I decided it was time to leave Polycon Group. And we were like, okay, neither of us have any money and neither of us have a job. What are we going to do? And I said, well, we'll just start our own company. And we did. And it's just been absolutely gangbusters since we started that. That's pretty impressive to take that leap of faith. Yeah, well, I didn't have a choice. It was like, what else am I going to do? Yeah, because we had like legit, I think when we booked our first seminar, we were in Canada and I was going to speak at Swiss and we had no money, like zero dollars. We had no idea how we were going to get. We were supposed to go to New Zealand We had no idea how we were going to get there And a guy calls me and says hey would you come and do a private seminar for me and 30 of our coaches in Kuwait And I was like yeah cool If you can get me to Australia or to New Zealand I can do that And you got to get my girlfriend there too. So then that's how we got home. We said, all right, we can do this. So we just got started and did it. Wow, that's so awesome. And to think about what Muscle Nerds is now compared to then, that's pretty impressive, Luke. well I mean thank you I mean it's really it's crazy it's crazy to me how fast it happened but it was all what people don't think about too is I was already in the industry for um god since I was since like 1996 so if you fast forward to 2015 I had already been like in the industry worked at the Pollack and Group and other things and it's pretty well known at that time. So it looks like an overnight success, but there was a lot of like paving the road to get there. So by the time I left Pollock & Group, there was a lot of people who wanted to work with me specifically, but didn't want to deal with Pollock & Group as a company. So I was very lucky and very lucky to network a lot while I was on the road, while I was teaching and doing other stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think, not that I plan to get into this type of conversation, but we'll see where it goes. I think working in this industry, it is so important to connect and collaborate with people, right? And how much that can do to help provide you with the stepping stones into whatever it is you want to create for yourself. Yeah, it's a weird time in our industry because you have a lot of people that want to be on their own and they're scared to collaborate. And you can get screwed. We've done collaborations with people who've got totally screwed. That's not going to stop us for collaborating in the future. It just makes us a little bit cautious. But even people who are just getting into the industry, the best thing you can do is start networking because just like any other industry, a lot of it's about who you know. So it doesn't matter if you're – you can be the best trainer in the world and nobody knows about you because no one's talking about you because you're not networking with anybody. So there's a lot of people. They want to keep their information to themselves. They kind of want to be a lone wolf. this is a very social, very clicky industry. So if you're not getting out there and talking to people and sharing information and talking about the trade like you really doing yourself a disservice right from the start How what do you think was the pivotal point between because you mentioned that people wanted to work with you but not with Poliquin group. Like, what do you think was that difference that, I mean, I guess that's the culture of muscle nerds, but what, what is that that you've created? You know, that's a good, that's a very good question. I thought about that. I'm not really sure. I think part of it was because I don't want to get too deep in it. because I don't want to get sued, but it was about how that, it was how that company treated their employees and, um, and also how they treated trolls and things like that, that made people shy away and go, well, we don't want to, like they fired every single person that built anything that they did. So like the entire platform, all the people that were the OGs were gone. Um, and there were, there were a couple of people who left, but most people just got let go because they didn't like anybody building a name for themselves. They wanted to be about the Pollack Group. And they couldn't separate the fact of the personality of the person lecturing that was lecturing for the company. They couldn't separate that concept that people are going to want to come to your courses if they like you. It's not it is about the company, but it's also about they're coming to see a specific person lecture, whether that was me or someone else, because we were considered an expert in what we were talking about. And everybody's got a personality you kind of click with that you like the way they're putting things down and that's what's allowed us to do really good muscle nerds because we're super transparent we're not politically correct we don't give a fuck i didn't ask you before we got on here if i could cuss or not that's um you know and i just say what it is i'm a maniac so that there are people there are other maniacs who like that thing so they like to come hear me talk they like