Show Notes

In this episode of the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast, we give a comprehensive introduction to resistance training. We explain what resistance training is and how you can start with simple exercises using body weight or small weights. We discuss the key benefits, including muscle growth, bone density improvement, and enhanced mobility. The episode covers various training tools like resistance bands, dumbbells, barbells, and machines, and emphasizes the importance of having a program and sticking to it. We also talk about essential concepts such as sets, reps, progressive overload, and goal-setting. Lastly, we offer some practical tips on staying consistent, proper form, and avoiding common pitfalls. Tune in to learn how to get started on your resistance training journey even if you’re a complete beginner!

Recommended Beginner Programs
Starting Strength
StrongLifts
P90X

Exercise Tracking Apps
Strong
Hevy

Full Podcast Transcript

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast. This is episode 18. I’m the Muscle Deficient Vegan here with the Protein Deficient Vegan. Do you wanna say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Hi.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So today we’re going to be doing an intro to resistance training. Resistance training is just when you work out your muscles with some sort of resistance against them. That can be something like weights or your body weight. It’s just something where your muscle has to push against some extra resistance.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you’re not just moving your arms in the air. You’re actually doing something with them that involves some sort of weight. It’s really good and beginner friendly because you can start where you are. In the case of bodyweight things, you can start with bodyweight. In the case of things where you want to load it with some kind of external weight, you can start with basically zero pounds, half a pound, and just move all the way up to hundreds of pounds over time.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So a couple of the benefits of resistance training. First of all, why do we even want to do this? The most common one that people are probably aware of is that it builds muscle, right? So it’ll build your muscle size, build your muscle strength overall. When people say they want to get toned a lot of times, what they really mean is they just want a little more muscle mass inside their body.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s a little more visible popping out. So resistance training is pretty much the only way to actually build the size and strength of the muscle.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And, you know, some people will get strong naturally from doing like farm work or heavy labor. Technically, that’s still resistance training. It’s just not quite as programmed. You’re just naturally working against resistance in your job all the time. So, obviously, that also builds muscle. Also it can improve your bone density.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Especially in the case of vegans it’s really important because vegans can naturally have lower bone mineral density just from our dietary differences with omnivores. I’ve actually saw a study recently where vegans who lift weights have a similar bone density to omnivores who lift weights.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But if you compare vegans who don’t lift weights to omnivores, vegans have a significantly lower bone density, and that can lead to fractures, osteoporosis, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s interesting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so especially if you’re vegan, you want to make sure you’re doing some kind of resistance training to make sure you’re kind of closing that gap on bone density.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I also heard that women are more susceptible to bone density issues.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, something to keep in mind. You try to, you know, you don’t need to do anything crazy. You don’t need to be a power lifter or anything.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Make sure you’re doing some kind of resistance training to keep your bones strong. Also it helps a lot with mobility. You’re trying to, you know, get up and down and get around. Maybe playing with kids or pets on the floor. Maybe you’re doing gardening, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Having sex.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you know, anything you need to be mobile for.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Um, so yeah, anyway, resistance training will help you a lot with your mobility and kind of keeping that as you go into old age. Because that’s one of the things that’s easy to lose if you, you know, if you don’t use it, you lose it with mobility. So, definitely something else to keep in mind and keep working on.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then just in general, having some muscular strength and combined with that mobility helps you just move yourself around more easily. So, if you’ve got to do things in daily life, you know, get up and down the stairs, get in and out of the car, move stuff around the house, whatever, just daily life things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: This helps you a lot with that because you’re a little stronger, you’re a little more used to those movements, you won’t injure yourself as easily. If you fall down, you can catch yourself a little more easily, things like that. So…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Changing out the water jug at work.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that’s a big one, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes. Ever since I’ve been able to do that, my confidence is through the roof. Like I don’t have to rely on a man to change out the water jug when I want water at work.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And everybody just looks at you in awe.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. They’re like, wow, a girl can lift a whole water jug. I mean, shocking.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So, you know, it’s definitely good for legendary renown in situations like that as well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think they’re only like 40 something pounds, but girls hardly ever change them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You don’t tell them that. You say, I think that’s like a couple hundred pounds.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think it is, yeah. Just do the math. The density of water is like 79, you know pounds per gallon. Everyone knows that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Everybody knows.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Everybody knows.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Those are some of the benefits. So, uh, resistance training, again, like I said, is when you use resistance against your muscles.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Some of the ways that you can actually do that, are with things like resistance bands, which if you’re not familiar with that is basically just a really big rubber band, and they come in different strengths.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So they’re a lot harder to stretch. So it’s like heavier weight is basically what’s replicating there and you just kind of you know tie them to a pole or over a door frame or something and then you can just work against the resistance bands as a really easy portable. They take up no space.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: They’re no weight. You can put them in your pocket really and carry them around.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Am I the only one that’s super paranoid about those? I am so you Freaked out when I use those the whole time. I’m like, it’s gonna smack me in the face. It’s gonna, it’s gonna snap in half and it’s gonna hit me in the face and I’m gonna die.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I get a little nervous doing things when I’m pulling it towards my face and I have had a couple snap. Uh, none of it turned out horribly. I think a lot of the energy when it snaps goes away pretty quick, but it does feel pretty bad. You can close your eyes. I don’t know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. I’m like stressed the whole time I use those things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And that’s one reason to get better quality ones. They will all eventually wear out. And a lot of the times you’ll see like they’re really worn before they actually snap.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. They start getting like pale colored.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah just like a stretched balloon or something. Um, but yeah, I mean, they do occasionally snap.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I like the knit ones. Those are mostly for like booty bands or whatever they call them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I haven’t even seen those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah. We have some downstairs.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I saw you use those. That is interesting. I’ve never used one like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I like those because like those aren’t gonna snap.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: How the hell are those gonna snap?

