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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the one day at a time podcast. And as the name suggests, if you live one day at a time, this whole thing isn't that overwhelming. It isn't overwhelming at all, actually, if you break it down.
Speaker 1:So do focus daily. I urge you, and remember the one big thing mantra. If it is if you're starting to feel like you've got no momentum, break it back down. One big thing today, it could be anything. Walk, workout, track your calories, drink your two liters of water, all this stuff.
Speaker 1:Just pick one thing and start building momentum because when momentum is behind you, you'll start adding more things to your day and you start building up and building up. And then momentum goes and then you'll be rebuilt, that's life. But on this podcast I'm going to talk about, and it's kind of an overview by Alan Aragon on her research, and the title is Minimal Dose Resistance Training for Improving Muscle Mass Strength and a narrative review of current evidence and practical considerations. By resistance training, that means either using weights, a resistance band, even your body weight. So when we're talking about doing workouts and stuff like that, the science is clear and I don't believe doing workouts to burn calories, lose fat isn't where the gains or the benefits are from working out.
Speaker 1:Workouts and resistance training specifically, so like using your muscle, some unique benefits to it you don't get from say just cardio only, So that's the important thing to know about resistance training. So you're starting to think it's the new year, you're starting to think about stuff to do and you're thinking people are working out, I'm not working out. You can literally start with a five to ten minute work at a home without any equipment and you can do some basic homework with no equipment and start building from there once a week, twice a week. By March time, April you might add some resistance bands in and then before you know you're feeling fit enough to take on tougher workouts with confidence. This is what it's about if you jump into the deep end and you're on your own especially if you're doing workouts from home you're going to feel like you're failing all the time.
Speaker 1:It's important to build up over time and realize that once you start getting confidence in doing some of the movements you will actually want to do them in the future, you'll actually want to do tougher workouts. Does that make sense? An example is, and I use this sometimes in this podcast, it's a meme because everyone does Jiu Jitsu, goes on about all the time, but when you first start the Jiu Jitsu martial arts very hard, you can't get your head around there, and then you're very unfit as well because the Jiu Jitsu fitness is like a different level to something else, It's like using your full body to try and tackle someone, choke about whatever. So the first six to seven weeks you're getting your ass under you is hard, but you're only doing two minute sparring, three minute sparring. So you're like doing one, you're dying, oh my god, how can you do more than this?
Speaker 1:But they leave it there, they leave it there. You're like, is that enough? And then you're six, seven, eight, nine weeks in, you're like, oh actually I can do two rounds and then I can do three rounds. And then after that, you can do four rounds. And then basically you then start having confidence where you want to turn up and because you're like, actually no longer am I dying doing it, I actually can push myself more.
Speaker 1:And that doesn't come from jumping into that end at the start. Does that make sense? Anyway, let's get into this review because I think it's very interesting. So resistance training is the only non pharmacological intervention known to consistently improve and therefore offset age related declines in skeletal muscle mass, strength, and power. Resistance training is also associated with various health benefits that are underappreciated compared with the perceived benefits of aerobic based exercise.
Speaker 1:For example, resistance training participation is associated with reduced all cause and cancer related mortality and reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and symptoms of both anxiety and depression. If that's not enough for you to start thinking about doing some body weight squats twice a week, if that's all you can do, you need to sort your head out because you can do these things like at home, and if you're a beginner, the best thing is you doing just 10 or 15 body weight squats, might be quite tough for you and you might think is it going to do anything? Yeah, brilliant. Because if you're finding it quite hard to do those basic stuff, it's great because your progression is starting really low, so you're having to go to the gym and do 80 kilograms squats or whatever, you're doing body weight and you can do it from the comfort of your home. So you're thinking, Okay, I can just go into my living room, my kitchen, just twice a week all I've to do is I'll do 15 reps of bodyweight squats, I'll rest for two minutes, I'll do 15 reps of bodyweight squats, and you start thinking of press ups, and a lot of women don't do full press ups straight away, men we've got bigger chest muscles or whatever, so it's easier for us, but for women doing it, you might start with wall press, and you're like, Is this doing anything?
Speaker 1:But yeah, is, of course. Anyway, back to it. Identification of resistance training strategies that limit barriers to participation may increase engagement in the training and subsequently improve population health outcomes. Across the lifespan, declines in strength and power occur up to eight times faster than the loss of muscle mass and are more strongly associated with functional impairments and risks of morbidity and mortality. Strategies to maximize health span should therefore arguably focus more on improving or maintaining muscle strength and power than on increasing muscle mass.
