Building strength and confidence

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:Hey, it's Tiffany. If you've been listening to the show for a while and find yourself thinking, geez, I wish there was more good news, you can sign up for my newsletter. It's filled with my favorite products, recipes, tips, and stories to help encourage you as you build your life of and the link is waiting for you in show notes. See you there.

Zach Pello [00:00:18]:Soreness is just a byproduct that can happen. What's really cool about this, though? Soreness is basically a response us to a chemical that's released. Your body senses, oh, we have muscle damage here. So it releases a chemical and it irritates the nerve endings. But what happens is your nerve endings just get accustomed to that chemical, and it does not mean that there's not muscle damage there. So six weeks later, you've been doing the same program. You're probably not going to get sore from that program, but I bet you're still getting stronger. And actually, under a microscope, you're still getting muscle damage.

Zach Pello [00:00:53]:You just don't feel that soreness anymore.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:56]:I'm a small-town kid born with a big-city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. Seventeen years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband, JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered that I could purposely embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world, and I want that for you, too.

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:31]:I'm Tiffany Souder, and this is scared confident. It feels fitting that this morning, I'm recording the intro to Zach Pello, my trainer's episode that we did together, because I got a pr this morning on my deadlift, which I'm very proud of. And I'm coming up on three years of lifting with Zach and, like, a small group of women, and it has been just, like, really anchoring. Part of my routine is to go and lift two days a week with Zach. So I just wanted to share with you as I spent time with him for another year, learned more just about lifting. I wanted to have him jump on the pod and just share with you what he talks to me about when we're lifting together in the morning. So I traditionally just do twice a week. Sometimes I'm able to get there a third time.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:21]:I'd love to do it more. It's just not what my life allows, and so I'm super at peace with that. And I was very much a beginner when I started lifting with Zach. I just felt like I knew just from reading headlines, not even in depth articles, that weightlifting and resistance training is really important as you age. I had this baby at 40 years old, and so I'm just really thoughtful about longevity. Like I tell my girls once a week, I'm going to live to be 102 years old, and so I have to make choices at 43 years old that help me live to be 102 years old. So I want to be strong. I want to not get hurt.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:59]:I want to not tweak myself when I'm jumping in the third row of the vehicle to do things and lifting 10,000 pounds of Costco every week. So, anyway, I'm doing it for just functional health. I'm doing it so that I'm strong, not just the way that I look, but things I can't see in my body, that part of me is really healthy, too. So whether you are experienced at resistance training and this is a part of the way that you do your life, I'm sure that you're still going to pick up some tidbits from my conversation with Zach. He's been training predominantly women for 20 years. Love working with people who, like, this is what they do. Literally, this is what he does. Postpartum bodies, he's used to that, whatever.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:40]:And if you're a beginner, Zach is also very versed in working and helping beginners. I mean, I was very much a beginner. I was, like, eight, nine months postpartum after Quincy. When I started working with Zach, I was really in rough shape. I was not an athlete growing up. I probably don't need to articulate that to you. You probably already know that. But being in the weight room was not a thing, and it was not part of my vocabulary.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:08]:And I think one of life's great gifts is when we're willing to be beginners again, when we're willing to walk in and kind of fumble around. And at the beginning, the app was overwhelming to my brain. Just like all this stuff, when you don't know something, it's hard. And when you're used to being really capable and competent at your life, it can be really difficult to be comfortable being kind of dumb and not good at it and starting with hardly any weight and all that kind of stuff, that beginner mindset, I think, gets harder and harder and harder as we get older. So, anyway, this is definitely a beginner mindset journey for me. I'm three years in. If you would have told me, I don't know. It's been a slow and steady race for me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:53]:I've lost about 20 pounds over the last three years, and there was never, like, one quarter where I dropped it all. It's just like, I don't like to be in a big calorie deficit. I have a really big, crazy life. It's just, like, not what I like to do. And so slow and steady runs the race. It's like my new mantra. I talk about sustainability all the time, and I'm all about layering really small behaviors over a long period of time because I got a lot going on, a lot I want to do, and a big life of, and I want to live. So, anyway.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:23]:Okay, enough of my preaching. Listen to my conversation with Zach. Okay, guys, we're back on the pod with Zach Pello. This is the third time he's been on the show, and I'm recording it in February because this is my personal three year anniversary of lifting and working out with you, which is awesome because I am not very disciplined. And so to say that I have been working with you for three years feels like a modern miracle. And I'm very proud of it. I'm very, very proud of it. It's awesome.