Protein Deficient Vegan: But yeah, like the rubber ones. Those kind of stress me out.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: The tube ones don’t worry me as much. It’s mostly like the really like thin rubber ones.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they have the rubber ones which you just kind of usually hold and wrap around your hand. They have the tube ones which you just mentioned which actually have handles attached to the ends.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. All good options. Sometimes they might snap. Usually not a big deal but I could see it snapping it in just the wrong place.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So resistance bands, really easy, lightweight option. Once you get into a program, you’re not gonna be able to do all the movements you want with resistance bands and

Protein Deficient Vegan: double, triple them up.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s true. Yeah. You can do two at a time, but it gets a little hard, you know, and a resistance band. Another thing about a resistance band is it changes like the weight as you pull it. So if you’re not staying the same distance away, every time the weights a little different.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. It’s also, Pretty hard to track progress because like depending on like where you hold it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Like if you have it more stretched out it’s obviously going to be harder to pull and then like what does medium mean? Heavy mean? Like I don’t know what those mean.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s like really hard. I, we have some that have like pounds on them. Yeah. But like specifically what does that mean? That’s what I’ve never known.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’m like how far away do I need to stand for it to equate to 50 pounds? Like who the hell knows?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah and I’m sure there are ways to look that up but yeah it’s really hard to. Really keep track of it during a program, but they are an option and they’re good if you’re in a pinch or if you wanted to travel and they’re also really good for warm ups, which is a lot of people use them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so you just tie it to something and kind of hold it and do some arm warm ups or something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, those are good for like physical therapy, but like you said travel. Like in a hotel room, that’d be a good option.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, if you’ve ever been to a physical therapist, they’ll use these a lot. Yeah, so that’s one option.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The other ones that you’re probably more familiar with, dumbbells and barbells. So dumbbells are the ones you hold in your hands, right? You do like curls with or whatever. You can do anything with them, but that’s kind of what you think of. Yeah. And then a barbell is the big round plates on a long bar.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That you see people using for like bench press and squat and things like that. Dumbbells are good because they’re a little more portable, but they’re not quite as loadable. A lot of dumbbells, even the good ones only go up to like a hundred pounds and there’s a couple of specialty ones that go a little higher than that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But barbells, you can pretty easily load up to nearly a thousand pounds, depending on the barbell and weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, but like, who’s really using a dumbbell for more than a hundred pounds, for the most part?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s true, but a lot of people do like to do dumbbell bench press, but then it gets like, if it’s heavier than a hundred pounds, it’s hard to get into place.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for sure.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But I’m just saying, if you’re in a position where your bench press is like four hundred pounds, dumbbells…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you should be using a barbell anyway.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think the best investment I’ve ever made is the adjustable dumbbells. Those are so great.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They take up so much less space than having like all the dumbbell sets from like five to fifty pounds.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Absolutely, and if you get all the dumbbell sets, you’ve got to have all the room for them and they’re also pretty expensive. Like the adjustable dumbbells are expensive as a set. Yeah, but they’re not really as expensive as having an entire set of normal dumbbells.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And there’s just the one, you know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And you can move between them really easily.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, there’s several different types out there. They’ve all got their pros and cons. But in general, I’d say if you were trying to do a home gym, adjustable dumbbells is probably one of the first major purchases I would make, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: For sure.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which one is your favorite that you’ve used?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I really like the power blocks, but they’re a little slow to switch around. And I’ve got a couple of complaints about the way it gets caught in your shorts. Yeah. I liked, I think I liked the Bowflex better as far as the form factor, but the Bowflex also had the issue where they were the same length no matter what weight it was and they’re a little awkward.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they’re really bulky.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’ve seen some other ones I think I would like more but I can’t really justify buying them when i’ve already got a set that works really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I think the nuobells look really nice. It kind of looks like a normal dumbbell most of the time, but the power blocks have been fine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s just I have minor complaints.

Protein Deficient Vegan: My issue with most of them is that the hand like the handles are way too big for like female hands or like I think I just have naturally like smaller grip. Yeah. So the only ones that like I can actually hold on to without like basically dropping when I go up in weight are the uh, the power block, the small ones.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They have like a small set that goes like 32.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which doesn’t do everything, but like I can at least hold it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah. It’s got a better grip and they come with a contoured grip and on mine, I swapped the contour grip out just for a knurled steel grip. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Which is a little better for the heavier weights. So, they were often good options.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I had so much trouble holding those Bowflex ones because the grip on that is like massive.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I didn’t like the grip on the Bowflex also because not only was the grip huge, but it would also give under heavier weight.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So if I was doing heavy rows or something, I’d be able to like squeeze it, which felt really weird. Yeah. I just prefer steel grips when they’re an option. Yeah, adjustable dumbbells, uh, awesome. And then barbells obviously are great for lots of heavy exercises like squats, bench, stuff like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Ooh, and we got rainbow plates.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Yeah, we had a deal I think last Black Friday and got some, I think they were calling them spectrum, but basically it’s like a rainbow abstract weight plates to load on the barbell. They look pretty cool in person.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They’re so pretty. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I think I made a joke on Instagram about like if you want to spend a lot of money on weights at least get the pretty ones to appease your significant other.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It seemed to work pretty well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes, you can justify anything if it’s pretty.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, the gym floor is pretty. Yeah, colorful benches and stuff. You walk down there it’s a explosion of color and you don’t even think about all that’s

