From Pain to Gain – Dr. Shannon Ritchey’s Science-Backed Fitness Revolution

You all are going to love today's conversation. We are chatting with Dr. Shannon, who is a former physical therapist, fitness trainer, and the founder of EVLO Fitness. She uses her platform to educate women on how to work smarter, not harder, using science. She is brilliant. And there is so much synergy between EVLO and modern thyroid and modern weight loss. Let's dig in. I am so excited to have this conversation today. It will absolutely help my people and just be so incredibly valuable. So thank you so much for taking the time.

Yes, I'm excited to be here. And we just recorded one for my podcast that was so good about GLP1. So they need to go listen to that Dr. Shannon Show.

Yes, the Dr. Shannon Show.

Go check it out.

I've been on her podcast twice now. Both conversations were amazing. So excited to keep this going.

Me too.

Yeah. Well, I kind of wanted to start with just an intro. So you developed EVLO Fitness, and I love tuning in to yalls content. Tell me a little bit about your story and how you ended up doing what you do.

Yeah, so I have a very personal reason for educating the way I do specifically, and it's because I was one of those people that believed everything I was sold about exercise. That you can use exercise to burn off what you eat, that you have to exercise a lot to be smaller, that, you know, at one point I thought, like, women do yoga and Pilates or cardio and light weights, and they don't lift heavy weights. And I was kind of someone that I fell into all the marketing around fitness. And so now when I realized 99 of the things were sold are untrue, it has changed my life, it has changed my results, it's changed how I feel physically. So I started in kind of after college when I was in physical therapy school, developing a habit of over exercising. So I was teaching group fitness at the time. And then I would also go do my own workouts. So there would be days where I was, you know, teaching and then working out and lifting and doing yoga and so much activity and so much intense activity, and it was all fine until it wasn't right. And I hurt my back squatting heavy, and after that, didn't let it heal, continued to over exercise, and that developed into chronic pain in my hip, in my wrist, in my shoulder, all over my body. And I was, you know, 25 years old.

Oh, my God.

And so I was so used to it. And I thought that chronic pain was a normal side effect of being fit. If you want to be fit, if you want to look this way, like, you're just going to feel crappy. And as a physical therapist, I would even tell my patients that. I would even tell them early on. And I feel so bad about this now because I know that's not the truth at all. That, you know, it's just kind of the price you pay. Like, we'll just, you know, you'll just keep coming to physical therapy, we'll help you, we'll make you feel better, and then you go back to your workouts and you tear yourself up again. And so it really wasn't until I moved across the country, took a break from exercise for two weeks, and realized how much better I felt that I was like, this is not okay. Like, I was like, I don't have back pain, I don't have hip pain, I feel incredible. And I'm not exercising right now. Like, what's going on? And so at that point, that was like 2019. I dove into the literature around building muscle, around improving body composition. And I studied, believe it or not, a lot of bodybuilders, again, believe it or not, some of them are like, bro sciencey, but some of them are really heavy, evidence based, and they are the ones conducting a lot of the strength and hypertrophy research. So I dug into the research. I really tried to understand the physics of exercise and how to exercise smarter, not harder. How load goes through your body and how our bodies adapt to that load, how to fuel yourself properly, how to recover properly. And what I realized is women are not exercising in this way at all. There is not one single fitness program that I could think of that is applying things in this way. Every single fitness program online or in studio that I could think of was tearing people up and not giving people results, but making them sweat and work hard and feel like they got a good workout. But if you look at the mechanics and the science of it, they weren't. So that's why I developed Evlo and I as a fitness instructor. Like, I knew I had the skills to be able to teach a class like this. And it's evolved a ton. That was in 2020, right before the pandemic, right? Crazy timing, crazy timing. So everyone was going online, so it was wild. But, you know, it didn't take off. Like, I think the first year we had like maybe 100 members. So it really was slow moving. And then luckily, a lot more people have been educated about the importance of strength training and building muscle, which is like, I'm, I'm like, I've been talking about this For a long time, but I'm glad it's popular. Yeah. That's kind of the story behind Evlo and why I'm so passionate about this stuff, because I'm like, you do not have to kill yourself. In fact, it's counterproductive to kill yourself in your workouts in order to see results. And really great body composition. And I'll say, now I have better body composition than I did when I was working out 10 hours a week.

