20 Menopause Fitness Changes You’ll Be Glad You Made

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What are you waiting for? Good night. If you're wondering why what works for your best friend, what works for your sister, isn't working for you, I've got the answer. This is all about menopause changes that you want to make, 20 of them in fact, and I'll talk first about a few that really apply to all of us, and then there's some that apply more. To each stage, perimenopause versus postmenopause, and what it is that you want to do and why. Here we go. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond. Before you knew to ask them. Yeah. The goal to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Okay, I'm going to dive into this episode, but before I do, I'm going to warn you. I wondered if I should really do this or not, and my dog is desperately wanting to get up here and say hello. One day we'll let that happen. Oh, maybe today's the day. He's putting his paw in my lap. He may be a lap dog, but I'm going to share this with you. I am drinking this, and I am drinking black cherry lime. This is Element. If you haven't tried this for electrolytes, I'm going to encourage you, but I hesitated to do this Don't say I didn't warn you. This flavor is amazing. And I am not— this is sparkling electrolyte water, so it's a little bit like having a soda. And I don't know about you, but all of the rest of those I don't like. I'm not— never was really a soda person. We didn't have pop around, so maybe I just wasn't in the habit. But having to have a can of sparkling water was never my deal. And I haven't liked the imitation things with stevia in them, just I'd rather have water with lemon, but this is really good. Don't say I didn't warn you. So if you're looking for better hydration, remember that it's not water alone. If you are finding you're drinking more water and you're going to the bathroom a lot more frequently, you're not actually hydrating. It's going right through you. So we want to plump up your tissues. We store our water in muscle. So we want it because it's actually going to help you have more energy for the workouts if you got it. So adding electrolytes to what it is you're drinking can help. So you might have one of those, you might have two glasses of water. Just think about it that way. All right, let's dive into this. So in general, before any of these are truly beneficial, we have to give you a little preemptive information. I'll share this: if you're not measuring you have no idea what's really happening. And there are two ways that we measure: subjectively and objectively. And at first, you're going to have to really use that subjective because you're going to see those changes first, signs that you're making progress that are not attached to the scale, not even attached to body composition. So you want to make sure that you're measuring and you're tracking percent body fat, your skeletal muscle, and by that I mean absolutely not a sliding percentage. You want— yeah, percent body fat, 30% and higher is obese. There are a lot more people getting there than should be. We need to bring that number down, and we really need to work on the message we're sending to our children about what's appropriate and what's healthy. But you also want to look at skeletal muscle, but not in percentage, in pounds or kilograms depending on where you are in the world. And other things you want to do is you want to take your measurements. I do always right side unless there's a reason to go left. You don't have to do both. You certainly can if you want to, but that's right calf, that's right middle of your thigh between your knee and your hip, it's right hip, biggest part of your buttocks, it's your waistline, that's your umbilical cord because that's not changing, smallest part of your waist will, right under your rib cage where your bra would sit, your shoulders, which is right at your armpit, around the outside of your arm, and your tricep halfway between your elbow and your shoulder. Taking all of those and periodically checking in with that as well. The one that is most related to longevity and to your health risk is the waist. If it's 35 or greater for females, for men it's a little bit higher just because naturally body size is a little bit bigger. That's a risk factor. However, if you're a smaller-sized woman and you're nowhere close to 35, but we look at you in the mirror and you're much more of an apple shape than you are an hourglass anymore, and you know that you've put weight on there, still for you is potentially a risk factor. So take that with a grain of salt. 35 or more is a risk factor at waist. So we want to look at that, and we're talking heart health specifically, but other things also pertain to that. Those are your hard numbers, right? I mean, get on a scale, you look at percent body fat. Ideally you're doing that at home, you have a smart scale, you're looking at your skeletal muscle. If your smart scale is not that smart, it's just junior high smart, it might just be telling you fat-free mass, and that's everything but your fat. And that's okay. We can also just calculate that backwards. If all your scale is doing is weight and percent body fat, we can calculate your bone, your internal organs, they're not changing in weight that much. So if you're going up or down a