The other while I was working out at my gym, something struck me. There might have been about 15 people there; it wasn't very crowded. What struck me was that about 2/3 of the people there were women. Back in my day, my brother I owned a Gold's Gym in our hometown for 10 years. Maybe about 10% of our members were women. Probably not even that. Things have changed, and you'll find more and more women understanding the benefits of exercise, weight training in particular.
As a natural health practitioner, I've not only seen in my own life in how training helped me reverse some developing health problems that I had at one time, but it's also something that I've seen play a really valuable role in allowing my clients to accomplish their health goals.
A lot of times, we think of weight training like something that will bulk you up. Today, you would think that those myths would be dispelled. But there's still a lot of women that believe that lifting weights makes them bulky. Nothing could be further from the truth, and you have to start reapting the benefits of weight training if you're not already!
Years ago, I wanted to raise my life insurance, and the life insurance company sent a doctor to my office. They drew blood and came back a week later. I had failed the examination. Here I am, a guy preaching health, and I failed the life insurance exam. I let myself go, and was doing things opposite of what I was telling my patients to do. I was just letting life get in the way. A lot of us are guilty of that, right? Living a life of convenience often means letting our health slide.
I was busy. I had multiple practices. We had the gym business. Plus, I had four young kids. I just let things get in the way. I was shocked that I could fail that exam. 
The insurance company came back and told me that I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, that I had a fatty liver, my liver enzymes were elevated, and I was pre-diabetic. That's just what the blood test showed!
What I didn't explain to them was that I was dog-tired, I had brain fog, I had sleep issues, skin issues, and a lot of other symptoms that pointed to deteriorating health at a pretty young age. I was only in my 40s at the time. The thing that was really a punch to the solar plexus was failing that exam. It made me realize that I've got to go back and do the things that I was preaching to my patients.
So, I did it. I began doing everything that I'd always told my patients to do if they wanted to be healthy. A little bit over six months later, I had really changed physique-wise. More importantly, I had changed health-wise. All of my issues went away. My high cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and all. I was no longer pre-diabetic. All those symptoms disappeared. 
I felt like I took 20 years off the clock. I was reinvigorated!
It just made such a difference not only in how I looked, but how I felt. I became so much more productive. My mind became clearer. Exercise played a role in that, too. Yes, you have to change your diet! You have to quit throwing gasoline on a fire, or that fire, like we always preach, is the cells of our body that are inflamed and damaged. That's where sickness and disease begins.
And here's the proof:
But besides diet, exercise plays a big role. Yes, it can change the way that you look, but that's more cosmetic. If you're interested in that, if you want to lose weight, if you want to tone up, there's absolutely nothing in my experience that's more productive than a combination of weight training and what I would call burst training, or high intensity interval training.
It doesn't take a lot of time to train like this. I spend no more than 30 minutes in the gym each time I'm there. Sometimes, if I'm only there doing burst training, I might only be there for 10 or 12 minutes! Then I'm back to my regular day. A lot of times, I do a workout at home. I have an elliptical trainer at my house, and I'll use it to do my burst training.
My point to you is that what it did for me, besides change how I looked, is that it was useful in helping me get my health back! Exercise helped me with regaining lost strength, increasing blood flow, improving my brain, and relieving my joints of the soreness that I felt all of the time. It made a tremendous difference in my quality of life.
So, here is a rundown of what this type of exercise can do for you:
✅ It reduces inflammation in your body
✅ It resensitizes hormones in your body
✅ It makes your cells more receptive to hormones
That's how I was able to help get rid of my pre-diabetes. I was insulin resistant, but by resensitizing those cells, I was able to completely get rid of that.
Today in my practice, we have Type II diabetics regularly who come to us, who have been told by their medical doctor "There's nothing you can do, you are destined for a lifetime of taking this medication." We say, “Baloney!” There are things you can do! The evidence is out there, but the medical doctors are not reading their own research!
About 90-95% of Type II diabetes is completely reversible if you catch it early enough for sure, and if you address the root cause behind your diagnosis (you can learn more about this concept in my FREE Masterclass, which you can find at ColeClass.com, if you're interested). 
Nobody is diabetic because they lack Metformin. The MDs wanted to put me on cholesterol medication and blood pressure medication, and I said, "No way; that's not what's going to fix my problem. I've got to address the reason why my cholesterol and my blood pressure and my triglycerides were elevated."
Changing my diet, getting an exercise program, weight lifting with high-intensity training or burst training -- that's what turned it around for me.
Know, though, that if you lift weights, you can just walk in the gym, grab a weight, do some repetitions, and stop.
What I see too often, especially with older folks like me, not really lifting in a beneficial way. What I noticed when I was at the gym the other day is that the females really knew what they were doing. 
They were pressing it, and their last repetition was to near failure for some of these women.
One was doing overhead presses, and another was doing seated rows. They understand this concept that whenever you do resistance training, you want to take that to the point of near failure. You want to keep good form the whole time; you don't want to overdo the weight to the point that you end up hurting yourself, but in that 8, 12, even 15 repetition range, that last repetition should be tiring. You should barely be able to make it, and then when you're done (especially with bigger muscles like legs, back, shoulders, and chest), you should feel a little bit winded because anaerobically, you're working hard.
Lifting weights like that is going to be tiring, and that's exactly what you want.
That's my advice today -- look into doing a resistance training program in addition to changing your diet.
You don't have to spend a ton of time exercising. It can be 20 to 30 minutes, 3-5 days a week depending on the energy that you're going to exert each time. You can see pretty dramatic change with just a minimal amount of time spent in the gym. Don't let time be your excuse.
Make the time for it, and you will see the benefits, just like I did. It'll not only change how you look, but it'll change how you feel, and it'll do things on the inside that a lot of people have never been made aware of. That's where true health comes from.
