Hattie Boydle (00:00):
It's not till the reps actually start to slow down that we're actually doing something. But what people do is the rep slows down because it feels a little bit hard and they rack it and they're like, that was good. You were so close. And so the invitation is to lean into the discomfort that set gave you and go, I can do it. We are built to do hard things and like I said, the analogy of bodybuilding is we only grow against resistance. That's with life that's in the gym.
Michelle MacDonald (00:37):
Welcome to the show everybody. I have Hattie Boydle as my special guest today, and I don't know about Hattie needs an introduction. You probably heard her on an earlier episode. I think actually Hattie was my first episode, first or second episode when I first started doing a podcast. So she's living in Australia, a phenomenal athlete. She's a five-time pro title holder. She's been in the game for a long, long, long time. I think she was almost born being an athlete and coaching and all of that jazz Started as a personal trainer and worked her way up the ranks. So a lot of history working with athletes, coaching athletes, being herself a top athlete. And she's also co-owner of training the female athlete. She's also a co-owner of the transformation company, flex Method, and she is a clean health educator, which is a very well-known fitness and health education platform in Australia. She's also the coach of Anna Cretin who won the title in Australia last year that Hattie had won the previous year. So she actually coached this gal to win the title that Hattie had won. And her physique is absolutely phenomenal. I mean, the rest of us were watching this girl and just totally gobsmacked. So Hattie not only is herself a top athlete, but very, very competent as a physique coach. Hattie, welcome to the show,
Hattie Boydle (02:03):
Michelle. It is always an honor and a pleasure. I think it was your first episode starting this podcast and it's been so great to see how many phenomenal other women that you have had on this podcast because you for one, are such a big inspiration to so many women of all ages. And then you've been able to connect us with so many other amazing women across the globe with so much incredible information. So I felt so honored that you wanted to have me back as a repeat guest. I will do this a thousand times over. Not only do I just love talking to you, Michelle, but I love the work that you do. So it's an absolute honor to be here
Michelle MacDonald (02:41):
Right back at you. Right back at you. Alright, so when I talked to you previously, we really focused on mindset and in this episode I really want to showcase your talents in this field as a female fitness educator and coach. Let's get to it for you. When you're working with female athletes, could you explain a little bit your whole process for assessing a new client? What key factors are you looking for? Are you looking at training, history, goals, body composition, medical history? What are you looking for?
Hattie Boydle (03:14):
I mean, all of the above. Something that I really came to learn, I've been in the industry for 18 years and I really came to learn something that was very important, which was what people say they do and how they actually perform it are very different things. And so one thing that I always do with all of my athletes is when they come on board with me as a VIP client, they do a movement assessment. So of course we get the medical history, we get the injury history. Obviously when I see the injury history and I look at the movement makes a lot of sense. But the movement screening is something that is so incredibly important because it will expose to me some of the weak links and we can look at weak links as maybe some stability issues, lack of mobility, tightness around the joints or particular areas of the spine, which is then causing pain somewhere else.
(04:08):
And we know that when we then load the spine, it's really going to exasperate those things. So a goal of any coach is to move our client from A to B as quickly as possible, but also as safely as possible. And so a part of that is obviously the habits and behaviors, but also how we move. So I do a movement assessment on my clients and I use that information to not only create the program but create maybe things like preliminary work, the things that most of them miss. I can put my hand up and say for a good 15 years of my career, I really didn't emphasize the preliminary work and I got away with it till I couldn't and now it's the gatekeeper to whether I can lift or not. So we get that with age and now I really promote that to a lot of my clients.
(04:54):
So they're not about, this is the gatekeeper. If you want to do this thing over here, cool, show me that you can do this thing over here. Look at their habits, look at their behaviors. Actually, when I have a client come to me and they say that this has been their eating history, I actually get them to do two weeks of just let me see how you eat. Don't change anything. I just want to see what your pattern is like with your food. What time of the day are you eating, how much are you eating over here? So rather than come in and just change everything at once, we know that there's only so much we can do at one time and we want to think of the long game as well. So what are the most important things? What is the low hanging fruit that we need to assess first and we need to shift first in order to get a result in the six month window or the 12 week window.
