Women's Weightlifting 101, How To Avoid Getting Too Bulky, Hormone Imbalances In Fit Females & More.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Welcome to this podcast episode with Stephanie Goudreau of Harder to Kill Radio. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

It's a testament to the training. You don't always have to max out to see improvements and to increase your strength or your skill. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong, especially folks that try to program for themselves. How do we get women to embrace other ways of training that are actually scientifically, physiologically better for them? And how do we do that? Despite the preponderance of messages from the media? Are there ways to build people that are more resilient? And I think the answer is yes.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movements get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

All right, ladies and I guess gentlemen who have a lady in your life, today's podcast is pretty much all catered and customized to you. If you've ever wondered what kind of weight training program you should be doing to, to do anything from get stronger, to get a sexy body to look better in your clothing of choice, then we're going to be talking about that in today's episode. We're going to talk about how women can avoid bulking up common hormone imbalances in fit females, why so many crossfitting ladies can eventually get such funky looking abs, a lot of little crucial elements of Women's Weightlifting 101 and pretty much everything that you need to know when it comes to being a lady, getting strong weight training. And don't worry guys, we've got plenty in today's episode for you as well. My guest is Stephanie and Stephanie, I do not want to butcher your last name, so I'm going to let you jump in right now. After I give an attempt, I'm going to, I'm going to throw out a guess here and say it's Godreau.

Yep, there you go. You win.

Did I nail it?

You nailed it.

Sweet. Stephanie Godreau. So let me tell you all a little bit about Stephanie. She's got an education in biology and human physiology. She's got 12 years of science teaching experience. That means that she doesn't just hang out at a gym as a gym rot. She's actually spent some time in the textbooks, too. Holistic nutrition training. She has a certification in that. She's got a blog that you may have seen before called Stupid Easy Paleo. I love the name at, you guessed it, stupid EasyPaleo.com. she's competed in everything from endurance mountain biking to crossfitting to weightlifting. She actually coaches weightlifting at CrossFit Box in San Diego. And she's actually coached crossfitting in gyms all over the place, from Scotland to Southern California. Stephanie has a couple of books, one of which I own, which is her Performance Paleo Cookbook. The subtitle of that is Recipes for Eating Better, Getting Stronger and Gaining the Competitive Edge. She's also got the book the Paleo A Beginner's Guide to Real Food for Performance. I'm not paleo, as many of you know, but I still enjoyed her books. And we're going to talk a little bit about her cooking and meal planning philosophy as well. And she has a podcast. Her podcast title is awesome. It's called Harder to Kill, Harder to Kill Radio. And over on that podcast, she basically talks about how to build unbreakable humans. So, Stephanie, first of all, thanks for coming on the show. Or should I call you Steph?

The only person that calls me Stephanie is my mom, so Steph is great.

That's kind of like. It's kind of like me with Benjamin and Ben.

Oh, you only get called your full name when you're in trouble. That's kind of where I'm at. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited.

Yeah, I'm stoked to have you on the show. And obviously you're ripped and you know what you're talking about. And I will put a photo of you over on the show notes for this episode. So if any of you are listening in and you want to go get the show notes, delve into any of the resources that Steph and I wind up talking about, etc. You can find all the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Harder to kill. So, Steph, I was going through your Amazon bio and some information about you, and I was able to dig up the deep, dark and dirty secret that you used to be called sea elephant back in elementary school. Can you explain why you used to be called the sea elephant?

Yeah. So the sea elephant is another name for elephant seal. And these are giant creatures, not so lean, if you will, protected well against the cold of the ocean. But there was a group of three of us who were pretty close friends, and this is around the time where having nicknames after animals was kind of a cool thing. So the two of my friends and I kind of came up with nicknames and they nicknamed me that and, and they were named out like pandas and all sorts of other cute and fuzzy things. And it was, I think it was just kind of an ode to the fact that I was not the most lithe of individuals when I was a kid. And I did struggle with my weight quite a bit as I was growing up and, and that really influenced a lot of what I do and, and how I see myself and fitness and what it means to be healthy now. So Sea Elephant, maybe no longer. But I mean, at the time I didn't take it poorly. It was all kind of a nice pet nickname amongst very good friends, but certainly contextual. If somebody else called me that, I probably would have gotten pretty upset.

So what you're saying is you didn't necessarily start off genetically gifted, so to speak, with a nickname like Sea Elephant, but at some point, obviously along the road, you got pretty interested in either getting a better body or getting stronger or both. What exactly happened?

You know, sports were always really important to me growing up. And my, my sister, one of my sisters, who's really close in age to me, when we were younger, we used to take dance classes and do soccer practice and all that stuff. And after a while, I think I was probably about fifth grade, maybe a little bit younger, my mom kind of gave us an ultimatum and said, all right, you need to either pick dance or soccer. I do both. It's, you know, at the time I come, come from a very kind of lower middle class family. There wasn't a lot of extra money and just running the kids around. Four kids in the family.

Yeah. And incidentally, by the way, that happened to me too. My parents made me choose between tennis, basketball, baseball, soccer, etc. In ninth grade. They put their, their foot down and said, hey, you got to pick one.

So I picked, yeah, cool. And so that's what I did. I picked soccer and my sister picked dance. And it was interesting to see how we diverged throughout high school. She became a cheerleader and took that path, and I took the path of more traditional sports, so played soccer, ran track, and eventually got into martial arts and then ended up becoming a mountain biker later on. But throughout all of that, sports was a way for me to, I guess, have some control over the way I looked and control over my body. And then when I finished high school, I had to get a job and went to college and all these things. And you know, you go from playing high school sports to not being good enough to make a walk, you know, be a walk on and make a team in college and whatnot. And so I just kind of stopped exercising. And I remember going through pictures of myself and from my graduation party at my mom's house and I found this picture of me and I thought, oh my gosh, what have I become? You know, I was really overweight and I just said then and there. There was a gym down the street from my mom's house. I had never gone to a gym before, aside from doing maybe some random bench presses during gym class in one semester in high school. And I rode my bike down to the gym and I said, I'm gonna figure this stuff out. And that kind of led me to, you know, in a way, down this path. But I did some kind of gym rat, strength training, more bodybuilding type stuff. I was never very serious into it, but it did, it did help me to get my fitness and myself back on track. And then soon after that, I started mountain biking. And so my, my pursuits really left the gym and went outdoors.

