Antonietta Vicario: Episode Link
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TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to Hot Flashes and Cool Topics today We have a really interesting conversation with Antonietta Vicaario and she is chief training officer Pvolve. Welcome to the show . Thank you.
So happy to be here Well, you know, obviously Pvolve is on people’s radar because of Jennifer Aniston. I mean, you see her, you see her figure and you’re like, how do I get that? But
I really liked the fact that companies like Pvolve are talking about functional training, low impact strength.
Can you start with a conversation on what exactly Pvolve is and how did it get started?
Absolutely. So Pvolve is a functional movement based method, and we pair that functional movement with our own resistance based equipment.
So it’s really about putting tension on the body to build strength in the functional movement pattern so functional movement for people that don’t know. Our movements that you do in your everyday life right you can think like sit to stand reach rotate, you know lift something up or reach for that high cabinet. And so, by using the resistance and building up the strength in those everyday movement patterns,
you’re kind of future -proofing your body to, you know, create the strength that you need to meet the demands of your everyday. What’s unique to Pvolve is that we’re omnichannel,
so people can experience us in person at our growing franchise network and corporate own location studios. So you can work out with us in person. We have about 50 studios right now in development.
So we’re definitely starting to spread out and have like a brick and mortar presence. But then people can also work out with us digitally in our on -demand subscription,
as well as we have live classes with our trainers that are hosted on Zoom. So, you know, it’s Omni Channel. There’s so many different ways that you can work out with us. You mentioned the strength training piece. It is a huge piece of our programming. We have all these different class types and formats that hopefully we can get more into. But truly the science is that where your body is at, right? Your age, the different stages of your life, your movement should change and adapt as your physiology does.
That is so important for our listeners, especially the demographic that we target is menopause, or perimenopause, postmenopause women. And It seems like a really great program for women in that because of the functionality of it. Could you share with us menopause’s effect on your fitness level? What happens during menopause to your fitness level? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the most striking change that occurs during perimenopause, you know, I think people think menopause as like okay that calendar day after 365 days have passed and you’re in menopause but actually what’s happening in perimenopause is really important to mitigate from a movement perspective. Starting in your late 30s you start to lose muscle mass and strength right that process sarcopenia which I was flabbergasted to know that sarcopenia was like the phrase was only originated in 2017. So like we are just putting vocabulary to this process that we’re losing strength and mass by three to seven or eight percent per decade starting in your late thirties. This has real implications in terms of what that means from a bone perspective, your muscles support and surround your bone. So, you know, your muscular skeletal health, your ability to, you know, move well and support your skeletal system. Muscle is metabolically active.
When we think of our metabolism, we need to continue to maintain and or build muscle mass to keep our metabolic markers healthy.Muscle helps lower blood lipids. It really is, and I know you’ve hosted a bunch of interviews with some of Dr. Mary Claire Haver I just saw was on recently. Muscle really is, this is in the words of Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, like the tissue of longevity. So when we think about our aging body and the most important thing we need to prioritize, it is building muscle. And that’s so antithetical, I think, to a lot of what we were kind of trained to believe. I can remember I was in the background of my,
my mom was an aerobics instructor and I was like in her impact classes and great vines for days. And then, you know, when I started my fitness career,
it was like, I’ll spin all high intensity, we were like, you know, do in those cycle classes for days. And when you thought about weight training and strength training,
it really was like more for guys, right? Maybe some women were doing it, but it was this kind of niche workout. And now we’re just learning that a lot of cardio can actually be counterproductive for women in the menopause transition specifically.
Women are generally told less weight, more reps, but you actually are of the opinion heavier weight. Can you talk about why it’s important for women to go heavier rather than later?
