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If you are loving what you're learning in the podcast and you want to start applying it to your fitness routine, you can try one of our free classes. No credit card required. Just drop your email to get access. This is a upper body build class taught by myself. To take the class, visit portal.evlofitness.com I'm Dr. Shannon Richie. I'm a doctor of physical therapy, fitness trainer and founder of EFL Fitness. In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your health based on science. Welcome to the show. Hello everyone. Welcome to our 5lbs of muscle workshop. Today I'm going to help you learn why and how to build five pounds of muscle. In this episode, we'll discuss why you should build five pounds of muscle and what happens if you don't. A realistic time frame based on your age and your training level. How age and genetics play a role in building muscle growth. We will talk about considerations for Perry and post penopausal women. We will talk about what gaining five pounds of muscle actually looks like. We'll create a nutrition and training plan to help you build five pounds of muscle. And I'll help you calculate your calorie needs if your goal is to lose fat alongside building muscle. And finally, I'll give you some options for measuring your progress. Okay, let's go. So why should you build five pounds of muscle? Muscle tissue, in my opinion, is not optional. It's an essential biological machinery that every woman needs if we want to stay healthy as we age. Waiting to build muscle is a health gamble in my opinion. We can't afford to take Muscle loss begins at after the age 30 and we lose approximately 3 to 8% each decade. Every decade that loss starts to accelerate. By the age of 50, muscle loss accelerates to 1 to 2% per year. So 10 to 20% per decade. If you don't resistance train by the time you notice weakness or physical changes, you've already lost probably significant muscle mass that may not fully recover. So let's say your muscle mass peaks at age 30, then slowly decreases with age if you aren't trying to build it and or maintain it. So by the age 50, you might have lost 6 to 18% of your overall muscle mass. So let's go through an example of what this actually looks like and let's put some tangible numbers in it to illustrate how this affects your body composition. So let's say you're 40 years old. At the age of 30, maybe you had a hundred pounds of lean mass and lost 5% of that over the last decade. So you've lost 5 pounds of muscle over the last year, but your weight has stayed the same, meaning your body composition has now shifted. Your your ratio of fat mass is higher relative to the ratio of lean mass because muscle is more dense than fat and fat takes up about 18% more space than than muscle does. Exchanging 5 pounds of muscle for 5 pounds of fat may make you go up a pant size or two. Now, this isn't to make you feel guilty or ashamed or freaked out. It's just to educate you on one reason why focusing on muscle can benefit your body as you age. This loss is not just about appearance either. It triggers a cascade of biological decline, affecting everything from bone density to brain health. Women who don't actively build muscle through resistance training face higher risk of osteoporosis, metabolic disorders and functional disability with age. This rapid decline increases risk of metabolic diseases like diabetes. It accelerates cognitive decline, which is something I personally very much care about with a family history of neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and can cut decades off your health span. So the period of time of in your life where you can function independently. The biological clock on muscle starts ticking in your 30s sooner than you might realize. So waiting until you're older to address it means fighting an uphill battle against years preventable decline. Of course, it's never too late, but it's also never too early. I'm going to give you tips and advice no matter what your age is in this podcast, so don't worry. So why are we choosing 5 pounds of muscle? Because we lose 3 to 8% of our muscle each decade after the age of 30. Building 5 pounds of muscle can reverse your musculoskeletal aging by over a decade. Muscle helps reverse the body's propensity to gain fat, get weaker, and get sicker as we age. Muscle is truly your tool to improve your body composition and metabolic health now, but it will also improve your life significantly as you age. The truth is, it doesn't really have to be £5. It could be as little or as much as you want. But this five pound goal is strategic because it's both sustainable enough to create measurable health benefits and aesthetic changes while being realistic enough to achieve this within about a year or less. Studies show that even if you don't build five pounds of muscle, modest increases in muscle mass can improve metabolic health, reduce chronic inflammation, enhance daily function, support bone density and more. So any little bit adds up. So let's Talk about how muscle can help improve metabolic health, which has a direct effect on your body composition. Increased muscle mass enhances glucose metabolism by providing more storage sites for glycogen, the body's stored form of carbohydrates. Muscle tissue contains