The discussion revolves around the diverse benefits of muscle development for individuals of all genders, dispelling common myths surrounding women and muscle bulkiness. The speaker underscores how building muscle not only enhances physical strength but also contributes to improved balance, coordination, and long-term neurological health. Emphasizing a nuanced approach to fitness, viewers are advised to tailor their goals based on measurable outcomes rather than solely focusing on weight, promoting a more holistic view of personal progress. The speaker advocates for diverse workout routines and adaptive rep counts to effectively stimulate muscle growth while minimizing the risk of overexertion or injury.

Furthermore, the discussion delves into the different training methodologies, comparing approaches such as heavy weights with low reps versus lighter weights with higher reps. This comparative analysis serves to educate viewers on the importance of balancing training intensity with sustainable practices to foster muscle growth safely. The speaker underscores the critical role of joint and muscle maintenance through practices like chiropractic care and strategic recovery methods, particularly beneficial for athletes and those targeting specific fitness objectives. This comprehensive approach aims not only to optimize physical performance but also to promote long-term health and well-being through informed and adaptive fitness strategies.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:04 – Introduction and Benefits of Muscle Growth

02:03 – Methods to Stimulate Muscle Growth

04:37 – Setting Effective Fitness Goals

08:41 – Training Techniques and Risks

12:39 – Importance of Joint and Muscle Maintenance

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] we’re going to talk about exercise muscle growth today. Now, before a lot of women decide they’re going to, you know, phase out on some muscle groups, hypercritical to you guys as well. As far as balance, coordination, functional movement, burning fat, just strengthens stability, moving around long term health, neurologic health, brain health, mental health, hyper critical that you guys work on building your muscle tissue as well. Building muscle tissue in women is very different than building muscle tissue in men. So it’s one of the things you’re not going to get extra bulky unless you really, really try. It’s always funny when people come in. Women come in and they go, I don’t want to look like that. My point one of the one of the pros like a picture of one of the pros. Or if we’re looking at pictures online, they’ll look at somebody who is a pro bodybuilder or a pro fitness model, like, I don’t want to look like that. And I’m like, I guarantee you, you will not accidentally look like that. Never in the history of time has anyone accidentally looked like a pro. So don’t worry about that.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:01] You’re not going to accidentally ever wake up one day and go, oh my gosh, I’m huge. Not going to happen. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got to work really, really hard with these very specific intention of getting larger to get larger, especially if we’re talking about, like we see, stage or like we see on magazines and things like that. You can take almost any woman to that point. It’s just there’s a gigantic amount of work that no one’s going to accidentally do. So don’t worry about getting too big or too bulky. Usually what happens is that women come in, they go, I don’t want to get to bang, see her shoulders. I don’t want to look. Shoulders look like that. And then six months later they’re like, okay, I would be as big as her, but how do I get bigger shoulders than I have now? And then they start working up that that path because their view of it changes. But anyway, so the way that we get muscles to grow is we convince the body that the body is not functionally beneficial the way it is. It’s not adequate the way it is. The this thing goes back to the how many reps, how many sets and stuff like that that we get into.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:03] That’s, that’s a really, really bad way of doing it. The worst possible way you can do it is you say, I’m going to do three sets of ten, and that’s how I’m gonna work out. Because what ends up happening is you get stronger and stronger and stronger, and now all of a sudden, your body goes, oh, we’re good enough to do three sets of ten. We don’t need to get any bigger. We don’t need any stronger. We don’t need to get any leaner. We don’t need to become more efficient. We can stay just the way we are and and we can meet the needs of the body’s requiring of us. So that’s the issue. Where we run into with getting to a specific rep counts like that. There’s a couple different ways of manipulating this. One, you can change the exercise you’re doing, which sometimes helps, especially if you’re trying to, you know, do something very specific with the body, like you’re trying to build for a show. You’re trying to, you know, build for a specific, motion, like golf or tennis or, you know, anything like that. So changing the elevation. So going from, you know, a flat to an incline to a decline style bench, doing high or low flies, things like that can start to shift the way that we, we focus the pressure on the muscle and can cause it to hypertrophy or grow in different, more different ways.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:17] The other option that I like is to vary the strap, the rep count. If you can do ten, do ten. If you can do 11, do 11. Even if you’re supposed to do ten, when you get to that last one, if you think you’ve got enough for three quarters of another rep, get that last three quarters of the next rep in and do it every set. So every fact you’re supposed to do ten, but you get 11 or you get 12. That’s the way to go. You want to go to failure. The way that we convince the body that it needs to change is by showing it. It is inadequate in the way that it functions today. So you have to go to failure. When you go to failure, the body goes, okay. I tried to get that last one up. I couldn’t get it up. I need to get stronger or I was doing 15 reps. I need to be able to do 21. I can only get 16. I need to increase my endurance. So those are the type of things now using endurance versus using, just strength. Strength are not necessarily the same thing. It depends on the goal. So a lot of times you just have to sit down beginning of this whole thing, and it’s usually best with someone who, you know, you can work with and say, what are your goals? And be very, very specific in your goals. The weightlifting thing and the the, the growing and the changing of the body are probably the easiest goals to set. So I always like to start where I work. People start with us and people go, I want to lose this much weight.