the jokes and the stories they like and they like the education um yeah and so uh i think that's kind of what it was is that i was just being nice to people you know um usually once a year i'll post this quote by zig ziglar helping up people get what they want out of life and eventually you'll get what you want and i've we've always it's always been my thing help people that don't expect anything from it eventually they'll help you back and they'll elevate you to a different position if that's how we start a muscle energy we'll always we'll always over deliver always I love that I love that one of uh I guess you know let's get sort of into the main crux of what I wanted to talk about today which is training um the I love that. I love that. One of, I guess, you know, let's get sort of into the main crux of what I wanted to talk about today, which is training. Before we get into specifics and talking about women's structures and all that sort of stuff, I know I've heard that you've got a pretty good brain when it comes to the history of training. A little bit, yeah. Depends what we're talking about, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, maybe I'll just let you sort of start that. But like where did, because everyone trains these days, right? Everyone's like got something that they do, whether it's running or weightlifting. But a lot of us actually don't even realize where a lot of those movements come from initially and how we created these different types of templates. It's like Strongman is such a great example of what we used to have to do in order to survive crossing over into the sort of weight training space. So if you could start with the history of that, that would be amazing. Yeah, I mean, it really depends. A lot of this stuff is very cloudy when it first started, but a lot of it comes from like men and their egos. So it's like, hey, I can lift this rock. Can you lift this rock? And that started all these kind of competitions. So if you look at things like some of the Highland Games stuff and some of the really old competitions where they did caber toss, where they did stone lifts and things like that. I mean, where did that come from? It had to come from a time where we didn't actually have dumbbells and barbells. Barbells weren't invented, I think, until like the mid-1800s. so and even a power rack if you if you look at you go into any gym you're going to see you know at least three to fifteen power racks those weren't even invented until the mid 1900s um but yeah so i mean wherever there's a human there's going to be a competition uh and it's crazy to me how insane how insane fitness is now as far as the weight lifting component because when i got into the industry, it was only the weirdos who lifted weights. Either you either competed or you could fit in bodybuilding or powerlifting. In Texas, powerlifting is a really big deal. So it's either powerlifting or bodybuilding or whatever. You never saw women at the gym. The only women at the gym would be, they would either be there for the classes or it would be the weirdo taboo bodybuilders that other women didn't really, it wasn't really appealing for them you know having to shave their back and take steroids and things like that but it completely different now And you know women have kind of grown up with people saying you going to look manly if you have muscle Women aren't strong. They're not built to be strong. And it's all a bunch of bullshit. And I think it's a fantastic thing that you can go to any gym now. And there's a nice 50-50 blend of men and women. More women are getting into competing and competing. And especially like powerlifting is huge right now, not just for men but women as well and that was kind of a weird thing where I grew up because yeah we had power lifting in our high school um we had a powerlifting team and we did powerlifting things but when I got out of high school it was a very small section of people and that's kind of exploded but as far as like where a lot of this comes from shit I don't know um I'd have to look back, I can tell you like bodybuilding, some of the, the start of bodybuilding was Southern California back in the sixties, the fifties, sixties and seventies. So they would, they tended to do a lot of different things. They didn't just bodybuild. They did powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, they did gymnastics and tumbling and things like that. And so at the powerlifting and weightlifting competitions, sometimes they take the shirts off and they judge people on who had the best chest or the arms or whatever. And that kind of evolved into what we know now as bodybuilding it just uh they were like that's cool let's keep doing that and so they kept doing it and then it eventually evolved into kind of amateur level stuff and then now we've got these crazy freak pro guys that are just insane i was always curious about where they got um i'm not going to word this correctly so i apologize in advance luke but where they got um you know the different dimensions for bodybuilding or even the different dimensions for Olympic weightlifting? Like, is it Russia where your femur has to be a certain length or in bodybuilding, your