← The Dr. Shannon Show
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Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I built evlo. EVLO is science back strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try evolo now for two weeks free if you visit evolofitness.com welcome
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to Fitness Rewired on the Dr. Shannon Show, a nine episode capsule designed to close the gap between fitness culture and exercise science so you can see higher return on your effort and finally feel like you're doing enough. Many fitness beliefs come from marketing and tradition and don't align with current evidence. When you learn the truth, you can rewire your thoughts around fitness. That shift leads to higher quality actions, better results and health you can actually sustain. I'm your host Shannon Richie. Welcome to the show. I want to challenge you to think of the very first time you remember anyone intentionally working out. For me, it was my mom doing Jane Fonda DVDs. I remember them talking about lifted booties and toned tummies. I remember the before and after infomercials of people holding up their old pants. I remember Just do it campaigns with sweaty athletes. My ideas of what fitness should look like or should do for your body was first planted at a young age from advertising and media. When I first started unraveling some of my own deep seated beliefs, it truly blew my mind and I felt lied to. It made me realize how much time I had wasted pursuing the wrong goals, doing the wrong workouts, wearing my body down, and ultimately creating unhealthy mindsets around fitness and my body. And whether we realize it or not, we have all been shaped by the media and unfortunately there's a large gap between fitness culture and science and I don't see that gap between fitness culture and science getting any smaller. In fact, I see it widening and it's my personal mission to do everything I can to close that gap to make the science more accessible to the masses. So for those of you who are already consistent with exercise, closing this gap and understanding this gap will help your workouts be higher return on investment. It will help improve your mindset around fitness and your body. Your mindset and your actions will affect then the next generation. Your children potentially will see how you're behaving in the mindset that you have and they will be exposed to healthier, more truthful messaging around fitness and on the other side. For more sedentary individuals, it will lead to more consistent exercise lifestyles because you'll realize that it doesn't need to be brutal to make a major impact on your health. It will lower the barrier to entry. It'll reframe exercise from overly intense and grueling and brutal to something that feels really accessible and effective. Understanding where this messaging came from is powerful because it helps us rewire our brains. And when your brain changes, your actions change. When your actions change, your results change. But it starts with education. It starts right here. So today I want to talk about the history that shaped our beliefs and around exercise. The first step to improving your results in your mindset is understanding where our old beliefs came from. They were shaped by media and culture, not shaped by science. So let's go over a brief history of the fitness messaging to learn the roots of some of these beliefs. And then in each episode in this capsule, I will break down a different common belief so that you really understand the science. So let's start by going all the way back to the 1900s. In the 1900s, muscular physiques were popularized by men like Eugene Sandow. Muscle became associated with power and dominance and masculinity. Women were participating in what was called physical culture, but it emphasized more grace and posture and poise, but definitely not visible muscle. The message for women was that men build a muscle and women remain small and dainty. By the 1940s and 50s, the messaging centered around femininity. So think like Marilyn Monroe type curves. The goal wasn't strength, it was to reduce inches, melt your belly fat, get back your figure slimmed down for your husband. Workouts were calisthenics and light stretching and rhythmic movement or floor exercises. Spot reduction was everywhere, so vibrating belts, slimming corsets, waist trainers. Muscle was definitely not a part of the conversation for women, as it was seen as masculine. The object was about the feminine curves and reducing fat where you didn't want it, like in your waist. In the 60s and 70s, fashion took over and Twiggy became the ideal. So think like long, thin, delicate curves weren't emphasized as much anymore. But still no one was telling women to lift weights. Then the 1980s hit, and this was an important time that shaped much of what we currently see in fitness culture, because we started to see two distinct cultures emerging. We had the Jane Fonda era with aerobics and really light weights. And then we had female bodybuilding. In 1980, a woman named Rachel McNish won the Miss Olympia title. Her physique was Lean and