specialized glucose transporters that help remove glucose from the bloodstream more efficiently, which improves insulin sensitivity. Additionally, muscle cells produce and release myok, which are specialized proteins that act as chemical messengers throughout the body, reducing systemic inflammation and supporting metabolic health. This increased muscle mass also helps maintain better blood sugar control during and after meals. More glucose storage helps prevent sharp spikes in blood sugar levels, so this means that you may have more stable energy levels and less intense hunger cues. This can directly affect your body composition. You may have more energy to stay active and have an easier time staying within your calorie need because of more stable hunger cues. A reminder that improved metabolic health through building muscle does help improve leanness. But if you're in an overall calorie surplus, building 5 pounds of muscle is not necessarily going to make you leaner. So although muscle has a powerful effect on metabolic health, it isn't the only thing involved in getting leaner. Or it really isn't even the primary thing involved in getting leaner. So that's why to build muscle, it truly is one of the most powerful things you can do for your present self and for your future self. Let's now discuss a realistic timeframe to expect based on your age and on your training level. The timeline for gaining muscle varies significantly based on those two things, your age and your training experience. Traditionally, we thought that beginners had early strength gains that were purely from neurological adaptations and cell swelling, with true muscle growth really only starting at weeks 6 to 10 or 6 to 12. And these are even things that I've said on the podcast in the past. However, some interesting research which I'll cite everything in the show notes, suggests that this isn't necessarily true. Some research using MRI measurements have challenged this, showing untrained individuals can gain actual muscle tissue so not just cell swelling remarkably quickly, approximately 0.33pounds in their thighs alone, just with two weeks of resistance training and 0.58lbs of muscle in their thighs alone after four weeks. If we extrapolate this out to full body muscle mass gains, this suggests a newbie might realistically achieve five pounds of muscle within maybe three to four months, though this timeline may extend for older individuals since this study did focus on adults in their 20s. If you are trained, if you're already strength training, maybe you've been an evil member for a while, this journey may look a little different. Muscle growth tends to happen more gradually if you've already spent some time building a good amount of muscle mass. So building five more additional pounds of muscle may take anywhere from five months to two years, depending on your age and on your lifestyle. So be patient if you are someone that's already trained, but know that it is possible now. What if you're someone that you're not new to strength training but you've taken some time off, whether that be from a life event like having a baby, or maybe just being less consistent overall for whatever reason, there's really encouraging data to support that. Regaining lost muscle tissue happens relatively quickly due to muscle memory. Rebuilding previously held muscle mass typically occurs more quickly than building it the first time, making the journey back to your previous muscle mass a lot more efficient. In my personal experience, I lost about five pounds of muscle in the five months after delivering my daughter. So in the five months postpartum. But when I got back to consistent training and eating enough protein at around like five month, five or six, I quickly regained a significant amount of muscle. So I gained about 4.2 pounds of muscle within about three months. So regaining muscle mass after some time off can happen pretty dang quickly. Although I can't promise a timeline because it will very much depend on your training history and lifestyle, most can realistically expect 5 pounds of muscle gain within about a year, or potentially much less. Aside from training status and lifestyle, how do genetics play a role in your ability to see results? So, based on a twin study involving 353 postmenopausal twins, genetics accounted for approximately 30 to 50% of a person's lean mass potential. While the majority of their lean mass potential, between 50 and 70%, is determined by controllable factors like training, nutrition, and overall lifestyle choices. This research suggests that while genetic predisposition does play a role in mus muscle development, individuals have substantial control over their body composition through their daily habits and decisions. So again, although genetics are real, the majority of us and the majority of our results are within our control. What about age? How does age play a role in your ability to build muscle and improve body composition? I get lots of questions about how to build muscle in the peri and postmenopausal years, so I want to discuss that here. While it's advantageous to develop muscle before this time in your life, muscle building remains both possible and crucial in the peri and postmenopausal years. So during these hormonal transitions, decreased Estrogen levels can