In this episode, Cheryl McColgan shares her journey of strength training and body composition changes over the course of a year. She emphasizes the importance of tracking body composition, not just scale weight, and highlights the benefits of consistent strength training. She discusses her approach to strength training, including progressive overload and full-body workouts.

She also mentions the use of supplements like creatine and the importance of proper nutrition. Throughout the year, Cheryl gained 6.5 pounds of lean mass and lost 2 pounds of fat, demonstrating the effectiveness of her approach.

Takeaways:

• Consistency is key in strength training and body composition changes.


• Tracking body composition, not just scale weight, is important to understand progress.


• Progressive overload and full-body workouts can be effective in building muscle and losing fat.


• Proper nutrition, including adequate protein intake, is crucial for muscle growth.


• Supplements like creatine can support muscle growth.


• Gains in lean mass and fat loss can occur simultaneously with the right approach.


• Addressing foot health can improve overall strength training performance and reduce pain.

Creatine and aminos I use

Foot health tools from Dr. Emily

New Sleep Technology Bia

Body Pod at home body composition, 98% Correlated to DEXA

Study on full body workout vs split training for fat loss

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Show Transcript

Cheryl McColgan (00:00 .748)
Well, hello friends, welcome back. It has been a little bit, but I am excited to be back on the mic and have several interviews scheduled coming up over the next.

few weeks, so it should be back to a more regular schedule going here into fall. I promise if I’m ever going to peace out for an extended amount of time again, I will definitely let you know. So don’t worry if occasionally there’s a week skipped or something like that. I used to put this out religiously every single week on Wednesday and it was a lot easier when I had some interns helping me produce the podcast. But now it’s just little me again, all by myself.

So and a few things have been going on in not only my life, but in the business. And so that has made things not as regular. But anyway, I have no intention of going away at least not right now. So I will let you know if that ever happens. But anyway, for today’s solo episode, I have something to update you on that I’ve wanting to share for a while. And I’ve mentioned this before in the past. And that is my Dexa body scan.

that I was keeping track of since I started lifting again. And so I’ve talked about this a little bit in the past, but I might as well share the history again with you before I get into what I’ve been doing over the last year to increase my strength.

and how that’s been going and what I’ve been doing and some lessons that you may want to take away from that process. But anyway, how it all started is that I’ve been active pretty much my whole life, was a runner for 17 years, played sports in both high school and college. so my first experience with weightlifting was way back in the eighth grade basketball, which at my age is kind of shocking that it

Cheryl McColgan (01:58 .306)
even in my mind to lift some weights to have better sports performance because it definitely, especially in high schools then, you maybe the boys were in the weight room, but it was definitely not a thing for the girls teams. And I think the only reason that I had it in my head was just because I’ve always had such this personal interest in health and wellness and because I had watched my dad my whole life. He was a runner and he had always lifted weights. He’s basically like Jack LaLanne. If you don’t know that name at the younger people listening here, go Google Jack LaLanne, but he’s very

inspirational, was very ahead of his time in terms of being into health and wellness and lifting weights and being very fit. So anyway, I think it was basically just my exposure to all that and my own personal interest that made it so that even at that young of an age and a time where it was definitely not as known as it is today, think girls teams in high school today do get in the weight room and I think it is, you know, all over social media and more normal for women to be lifting. But anyway, way back in the eighth grade, that was my first thing.

pretty consistent there for a while while I was playing.

And somehow got off of that. And then when I had my first big girl job in downtown Cincinnati, I belonged to Gold’s Gym and I would lift weights there. I was mostly cardio because I was a runner then and that is what at the time I believed was the very best thing to do for fitness and for health. And so it was primarily cardio, but I did do some lifting. And then all over the many years since then, I have been involved or joined a gym.

I was a yoga instructor for a very long time, have been practicing yoga for, my God, embarrassing to say, but like 30 years now. On and off with the asana, it’s always like part of my paradigm to follow kind of the yoga principles of living. But the asana part, which is the poses that that kind of has come and gone over the years, but I definitely always have stints with it where I’m super consistent and then go away. So that was a very power based yoga. So I did get a lot of body weight exercise.

Cheryl McColgan (04:01 .204)
in through that. So strength training, like I said, basically on and off my whole life. And what has generally happened in the past is that whenever I get injured, I just quit going to the gym for that amount of time, quit lifting weights, I’ll still always do my walks and my hikes to the extent I’m able depending on what the injury is. But something would happen, and I would just quit because I ended up having in the past, I’ve had surgery on each one of my shoulders.

Long story, I a genetic anomaly with the shape of my bone and because I did a lot of repetitive motion with golf over the years and also the times I probably lifted weights repetitively that that hurt my rotator cuff, so I had a lot of pain. So I had a surgery on each one of the shoulders. And so obviously I did my rehab at the time, which involved…

certain types of movements and some weights. So that was also mixed in there. So I’ve certainly had plenty of experience doing it. I’ve just never been long -term consistent. And so now as I turned 50 in 2023, it’s definitely been in my mind. A