So at some point, where did you discover CrossFit? Because obviously you've gotten into that pretty hardcore.

So it was 2010, I had just finished a season of Xterra triathlon, so off road try, and I was still doing endurance mountain biking at the time and a friend of mine basically dared me to try CrossFit. So I, I said fine. So I did a workout in my garage and thought this hurts in a much different way than going out and doing a 12 hour solo race does. But it was, it was, there was something strangely fun about it. So I walked into my local CrossFit gym and asked them a bunch of questions and I started and, and that kind of precipitated this, this path that I've been on. Now ironically, I don't actually CrossFit anymore. I'm strictly on the weightlifting side of things. But I did for two and a half, well, three and a half years. I did compete and put my focus and energy into that. But when I left my teaching job to start my own business doing the competitive level of CrossFit that I needed to stay in the mix was just way too much stimulus for me. I'm 30, competing with 20 year olds, so the training was too much, the stress was too much. For me. And so I just decided to back off and do strength training and weightlifting. And frankly, that's the part that I always liked the best about CrossFit anyway, so.

Well, for people who don't really understand what's the difference between CrossFit and weightlifting.

Yeah, so CrossFit is really the, the merging of a few different types of athletics. So you have single state stuff like endurance training. So you might go out and you might, one day you might run a 5k or you might do a 2k row or something like that. It's mixed with high intensity type of interval training. So you might do everything from box jumps to shooting a wall ball at a 10 foot target to pull ups. And then there is an aspect of strength training that's also mixed into it. So you'll learn how to squat and deadlift and do Olympic weightlifting, power cleans and power snatches. And then there's also some gymnastics added in there. I mentioned pull ups and muscle ups and that sort of stuff. So it's really a very diverse type of training where you're doing a little bit of everything. Weightlifting.

Oh, go ahead. No, yes, proceed with your explanation of weightlifting. Sorry.

Right, so weightlifting is based on the sport of Olympic style weightlifting, which is where you learn how to do two main lifts, one called the snatch, which is where you take a barbell from the floor to overhead in one movement, very explosive, very powerful, very fast. And then the other being the clean and jerk, which is where you take a barbell from the floor to your shoulder and then in a second movement from shoulder to overhead again, you have to be very, very powerful, very strong, but very explosive as well. So it's a much more specific discipline than just CrossFit like Olympic Weightlifting is a component of CrossFit, but weightlifting in and of itself is its own sport.

Now, I don't know how much of a geek you are when it comes to things like self quantification, but I'm curious because I tend to see the. Well, I work for Wellness fx and what that means is every Thursday is my consult day, so I sit down and I go through blood work of a handful of individuals who have done Wellness FX blood panels. And they frankly send me a lot of their crossfitters and their triathletes and stuff like that. And I do tend to see hormonal dysregulation, high levels of inflammatory CRP and some internal biomarker dysregulation in people who are doing a lot of Metcon combined with weightlifting like CrossFit. Especially in women. I'm curious, have you noticed anything either qualitatively or quantitatively in making a transition from something like CrossFit to weightlifting?

Yeah, so I don't. In terms of the self quantification stuff, I haven't done a lot of my own biomarker studies and stuff like that. Actually I recently had a DEXA scan done, so that was pretty interesting information for me. Um, but in terms of, you know, really super specific drilling down blood work, I haven't done anything in recent memory, but I did recently have the dexa. Um, it's interesting. So I used to race endurance mountain bikes and I'd be out on the road doing hours and hours of riding a day and whatnot. But I used to use heart rate stuff quite a bit back then and I'm getting a little bit more interested in weaving that, that HRV stuff back into my training now. It's interesting. I've been doing weightlifting for so long and I'm pretty to know when I'm not recovered because the first thing that tends to go for me is my speed under the bar. And so I've just come to know that. But I think for a novice it's a really powerful tool the, the hormonal stuff. And what I've noticed in my own body qualitatively is my muscle mass has shifted. I used to be this term, but jacked, like I used to be a lot more jacked, especially in my upper body because the type of the training sets of CrossFit is much higher. You're. So you're doing a lot more volume at a, more, at a lighter to more moderate weight. Right. I can't, if, if my max, I don't know, shoulder to overhead is 65 kilos, I can't do that for like 40 reps, but I could probably do 45 kilos for that, that many reps. So in CrossFit you're seeing lighter to more moderate weight, but lifted at a much heavier volume than what we do in weightlifting. So you tend to get a little bit more of the, the testosterone response in something like CrossFit, high intensity type stuff compared to something that's more like weightlifting where I get up, I do one to three reps of something and I sit down and rest. Right. More ATP dependent than something like CrossFit, where you're going for anywhere from, I don't know, three to 20 minutes, just kind of depending on what kind of workout you're doing. So you're, you're definitely having a much more Glycolytic demand there.

Yeah.

So I've noticed for myself, my, my. And, and this is, again, this is just kind of qualitative, but I know that my cortisol, I feel less stressed and I'm actually leaner around, kind of around my belly button area than I, than I was when I was stepping away from CrossFit. So I know there's a little, it's, it's definitely a high cortisol environment and then just kind of on the hypertrophy side. There was much more hypertrophy for me in CrossFit compared to weightlifting.

Yeah. I think that's what a lot of, especially women have a hard time wrapping their heads around is this concept of protein breakdown and protein synthesis. Right. When you do something very catabolic, when you damage muscle fibers and you send them into basically a World War II state following something like a wad, the response to that, as most people know, is protein synthesis. You rest and you recover from that type of catabolic activity and you get satellite cell proliferation and you get a bunch of new muscle fibers in either their size or their number being laid down, and you get hypertrophy and you get, in many cases, assuming you've got enough calories present, you get bulking. And even though it seems counterintuitive when you shift from that to something more like what you're doing, right, like very, very low rep, higher weight, less catabolic, more power based, you can get a response that isn't quite as much of a hypertrophy anabolic muscle building response. And you almost get more of a toning effect counterintuitively to what you'd think would cause the toning, which would be like Gwyneth paltrow esque, like 20 to 25 reps. Yeah. I think it's really interesting and it's interesting to hear your personal experience with that because I've said that before on podcasts and women are just like, no, no, I will bulk up. I got to do the metcon stuff. And it's like the metcon. The metcon stuff. You know, unless you're literally starving yourself and at a pretty severe protein deficit, you're gonna bulk up.