bicep to neck ratio has to be a certain length? Like, where did that stuff even come from? Yeah. So with the, there's, there's what's considered the golden ratio in bodybuilding and it's, it is calculated off of Steve Reed's proportions. He was known at that time as having the most symmetric looking physique. So if you go online and you look up like bodybuilding.com or any other website, look up like golden ratio bodybuilding and you'll measure your wrist, your ankles. You basically look at the circumference of your bones and that gives you a good rough estimate of how big your neck arms all this and how they should be together right So you know it I guess you say it come over like 50 to 70 years of just kind of measuring and seeing where people are at and saying, well, what looks the best? Now bodybuilding doesn't care. It's like, who's the biggest? Who can get the biggest and have walnut ass? You know, who can have like zero subcutaneous fat almost and be the biggest guy and take the most gear? So I'm not a huge fan of what bodybuilding, at least professional bodybuilding, has become. I think classic physique is a little bit better. But with femur size, you see that a lot in Chinese weightlifting. The difference between like Eastern European, Russian and Chinese weightlifting versus the world is that the rest of the world doesn't really care about it. It's a much there's more emphasis put on there. And in fact, weightlifting is a French sport in China. But they still select kids. Like they'll take kids and they'll run them through sprints and endurance stuff. They'll run them through a 1,600-meter, 100-meter. They'll measure the ratio between their humerus and their forearm, their femur, the angle of their ankle towards the rest of the foot, the distance between how long their thumb is. Like they think about everything. And that's why they're the best in the world. They win everything. I think they've got like the top 20 lifters right now because the selection is so crazy. And it's a it's a way for underprivileged kids to actually get out of poverty if they can be a national level weightlifter or an Olympic level weightlifter. But just consider this. That is not considered a massive sport in China versus things like badminton and ping pong and some other things. Right. So they actually don't really care that much about Olympic weightlifting and they're still the best in the world at. So that's how serious they are. That's crazy. How does that then play into if you're a woman in the sport? Because are those rules applied to females in elite weightlifting females? Yeah, but completely different ratios, because you've got to you've got to counter. You've got to look at like Q angle of the hips versus the knees and the ankles. and there's other standards for them, but it's still just as serious. You just mentioned Q angle. Yeah. What is a Q angle? So you're looking at the Q angle and the angle between where the hips, knees and the ankles are. So a woman with a wider hips is going to have a sharper Q angle than a man So that going to have an effect on how they lift also how they run or how they perform full stop So a woman with really wide hips is going to move quite differently to somebody with narrow hips. And you don't see that with men a lot because men have a smaller variance of hip widths because of obvious reasons, like some people have hips conducive to birthing and some don't. So, and it's hard to talk about this these days because you get in trouble for saying this, but you can talk about whatever you want to talk about by a lot. But if you were born with testicles, you've got a very small variance of your hip structure. If you're born with ovaries, you're going to have a much wider discrepancy on hip angle. So the wider your hips mechanically it creates a disadvantageous position for certain things like running like if you look at women with wider hips they're never going to be very good runners just because the fact they're not mechanically built for it so if you look at women who run really really well like sprinters at long distance they'll have a narrower hip structure so they'll either have for the sprinters more of a mesomorphic type of build like a man like a as a morphic man, meaning like wide shoulders, narrow hips. And then girls who run long distance will tend to have more of an ectomorphic build. So they'll have really long limbs, narrower hips, narrower shoulder girdle. But yeah, so it gets a bit more tricky when you look at that. So the heavyweights will tend to have bigger hip structures, which is good because they can squat a lot more. Yeah, so there's a whole mess of stuff you could look at with that. But I think it's important to have this conversation because most people who are listening to this podcast are your general females and they're probably your general gym goers. But there's so much about a woman's structure, which is different to a man's structure, and how that can either negatively or positively impact your training experience. Yeah, 100%. And it's going to alter how you perform certain movements as well. And even every human is going to be different. So you're going to have people with a shorter