How do we get past plateaus in our training? If you’ve ever wondered how to keep progressing on the foundation you’ve built, or have questions about a specific program or how to tailor your training to your life stage (cycling years, perimenopause or post menopause), this episode is for you.
I’m talking you through how your body responds and adapts to the stimulus you give it, and why you’ll need to change that stimulus as you get stronger – and as your hormone status changes over time.
In this episode, I’m exploring….
⭐️ How to build a strong foundation and meet yourself where you’re at
⭐️ Ramping it up with either more time, or more resistance
⭐️ Getting more specific in your rep ranges
⭐️ The importance of applying your life stage to how you ramp up your training – custom guidance for your cycling years, progressing for perimenopause and progressing post-menopause
⭐️ How our training can exacerbate underlying imbalances from our daily life activities without good guidance
⭐️ The value of adding self care, mobility, yoga and stretching to your routine
⭐️ How to follow a customized program for your life stage
Links to follow up from this episode:
- Access to a Rock Your Life membership (custom programs for women in all life stages)
- All Betty Rocker Workout Programs (90 Day Challenge, Home Workout Domination, Lioness, etc)
- Free Foundations of Functional Fitness Workshop (15 min videos for 14 days to help you build good form!)
- Building a Balanced Physique and Protecting your joints (article)
Episode Transcript
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The Betty Rocker (00:15):
What’s up, rock stars Coach Betty Rocker here. And I thought it might be interesting today to talk a little bit about how muscle grows and about progressing through your different types of training to really create what’s called adaptations in the muscle tissue. Now, you may have heard before that you need to mix up your workout programming. And this is true, eventually your body gets used to the load that you’re giving it. So say you started out with body weight training, maybe you did my Make Fat Cry challenge or one of my other fantastic 30 day challenges inside rock your life that are body weight based and you really enjoy that. You know, I, I hear a lot of people like, I wanna keep doing the 30 day challenge, or they go through my 90 day challenge program, which is another body weight based program, and they are enjoying it so much.
(01:07)
Not only is the time short, it’s like, you know, really convenient to do it in that time, but maybe they, they really enjoy the, the variety of all those body weight movements and how good that feels to just move your body. Well, once you’ve sort of built up a base using gravity in your own body for resistance, your body has adapted and it’s reached a certain level in a sense. And maybe you’re gonna maintain that and you’re just, you’re happy with where you’re at and that’s what all that you have time to commit to. And you’re never gonna get any weighted objects or have, you know, any homework, workout equipment or anything like that. And, and you could stay there, but your body will adapt and it will not probably progress much beyond where you are with that type of training. So this is why we also have other programs that allow your body to start a different type of challenge to be challenged so that the muscle tissue can adapt to an additional load.
(02:03)
Now, another way that you could progress and see additional progress if you were wanting to stick with body weight training would be to use more time. So spend more time in your workout. So if you’ve been doing 15 minute workouts and you’ve kind of hit a plateau, you could potentially go up to 25 to 35 minute body weight training. And from there, that would give your body more time under tension. That would give it more of a load that it’s working against. It would be more fatigued and that would help your body to progress even further, right? And that’s another way to adapt. But if you wanna stick with either the shorter time or you even wanna give yourself a little more time, you can add more load in the, the sense of resistance. So you start to add handheld weights, for example, and you start to maybe use stretchy bands a little bit more frequently, or even ankle weights, those types of things.
(02:54)
Those are all great resistance options. I love using an exercise ball to take, you know, a crunch that you were doing on the floor to in increase the range of motion, because as your back sort of stretches over the ball and then you come into a sit up on the ball, a crunch on the ball, you’ve opened up your range of motion even farther. So that’s another way to up the challenge for yourself. So thinking about these different ways that we can approach challenging our bodies to adapt to a new load or a new amount of time that we are, that we are giving it. So for example, home Workout Domination, that’s a program that I created that utilizes homework, workout equipment and uses that progressive overload aspect of training with, with a home workout type of equipment set up. You know, you’ve got stretchy bands, you’ve got your dumbbells, you’ve got maybe a jump rope and maybe an exercise ball.