Protein Deficient Vegan: right. I see no price tags

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The next option is, like, a machine. This is usually gonna be at the gym, right? Like, you might be able to get one for your home gym, but they’re really expensive. Mm, tonal. Yeah, Tonal is actually pretty good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Tonal is pretty cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so, um, loaded machines, usually the machines at the gym are for one specific movement, so it’s like a bench press machine, or a shoulder press machine.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, or like a tricep.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Machine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And uh, cable machines count on this, a Tonal is a cable machine, which is just basically two cables, you can swap out a bunch of different attachments for the handle pieces, and you can do a whole lot of different exercises with a cable machine, so those are really good too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I like the tonal for upper body stuff. I think it’s a little challenging for anything lower body.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So it’s like pretty hard to do much lower body with the tonal.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, mainly because lower body is big muscles and you need big weight. But also because it’s really awkward to do this.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, the setup’s just awkward. Like I definitely prefer like gym machines.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for sure. I agree. Also another one is medicine balls. People use medicine balls a lot for functional movement type stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: A lot of ab workouts.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yep. A lot of ab stuff. You can do, like when you’re throwing it at a wall, or you can just do crunches while you’re holding a medicine ball.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: A lot of little stuff like that. But that’s a way to get extra weight. Yeah, um, you can also use kettlebells which are kind of like dumbbells or just little balls of usually iron or something with a handle on it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You know what I’ve been seeing is crazy is they’re they’re selling these like very beautiful looking kettlebells for women.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That are like womanly colored and they’re fucking super expensive.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I think that comes from CrossFit. They use kettlebells.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’m like why would I pay $50 for an eight pound purple kettlebell? In what world would I do that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You say that, but we have those rainbow plates. We were just talking about.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t think about those!

Protein Deficient Vegan: But yeah, but that the kettlebells crazy like at least the rainbow plates are like heavy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s like what?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and you know what else i’ve seen targeted at women is like they have like these really pretty like decorative like dumbbell type things that are only like five or ten pounds and they’re super overpriced. Yeah, just because they’re like a pretty color and they look like art.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. I I think it’s crazy. I don’t know. Have you seen these?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I haven’t seen those but I believe it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also, you can do weighted vest, ankle weights, arm weights, a lot of different things like that. And then, of course, just, if you’re not talking about extra weights, uh, just body weight is a, a reasonable way to do resistance training. Um, you don’t actually need any weights. You just do movements in a way that use your body weight to add that load to the muscle.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, like lunges and squats and..