(05:40):
I personally don't work with people less than six months minimum because 12 weeks will get your result, but it doesn't get you sustainability. 12 weeks will get your result, but it doesn't teach the process. It's just not enough time to embed a lot of the skills that six months can give you because in six months I want life to throw everything at you and guess what? I'm going to help you navigate it. And that's the role of a coach. And I think it's really, there's a massive misunderstanding of why people actually ask for a coach or work with a coach. You don't work with a coach when things are perfect. You actually work with a coach when things are, you're at the bottom of the well and you dunno how to get out and then that's where you ask for help. So movement assessment, I look at just how they eat.
(06:19):
We do a diet diary. I look at their macros. Once I've got a really good idea of the basics, we start there and then we enroll or we move people towards, Hey, if we do this thing over here, the next phase is this. And I think a really important thing when it comes to working with any type of client, whether it be an athlete or whether it be gen pop, is that they need to see what they're working towards in a tangible thing that they can manage a step-by-step process. So we look at the habits and behaviors. Obviously there's a lot of wiggle room in the beginning and then lots of exercise, video feedback. I know that's something that you do, but I want to see now how they move under load and then we make these little adjustments as we go.
Michelle MacDonald (07:05):
Yeah, everything that you've said is so spot on, we do something so differently. Do you use an app when you're doing or any kind of a platform other than videos when you're doing movement assessment because you're virtual, right? You're not having people come in and work with you anymore in person or are you?
Hattie Boydle (07:22):
No, everything's online. So essentially I have a series of videos that they get sent and I write them with the instruction of I want how I would like them to perform them. And then I'll screenshot, put on notes, put in lines, show them what it should look like, show them what they look like so they've got a visual representation of what we're actually moving towards. And yeah, the beauty of technology is that we can do it anywhere at any time. They're going to do their movement screening and the comfort of their own home so they can do it on the floor in barefoot, no one's around, it doesn't matter if they fall over. It's very easy. It's a very easy assessment. And then it is so crazy how this really easy assessment shows me so much. It doesn't show me everything, but it shows me enough to get a really good idea of why this person might be experiencing pain or why they're lacking the ability to grow this particular muscle group. People really underestimate what their feet do, how much their feet play a role in growing glutes, things like that.
Michelle MacDonald (08:21):
Tell us more about that.
Hattie Boydle (08:24):
So a lot of people who have a really tough time developing their glutes have very weak muscles in their feet. And so when we watch them, I can tell when someone has not spent much time on one leg, the ankle just cannot find stability in the floor and we see it roll in or roll out all the weight, go on the outside of their foot and then wonder why they're getting a little bit of sciatic or back pain or even that really gritty feeling up in that glute me because there's just not enough work strength in the foot to sustain the rest of the foundation. So a lot of times women come in and they want to do these really cool things. They're doing all these great great squats and dailies or even glute hip thrusts, lunging, everything, and they're not really seeing a great result in their glute development and it's like what's going on?
(09:14):
It's like we've just got to assess this one little thing down here and I'm not going to take those things away from you because I know that you thrive doing a squat and deadlift. Something that I learned from one of the best mentors I've ever had is Sebastian Aura. We don't punish what is strong, but we focus on what's weak because we are only as strong as our weakest link and we know that the nervous system is incredibly powerful and very responsive to what's going on in the body and it will stop at what it can manage when there's a weak link involved. So we are only as strong as our weakest link, so we don't punish what's strong, we keep focusing what's strong, but we do need to address some of the underlying issues. And sometimes it's as simple as let's spend some time on one foot. Let's get out of the machines, let's get out of the bilateral work, let's do some really basic stuff on one foot, even some unstable surface work. Things like anti-rotation as well on one foot is really great. So pallet press on one foot, these things are really great at challenging both the feet stabilizers but also the hip stabilizers.