tibia, longer femur, shorter torso, longer torso in relation to the femurs. That's all going to affect mechanics of how you get into a deep squat safely and produce the most power, how you deadlift, how you bench press. Then when you look at women, there's a much higher variance between that because of the difference in how each woman is. most power, how you deadlift, how you bench press. Then when you look at women, there's a much higher variance between that because of the difference in how each woman's built. Because there you can have, if you're looking at, how can I put this? It's like, I don't know, maybe this makes sense or not. It looks like building a Lego set, right? I don't know. That might not work. You see what I'm saying? It's like, you can't fit everybody in the same movement. it's hard enough to fit. If you have like 10 guys, it's hard enough to look at, okay, how should each guy squat? Because they may have to squat 10 different ways. But if a trainer doesn't know anything about that, they're going to try to get those 10 guys to squat like they do, but they may be built completely different. Then when you look at women, it can be even a bigger difference because there can be a massive difference between lower body and upper body, a much, much higher difference than you're going to see in men so it gets a bit more technical when you're looking at like women squatting and deadlifting and that the foundation stuff's still the same but there might be a lot of tweaks you have to work with especially if they're if they're a gynoid body a gynoid distribution so if you look at someone who's a bottom heavy whether that's big hips big lower body or um like a little too much stored energy on the lower body versus the upper body like you A lot of women will have the bottom and the top might not match, might not match perfectly to what it might not be symmetric, whereas guys, it tends to be a little bit more symmetric. And then the guys, their size is going to come in their waist versus having a lower body that's different than the upper body. how much does that then influence you know all of those i guess quintessential trends that you see women trying to achieve like you know big butt small waist narrow shoulder like how much does our structure influence our ability to create those i guess training outcomes yeah it makes a big difference right i mean if you have a girl who and let's say you know a lot of people will poo-poo the Samadhi type stuff, but from a training perspective, I still think it's relevant. And if it wasn't relevant, they wouldn't teach them every anthropometric course in university that you're ever going to take. So you have to, if you're going to go into a sport or in a certain style of lifting you need to make sure that you actually built for that right You can dress a turd in a tuxedo It doesn make the turd any fancier It just a turd in a tuxedo So I I look I I sit around a hundred kilos like that's, I've been over a hundred kilos since I was 15 or 16, right? So I'm never going to be an Olympic level marathon runner. It isn't, I can train with the best trainers in the world, the best sports scientist, the best nutritionist. I could take the best drugs. I'm never going to be a Nigerian marathon runner who can run the marathon in two hours. It's not going to happen, right? Just like you take a guy who's a NBA basketball player who's seven foot tall, he is never going to be a great power lifter. And I think that a lot of people don't take that into consideration when they see other people doing cool things and they go, I'd like to be able to do that. It's like, cool. You can do that to your capacity, but you're never going to be excellent at that. You can be average. You're never going to be excellent. Right. So I think people need to be realistic about what they can do. Right. So if you, if you are super ectomorphic, can you build a big butt? You can build a butt. It's never going to be a massive butt unless you go to Brazil and get a Brazilian butt lift. This is not going to happen. I'm sorry. I could give you all the steroids you want. It's never going to happen for you because you don't have the structure for it, but you can build a really nice perky round butt. It's just not going to be like a Kardashian butt, which I think is pretty much a Brazilian butt lift anyways. Let's take a quick break from this knowledge bomb episode. If you're enjoying the podcast and want to find more information on how to become your most fertile self, make sure you head to thewomenseries.com and check out our full access membership. Or if you're a fellow coach and want to upskill your knowledge in both business and functional medicine, I highly recommend the Institute of Health. You can find more info on them in the show notes. And now back to the show. Because it's just soul destroying to me when I see all of these, let's call them fit influencers selling booty bands and you know body weight squats as the reason to why they have these juicy backsides Can we just debunk some of this from a training standpoint Because it in my opinion it a load of crap but I I'll let you go there. Okay. So, and I'll give you the, the key to building a