595: Expert insights on strength training for women
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Welcome to our third episode of the MBG Compilation podcast series. Every Thursday in May, we're dropping a special compilation episode focused on some of our most popular topics like brain health, hormone replacement therapy, VO2 max, and more. In each episode, you'll hear expert insights pulled together from some of our listeners' favorite conversations, giving you a quick, powerful look into the topics that matter most for your health and longevity. We're excited to hear what you think. Now let's dive in.

If you've ever wondered when to start lifting, hint now, how much protein you actually need or how to train in a way that truly supports your goals, not just aesthetically, but metabolically, emotionally, and long-term, this episode is for you. You'll hear from Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on why muscle is so much more than tone and how it's the real foundation of longevity.

Dr. Vonda Wright breaks down the myths around aging and strength and why it's time to stop playing small in the gym and in life. Dr. Bill Campbell and Dr. Don Lehman share practical science-backed advice on body composition, hypertrophy training, and protein targets that actually make a difference. We'll also hear from Dr. Jamie Seaman on becoming truly motivated.

and from Bonnie Swee on the deeper meaning of muscle, how it shapes who we are inside and out. If you've been lifting for years or you're just thinking about picking up your first dumbbell, this episode will meet you where you are and inspire you to keep going.

Before we dive into the how to lift, to fuel, to recover, we have to start with the why. Why is building muscle so essential for women's health beyond just aesthetics or athletic goals? To answer that, we're turning to Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. She's the founder of the Institute for Muscle Centric Medicine, and she's one of the leading voices redefining muscle as a key driver of longevity.

She breaks down what makes skeletal muscles so metabolically powerful and why it's time we start thinking of it not just something to sculpt, but something that can literally save your life. Here's Dr. Lyon.

First, I'm going to sell you on why muscle is important. I need to sell the listener as to why muscle is important. Otherwise, you're going to go, yeah, I know I should be working out and I know I should be eating protein. But let me tell you why. Skeletal muscle is not just for looking good naked, which is definitely a plus.

It is not just for power and strength like we discussed earlier. It's not just for Pilates or weightlifting. Skeletal muscle is the largest endocrine organ system in the body. And what does that mean? That means when you contract skeletal muscle, skeletal muscle secretes hormones. These hormones are chemical messengers. They are called myokines. And you're probably thinking, why do I care about a myokine? Number one, take a moment to really hear what I just said.

This idea that contracting skeletal muscle, that what skeletal muscle releases travels throughout the body and impacts nearly every organ system. There is a crosstalk. Skeletal muscle is an endocrine organ that you have direct control over. I cannot say that for anything else to my knowledge. Contracting skeletal muscle releases myokines, which interface with immune cells.

They can impact immunity. They can help regulate immune responses for when we all have heard about Hashimoto's or there's all kinds of autoimmune illnesses out there. In fact, it is much more common than we would like to see. And whether that's genetic, environmental, it's probably a perfect storm. But if an individual is struggling with any kind of autoimmunity,

Exercise is definitely incredibly helpful because it modulates the immune system. The other reason why skeletal muscle or one of many reasons why it's important is it is your metabolic sync. And that quite simply means that when we think about nutrition and eating and carbohydrates,

The majority of the place that these carbohydrates are disposed of is skeletal muscle. So the more healthy muscle mass you have, the more places that you have to store carbohydrates. We store carbohydrates in the form of glycogen. In addition, skeletal muscle is full of mitochondria.

mitochondria. We've all heard of the powerhouse of the cell. It is a place where ATP is utilized. It is a site of fatty acid oxidation. This all is within skeletal muscle, which again, you have direct control over. It is your body armor if you were to fall or if you were to get sick, which hopefully none of us have to contend with, but it does happen. If you have issues with fertility, body composition becomes a major issue. And I

Polycystic ovarian syndrome is one way that I would like to highlight this idea that skeletal muscle can actually play a role in fertility because the more you can regulate insulin sensitivity...

the better your chances of managing your body composition. So when we think about PCOS, we know that, of course, there are multiple things that can play a role into that. But if someone is struggling with insulin resistance, skeletal muscle is the way to leverage this.