Zach Pello [00:05:54]:You should be proud of it, too. I mean, three years is amazing with all that you have going on in your life. And I think you are a disciplined person, but you have discipline going so many different directions, and to be able to commit to the last three years and be consistent has been amazing. So I appreciate you doing that, but also having me on your podcast as well, it's great to be here.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:14]:Yeah. So we're going to talk, kind of just bring my listeners in on the conversations that you and I are having in the mornings when we're lifting and working out. If you have not heard me talk to Zach about Zach before and kind of my own minimums, what I do is I go to a gym that's like 20 minutes from my house. It's not actually that terribly convenient. I go to a gym at 06:00 in the morning, and Zach writes programs for us that last six weeks. And inside of those programs, there are three different workouts. Three different workouts that go for six weeks. And it's from six to 07:00 a.m.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:51]:That's the time period that I most often go to. And there are up to three women that are working out together. So it's like small group training, but we are doing things like bench press and leg press and deadlifts and I love it. I feel very tough and strong when i’m doing it.

Zach Pello [00:07:06]:And you are tough, i mean, It's just great to see these ladies build a community and support each other and feel confident in the gym and creating space for themselves in the gym. I'm just happy to be a part of that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:22]:Yeah, it's been really fun. I think we have this awesome culture where we really are rooting for each other, and we're not staring at ourselves in the mirror the whole time. It's, like, really great. I love the vibe of it.

Zach Pello [00:07:32]:Absolutely. And I think that's the great thing, is it's, like, a little bit more private. Like, it's still a group. It's not as big as, say, crossfit, where you have 10-12 people in a group, so you can create some of those little bit smaller connections, which is kind of nice.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:43]:I definitely know my way around a gym much more than I did three years ago, but I still keep paying Zach. I still keep going to this group because it is a huge part of my own accountability traps. It is easy to hit snooze for 20 more minutes and miss your workout. It is easy to say you're just too tired on a Monday morning. It is just so easy to say no to yourself. And so this is a really important trap for me that I set and I pay the money, and all of that is part of my accountability process. Okay, so what I thought we'd do is talk specifically. I'm 43 years old, and the way that you start thinking about taking care of your body, I think when you get to middle aged or whatever that means, is you want not just to live a long time, but to have health and vitality and to be able to pick your kids up and run across the backyard and still live fully in your body and in your life.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:39]:So I thought we'd talk about that. How do you think about weightlifting and exercise and progressive overload that you train towards? How do we understand that? Well, so that it can help us age gracefully. So let's talk just with kind of an overview of. I think weightlifting is kind of having its moment. When I was growing up, it was like Arnold Schwarzenegger and, like, gold's gym and rip tank know kind of vibes. And it's changing a lot in a lot of ways. I think that's good. So what are the weightlifting benefits for anyone? But let's talk specifically, maybe about women, because it's who you train and it's.

Zach Pello [00:09:13]:Who, you know, the first, most important one for a lot of women is going to be bone density as you age, that gets worse. And this is one of the ways to help fight against that. And I think that's something that is people just don't, they don't think about it very often until it's their later in life, and then they realize, oh, man, I need to do something about this. But there's also so many other benefits on top of that for your health in terms of blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and keeping a healthy body weight. And these are all like, we're talking more like your regular markers for health. Of course, having more muscle mass has also been tied to longevity as well, and that's really important. Strength has been tied to longevity as well, too. So we have all these benefits that are non psychological.

Zach Pello [00:10:08]:That's something we could talk about as well, but just physical benefits right off the top. And then to think functionally, picking up your kids, being able to just go for a hike right away. Strength is one of those things that really, because as we age, the biggest detriment to our health is how we have a decline in activity. And then because of we have aches and pains and arthritis, we do less and less and less, we become weaker and weaker. And that right there is one of the biggest ways we can age ourselves. So weightlifting is kind of the fountain of youth in staying active and keeping moving.

Tiffany Sauder [00:10:46]:One of the things you said to me when I first started training with you that I did not believe, because I just hurt everywhere, is I said, I really feel like I need to do yoga because I feel like I don't have flexibility. My lower back was hurting me a lot. And you said weightlifting will increase your flexibility. In my head, I was like, no, it won't, but it has, it's wild because you can explain why it is, but when you're down in a squat and it pushes your body down, your hips down, I'm so much more flexible.

Zach Pello [00:11:18]:That's such a common, but it doesn't.