Yeah, you want muscle hypertrophy, right? You want, in order to build muscle again, muscle is so important for all of the reasons that I mentioned, but In order to build it,
you really need to hit your max load. So absolutely, I think we’ve all probably taken sculpt classes where you’re just doing like rep after rep after rep after rep,
and it’s more endurance training, which is wonderful and important. But if you’re looking to build muscle, which is really part of maintaining a healthy body composition because of that natural loss,
like I think of it as, you know, you’re kind of like, you’re just trying to catch up to what your body’s doing, your body’s losing muscle. So we need to catch up to that and really,
really focus if you want to build on those heavier, heavier loads. So exactly it’s about hitting muscle failure. It’s about working with your just load possible and doing minimal reps and you’ll start to know that you’ve hit muscle failure is the term that we use when everything slows down. If you think of a bicep curl, you’re curling up and down, you know, once your body has to slow naturally in order to execute the rep,
then you know you’re at failure and your body just kind of gives up. And that is the place where you’re truly building muscle versus just maintaining muscle. So hitting that failure is really important.
I will caveat though and say it’s not something that you should just jump right into, right? Like I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to be like, let me see, you know,
the heaviest weight that I can possibly lived, if you’ve never done any weight training before. So, you know, obviously, working to understand the biomechanics of movement,
right, understand how to move well, that’s part of the underpinning. So, you know, truly, when it comes to functional movement, what I think we excel at at PVOLVE and what members tell us is like,
we are teaching people how to move. It’s not about momentum, it’s not about slinging weights around, right? The form and the biomechanics of what you’re doing is part,
it’s critical to being able to do these movements long -term. And, you know, that is really such a message at Pvolve that you don’t have to break your body down,
you know, that we work smarter, not harder. And so starting by really understanding how to move your body well and then adding load from there is critical to being able to move long -term.
And I’ll also say, I think that’s where hit, you know, really kind of has it wrong. It’s like just go, go, go. And people will enter themselves if they’re not executing the movements correctly,
right? Like all movement is great. We want movement, any and all movement, every movement, like just move your body, but move your body well, right? Understand that how to move your body.
As the chief training officer, that is my most important responsibility that our trainer team, wherever it is that you’re interacting with Pvolve, that our trainer team is really teaching that how to do the movements, not just what movements to do, but how to do them. Just to avoid injury, just like you said, because I was thinking when you were talking about when you hit your fatigue, and I’ll do reps, and I know, and I’m like, I can’t get this over my head anymore, and that’s fatigue, but I think what’s so important with Pvolve is how to move and avoid injury, because just like you said, a lot of people do that. They become injured when they start a new program or they’re really trying to run out of the gate real fast.
And I think that’s what’s so interesting how the aging and clinical study that was done and reading about that was so really important and just made so much sense. Can you talk about a little bit about what that was and what you found from that? Yeah, absolutely. So this is another thing that I love talking about because it again, there are so many things where I was just like, oh, oh my God, how did we get here?
So we started a clinical study that looked at women in the menopause transition. So women 40 to 60 at the University of Exeter,
which is one of the world’s leading top sports and exercise science research institutes. And what we found when we began this study or what we learned is that only 6 % of sports and exercise science research is conducted on women, like 6%. I have a pit in my stomach and I’m nauseous every time I say that, right? And why? Because our physiology is complicated,
right? When you compare it to a man, our aging process is not linear, our hormones are vacillating so wildly specifically in the menopause transition. But even before that,
you know, we’re menstruating, we go through periods where, you know, potentially you’re in your perinatal journey. So our bodies just go through so much from a monthly perspective,
even a daily perspective in menopause, obviously the vacillations and all of those hormones or sex hormones are changing, right? That’s why you can go months without having a period and then all of a sudden it’s back. And so, the environment that that’s creating in your body is very complicated. But you would think that that would mean we need to do more research to really understand how to work with our ever -changing physiology, and that’s just not the case. So, you know, we really wanted to look at, okay, how can movement intervene with this stage in a women’s life?
We knew the information about sarcopenia, we knew about that natural loss in muscle. So the participants in the study did 12 weeks of supervised p -volve activity.
So four classes a week for 12 weeks and those classes ranged in about 35 minutes to 55. So, you know, if you think about it, not that much time when all is said and done compared to the standard general recommendation of 150 minutes of exercise per week. Mixing cardio and strength -based training.