And quite frankly, it is your storage form of amino acids, which becomes really critical as we age. The body is constantly turning over. You are a new person and you have the turnover of liver and the gastrointestinal tract, skin, hair, nails, you name it. Those require amino acids.

And oftentimes when someone is not eating a diet that is robust enough in protein, the body will dip into its own protein reserves, which are skeletal muscle, which technically I'm saying it kind of on a macro level, but it needs those amino acids. And so hopefully listening to what I am saying has now convinced you that skeletal muscle is really the key to health and longevity. In fact,

We know that the lower your muscle mass, you have a decreased ability to survive nearly any disease.

So if muscle is your body armor, your metabolic engine, and your reserve tank of amino acids, how do we actually build it? Dr. Lyon puts it perfectly. Muscle is a form of metabolic currency, and it's one you can't buy, you have to earn it. But in doing so, you gain a whole lot more than just strength. Plus, she'll explain why hypertrophy training is one of the most effective ways to improve strength, metabolism, and resilience as we age, and why it's never too late to get started.

Skeletal muscle is the metabolic currency, and it is a currency that you cannot buy. And when you have to earn it through hard work, it really helps you become a certain kind of person. It requires, like you said, you put in a lot of hard work, it requires discipline, and it requires a level of resilience, and it requires a level of commitment.

That you can't fake. You're either doing it and you're executing it or you're not. And there is a cultivation of character that happens with the discipline of training. When we think about strength, that's really the ability to produce a maximum force against any kind of external resistance. And again, is there multiple ways to get strength? Yes.

Muscle hypertrophy refers to the growth of muscle tissue. And again, that can manifest in a variety of adaptations. Typically, when people think about hypertrophy, again, there are multiple ways to do it. And I think some of the science has changed in terms of this rep continuum. That could be often spoken about 8 to 12 repetitions. And that's what people commonly refer to as the hypertrophy zone. Could you do a lighter load with more weight?

you absolutely could. For a beginner starting out, number one, you might never feel ready. So please do not rely on the moment of feeling ready or feel as if you have to lose weight or get in shape before you go and train. Again, I am a physician who sees patients and that is something that I've heard many, many, many times that people struggle to go to the gym because they feel that they have to get in shape first. If we can shift from what people have to lose and

to what they have to gain from muscle and strength, that's a much better strategy, both physically and mentally.

Now let's hear from Dr. Vonda Wright, a double board certified orthopedic surgeon and women's health advocate who's on a mission to help women age with strength and intention. She's known for cutting through the fluff around midlife fitness. She breaks down what it really means to be toned and spoiler, it has nothing to do with eating less. In fact, if you want muscle definition, you have to eat, especially protein.

The best way to recompose a body, which is how I frame talking about our body. I never talk about losing weight. This is the one and only time in 2025 you're probably going to hear me say online belly fat or meadow belly. I just don't talk like that.

because what we need to do is recompose our bodies, right? And I say it like that because we're not trying to be skinny. There are lots of people who are skinny fat, meaning they're really skinny like my pinky, but 50% of them is adipose tissue, which is metabolically unhealthy. So when we say toned, we're just defining as recomposing to having a lot of muscle mass, right? I think that's what you want us to get at.

So how do we do that? Well, one of the ways I like people to do it is really to become a deep learner of what they're eating, right? Well, number one, you have to eat to be toned, right? We cannot fall into the myth. And it's a hard lesson. Even if you're always on, it is a hard lesson that women of my generation were taught since infancy, they have to be little and they have to weigh a certain amount. And so getting over the mindset hurdle,

of, I'm going to eat more. To be more toned, it really matters what I eat. To build the muscle we need, we need to be in front of how much protein we're getting. Whether that comes from whole food or it comes from whey isolate protein that we use as, and I hate to, I don't like to call it a supplement. It's a feeding. I call it a feeding during the day when I describe

dividing the total protein we need into four to five episodes, three whole food episodes, two additional feedings, one of which in my life is whey protein isolate. And when it comes to building strength and midlife, Vonda doesn't hold back. With estrogen on the decline, the game changes. And the best way to keep your body strong and capable is to stop fearing the heavy weights.