pound or two, that's probably lean muscle mass that we're losing. We don't want to do that. We want to gain it, or we want to maintain it to be around for a very long time. If you've always said, I don't weigh, I don't like to weigh, I get it. I just pay attention to how my clothes fit, maybe you say. It's time to change that thinking for you and I both. Not a big person to recommend weighing or overweighing. And this is counter to some of my great friends, respected experts. However, I've seen too many women get so caught up in that that it's an obsessive kind of thing. Women can go up or down, literally. If you're in perimenopause, more so than others, but they can go up and down by 3 to 5 pounds in a day based on what they eat, based on their hydration level, based on barometric pressure. Some women are much more sensitive to it. So If your hormones are in fluctuation, weighing daily could drive you crazy. You may be ecstatic one day, you may be dejected another for the wrong reasons, not actually seeing what you think you're seeing. So choose once a week. If you like to do it a little bit more frequently, don't do it right after an evening or a weekend that you binged, and just be consistent with the day and the time and how you do it. Meaning right after you get up, you voided your bladder and you weigh, boom. But by the time you may realize that you've lost a small amount of muscle, it could be too late. Now we're losing muscle in small bits if we're losing weight at all. Losing a small amount, not a problem if you find out when it's a small amount. But if you don't find out and it's a longer period of time between you're actually measuring and you're losing, that number now could be very significant, and it's a lot harder to get it back. It's a lot easier to keep it than it is to get it in the first place when you're over 50. When you're over 60, it gets even more. Our status on this scale— percent body fat, percent, or the, the pounds of skeletal muscle— are reflections of the habits that we've got. Probably of our sleep, probably of our strength training, resistance training, of the amount of exercise that we're doing overall, and the amount of our stress, not to mention the amount of protein we're eating. There are 10 things that really apply to all women in perimenopause, and we could actually say this is probably true for women who are premenopause too. Your 20 and 30-something-year-old daughters, daughters-in-law, this applies to them too. But here's what we want to do for working with, not against, our hormones. Intense early and light exercise can go anytime, but we use the words, the alliteration dance of intense early and light late. Try to get all of that intense early, like high-intensity interval training where you're really going really hard. If you were going to do a longer hike, ideally you start in the morning. And you're done early, and you may be able to, to get away with doing heavy strength training later in the day, but I wouldn't go much later than mid-afternoon because it can actually interfere with your sleep. So you're going to get better quality sleep if you get those things in early. So those of you who are thinking, but I got to go to work really early, it doesn't fit in for me very early for other reasons, know this, you know, really we're only talking twice during the week when that has to happen. You can use your, your weekend or your days off otherwise. You only do strength training twice, right? So you can get away with that. And again, if there's just no wiggle room, you can't get up that 30 minutes earlier to get a workout in before you go, number 2, exercise late, make it light. I would definitely Flip that. So intense early exercise, that's hard, make it light. Number 3, increase recovery between challenging exercise sessions. So that doesn't mean don't do anything. It just means if you're gonna exercise really hard on Monday, as opposed to the Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule we all used to be ingrained in our head because that's what a gym would offer, right? Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that's when it is. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, that's when it is. As opposed to falling into that, pay attention to how you feel. How are you sleeping? How's your energy? Are you still sore when that, that day rolls around? Then maybe you should go again. Think about it, take another day of rest. A lot of women have actually started our programs and realized with that extra day of rest, and they do it Monday and Thursday not 2 set days, but just for example, if they feel better, more energetic, then they're not constantly sore anymore. So they're living life and they're more active all day, most days, as opposed to feeling always beat up and tired. Think about the amount of energy expenditure that goes up if you're active all day, most days. It's actually much better than just that short window of time when you're exercising. So increasing the recovery time— say, take a 3rd day between 2 strength training sessions, use that as an example, but there are other indications. Do HIIT, but don't do HIIT necessarily back to back. Give yourself— when there's more wear and tear and damage to muscles because it's hard, you want more rest and recovery between doing that again. And if you love to go run, that's