Why Your Workouts Aren’t Working—And the 7 Fixes That Will Change Everything

Ever felt stuck in your workouts, unsure if you’re making progress—or worse, dealing with soreness, burnout, or injury? I’ve been there. In this episode of HealthSpan Digest, I’m breaking down 7 game-changing resistance training strategies backed by science to help you train smarter, get stronger, and maximize your results.

You’ll learn:

✅ Why compound movements should be the foundation of your training

✅ The sweet spot between training hard and avoiding burnout

✅ How to progressively overload without wrecking your joints

✅ Why lifting weights beats cardio for fat loss

✅ The power of eccentric control to maximize muscle growth

✅ How recovery is the secret weapon for performance and longevity

Whether you’re short on time, struggling with motivation, or just looking to level up your training, these strategies will help you get more results in less time.

🎧 Hit play now! And if you’re enjoying the podcast, don’t forget to follow, rate, and review—it helps more people find the show!

📩 Got questions? Message me or connect with me on YouTube for more healthspan insights. Let’s train smart and stay strong! 💪

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Transcript

Have you ever felt frustrated after weeks or maybe months in the gym where you see very little progress or maybe you end up feeling just kind of burnt out or sore or even worse injured, you know, that point where you feel like, gosh, I don't even know if I can stay consistent with this. Well, I've been there. There isn't a mistake in the gym or in the exercise and fitness world that I haven't made myself. And when I think back to when I first started really lifting weights, doing resistance training,

I wasted so much time really just kind of going into the gym without a real plan, just kind of doing things that were pretty hard. And then finally, I started doing some deep dive work into some science back strategies that would really, it really changed everything changed. I mean, certainly my health and fitness, but also led me down the career that I'm doing now. And what I want to do today in a fairly concise episode here, pretty short episode is I want to give you some top

tips that were really game changers for me. And I think they can do the same thing for you as well. Welcome to HealthSpan Digest. My name is Aaron Shaw. I've spent nearly the last three decades helping people extend their health span. And I do this through combination of both science and technology. The science being exercise science, nutrition science, behavioral science, and the technology part being, well, one, I have a smartphone app, but also video meetings,

exercise demonstrations, assessing movement patterns. And I would say in all, I'm really kind of like an accountability buddy who's also a science nerd. So that is HealthSpan Digest. My business is HealthSpan Physio Coaching. But let's define, first of all, what is HealthSpan? So HealthSpan, hopefully you've heard this term by now, but HealthSpan is the length of time within our lifespan that we are healthy, active,

vibrant, really engaging in life, and ideally free from disability and free from diseases that can be prevented. My typical client is middle-aged, kind like myself, and busy and stressed and certainly has a whole lot of decision fatigue and really is looking for somebody to lead them down a path, make it simple, make it direct, make it easy to follow.

Aaron Shaw (02:20.854)

Again, like myself being a middle-aged person, we've got a history of bumps and bruises and, you know, we've got some old tendonitis that maybe kind of flare up or surgeries that from previous injuries or whatnot. And we need to make sure that we can kind of navigate these conditions because some of them we just can't escape entirely. But how do we navigate these conditions and still live a vibrant life, be healthy and strong and capable deep into our older years and to our

the last years of our life. Well, so resistance training, strength training is a key component of that. And of the five pillars of healthspan, which I'll mention here in a moment, of the five pillars of healthspan, bar none, physical exercise, resistance training has the greatest impact on the length of our life, on the quality of our life. And I would even say for those of us that are in

professional careers and stressful careers and certainly careers that are physically demanding. Same thing goes. So if you work with your body in any sort of way, shape or form, as we all essentially do, we have to have physical exercise. The benefits of physical exercise are vast. Everything from the metabolic benefits to bone density, to blood sugar management, to the emotional component of it, where it's been clear evidence that

Physical exercise reduces stress, reduces symptoms of depression, improves sleep, on and on and on. So it is incredibly important that we focus on this particular pillar of health span. The five pillars are exercise, as I said, nutrition, sleep, emotional wellbeing, and preventative care. So these five pillars act as the support system for our wellbeing overall, physical and emotional.