For midlife women, and I'll talk about men in a minute, for midlife women, as estrogen at 40, ladies, at 40 starts to decline in a precipitous way, even though we might not hit menopause the last one year from our last period until 51, 52, we see a precipitous decline such that we do not have the anabolic stimulus of estrogen that we once did to build muscle.

We can build muscle and do build muscle, but the stimulus we now need for longevity and power is to lift heavier, right? So I am trying my hardest, as is a lot of people, to progress us from the mamby-pamby pink weight era of, I only want to lift light weights 60 times because I don't want to get big, which will never happen, people. Right.

to, okay, let's challenge our bodies. Our bodies live in a state of amazing homeostasis. If we're to ever challenge our bodies, we're never going to rise to do better.

So now you know how to fuel properly and that lifting heavy is key, especially in midlife. But how do you actually put that into practice? What does an effective strength training look like? Dr. Vonda Wright shares exactly how to structure a simple, time-efficient, and science-backed workout that hits all the right muscles and keeps your core strong. How do you think about...

number of sets and how many days per week for someone, again, who's busy? So the research shows that you can be effective with two times a week. If on those two days, it's a total body, you do an upper body, you do a lower body, two days a week. But they have to be quality lifts, right? So when you're lifting for that one hour twice a week, that's what you're doing. You're not playing around. We're not

We're lifting because it's not only we start out and this is just the way that my strength coach started me doing this many years ago. And so I am a creature of habit now. So we have a compound lift of the day. Let's say it's my bench press.

And then that same day, we have the accessory lifts. To the accessory lifts to a bench press, for instance, biceps, triceps, lats, delt, rows. Those accessory lifts, we lift a little lighter, but we do eight reps, right? So it's heavy lifting.

In our compound lift, our accessory lifts are still heavy, but not as heavy. We do eight reps, three sets, three to four sets. And then I always, in my workouts, throw in

a core workout. I don't think we can get enough core because it's how we keep our low back stable. It's how we don't get injured because our pelvis is the center of the universe. So the core is every workout with the compound lift followed by the accessory lifts and that'll take you an hour.

Up next, we're hearing from Dr. Bill Campbell, a leading researcher in exercise science and muscle hypertrophy. Bill's known for his no BS science-backed approach to building lean muscle and optimizing body composition. He lays out how often you need to be lifting each week to see results and why intensity matters way more than endless sets. If you want to train efficiently and effectively, this is your blueprint. Generally, what we want to do is train

Work out or stimulate each body part to a minimum of two times per week. I would say two to three times per week. So what's not ideal is having like a back day and a quad day and a chest day. And then you're waiting six entire days to to work out those muscle groups again.

So when you go to the gym, if you can go a minimum of two times per week where you're doing a whole body routine, that seems to be the best in terms of building muscle. Now, other other that that would be a minimalist approach. Another option would let's say you could go three days per week. Well, maybe it's a three whole body days. And if you some people want to go four days, two lower body days, two upper body days,

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So think of this, I need to stimulate my muscles a minimum of two times per week. And let's, I'll say even two times per week. Once we get more than that, the research is not definitively saying that four is better than two or three, five is better than three. But we know that one is not ideal. We know that more than once is ideal. So if you're living a lifestyle where resistance training is part of this, two times per week is a minimal. And-

After that, what is your available time? What is your interest? Are you doing other forms of training like mobility work, power work? So hopefully that at least I gave you a baseline to consider. The most important thing is the intensity of your lift. So before we even get into volume, you're going to pick up a weight. For chest, you're going to do a bench press or you're going to be in a machine where you're going to move the weight.

The most important thing here to stimulate a hypertrophic stimulus on the body or a stimulus for the body to grow, or if we're dieting, a stimulus to maintain our muscle mass. Whatever weight you pick up to use, you want to keep lifting that weight until you can't lift it anymore. Or this is even better to when you think you could do one or two more repetitions. I call that training to near failure.