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you can definitely get a pretty good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Push ups are a really common example. Pull ups, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: True.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And so also with the resistance training, there’s a little bit of terminology that you might read when you start looking into this. So we’re just going to go over a couple of the kind of vocab or introduction to resistance training.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So a big one is sets and we’ll do them in combination. There’s sets and reps. Reps means repetitions. So if you think like you grab a dumbbell to do curls, you do 10 curls. Like you just move your arm up and down 10 times, that’s 10 repetitions. And so if you’re doing 10 repetitions, you might want to take a break and then do another 10 repetitions.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And that second time you do it is called the second set. So typically, if you’re following a program, it’s going to be, like, do 3 sets of 10 repetitions. Yeah. So you’re going to see sets and reps extremely commonly if you’re looking at any kind of resistance training program.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and sometimes you’ll see, like, 10 times three.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’ll be like 10x. Yeah. And that means 10 reps for three sets. You also see rest periods. So what that means is how much time you just recover in between your sets. So if you see 10 times three, you do 10 reps, three sets, and then typical is like a minute to two minutes between sets.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you just rest for 60 seconds after you do your 10 curls and then you start your other 10 curls.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then, muscle groups is something you’ll see, and you might see your muscle group as like arms, and that could mean bicep and tricep and shoulders, or sometimes shoulders aren’t included.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You might see a muscle group that’s like your back, and that’s a lot of different things. If your muscle group is legs, that might be like quads and hamstrings and calves and all that together. So typically the muscles are grouped together in that way, just so you can visualize because ideally you want to do exercises for every part of your body, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That has major muscles. So it’s just so you can say, okay, I’ve covered my legs and my arms and my back and my chest, and like my core, abs, whatever. So it’s just so you can say, okay, I’ve checked all the boxes on all these different muscle groups, so I know that I’ve hit in some way all the major muscles in my body.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you’ll see that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then another big one for resistance training is something called progressive overload. So this sounds a little technical, but really all it means is try to do a little more next time than you did this time. And that’s how you can really build the strength and the size in your muscles.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So it can be, you did more weight than last time, or you did more reps than last time, or you did more sets, or sometimes it’s even like, I didn’t rest as long between sets. So there are a lot of ways to progress in this way. The standard one is just you add a little weight. So, if you squat, let’s say you do squats twice a week, as an example.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: As a beginner, you might just try adding 5 pounds each day. Assuming you hit your goal, right? If your goal is like 10 reps for 3 sets. If you got that on day one, then on day three or day five or whatever, when you go to do your squats again, you might just try that same thing with an extra five pounds on the barbell.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And it’s a little different for like smaller muscles.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So like if you’re doing bicep curls or something and you’re doing like three sets of 10 reps, maybe like on the next day you try to do 11 reps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yep, exactly. And you can also do sets. So if you’ve got 10 reps, three sets, next time.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Like you were saying with the small muscles, you can’t really add weight very quickly. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So it’s really hard to even add reps. Some of them are really slow too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they are slow, but it also, it’ll work for a long time. Especially as a beginner, you can do this, basically just in a straight way without having to think too much about how to handle special situations for probably a year, maybe even more in a lot of cases.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you can just, keep adding weight and trying to hit it. And if you don’t quite hit it, just try the same thing again next week. And you’ll probably hit it. Like as a beginner, your muscles are going to get stronger really fast. So you’ll be able to progress with, especially the bigger muscles, um, for a very long time right off the bat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So that’s kind of the main way to progress your strength and muscle size.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And by bigger muscles, you mean like legs and back kind of, right. Yeah. Like arms are a little harder to do.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Shoulders and arms are a little more tricky. You’ll still be able to progress the same way for a long time. It’s just going to be much smaller increments.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Like you’re going to be adding, like you said, maybe one rep, uh, two reps, something like that. And then you’ll probably go through a couple of weeks adding a couple of reps and then eventually be able to move up in weight and you kind of start the process over. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But you’re never going to move up in weight like you would with squats, like five pounds.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s like oh, you added two pounds after a month.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. You’re curling 200 pounds by the end of the year. No, I don’t, that’s not going to happen. But yeah, the same theory works, but it’s going to apply a little differently to every muscle group. And then eventually, once you kind of hit a part in that progression where you’re, uh, we call it a plateau where basically you’ve been trying to increase for a couple of weeks and you’re not quite increasing, you’ll have to get into some strategies around what we call deloading, which is like you lower the weight a little bit below what you’ve been working on to give your muscle a little time to recover.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then you eventually work back up and you’ll break through what you were stuck on before.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and can’t you do things with like shifting how many reps you’re doing? Like for instance, if you’re targeting like 10 to 12 reps. Can’t you like go down to like 8 to 10 reps for a little bit to try to like break through that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and you can even, you could even maybe change the weight. Go down to 8 to 10 reps with maybe even a little bit heavier weight. Yeah, heavier weight. Yeah, there’s a lot of different ways to handle it and you’ll respond a little differently to each one. But you know, you won’t really have to worry about that until you start hitting some hard plateaus at least several months into a beginner program.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool. So that’s the basic idea for resistance training.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So now we can talk about how do you know what you’re actually trying to achieve when you’re doing a resistance training program? So we want to talk about setting an actual goal. So there’s a couple of different goals you can have with resistance training.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: One, if you’re thinking about like a bodybuilder, it would be muscle size, which technically is referred to as hypertrophy, but that really just means like how big physically the muscle looks. Right, so that’s some people’s goal. That tends to be your goal if you want like the visual, you know, aspect of muscles.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right, but you could also focus on muscle strength, which, it is related to muscle size, but if you focus on one or the other, you’re going to get that result a little more. So you can actually grow quite a bit of strength without growing the actual size to an extreme degree.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And these goals are more driven around how many reps you’re doing, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. More or less. Yeah. And you know, rest periods and the actual movement exercises you’re doing and stuff like that. But yeah, typically you’re doing less reps if you’re focusing on strength and more reps and more volume in general overall, if you’re doing muscle size.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Less reps, higher weight if you’re focused on strength and more reps, lower weight, if you’re focused on. Yeah. Visually.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah, for strength you’re really focusing on like doing your one rep max a lot. And things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So like power lifting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Powerlifting. You think of strength as powerlifting and then muscle size as, bodybuilding typically. Yeah. And also your goal, if you’re not really focused on either one of those in specific, your goal could just be like fat loss, in which case it doesn’t necessarily matter like really which program you follow as long as you do something consistently and you make progress overall.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then you could just be, you know, I don’t really have a particular goal.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I just want to be in the gym working out, working on my general fitness. Yeah. So that’s another one where it doesn’t really matter what program you choose to do. And you can even rotate programs quite a bit. You just want to be in there, you know, lifting, making progress in some way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I guess here’s maybe a good time to mention like, when do you know if you should move up in reps or like change your weight?

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s when like. You physically can’t lift anymore. Like you’re to a point of failure or like maybe a rep beneath that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So for instance, if you’re trying to look lean or whatever, you wouldn’t want to just use five pound dumbbells and do infinite curls. It’s going to take a ton of time to get the results that you want.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And you would have to do hundreds of reps, right? So, go to 15 pounds and do 12 or if you can’t do 12 if you can do 10 and then that’s when you fail, you literally can’t lift that up anymore. Yeah. That’s when you know you’re done.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah, you know, there’s a couple of technical things like your rate of perceived exertion and how many reps you think you could have done after you failed and we call it reps in reserve.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But in general, you just want to try to keep the intensity up, is probably the best way to encapsulate that. So like you want to, do your set and make sure your set was hard and you were near the point where your form is still good. Yeah, definitely always want to make sure the form is still good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, in some exercises you can do point of failure, like bicep curls, like you can, if you can’t lift anymore, like obviously you’ve reached failure, but like, obviously you wouldn’t want to do point of failure on like a chest press where you don’t have someone that’s like a bench press where someone’s not really like

