The importance of tailoring workouts to individual goals. From addressing the needs of beginners to more advanced athletes, covers how to align training with specific objectives, such as improving performance in sports or preparing for pregnancy. The discussion includes practical advice on balancing muscle groups, preventing injuries, and the critical role of mental and physical preparation for significant life changes. Highlights the importance of a holistic approach to health and wellness, supported by charitable initiatives.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:04 - Overview of Exercise Regimens

01:07 - Initial Workouts and Goals

02:04 - Goal Setting

02:58 - Workout Variations Based on Goals

04:13 - Sport-Specific Training

05:21 - Swimmer-Specific Training

06:30 - Training for Female Athletes

08:38 - Pre-Pregnancy Preparation

10:45 - Preparing for Pregnancy

11:48 - Support Systems and Overall Wellness

12:40 - Holistic Health Approach

13:29 - Charity and Support

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] I'm sorry about lifting. Again, the way you lift, restructure your lifts, all that kind of stuff. The rep count, the set count, which exercises you're going to do. If you're going to do push, pull, if you're going to use bars, reunions, cables, have it like every, every single thing about the way you lift work, where you workout, how much cardio you're going to do, if you're going to do cardio at all, is entirely dependent upon your goals. So, like everybody's heard me talk about how much I don't like bars, squat bars, bench bar are such a thing. However, I have lunch powerlifters I work with, and that's their sport. Their sport is using a bar to lift weights. So obviously they have to train with bars. So there's a lot of things we do to make that safer and make that more functional for them. But we still they still train with bars, pretty much everybody else. We're not talking with bars. But that's, that's kind of how it is. And when people ask me what's the best workout I can do? Well, it's entirely depend upon which goals are, it also depends on where you are in your journey.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:07] If you're still struggling in the gym three days a week, do whatever you want. Like just go in, lift, you know, use the the range of motion that your bodies use. That is the proper range motion for that joint. I would stay away from bars, but if you want to do some stuff with bars just to kind of get in the habit of doing stuff, knock yourself out. As long as you maintain your form or your form of movement, you're going to be fine. What ends up happening is when you start working out more often, and you get more serious about your. The goals you have with lifting. That's what we need to get a lot more specific with what you're doing and how you're doing it. This is why the first, you know, sometimes two times I sit down with people. We specifically go over goals. Like the most important thing when we start, like going through our journey. The most important thing we do is we go over goals. And there's two reasons. It's like a 7030 type of thing. The vast majority of the reason we go over goals is for you, not for me.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:04] So that you understand where everything is and so you can put down what you want and commit yourself to yourself, to the things you want. Because then I'm going to tell you if you're like, this is where I want to go. I'm like, cool, this is what's going to be required to bake that cake. It took me this much time in the gym. This is your diet. This is your hormone set. This is your recovery pitch. This is your you know, this is how you do it all. This is your sleep. This is how everything breaks in to get you from where you are now to where you want to go. Are you sure this is where you want to go? Absolutely. Without a doubt. It's where I want to go. Great. Here's the cake to get you. Here's. Here's the ingredients that's going to required to get you to where you want to go. That's where all this stuff really starts to matter. So, like, there's a lot of people who, you know, we'll have on a, on a heavy lifting schedule of lower reps. It will have, you know, like 6 to 10 reps.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:58] And there's a lot of people have at that, you know, 12 to 15, you know, 17 style reps that, longer breaks, shorter breaks. It depends upon, again, what your goals are and where you're trying to go. You know how much when you do your cardio, how you do your cardio, that whole thing also plays into what your specific goals are. So when we talk about. You know the thing I like when I go through, like, hate on these videos, I say this is how you do stuff. It might not be conducive to your specific goals, so making sure that you guys have your goals set again is super duper important, right? So for instance, let me give you an example. So let's say we have somebody who wants to run a marathon, doing really heavy, squat work and doing really heavy leg press work. Building the thighs are big isn't conducive to your goal is, if you're like, hey, I want to run 26.2 miles. Having big thighs, you got to run around is not going to be conducive to what you're trying to do. I mean, if you look at the guys who win marathons versus the guys who when, you know, leg press competitions, they don't look the same. And there's a reason for that. So now you're still going to go in and you're still going to left.