make muscle recruitment more challenging and can impact recovery. So this is important information to understand so that you can know how often to lift and how heavy to lift. So when we think about how often to lift, most studies say that weekly training volume, so the amount of sets you're doing per muscle group per week matters more than how many sessions you're doing. But I would argue that shorter, more frequent sessions are best for peri and postmenopausal women. Studies indicate that we need at least four hard sets per muscle group per week to see significant muscle gain in body composition changes. If we break the body into about nine major muscle groups, so quads, hamstrings, glutes, abs, back, chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, that's a total of 32 working sets per week at least. Research suggests that you could do, in theory, all of these sets in one single workout. You could break them into two workouts, three workouts, four, five, six, whatever. However, I would argue that instead of trying to clump these together into one or two or even three workouts, I would suggest spreading the work throughout four or five days rather than cramming it into two or three sessions. This is because fatigue limits motor recruitment. If you are doing longer sessions with overall more sets, your fatigue starts to inhibit your ability to recruit as much of the muscle. So quality of the set decreases or goes down as the workout continues and as you accumulate fatigue. This is an especially important aspect of training in the peri and postmenopausal group, since lack of estrogen is already limiting muscle recruitment. So we want to limit how fatigue is affecting your ability to recruit a muscle. But if your workouts are shorter with fewer sets and spread more throughout your week, you are limited less by fatigue and have higher quality sets and can stimulate muscle tissue much more effectively. So that's how many times per week to train. Again, I suggest spreading that volume throughout maybe four or five workouts per week. If you're an Evelyn member, leaning on the four to five times per week track rather than the three time per week track. If you can again doing the three time per week track, you can still see great benefits, but ideally we spread them into more sessions. Additionally, Perry and postmenopausal women may consider lower rep training with heavier weights. Now it's possible to effectively build muscle with sets up to 30 repetitions. Higher reps are associated with more fatigue though. And again, this increased fatigue may limit muscle recruitment and the quality of this set. So when you're first starting strength training, or if you're first starting Evolo, you may lift a little lighter with higher reps to kind of get the movement patterns down. But as you start to feel confident with those movement patterns, try to lift a bit heavier. There's no magic number as long as you get close to failure. So you could try six reps in each set. 8, 12, 15 does not matter. Just see what feels the best for you and what rep scheme limits your overall fatigue. A good kind of rule of thumb is that you want to feel relatively fresh going into each set. So if you do eight reps, let's say, and you feel pretty, like your heart rate isn't super high and you feel pretty energetic and fresh and you're following set, that's a really good rep range for you. If you do 25 reps and you're like I am cooked going into the next set, your fatigue is higher. So your motor recruitment might be lower. Again, no right or wrong here, just something to kind of consider and play with. But know that even if you are lifting higher reps, 25, 30 reps and and you truly are approaching that muscular failure point where your final rep is really hard and really slow, you can still see muscle growth despite your age. So if you're perior or postmenopausal, I would choose the four or five time per week track again since the sessions are shorter rather than choosing the three time per week track. If you can know that we walk you through how to get close to failure in every single Evlo class, you'll hear us queuing so that you can lift heavier and do fewer reps and stop sooner than we do in class. That is no problem. We always say you don't have to follow us exactly. It's just about getting close to your muscle failure. So if you do fewer reps, you could stop and break and rest while we are finishing up the set that we're doing in class, no problem. So another thing that I want you to consider is don't worry about how much something burns or if you're shaking or how many calories you're burning. None of that is important for body composition changes. It's all about giving your body a strong enough signal to trigger a cascade for muscle development and growth. So that's Peri and postmenopausal women. Let's move on to a common question I get, which is what if I feel too big from trying to strength train, can I just maintain the muscle mass that I currently have? My answer is yes and no. First of all, if your Goal is to be leaner. Focus on diet. Many times when you're building muscle, people feel bigger because they're also in a calorie surplus. So they're gaining muscle, but they're also gaining or maintaining fat mass. It's possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. This