#21 - What Is Muscle Development?
Hey, Hey ladies. Welcome to episode 21. We're getting into the muscle development series now. So episodes one through 10 mindset and then we went into macro nutrition and now we're going to deep dive into muscle development. And today we're going to start off with episode 21, which is what is muscle development. I'm gonna get really clear on this. So, I want to talk about a few different forms of activity that you might have in your day-to-day life. The first is just active living. What active living is, is our step counts for the day, going up and down stairs in the office building, or maybe in our condo, maybe at home, walking the dog, playing with your kids, all of these things are active living. These are things we want to be able to do, we want to be functional enough for active living that's like a minimum baseline in my books. I want to tell you guys a little bit about a experience I had recently, if you're in my community, if you're receiving Friday Coach Treats, which is my weekly email out, you may have read about this last week. If you're not receiving Friday Coach Treats, you should be. Get over to my website, sign up, it's so worth it. You get recipes every week my friends, that's what the treats are plus other things. I'll put the link in the show notes. So, I was talking about how, since I moved my coaching practice from, in a gym facility into online and being more in an office space at a desk all of the time. My daily step count has gone from like 12 to 15,000 steps a day, to like 2000 steps a day. I hadn't realized that it was this low until my body started to ache. Like literally my knees are annoyed, my hips are annoyed, my hamstrings are tight, my lower back stability is decreasing, my posture is getting worse. Like it's crazy. So this past week I got a Fitbit. I haven't had a smartwatch really ever. I haven't really used one. I've looked at my steps on my phone from time to time. But I've never really monitored my health with some of the tools that are available, out there today. So I recently purchased the Fitbit since which is the newest line of Fitbit, which has all the healthcare stuff. Anyway, love it. It's fantastic and it's really brought to my attention, how low my active living movement is, now that I'm working from home in an office. So one of my 2022 goals is to improve my active living and getting the Fitbit was the first step in this. And since getting the Fitbit, I've made sure that I'm hitting that 5,000 steps every day, I'm getting outside, walking more, making sure that I get on my elliptical, my max trainer, and do some movement. One day I even hit 13,000 steps, but my knees hurt the next day. You all, like bad. So I want to improve that my goal for the end of January is to be up to 10,000 steps, five days a week. Now, my second step in increasing my active living arrives tomorrow. Are you guys ready? What do you think it is?
You guys, I'm getting a puppy. I'm so, so excited tomorrow. My husband and I are leaving first thing in the morning to drive six hours to the Oakenoggen to pick up a 12 week old puppy that we are so stoked for. We've already named him. His name is dude. We're spelling it differently. We're spelling it, dewd like, dwed. I love it. And he is three quarters Rottweiler, one quarter cane corso mastiff. He's going to be a big boy. I'm so stoked. So now that we have a dog in our life, again. I'll have to get out and walk a few times a day, at least. So I'm so excited to have a fur baby again, I feel like the dog shaped hole in my heart is being filled up. This may be the last podcast that I don't have, like little puppy wides, our little puppy barks in the background on, so enjoy the sound quality today, you guys. So back to active living. So active living is all like the basic it's the bare minimum. Right. And then we add on purposeful exercise, cardiovascular exercise, muscle development, yoga, pilates, physio-therapy like all these different purposeful sources of exercise to improve our functionability in active living. As we age, our ability to live actively and feel good living actively decreases. So absolutely we want to incorporate other forms of purposeful movement to keep our functionability and our active lifestyle as good as possible for as long as possible, right. I plan to live to like a hundred, maybe like 110. I don't know, technology is pretty amazing these days. So I want to be able to do things when I'm 90. I want to be one of those 90 year old ladies out there skiing. I snowboard. So out there snowboarding, right? So, active living is kind of that main baseline and then cardiovascular exercises, what a lot of people look to when they want to get healthy, when they want to lose weight, they add in cardiovascular exercise. There's nothing wrong with that. Cardiovascular exercise is getting your heart rate up. And doing something that's repetitive, usually. So like running or biking or getting on an elliptical trainer Or doing like a hit cardio workout kind of thing. Cardiovascular exercise is fantastic for heart health for lung health, for endurance. And it is great for increasing our active living abilities. However, I really want to focus your attention on muscle development, because I think this is an area that, especially in women, is neglected and it's so, so important. I cannot emphasize that enough. So, so important. I went to the googles because that's what I do. And I was like, why is muscle development important? What are the benefits of muscle development? I wanted to see if there was anything out there that I wasn't aware of. And there was a few things that I found, nothing fancy, nothing new. What the Google said is, it increases your bone density. This is so important as we women age. Our bone density decreases. Having a good muscular structure, a good muscle foundation so important for keeping your bone density strong. I recently went for a DEXA scan, It's like an MRI of your whole body that shows you your lean body, mass, your body fat, your muscle mass and your bone density. And the technician thought she had made a mistake. She wanted to run a second scan. And I was like, why? And she's like, because your bone density seems unusually high. And I was like, oh no, that's totally normal. I have super human bones. So because I've been lifting weights because I've been so focused on muscle development since my early, early teens. I have incredibly strong bones, especially considering I'm lactose intolerant. And I don't need a lot of dairy, right. So increase a bone density, next managing weight, the more lean muscle mass you have your body, the more calories your body burns for every extra pound of muscle you have on your body, your metabolic rate goes up 50 extra calories. So for those of us who focus on muscle development and have higher level of muscle on our frame. We can get away with eating more. It's so fun, you guys come on over to the dark side. Some of my athletes that are fairly lean in their off seasons that have high muscle mass and are trying to build muscle are amazed at how many calories they can eat. Little Michelle Elliott, who is our bikini pro, she weighs 110 hundred 15 pounds in her off season and for her to put on weight, we have to give her like 3000 to 4,000 calories a day, it's pretty intense. She's like, I don't know how to eat this much. And most people are like focusing on eating less, right whereas in Lady Sculpt my membership group, I love that I've got a few women in there whose goal for 2022 is to increase their lean muscle mass and increase their metabolic rates so that they can eat more while maintaining their weight. That's a goal we have in Lady Sculpt is eat more, weigh less, because then your metabolism is working so hard. It's what we call an inefficient metabolism. We're all working for inefficiency in there but in the best way possible.