We had two groups, one that did the PVOL protocol and a control group who just followed standard recommendations. What we found is that those who participated in PVOL,
we mixed strength training, so weight training, Our perspective on cardio, which I haven’t shared yet, but our perspective is similar to Dr. Stacy Sims for those who know and have understanding of her research. So it’s, there’s no cursing here, but S -H -I –I-T, short, high intensity interval training. There’s an extra I in there. So, you know, not quite an explotive, but I think of that every time I’m doing IT training,really short intervals where you’re pushing your heart rate to its max thinking like 20, 30 seconds sprints. And then recovery, we found that with that, you’re getting, you know, very rapid changes to the brain, you’re pushing your heart muscle, you’re getting all of the benefits of cardiovascular training, but without these huge, sustained cortisol spikes. So they’re less inflammatory in the body. So those circuits, the weight training and our sculpt, which is a mix of mobility, training, really taking your joints, your hips, your spine through all different ranges of motion, all different planes of motion to help with mobility, which is also something that tends to decrease as we age. So mixing all of those content types together, the participants found that they had about 19 % more increases in strength compared to the control group.
And this is through things like muscle biopsy, DEXA scans and other measurements, about 20 % more flexibility following Pvolve, 10 % gains in overall mobility and stability, they lowered their blood lipids, they increased lean muscle without weight gain, and we also did some subjective measurements. So standard subjective measurements of, you know, quality of life sleep energy and we found that people who followed the people program had 23 % less fatigue enjoyment of exercise and a feeling of overall enjoyment and quality of life by, you know, engaging their body in these functional, in this functional way. So, you know, super proud is not even the word, I don’t have a word strong enough to, you know, express that this is a real intervention, and I feel so proud of,
you know, what we’re building specifically for, you know, women in the in the 40 to 60 in that menopause transition. But certainly, you know, after and even before,
right? This way of working is we say, you know, people are just going to help you live younger longer. And, you know, there’s there’s now scientific proof that we’re doing that.
For women in our demographic, I think it’s so important that we do we want to be able to pick up our grandkids. We want to be able to carry stuff. We want very functional, really routines,
so the idea of like pushing a tire across the field, it doesn’t really seem functional. And that’s why I think Pvolve is attracting a lot of our demographic with them.
You also talk about meeting where you’re at, because some women can’t jump into a 50 -minute class. Can you talk more about it? A lot of women are just starting an exercise routine at this stage of life?
Absolutely. Yeah. And we have classes that range from on our on -demand platform that range from 15 minutes all the way to, you know, 75 or 90 minutes.
So there’s truly something for everyone. We have what we call our basic beginner classic basic training, teaching people just how to activate a muscle kind of going back to the how like you can you know sit and stand but when you’re thinking of pushing down through the floor with your feet as you’re standing upright the how you’re going to feel your muscles engaging in a different way so just training people how to
even engage their muscles sometimes for the first time that mind to muscle right that we’re moving mindfully Um, that’s a new concept. So, you know from teaching that concept truly from the starting ground all the way up to, okay, you’ve been with us a while and we’re going to continue to challenge your body in all of these different ways. Through different lengths of time, you know, absolutely, we want to be inclusive. We believe that there is a space for every body, right?
I think that that’s such a tenant part of our DNA. I know I’ve certainly, you know, not to bash other fitness concepts, but I’ve certainly been to classes where the trainer is kind of like yelling at you and barking at you and screaming go harder and the, you know, treadmills should be up to whatever day eight mile this is your 10 mile, you know, per hour interval. And it’s like, okay, I’m not there. And she’s not there. And he’s not there. And you can see people really struggling as a trainer, you know, who’s certified in all of these different techniques. It’s is so alarming to me when I see like, okay, that’s an injury waiting to happen.
It just I have to go in with my blinders on and take some of those classes, and it’s irresponsible. So, you know, making sure that we have a space for everybody and that we’re being really responsible as we’re getting people to experience, you know, their bodies in this really profound way. And you mentioned that, you know, you mentioned the tire image and wanting to be functional,
to lift up your grandkids, to be able to do the things that you want to do every day. There’s also, though, the confidence and just the mental part of it, that’s the magic of exercise. Obviously, you’re releasing serotonin and there’s all the happy hormones that you get when you’re exercising, but to feel strong, right? To really like feel like, oh my gosh, I just did this thing and now I can like conquer the day.
It’s so empowering and we, you know, we definitely hear people all the time that are, you know, you might come like, okay, I want the functional aspect. I want to look good.
