Pete Wright: Hello everybody, and welcome to Build for Health, the show that redefines strength, because muscle isn’t just for looks. I’m Pete Wright, and I’m here with Coach Srdjan Injac. So let me just tell you what happened this week. Srdjan says, “What are we going to talk about on the show?” And I said, “I got you, man. I got you.” And I put together three glorious, glorious topic ideas. And you know what he sends?
He sends one line. One line: “We’re going to talk about something else.” And that’s what we’re talking about today. So this is all you. This is important to you. You’ve got a bee in your bonnet, you’ve got a burr in your side, you’ve got a thorn in your claw.
Srdjan Injac: Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright: And we’ve got a little bit of a follow-up, right? Because we’re talking about being in the gym while woman.
Srdjan Injac: Yes. Yes, I ignored all your topics and went straight to mine.
Pete Wright: Okay. Ignored all of them. Yeah, that’s fine.
Srdjan Injac: Because I had a few questions from my clients, my female clients.
Pete Wright: That’s fine. I’ll have my day.
Srdjan Injac: And then I just thought about it, and I’m like, okay, let’s talk about this a little bit.
Pete Wright: We’re gonna do it. Yeah, I’m glad you did. So let’s go. What are the issues top of mind for your clients right now?
Srdjan Injac: Well, I see, for a long time, I mean for decades, fitness was marketed very differently to women than to men. Men were sold muscle, strength, heavy weights, and performance, while women were sold weight loss, being smaller, toning, flexibility, burning calories. So think about the way women’s fitness was portrayed through different areas: aerobics classes, step-up classes, treadmills, light dumbbells, yoga, and Pilates.
Pete Wright: Jazzercise, baby. Jane Fonda. Am I dating myself too heavily?
Srdjan Injac: But none of those things are bad. They’re all excellent forms of exercise. The problem was the message underneath. It was, “This is how women are supposed to exercise.” If you spend enough time on social media now, you can almost get the impression that men and women need a completely different rule book when they walk into the gym. But when we’re talking about the basic principles of building muscle and getting stronger, there’s actually a lot more overlap than people realize.
Women were essentially taught that the goal of exercise was just to burn as many calories as possible without building too much muscle. You don’t want to get too muscular. That’s why the cardio made sense, where they run for 45 minutes and these little watches and machines tell them, “You burned 400 calories.” While you lift weights for 45 minutes and there’s no big calorie number flashing back at you, like, “Oh my God, I burned so many calories.”
But if your entire definition of fitness is weight loss, cardio can appear to be the better workout, even though that completely misses many of the long-term benefits of resistance training. So they’re looking at exercise entirely by how many calories it burns during the workout. And exercise isn’t valuable only because of what happens during those 45 minutes. Resistance training gives the body a reason to maintain or build metabolically active muscle tissue. So it improves strength and physical capacity, and it can improve insulin sensitivity and glucose handling. And cardio provides adaptations that resistance training doesn’t fully replace, and vice versa.
So that’s why I wouldn’t tell women to stop doing cardio. They can still do cardio, Pilates, all that stuff. But I will tell them not to let the cardio and Pilates and all that replace the resistance and strength training.
Pete Wright: So what is the grand fear right now? It feels like we’re talking about this as if you’re still getting questions about, “Well, I don’t wanna bulk up. I wanna just lean, tone.” Is that still true? Are people still afraid of bulking up?
Srdjan Injac: Yeah. They’re still afraid. They’ll come to my office and they say what their goal is, and they’re like, “Well, I don’t wanna look like you.” I’m like, “Don’t worry, you’re not gonna look like me. It’s okay.”
Pete Wright: I feel like this podcast should be about how it’s really, really, much harder than you think to bulk up.
Srdjan Injac: It’s so much harder. I challenge you to try to bulk up.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: All right, intentionally try to bulk up and see if you can succeed. How long will it take you? You’re gonna give up, because you’ll be like, “This is not gonna happen.”
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: It’s that hard. People think if they just look at a heavy weight, or do one heavy set, “Oh my God, I’m blowing up. I’m gonna bulk up.”
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: I wish that’s how it worked.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: I wouldn’t struggle all these years to get to this point. So yeah, they’re afraid of heavy weights. They’re like, “I don’t wanna lift heavy because I don’t wanna get too big.” And I completely understand where the fear comes from, because women were always told that they should use the little pink dumbbells, do really high repetitions, focus on toning.
Pete Wright: Yeah. For generations.
Srdjan Injac: Yeah, always, always.