Michelle MacDonald (10:16):
I'm going back to my time with you at our gym where we had that foam pad and we were doing all these exercises and it was always like, we can't just make it easy. We've always got to add things. So it's really, really challenging to do the thing. Even dead bugs, you had a way to make it even harder, but always so brilliant and they were just small little adjustments, but it really highlighted any weaknesses.
Hattie Boydle (10:42):
I think coaching is one of the best jobs in the world. I think we could both agree that as you do it longer and a little bit more and you work with more bodies and you learn to problem solve better, the game just gets a little bit more fun. So I definitely learn a lot from my own injuries and for anyone who's listening, injuries do occur. It's not that you're necessarily doing anything wrong, but your injuries will expose to you what maybe you're doing too much of or what needs a little bit more work. But I can really say a lot of the knowledge that I've had around injuries is just from my own. I had weak feet, my right foot was collapsing in, I was getting crazy back pain, I had to pull things back to shoot myself forward. And I think that's something that is.
(11:33):
So we get really frustrated when that happens, but this is just a part of the long game. We don't just keep getting bigger, we don't just keep getting stronger. We are going to have these little pockets that we do have to address to allow us to keep subtly progressing in the long term. If we just got stronger, we just got bigger, we wouldn't have jobs. One of the best things about coaching is we get to problem solve with someone and by default they get to learn a little bit more about how the human body works.
Michelle MacDonald (12:03):
What are some of the common mistakes other than, so we've got feet. What are some other maybe two to three other common mistakes that you see that women are making in their trending approach and where really building that solid foundation of strength and conditioning is going to help 'em with their long-term success?
Hattie Boydle (12:20):
Okay, doing too much too soon. I think anyone can do volume, but volume has a limitation. And I think one of the biggest mistakes a lot of women make is just doing so much volume and never understanding that or never kind of learning or understanding what true intensity is. So they can do all this volume and then they wonder why they keep feeling like they're spinning their wheels, they're doing so much work, they're training so hard, but their idea of hard and effort are two different things because sweating doesn't equate to intensity. Some people just sweat more than others. I train really hard and I don't actually sweat that much. And I think learning what true intensity is is a really big factor. The thing about intensity and true intensity of what it takes to build our bodies is something that we learn over time. It's like wisdom.
(13:18):
The hard thing about true intensity is we have to go there. And I think bodybuilding is such a great analogy for life. We only grow against resistance. It's the same thing with our muscle training. The muscle isn't enough to grow it. And so working with a great coach, whether that be in personal, online and helping you understand what true intensity is. So I think that's a really big missing thing. If I ask my girls, what's one thing that you've learned from when 80% of them say training intensity, we get people that say, I'm not a beginner, I've been training for 10 years, but your physique says otherwise, trust me, if you've been training properly for 10 years, you don't look like an average person. And this is the illusion on the internet. So there are some people, if you learn training intensity early on, guess what?
(14:06):
You could train for five years and still look better than someone who's training for 10 years because it's the intensity, right? So intent, intensity, those two things are important when it comes to training and building the body. A big mistake I see for a lot of women just in terms of a movement is just overextending the lower back and not utilizing their core as best as they can, which then in turn, if you're not using your core properly or correctly or optimizing it because it's very strong and it's there to stabilize the spine, which then allows us to lift heavier in our deadlifts, heavier in our squats, heavier in our hip thrust, that becomes in the weak link whether we have breakdown through form or we just plateau in strength. So one of the things that I often see in my females movement screen screenings is that excessive lordosis looks hot in photos, looks hot on the gram.
(14:57):
We often see really poorly performed exercises on the gram by girls because it looks sexier with the arch back. It doesn't quite look so good when you're pulling your rib cage down and you're stacking the abs and the waist ain't looking so small. But guess what, in terms of strength development and improving performance and protecting the spine, things that you care about when you get older, trust me, those things matter. And so teaching our clients how to use their core correctly is a really big mistake that will make, it will have a carry over to everything that you do and it will minimize long-term injury as well.
Michelle MacDonald (15:32):
Great. So we've got feet, we've got core, we have volume versus intensity. You think you have a couple more, right?
Hattie Boydle (15:40):
Sleep.
