The Science of Exercise for Women 40+: What to Prioritise (And What to Ignore) | Dr Lauren Colenso-Semple and Dr Alyssa Olenick

Over the past few years I've been getting more and more questions from women in their 40s, 50s and 60s about exercise and there's a clear theme here, a loss of confidence and this is a segment of the proof audience that I really do deeply care about supporting. We've had numerous episodes in the past on menopause and midlife health and it's very clear that this stage of life brings unique challenges but also unique opportunities. Many women out there are doing something, they're walking, they're lifting, they're attending classes, sometimes a combination of these things and that's awesome. Any movement really should be encouraged and supported but they're unsure if this is working or if this is the best exercise for this stage of their life and second guessing themselves and with so much conflicting advice online, zone two steady-state cardio versus high-intensity training or hit heavy lifting, yoga, palatis, it can all feel a little overwhelming. At the same time midlife does bring real physiological changes, recovery shifts, hormone shift, strength and body composition can feel a little harder to manage. So today we're cutting through all of this noise. This episode is about what actually matters when it comes to exercise in midlife and beyond, how the body changes, what goals are most important and how to train in a way that supports confidence, health and long-term capability. Joining me are exercise physiologists Dr. Lauren Collenson Simple and Dr. Alyssa Olinek. I sincerely hope you find this helpful and that by having more information on this topic you feel more confident in your health, in your body and in your mind. And if you do, please share it with the women in your life who might also benefit. Okay, let's get into it. When I was thinking about where I wanted to take this conversation and we both individually had episodes, Alyssa, we had a conversation maybe a year and a half we are now I think and Lauren very recently in asking my community what they wanted to learn about exercise. It became pretty clear to me that there is a fairly large sort of contingent of women that feel like they're putting in a lot of effort and doing all the things so to speak but maybe not getting all of the results that they expect or want or desire and because of that kind of feel a little bit confused and maybe even second-guessing themselves like what's all this effort for if I'm not getting the results that I want? Am I doing the right things? Is this exercise program working for me and coming across a lot of information online which no doubt contributes to that confusion. So I want this episode to really help kind of reorient that woman towards the things that matter and maybe away from the things that are distractions and perhaps no matter as much. So that's the mission that we're going on and I feel I feel with both of you here we should achieve that. To kick things off what would you say to a woman who expressed feeling like that to you? What would the first thing you say to her be? So I feel like I get asked that all of the time. I'm actually just had a phone call with my cousin who's 47 a couple days ago and was saying a lot of the same things and so I think that the first thing most important when talking to these women across the board is acknowledging how they feel and the frustrations that they're having because I think so often they feel dismissed on listen to like what they're feeling isn't valid before going straight into correcting well this is actually what's happening or this isn't what's happening or all that stuff because I think then they shut down in response to that. So I think the first thing is saying yes like this is a really rough period of time there are a lot of changes occurring all at once these things might be happening. Let's talk about what's actually happening explain then what we do have control over what we can do and then maybe getting into what is distracting you from the outcomes that you can achieve and what's actually worth your time and energy especially when typically time and energy or two of the biggest things that they then report are conflicts to them accomplishing the mission of them wanting the results that they're having. We'll also acknowledging that there's a lot of overlap with aging and midlife and things change and that is sometimes just part of it for everyone across the board. With regards to that feeling of not getting the results that they desire how much of that do you think is down to the exercise they're doing and whether it's the selection of exercise or the duration or the intensity versus the actual results and the expectations that they have. So I work with a lot of women and I think sometimes what women grew up thinking is effective and what they associate with feeling like it should be working like I'm trying a lot I'm doing a lot I'm working really hard is associated with like the burn or extremes or how hard I went versus what we know and exercise science is putting appropriate stressors on our bodies to have the outcome that we want and so I think that sometimes it's bridging that gap between it feeling like it's effective versus actually being effective so I do think sometimes especially you know we're in an Asian population where women are incredibly active so maybe they're not the most common but most women are engaging in things like resistance training or formal cardiovascular training they're doing a lot of group fitness or body weight movements or group classes and those aren't inherently wrong or bad but they might not be the stimulus that they need for the results they're looking for and getting them to bridge that gap so it can be or I think a lot of men and a possible women just haven't engaged in the activities that we know give the most bang for your buck across their lifespan and then things do start to change and they need more of that to drive that needle forward and to them it does feel totally different or antagonist to what they've been doing their whole life so it's either a mix of thinking what they're doing well it feels like it's working so it should be working and working really hard and they are working hard or what they've always done they've never really faced the repercussions of neglecting certain things like maybe strength or power or you know things like that until their body kind of starts to age and things like that so I think it can be the exercise program I think it also can be lifestyle factors that are happening all at once that can influence then how they're approaching that and lifestyle behaviors around it it's not a straightforward answer I know a lot of women want that like yes it is exercise or yes it is hormones but there's all these interplays and overlaps that are happening all together but I think it really depends on what were they doing or are they doing because they can be working really hard and it still not be the thing that moves the needle forward and maybe it will help us kind of have a framework for this conversation by understanding at least from your perspective as exercise physiologist what what do you think the role of exercise should be for let's say a woman in her 40s 50s or 60s in terms of her health and and what her I guess primary goals should be that exercise would be helping her achieve I think the biggest issue is that no one's asking them that question what is your goal and so therefore the women are saying for a woman who is 45 and something else or 60 and something else what should I be doing and they want this program this answer that is tailored to me but any good coach would say well what what is the goal here and the issue I think long before entering midlife is that women have been conditioned to use exercise as a tool for fat loss and so the goal is actually changing body composition I want to look like this and often some of these exercise programs or classes promised really dramatic changes in body composition and unfortunately exercises only a small piece when it comes to getting those kinds of changes and so if we are working really hard as Alyssa said and sweating and being consistent and feeling like I'm putting in all this time and energy and I'm paying my dues weekend and week out and I'm not seeing my body change and we're not addressing the diet then there's a big misunderstanding between the relative contributions of exercise and nutrition I've been using Woop for over six years and I can confidently say it keeps me on track when it comes to my sleep and exercise routines the next generation of Woop isn't just tracking your workouts it's monitoring your sleep quality your recovery state and even giving you insights into your biological age no screen no distractions just continuous data on what your body actually needs and here's what matters daily Woop where is linked to increased physical activity to better sleep and improved heart rate variability I have no doubt that my Woop is helping me train some smarter, recover faster, and make decisions that support my long term health. Head to join.woop.com/simon. That's join.woop.com/simon to get one month off your first subscription. What's the re-frame there? How would you prefer women look at exercise? The exercise is a tool for overall health. So whether you're 20 or 60 or 80, we should be exercising and we should do something that we will do consistently. Meaning we need to enjoy it to some degree. If I had a magic wand and could make everybody do something, it would be to lift weights. As we know that improving muscle mass, maintaining muscle mass is a major contributor to long-term health and physical function. And also it facilitates some of those changes in body composition that people are pleased with from a kind of aesthetic standpoint. So I would always like to have that resistance training component in there. I find that when a lot of women start lifting weights, they end up loving the progressive nature of it and then they're more likely to stick with it because it feels really empowering to gain strength. And so it's not just showing up in the gym and leaving, you're beating yourself. What do you think are the main sources of confusion or things that kind of stand in the way of a lot of women participating in resistance training? I actually read a paper on this recently where they like surveyed women and it's always an incomplete study but this based off even my experience with training women and kind of trying to convert them to the dark side of weight training is I'll think a lot of women one, they were never shown how. We see the statistics of young girls dropping out of sport because of their body changes or not having access to things. I think a lot of women never got that teenage boy, football player, wrestler, basketball player, dirty ball, get the gym type phase in their life where they really got to go in the gym. I have that as a teenage girl and that changed my life. But I think that so many women didn't have that and they didn't find any sort of, to build off what Lauren said. It's not going to work out other than how do I become smaller, thinner, especially this I think this current generation of midlife women. That's what I'm hearing time and time again. I'm sure you are as well as like well, I've been told my whole life to be smaller so it's hard for me to get past that. So they were never introduced to strength as a tool for performance or to become better or challenge yourself like she mentioned, but also they were only ever then introduced to fitness as a way to be smaller, lose weight, burn calories. All of those things was what the messaging that women were given. And I really, really want to pause here to say that so many people say that like exercise in sports science is the reason this is an issue. It isn't. This is media narratives towards women. Sports science has never told women to only perform that way. I'm going to stick up for the researchers. But that's the media message that women have been given their whole life mixed with then not being as active in sports, dropping out of sports earlier, not engaging in these types of activities across the board. I also think a lot of women report a lot of barriers to time, especially I think we see in the exercise guidelines participation, women are always, um, between the guidelines lower than males, but it drops in their 30s. Well, what I'm doing in their 30s, typically they're raising families, they're having children. And I think that becomes then another barrier. So I think there's a lot of social aspects that go into that, whether that's not knowing what to do, not having access, not being exposed to at a young age. And then I see a law is a lot of women are very, very, very hesitant to get hurt. I've seen this in every setting that I've worked in with males or women or coaching women is that I feel as if the women are so scared to do the wrong form or do it the wrong way to the point that they're afraid to do it at all. And they've never had somebody show them or teach them or do it in a way that they feel confident or safe in what they're doing. And I think that often ties into a lot of their hesitation to load heavier, you know, load the intensity and other things like that. So I think there's a couple different social factors and just, you know, lifestyle factors or just exposures that come into this. And then I think especially this generation of women, I mean, we're seeing it with a lot more people in the 20s and 30s, which is amazing, but they weren't exposed to this at all until the last five, 10 years and all of a sudden everyone's playing with the lift. And they're like, I don't even know where to start. So I think there's been, there's a few things that go into why that is. Yeah, at least from my observation, it seems to be really pleasing that there are a lot of women in their 20s and 30s that are, that are lifting. And the reason I kind of wanted to focus on the 40s, but more importantly, the 50s and the 60s is that it's almost a generation that is sort of left behind because a lot of the time in speaking with them, really the last time that they kind of did a lot of regular exercise was often in school or university. And then they had a couple of decades of raising a family and working. And so they're kind of health and exercise regime sort of took a back seat. And now they're hearing all this information about the importance of everything. And at the same time, like you said, I'm worried about lifting weights as it can make me bulky. And I'm going to get injured. I don't have enough time. So I want to step through some of those barriers to help women kind of better understand what is fact and what maybe is myth there. But before we get to those kind of details, just to canvas this conversation, what are the downstream, let's say consequences, which sounds scary of not doing a resistance training? If we aren't maintaining muscle with resistance training, we know that is the most effective way to maintain muscle. And if we don't do that, we inevitably lose it with age. That's very, very clear. And part of having muscle means we are able to perform all of our activities of daily living. So it's not just can I do a barbell deadlift, it's can I pick up and carry my groceries, can I reach something off the top shelf, can I get in and out of my car, can I pick up my kids and grandkids and over time that becomes standing, sitting, walking, going upstairs. So all of those things start to be compromised when we lose muscle and when we are less and less active. And that means that what your daily life looks like in your 80s, in your 90s and perhaps even beyond is really compromised and your ability to be functionally independent is not what we might hope, especially given how long people are living now. We don't want to set ourselves up for the last 20 years of our lives to need a walker or a chair or somebody helping you with daily tasks. And I'll add to that, you know, women live longer than men on average, but they live more of those years in a compromised health state that's influenced by either cardiometabolic health, metabolic disease or muscular skeletal decline associated with like poor muscle mass, low bone density. And so this isn't just, you know, I think it's really hard for people to conceptualize, like I'm training for being 80, especially if you're in your 30s, 40s, but as you're, you know, you see this a lot more in the peri-imposedment, opposable women were all of a sudden that reality sets in for them. But, you know, it's not just about those years then, it's also about these years now and the years that you have. I mean, women's been a third of their life peri-imposedment, opposal and they deserve to have those years spilled, be spilled with a life where you are capable to live the way you want to live, right? Not just be able to sit and stand from, you know, a seat in your 80s, but also can you keep up with your grandkids, your kids, go do things and continue to have life in the years that you're having. And that does not, I think the biggest issue with a lot of the messaging on social media is it is very doom and gloom and scary, but it also makes it feel like it's like a death sentence that you can't live a life that's fulfilled or all these things and having physical capacity is really important to act not just, you know, live for your people call your old lady body and that's amazing, train for your old lady body, but also like don't forget to train for your right now body and the life that like you want to live to be able to do things and tie back to what she said earlier is like, I'm really big on performance goals with women because what do you want to be able to do with your fitness and not, you not just, okay, well, I hope that I can stand from a chair when I'm 80, but what do you want to do right now with that and having muscular strength and power are incredibly important building blocks to being able to like kind of live a life on your terms and do the things that you want to do and be able to get up and go and, you know, keep up with your kids or go for that hike or say yes to that trip or whatever that looks like and having the capacity in the foundation to do that. I think there's another big emphasis on the number of on my dexascan, right? Like how much muscle mass do I have or what is my T score and instead of focusing on some of those metrics or on the progression of those metrics, which can actually be pretty disempowering if they aren't moving much. Instead we can focus on that performance. What am I able to do because it's not just about how much muscle you have. It's not just about that bone density on your dexascan. It's about preventing risk of falls. It's about having that balance. It's about about moving through space in a way that if you trip, you catch yourself. And so all of these things work together to improve our quality of life. - Yeah, I think we've sent it on something that's really important, right? I would bet that almost every listener who is listening right now, the thing that they're most interested in, you said physical capacity, right? It's the capacity to do whatever it is that you love to do for longer, whether that is playing pickable or hiking or jogging or whatever it is. And I think people are looking to Dexa and T-School as things that you can measure now that are almost like a window into the future. But what I'm hearing from you is that maybe, maybe there are better things that we can look at today that would be an indicator as to whether we're going to be able to continue to do those activities in the future. - Well, I think Dexa has its own set of limitations. And so if we're looking at this as a metric of success for what I'm doing in the next year, and then if there are improvements on paper or not, I'm going to judge everything I did in the past year as either success or failure, that's a big problem because we can have a lot of improvements in other parameters that don't show up in those metrics. When we think about muscle quality, when we think about muscle function, when we think about performance, and even stabilizing bone density or improving balance so that if we fall, we don't fracture. So I think all those things really work together. And certainly if your somebody is considering a medication to slow bone loss, then a Dexa is probably indicated. But if you aren't necessarily at risk, meaning you haven't had a previous fracture, you don't have a family history, and you're just sort of measuring to measure because you're curious, I think sometimes we end up in a position where that data isn't actually as useful as we had hoped. And sometimes it can be a little bit disappointing or discouraging. - So let's think about an avatar and let's make it somewhat specific. Let's say it is a woman in her 50s and she enjoys jogging and playing pickable. What's the first kind of place you would start to look at her overall, just like high level, her exercise that she's doing in her life? To understand if it's going to support that physical capacity as she's moving from decade to decade. - So typically with any person, the first thing I ask is what is your normal week of exercise and training look like? Like it's the most simple thing. I think women are so eager to, I get women are so eager to give you every bit of information about them and their life, right? And I think to Lauren's point with the Dexa obsessions is like they still center everything on like, well this was my body fat then and here's my body fat now and things like that. Like I just want to know what you're doing in a week. Let's just look at what you're doing in a week, how consistent are you with that? How does that feel for you? Where