The Exercise Order That Actually Builds Muscle in Menopause

Foreign. The beginning of January, I talked all about how to look at taking advantage of everybody's desire to, you know, create some resolutions. Although I would say resolutions are hollow if they don't stick. But how to look at this year and how to change a few things specifically around body composition, because, let's face it, the reality is, is we almost always all enter into this time period with goals to be healthier. And right now, our goals to be healthier are going to be predominantly the goals of putting on more muscle mass, maintaining leanness, improving bone mineral density, flexibility, and, and feeling better so we can have the best, most productive and exciting next season. Right. So what I want to talk about today is go a little deeper into how to use exercise to maximize body composition when you're a midlife woman, right? We all know that we could probably eat crap and just cut back our calories and work out a little bit more when we were younger and those things would work. But I want to talk specifically about the exercise component and how to dial that in. If you remember, I've spent a lot of time in the biochemistry of the body and over 21 years of clinical experience and then my own body kind of going through its motions in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now my 50s. And so there is a way in which to do exercise and make it work better. And I'm speaking directly to the woman who maybe has struggled with your body composition. So if you have always been lean and you have never had trouble with your body weight, some of these statements are not going to be as important to you because your body is very efficient at several things. And number one, it is very efficient at fuel partitioning. That means switching from glucose burning to fat burning and utilizing the right materials appropriately at the right time, and producing ATP, which is your mitochondrial energy. What we do know, if somebody has spent a significant amount of time overweight or obese especially, we see a decline in mitochondrial function and overall metabolic activity. And some of the research shows that it can be up to 30%. So even looking at a basal metabolic rate, what it takes for you to kind of burn energy throughout the day, the things that your exercise machines calculate based on your body composition or your body body height and weight, you know, your BMI can be largely inaccurate, but particularly if you've been overweight, because the body will downregulate many, many pathways if you have been somewhat sedentary and overweight for a long period of time. And what we're talking about today is really how to use strength and, and different types of exercise to preserve and build lean muscle mass, particularly for signaling. Right. So this is not just, hey, I, you know, I'm thinking about it as I'm either building stuff up or I'm burning stuff off. It really is. What is that signal saying metabolically inside the mitochondria, you to the central nervous system, to the sympathetic and parasympathetic drive the hormonal symptoms. So let's, let's set the stage. So why does this matter so much? So when we lose estrogen, right, it changes our fat distribution. It changes, it changes the inflammatory activity of fat, increases inflammatory cytokines, reduces insulin sensitivity, and specifically affects muscle function. Now, testosterone will contribute to that. We don't see a rapid decline in testosterone as we go through menopause. It's actually a steady ass decline from about 20 onward. So often women have excess testosterone relative to estrogen if they're not on hormone replacement. However, neither one of those hormones would be optimal in a menopausal woman if they were not restored by doing hormone replacement. So midlife brings two major hurdles. Insulin resistance and especially visceral fat. Weight gain and then the sleep and the stress that all goes along with it. And anabolic resistance, which I touched on in last week's podcast. So if you haven't listened to that one, man, I would go back because that is a huge primer on what to do with your diet and to set the stage for today's talk. So that anabolic resistance to protein and exercise is, is where we see it fail. And the reason why I bring this up is, is there is a metabolic effect of protein that, yes, you want it to do muscle protein synthesis. So when you eat protein in a metabolically active and, well, iron, you know, well honed machine body, when you eat protein, especially in a large enough amount, the bulk of it should go to build muscle. Well, what we know is that it doesn't. It can often go to gluconeogenesis. And actually, if you're eating around 20 grams or two eggs in the morning, the bulk of that, if not all of it, is going to go to gluconeogenesis. That is, your body's going to make glucose out of it and it is not going to use it to make muscle because the amount is not large enough. And when you have anabolic muscular resistance, we're going to have a greater level of that, especially if you've been overweight. And again, this is an amino acid metabolism issue that is very specific to overweight and obese individuals. Metabolically healthy individuals, a lot of the, you know, 20 year olds that they use in studies don't have this problem. So what we're going to talk about today