Muscle Deficient Vegan: going to be

Protein Deficient Vegan: able to catch that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like most times you wouldn’t want to go to like I’m completely failed.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And also just on that point a little bit, they’ve seen in some studies that there’s not a big difference between literally physically failing and being one or two reps short of failure.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So if you’re on a risky exercise, like you were saying, like a bench press, you definitely shouldn’t push it. If it’s going to be a risk to your safety. Safety first, you know?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And I think like once you do it a few times, you can kind of figure out like, what does that feel like when your, your arms are like about to give out.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like you get the hang of like what that ends up feeling like.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. It takes a long time to understand. And a lot of the time people underestimate themselves. So they think they’re going to fail way before they actually fail. So they’ve done studies where it’s like, okay, tell us

Muscle Deficient Vegan: how many reps you feel like you were going to be able to do and then they like have you in a safe environment they just say go literally until you physically cannot do anymore and people end up doing a lot more reps than they think they can, if you’re actually pushed to a physical failure. So you get used to how that feels over time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah and honestly gym machines are like a really good one for the most part to go to failure because you’re usually in a safe position and you’re just pushing away from whatever that position is so like when you fail you just end up you know what I mean.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Absolutely. Yeah, and so while it’s important to keep these goals in mind, just so you kind of know where you’re going and where you know where your program might evolve into, um, if you’re just starting out as a beginner, it doesn’t necessarily matter which goal you start with because you’re going to get almost the same progress out of either of them because your muscles as an actual beginner are going to respond in both size and strength pretty aggressively.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So there’s no set timeline for when am I not a beginner. But somewhere around the year to two year mark of consistent exercise, you’ll probably be in more of what they call an intermediate phase, which is where you would start tailoring your training probably towards like powerlifting or bodybuilding or some other specific goal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So like, how does that work? Say like five years ago. I lifted weights for two years and then I haven’t lifted for four years. Am I now a beginner again?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You would be a beginner again at the beginning, um, but they’ve seen that your muscles kind of have, you know, a quote unquote memory. Yeah. So you’re going to regain, especially if it was only five years ago, you’re going to regain a lot of that a lot faster than you did the first time around.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So let’s say you were in the quote unquote beginner phase, right? For two years before you probably only be in that beginner phase for like eight months. Okay. So your muscles will, like, re adapt, because they still have a lot of extra cells and stuff you built in there before. So it’ll be a lot quicker progress, but yeah, I mean, if you’re untrained, you’re untrained, so you will technically be in that beginner stage again.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So next, just some general tips and kind of pitfalls to avoid when you’re doing resistance training. Number one is you want to make sure you’re doing some kind of warmups, especially as you get into your late twenties, early thirties and definitely beyond that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So like warm up with cardio and then maybe some dynamic stretching.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. This is good for injury prevention because if you just go in cold and start doing, you know, heavy squats or something, you’re probably going to have a bad time. So you want to be really careful with that. There’s a quote I heard. It was, if you don’t have time to warm up, you don’t have time to work out. Which is a kind of a good mindset to keep in mind because a lot of people will go in and be like, Oh, you know, I’m in a rush.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I don’t have time to really do these warm up sets today, but I want to get my workout in. I mean, statistics is going to catch up to you eventually and you’re going to have a bad day. And that’s going to put you several weeks behind on your workouts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Especially with back stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I’m always so scared about back stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you gotta be careful. So, but it’s pretty easy to like, you know, pull a muscle or maybe even tear a muscle. Yeah. Even something like a bench press is really common. You gotta be really careful with one.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Move the wrong way and now you’re out for like, several weeks.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so you can do like a general warm up with something like an elliptical or a rower, maybe just 5 to 10 minutes when you first get in the gym to literally to warm up your body, get your temperature up a little bit.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Your muscles are a little more pliable and things like that. But then also, as you go to do your more major exercises, you would just do lighter sets at the beginning, to warm yourself up for that particular exercise. So again, if you’re going to do, like, squats, in your typical squat, is like, let’s just say it’s a hundred pounds, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I always actually start squats with a warmup set of just the empty bar. Yeah. Uh, you know, Jay Cutler is a popular bodybuilder. He calls them like feel sets. So you just kind of get the empty bar and just like do a couple reps with it to make sure your body, like nothing is like hurting in a weird way with just the movement itself.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then there’s a bunch of different protocols for like warm up percentage wise, but you can kind of just feel it out. Like, I’m going to throw 20 pounds on the bar and try a couple more sets, make sure it still feels good. And then just kind of build up, maybe just not like nothing extensive, just like a little warm up set or two before you do your actual, what we call working sets, which is actually the weight you were planning to lift that day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And I think you don’t really need to do that with like everything. No. This is more of like large, heavy lifts. Like you wouldn’t be like tricep pushdowns or anything like that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I mean, maybe, if you’re, it depends on how heavy your stuff is. Like if you’re to a tricep pushdown that’s like a hundred pounds.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Maybe you do a fifty pound one first or something. But you can kind of play by ear. You can kind of feel the stuff where you’re like, Ooh, I wish I would have warmed up a little bit before I did that. And you kind of just add it to your routine going forward.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But yeah, curls are something you probably wouldn’t really do any warm ups unless you were doing crazy heavy curls.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But definitely always with something like we call, you know, compound exercises. Right. Big squats, bench press, stuff like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Multiple muscle groups involved.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, exactly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Make sure you don’t have something slightly tweaked before you uh, squat 400 pounds.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you don’t want to be in the bottom of the squat and then realize, oh my calf is cramping or my back is tweaked or whatever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So yeah, it’s always a good idea just do, a couple of warm up sets for the bigger exercises. You also always want to try to prioritize your form, especially as a beginner, and form is just like the, the way that you do the movement. Make sure you’re doing it properly, your body’s in the right position, you’re doing it in a controlled way, you’re not just blasting through it, you know, bouncing off your chest on a bench press or bouncing out of the bottom of a squat, something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which is where tempo fits into, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah, tempo is good, which is where you have a, you know, a set number of seconds that you’re doing each part of the movement. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I actually really like tempo because it allows me to lift less and feel the same.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: In general doing lighter weight with good form is way preferable to doing a heavier weight with bad form because you’re more likely to get hurt. And you can learn form for the different movements, obviously you can get a coach or a personal trainer or something, but you can also learn a lot on your own.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can watch form videos on YouTube, uh, read some books. There are some books, um, like The Starting Strength has a barbell book that talks about some barbell movements and stuff like that, but there’s books, all kinds of bodybuilding books that’ll show you how to do movements. And typically, a good way is just, if you’re watching videos, try to pick out a couple of what are called cues, which is just kind of a mental reminder for each exercise, like in squat, there’s a couple cues like, you know, keep your chest up, and there’s one I always liked in squat, which is like, pretend there’s a string attached to your butt, and that’s what you’re getting pulled up by, just to make sure your hip and your shoulders and kind of stuff are going up at the same pace.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So each, um, exercise will have a couple of cues like that, that are good to keep in mind. As you go through the movement, and especially as a beginner, I’d say the most important thing if you’re learning a new movement is just to focus on form really, you know, heavily for probably the first couple months that you’re doing a new movement.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Because you don’t want to get to a point where you’re progressing in the weight but you’ve been doing it with sloppy form and now you end up doing like a really heavy bench press with crappy form and it’s going to be really hard to go back and untrain that and you’re going to give yourself a higher chance of injury.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can also, if you’re working on this, you know, take your phone and record yourself doing the lifts. And then you can just review the video and you can see for yourself, like, Oh, I’m a little uneven when I do this exercise, or like my back’s bent a lot more than I thought it was. Some stuff like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But, if you’re taking a video in a gym, ask other people around you if they’re okay with it. Cause like, people that come in with tripods and like, you feel like you’re on their video the whole time. I hate those people.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and don’t be that that person that’s like gets mad at somebody for walking across your camera screen If you’re in a public gym, like it’s gonna happen like just…