is that at? And typically for me first things first is like, where is that at compared to even like the exercise guidelines? Like getting you to the minimums that we know are important for health. And I know people really over heart the exercise guidelines, but I like it is just like a minimum place of like, where are your gaps compared? So if she's jogging and doing pickable, well she's probably meeting in the aerobic guidelines, which most people are more likely meeting aerobic guidelines than resistance training guidelines. So then I look at that, so maybe she's jogging three days a week, doing pickable two days a week. Well that's great, that's five days a week of probably at least 30 minutes of aerobic activity. Well there's probably a gap in her resistance training. So what it matter if she went and got a dex or not, whatever that outcome was regardless, I think we oath of our guidance would be like, well let's start doing some power based strength base, musculoskeletal demanding training. So let's lift weights, right? Like that would be the prescription for that, regardless of what her test scores were or anything else would be like, hey well let's see can we add in some formal lifting within this in the week? And that'd be the first place that I would start is like, the women always want to get to the top of the pyramid of the perfect things to do, but like let's just look at what you're doing and the small things that we can do to move that forward a little bit more to bridge that gap between your capacity and what you need, especially if you're talking to someone who's in their 50s, well they're aging, I want them to be resistance training, male or female across the board because we're getting older and that's a risk factor, but it is even more so in women. So that's why it's probably more vitally important that they start if they haven't started yet. - And if we stay high level there for a moment, so if I'm following you, you're really thinking about exercise, at least at this stage in two buckets, the cardio and resistance training, and I'm sure we will double click on ancient more and more specific. - At the most superficial level, like those are the two most simple buckets. - So with those two buckets, and you mentioned that more women are probably meeting the aerobic guidelines. If we think about coming back to time, which was one of your potential barriers, at least a barrier that women will mention, how many hours across a week would be dedicated to overall exercise to meet the guidelines, and what percentage of that would be cardio training versus resistance training? - Yeah. So the physical activity guidelines are at least two days of whole body resistance training, totaling 60 minutes per week. I will say that resistance training guidelines are very vague on what that actually means. So I think we will probably go until a lot more specifics on what that means. I think that they do a disservice of not making those little more specific, but aerobic guidelines are a little bit more clear cut where it's 150 minutes of moderate intensity and or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity. And those can essentially be traded off for two to one minutes, which is really confusing to people because they're like, "How many minutes is this versus this?" What is moderate, what is vigorous? They're often reported as METs, which is metabolic units, and nobody's measuring their fitness activity and metabolic units. So the best way I describe this for people that I think is the easiest to understand is moderate intensity is things that probably get your heart rate over 100 beats per minute. You start to have an increased rep respiration in your breathing rate. You're probably exercising at like a 3, 4, 5, maybe out of 10. It's really not that crazy. It's just something that's making you physically have to produce a little bit more work to accomplish and do. So typically this starts like a brisk walk for some people if you're fitter and might have to be a jog or something more intense to get you in that. It can be modes of daily living for some people if you're vigorously cleaning or gardening, it can even overlap with this as well. And then vigorous is going to be more of your formal, probably like a truly jogging running or formal cardio of some sort or activity like that. Typically 5, 6, 7 are greater out of 10 effort. It's going to fit into this vigorous. So most people when they start doing cardio, they don't really, 'cause when I talk about the exercise guidelines, people come with me with a pitchfork. They're like, "I don't have 150 minutes per week." And I'm like, "Most of you if you're doing any formal cardio, it's probably falling into that vigorous category." So to speak, so that's about 75 minutes a week. If it's formal, if it's just like, "Hey, I'm going for some brisk walks during the week, probably looking more of that 150 minutes per week." So about one to two hours of formal cardiovascular activity. Now there are health benefits that we see up to 300, even 500 minutes per week, but that's a lot for a lot of people. So it's not that that's the minimum of, "Oh, they're all the health benefits are the same." They continue to improve from there, but that's where we see the most significant benefit in things like cardio, metabolic disease, risk mortality, which is fancy way of saying, risk of dying, things like that. - Can we linger on that for a second? - We sure can. - Because I think, at least my memory of these kind of curves looking at exercise, strength training and cardio training and mortality. If I'm remembering correctly, like you said, most of the benefit is achieved within that kind of first couple of hours of cardio. And same with resistance training, I think most of the benefit is around like one hour a week. And the reason I want to linger on this is firstly, is that accurate? And I think that's important for people to appreciate that if correct, going from nothing to something, that's where the kind of greatest magnitude of risk reduction lies. And so just getting there, and I think even if you look at daily steps, like going from zero steps to like 6,000 is when you have this huge risk reduction and all cause mortality. And yeah, you get some extra benefit beyond there. But focusing on kind of just getting started is the most important thing. - Yeah, there are these like essentially J-shaped curves. And your right steps are the same way. And it's essentially every like little bit more of steps you do up to like 6,000, 7,000, maybe 8,000 tops, it's kind of curves out. So it's like, well, yeah, it doesn't hurt to do 10,000 steps a day. But anything past that isn't getting like, that's where most of the benefit is. So if going from 1,000 steps data three, more significantly improved your health risk than going from like eight to nine. So to speak, same thing with cardio. I think that most of those benefits start to really plateau a lot more between 150 to 300 minutes per week. But again, people, women freak out when I say these numbers 'cause it seems like so, so, so much time. So that's why I focus on like, let's think about the least most that we can do because the most of that benefit is happening. in that especially when we think about if you're more detrained or you're not doing a lot of cardio or you're doing stuff that is more hard, you know, your group fitness classes, your cardio classes, your little hit bike sessions that you do, those are probably vigorous and that's only about an hour and 15 minutes per week plus the lifting. We're looking at like two and a half hours of total activity per week at a minimum, right? I know for a lot of people that might seem like a lot, but if you could only start with an hour of each that is still significantly better than zero of each and I don't think people are saying that to a man, I think they're saying like, well, if you're not doing heavy hard resistance training six days a week plus the hit classes three days a week, well, then you might as well not try, but it really does your actual. Well, it feels it feels hot to fit it all in. So, and I guess to make it really simple, the point that I was trying to get out is if I'm an individual and I'm getting to six thousand steps a day and I'm beating myself up for not getting to 10,000 or I'm just focusing so hard on getting to 10,000 and that's coming at the expense of me not doing any resistance training. That's probably not a good idea. That's right. And when we look at these shorter resistance training sessions, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, that's where we see, as you said, like the magic happened initially. It's those two 20 to 30 minute sessions are a huge improvement from baseline. And then beyond that, yes, can we maximize our muscle? Can we optimize our strength development? Yes, we can. And the other thing is depending on what you're doing for your resistance training, you are potentially getting some cardiovascular benefits as well from resistance training. But I think importantly, it's not just how many minutes are we spending doing this? It's what are we doing the rest of the day? And how what does our overall lifestyle look like? Because we're not just exercising in a vacuum and then, well, maybe we are. Maybe we are exercising and then we are sitting or doing multiple international flights all the time. And we're exercises that much more important because due to our job and lifestyle, we are extremely sedentary when we're not doing structured exercise. But for many of us, we have the opportunity to be physically active in an unstructured or not exercise specific way. And that makes the whole conversation feel a lot more palatable and achievable when we say, Hey, it's not just this and this exercise session. It's how are we spending our day to day lives and how active are we? Yeah, I find that a lot of people want to talk about because I'm the cardio person. People know me as that. And I think it's really important to do cardio, but they think, well, I have to add hours and hours on that. And like, think about building your life around being more active. Can you take more walk breaks during your day? Can you take the flight of steps? There's even small studies. Now these are really, really acute for exercise snacks, where even just like workers who went off the steps, like every hour on the hour for eight hours a day. And like, that's going up the steps. We all know we lose our breath. It's harder. Like they even have small improvements like VO2 max and or aerobic markers or vascular health by just doing that. Now, is that going to be the same magnitude as like some formal trick? No, but that's something little that you can think about like, how do I build activity into my life, whether that's increasing steps or things like that? But to your point, too, I've had this conversation a lot with people with the over emphasis on steps. And if your, the time it takes to get to 10,000 steps today is like three to five miles of walking, give or take whatever that looks like for a person. I think it's somewhere in that range. I would rather someone take that hour. They spend trying to achieve that extra 5,000 steps and do some formal exercise because we do have some studies that even show that from a step standpoint, like for more active people, that threshold goes down to like five to six versus like 7,500. There's like a little bit of you still want to be active if you're active, but I would rather you, instead of going for an hour walk to try to hit your steps, I'd rather you do a 30 minute formal lifting session or do some sort of short, high intensity cardio or whatever that looks like, actually do some formal training if that's the trade off in your time kind of thing. It's not that that leisurely walk is bad. It's that if you are time poor, you can use it for a big piece of this conversation that I think is missing that a lot of people don't understand is that intensity drives a lot of adaptations. And if you're short on time, we can use intensity. It doesn't always replace volume or doing more, especially if you start to have very specific goals or wanting to optimize or maximize things. But for people who are in this conversation right now is like, how do I just maximize my health benefits without feeling like I'm going crazy and I don't have enough time? We can start playing with these variables of utilizing intensity a little bit more, trading time spent for steps on formal resistance training or activity or whatever that looks like. So we can be make a better use of the time that we're using, especially because I do think women are really overwhelmed in thinking they need like 10 hours of exercise a week in order to be healthy plus do other things that they're having to do. And they don't, especially if their goal is just like, I just want to be healthy. I just want to be healthy. Now if we want to optimize beyond that, yeah, that's another conversation you might have to do more. But if we're just trying to do that, that little bit from nothing is really, really significant and the impact that it has on your health for muscular scale tool or cardiovascular. Are there any things that you would personally want to change in the current guidelines? I think the guidelines like many general guidelines, they don't really explain what to do, how to do it. It's the same thing with the new nutritional guidelines. You see this number or this diagram or we're telling you to eat this much protein or avoid this and avoid that. But how do I eat? And the same thing goes for the physical activity guidelines. What is high intensity? What's moderate intensity? And if I'm doing resistance training, what counts as resistance training and there's so much confusion around that because there isn't really any example and the fitness industry steps right in to say, here you go. And there's so many versions of the solution provided by the fitness industry that is often tailored to women or tailored to the midlife woman. And so I think perhaps a lot of the members of your community think that they need a perimenopause workout that postmenopause, the guidelines change or the guidelines don't exist for me. I'm not included in that. So I think there's just a lot of confusion and the fitness industry is really there to muddy the waters. Yeah. I agree. And this is a critique I've had vocally across all my time in academia is that they just do the same thing that a lot of science does where it says what to do, but it doesn't teach people how to do. And I think you do a lot better job at giving explicit being more explicit in what is two days of full body resistance training? What is a met minute? Like people have no idea what that means. Like we need to have it for people. Like what does that look like in a week? What is what? Because especially for women, well, what is resistance training? Is it yoga? Is it Pilates? Body weight movement? Is it, does it have to be dumbbells? Like there's, because resistance, the word resistance training itself doesn't encapsulate. Well, you're putting resistance in your body in these different ways, but no, that's not what we mean or no, that's what you should be. It's very confusing. Like we're, especially, I think those guidelines could be a lot more hashed out and more deliberate and specific. And there's a lot of, I like you mentioned, people filling in the gaps there then for people on what that means. 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Now Momentus is offering our listeners here at the proof up to 35% off your first order with the Promo Code, the proof. Head to livemomentus.com and use code, the proof, from up to 35% off your first order. Yeah, I definitely come back to the nutrition guidelines. I wish that they showed full days of eating, plates of food. And to your point, when they say, "Donate this," show the swap. Instead of eating that, here's an actual food. So when you're in the grocery store, not this, take that. And what does that look like for a whole day? Not just a single plate of food. That would appear to be much more comprehensive in actually creating behavior change. If someone's listening to this and thinking, "Okay, I hear you that the guidelines have been developed, including women from midlife and all." on, but they're also of the view that the majority of the exercise physiology research has been on men or younger women. What would you say to them? They are correct, but also they are incorrect. I think there's a lot of limited views on what this actually means in the world. And I say this as someone I was the second author on the invisible sports woman paper that like caught out the lack of research in women. I think people misquote that paper all the time to then use it to sell some narrative that they want to have. And so we did find that in the top five journals, mostly looking at pre-minopausal women or men versus women in general, that only 6% of studies were done on women's specific issues. People love to say that 6%, but still 34% of total participants are women. Should it be 50/50? Absolutely, but I think they make it seem like it's only 6% of women are included in studies. So limited research or needing more research doesn't mean no research. And then Kelly of Period in the Period, who's amazing, she also let another kind of statement paper from our group saying like a lot of there is not a ton in parimenopause in midlife, especially with women who have performance goals. We do need more of that. But also we have tons and tons of trials of women undergoing resistance training protocols, cardiovascular training protocols. Women are more prevalent in weight loss literature than men. They are over 50% women in most of those studies. So I think there's this idea that there is a really big need for a lot more research in like women's specific stuff, like especially like there's, you know, a lot more research going into menopause and endometriosis and things like that that is really important. But with some of this stuff in the studies that we have, there are trials that are done explicitly in menopausal women. And we see a lot of the same outcomes and data that we're going to talk about that we see in young women or men. Sometimes those outcomes are a word attenuated or less than then the same magnitude of maybe a 20 year old boy, but they still happen, right? And those studies are being done in those populations. So less does not mean none, but also does not mean we don't need more. And I think that's a hard thing for people to bridge the gap on and then they love to manipulate that narrative to then, well, they then they saw they manipulated to sell you hypothesis, not actually what the studies are showing, which is no better than data on a 20 year old boy might be better than a hypothesis that hasn't been unfounded across the board. So. But there's no research to suggest that those guidelines, what we spoke about, which was a kind of minimum dose of an hour awake of resistance training and then 75 minutes of vigorous cardio or 150 minutes of moderate that that should be different for women versus men. There was one study that came out last year that wasn't perfect that show that women might be able to get away with in pre-menopausal state like less total minutes because they adapt more efficiently than men. But even that, I'm very hesitant to like take home, but we see a lot of times in these studies that look at low versus high intensity exercise, all that stuff, they stratify a bit sex or age. Typically we see very similar response curves in them. There's not like this just dramatically different response between men and women that's telling us to aggregate this data and to have completely different outcomes that is like often what's being told. We see very similar response patterns, even if it's not the exact magnitude of them. And what about not just the duration, but like the type of resistance training for example, if you think about sex differences in muscle fiber type or how women respond to resistance training or changes in hormone levels, does any of that require differences in things like the number of sets and reps and intensity and all these different variables that lie within that 60 minutes of resistance training? Yeah, I'll give that to our token muscle physiologist. No, we have some data that shows sex differences when you're untrained. So if we take an untrained adult male and female, there might be some fiber type differences, but the proportion for the vast majority of people is around 50/50. So we're talking 51/49 in one direction or the other. That's sort of the magnitude of the average sex difference. And just there, we're talking about the type of muscle fibers, which we might maybe we just pause on for a moment and just explain what that is. Sure. So people know that know this as type one or type two or these more long and slow or oxidative type fibers and your fast, twitch, or power type fibers. And it stands to reason that somebody who is an elite endurance athlete tends to have a higher proportion of the type one. And someone who is an elite strength power athlete tends to have a higher proportion of the type two. And we see this with both sexes. So elite athletes of both types in both sexes can have this skewed fiber type distribution. And just to define a little bit more what fiber type means, a muscle fiber is a muscle cell. And the cell will express these proteins. And so the protein is called myosin-heavy chain. And that delineates which type we are referring to. So is it myosin-heavy chain type one? Is that as a predominant protein that is being expressed or is it myosin-heavy chain type two? It does go beyond that. That's kind of a simplified explanation because you can have hybrid fibers, meaning you have a cell or a