muscular, but still aligned with conventional femininity. At the time, she looked athletic, she didn't look extreme. And this started to pique women's interest in lifting weights. But as the 1980s progressed, muscle mass increased and extremes became greater in the bodybuilding community. Competitors like Bev Francis brought a whole new level of masculinity that the mainstream had never seen in women before. She was building a ton of muscle. And media coverage started framing these athletes as like, shocking or controversial or even unfeminine. Headlines emphasized how extreme they were. And that media framing is crucial because what happened culturally was two opposite reactions. On one side, female bodybuilding proved that women could build some serious muscle. It demonstrated that strength wasn't biologically reserved for men, and that was really empowering. But on the other side, it reinforced fear because to that point, women weren't really lifting weights. We didn't have a lot of experience with weightlifting back then. So women who had no experience with lifting thought in if I start to lift weights, is that what I'm going to look like? Never mind that those physiques required extreme training volumes. Spending hours and hours in the gym each day. They often required pharmaceutical enhancement, they required years, and they required very low body fat percentage levels. All of that work the average woman wouldn't have the time or capacity to recover from. But that nuance didn't make it into the everyday conversation. Instead, the simplified cultural takeaway became weights equals bulky and aerobics and lightweights equals toned. So this happened at the exact same time that the aerobics boom was exploding. So you had Jane Fonda on one screen promoting long lean, high rep burn and female bodybuilders on the other, portraying muscle as extreme. So by the late 80s and 90s, fitness magazines leaned heavily into language like tone don't bulk light weights for definition shape without size. Female bodybuilding unintentionally became the quote, unquote, what not to become example in the mainstream. That framing shaped how women approached weights for decades and even how women still see weights today. Even now, when a woman says she doesn't want to get bulky, she's not picturing moderate hypertrophy, which is much more realistically what happens when you start lifting weights at moderate volumes. She's picturing the 1980s stage ready bodybuilders. And even if she's not, she might be picturing just bigger or, or bulkier altogether, which I'm going to have a podcast all about here in just a few days. But here's something else that's really Important when fitness later reintroduced strength training to women in the 2000s and 2010s, it even then had to soften the language to make it more acceptable. So this is where like strong is the new skinny or build big glutes, grow your glutes, shrink your waist. That's where all of that came from. It was an attempt to rebrand strength without triggering the old bodybuilding fear. So after researching this, I'm realizing that the 80s era was really a pivotal moment that set the stage for women being marketed towards toning and sculpting workouts. Then there was a second wave of marketing that largely influenced what we see in the culture today around the fitness. And this happened in the early 90s. The culture shifted from 80s aerobics, which was mostly about like fun, energy, appearance, fun music, not a ton of intensity, light weights, maybe not breaking a huge sweat, but still working your body. It shifted towards the intensity grit. No pain, no gain. And brands like Nike played a major role in shaping that narrative through advertising rather than exercise science. Nike's marketing in the 80s and 90s reframed exercise as a test of mental toughness and and personal discipline. Campaigns built around slogans like just do it launched in 88 portrayed training as uncomfortable. No pain, no gain, lots of fatigue, lots of sweat. And that was portrayed as virtuous. And like a signal of success, advertisements frequently showed athletes training alone in harsh conditions, sweating, exhausted and persevering, reinforcing the idea that effort and suffering were proof of effectiveness. And this messaging aligned with a broader cultural rise of performance and endurance sports at the time, which also shifted public perception from exercise as recreational movement towards exercise as intense self optimization, which is a mindset that still influences modern fitness culture today, even though physiological adaptation does not require workouts to feel punishing to be effective. Then in 2009, Fitbit launched and tracking exploded into the mainstream. This culture of sweaty, hard workouts was further perpetuated by these fitness wearables. I remember this era very clearly because this is when I was just getting into the fitness industry. At the time, as an uneducated fitness consumer and instructor, I saw fitness watches as a great way to track how effective my workout was. But what I didn't realize is that that was slowly transitioning exercise from being about fitness and