Next up, we have decreasing risk of chronic disease. This is so important, so important. Having that main muscle foundation helps your body fight off chronic disease. And the Google's also say increases quality of life and this kind of ties back in with active living, right. It increases that quality of life, your functionability, your balance, your ability to squat down and pick something up and stand back up. Right? I remember, probably 15 years ago, a gentleman came to me when I had my one-on-one training studio and he was in his fifties and he's like, I just want to be able to keep up with my kids on the ski hill. And I started training him, he lost probably about 20 pounds and we started really working on lower body muscle development. And he came in one day and he was so excited and I was like, what's up? And he's like, I bent down at the grocery store and grabbed something heavy off the bottom shelf and didn't need to lean on the shelf to get back up. And he hadn't been able to do that in like 10 years. And just that basic active living that basic functionality, so important and so noticeable when you start to lose it. How important it is, right. So quality of life, some of the things I want to add to this list. So that was kind of the main four that the Google's talked about. But I also want to add, like in the transformation program, there's mindset work, there's nutrition work, and then there's workouts. And what the workout part of it does, what the muscle development part of it does, is it creates this confidence. When you were working out and working your muscles and learning how to move weight and becoming stronger and seeing yourself become stronger in the amount of weight you can lift and noticing your body change shape, it increases your confidence. You start to believe that you have this capability to change the shape of your body. Muscle development is what changes the shape of your body. Nutrition weight loss, it makes your body smaller. Muscle development, lifting weights or you pushing your muscles against resistance of any kind, changes the shape of your body. This is one of the reasons I got into weight training at such a young age is because someone told me. You can change the shape of your body with lifting weights. And I was like, yes, sign me up. Also resilience, when you are willing to go into the gym and lift weights and push your body, day after day, you create a resilience, you become stronger. And with that strength and that resilience, you become more resilient and stronger in every other aspect of your life. Your immune system, it becomes stronger and more resilient. Your mind becomes stronger and more resilient. Everything about you becomes stronger and more resilient. And last when you go to the gym day after day, week after week and increase grease your muscle foundation. You create a neural pathway that starts to feel very capable of setting new goals for yourself, creating new habits for yourself, your whole life can change by adding a muscle development program into your daily routine. I'm not exaggerating. All right. So that is my rant.
Let's get in to what muscle development is. So muscle development doesn't necessarily mean that you're going into a gym and lifting weights. Muscle development is pushing against resistance for anywhere from one rep to let's say 20 reps. I'm going to get into specifically what reps do what later in this muscle development series. But for now, let's just think of like, a resistance that you can do for eight to 12, is like muscle building it's hypotrophy or even six to 15, if you really wanted to look at the outskirts of hypertrophy. So there's lots of different ways to do this, you could like do body weight exercises, which are called calisthenics, like chin ups and pushups and body squats and lunges. You can do them from home. You need no equipment to do them. There are a whole workouts in Lady Sculpt that have no equipment at all. They're fantastic for camping and traveling and for working out at home before you have the courage to go and sign up for a gym membership. Like I said that consistent muscle development off the hop creates more confidence. So even if you start at home with calisthenics with body weight movement, you're going to build up more confidence and before you know it you'll be ready for the gym.