Tiffany Sauder [00:11:21]:I'm like, well, no, you have less flexibility because you're lifting weights. But it's wild. You're exactly so much more flexibility.

Zach Pello [00:11:27]:And the studies have shown that compared to stretching, if you lift your weights to a stretch, of course, if you're stretching, you don't feel a stretch, you're not going to get more flexible. But if you're lifting to where it's stretching your body, you will improve your mobility better than stretching alone. And so, yeah, if you're working on getting that range of motion, you are going to improve your flexibility with weightlifting and building muscle doesn't make you less flexible either. I think that it stems from the idea that you get sore so you feel tight, so you automatically assume, like, weightlifting is making you tight. But it's just that soreness for the couple of days that it does that. That's a huge benefit. And I've increased my mobility so much in the last couple of years, focusing on form and range of motion with my weightlifting. I mean, it used to be all about weight, but there's a little bit more to it than that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:20]:I have not been hurt in the three years I've been lifting with you, which I think is so amazing. Not that I expected to get hurt, but I think the way that my body can support itself because it's just stronger. I still am crawling into my SUV, into the third row, like contorting myself to jump back there to buckle my three year old, and I'm like, I love that I can just bound in my car, reads around and get the thing. All of that stuff is, I don't know, it's just so valuable to me. I love it so much.

Zach Pello [00:12:57]:Absolutely. I tell people, too, it's like if you're hurting when you're lifting weights or whatever, there may be something you're doing wrong or maybe you don't have to do that exercise, I would say, to try to see if your form is wrong first and adjust from there. But sometimes you say, you know what, maybe this one exercise is just not for me. I mean, if you had hours to spend to figure it out, sure, go ahead and do that. But many of us don't have that kind of time. So you work on it a little bit and then eventually you might just say, you know what, I'm okay with not doing that one.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:29]:Yeah, you have things in your shoulders. There's some women that work out where they just can't. There's certain things that just hurt them. And so you're just like, that's fine, we'll just work around it. We don't have to do that. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about, you and I were having this conversation, I don't know, a couple of days ago about how, in your observation, women that are in their forty s and fifty s and the way that they think about weightlifting and how fast they're going to get success and how hard they are on themselves versus when you're training kind of today's 20 and 30 year olds, the difference that you see. Let's talk about that for a little bit.

Zach Pello [00:14:01]:This is such an interesting thought I've had recently with clients. I've noticed over the years I've trained women that are now years ago, they were in their thirtys and I feel like they were in this mindset of a few things. Number one, they were very focused on just body weight and the scale, number one. Number two, they were really worried about gaining muscle and fearful it would make them look bad. And they were very impatient with, again, weight loss on the scale. It's like it was all about the scale. And as I've trained more and more women coming out of college, it's so interesting to me because they are so much easier on themselves when it comes to the rate at which they lose weight on the scale. Number one, they always talk about how I know it's not just the weight.

Zach Pello [00:14:53]:I'm okay. I just want to feel better in my skin. And so they've taken some of that out of the equation. They also are wanting to get stronger in the gym. And they're okay with building some muscle because they know it makes them more shapely in the areas they want to be shapely. And especially nowadays, like a lot of little ladies, they want to get their glutes more shaped and things like that so that they're in there doing deadlifts and you see them squatting 200 pounds or something. It's pretty cool to see the difference. I mean, it just wasn't like that 20 years ago.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:26]:I get so inspired. There's some older women that work out in the gym at 5:36 in the morning and they're in their mid sixties, some maybe even in their early seventies. And they are so strong. And even the way they carry themselves is so confident because just like they're, I don't know, musculoskeletal, whatever that word is.

Zach Pello [00:15:48]:Absolutely.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:49]:It's just like, really, friend? I'm like, that is as, I don't know, inspiring to me as anything.

Zach Pello [00:15:54]:Yeah. And there's a trainer at the gym I know you see all the time. He's like 70 years old. And this guy, I mean, he stands up with good posture. He's deadlifting weight way more than I could deadlift. He doesn't seem to have any issues. It's pretty cool.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:12]:It's rad.

Zach Pello [00:16:13]:It's pretty cool.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:14]:Okay, so you focus on progressive overload. Is the style of training that you ascribe to that you prescribe to us as your clients. Let's talk about what that is and why you think it's so effective.