Pete Wright: Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: It’s even now. Heavy weights were supposed to be for men. And that’s not really how muscle works. First of all, building a significant amount of muscle, like we said, is hard. It takes consistent resistance training, progressive overload, adequate nutrition, and just a long time, a lot of time.
And anybody who’s seriously tried to build that muscle knows that it doesn’t accidentally happen because you all of a sudden start lifting heavy weights. Women generally have much lower testosterone levels than men, of course, which is one reason men typically have a greater capacity for building large amounts of muscle mass. And also, one thing: when they started saying “toning,” the word toning, because they use it constantly. They’re saying, “I want to tone up.”
Pete Wright: Yeah, what does that mean? What does that mean?
Srdjan Injac: So there’s not really… yeah. When someone tells me they want to look more toned, what they usually mean is they want more visible muscle definition, right?
Pete Wright: But not too much.
Srdjan Injac: Yeah, they don’t want to look muscular. “But I want to look toned.”
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: So they just want to look slim, just skinny. But if you look at what toned is, that generally comes from some combination of building or maintaining muscle mass and reducing enough body fat for that muscle to become more visible. So doing 30 repetitions with the tiny little weights doesn’t create a special kind of long, toned muscle.
That also doesn’t mean that women have to walk into the gym and start doing one-rep maxes and crazy lifting. Heavy is relative to the individual. A challenging set of six or eight repetitions can be heavy, and so can a challenging set of ten or twelve. So different rep ranges can build muscle as long as you’re providing enough resistance and effort. The important thing is that you’re actually challenging the muscle and progressing over time. Resistance training just helps women build and maintain their muscle, increases strength, and supports bone health as well.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: That becomes increasingly important with age, particularly around and after menopause. That’s when maintaining the muscle and bone becomes an even bigger priority. So instead of women being afraid that lifting weights is going to make them too muscular, I think we need to change the conversation. Muscle is something you’re going to want later in life. Strength is something you’re gonna want later in life. Bone density is something that you’re also gonna want. So you’re not just training for how you want to look this summer when you’re on vacation. You’re building physical capacity that you want to carry with you for decades.
Pete Wright: That’s funny. We were talking about social media last week, and it just hit me right now that so many people’s workout plans are conditioned around someone else’s content calendar, because they’re all around “get fit for summer,” and you’re talking about “get fit for eighty.”
Srdjan Injac: Yeah. Yeah. Think about ten years from now, twenty years, thirty years.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Do you want to be able to move around and be independent and be able to lift things and play with your grandchildren? Or are you going to depend on somebody else to take care of you? You won’t be able to move things, and you’re gonna constantly be asking for help. You’re building muscle not, like I said, for this summer.
Pete Wright: Yeah, yeah.
Srdjan Injac: It’s not a short-term thing. You gotta think about other things: your bone density, so many different things.
Pete Wright: But beautifully, if you focus on those things for your sunset days, if you focus on getting fit for your elderly days, you’re gonna have a fine summer.
Srdjan Injac: Yes.
Pete Wright: You’re doing the same good stuff. You’re just doing it with a different focus.
Srdjan Injac: Exactly. Everyone that comes in, I ask them about their history working out. Have they worked out before? Have they had a trainer before, and all that stuff? And they’re like, “Yeah, I’m working out. I go do yoga and Pilates and all that stuff.” And I’m like, that’s all great, but you need so much more. And I get it, they’re more comfortable in those—
Pete Wright: Environments.
Srdjan Injac: Environments, exactly.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: When they walk into the gym, there’s a lot of people, all this heavy stuff and machines and a lot of guys, and it looks kind of scary. But when you walk into the yoga and Pilates studio, there’s ten other women there and an instructor, and you’re more comfortable. She’s gonna kind of walk you through all the stuff that you need to do, and you feel—
Pete Wright: Yeah, yeah.
Srdjan Injac: —like you can do this, and you feel good, and that’s fine. You should work on that more: with strength, with the flexibility that’s gonna help you, that yoga, and then Pilates with your core. You’re supposed to have all that stuff. I would like to see more guys in those classes, actually.
Pete Wright: Yeah, right.
Srdjan Injac: Because they need that too.
Pete Wright: Flexibility and lengthening of those muscles, yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Definitely. If I had time, I would go to those classes as well.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: It would actually help me in my hypertrophy and my gaining muscle mass, because now I have a bigger range of motion.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Spend more time under tension when I’m lifting weight. So it would actually help me gain more muscle mass if I had more flexibility, more mobility.
Pete Wright: Fascinating. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: So I’m like, we should all be doing all of those. Not just women doing Pilates and yoga, and we’re just doing strength training.