fiber that actually expresses both that one and the two. And there are also sort of subsets of type one and type two. I think now we're getting a bit to into the weeds. But if I can just say we have pure one and two and then we can have hybrids. And a lot of these are a little bit difficult to measure depending on the technique that you use. But what we see more and more if we're able to use a technique that allows for the identification of hybrids is more sedentary people tend to have more of these hybrid fibers. So that's what we should be concerned about. But if you have a majority of type one because you are an elite endurance athlete or you have a higher proportion of type two because you are an elite Olympic lifter, that's not good or bad, that's a sports specific adaptation. That's a training adaptation, not a selection bias. And we're going and this is a whole not the podcast. Yeah. I mean, we don't know because we don't have data for throughout the lifespan. Are they elite because they started out with the slightly skewed distribution or was that all activity specific adaptation? In any case, we know that the elite female strength and power athlete can have 75% type two, which is a dramatic shift. So clearly there is no handicap there of being a female athlete. So if we connect the dots here, why this matters, I guess, for the typical woman who's listening to this podcast now who's thinking about aging well and being able to have functional capacity, why does this matter that there doesn't appear to be big differences, I guess, in muscle fiber type? What does that actually mean for her? I think the conversation about fiber type should never be used to prescribe training. And that's because, as I said, even in these untrained where we see these subtle differences, we also see those shifts once you start doing one type of training or the other. And so we aren't measuring fiber type unless you're participating in a study that's certainly not a metric that is reasonable or viable to track over time. What we know is, regardless of the type of exercise you engage in, we will see certain adaptations. Fiber type might be one of many activity specific adaptations. But if we think about overall health, it's not that the more endurance type athlete is healthier than the more strength power type athlete. There are a lot of other parameters that go into kind of overall health. So we aren't striving for one fiber type distribution or the other. The biggest take home is we want to avoid long-term bed rest or illness where we're developing all these hybrid fibers. And I think the thing that gets lost often is one. People have said stuff about things like muscle fiber type, but then they don't, then they completely forget that exercise adaptations happen at the muscle. Like I don't know where this disconnect in the world of fitness is. Other than like, oh, get strong big muscle things like that. But it's the adaptations that you get from the stress you put your body under from like lifting weights or doing endurance or power training or whatever that looks like. That matters more for the outcome that you're getting than like knowing your dexan numbers or knowing your fiber type or knowing even your VO2 max. Like I think there's these little tiny things that everyone's this overlapping. So things aren't, they do exist. They aren't totally non-important or. or irrelevant or don't matter, it's that the outcome of what you do to improve those matters regardless of that information. So if you want to become more aerobically trained and have the adaptations of that like positive vascular flexibility and mitochondrial density or cardiovascular ability to breathe in and deliver oxygen and uptake it to your tissues, you're going to do a aerobic training to develop that. If you want to be able to have muscle grow or be stronger or more powerful, you're going to do strength training to do it. It doesn't matter what your baseline musculature is. I mean, I am the prime example of shifting across your lifespan, right? And it's shifting to the training response that I've given. Your bodies are very plastic and adaptable, but it's more about, okay, well, what stress do we need and those positive adaptations you get from exercise that lead to performance benefits that happen at these muscular levels also are what make us healthier because they're forcing your bodies to adapt to it. So it's not women are obsessed with this muscle fiber type thing, especially in like ultra endurance, the world I come from and it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter, right? Like you just train it and I'm training in general and proves a lot of the same characteristics that having that is. And honestly, women obsess about this baseline type one muscle fiber thing, but training status matters more than your baseline sex when it comes to that. More aerobically fit women have all the same or greater characteristics that you associate with having type one muscle fibers than their sedentary counterpoints. So I think it really leaves out that thinness adaptation component and that's what we care more about is like, okay, well, what are you giving the input? What's your body to have the output for and it's going to adapt to that and that leads to performance or health or both because they often overlap. Okay. So what I'm hearing, sorry, I just got to get to that. No, I think there are different people out there, some who love all of the details and some who quite frankly that is just over complicating it. Yes. And then they get paralyzed. So I'll try and summarize and then we can kind of make sure we're catering to both people a little bit here. But what I'm hearing is that there's not big enough differences in muscle fiber types between sexes to for that to result in different types of resistance training protocols for men and women. But at least to my understanding, as all of us age, men and women, that does tend to be a loss of strength and power as we get older. And we could go into what explains that at a muscle fiber type, but maybe that's not even necessary or we could just go straight to like you said, what is the stimulus? So what people are really looking for as they're aging is how do I attenuate that loss in strength and power because I don't want to have a fall and I want to keep playing pickle ball. Right. So yes, we could go into the muscle fiber kind of explanation if we think that's appropriate or we can just go straight into what does a good resistance training program look like for the woman who is in her 40s, 50s or 60s to attenuate some of the age related changes that we see in muscle, which negatively affect those important outcomes and really her goals. So I think the thing is to, I think we've really beat the head dead horse and this is like, let's zoom out on what we actually want to care about, right? Like if you want to look at your dexas and see what you have, whatever it doesn't matter because the outcome for that regardless is going to be probably resistance training will improve it, right? So we know that that's the solution to whatever your problem you've identified with your data or whatever that looks like from curiosity or medically prescribed or hand grip strength or whatever the measure is of the week that we're obsessed with because of some viral video. We want to look at strength, which is how much weight can you move in the gym? That can be isolated to any type of activity or power, how fast or how quickly can you move something because power and strength are both lost with age. And we're getting some data now that showing us powers declining more prior to strength reclining. And I don't think the reason I harp on this is not that I think everyone needs to become super, super crazy powerful is that women are never sold programs that train them almost like athletically. They're always sold programs that are trained for like fat loss weight loss or body recomposition changes. And they don't think that there's other ways to move that sometimes can make this a little bit more fun and variable to then just like, oh, you get a pro bodybuilder split. Like there's a bunch of different ways that you can train these characteristics in the gym. But ideally at the end of the day, you're doing something that allows you to move more weight or more reps or do more overall or move something quicker or more powerfully, whether that's your body or weight. That's like my most rudimentary, simple metric that can give women something to like focus on improving rather than obsessing over like a biopsy. They're never going to never I've never had a biopsy. I don't know if you have. I've had every other test imaginably done to me. But those are the things that are going to be like the outcomes that we actually care about. And I say that because you talked about my best advice to give women, put your blinders on to so much of the other information coming at you because you will get so much success if you can just like narrow in on what I don't want to act like me and Lauren have the best advice in the industry. But we're going to give you really simple concrete advice that isn't as distracting. And if you really focus on those things, you're going to save your time and energy, you're going to get a lot more of those outcomes that you're looking for in all the wrong places by just really these simple things that honestly are going to look a lot like training like a man. And I know that that people hate when I say that, but it's going to look a lot like training like a man because men train for strength and muscle and power and hypertrophy and all of these things more statistically often than not. You think this is something that we can simplify to a point where a woman could walk into the gym and do this by herself or at this level is a coach or a personal trainer required. I think that we could probably simplify this here today to a way that they can go in and do it. But I usually give the advice to most women if your hesitant or scared even a few sessions with a coach or personal trainer just to get your comfort level can be a really great thing to do or starting with a program even if that's online virtually whatever that looks like that kind of lays this out for you. So you don't have to feel like you have to like do it all yourself. I think we could probably delineate enough here today to get them feel like they can walk in the door and at least start with something. I think it's also important to point out that there are options here. There's some flexibility and you can choose based on preference or access to equipment because the key principles are full body. We want to be working all the major muscle groups and it needs to be sufficiently challenging and challenging will change depending on the exercise that you're doing and it needs to be progressive in nature over time. So we want to do more as we improve our strength. And if you do that using machines or barbells or dumbbells or bands or a combination of all of the above then that's great. And so it isn't as if there is this must do program or piece of equipment that is going to get you there. Alright story time. Years ago in my early 20s I spent a fair amount of time in China and Sri Lanka and India. I would go there and I would visit tea regions I'd sit with growers and learn how different teas were actually grown and prepared and how different they could be nutritionally. That's where I first fell down the rabbit hole with poo air tea. I loved the flavor but what really stuck with me was how this tea made me feel. It was kind of a kind of a natural way of thinking about the taste of the tea. I was very excited about the taste of the tea and the taste of the tea. I was really excited when I was really excited when I was really excited about the taste of the tea that I had been eating. I was really excited about the taste of the tea and the taste of the tea. I was really excited about the taste of the tea. It was a really concentrated source of polyphenols. The black poo air is naturally fermented giving you a different spectrum of tea polyphenols along with some really healthy gut loving pre-bought compounds. So if you're like me and appreciate tea not just for the ritual but for the phytonutrients it delivers. I think this USDA organic poo air tea duo from Peek is a really elegant option. You can get 20% off today at peaklife.com/simon. Should we go through some of the kind of broad brushstroke principles, like how many sets you might want to do for a particular muscle group and how you might want to think about reps and effort and start with the basics. I'm sure I'll have a bunch of questions along the way. Is that how you would begin to think about this in terms of setting up someone's resistance training program looking at that they are exercising all muscle groups and they're doing a certain number of sets per week? I don't know that I would say number of sets per week necessarily, although you can structure it that way. But if we start from the basics of what is a full body workout, maybe that's a good place to start because we can think about our upper body push and pulling movement. So we have an upper body push meaning a bench press or a push. up, you're pushing weight away from you horizontally. And then we have a vertical upper body push. So we're pushing weight to the ceiling. That's your overhead press. So I'd want to see the horizontal and vertical pushing movement. And then I'd want to see the horizontal and vertical pulling movements, meaning a row or a pull down or a pull up, something of that variation. So with those, we're working all of the upper body, major muscle groups, front and back. And then if we move on to the lower body, we'd want something that is, you know, quad dominant or knee dominant, like a squat or a lunge or a step up. And we'd also want something like a deadlift or a good morning that is going to target the hamstrings, the glutes that posterior chain. And we could go beyond that to add, you know, a hip thrust variation. And then we can add in some more accessory type exercises as desired by the individual. But like broad strokes, we want to think about upper and lower body pushing and pulling so that we're getting anterior, posterior chain. And we're working all of those major muscle groups. And what do you, what do you think is a kind of minimum effective dose? If the outcome of interest is, is strength, I will start there. If you were to do an upper body push and pull and on a lower body push and pull or hinge and squat type movement. And so if we were to pick four exercises and do three sets of those, that would be a really great place to start. And we could split this up if we wanted to and we could do the horizontal push on one day and the vertical push on the other day. So maybe on, on workout one, I'm doing a bench press and a row and a squat. And then workout two, I'm doing a overhead press and a pull down and a good morning. And we can split those just as sort of a bare minimum structure where we do at least three challenging sets so that wouldn't include warm up. And we make sure that we're progressing with with good form and we're terminating that set a couple reps shy of failure. So when I finish the set, if I'm doing ten, if I finish, I want to feel like maybe I could do one more, maybe two more. And if I have many more reps left in the tank, I'm using a weight that's too light. And so I need to load heavier. Right. So for each of those kind of movement patterns, based on that program, you'd end up with like six sets per movement pattern a week. I think I've seen some studies that shows few as four to six total sets per week gets new. Like you were talking about earlier, like most of the way there and the magnitude of benefit. Now, most women are in bodybuilding rabbit holes of social media. We're getting like the maximum effective dose and the 45 set studies and things like that. But I think for a lot of women having two days a week and I like that, like if you're good, I love a full body split if you're only doing two and you can expand this into three days per week because then there's the frequency component because you're going to be able to touch the lower and upper body is more more frequently. Hence, frequency. But then you're getting that kind of minimum dose of like somewhere between four to six per week. If you do, she said three sets. I usually tell people like my minimum is two hard sets of any exercise. I love that. I say a lot to women who are like short on time. I'm like two hard sets. Like that's my minimum, but two to three is a really good range. So you get the frequency in, you're getting that four to six. And then over time, if you're adapting and you want to do more, you can handle more either adding the third day or an extra set can then take you to say eight sets. And that's a form of progression there within that. But really just she listed all the major movement patterns, which is exactly what I would say. And trying to hit those at least once or twice per week is probably like, because I know that you gave some examples of the way to do it. I'm going to want to say they want an exact thing to do that. But it's hard because it is there is a lot of fluidity in the way you can structure a strength program and have it work for you based off the movements that you're doing and self selecting for that. And I like the buckets of movement categories because then you can say, well, I prefer a light press to a back squat. I don't really feel comfortable in a back squat. You know, when I'm new to the gym and honestly for women that this is like really overwhelming for if you go to like a planet fitness that's like 10 bucks, they have their little machine circle thing. You could start with that and it goes through every single major muscle group. If you pick like four or five of those and went through that, like this doesn't have to be like some super scientific, perfectly calculated to reps and sets type thing. And you take a few of those two or three sets, those two that effort level that she was saying, you can that's an amazing way to make a lot of progress for a good bit of time. And then if you want to like get more specific from there, but I'm going to magnify in a little bit on what she said about effort because this is where I think most women mess up. I'm going to buy mess up. I mean, like you shouldn't feel like you're shame and doom or gloom is that I think that because a lot of women, like I mentioned earlier, they didn't grow playing sports. And unless they went through some sort of fitness in the past where they worked really hard, they might not know what like hard feels like to them. Like perceptually, they might stop a lot shorter to failure or that true like one rep shy effort. I see this all the time with my clients. I love giving them am wraps or as many reps as possible after like eight weeks of training. I don't have them take like some other exercises and take them to failure and they are like, oh my gosh, I was doing eight sets at 100 for this whole block and then I just did 20 reps at that. And it gives them like an anchor, like it gives them an anchor of what that was stopping that said way too early. Although load was too light. Yes, exactly. They were either stopping the sets too early or the load was too light. And a lot of that I think comes from woman either one not knowing to I under load on intentionally all the time. I'm just as bad as everyone else and I have to check myself as well. And I've been lifting for years. We're not all perfect here. And three, just like not knowing what that actually feels like. So if you don't know what failure feels like, well, if me and Lauren say, we'll go into your one to four reps shy of that. You're like, what does that even mean? So thinking about that and like if you're not sure, take an exercise that you feel safe in. Like it doesn't have to be a deadlift that might feel scary to take to failure, but like your bicep curl or your row or whatever. Or a shame or something. Yeah, something that feels a little, yeah, more safe. And if it's you're doing three by 10, don't stop at 10. Stop it when you can't stop anymore. And I have like this little litmus test that I like to give women of like, is it heavy enough? And one, if you don't need to focus at all with what you're doing, like you're just kind of looking around the gym, going through the motions, it's, you can probably do more weight. I think a lot of women say lifting is boring, but interest brings in our intensity brings interest. So if you make an intense enough, it's going, you're going to be more focused in on that in that session. So it might actually feel more enjoyable because it's forcing you kind of that intensity that we chase in like group fitness classes, feel the burn type thing. Well, that's because intensity is making it interesting or you're having to focus kind of thing. So then weight there is an intensity component or reps or whatever that is. Do you can you focus? You need to focus while you're doing it. The next one is your reps should start to slow down. So say you're doing a set of 10, your first like three to five, we're going to move a lot faster than the last few. If your reps move the same speed the whole time where they never slow down or they never kind of change an effort level across the set, you can probably do more weight or you can probably do more reps. And then my third one is women love to like super, the joke line is like they like to super set their lifting with burpees and jumps and things like that. With things like an isolated like a bicep curl or something like that, you're not going to feel like you need this immense amount of rest. But if you're doing heavy things like dead lifts or a leg press or a squat