is the better signals, the exercise signals, right? So let's talk about the science. Right? So exercise, when your muscle contracts, the contraction moves a reset a transporter called GLUT4 up to the cell surface, right? So GLUT4 enters the muscle and glucose can enter, enter the muscle independent of insulin's action. So this is directly related to muscle contraction. And after exercise, your muscles are going to be more insulin sensitive for about 24 to 48 hours depending, depending on the intensity and the type of training, the status of your training. So when we look at women in midlife, insulin is less effective and contraction driven when we're working on it can be a way to work around it. So stimulating activities that can stimulate glute 4 in an insulin resistant person is going to be helpful. Now if you listen to my conversation last week, Glute 4 Transport is also estrogen dependent. So if we are not hormonally balanced with hormone replacement, glute 4 is a little bit sleepy at the wheel. So when we, when we look at glute 4, we need estrogen on board to help it transport independent of insulin. And we also need that glute 4 activity to take glucose to the mitochondria. So insulin sensitivity and glute 4 are very important to that. Now this is a game changer when we understand that most of us are a little bit of insulin resistance because of the active loss of estrogen in menopause. So exercise is going to improve your insulin sensitivity, your glycogen storage capacity, which is how your body stores glycogen sugar for later on in your muscle tissue. It's going to upregulate mitochondrial function and reduce post meal glucose spikes. And this is why exercise is so important. It's actually why I put it in front of protein consumption in somebody who is struggling with body composition. And it's because it creates this sponge essentially for your body to use glucose effectively, which, whether your insulin sensitivity is getting better, which exercise will do and whether your glute for transport can get better. So if we use exercise in the very beginning to sort of amplify these utilization pathways, then go after protein consumption, we can get more muscle protein synthesis and less gluconeogenesis. Now which exercise works best? So resistance training, we can't hit this home enough. This, this increases total muscle mass and glycogen storage space, right? So the more muscle I have, the more glycogen storage I can store. Zone two, which is more of a steady state aerobic capacity, improves your mitochondrial efficiency and fat oxidation and it also supports insulin sensitivity. But it's how it's done and when it's done and at what heart rate zone it's done. And then intervals and high intensity intervals are very strong glucose lowering stimulus, but they have a higher recovery cost so they need to be timed appropriately and the duration of the actual intervals and the duration of the exercise itself can either be productive or less productive. So let's talk about the science. So muscle protein synthesis in midlife and specifically muscle protein breakdown, right? So we have kind of a versus what are they? So, so the net gain happens when muscle protein synthesis exceeds muscle protein breakdown over time. Now why, when and where does this happen? So what we see particularly let's say in endurance athletes, so if you've been a runner for a long time or you're doing triathlons and marathons, or even in my case, I love cycling, but I have to pair that with the right resistance training. So I'm not increasing muscle protein breakdown. Those catabolic activities that raise cortisol and increase muscle protein breakdown are amplified when we do too much of those activities. Now muscle protein synthesis has two major triggers, mechanical tension, which is strength training. And it has the essential amino acids, especially leucine, which the protein quality is important. So leucine is, is predominantly found in animal proteins. This is where type of protein matters. If you were to try and match the amount of leucine in a chicken breast to, let's say like cups of quinoa, you would need multiple cups of quinoa to equivalent, be equivalent to what you find in animal protein. This is the challenge in vegetarian and vegan diets. You may get the essential amino acids, but particularly the ones that are essential to muscle protein synthesis are relatively low. And leucine is a major stimulant to the muscle protein synthesis pathway. Now when we go into perimenopause and menopause, the threshold to stimulate muscle protein synthesis rises, right? So we need more robust strength stimulus and adequate protein per meal. So this is something I touched on last week, but I want to touch on it more. So that means the little weenie weights, you know, the 2 pound, 4 pound, 5 pound weights, doing lots and lots of repetitions, that is the Tracy Anderson kind of stuff. It doesn't really work. When you're in this next season of life, we need more stimulus to get the effect tell the body to go build, right? And when we eat protein, we need a lot in the breakfast meal and a lot in the dinner meal, and it needs to be over 40 grams. So for those of you that are like, I'm doing avocado toast with two eggs, that barely equates to 14 grams of protein, right? Two eggs, 14 grams of protein. Nowhere close. You have got to get 40 grams in or more. I have a