When More Is Not Better

“You either need to start eating more, or cut back on your exercise.”

When I told this to one client who wanted to lose fat and build more muscle, she told me she hard a hard time wrapping her head around that idea. Isn’t the goal to push harder and eat less when you want to lose weight and build muscle?

More exercise is only better if we can meet the demands of more. If more is leaving us always sore, prone to injuries, in constant pain and feeling “heavy” all the time, irritable and anxious or unable to mark improvement in our workouts and in making body composition changes, we may be doing too much. Or, I could also share the perspective that if you may not be over training, but you may be under recovering.

When we consider the balance of movement and recovery, we have to remember that if we are exercising more, our recovery needs to be even more intentional and meet the demands of what we’re asking our body to do, otherwise, we send our body into a stress response that can prevent us from feeling our best and meeting fitness goals like weight loss and strength gains.

On average, most of us benefit best from training 3-5 days per week of moderate to intense workouts. You can certainly exercise 7 days per week but likely some of those days should be mobility focused or lower intensity.

If you’re participating in the BUILD program in the BBH Online Studio, you’ve already noticed that even though we schedule out 6 days of workouts for you each week, we want you to focus on meeting the 3 priority days workouts first! If you’re recovering well from those 3 workouts, you’re invited to complete our supplementary workouts. Always included are mobility focused workouts and recovery focused workouts. Every single workout shouldn’t crush you.

If you’re hitting these recommendations and not seeing results and notice your body is always exhausted, you likely need to prioritize recovery better to meet the demands of your moderate/intense workouts with these tips:

• Fuel Better: Often when I have clients track their nutrition to help troubleshoot why they aren’t seeing results from all of their hard work, I find a lack of nutrients and proper hydration. Not enough protein is a big culprit for a lot of women but also lack of energy from very low-carb diets with frequent exercising contribute to lack of results.

• Sleep Better: Ya’ll, I cannot stress the importance of this one for better recovery. Get on a schedule. Go to bed earlier. And try to keep the routine at least most weekends too.

• Consider your program: Stop over doing it! If you’re training 6-7 days per week and doing a heavy full body workout or HIIT workouts every single workout, you may want to consider varying your workouts to include recovery based workouts, lower intensity cardio and mobility focused workouts between heavy days to give your muscles more time to recover.

• Supplement: Many times, lack of important minerals from for example an insufficiently nutrient dense diet can lead to deficiencies that aid in better muscle tissue repair. Start with a basic multi-vitamin if you haven’t already!

If you feel like you need more guidance, it’s not too late to join the BUILD program on the BBH Online studio. As a member of the BBH Online studio, you can expect the availability of more personalized coaching just by reaching out to your BBH trainers any time you have a question.

What I’ve Learned About Correcting Movement, Balancing Hormones & Improving Your Fitness

I’ve always tried my best to commit to a growth mindset. In an industry where science is still being uncovered, we must accept that we don’t know it all. I’ve continued to evolve my training practices around the latest science but also around daily discoveries I make with each individual client. 

I want to share a few things I was confronted with this year that really challenged what I know about correcting movement, balancing hormones, and improving your fitness.

Is Corrective Exercise Overrated? 

I have been a self proclaimed “form police” type of trainer. I’ve always believed one of my biggest responsibilities as a trainer is to fix my clients muscle imbalances through corrective exercises. There’s a very big message in our industry claiming that we are broken and we need to be fixed or else we’ll get injured. Well, that’s not necessarily true and that messaging with clients only instills fear of movement. It can prevent many from even getting started on their fitness journey. In reality, we are not as fragile as we may believe.

I recently dove into numerous published studies around movement dysfunction and their relationship to injuries. Excuse me while I grossly summarize these findings for the sake of this article- I’ve cited sources below for reference if you are interested. 

In these prospective design approaches where we look at the outcome (injury) first to hypothesize a causation (why it happened), we see that joint dysfunctions was not the likely cause for injury. Clients rehabbing from injuries got stronger and became pain free over time simply by following a gym strength training program EVEN THOUGH they showed no change in the way they moved. So they got better, but still moved the same way.

So how does this change the way that I train? I still demand better form from clients, but I am less rigid about it. While we can still agree that major muscle imbalances can create problems over time, it appears that some degree of imbalance is totally safe. If the movement isn’t absolutely “perfect”. I’m less hung up on addressing it solely through corrective exercise before moving forward. I confidently lean more into the “where do you feel this exercise? Or “how does this exercise feel” question I always ask my clients. If the exercise is eliciting a muscle burn in the intended muscle group, we’re moving in the right direction. We can “correct” and strengthen at the same time. And what seems to be more important for becoming pain free, is to prioritize getting stronger using heavier load.