Protein Deficient Vegan: do what you’re in a public gym.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So anyway, yeah, there’s definitely some etiquette if you’re in a public gym for the camera thing. Just don’t be a dick in general. Yeah. Uh, there’s also some apps. I think one’s called on form. I can’t remember what the other one is called, but it’ll basically like draw angle lines on your videos while you’re doing your lift.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you can see the angle of your back, like for a squat or something like that. So you can kind of make sure it’s consistent and in the right place. So you don’t really need to do something that technical, but if you’re, you know, kind of nerdy and you’re, you like to see stuff like that, there are options for that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool, and then even if you think you know form, it’s probably a good idea to take a video maybe every six months just to make sure you haven’t fallen into some bad habits or something like that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The next tip is just don’t do too much too soon, especially if you’re going into a new program or, uh, just maybe some new exercises individually.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, you really want to start out again, focus on the form, just start out with light weights. There’s some stuff like if I start out a new movement for the first week or two, I might even start with like the lowest weight I can and then maybe progress in the middle with the workout or whatever. Like just to make sure like, okay, I know how to do this movement.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’m comfortable with it. Now I’ll start adding the weights. Like I’m not losing a lot of time if I just want to make sure I’m perfecting it. Always start lighter than you think you need to start. You can always increase it later. Again, we really want to try to avoid injury, so anything that can keep us from tweaking a muscle or something and being out of the gym entirely for a couple months is what we want to aim for.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So just start a little lighter than you think, and then if you come and you say, oh, that workout was way too easy, you can increase it pretty substantially next time, but if you’re just starting out, just start lighter than you think you should.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then as far as things like outside of the actual gym while you’re doing your workout, you want to keep your fundamentals solid. So those are things like your sleep, your, uh, just general rest, um, outside of sleep. So make sure you’re not doing a bunch of workouts and then going gardening and then going to play in your sport and then going to your physical labor job and just going in a continuous cycle of that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Like you need to make sure you’re, you know, resting appropriately. Make sure that your nutrition is on point. You don’t want to put all that work in, in the gym and then, you know, you’re not getting in your protein or you’re not eating the appropriate number of calories and all your hard physical work isn’t optimized or it goes completely to waste because your diet’s all jacked up.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You’re not going to get very far if you’re not focused on like the sleep and the nutrition and things like that. The muscle actually responds and grows on the rest days.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, that’s interesting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, you do your work in the gym, but then, you know, if your sleep’s jacked up and your nutrition’s jacked up, like your muscle is not going to be able to recover the way it’s supposed to and grow.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, I saw somebody actually, they call their rest days muscle growing days. Just so they remember like these days are important too, even if I’m not in the gym. Hmm. So, I think that was pretty cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then lastly, you want to focus on your consistency and also your tracking to make sure you’re being consistent.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The best routine is the one you will stick to, people say a lot. There are a lot of things that might be like the perfect routine for the goal you want, but if it’s something you hate or something you’re not going to do on a regular basis, that’s not going to be a very good routine for you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like I fucking hate squats.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like my form, I cannot get my form right. And I no longer care. I just am not a squat person. I don’t do squats.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And to the point where like, if you start a new program and you see squats are in it, you’re just not going to do the whole workout.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah. It like completely demoralizes me when I see squats.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like it just makes me mad.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And I’ve got some stuff like that too, for sure. Uh, like I kind of hate split squats. I’ve been doing them a lot more lately, but that’s one of those things where it’s like, oh man, I’m going to dread this workout. Yeah. As long as there’s only maybe one of those things in there, I’m okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But yeah, there are definitely things where it’s like, okay, I’m doing this program. I don’t really like this program. So I’m gonna like skip this day and skip that day. And eventually you’re skipping a bunch of days, which screws up all your progress.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And there are enough different like exercises, that like, I can find replacements for squats.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Even if it takes two exercises, I’d prefer that over doing squats. And I feel like that about like, I don’t know, like, uh, oh bent over rows. Yeah. I just hate those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I love those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I hate those so much, but there’s like other ways to do rows. Yeah. Like there are infinite ways to do rows that do the same exact thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And I’d rather just do that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Then like suffer through a thing I hate.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. And there’s no reason not to swap it out. I mean, your muscle, your, your back doesn’t really know if you’re doing a bent over row or a cable row or whatever to, you know, to a certain degree. So definitely just make a program or use a program that you really like.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: If you hate some stuff in it, swap it out. And just, number one priority, pick something you’re actually going to stick to. Because that’s the most important thing for your results.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Your results require consistency with resistance training. So, even if you’re doing something you like, if you’re only doing it once a week, you’re, might not progress at all, you’re going to have really slow progress.