That's amazing. And so I feel like the perspective as a physical therapist is so valuable for this. You know, Like, I feel like in the fitness world, not to discount other methods of training, but having a physical therapy perspective on this can change everything. Just from a longevity standpoint, a sustainability standpoint of taxing your body and putting pressure on your body, doing it well is everything.

Yeah, it really is. And I saw firsthand so many patients, clients that I worked with as a physical therapist struggle with some common movement patterns that we see everywhere. Planks, squats, overhead presses, things like that. And when I really looked at the mechanics of these movements, I realized these aren't necessary to build muscle. There are so many other movements. And if you're just applying the principles of hypertrophy, which we can talk about, which you're getting, you're picking one muscle group, you're targeting it effectively, and then you're taking that muscle or that exercise close to failure. You can build muscle and strength with a wide variety of exercises. So I think my philosophy now is, let's not wedge our bodies into any exercise. Any program that doesn't feel good. Exercise should leave you feeling stronger, better, more resilient. It should not leave you feeling weaker, more tired, hungrier, joint pain. None of that should be a side effect. But all of that is normalized.

And I preach that exact thing to my patients. So thank you for saying that, because I think exercise can be used as a tool for growth, longevity, health, lifespan, healthspan, or honestly, I've seen it personally, professionally destroy people's health.

Yes.

In almost ways that are not even recoverable by doing it. By always thinking, I need to do more, I need to go harder. Oh, I'm not listening to my body. Actually just need to push myself more and I'll get better.

No, no, because exercise is medicine. And I love that saying, exercise is medicine. But just like we were talking about with the GLP1s, you can over prescribe a GLP1 and have negative side effects.

Yep.

Same thing with exercise. You can overdose exercise and see negative side Effects. So it's not just exercises. I mean, most people need to be exercising more, I would say, but a lot of the people listening to your podcast or my podcast are probably overdoing it and could afford to do less but better. So if we think about let's exercise medicine, let's pick the dosage that's right for you, the type of drug that's right for you, the type of exercise that's right for you, and let's recover. And when you do those things, you will feel like you're working out for way less time, way less hard, and yet you'll see way better results.

I love that. Powerful, powerful. Tell me you touched on this earlier. Like, women become so afraid that if they lift weights, if they over exercise, not over exercise, meaning taxing yourself, but lift heavy, et cetera, they're going to be bulky, they're going to be masculine. Tell me why it's important for women to build muscle. And can you speak to that myth?

Yes. So I want to first say that this does. This is a real phenomenon for some people. They feel bulkier or bigger. So I want to talk about why that might happen. So when you lift weights, especially in the beginning and especially if you're doing a high volume program, so if you're doing a program where every single workout you know is an hour long, and there's a lot in that workout, you will get cell swelling, which happens from the exercise. Exercise is stressing your body, so you'll get a little cell swelling. So some people mistake that swelling as, oh, my gosh, I'm bulking up. But what we see is that you don't build very much muscle until like, maybe two or three months of being consistent. But people will strength train for like two weeks, and they'll be like, I bolt up. It's like, well, you probably just had some cell swelling and you're probably, you know, doing a little bit too much volume and you could taper back the volume a little bit because if you're swelling a ton, you might not be able to keep up with that inflammation. So.

Right.

We don't want to overdo it. So that's the first thing that I often see, people mistaking cell swelling for bulkiness. And again, cell swelling is also temporary. It'll often go away with some time. So I'm always like, just give it a time. Give it some time. It'll probably go away. And then the second thing that I think happens is people are gaining muscle, but they're also either gaining fat or not Losing fat. So they feel they're gaining mass overall even though their body composition has improved. So the ratio of lean mass to fat mass has improved, they feel bigger, maybe their clothes feel tighter. And that could be where nutrition could be adjusted a little bit. Because I always say, like, exercise is really not going to. No matter what type of exercise you do, it's not going to have a huge effect on fat loss. Maybe a small, small effect, but fat loss is mainly going to be up to your nutrition. So yeah, take a look at nutrition. And I know that you're probably helping your patients with Nutri, the nutrition piece a lot, but I think that people over rely on exercise for fat loss. And when they're like, I thought that strength training made you leaner. I'm strength training and I'm not getting leaner. And it's like, well, it's maybe because there's also a fat component as well. Those are the two things that I think, the two reasons why I think people do feel bulky. Now I will say if you're controlling nutrition and if you are understanding there might be a little bit of cell swelling that goes away with time and consistency. Building muscle takes time. I have built over the last three months, I've built about five pounds of muscle, which is a lot of muscle to build in that period of time.