Sources: 

Swain et. al, 2020 PMID 31451200

Menezes Costa et. al, 2011 PMID 20655254

Alfonso et. al, 2021 PMID PMC C8067745

Pardos-Mainer et. al, 2021 PMID 33419178

Hormonal Health. 

For the past two years I’ve been on a more in depth journey to see if there was anything new I could discover around women and their hormonal health at every stage of life. I completed multiple online continuing education courses and soaked up information from experts in the field hoping to uncover some new truths.

The biggest truth remains unchanged, and that’s that our first line of defense for creating a more flexible metabolism and balancing our hormones to maintain a healthy weight, achieve weight loss, gain energy and to build muscle at any age, boils down to managing stress through diet and exercise (specifically strength training). 

That’s not to oversimplify the fact that our hormones fluctuate depending on our monthly cycles and reproductive age, but regardless of whatever stage we are in, a healthy diet and focus on strength training should be our first approach to encouraging a more flexible metabolism.

My mission in 2023 is to help women become more in sync with their own biofeedback so we can translate it into what their exercise and nutritional approach should look like. You may be eating too much, you may be eating too little. You may be over training, you may be under training. You may need more recovery. You may need to focus on a few lifestyle habits to combat insomnia and improve energy. In the new year, I’ll be focusing more on coming up with easy methods for interpreting our hormonal cues to be able to implement more effective training and nutritional strategies. 

Focus on PROTEIN and Improve Your Fitness.

I’ve wavered from not really paying much attention to protein (just paying attention to eating whole foods and keeping it healthy), to (after reading Proteinaholic) believing we get way too much protein and in the next year limiting animal protein to no more than one meal per day or less, and now swinging back around to the power of protein for faster recovery and more efficiently achieving body recomposition. 

Whether you choose to get your protein primarily from plants or from animal sources is your own choice but I do wholeheartedly believe that getting animal protein has incredible advantages. Animal protein is more bioavailable, it’s a lower total caloric whole food protein option, and holds unique micronutrients you can’t find as available in plants. 

If you have goals to lose weight more easily and build muscle for better metabolic health, then eating enough protein must be a priority for reaching those goals more easily. 

We’ve explored prescribing protein rich diets in our BBH Nutrition Corner for our online studio clients as well as encouraged clients in the studio to track protein and in every case where the client has been compliant consistently, we’ve witnessed them achieve body recomposition goals. They have lost fat AND built muscle at the same time which is typically no easy task! If you want to become MORE FIT in 2023, prioritize protein. Don’t know where to start? Well, I’d say reach out for a personalized evaluation. Or start by following our BUILD program featured for the next 3 months this year.

“The more you know. The more you realize you don’t know.” - Aristotle 

Keep on learning in 2023.

Cross Country (Dab)ble

“If you live off a man's compliments, you'll die from his criticism.” ― Cornelius Lindsey

I ran cross country my freshman and sophomore year of high school. My two older sisters, Abby and Tarah, were very good cross country athletes. I however, neither had the passion for it, nor the talent. 

I hated running in the NC summer heat and humidity. I hated how uncomfortable it felt to have my heart rate spike. Running was so boring and so unglamorous. It wasn’t like a sport where you make a big play and get crowd cheers and recognition. As the 4th child of six kids, it’s only natural to crave a little recognition.

My dad was an avid runner in his day and he wanted all of us kids to be great runners too. I don’t remember him forcing me to be on the team, it was just kind of expected. And because my two older sisters were so good (Abby got a college scholarship to run track and Tarah was always top 5), I felt the pressure to be just as good. 

I wasn’t good. And embarrassingly I didn’t even have honorable team ethics. Because I didn’t feel like my efforts mattered to the team, (if you didn’t place top 5, you weren’t earning the team any points), I did everything possible to try to get out of meets. Once, I faked an ankle injury mid race one rainy day so I didn’t have to keep running in the muck. I really hated not being good at something and when I wasn’t, I made excuses. This was true, too, for the 5 other sports I dabbled in through middle school and high school). I even feigned asthma to try to get out of being on the team but my dad just sent me to a physician to get an inhaler. I didn’t have asthma but I got an inhaler anyway. My race pace didn’t improve.

WHS Cross Country Team 1999-2000

One cross country practice as we were performing some core exercises, our Coach pointed me out to the rest of the team as an example of how to properly do the core exercises we were doing. I glowed from that recognition and as crazy as it may seem, it was in that moment that I recognized being strong as an accomplishment. I may not have been a good runner, but I was strong and had great form and that was pretty cool. Coach’s comment was a definitive compliment. Strong became something I wanted to explore more of and in my senior year of high school decided to enroll in a weight lifting class that would introduce me to strength training. 

I’ve struggled to love running my entire life and consider myself a seasonal runner- running only when the mood strikes or the weather is irresistible. I blame high school cross country for that. But, I’m grateful to have dabbled in the sport. It held that defining moment that led to my desire to build strength.