or even a heavy like shoulder chest press, like you should feel that you need at least a little bit of time between those exercises before you're like, okay, I could go and do the same exact output of what you just did. You should feel like your muscles need to recover for you to perform at the same level you just did. And I like that because I feel like women aren't taught how to lift intensely for their thing. They're just told everyone needs to lift heavy. Well, what does that mean? It's relative to you is relative to the exercise that you're doing and it's relative to your perception of what heavy is. And so I like those as like ways to test and check that because I see it all, I coach so many women and I love seeing them going, oh my gosh, I'm so much stronger than I thought I was, but they just needed to kind of like in a safe enough environment. Show themselves pushing themselves is safe and they can handle it and that they can do more and it you almost have to do it to get it and then move forward with it. I think we can all fall into that trap of kind of just going and going through the motions and what I'm hearing from you is and again, this is not to to shame anyone. But it comes back to the time barrier again because what I'm hearing is you actually have to you can put in less time if your intensity is higher and you're getting more bang for your book in that 60 minutes of laxidaseical lifting is probably not as beneficial, quote unquote, it's still good for you. Then like 30 to 45 minutes of like true intention lifting, taking to a higher intensity is kind of I mean, that sounds very black and white when I say that. I know people sometimes don't like the nuance, I'm seeing a little more abslootie. It's not as if 60 minutes of even body weight light stuff that you're doing at home is still beneficial. Even if it's not to that intensity, it's still better. than that nothing threshold. But we're talking about like sheer outcomes of training sessions. If you're doing it anyway, you might as well get the most out of it kind of thing. We're talking about how to make that set as effective as possible. And like you said, sometimes people just don't know what is the effort that's required. So from the research, what I'm hearing is that getting, choosing a weight and doing a certain number of reps so you get to a certain proximity to failure is really important. And if we simplify that further, when you think about the goals that this population, these types of women generally have, which is not losing strength as they age, not being susceptible to fall. So keeping their power, but also maintaining bone mineral density. So if we factor all of that into this conversation now to kind of further guide this person, what's the ideal number of reps when they are doing the lap pull down or the row or the squad? What's the guide for reps so they can then make sure that choosing the right load? So from the scientific perspective, it doesn't matter as long as you are training close enough to failure. But if somebody is brand new to lifting, understanding failure is a bit of a journey. I can't tell you how many participants that I've had where I'll put them on a leg extension machine and they'll say, this is hard, this hurts, this burns. And I'm, yeah, it's supposed to do one more, do one more, do one more, and they've done 10 more than they thought that they could. And it happens all the time. And so I love the idea of a machine to really learn what failure means because it's also kind of a safe way to do it. You're either pushing or pulling and you're able to move the weight or you're not. And that's failure when you physically can't move it anymore. And so learning that is once you realize what failure feels like, then we can push back from there and you'll know, okay, when I say to myself, I only have one left. I've checked myself. I know I'm in that ballpark because I've experimented with actual failure in some of these exercises. And I think a good rep range to start is probably 10 to 12 because you are getting enough practice with the movement that you're comfortable with the exercise itself. And you're also able to reach true failure without some other type of fatigue taking over depending on the movement. So if I did a set of 30 barbell squats, it might be that my lungs get out before my legs. Okay, so to kind of recap, because I do think this is a pretty understandable and accessible program. At least for someone who has access to the gym and maybe we can talk about what someone could do if they didn't. But if they did have access, you described this kind of full body workout that had a push exercise, a pull exercise, a squatting exercise, and then a hinging exercise. So that's four different kind of movement planes. And for each doing two or three sets, I think you said you could probably get away with two sets if the effort is hard sets. If they're effective sets and you're getting close enough to failure. That's why I'm going three because I think the first one's not hard enough. That's true. And I will say I typically do three to four on main compounds and like this for accessories for time's sake. But I usually like that's I like giving women this like minimum because I think I see a lot of times people are like, well, I don't have time for three of all this. I'm like, well, too hard of those and get home and get out. But if you can take them hard enough is the point to that. And building off her rep range things and all that stuff, I really want to reiterate to this to women listening. A lot of this stuff is seen in the trials done on post mental puzzle women for muscle for bone. It's two or three days of week of whole body resistance training, typically two to four sets, usually not always 10 to 12 reps. But that's pretty common in exercise science literature. Sometimes it's heavier, sometimes it's higher rap, but it's usually in that ballpark range, usually somewhere between six to eight total sets per like major body part per week. Like this stuff is like what's being seen in these it's not like this is just like over extrapolated like we, you know, there's variations from study to study to study design. But these are the studies that are looking at muscle strength or strength or muscle growth strength and bone. Because I know women are listening to this thing. I want to know, well, does this apply to me? Is this going to improve the things that I want and these the outcomes that I want? And yes, we see this in men and young women and things like this too. But we also see very similar protocols and set up in just this is kind of the generic exercise science intervention protocol like across the board. They're usually using and stealing in some variation across studies. So it's it's not just stuff that is like, oh, well, it might, you know, like there's trials that are using this similar setup in some variation or another for muscle strength and bone because I know that's what women are listening to this. And I like, well, is that going to actually improve these things that I care about? And that is what a lot of these studies are using in their approach. Two other questions I have that I think people listening might be wondering, one, as they're doing the reps, does the speed going up and down? Does that matter? Maybe what the research describes is tempo. And second, and you kind of touched on this, but what would you say the ideal amount of rest is between sets? Hembo doesn't matter. You shouldn't be worried about tempo. I mean, people will try to do kind of these super slow eccentric's. That's there's a whole body of research on that. The there's going to be an easier phase and a hard phase of every lift. And if it's challenging enough load wise, then as Alyssa said, it's automatically going to get slower on the hard phase as you do more and more reps. So that last rep, it will kind of be a grind. And so tempo is taken care of by that unless you're trying to artificially slow it down. Otherwise, we should be saying, you know, do it as quickly as quickly as you can. And then do the easier phase or the lowering phase eccentric in a controlled manner. So if I'm doing a bicep curl, when I bring my my wrist to my shoulder, I'm lifting the weight as quickly as I can to get the weight up. And then I'm lowering it back down in a controlled way. And does that take care of power? If we think about, I guess the goal of being able to produce force quickly as we're aging so that we can quickly react if we have a little full or trip and we don't end up hitting the ground and being at risk for a fracture, is is that enough or do we need to supplement the training further to kind of provide a stimulus for power? There's an overlap for sure. I mean, having a more strong capable body, that nervous system that integrates with your muscles, like I mean, you're going to be more capable across the board. Strong people are going to just have that. Because think about a great example is when you first start lifting the gym, you're kind of awkward. You don't you can't move through the motions. You feel disconnected to your body. And the first few weeks of adaptations are literally your nervous system just adapting to what you're doing. You're not really even getting like musk really strong yet. Your body's just going, Oh, okay, like I can recruit more fibers and I can do more of this and handle more of this. I do love strength training paired with some form of power or plyometric training for women. When I say for women, I'm kind of like, well, everyone I kind of like that for. I do think it offers complimentary advantage to that. If you're going to do one or the other strength training is probably the most important brain for your buck. We have studies where we put them both together and it has positive outcomes on muscle outcome strength power. Well, strength and power usually are measured in different ways and studies or bone density. I like them, but it doesn't always have to be I think I like, you know, you can do very low, low minimal jump training. You can do reactive training. You can even do like moving weights faster in different ways. There's a lot. So yes and because it can it's encapsulated in the power of strength training, but also complimenting that with these other things can be positive. But again, I think women are seeing that and then they're getting confused on what that means. Like the strength is probably the most important component of that, but complimenting it with some sort of power based training where you're moving things quickly or your body quickly has it's advantageous as well. But again, that strength component is like the bigger of the rocks there and the glass of your health and things like that. Because if you're doing barbell training, you're going to necessarily need to decrease the load in order to move it more quickly. And so if we're still in that phase where you're trying to identify a challenging load and failure, then it can get a little bit messy. So if we think about the way that power lifters train, they might have a a power day, meaning they're intentionally lifting at 60% of one rep max, but they're really trying to move the weight as quickly as possible. And that is different type of adaptation to kind of maximize performance, but they already know what their one rep max is. And they are already doing that really challenging training. So I think if you're still trying to distinguish challenging from not enough, then inserting more power training in there starts to get a little bit complicated. What's possible in terms of if we're thinking about the, let's say, typical age-related changes that we see in muscle and in strength, which is no doubt from a pretty sedentary population, a lot of that data. What's possible in terms of if a woman is listening in her 40s and 50s, and she does this type of program? What's possible in terms of attenuating those changes that we typically see is that you can slow it down by a certain percentage or what would you say is realistic? I don't think we have data to really lean on to say because what we have is decades of or comparing people in different decades of life who are not doing any kind of structured resistance training and then mapping this curve or rate of loss. And if we insert resistance training into that and we start at any point, then it is certainly likely to attenuate that the degree to which it will attenuate, I can't say, because we don't have enough people who are training in every decade of life to model it in a trained population. But certainly we've seen that people who start lifting in their 40s, 50s, 60s, even 80s can gain muscle. We have the literature on that. And then we also have research and masters athletes. And these people are definitely maintaining their fitness and are extremely strong well into older adulthood. So I think we should certainly be encouraged by both of those metrics that it's not as if you get to a certain decade and lose the ability to adapt or lose the ability to maintain those adaptations, provided that you are still sticking with the physical activity. I mean, I think the greatest disservice we do to people seldom this idea that you turn for 40 and it's like everything's downhill and that's a great point of we're seeing these master athletes and these older populations get incredibly strong and incredibly fit. Even people anecdotally on social media, how many women are in their 50s, 60s, 70s that we see started resistance training then in that. And they're incredibly strong or incredibly fit or have done amazing things with their fitness. So I think if anything, like I really just want to hone in on that, that I think a lot of women get sold this like doom and gloom. It's too late. Well, if you didn't lift in your 20s and 30s and now you're parry menopausal, like too late for you, type narrative and it's never too late to start and it's just because you can't get back what you didn't do in your 20s or 30s, doesn't mean that you can't make progress now or can't change the course of the rest of your life, so to speak. On progress, if we think about this program, what are the variables that someone is playing with or focusing on to ensure that that program is continually providing a stimulus to create the adaptations that we're looking for? So over time, you want to be able to move more weight in the exercise that you're doing, more sets at the same weight, being able to do more sets. So maybe you go from two to three or even two to three days per week. That's progress. And I think an underrated one there too for a lot of women, especially because there's that skill level and gap that we have is like, I know this isn't measurable, but I always tell women, like if you feel more comfortable and confident in how you're moving in the gym, like that is a great way to measure early progress because that does matter, especially for women where that's a really big barrier. But from like an objective lifting standpoint, typically you're progressing in one way or the other, you're adding load or volume or increasing intensity in one of those ways. And that's what makes lifting fun because I think women think it has to be this one-size-fits-all thing. And so you change the way you lift, you can change up programs, protocols, approaches you can take and still make a lot of progress. Or she is mentioning with like some of the power training, like maybe you become more skilled and you can start having fun with different variations of lifts or approaches to it. And that's a way to continue to make progress while also keeping it interesting and fun. So there, you know, people get thrown progressive overload around all the time. And I think something that people often think is that you've to force it rather than it's just your body's adapting and then you're ceiling for what you can do, rises with it. And then your performance of what you can perform will rise up to meet that new capacity that you have. One key with progressive overload is, and I think some women struggle with this, is you have to stick to the same program for long enough. And so, you know, if I'm only doing this for a couple of weeks, then I'm probably not going to see huge progress in the number of weights, the amount of weight that I'm lifting or the number of repetitions that I'm doing. So you need to really stick same exercises, same setup, but I'm doing the leg press and I'm doing that for 12 weeks. And hopefully, fine, eight. But I'd like it to be 12, but often, you know, people get on this kind of, there must be something better out there. And so then they program hot. And I think women are particularly guilty of this. Binder's on. So I'm hearing patients. Yes. And I mean, might say, oh, well, it's boring. I've been doing that. I've already been doing that for a month. Great. I want you to continue doing that and really focus on, you're doing three sets of 10 on leg press. If you're keeping the weight the same, that should become three sets of 15 or that should become three sets of 10 at, you know, plus 10 pounds from where you started. And that's true for all of the exercises. And if we do, if we do that program for long enough that we can actually see those improvements, that is really empowering. And then you can move on to a different variation of a similar exercise. So let's do some lunges or some split squats and then progress with that. So it's important to be actually tracking the numbers and not just winging it. Unfortunately. It depends. Because I see, you know, I can see people, you know, like me, I'm kind of laughing to myself and thinking, you know, loosely, I know where I'm at. I used to track a lot more closely. I can imagine some people listening and thinking, gosh, this is going to be a lot of tracking. Do I need to take a diaries of the gym and track every single sit? How do you, how do you kind of recommend people approach that to ensure that they are, they are progressing and not reaching a plateau? I think some sort of tracking is really helpful, even if it is for a few months. Because then you know that you are improving and you, you know, you stuck with it long enough to understand failure. And then from there, if you're somebody who hates tracking, that experience has given you the tools and the awareness that maybe you still have some metrics in the back of your mind. And then you know that what failure feels like and you know that if on this exercise, I'm typically at this load with this rep range that when I go in and I think, oh, wow, this feels way harder than it should than it kind of humbles you. It's the same way that tracking your nutrition can be helpful for a short amount of time. Because it gives you the awareness of portion sizes and it helps you understand what those numbers are and what, sadly, a tablespoon of peanut butter really looks like. And so once we have the experience of the tracking, then we can kind of take those skills with us. Yeah, I think if I think about myself, I used to track quite closely. And I would say now I definitely track the muscle groups and the exercises that I'm doing across a week. I know I have a plan every time I go in, but rather than riding down every set and how many reps I really focus on intensity and just making sure I'm getting to within a couple reps of failure. And if I didn't choose the right load, it just means I'm doing more reps. I think that's a thing too that a lot of women don't have an advantage of because you have a history of lifting. So even if you maintained underloaded for a little bit, you're going to maintain so much of that baseline of that all-in phase that you had, right? Like I had a massive all-in phase that I can maintain now with like seasons of what I do with not being perfect or maybe my effort isn't spot on, but I had that base that I built from that. And I think a lot of women don't have that. So I think a period of tracking, if they really, you know, I think you have to kind of balance that compromise of women are like, why don't I want to track? I don't want to think of one more thing within they complain they're not getting progress, they're not getting results. So you have to be honest with yourself. Do you want the mental flexibility of kind of doing whatever? You want in the gym or do you really want to see results from what you're doing? And that's just, it just is kind of thing. So you need some system of capturing and knowing, well, what are my doing week to week and how hard am I doing or what did I do the previous week and just can be helpful or being able to go in the gym and being like, it's self-adjusting every single time to know. Where someone like you or me or Lauren who's been lifting for years, if I don't track in my app, what I did the week before, I roughly know what I can do for almost every exercise under the sun, even if I haven't done it in a really long time, or at least where to start, do a set, adjust from there. I think for women who are starting to live for the first time ever, it's just going to actually be mentally easier to have that, to know what you're doing, what you did the week before and what you need to do, especially because so many women, one of the barriers they have is the mental load of everything else they're doing in their life. And if you have a program that just tells you what to do and what you did and roughly where to start, it's just going to make it that much easier to go into the gym and get the work you need to get done done. And if you don't want to do it long-term, we all drink that cool day when we first got into lifting where we got super into it. We probably all went really hard and built this like amazing strength base. And if women haven't had that, I encourage them to like find whatever variation of that season is for them, because then