Zach Pello [00:16:29]:When you're training, a lot of people just go in haphazardly and just do a workout. They're just going by feel with progressive overload. The idea is that over time you have to be able to increase your workload. So you can do that by increasing, say you go up five pounds on your squat, or say you go up two reps on your rows, or say you slow down your reps. So instead of doing a rep that takes 3 seconds, now it takes 5 seconds with the same weight. So any way you're able to make it more challenging over time is the key. So from day one to one year, you should be up on almost all of your exercises, especially if you're just starting out, it's pretty impressive. If you do the workouts, you can see like the last week you did ten.

Zach Pello [00:17:18]:This week. Wow, I got 14 reps. How the heck did that happen in one week? So it's pretty cool. And this is the ultimate measure. And if you just go in there randomly, a lot of people are missing out on this and they're just getting their heart rate up. They're getting a workout, but they don't really know what they lifted a year ago or three months ago. And a few things that kind of go into that is, number one, having an actual program just like you were talking about earlier, how I write up a program every six weeks for you guys that you follow that you can actually look at your progress week to week and actually log your progress week to week. And I think a lot of times people might be like, oh, that's a lot of work.

Zach Pello [00:17:57]:But I'll tell you what, as you know, it's fun when you see like, wow, I've gone up 20 pounds on this exercise in the last three months. That feels so good in terms of your mental confidence, and it's empowering to feel that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:18:14]:So that's some of the just sense of giving us a sense of accomplishment, but it's actually changing our structure of our body when we're doing that, too. I had never written a workout down in my life. I don't think I'd followed a half marathon training program with probably 50% compliance, knowing me. But I had never written down reps and done the same machines six weeks in a row and all that kind of stuff. And it does. At the beginning, you're sort of like, it takes a hot minute to get mentally oriented, to like, what am I writing down and what is this thing? And what did I do last week? But you are so good at just, I think, reminding us of the compounding impact of time. And when we do just a little bit more, like literally hold your last rep, which you're having me do so much right now. Stay down in a squat for 5 seconds, your last one, and then try to get back up that those little increments of effort week after week after week after week add an enormous amount of impact.

Zach Pello [00:19:18]:Yeah. If you don't continue to challenge your body, your body will actually regress and people will tell me, when does it stop? Well, I mean, honestly, it's never stopped for me, but there were times in my life I was stronger, but there were things that set you back, whether it's life or say, like playing with the kids, I fell and got hurt, things set you back. And then as you switch up your exercises every six, eight weeks, you kind of are a little bit reset on those new exercises again. And then you have to build those back up again. But that's how you build muscle, that's how you actively build strength, that's how you build better muscular endurance. Like, if you just do the same constantly, you will not change at all. Your body will not change. And if that's okay with you, that's actually fine.

Zach Pello [00:20:10]:But you have to ask yourself, is that okay with you? Are you okay with just doing the thing and maintaining? And that's okay if it is?

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:19]:Well, let's take a detour, actually, to this word maintaining.

Zach Pello [00:20:22]:Right?

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:22]:So I listened to our episode from last year, earlier today, and you actually said the work it takes to weigh the same every single year is actually a lot. You're like, if you never gain the five to ten pounds, you don't actually have to become in weight loss mode. And I think I weigh within a pound or two of what I did last year. This has been a year of full maintenance for me. There has been maybe four calorie deficit days. I'm literally living in the pocket of what is sustainable. I am not doing anything else, but I've gotten a lot stronger this year, I would say. Don't you say?

Zach Pello [00:21:04]:Absolutely.

Tiffany Sauder [00:21:05]:I've definitely continued to add weight, but it's not necessarily put weight on the scale. Maybe I've exchanged a pound and a half of muscle for a pound and a half of fat. I don't know my body composition that specifically, but I would say I feel proud of being able to weigh the same in spite of so much just busyness. And I'm like, that gives me confidence that my minimums are serving a really sustainable, healthy life. I'm still putting stress on my body, I'm still working out, I'm still pushing myself, but I'm just at a super sustainable place and I think that is an exciting point of arrival for me. Sure, on tired days, I wish I weighed ten pounds less. But mostly I'm just really happy with the freedom I have.

Zach Pello [00:21:55]:Amazing. It's so freeing. You don't have to put so much of your mind power to it all the time. I think people forget that. Like, if you ask people when was the last time they stopped thinking about losing weight, so many people will tell you, I don't know. And that's sad that their life is consumed by that and getting away from that. It's okay to have a goal like that, but being able to focus on being okay with maintenance at times, that's so powerful.

Tiffany Sauder [00:22:23]:Yeah. I think you guys just had your fourth kid. You've not been in a season, although you're going to train for a competition, which is insane. But there's seasons where you've got new kids, you've got a lot of things going. I am just not the main event in my house right now. And so to put all this infrastructure around change for me personally, is just not exactly not where we're at.