Speaker 1:Accumulating evidence suggests that minimal doses of resistance training characterized by lower session volumes than in traditional guidelines together with either one, higher training intensity loads performed at lower frequency, so low volume high load, or lower training intensities but at higher frequencies and with minimal to no equipment. So this is called exercise snacking, which means every hour you'll go and do 10 press ups, for example, or 10 sit ups and 10 bodyweight squats. And this can improve strength and functional ability in younger and older adults. Such minimal dose approaches to resistance training have the potential to minimize various barriers to participation and may have positive implications for the feasibility and scalability of resistance training. In addition, but frequent minimal dose resistant training approaches such as exercise snacking may provide additional benefits for interrupting sedentary behavior patterns associated with increased cardio metabolic risk.
Speaker 1:Compared to traditional approaches, minimal dose resistance training may also limit negative effective responses such as increased discomfort and lowered enjoyment, both of which are associated with higher training volumes and may negatively influence exercise adherence. A number of practical factors including the selection of exercises that target major muscle groups and challenge both balance and the stabilizing musculature may influence the effectiveness of minimal dose resistance training or outcomes such as improved independence and quality of life in older adults. This narrative review aims to summarize the evidence for minimal dose resistance training as a strategy for preserving muscle strength and functional ability across the lifespan. This review goes on in detail and it basically is saying that depending on the camp you're in, so some of you listening, like most people listening here are not going to want to be athletes or want to train like an athlete, training two, three hours a day, all that stuff, the advice for optimal performance down that route is of no use to you. And the practical advice, because the mainstream advice we get in health and fitness has stemmed from bodybuilding, who bodybuilders really pioneered resistance training and stuff like that, their average was always to maximise muscle growth and has come from potentially anabolics and stuff as well, but we've now living in an era where most recommendations have come from that world.
Speaker 1:And it's not to say it's a bad thing, it's just to put into context like yes, optimizing to get massive quads and massive lats and massive biceps and if actually the main name is the physique enhancing, then of course they're going to want to be pushing the boundaries there. But for most of us listening here, and I would assume 80% of you guys listening here, you just want to increase your quality of life, you probably want to reduce some fat, you probably want to just feel a bit stronger, reduce any age related risk of that, you just want to feel better in yourself and more confident, you don't have to follow the status quo when it comes to working out three-four times a week, forty five minute sessions. You can start off, like I say, the exercise snacks. Every hour 10 body weight squats. Every hour 10 sit ups.
Speaker 1:Every hour you can do some wall presses. Every hour you can do some tricep dips. You know, just do some of these throughout the day and you don't necessarily have to have a time then to work out, and if you're a desk worker you manage to get this break from work every hour and the exercise snack study actually showed less drowsiness, you're more alert and stuff like that as well. So there's a lot of benefits to have in five minutes every hour or even three minutes every hour to just do some resistance training. Then start watching videos and I can provide them of resistance band workouts and they're brilliant as well.
Speaker 1:When you start thinking and you start speaking to people who are getting older, what's one main thing we talk about? We talk about the injuries we have, we're talking about being stiff, we're talking about feeling like I don't want my bad back, we're talking about how these things really impact our lives. The advice you go to from a physio for example is you need to be doing your stretches, you need to make sure you're not sitting down all day, you need to make sure you're getting your walk and your steps in. These are serious things to think about because if you don't start doing these small things every day, you're probably going to end up where you've got chronic back pain or chronic pains, and that's not going to be it's going be harder down the line. So whilst most of you listening want to lose fat right now, this podcast really isn't about fat loss, we're talking here about like the resistance training benefits.
Speaker 1:So if you're interested in doing any of these things, if you want to get into training, on Monday we're starting a four week January workout challenge and there's eight unique workouts we've designed, four for the gym, four home, weights, no equipment, stuff like that. You take a quiz and it tells you what workout is most ideal for you. And then you're going be put into a WhatsApp group as well with everyone that's in that group, so you have a like minded approach and stuff. So some of the workouts are very, very minimal, no equipment, you've got fifteen minutes three times a week. That's enough.