And I think that's such a common thing too. I mean, there are so many higher level athletes. Just watch the CrossFit games. And first of all, these people are in competitive season. They're absolutely shredded because they're, they're depleted. In a lot of cases, their nutrition isn't quite where it needs to be in terms of caloric Intake and or macronutrient split. Like you said, getting enough protein, getting enough carbohydrate to get it, get decent glycogen replenishment. Like all of this stuff is so important. And it, it's when you ask that question about why do CrossFit women have abs that look like that? And it's because it's a, it's purely a function of their training. When you really break it down like they're doing essentially almost type bodybuilding type protocols, like they're doing those, those moderate to higher rep types of ranges than somebody who's just going to go and do a starting strength program, a Wendler 531 is going to do some Olympic weightlifting and maybe work up to sets of where you're doing a set of five or six of your warmup weight. And we always joke that's our cardio. Because you do sets of five, make the weight moderate enough, you're going to actually get kind of. You got a cardio pretty good cardio beginning to your workout. But, but yeah, it's really interesting. We still have that, that fear of bulking up and it's really just not understanding even what I tell people I'm a weightlifter, they're like, oh, so you compete in bodybuilding? And I'm like, totally different, Totally different.

Way different. Now, what about cardio in terms of both looking after things like your cardiovascular fitness or your heart health and also looking at things like whatever calorie burning and things of that nature. Where does cardio fit in for you in the type of weightlifting protocol you're doing now?

I don't do any extra cardio on top of what I'm doing now simply because I'm really after making sure that I'm maintaining my muscle mass.

Now when you say extra cardio, you mean anything in addition to just the cardiovascular response you're getting from weight training and the warmup and cool down therein or.

Correct. Yeah, some people, I mean some people will do, they'll do some rowing or they'll do some steady state stuff like that. I just don't right now because my schedule is pretty packed as it is. But it's interesting. I've had some times where I've had to, I don't know, you know, you're out playing around and you're running or doing whatever and you know, as a weightlifter you kind of think, wow, I'm probably, I mean, I probably couldn't go out and run a half marathon right now without being pretty messed up, but I can run, I can do those types of cardio things, even though I don't specifically train for that sort of stuff. So I don't do anything above and beyond whatever I get from weightlifting. And like I said, sometimes that's working up to sets of 10 or whatever it is and you start to sweat and get out of breath pretty quickly doing that sort of stuff. And so there is, I think, a lot of overlap. You know, certainly as I mentioned, if you're going to try to go out and run PR your half marathon time, it would seem a little ridiculous to not do any training right. For that. But hey, if I'm going to try to run away from something, I think I'm going to be okay.

Or if, or if you just want to maintain a decent body. Right. And appropriate body fat percentages and things of that nature.

Yeah. Well, it's really interesting. So a lot of people think, well, you know, if you're okay, you need to try to lean out. And so a lot of weightlifters, when they're getting close to competition season and let's say they're hovering right around where their weight class is, they may decide to do a little bit of, to weave in some extra steady state cardio stuff a couple times a week simply to just get a little edge there in reducing body fat a little bit. But you know, I think it's really interesting what a lot of folks consider, you know, ultralan to be ultra healthy. And for a lot of people that's not actually the case, especially for women. So, you know, we're bombarded with these images of women with 10% body fat or they're in their figure competition season and they're not going to stay that way forever. But for some reason we're led to believe that this is the optimal body composition for a female. And it's pretty, it's pretty interesting the type of training that I do and my diet and making sure my other life factors are in order, my sleep, my stress levels, meditation, all that stuff. I'm as you know, I'm probably leaner than I was 10 years ago. And that's not with actually doing any more extended endurance or steady state cardio stuff. So you will see weightlifters do that when they're getting especially close to competition if they need to get down a little bit. And you don't want to cut too much water weight, especially in the sport of weightlifting because we only have an hour or two between the time we weigh in and when we start to compete two hours. It's not like MMA where they get a 24 hour replan. So they're, they're cutting down 20, 30 pounds and then they're stepping on the scale and then they've got 24 hours to try to rehydrate and get a little bit of nutrition on board. For weightlifters and power lifters and that sort of competition type of stuff that we do, we don't have that time. So it's a very delicate balance between if you're going to do a cut, trying to reduce maybe a little bit of body fat leading up and going a little bit easy on the water cut. But that was a really long winded way of saying that I don't really do much cardio unless it's getting close to the time of competition. And I'm like, yeah, I could, you know, could stand to maybe get down a kilo and be a little bit more comfortable. But right now, I mean, I compete at 69 kilos and I'm. Today I weighed myself, I was 69.4.

So, yeah, you know, so odd for an American to talk in kilos. Only the weightlifters, let's delve into specifics because a lot of women may be listening in, wondering, okay, well, for someone to, to stay lean, maintain good cardiovascular fitness, et cetera, with a weightlifting protocol, are they weightlifting 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours a day? You know, are they living in the gym? You know, what's the warmup, what's the cool down look like? So, um, can you kind of delve into specifics and walk us through what kind of like a, a typical training block, like a week's training block would look like for you?