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:13] Like the biggest thing I would have those guys do is the extreme full. Like real slow, full body motion, single leg squats on a destabilized surface. And the reason for that is because as you're running and as you start to get tired, you're going to get sloppy in your form. So the last thing you want to do is, you know, at mile 20, you get sloppy in your form. You step on a twig or something and you roll your ankle, and now you got six miles that you can't do because your ankle stability was weak. So that's that's the way we live for something like that. Just very small example. So that that would be one of the, one of the two things we're really lifting for something that's highly partizan and intrusive. The other thing. So, for instance, one of the things I will do for swimmers, some think, triathletes or just swimmers is we really work the back muscles. Especially the breaststroke. So if you're doing things that are causing you to do this and really exercise the pecs over and over and over and over again, you have to balance that neurologically. There's two problems with that for swimmers. One, this joint isn't a real joint. And so it's highly susceptible to neurologic tone problems.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:21] So if we keep activating flexor groups watching that happen and we sleep on our sides, what's going to happen is we're going to start having shoulder issues that are really bad. So what we want to do is focus on, you know, the the inverse or the opposite of the motion we do for our sport. So if you're doing a lot of this, which is high shoulder, which is low shoulder, high pack, we want to make sure that we're doing posterior flies. Rear delt. I'm going to come back in the opposite direction. Open the chest up. And so that's how we we gear that lifting schedule because you're getting plenty of fly work. You're doing plenty of chest work as you're doing your, your actual sport. You're swimming. But if we don't like I said balance it. We're going to have issues with the front to back issues. We're we have shoulder issues, things like that. The other really big thing we do for swimmers is we make sure that their head is their chins away from their chest, because the more you're looking at your chest, the more you start rolling forward. And when we start opening up the AC joint. And so we're gonna have more issues there. So there's isotonic isometric exercises. The way you sit are going to be highly impactful on your sport. Female athletes from the biggest soccer players, softball players, basketball players, volleyball players.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:30] One of the things we do more than anything is we work the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is responsible for maintaining the way the pelvis sits. And female athletes, the reason that the female has one of the reasons that female athletes blow their knees out so much is the cue angle. So the angle from your from a woman's hips to her knees is 30% larger than it is in that. And the reason for that is because your pelvis is were designed to have babies. Again, I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but then when they're radically different, they're they're not even even close to the same thing. So from a structural standpoint, if you just look at the pelvis like that's how we know we see a skeleton, it takes that long to figure out if it's a man or woman. The pelvis is radically different, and it's designed that way on purpose because it's designed to separate when the baby comes through and then come back together. Men's policies do not have enough room for a baby to pass through. And the way they're structured together. It's not going to separate. Women's pelvis separates at the pubic symphysis. And when it gets when it gets the hormone relaxin in it. Now here's the problem. Every month when you have your cycle, the whole pelvic floor thing, China shifts around a little bit because your cells in the blood of the whole nine yards.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:39] So that whole thing, that damn it changes. And so if you don't understand how that's changing and then design an exercise routine around it to maintain stability in the pelvis, you're going to have femur rotation, the femur rotation, same down to hip as it is in the knee. All wonder. So if it rotates up top it's going to rotate down. And when it rotates down low that's when you have more torsion on the knee and the ligaments. So as you cut they blow out. Now you were like oh you gotta get me stronger. The knees, ligaments and tendons like how many muscles are in the knee, not their muscles. Think of to your knee where there's no muscles in your knee ligaments and that's it. So if you want to strengthen the knee, you got to strengthen the pelvic floor and the hip to keep that femur from rotate. You gotta get the pelvis adjusted properly and maintain so that the bone structure doesn't move, that that's moving all the joints and ligaments and everything, putting more strain and load on the body. So when we take female athletes like that, one of the biggest things we do is we start specifically working on pelvic floor work.