Michelle MacDonald (15:40):
Sleep of course
Hattie Boydle (15:42):
Sleep's a hard one. You've got a lot of moms and look, I'm not a mom, but I get disruptive sleep from my dog who crawl into my bed every morning at 3:00 AM And so look, sleep is again, if I could tell a client there's one thing you need to improve, well 90% of them it's sleep. It is so underrated in its benefits to pretty much everything from a spiritual, mental, physical standpoint. It's our emotional regulation. It's our ability to coordinate things. It's our ability to learn. It's our ability to synthesize new muscle tissue for us to be anabolic. It's the most anabolic thing we can do sleep yet, it's the thing that we often choose for some people to miss. If there was one thing that most of us could improve, even if it's by 30 minutes a night, I would say sleep. Because it is the catalyst for discipline to wane very early, for willpower to become short, for our ability to push in our ability, ability to recover.
(16:42):
And I think the final piece that I'll say is over-training, over-training under reading. That's a big one that I often see with women and it's honestly 99% of my females train four days a week. That's it. And that even Anna who recently won Miss Fitness Australia, she trained four days a week and yes, in ways she had built such an amazing foundation but she didn't for fat loss, it's about stress management and in fat loss you're not building muscle. So there's got to be enough volume to stimulate and maintain the lean tissue that you have built or that you have. And then we need to create a calorie deficit. And so it is this balance individual to individual. We know this, we see some women diet on high foods. We see some women have to diet on low foods, but there's this really fine balance of enough stimulation, but non annihilation and enough calories to cover the cost and to at least maintain that lean muscle tissue. So protein, I know that you've spoken about protein many times and I know that's something you speak to your women about. This protein intake that most women lack is super important there. So there's a relationship issue between output and intake, but also what women think needs to be done to build their bodies.
Michelle MacDonald (18:05):
You want to explore that a little bit?
Hattie Boydle (18:07):
Sure. So I think what can be challenging is in the beginning most people do need some volume because we haven't learned intensity yet. So often beginners, when we look at beginners, we might give them slightly higher rep ranges because they need the repetition of that movement pattern over and over and over again. Now what's really interesting is if you are new to training, you're stepping into the gym for the first time, for the first 12 weeks of your training, you are getting neurological adaptations. Your body is learning to move this with this to extend the arm here, to pull the rib cage here, to stack the apps, use the tricep. We are actually not building muscle. This is actually why beginners don't train to failure. They don't need to. So there's rules for every kind of phase of each person's journey. Beginners, you don't need to train to failure, you still need to train hard.
(19:13):
You still need to learn intent in every one of your reps, you're trying to learn about your body, what it feels like, how to move it. You need that repetition under you about you actually don't need a thousand exercises yet. You need basic exercises to do really well. Actually isolated work is great for a beginner because they don't know what it feels like to train the body yet. So beginners you, you actually don't need more than four days of training a week, especially if you're doing high rep work. There's so much learning and rewiring of your body to do first. But the goal of that phase, once that's over, is to gradually allow you to increase the load that you lift. And intensity and volume, they have a bit of a bell curve. So there's only so much that we can do when intensity starts to rise as it meets the top of the curve of the downgrade of what volume gives because volume is far more fatiguing than what lower volume is, even if the lower reps with a higher load will train and work the nervous system.
(20:18):
So that still needs recovery as well. But the goal as we move through each phases is to slowly start to drop the rep ranges so that we can start to increase the load that we are lifting and over this phase, learn what intensity is. As you learn intensity, you don't need to then increase the volume per se. And this becomes very individual dependent because we do have hyper responders to training genetics play their role in how training and nutrition is influenced in the body. This is why we've got so many people who train and we've only got a number of elite bodybuilders in the game. Anyone can be a bodybuilder. This is the thing I love about bodybuilding, and I was thinking about this this morning, Michelle, and I was walking home with my coffee. I'm like, the beautiful thing about bodybuilding is anyone can do it. That doesn't mean you're going to be elite.
