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Speaker 2: Or check out the show notes for more.
Speaker 1: Every year, on my birthday, I gift myself a dexa
Speaker 1: scam Happy birthday to me, and I have been doing
Speaker 1: this now since two thy and thirteen. So if you're
Speaker 1: a data girl, oh my goodness, I have this gorgeous
Speaker 1: spreadsheet where every year I pump in the most important
Speaker 1: metrics out of my deser scan, and really my goal
Speaker 1: has been to fight the clock. My goal has been
Speaker 1: to keep my body composition about the same more obviously
Speaker 1: even improving as I've been aging so ideally maybe losing
Speaker 1: a little bit of body fat and then of course
Speaker 1: gaining that beautiful lean muscle mass. So last year I
Speaker 1: decided to really focus on getting stronger. I'm a little
Speaker 1: bit of a pipsqueak, and I was like, this is
Speaker 1: my year. I'm gonna lay down some more beautiful muscle.
Speaker 2: I'm a crossfitter.
Speaker 1: And then on top of my CrossFit, I went and downloaded,
Speaker 1: which I've done.
Speaker 2: Before, this great app.
Speaker 1: It's called Smolov Junior and it's just a really simple
Speaker 1: protocol that you follow for three weeks, so you do
Speaker 1: it for dead lifts. I did it for dead lifts,
Speaker 1: I cycled through twice actually, and then I did it
Speaker 1: for squats as well, and boy did I get stronger.
Speaker 1: I actually managed to hit my goal last year, which
Speaker 1: was triple digits in the deadlift. I got to one
Speaker 1: hundred kilo deadlift and it's only now a few kilos
Speaker 1: off deadlifting double my body weight. So I'm pretty proud
Speaker 1: of that, saying as I'm forty six and I'm also
Speaker 1: got to my goal of squorting one and a half
Speaker 1: times my.
Speaker 2: Body weight as well. So so so chuffed.
Speaker 1: So here I go walking in Chess, proud to my
Speaker 1: DEXA scan on the birthday. Can't wait to see this
Speaker 1: great lean muscle that I have laid down. Well, you
Speaker 1: want to know what? I gained one hundred grams of
Speaker 1: lean muscle in that twelve months, like nothing like hello,
Speaker 1: oh my goodness. My body fat had stayed the same,
Speaker 1: and I just like, it's measly, you know, insignificant amount
Speaker 1: of muscle mass, And I.
Speaker 2: Just thought, wtf. I'm a hard exerciser.
Speaker 1: So it just reminded me how hard it is to
Speaker 1: lay down lean tissue in your forties and beyond. And
Speaker 1: the other thing it got me questioning was even though
Speaker 1: I didn't add a single kilo of muscle, I am
Speaker 1: so much stronger. I mean, I am physically stronger. My
Speaker 1: performance in the gym proves that.
Speaker 2: So I want to know is my body still healthier
Speaker 2: even though I didn't add any more muscle? This is healthy?
Speaker 2: Heer with Amelia Phillips.
Speaker 1: As this episode goes live, it is officially spring. Yeah, hey,
Speaker 1: music to this exercises is I just love the excitement
Speaker 1: in the zeitgeist around exercise in spring. Bring it on
Speaker 1: every single year. And look, when you've been in the
Speaker 1: health industry long enough, you know that this really does
Speaker 1: mean two things. Number one, more hay fever, but number two,
Speaker 1: busier gyms, more people out and about training, really wanting
Speaker 1: to maximize their results in of course, the shortest time
Speaker 1: frame possible.
Speaker 2: We want those quick wins. So what better time.
Speaker 1: To bring in one of the world's leading experts on exercise,
Speaker 1: nutrition and female physiology, doctor Stacy Simms. Now, if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with doctor Stacy, first of all, hello, where
Speaker 1: have you been, my friend? Because you are in for
Speaker 1: such a treat today. She is a world renowned exercise physiologist,
Speaker 1: a nutrition scientist, and a speaker who specializes in female
Speaker 1: specific training performance and hormonal health, which.
Speaker 2: We all need.
Speaker 1: Is actually recently on the Mele Robins podcast for goodness sake,
Speaker 1: So guys, we are in the realm of queenhood here.
Speaker 2: Can I just say?
Speaker 1: She completed her post doctoral research at Stanford University really
Speaker 1: focusing on the sex differences in environmental and nutritional physiology,
Speaker 1: and she's got over twenty years experience helping women to
Speaker 1: optimize our fitness, recovery, and of course longevity. She's also
Speaker 1: the author of Raw and Game Changes, books that really
Speaker 1: empower women to train smarter, which clearly I need after
Speaker 1: my recent results. And she's recognized internationally for translating some
Speaker 1: really complex science into practical strategies for women of all ages.
Speaker 1: And of course I'm very passionate about women in midlife.
Speaker 1: Please guys follow her on the Instagram she's got almost
Speaker 1: a million followers and sign up to a newsletter. You
Speaker 1: are going to be educated and inspired, just like you
Speaker 1: would not believe.
Speaker 2: So if you are.
Speaker 1: Ready to get the most out of your exercise sessions,
Speaker 1: to learn how to recover smarter, and to really work
Speaker 1: with your body instead of against it, then my friend,
Speaker 1: you are in the right place.
Speaker 2: In today's episode is for you, Doctor Stacey.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on Healthy Her today.
Speaker 3: Before we finish this podcast, I need the name of
Speaker 3: that app because that sounds amazing.
Speaker 2: Oh it's Molov Junior. OMG.
Speaker 1: I've done it about four times in my life. Smolo
Speaker 1: v anything with an Eastern European name in it, smallov
Speaker 1: Bulgarian squats, Romanian deadlifts. You know is going to hurt,
Speaker 1: Sure it is. And so it's basically a calculation. You
Speaker 1: type in what your one RM is for a big
Speaker 1: compound move, like it works really well for squats, deadlifts,
Speaker 1: bench press. You type in your one RM and then
Speaker 1: it asks you do you want to improve by five
Speaker 1: or you put the percentage you want to improve by
Speaker 1: five percent over three weeks, and then it calculates your
Speaker 1: training protocol and it's just the one move. So basically
Speaker 1: you deadlift four times a week, but the sets and
Speaker 1: reps completely change in the weights and so it's super
Speaker 1: clever because the week starts quite light and so you're like,
Speaker 1: oh this, it feels totally manageable, and then by the
Speaker 1: end of the week you're doing a lot less reps
Speaker 1: but a heavier weight and more sets, and so it
Speaker 1: kind of creeps up on you. It's a really good one.
Speaker 1: Not for beginners because it is the same move, repeat it,
Speaker 1: but oh my gosh, it it gets you stronger. But
Speaker 1: as you can see, maybe not lying down more muscle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, building muscles. So I know it's.
Speaker 1: It's like what, Yeah, I laugh so much when we
Speaker 1: talk about strength training and one of the first things
Speaker 1: women says, I don't want to bowl up, and I say,
Speaker 1: you wish look.
Speaker 3: For you.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, If only all right, doctor Stacy,
Speaker 1: I'm going to float a scenario with you. I want
Speaker 1: you to take yourself out of your amazing athletic body
Speaker 1: and I want you to picture this. You are a
Speaker 1: pery menopausal woman. You would call yourself an intermediate exercise
Speaker 1: So you know you've had bouts of high intensity exercise,
Speaker 1: You've had a big break, you know, you've had kids,
Speaker 1: maybe an injury here that you're intermediate.
Speaker 2: You're hot and cold.
Speaker 1: In the last few years, you've noticeably gained body fat
Speaker 1: and you're feeling a lot weaker. Now it's spring, you've
Speaker 1: decided this is it time to get back on the
Speaker 1: exercise bandwagon. You've got four hours a week to dedicate
Speaker 1: to structured exercise and maybe a little bit of incidental
Speaker 1: outside of that, and you'd really like to strip this
Speaker 1: extra body fat and also exercise for overall health span.
