Dr. Stephanie Estima
speaker
178 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Stephanie Estima’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Ego is the enemy in the gym. Ego is the absolute enemy. And this is why I was saying before, I don't actually care that you're lifting eight pounds, like you're doing lunges with eight pounds. Like as long as you're getting to an RPE of eight, nine or 10, which is receipt rate of perceived exertion, eight, nine or 10 in your set. Like you could be doing a hundred lunges. It doesn't matter.
You know, if you're doing, if you have the eight pounds and you're like, okay, I am at an eight out of 10 right now. Or the other way to look at it, which I tend to like a little bit better is a reps in reserve, which is RIR. So how many reps left, right? It should be like between one and three. Yep. I love that. And you know that you're getting there because the reps are slowing down, right?
So you're not like rep one no longer looks like, let's say you're on rep 15. I don't know. Like your rep one and rep 15 look very different. Rep one is really fast. There's not a lot of struggle with it. But rep 15, you're struggling for the depth. You're struggling on the concentric, like to come back up to neutral or to your starting position again. And the subjective...
weight, like it feels like rep 15, like the eight pounds actually feels like it's 800, right? So it feels heavier, right? So that's kind of, you know, some guidelines or some action items for your listeners where they're like, but how heavy? It's like heavy doesn't matter. What matters is that you approximate muscle failure. So RPE of eight, nine or 10 or RIR of one, two or three.
And those are kind of the qualifiers, right? It's like, can I do one more rep? And can I do it in full range? And is the velocity slowing down? And does the weight feel subjectively heavier to me?
Great.
I know, I know. Yeah, heavy is such a subjective term. So if you're new to the gym, you know, like I was saying before, the 10 pound weights for lunges might be the best weight for you. But if you're still at 10 pounds, like six months later, you're not using some of the principles of progressive overload. Heavy, like I said, and like you said, very subjective.
The weight literally doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that you have good form and technique. That's the only thing I care about. And that you're approaching muscle failure. Those are like the two things. So for you, you have PA, right? You have psoriatic arthritis, which is an autoimmune condition where we see active destruction of the joints.
So for you, I would even layer on top of that when we're talking about arthritides. So like PA, RA, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis.
The other goal for someone who has an arthritide, in addition to what we just talked about, is actually preserving range of motion because we know that there's a progressive destruction of the joints, either in between the bones in the capsule or the bones themselves become deformed and then sort of late stage disease. We actually see both of those things happen.
So for you, it's not even about lifting heavy, like the eight pounds actually might be excellent for you as long as your range of motion is full and pain-free, right? So whatever your range of motion is in that pain-free range, because a lot of, and I've dealt with a lot, a lot, a lot of women with arthritis.
That's the other thing that we get hit with in our menopausal years is like all these arthritic issues. diseases. So you want to be thinking about a range of motion, ideally full range of motion, but if full range of motion isn't available to you, whatever pain-free range of motion you can do with an aim over time to extend that. And that doesn't necessarily mean progressing with weights.
It just means progressing with the range, like either passive range. So a practitioner is doing this for you or active where you are engaging your muscles to move
uh whatever whatever uh joint or capsule that we're talking about so active and passive range of motion we want to be protecting both of those things yes um yeah so that that's how i would qualify like how heavy should i lift is like do you have an arthritide if you do
Heavy shouldn't be the... And even if you don't have an arthritide, the heaviest weight that you could possibly lift is not the goal. Because when you choose a weight that's very, very heavy, your body's going to figure out some way to move it. But it's probably not the way that... It's probably not the muscles that you want to move. So I'll give you a really good example. Deadlifts or squats.
Often when the weight is too heavy... What you'll see is that the erector spinae group, so the lower back muscles in the lower back, will actually start to engage at the bottom of the squat rather than the glutes to initiate that lift. And that's because the weight is too heavy. You've overwhelmed the glutes because the glutes are in an inherently weak position at the bottom of a squat.
They're long. which is where all the muscle growth happens. But if the weight is too heavy for the glutes to overcome that, other muscles are going to try and lift. So the lower back is going to start lifting. You're going to start leaning forward to engage those erector spinae. Your quads are going to take over. Hammies are going to take over. You might have some asymmetry from left to right.
So like one knee might cave in more than the other. And so now you have adductors that are working differently, like the inner thigh muscles that are working differently from left to right.
So, I would say that heavyweight is great if you have the motor memory, like if you were someone like Dr. Tina who was doing all these activities as a young child and she has the motor memory that she can reengage. But if you're new to muscle building, I've been lifting for decades, but even if you're kind of a seasoned lifter, your number one priority should always be good technique.
because we know when we see good technique in the gym because it's such a rare event. We always see people squatting to 90 degrees. We see them falling forward with the chest. We see the genu valgum, which is like the collapsing of the knees. We see the ankles that are super tight so we don't have good ankle dorsiflexion. We see like everything falls apart.
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