what you really love to do. It's a lot of wear and tear because there's more damage, more high impact in between. What if you swam, got in the water, or did water running or walking instead? So you can still get this stimulation, but you're not beating yourself up. Same with a bike or a rowing machine. Little less wear and tear, still able to move and maybe do it a little lower intensity. Number 4, if insomnia strikes, and it does for a lot of women in midlife going through hormonal changes, leave agility work for another day. Now, most of us should be doing agility. We need that rapid change of direction. We need your legs to be able to go left and right as well as just always forward. We need to move backward at some point. We need to do it in an unpredictable, quick, quick kind of pattern instead of just slow and predictable because that's what we'll need when we have to right ourselves from falling. We slip on a bit of ice, catch our toe in a rug or a stair. That reaction skill also takes your foot from the brake to the accelerator or vice versa. So that you are good in chaos, right? You're there, you're reliable. But if insomnia strikes, we all operate— now, not your blood chemistry level changes, but we operate like a drunk. Our reaction skills are, you know, not as good as this. You can't close your eyes, touch your nose. You can't stagger your foot and stand as if you're on a balance beam. You're not going to move as well, and then you're more at risk for injury. And there is already present a higher risk of injury among women in midlife. Joints and ligaments are not as stable and/or sometimes more rigid, which also lends to not as stable but more likely and prone to injury because of the decrease in estrogen causing a decrease in collagen. Connective tissue changes. So realize that you don't want to put yourself at risk. So should you exercise if you didn't sleep last night? Yeah, ideally you keep your regular schedule. In fact, if you can get out and move, but maybe it's just going for a walk as opposed to, say, getting on a treadmill that doesn't have handles, right? So don't do anything that is causing you to be unstable. Not today. Other days, yes. Number 5, warm up and cool down like a boss to prevent injury. Similarly, tapping into lack of connective tissue, more rigidity among our joints, ligaments, tendons specifically, we may need a longer warm-up and/or cool down. Now the cool down, many of us skip. Yes. Anybody else? Right. We might be better about easing into exercise because we actually may feel the need to do that. Maybe a little more stiff, sitting more than we always used to. But cooldowns we can skip because we're feeling pretty good at the end of an exercise session, right? And we always think we'll do it later. We never do. 50 years later, right? I can vouch for that. But what you're doing is actually increasing the performance and productivity in your next exercise session. You're already making it better and enhancing your recovery by helping to flush out some of the lactate. That's just the toxic chemicals that establish in the bloodstream when you're exercising heavily and hard. You start flushing them out by increasing circulation. So you're not going hard, but you might walk home do a little stretch. That's the prime time to work on your mobility, what we used to know as flexibility. Okay, number 6 is bookend your workouts with fuel. That's before and after. Don't skip. Don't go into a workout fasted, especially if it's a hard workout. There is low energy availability that happens. And if you remember back to when we were probably in our 20s learning about the female athlete triad. You know, that, that was studying young women generally in their 20s, and often they were athletes who were in particular sports. It was more true, less so in something like basketball or softball, but more so in something like track, cross-country, maybe gymnastics, ice skating. Those sports where an aesthetic piece also came into play, and being lighter also was associated with being faster, women tended to eat too little, exercise a lot or more to either look better, perform better, and they were driven. And it caused a lot of women, young women, to experience amenorrhea. Becoming very much like a postmenopausal woman. And I remember thinking about that in my 20s, like, how awful would that be to be postmenopausal? And here we are, not as bad as we thought, right? But you want to make sure— what's the difference? Basically, if you're amenorrheic and you're young, you've stopped your period, you're not having that regular cycle. Your hormones like estrogen are not flowing through you as well as they should, or as high, so you're putting yourself at risk for bone density losses. Well, similarly, we're, we're already there, right? But low energy availability puts a huge stress on our system at a time in our lives where we're already having an escalated response to all stressors in our lives. Because estrogen's gone down and cortisol goes up. So the way you dealt with stress prior, and mentally we're not very good at seeing this, coming back to bookending your workouts with fuel, even if it's just a little bit. If you, for instance, have cream in your coffee— so I don't do dairy, I, I don't recommend it because of the inflammatory effect, but I do coconut cream. In my matcha or