lot of women shoot to 50 to 60 just so they can make sure that they've had like front load the day in the protein intake. Now, again, jamming in 150 grams of protein and not doing exercise is not going to automatically make your body build muscle. You've got to give it the stimulus because again, we're not really good at that. So what is the pathway story? Right, so strength training activates signaling that promotes muscle building. This is mtor. MTOR signaling, Right. So MTOR gets stimulated by protein intake and it gets stimulated by muscle protein synthesis by the mechanical load of strength training. Endurance training activates signals that improve energy efficiency through ampk. Right. So this is not, you know, doing endurance training does not stimulate muscle protein synthesis in that way. So we're going to side table that for later on. So in the beginning, we need to start programming the body to do strength training activation to stimulate mtor, to stimulate through a mechanical load. Now to maximize glucose disposal and muscle protein synthesis. How do we do this? Right. So how do we get the body to do this? We have to lift heavy ish regularly with increased mechanical load. Right. So the goal, I would say, is three to four times a week. Two times a week is not enough unless you're doing pretty intense exercise to really stimulate muscle growth because again, it is something that has declined over time and particularly during menopause. So we want to prioritize big patterns. So the big, big players here are the strength and conditioning activities that we often see in power moves. So these are going to be squats, deadlifts, leg press, your bench press. But I would say women focus on the lower half of your body, right? So squats and lunges hinging patterns, which are your deadlift patterns, pushing and pulling and carry. Right. What's interesting is if we look at the research, grip strength has been associated with longevity. Right? The better the grip strength for the longer period of time, the better the longevity. Don't go and work your grip because that's complete bullshit. Grip is a proxy for strength. So a couple of the things that we use to identify this is Your dead hang. So holding onto a bar above your head with your feet off the ground, the longer you can hold, the stronger you are in. That is especially a proxy for later life strength. Now the farmer's carry is also one of these things. So if we look at a farmer's carry, which is carrying weight in both hands, and for a woman, ideally in our age group, we want to carry about 6, 75% of our weight for at least a minute, right? So what is that? So if you're 140, 150 pound woman, that's about 100 to 110, 115 pounds, carried between two hands over the course of a minute, right. That carry core exercise is very important. So when we're lifting, one of the best ways to do that is to lift heavier with progressive load. So if you are somebody that has never lifted weights before, that's totally cool because we all start where we start. But what it means is, is our goal is to get where the last one to two repetitions, you know, reps are difficult to maintain actual form, right? You can maintain form, but you really gotta work at it. You know, in the bodybuilding community, you know, there's the kind of this idea that the only reps that matter are the last two, and those are the ones that you actually hit. You're, you're in the tank, right? You're in the tank and it's very difficult to do the rep. Most sets then require a, you know, no more than nine repetitions, you know, one to three reps ideally, and then you hit the tank. Now, in the beginning, if you've never lifted before, you can do higher repetitions, lower weights, but as you go up in strength and form, as you improve those, we want to lower the number of repetitions and increase the effort in each rep. So one of those days that you're lifting needs to be low, low repetition, heavy weight. So one to three reps, let it rest. One to three reps, let it rest. And in most cases, this is the best time to do things like deadlift, squat, bench press done, right? Because there's a big muscle groups and they stimulate major muscle fiber growth, glucose utilization, and increased muscle growth, glucose utilization. And so therefore, then MTOR gets signaled. We get all these other signaling pathways. If we've got testosterone on board, we get good growth hormone activity and then we get muscle building. Now, on the other day, right, the other day, you can do slightly higher repetitions, but I would say if you're able to knock out 12 reps, and the last two are not difficult. That is your sign to increase the load. And you don't want to rip through these really quickly. It actually helps to do the repetitions at slower contraction. So eccentric and concentric activity, you know, up and down. If we slow them down, we make it harder on the muscle. And when we do that, we're increasing the mechanical load. So if you have hand weights at home and you don't have heavier weights and you're sort of maxing out, what you do is lower the repetitions and take longer time to do it, that will make it equally as difficult. So no swinging, good form, and we do that. And one of the ways that people do splits is they might do lower body one day, upper body one day, or pull, push, pull and use a combination and then throw in that heavy