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The Dr. Shannon Show
#221: Weights or cardio first, reaching failure vs. reps in reserve, and an important announcement
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Dr. Shannon Richie
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 Evil Fitness. In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your health based on science. Welcome to the show everyone. Welcome back. So I have a little bit of a different episode for you today and make sure that you stay to the end of the episode because I have an important update that I want to fill you all in on. So it is currently June 2025 when I'm recording this. We're halfway through the year ish and at the beginning of this year I encouraged you all to set the goal of building five pounds of muscle by the end of 2020. And since then I have been so inspired by the stories that I've heard from you all. I get DMs daily of you telling me your success stories and what you're seeing and feeling in your body. Many of you have actually reached the goal of building five pounds of muscle over this six months. Many of you are well on your way. And one of my favorite things is helping people see the physical change in their bodies, which we talk about all the time on here and we'll talk about today. But I also think the most important part is the mindset shift. When you internalize and start to practice all of this, you stop being so hard on yourself for missing a workout or not burning enough calories because you know the right ingredients to stay healthy and progress forward are not just doing more, but doing it better and consistently. So if you're new around here, I'm putting all the podcast links in the show notes about all the content that we've done to this point about building five pounds of muscle. I did an initial episode detailing how to do it and then we have some like FAQs and I have stories about my own personal journey as well. So I'll link all of that in the show notes. But I recently asked my Instagram and then our email list to send us your stories about building muscle this year and what is working for you. And we received so many great stories. Again, I get DMS daily about successes from members, which makes me so happy. So I wanted to select a few to chat about today. So first of all. For those of you that sent in your stories, thank you. We had so much fun reading them and I'm always so inspired by this community. You all truly keep me going. And a lot of these stories were from members who had great tips for the community, things that they learned that they could pass on. And I wanted to take those tips a share their stories and their progresses and what's working for them and then share their tips with you and kind of back those tips by science and explain them. Because a lot of the tips that they share are frequently asked questions that we get. So it's not just about sharing their stories this episode it's my hope is that you will walk away being like, oh, I learned something. I've been wondering the answer to that and I learned it today. So you'll also learn some things in this episode. So many Before I get into these testimonials and stories, many of these people set the goal of body recomposition, which means losing fat and building muscle. And I'm not going to talk much about their diet because we were focused on muscle here. But remember that diet is crucial for fat loss and eating 0,75-1 gram of protein daily is essential for muscle growth. So the diet and nutrition piece is equally as important as the training. We're going to focus more on the training today in this episode, but just know that that's really important if body recomposition is a goal of yours and you don't have any education about that yet. I released an episode last week about that. That's episode 220. So I give a little bit more information about nutrition in that episode. So let's start with these stories. First, we have Lauren. Lauren has gained 2.5 pounds of muscle in about six months by following the five time per week Evolo track with build plus and no cardio. She says that she does her own cardio, either a peloton ride or a weighted vest walk or a hike on her treadmill. Her tip was to focus on actually getting to muscular failure. Vers is focusing on reps and she also said that she has been doing her weightlifting before her Cardio, which I 100% agree with. And that's a frequently asked question that I get. Should I do cardio or weightlifting first? So you want to weightlift first. And the reason that lifting before cardio is more effective is because we want strong neuromuscular signaling in our lifting sessions. You get the strongest, most potent signal to your muscles when your body is fresh. If you're fatigued from a cardio session that you just did, that signal dampens. It's like trying to give a speech the night after you, like, sing your lungs out at a concert. When your voice is fresh, you can project powerfully, but after hours of scream singing, your voice is hoarse and weak. And even though you're trying to be forceful and you're trying to talk normally, it comes out hoarse. And the reason I'm using this analogy is because I recently lost my voice after talking a lot on a podcast. And I had to give us the speech or a talk the next day. And it was like I was trying my hardest to get the voice out, but it wouldn't come out. So that's why I thought of that