Speaker 1: What do you do in your four one hour sessions?
Speaker 3: Love this question? This is great. You think about spring,
Speaker 3: A lot of people want to be outside and then
Speaker 3: we often see like the weaker might not be back
Speaker 3: and do so for being outside, So we do want
Speaker 3: to incorporate some of the outside time to have the
Speaker 3: benefit of being with nature for stress release, especially with
Speaker 3: perimenopause and are tired, but why you're drive and we
Speaker 3: know that if you're getting more pair of sympathetic activation
Speaker 3: through that mental stress release of being outside, it helps
Speaker 3: with body comp because we're able to drop that sympathetic
Speaker 3: system that tired but wired and really feed forward to
Speaker 3: getting better sleep. That's where I'm going with us, because
Speaker 3: we need to really look at sleep and sleep optimization
Speaker 3: because we don't get good sleep. We can't budge the
Speaker 3: needle on any metric. So if I had four hours
Speaker 3: a week to dedicate, I would have at least one
Speaker 3: outside that would be really kind of low intensity stress release,
Speaker 3: going for a walk in green space if you can,
Speaker 3: or run or ride or something that's outside, and then
Speaker 3: I would have one that could either be outside or
Speaker 3: inside that was strength oriented. So if we're looking at
Speaker 3: an outside strength orientation, it could be going to a
Speaker 3: playground and using resistance bands to add load with confidence
Speaker 3: to be doing lunges, pull ups, any kind of body
Speaker 3: weight action. That's going to give you the tendon and
Speaker 3: the ligament and the muscular poll that you want for
Speaker 3: that strength. And if it's inside, you can do the
Speaker 3: same thing with resistance vans on a rig or in
Speaker 3: your garage. And then I'd have two dedicated sessions in
Speaker 3: the gym, and the two dedicated sessions would be a
Speaker 3: mobilization warm up, so you're actually working to mobilize the joints,
Speaker 3: so you're not stretching. You're trying to open up all
Speaker 3: the joint capsules, get better range of motion. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: then I would have a knee forward, squat focus, heavier session.
Speaker 3: When you're first phasing in, it's going to be more reps,
Speaker 3: lighter load, getting that motion in.
Speaker 1: You just say knee forward. Can you just explain what
Speaker 1: you mean by knee forward?
Speaker 3: We think about lower body. We have squat and lunges,
Speaker 3: and we also have things like hip thrusts and deadlifts.
Speaker 3: So we're talking about the knee forward. It's more of
Speaker 3: our lunges, our step forward lunges, squads, anything is going
Speaker 3: to be more quad dominant but also works the glutes.
Speaker 2: And why is that women.
Speaker 3: For the most part are quad dominant, but we don't
Speaker 3: necessarily have the quad strength for appropriate reception and being
Speaker 3: able to be reactive to side steps. And if we
Speaker 3: have kids or we're going for a walk on a trail,
Speaker 3: we need to have that propriate reception for some of
Speaker 3: that cutting motion. And we need to have really strong
Speaker 3: quads in and around and muscles around the knee to
Speaker 3: protect the knee and become bulletproof. The other thing we
Speaker 3: see in perimenopause is there's an upsurge of joint pain
Speaker 3: and osteoarthritis. So if we're creating bulletproof knees through more
Speaker 3: knee forward motion and ned forward strength, then we are
Speaker 3: feeding forward to preventing pain in the joint and offshooting
Speaker 3: some poor muscle patterns that might occur with joint pain
Speaker 3: or osteoarthritis.
Speaker 2: Oh, that makes so much sense, And sorry I interrupted you.
Speaker 2: You're in the middle of explaining the the gym.
Speaker 1: Focused workout, so sorry, let's just circle back to that.
Speaker 3: So we do our mobilization and that's maybe ten minutes,
Speaker 3: and then we have twenty in to twenty five minutes
Speaker 3: of a really focused need forward workout, So that could
Speaker 3: be front squats, back squats with like volt Garan split squats,
Speaker 3: so it's not a lot of different movements, they're just
Speaker 3: very focused. And then we finish with some jump training,
Speaker 3: so it's either plyometric type stuff or maybe if we're
Speaker 3: just starting to learn plio, we're doing band assisted pogos,
Speaker 3: which is going to give us some high intensity work,
Speaker 3: but it's also going to work on strengthening the joints
Speaker 3: and the ligaments and the movement patterns for jumping, and
Speaker 3: jumping is important for bone health. The next gym session
Speaker 3: would be very similar in the mobilization and the plio
Speaker 3: or jump focus, and in the middle will be more
Speaker 3: posterior chain. So this is where you might be doing
Speaker 3: hip thrust and bent over row, so you're getting that
Speaker 3: hinge motion, but you're strengthening upper and lower body of
Speaker 3: the same time.
Speaker 1: And so why posterior when you talk about knee forward
Speaker 1: in that previous day, now you're talking about more posterior training.
Speaker 1: Can you give us a little background as to why
Speaker 1: you want to focus on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so women are, like I said earlier, quad dominant,
Speaker 3: and we don't really tend to turn on our glutes
Speaker 3: and we tend to very weak ham strings. We want
Speaker 3: to be bulletproof in the knees and the hips. We
Speaker 3: also have to have strong reactive hamstrings and also work
Speaker 3: the glutes. We sit most of the time all day
Speaker 3: and that turns the glutes up, makes the hamstrings soft,
Speaker 3: So we want to be able to activate that right,
Speaker 3: and we also need some upper body kind of pulling
Speaker 3: you back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we spend our whole life rounded and leaning forward.
Speaker 1: So posterior work is opening up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. When we open it up and feel that space,
Speaker 3: it allows us to stand up stronger, breathe better, and
Speaker 3: as I like to tell people, you want to be
Speaker 3: able to take up and have that confidence. So if
Speaker 3: you're walking on the footpath and there are three coming
Speaker 3: towards you, don't move, have them move because you know
Speaker 3: you don't want to have to step down off the curve.
Speaker 3: So if you have that confidence around you from being
Speaker 3: strong and open, you're just like, yeah, I'm not moving. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's a confidence building thing with that postural change.
Speaker 1: Okay, ah, that just sounds amazing. All right, So we've
Speaker 1: got out ten minutes of mobility. We've got our kind
Speaker 1: of twenty to thirty minutes of strength. Slightly different focus
Speaker 1: on each day what else have we got in those
Speaker 1: two gym sessions.
Speaker 3: And then we finished with the high intensity work. So
Speaker 3: it's apply o work, or it's jump training, or it's
Speaker 3: sprint interval work. And the reason for that super super
Speaker 3: high intensity but short bout is it allows our body
Speaker 3: to understand a very strong, super strong stress, but it's
Speaker 3: not something that is going to necessarily be overly taxing
Speaker 3: to cause injury or burnout. So the other when we
Speaker 3: think about that high intensity work, it's one of the
Speaker 3: fastest ways to signal the body to stop storing visceral
Speaker 3: fat and it also works with brain health.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 1: So in our little scenario here where intermediate exercises and
Speaker 1: we're kind of coming off probably a bit of a
Speaker 1: lull through winter, what would you see as a good
Speaker 1: high intensity finisher that maybe we don't feel confident doing
Speaker 1: these big jumping moves, right yet, what's a couple of
Speaker 1: examples of what we could do instead?
Speaker 3: And if you're coming back from injury or you have
Speaker 3: store joints, you don't necessarily want to do box jumps
Speaker 3: or anything like that. So, like I said, we could
Speaker 3: do band assisted pogos. But more to the fact, that's
Speaker 3: a little bit easier to kind of get people's head
Speaker 3: around as doing an explosive kettlebell swing. So it's a
Speaker 3: little bit heavier than what you would want, and you're
Speaker 3: only coming up to eye height. You're not going all
Speaker 3: the way overhead. Maybe you're doing battle ropes. We'll be
Speaker 3: doing really heavy ropes to get that high intensity. Yet
Speaker 3: you could do peace, you could.