Yeah, absolutely. So at most I train four days a week. That's a function of a couple of different things. And I've been weightlifting for five years, so I, it's again, I know myself better than I used to, but I work with a really great coach and we trained in the same gym, so he sees me train and he can adjust my programming as necessary. But at, at this point, I know even from my days of doing endurance stuff, running, mountain biking, whatever, I don't do super well with volume. I don't do well with high volume weeks, especially stacked back to back with one another. And you know, I'm, I'm pretty cognizant of my, my nutrition, my sleep, like all these other factors. So it's not like I'm, I'm sleeping four hours a night and eating like crap and then wondering, wow, why am I not recovering. So all things considered, all that stuff's pretty great. But even when I was doing other types of training, high volume stuff didn't work for me. So at this point I know I can get a pretty good response out of three to four days a week. So what that looks like for me is generally, and this is, it can vary, but generally Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday in the gym. So I'll go in, I'll do some foam rolling, I'll do some dynamic warmup stuff kind of moving through different ranges of motion. I'll grab an empty barbell, do some more specific type of movements to just get loose and kind of drill those movement patterns and then it's straight into the workout. And that could look like on an average day. We generally do higher skill stuff at the beginning of the workout simply because we're fresher and we're going to actually be a bit more coordinated and we haven't fatigued ourselves. And in snatch and the clean and jerk there, it's a high, it's a strength exercise, but it's, it has a high skill component to it. So we do those types of skill, specific skill things at the beginning and then the end of the workout is generally strength based. So some type of squatting, whether it's front squats or back squats, some RDL work. So Romanian deadlifts, we don't do a lot of traditional standard deadlifting simply because that stimulus is so potent. Because if you're going to lift pretty heavy with a conventional deadlift, you know, you could be. For me, I, my, my max deadlift is 145 kilos. So I was training, I might be lifting anywhere from 1:20 to 1:30. And that's, that's a significant neuroendocrine response and it's a significant CNS demand and the recovery time from that is quite high. So we do other things to strengthen posterior chain like rdls because you just can't move as much weight and then some stretching at the end. So on average it probably takes me an hour and a half between the warm up and the cool down and whatnot. But that's three or four times a week.

Right. So an hour and a half, around four days per week of relatively neuroendocrine and central nervous system demanding type of activity. Right. Again, not, not anything like elastic bands and pink covered concrete dumbbells.

No, no, no. And you know, it's depending on where I'm, what I'm doing, I might do some other accessory stuff, some strict pull ups or strict dips, just working some extra strength stuff. But generally, yeah, it's not swinging the two pound kettlebell and doing a bunch of that kind of training. And for me, you know, it looks like 1 to 1 to 5 reps and depending on the movement, I don't know, 7 to 10 sets perhaps, but that includes all the warmup sets that go along, that go along with it. So I might be doing two, two set. Like last week I had back squatted two sets at my 90%, so those were my work sets. So that was 112 kilos. It's pretty, it's pretty heavy and I, I definitely felt it, you know, a few, four or five days later I could tell I was still a bit fatigued from that sort of thing. So we, it's really interesting. I, I don't, we don't really go to max all that often, especially on our accessory movements like our squatting, our strength stuff. Once, about once a year I'll test my max to see where I'm at. And after a full year of not going to max and working probably anywhere between 70 to 85% for those different sets like say back squatting every year I've pr. So it's, it's a testament to the training. You don't always have to max out to see improvements and, and to increase your, your strength or your skill. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong, especially folks that try to program for themselves or they're, they're new and they're just like, I need to go to the gym five days a week or six days a week and lift heavy all of those days. I mean, it's a fast train to burnout and overtraining and injury.

Now what about in the times that you are not engaged in that hour and a half long weight training routine? Are you metabolically active? And the reason that I asked that is twofold. I'm curious what kind of natural physical activity and how you're implementing that into your day to day life actually is. And I'm also curious because we've had guys like Dan John on the show before who's like basically lift hard and then sit on the couch and watch college football games and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in between. Because anything extra you do outside of that weight training session is potentially going to inhibit the amount of say, type 2 muscle fibers that you have for power and explosive activity. You don't want to be walking around all the time. You don't want to park far away from the grocery store and walk in because you might develop some slow twitch muscle fiber. Like what is your take on the type of activity that you engage in apart from the actual training session?

Well, you know, the way I look at it is this athletic training and competition is a really important part of my life and how I identify myself. And it's a culture I belong to and I care a lot about it. But I know I'm not a professional athlete. I'm not making any money doing what I'm doing, nor have I ever. So I take that. I have that in the back of my mind. Like sports matter to me, my training matters to me at this point. It also matters to me that I have a life outside the gym. It matters to me that I have a good relationship with my husband and my family and my friends. It matters to me that I'm a self employed solo business owner. Right. So there are all these other things that I know, hey, I actually have to get work done. And I know for me. So here's one example. I have a standing desk at home because when I first started working for myself, I was sitting all the time and I felt like crap. And it actually made my lifting worse because I was, you know, sitting down. My hamstrings were super tight.

Right, your butts turned off.

Yeah. So I was slouching, you know, all that stuff that we try to avoid. But I did a lot of sitting. So I decided I was going to get a standing desk. And so now what that looks like is I get up and I stand at my standing desk and I do work in the morning and then I go to the gym and around midday, around noon, and I do stuff there. And then I come home, I might do some chores around the house, some grocery shopping. I coach a couple nights a week, so I might be at the gym coaching. So I'm up, moving around, walking around, demonstrating, lifting, you know, so I'm, I'm in motion quite a bit. And so like I said, for me, if I was, if I knew I was going to be a potential Olympic trials athlete or you know, on a path to world domination with what I'm doing, I consider otherwise. But at this point in my life, I just want to be a good masters athlete, a good solid weightlifter. I want to keep getting stronger little by little. I'm definitely past the point of novice gains. So, you know, it's just kind of keeping, keeping that, that ever upward, slow progression. We do some walking, some foam rolling. I try to do yoga at home, but the cat is always on top of me when I do, so it's not quite so easy. And we live in a pretty tiny house, but yeah, like walking to the grocery store. We live just a few, but we live in an awesome neighborhood in San Diego. I can walk to virtually anything that I need. So trying to get out and walk when I can, unless I'm going to run an errand on the way to somewhere. But yeah, I mean, trying to incorporate movement and opt back into a lot of the movement that people have.

Natural movement, though. So you're not doing those four weight training sessions and then also say like, whatever, riding your bicycle 30 miles while commuting or squeezing in a couple extra epic hikes and mountain bike rides on the weekends and stuff like that?