So we need to focus, make sure we're giving quality attention to each one of these. And today we're going to dive into the exercise pillar and specifically resistance training. So I'm going to run through a list here of seven tips that each one will have a little takeaway, something that you can make sure that you're doing currently or consider integrating into your, what is probably your limited time and limited motivation. At least that's

Aaron Shaw (04:41.89)

away. My life is and all of my clients, we're all dealing with that same struggle. If it's not time, it certainly is motivation. So let's hit these off. Number one, what is one of the best things you can do with your limited time and motivation when you are going to do resistance training? This is going to be prioritizing compound movements. Compound movements are really when you integrate several movements at the same time. So with these, you can think about doing

a squat or a deadlift or some, what I might, I'll tell you my favorite exercise right now in the gym is a compound movement where I do a reverse lunge while holding a dumbbell up just in one hand, while, while holding a dumbbell on one hand, as I step back and do that lunge, once I'm down in that lunge position, I take that dumbbell. It's in my hand. I do a shoulder press.

And then I step back out from my lunge. So I'm getting balance. I'm getting shoulder exercise. I'm getting obviously glutes and hamstrings, core and my quads. And it is a super efficient way to get a bunch of muscles activating at the same time. And it's time efficient. It is challenging. It is hard. And if somebody was going to start this, I would suggest maybe just going through that reverse lunge with very lightweight or very little weight.

to make sure you kind of get the movement pattern dialed in first. But once you kind of get that set, then you can get so much return on your investment in a little amount of time with that reverse long shoulder press. So research is very clear that it is a great way to maximize efficiency and increase functional strength. So these compound movements tend to be things that we need throughout our entire lifetime and is a great way to do that. So if you're not

doing compound movements. you're not prioritizing compound movements, I would consider doing that. When you are doing an isolated movement, let's say for example, a calf raise or forearm curls or something, you can do those, but make sure that they are after you've invested the initial chunk of time and chunk of energy into compound movements. And then if you still have a little bit of fuel in the tank and you really have an area that you really want to give extra attention to, go ahead and do it.

Aaron Shaw (07:07.298)

But the priority is going to be these bigger compound movements, if you Tip number two. I've had clients who are on both sides of this equation and I've been on both sides of this equation, but you want to train close to failure, but not every single set, but you really want to train close to failure. I've had some clients who, certainly some people I see in the gym that clearly aren't training quite hard enough.

pushing quite hard enough when they finish a certain set of an exercise. And then there are others that will push until they are literally absolute to absolute failure and failure, meaning they get halfway through that last repetition and they have to stop. they just literally done absolutely fail. The sweet spot is going to be somewhere in between those two. So the studies will show that when training, if you can get within

one to three reps of failure. That's gonna really help maximize muscle growth and kind of reduce fatigue and really is going to decrease your risk of injury. When you really push to that last rep where you can only do part of a rep and your form starts to fail, the risk of injury goes through the roof and it is just not worth it. I one of the best ways to have a successful pursuit of health is not to get injured. If you can exercise consistently,

and minimize your risk of injury. That's the win that the results will come if you're doing it well, the results will come. But if you're fighting an injury and you start and stop, start and stop and do that over and over again, that's going to be frustrating. That's going to be a really quick way to burn out really not get the return on your investment. you're getting hurt, which nobody wants to do. So the sweet spot is to

Do an exercise where you push really hard, still challenging. And I'll give an example of let's say a shoulder press. So you're taking a dumbbell and you're reaching it up overhead. And you want that last rep when you decide to stop to be really hard. But I want you to feel like you could do one, maybe two more repetitions with good form. So this takes practice and certainly there's some trial and error.

Aaron Shaw (09:26.638)

especially if you're doing an exercise or a movement pattern that you haven't done before, it is hard to figure out exactly when, you know, can I do one more? Can I do three more? And it's going to change day to day. So you may be even lifting the same amount of resistance a couple of days a week and depending upon how you sleep, what your nutrition is, what your attention is to what you're doing, maybe you did eight repetitions with 20 pounds one day and then you do 10 repetitions with 20 pounds another day.

It's really about being present and listening to your body in that moment. But the sweet spot is this, this, the repetition in any given set that will give you the most return on the, on your investment while decreasing your risk injury is that repetition where you stop and you think, I'm pretty sure I know I could do one more repetition, maybe two at the most three, but certainly not more than that. Cause my form is going to be compromised.

That's what you're shooting for. So if you are nearly dropping the weights on your head because it's too much, that's the failure. That's not worth it. If on the other hand, you put a dumbbell down, you've done, let's say, bicep curls and you kind of put it down in your mind, you said, I was going to do 10. So you did 10 and you put the weight down. And really, if I was there saying, can you do, how many more could you really do? And if you picked up or you kept on doing that bicep curl and you did four more repetitions or five more repetitions,

You're that means you're cutting yourself short. That means you're not getting the physiological stimulation to get all of those beautiful gains from strength training. So the key here is going to be to try to train close to failure, not into failure, but we want to kind of feather that amount of resistance. Tip three, you want to use progressive overload, but you want to do this in the right way. So what does that mean?