you can be more flexible with it as you go because you're relying on that like training age that you just don't have that a lot of people, a lot of men have because they did athletics or strength training their whole life or women who have long history. I mean, I've been lifting since I was 15, right? Like that's a crazy advantage that a lot of women don't have. So you're gonna have to be graceful with yourself for that period of time of like playing catch up with building that base of like what you maybe didn't have yet kind of thing. And that might require a little bit more measuring what you're doing so that it's easier to actually make progress and not spend more time spinning your wheels and being frustrated you don't get results or whatever that looks like to you. - Another thing we haven't really talked about that I think is extremely important is if the goal is to gain muscle, we can't be in a calorie deficit. And I think so many women try to do both. And it's I want muscle is the goal, but really they want fat loss. Or and you know, can you have both to an extent initially? - Yeah, but long term it's not a viable approach. And if we're constantly dieting, if we're constantly in it focusing on on fat loss, then we are not building that base of muscle that she just described. - I actually make a post every new year that says why I think women should give up dieting for a year. And it's essentially like spinning a year, going all in and actually feeling like, one, what it feels like to be fed and not starve yourself your entire life. And two, like actually going all in on that period of time of like getting stronger and gaining muscle and making progress in the gym and not tying every outcome that you get in your fitness to just like some sort of restrictive fat loss type thing. And I think when you say that, women get a jump scare because they're like, "Well, that does, I mean, I can never try to change my body composition or weight loss, especially in middle, mid life where they're shifting in fat storage patterns. Women are frustrated with their bodies. They feel like they're unfamiliar with their bodies. Like I absolutely get that. But regardless of if your body never changes again, right? From 40 to 100. Like if it never changed, which it will, because we're gonna age, like what you do and make that progress in with the gym with that strength and muscle gaining still matters and it's still important. And it's not that we're saying that like you can never try to change body composition, but like really that period of time of doing what we think we've all done here to really build that base is so invaluable. And you're going to make more progress long term by doing that. And yeah, that's a good point to that. - I think this is also hitting on a lot of feedback I got, the frustration from women who were, I think many of them, if you asked what their goal was, it would be like quote unquote to get toned. And yes, there is the goal of like let's reduce cardiovascular disease with exercise long term and let's increase our bone mineral density. But they want it all and I understand that. So they're looking at exercise as a lever to shift some of that weight around the midsection to get stronger at the same time. Is that possible? And where would you say this population is perhaps better orienting themselves in order to achieve those goals, both from a kind of muscle strength and bone mineral density outcome, but also body composition? - Well, it's confusing, right? 'Cause I'm going to just say the words at all the women listening to this are thinking right now. What you're saying don't be in a calorie deficit while you're trying to gain muscle, but a calorie deficit is the only way to lose that. So and they want both at the same, and I get I sympathize so much with why women are so confused especially with 17 different variations of the same different message being thrown at them in different ways and they are like, well, what does that even mean? Kind of thing, but I think that one, a lot of women are eating more than they think they are but they're eating in a really haphazard pattern. So they're like kind of shifting it towards the evening or towards the weekends. And so if they evenly distribute that a little bit better, they probably feel better and see where they're actually at from like a baseline of eating kind of thing. To you're probably going to be better off not being in some crazy diet phase while you're trying to build muscle that doesn't mean that you can't try to lose fat and resistance training at the same time you absolutely should. But if you're going to actually spend the time trying to build muscle, you should spend that time trying to build muscle. And I think when women here eat enough, they hear overeating gain a bunch of weight. I don't know why they always jump to that conclusion but I see it all the time. And that doesn't mean overeating gain a bunch of weight. And I think women are so scared to let go of that control of under-eating they've done for years. That eating at maintenance or eating to maintain feels just as scary. And that's why I said redistributing their food across the week 'cause sometimes they are eating the same amount but they go through periods of like living off wind and air and coffee until like I'm face deep in a bag of Cheetos at 9 p.m. kind of thing versus like kind of more eatingly spreading that so they feel better kind of thing. But I think maintenance can feel just as scary as a surplus to them. And sometimes these period of time take doing the uncomfortable thing of like just maintaining your body even if you aren't super happy with it so that you can build a sound or stronger body. Then if you want to do something like that loss and like you mentioned earlier and you can dive into this more too as well as all the shut up. But you talked about like nutrition really matters here too and we can dive into that a little bit if we want and nutrition isn't just like calorie deficit, right? Like it's all, I mean, you know, your whole podcast is talking about this actually so though listen to everything else Simon has but like it's not just calorie deficit, right? There are components and levers that you can be improving and pooling outside of the gym that can be nutritional without just being like restrictive paired with this across the board. I just, I sympathize for the frustration but also the like confusion that thing comes along with that frustration. - Okay, so what would you say to the woman who's listening and is thinking I get it, you're selling me on the resistance training and I understand that if I'm not eating enough, then I might not be getting these benefits from all that training and effort that I'm putting in. But at the same time, I am self conscious of increased body fat around my midsection and my body doesn't feel and look the same as it did when I was in my 20s and 30s. What would you say to someone who's kind of grappling with those two ideas? - Muscle growth takes time. So the reason that I think we're really pushing spending a substantial amount of time, you know, a little bit say to a year, I would love to see more women do that, not truly because when we think about changing our body composition, there are two levers to pull. There's muscle and there's fat. And so the way that we can really see some game changing body composition results is if we do spending enough time eating at a maintenance building muscle and then we focus on the fat loss because otherwise you're just sort of focusing on fat loss and yes, you're resistance training, but typically if you're in a deficit and you're lifting weights, then you're maintaining muscle. You're not building new muscle. So I think that just from a practical perspective that is a really important point for people to understand. But of course the more emotional component of struggling with that is, you know, that's easier said than done. - Yeah, and I think that, you know, we can dive a little bit more into like the whole conversation about changes in fat storage pattern now. And I also want to acknowledge that like just because that's true doesn't mean it doesn't suck. Like I know it can feel really dismissive from I'm just gonna call it as it is to women in their 30s saying, well, it just changes 'cause it's gonna change for me, it's gonna change for Lauren's gonna change for all of us. We're gonna go through all of this. And so there is a preferential redistribution of where women store fat. So when you're pre-miniposal, you tend to store more on your hips and your glutes in your lower body. And then once menopause comes in your hormone shift, and estrogen declines, you start to see these shifts more towards central storage. Some of that is going to be belly section subcutaneous. That's like the outer layer of fat. If you're pinching, what we describe the minobelly, which I will never say that in a literal context, but that's what a lot of women are calling it, that extra little bit of fat around the midsection and/or then viscera adipose tissue, which is around the organs, which is more problematic from a health standpoint than the subcutaneous adipose tissue. So women tend to see more of this central fat storage pattern. It's a lot actually more like men in some ways and how they start to store it. And it's not that you're gaining more weight necessarily. It's that it's shifting where you gain it. And that's why more women are noticing us. And that's why they're like, "Well, my body doesn't look out. "Looked when I was in my 30s." Or it's changing and you might not actually be changing weight as much as your body's just changing words, storing it. Or you can gain weight. I mean, there is what is it? Five kilograms of gain weight reported during the menopause transition from this one study, something like that. Something like 10 to 12 pounds is reported across the whole. - So that might be a little bit of both. - Yeah, and what's hard is there's an overlap of hormones are changing, but also we are aging, but also lifestyle factors that maybe we've neglected or ignored or feel like they've been pushed to the wayside or life is busy, we're stressed or symptomology then affects how we live our day to day lives. Kind of all can come compound. And I think that's, again, I'm speaking this with sympathy. I get women are so frustrated 'cause it feels like every input is kind of affecting their output with this. - And then throw on top of that the beauty standards and the message of like being forever young. - Yes, there's this whole, and I say that in a way where it's in part where it's like, in some ways it just is and it sucks and I'm gonna go through it and it's gonna happen to me too. And also, let's talk about what we just talked about before off the cameras was this like immense pressure women have to look a certain way and be thin and how their entire life's narrative has been, well, I grew up in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s and everything was super thin and super skinny and that's all I was sold. And I recognize how hard it is to overcome that messaging but it is also vitally important for your health longevity and well-being that you are brave enough to overcome that messaging and do what it takes to move past that and it's going to be really messy to un-disassociate the exercise with skinny and thinness and fat loss and calorie burn and reshaping your exercise to be things that are gaining muscle, taking up space, being stronger, which can be really, really empowering. I think a lot of women start to hold onto that 'cause that starts to feel really good to them. Well, also, I think I mentioned this before, was like even if your body never changed, those performance gains that you make in the gym are still beneficial and still helpful. But it might take a little bit of challenging that message, that little monster in your head that's saying like restrict, be skinny, be thin. And I think where a lot of the marketing and menopause comes from is the fact that women spend their whole life chasing that. And now that you're in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, that approach isn't working anymore for you. And I think what we're offering you is a different approach but it might feel scary 'cause it's also an approach that is saying stop restricting, take up space, gain mass, get bigger, maybe way more, and that can feel really terrifying if you've never done that in your life. - Yeah, what I'm hearing is that if they're overindexing on being small and being skinny, then that can come at the detrimental to the detriment, the expense of these other outcomes like your strength and your power and your bone mineral density which are coming back to where we started this conversation. Vital to the ability to have the physical capacity to keep doing the actual activities that you love to do. - I think we've also been encouraged to compare ourselves to each other and this is, you know, since we were teenage girls. And so not everybody's menopause transition looks the same. Just like not everyone's postpartum experience looks the same. When it comes to how your body might change and whether it changes at a certain rate compared to other people. And now because everybody's on social media, it's really hard to look around and not play that comparison game. And I think even if you're somebody saying, well, I want to look like that person. And then we think, well, even in the best of all scenarios when you're eating the protein and doing the lifting and losing the body fat, you don't have the structure to ever look like that person. And that is something that kind of factors into this narrative of perpetual dissatisfaction. And I come from a background of gymnastics and dance where as a girl, they would line us up and weigh us and that from an early age, put weight, scale weight as an important metric in my mind. And it's very hard to disconnect the scale weight from you as a person and feeling good in your own skin. And I think an important reminder for a lot of women who come from that kind of same line of thinking is the number on the scale is the least interesting thing about you. And we have to stop putting so much of our emotional energy into what the scale says. And I'll add to that too. I think that something that I lean into so heavily with my coaching is this phrasing called the fitness to say yes. And I watch how much that revolutionizes the way women think about fitness in their bodies because it's so much of a celebration time and time again of like, yes, you're going to have periods of time where you're not happy with your body or you're frustrated with what it looks like or we compare ourselves a picker, we're going to do it, right? We all do it, I do it. But it's not that you're never going to do that again. It's how you say, okay, well, I'm still going to go do the string training, I'm still going to do these things. And focusing on like, well, what is this giving to my life? But at the end of the day, you know, I think there is that hump of coming over like caring about that and also recognizing that if you want to improve body composition, that's also can be a positive health thing, gaining muscles and proving body composition. And we're asking you to do something that requires you to potentially gain weight. And the body that you want might weigh more than you think it's going to weigh. And also like women are, you said it earlier, like women are so afraid of being bulky. And I think I used to be of the nature of saying, well, like, lifting doesn't make you bulky, but every woman's perception of what bulky means is very, very, very different, right? And so I will say that lifting will make you gain muscle. It will make you gain mass. It isn't, that is the, that is the point of doing it. But also one that isn't a bad thing. Two, that is the outcome that we want for those health parameters that we want and need. For agility is the thing that's tied to low muscle mass and sarcopenia and osteoporosis. Like if you really care about those things, you have to think about creating a body that is structural and sound. And it might be both bigger than you think it's going to be or weigh more than you think it's going to be. But also like you really need to disassociate from this idea that there's this like idea. I don't care what you weighed when you were 18. I don't. I weigh 30 pounds more than I did when I was 18, right? I really, really, really think that women need to just start to reshift that focus. Not like you can care about your body fat or composition or wanting to lose weight and that's fine. But keeping that independent of your goals in the gym, but if you truly want to have tone or your body to look better, a lot of that is coming from a baseline of muscle mass. Like you have to have, like if you're losing all this weight or what? What's underneath it? You need something there that's a little bit more tough love. And the body that looks more toned in muscular is probably going to be heavier than you think it's going to be. So if we're not paying this close attention to the number on the scale, and instead, we're looking at things like health, strength, what we lift, number reps, the load, these sorts of things that we're progressing with our exercise, how do we diagnose if we're not progressing? How do we diagnose if that is because of the way we're exercising or if it is from underfueling and restricting? Well, I think that that can be hard if you've been chronically under eating and restricting. The only thing you might know is the state of that. So you might not know. That's a big reason why I think we're both advocating for being fed and eating enough because you don't know how good it feels to train adequately fed until you do it. So the first thing I'll say, taking things to an AMRAP to fatigue, just go see how it feels to do a training session when you're fed. This isn't a fast versus fed argument. I mean, actually eating enough calories across a day or week and seeing how you feel with that. 'Cause I think that's the biggest thing I see click for women. They're like, oh, I ate more and my training started to feel better. I started to actually recover. And I think for so many women, they have to see that to trust it. It can be really hard and really scary to be like, eat. more and you'll perform better in recovery more because it's really scary to do, but you almost have to take the leap of doing that and then seeing that difference in that baseline between underfed and adequately fed. And if you eat consistently enough and in a regular pattern, like I can tell day to day, oh, well, I didn't eat enough because I felt this way on this run and I never feel this way kind of thing. And you can start to notice the patterns in your energy or your recovery or even like how much you can push in a training session regardless of what that is. But if you're consistently kind of consistently following the same lifting program, you're consistently eating similar sleep. I know as an issue for people, but say things are mostly consistent. You'll start to be able to notice those variations and those things and how that impacts your training. But if you've always been under eating, you won't really know that difference until you experience what it feels like to be in a trained state. Well, I think a lot of women in this stage of life will say, I'm doing all of the things and swear by it. But have you really audited all of those? Or do you just think? Because and we talked about the value of tracking your training or sticking to a training program for long enough. And the value of tracking your nutrition for a period of time can really factor in here because sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking that, yeah, we're eating exactly how we used to, but we're not. And we don't know until we really take a look at it for long enough to evaluate how much are we really eating? And is it varied based on the weekend or going out with friends or alcohol? And when we start to really get that full picture, then we can honestly say, what are my maintenance calories? Am I really eating 1200 calories a day and not losing weight? Or if I actually track for long enough and get an honest audit, what are those calories? I think that's a big point too, is that there's that constant narrative I'm doing everything right and nothing's working. But there's no audit, there's no measurement, there's no assessment, there's no measure of that. I don't want women to become more obsessed with data of numbers. But also there's this idea that like all effort is created equal kind of thing. And I'm trying to think about the best way to explain this kind of like earlier when I use the group fitness example, like you can do a bunch of group fitness classes per every week. And that doesn't make their bad for health or exercise. But if you're not gaining muscle, well, you're you are working hard. You're just not doing the thing that you need to do to adapt to what you're doing. And I think the same thing kind of goes here too. If you again, I said this earlier, like if you want to truly make the progress you're looking for, sometimes you're going to have to take a peak under the hood. And that doesn't mean you have to track every calorie or every macro, but like just creating more awareness and honesty with yourself about what's going on can just reveal a lot because there's even studies that look at like dietary recall and like art register dietitians. And they overestimate what they eat or forget what you eat. And I'll go through periods of tracking versus not tracking. And I had a I basically have taken the last maybe five months off tracking after tracking for years. And the amount of effort I have to take into actually thinking about