Speaker 1: Do no one lacks you right now? What about buy
Speaker 1: can row? What about just getting on a stationary cardio
Speaker 1: machine and just going hord twenty seconds on, ten seconds off,
Speaker 1: well forty five seconds on fifteen seconds off.
Speaker 3: When we talk it sprinted interval training. In this age group,
Speaker 3: we're looking at thirty seconds as hard as you can
Speaker 3: or less, so twenty to thirty seconds as hard as
Speaker 3: you possibly can and a full two minutes recovery, because
Speaker 3: we want each of those intervals to be as hard
Speaker 3: as you can possibly go. And if you're doing Tobata
Speaker 3: style or you're only having ten to fifteen seconds off,
Speaker 3: it puts you more in a moderate intensity, not a
Speaker 3: super high intensity. So you could do as salt bike,
Speaker 3: you could do the rower. I would not say treadmill
Speaker 3: because you can't really jump on treadmill confidently and run
Speaker 3: at top speed for thirty seconds and jump off it's
Speaker 3: too dangerous. Yeah, it's really proficient. But even then it's
Speaker 3: something that you can't really get up to speed.
Speaker 1: You might become treadmill roadkill, which we've all we've all
Speaker 1: done at.
Speaker 2: Some point in our life.
Speaker 1: I've been scrolling on my phone and half my foot's
Speaker 1: gone off the belt and the other half is yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: stop suddenly, and yep.
Speaker 2: It's always pretty, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we leave the treadmill alone. So really, it's
Speaker 3: any mode that you feel confident, and the more that
Speaker 3: you do it, the more confident you get, the more
Speaker 3: you can get into it. But I would really urge
Speaker 3: everyone to put a little bit of jump work in.
Speaker 3: So that's why I really like resistance bands. You could
Speaker 3: have a resistance band tied around the rig and then
Speaker 3: around your waist and you could do jumping lunges to
Speaker 3: help you with that, or tie it above on the
Speaker 3: pull up bar and you're holding onto it and you
Speaker 3: can do jump motion that way. Because it's not about
Speaker 3: how high yet or how explosive you are. It's about
Speaker 3: getting that kind of rebound information and ground reactive force
Speaker 3: through the bone, the tend in through the ligaments, and
Speaker 3: get that muscular component ready for you to be able
Speaker 3: to independently jump.
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on a couple of I guess
Speaker 1: precursors to jump training? For example, a slam ball, where
Speaker 1: you might pick a heavy slam balls. They're a bit
Speaker 1: different to a med ball because they're just these really heavy,
Speaker 1: dull balls that you pick up over your head, super heavy,
Speaker 1: and you just peg them down on the ground as
Speaker 1: hard as you can.
Speaker 2: Would you see.
Speaker 1: That as a type of I guess explosive training as
Speaker 1: a precursor.
Speaker 3: Yes, in high intensity, but it still does not work
Speaker 3: the same as the jumping motions, okay, because the goal
Speaker 3: that we want from a jump motion is to have
Speaker 3: the ground reactive force go through the entire skeletal system,
Speaker 3: and that means landing hard. Doesn't have to be high,
Speaker 3: but it should be hard.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So another precursor for you, love your thoughts is if
Speaker 1: you're doing it dead hang So whether you're the outdoor
Speaker 1: person in the kid's playground and you find like a
Speaker 1: monkey by area that you can maybe jump up, and
Speaker 1: you know your feet are maybe thirty centimeters or less
Speaker 1: twenty centimeters off the ground and you're hanging there dead
Speaker 1: hang for your thirty seconds or whatever you can do,
Speaker 1: and then you let go and you drop to the ground.
Speaker 1: Is that does that get the doctor Stacey tick of approval?
Speaker 3: It does. It does because when we talk about jump
Speaker 3: training for bone health, you really aren't jumping that high.
Speaker 3: And it could be a very low depth jump, which
Speaker 3: is kind of like a dead hang to drop into
Speaker 3: the ground. It could be stepping off a stair hard right,
Speaker 3: one foot down, two feet down. It's not a full
Speaker 3: box jump. If you start putting a full box jump in,
Speaker 3: that's more applyometric, high intensity with a little bit of
Speaker 3: that ground reactive force. But yeah, because we forget how
Speaker 3: to jump, and we forget how to land. Because if
Speaker 3: you think about kids skipping down the road, when was
Speaker 3: the last time you were skipping?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, not a pretty site hour.
Speaker 3: So we forget and our body forgets how to generate
Speaker 3: force and absorb the impact. And I mean even skipping
Speaker 3: is a good precursor for a jump training.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and actually it is fun.
Speaker 1: We do do a little bit of skipping, and besides
Speaker 1: getting whip marks all over my legs and arms, it
Speaker 1: is actually quite enjoyable. Thank you first of all for
Speaker 1: giving us that snapshot, and I hope for those of
Speaker 1: you that do fit that intermediate exercise bucket that gives
Speaker 1: you a lovely framework from which you can build.
Speaker 2: And if you're sitting there.
Speaker 1: And you're hearing these words back squats, Bulgarians, splits, Pogo
Speaker 1: and you're going what what what what? You know this
Speaker 1: could be your wake up call to say maybe it's
Speaker 1: time to invest in a personal trainer.
Speaker 2: And maybe you.
Speaker 1: Say you scribble down doctor Stacy's little framework and you
Speaker 1: go to this trainer and you know, chat to them
Speaker 1: about this is the kind of program. I want you
Speaker 1: to write me and teach me some of these really
Speaker 1: foundational moves because it is money well spent, don't you think.
Speaker 3: Absolutely looking at move And the one thing I have
Speaker 3: found when women are not confident in the gym and
Speaker 3: they go hire a personal trainer, they're afraid to speak
Speaker 3: up with what they want, so they end up filling
Speaker 3: an entire hour in doing things that are not really
Speaker 3: optimal because a personal trainer feels obligated to fill that
Speaker 3: whole out. But if you go with a framework and say, hey,
Speaker 3: I want to do some mobilization. I want to do
Speaker 3: some heavy lifting and I want to do some jump
Speaker 3: or high intensity work. At the end, it gives them
Speaker 3: the opportunity to go great. Now I have the framework.
Speaker 3: This is perfect and so you know it's going to
Speaker 3: work for you. They're going to teach you how to
Speaker 3: do this and keep it interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, your mantra, which I love and it's really taken
Speaker 1: off around the world is women are not small men,
Speaker 1: and it really has reshaped how we as exercise professionals
Speaker 1: think about training. Can you maybe run us through the
Speaker 1: most critical physiological differences that we need to be aware
Speaker 1: of and nurture in our beautiful female bodies.
Speaker 3: Well, we start with the X X versus X Y chreminosome, right,
Speaker 3: and unfortunately we only have the binary type of research available.
Speaker 3: But if we start with the knowledge of a female
Speaker 3: assigned or a person assigned female birth or XX, we
Speaker 3: have morphology differences. So that means that our muscle fibers
Speaker 3: are different from birth, so we have more of those
Speaker 3: endurance type fibers. We have better capability of burning free
Speaker 3: faty acids. We have better oxidative and inflammatory responses, meaning
Speaker 3: that our body really tunes into dampening those two effects
Speaker 3: pretty rapidly. And how that transfers out is that women
Speaker 3: are really good going along and slow and burning fat.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, I feel my listeners would be challenging that
Speaker 1: going on. I don't know how good I am at
Speaker 1: burning fat, but hey, it sounds good.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We don't have a lot of the fast twitch fibers,
Speaker 3: so those are our glycolytic power based fibers to lose
Speaker 3: the more as we get older.