big butt, get a, get a massive squat and a massive deadlift. That should be the foundation. Like you want to do hip thrust, that's fine, but that's not going to build a massive butt. It's going to, or it will take forever to do it. The stronger you get, you have to build a structure to support that. So get very good at a weightlifting style deadlift, get very good at a nice deep squat, get really strong at that. Your butt will grow and your legs will grow. Everything will grow together. So it'll be nice. So I was talking to Zoe about this, talking to my wife about it the other day. She was like, you don't really give people a lot of hip thrusts in their workouts. I'm like, yeah, they're not a, they're, they're a low return on investment exercise. Like they're cool and they feel nice, but you're never going to get the range of motion that you need that you can get out of a really good squat and a really good deadlift. Um, so that's like the first thing. The second thing is a lot of women won't eat enough to build a big booty because most women are chronically dieting all the time because they're deathly afraid of putting on a little bit of extra stored energy. If you want to grow, you're going to have to eat food and you're going to have to eat protein. And that's probably, at least in my experience, the hardest thing for women to get to consume is eating enough protein. Every time I do a nutritional assessment, I'm lucky if they're eating 40 to 60 grams all day. And I'm like, we got to double that or even triple that. I don't know how I'm going to eat that. I'm like, well, I mean, I'd probably use my mouth. That's that's what I would probably use. So we might have to give them extra shakes and, you know, whatever. But they don't they just tend to not eat enough to actually grow. And if you're training hard and you want to build muscle, you're going to have to eat for it. What what would be sort of the limit that you would expect in terms of like body weight to gram ratio? What would you want to say for a protein? I mean, yeah, I mean, the literature is pretty clear. I would say bare minimum 2.2 grams per kilogram. That's bare minimum. I've seen better results at somewhere around 2.8, but that like pulling teeth to get that done And women it like I torturing them and I got pliers and I ripping their teeth out to get there But I would say if they can get the 2 2 that really good I will tell you in almost any situation, more protein is usually better. It just depends what you can afford because protein is more expensive than carbs and fats, what you can digest as well. And as long as you don't have any type of pathologies, there's rare pathologies where more protein is not gonna be a good thing like if you've got like renal failure kidney failure or low low uh filtration rate it's a couple of odd ones out there but you probably wouldn't be focused on hypertrophy at that point anyways you'd probably be focusing on kidney health yeah well you'd hope so yeah um one of the things you mentioned was like just getting like a really good squat what are some of the limitations that you often see women running into in order to achieve a really good squat? Because you mentioned before, even like ankle mobility or, you know, femur length to tibia length. I mean, the thing is, look, ankle mobility doesn't have to be a problem because that's what a good pair of weightlifting shoes are. Look, women, and I'm going to be a total misogynist, women love shoes. They love shoes. Instead of going and buying another pair of Jimmy Choo's, go buy yourself a really nice pair of Adidas Adipowers or at minimum Powerlift threes, you will be really surprised at the difference in your squat. If you'll use proper footwear and stop, stop squatting in those shoes you run in, um, because those aren't really a great tool for what you need. You need a solid platform, a nice like 0.75 inch hill lift. And if you need more hill lift, if you really have that much restriction, you can always add a ramp or add a plate under your feet as well. Uh, but I've never had a single person. I couldn't get into a deep squat, if they can't get there, more hill lift. I don't know if you'll remember, how old are you? 33. 33. Do you remember Saturday Night Live, more cowbell? No. Okay. All right. So this won't work for you. But if you look up Saturday Night Live, more cowbell. For me, it's like more hill lift. Get more hill lift until you can get there. We can work the ankle restrictions out over time. And a lot of the ankle restrictions, it can probably be fixed by rotating your feet where they want to be and maybe working on some hip stuff and that type of thing. But most people could get into a deep squat. They just have to be taught how to set it up correctly and how to cue it and then manage the load correctly. How much do you think those shoes that women wear, those Jimmy Choos, how much does set it up correctly and how to cue it and then manage the load correctly. How much do you think those shoes that women wear, those Jimmy Choos, how much does that influence their capacity to train in a structurally optimal way? Oh, high heels are destroying your posture. They're absolutely destroying your