But you're a professional.

I'm a professional. And the reason that that happened was because there's this really cool phenomenon called muscle memory, which I'm actually not going to refer to it in the way people probably think it works. So what happens is over the, I had a baby in and over the six months of postpartum, I lost muscle. I just wasn't training to the same degree that I was prior. And so I lost about 5 pounds of muscle in that time period. When you lose muscle that you already have had established at one point, it comes back a lot quicker. And this is probably because there are neuromuscular pathways established. So it just kind of, it comes right back, which is so cool because it just goes to show, invest in the muscle. Even if you just invest in it one time and then you have to take a prolonged break for whatever reason life happens. When you go back to build it the second time, it's not going to take excruciatingly long period of time. So that's why I was able to build five pounds of muscle in that short period of time. But if you look at my body composition, I mean, I was also losing fat because I was adjusting my diet during that time. But my body composition, like, my jeans are like, bigger, you know, like I went down in a pant size. Like, I don't feel bulky by any means.

Right, you're not bulky.

And. And that's why it's like it. Muscle takes a long time to build. So I think that, you know, most women are not going to build five pounds of muscle in three months. They'll probably take a year to build five pounds of muscle. And when you do, you're probably going to really like the aesthetic of it. It's going to feel. You're going to feel really strong. Especially if you're pairing it with nutrition. You might feel that like, quote unquote toned, which I don't love that word, but that quote unquote toned look. Yeah. I think that it really shouldn't be a fear if we're educated about it.

Right. Like what I'm hearing you say is you're not just going to wake up one day and have giant biceps. You know, like, that's just not how this works. So you kind of get to pick and choose aesthetically where you want to hold and maintain versus where you keep building. Because again, it's not happening overnight.

It's not happening overnight.

Question for you. So I also had to kind of trim back over the summer my weight training because of just health issues with my daughter. And I'm so sad because I worked so hard to build so much muscle that is, you know, that I'm losing. Tell me about the muscle memory piece and how rough estimate.

Right.

It doesn't have to be scientifically extremely founded in literature, but rough estimate. In your professional experience, how much more quickly do we get to rebuild that muscle that we've lost from after previously building it?

Yes. Let's see if I can recall the study where they looked at this. So I think I'm going to get the week slightly wrong. And maybe if Peyton remembers, she can chime in. But. So they. They took a group of novice trainers who had never strength trained before. And I believe they trained for like 12 or 17 weeks or something like that. And they gained a significant amount of muscle mass in that period. And then they took off like another period of time. I think maybe seven weeks. Again, I'm not remembering the weeks perfectly. And then they came back. They. It took them half the amount of time to gain the muscle back the second time. So it makes me so happy. It happens a lot quicker. And they're not really sure why. At first they thought it was because you're not Losing the myonuclei. So when you're building muscle, you're actually building more myonuclei. And when you lose it, you don't lose the myonuclei. So you keep certain parts of the muscle tissue alive, so to speak. There's been studies that have argued against that. So we're not really sure why it happens, but we do know it happens. For me, it took me about, I would say maybe six months the first time to build five pounds of muscle. And this time it took, you know, three.

That's so valuable because even as we age, right? Like heading like so many of my listeners, your listeners too are in this perimenopause state where it gets really difficult to build muscle every five years. It gets more and more and more challenging. So laying that foundation in our 30s, our 40s is so powerful to impact later on in life, even if we're not consistently working out all the time because of the seasonality of life and stressors and whatnot.