We need to combine all of them. And there’s no different workout for men and women. It’s pretty much the same workout, the same exercises. Of course you’re gonna lift a little bit differently, and you’re not gonna be lifting that heavy. I mean, that doesn’t mean that men and women are physiologically identical. Obviously we’re not, with our difference in hormones, average muscle mass, body composition, strength, fat distribution, and other physiological characteristics. Women also have menstrual cycles, pregnancy, menopause. That can influence training and recovery at different points in life. And those things deserve some attention, of course. But that’s very different from saying women need an entirely different style of resistance training.
No, they confuse someone’s goals with their sex.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: It’s different. A woman might tell me when she comes in that she wants to develop her glutes and legs while keeping her upper body more athletic, and a man usually would tell me he wants a bigger chest, shoulders, arms. And of course I’m going to design those programs differently. But I’m changing the programs because their goals are different, not because muscle somehow follows completely different rules for men and women.
Pete Wright: So what are the considerations around hormonal cycles? And you brought up menopause, which, again, ages me that my circle of friends are dealing with menopause right now. And I’m curious how you train through those considerations, if any. Is it part of the program?
Srdjan Injac: Well, the conversation does change a little bit, because we aren’t talking about normal hormonal fluctuation throughout monthly cycles. During the transition through menopause, estrogen levels become more—
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: —variable and eventually decline significantly. And estrogen isn’t just a reproductive hormone. It has effects throughout the body, including bone, muscle, metabolism, and where women tend to store body fat. So one of the biggest concerns is bone. Estrogen helps protect bone tissue. So as that declines, bone loss can accelerate, and that’s one reason the risk of osteoporosis can increase after menopause. It’s something everyone should think about.
And this is where resistance training becomes incredibly important.
Pete Wright: So you want to do more resistance training?
Srdjan Injac: Yes, definitely, and you should. I have one client right now, she came to me and she said, “I want to do this before I hit menopause,” because she understands what can happen after—
Pete Wright: Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: —if she doesn’t have the muscle mass, when the hormones drop, all these risks she might have. So putting your muscles and bones under proper resistance gives the body a reason to maintain that strength and support the bone health that you have. So you’re not lifting weights to change how your body looks right now. You’re investing in your ability to stay strong and independent later, after menopause.
Muscle is another big priority, because of course we naturally tend to lose muscle as we age, and strength goes down as we get older. So if we’re not actively doing something to preserve them, combining age with the hormonal change around menopause, maintaining muscle becomes even more important. That’s why I don’t think this is the time for women to become afraid of lifting heavier weight. It’s actually the time when progressively challenging those muscles can become extremely valuable.
Body composition can change too. Some women notice that even though their body weight hasn’t changed dramatically, they’re now carrying more body fat around the abdominal area, or they’re losing some of the muscle they previously had. And I know that’s frustrating, because someone might say, “I’m eating the same way, I’m exercising the same way, doing the same program. So why is my body changing now?”
Part of the answer is that the biological environment has changed. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless, that there’s nothing you can do about it. There are things that you can do about it. That’s why it’s important to keep going to the gym, keep doing the resistance training. This is where I would put a lot of the emphasis: on that resistance training, adequate protein as well, staying active all the time, sleeping well, nutrition.
Cardio is still valuable for your cardiovascular health. But I wouldn’t want, when we’re going through menopause, to only do cardio while totally ignoring the resistance training. You want to give the body a reason to keep that muscle and strength.
Pete Wright: But where does pickleball fit in? Because it seems like everybody only wants to do pickleball.
Srdjan Injac: You can do that on your days off, recovery days.
Pete Wright: So you’re saying, just for the record, pickleball is not resistance training.
Srdjan Injac: Pickleball? No. We can put that into cardio training.
Pete Wright: Okay, okay.
Srdjan Injac: Yeah, cardio days.
Pete Wright: All right. It doesn’t matter if you’re putting the ball in the kitchen or you do a dink, whatever. I’ve learned some words. I don’t do pickleball.
Srdjan Injac: I have a lot of people. There is one, she does pickleball, and she has some problem with her shoulder and all that stuff. I’m like, “Maybe you should take a little break from the pickleball.”
Pete Wright: Yeah. From the pickleball.
Srdjan Injac: “Nope, nope, nope, not gonna happen.” And I’m like, all right. Yeah, she canceled on me many times because she has a pickleball tournament.
Pete Wright: For pickleball. The nerve. The nerve.
Srdjan Injac: I know. Oh my.
Pete Wright: Okay. All right. So we talked about menopause. Anything else hot on your list of things that are actually different? Because we talk about how so much is the same, and we should stop considering that women have to have a completely different workout program. But from your perspective, what else is different?