Speaker 1: Is that maybe why when never going to compete with
Speaker 1: you saying bolt in the one hundred meter sprints, We're
Speaker 1: probably not going to get there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, you can train them specifically, but we're still
Speaker 3: going to miss the mark against the true x Y.
Speaker 3: And we don't produce as much lactate either. Our lactate
Speaker 3: responses are different than men's because we don't have as
Speaker 3: many of those glacolytic fast switch fibers. Why that's important
Speaker 3: is it transfers into how our ability is to withstand
Speaker 3: those super high intensities. Also brain health, because the more
Speaker 3: that we can produce lactate as we get older, the
Speaker 3: more we're able to teach our brain to switch between
Speaker 3: glucose and lactate, so that helps slow the rate and
Speaker 3: risk of dimension Alzheimer's. We bring in also back down
Speaker 3: to bone density. Women have not as strong or as
Speaker 3: dense bones as men. We also have a different Q
Speaker 3: angles that means the angle from the hip to the knee.
Speaker 3: So we have to be careful about our quad dominancy
Speaker 3: for our running and are jumping in her cutting motions,
Speaker 3: especially for chasing the kids. I've had quite a few
Speaker 3: friends who have jumped into kids' soccer games or have
Speaker 3: chased the kids and have torn in a meniscus or
Speaker 3: an acl on just because differences right.
Speaker 2: Now, Q angles are really interesting.
Speaker 1: One if you imagine you're walking down the street and
Speaker 1: you've got a lady and a man walking towards you,
Speaker 1: and let's say there's an X ray machine, and so
Speaker 1: they clothes disappear and you can just see the skeleton
Speaker 1: walking towards you.
Speaker 2: You see the.
Speaker 1: Man's fema and his thigh bone will be just very
Speaker 1: much vertical up and down, you know, like yeah, parallel
Speaker 1: to the ground. Whereas the lady it's a little bit
Speaker 1: more of that triangle shape, isn't it. She's got the
Speaker 1: slightly wider hips and then that fema just angles in
Speaker 1: almost like a little v subtly, and you see that
Speaker 1: in you know, in X rays and in diagrams, you
Speaker 1: can go, oh, that's no wonder women and knees can
Speaker 1: be such an issue, and no wonder we.
Speaker 2: Get these super tight itvs as well.
Speaker 1: And I don't think a lot of women realize that
Speaker 1: Q angle, which is great for birthing babies and you know,
Speaker 1: great for Kim Kardashian and her hourglass figure, but not
Speaker 1: so great if you try to do some athletic moves.
Speaker 3: It's great for sprinting, running, all those fun things that
Speaker 3: we like to do, which is why we have to
Speaker 3: really focus on doing things like lambshells, which you know
Speaker 3: are kind of boring and important to really get strength
Speaker 3: and around the glot mead and the glop max and
Speaker 3: all those things again. Bulletproof knees.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, hearing you say a lot of those things
Speaker 1: makes me feel like women are quite hardcore in the
Speaker 1: sense that, like, I mean from an evolutionary perspective, like
Speaker 1: we're endurance baby, We've got like lack date tolerance, where
Speaker 1: got a lot of innate systems in our body that
Speaker 1: are just tuned for survival.
Speaker 2: How cool is that, you know?
Speaker 3: And that's we're can change the narrative right because we
Speaker 3: think about all the fitness and sports stuff, the man
Speaker 3: is the default and the woman is the anomaly, even
Speaker 3: in the language where we go the ladies bar instead
Speaker 3: of the thinner bar for smaller hands, the girl push
Speaker 3: up instead of a modification of a push up, because
Speaker 3: it makes everyone in that subconsciously or less than think
Speaker 3: that women aren't as strong or they can't do the same,
Speaker 3: and that you don't really want to be like a woman.
Speaker 3: But in fact we are the more endurance and we're
Speaker 3: more stress tolerant. We are the reason why there are
Speaker 3: still humans on this earth because of evolution, the fact
Speaker 3: that we can birth babies and still keep going and
Speaker 3: our bodies are set up for that.
Speaker 1: Why is it so hard to get real answers about
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Speaker 1: I hear you saying these words, and it makes me
Speaker 1: want to get up and move. It makes me want
Speaker 1: to celebrate my body. It makes me want to take
Speaker 1: up space in the weight room, and even though he's
Speaker 1: deadlifting a weight much heavier than me, it makes me
Speaker 1: want to own what I am doing. And you know,
Speaker 1: motivation and inspiration to exercise is one of the biggest
Speaker 1: barriers I find, and so even just hearing you educate
Speaker 1: us on that, it actually lowers that barrier because it
Speaker 1: increases our motivation and it makes us respect our bodies
Speaker 1: so much more, don't you find.
Speaker 3: Yeah, women understand and they go, my body is capable
Speaker 3: way more than what I'm letting it do. It breaks
Speaker 3: a barrier in a mental state because we're so conditioned
Speaker 3: to blaming ourselves and negative self talk. And if we
Speaker 3: take away the comparisons to the quote norm, which is
Speaker 3: the male norm, and we look at what our bodies
Speaker 3: are capable of and challenge our own selves, then it
Speaker 3: opens up a whole world of confidence and that feeds
Speaker 3: forward to every aspect of our lives.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because you're one of the few people
Speaker 1: that really advocates for high intensity exercise for women, and
Speaker 1: it is a little bit of a challenge because you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of the women I speak to are exhausted
Speaker 1: and they're worried about injuries, and the thought of pushing
Speaker 1: themselves to the max just does feel incongruent. So I guess,
Speaker 1: how can we help our ladies fall in love with
Speaker 1: that feeling of, you know, that fast finish and that
Speaker 1: higher intensity activity rather than feeling like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: going to drain me and deplete me, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to feel useless and hopeless and unfit because I get
Speaker 1: puffed out and red faced and you know, ugly sweat.
Speaker 3: Another thing that we need to educate women on when
Speaker 3: we're talking about high intensity. We're not talking about the
Speaker 3: forty five to sixty minute boot camp classes. We're not
Speaker 3: talking about the spending classes. We're not talking about all
Speaker 3: of those that really make you super sweaty and exhausted,
Speaker 3: because that's what we've expected to feel like once we
Speaker 3: do high intensity. If we do high intensity work, it's
Speaker 3: hard enough to be challenging to the body, but with
Speaker 3: the recovery between intervals, your body is getting the Okay,
Speaker 3: I can do this again. And if we're doing it properly,
Speaker 3: the post exercise response is a boost of growth hormone,
Speaker 3: it's a boost of testosterone, it is a drop in cortisol,
Speaker 3: and a few hours later it's that extreme parasympathetic AH response.
Speaker 3: You get the runners high for some people call the
Speaker 3: Northern Run, and then that feeds forward into this is great,
Speaker 3: I feel great. If you're doing a session and if
Speaker 3: you'l absolutely smashed at the end, that wasn't the right session.
Speaker 3: So if we're thinking about high intensity and talk about
Speaker 3: high intensity finisher, and we're doing twenty to thirty seconds
Speaker 3: as hard as you possibly can with teuish or more
Speaker 3: minutes recovery, you might really only be able to do
Speaker 3: two maybe three of those intervals for the first month
Speaker 3: or two that you're doing it, but you never really
Speaker 3: want to go beyond five of those because then they're pointless.
Speaker 3: You really can't recruit the types of fibers and nerves
Speaker 3: that you need to to hit that high intensity. So
Speaker 3: it's very effective, and yes it's challenging, but it's not
Speaker 3: challenging in a way that we're used to in the
Speaker 3: fitness world. You're absolutely drained and smashed.