But then they’re like, this has changed my perspective in every aspect of my life. I feel strong. I feel capable. I feel resilient.
I talk all the time in my classes. When you’re getting through a challenging moment physically, that relates to so many other aspects of your life. You build this resiliency and perseverance that you can get through anything. And I definitely have experienced that in a very profound ways in my own life. I feel so blessed to be able to work in fitness, but my fitness has served me through many really dark moments in illness. I’m post -menopausal myself, I’m 45,but I was early onset menopause due to cancer diagnosis in my 30s, in my mid 30s. And, you know, my doctors were like,
the strength that you had built before, right, like the reservoir of what you had built before is undoubtedly what enabled you to get through this journey in a way that’s incomparable to other,
you know, to other patients that they had seen. And that’s physical, but it’s also mental. Yeah. – It is amazing, you know, you talk, you touched on so many points there.
First of all, where you see people that feel like they go into class and they are, they just can’t keep up. And then that just turns them away. They don’t wanna come back. So you want people to come back.
You want people because not just because you want money, but because it’s going to make them healthier. It’s going to make them happier. And like you also said, it’s not even just about looking good. It is about what happens inside, mentally, everything that can happen there. And that is another thing that I like so much about reading about the study with P -Volve is the longevity aspect of this, that it is not just about,
oh, we want you to fit in the stress, we want you to look this way. It was about longevity and that is so important. Just, there’s so much involved with the longevity, but the importance of flexibility,
the importance of your hip strength, everything like that.
Can you talk about the importance of what longevity, the role that longevity plays in p -volve and why hip strength and flexibility is so important? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, hip strength specifically, people as you are in the menopause transition, not only are you losing muscle mass and muscle strength, but often there is less density to your bones, right? So it’s really important to build, again, that muscular musculoskeletal strain. Strong muscles surrounding dense, strong bones. Our bones need impact. They need impact in a sustainable way. So again, when you’re teaching those proper biomechanics,
you’re able to do some of those short, high intensity interval trainings without compromising, you know, your joints, you understand how to to move through your ankle,
move through your hips, and that helps protect the bone. We all know, you know, falls, especially later in life when we’re talking about longevity in your 60s,
70s, 80s, falls are a real risk. So, you know, being able to build that muscle strength, that bone strength, the mobility piece is really important to our hips are meant to move more than just our,
you know, neutral or a lot of fitness focuses on external rotation. We focus a lot on internal rotation. So trying to paint that for your listeners, you know, if your legs out in front of you, it’s turning your inner thigh in very uncommon position in fitness. However, if you think about say like golfing or tennis or just twisting quickly, our bodies are moving through that internal rotation and it is a really important movement pattern to train because it helps you train all of your glutes versus well, unlock your hips, train your glutes. It helps with lower back strength, lower back pain. So the mobility piece is really and let me know if I’m geeking out too much.
– No, not at all. – Probably not. – Also thoracic mobility.
So we’re all sitting at our desks, our shoulders are often rounded, we’re texting, we’re typing. So a lot of people know, okay, for posture, I have to train my mid -back muscles, right? My upper to mid -back muscles, we think about that, but We also need to mobilize them. So part of what we do with the mobility piece are really being able to isolate, twisting, rotating through the upper back while strengthening it. And it really does help with posture, training– posture, training core stability. When we talk about our core, it’s not just our abdominals. Our core muscles, our back muscles working in synergy with our abdominals. Our core is our pelvic floor,
which we can also kind of pin because pelvic floor training is really important for women and men of pause as well. And our breath, our diaphragm, our respiratory system, and our respiratory system,
our breath or diaphragm is part of our parasympathetic nervous system. So, you know, there’s, there’s so much that goes into really training the body for every day,
working with the breath, working with mobility, working with those deep core muscles, addressing the pelvic floor. This is all part of our programming that’s specific to women in menopause,
teaching them about how to do a deadlift potentially and lift those high, high weights, but using the strength of the glutes, using the pelvic floor,
using your breath, so you’re protecting your back, you’re, you know, creating necessary tension in the body to be able to do your movements correctly. I don’t know if I directly answered your question.