Next up, we have isolation and activation movements. So this gets into really small movements where you're activating specific muscles or isolating specific muscles and doing it repeatedly. You know, for six to 12 reps or however many reps to build that muscle. We see this lot and physiotherapy, if you've got a specific injury or a muscle that's gone dormant or if you're trying to rebalance your body, let's say you broke a leg and you're trying to build up muscle on one side that's isolation, activation movements. That's muscle development, too. And anything we do in physiotherapy offices. Like they've got machines that actually assist with muscle developmen, there as well. Mind muscle contractions are also a form of muscle development, this is where you try to contract a muscle without moving your body. Say what, rght. So like, just thinking about the muscle you want to contract. And tightening that muscle without moving your body without flexing it, certain muscles are much easier than other muscles. I work with my competition athletes on this a lot. It's also a great way to get started with muscle development, especially with areas like the glutes, creating that mind muscle connection, being able to contract that glute muscle without doing a hip thrust or without doing a hyperextension. And then when you add the hip thrust or add the hyperextension, it's almost like double the result because you've got that mind muscle connection. We're going to talk about that more next week. You guys. And you've got the actual movement that is firing that muscle and that muscles engaging to do that movement. Also have resistance bands, resistance bands can be a great form of muscle development. So this again, adds resistance to the movement, creating the ability for your body to recruit more muscle fiber. All right. That's essentially what we're trying to do is we're trying to add load to our body so our body is like, Hey, I need some help over here. This chick is lifting some heavy stuff and it recruits more muscle fiber, your body builds more muscle. Now, shout out there to my ladies who are like Lylas, I don't want to get too big. Ladies, let's worry about that if it happens. Okay, I promise it's going to take you a while. Muscle development is not quick, it's not breezy. Some people build easier than others. Yes. But very rarely do I get a client who comes to me. Who's like, Lylas I'm a little bit too muscular. I do get clients who come to me and they're like, I don't want to be as muscular as you, that's totally fine. It's taken me like 24 years to get where I'm at. Now, it hasn't been extremely consistent. There's been off years, right? But it takes a while to build muscle. So starting a muscle development program, you're not going to balloon up overnight. And know that it's much easier to tone down muscle, if there's a part of your body that is looking a little bit more muscular than you'd like when you look at my competition athletes on stage. They look muscular, And then you see them a week later on the street. And they look Like fit women. It's very easy to tone down muscularity. So don't worry about being overly muscular by adding in weight training or resistance training.
Now, let's talk about How much weight you're lifting. Five pound weights are a great place to start, if you haven't lifted before. But if you lifting regularly or working. working out at home regularly for three to four months or longer, and you're still lifting five pound weights, girl go buy some tents. Go buy some fifteens. Five pound weights are not going to give you the muscle development you need to support your goals, especially. If you're looking to increase your bone density, if you're looking to build delts and lats and quads and glutes. Right? we need to add some weight. We don't want to be afraid to lift heavy. There is no shame in lifting heavy. One of my favorite things to do, is go to the gym and outlet the dudes. It gives me a lot of joy to sit down and grab dumbbells that are heavier than the guy next to me and do the same exercise. Don't do that until you're ready. Until you can actually lift the weights. But I love being strong. There's a lot of empowerment that comes from being strong, so let the fear go. Let all the mindset chatter of what will people think? What will people say? I'm going to talk about that later in this series as well, how to deal with other people's thoughts about your muscle. It's coming. We're going to talk about it.
Also, I want you to think about hard lifestyle work in terms of muscle development. Like if someone asks you to go out and chop wood, Yeah, you might throw, you know, 200 chops and that's more endurance, but I bet you'll be sore the next day. And if you're sore the next day that's a good sign that you're developing some muscle. It means you've tore into that muscle, it means you've done some damage. And when you have dom's. Dom's are delayed onset muscle soreness or muscle stiffness when you feel it the next day. You know, you dug in there, you know, your body is going, oh, we need to recruit some more, w need some more muscle. This girl she's working. Right. Your body is so smart. Let's say you go to a cabin and you chop some what? You've never done it before. Can you chop some wood the first day you chop for five minutes and you're like exhausted and tired. Your smart ass body with one day is going to be like, if she does that again tomorrow, we're going to need to be stronger. And the next day, you've probably be able to chop for more than five minutes. And if you did, let's say you chopped for 10 minutes the next day, your body would be like, oh, we need to develop more muscle. We need to recruit more muscle. What if she needs to chop for more than 10 minutes the next day? Right. And you'd be sore the next day. And it's all right. you could go out and shop again, or you could take a break off and I bet you that next day after that break, you'd be able to chat for 15 minutes. That's the amazingness that is our human body and our ability to develop muscle. The adaptability of our body happens fast. But the muscle development itself, the amount of time it takes to put on a pound of muscle or five pounds of muscle. It does not happen overnight. So go out there and lift some heavy weights. And then let your body rest and recover and then go up and lift more heavy weights and keep doing this until you've created and sculpted the body of your dreams because muscle development is one of the main ways to do that. All right ladies. That's what I have for you in episode 21. What is muscle development? We're going to be talking about muscle development for the next nine episodes. In this series, you can look forward to topics such as mind muscle connection, three steps to building muscle, how to sculpt your body, like seriously, like how to create a body that looks exactly the way you want it to, how to be more consistent with your muscle development? Are you someone who starts and then stops and then starts and then stops? I teach you how not to do that. We're going to talk about taking breaks and rest. We're going to talk about how to train for your age. It doesn't matter what age you are. You can train, you can develop muscle but depending on our age, we may want to focus on different things. We're going to do a whole episode on that. And we're going to talk about how strong is the new sexy, and how to deal with other people's opinions about our bodies. All right. You guys, so that's what we have coming up for you over the next two months. This series will take us right through to the end of March you with me. Come back next week for a brand new episode. I'll see you then. Bye for now.