analogy. But the your muscles are the same way. Your nervous system is like your vocal cords. It needs to be rested to deliver those sharp, clear commands that makes your muscles generate the most force possible. If you fatigue your body with cardio first, you won't be able to generate the same amount of strength. And your workout, your lifting sessions won't be as potent and powerful. So that was the first story that I loved, and I loved the takeaway of doing her lifting sessions before her cardio session. So you can do them in the same session, right? You can lift, you can do a Neville class, and then you can follow that with cardio if you want to pack it into like one hour, let's say. But do the lifting session first. Or if you're taking steady state, do steady state after you do the lifting class. Next up is Faith. So, since January, faith has gained 2.6 pounds of muscle and lost 4.7 pounds of fat. She is following the five time per week Evolo track. She takes steady state once a week, which is our 15 minute light to moderate intensity class, and is getting the recommended 150 minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio. So she's doing everything that we recommend from an exercise standpoint, and she's seeing really great success. Her tip for the Evolo community is to listen to the podcast. So all of you are already doing that. But she said having the knowledge of the research to support what I'm doing has been a game changer in the Evolo practice of gentle consistency as well. Because I know the why and the how, and I don't just feel like I'm doing it just to do it. So I will say that educating myself, I have a kind of personal story behind this. I think that educating myself was fundamental in changing my body composition years ago. And Helping me heal from chronic pain. It allowed me to totally change my mindset around exercise. I had less anxiety about, quote, unquote, not doing enough, or missing a workout, or taking recovery days, or not killing myself in every single workout, or not leaving the workout drenched in sweat. And again, I think when you understand what works and what doesn't, you stop feeling guilty for doing all the activities that are just burning you into the ground, but not really moving the needle very much. So I really, really believe that education is extremely powerful. So if you're struggling with this stuff, start to educate yourself. Listen to the podcast. We have episodes about like almost every single topic in the archive. So go back and listen to some old ones if you need to. Next we have Lisa. Lisa is 53 and she said she's in perimenopause. She has gained 6.4 pounds of muscle. She started doing evolo in January of 2025 on the five time per week track, doing zone two cardio and one weekly sprint session. So she didn't say what if she was doing intervals or rehit or sprinting on a bike or she didn't specify what she was doing there. But consistently following the five time per week track, doing zone two cardio and then a little bit of sprint training. And I love her story because she's 53, she's perimenopausal. She has gained over 5 pounds of muscle in this year already. And it just goes to show that if you are lifting close to failure, you can still gain muscle no matter your age. I saw a post yesterday on Instagram from an expert in this area who was recommending that perimenopausal women do four sets of four reps, so really heavy weight for four reps and squats and deadlifts and things like that. And that's what they have to do to build strength and muscle. Or at least that was her recommendation. And that may work, but it is not the only way. In evla, we tend to stick to more of a moderate rep range. Although we say you can go heavier and do fewer reps or you can go lighter and do more reps. It's truly preference. I like a moderate rep range because I think it allows you to. It's easier to kind of get going with, especially if you don't have a history with lifting because it's not so daunting with the super heavy weights. And we hear from our members in perimenopause all the time about how they're seeing success. And it's because it simply is not true that the general rules for building muscle change all of a sudden when you hit perimenopause. The guidelines really apply, no matter your age, no matter male or female. So as long as you are getting close to failure or to failure in 30 reps or less, as long as you are eating enough protein, and as long as you are training each muscle group 2ish times per week, you're going to see muscle gain, bone density gain, strength gains, all of those things. So you have a, you have, I mean there's rules, right, if you follow those things, but within those things you have some flexibility. If you like to lift in more of the moderate range for slightly lighter reps, or if you like to go really heavy, you can really do any of that and make it fit your body. There's not a one size fits all, even during perimenopause. I think this is great news because it really means that you have some flexibility with your training. So if super heavy compound lifts aren't of interest to you, or if you maybe have gotten injured doing them in the past, you can do relatively lighter weights and you can do more quote unquote isolated lifts, targeted lifts like we're doing in Evlo. We haven't, we don't squat and deadlift and yet our members are still seeing muscle growth and strength gains. So you have