No, you did. All of those things, they all help with longevity. They all help prevent injury, especially as we age and that happens and just knowing the right way to do things because a lot of women live alone.
A lot of women are older and live alone and things are happening and they wanna do things. They wanna continue to do things around their house. They wanna garden. They wanna be able to hang a picture on the wall without having to call somebody to come to their home. And these things are just functional and important and help prevent injury because you know we have older women in our lives and people that we talk to and we hear about these injuries and we’re like oh no you know that can just lead to a just devastating outcome and I think it’s so important to have something like this out there for them and just this study just this study alone just and the study is up on the on the website if you guys want more information on that they on that. They have a whole list of information about what the study found. And it really is, like Bridget said, really interesting on how it benefits women peri and postmenopause.
I’m a Pilates instructor. A lot of what you’re saying, I’m like, yes, I’m in the choir. I’m singing the praises. form is everything. And that’s one thing that I used to really teach my classes is about form. So I was surprised when I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis and osteopenia. Now a lot of it’s genetic. My mother has it. I’m like sold, you know, signed me up. I’m ready to order my pVolve stuff. But do you have anything coming up in the next couple months that might, you know, attract women to say, Hey, let me give this a shot that that specifically or osteopenia or osteoporosis. – Or just functional. – Or just longevity function,
anything. – I’m saying I’m ready to sign up. What can I look forward to? – Yeah. – Okay. – Let me phrase that. – For you, yes. For you, Colleen, specifically our intro to progressive weight training or intro to lifting has specific modifications to be mindful of if you do have Pena osteoporosis. So we have some things specifically very well modifications are really important and I don’t think a lot of exercise programs offer modifications like they should because if you have a class of 15 people. they’re all in different stages of age, flexibility, strength, you can’t teach one thing to 15 different people. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. So we’ve, you know, our library is robust. We have thousands of workouts. There’s a category called movement therapy, you know, where we’re really deep diving into some common muscular skeletal things that we see and exercises that are, you know, helpful in terms of improving knees stability or shoulder strength or, you know, osteopenia osteoporosis. We work with our clinical advisory board on programming specific to those different needs states. That’s also an incredible resource in our library and those workouts are amazing. Like you said, it’s all about education and just knowing,
okay, this is my body. These are the unique things that are true to me. So what is it that I need to know when doing these movements? So we really try to arm people with that information.
In addition to that, though, for this audience specifically, our Healthy Aging Protocol that we used for that study that led to those incredible results, that’s available as well.
We have a calendar page that links to programming specific for either your goals, potentially your life stage.
And so you can find that healthy aging protocol. That would be in my opinion, a little bit probably more like intermediate to advanced.
So depending on the listener and where they’re at in their journey, they might want to start with something that’s a bit more introductory, but that’s available as well. – If you were to, if I were to sign up for P volve, what, you know if I’m in Nashville, if there’s not a place here for me to go, or if I wanna just do it in my home, how do you get the equipment and things like that?
– Yeah, so pvolve .com. There are two different bundles that you can select. So our starter bundle, which is three pieces of equipment and then like are all in,
it’s called the transformation bundle. And that has 13 unique pieces of equipment. And, you know, not to be overly salesy, but truly this method is incredible and we find that most people that start with the signature bundle just wind up going all in. Some of my favorite pieces are in the transformation bundle. We have pieces of equipment that work in a different elevation. So it’s a slant board.
You see this a lot in the weight training world, right? it helps put your muscles into different deficits, so you’re able to get deeper into certain ranges of motion and challenge your stability. So that’s in the total transformation.
There are like ankle bands, ankle weights that are very ergonomic, are proprietary, P -ball, P -band, P3, like really unique equipment.
So if you can dive all in, it’s going to give you access to all of the classes and truly the equipment is, is so unique. And as part of certainly what,
you know, Jen loves about our brand. It’s the method, the equipment and the inclusive environment for sure. So pvolv .com, check out the bundles.
I recommend the transformation. You’re going to keep adding to your card once Um, and then yeah, look at, at the website as well.
You can see all of our locations and we do have a location in Nashville. So you’ll have to come and bridge it. Cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us all about, you know,
Pvolve and functional exercise and make sure guys, you check out p -volve .com. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.