Speaker 1: I had neuroscientists Paul Taylor on recently and he was
Speaker 1: educating us on hormesis, which is the you know, the
Speaker 1: healthy stresses and everything you've just described there reminds me
Speaker 1: of what he was saying around these are stresses that
Speaker 1: elicit a healthy adaptation and response afterwards, such is what
Speaker 1: you said. You know, you're calming down your quartersold levels
Speaker 1: reducing It's basically you've done the fight or flight.
Speaker 2: You know you've fought or you've run away, and then
Speaker 2: you get to relax at the end of it.
Speaker 3: A friend and mentor who is a top theologists and
Speaker 3: egos to conferences and one of the conferences that he
Speaker 3: opened recently, he's like, we're sitting in a room that's
Speaker 3: going to kill us. And everyone's like, what are you
Speaker 3: talking about. We're in an air conditioning conference room. He's like,
Speaker 3: we're sitting in a climate controlled room. We have water
Speaker 3: accessible at all times everywhere. There are nibbles at the back,
Speaker 3: we're sitting down, we're in an inert state. We're not
Speaker 3: challenging our body at all. And this is exactly the
Speaker 3: environment that kills us. We don't challenge our bodies. And
Speaker 3: I was like, that's exactly it. If you want to
Speaker 3: live a really good health span, you have to be
Speaker 3: comfortable with being uncomfortable in different parts of your life,
Speaker 3: especially around exercise and how that affects your stress levels
Speaker 3: with regards to high stress and the overcoming reduction of
Speaker 3: stress that occurs after something like high intensity or heavy
Speaker 3: resistance training session, because you've put your body out of
Speaker 3: that comfort zone and it's adapting to that. If we
Speaker 3: don't adapt, then we don't. Actually, it's in your health span.
Speaker 1: It makes sense to hear you say it, but then
Speaker 1: when you look out in our world, there's just comfort
Speaker 1: at every single point that it really does take conscious
Speaker 1: effort to go, Okay, well, what are those healthy stresses
Speaker 1: that I'm going to really focus on, which I know
Speaker 1: are then going to move the needle of my health
Speaker 1: and my longevity as well. And obviously exercises such a
Speaker 1: silver bullet in that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean we look at the four main things.
Speaker 3: It's sleep that you can't budge anything without really good sleep,
Speaker 3: so important for metabolic control and blood glucose homeostasis and
Speaker 3: all of those things. Then we have physical activity and nutrition, right,
Speaker 3: and they're kind of hand in hand because you need
Speaker 3: to have doses of both in good amounts to actually
Speaker 3: progress and change your body camp get healthy all those
Speaker 3: kinds of things. And the very last one is the
Speaker 3: mindful and community because we're not designed to be isolationists.
Speaker 3: We're not designed to be alone all over the time.
Speaker 3: So that's why it's like, you want to get out
Speaker 3: in nature, you want to be with your community, have
Speaker 3: a friend, go for a walk, because then you're getting
Speaker 3: the light exposure, you're getting to be out away from
Speaker 3: all the mod conveniences in you're connecting with a friend.
Speaker 3: So those are the four big touches, and then everything
Speaker 3: else is kind of incidental.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm so with you, And it's funny how we're
Speaker 1: always looking for that biohack or that you know, really novel,
Speaker 1: new innovative tool, which I'm all for and don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, but we've got to make sure we've got
Speaker 1: those foundations. First, I want to circle back to something
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier when we were talking about how awesome
Speaker 1: the female physiology is, and I'm so with you, but
Speaker 1: there is one part that you did mention, which is
Speaker 1: our bone density, and that maybe one that our male
Speaker 1: counterparts don't struggle with all those lots of them do,
Speaker 1: but not to the extent that we do now when
Speaker 1: it comes to bone health, and I'm so glad bone
Speaker 1: health is having a moment. We know that strength training
Speaker 1: is super important, and I do want to ask you
Speaker 1: about that, Like first question will be about where the
Speaker 1: pilates cuts it. But then I want to also talk
Speaker 1: and get your perspective on the second part of bone
Speaker 1: health and exercise that you alluded to earlier. Can you
Speaker 1: talk through the best strategies to support our bone health
Speaker 1: with exercise that's.
Speaker 3: Not looking at bone It is adaptable, just like our
Speaker 3: muscles are, and it needs a very strong stress. So
Speaker 3: if we go back to the harmonic stress aspect, we
Speaker 3: need a very strong, reactive response for the bone to
Speaker 3: have current over and get denser. So we think about
Speaker 3: strength training. Yes, it holds in multiple directions and it
Speaker 3: causes strength to increase in the bone, but it's not
Speaker 3: strong enough to cause multidirectional responses up through the bone itself.
Speaker 3: So strength training yes, but we're not having a ground
Speaker 3: reaction for us. So what I mean by that is
Speaker 3: when you jump and land the landing, your body moves
Speaker 3: in response to that impact. The ground doesn't. So that's
Speaker 3: the kind of impact that we need to go up
Speaker 3: through the entire skeletal system to create strength in all
Speaker 3: different directions. Strength training and resistance training. As long as
Speaker 3: it's a heavy enough load to pull on the tendons
Speaker 3: and the ligaments and the bone and through the range
Speaker 3: of motion, yes, that does help. We see that that does.
Speaker 3: But the more intense we are with purpose of loading
Speaker 3: and jumping, the better we are with bone and bone strength.
Speaker 3: The other really critical thing is vitamin D because if
Speaker 3: we don't have vitamin D, then we are missing the
Speaker 3: mark on some of the key components for building bone.
Speaker 3: So those are the things that I'm always telling people, like, Yes,
Speaker 3: resistance training perfect, that's the entry point to maintaining or
Speaker 3: trying to build mass. We're looking at resistance training. What's
Speaker 3: the loading. If we can increase the loading and have
Speaker 3: higher loads, it's great. There's some really cool research that's
Speaker 3: coming out showing that women who are in their seventies
Speaker 3: doing the higher loads actually help with bone density. Then
Speaker 3: when we are getting through and we have a good
Speaker 3: grasp on all of that, then we start adding in
Speaker 3: the jumping. That's why when we're going back to the
Speaker 3: avatar the start, if we are bringing in some of
Speaker 3: that jump training or the pliometric or the faster, higher
Speaker 3: intensity stuff towards the end, is preparing us to be
Speaker 3: able to do a true jump training type program. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it doesn't take a lot. It could be three
Speaker 3: minutes a few times a week that you're actually getting
Speaker 3: that impact.
Speaker 1: And again coming back to confidence, a lot of this
Speaker 1: is around confidence, isn't it. It's like I haven't jumped
Speaker 1: since my kids were babies or since before I had children.
Speaker 1: My pelvic floor has never been the same, and so
Speaker 1: it is around building that confidence that there is a
Speaker 1: starting point for everybody shape, isn't there There is?
Speaker 3: And I mean full disclosure, I can't do box jumps
Speaker 3: like I can't do a twenty inch box jump because
Speaker 3: the very first time I saw people doing box jumps,
Speaker 3: a woman missed mark and broker leg and I was
Speaker 3: first unseen. So now every time I look at that
Speaker 3: height of a box jump like, ah, I can jump
Speaker 3: up on plates, but it's a box.
Speaker 2: Isn't that funny?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: It is self preservation, self preservation.
Speaker 1: And look for those of you that are really fascinated
Speaker 1: with bone health er, I love this topic. I actually
Speaker 1: interviewed professor Belinda Beck not so long ago, who yeah,
Speaker 1: founded o'neiro and did all that amazing research that completely
Speaker 1: made a mockery out of myself and other excise professionals who,
Speaker 1: for I'm embarrassed to say, many decades used to tell
Speaker 1: people that you cannot improve bone density over the age
Speaker 1: of fifty. And I'm sorry to my previous clients.
Speaker 2: Who I said that to. I was wrong. Belinda Beck
Speaker 2: has proven that you can.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Isn't that amazing.