coffee, depending on what it is. So even if I were to exercise very early, I would have had some calories. So I've broken my fast and I've got at least a little something, and then I'm going to eat pretty quickly after I'm finished because I didn't have much before at all, rather than waiting. Hey, this is Debra Atkinson, and there is one thing you can't do in the gym at your age, and that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself, not only to get the protein but the fiber, the fruits and vegetables I want daily, I started drinking a smoothie a day 30 years ago. But when I realized all the junk, the sugar, and the extras that you don't want, that I don't want, hiding in most protein powders. That's when I finally caved in after years of saying I will never ever ever sell supplements. Stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning after workouts by always being prepared. Look, yep, I agree, real food first, but it's just not convenient to carry a turkey sandwich sometimes the protein, and don't forget the fiber, they kill cravings and they boost satiety. And you've got to make it easy to do the right thing. You can use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at flipping50.com today. So that still is bookending that workout. Ideally, if you're up a little bit longer and you can stomach something before you get started, even half a banana, a smear of nut butter— I like hearty rice cakes, smear of nut butter on that— something so you've got something to light the fire. You're actually going to get a better workout, probably work harder. And this is true from what we've seen happen to women who are exercising. They tend to go harder but not feel like it's harder. They tend to either go faster, lift more weight, have more repetitions to fatigue when they fueled. They simply overall feel better. And a lot of times we falsely believe ourselves that I just— I don't like anything in my gut before exercise. And the truth is, and I was a runner who would have sworn by this, for years because I have a touchy stomach. And I would, I would have said my stomach gets, you know, kind of weird when I run, so I don't want to eat anything before. Once I started, I was like, oh my gosh, this was actually the answer. Because sometimes as you're running and you're getting going, especially if you're younger, you can have a little bit too much stomach acid. And the stress in the running in combined actually make it worse, whereas if you give your stomach something to do, to work on, it can make it better. So just start with little bits, see how you do. Something easy to digest. If it's high-intensity exercise like HIIT training, you're going to want a little bit more carbohydrate. If it's strength training, you can stick with mostly protein. I'll do a simple shake. I'll have a little Flipping 50 protein powder in a little bit of water or unsweetened almond milk and shake it up. And there's no, you know, minimum or maximum necessarily. You're just looking to get something in. So 10-20 grams of protein in, easy to digest. It won't sit like a bomb in your stomach. You're going to be ready to go. Number 7: quality movement wins over frenzied movement. So if you are going to those boot camps that were just oh so popular 10 years ago and you're just I'm going to do a battle rope and then I'm going to go and do burpees and then I'm going to go and do this. And you're just never taking a break and doing quality movement. You will find your progress is so much greater when you actually are slowing down. If you're doing a strength training component, you're doing it to muscular fatigue as opposed to just going as fast as you can to get as many reps as you can. AMRAP. Is anybody familiar with that? So it's a CrossFit term, it's a workout of the day kind of a term. As many reps as you can. AMRAP. It's not a great solution for high-quality movement that reaches muscular fatigue, and that's the goal. So think about quality movement over frenzied that may actually cause more cortisol elevation and less lean muscle mass. Overall. Number 8 is basics work better than variety for variety's sake. So I know we all love entertainment, but there are so many fusion classes out there that sometimes we lose sight of what's the goal with this exercise actually, right? And our primary goals, if we want to age really well, are gaining strength, gaining lean muscle tissue so that We're able to control our blood sugar levels better, which keeps inflammation down, which keeps disease risk down, which keeps our energy levels high, makes us want to do the things we want to do with the people we love to do them with, and enables us to do that when we want to, not when, when I feel better, right? So we really want to look at what are the exercises that do that and always have and always will. They're not very sexy. Their chest presses, their rows, and their squats, and their lunges. And yes, you'll find all kinds of sexy people doing all kinds of sexy, crazy exercises. And we want to look like her. Like, if we do that, we'll look like her. That's what they're selling. And it's not necessarily true. And the thing you have to say that I'll say this that a lot of times someone posing for an image, doing an exercise, and even is the creator of the program, that's not what she did to get looking like that. So question