Generally not. I actually sold all my bikes, which is kind of sad when I think about it. But I ran. Moved house and ran out of space to store everything. So with that being said, we're actually going to New Zealand in a couple months and I know we're going to be doing a lot of hiking. So I'm actually interested in kind of getting back out there and doing a little bit of training for that. But other than that, no, nothing above and beyond.

Gotcha. Okay.

Yeah.

So you mentioned at one point a little while ago, meditation. Do you meditate? And if so, what. What type of meditation do you do? What is your practice?

Yeah, I do meditate. And you know, it's one of those things where I always knew meditation is supposedly really good for you, but finding.

The type of meditation, that's what all the hippies say.

Finding the type of meditation that I would, that resonated with me and that I would stick to was really. It became a problem to find something that I liked and just to make it a routine, right? To actually do it every single day. And a friend of mine is a. Is a meditation expert in a yogi and she does wonderful meditations and she recorded some for me. And, and I love her to pieces and I hope she's not listening, but I was just like, it just wasn't the type of thing that I would necessarily sit down and do because I had to have my computer open and a bunch of other stuff. So I had heard through the grapevine about an app called Headspace and I decided to check it out and turns out for me, that was the one that was the one that made me do. I just stick to it every day. And there's some interesting little things in the app. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there is some gamification to the app where it's like, hey, and you don't know this stuff upfront, but sooner than later you're like, I got an email because I meditated 15 days in a row and I got a coupon or whatever it is. And so there's some incentivizing of that app, which I think is huge because as we know, we're so bombarded. There's so much information out there, everybody wants our attention. And so that for me was a little bit. I was like, I can do this.

And the Headspace app, I have it on my phone, have experimented with it a little bit. I did about five sessions and then, well, I'll be straightforward with you. I decided it wasn't for me because I do so much meditation and box breathing and focus during. I do a lot of sauna and I do a lot of cold thermogenesis. Both require me to do everything from like holotropic hyperoxygenation breathing to breath holds to staring at a wall with steam coming out my ears because I'm still freaking hot. So you box breathe to maintain your focus during that. But when I experimented with it, I believe from what I recall, this was a couple months ago. It's 10 minute sessions.

Is that the free trial is. And if you decide to go beyond that, they have a huge variety of different time time sessions. You know, anywhere from five minutes to an hour. They've got different applications so you could do. There's a meditation for sleep, there's one for preparing food for walking. Right. So there's, there's. And I wish they would convey that a little bit more because I could definitely see where you would try it out and think if it's going to be 10 minutes of this every single time I do it. I'm not really into it, but. Yeah, but it does. It gets way more varied and there are definitely a lot of other time domains and stuff like that.

Right.

But for me it ended up working. I mean I am, I'm not a religious person. I think I'm getting a little bit more spiritual as I get older.

And the closer that you get to death.

I guess you could say it that way. I don't know. I don't know if it's just because I'm more. I'm trying to be more connected to other people and more connected to the natural world and that's really of stuff. But I like the pragmatic nature of Headspace though. And I do Oftentimes go and do those other meditations that my friend recorded for me because she's much more about, she is much more heart centered and it's just different in how it's delivered. So I think ultimately folks have to find what resonates for them and not to give up, but to know that taking that time. Because a lot of people think meditation is where you have to try to lie still and clear your mind and not think of anything. And the goal is to think of nothing. And that's not actually the case. And so I know a lot of especially type A people. Like one of my friends was like, I can't sit still for five minutes. This is going to be impossible. And I said, can you just, will you just try it? Just try it, please. And so it ends up that she really likes it. But I think a lot of people think meditation means you have to, you have to try to think of nothing. And it's, it's really, it's really intimidating to think of it that way. For me, it's, it's just been, it's been great and I really have found it very valuable not only in all aspects of my life, but also in, in weightlifting.

Do you start off each day or implement that at some point each day?

I usually do it before I go to sleep.

Okay.

It just works for me better. I'm a morning, like kind of get up and get out of bed and I'm wide awake and do my thing. But I remember hearing you talk at Paleo effects about how you do your journaling and stuff in the morning. And I've wanted to try to shift stuff that way. So we'll see.

Yeah, it can come back to bite you. The longer that you stay in bed, you shift your sleep clock forward. Like this morning I Woke up at 7:30 and for me that's a little bit late. It means that some of the day has gotten away from you in terms of morning productivity. So yeah, you have to strike this fine balance between waking up each day with the perspective that you have the affluence of time and forcing yourself to stay in bed and relax a little bit and also not hitting snooze or occasionally what happens to me is I'll fall asleep and go back in and kind of have an extra dream cycle, which is great until you actually get out of bed and realize, oh crap, I've got 15 minutes now to do coffee Apu podcast prep and get on the show. Now, in terms of your interaction with other women in the fitness community, or in the weightlifting community. Do you do much in the way of consulting and personal training?

Right now we're in the last week of the registration for a program that I just launched which is combining nutrition, weightlifting, or I should say strength training because it's not weightlifting based, but just general strength training and mindset work. So, you know, it's. As somebody who has a blog and is on social media a lot, it's hard to have the time to sometimes sit down and work with people one on one. I do have a one on one option for that though of one on one coaching. But where I contact a lot of people right now is just is through coaching at the gym. So that's been really fun and really interesting for me. And I'm just on staff at the gym. It's not my own personal business. Although I don't walk in and go, I'm stupid. Easy Paleo guys. This is awesome. It actually is. Kind of still find it. I'm a little sheepish about that sort of stuff and people will come up and ask me and we'll have a conversation about it and I guess I'm still like, oh my gosh, people read my blog, like it still kind of blows my mind. But at the gym, I'm on staff for the gym and it's interesting. I've had folks that'll come in and visit and say, oh, I saw that you post about this on your Instagram. Or I read about this gym. So I thought I'd come in and oh, you're here. So it's been really fun because I do get to work with a lot of women at the gym yesterday or Saturday. I was coaching Saturday morning and we had a bunch of female athletes in, which is really awesome because we don't have any other female weightlifting coaches at the moment. So I know that they appreciate it.