Speaker 3: People used to say you couldn't build yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Like you can prevent the decline of bone density, but
Speaker 1: you can't build more bone after I mean, that's what
Speaker 1: that's it's terrible. You can and Belinda's doing it with
Speaker 1: seventy year olds.
Speaker 3: The tame is you can't build strength, then you shouldn't
Speaker 3: be lifting heavy past the age of fifties. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you feed yourself in Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to quickly also ask you about my challenge
Speaker 1: at the start of this episode where I'm stronger, but
Speaker 1: I don't have lean muscle mass.
Speaker 2: Am I healthier or was that just a waste of time?
Speaker 3: Lean not a waste of time, because if you think
Speaker 3: about the precursor for strength, right, it's a neuromuscular connection.
Speaker 3: And one of the very first things that women lose
Speaker 3: in perimenopause, especially late perimenopause, is the ability for myosin
Speaker 3: and actin, which are contractile proteins, to bind effectively for
Speaker 3: a very strong muscle contraction. So by doing what you did,
Speaker 3: you were effectively creating a better environment for my to
Speaker 3: be reactive, because the problem with it when we start
Speaker 3: to lose estrogen is myosin becomes dysfunctional so it can't
Speaker 3: grab onto actin. So by doing the heavy loads and
Speaker 3: working specifically on becoming stronger, you're doing that neuromuscular and
Speaker 3: you're keeping the integrity of myocin. It is incredibly, incredibly
Speaker 3: difficult to put on lean mass, build muscle.
Speaker 1: Like you have experienced, like physical mass, like where the
Speaker 1: actual muscle. If you measured my bicep with a tape,
Speaker 1: measure the mass of it or my quadricep, it's physically hard.
Speaker 1: Are you going to say over forty or just in general?
Speaker 3: It depends on really when you hit perimenopause, so we
Speaker 3: could say average age of forty for sure, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: and some younger, some older. And when we're talking about
Speaker 3: doing hypertrofee sins where we're looking at our ten to
Speaker 3: fifteen reps at a lighter load, it doesn't It does
Speaker 3: create a little bit more lean mass, but not as
Speaker 3: much as you would think when you were younger. So
Speaker 3: what we have to focus on really to build that
Speaker 3: lean mass with the conjunction of strength is how we
Speaker 3: are looking at our cardiovascular work and how we are
Speaker 3: fueling ourselves. Because as we get older, we become less
Speaker 3: responsive to resistance training and protein, so we have more
Speaker 3: of an anabolic resistance to both of those. So if
Speaker 3: we're going to do strength training, then we have to
Speaker 3: make sure that our protein intake is adequate in and
Speaker 3: around the training and throughout the day, and people are
Speaker 3: worried now because the high protein conversation is coming into
Speaker 3: play and it's crossing over into the clinical world, and
Speaker 3: the clinicians are saying, no, you don't need that much.
Speaker 3: But when you are an active woman perimenopausal, you're trying
Speaker 3: to change a body composition, you're trying to build lean mass,
Speaker 3: you do have to be egging up to that one
Speaker 3: point eight two Graham's per kilo per day.
Speaker 2: Which is hot.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're a seventy kilo woman, we're talking
Speaker 1: over one hundred grams of protein per day. And really,
Speaker 1: if you sit down and work it out, you basically
Speaker 1: have to build every single meal around thirty grams of protein.
Speaker 1: And so I'm starting to get a lot better at
Speaker 1: and with our members on our programs as well to go, well,
Speaker 1: you know, have you got five or six thirty to
Speaker 1: forty gram protein combos that you can just a whip
Speaker 1: out of the cupboard and the fridge and chuck them together. Like,
Speaker 1: for example, I'm so lazy, right, so when I'm too
Speaker 1: busy to have a proper prepared lunch, I know that
Speaker 1: my tin of tuna and the same size amount of
Speaker 1: cottage cheese mixed together is thirty five grams of protein.
Speaker 1: So in my brain, I'm just like, what can I
Speaker 1: put with tuna and cottage cheese. Oh, here's a bag
Speaker 1: a salad that a pre made salad, and it, you know,
Speaker 1: comes in these little separate packets of the sauce and
Speaker 1: the topping, so I can decide how much a little
Speaker 1: I want to put on that.
Speaker 2: And so I feel like, if you just go, okay, what's.
Speaker 1: A bunch of combos that's thirty or forty grands of
Speaker 1: protein for breaxiit what's a couple that suit me for
Speaker 1: lunch and a couple for dinner. Once you've got I
Speaker 1: don't know, five or six combos, it starts to become manageable.
Speaker 1: But if you don't focus on it, you will not
Speaker 1: hit that number.
Speaker 3: And women can eat less than they should. And so
Speaker 3: you know, by the default of having the whole calories
Speaker 3: in calories are calorie restriction, we've gotten into this whole
Speaker 3: massive women not eating enough for what they need to
Speaker 3: be doing. So that's the other thing. If we start
Speaker 3: really focusing on having protein and fiber at every meal,
Speaker 3: then we are actually increasing all the good things that
Speaker 3: our body needs, and you start to hit that mark
Speaker 3: of one hundred grams or more relatively easily, even if
Speaker 3: your plant forward, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you are so full, like a big amount of
Speaker 1: and particularly if you do have dairy products, which I'm
Speaker 1: also on a bit of a calcium bandwagon at the moment.
Speaker 1: Is trying to get your thirteen hundred milligrounds of calcium
Speaker 1: a day, and if you're not a dairy girl, it's
Speaker 1: ten times harder.
Speaker 2: But I don't. I do have a bit of a dairy.
Speaker 1: When you are upping your protein and upping those dairy
Speaker 1: based proteins as well glass adding some fiber in with
Speaker 1: the veggies and the rainbow of vegetables. I'm never hungry,
Speaker 1: but my calories are probably actually, if anything lower compared
Speaker 1: to say when I was just not worrying about it
Speaker 1: and having big ficutcia sandwiches and you know, ultra processed
Speaker 1: cereals and things like that. But I do want to
Speaker 1: ask you about women that struggle with body fat. And
Speaker 1: we in our programs, we do a lot of blood work,
Speaker 1: and we do see a pattern of a woman who
Speaker 1: is overfed.
Speaker 2: So we see this.
Speaker 1: Pattern of a woman who, you know, blood sugar control,
Speaker 1: insulin resistance, non alcoholic fatty liver disease starting to show up,
Speaker 1: cholesterol rising, she is, her body is, you know, thyroid
Speaker 1: TSH starting to climb up. Her body is showing a
Speaker 1: pattern of overfed. So how do you reconcile what you're
Speaker 1: talking about now with that profile of a person here back?
Speaker 3: And I'm like, that's identifying a lot of the women
Speaker 3: I know who are in relative energy deficiency in sport.
Speaker 3: There's a rebound effect. So if we're talking about someone
Speaker 3: who is having a really poor metabolic profile, we really
Speaker 3: want to look closely. Eating a lot of ultraprocessed foods,
Speaker 3: that's the first thing to really consider and clean up.
Speaker 3: Then we have to think about the timing of the food.
Speaker 3: So how are we eating throughout our day. Are we
Speaker 3: trying to follow the trends where we're overnight fast holding
Speaker 3: till eleven or twelve, or are we actually eating according
Speaker 3: to our circadian rhythm. So when we start really digging
Speaker 3: in saying okay, here's a woman who has a really
Speaker 3: poor metabolic profile and we need to improve insulin sensitivity,
Speaker 3: we need to really look at the AC one. We
Speaker 3: need to look at changing the lipid profile. When we
Speaker 3: start putting parameters around. Okay, let's have breakfast within a
Speaker 3: half an hour or so when you wake up, or
Speaker 3: some food within a half an hour or so when
Speaker 3: you wake up, and then we fuel strategically throughout the
Speaker 3: day and we have dinner, and we stop eating with dinner,
Speaker 3: and then an overnight quote fast and we keep that
Speaker 3: pattern for a week to two weeks. We see changes
Speaker 3: in the blood.