(03:47)
Those are optional pieces that I, that I show you and that type of a program. And then we have a lot of great challenges inside of rock your life that are of a similar type to home workout domination. Some of them have different workouts every day, some of them have repeating workouts that you can progress through. It’s all, it’s all different ways that are fun to train. And then you can start to refine a little bit more. So if you want to now start to create even further adaptations in the muscle tissue, well here’s where we start getting more specific about rep ranges, for instance, and about how much resistance we’re actually using. So it may be beneficial to you to start really paying attention to the cues that I’m giving you in some of these workout programs of like, I want you to be within eight to 12 reps, right?
(04:32)
If you are constantly able to do 15 to 20 reps in your program with the amount of resistance you have, well maybe that’s a sign that if you win a little bit heavier, you could be down closer to eight to 10 reps, for instance. And there are some really fun programs in Rock Your Life where I take you through that. And we also have programs in Rock Your Life as well as outside of Rock Your Life and the Lioness program where you are really lifting much heavier equipments. It’s, it’s sort of a transition between the homework workout equipment and maybe barbells. If you have a garage gym or you wanna go to the gym, you could do that, all these programs with just your homework workout equipment too. But it’s an opportunity to really apply what’s called progressive overload. This is where you’re, each time you come to the same workout and the same workout moves, you’re tracking how much weight you used and how many reps you did.
(05:20)
And over time you watch yourself go heavier and your body gets stronger and stronger. So these are just some of the different ways that we help you progress once you get on board with the Betty Rocker universe, as we call it, the Betty Rockie verse. And I think that this is just a really great way to build your body up and to enjoy that, that progress that you can really truly have. And there’s, you know, an aspect of it where when you get to a level where you are comfortable, where you have access and time to do the thing that you’re doing and it’s, and you’re happy with where your body’s at, you know, then you just change up the program that you’re doing. Then you just, if you’re in rock your life, for instance, you would just do a different challenge that had a similar, a level of challenge to your muscle tissue.
(06:09)
So you, you know, we see a lot of members who just slowly over time acquire different pieces of equipment and then they, they just continue to progress and, and then they change it up. And, you know, life, life happens sometimes we don’t always, you know, I always say progression is not linear. You know, you’re not meant to go on this like escalating constantly journey. Sometimes we go up, we go down, we go up, we go down, we take a break, we come back to it re rebuild. Sometimes we have an injury or some type of setback, but it’s really good to build a base and to understand the foundational principles of functional fitness, which is why I created the, the workshop, the free workshop that anyone can access. It’s called the Foundations of Functional Fitness. And it’s just a two week workshop, 15 minute quick videos where I take you through the correct form for all the different major lifts, pushing and pulling, and how to really optimize your rotator cuff alignment.
(07:03)
A lot of topics about posture and alignment when it might be appropriate for you to seek out the care of a practitioner who would help you hands on. There’s a barefoot training video, there’s some conversations about progression and adaptation, and there’s just a, a deadlift, a have form, squat form, lunch form, you know, a lot of those types of, of topics that I think are really important to master because a lot of people will jump in on a type of training because they’ll see somebody on social media who has a specific body type that they want. And this is totally natural, you know, like we wanna do the thing that will get us the body of the person we’re looking at, but we forget that that person had to build up themselves and that there are probably years before their showing you this physique that they spent, you know, building that strength, building that muscle tissue.
(07:52)
And the the worst thing that we can do to ourselves, of course, is to train with bad form. And when we don’t realize that our form isn’t great, we, we can end up having injuries or setbacks or, or we start wearing and tearing on our body and we don’t realize it ’cause it doesn’t hurt yet, right? We’re like creating a situation down the road. What we see with I, I used to see when I, when I was a structural integrationist and I was doing a lot of hands-on work on people’s bodies and realigning them. A lot of athletes, I found a lot of people would get injured going to workout classes where there was heavy weight involved and there wasn’t a lot of instruction to build people up. Now there are other workout group fitness classes where they really do spend a lot of time helping people get the foundations right, and that, that’s, I applaud that.