Zach Pello [00:22:45]:So you got to figure out, yeah, what's the amount that works for your lifestyle right now. And there are times when you're going to be able to push your fitness to another level. But even doing what you're doing now, you are getting stronger and you see that progress. And there's something about that that's not scale related, to be able to actually measure and see objective progress week to week. And it's something where as a mom, you're a business owner, you're taking so much of your time and putting in all these other areas, but it's like you're able to focus on yourself for just two, 3 hours a week in total and see real, measurable progress. And you don't have to have the emotion of food in there and all this other stuff. It's so uplifting to focus on getting stronger. It's amazing.

Tiffany Sauder [00:23:32]:So how much is enough? I work out. Yeah, let's call it two to four and a half hours a week. It's not a massive pie chart of my time. How much is enough?

Zach Pello [00:23:42]:I think what's really cool about this, and this is going with cardio, but I just want to say this real quick. I start adding 10 minutes of cardio five days a week, and that's about an hour almost. I'm actually up to 12 minutes. Okay. All right. We're kicking butt.

Tiffany Sauder [00:23:54]:I love this.

Zach Pello [00:23:55]:All right. And it's an hour a week. Right. But what is amazing is I've seen progress. My heart rate.

Tiffany Sauder [00:24:02]:I have to go higher, incremental.

Zach Pello [00:24:04]:Yeah. I got to go to a higher level now. It's pretty amazing, and I'm tying this to weightlifting.

Tiffany Sauder [00:24:10]:Well, what are you doing? Are you running? Are you walking stairmaster?

Zach Pello [00:24:14]:Yeah. My goal is to keep my heart rate at a certain range, and it's easy for me to measure progress by how high the level is, the speed. But with weightlifting, same thing. You've got your weights, you've got your reps, right? And so what's cool is you can test this. You could start out with 310 minutes workouts a week. And I can guarantee you, if you have not been lifting the next week, if you did the exact same workouts, you would be able to increase your reps or weight. I think 10 minutes, three times a week is obviously, you're not going to get results from that continuously for a long period of time. But I would say you can get most of your weightlifting benefits from probably two or three really heavy, like, 30 minutes lifting sessions, focusing on the main exercises that get kind of your whole body.

Zach Pello [00:25:05]:You can get a lot of results from about an hour and a half or 2 hours a week in total. And I think the key is to minimize your time, is to identify maybe what areas of your body you would like to improve the shape of the areas of your body you'd like to be stronger at. That way you can do 30 minutes workout and feel like you hit everything you wanted to hit. And that's the beautiful thing with weightlifting, is you don't have to do everything. You don't have to do bicep curls. You don't have to do calf raises, forearm curls. I mean, you can do, like, more lower body or more upper body, depending on what you want in your Physique.

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:42]:So, to give people an idea in our workouts take about an hour. We're doing how many exercises?

Zach Pello [00:25:48]:Eight exercises. And that gives you. That's the thing is, I think people try to cram too much into their workouts and they end up turning it into a cardio session. If you're doing a cardio session, you're not lifting heavy, and so then you're not getting the benefits of what lifting heavy provides.

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:07]:So we're doing eight exercises and we're doing three, what do you call it? Not reps. Three sets. Three sets. We're doing three sets of eight, so that's 24. So I would say each one doesn't take a minute necessarily to do so. We're under some type of load or tension for 25 minutes.

Zach Pello [00:26:26]:Right.

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:27]:And the rest is rest. I had not thought of about that way before, but it's like 25 minutes under tension.

Zach Pello [00:26:35]:Yes. And so I think this is kind of a.

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:37]:You couldn't put that into 30 minutes because.

Zach Pello [00:26:39]:Right. It would be crazy. Like, you'd be rushing the whole time. And that leads us to kind of thinking about. There was a study that showed that, say these people worked out for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and one group only did. They did half the amount of sets and rested twice as long. The other group did twice the amount of sets and cut their rest in half. And what was amazing was that both groups got the same results.

Zach Pello [00:27:11]:So you could choose to go in there and say, you know what? I want to get stronger. I'm going to take my rest between my sets. I'm going to enjoy this. I'm going to squeeze out what I can out of every set and take rest periods and have this kind of, like, not feeling like I'm all over the place, like going up, like blah, going crazy. Or I could go crazy and feel like I'm dying at the end of the workout and get the same result. And it's like, that's what we don't need in our life right now. We need a little bit of quiet, a little bit of calm. And then again, it's like, if you actually want to feel like you're lifting some weight and getting stronger, you need the rest periods in there.