posture. So when you look at the foot, if you're, you have to think that when you're wearing those shoes, you are constantly in plantar flexion. So the tibia and the fibula, your shin bones, will slide back on the talus. So you kind of start this kind of default position where your brain recognizes this as being normal. So then when you take the shoes off, the tibia doesn't necessarily move forward. So what that does is create a posterior tibia position on the foot, which drives more foot front and less heel. So with less heel, your weight will displace forward. As your center of mass gets forward, that's going to work its way all the way up. So your desire is to squat on your toes, hips forward. Then you have to lean back with your spine and then move your head forward to try to balance out your center of mass. So yeah. So I think, yes, I talked to my female clients about this a lot where I'm like, look, I understand you're in an office. Stop wearing the heels for a while. Wear flats. And they're like, oh, but it makes me shorter. I'm like, who cares? Like the only person who cares about that is you. You know, all people care about when they're at the offices. I can't wait till it's five o'clock or, oh God, Luke, the bodybuilder brought in fish again. It's going to stink up the office. They don't give a shit how tall you are nobody's looking at your feet you know maybe the other women are seeing what shoes you wore but you shouldn't care what they think anyways like you should care about how your body feels yeah it's so true do you ever encourage people I mean not just women but people in general to train barefoot it depends so I think if you're going to squat and deadlift wear the right footwear but I am big on periodizing periodizing footwear as well like don't always use that But then if we're going to switch off that, then I'm probably going to switch your squat to a different modification. So I definitely know no wearing sneakers, runners, tennis shoes in the gym. But I usually I say look let wear the footwear for your deadlifts and for your squats And then we take your shoes off or switch to minimalist shoes for your accessory works your split squats your step ups All of that stuff will switch to like a zero drop minimalist shoe like like zeros or or like Vivo barefoot or something like that. I think people should be wearing those shoes more often anyways, because if you continue to wear these shoes with a lot of sole on them, it kind of gives faulty feedback to the proprioceptors in your foot. So your brain never understands where you are in space and time. So it just tries to make a best guess and then alters your physique based on the faulty information it's getting from your feet. And does it also, I mean, I'm not sure, but does it also then impact that sort of mind muscle connection between brain to foot if you've got that faulty feedback taking place? So you got to think of it like this, right? Muscles, muscles take direction very well and they take direction from the brain. The brain says, hey, do this. They do that. But the brain gets direction from proprioceptors. So your mechanoreceptors, your noceptors, all of these things are basically telling your brain where am I in space and time? Does something hurt or does it not? And your brain is going to take direction from that and alter that position based on that. So, for example, if you're doing an overhead press and you don't have a lot of space underneath the AC joint, if your humerus rams into that, the brain is going to get feedback from those receptors saying, hey, I don't have space here. This hurts. so I need to either create pain so you don't move into that or try to create a compensation pattern to work around it so if if the brain's not getting feedback on what's happening in the peripheral system it doesn't know what to tell the muscles to do so it just it just guesses so interesting I remember years ago I was doing some ollie lifting um at the space that I used to work at and one of the coaches who was quite he was an ex-rugby player he was mentioning that looking at the speed of which somebody's feet move can tell you a lot about what's happening with their brain and vice versa and especially obviously with that triple extension in a in like say a snatch for example um if their feet aren't really moving that's more about what's going on neurally for them so i just find it really interesting yeah no i would say everything's neural Without that you can move anything but your brain also has to get that feedback So let say for triple extension let say you have some lower back issues you start moving the triple extension there going to be some apprehension that going to slow that down If you get out of position, there's going to be some apprehension is going to slow that down. So the more you groove that, the more your body is going to either slow down or try to move around that by weight shifting either forward, backwards or to one leg or to the other leg or rotating somewhere to try to find the easiest path to move where it doesn't find pain or it doesn't find restriction. I'm glad you brought up lower back pain because, you know, one thing that a lot of women have over men