#180: Why Your Son Shouldn't Be Your Strength Coach

The first is that their goals are really, really different, okay? If you think about a young man, [laughs] and believe me, during those two and three-minute breaks between sets that I've spent hours watching young men in the weight room, their focus is completely different from a midlife woman's focus.

They are concerned about growing their chest muscles.

That is their number one muscle.

They want pecs.

Then backs, they wanna have a nice V, and then their arms.

Like, that is their main focus, all right? Whereas a woman in midlife, she's concerned about things like her whole body getting stronger, strengthening her bones, aging well, being able to live independently, and those things require a full body program, not a huge focus on one muscle group or another, but overall strength and musculature and strength training, lower body, upper body, so that your bones get stronger and doing that in a pretty even way, okay? So their program isn't gonna be totally different.

And in practice, what this looks like, and I... oh my gosh, I see it over and over again, is that the guy, the son, is having his mother do three different ex-Chest exercises in their session so that they can hit the upper pecs, the mid pecs, and the lower pecs.

Now, I don't know about you, but I do not know very many women who are super concerned about what their pecs look like.

That's probably the last body part that they care about, 'cause you know what? We have boobs under there.

[laughs] So in a way, like, whether our pec muscles stick out a little bit more or a little less is kind of irrelevant.

And having great pec muscles is actually not gonna help us with a lot of the things that we are concerned about, like getting up off the floor, being able to carry our groceries, all these kinds of things, right? Surviving in life.

And the problem is that in a training session, you only have a certain amount of time.

I mean, p- I don't know very many women who have, like, three hours to spend training.

You kinda wanna get in, do your workout, and go on, because you have a lot of other stuff to do.

Kind of spending three exercises on one muscle group is really inefficient for the goals that we have.

So really, the mothers and the sons programs are going to look extremely, extremely different.

And this brings me right into point number two, which is that they say we have the same 24 hours in a day, but [laughs] I remember when I was 20, even though I was working, somehow I had time to go to the weight room and work out and run and party and do all these things because I, like, recovered totally differently.

I, I don't know how I even found all the time to do [laughs] all the things that I could do.

Nowadays, I really have to fit my weight training sessions into my week.

I have to juggle my work, juggle running the house, taking care of my children, of course, like, taking care of my aging parents, and then also having a social life, and it is not the same 24 hours.

So I really need a super efficient, effective program where I literally can go in, do it, and get the heck out of there and get my results and get on with my life, that that is not, like, something where I'm spending a ton of time just in the weight room or doing my workouts.

So it is, it is very different, like the perspective.

I mean, if you think yourself [laughs] what life was like in your 20s, it was significantly different.