We know that muscles grow when they are progressively challenged. And what we all sort of default to is making something heavier and making something heavier and making something heavier. And that is true. And if you start off one day doing a bicep curl with 15 pounds, and then after a while, it gets to be much easier and you start doing it with 20 pounds and that gets easier, less of a challenge and you keep on adding weight. Yes, you are absolutely progressively overloading and really following your...

Aaron Shaw (11:52.832)

your investment is paying off. so you're, continuing to stimulate your adaptations through progressively making an exercise more challenging, but it doesn't have to be just adding weight. can increase repetitions. can certainly for most people improve your technique a little bit. And what I think is really overlooked is slowing down the eccentric phase or the lowering phase of an exercise. So I have a lot of clients who

have exercise at home, they don't go to the gym, they don't like that scene, which is totally fine. And they often have limited weight selections. there are certainly some people who have home gyms that are as robust as a regular gym, but most of my clients have a couple of dumbbells and a couple of bands. So they may be limited or some that are definitely limited in the variety of weights that they have to choose for any given exercise. So we just switch gears and say, hey, it's okay. You don't need to go

buy a gold gym and have it in your spare room. But what you can do is take that exact same exercise with a certain weight that you have and move slower, get in a few more repetitions. As long as you're kind of upping those repetitions, so those last few are really hard. And again, think back to the example I just said, training close to failure. You want to make sure that those last

Few repetitions are just really challenging. what you can do for progressive overload is increase resistance, increase repetitions, or increase the time, what we call time under tension, increase the amount of time that your muscles are working, which you can do by doing a little bit slower on the eccentric as well. Tip number four, train each muscle group at least twice per week. So this is what the, kind of the meta analysis, big,

chunks of data will say that if you can hit your major muscle groups twice per week, it will lead to better hypertrophy compared to once a week, as long as you are consistent with the volume and you're hitting all these other points that I'm talking about.

Aaron Shaw (14:07.436)

Now you could do three times a week or four times a week or five times a week. And some people go to the gym every single day and they dabble with different body parts, which is also fine. But again, those of us that are limited on time and even sometimes when I have a little bit of time, oftentimes, oftentimes it's because I've just stopped working and I'm just fried and tired, know, emotionally tired, just have a hard time rallying to do a, you know, big time suck workout at the gym. Then that's okay.

You can go to the gym or you have your home gym with a well organized plan and with enough dumbbells or resistance bands that you have, you could do two days a week of resistance training and really hit every major muscle group and get really good return on your investment. You can build muscle, but make sure you're hitting it at least twice a week.

If you only have time to go to the gym or you only have time to do resistance training once a week, I would try to find time for that second time. And this is where this is kind of a custom, you know, what I do with my clients is try to customize, you know, what is your, what's going to be sustainable for you, both from a schedule perspective with work and family and whatnot, but also from a motivation perspective. A lot of people will lean into during doing cardio a couple of days a week, which is also fine.

And I have a lot of people who enjoy doing yoga, which is again, also great to do. Yoga is great. know, so this would be like mobility training is great. Cardiovascular stuff is great. Cardio is great, but can also be kind of a time, time suck and can take a big chunk of time to, if you practice it long enough. And then what's last on the list often is resistance training. So people will try to get to the gym once a week if they can, sometimes I can get twice a week. And I would argue if you can please get yourself

in a place where you can do resistance training twice a week, you will get a big return on your investment and it will actually help you with mobility, stability. It'll help your cardiovascular status as well. So twice a week in the gym, you're worth it. Tip five, I this a little bit, but I want you to think about slowing down your eccentric phase of a lift. So this is like the

Aaron Shaw (16:31.864)

the releasing of the weight, if you will. And I'll give an example of doing a squat. So if you've, I'm sure at some point in your life, you've had either a chair that you're going to sit in that was a little flimsy or like the chair I'm sitting in right now, which squeaks quite a bit when I sit down on it. If you're going to do a squat, that the next time you do a squat, again, whether you have a barbell on your back or whether you're just holding onto dumbbells or holding onto a medicine ball, whatever it is,

When you do a squat, I want you to go down slowly as if you're gonna sit on that squeaky chair or that fragile chair. You're just gonna lower yourself ever so slowly. You're gonna get your butt down to that low chair or imagine a little box or something like that, but it squeaks or it's a little bit flimsy. When you slow that pace down, that eccentric phase, a lowering of the weight, your muscles actually get a little bit more.