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You know, to a certain degree, the more volume during the week, the more results you get. So, if you’re not consistent with your workouts, your results are really going to suffer. That’s just how the muscles work and how they respond.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And you’re going to be doing so many different exercises, there’s no way you’re going to remember what weight you were at, so you really need to track it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I like the Strong app.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, me too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s free and you can track like what you did, how many reps you did, what weights you did.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and if you’re an Apple person, the strong app on the watch is really good. I pretty much use my watch exclusively to track my workouts these days. I think there’s another app called Hevy, H E V Y, that people are using now.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Um, it’s very similar to Strong, but I still like Strong better. And there’s a whole lot of other one offs.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can also write it down.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yep. I used to use, when I, um, very first started lifting, I used a small, uh, notebook that I just literally wrote and took with me every day to the gym. I really liked that, actually.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Um, but, it’s just easier to keep track of it in digital, and I can see my best and stuff. Yeah, whatever way you want to do it, just make sure you track. And I would also recommend, you know, after your workout, you track like how hard was it? That way, you know, kind of next time, how much am I going to increase the weights on this thing and this thing and this thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you can just kind of keep track over time to make sure you’re progressing and you know what you were doing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So yeah, if you’re not measuring it, you can’t really manage it. So you just want to make sure you’re tracking it in some kind of way. Plus, it’s just kind of cool to see your progress over time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s really motivating.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I like the Strong app because it’ll tell you, like, if you’ve hit a new, like, PR or whatever.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s kind of nice.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that’s a really good feature. It’s just like, oh, I did my workout today, I lifted, you know, tens of thousands of pounds, and I hit three PRs. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Feels good. You can take a little screenshot of it and send it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You will occasionally plateau, you know, even if you’re being consistent, you’ll hit a point where it’s like, I can’t really progress right now. Maybe you have to go into the deloading thing like you were talking about, but that’s totally normal, right? Like plateaus are part of the process. It shouldn’t be considered a failure or you’re like, you’re not progressing or anything like that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You’re going to hit plateaus if you’re doing it properly and you’ll just have to, you know, manage it. And you will break through the plateau. Like it’s literally part of the muscle building process.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and there’s some stuff that you’ll plateau almost immediately. Like the lateral raise is like incredibly hard to progress on.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Lateral raise will take you, you know, you’ll probably only add ten pounds to it. Maybe your entire lifting career.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also, even at the highest levels, like professional power lifters will go like an entire year just to add maybe 10 to 20 pounds to one of their lifts. Like, uh, their plateau is just like the end result eventually, um, you know, obviously when you hit your like actual genetic maximum and stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. But even as you’re working up to that, plateaus are a very common part of the process.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, uh, if you’re trying to find a program, again, there are a ton of them out there. I do have a couple recommended beginner programs for resistance training. The one I actually started with way back in the day is something called Starting Strength.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It mostly focuses on, um, squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, and it does power cleans. A lot of people substitute the rows for the power cleans. I know the guy who made the program isn’t a huge fan of that, but I think he’s kind of accepted it at this point. Um, but yeah, so that’s, that’s a really good one.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It just has you progress over time. It’s like three sets of five. It’s a strength program specifically, so not really for muscle size. But again, as a beginner, you’re going to grow muscle size too. There’s another one called StrongLifts that’s really similar to Starting Strength. Uh, but it’s typically five sets instead of three sets.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But, uh, there’s a really good app for StrongLifts. There’s a good benefit there. You can basically just install the StrongLifts app. Start as a bare beginner and just follow exactly what the app tells you for two years and you’ll have great progress with, uh, just strength specifically, again. Um, something a little less, like, strength focused is the P90X series of workouts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I actually love P90x.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So, from the strength perspective, they have like a back and bicep one and then they have like an arms one that has like shoulders, biceps, and tris. And then they have like a chest and back. Yeah. And then, yeah, I don’t know. That’s what I actually started on and I really like it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They have like, I think they’re on P90X3 or something. There’s like a few different varieties of them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, those are really approachable because those other two programs I just mentioned are almost exclusively barbell programs.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, these are all dumbbells.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: P90X is like dumbbells and maybe, and they do resistant body weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They usually have like one person on there that’s showing you a modified version like whether that’s with resistant band or whatever. Yeah, so like literally anyone can do it and they have like they show you like really strong dudes, but then they have like people that are more beginner types. I mean, they’re not really beginner types, they’re like obviously in very good shape.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, but yeah, it feels like more approachable. Yeah, and yeah, I think those are more focused on like hypertrophy like higher reps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Then, kind of the ones that you mentioned.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely. And I’ve seen, you know, a couple of the P90X workouts that I’ve seen, they look pretty