(08:42)
But there were a lot of things, a lot of people I had to treat who had gone to like group fitness classes where they just got injured because they were just slinging around heavyweight without real attention to their form. They came into it maybe with postural, uh, or, you know, misalignments in their hips or their shoulders. And you think about it, a lot of us are working at a computer, or if you’re not working at a computer, you can’t get away from the fact that you do most of the things with your hands in front of your body and your head and neck tilt down to look at your phone. You may be watching this on a phone right now or listening, and you’re looking down right? And your chest is collapsed, your head and neck are collapsed, and this creates more work for those front body muscles of your, and, and this over time, you know, wears out the, the body in that sense.
(09:29)
And so then we go and do a bunch of pushups which activates the same exact muscles and then they just get overworked and our back muscles become very weak over time. And this exacerbates the issues we see with a lot of people in the rotator cuff. So one of the things that I’m always working on training people on is posterior chain training and helping to strengthen the muscles of the back and the back of the legs and the glutes and like bringing our bodies into an open position and helping to counterbalance a lot of our day-to-day stuff we do in our, in our lives. But that’s just something you could think about for yourself with your training and really I think you should do that. Foundations of functional fitness free course, by the way, it’s a great little workshop and I’ll give you a lot of body awareness for, for many of these things we’re talking about.
(10:14)
But back to adaptations and, and why we don’t wanna jump ahead of our training before we’re ready. It, it’s because of this exact reason. If you’re adding a lot of weight or load to a body that’s not aligned properly, it’s very easy to strain the joints, to hurt your knees, to be, be doing a squat. If your pelvis is rotated, then you’re gonna, you’re not, your knees aren’t gonna be lined up, your ankles aren’t gonna be lined up, right? And you’re gonna get injured frequently. Maybe not right now like I was saying, but maybe down the road. And another thing that we always add into all of our challenges and programs is either yoga or mobility or some type of flexibility training because, you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re 30 or you’re 50, our bodies as we go through time need consistent mobility and flexibility training.
(11:03)
We need to pay attention to that flexibility around our joints and in our muscle tissue. So that’s something that I really build in and build awareness about. And I, I remember being in my like early twenties and really having this idea that like I had to go hard in my workouts all the time or I wasn’t gonna be making progress. And we know that that’s actually not very helpful for muscular adaptation either, because what we need is to have rest and recovery periods in order for that muscle tissue to be able to repair and recover. You don’t actually build muscle when you’re training. You actually are breaking it down. You’re creating the micro tears, you’re creating an inflammatory response when you’re training. And so, you know, we need that recovery time after the workout. And this actually changes in the different life stages. We go through women, we have an easier time recovering from our workouts when our we’re in our cycling years than we do in perimenopause or post menopause.
(12:01)
And this is because we have more estrogen and progesterone then we can bounce back and recover more quickly. It’s still a good idea to take rest days and it’s still a good idea to do your low impact flexibility and mobility activities, but it becomes essential to do this as you get into per and post menopause. This is why another layer that I offer in my programs is the custom track options for women in different life stages. So you can actually choose a workout program that is hard enough to challenge you and meet you where you’re at currently, whether that’s 15 to 20 minute body weight workouts, 20 to 30 minute workouts using home exercise equipment, or you’re already lifting heavier weights. You wanna take that as your start point and then layer onto that the sequencing that is optimal for your life stage. Because remember that estrogen is anabolic, meaning muscle supporting.
(12:52)
And when we have a regular cycle, we get this natural fluctuation of estrogen and then progesterone that fluctuate over the course of the month. And we wanna train in alignment with our energy by pushing it harder during the first half of our cycle when estrogen levels are higher. And then taper our training intensity down after ovulation and backing off the intensity before your period. And that’s probably really intuitive and natural to you. You may already feel more tired before your period and that’s because you have more progesterone at that time. Your body has little bit more inflammation at that time, so it doesn’t help you to be going super hard. Your body can’t quite recover as easily. So you wanna listen to your body and trust the process. You don’t get gains in fat loss or in muscle strength by pushing your body harder than it wants to go when your inflammation level is already heightened just before your period from those higher levels of progesterone.