One of the reasons that I ask you this question is because I in many cases will do consults or will speak with female athletes or simply female exercise enthusiasts or people who care about their bodies and especially in the aging female population. One of the things that I run up against is women who are concerned about increasing levels of body fat as they age, or women who are concerned about like natural fat deposits in the hips, the butt, et cetera. And I even ran into this like back when I was a, when I was a personal trainer, right? Like people would come in, they'd be like 40, right? Like, you know, the classic 40 year old soccer mom who still wants to look good in her bikini. And I Always had a little bit of a hard time striking a balance between trying to help them lose weight but not doing so while producing biological stress or hormonal burnout. And also expressing the fact that it's okay and natural to not only be a little bit more fat when you're female, but also even get a little bit more fat as you age. Like that's natural. But I'm curious how you approach that or how you express that when you're talking, especially to females who are. Well, it's really. I mean, a big part of this is Hollywood, right? And magazines and all the impressions that we get from pop culture that you're supposed to stay extremely lean as. As you're a female and especially as you're an aging female. So what's your take on that? And I know it's a loaded question.

Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is that if you have someone come to. If I have someone come to me who's fearful of some of the recommendations I might make. For example, a gal emailed me and I mentioned her yesterday on Periscope. So I think this. I won't say her name, but a gal came to me via email and was expressing a lot of concerns about exactly what you're mentioning. You know, starting to have more body fat and plateauing with her efforts and etc. Right. Very, very common story. And my answer to her was. And it's. It's sometimes easy to be kind of blunt via email because you, you know, you're just like, this is the way it is. But I said to her, I think you're exercising too much. And she was describing to me what she was doing. She was working out five or six days a week, multiple times a day. And I just thought, holy crap, can you back off a little bit and see what happens? And it's really hard. That's a scary proposition for somebody who has bought into or has only been told or has only gleaned from media and popular culture that we need to exercise more, more, more, more, more, and eat less, less, less, less, less if we're going to have control over our bodies. And because so many women and guys come from a background of disordered thinking about their own bodies or disordered relationships with food and exercise. And it's interesting because with exercise, it's seen as such a positive thing. And so especially for folks that are overdoing it, they oftentimes get positive feedback from those around them. Look at how dedicated you are. Look at how amazing you look when inside they're dying or you know, things then start to start to the wagon, the wheels start to fall off the wagon hormonally and, and then you end up in this, this cascade of things that you have such a hard time not just reversing but you have, you have a hard time slowing it down, right?

Healthy on the outside, sick on the inside.

So you know, it's really scary to talk to women in that way and say, hey, actually I think you need to cut down the number of days you're lifting or, sorry, the number of days you're exercising and, or take down the intensity, right and, or take down, step back from the type of training that you're doing. It's really, really scary because in a lot of cases people really like it or they get a great stress response from it and they're like, but it feels great when I do it afterward. So it's, it's really complicated. And I think what helps a lot of women is finding someone they can trust. Whether it's, you know, it's a coach, it's a blogger, it's, it's a trainer, it's a health practitioner of some sort is like finding somebody you can really trust and know that that person knows what they're talking about. The other thing that can really help is community. And this is actually a really strong interest of mine. In October at AHS in New Zealand, I'm going to be talking about moving beyond the Fitbit and Toning and it's just this, it's exactly this topic. It's how do we get women to embrace other ways of training that are actually scientifically physiologically better for them in the long run? And how do we do that despite the preponderance of messages from the media that we're actually supposed to look, you know, we're supposed to be incredibly lean throughout all of our whole entire life and at different, you know, we just had a baby, but we need to get back in shape four weeks later. We need to look like a model or we need to look like a celebrity does can you believe she's only had a baby 6 weeks ago or 4? 4 weeks ago. And we're all different. So the interesting factor that seems to be true, or I should say common in these women feeling supported and staying with it long enough to feel like it's working is community and the support of other like minded people who are there for them, whether it's sitting down and talking with them or just going through the experience at the same time. So that community aspect is so, so critical. And it's, you're right, it's hard, it's hard to get women to, to back away from the, the two pound kettlebells and all this other stuff. And I always joke that my, my mother in law's 71 and she can lift more weight than that. So there's no excuse for doing a two pound kettlebell. But yeah, but it's really hard.

It's interesting too. And it's just, it's just something I've always struggled with. Because what I want to say is it's okay for you to be fat or your body looks just fine, you don't need to be leaner or even this one, right? You're gonna get fat, wrinkled and what some people in society might call ugly as you get older. And you know what, that's okay. But obviously you can't just say that because that's not what people really want to hear and it sounds rude. And so it's just something I've always kind of struggled with. It's like my wife, for example, right? I know when she's 80, she's not going to be by all whatever societal standards, hot, whatever, lean and hot. But that shouldn't matter. That's my conundrum that I run into is it's okay to just not have this perfect body and your body's going to change as you get older.

There's some really interesting folks out there who are being quite vocal about their pursuits in say for example, the figure competitive world or whatever sport it is. And this idea of, you know, you're at the pinnacle of whatever it is you're doing, your body looks amazing, it's on point, it's perfect, whatever. And their lives are a wreck. And I think it's really, it's becoming less taboo to talk about that sort of stuff. But we need more people to speak up, I think, and talk about that sort of thing to, to normalize it and say actually sometimes you could have the most perfect body and your life is in, it's in shambles, your health is in shambles. And there's a really interesting distinction between health and fitness in a lot of cases. Like you could have an incredibly fit body, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthy. And the other thing I think that is very telling and sort of resonates in my brain as you're talking is how we value our elders, especially in this country. You think about other cultures where elders, people who are older, are revered, they're respected, they're cherished for their wisdom and their life experience and that sort of thing. And I feel like sometimes here in Western society, we don't do that. So getting old is not seen as earning. You know, you've earned your scars and your wrinkles, and they're badges of honor in a way. And it's a testament to maybe how you look on the outside is. Isn't reflected to. Isn't reflective of who you are on the inside. But I think we struggle a lot of times to value our elders in this country.

Yeah. And I completely agree.