Zach Pello [00:27:47]:But people are so worried, like, well, then I'm not fitting in as much as I can.

Tiffany Sauder [00:27:52]:Yeah, it takes a minute to get your brain around that. Or now I'll be like, can you put 20 more pounds on so I can do half the reps?

Zach Pello [00:27:58]:Yes. That's the way to go.

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:00]:See, that's what we want.

Zach Pello [00:28:03]:I'm doing my lunges and I do a set, like, really heavy for ten on one leg, and then I'll rest a minute and a half, then I'll do my other leg. I mean, my goal is to lift with intensity on the set. I'm doing not be dying in between the sets.

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:18]:It takes a minute to learn all that.

Zach Pello [00:28:20]:Yeah. And getting away from a calorie burn focus. That is a big trap because you don't look at the calories burn. Don't think of it like that. When you're lifting weights, ask yourself, did I add more weight to the bar. Did I go up from last week? That's way more important than the feel or the burn or the systemic. Just burnout of your body. And we are overworked.

Zach Pello [00:28:50]:We got kids, we're sleep deprived. We don't need to be beating ourselves up that much.

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:58]:So that actually triggered for me feeling sore because I was like, I don't feel sore anymore. Does that mean I'm not working as hard as I think? And you had a good response because I was like, I just don't feel sore. Am I not working hard? Because I think I am.

Zach Pello [00:29:14]:So a lot of times. First of all, what I tell people is if you're adding weight and reps to the bar every week, you're doing enough work, right? If you are seeing progress every week, it doesn't matter if you're sore or not. Soreness is just a byproduct that can happen. What's really cool about this, though, soreness is basically a response to a chemical that's released. Your body senses, oh, we have muscle damage here. So it releases a chemical and it irritates the nerve endings. Well, what happens is your nerve endings just get accustomed to that chemical, and it does not mean that there's not muscle damage there. So six weeks later, you've been doing the same program.

Zach Pello [00:29:55]:You're probably not going to get sore from that program, but I bet you're still getting stronger. And actually, under a microscope, you're still getting muscle damage. You just don't feel that soreness anymore. And you know what it's like you put the bar on your back for squats, and it used to be painful. Everybody complains about it. I'm like, don't put a pad on there. Just get used to it. After a while, you don't feel the pain anymore, yet you actually have more pressure on those structures.

Zach Pello [00:30:21]:Same with foam rolling. If you foam roll three, four times a week, it will become less painful. And a lot of that is actually desensitizing your nerve endings. So you don't feel that pain anymore. The same pressure is applied, but your body realizes this is not dangerous. This is fine. Your body can recover from it, and that's where the pain goes away. But people think, oh, soreness is important.

Zach Pello [00:30:46]:So, you know, if you really wanted to get sore all the time from your workout, skip a week. Every other week when you go to workout and it's like, does that really think you're going to get better results taking a week off every other week? Probably not, right? But you're going to get sore.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:00]:Yeah. Right. When you come back.

Zach Pello [00:31:01]:Yeah.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:02]:Okay. Anything else you want to say on the exercise part?

Zach Pello [00:31:07]:I think, yeah. Getting away from making it cardio and calorie burns, those are huge. Trying to get away from the Calorie burn focus. Focusing on progressive overload. Rest periods. I would say, like 90 seconds to 2 minutes is good. I see a lot of people, if they're doing like a 32nd break, it probably didn't lift heavy enough or hard enough. Yeah, I think we covered most of the benefits, I think.

Zach Pello [00:31:27]:And just feeling empowered and all those health benefits, too is huge. Yeah.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:32]:Awesome. Okay, so let's take a little pit stop in nutrition. There's a lot of information out there. I feel like you are good at just simplifying things. I even love the, like, 10 minutes of cardio a day. I'm like, I could get to the gym 15 minutes before we lift and get in a half hour to 45 minutes of cardio that I'm not doing right now. It's only one more drive. Nothing is happening between 530 and 545 in my life.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:58]:In the morning, 15 minutes of sleep is not going to change. That is a very accessible thing to do. That would give me some heart rate. Push a little bit, and I don't have to do another thing. I don't have to wash another set of clothes. All the things that come with just the downstream effect of changing it from more than two to three times a week, which is hard for me. So how would you simplify the nutrition side?