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:37] So I’m like, that’s a terrible goal. Because if you add a pound of muscle and lose a pound of fat, your body just scale has changed zero. But you’ve made significant positive movement and where we want to go. So typically what I would recommend is instead of using weight is to use measurements. You know, size of your biceps, you know, chest. Belly, hips, legs, that kind of thing. And kind of go with that. I’ve had lots of women. Not a lot of guys. Guys don’t really care. You know, you tell a guy, hey, you’re not going to lose any weight, but you’re going to be ripped. And you guys, like, cool, I don’t care. Weight doesn’t bother us. However, women, because of society or whatever caused it. Women are very, very tied. Their self value to this weight on a scale. For some reason they think the BMI is a real thing. When it’s not, it’s made up. It’s absurdity where they look at it and they go, oh, I’m five six. I’m supposed to weigh a very specific amount, or else I’m fat, or else I’m inadequate and oh, I’m bad. Throw all that trash out the window. So the other thing about it is that you need to figure out how you want to look. Do you want to have curves? Do you want to be sticky? Do you want to be muscly? Like, how do you want to look? And then do design with your workout and your diet to meet that those parameters? A lot of women don’t want to lose their curves. They want to be curvy, which is fantastic. Lots of people, including myself, are a big fan of curvy.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:03] So great. You don’t have to lose it. You can actually enhance it. So those are some of the things, which depends on how you design your workout, what you’re going to do with it. But again, weight is probably the very worst way that you can measure that. Look, it’s going to be the best measurements are going to be, you know, kind of the best way to go. As you’re working towards that. So kind of some of us have to reshape the mind and reset, reshape the goals. Depending on what we really want. A lot of times, like I said, I want to weigh. I want to lose 20 pounds. I’m like, why? Like I do? You’re in a contest where you have to weigh a certain amount to get on stage or to, you know, wrestle or just whatever you’re trying to do, like, is there a weight class you’re trying to get to? Because that’s a completely different conversation. But if there’s not like, oh, no, I just, you know, for life, I don’t want to walk around, you know, weighing 140 pounds. What if 145? You look just. Right. So don’t don’t, don’t set a number and then decide that some what you want to do. I’ve seen lots and lots of women who’ve come in and I tell this story a lot. And this is the the biggest one. But I see this variation all the time where I had a lady come in, and she was super excited, super happy. She wasn’t wearing herself. And she’s lost four inches, around her waist to get all new clothes. Right. So that’s that’s like a Monday. She came in and told me that on a Monday.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:27] And then, it was either later that week or early the next week. She came in and was just very unhappy. And she was like, I don’t think this is going where I want to go now. I was like, you were literally just in here talking about how you had to get all new clothes because you’ve lost so much size, you’re so much leaner. You had to get all of your clothes. And she was like, that’s irrelevant. She’s I’ve only lost 3 pounds. So she lost four inches and then we lost 3 pounds. The reason for that was because she was building a lot of muscle. So what is happening is if you lose 5 or 6 pounds of fat and you gain, you know, 4 or 5 pounds of muscle, again, you’re not going to see it on a scale. You’re much healthier. You look better, you feel better, you have more energy. Everything’s been more beneficial. However, you don’t see on the scale. And so that’s one of those things we have to keep on track. So what we’re going to do that keep that in mind. That’s more of a psychological mental thing we’re getting at later. But the number one thing if you’re trying to grow your muscle tissue, is you have to allow the body to understand that it’s not good enough, strong enough, doesn’t have the endurance it needs to do the task that you’re asking it to do. Again, mind drives body growth. So that’s kind of the piece we’re getting into it. Now there’s a couple different options on this one. I see lots of different people do different ways and they each have their pluses and minuses.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:41] So heavyweight low reps is going to put tremendous pressure on the ligament attending the joint. And it is going to cause it’s going to have a higher possibility of causing, long term damage. So joint damage limitation and damage, surgical requirements. It can it can end, you know, what you’re doing workout wise for months or forever. So that’s the downside. The upside is that there is slightly more growth in a, in a compacted amount of time. So if you let’s say you go for a year and you’re lifting heavy weight, low reps, you might get stronger and grow muscle tissue a little bit faster. The problem we run into is if you get an injury that holds you out for 4 or 5 weeks, couple months off of surgeries, and now you’re out five, six months, you’ve lost way more than the games that you’ve ever seen. So low rate, low, low rep, high weight is. That is a very risky option. If we kind of go up and we go up in rep counts and down and the amount of weight we’re using, you’re going to get a lot safer. Now there’s a point where it kind of becomes absurdity. Know you’re doing 50 reps. That’s not necessarily, you know, as beneficial. Unless you’re trying to go for endurance. If you’re trying to do, for instance, in the combine, they do a 225 bench, as many times as you can do that. So if you’re trying to do that and lots of guys do that and come on that, that’s a, that’s an understandable thing. That’s a totally different workout that you’re trying to do.