is called body recomposition, but it requires proper nutrition. So if that is a goal of yours to get leaner while you're building muscle, take a look at your nutrition, which I'll go over more here in a moment. But if you're in a season of life where you truly just want to maintain your muscle mass, you do need to train similarly as you would for gaining muscle mass. So you'll be taking sets a few reps shy of failure in 30 reps or less. The main difference between a maintenance program and a gaining program is overall weekly volume. So to maintain, you would need more like one to three hard sets per week per primary muscle group. Whereas to gain, you likely need more than three sets per week per primary muscle group. If you're an evil member and you want to maintain, you can take upper body build, lower body build, and mat build spread between three days throughout the week. This will ensure that you have enough volume to maintain. Although I don't recommend doing this permanently, it can be a good strategy for busier times in life. What does gaining five pounds of muscle really look like? If you're pairing nutrition with training for body recomposition, so losing fat while gaining muscle, you will notice more muscle definition everywhere. It probably won't be super extreme gaining five pounds of muscle because it will be distributed throughout your entire body, but you'll feel and look stronger for sure. So like I said, I've built about 4.2 pounds of muscle in the last three months. And then number one thing I feel is just better overall and higher energy. But I also notice more muscle definition everywhere in my body. Now, this isn't something that I talked about a lot on my social media, but it is important to note this. I have also been combining nutrition for a little bit of fat loss so that muscle definition is more noticeable. Noticeable because I've gotten leaner overall. I've been following the Nutrition for Body Recomposition guide in the EVO membership for fat loss. But just knowing that just strength training isn't necessarily the magic ticket to get leaner I think is really important. So we Talked about why 5 pounds of muscle can be so powerful. Let's now talk about how to do it. So it's going to involve four primary things in a framework that I call the Reps framework. So each letter stands for a different tenant of this. So R is repetitions. Approach muscular failure in 30 reps or less in each set. This is something that I've been alluding to throughout this podcast. It doesn't matter if something feels hard or makes your muscles burn or shake. What is important is that your last few reps have a significant decrease in velocity. You aren't able to lift the weight. Click quickly. Despite your best efforts, you can truly pick any amount of reps, anywhere from 6 to 30 ish taken close to failure, and that will be effective for muscle growth growth. I've changed my opinion over this throughout the years. I personally used to prefer higher reps closer to like 25 reps, but the more I train, the more I'm gravitating towards fewer reps, like 15ish reps or sometimes less. But truly, no matter your age, no matter who you are, you can choose anything from 6 to 30 reps and build muscle. So choose based on your preference, what you enjoy and what you can stay consistent with. If you're newer, you may do better with a little bit lighter lifting and higher rep closer to that, you know, 25, 30 rep range. But we walk you through this in EVLO when you join, because we start you with foundations and we kind of walk you through that whole thing. So if you're holding something for minutes on end, let's say you're going to a reformer class or a bar class and you're doing a movement that is like four minutes long and you're shaking and burning. That isn't necessarily toning or burning fat. It's mainly just improving endurance. As we age, we keep a really good composition of our muscular endurance fibers, so we don't need to focus on those fibers as much as we age. So really, really focus on getting close failure in 30 reps or less. So that's R repetitions. The next one is E. Exercise selection. Choose simple exercises that target one main muscle group and that will be the most effective. For muscle growth. You want to be limited by the targeted muscle, not by the burn, not by shake, not by discomfort or pain, not by fatigue, not by boredom. The exercise shouldn't target more than one muscle group at once. If you're trying to do too much at once, you won't get high enough stimulus for any of the muscle groups that you're targeting. So less is more. For example, if you're doing an exercise like a plank on a Pilates Reformer. And you've got one leg up and you're moving the other leg in and out. That is an exercise that feels really hard and you might burn and shake and it might feel like you want to stop, but there's so much going on that you may stop that exercise because of overall fatigue or discomfort, not because any one muscle group got close to failure. So that's an example of an exercise that probably isn't very effective for muscle growth or body composition changes. So focus on one muscle group at a time. So whether that be quads or glutes or abs or chest, instead of trying to target everything at once, this allows for higher stimulus per muscle group, resulting