Well, that's why I'm so passionate about teaching women in their 20s and 30s to do this now. And I've had friends that say, like, oh, you know, I'll just worry about that when I'm 50. And it's like, it's never too late. First of all, if someone's listening and they're like, ah, I need, like, don't panic. It's never too late. But it does get significantly harder. And that's just the reality. And if you're not building muscle, you're losing it. And so with each year that passes beyond 30, you're losing muscle and it gets harder and harder and harder with every year that passes. So if you can set yourself up as early as possible, it's never too late. But set yourself up as early as possible with a foundation of building muscle, then you aren't going to feel like you are in a hole when you hit 50 and perimenopause kicks in. And so I really think that I really do feel bad for that group of women right now because I think, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, the narrative around exercise for those women was cardio, maybe some Pilates and yoga, but it lightweights. It was not building muscle.

It was the opposite.

Right? And so they have that wiring in their brains. And so they didn't spend, you know, their 20s and 30s building muscle and building this really strong foundation. And so. And they're really struggling. That group is really struggling right now. So I do think that taking time to invest in it now, even if you're just building one or two pounds of muscle a year. Yeah. You are going to not only decelerate aging, you can reverse aging.

Yeah.

So I think that it's. It's never too late to start, but it's also never too early.

Such. Such great insight. Tell me how you and Evlo. How do you feel like women should be building muscle? Give us some tips. Give us some information around that.

So I have a reps framework, which I talk about on podcasts, just to make it really kind of easy for people to remember the important things, because I think it's really. It can be overwhelming, like, oh, I need to do this and this and this. It's like block out everything else and just. If you focus on these four things, then you'll see results pretty much guaranteed. And I know everybody's different and you deal with the outliers who do this, all the right things and don't see results. And then maybe that's when you go see a practitioner. But. So reps. So the R in reps stands for repetition. Getting close to failure in either up to all the way up to 30 reps. Studies show you can do all the way up to 30 reps, which is a lot. But anywhere from 6 reps to 30 reps, you can build muscle as long as you approach failure. Failure means you are unable to complete another rep despite your best effort. You would need help from, like, a spotter or another hand or something to even complete the movement. Studies show you don't have to get all the way to failure, and you probably shouldn't, because going all the way to failure can cause a lot of fatigue, which can influence the rest of your workout and also subsequent workouts. But you want to get a couple reps shy, so maybe two, three, four reps shy. How you know you're close to failure is your final rep should be slow and hard, so you have a decrease in velocity. You're trying to lift the weight quickly. Let's say you're doing a bicep curl. You're trying to lift the weight quickly, but you physically cannot, despite your best efforts. That's how you know you're close to failure. And then you could maybe do another rep if you have clean form and then just stop the set. So you could choose heavier weights for fewer reps, or you can do relatively lighter weights for more reps. I tend to find that somewhere in the middle is really good for a lot of people. I personally like around 15 reps or less, especially these days. I'm Just liking less. Fewer reps. You get stopped by the burn less because those higher reps, you'll accumulate what's called metabolic stress, that burning sensation. Metabolic stress is just an accumulation of ions in the tissue. It doesn't cause muscle growth, contrary to popular belief, but it can stop you from getting close to failure because you're stopping because of the discomfort of the burn. You're not stopping because you're actually close to failure.

Interesting.

So that's why that, like, 20, 25, 30 rep scheme, that can work if you truly are approaching failure. But for a lot of people, they're like, oh, it's burning, it's burning. I can't do it anymore. Not because they've actually gotten close to failure. So that's why I like to say, like, you know, I personally like 15 reps or less, but you can really do any of it.

I also just get bored. Like, I don't want to take that much time to do every single workout.