Srdjan Injac: I mean, there’s really not. It’s only those things, while they go into menopause and during their cycles.
Pete Wright: Anything? Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: It’s different. But you should still do the same type of workout. There’s no different type of workout. When you watch all these influencers on social media and they’re like, “This workout is for women,” I’m like, just don’t even look at it. Just scroll through that and don’t pay attention to it.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: The workout shouldn’t be for men or women specifically. It’s a workout. You don’t have to do a three-hundred-pound deadlift. Do the amount that’s challenging for you, but still do it, and do it heavy.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Make sure you lift heavy.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Everyone that comes through here, we have a consultation. I have another consultation tomorrow, and I’m sure I’m gonna get the same questions: “I don’t want to get too bulky,” and all this stuff. And I like the one I mentioned. She came in before she hits menopause, because she understood what’s gonna happen when it happens. So she wants to be ready for it. And I wish more women would do that. But they all feel okay now, they feel fine, and then after, when things start changing and they start noticing the change and feeling it, then they come in and they’re freaking out. Like, “Oh my God, help me with that.”
Pete Wright: Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: “I can’t do this. This is happening. It hasn’t happened before.” I’m like, I know. That was before, but it’s happening now.
Pete Wright: Yeah, this is not your fault, but it is yours.
Srdjan Injac: Exactly. We can still do something about it, but start earlier, before that.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Before you start having problems.
Pete Wright: If for no other reason than just to learn how the gym works when you still have the strength and flexibility to do it. It is going to be harder to learn to do the things you need to do safely as you find your strength and faculties decline.
Srdjan Injac: Yeah. I mean, you’re working on your habits now. You’re gonna start working on different things.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Like you said, learning, getting more comfortable with that environment. You can still go, and I have clients that still go and do Pilates and all that stuff, and their instructor was saying, “Oh, I can see the improvement. Your core is stronger. Now you can hold this position for a lot longer,” all this stuff. And she was like, “Yeah, I do a little strength training now.” That’s gonna help also the classes that you’re taking, like yoga and Pilates. It’s just gonna contribute to that. You have to do all of those things.
I have a lot of people that just do yoga, like, “I’ve been doing yoga for ten years, but I feel like I’m not strong enough.” I’m like, no, because it’s not gonna build that much strength.
Pete Wright: Right. That’s not what yoga’s for.
Srdjan Injac: Exactly.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: They’re flexible like crazy.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: And that’s great. But what’s the point of flexibility if you don’t have the strength to move through that range of motion? You can be all flexible, but you need the muscle mass, you need the strength, you need your bones.
Pete Wright: Yeah. All right. Awesome. Well, okay. You win this round. I’m glad we did this today.
Srdjan Injac: I know, me too. I hope more women would listen to this and not be afraid to actually go to the gym. Pick up the heavier weight.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Pick it up. Try it. Make sure you’re not comfortable with that weight.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Srdjan Injac: Every female client, if I see they’re comfortable, they’re like, “Uh oh, you’re gonna put more weight on, aren’t you?”
Pete Wright: Yeah, as soon as you’re comfortable.
Srdjan Injac: I’m like, “Yes, I am.”
Pete Wright: Right.
Srdjan Injac: I’m gonna put more weight on, yeah.
Pete Wright: This is for the people who remember: this is not for you. It’s hard to learn how to look like you are suffering enough that Srdjan won’t put more weight on. He’s just very good at reading your fakery. Trust me. Just lean in. It’s fine.
Srdjan Injac: People try that.
Pete Wright: Test yourself. Yeah, he’s too good.
Srdjan Injac: They try that. It doesn’t work.
Pete Wright: Yeah, it does not work.
Srdjan Injac: I’ve seen it before.
Pete Wright: I’ve seen it all.
Srdjan Injac: I go with the weight up, and they’re like, “You didn’t even ask me.” I know.
Pete Wright: I know, because you’re faking.
Srdjan Injac: I’m like, “I can tell.”
Pete Wright: Because you’re faking, and then we’re gonna fix that.
Srdjan Injac: I know.
Pete Wright: All right.
Srdjan Injac: Yeah.
Pete Wright: Hey, thank you, Srdjan. Thank you, everybody, for downloading and listening to this show. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. If you’ve got questions about training and recovery, or how to make strength work for you in your life, we want to hear them.
Srdjan Injac: [crosstalk]
Pete Wright: Swipe up in your show notes. Use that link to send in your questions for the coach.
And don’t forget to subscribe and share. This is how we grow stronger together. Thanks for listening to Build for Health, and we’ll see you next week in the gym.