flexibility. It's such great news. All right, this next story comes from Devin and it is one of my favorites because it demonstrates the power of less but better and how less but better truly provides superior results. She's actually been doing Evolo for two years, but she said that she was under fueling, she was under a lot of stress and she was doing a lot of cardio to try to burn calories in addition to the EBLA workouts. So she said she had a crash in December of 2024 and committed to the five time per week track with no cardio aside from walking and some occasional running. In about six months she has gained 3.8 pounds of muscle. And I love this story because she was doing the EBLA workouts. But it wasn't until she started fueling and recovering properly that she actually saw the benefits. She said that she was in a vicious cycle of destroying herself with calorie burning workouts that just led to burnout. She said that she's lean, strong and she said, I couldn't be happier with how I look and feel. Evolo is the most effective science based program I've ever done and I'm a Member for life. Again, I just love this story because it goes to show that you don't have to run yourself into the ground to see results. All right, next is Julia. She gained 4.2 pounds of muscle since January on the five time per week track and increasing protein. She also said that her body doesn't hurt anymore, which is huge because again, coming from someone who used to run their body into the ground and have all this chronic pain, you can stay so much more consistent when you aren't hurting all over, when you aren't sidelined by injuries. And that is coming from A, selecting a program that isn't overusing your body and then B, having some self regulation, right? So if you show up to your workout and you're like, yeah, I'm kind of sore or this is kind of bothering me, or I'm really tired, like, you don't have to do the workout full out. You could do one set and fast forward to the cool down. And we give you that autonomy all the time. And I think that understanding your body's cues and applying those things will allow you to stay in the game because your body is usually pretty smart and gives you the right cues if you just listen. So if you're listening to your body and you're learning how to listen to your body and you're adjusting accordingly, you don't get as hurt as often. You stay consistent, and therefore you start to see better results than ever. One tip that Julia had for the community is she said she notices the best results when she trains all the way to failure. And this is something that I wanted to talk about. So what we see from the literature is that you can see really similar results whether you train all the way to failure or if you stop a few reps shy. So like one to three reps shy of failure. But the difficulty with training close to failure, so getting a few reps shy of failure instead of all the way to failure, is that it's really easy to misjudge. And I think a lot of people do misjudge, especially if you're newer to strength training or even if you're not, if you're just not used to training close to failure. Getting to failure is pretty obvious, right? You try your hardest, but you cannot physically move the weight. That means you're at failure versus getting close to failure. You can still do the rep, but it's a lot slower and it's a lot harder. So if you aren't seeing results, try training all the way to failure, at least for a little Bit in a couple of your workouts, write down the weights and the reps that you did for those lifts. We have a little notes button in the circuit tab of the app if you want to keep it all in one place for each exercise and try to match or exceed that each week so that you know you're applying progressive overload. So we always say in class, like, train close to failure. We remind you in every single exercise. And I sometimes accidentally get all the way to failure. My goal is to shoot to train, you know, a couple reps shy of failure. Sometimes I'll get all the way there. Um, but again, you can really do either. The downside of training all the way to failure is that it can be more fatiguing. So it might be harder to recover from if every single lift, in every single workout, you're training all the way to failure. That's why we recommend training close to failure for the most part. But again, it might be something that you just play with just for a couple workouts so that you can really test like, oh, okay, this is what getting to failure means and looks like in this lift. Now I'm just going to back off a couple reps and get close to that as much as possible. Again, don't worry about it being perfect. It's just a little tool and a little tip for you. All right, I'm saving the biggest transformation for last. This one comes from Annie. She's 39, another one that's in perimenopause. So she wanted to build muscle and improve her bone density. And she didn't tell us what she was doing before, but my guess is is that she wasn't strength training prior to this. But again, I wasn't sure what workouts she was doing before this. So since January, she's built nine pounds of muscle and lost seven pounds of fat. So she has body recompositioned and she is truly applying everything that we recommend. She's doing the five time per week track with Build plus, which by the way, you can do any of our tracks and they'll be pretty much equally effective for