(21:11):
That doesn't mean you can't be elite in your own way because you're bodybuilding for you not anyone else. Or you should be your body. You get to build it, you get to live in it, you do what you want, but it's something that anyone can do. The tricky thing for a lot of us is we have all this evidence, we have all this science, but then we have millions and millions of different bodies and how we respond to the training influence the sleep, the nutrition is going to be slightly different each person. But we have a little bit of evidence that shows if you do this, generally this will work. If you do this, generally this will work. And so we have this range in which hypertrophy works from, we know that reps for five up to reps of 30 if taken to proximity to failure can grow muscle.
(21:52):
But we also have people who have very different bodies who actually respond better to lower reps versus they do higher reps. But you are not going to know till you go through this journey of training and you have training logs and you actually in each block of your training, and this is what I do with my clients before each training block, I look at, okay, of this six period week period with this rep ranges or this volume, what was our growth? And so one of the most important things that we do when we ever start this game because it's a game and the goal is to be in it for as long as we can, is to measure and manage what our rate of progress is for X amount of volume for X amount of food. I recently put up a video yesterday and I had like 2020 was the first first year I ever reached 3000 calories and I was 64 kilos was beast trying to get there.
(22:40):
And this year I'm two and a half kilos lighter and I've got 3000 calories. And what's really cool is actually to measure these two things and be like, wow, well my goal is actually to get back here, but I'm probably going to have to eat more food than what I am to get back up here. And I wouldn't know that if I didn't measure everything and manage everything. So a really key piece to the bodybuilding game as we progress as a beginner into intermediate, into advanced is that we use the data that we've got and that we've worked through to see actually as we become more advanced, what works better. Because as we become more advanced and we get stronger, we're not necessarily going to use the rules that we use when we were a beginner. So what got you here won't get you there, but you can still use data points around how far you've come and actually what is the tipping point at some point where it just becomes too much volume and you go, okay, got to pull back the ladder.
(23:38):
The other piece is like what's the outcome? I love strength, Michelle. A phrase that we often hear in the community amongst women is, oh, okay, so if it's a high rep, I go light. It's like no, when it's high rep, you lift as heavy as you can for high reps. And this is where I think we can really focus on strength. Strength at all. Rep ranges not it's heavy. If it's high rep, I go light, it's like actually how do I teach my body to handle as much load and progress in strength like I would if it was five reps to lift as heavy as I can for those 20 reps. And so if we can always focus on strength on every phase that we're in, we are going to over time just improve our overall work capacity and our ability to handle heavy loads at all rep ranges.
(24:26):
And it kind of removes just the focus on our bodies as well. So something I really am grateful for is strength training. I think it's one of the best things we can do as females. Obviously as we get older, we know that we do over time have to explore or not have to, I shouldn't say that should. Looking at exploring, being able to be able to lift those lower reps and those higher loads that are required for bone density things that we need as we get older. But we're not going to start there. Especially if you're new to training, you're not going to start at eight reps. You're going to start where I said at the beginning, you're going to start at 15 reps because you need to build the confidence and the motor skills, the neurological patterns to then be able to later on explore those lower rep ranges.
(25:07):
So I do love a linear approach for most people, especially in their first year of training. I think a linear approach does a great job and then things can get a little bit more fun after that first year of training and they know how to move their body. We are injury free. We've done a lot of structural balance work. So I'm a massive fan of general preparation phases, which is to prepare the body for the work later on. This is where high rep work is really great. We know that high rep work is great for the joints. We need to make sure that we are supporting all the little muscles and the ligaments and the tendons around those joints which actually have to handle a lot of load. I think they get missed because we just want to grow the quad, we just want to grow the glutes, we just want to grow the shoulders and the shoulder joints are very complex joint. So making sure that that's very healthy. I've gone off a little bit of a tangent there Michelle, I have to.