day. Now the intensity is important. Again, eight to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week, right? So it's not get in there and work your body, the entire body, every single day. Circuit training can be used, but you don't want to do it every day because you need the recovery to help your body build muscle fibers and build bigger muscles. You will not get bulky. There's no freaking chance you can get bulky. Even if you're on testosterone. The only way you could get bulky is if you were taking incredibly high beyond physiological doses. Right? But we do need muscle fiber growth. So when you're looking at your exercise, you want to intersperse rest days between strength training days to allow your body to recover and rebuild. So the conical tension through weight training is the number one exercise driver of muscle protein synthesis, preserving and building lean muscle mass. Now step two is we're going to use glucose clearing, right? So movement daily, especially after meals. This is where your walking comes in. I hate to break it to you, but even with the weight vest, a weight vest is going to make a walk a little bit harder. But this is daily movement. This is not going to create more muscle, it is not going to increase major glucose utilization. But we need it because that helps tell your body to utilize glucose in the bloodstream Available right now. Especially good for after eating like a 10 to 20 minute brisk walk, you know, after your meals is great. Or taking little exercise snacks, which is like a two to five minute stair climb, body squats, marching in place, burpees. But I wouldn't do that. I hate burpees. Or even, you know, jumping jacks or other things can help glucose clearance, right? So these daily movement snacks are really important and we need that level of Movement. But it is not the same as aerobic work that is there to help with mitochondrial function, which is what I'm going to talk about next. So aerobic work that you can recover from is generally zone two, right? Zone two needs to be heart rate trained. Right. You can't guesstimate on this. This is where we use heart rate monitors. The, the things like Oura rings or Ultra Human, they aren't really great at heart rate management because it's too far from your actual heart. I prefer the Wahoo chest strap and I use it when I cycle. Now, zone two training in a woman in her 50s is going to generally be somewhere between 120 and 140 beats. Right? Beats per minute. And so. So when you're working at that level, it's harder to talk, but you can still talk. Right. And that is a threshold. That's the lactate threshold. And it's very hard to tell. I mean, ideally we would have a lactate lactate meter to be able to see, see that. But we don't have, like glucose meters, like lactate meters. And they're a little bit expensive to do and a little bit time consuming. But essentially, when you're in that zone two training, it's faster than you can walk, right? It's almost impossible to walk fast enough. Jogging or running, it often feels like you're not working hard enough. And people actually run at a pace that's beyond that. Closer to zone three and cycling, it's a little easier to do this. Or elliptical or swimming, it's a little easier to do this because you're able to actually maintain a speed that increases this. Ladies, if you're noticing more fine lines and wrinkles, it's not just about aging. It's about the loss of estrogen. And that affects our skin structure, making it drier, thinner, less firm. But here's the great news. I've created Biased Mastery Cream to help. This luxurious bioidentical estrogen cream supports your natural hydration and elasticity. It's packed with nourishing oils like olive jojoba, aloe and coconut. So it feels amazing and helps soften those lines and bring back that healthy glow. I've been using it and let me tell you, my skin has never looked or felt better. It's smoother, more radiant, and those little cracks and creases are way less noticeable. If you're ready to give your skin some extra love, check out buy EST Mastery on the Metabolic Blueprint website. And that's metabolicblueprint.com Biased mastery, that's B I E S T mastery. M A S T E R Y and your face will thank you. Now, where does zone two come in? So zone two helps glucose utilization and mitochondrial activity, so it increases mitochondrial biogenesis. So that means in every single cell we produce more mitochondria, right? So I'm building muscle fiber and producing more mitochondria. I become more metabolically active, my body becomes more efficient. And zone two, for it to be really, really effective, it needs to be longer in duration. And so this is one of those things that the longer you do it, the better. Me personally, I do one to two zone two trainings a week where I'm out on a bike for a longer period of time. And what's interesting about zone two, when you utilize it properly and you get into that heart rate zone, what you'll start doing is you'll start being able to take the heart rate to a higher rate, but do more fatty acid oxidation at that higher rate. So here's where the difference resides. When you're lifting weights, you're in an anabolic state. Your body is using glucose during that time, right? It is not burning fat. That is not what it's doing. But it increases fat burning afterwards, right? So it's acts as a glucose sponge, increases fat