in better overall results. So we got R, which is repetitions, E, which is exercise selection. The next is P. Protein nutrition is just as important as the training stimulus. You need proper building blocks in order to build lean mass. Our registered dietitians recommend 0.75 to 1 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. If your goal is body recomposition or any kind of fat loss while you're building muscle, calorie intake is crucial. The arties that we work with have recommended starting at maintenance calories and decreasing by 200. If you feel like you aren't noticing fat loss at your maintenance, let's walk through how to find your calorie goal. And this is all credit to an RD that we work with with @evlo. Her name is Asosa, who created our Nutrition for Body Recomposition guide. So if you're driving, know that you can find Associates guide on the EVLO membership and this will easily walk you through this calculation. You can find that by going to the Learn tab and search Nutrition for Body Recomposition. So let's go into this calculation. First, you'll use the calculator that I'll put in the show notes to find your BMR. Write that number down. Next, multiply your BMR by 1.3 to get your maintenance calories. You can start there for body recomposition. And this is where I tend to focus. Then you can subtract 200 calories per day if you find that you aren't losing fat. Again, the RDs that we've worked with have often said that you can see body recomposition just at your maintenance calories. So it may not be necessary to be in a calorie deficit at all. Now, if you are going into a calorie deficit, the RDs that we work with say that a small deficit is really Important if you go too big, you're more likely to under fuel and potentially binge later. So it might be more of that yo yo type of effect. So those are calories. And I do recommend tracking if your goal is fat loss because you want to make sure it's a pretty small range, right? And so you want to make sure that you're eating enough but you're not overeating. On top of that, you want again that 0.75 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day and then just staying within that calorie range that you calculated in Associa's guide on that EVLO membership. There's a bit more information about the other macros like fat and carbohydrates. Personally, what I do is I just shoot for about one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day and I just let carbs and fat kind of make up the remaining calories for my day. But again, she also helps you calculate carbs and fat if that's something that you're interested in looking at too. All right, so we've got R repetitions. E exercise selection. P protein S is structure. How many days a week should you work out and how many days should you rest? Think about how many sets you do for each muscle group rather than how many days per week you work out. Shooting for at least four sets for the main muscle groups each week. You can do that in the 3, 4 or 5 time per week evolo tracks. I personally prefer the 4 or 5 time per week track and here's why. The 4 and 5 time per week track are 35 minute classes and the volume is spread out throughout your week. Whereas the three time per week track, they're longer classes, but be but it has the same volume as the five time per week track. Many people like this track because the classes are longer and we've been conditioned to to think that longer workouts and are harder and therefore more effective. But this is not the case when it comes to building muscle. It is a good track if you need it. But what happens is when the workouts are longer, you accrue more fatigue during the class, making the second half of the class less effective overall. So if you can shoot for the four or five time per week Evolo track, I also recommend taking at least one, preferably two days off lifting each week. If you aren't taking recovery days, you'll see your quality suffer because of again that accumulated fatigue. This means you aren't getting a very high stimulus to the Muscle and therefore kind of watering down the results for your time investment. So just to summarize what's important for building muscle, the crucial things for building muscle and therefore improving your body composition is number one repetitions, making sure that you're approaching failure in each set in 30 repetitions or less. Your last few reps should be hard and slow. It doesn't matter if they if you burn or shake or sweat. Approaching musc muscular failure is what's important. The next is E. Exercise selection fancier is not better. Choose simple exercises that target one muscle group at a time. The P is protein. Eat 0.75-1 grams of protein per pound of body weight each day and finally, structure. Shoot for at least four hard sets per week per muscle group and build in 2ish recovery days. So how can you measure if you're gaining muscle? The most reliable way to measure is by getting a DEXA scan. You can go as frequently as you like, whatever makes the most sense for you, whether that's quarterly or monthly. I go to body Spec in Austin and I know they have these like all over the country in a lot of major cities, and I think the Scans are like $40 each. If you don't have access to a DEXA scan, you can try using a body composition scale. I got