is that anterior tilt. And especially, you know, if we're talking about women who are pregnant or doing lots of cardio because their hip flexors are so fucking tight. How does that sort of influence how a woman moves comparatively to a man in the gym? Yeah, again, it's going to be based off of that. a what's the cue angle and um and where the hips are rotated from if you locate that anterior posterior tilt i would say probably nine out of ten people i see have excessive interior tilt now the nice thing is that women have a little bit more wiggle room for that than men um so we can accept a slightly more interior tilt they tend to be able to get away with it because of how the hips are structured, whereas men don't. So if you have a lot of lower back pain, some of the things that are probably going to be causing that is A, if you're wearing heels a lot, if you wear heels a lot, that pushes your center of mass to a different area. So your body has to accommodate that by tightening certain things. And if it tightens that, let's say it's tightening your QLs and your lower back because of the heels, that's going to cause a lot of compression in the spine. When you get compression, you start to move with, with over-compression. It's going to start clipping on nerves. When you hit those nerves, that's where you're going to find the pain. So you're going to find a lot of pain in like a S1, L5, L4, which is where most people, probably the highest percentage of getting a herniation and a highest percentage of lower back pain is going to be there and then radiating out to the SIJ. A lot of that stuff, if people would stand up more and move more, like not just go to the gym and move, but also move all the time, they'd get rid of a lot of those issues and stop sitting down at a desk. I'm not one to talk. I've been sitting here for 10 hours this morning programming for people but I tried to get up and move around a little bit but you know the going back to the brain the brain or from an evolutionary perspective we don't want to earn excessive amounts of energy that we don't have to. Because if you look, look at the way we're built now, we haven't evolved. We have evolved a lot. More specifically, our environment has evolved a lot over the last 10, 20, 30,000 years, whatever, But our genetics, that genetic code, has not really changed that much when you look at how long that's been. But our environment's changed way faster than we can. It continues to progressively evolve a lot faster. So you get people sitting in chairs all day. When you go to stand up, the body has created this default position of accommodating that chair posture. So things are going to get tight. So when you try to stand up, you're going to have to compensate now in order to override that default position. And that's what's going to cause things like over compression and going to cause some shifting and going to cause some of those nerves to get clipped. Yeah, it's so interesting, like just in terms of how much our daily life plays into our lack of results, maybe aesthetically and vice versa, right? yeah well and then you you know you go on with a trainer who doesn't do a proper assessment proper orthopedic assessment even the bare minimum they just go you go into any gym uh going to fitness first going to good life that client's gonna that coach is gonna say hey come in for a session let me show you what i can do and then they're just they're not going to do any medical history any injury profile they're not going to do any type of orthopedic assessment they're just going to run you through the most brutal program they have and they're going to fuck you up massively and you're going to leave the gym like, oh, I'm so sore. That was a great workout. And they're like, cool. And like four or five months later at the physio trying to untangle this mess that that trainer just did because they don't know shit about anatomy. And they really, a lot of them don't know anything about how to move properly because they've only learned from someone who knows how to squat in one way, deadlift in one way, bench in one way. And so they try to fit all these people in that specific way of moving. What a lot of people need to do, honestly, is a lot of structural balance stuff and a lot of movement-based exercise before they ever start to squat. I mean, you have to think like when you're sitting in this chair or I'm sitting in this chair, I'm sitting in a lot of posterior rotation and a lot of back flexion. That's a normal seated posture in a relaxed position. Sitting in this chair, or I'm sitting in this chair, I'm sitting in a lot of posterior rotation and a lot of back flexion. That's a normal seated posture in a relaxed, slumped position. If I go to stand up, I now have to tell my brain, okay, we're done in this position. We need to learn how to extend and interiorly rotate. So if this is my default position, the brain's like, I don't like that very much. So you get out of the chair and you try to extend. You're like, oh, shit, my back is so tight and sore. So you have to actually work on grooving that extension again and getting everything back in the right bony position is supposed to be in. And the