Michelle MacDonald (25:51):
No, no, no, it's great. This is great. I'm going to actually just pull in a little bit for the listeners. So we've got this idea that depending on the phase of your journey, if you're a beginner, what you'll be doing to grow muscle is probably going to look different than what you are going to be doing when you're more advanced, not advanced even in terms of like that you're this great lifter, although we hope that that would happen, but that you'll have to do more things to drive that hypertrophy. But as a beginner, you're probably looking at higher up work. It's probably going to be safer as well because you need to build up that foundational healthy movement patterns and your core, your gluteal muscles, making sure your feet, making sure your connected chains are integrated beautifully and probably your caloric consumption is going to hopefully change as you build that tissue.
(26:43):
You should be seeing calories ramp up. And then I love how you introduce this idea of really tracking your progress and I was going to ask you about that. I know a lot of people, I've got several athletes on a build and I always send them to those episodes that we did at ING Strength Club with the build because they're very, they're so confused. How will they know if they're building muscle, the feeling of building muscle recovery changes when you're in a caloric surplus, all of that. And so what are your top tips for tracking progress? Am I gaining muscle tissue over time? Do you have a favorite couple of things that you like athletes to look at?
Hattie Boydle (27:23):
Yeah, I mean the thing that I look at is what's growing more? Your waist or your glutes?
Michelle MacDonald (27:28):
I'm the same way. Okay, good.
Hattie Boydle (27:29):
So the thing I look at is obviously I always with a client, I always start them at a maintenance face. There's magic and maintenance and then when we find maintenance, we know that we can work above or below that. I love maintenance. I spend time working on finding my maintenance calories for my client. But even what's a maintenance volume right now that we're just kind of staying the same? This is not bad. This is good because guess what? When you know how much volume it is that you stay the same in terms of food and training, you can just tip it up like this. You don't just go, I think it's over here and I think it's down there, you know this data. And so from there I increase calories anywhere it's very individual from anywhere between five to 10% and we see what happens because you can't force feed muscle.
(28:26):
Yes, there's a saying, you've got to eat big to get big. Sure, but guess what you need to make sure you're doing before that but training intensity and you know how to move properly. You also need to know how to progressive overload. So we know a key function of hypertrophy is increasing the total volume load. Now I like to preference strength, that's me personally, but I give my clients options because they're not just like me. I can't just train them the way I train myself. So I tell my clients, okay, this is how I'd like you to progress. This is how we need to progress to ensure that we are growing new muscle tissue. The first is that training effort. So set one, guess what I want a hundred percent effort. I want you to work to that three to one rep shy of failure if not failure.
(29:16):
And my second set that I see from you, I shouldn't see more reps and I shouldn't see a drop in weight, but I am not going to be upset if I see a drop in rep because you generated so much fatigue from that first effort of set that I got a little bit more diminishing returns. And then third set, I got diminishing returns as well. Now the second week that you go and perform this exercise, you don't necessarily need to increase the load, especially if you fell under my rep that I gave you. I want you to keep that same load but you are going to beat the reps from before across all of your sets. And I just want you to think effort, don't be limited by the rep range, be guided by it in terms of what weight you think you're going to use.
(29:55):
And if you get to 15 reps and you've got more, guess what? You're going to give me more. And that's what I like to teach in that maintenance phase of my clients. I want to make sure that they know how to train with high intensity in that maintenance phase. We're not going to try and learn that when I'm increasing food. I'm going to know that you can do this here. And that's a really important thing because there's a very big misunderstanding. I don't dunno if you know this, Michelle Girls will go, okay, set one. Yeah, that was pretty hard. Yeah, set two, I'll increase the load a bit more. Oh yeah, set three. Three. I know, I see that. I'm like, that was just to warm up for, it's the one I'm going for. Guess what? You just did one hard set and I bet you did that across five exercises.
(30:32):
Instead of doing 15 hard sets, she did five hard sets. And guess why your body's not growing that. And this is the thing about training intensity. And the hard thing is, and my clients say this all the time, they're like, the thing is though, the hard I work now I've got to work harder next week. And I'm like, beautiful. Be proud of that effort. And so there's what's hard is because women are like, it was so hard, but how long did that hard last for two minutes. And guess what? When you accomplish that mountain, you felt great about it. You were like, oh my god, I just work so hard. And that's kind of what we need when it comes to building our bodies, that type of effort. And a great thing that you can do is film your sets. And guess what? That effort that felt, that rep that felt really slow or rep that felt hard and was burning that rep velocity didn't change.