Getting old is seen as like, oh, you know, that's, that's horrible. Why would we want to do that? And there's so much.

It's also a very profitable business. Everything from hospice to elderly, you know, care to nursing homes. I mean, there is a monetary incentive in many cases for us to shove our elders into nursing homes as well, which is sad, but it's the reality. You know, I also think that it's important for us to note here that we're not, you know, when we say that, like, whatever, it's okay to be fat. Fat is not synonymous with being unhealthy. Right. Like, you can have whatever a body fat percentage of 25. Right. Which a lot of women who are striving to whatever look good in a swimsuit, for example, would have a sharp intake of breath and think that 25 seems really high. But you can have amazing biological parameters and basically be clean as a whistle biologically at a body fat percentage of that. But the only problem is that you may not look like the COVID of Cosmo, you know, and so there's that too. Like, being fat is not necessarily. We're not saying, like, you be unhealthy.

No, no, there's. It. People want to be so reductionist and think there's only one way to look. Right. Like, there's only one perfect standard. There is only one way by which to measure ourselves. And it's such bs it's really. I mean, there, there. It always reminds me of that graphic of Olympic athletes in different sports, you know, and to some degree, they're. I mean, they are at the pinnacle of their. Their physical capability. You're at the Olympics, and in some way the reason why certain body types are favored is because it's just more. It just works better with that sport, I guess. I'll say. So, you know, you wouldn't necessarily be a 48 kilo female weightlifter if you're 5 foot 10. Right. And so we have these Kind of typical body types, people that row or tend to be tall and lean or marathoners. So in some ways it's which came first, the chicken or the egg. But you take a look at the range of human bodies and ESPN just had its annual body addition, whatever it was. And the gal who's, I think she's a hammer thrower and I just thought her message was just incredible. And it was like, my body, I'm incredibly good at what I do.

Yeah, those ESPN body issues are amazing. I actually had forgotten about those. It's been a couple of years since I read the ESPN body issue. I need to go, I need to go check that one out because I used to enjoy looking through those at all the different athletes bodies. Right. You know, at first it felt for a second like I was reading like Swimsuit Illustrated or porn or something. And then you realize, no, this is just like the amazing human body. It's nothing to, you know, it's nothing sexual at all. It's just these, you know, these amazing displays of like you say, like all the different ways that the human body can be and look absolutely amazing. I want to ask you in a little bit of time that we have left about really interesting article that you have on your website, Stupid Easy Paleo, about four real foods that you may be overeating. I thought this was interesting and thought provoking. Can you delve into what those four foods are that people are overeating?

Yeah. So it was hard for me to narrow down the list. But the reason I wrote the article was that we tend to understand and transmit information as human beings through heuristics, these general ideas, these kind of big picture ideas. And so when we say, for example, nuts are full of healthy fat, it's so much more nuanced than that. And nutrition and everything we're talking about is so nuanced and so contextual. But if we're going to sit here and try to talk about nutrition, we tend to break it down into really general heuristic terms. So when people are trying to approach eating healthier, first of all they tend to hear a lot of sound bites or they get a little, they got a, they get a lot of little bits and pieces from the media. So they might hear, okay, well in a paleo diet you're really encouraged to eat a lot of healthy fats. Okay, so nuts are healthy fats. So that means I should eat a lot of nuts. And that's one of the four foods. So the four foods that I had on that list were natural Quote, natural sweeteners, kombucha, dried fruit and nuts. Right. And so the, the whole point of the article was even though these foods are, quote, healthy, they may not be healthy for your body, first of all, because you might have an intolerance to almonds or you might, like my husband, have a histamine intolerance where eating a lot of probiotic rich food actually flares up your eczema or migraines. Yeah, right, exactly. A lady just commented to me last week she gets headaches from kombucha. So it's like just because you read that something is healthy and a good idea doesn't mean it's a good idea for you. The dried fruit I threw in there because for me, pretty much throughout my whole life, I've always had an insatiable sweet tooth. Once I started addressing my nutrition and eating more nutrient dense foods along the lines of a paleo type diet. And I don't eat strict diet Paleo, I just want to throw that out there. But along the lines of a paleo type diet, right? Meat, seafood, eggs, veggies, fruits, healthy fats. Once I started eating that way and I was still eating a lot of dried fruit, I was like, why am I still having this problem where I just want to eat sugar all day long? And for me it was that dried fruit is a really concentrated source of sugar. So I think it's really interesting that a lot of times when people are starting out, they kind of go by this yes, no list. Whatever diet it is you're going to follow, you're vegetarian, you're vegan, you're paleo, you're primal, whatever it is, you're a real foodist, you're raw. Any dietary paradigm, it's really easy to abide by that yes, no list, because it's a way for your brain to wrap itself around the ways in which you have to change what you're eating. But you still have to know yourself and what works for you. And at the end of the day, just going ahead and blindly eating whatever you read is a good idea may not actually be working for you. So I guess the point of the article was to know thyself to do the work and understand what foods are working well for your body and which foods aren't. And then just because it's healthy doesn't mean healthy air quotes doesn't mean in a lot of cases it's like an unlimited food. So.

Right, right.

Kombucha, for example, is kind of just meant to be a tonic, a probiotic supplement, if you will. I know so many people that drink kombucha, like soda, and it's like they just replace soda intake with kombucha intake.

It can be extremely tempting, too, because we make kombucha, right? We make it in batches. My wife makes it. I can tell you right now, upstairs in my refrigerator, there are 20 bottles of amazing kombucha. And it is extremely tempting for me to drink a bottle of day. But like you say in the article, I mean, even something that flashes on the radar, right. It's extremely acidic or can be very ac, and that can wear down the enamel in your teeth. And so, you know, even though it. Yeah. It's full of, like, lactobacillus and all sorts of good probiotics, and it actually. The specific strains in there can actually break down a lot of candida and fungus. It's not necessarily something that is that. That you can't overdo or, like, you get into nuts, you know? And I like what you say about walnuts, right? Walnuts, which are just like, the perfect nut. Right. The fact is that, as you allude to, they're structurally unstable. Right. They're prone to going rancid. So if you just have, like, a big glass jar of walnuts in your pantry, you may actually be eating oxidized fats after a while. Even though you're getting all the walnut benefits, you're getting some of the harm along with them. Or like the dried fruit that you go into. Right. I think you mentioned the Trader Joe's dried mango slices. Yeah. Those are like unsulfured. They're unsweetened. They are, I believe, just mango, but they're also a crapload of just mango. Right. Like, you. There's like, what, four or five entire mangoes in a bag.