building muscle. But most people I notice, have tended to choose the five time per week jacks. It's the most popular track, but any of them work. So she's doing the five time per week track with build plus. She's doing 150 minutes of cardio. She's either so in that cardio, she's either walking or she's biking to work, or she's adding our 10 minute rehit classes once a week. She's eating enough protein, and she's in a slight calorie deficit for the fat loss piece. So her deficit is like only a hundred to 200 calories each day. Not only has she seen this body composition shift, but my favorite part about her story is that she's seeing a shift in her energy. Her energy's higher. Her. She's feeling stronger. And in her email, I could really tell that she's, like, so proud of herself and confident. She's, like, telling her husband how she's an evangelist for Evola, which just, like, makes us so happy to hear, and I love to hear when people feel stronger and better and also see the physical results. I think it's such an awesome thing and feeling. So the best thing about all these stories is now these people have built a base of muscle and they're learning what works, and they can take that with them and. And compound those effects for the rest of your life. Building muscle is a skill that you can continue to apply forever for the rest of your life. And the beauty is, is that once you build muscle once, even if you lose it, let's say you have a baby like I'm about to have, or you go on a long vacation, or you're sick for a long time and you lose some muscle when you gain it back or when you go back to building it, it comes back faster the second time. This is a phenomenon that has been shown over and over and over. And the theory is that muscles have quote unquote memory. So as we build more muscle mass, we are also increasing the myonuclei, or the quote unquote brain of the muscle, and that stays even if the muscle tissue is lost. So muscle comes back faster the second time. So the hardest time to build it is the very first time, and then it gets easier from there. You learn what works, and even if you lose it, it comes back faster the second time. All right, so those are the stories. Before we wrap up, I have some news to share. So this is the last episode that we're releasing for now. I have been doing this podcast for over four years, and we've never missed a Thursday, and we've often put out more than one episode per week. But it's a lot of work. And for my solos, I spend like 10 plus hours researching and writing every episode. I care so deeply this podcast and I absolutely love doing it. Aside from teaching classes, it's my favorite part of my job is writing and researching and creating these episodes. And to this point, it's never felt like a burden or a chore. I absolutely have loved doing it and I have loved the feedback that we've gotten from all of you. We've never monetized this podcast. I've never made a dime from the podcast. We have gotten offers for advertisers and to join agencies, but I've ultimately passed on all of that because it just didn't feel right. My goal of this wasn't to make money, it was about educating. And I really do feel like we have been able to achieve that to this point. At this point we have such a body of work, four years worth of really educational podcasts that you can go back to and return to. But with another baby on the way and a lot of projects on the horizon, I've decided to take a break from the podcast. I want to focus my energy on the membership and I'm very excited for some things to come to evlo, but even before the end of the year. And I'm also starting some other projects in the fall that will take my time and energy that I think you all will be really excited about as well. So as far as what's to come for the podcast, what's next? I'm not really sure. I can't see myself being done with this completely. I can't see myself just as this being the last episode. I know there will be things that come up in the future that I want to podcast and talk about. There'll be questions that come up, there's always new trends that I want to kind of talk about. I know there'll be guests that I want to talk to. So we may release episodes in the future kind of sporadically as things things come up. Or we may do the podcast in seasons again. I'm not really sure where it's going to go. So make sure that you're subscribed to the show so that when we do release a new episode in the future you see it. Also, make sure you're following on Instagram so that you can see any updates there. I have truly wanted to use the Dr. Shannon show and formerly Fit Body Happy Joints as a long form way to educate the EBLA members and the podcast community, answer questions and really help you all see better results. I am a big believer that proper education is one of the best ways to rewire your brain around fitness and have a healthier relationship with fitness in your body. And honestly to spend less time doing all the things that aren't working and just running yourself into the ground and I know I've said that, like three times in this episode, but my hope is that you all feel the same way. And if so, I've done my job with this podcast. Thank you for listening, for sharing the podcast, for giving me your valuable time. I am so honored to have you here listening, many of you listening every single week for years. And we will see you all next time. Bye for now.