Meet Maryanne. She’s a 69-year-old teacher at a Montessori school, and in 2024, she had high cholesterol. Now she doesn’t. Plus, she’s a lot stronger and fitter. How did she do it? That’s exactly what we’ll talk about in this article.
But if you want to hear Maryanne tell her own story, you can check it out in this 4-minute video:
And if you want to get help with your own cholesterol (even if it’s high due to genetic reasons), we have a special program called “High Cholesterol Reversal Program.” To see whether you qualify for that program, fill out the application form on our home page. Doing so doesn’t obligate you to anything. It simply sets up a quick, 10-15-minute chat where we discuss your current situation, and see whether we can help. There’s no pressure, obligation or sales pitch.
Maryanne’s Life Before
Before Maryanne started working with us, she would go for walks, and do exercise videos from YouTube. She was glad that she was doing something good for her health, and although she felt decent enough, and wasn’t overweight, she still had some minor health issues.
She’s had mildly elevated blood pressure for a few years (in the 130s) and high cholesterol.
In 2019 and 2022 she had falls, and broke a couple of bones. After speaking with her doctor, they concluded that those kinds of falls shouldn’t result in broken bones. So she had a bone density scan, and was diagnosed with osteoporosis.
Not wanting to go on medications, she found my osteoporosis book on Amazon. She purchased it, read it, and reached out to me to get some personalized help.
I set her up with her trainer, Meagan, and they got to work. On everything – her osteoporosis, high blood pressure, and cholesterol.
Maryanne’s Exercise Program
Sometimes, clients have singular, very simple goals, and we can direct all their attention to those goals (like just osteoporosis reversal, or just fat loss, or just toning, and nothing else). But other clients are more complex, and have multiple chronic conditions. Maryanne was in the latter category.
Each individual condition has very specific exercise guidelines. So what happens when clients have multiple conditions? We can’t be as targeted, and have to be more broad. We’re looking at what are the exercise commonalities to all 3 conditions. As I talk about in my books on osteoporosis, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure, one major commonality to all 3 is strength training. Cardio doesn’t do it (it’s very good for heart health, but for reasons that I talk about in my cholesterol book, doesn’t really move the needle for cholesterol).
But just using the term “strength training” is not enough. That’s as broad as the word “shoes”. Within that broad category, you have running shoes, sandals, slippers, dress shoes, stilettos, boots, etc. The same is true for strength training. The different kinds of strength training differ from each other based on:
- Amount of weight/resistance used
- Number of sets per workout or per week
- Number of reps per set
- Tempo (how fast you lift and lower the weights)
- Which exercises you choose
And a little aside: strength training is defined based on the amount of weight you’re lifting – not on the equipment that you’re using. A lot of people think they’re strength training because they use dumbbells. But if the dumbbells are too light, a person is not strength training. They’re doing cardio with weights. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not strength training. I elaborate on this in much greater detail in my article on what is strength training?
Anyways, back to our regularly-scheduled program: What are the strength training commonalities to osteoporosis, high cholesterol and high blood pressure? Strength training in the 8-12 rep range, 3 times per week. There are some differences, of course:
- For osteoporosis, exercise selection really matters. For high cholesterol and high blood pressure, exercise selection is of much less importance.
- For osteoporosis, it’s quite important to come relatively close to muscular failure. For high blood pressure, you want the opposite – don’t go close to muscular failure. For high cholesterol, it’s not that important.
- For osteoporosis, tempo (how fast you lift the weight) matters. For high cholesterol and high blood pressure, it doesn’t.
Knowing that, here are some of the highlights from the program that Meagan devised for Maryanne:
Format
Meagan has Maryanne using tri-sets What are tri-sets? It’s a way of organizing training. It means moving from one exercise to the second, and then the third, before going back to the first exercise again.
There are several different ways of organizing training. The most common of which is something called “straight sets.” That is – you do an exercise. Then rest for 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Repeat that exercise. Rest again. Repeat the exercise for a third time. Rest a third time. Move on to the next exercise.
While there’s a time and place for straight sets, it makes less sense for someone trying to accomplish multiple goals at the same time. Why? For two main reasons:
- In a 1-hour workout, you spend just as much (if not more) time resting as you do actually doing the exercise.
- Fatigue accumulates from one set to the next, and performance really drops.
Tri-sets solve both of those problems. By choosing several exercises for unrelated muscle groups, while one muscle is working, a different muscle is resting. An example of this would be leg extensions (which work the quads – the front of the thighs) with lat pulldowns (which work the mid-back and arms). While the quads are working, the mid-back and arms are resting. While the mid-back and arms are working, the quads are resting.
This maximizes the amount of workout time actually working out and not resting in between sets.
Because working the mid-back and arms is considered rest for the quads, the resting muscle group inevitably gets more rest than if we were doing straight sets, so performance doesn’t drop as much between the first and last sets.
Very efficient. We like efficiency.
Number of Sets
As I talk about in my article, comparing exercise to medicine, when it comes to medications, we need 2 things to make them work:
- The right medication
- The right dosage
The same is true for exercise. We need:
- The right type of exercise (cardio, strength training, stretching)
- The right exercise selection
- Dosage (in strength training, the dosage refers to the amount of weight/resistance, number of repetitions, number of sets, and number of days per week)
When it came to the number of sets, for some things, Maryanne was doing 3 sets, for some things, 2 sets, and other things, 4 sets. Why are different exercises done for different numbers of sets? Targeting. If someone has osteoporosis, they need more sets for the areas with the worst T-scores/bone density.