Speaker 1:The mindset that you need to optimize everything and squeeze everything out of everything is silly. When it comes to fat loss and stuff as well, if you think you've got to be perfect, people are saying don't eat a specific food, don't eat the protein bar, don't eat one of these things. It's like when you have mindsets like you can't do anything unless it's perfect, that is basically preempting potential disordered eating stuff. When you start saying you can't eat that, you can't eat that, you can't eat that, you should be eating, I should be eating, I'm trying to scare people. Know, saw a video on TikTok because someone was saying that diet Coke's got four greens on it, then they're saying it's a healthy food.
Speaker 1:It's like, no, the four greens have just got something to do with salt and saturated fat or whatever it is. It's not saying that it's like, you should consume thousands of liters of this stuff, but diet coke and the guy who's reading out the ingredients, you're like, look how bad this is. It's like, the studies on humans on all foods in moderation are absolutely fine, like all of them. There's not one food out there if you add it in moderation it's going to cause long term damage. Like someone can bring me Reese's and say, do it, if you eat that once you're going to have a problem.
Speaker 1:No, that's not what anyone's saying, that's not what the Reese's says. So to be scared of having moderate doses of foods that yes aren't optimal nutritionally because they don't have much micronutrient stuff, but they satisfy other needs in our life which are also important. It's not just about having the perfect body and trying to be perfect health because it doesn't exist. Of course it doesn't exist. You know, what's more important to you really is when you think about the mindset is do I want to stress over everything I eat every day causing me to have a stress response, which causes me to have my body to actually trigger a stress response and we know that happening every day, all the time, is causing loads and loads of health problems.
Speaker 1:Stress management is probably one of the most important things you could do. So if you're stressing yourself out over everything you eat and then you're eating stuff that you like but you think are bad for you, you stress yourself out more again. Can see this downward spiral of a thing you're going on because someone has told you this is bad for you. That's not the case. The problem we have is that people are overeating calories, they're not moving enough and they've really not got anything to kind of have as an output for their stress levels.
Speaker 1:So like a lot of people don't have many hobbies anymore, a lot of people just work all day and then they're so stressed with life and finances and stuff, then because that's a build up they're not having a release. So you're not having a stress release, you don't have anyone to speak to in your life, you're worried about every gram of every food you're eating, you think you've to do crazy workouts and all because of all that you find yourself really useless. You think you look useless, you think I can't be doing all of this, it's impossible. And it is impossible to think of everything and do it all. That's why you don't need to do it, you've to think of three main things or four things that if you get those right everything else falls into place.
Speaker 1:Think of what three pieces on the board can you move that puts you in a position where you win. So think of this in chess or even in there's a good thing in jujitsu where they say it's not about say you want to do a submission to someone which means you've got to make them tap. A lot of people are thinking about the submission before they even get into position, but the top guys say don't worry about doing a submission now, if you get into the right it will happen quite easily because it's just going to be there for you. And it's the same thing with health and fitness, if you have your calories in the right place, you get your step count up, you're hitting a decent amount of protein each day, you are literally putting yourself right there ready to kind of do, the win essentially, everything has to fall into place. But if you're thinking about a 100 things to do before you even go those three things in place, nutritionally for weight loss, then you're gonna be trouble.
Speaker 1:The same with weight training. If you think you've got to do five workouts a week and you've got to do hardcore workouts and go to the gym and all that, you're miles away. But if you say, okay, every day I'll do 20 body weight squats and 20 wall presses and I'll start there, I'm a real beginner, you know, it's gonna be tough for me, that's doable. And then you're putting yourself in a position where eventually you'll have the confidence to maybe say to your friend, do you wanna go to that community workout? Do you wanna go and try the gym out?
Speaker 1:Maybe I'll go and get a PT and go to the gym, see if I enjoy it. Or maybe I'll get some weights at home because I'm actually starting to feel stronger and I like it now. So always start from a start very, very near to go very, very far. That's really what you need to think about and don't let people tell you black and white things because that's what's going to stress you out more and I've done a topic, I've covered stress a lot on this podcast and the research behind this, so minimize stress management, don't catastrophize, the theme of the week is take things one day at a time and really start very, very near to go very, very far, and you'll do well in this entire thing. And trust me, you won't be you won't need to follow some, like, athletes optimized programs.
Speaker 1:But have a good day, everyone, and I'll speak to you all soon.