(31:22):
So guess what? You had way more on the tank. Okay, so filming your exercises and going, what rep did my velocity of my speed involuntarily slow down? Because it's not till the reps actually start to slow down that we're actually doing something. But what people do is a rep slows down, it feels a little bit hard and they rack it and they're like, that was good. It's like you were so close. And so the invitation is to lean into the discomfort that set gave you and go, I can do it. We are built to do hard things. And like I said, the analogy of bodybuilding is we only grow against resistance. That's with life, that's in the gym. So that's something that I really work with my clients on before we ever even enter a build. Because if that piece is missing and you start to increase calories, guess what you're going to do?
(32:20):
You're just going to accumulate body fat. And that's going to be the thing when we look at your measurements that the glutes aren't really growing, but the waste might be and your experience of the build, you don't want to do it again. So again, I say to my clients, there's a misunderstanding of what happens in a build. You're not meant to get fat. Yes, some fat will accumulate over time. That's a part of the strategy. Okay? Trust me, it's a part of the strategy. But the goal is not to get fat. And so how we can minimize fat gain is one, finding the maintenance and working a little bit above that, making sure that we know training intensity, true intensity, and we know how to progressive overload. And we know the game of total volume load, which is your sets, times reps, times your weight lifted.
(33:06):
And as long as that is increasing each week and you are working within that proximity to failure, you are going to be giving enough stimulus to your body to change. Pair that with good sleep, minimum seven hours, pair that with rest days. Okay? And I'm not talking about active rest days, just have a fricking rest day. That is going to be the thing that grows your body because I know you love training, I love training too, but guess what? I know you love more results. So you're going to have to pull back, find this middle ground of enough stimulus, but enough recovery for your body to fully
Michelle MacDonald (33:39):
Change. Beautiful. I mean, you just hit so many markers and I know I'm going to be driving my clients to listen to this because the way you talk about this, it is just so easy to understand and know what it is that you have to do. And the misconceptions about what it takes to build muscle and whether you're in a build or not is so freaking bang on. I think one of the things that I'm often correcting with clients is that, nope, either their first two sets were warmup sets because they were able to add weight or there's no change in bar speed, right? So it's like that wrap, there's no change in speed from one to 10. You're still not there. So I know it feels hard, but it's going to feel harder when you actually tap into your true potential. We've covered a ton, so I'm going to wrap it up here because we're going to come back and slay so much more around mindset and body training and nutrition. I mean just going deeper into what it takes to build muscle tips, strategies to do it, things to avoid in all of that. So guys, come back to the next episode and we'll dive in.
(34:54):
Wow, that was a wealth of information. I hope you got as much out of that as I did. And let's recap. I'm going to give you my top three things that really stood out to me from this episode with hadie. Number one, training intensity over volume. And I got to agree with her. We see so many women overestimating the importance of high volume training and they really underestimate true intensity. So really doing those heavier lifts. And that also means spending time building up your foundation and doing the work of learning how to stabilize your body, create total muscular tension in order to do great heavy lifting. Had he emphasized that to the edge of failure with fewer sets and reps can be far more effective than simply doing more reps. Number two, the role of stability and foot strength. So this might be surprising to some of you.
(35:50):
She talked about how weak feet can impact glute development in overall movement efficiency. So if you're struggling to see results, it could be that your foundation literally might be the problem. And that's not bad news. It's something that's very fixable. Third thing, power of recovery. So growth doesn't happen in the gym guise, it happens in rest and recovery, right? That's when your muscle tissue gets remodeled. So prioritize your sleep, get proper nutrition, eat sufficient protein, make sure you're taking strategic rest days. They're just as important as the workouts themselves. Thanks for listening to Stronger By Design. Guys. If you enjoy this episode, please help us out. Leave a rating. Leave a review. That would be amazing. We want more people to discover the show. And if you found value in today's conversation, please share it with a friend who would benefit from Hattie's thoughts. See you next time.