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:09] It’s an endurance function and it’s that that one’s all that different. But there needs to be a set point where you kind of figure out for your body, for your risk tolerance, for your goals and anything else. Where are you going to set that rep count? Between when you go up and reps for these sets and when you go up in weight. It’s been a little bit different for everybody. Work with your coach on that one. That’s going to be really, really important that you guys understand that dynamic to prevent injuries and to substantially increase, get us where we want to go goal wise. So failure is your friend. If you get through it and you it on one more, you’re cheating yourself. You’re not going to get to your goals. You want to go through and you want to fail on the last rep of every set you do. And when you get done, you want to not be able to move that body part. That’s kind of where it is. Other other pieces. Things that factor into that is how much muscular work you’re going to do on that day. Lots of people split their work up south. They’ll do full body workout. They’ll do push pull workouts, they’ll do something like that. Which is fine depending on your goals. Like there’s goals that that works out pretty well for. If you’re trying to grow muscle tissue. I would not do that any at all. You want to completely focus on one muscle tissue, you want to exhausted the point where it cannot do anything else, and then make sure you have the recovery chemicals.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:31] But that’s kind of where that one is. So if you guys are looking for muscular growth and you’re looking at your workout, that’s the first thing that you guys need to do is figure out one of your goals, where you want to be that whole thing, and then figure in your risk tolerance of how quickly you think you can get there. And then really, really, really stay with it. And I’ll tell you, if you’re going to do low, low rep highway, you’re gonna have to be in with your Cairo, in with your massage therapist image. You’re getting your dry needling, getting your adjustments, getting your muscle, getting your lymphatics worked out. It’s gonna be substantially, substantially more important for you to do that. So because, again, the thing that we’re pushing on is we’re pushing the body to grow. We’re pushing the body to accelerate, pushing the body past its comfort zone into an uncomfortable position so it will grow and and develop. The problem with that is that if you kind of get it out of whack, it’s going to end up getting hurt. So you’re going to end up with shoulder issues or neck issues or low back issues that can theoretically, you know, kick you out for a long time. They can do all sorts of other damage. So making sure that the joints are functioning and the nervous system is functional, the musculature is moving in the proper plane, proper range of motion.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:39] That’s really super critical. And so that’s going to be, you know, again, chiro pt massage therapist. So that’s gonna be really, really important. The maintenance on the machine is hypercritical when we’re trying to get it to develop. Which is why kids need adjusting a little bit more often. Female athletes see that tremendously, especially as they’re going through puberty, especially. They’re having their cycle hypercritical dysfunction. So if you guys are not getting in with a solid chiro, if you guys are not looking at dry needling as we’re trying to increase, those are things you’re going to have to start to do. There’s more maintenance required on the machine as you put more pressure into it. It’s just it’s common understanding. So, you guys need to find a really solid chiro. Women, if you’re looking for a good chiro, I would, I would stop, start shopping for the pregnancy and the pediatric, kairos because they’re going to have a much better understanding on pelvic floor function, round ligament function to assess issues. The pelvic function and the pelvic structure in a women is radically different than the men. And from my general experience, the ICP, pediatric, certified, Kairos are going to have a lot better understanding, of not only how the pelvis in a woman works, but also how to bring it back into balance.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:58] Same thing if you’re a guy, a pediatric and pregnancy, doc is not a bad option for you guys either, because the pelvis is hypercritical to everything we’re doing. It has to move just right for leg day. It’s got to move just right for balance and coordination function. So getting that where it’s supposed to be is super important. So, you know, if you have somebody who has a really good understanding of, pelvic function, they’re they’re fine. I learned mine. So I got my neuro certification, I got my sports certification, I didn’t learn I learned with those two, you know, 100 hours of education between the two of them, 4 or 500 hours of education between the two of them. I learned ten times more pelvic function from my pediatric AICPA, Karen’s than I learned from those classes. So that’s why I tell you that if you’re going to start, you know, worry about pelvis, go to the guys who work on the pelvis all day, every day is the sole function of what they do. So highly recommend that you guys start going in and figuring out how the pediatric and pregnancy guys can help even the men. But for sure, the women, getting that thing reset and pelvic floor stabilization functionality is super critical, especially if you think about getting pregnant. So real quick on those things, we can go back over those later. If you guys have any specific questions on, drop a drop in the comments or questions at Chalmers almost. Com and, we’ll go through them. Thanks for your time.

As always if you have any questions, please send them to [email protected]

Check out Chalmers Pillarsofwellness.com for Wellness updates! And ask me any questions you have at [email protected]. I answer all of them and look forward to hearing from you.

The Chalmers Wellness Stubstack just launched. Comment, Like, and Interact with other people on their wellness journey. Communities can make a difference.     DrChalmers.substack.com

Dr. Matt Chalmers

Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only. Before taking any action based on this information you should first consult with your physician or health care provider. This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions regarding a medical condition, your health, or wellness.