damage, and there's a little bit more time, again, there's time under tension. And that leads to muscle gains. That's the whole point of what we're trying to do here. We are trying to overload our muscles. We are literally trying to damage our muscles a little bit with control. And you can do this with lower weights when you move a little bit slower. let gravity work on you for a little bit longer. think.

using the squat as an example and for lower body and for an upper body, even doing a bicep curl. If you were to take four seconds, maybe five seconds to lower, which if you really count that out, honestly, it's pretty long and you can go longer. You can certainly do it for 15 seconds to over 20 seconds. Nice long, long, long release. I promise you, if you're not doing that now, the next time you do.

a very familiar exercise. And again, I'll use the bicep curl because a lot of people do those and reverse it, or at least it's easy to understand. Pick a weight that you would normally pick up and say, I can do 10 of these, let's say. And instead of doing 10 as you maybe normally would do, every single time you release that, so you start lowering it, count to, let's say, six or eight seconds, slowly.

Aaron Shaw (18:44.75)

slowly. You can pull it up in one or two seconds, give it regular contraction like you would, but really, really slow that down. I promise you, even if you're using the same way that you've been doing for weeks, for the past several weeks, you will have a unique sense of soreness and effort in the following day just from slowing your pace. And that is your loading that tissue is going to adapt without adding resistance. Super valuable. Tip six. I have

probably most of my clients that initially reached out to me.

have weight loss as one of the top things on their mind. just had somebody not too long ago who, again, among some other health and fitness goals and longevity goals had really wanted to lose a little bit more weight, wanted to lose 10 or 15 more pounds. And this was a wise decision for this person. And she was on a cardio kick for about the past year or so, cardio, cardio, cardio, cardio. And

When she first started this down this cardio path, if you will, to cut down her weight a little bit, she lost some weight and then it really plateaued. And the challenge was she didn't have, you know, hours and hours and hours a day to do cardio, which she thought was the solution. And she wasn't meeting her goal. So what we did is follow the science. And what we talked about was how muscles need to burn calories.

When you see, if you happen to see somebody, certainly if you think of like bodybuilders, people who are like literally trying to get, you know, have big, big muscles, they have to feed those muscles. Those muscles need calories and fat is stored calories. So if you can take the time to build your muscles, and I don't mean to the point where you're going to be in a bodybuilding competition, because that is profoundly difficult to do.

Aaron Shaw (20:49.514)

I mean building muscles by doing resistance training. And initially you could be building muscles and you may not even see a visual difference in the mirror, but every little, every pound of muscle that you add to your body is a pound of muscle that needs calories. needs calories when you're exercising. It needs calories when you're sitting down on the couch at night watching TV. It needs calories when you're sitting around reading a book. It needs calories when you're walking down the street. Muscles need more calories. And if you want to

burn fat off of your body. And again, just think, fat is just stored calories. That's all it is. It's just a fuel tank that's sitting there and really kind of for a lot of people, it's overflowing. that excess in calories is there for the taking. And the hands down, the best thing that's going to eat those calories away are muscle. It's not cardiovascular. mean, you'll

You can burn some calories doing some cardio for sure, but once you're done with a cardio, that burn kind of fizzles out pretty quickly. Build muscle, burn more calories. The takeaway is if fat loss is your goal, do not skip lifting. Even if it's twice a week, as I just mentioned before, get in that two times a week lifting session, compound movements, slow eccentrics. You can still do your cardio, that's fine, but I promise you, you will.

If you're not doing that now, you will see a difference in your body in the weeks and months to come, just from adding resistance training. You will lose fat for sure. The seventh tip, the last tip I want to talk about here is rest and recovery. is, this is typically an error of people who are either headstrong and just feel like, you know, or, or strength training is their

coping mechanism and I certainly will admit that I've gone through phases where I've felt like I need to get to the gym for peace of mind and lifting a lot, lifting a lot, lifting a lot and day after day after day. And what happens is when you don't recover enough, your performance is going to be compromised, your risk of injuries going through the roof and really after a period of time, it's easy to get burned out. So again, it can

Aaron Shaw (23:10.392)

whether you're going to the gym often because it's your emotional outlet, which is okay. Or what happens in January of every year is people say, here's my resolution. I'm going to get after it. I'm going to go to the gym and they sign up for class and they got a personal trainer and they start doing stuff and they just hit it really hard. And sure enough, not surprisingly, within a couple of weeks, they are burned out.