Yeah.

Which if you mow through a bag, like, just think about trying to eat four or five mangoes, right? You just. You can't do it because they have all the fiber and the water and content and everything in them. And I thought it. I thought it was really. And. Oh, yeah. And then you go into the natural sweeteners, too, right? Like honey and coconut sugar and maple syrup and. And agave is one of my favorites, of course. And, yeah, I mean, those along with the healthy green juices at Whole Foods, right. They just, like, in many cases, they're just mainlining sugar into your bloodstream. In our community, where we've got lots of people doing everything from bulletproof coffee to coconut oil to all this stuff, every time you do that, you're oxidizing all those cholesterols. So you're creating this atherosclerotic fluid firestorm. And that's one thing that really gets to me. People will be like, oh, I did my bulletproof coffee, and then I had some coconut sugar, and then I had my five egg omelet. And half of that omelet goes gluconeogenic. And so you get this spike of glucose and cholesterol, and it causes all these issues. Even though everything that you just listed is technically healthy and it is a real food, it's like once you put it inside the factory that is the human body, some different things can happen, no matter what's on the label.

Yeah. And I think it's just the idea of. I mean, I approach nutrition from a very pragmatic point of view, like a physiological point of view. And for me, a paleo framework is not historical reenactment. I actually really don't care what Paleolithic man ate. I'm more interested in what works most optimally for our bodies. So I think that's a really interesting way to frame things because it doesn't just become some ambiguous or, you know, it's not like there's just a list for the list sake. Right. It's like the foods on this list are there for a reason, but always, always, always be a good consumer. Like, there's no. There's. There's no. Like, ignorance is no defense of the law. Right. So there's no excuse for ignorance when it comes to how you're going to, you know, take this, whatever framework it is, dietarily that you ascribe to and start applying it to your own life.

Yeah.

Context matters.

So I've got one last question for you. What. What, in your opinion, does it mean to be harder to kill?

Yeah. So I just. I decided to call the podcast Harder to Kill. A little bit of an homage to Mark Rippeto in there, because he's famously quoted as saying something like. It's something like strong people are harder to kill or useful in general, I think is the quote. So it came from a nutrition seminar that I did. So a lot of the people that I. That I talked to you about nutrition don't consider. They don't even consider themselves athletes yet. They're in the gym five or six days a week, and they're dedicated to what they do, and they spend money on it, and they spend a lot of time doing it. So the word athlete is kind of hard for people to identify with sometimes. And so I was at this seminar of folks about talking to folks about nutrition, and I said, well, okay, like, let's. Let's just say, what do people want? They want to be healthy, they want to be happy, and wouldn't it be nice to be harder to kill? And everybody just kind of went crazy and was like, that means that's so awesome. But really, what I'm. What I mean, mean by that is you have the resilience and the robustness both physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, to withstand some of the. The crappy things that take people down too soon in life or, you know, are. Or are by some stretch of the imagination, avoidable. We can't necessarily out. We can't change our genetics. We can in some cases, change how those genes are turned on and off. Right. As we know, but we still have a genetic template, so there's only so much we can do. But a lot of the choices that we make can influence the expression of our genetics. So are there ways to build people that are more resilient and more robust? And as I mentioned, that can cover every aspect of. Of health, wellness, lifestyle, the whole shebang? And I think the answer is yes. And I know you. And there are a lot of people that do a lot of biohacking stuff, which is super interesting and super nerdy and super cool. And a lot of people are like, that sounds awesome, but I don't know if I could do that sort of thing. So what are some of the, I guess, gateways that we could give people to start working closer toward that optimization that are a bit more approachable or are more within their grasp? Because for so many people, just starting is a big deal. Right. They're not at. They're not at the level that other people are at. So what are some of the things that we can get people to do? We can get them to move their bodies more, we can get them to make better food choices a majority of the time. We can get them to start addressing the ways in which their stress is taking over their life. And it's those little changes that add up over time. So building in the resiliency, building in the robustness, so that when stuff goes wrong for real, you've got some resources there, you've got some savings, if you will, to not be totally destroyed by that sort of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, for me, big, big part of it is A, being able to lift heavy stuff, B, being able to step into a cold shower or jump into something cold without a sharp intake of breath, meaning you've got nervous system resilience and C being able to do something like sit in something hot that is uncomfortably hot for a long period of time. For some reason, when I can do those three things, when my body's able to handle those, I'm pretty dang resilient. And I do quantify that, right? I measure that. I do HRV measurements and my HRV is through the roof when I keep up those three practices. So that's the way I do it. Anyways, though, we've obviously gone for a little while here and I know that people may want to learn more about you, follow what you're doing. Like I mentioned in the intro, I have your Performance Paleo Cookbook. I like how it's just like simple and easy and we didn't talk about it a whole lot, but I think if anybody out there is listening in, you want some of Stephanie's cool recipes and also a little bit of her philosophy, check out Performance Paleo Cookbook. She's got a podcast. I'll link to that in the show notes. Harder to Kill Radio, her website, stupid easypaleo.com and if you have questions for me or you have questions for Steph, you can go to the post the show notes for this particular episode and you can leave your comments there and one of us will check them out and reply. And all of that is over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com of course, HarderToKill so BenGreenfulFitness.com HarderToKill is where you can grab all that stuff. Steph, thanks for your time today and for sharing all this with us.

Sure, it's fun. It's always great to nerd out with like minded individuals, so I was happy to do it.

Sweet. All right, cool. Well folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Stephanie. Gonna give this one more attempt. God row. Yay. From BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a wonderful week and go do something that makes you harder to kill later.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Go to Ben greenfield field fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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