And that's a great point, too. So a lot of people, again, you want to be stopped from the muscle. And this is something that I emphasize a lot. You don't want to stop because of heart rate. You don't want to stop because of the burn. You don't want to stop because of the boredom. You don't want to stop because of discomfort. You want the muscle to be the limiting factor. And that's how you know you've gotten enough stimulus to actually induce a change. So a lot of people will do these fancy combination exercises and they'll do, you know, three, three sets of 10. And you know, they've, they are stopping because they're tired or they're stopping because they're, they're like, oh, I'm, I'm fatigued. They're not stopping because of the muscle. So that's kind of leads into the next portion of this. So the R is reps, the E is exercise selection. So choosing an exercise that's really simple and really targeted, I like to think about one muscle group at a time. And because again, you want the muscle to be the limiting factor, nothing else a lot of people will do. Like, I don't know why I'm blanking on a combination move, like a side lunge with a row. They're like, I'm working my legs and my upper body at the same time. The problem with this is that you're either stopping because of an arbitrary set of reps. Like, you're like, I was supposed to do 10 and I did 10 or you're stopping because of fatigue, or you're stopping because maybe the row portion you can't do anymore, but your legs could do plenty more.

Yeah.

So you're kind of wasting your energy by combining those two together. So just separate them. Separate. Do legs separately, do arms separately, do core separately, do them all separately so that you can really hone in on creating stimulus in one situation specific muscle group at a time. So that's exercise selection. So that's R, E, P is protein. So eating enough protein. The RDS that we work with recommend 0.75 to 1 gram per pound of body weight per day. Is that. Was that what you usually typically. Yeah, I feel like that's like the standard these days, for sure. And then the S is structure. So I think it's very common in the world of, like, class pass and group fitness, which I am a big former group fitness junkie. I love it. I just think it's so fun. But the problem with group fitness is that there's not a lot of structure. So you could go to a class and work glutes and abs and arms on Monday, and then Tuesday you go to another class and work glutes and abs and arms. You're working the same muscle groups day after day. Studies show that you really need about 48 hours in between working muscle groups in order to see muscle growth and not just spin and chronic inflammation. So structure your week. Think about working each muscle group 2ish times throughout the week on non consecutive days, with about 48 hours in between, if you can, at least. And then taking recovery days. Like, I lift five days a week and I take two recovery days. So that's kind of the reps framework that I like to lay out.

So question, I'm gonna back up a little bit.

Yes.

Now, no. But for my own curiosity, when you say do your reps until you hit failure, do you do multiple sets of that, or do you do one set to failure and then move on to your next muscle group?

So the way you can do it either way, when we think about sets, how many sets of each muscle group we want in a given week, it's called volume. We want at least 4ish sets per muscle group per week. That can be all in one workout. That can be distributed into different workouts. But we want at least 4ish sets for muscle growth. In EVLA, what we do is we'll do a set of chest presses, and then while chest is resting, because you want to give time to rest in between, we'll do A set of, let's say it's a full body class. We'll do a set of abs and then we'll do a set of glutes and then you can pair these sets together so that while the chest is resting, the glutes are getting work. And then you go back to the top and repeat it again. So it's kind of like a superset. And that's a way to save time. Now if you are someone that you're feeling really fatigued from doing that type of workout, we always say like, pause the class, take a break. We don't want your heart rate stopping you, we don't want your over your fatigue stopping you. Pause the class, take a true break and then once you feel fresh, repeat again.

So valuable. And I love your efficiency too. Like I'm all about efficiency. Yeah, it is very life and my workouts, so efficient.

Yeah.

Tell me some of the most common reasons you see of why people are not seeing the results that they would expect.

I think they're expecting exercise to drive fat loss, drive weight loss, or they're just doing the wrong things. Like I feel so bad for the fitness consumer because we are sold so much BS on the Internet. I mean I can't tell you my explore page is filled with incorrect information.

Like I bet that kills you.

And yes. And it's always the, the stuff that doesn't work that goes viral. Like, do these four exercises to tone up your arms. It's like, well, when we think about toning up our arms, that requires fat loss. You can't spot treat fat. So exercise alone is not going to tone your arms. It might build muscle there, but then you're doing these arm circles for four minutes. That's not building muscle. So it's just like it drives me a little bit crazy. So I think there's a lot of misinformation. And so people are exercising and so spending their valuable time doing these workouts they think are going to work or they're promised are going to work, but they're not. So go back to what I always say. Go back to applying the reps framework. Are you getting close to failure in under 30 reps? Are you choosing like smart exercises? Are you eating enough protein? Are you structuring your week properly? And if you're, if those answers are no, then that's probably why you're not seeing muscle growth, right? Why you're maybe not seeing fat loss again.