one called Hume just a for you all so that I could test it and compare it to the results that I was getting from my DEXA scan. So what I did is I got my latest DEXA scan and then I went home and immediately used my HUME scale. And Hume was extremely inaccurate. So you can use that knowing that it'll probably be very inaccurate. However, what we care about is the trend, not the absolute values. So it could be a good tool for you to use as long as you don't feel like you're obsessing over the scale. I wouldn't recommend getting on it every day because it's really common for weight to fluctuate. So try weekly or monthly to track the trends. And then finally, if you don't have access to a DEXA or one of those body composition scales, you could just go by overall how strong you are. If you're getting stronger and you're approaching muscular failure and you're eating enough protein, you're likely also building muscle. You'll be able to see more muscle visually just in the mirror. So you can go by just how you feel and how you like look. So I've spent the last few months applying this information and trying to build five pounds of muscle at the time of this recording, I've built 4.2 pounds of muscle over the last 3ish months. This happened relatively quickly because number one, I've been consistent with the five time per week evil track and eating enough protein and number two, I've already built this muscle before and as I mentioned earlier, it comes back quicker the second time. I've also lost a little bit of fat as I mentioned earlier, because I've been eating at about maintenance or maybe sometimes slightly lower than maintenance, so my body composition has changed. Overall, the lifestyle of building muscle feels so sustainable to me. My body doesn't hurt from overdoing it, I'm not starving from eating too little. My workouts are 35 minutes or less and I love being able to take two active recovery days each week. So because I'll likely hit that goal by the time January 1st rolls around, I'm setting another goal to build five pounds of muscle in 2025 alongside you all. Each quarter of 2025 we'll do a check in on the podcast. I'll talk about what I've learned, we'll address some FAQs and I'd love to read some of your stories on the podcast, so make sure to send them to us. So let's build five pounds of muscle in 2025. This time next year you'll be five pounds stronger. You will have set your musculoskeletal aging back by a decade. You will feel more energetic and your body composition will be better. You will reverse the natural propensity for your body to decline with age. To me, building muscle is not optional, but it doesn't have to consume your life. It doesn't have to leave you feeling run down. You can do it with 35 minute workouts from home and the EVLO membership is here to help you achieve this. I created EVLO because I was frustrated by a lack of science based fitness methods that were both practical but effective. In evlo, we release brand new classes every single week so you don't have to repeat the same classes. Each class is taught by a doctor of Physical Therapy. I'm in there teaching as well. You'll start in our Foundations program and then we place you into one of our weekly tracks. I did the five time per week track over the last few months and have seen really great progress. Each class on the four or five times per week track is only 35 minutes. The classes include Mobility, Warmup and cool down. So not only are you getting in really high quality muscle work, but you're Getting nervous system regulation built in, which is crucial for results. Every exercise we select is carefully hashed and rehashed. We aren't wasting your time with exercises that aren't actually moving the needle. We heavily cue to help you get the most out of your movement. And there's all these alternatives you can use if you don't want to do the movement that we're demoing. There's customizable music, there's ways to track the weights you use. We answer questions in the comments of each class. This membership is truly, in my opinion, the most holistic and sustainable way to build muscle. The membership price is $55 per month and you're really getting the quality of a personal trainer, but potentially better results for a fraction of the price of a personal trainer. So to me, I we really tried to base the price of this membership on the value that we're providing. And to me, when we think about the value that you're getting from this, the ability to build muscle with less wear and tear through your body, it's a steal. So if you're on the fence for 2025, we are doing a promo where you can get the month of January for free. Starting December 29th and running through January 1st, we are extending our free trial. Our free trial is usually two weeks and we're extending it to one month. Month. This is for new members only. So until then, if you are ready to join us in January and try to build 5 pounds of muscle, gather your equipment. Maybe take these couple weeks to listen to a few podcast episodes so that you really understand where we're going. Get yourself ready to go and we will see you inside the membership. Not to be dramatic, but this is truly the investment in your health that can change the course of your life. Can't wait to build a five pounds of muscle with you in 2025.