longer you sit in that chair, the harder it's going to be. So for a lot of these people that are coming in, I mean, let's let's look at it. Most people that go into train have desk jobs. They have desk jobs. They're salesmen, they're executives, they're accountants, they're people with money because training you need disposable income to do that. you're not going to specialize in McDonald's front counter workers because they don't make enough money to pay for training. So the issues you're going to see with the people you train mainly are because they have a desk job and they don't move enough. So when they first come in, what we need to do is we need to run it through the gamut of things like step ups, split squats, learn how to hinge without using your lower back, how to get the glutes to work instead of overusing the hamstrings how to get tightness out of the anterior portion of the lower body like your quads because that a lot of cases some of the rotators for international rotation on the quads being an anchor is what pulling you into that into your rotation anyways so we have to reverse that before we can ever sit down into a nice squat or pull into a nice deadlift so and by basic movement you're talking about body weight not even body weight but i would say I probably the best, the best way I've heard to think about this is I went to my buddy, Jordan Shallow, had a seminar here a few weeks ago. And he says, look, for a lot of your clients, the first thing you have to do is get them stronger than gravity. And I went, that's the, that's probably the best way I've ever heard about it. Because how many times have you gone to their gym, test them to do a bodyweight squat. They can't squat all the way down. They can't get out of it when they get to the bottom. But yet we want them to manage an external load. Like, how are they supposed to do that? So we have to get them stronger than gravity, then stronger than gravity against an external load. And we have to teach them how to do that with good, proper technique. Like a lot of people can squat and stand up with horrendous technique. We'd never load that. So they have to learn how to do that with good technique and then slowly, conservatively load that over time. So for me, looking at movement, a lot of it's going to be based on split squats, various forms of split squats. step ups I will you know almost 100 of the time train somebody in lengthened ranges of motion because they been in these shortened and mid mid positions We need to open them back up So we use pullovers I use a lot of stretching We blend in stretching and lifting in the same workout I know people say you're not supposed to do that, but if you stop glorifying strength and saying we need to move better, I'm going to get you to move better and then get you strong. But getting somebody strong who can't move well is a disaster. You can't squat this stuff away. you're going to have to learn how to open up and move better, get better, not just flexibility, but mobility, and then add some external weight on top of that. It's so true. Years ago, I did some stuff with Ido Portel. And I was in a having to be in a deep squat position for a very long period of time. And there really is a difference between like holding a deep squat, like with good sort of tone and strength versus just slumping down into a quotation mark deep score and most people think that the second is the normal the second is the normal if you're in the woods you need to take a shit and you don't want to poop on your feet but that's it that's not that's not the position you want to be in uh when you have 100 kilos on your back if that's the case then if I felt that was the best thing, I would install a squat rack in my bathroom and I would do box squats and take a poo. And I just use it as like descending load reps or something But like people need to understand that again different movements require different um uh different standards So for me um if you in the woods you need to take a poo cool round that back because you're not going to load it. But if you're in the gym, we're going to use a weightlifter style squat. That's the first squat I'm going to teach you is how to get into a deep squat with a good extended back position. Then if the priorities change we may alter that so like the difference between a clean grip weightlifting deadlift which is what i normally teach them first versus like a more powerlifting style deadlift well powerlifting style deadlift you're going to have a much higher hip position and you're going to accommodate probably some rounding of the thoracic spine but you have to develop the muscles to be able to hold that in a lengthened state first because if you don't if you're if you'd like to keep listening to this episode, please head over to Patreon, where for $5 a month, you get unlimited access. You can also find full access to the podcast, as well as my courses, multiple webinars and ebooks at thewomensseries.com. As always, please remember this podcast is for informational purposes only. You should seek professional advice for any health related issues. Thank you for supporting me, and my desire to make all women healthy, fertile and whole.