And when you're taking it to near failure, what that's doing is you're activating all of these motor units and it's causing all of the muscle fiber cells to be activated. So again...

You want to take each set that you do to near failure. So if I can, if I, let's just say I'm bench pressing 200 pounds and I could do it 10 times. And if I tried on the 11th time and it would not get off my chest, I would have to call my, my wife into the garage, get this off my chest. I can't do it 11 times. As long as I go to about eight or nine, that's good. There's no added benefit for muscle hypertrophy to, to going to failure.

So there's the most important consideration, the intensity of your lift. Now, in terms of how many sets, how many reps, the number of sets typically seems to be less and less valuable as you get past three sets. So in my own personal workouts, I never do more than three reps. I get bored actually to have three sets or three sets. You mean not reps? Yeah. Three sets, three sets of an exercise. Yes.

So you can do more, but the muscle protein synthesis, which is a measure of the acute hypertrophic potential of that workout, really isn't amplified by doing many more sets than this. So, and in fact, for every additional set you do after one,

you're getting less and less of a hypertrophic stimulus. So going to near failure on set one, awesome. If you want to go ahead and do a second and a third set, but after that, you're just doing more sets because you love doing more volume. I don't, I don't believe that you're getting a lot of, you're not building a lot of extra muscle mass.

Let's bring in one of the leading voices in protein research, Dr. Don Lehman. He is one of the most respected experts in how protein impacts metabolism, muscle health, and aging. He explains why the RDA for protein is actually just the bare minimum, not the ideal. He also breaks down the critical amino acid leucine and how much protein you really need to support everything from your muscle maintenance to metabolic health, especially as you age.

With protein, the RDA is 0.8 grams per kg. And the upper limit is something above 2.5 grams per kg, which is more than a gram per pound. So there's an upper limit. The average American is taking in 0.9 to 1. So we're at the very bottom of the range.

That's kg. That's kg. Yeah. I think that's around 0.4 grams per pound. I think the RDA, if we were to equate to pounds, is 0.36 grams per pound of body weight. So those are the ranges we think of. I was going to mention that...

Of women over the age of 65 in the United States, 40% are below the RDA. So women in particular are very close to the absolute minimum. You know, that translates into around 60, you know, depending on body size, 50 to 65 grams per day, 40% are below that number.

I mean, that's really striking. - It is striking. And when we think about the RDA, my understanding is the RDA was established as a bare minimum.

and this is someone who just just to survive and i don't think any of our listeners want to survive they want to thrive we recommend around 120 grams per day for healthy adults we find from a metabolic standpoint working predominantly with women that if they get below 100 grams per day they lose most of the benefits of protein glucose

fatty acid metabolism, glucose, insulin sensitivity, weight loss, satiety. So we think there's kind of a major marker at around 100 grams per day.

So you now know how much protein to aim for, but when you eat that protein is just as important. Dr. Lehman explains how protein timing throughout the day can dramatically impact your ability to build and preserve muscle, specifically why breakfast might be the most important meal for flipping your body from a muscle-breaking, catabolic state to a muscle-building, anabolic one. So you leave me my next question in terms of distribution of protein. If we just, let's just settle on, say, the 100-plus protein.

Is it an even split between breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Or it sounds like, in your opinion, breakfast is king here, followed by dinner, and don't think so much about lunch. Dr. Jones and I did an experiment. We were looking at this distribution question, realizing that the average American's eating around 90 grams per day.

males, females a little closer to 70, but around 90 grams per day. But they're eating 60% of it or more at dinner, 65. So they're eating approximately 10, 20, and 60 are how they distribute protein. So we basically said, we know that that first meal is critical. So let's just redistribute 90 grams. And we went 30, 30, 30.

That happened to be even, but the issue was we got 30 into breakfast. And what we found is with the exact same calories, the exact same protein, the exact same protein per day, we got higher level of daily protein synthesis just by moving it from dinner to breakfast. The thing to think about, a couple of pieces of information.