moving my body to being more about burning off what I ate. And everyone around me in the fitness industry felt similarly. Apple watches arrived in the mid 2010s, and so closing your rings made calorie burn a top priority. People started feeling like Their workouts didn't quote, unquote count if they forgot to start their watch. Strength training became less of the priority because it didn't produce such dramatic calorie burns and didn't make a dent in closing your rings. It pushed people towards doing more cardio because it felt more measurable. Not only did workouts not quote unquote count if they didn't burn enough, but ring closure was a daily goal, meaning the recovery days with lighter activity was discouraged. So people were exercising hard, often and not recovering. And this coincided with when I started practicing as a physical therapist and I was seeing a lot of my fitness minded clients coming to me who were not taking recovery days, who were they got had the apple watch on and they were trying to close all their rings and they were prioritizing hard workouts at the cost of their physical body. This further ingrained the idea of intensity and extremes. So now we're in the 2000s and it feels like history is repeating itself a little bit with two opposite cultures. On one side we have skinny and toned. This is Ozempic filming yourself doing workouts that are Instagram worthy that don't actually change the muscle meaningfully. It's kind of that that girl aesthetic. And then on the other side, there's a muscle building movement which I am a part of. But this is also starting to get extreme. There's extreme protein intakes, hormones are becoming normalized in women, which I'm not saying that's bad. But on this side of things, there are influencers who are pushing heavy weights only and presenting very muscular physiques as the new standard. And it kind of feels like the 80s all over again. Except now viral messages have an even bigger reach with social media. It's not just what's on the magazine covers, it's what we're all taking in on a daily basis, multiple times a day. And this further ingrains and perpetuates these messages. Messages like, give me six weeks and one dumbbell and I'll get you toned and sculpt. Or my Pilates and strength program will help you burn fat and build muscle in just six weeks. Or the gym made me bulky, now my home Pilates program got me toned. And then on the other side of things, we have women have to lift heavy or they'll get sick and fall and break a bone and die. Or women shouldn't train like men or lightweights are pointless. And I'll be honest, even I question myself sometimes when I'm seeing so much Pilates content or super super heavy weights only or these sweaty aesthetic workouts because it really is constant and when you're surrounded by it constantly, it starts to mess with you. But these viral claims aren't making us healthier. They're making us more confused, less consistent and more frustrated. And it's costing our health. People are not prioritizing their muscle or if they try, they give up because they're sold it needs to be super heavy and that doesn't feel accessible. Some people stop exercising entirely because they try these programs and don't see the promised results. Other people overdo it, feeling like they can never do enough, trying to chase the burn or burn off what they ate and and they're left with broken down bodies and lost periods. Understanding where we came from helps us to understand what we're currently getting sold. There is so much noise, so it's difficult to know what is right and what is wrong. So in this series I want to dive into the misleading marketing that has shaped how we think about fitness. I want to break down each element so you know what's actually worth your time and what may be misleading you. When you are armed with education, you're more likely to take consistent action because you understand the why. Changing your brain comes from first understanding the science, then applying it long enough to see results. Not to be dramatic, but this is a process that will truly change your life. So in this series we'll discuss all the beliefs that have prevailed mainly due to marketing. I'll discuss where they have merit and where they fall short. We'll go deep into each of these topics. So first we'll talk about cardio and calories burned. Then we'll talk about workouts being hard and why exhausting workouts are not necessarily more effective. We'll talk about sweat and heated workouts. We'll talk about if you need to be sore. We'll talk about toning and sculpting workouts. We'll talk about if heavy lifting is the only way, why you feel bulky. And we'll end with an episode on what to focus on instead. My goal is that you walk away from this capsule with a good understanding of how to exercise to truly sustainably change your health. So join me for tomorrow's episode where we'll talk about how calories affect weight loss. We'll get into how your body burns calories. And I'll touch on a brand new study from February 2026 that suggests strength training may actually burn more calories than cardio. We'll see you tomorrow.