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I’ve made you watch them.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I really like them. Like, whenever I get in a rut, I’m like, I’m just going to go back to doing the P90X ones.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they look fun. And, you know, I’ll put, uh, the links to the, all these programs in the show notes just so you can kind of get an easy access to them. I don’t know if we can link directly to P90X workouts?

Protein Deficient Vegan: No, you have to be, uh, I think subscribed to Beachbody. But you could probably, you can buy like the actual DVDs and stuff. Or you can like subscribe to Beachbody and um, just watch them, digitally stream them or whatever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But I have like the original old cds and you can probably find them at a flea market or yeah, goodwill probably has them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that’s one of the good things like even if it’s a couple decades old, your muscles still build the same way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like yeah I remember showing you the original one and it was like, oh, yeah I mean, this is like pretty much still how we do it. So…

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I mean what would change really? Yeah. No, that’s a good option. And it’s again, like I said, really beginner friendly, very approachable. I would say if you’re not at a commercial gym and you’re trying to work out at home, P90X is probably a good go to beginner routine.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And if you’re going to do the Beachbody program, like they have so many, like if you end up buying the subscription, which I’ve had for like a long time, cause I just ran a little quick videos and stuff, but like there are so many videos, like they also have like yoga and all kinds of other stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like yeah. I think it’s like one of those thing’s that’s like if you’re gonna spend money on something, like that’s a good one to have.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I think we were talking about before they even have like stretching videos and stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they’ve got like a ton of stuff. They have like boxing programs, all kinds of stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so, uh,

Protein Deficient Vegan: We don’t sell Beachbody, by the way.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh,

Protein Deficient Vegan: No.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No,

Protein Deficient Vegan: No.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Or, you know, like we said you can probably just go find old DVDs on eBay for the easiest ways to get access to these.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They’re probably on YouTube also, I don’t know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, maybe.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then, just to recap. So, some of the important things you want to do as a beginner. Getting into the, kind of an introduction into resistance training. Uh, set a high level goal. Just have that visualized, even if, you know, you’re not really doing a workout for that goal right away. Pick a routine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Again, the best routine is the one you’re going to stick to. And we’ve got a bunch of options, a bunch of other options online. Um, do your routine consistently and track your progress. Um, and then make sure that you’re making it a little bit harder on yourself every time for that progressive overload.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Because, you know, if you just do five pound curls every, you could do five pound curls three days a week for a year. You’re not really going to get any stronger. You’re basically just like cardio at that point.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and I think this note is more for girls just because like, the media has brainwashed us into thinking that we should only be curling five pound weights. And I think like all women and girls need to know that you can do way more than that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And like you’re not going to turn into like super massive manly muscles like that doesn’t happen overnight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it will never happen overnight like so for girls like lift more than you think you would lift, you know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I think female bodybuilders would be insulted by the concept that you could accidentally grow huge muscles, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Exactly. Like they work their whole lives to get to where they are. And there are girls out there that think if they lift for one day, they’re going to be like massive manly looking people overnight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s not how it works.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so also make sure you get your rest, nutrition, and sleep in order. Those are, uh, I would say just as important as the workout itself, really, because your body does a lot of recovery and muscle building on those off days, and sleep itself is, like, huge.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, definitely make sure you have that in, in order.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, and then just in general, your results are going to take time. You know, like, uh, there are programs that are, like, 12 week programs, and you’ll make, uh, you know, pretty decent progress. You’ll probably feel a lot better, drop a little bit of weight if that’s your goal.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But overall, this is like, you know, a multi year, you know, journey, probably probably really lifetime. But even just see like a drastic change, I would say it would take a year at least. And then you kind of go from there. So I wouldn’t expect like, I’m going to go to the gym for a month or two months and I’m going to like look entirely different or whatever like it’s really kind of a long term thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, which is actually a good point on the p90x thing because they always show you these like crazy 90 day transformations.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and it’s like yeah maybe you’ll have something like that, but like probably won’t have something crazy like that in three months.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and if you like, you know, uh I’m going to use weight loss as an example just because it’s probably like the common one that people use for advertising. But like, you know in three months, at most you’re probably going to lose 30 pounds, so like that’s going to be a pretty decent visual difference depending on your body weight. But it’s not going to be anything life changing in three months.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Like it’s going to take time, just to be realistic.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And even that’s like extreme like that’s like if you do literally everything right and a lot of these programs are like you’re working out seven days a week, which like will eventually probably lead to some burnout. So like…

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Not a great plan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah You know, maybe start out kind of small if you’re like really quite new to it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: All right, so if you have any questions feel free to reach out on Instagram or any of the other ways that you want to contact us all of our contact information is in the show notes as well. And then, if you like the podcast and you want to hear more, don’t forget to follow or subscribe depending on where you listen.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: We talk about both fitness and nutrition and we have special topics in nutrition for vegans when we get into that topic. You can also leave a rating or review of the podcast and share it with your friends to help us out. So, I think that’s everything. Do you want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bye!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Bye, everybody!

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