everything, whether it's a thought you have in your head that maybe is a limiting belief or what you're seeing in marketing. So realize that the basics work. They work really well. And if you're following research, you're using exercises that are based on research that got great results on people, women just like you. Not on mice, not on men, and not on young women. None of them has your profile. Fuel before any intense exercise. And I know I just said bookend your workouts with fuel, but this is really important. And so it's also appearing here. Fuel before any intense exercise. And this is no matter the duration, how short it is, you still want to fuel. And I know this goes— flies against a lot of people who are talking about fasting and the benefits of fasting. And I'm actually not against intermittent fasting for the right people, and I think we introduce it. But my definition of fasting is let's start first with 3 meals, no snacks, and at least 12 hours overnight. If we could start there, a lot of people would be better off and burning fat naturally, you know. And maybe you want to shorten that window of eating but without changing calories, you know, doing these crazy, you know, 18 hours of fasting, 6 hours of eating, or doing a 24-hour regularly, or 36 or 72 hours. Those are crazy. Crazy long. And then if you're trying to exercise on top of that, you may be actually burning yourself out. Number 10 is listen to your body better than you ever have before. And I think I started this way. Most of us, I think, are to the point where, yes, we want results and we don't want results at the risk of an injury because we value the ability to move and move freely through our lives, not just through our exercise. Without limitations. So I think we're mostly better at this, but I think there are those times where, boy, we all can fall into the trap of wanting a quick fix. Let's talk specifics. Let's talk specifically about some of the things that are related to perimenopause specifically. So remember, in perimenopause, the trend is down, but there's an up and down and up and down and an up and down. You may skip a period, you may then have one, but your hormones are really doing a roller coaster ride on you. And that means your energy level is— maybe that you're feeling a little extra padding in the cushions. Your body is putting on weight, and it may be fat weight, and it also just may be inflammation. Food you used to eat, you're a little bit more sensitive to, because if hormones change, your gut microbiome changes. That means you're not digesting as well as you used to. So number 11 is restore before more. That's the number one tenet of Flipping 50. Remember this: exhausted can't get fit. If you're tired all the time right now and you still are pushing yourself through punishing workouts, you're not getting yourself more fit. And I know you may have a history of 'But I was an athlete and we pushed hard.' And— but you weren't and aren't an athlete right now in this moment in menopause with this hormone profile you have right now. So I totally believe wholeheartedly that you can be an athlete again if you want to be, but we're not going to do it by the same training strategies. Does anybody remember the book by Dara Torres, who was the Olympic swimmer? And I can't remember, she was 42, I want to say, when she went to the Olympics. And I don't know again which Olympics it was for her. It might have been her fourth. But she returned, and of course there she is swimming with teenagers, right? Teenagers who could have been her children, you know, based on her age. And everything was different for her. And she wrote about— she required more recovery. She was working hard in sessions, she was doing volume, but she had a greater need for recovery. So that meant maybe more recovery strategies, like she had to do more recovery sessions, more stretching, more massage, more compression boots, you know, things like that, and tools. But potentially also more time between her hard workouts so that she was fully recovered. Now, she still got to the Olympics, she still did pretty damn well. I know it's a family show, but there's that. And she did that because she took the recovery time. So had she not, she'd been breaking down, getting more tired, putting herself at more risk for injury. And so do I, so do you, even though we're not training for the Olympics, but we can easily get into that. Well, I gotta go work out again. It's on the schedule. You know, you kind of have to override. So you can't if you're exhausted. Get more fit. And we're going to learn that lesson again and again if we don't pay attention now. Number 12, and this again for perimenopause, focus on muscle building. That's your priority. So during a time, during that perimenopausal roller coaster, when you're potentially going to have a little less energy, maybe you're going to feel more fatigue and not quite understand why you're feeling so much of that now. Make your top priority with exercise muscle building. It's going to be really important for your future, so focus on that. Then 13 is high-intensity interval training. Might hurt you, or it might help you. You have to assess that for yourself, and it might help you for a little while and then hurt you on that roller coaster. You have no idea of knowing when it's going to whip around a