Speaker 2: Markers, positively healthy change.
Speaker 3: Positive changes because when we start eating, according to chronobiology,
Speaker 3: which means our circadian rhythms, the biggest shifts in that
Speaker 3: circadian rhythm is exposure to light and dark. And when
Speaker 3: we eat food, when you are looking at holding it fast,
Speaker 3: you're effectively phase shifting. You are changing your body's hormone profile,
Speaker 3: so our natural lutinizing hormone pulse, our appetite control as
Speaker 3: well as our melotone peak at night that allows us
Speaker 3: to sleep. We're phase shifting it to a point where
Speaker 3: it's as if we were doing a night shift. And
Speaker 3: if you're doing a night shift, you get really poor
Speaker 3: metabolic control.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh my gosh, shout out to all my nurses
Speaker 1: and all I know, how beautiful listeners that are on
Speaker 1: the night shifts, Hats off to you, guys.
Speaker 2: It's tough on the body.
Speaker 3: Really tough on the body. And then there are ways
Speaker 3: when we're looking at night shift workers to do some
Speaker 3: strategic food into it in the overnight to pull that
Speaker 3: metabolic perturbance back to normal. And that could be a
Speaker 3: podcast that we could do well.
Speaker 1: I would love to get you back on to talk
Speaker 1: about nutrition for health, circadian rhythms, fat loss, muscle preservation.
Speaker 1: So let's park the nutrition stuff because I know you
Speaker 1: could talk all day, and as a nutritionist, I'm so
Speaker 1: want to unlock that amazing brain of yours. But let's
Speaker 1: get back to exercise, okay, because it's spring and we're
Speaker 1: all syched and pumped and feeling proud of our amazing physiology.
Speaker 2: I have heard you talk about.
Speaker 1: Zone two cardio with a little bit of an eye
Speaker 1: roll for women, and so for zone two cardio, just
Speaker 1: sow you guys if you're not familiar with it. It's
Speaker 1: training at a particular heart rate zone, which is zoned two,
Speaker 1: which is what around that sixty to seventy percent of
Speaker 1: your max the heart right, which is kind of where
Speaker 1: you can talk but only just love your thoughts on
Speaker 1: zone two because I did read in your recent newsletter
Speaker 1: you were like, don't even get me started on zone
Speaker 1: two cardio. So I'm like, let's get us started on
Speaker 1: zone two cardio.
Speaker 3: Looking at someone who's trying to maximize your time and
Speaker 3: their exercise, which is our cohort here es is how.
Speaker 1: Four one hour sessions? We're busy moms, that's all we
Speaker 1: can do.
Speaker 3: Right if we look at what really budgets the needle
Speaker 3: imperiment apostle super busy women were you know, older moms
Speaker 3: like I was a geriatric mom.
Speaker 1: I don't I love that term. How geriatric were you
Speaker 1: when she popped out?
Speaker 2: Thirty eight?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: So old? Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3: So so you know, we have this whole population of
Speaker 3: people who are super busy because there's so many things
Speaker 3: going on in their lives. Like I have four one
Speaker 3: hour sessions I can claim as my own during the week.
Speaker 3: Do you really want to take two of those and
Speaker 3: go really long and slow, knowing that your body is
Speaker 3: already super capable of going long and slow. We already
Speaker 3: have the mitochondria density, and we have mitochondrial proteins that
Speaker 3: are more robust. We have better mitochondrial respiration. So all
Speaker 3: that means really good fat burners. The zone two conversation
Speaker 3: came because men are not metabolically flexible. Women are. By
Speaker 3: the nature of being women, we can shift between carbohydrate
Speaker 3: and fat. We do that across the minstrual cycle. Anyway,
Speaker 3: we start to have a little bit of issues when
Speaker 3: we are having changes in our ratio of estrogen progesterone.
Speaker 3: That's where high intensity comes into play. So if we
Speaker 3: are looking to really budge the needle for body comp
Speaker 3: for brain health, for propriateception bone health, we need high
Speaker 3: intensity and resistance training. And when we look at the
Speaker 3: true high intensity we see in the literature it is
Speaker 3: better for cardiovascular health because it exerts a stronger pressure
Speaker 3: through the entire system for blood flow shifts, so we
Speaker 3: get more robust responses and better blood vessel compliance, better
Speaker 3: blood pressure control. We see that super high intensity work
Speaker 3: helps with mayakine expressions. So those are hormones that are
Speaker 3: released during exercise from the skeletal muscle that is telling
Speaker 3: the livery you know what. We need these free faty
Speaker 3: acids to be stored as fuel for at rest. We
Speaker 3: don't want them stored as a visceral fat.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you something on this because it's
Speaker 1: very confusing because historically we're taught that actually, if you
Speaker 1: want to burn the most amount of body fat, you
Speaker 1: need to do that long and slow, and that's where
Speaker 1: you're in the fat burning zone. What you're saying is
Speaker 1: kind of counterintuitive. Can you just explain that?
Speaker 3: So that fat burning zone came from when you're looking
Speaker 3: at the metabolic fuel systems in the body, because we
Speaker 3: don't automatically go from carbohydrate right into fat right, so
Speaker 3: we are always burning some carbohydrate. If you're at a
Speaker 3: lower intensity, there's a shift where the body gets into
Speaker 3: a steady state and relies more on free fatty acids
Speaker 3: for fuel. But that does not necessarily mean that you
Speaker 3: are going to lose body fat, because if we're burning
Speaker 3: more free fatty acids during exercise, then the body is like,
Speaker 3: I need to store more of that if we want.
Speaker 1: Just and I'm saying this because I might listen, is
Speaker 1: what we think of this? Well, then why a marathon
Speaker 1: run is so bloody skinny.
Speaker 3: Because they are doing a higher intensity than what you think.
Speaker 3: If you look at the marathon runners that are the
Speaker 3: elite marathon runners, they're working at a VIO two that's
Speaker 3: about eighty percent, So they are tempo running an entire marathon.
Speaker 3: They're naturally talented, so they are going through a lot
Speaker 3: of carbohydrate utilization. They do a lot of speed work
Speaker 3: as well. They're not just long slow distance. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 3: look at general pop that is running a marathon and
Speaker 3: just running to finish. Most of them are not that lean.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We see that with a lot of ultra endurance runners
Speaker 3: now because a really fast rising population of ultrarunners are
Speaker 3: women who are forty plus and we see that bimechanically
Speaker 3: and from a physiological standpoint, that long slow xx comes
Speaker 3: into play where they're really good at storing and using fat.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing if you want to be able
Speaker 3: to strip body fat down, it's the high intensity work. One.
Speaker 3: We see these all these metabolic changes that incur through
Speaker 3: high intensity that then stimulate the body not to store
Speaker 3: visceral fat and to pour more of the free faty
Speaker 3: acids to storage into mitochondria in the muscle to be
Speaker 3: used as fuel at rest. But the other the higher
Speaker 3: core temperature that comes with high intensity work is a
Speaker 3: signal to say we don't want to have extra thermal layer.
Speaker 3: We don't want to have that subcutaneous fat because how
Speaker 3: am I going to dissipate this heat that's being produced.
Speaker 3: So there's a thermal response as well. If we're going
Speaker 3: long and slow all the time, we're not really getting
Speaker 3: out of that comfort zone that I talked about earlier.
Speaker 3: We need to have that perturbation.
Speaker 1: I'm just hearing a whole bunch of my members throwing
Speaker 1: their hands in the air, going, oh, I signed up
Speaker 1: to that marathon or that trial race thinking it was
Speaker 1: my ticket to leanness, and now they going, oh, if
Speaker 1: we're going to go and switch it to high rocks
Speaker 1: or one of those more higher intensity competitions.