Zach Pello [00:32:24]:This is always a really interesting topic because there's a lot of holes you can go down with nutrition simplifying. It helps, though. I think there's the whole calories in, calories out debate. I don't think it should be a debate. I think that we have to understand the complexity of calories in versus calories out because there's a lot of things that affect that equation. Your hormones, all these things, right? Your gut. There's so many things that impact it. However, it still remains true.

Zach Pello [00:32:53]:And I think there's a better equation, though. Instead of calories in, it should be calories absorbed versus calories out, because we don't absorb all the calories we consume. But there are some factors, like if you eat processed foods, right? Like the more processed foods you eat, the more calories you absorb, number one. And the less calories it takes to break it down. So, yes, food quality does matter. Yes, hormones affect the equation because it lowers your metabolism or it increases your appetite or it reduces your movement outside of exercise. There's so many factors here. I still think it's important, number one, to maybe do a two week food journal every single day for two weeks.

Zach Pello [00:33:37]:Just see where you are. Some people are really against tracking their calories. And I always remind people, tracking calories is not a diet. Tracking calories is a journal to see where you are. And it's not the habit. The habit is, what does tracking calories do for you to understand about what you eat and what you can change. Right. And so I think taking an audit of two weeks, see where you are, see, and be 100% honest about it.

Zach Pello [00:34:08]:So that way, you know where you're in control. You know what I mean? Like, put yourself in control. Don't deny it. And look at that. And I think then you can decide, like, hey, you know what? After two weeks, actually don't mind tracking. Or you can say, you know what, I don't want to track. But I see, like, okay, I can improve here and there. Another way you could do is not, you say you don't track at all, right? And it's like, just starting to replace whole foods or, sorry, processed foods with whole foods.

Zach Pello [00:34:33]:Whole foods generally are less calorie dense. There's studies have shown if you let people eat more processed foods and you let people have another group that doesn't eat any processed foods, there's a 500 calorie difference on average. So we can say, oh, there's something magical about the whole foods that made them lose weight. Well, they ate 500 calories less per day on average. That's what they showed. I mean, it was like, legitimately, they were eating less calories.

Tiffany Sauder [00:34:57]:I had this experience literally last week. I thought about it. So I had, I think accidentally, but on purpose, like, six oreo cookies, which is, like, almost 400 calories. Yeah, which is fine, whatever. But I was like, it would take four whole apples to be 400 calories. If you made me eat four to six apples, I would run out of energy. There's no possible way.

Zach Pello [00:35:27]:Exactly.

Tiffany Sauder [00:35:27]:So I did have that thought of, like, that's so fascinating. Yeah, I probably could have eaten six more. You know what I mean? It was just like, yeah, and it takes you 3 minutes or less, and.

Zach Pello [00:35:39]:Then you got another 57 minutes of, like, say if you're watching a show, just sit there with nothing in your hands, and you're just like, what else can I eat over there? I do it all the time.

Tiffany Sauder [00:35:49]:Kitty pop.

Zach Pello [00:35:50]:Right? Yeah. But you take, like, apples or whole food. Right? And it takes you longer to eat it usually, and it's just processed foods. If we didn't have processed foods, we would not be in a situation we're in. And I think that's so important to understand that the processed foods really wreak havoc on our bodies in terms of. And I'm not even against them.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:13]:Yeah, we have granola bars.

Zach Pello [00:36:15]:Yeah, we do too.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:15]:Cheesets and oreos in our house.

Zach Pello [00:36:17]:Right.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:17]:And we probably always will. But for me it was awareness of, like, this is a riot. And just having consciousness of like, I.

Zach Pello [00:36:26]:Had a client recently, she started tracking. And so the doctor or the pharmacy rep came in, she's a nurse and brought in some food and she didn't think anything of it. She tracked it. It was like a sub from someplace and it was a salad and a cookie. The total was 1500 calories. And she just couldn't believe it because she's like, I eat this stuff. This didn't seem like that much food. It felt pseudo healthy.

Zach Pello [00:36:56]:And I'm like, look, this is good information because now, you know, like 1500 calories with this meal. If you were going to splurge on 1500 calorie meal, is that the meal you would splurge on or would you rather have pizza or would you rather have a burger, fries and a beer? Me, that's what I would rather have versus a sub and a salad and a cookie. I don't know. I'd rather have the burger, fries and a beer. Right. So it's a really eye opener. And I think we have to have the balance. But again, I think that the whole issue comes around from definitely processed foods, foods being convenient, us not thinking about the preparation of the food, all that kind of stuff.