(13:49)
And then in perimenopause, of course, those levels of hormones start to drop. And that’s because those hormones are made by our ovaries. And as our cycle slows down, one of the reasons we start to feel more tired and sleep gets weird and we have hot flashes and start gaining weight is because your hormone levels are no longer at that, even even stable dose. They’re, they’re off kilter. And this is when we wanna tune in to absolutely not over training because it increases inflammation and we, we can’t recover as quickly. We just don’t snap back or bounce back like we did when our estrogen levels were higher with our regular cycle. So this is why you want to use one of my custom training guides where I lay out a smarter schedule for you. And this is how you can keep progressing too, because you’ll challenge yourself effectively in the workouts you do meet yourself where you’re at now, get the right amount of recovery to handle the inflammatory load the workout creates, then fuel effectively to support your body with the nutrient building blocks it needs.
(14:51)
And then be ready to hit your next workout strong again so that you can stimulate the adaptation and response and really see a great result and be effective with the training that you do instead of just burning yourself out and just getting further and further behind. And then if you’re post-menopausal, all of this is true for you as well. And it’s only that much more important because now the hormone levels are no longer erratically fluctuating, they’ve just stopped fluctuating at all and they’re just generally flatlined. And a lot of women really lose muscle at this stage of their life and gain more weight because they’re, they’re either not following a good program and adding resistance training into their workouts and they’re, maybe they’re not challenging themselves enough in the workouts they do. And this is often combined with one of the other things I mentioned.
(15:40)
They’re, they’re either over training or doing a lot of cardio and they never fully recover because they just don’t have the same reserves to handle the inflammatory load created by all the workouts they’re doing and doing more strategic cardio like short burst cardio plus dedicated resistance or strength training combined with strategic recovery days to help you really recover and then come back and really maximize the effectiveness of your next workout is actually what will help you see the best results and get stronger and lose the body fat. Plus, of course, paying attention to and following my guidance with your nutrient intake. And this is exactly why I want you to be using my custom workout tracks that I create for you and rock your life and in my other programs. And very important for us in every life stage, from your cycling years to perimenopause, to post menopause.
(16:30)
If we wanna maximize the effectiveness of the workouts we do, we need nutrients, we need the right fuel around our workouts. So one of the big mistakes I see a lot of people making is not eating before they train or waiting a long time to eat after they train. Not eating enough protein in general or being afraid of carbohydrates. And these things will really rob your body’s ability of making muscle of, of being able to lose body fat. Because if you’re not eating enough fuel period and you’re not eating enough protein or even enough fiber rich carbohydrates, you’re gonna be craving something all the time. And I, I hear from so many people who have sugar cravings and carb cravings and they kind of are, it feels like they feel out of control, creates this vicious cycle so then they feel like they need to punish themself with a workout and they need to eat less and exercise more.
(17:21)
And it’s just this awful sort of cyclical thing that ends up, you know, damaging your metabolism in the long run and making you store more body fat than less. You probably have heard me talk about how important protein is for you and seeing your body progress and respond to your workouts. But in a nutshell, if you are breaking down your tissue during a workout, you need the nutrient building blocks to build back up strong again. And the amino acids we get from our dietary protein are the one of the most important factors in that process. When we don’t have enough amino acids circulating in our body from our last meal, our body breaks down our muscle tissue to access the stored amino acids in that tissue. And that means that if you’re hoping to get sculpted and toned, as in have muscle tone, which also helps you lose body fat faster and you’re not eating enough protein and not eating enough in general, your body will just, can constantly be breaking itself down, just leaving you flabby and tired.
(18:19)
And not to mention it creates a stressful state in your body when we don’t have enough fuel to run on, which elevates our stress hormone cortisol and cortisol acts on our system by making us store more body fat and lose more muscle. So it’s this double-edged sword that’s sabotaging the hard work you do when you don’t eat. And one of the reasons you need enough protein is because you’re not just rebuilding your muscle tissue that your body needs those amino acids for, it also needs them for your brain function and mood, your hormone and enzyme building blocks and your immune system health. So if it’s constantly having to break down your muscle tissue to get the stored aminos, just to have enough building blocks to build neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine so that you have a good mood and you feel better, you’re, you’re, you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul basically.