burning capacity afterwards. Zone two is where you burn fat and you burn glycogen stores. So you burn through glycogen stores first and then you burn fat. What's interesting is when this is done properly with longer duration. So when I do mine, it's usually on the weekend and I go for about an hour and 15 minutes to two hours, I'm on my bike. This is also my mental health thing. And, and what I have found over time is my threshold for zone two improves, meaning I can create a little bit higher heart rate but still stay in that fatty acid oxidation zone where I'm still fat burning. So what's really happening here is as you create more mitochondrial efficiency, you're better at burning fat and burning glucose at the same time, but you're not doing it to the extent that you burn off the muscle that you just tried to put on. When you're in zone three, in zone four, at extended periods of time, where you're above that and you're not getting enough oxygen, you start to burn off the muscle you put on. And this is what happens with most of us that were in the aerobic Gen X world. We were, we were working out at a level that is beyond that capacity and A lot of your high intensity interval like locations, your, you know, FT45s or whatever, or your orange theories often take their aerobic thresholds above this zone. And even though they've got weight training and other stuff in there, it is largely a high intensity interval activity that is actually cardio at the same time. Why it may make you feel great, it may actually be counterproductive because it, it doesn't improve that muscle protein synthesis activity. And it also is beyond the fat oxidation level at that time. And so you're basically burning off muscle. And that happens a lot. I see a lot of women that have come to us at Minerva or my clinic for the last 20 years and they're working out like a fiend. And they love this kind of exercise because it's great for the mental health. But they're like, I'm working my ass off at a, at a, you know, orange theory and nothing's happening. And this is why. So zone two needs to be at a slightly lower threshold, but a higher threshold than what you can do walking. Adding a weight vest often makes it better for, you know, mechanical load. Again, mechanical load. And there are studies looking at improvement in bone mineral density with weight vests. I've had one for 22 years. I love weight vests. It's, they're valuable but again, they can't get into that zone two training now. So one really good zone two a week helps to start getting you there, especially once you've got the strength training. And you can always tell if you're in a go. Good zone two is that you recover and the next day you may be like, oh, I could do that again. You won't do it again necessarily, but you could do it again. If you feel run down and beat up, then you were probably exceeding your zone two capacity. And that's a really good way to sort of see it. And this aerobic capacity increases your metabolic flexibility. Switching right your partitioning between glucose and fat and improves your insulin sensitivity and increases mitochondrial biogenesis. This is the big deal now. Now once we get those things dialed in and if you've been struggling here for a long time, it could take 8 to 12 weeks for your body to become efficient doing this. This is where we start hitting that protein strategy because it triggers muscle protein synthesis. So this is where we start to shoot for that 1.6 to 2 grams per kilogram per person. So that's, that's going to be at your like 40 gram to 50 gram per meal. If you're doing three meals a day, right? And we want to aim for a leucine threshold by choosing things like whey protein. If you tolerate whey, whey has a great protein, right? Greek yogurts, eggs, but you got to eat a truckload of them. Poultry, fish and lean meats, right? You can do this with vegetarian and vegan, but it is difficult cold, right? You want to increase your, increase your total protein mix and it often needs a lot more per gram. Right now, soy protein, love it or hate it, organic soy protein is the only vegetarian source of protein that is 100 bioavailable. But again it's leucine content is much lower than animal proteins. But we want to make a combination. So you need legumes, you need some soy, you need your other forms of protein in your vegetarian forms to get close, right? And distribution really matters here. So as we look at the protein intake, a little at lunch and, and you know, a little at breakfast, a little protein snack here, a little protein snack there, your body's going to do gluconeogenesis. It is not going to build muscle. You need a bunch at breakfast and a bunch at dinner. Lunch, oddly enough, doesn't seem to, to matter as much. But, but if we're shooting for those higher goals often we got to eat quite a bit at lunch to hit those numbers. And again, we want a protein forward meal when we time it around exercise, right? So now how do I put that protein in with that ever so important exercise? We want to have a protein forward meal 1 to 2 hours post lift, right? Just practical. It doesn't have to be magical in many cases. This is where a lot of people do protein shakes. After working out my favorite time, if I had a perfect schedule, I would work out late in the afternoon, come home and pound my protein at dinner. That's where I seem to have the best