what I'm eating in a day now to make sure that I am eating enough for my performance goals. Actually requires like more cognitive effort than I did when I was tracking. And I was just like input output. Yes, no. And it doesn't, you know, neither one of those are correct answers, but I do have to be a little bit more aware of what I'm actually choosing meal to meal if I'm choosing not to track it versus like when I do. And I think a lot of women have an unhealthy relationship with tracking. So I don't want this to sound like a my fitness pal 1200 calories weight watchers type thing. This is more of like it's not just about calories in it's also like I alluded to earlier. Like are you eating evenly across the day? Are you waiting on to like, you know, crash and burn binge eat on the couch every night because you didn't eat all day. Are you forgot a lot of women forget to eat meals or they shift it all to the weekend? It's like let's try to think about eating also in a way that like keeps you having sustained energy across the day and you're actually eating meals or you're, you know, balancing that or increasing the food quality. It's not just about like I think women get really myopic on just like calories, calories, calories versus like, okay, like you can still monitor these things to look for these other things to improve that can improve recovery and performance and how you feel. That isn't just a conversation of like calories, but also giving honest with yourself about what you're actually doing. That's the kind of tough love thing. I think a lot of women are missing. You're kind of hearing two things. Let me throw this back to you. I'm hearing that and I think a lot of women have this idea that as they get into their 40s, 50s and 60s, they have almost like a broken metabolism. So maybe we can talk about that and that they're reportedly they're eating much fewer calories but they're gaining weight. And what I'm hearing from you is that people often are unaware of the calories they're consuming and are under reporting. But then at the same time, I'm, and maybe it's a different person avatar. I'm hearing this person who's doing the resistance training, but it is not, is underfueling. So are these two different people with a one who's gaining weight and is eating more calories than they thought they were and then the other person who's struggling to build muscle and is underfueling? I think there's a lack of awareness of how many calories people are eating and calories matter. I hear from women saying, "I eat healthy." And that, I recall a kind of clean eating way of the trend that went through of people saying, "Well, as long as I eat nutritious whole food, then I should be losing weight," right? That's not the case. Not to say that nutritious food isn't important. Of course it is, but calories are still important if we want weight loss, if we want fat loss. And so it's not just about making those nutritious choices. It's also being aware of the calories in those foods. Because there are nutrient dense foods that are also very high in calories. And I think sometimes both those women can be the same person because they go, I think a lot of women go through. They can be eating even more calories than they think they are, while still engaging in restrictive behaviors. And then they can feel counter to them that they're not making progress because they're both thinking, "Why don't eat that much?" But they're unaware of where they are eating more than they think they are. Because it's short-term restrictions. Yes, yes. They go through short-term restriction whether that's within a day, within a week, or within a month, and they'll go through periods of that. So again, it's a lot of effort eating really restrictive, like Monday through Friday, for example, thousand calories. I'm on it. I'm on it. I'm not eating. That's a lot of effort. But then on the weekend you get the creep that comes with that. Or some of the really hard-onest conversations of the couple glasses of wine at night that you don't factor into the calories that you're taking in and little things like that. So there can be these restrictive short-term pattern that, again, effort. You are putting in a lot of effort. We are not dismissing your effort. But is it the reality of what the effort is accomplishing actually the thing that you're trying to work for? Right. So getting a more consistent calorie intake that meets your activity levels. So at least that amazes-- It's probably the best way to say it. Yes. At a maintenance level of calories. Because what I'm hearing from you is you could have those five days where you're on the fueling going in and working out. So you're not supporting your training as much as you would be if you were fueling correctly on those days. So just trying to fuel at a maintenance level across the entire week. Or if it's a calorie deficit, a sustainable calorie deficit. Because when you can only last for five days without binging or feeling like this is completely unsustainable, then that's not good either, right? We need to be in a calorie deficit that we're going to be able to maintain for long enough to actually see some results. Is it possible for someone to be in a small calorie deficit? So quote unquote, be on a diet because they are wanting to lose their body fat while still doing the resistance training that you two have spoken to and getting those muscle and bone adaptations that we're looking for? Maybe. I don't know. The nuance that women don't like is it probably depends on your training status. If you're new to all of it, you're going to have positively respond for a good period of time and or like weight status. People who have a lot more out of posity might get away with that more than the quintessential I'm lean that I want. I must be leaner woman. And that's I think sometimes those are two different conversations and it's hard because the the water is getting worked between those two and there's sometimes the woman who is I'm lean and I want to get leaner. It's like, yeah, honey, we love you. Please stop. Please stop with the restrictive dieting versus like him getting into a positive lifestyle change. Like I do have significant fat loss that I genuinely want to lose. How do I best approach this while still gaining muscle and strength and working towards that? I think sometimes those can be two different conversations. Yeah. If you have 60 pounds to lose and you've never lifted weights, then this concept of body recomposition is possible and it will last forever but certainly for the first few months of training that you're more likely to be. likely to experience that, then if you are somebody who has been training for five years and you want to lose 15 pounds, we're probably not going to see it with that person. Once someone understands the kind of total amount of calories that they go into consume, we won't spend too much time on this, but if we did just kind of linger on nutrition here a little bit more, obviously, proteins important. Perhaps you can speak to how you would want people to think about protein and then after that, how would they think about the other macronutrients like carbohydrates and fats? Yeah, we like to say at least 1.2 grams per kilogram, you can go 1.6 grams per kilogram. Some people will recommend going even higher than that. I think that if we're going to describe it in a way that people can kind of take into action, it's have a high quality protein source with every meal and then add in a high protein snack. And for most people that will be in that target range. And beyond that, if you want to structure a higher fat or higher carbohydrate diet, some of that can be preference based. Some of that might be performance based, especially if you're doing a higher intensity long endurance type training. And we want to make sure that we're in that we're getting adequate fiber as well. It was especially if we're talking about a calorie deficit, then we want to eat in a way that supports the society, the ability helps us feel full and protein can help with that fiber, can help with that as well. Yeah. I think that's a big thing too that you know, diet quality, independent of calories use, you have to have both like Lauren mentioned, but also like diet quality can also help with some of that like satiety fat. I mean, again, this is your whole podcast and all that stuff. And we have a lot of great data on like the Mediterranean style diet for health outcomes and menopausal women. And if there was like one diet that would be recommended. And a lot of that is protein like starchic carbs, vegetables, fiber, things like that, of course, within a caloric controlled state, but that will help with a lot of that satiety and fullness. And I think that a lot of women also don't recognize that like some of that can influence your perception of how much you're eating versus not eating and how you feel and being hungry all the time because you're eating like really dense food or low protein, low fiber foods sucks. And you might want to eat more because of that. And that's really kind of this assessment of these things can come really important. Food volume is another piece that we might throw into that. So something like a salad where you can have a lot of leafy greens and crunchy veggies. And it feels like a lot of food, but a lot of the ingredients in that salad are not actually really high calories. For a lot of women, I think they don't also too like it doesn't have to necessarily be a calorie deficit. But if they're engaging in resistance training and like eating and cleaning up their diet or improving quality or composition of it, then you might indirectly start to see some of these body composition changes without like being in a calorie deficit or in a dieting phase or all that stuff just by these things indirectly in proving that. And sometimes that can be nice because you're not it's not the same headspinning thing as like, oh, I'm in a deficit. And like you're just truly focusing on that performance outcome. You're complimenting it with your diet. If body composition change happens with that, like amazing. That's great. That's a good thing. It might end up happening anyway without the like white knuckling approach that they've like taken for most of their life. And just to kind of bring this back to the resistance training we were talking about, the whole point of thinking about nutrition and setting this up. How we've been describing is so that when you do the exercise, you're essentially just providing a stimulus to your body and your body will adapt to that if it is the right stimulus, what we've gone through. And in order to do that, that's when nutrition becomes really important to make sure that you have the energy and the building blocks to actually synthesize new proteins, create new muscle tissue and get the the outcome of strength or power or whatever it is that we're looking for. To fully kind of tie the knot in resistance training. If someone is really focused on building stronger bones. So let's say that they are someone with a family history of osteopenia or osteoporosis. Maybe they have osteopenia themselves. Is there anything in that current framework that we've walked through that you would want to tweak or add or modify for that person? I think everything we covered really touches on it. The only thing is kind of going back to what I talked about earlier, like strength is the really, really big rock there with all of those things. But we do have some trials in middle-puzzle women looking at like jump landing training or small jump training or hop training or some sort of acute polymetrics or whatever that looks like training in conjunction with the strength training for improving bone density and bone outcomes. And I know a lot of women get hesitant for that because they have pelvic floor issues or knee issues or things like that. That's why I really emphasize that like the strength training is going to be the bigger rock in that component fair. But that is something that can complement that add that I like that. Or, you know, we never really circled back to people who are doing things that are like from home with maybe inadequate ways or just body ways or just bands. And some of these trials, I mean, they're like a year long, but they have women doing like a few sets of 10 to 12 like pogo hops a few times across the week. And they do see some improvements in, you know, bone density. So if you're not able to access those and you can gradually progress to something like that, like it could be something that you mix in that can support that kind of thing. So I like that as a kind of bucket like power and jumping and strengthen to like it can be kind of combined into one big cohort of things that you could do for strength, power, muscle support in my head. But that is something that we do have some data and trials on that you can can can do in conjunction with the strength training to complement it. But again, I like really hate the podcast that make people think that things are like very absolute and scary. You have to do one thing. And I really want to emphasize that like if you're just doing the strength training like that is really sufficient. You're going to get a lot of progress if you're loading it as we loaded it and things like that. I personally like that in conjunction. If you're able to do it, you can tolerate. You want to do it, whatever that looks like. But again, really easing into something like that, not just like literally jumping into it kind of thing, especially if you don't have a training background and training history, you know, you know, you I don't want to say there's like minimums you have to meet for that. But you just want to be careful about doing too much too fast to soon with any exercise program in general. I alluded to this earlier, but we care about bone density as a measure because it's a marker for fracture risk. And so when we think about what we can do to prevent fracture risk, it's also about fall prevention. And so I would love incorporating some sort of balance training into our resistance training. And we could do that with something like a walking lunge, for example. So it doesn't have to, you might think of balance exercises, some other type of exercise, but it really could just be the way that you can orient your body doing a single leg movement or a single arm movement or can we do, you know, step ups with a controlled eccentric something that is really allowing us to move through a full range of motion in a way that if we were in a position to kind of lose our balance or stumble that we would be able to catch ourselves because our strength training program includes exercises that are encompassing all those planes of motion. Yeah, that really emphasizes the importance of exercise selection because back to your earlier program that you were describing. That could look very different if you're choosing, you know, all, you know, lower body exercises where you're using both legs together, kind of bilateral versus uni level, uni lateral or like split legs squats, for example, things like that. It could, but I would say if we're going back to basics or if we're just starting out, then we want to choose exercises that are easy to learn. We don't want something that's too complex because we're still developing that kind of kinesthetic awareness. Where is my body in space? That's why deadlifts are so challenging. It's just a hinge movement pattern. It's really challenging to teach people that movement pattern because it just doesn't feel that natural. And so I would start, like I think machines, like the machine circuit, I'm a big fan of that for a beginner because we're hitting the basics of targeting all the major muscle groups and learning what failure is and getting comfortable with some of these movement patterns. And so once we've done that, then we can start to graduate towards the dumbbell or barbell movements or the single leg movements and I think we can end up with a nice mix, but I would still, if we're first day one, then I don't want to over complicate it. I was going to say the only thing I would add to that is that I think tying back to our conversation earlier about like thinking and betting things into your active life. Like I'm thinking about our avatar of like the woman playing pickleball. Like keep doing those things because you're being reactive. You're moving louder lately. You're moving forward. You're moving a multiple planes of motion. And it doesn't have to be pickleball. It can be, you know, maybe you hike on really rocky trails or you're having to react to the terrain or maybe you play with your dog or your kids or your grandkids. Like don't also ignore like how other activities can fit into this whole picture here. It's not just like go to the lift gym and become lifting robots and that all like movement should also be variable and fun and add to your life. And like I, I just want to hone in on that because I think a lot of times midlife women think they're like not doing enough or they have to give up activities they love. No, those absolutely contribute and complement to all of these things that we're talking about. Here's our 52-year-old pickleball player that's adding and lifting. Well, I'm going to tell her to keep playing pickleball. Like I'm never going to tell her to stop playing pickleball. I'm just saying keep playing pickleball until like, because that's the specific stimulus at the end of the day, which her body is adapting to. Yeah. And it's a great, like I think a lot of adults in general stop playing or like in general, whether that's for fun or like a sport, like in moving in different ways. Like that's good for you. So it's not like you only have to do the one thing, like keep doing the things you love and then just find ways to complement them with the stuff that like is the stressor or that moves things forward kind of thing. My parents are 70 and I was saying to them the other day because they live in a place where they've had so much snow this winter. And I said, you know, why don't you just pay someone to shovel for you? Like pay a kid to come and shovel. And my dad said, no, because it's forced physical activity. So like we are always going to cut the grass. We're always going to shovel the snow. And so it's another thing. It's not just the thing you enjoy, but maybe the thing you don't enjoy that still has to be done around the house that keeps you physically active. And I think that ties into a conversation that you didn't ask in a question. But I know we talked about wanting to mention here is that there's this perception of like this lack of perception of like maybe activity decreases as we age, we slow down or not as active, maybe with menopause, potentially being influenced by that. We're like, you think that you're being active, but you're not. And like that building in a life around, I think we all build our lives around resisting effort now. Like everything's automated. Enforcing yourself, like I mentioned earlier, the stairs, the walking further, but like the shoveling, like that's amazing, right? Like my dad's 65. And if it's too cold outside, he'll walk up and down his steps for 30 minutes a day in the house. People don't do that, but that's amazing. And that's so like silly and accessible, you know what I mean? But that little bit of like stuff that we kind of don't do or opt out of or kind of start to forget that we don't do. And we're indirectly moving less, which at the end of the day, I think people underestimate how much like daily activity can contribute to like weight creep across time for everyone. But especially as we age, we just, we move less, we play less, we do less things, we sit more, we have jobs, kids, you know, we're stressed, we're commutes, things like that. I'm not shaming anyone for those things, but you know, being aware of like where you can bake in those little bits of that across your life can be really, really potent. Yeah, there's, there's really kind of two different things here. We're talking about exercise, which is this more prescriptive stuff that we're going through. But then there's generally just movement and exercise can't, can't replace movement through the rest of your day. Yeah. If you look at the centenary and populations, you know, they're not necessarily doing the formal exercise that we're talking about. And maybe that would give them even better health outcomes. But one thing that they are doing is shoveling the snow and, you know, walking down the street to get their groceries and farming and they're doing that into the 70s, 80s and 90s. Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about continuing, you know, everyone's obsessed about the exercise routine that they should do and that's important and amazing. But we, and I think it comes because of the stressors of life, but like building that life around activity is probably going to be the easiest way to feel like you're able to stay in health and fitness without always feeling like you're never doing enough. Makes me a little bit worried about the at home robots that will be doing the dishes and the laundry soon. Use it to make more time to train, I guess. Yeah, I think it's important to acknowledge the people who hate structured exercise. Yeah. I mean, how many people are actually meeting those physical activity guidelines that we discussed? No, and I bet a lot of women listening to this podcast. I mean, I see it all the time. I just hate lifting. I just hate it or I don't want to do it. And I'm like, well, then do what you're going to do. Like just be, be, I think the biggest thing with all the stuff towards women right now is like, it's okay to say, I know the benefits or the risk factors of not doing this or why I should do this, but I'm going to just not do it anyway because I don't care. I prefer this and this is what I'm willing to do. And that's okay. That's okay to say that, but that doesn't make like what we're saying to be like not true. But you can say like, I just don't like that. Is that the best thing for muscle and bone and health? No, but if you're going to go be active in other ways, it's still amazing and positive and beneficial. And I think that is tricky because like I think a lot of women are, you know, soul the weightlifting thing and a lot of them are drinking that Kool-Aid, but there's still so many that don't, I can't get my own mother. She's going to listen to this podcast. I'm sorry, mom. I can't get my own mother to weight training. My grandmother died three months after hip fracture. And like that just is the outcome that you see with those things. And, but that's a choice, right? Like we all have the choices that we make, but staying movement in the way that you can incorporate balance or whatever that looks like to you. And or I know we just talked about like this idolized way of resistance training, but if you're only able to do body weight training at home or resistance band training or some other form of whatever that looks like to you, like that's okay. And it is better than nothing. We see compounding benefits across the spectrum. So even if it's not optimal, that doesn't make it worthless. Right. I was actually going to ask you about maybe the the the person who's doing yoga and Pilates or one off and feels pretty strong. It's pretty good balance and is wondering, do I do I really need to lift weights? Go ahead. It's not a substitute for resistance training because it isn't challenging all the major muscle groups. That we discussed, it isn't typically progressive in nature, the way that we discussed. And if that person would do those two 20 minute resistance training sessions, I would be really happy with that. But it is important to acknowledge that personal preference when it comes to physical activity is huge because if someone is going to take anything from what we discussed today and then follow that guideline for a month and then just fall off, that's not doing much for their long term health. And so if we can find something that includes even some of this, but we're able to do it for months and years to come, then we're getting the real benefit. And I was thinking about too, it's not Pilates and yoga, but I think a lot of women freak out because they get a lot of like fear messages around group fitness programs. And how they're not adequate enough for their bad for them and things like that. But women are more likely to do something in a social setting. So they're more likely to do something in community with each other. And that's an important thing we have to think about here too. And so my advice to that is that if you loved your orange theory or your F-45, your Burns boot camp or I don't know what all of them are out there, do those, but take the advice and guidance that we gave you about the weight training. And when you're in the weight training section of that class, load it heavier at your F-45 or whatever it is. And even like orange theory now has like more weight focused days. Like go to two of those classes a week and take the same principles we gave you here today to pick the heavier weight or go closer to fatigue or failure in the exercise that like you're willing to do. But if you like variety and I know we haven't gotten into cardio, but you like other things like the group fitness classes, the Pilates, the yoga, I really love the framework for all people like get two days of the resistance training in a week and then have everything else you do be the variety, the fun, the different, the interesting, the whatever it is. You have that be your like structured sound anchor. And then unless you have some specific goal for like endurance training or cardiovascular training or ability flexibility training, like a lot of that can be kind of changed a little bit more often week to week unless you have some like specific progressive goal within it. And allow that to be where you have like the interest or the variability or whatever that looks like. And if you can tolerate that to structural days per week or apply those principles to what you are doing, you can kind of like make do with whatever else that you prefer to do in your training plan. Let's slide across to cardio. My favorite topic. Right on cue. So if someone is thinking about just decreasing their risk of developing chronic disease, being healthy for longer, you mentioned earlier that there is guidelines for vigorous cardio and then also more moderate intensity, cardiovascular training is one of those superior to the other. If if someone had the choice between the two or is it best to split and have a portion of moderate intensity cardio every week and then also some dose of high intensity. So when it comes to cardio, this is one thing where I don't fully agree with the guidelines. I think that intensity is just as important as all of the cardio. I think in an idealized world, everyone would do some form of slightly more intense exercise. I don't think it's the same exact benefit as the long duration stuff. And essentially they work similarly on the screen. on the same pathways in the body, but they also have like the intense stuff has like a higher magnitude of benefit. The difference is you just can't do a ton of it. You can't handle a lot of it. We can't do all of our cardio from that unless you're doing not a lot of cardio in a week, so to speak. So I like, I definitely take the like both and approach unless you're only doing a really tiny bit of cardio week, then that can preferentially be more intense in the hopes that the other stuff you're doing is being active beyond that kind of behind the scenes of that. So if you're only doing a little, if you can tolerate it and you're willing to do it, you can get more bang for your buck with the intensity. If you're doing a moderate amount, I like the idea of doing a little bit of both. But again, to our past conversation, if you're only willing to do one or you're just starting out or you only like moderate intensity or easier activity, it's not inherently bad for you. You can still get benefit. It is still good for you kind of thing. There's a lot of and/or with cardio and people hate that when I talk about it 'cause I want this like black and white statement of, but like I'm not gonna say menopausal women should do three days of hit per week 'cause you might not tolerate even one session of hit per week right now. But you might tolerate like two easy moderate and tensi sessions in build from there. - When you say might not tolerate, what do you mean by that? - If people have really low fitness statuses and you throw them into a super high intensity protocol, they might hate it. - Like in the way you're full by full. - Yeah, and they're gonna feel terrible. They might not have any baseline fitness for it. They might never show back up to exercise again. Or when I say tolerate, like it's gonna be really physiologically hard on them 'cause they just don't have any of that like underlying adaptation for it. And or you might not recover from it 'cause you haven't adapted to handle anything like that. And that's where I think a lot of women freak out 'cause they're like, I'm not recovering or handling and I'm like, well, did you just do too much too fast too soon? It's just progressive exercise in general. But typically when it comes to like keep it really simple, the less you do the more intense it can be and you can probably handle 'cause you're doing less. The more you do, the more you're going to probably have to polarize it or distribute it between the two because you can't do all of that training at high intensity. You have to, by nature to keep that truly high intensity, the rest is gonna have to become more easier and moderate in nature kind of thing. So that's like it's kind of this spectrum of like how much you are doing. But then beginners might need to start with lower to moderate intensity stuff just to build up some fitness and then work up to that higher intensity stuff across the spectrum. Now, can you put sedentary people on a bike and have them do sprint interval training or hit training? Absolutely, studies do it. They see positive benefits. But that doesn't mean that you're gonna like it right off the bat or it's gonna feel good kind of thing. And it's okay to ease into that with whatever you want to do or willing to do whatever that looks like for you. - How would you distribute this if someone had 20 minutes a day to do cardio? - Yeah. - And would 20 minutes a day be better than, you know, two, 70 minute days? - Are you talking about two 20 minute days? - So would it be better? If someone let's say has, let's make this simple, let's say that someone has 150 minutes a week. So they have two and a half hours. Would it be better to evenly distribute that across seven days a week or do that in two slash three days, bigger sessions? - I think for health outcomes, it probably doesn't matter. I think if you have performance outcomes, it can matter. So I think there is benefit, say you're training for a race and you have a specific goal, an endurance race, a biking race, a running race, a thing like that. It might make more sense to have a session be an hour to 90 minutes long when you're working up to the goal that you have. But if you're just trying to do things for health, they, I think at this point, they changed it now to its effective as little as like one to two minutes. It used to be 10 minutes. I like the idea of like a 20 to 30 minute minimum for anything that's lower to moderate intensity that's more continuous up to 60 minutes. I think that that's a good reference point for people. But I think, again, from health, it seems like it matters more that you're getting it in and you're getting that stress and stimulus versus if you have like a performance outcome, when you're not gonna train for a half marathon, running on 20-minute runs six days a week, right? Like you're going to have to have longer sessions to accumulate those adaptations and then other muscular-scaltle adaptations within that. But our ideal avatar, maybe she just wants to be fit for health, and fitness, and life. And she only has two days a week to do cardio on top of everything else that she's doing. I'm probably gonna say, let's maybe make one of those higher intensity, see how you feel and you adapt and recover from it. Maybe we make both. If you're only doing 40 minutes of cardio a week, maybe we're making both of those higher intensity or once higher intensity and once moderate intensity, just based off like what you can handle and recover from, but we're making one of them have a little bit more intensity. And then hopefully you're moving a lot the rest of the time outside of the gym. But if you have a lot of time to train per week, having more of that be that moderate to easier to accumulate more of that total minutes of time is beneficial because what we see is that, yes, you get a lot of adaptations and short-term with HI and high intensity and sprint interval training for like via two max and metacondyl density and all that stuff. But volume also across time starts to improve those. So it's more of that long game. So I think a lot of people want this black or white, yes or no, either or. I think both are beneficial, both are important. When we look at the studies done in menopausal women, we do see positive health outcomes in both of those. We do see potentially maybe though because we all care about this, maybe preferentially improved body composition outcomes and or reduced central fat with the high intensity training, potentially with that. I'm not claiming it's like a miracle for anything like that. - Is there a mechanism there that may explain that? - You know, I don't know off the top of my head. I would assume maybe potentially some of the intensity, maybe mobilization of triglycerides, things like that. I think that also there is a really big stress to fat oxidative pathways and our body, when we adapt to high intensity endurance training, fat oxidation doesn't always result in body fat loss kind of thing, but there's probably like this stomach, you know, stress that's trying out. - That runs a little bit counter to perhaps some of the, maybe it's a little bit more old school thinking that hit increases cortisol, which is bad from a body fat. - That's probably a great thing for us to talk about 'cause I know that we're getting that all the time with a lot of the things that we're seeing. - Is that still around today? That idea? - Oh, what's all exercises, demonetization, everything intensity for women is bad, it's making you fat. Everything. - But people say zone two is bad. - They also say it's all. - Yeah. So. - Okay, I haven't seen this. Walk us through this. Yeah, get me up to the stage. - So zone two is making us fat because it's spiking cortisol, but so you should only do high intensity, that's the one camp. And then the other camp is don't do high intensity as a woman 'cause it's spiking your cortisol and making you fat. I've heard mechanisms all over the board as much as zone two is making us fat because it's altering the microbiome and things as crazy as that. So I've heard all these things across the board, but when we look at exercise trials and menopausal women that are pretty much just giving them the exercise guidelines, like modern intensity training of 150 minutes to 300 minutes per week, they lose fat. And the more crowded they do, they typically lose more fat within that type of thing. So it's not backed by what we're actually seeing in these interventions. And the exercise cortisol response is adaptive. So that means that it's one necessary. We need cortisol to spike, it's a stress response so we can tell our bodies, hey, we need glucose, hey, we need fat, we need to use fuel, we're sitting into the bloodstream, it's not inherently bad. It's also adaptive. So the exercise that I do training for the things that I do is less stressful on my body because I'm adapted to them than if my mom went and started doing the same things. They would be more stressful for her on day one, right? Kind of like when I mentioned before, tolerant stuff, like that first really hard session is gonna be a lot harder on someone who's never done that before. Then like me, who does it week after week after week? Just like lifting within endurance or cardiovascular training, I've adapted to that stressor over and over and over again. But it's adaptive, which means that the next time you do it or as you keep doing it, it will be blunt or less. Or you go on, it comes to zone two training. The cortisol response to like long and certain duration sustained, modern intensity cardio is actually pretty low and or only really rises chronically if like glucose starts to get low across the duration of exercise intensity. So like if I go out for a really long run, I'm training for race and I don't eat enough into workout carbohydrates, that might spike my cortisol more than like that run independent of that. But it's not, it's something that's just been really kind of fear-mongered and bogeymaned in the industry for women. And it's gone to the point where women are afraid to do cardiovascular activity or they feel like if they're not doing hit three days a week, well, they're not doing cardio correctly kind of thing. So kind of flips on these two sides of the coin. - So there's a lot of women out there that you think now have taken up resistance training but have dropped the cardio completely? - Yes, or they're only doing like hit or walking. It's like you get kind of one of these two. I don't know what you're seeing. I'm seeing like these one of these two things. - Right, steady state cardio is gone. - Kind of this, yeah, it's kind of not good for menopause. And I do agree there might be a preferential, maybe we are shifting a little bit more intensity to get a little bit more of a stimulus from our training that we're doing, but it's not inherently bad, especially for, you know, maybe this isn't our avatar listener, but a lot of the women I work with, they're athletic. They still want to train for races or have endurance goals or hiking or performance goals. And they're like, well, am I supposed to stop? I'm training for triathlon. Do I stop biking? Do I stop? No, it's still a necessary thing for the goals that you have kind of tying back to your original statement of like, What's your goal? What do you want from what you're doing? Kind of thing with your fitness and your training? And none of it's inherently bad. It's all adaptable. Yeah. - Would you say that the high intensity cardio is kind of stimulating a different system and leading to different benefits than the moderate intensity cardio? Like if someone is, if their goal is purely just aging healthfully and reducing their risk of chronic disease, do you ideally want to mix up both? - I love a mix of both. I think that if you're doing low volumes of cardio, having the intensity is going to get you more of that bang for your buck stimulus. And there is an intensity component to exercise that we want. And now when you look at all these different studies, that doesn't have to be hit or sprint interval training. Like that really can be like what we consider to be vigorous, which can literally just be like a jog or run for people. Or, and again, on I say running or jogging, that's usually what the exercise guideline uses an example. It can be a bike and elliptical stair step or a roller machine, whatever that looks like. It's not as intense as the people think it needs to be, but there is a component of intensity that drives some of those benefits that we see with mitochondria and/or adaptations that we're getting, or it's just a stronger stimulus. It's the same thing as like if you do a bunch of lower weight lifting and for a lot of volume, you might get a positive adaptation for it. But I like it, but again, it's not like if you don't do some intensity ever, the cardio that you're doing or the lifestyle activity you're doing is not beneficial because they work on the same systems fundamentally at the end of the day. - I think most wearables now kind of show across the day like how much exercise you did in zone one, two, three, four, five is that, would you say these wearables are a good way of tracking your time at these different intensities? - So the, I have a boop, not sponsored, I pay for the something on money. And I like it because it breaks that across for me. And I do genuinely like that. As you use the technology code called Photoplethysmography, which is essentially indirectly assessing how, what your heart rate is. It's not going to be as perfect as chest wrap, but for most people, it's probably like okay enough. It could be, and that could be a metric for tracking how much time you're doing. I'm like, we'll be at the end of the week. We'll class a breakdown for me like my zone, spend and time and things like that. And I'm a dean of nerds, so I like that. If it's something that you're just obsessing over more, maybe not, but it can be a fun way for quantifying what you're actually doing for like intentional activity. 