Exercise Selection
Meagan had Maryanne doing these exercises:
- Hip abductions
- 1-legged deadlifts
- Band pull-aparts
- Squats
- Lat pulldowns
- External rotations
- Side bends
- Calf raises
These are, of course, just the highlights, and not everything. Over her 2+years with us, Maryanne has had a number of programs.
Furthermore, if you just read about the exercises, you’d miss the “secret sauce” of the exercise program – the progression model, and the workout-by-workout adjustments that were made based on Maryanne’s progress from the previous series of workouts, energy/fatigue levels, and more. After all, no exercise program should be a static program, where you’re doing the same exercises for the same weights, sets and reps every single time. An exercise program should be dynamic, intelligently, purposefully, and systematically changing the exercise variables to move the client forward… as opposed to haphazardly changing the program whenever you feel like it, without rhyme or reason… like a lot of personal trainers do.
Maryanne’s Nutrition
As far as Maryanne’s nutrition is concerned, only minor changes were necessary. She was already at her ideal weight, so caloric modification wasn’t necessary. We just had to adjust the composition of her calories.
For osteoporosis, the most important nutrient is protein. So we gave her practical strategies to get an adequate amount of protein in her day.
As for her cholesterol, in my book, I talk about the only 5.5 nutritional factors that really matter. Fortunately, someone doesn’t have to implement all 5.5 for cholesterol profiles to improve. Because we wanted to make it as easy as possible, we just selected a single nutritional factor to focus on: fibre.
We calculated two things:
- Her fibre requirements
- Her actual fibre intake
…and we saw that her requirements were a minimum of 25 grams per day. But her actual intake ranged from 10-27 grams per day. So we needed her to be in the upper part of the range more consistently, as opposed to occasionally.
The changes were super simple:
- She was already snacking on fruits. But they were low-fibre fruits, like apples and melons. Instead, we had her snack on different fruits that were high in fibre: dates, prunes, figs, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries.
- She was already eating bean soup and lentil soup. We simply had her eat it more frequently.
- She was already eating rice, which is a low-fibre starch. We simply had her switch to high fibre starches: beans, lentils, peas, chickpeas, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, etc.
Maryanne’s Results
Maryanne’s efforts seriously paid off:
- When she was first diagnosed with osteoporosis, her doctor pushed medications hard. When she refused, and told him that she wanted to try exercise first, he scoffed, told her that she’d likely break a bone in the next year, and then regret not going on medications. Instead, a year later, he had to eat his words, because her bone density improved.
- Her blood pressure completely normalized.
- Her cholesterol significantly improved as well.
When she first started working with us, here were her readings:
- Triglycerides: 1.31
- Total cholesterol: 6.94
- HDL cholesterol: 1.41
- LDL cholesterol: 5.0
A year later, here were her readings:
- Triglycerides: 1.61
- Total cholesterol: 6.37
- HDL cholesterol: 1.26
- LDL cholesterol: 4.4
Two years later, here were her readings:
- Triglycerides: 2.17
- Total cholesterol: 6.0
- HDL cholesterol: 1.43
- LDL cholesterol: 3.57
You’ll notice that her triglycerides did indeed rise over time, and that’s an important lesson: health markers don’t always move in the same direction. Some move in the right direction, and 1-2 move in the wrong direction. There is indeed an explanation for it (which is beyond the scope of this article), and we are working on it, but what we’re concerned with is the aggregate heart disease risk. In spite of the triglycerides rising, her heart disease risk dropped quite a bit due to the improvements in her total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, and of course, fitness (which, by the way, is a stronger predictor of heart disease than almost every blood test).
Besides improvements in her blood markers, bone density and blood pressure, there were some obvious improvements in her physical strength:
- Before, she could only do one-legged deadlifts with 10 pounds. Now, she can do 35. So she has stronger glutes, and backside.
- Before, she had to squat while holding on to something for assistance. Now, instead of assistance, she uses resistance – 32 pounds.
- Her good mornings (an exercise for the backs of the thighs, glutes and lower back) went from 5 pounds to now, 48 pounds.
Maryanne’s Obstacles
Just so you don’t think that progress was easy for her, it wasn’t. Maryanne lives a real life, with real obstacles.
- As mentioned, she broke 2 bones, in 2019 and 2022. They still hadn’t fully healed by the time she started working with us. But they’re fine now. She didn’t use it as an excuse to avoid exercise. She knew that exercise was the very thing she needed.
- She also started off with sciatica. Not pleasant, but not a deal breaker, either.
- She also goes on holiday during the summer for one month. That’s the benefit of virtual training though – it doesn’t matter where she is geographically. She can still get her sessions done.
- Despite being 69, she still works Monday-Friday, so she gets her workouts in first thing in the morning.
- She also has arthritis in her knee and wrist. Yet, in spite of that, she’s still able to put in the kind of effort that got her to where she is now.
In spite of these very real-world obstacles, Maryanne still achieved great success.
How’s Life Different Now?
Now that Maryanne is significantly stronger and healthier, how’s her life different? Quite a bit. She feels stronger (because she is) and healthier (also, because she is).
And a major win – after some time training with us, she was walking her dog, and the dog pulled her hard, and caused her to fall… yet nothing happened. Didn’t break a bone, didn’t sprain or strain anything. Just a bit of minor soreness that went away after a few days. Whereas previously, falls like that broke her bones.
Overall, we’re very proud of Maryanne and the results that she’s achieved in different areas of her health.
If you want to get help with your own bone density, cholesterol (even if it’s high due to genetic reasons), or blood pressure, we have a program for you. To see whether you qualify for that program, just fill out the application form on our home page. Doing so doesn’t obligate you to anything. It simply sets up a quick, 10-15-minute chat where we discuss your current situation, and see whether we can help. There’s no pressure, obligation or sales pitch.