effect. But that doesn't always work for my schedule. But if you work out in the morning, it might be, you know, having a little bit before you go in to work out and then hitting it hard for breakfast so you get, you know, the protein you need to, to act on that muscular synthesis activity that you stimulated through exercise and metabolic mechanical load, right? If you train fasted, be extra intentional about your next meal, make sure that meal is enough. Now here are the two other major multipliers here that we have to talk about. Creatine and sleep. I know everybody's talking about creatine, everybody's taking creatine. Creatine at 5 to 10 grams a day is a game changer. For women. When we look at it for strength training, it improves strengths, it improves training capacity and improves lean muscle mass. It also helps pull water into the muscle, helps hydrate the muscle. It is, it is a support in the brain. So we have cognition studies that it's helpful. It is, along with choline, a methyl donor as well. And so when we have creatine, particularly in the monohydrate form, which is the one that's most studied, it's going to help. So adding creatine over the course of the day, Some of the studies that have come out recently show 10 grams or more can help with jet lag or sleep issues and help get past a little bit of the brain fog. But 5 grams a day is kind of the minimum. Now here's the other multiplier. Sleep, right? Sleep is either going to improve your muscle protein synthesis through driving insulin sensitivity or, or it's going to reduce your insulin sensitivity. And we know poor sleep leads to cravings and poorer diet choices the next day. So you must be sleeping. And this is where progesterone often can help. And estradiol, if you are in perimenopause and menopause and your hormones are not dialed in and you're insufficient because of the hormone loss at menopause, often sleep is a barrier. Here we need seven to eight hours of high corn quality sleep. And so this is where all the muscle building happens, right? So you could be kicking ass in the gym and you're not going to get very far if you aren't sleeping, right? Because actual muscle protein synthesis, muscle building, glucose utilization and fat burning happens while you sleep. So we have to get that dialed in and recovery drives your adaptation. And adaptation is muscle protein synthesis. So when we measure, we want to measure what really matters, right? Strength markers, reps and or load improving particularly on those key lifts, the deadlift, the bench press, the squat, the leg press, those things are important, those big, big muscle groups. So tracking your data here is important. So over time, you should progressively be able to load more weight or slow the weight down so you can use the same weight and make it more difficult. Or we increase the rate and lower the reps, right? That's the way we know waist circumference. So as you become more insulin sensitive, you put on more muscle mass. We should see a drop in waist circumference because we're losing visceral fat, which is a sign of insulin sensitivity. That's important. We may not like the jiggly bits on the outside, but it makes A difference. And if you use a cgm, which is Continuous Glucose monitor and your labs, we can look for glucose patterns, insulin sensitivity patterns like your fasting insulin and pro insulin. And we can also look at your fasting glucose levels and, and other markers to understand how efficient you are. We can do things like postprandial or post meal glucose and insulin levels to kind of see what your insulin sensitivity is and then your fasting glucose, obviously, and looking for potential spikes. Now here, I gotta say something because this pisses me off all the time. I know you find that shocking. So CGMs. CGMs are going to be worn where they're going to show continuous interstitial glucose loads, right? So that's the tissue, that's the fluid between the tissues. And they don't always 100% correlate to blood levels, right? So there can be variation here. That's why, like if you sleep on your glucose meter, sometimes it will show very low levels of glucose because it's actually reading the interstitial space. It's not tapped into your vein. Now, when you're working out, right, when you're working out, you should see a glucose increase because your body is mobilizing glucose from the muscle tissues and the liver first to burn. That is not a spike. When you eat and you see a steady state rise in glucose, that is not a spike, Right? And the makers of Stello and the Libre for consumer use both erroneously call any increase in glucose a spike. We should have increases and decreases in glucose over utilization. A spike is when it goes up dramatically and then dramatically back down. So if your glucose level looks like Mount Everest, there's a problem. If it looks like the rolling hills of Tuscany, it's not a problem. So if you're wearing a cgm, remember that, that's important. And if you're doing things like sleeping on it by accident and it goes off at night showing a low blood sugar. These things were designed for diabetics and they can erroneously show low blood sugar when they're not really low. Um, and that's repeated again and again. So if you get a really low level, you want to use a glucose meter to check it because chances are you're not that low unless you truly are hypoglycemic, which