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:38] So single leg squats, bridges, planks, lots of core work. Because remember your core is not your abs. Your core is your pelvis. Here's your pelvis. Everything attaches to your pelvis, your legs attached to it. Your spine attaches to it. Your upper trunk attaches to it. So the things that is tying the lower to the upper together, that's your pelvis. That's your core. And so when we do core work we're actually doing pelvic work. she goes are another great thing for female athletes because we got to get that internal pelvic floor to solidify and to strengthen and harden. And so that it maintains function. So all of the exercises we're going to do are dependent upon that. Now, as a woman, if you're not a female athlete, those things are so important. But they're less important. Like if you're like, hey, like I, you know, I just want to look good and feel good. I don't need to go out and, you know, be able to run five miles an hour playing soccer. I'm not cutting. Okay. We're still gonna work on knee function, but it's going to be lower on a priority list. So now again, if you're a woman, you're like, hey. Look, I want to have babies soon. How far? Like. We're starting in six months. Perfect. We can start exercising for pregnancy.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:49] If you guys have never thought about exercising specifically for pregnancy, you're missing about the amount of 28 year old women that I see who pee on themselves a little bit when they laugh because their pelvic floor was weak. It's pretty hot because no one when they started to talk about, oh, I mean, you're pregnant. No one. You need to start working out very specifically because the body you have after you have babies is built upon the body you had before you had babies. So if you strengthen it up and you get it ready to go, you clean your diet up and stuff like that ahead of time. What you're gonna end up with after you have your babies is a whole lot different than what you get when you could have ended up with so. And by the way, just for you guys, I have never see I've seen tons of car wrecks. I've seen all sorts of sports injuries. I've seen all kinds of things. I have never seen anything that destroys someone's body, like having a baby. So if you guys aren't ready for it, I don't care that you're young or whatever. There's a good chance this can tear your body up, so get ready for it.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:45] You know, I have I have dealt with. I used to be a pediatric pregnancy clinic for a long time. I have watched. Maybe thousands of women in the ages of 18 to 40 get pregnant and go through the cycle. And so I'm very, very, very, very aware of what's going on. And the women who did not prepare properly. They weren't happy with the results afterwards. It's a lot harder to climb back up the hill at the hills a lot higher. Plus, you're already broken. So now you're injured and you're climbing up a bigger hill. So get ready beforehand. We can walk you guys through that whole thing if you want. If you guys are thinking about having kids or if your kids are thinking about having kids, if you're a grand, you're about to be a grandparent. You know, get them. And let's make sure that they understand how to eat, how to deal with their stress, how to work out. The most important people we can actually work with. Are those the women who are thinking they want to have kids in the next six months. Because here's the thing. If your body is not physically ready for it, it's going to be really hard.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:48] If your body's not technically ready for it, it should mean bad for your mom and for baby. Because if we don't get all the toxins and heavy metals and trash out, we don't fill the bottom vacuum with good, high quality nutrients. We don't change that diet ahead of time. Well, then, whatever, whatever chemical toxins are in the body, the heavy metals to hold of you are going to be there. Toxic fighting environment, babies trying to be built in. And so that's not going to lead to the healthiest possible that you can have. If we if the mom is all stressed out, she doesn't know how to deal with her stress, low stress chemicals or stress hormones or bathing all over the baby. That's also not good. And all this stuff. If you can research, just please look all this up. So that's how the emotional state of mom is passing the kid. It doesn't just stay up here. All that stuff that happens up here. May has quick chemical hormonal changes. Are we talking about the sympathetic parasympathetic, the cortisol function, the digestive function that is completely changed by the way your mind works?

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:40] Yeah. If you're pregnant, you're always stressed out about it. You're always in that sympathetic state. All those synthetic chemicals that are there not great. And all the the lack of all the really good digestive stuff that's going to affect the baby, too. So if you don't have your if you haven't built up the way your mind works or even built a support system, we're gonna be in trouble. So both those things we can go over if you guys are pregnant, especially if you like. For instance, if you're the grandma, grandpa and your daughter or son, whatever your family unit, your lower family unit is looking to start having children. Both of you guys getting in that we can build that support team and support structure is also really, really important. There's a lot of stuff mentally, physically and chemically we've got to do for women when they're getting pregnant to really maximize, health of mom and healthy baby. So if you guys are getting into that, that type of, that type of arrangement, get in here and let's get started on that one. But again, anything you guys buy from Pillars of wellness.com saw, all that money goes to charity that we're using the tree of life to our health, that we're using psychedelics and ketamine to break PTSD, addiction, depression, and first responders and, veterans. So thanks for you guys time. We'll see you guys soon.

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