corner. Okay. Unfortunately, it's not going to tell you in advance, so you're going to find out the hard way. A lot of women in perimenopause don't do as well doing high-intensity interval training during peri, but can do it later. But you have to play this by ear. It may work and it may work fine, and it may help you offset any belly fat or prevent gains. But if it's backfiring, you doing high-intensity interval training and doing more exercise also may put on weight or belly fat. So if you find that's happening, the first thing to peel off is your HIIT. So just know that, yeah, it's there, it's up for grabs, but you might want to shelve it for a little while and know, I can, but right now I'm getting better results maybe without it. 14 is activities that create positive neurotransmitters are your best friend. So the brain fog, so commonly talked about, and the brain fog can spill over to other things. So brain fog is— by the way, I had the flu the last couple of days. And I was like, oh, I remember this. There were days in perimenopause, and unfortunately for me, not very many, but I remember just feeling like I have so much work to do and I, I quite honestly can't do it. Like, I'm just not able to focus on it. And, you know, this is what a lot of women will experience. It's one of the worst things. So you have very limited concentration time. You need to take advantage, by the way, of those times in the morning when cortisol hopefully is to your advantage and it's a little bit higher then, so you can focus, do the problem-solving things, the harder things at that point. But focus on things that create neurotransmitters, positive ones. What are those? Exercise to music. For many of us, music is a neurostimulator Focus on things that get you outdoors, working in a group, working out in a group, or if you prefer, just a friend, just a single friend. So you're talking along the way and you're enjoying the conversation. So socially operating, or walk with your dog, that's social in one way or another. Petting animals but keeping them with you while you're exercising is really what we're focused on here. So focus on those things that cause those positive strokes from doing it. You also may feel like you have less motivation, even if you're somebody who exercises regularly. And there's studies that show we have fewer dopamine receptors. And dopamine is another feel-good hormone. Serotonin is the one most associated with women. It's the one we hear about the most. But dopamine gives us the feel-good things that we experience often from doing exercise, and we won't get as big a dopamine hit from the same exercise as we used to during menopause. Number 15 is don't underestimate walking and strength training. Keeping it simple. Don't underestimate just cutting back to the simple and the bare minimum. Walking on a regular basis, moving more often throughout the day, and doing your strength training could be the most powerful dose that you have. If you can do the other things and want to and can make time for them, okay, great. But if you just peeled back to the very basics, a lot of women in perimenopause will find that actually serves them really well to keep it simple. Okay, so let's flip over. Knowing that menopause is that blip on the scale where you've hit it I like to address this when I'm talking to trainers and health coaches in our Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. Like to talk about this as menopause transition is the couple of years at the end stage of perimenopause, the early 2 years into postmenopause. You've hit that 12th month, no period, that's officially menopause. But there's a lot going on there in terms of what could happen to muscle, what could happen to bone if we're not doing something positive about it. That's a really crucial time to get together with a female who's midlife. If you're a trainer or health coach and you happen to be listening, here they are for post-menopause, and there are 5 of these. Number 1, energy is more stable. So that's a good thing. You could push a little harder than you did. So I don't want you to settle back and think, oh, now I'm older, because that is mainstream. It's what everybody's doing. It's not what we've got as evidence now in research. We can actually take a little bit more. We can weather it and do really well, and we can minimize our body fat, we can increase our lean muscle, we can get stronger, and we're going to live longer. Healthier by doing that. So you can tolerate a little bit more. Continue to prioritize your strength. Do not discontinue that. Number 18, frequency of your HIIT, your high-intensity interval training. Now maybe you couldn't do any before. It can often increase. A lot of times 2 times a week would be as much as I'd want somebody in perimenopause to do, just because we've got to conserve a little bit more. Make sure you're not throwing yourself under the bus because you're more susceptible to negative effects of stress, but you might increase that to 4 times a week. Here's the guideline I use, and somebody could do 5 times a week if you chop it up differently. Here's how I like to think of it. 45 minutes during the research that I wrote for You Still Got It, Girl! The After 50 Fitness Formula for Women that I did showed that as HIIT went up in mainstream over the course of years, the injury risk also went