Speaker 3: Here, a marathon's time in a place for zone too.
Speaker 3: Don't get me wrong, I call it my soul food,
Speaker 3: like I'm notoriously out on the weekends riding my gravel
Speaker 3: bike for hours at a time. It's just when we're
Speaker 3: talking about the priority and the bread and butter for
Speaker 3: short time management, we need to be very specific on
Speaker 3: what we're doing, and that's where your resistance training and
Speaker 3: high intensity comes in.
Speaker 1: The best bang for buck is what you're saying with
Speaker 1: where we're you know, literally what we said at the top, well,
Speaker 1: the other thing with high intensity, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask your perspective on VO two max.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's really great.
Speaker 1: Now we don't have to go to a lab and
Speaker 1: put on a mask and do a maximal effort to
Speaker 1: estimate our votwo max. If we've got a wear a ball,
Speaker 1: then you just have to go to your app and
Speaker 1: it's accurate enough.
Speaker 3: Your woman, it's not accurate.
Speaker 2: Oh is that right? Oh?
Speaker 1: Tell me on this because then I want to talk
Speaker 1: about using VO two and high intensity and VO two
Speaker 1: and longevity and energy and health.
Speaker 3: So when we're looking at wearables that are out there,
Speaker 3: we have to remember the algorithms are designed for the
Speaker 3: male physiology because it's learning from the existing data. And
Speaker 3: most of, if not all, of the engineers that originally
Speaker 3: designed the algorithms were men. Because that two's in the room.
Speaker 3: The engineers are male. Like I went to interview at
Speaker 3: Apple for an ex fist position back in the day
Speaker 3: and it was nothing but men in there. I was
Speaker 3: like the only woman. And so when you're thinking about
Speaker 3: the wearables, all the algorithms are designed to pick up
Speaker 3: the nuances of male physiology. It's very apparent when you're
Speaker 3: looking at things like heart rate variability, that women's physiology
Speaker 3: is not included because there's a natural shift in our
Speaker 3: nervous system between our follicular and our luteal phase. So
Speaker 3: if you're looking at a wearable there's no way you're
Speaker 3: going to get ready to exercise high intensity five days
Speaker 3: before your period starts or if you're in perimenopause, because
Speaker 3: it's not reading all the changes that are happening. So
Speaker 3: when you're looking at VA two max and the algorithms
Speaker 3: that are there for VIO two max, it's ten percent
Speaker 3: error up or down either way, especially for women.
Speaker 2: Are we going to change this?
Speaker 1: Is there are there researchers out there testing a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of ladies with their VO two max and we're
Speaker 1: going to have some updated algorithms.
Speaker 3: Please say yes, yes, we are working for sure.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're touching back on VO two max
Speaker 1: because we hear a lot about it in the longevity
Speaker 1: space as far as a great mortality predictor. And if
Speaker 1: you're in the advance to elite VO two max levels
Speaker 1: compared to the very poor, you know, I can't remember
Speaker 1: the stats off the top of my head, but eighty
Speaker 1: percent mortality changes. Do you think that that's a metric
Speaker 1: that as a woman could be helpful for us to
Speaker 1: understand and something like high intensity into wal training might improve.
Speaker 3: Yes. No, So I always like the VIO two is
Speaker 3: a really good lab based parameter because you can have
Speaker 3: a high VO two but not work optimally in that
Speaker 3: if you look at I always like to use cyclists
Speaker 3: as an example. If you have someone who is a
Speaker 3: really fantastic hill climber, part of it is that they
Speaker 3: can have a really high VO two and yet work
Speaker 3: at a very high level of that VO two without
Speaker 3: tapping into a lot of carbohydrate use. But you can
Speaker 3: also have someone who has the same high VO two
Speaker 3: but doesn't maximize their aerobic capacity, so they can't climb
Speaker 3: as fast or as hard as the person who's in front.
Speaker 3: So when we're looking at VO two, that's a really
Speaker 3: good benchmark, Yes, we see it, and it's also a
Speaker 3: measure for intensity. And for women being able to do
Speaker 3: high intensity work and have better oxygen uptake, that's really
Speaker 3: important because then that means it's feeding forward to better
Speaker 3: brain metabolism, and for women it's all about the dementia
Speaker 3: and cognitive sex differences that we see as we get older.
Speaker 1: And also just on a very super simple level, don't
Speaker 1: you think it equates to having more energy in the day.
Speaker 1: If I've got a twin that's got a VO two
Speaker 1: max that's forty percent worse than mine and we're both
Speaker 1: mirroring each other running up and down those stairs chasing
Speaker 1: after kids, I'm going to be less exhausted at the
Speaker 1: end of the day than my lower VO two max twin. Right, So,
Speaker 1: even just as simple as it don't give me a
Speaker 1: bit more energy to get through the day.
Speaker 3: So your body is able to be more efficient in
Speaker 3: oxygen use. So that means like running up and down
Speaker 3: the stairs. Your people aren't going to want to hear this,
Speaker 3: but you're going to not use as much to get
Speaker 3: up and down those stairs as your sister who has
Speaker 3: the forty percent less Yeah. Yeah, and more. Thinking about
Speaker 3: this sympathetic versus parasympathetic drive and all the things that
Speaker 3: lead into better health. That's a great thing. But when
Speaker 3: we pull back into the old school idea of burning calories,
Speaker 3: not such a great thing. Yeah, So I always am like,
Speaker 3: let's not talk about calories. Let's think about the nervous system,
Speaker 3: the economy of movement, how we're feeling, how we're sleeping,
Speaker 3: all of those things. So yes, VO two does come
Speaker 3: into Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like that because it's like, all right, okay, strength
Speaker 1: training goals. We can kind of see that we're getting stronger,
Speaker 1: either because our weights are going up in the gym
Speaker 1: or we're having a dexter and hopefully getting a better
Speaker 1: result than I did high intensity interval training. Maybe we
Speaker 1: can look on our app and see our VO two
Speaker 1: max ticking over and you can see it has climbed
Speaker 1: by ten percent, And Okay, maybe it's not the most
Speaker 1: accurate thing in the world, but at least it's a
Speaker 1: metric we can say, wow, we're getting fitter, which is
Speaker 1: kind of what I really like.
Speaker 3: Trends over time, not absolute numbers.
Speaker 2: Yes, trends over time. I'm so with you. Well, look,
Speaker 2: Dr Stacy, we have covered so much.
Speaker 1: I am feeling super motivated to exercise, and I'm really
Speaker 1: hoping that our listeners are and have enjoyed nerding.
Speaker 2: Out with us.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to just wrap up with a final question,
Speaker 1: and I want to come back to our beautiful listeners
Speaker 1: and for a woman listening who is ready to really
Speaker 1: ramp up and mix up her training.
Speaker 2: What is one partying piece of advice that you have
Speaker 2: for her.
Speaker 1: She's going to hang out the headphones from this and
Speaker 1: she's off and ready to go.
Speaker 3: Look at it at a lifestyle change. Don't jump in
Speaker 3: and think about it as a training block, because I
Speaker 3: don't want people to get injured and more demotivated. So
Speaker 3: you want to phase yourself into anything new and know
Speaker 3: that listening to your body intuitive intuitively is way better
Speaker 3: than using any wearable because when we actually listen to
Speaker 3: our body, understand our rating and perceived exertion, how hard
Speaker 3: we're pushing ourselves, then we're able to progress. But if
Speaker 3: we're like looking all around us and being distracted on
Speaker 3: those external cues, then we tend to go too hard,
Speaker 3: too fast and burnout.
Speaker 1: Doctor Stacey Simms, such beautiful, wise advice. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for your time today.
Speaker 3: No, thanks for having me, it's been great.
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