Zach Pello [00:37:37]:So we do have to make a transition to less and less processed foods and alcohol too. I mean, holy Toledo. I mean, I think people are doing a lot more alcohol than they should be. It's easy for me to say since I stopped drinking alcohol two weeks ago.

Tiffany Sauder [00:37:52]:Oh, you did? Yeah, that's its own episode. We don't hardly drink at all anymore.

Zach Pello [00:38:02]:Just doesn't serve you.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:04]:Yeah. And there's just a lot going on and we've got teenagers now and I don't know, it's just sort of like, it's fine. It doesn't need me. One of the things my husband and I have found is a very simple, if I feel like the scale is creeping up or my pants are getting tight, is we'll just not eat after.

Zach Pello [00:38:19]:07:00 p.m. That's huge.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:21]:It's just like one rule it's like the rest of the day, I can kind of stay in the zone again. Outside of my six oreos, I don't have one vice that is pulling me under. Like, oh, if I could just get rid of regular soda, or if I could just get rid of the bottle of wine. Mine is like, I eat every shell on the taco. I'm given those kinds. That's just who I am.

Zach Pello [00:38:46]:Yeah. What are people eating after 07:00 p.m.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:49]:Most of the time, yeah, it's not that good. So that's kind of the one thing so simple to manage. Every other choice can pretty much be in the lane of what it is. And, yeah, probably 250 to 500 calories a day comes out just by making that choice.

Zach Pello [00:39:06]:Absolutely, 100%.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:08]:That's an easy one for us. He's better at it than I am at managing it. Babe, love you. You're good at it.

Zach Pello [00:39:13]:Great. Good for you.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:15]:And I'm like, I'm starting tomorrow. But really, it does help a lot.

Zach Pello [00:39:18]:It does make a difference for very easy, too. Men and women. Men have much higher gas tank in terms of calorie burn naturally. And it's not fair. It really isn't. It's just the reality of it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:31]:Yeah. Just composition.

Zach Pello [00:39:32]:Being a woman. If a woman's five foot one and doesn't exercise, I mean, the metabolism is very low in terms of what they can eat. I feel for women and people that are smaller in stature.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:45]:Yeah, it would be a big bummer. Yeah, I'm tall. And what do I say? Strong like bull.

Zach Pello [00:39:51]:Strong like, right? Yes. We've got Seawell. We've got to hashtag that strong leg bull.

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:01]:Well, we will wrap with that. Cool. Zach, thanks for joining me today. You do have a couple of spots, but right now there's a couple of spots open. So if you live in the Zionsville Carmel area, I know a lot of people listening do. And you're looking for a trainer. You can come to the gym with me and the rest of the ladies. You also have different time periods, not just 06:00 a.m..

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:22]:Yeah. And then you also do virtual training. If someone is not close and they're interested in a great program with progressive overload and on their journey, that being strong like bull.

Zach Pello [00:40:33]:Strong like bull. I really appreciate that. And, yeah, I mean, I'm always looking to add more women's groups, so I said, as long as I can get two people in, we can create a new group for a time that might work for somebody that they can't make the 06:00 a.m. Times or the 09:00 times. So I try to be flexible. But, yeah, I would love to talk to anybody that just wants to chat and reach out. That's no problem.

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:55]:Yeah. And the vibe is great, whether you're a beginner or, I've been doing it for three years. Jane, who's worked out with you, she's been doing it for twelve, probably 14 years, like for forever. But there's people who are new, too. You don't have to have. I had no vocabulary in the gym when I started.

Zach Pello [00:41:12]:Yeah. And I try to keep it very beginner friendly. Absolutely. We're not doing these really complex exercises. My goal is to help people get in there and get started quick and start to see the progress of know from week one.

Tiffany Sauder [00:41:28]:Awesome. Well, you can find Zach on Instagram and on Facebook, and we'll drop all the links in the show notes.

Zach Pello [00:41:34]:Perfect.

Tiffany Sauder [00:41:35]:Along with a way to find how to sign up for an intro if they're interested in working with you.

Zach Pello [00:41:38]:Zach sounds great. Thank you very much.

Tiffany Sauder [00:41:40]:Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I will. If you want to get the inside Scoop, sign up for my newsletter.

Tiffany Sauder [00:41:57]:We decided to make content for you instead of social media algorithms. The link is waiting for you in show notes, or you can head over to tiffany Stouter.com. Thanks for listening.

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