up. And after about 45 minutes during each week— not per session, everybody— during a week of high-intensity interval training— now we're not counting the warm-ups and cool-downs— after about 45 minutes a week, injury rates went up significantly. So what does that look like? Well, maybe that's 2 20-minute sessions. You got now about 40 minutes of high-intensity interval session. So that is the hard part, the recovery part. The hard part, the recovery part. That's all of that. So you could also say, well, I could do 10 minutes and do that, you know, 5 days a week, then I've only got 50 minutes. Is that okay for you? It might be okay. Or do that 4 times a week and do 10 to 12 minutes, and then you're right at about the space. So Don't all add those all at once. You know, if you're regularly doing 2, try the 3rd time, see how you do with that for a few weeks. If you haven't been doing any, start with 1, do that for a week or 2, see how you feel at the 2nd time, do that for a few weeks, see how you feel at the 3rd time. The more you add something to think about— maybe you love running and you're running on a treadmill, you're running uphill you might wanna think about if you're doing 4, so you're doing more frequency that you don't pound on everyone. Remember, it's not the mode, but you're using your legs and, and muscles differently and you're not breaking down the muscle with the high impact quite as much. At the end of your workout, you're doing some stretching. Mobility is done that day, but on days you're not otherwise exercising, Maybe you just go for a walk and you're not used to coming in and stretching after the walk. Try doing that, or try adding a short yoga session or Pilates. Or if you've got a Power Plate, you're actually exercising right on that. Doing a pigeon pose on it to maintain mobility can be very helpful. And number 20, da da da da da, drum roll please, it's add power regularly to your workouts. And the way power shows up is through moving quickly, generally against resistance. So that could be you pick up a medicine ball, you're gonna take that and you're gonna slam it down on the ground. You're gonna slam it. And you could stand on two feet, you could stand on one foot, you can push it against a wall as hard as possible. You can just throw it out into the yard as hard as you can. That's an example of using power against resistance, fast or hard. You can also use power in strength training exercises. There's a difference between momentum, where you're just going back and forth and quick, versus something heavy— fairly heavy, not as heavy as you can go— but powering that up as quickly as possible, slowing it, and then lowering it down under control. Powering up, slowly lowering it down. And of all under control. Those things are really important. So that is adding power regularly. Those are things you want to make sure post-menopause— absolutely, that might sneak into perimenopause, but the older we get, the more we're going to pay attention and the more things you can pay attention to. So isolate in perimenopause, focus on those things that are really ideally the things you most need to feel Good, not exhausted. Post-menopause, you should feel like the gate is open, like you have the latitude to come back to things you enjoyed that maybe you'd put aside 'cause you didn't quite have the energy. Now they're back. But your goal from here to the end now is maintain or gain that lean muscle, maintain and gain the strength should be tied to the muscle, and maintain and gain bone density. And there you have it. Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want to listen to. You as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman. So go and listen right now. So there you have it in quick summary. So really the important piece to remember is number one, you no longer have the hormones that you had once. You're not going back there. You can't get back to the fitness level that you used to have doing the things you used to do. Now the truth is you may look better and feel better than you ever have in your life. You could be at your peak of fitness because you're smarter, you're wiser, you probably have a little bit more patience maybe a little bit more common sense. Is that just me? But I know it took a while to get here. You do want to do things differently than you've ever done before in your life. If you're in perimenopause, chances are you're going to want to scale back from what you think or what programs, guidelines, position statements, and trainers may be telling you to do. When you think you got to go harder, you got to hit it intensely, During perimenopause, you have to really listen closely to what's going on for you and pay attention to the things and the ways that you want to measure it. In postmenopause, things have evened out. You're no longer on that roller coaster and you're a little bit older. You're going to need more stimulus. You have fewer hormones. Even if you're doing HRT, you don't have the same amount of hormones you had premenopause or even in perimenopause. So you need more exercise stimulus of the the right kind. And don't forget, you need to respect yourself with the right recovery. Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you would love to ask? Or maybe a story you want to tell? 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