is a whole nother conversation, right? So you gotta measure what matters. And to me, the exercise components are some of the most valuable. Also, recovery, if you're working out and you feel like you're hammered, crap afterwards, you have overdone it, particularly when we look at cardio type exercise. That means you were outside of the zone too. And high intensity intervals. High intensity intervals should be intense for short periods of time. And the duration of the exercise starts to lose its favorable capacity at about 15 minutes. So 45 minutes to an hour. Just because you showed up to the class doesn't mean you're going to get value out of it. High intensity intervals are better for shorter durations. Now, here's the myth busting round. Let's get this clear. Cardio burns fat. Lifting weight bulks you up. That's lifting actually is how you keep metabolism in shape. It's how you build muscle fiber. And that mechanical load on the muscle also builds bone. And five pounds is five pounds. But five pound weight compared to a five pound bit of body fat, which is about the size of a bread loaf, is very, very different. Right? So more muscle, the more metabolically active the leaner you are. Protein is bad for kidneys. Complete bs. As long as you don't have kidney damage from some other kidney disease, you can eat as much protein as you want. If you're struggling and you're eating all the protein you can, and your body composition isn't changing, it's largely because you have insulin resistance and muscle protein synthesis problems. The exercise components we talked about here today. And then worry about your protein intake and you'll find that you'll be better at it. The adaptation, on average, in studies looking at people who have muscle protein synthesis issues and amino acid metabolism issues, usually 8 to 12 weeks is where we start to see significant adaptation and then we see changes. Most of us don't stay committed long enough to see that. So this exercise really commit the whole first quarter. Let's knock it out. And if you've been told you're too old to build muscle, that's bullshit. We have studies with women all the way into their 70s, 80s showing that they can build muscle and they can build bone. And the response is real, right? Muscle is trainable and buildable, right? So here's a sample, sample week here to think about it. One full body strength day. So this is your circuit, right? You're maybe keeping it a little more intense. You're doing upper body, lower body, arms, legs, abs, all of that. Then I want you to think of one zone two exercise day, ideally 45 minutes or more. And if you can do it even longer and enjoy it even better. And again, for most of us, that's not going to be running. You're going to need some other form of exercise, whether it's elliptical. I do bicycle, swimming, something where you can get that load a little bit higher. Now, strength training. Strength training a minimum of three times a week, ideally four. And we want to do, you know, upper body, lower body, or a push, pull, and we want to. You want to separate those. So if you're doing upper body one day, you want to give it at least two to three days of rest before you do it again. So often, you know, body splits where it's upper body one day, lower body the next, or, or interspersing that with some active movement, possibly yoga or other. Other things like Pilates, which do not build muscle, and then adding another strength day where it might be lower body, and then working in some of those kind of heavy, what I call your strength and conditioning exercises, your, your squats, your deadlifts, and your bench presses. And then think about lowering the reps, increasing the rate or slowing down the repetition, how long it takes you to do a single rep to make it harder, right? So here I want you to think your muscles are your metabolic ally. And if you train them and, and feed them properly and let them recover, they will give you what you want. So I want you to think of seven days, seven days of the next seven days and pick one of these things, one of these things to implement that maybe you aren't doing. It could be post eating walks. Like over the holiday season, my husband and I did a lot of walks after meals because there was times off or I was working from home. So I had a slight more flexibility with my schedule, which was huge and it made a big difference. Right? It might be that you're doing some strength training and really hitting it harder than you've done it before. So for the next seven days, pick one of those and start implementing it and think about how much better you're going to feel when your body is more efficient. Right? When your body's more efficient. So I want to thank you for listening. You are stronger and more powerful than you could ever possibly believe. And when we get strong, our entire outlook on life changes. And so I hope you found this entire episode on how to utilize exercise to help with muscle protein synthesis and building muscle and bone, and how to put it together with what you eat to get the outcome that you want. So thank you so much for listening to Menopause Mastery, whether you're listening to me on your favorite podcast platform or you're watching me on YouTube. And I'll be back with you next week with a deeper dive in how to make menopause your most valuable and special season of life.