One is the body is constantly going through cycles that are anabolic and catabolic, particularly muscle. Muscle during the nighttime is catabolic. It's breaking down. And you'll go through 12 hours of fasting and it's breaking down. It's continuously breaking down muscle. You wake up in the morning and until you have a meal that triggers protein synthesis, you're

And we can get into leucine and mTOR and all of that. But until you have a meal that triggers muscle protein synthesis, you'll stay catabolic. And for most Americans, that first meal is dinner where they're having 60 grams of protein.

And then the second part of that is after a meal you have an anabolic period, but it only lasts about two hours. And we could go into reasons for that, but it lasts about two hours. So that means you're spending, the average American's spending 22 hours in a catabolic condition for muscle and two hours after dinner in an anabolic. We think that is the aging phenomena that we know as sarcopenia. So that's why we want to get breakfast hot

higher because we can now flip the switch back from being catabolic to anabolic and we can protect your muscles all day long. Up next, we're hearing from Dr. Bill Campbell. Leucine is one of the essential amino acids. It's a branch chain amino acid.

And that one amino acid is very unique such that none of the other 20 amino acids have the special feature that leucine does, which is leucine kind of acts as a switch. So I think of turning on the light switch in your room to turning on muscle protein synthesis.

So if you were to eat all the ideal amount of protein, but you took all the leucine out of it, your body's ability to adapt to your training would be effectively muted or severely limited. So leucine is very important in terms of allowing your muscle cells to respond to the resistance training or any exercise stimulus that you're doing.

What we know is that the trigger after that overnight fast is an amino acid called leucine, which triggers a process. There's a master control switch called mTOR that triggers what we call the initiation phase of protein synthesis.

So, when we're sleeping at night, your muscle protein synthesis is running at kind of a basal level, but it's kind of turned down. You're still making enzymes, but you're not making any structural proteins to speak of. And so, what we want to do is get back. And so, when we have enough leucine at a meal, we turn on that mechanism, okay, the mTOR mechanism.

What we know is that levels of leucine below two grams at a meal won't turn it on and levels above two and a half grams will turn it on. And that's about as clear as we know.

Okay, so 2.5 grams, the average American gets about 65% of their protein from animal-based proteins, about 35 from plant-based proteins. So if you use that, that says that the leucine content of foods would be about 8%, 30 grams, 8%, 2.5. That's where that number comes from. So we developed that.

We know that the leucine trigger probably isn't maxed at that point, and it probably maxes at maybe 3.5. But as you pointed out, it's diminishing returns. So we get a very sharp rise from nothing to activated at 2.5, and then it begins to slowly plateau out.

Now we're hearing from Dr. Jamie Seaman, also known as Dr. Fit and Fabulous. She's a board-certified OBGYN with a background in exercise science and nutrition. She's passionate about helping women transform their health through strength training, metabolic health, and mindset. And she's one of our scientific advisors here at MindBodyGreen. Jamie breaks down some key concepts for anyone looking to improve their health.

First, she explains why building muscle, not just losing fat, should be the main goal for when it comes to changing your body comp. Then she shares why cold plunging immediately after a workout might not be doing what you want it to do. Finally, she talks about how to build lasting motivation by changing the way you speak to yourself and making healthy habits non-negotiable.

If you want to improve your body composition, you should be focusing on building muscle and less on losing fat because that's what most women are really just hyper-focused on is like there's this 10 pounds that they constantly want to lose. And what most women will do is they'll cut calories, they'll skip meals. It tends to come at a loss of protein in the diet.

And then they're doing a bunch of cardio. So it's a very easy way to lose muscle by doing that. And so what happens is they might notice a 10 pound shift on the scale, but probably 50% of that is lean tissue. And they've, you know, kind of further hurt their metabolism. And so they're going to be chasing after that 10 pounds for the rest of their life.