they're injured or if they can even push through for a period of time, what you'll see is there's a plateau. Your body recovers from the stress of exercise while sleeping. And I've done other episodes on sleeping and had some sleep experts on this podcast. Sleep is magical. If you want to invest or if you want to get a return on your investment from any sort of exercise and any sort of daily physical activity. And if you want to

improve your cognitive performance, your decision making ability, and you want to decrease your risk of dementia and Alzheimer's, well, yes, exercise and yes, get high quality sleep. This is when the recovery really happens. So the key here would be, if you're going to do a challenging workout, especially if you're going to follow this advice that I've given so far, where you can do some compound exercises, you're going to do some slow eccentric, you're going to

really push yourself a little bit safely, then you're going to want to have about 48 hours in between exercising the same groups, same muscle groups. Give those glutes a couple of days to recover from the squats you just did or the deadlifts you were just doing. Give that tissue a chance to adapt. You've caused some muscle damage. That's what that soreness is, that delayed onset muscle soreness, the DOMs that we talk about sometimes.

That delayed onset muscle soreness is damaged tissue. And if you take that damaged tissue and you don't let it really recover all the way and you hit it again and you hit it again and you hit it again, you're really digging yourself a hole and the tissue is not going to be able to recover enough to, you know, there's a risk for injury. But also if you truly want performance, yes, be thoughtful with your resistance training. Make it challenging, safe, but make it challenging. Make it hard.

Aaron Shaw (25:32.908)

And then rest like a professional. mean, professional athletes are professional sleepers. Give a couple of days in between your workouts. You'll be better. You're going to have way better performance when you get back in the gym. And if you have time to do, if nothing else, at least two days of resistance training per week with a thoughtful, really custom program for you to make sure you hit all the muscle groups and work around any sort of injuries or aches or pains you may have. That's great. If you can get in three days a week, great.

but make sure you're getting in your resting certain muscle groups. could do, generally speaking, you can do back to back days. Just make sure at the gym or doing resistance training, just do different body parts. give one, know, give your, whether some people do splits where there's a leg day and an upper body day. Fine. Do a leg day one day. And then the next next day you do an upper body day and just let your legs just walk from, from dumbbell to dumbbell or machine to machine, but make sure that you're not hitting the exact same muscles over and over again.

because you're going to get diminished returns and you may get hurt. So those are seven tips, seven lessons that I have learned and I've worked with my clients on that are really common. The key here is to maximize your probable limited time and your limited motivation and get the most return on your investment. if you can and want to exercise five or six days a week, I would say great, do it. And if you want to add in a seventh day and it's an active recovery type of day,

That's fine too. Form rolling, stretching, all these, you can do something every single day if you want. But if, that's, I think probably, you know, 1 % of people can actually do that. But for the rest of us that can maybe get away with a couple of days a week, you want to get the most return on your investment, which means doing exercises that are compound, exercising close to failure, making sure the last rep of everything you do is really hard, but make sure you can

Theoretically do one or two more you're do progressive overload So that could be adding weight adding repetitions improving your technique always make sure your technique is just spot-on at all times You can again training each muscle group twice per week Control that eccentric control that lowering phase and I'm telling you if you do nothing else if you say hey These are the ways I feel comfortable with I don't want to lift more or it's all I have available to me

Aaron Shaw (28:03.052)

I can't really do anything slow that eccentric phase, slow that lowering, double it or triple it to whatever you're doing now. You will feel muscles like you haven't felt before without really kind of changing anything else. Remember the strength training is key to weight loss. There's a whole lot to unpack. We can talk nutrition and we can talk cardio and stuff, but to be clear, if your goal is to burn fat, what burns fat muscle burns fat.

And last but not least, don't skip your recovery. So those are lessons from the front line. haven't, I really don't share much of anything that I haven't kind of made my own mistakes along the way. So don't make my mistakes. We all learn from them. The science is real. We're just going to follow the science with our, with our decisions and try to make the best out of our limited time and bandwidth. If you have any questions on

resistance training or any of the pillars of healthspan. it's exercise, nutrition, sleep, emotional wellbeing and preventative care. Drop me a message. If you don't already, if you want to follow this podcast, that would be sweet. I am on YouTube. If you're not already watching this on YouTube, subscribing to my channel is super helpful for me and it gives me some information to make me know or reminds me that I'm not speaking into the void. So this is a topic that you want me to dive deep into, or if you know somebody who'd be a good guest, let me know.

I'd love to hook up with people and have a kind of nerdy but practical brainstorming session. So until next time, be well, do resistance training, you're worth it.