(19:06)
And it’s this vicious cycle. And part of why my ladies in perimenopause and post menopause start to notice the weight gain creeping up so much is because they’re frequently not eating enough protein even before they hit these life stages. They’re getting away with it for a while because the body is just more resilient in the presence of higher hormone levels in our regular cycling layer years, like including, you know, testosterone too, which also starts to drop in perimenopause. But once we hit our forties, we just don’t absorb the amino acids from our protein is easily anymore, which means we need more of them to do the same amount of work as before the body still needs them. So the best thing you can do if you’re still in your cycling years is to make sure you’re getting a baseline of, you know, something like 20 to 30 grams of protein per meal.
(19:57)
And if you’re in your forties and up, you wanna start bumping that up to 30 to 40 grams per meal. So if you’re not even close to that, just start with 20 grams, start looking up the nutrition facts on the food you’re eating and just looking at the protein. Just get start, get con, getting comfortable with that and then, you know, slowly increase that amount until you get closer to those ranges. And these are just ranges, they’re just a good place to start. Your needs may be higher or lower. There are so many different types of protein foods available, it’s not one kind of food alone. And you can boost your overall protein content easily by adding a smoothie with protein powder, which is why after years of being asked and also being frustrated by the lack of good options out there, I actually started creating my own custom formulas and protein powders.
(20:45)
I have just have a variety of people who use my programs and I ended up deciding to just go with a plant-based protein powder so everyone could use it. But I drew from multiple plant-based sources of protein to cover all of your bases, including a broad spectrum of amino acids and making sure you got all the essential aminos in with my formulas. So those are the aminos your body can’t make on its own and has to get from food. So whether you’re using my organic protein powders or another protein powder, make sure that you are getting all of your essential amino acids covered when you’re taking a protein powder. And you know, when you’re eating your protein foods throughout the day, you wanna make sure that you have a good variety of protein sources and make sure that you’ve got the essential aminos covered. So that’s your protein.
(21:32)
And when you make protein an important component of your meals and focus on as many whole food sources of your protein, carbs, and fats throughout the day, you will give your body everything it needs to power through your workouts and really drive those adaptations. And that’s really why I recommend fueling around your workouts, really paying attention to your protein intake, eating a balance of the nutrients and being sure you’re not over training constantly. So I definitely recommend fueling around your workouts, really paying attention to your protein intake, eating a balance of the nutrients and being sure that you’re not over training constantly. So when we look at this adaptation to the muscle tissue and building ourselves up over time, we wanna have a strong foundation. We wanna have good alignment and good form, we wanna challenge our body progressively, right? So not throwing too much at it all at once, otherwise you may hit a plateau and you may wonder why.
(22:30)
But it’s not this, it exercise alone isn’t what is gonna build your muscle tissue, right? It’s it’s ex not exercise alone, it’s gonna burn your body fat. Really, we have to look at exercise within the framework of what I like to call the four pillars of health. And all four pillars of health are gonna influence your hormone status. They’re gonna influence how your body’s ability to build muscle and burn fat. And the four pillars are sleep, nutrition, stress management, and exercise. So really think about how you can apply those different principles and how they all actually work together to support body composition changes to, you know, more muscle and less body fat. And then how we just wanna layer over that, the stage of life we are in and optimize our approach to meet ourselves where we are at as best we can and and know that I have tools and resources to help you do that.
(23:23)
And you can find them all at thebettyocker.com in my store where you’ll find my workout programs, my eating guides, my supplements, my online fitness membership, rock your life where every challenge is customized for women in different life stages. And I will look forward to having another chat with you about some of these other topics in depth. So keep listening and thank you so much for being here. As always, I’m Betty Rocker, you are so awesome, floss and amazing. Be sure to drop me a line and let me know if you have questions, comments, thoughts, experiences yourself with progression, and maybe you’ve hit a plateau before and you’ve been wondering why, and maybe this gave you some good ideas. So let me know and I will look forward to talking to you again real soon. Have a great day.
This episode brought to you by Rock Your Life!
Rock Your Life is my online home workout studio that you can attend from anywhere you are, and access workout challenge programs, healthy recipes, and get coaching and support in our private women’s fitness community for all 4 Pillars of Health. We provide customized programming and support for women in training with their cycle, training in perimenopause and training post menopause.
All of our workouts and training programs include a strong focus on form and alignment to keep you healthy and balanced. You’ll find workout classes to take a la carte of all types, including strength training, HIIT, kickboxing, yoga, barre, mobility and more!
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