Whereas if we can really shift our focus as women to saying, okay, I'm going to dedicate the next six months of my life to seeing how strong I can get. Because getting strong involves eating protein, eating amino acids, getting the right nutrients in your diet and doing consistent resistance training with progressive overload, the body composition improves.

always improves. The important thing to know about sauna and ice bath is that sauna, the timing of sauna around workouts, it's great to sauna after a workout. You don't want to cold plunge after a resistance training session because it can blunt

muscle protein synthesis. So you want that swelling in the muscle, you want that actually inflammation response. And so you don't want to get into an ice bath for several hours after resistance training session. So how I've kind of built my life is if I have time in the morning, I don't have to be in the operating room or whatnot. I'll come home and get in the sauna and

After my lifting sessions, I will occasionally sauna maybe on an evening or something like that or on a Wednesday morning or on a weekend when my days aren't a scheduled lifting day. And I generally turn it up the hottest it goes and which is about 160 degrees. I actually am putting in a steam sauna that will get hotter than that. And the difference between a dry sauna and a steam sauna is

is because of the steam effect, it doesn't allow you to sweat and perspire so you can increase your core body temperature a little bit higher. Now, more is not always better. Keep that in mind. You still get great benefits doing a sauna at like 150 to 160 degrees. I'll stay in there for 30 to 45 minutes.

It all comes down to the language in your brain and the way that you talk to yourself. And my brand is called Dr. Fit and Fabulous, which I always think sounds like real cheesy. But for me, it's just this, it's like your motto. It's like, what's your motto? If you want to be a fit mom or a fit dad or whatever it is, like, what do those people do, right? They wake up at 5am and they go to the gym and they work out and they have

no reason to not do that. And so the more you just make these things part of your routine, it's easy to get motivated for like 30, 60, 90 days. We've all done it where we've done something, we were doing great and then we stopped and we just went back to our old ways. You just have to start to make these things non-negotiable and show up for yourself. I call it pay yourself first.

And the more you do that, confidence is built through action. The more you just like do it, even when you don't want to do it, like that builds the most incredible amount of confidence in yourself.

Next up is Bonnie Swee, a journalist, author, and lifelong athlete whose work explores the intersections of identity, movement, and culture. She brings a thoughtful lens to how we think about fitness, not just as a personal pursuit, but a cultural one. Bonnie reflects on how lifting heavy is doing more than just building strength. It's shifting longstanding societal norms around how women are supposed to look and move.

As the science continues to highlight the long-term health benefits of strength training, more women are embracing heavier weights and challenging the outdated ideals of what a woman's body should look like. Here's Bonnie and how that shift is starting to take root.

We've been told that like for women, that there is like an upper limit, you know, for what we should be in terms of size. And so I think that's getting exploded more because we have to lift heavy to see the benefits, the maximum benefits of health. So I think that that's something that's beginning to break through in a really great way because people I know who wouldn't have

particularly like even been interested that much in exercise are lifting more now because they understand that that's something that they're they should be doing. So I think like some of the health benefits, the signal of

lifting heavy being really important for you as you get older has kind of broken through a little bit helped to break through that stereotype of women should only be like you know toned or like have a pilates body like long and lean or whatever like that's just I think part of that is all the health science that is underscoring like the the idea of lifting heavy being good for everyone

To close out our conversation, Bonnie leaves us with a message that cuts right to the heart of the entire episode. After all, the science, the stories, the strategies, the last point is perhaps the most important takeaway. Because it's not just about lifting weights or building muscle, it's about who you become in the process. Here's Bonnie with a powerful reminder that strength isn't reserved for a certain type of body. It's for you.

What do you want every woman to know about muscle? Ooh, it's for you. Really, that strength is for you. And I think that you don't have to look a certain way for it to be for you. It's about what it allows you to do more and better. And it is about feeling capable. It is about relying on yourself.

I hope these conversations left you feeling stronger, more informed, and inspired to rethink what muscle means for your health and longevity. Whether it's reworking your protein timing, lifting heavier than you thought you could, or simply showing up for yourself day after day. Remember, strength is about much more than aesthetics. It's about living fully, aging well, and owning your power. Thank you for listening.