'Cause at least I know for my group, I don't know about aura or these other ones, you have to do a 15 minute battle of activity for it to actually count it as activity kind of thing. But I've had it where like, it's tracked activity. And I was like playing with my dog. And it was like counting that as activity. - It happens when I play the guitar. - Yeah, yeah. - So it can get a little bit tricked from time to time. - Yeah, so like I usually keep it to like structured activity, so it could be a way to do that. And for me, I do look at that with training distribution of like, okay, how much intensity have I been doing in a week versus the volume that I'm doing, but I have specific endurance goals. So I really do care about looking at that distribution. If someone's just exercising for health, it probably doesn't matter as much, but like, I like, you know, in an ideal world, people do a little bit of both, right? Like there's no specific formula. I know people can get you to be 80, 20 or 30%, or all of that, but it really comes down to like what's your fitness level, what are your goals and how much are you doing? There isn't some perfect breakdown of what this looks like, and I know women hate that 'cause they want to be told, like do exactly this number of hit, do Norwegian 4 by 4, three days a week. Okay, you could do that, but like, you could also do a lot of other things too. - I think women are also a little bit lost as to how do they know if their cardio is working, like what are they tracking of a time? - So you can have your heart rate lowering at the same, it's kind of just like lifting. Your heart rate can lower at the same relative intensity that you're doing, or you can work at a higher effort, or you can complete more work for a set period of time. So say you have like a, you bike for 30 minutes, and you cover two miles, and then next week, you cover 2.2 miles. That's progressing, that's getting fitter. Or if your heart rate was 115 beats per minute when you biked this week, and then next week, it's 110 beats per minute at the same level of effort. Like that's adaptation, so that shows you you can go harder or you were able to do more total work within that set period of time. - I think this comes back to the discussion we were having in resistance training around effort, and knowing if you're working, if you're doing your cardio at the right intensity, are there any simple ways of kind of someone getting a feel for, is the exercise they're doing, moderate intensity? Is it high intensity, short of having a wearable and a tracker that's kind of showing it? How do they know if the walk that they're doing, is moderate intensity, cardio training for them or not? - So something we didn't ever talk about with lifting that I think would be helpful for lifting in this, is like auto-regulation and rating of perceived exertion and efforts. And for most people, unless you have really specific performance goals, you don't need a wearable heart rate, it can be helpful, but it's not harmful to track heart rate. But effort can be a great, like effort and how hard your breathing can be, or like talk test are really easy ways to assess this. So for like, moderate intensity exercise, somewhere of like a three to five out of 10 effort, you're breathing a little bit more rapidly. Maybe you can still hold a conversation, but it's not just like as leisurely as we are doing right now. You should start to feel like somewhat of an increase in your respiration and things like that. And then as you get into like more moderate vigorous, maybe five to six, five to seven, your breathing rate's gonna start increasing more rapidly. Maybe you couldn't carry a conversation with someone, you could do a few sentences at a time, maybe you know a few phrases, things like that. And then you get into like very vigorous activity, eight, nine out of 10. Maybe you're saying a word, you're not talking at all. You are feeling like you are really short of breath if someone was to ask you to do that. It almost feels like it fades from like the colors, like blue, yellow, to red. If you were to perceptually think that as well, I know when I did cross country growing up, it was a red run. We didn't use RPE, it was a red run when it was a hard day and it was a blue run when it was an easy day. And this sounds crazy when I'm saying, but even me and I'm running, like I can almost perceive that like on easy effort day, I can look around like it seems like light, but versus when I'm really focused in on those hard effort days, you know what I mean? Like there's also that focus level that we were talking about earlier today too. That's where cardio can be different than lifting though is that there's benefits to sometimes like not always everything being as hard as possible. I think a lot of them have a hard time disassociating that because they've always done like the boot class, hit type circus things as hard as possible. And there's, you know, health benefits to lower to moderate intensity exercise. It's not bad for you just 'cause it's easier kind of thing. It's all about just like, is it adequate enough to get your breathing right up, your heart rate up and or you're doing it for a long enough period of time that it causes an adaptation? You wanna add anything, sorry, I know. Cardiastic, my whole deep heart rate. I'm still here, we just made it sound really complicated. I am sorry. That's okay, that's okay. You simplify for us. Well, what we were saying earlier about pickle ball or tennis or hiking and biking or these things that people can do for fun that are physical activity, that counts. Yeah, and so that can kind of make this all sound a lot less overwhelming. When we started and I said, what's the goal here? You know, we could talk about optimizing the growth of every single muscle in your body. And the lifting program would look like way more exercises, way more sets, way more time. And that would be a certain type of program. And so if you are training for a half marathon, that's going to be a separate type of program. And so when we think about just general health goals, it becomes a lot more flexible. And we have a lot more options. And what we are getting, hopefully, from some of our daily physical activity that might just either be by necessity or for fun, that is all a part of this. And I think some people feel, oh, I need to optimize and progress in both. Very few people actually simultaneously like focus on and progress their endurance-based exercise and their resistance-based training. Typically, even if you're somebody who has simultaneous goals in both, you might prioritize one over the other for a period of time. Yeah, the play, the activity part is a good reminder because that also makes cardio more sustainable. - Yes. - Something that you're going to follow for longer, I know that most of my cardio comes from sport. And that makes it much more enjoyable for me. In terms of coming back to the typical, let's say, American or really anyone in a Western country, you just mentioned there that it's unlikely that someone's going to focus and progress both cardio and resistance training at the same time. And at the outset of this conversation, I think we stated that resistance training might be something that more people are falling short on. Is that accurate? - When it comes to meeting the exercise guidelines. Now, I come from a world of progressing resistance training in cardio-vascular training simultaneously, give or take seasons approach for balancing both. I do think for lay people, you probably can make progress both. I think there's this idea that you can only do one versus the other. you have to go find your little silo and camp. But I do think that when it comes to the general daily activity that she's talking about, like the play or the recreational stuff, not everyone, but if people are meeting the guidelines, they're usually meeting them through those modes of activities, or some sort of maybe recreationally active hobby they have that is more cardiovascular based. In general, that's usually the route of which they're accomplishing that. It's not usually like a traditional other than the small subset of the population that has these specific goals and outcomes that they want from cardiovascular training. And we don't really have a resistance training equivalent. Yeah. Like maybe rock climbing a little bit, but like yeah, there's just not that's a good point. There's not like a play based listening. Those guys are very in women though, they're very, very strong. Yeah, but I don't know that but even rock climbers now are getting like drink and like power rating power lifting cool aid to get stronger. So that's a whole another conversation for another day. But yeah, that's a good point that there isn't, which I think I'm tying to something that we didn't talk about earlier because I know like I don't want to assume that like every men a possible woman is like this unskilled fish who's like flopping around and can't do anything. Like I think we think like oh, we get biking and hiking and running and swimming and dancing for cardio, but then like lifting has to be this one thing. But there's so many substets like you can join a CrossFit gym. You can do bodybuilding type stuff. You can do power lifting. You can do Olympic weightlifting. Like you can do you know calisthenics based stuff including that like there's a lot of I think a lot of people think of lifting gets to only be like one flavor or type of thing. But there's a lot of different like sub worlds within that and you can kind of find the one that you like just like road and that can make it feel like play maybe a little bit more or a hobby or interest because it's like oh, I'm like now I'm a power lifter. I'm not just like lifting like oh, I'm going to do this thing. But the same principles will apply. Yeah, you know challenging progressive regardless of the flavor. But I'm hearing in that is that that sometimes we may incorrectly associate this population with being fragile and you're saying that there can be challenge and this population really can push themselves maybe harder than they believe. Yeah, I think that you know we have a lot of we have like our first real true generation of like master athlete women, right? Like it was really like what and some people's like what Catherine's Switzerland or whatever name is that ran the marathon. I met her once amazing like that was in our life. That was in like our grandparents or parents lifetime like the first woman ran a marathon, right? And so I think that we're now seeing this first true wave of like these masters athletes or highly active women or more active women who have been active their entire life that are showing us what's possible. But I also think there's a really amazing wave right now of women who just because they didn't engage in that are starting to say well like I want to get stronger. I want to engage in these things and there's not like this limitation of like when you're a metabuse. So you know it's time to just to to give up in your week and your frail and you might as well just like stop trying kind of thing because you can make a lot of progress. And there's no good or bad exercise for midlife or for menopause or after. And that's really important to state because I think there's a lot of fear that they're exercising incorrectly or that certain types of exercise can actually be harmful or detrimental to their goals. And that is really unfortunate because anything that we do that discourages people from engaging in any sort of physical activity isn't great. Yeah. But so we always I think need to be clear about the message of who is the audience here? Are they just getting into structured exercise for the first time? Are they somebody who has performance goals? Are they someone who has body composition goals? And then we kind of pull the levers accordingly because otherwise we're just sort of randomly picking some cookie cutter program and thinking that we should give it to everyone because of their sex or age and that makes no sense. And that's why I think I know that cardio stuff can come off confusing for people because it's like what is the goal right? Because people want this like one size fits all menopause approach to like cardio lifting fitness but they just want this like one size fits all program. It's like what is your goal? What is your training history? What do you want out of this? What do you care about doing? Because then those little nuances can and do matter right? But that's where it's also hard because they want the menopause specific version of that but it's often the performance or exercise science or strength and conditioning based approach to like what's mostly true for all other people apply to you the individual rather than being like the menopause specific protocol of XYZ training kind of thing. And you can again those like she said levers, gear shifts, whatever that is for the goal that you have and it's a spectrum of like do you just care about minimum health versus like you have more specific performance goals across the spectrum. And I think that if women listening to this feel confused by that like the first thing to ask yourself is what is your goal right? That's not just like while I'm in middle I'm a midlife woman telling me what to do for exercise because like you also have a say in like what you want from the outcomes of what you're doing and it's okay if it's like I just want to be healthy and live and live well. Another question that came up when I surveyed the community about you guys coming on the show was how to know if you are training too much and this concept of overtraining and recovery. So within this overall conversation that we're having today about the importance of resistance training and doing some type of cardiovascular training whether that's like a dedicated exercise session or it's playing a sport. How can a woman kind of gauge as to whether she's allowing sufficient time between sessions for the body to adapt and to get the progress that we're talking about. Very few people are truly overtraining. Once you are adapted to those initial kind of newbie gains and meaning you're really sore because you're doing something for the very first time and you're feeling like oh I never want to do that again or I'm sore for three days. Those start to attenuate over time. So once you've been doing it for a couple of months you're not going to have that kind of acute response that you can really feel and then assuming you aren't doing anything that is contraindicated because it hurts you meaning you know that really hurts my knee or that really hurts my hip. Obviously stop doing that but assuming you are physically tolerating the exercise and you aren't having issues with sleep and you're still feeling like you're able to progress then we don't have any kind of red flags there about recovery and I think that a lot of the messaging that women in this age group will often hear is it goes back to the cortisol thing. It's like well I'm doing too much training and now I have inflammation and so I'm retaining water and I'm puffy and so it's really kind of pulling on those fat loss tendency to go back to the way my belly looks or my face is puffy and maybe I'm training too much or maybe it's my cortisol or maybe I need this recovery modality or this supplement and so really it's not that you're training too much it's that the way that you are approaching the goal as a whole is perhaps missing one of those levers that we discussed so not everything is appropriate for fat loss when we think about exercise for fat loss the results are going to be pretty disappointing if you aren't adjusting your nutrition and yes in the studies women who engage in aerobic exercise high intensity interval training lose some fat the amount of fat they lose is really small we're talking about like a couple of pounds versus you enter a fat loss phase with nutritional changes and then exercise in the passenger seat and we're going to see four five sixfold that and so if that's why people get frustrated is they have a fat loss goal they have these body composition goals and they're just exercising and not changing the way that they looking at at the wrong level right yeah and it feels like I'm working really hard I'm doing all the things why isn't it changing well you know this isn't the right tool for the job and I think there's also this tendency in women's focus fitness across the spectrum to always blame exercise like it's immediately blame the exercise it's the intensity it's the lifting it's the cardio whatever it is where it the nutrition is important too but also like I think that a lot of women like under like mind the also like the lifestyle stress that often overlaps with the menopause transition and or then how symptomology impacts sleep and then that can impact energy and that can impact recovery but like exercise is almost always a net positive of course there's going to be a line of which like training can be maybe too much so to speak but it's generally far more than what like most regular people are doing right like most regular people aren't exercising 10 hours a week like they just they aren't they're exercising maybe two to four hours a week like we do talked about here. And so I think that there's this tendency to always immediately say, well, stop doing the exercise rather than why aren't we recovering, what levers can we pull that go into the system? Maybe you do need a deal a week. Maybe life has been heightened, and you're not recovering. Maybe we need to bump up calories because you bumped up training, and you're just not-- you know what I mean? You need a little bit more. There are little things that we can do to support ourselves. It's not to say exercise can never be stressful in the body or you don't recover perfectly. But there's this jump all the time to like, let's remove it. Let's make it sound scary versus like, how do we make it fit into like what we're putting into our system outside of that? Versus like, OK, what do we need to check to see? All right, I'm not recovering. I don't feel as good. I don't feel in fresh in the gym. Did we check sleep? Did we check lifestyle stress? Did we check what our nutrition was like? What other hydration was like? All of these other factors-- All of these other factors that can also impact how you feel-- And how you manage stress. And how you manage stress. It's not just hormones or exercise or one thing alone. We're humans living in systems of all these other things. Yeah, I think we do a really big disservice for women by always making them think that they need to remove the exercise when exercise is typically the thing that like improves metabolic health, decreases inflammation, like, reduce it, or supports fat loss or some reduction. It's not incredibly bad. Big magnitudes versus like, removing it all together is actually far worse than any of those things. Land the plane here for me. We've been going for three hours now, and I need to let you guys go. And you have a plane to catch quite literally. So if we come back to the initial kind of woman or avatar that we were talking about who felt confused was sick and guessing the exercise that she's been doing, what I've heard through this conversation is that resistance training is super important. And making sure you're doing that resistance training with sufficient intentionality, particularly around effort, is going to be important. What else would you add in terms of biggest takeaways for her such that she can walk away from this conversation and kind of orient herself towards the one or two things that really matter and away from the things that are possibly holding her back, causing unnecessary stress, and maybe stunting her progress. There are no female, specific or menopause-specific training programs. There is a goal-specific training program. And so what we need to stop focusing on is the life stage and start focusing on the right tool for the goal, because that will feel empowering. That will help you make progress. At the same time, we don't ignore or dismiss the real difficulties that some women face in this stage of life, because symptoms or sleep or mental health or just overall life stressors can certainly impact your adherence, your enthusiasm, and your ability to go to the gym frequently and be as physically active as you once were, perhaps. So we acknowledge that, but while acknowledging it and making space for those real symptoms, those real life stage changes, we also say we have the toolbox to shift some of those concerns, whether it's body composition or muscle mass or longevity or fat loss. We know what works because it works for humans of all life stages. So let's employ the right tool for the job to fit your goal. And I'll add that I think women get really confused as they see menopause specific, and it's different than what they've already done. And it's not that it's a menopause specific approach. It's that if you have been neglecting these things or never doing them, it might become more important now to start doing them if you haven't. So it is important for menopausal women to do these things if they haven't, but the application of it that we've discussed today isn't somehow menopause specific in nature. It's the same principles it's that just often, it was neglected or ignored or never of interest until it became important. And now it is really beneficial for you to do. And I really always like to wrap up any take home on anything with women's fitness is like you, like this is a period of time where things are changing and you are aging and I know that that sucks. And there's so much overlap between aging and menopause that I think is so hard to untie even in the literature. Like we don't have this direct clear message of like, this is this is the, but the reality is is they are happening concurrently. And the best thing that you can do is to work with your body, give yourself grace, have flexibility and not frustration for what's going on as much as you can. And recognize that you aren't powerless. You can, you know, you can still train hard. You are still capable. You might just need to adjust or tweak what that looks like compared to maybe what you've always done or maybe what you want out of your life moving forward. It's not just this juman gloom like into the world thing and really, really, again, I'm not claiming that me and Lauren here have the most perfect takeaways of everything to say, but there is so much stuff out there that is distracting you. And if you can just put blinders on and really apply some of these foundational basics for a period of time and not get distracted by the weight invests and the vibration plates and the fancy gadgets and the like random therapies and all this just really focus on training hard to improve outcomes. Give us, give us even eight to 12 weeks. Just like give us that and see how much more progress you make and really try to just hone in on the few messages that you consume and apply. And don't waste your precious energy that you barely have already on trying to like change it every single week or month to do the new thing kind of thing. That's really like that. Building with blinders on motto is really important here because people are gonna keep telling you what you're doing is wrong. And you just need to like trust it for a little bit to see for yourself that it works. - Thank you guys. I mean, my audience is I think 70% women. - That's crazy. - And most are 40 plus. So I know that this, there was a lot in this conversation but I know that this will be very well received. And I do think, you know, maybe people will want to listen to this episode a few times and keep coming back to it. But I do think that it will help improve confidence and quality of life. So I really appreciate the work that both of you are doing and thank you so much for joining me again. - Thank you for having us. - There you have it friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and want to stay up to date with future episodes, be sure to hit that subscribe button on YouTube and follow on Apple or Spotify. Finally, thank you for showing up and the effort that you're making to take control of your health. I look forward to hanging out with you again in the next episode. [MUSIC]