3 Steps to Improve Cardio Fitness and Longevity (at any age)

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. You're losing it, but you don't have to. In this episode, I'm going to talk about your cardiovascular fitness for a change. We talk about strength so much, but spoiler alert, there is a plot twist coming within this video. Stay tuned. I'm Debra Atkinson and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness and menopause and beyond before you know to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with the 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. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, 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 behind 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 you want, need, and deserve. So the reality is we are losing it if we're not doing something to hold on tight to it. We're losing cardiovascular fitness. It's named and measured by something called VO2 max volume of oxygen consumed within a minute, a specific period of time. VO2 max, by the way, is the most powerful predictor of longevity together with lower body strength. The two of them will tell the story of your future and mine. So increasing your VO2 max can significantly increase your longevity. And let's face it, we're not just concerned about how long we live, but how well. And it will do that for you too. So let's dive into this where I'm going to share with you, number one, what really is it? What is the slightly science geek definition of it so you understand it in simple terms? And what can you do? What 3 things can you do within your exercise week to improve your VO2 max? And how can you measure VO2 max if you don't want to go to a lab and be uber uncomfortable doing a test where you have to wear a mask, breathing in with those plugs, and you're breathing in oxygen so that they can measure the expired CO2 and see how much you consumed. It's not comfortable, I can tell you that. And there are other ways that you can much more easily gauge, have I improved? So here we go. Number 1, VO2 max typically declines with age. And part of it is in the definition. As we'll talk about, you'll understand why. With studies suggesting that an average annual reduction of your VO2 and mine, how rude, happens at about a rate of 1% after the age of 25. 25 coincides with the time we peak in our muscle mass. So muscle mass is the most metabolically active tissue. You've heard me say that more than once if you're an OG here. Muscle mass has a lot of circulation. There's a lot of oxygen being delivered to it. Fat mass doesn't have that at all. So we know that we want more muscle mass, and the more we have, the better our VO2 max stands to be. Now, we still have to do something fitness-wise for it to be optimal, but in our lifetime, whether we exercise or we don't, we all peak our muscle mass at about age 25, naturally. Now, that's not to say that some of us might have been inactive at 25 and now we're 55 and we're starting to pay attention, right? And maybe we're more fit than we were then. And go you! For you, I'd love to hear it. Tell me in the comments. I want to hear from you. And You are inspiring somebody else who will be reading those comments. So go ahead, lay it on. But I want you to understand that we don't have to decline, but we often will, even if we're doing the same routine that we did when we were 25 and 30, because it actually takes more stimulus as we age because the muscle quality tends to decline. We also tend to much more easily put on fat. And if you're here because you are a female in midlife going through hormonal changes, you know what I mean? That gets easier when estrogen comes down. Cortisol naturally is on the rise. That changes how we burn fat and store fat naturally. Now, that's not to say that you and I can't overcome those changes, but it does make it more challenging if we try to operate in the same system and strategy we always have because we don't have the same hormones that we always had, which is We just have to get a little wiser in how we are catering to them and dealing with them. So VO2 max typically declines with age, that 1%, starting after the age of 25, that annually, annually. So let's say you're 50, 25% reduction in your VO2 max. I hope you, like me, are saying, "Oh, heck no, that's not going to happen." And if you've been exercising Between those periods of time or between 25 and now, you likely did not lose 1%. Maybe you didn't lose any, but I'm going to guess we probably lost a little. We're just not pushing it quite as much. We're not as naturally physically high in muscle, so consuming that oxygen, but we're probably— we've got a little busier, we had careers, we had families, and we're just not quite doing as much. So let's— we can test that theory, but here we go. How can you improve it? There are 3 ways, so pay close attention. Long, slow aerobic exercise. If we were thinking equilateral triangle, we're thinking the foundation and the base of support for our fitness level, it is kind of primed in long, slow aerobic exercise. So we're talking going for walks, Hiking, biking, if you prefer long swimming, what activities do you like? Some of you might like getting on an elliptical and staying there for long periods of time. That base can be great. If you're a woman in midlife, I would beware of that moderate exercise. You get greater benefits working below a threshold where cortisol comes up. So it's where you're very comfortable, you're partially breathing through both your your nose and your mouth. You can't breathe entirely through your nose anymore. You're not that comfortable, but you're also not huffing and puffing and only mouth breathing. That's one way to tell. You can carry on a conversation, but you're starting to talk a little more like this between the breaths. So we don't have to go rocket science and say, what heart rate is that? What percent is that? Because unless I tested you personally, I can't tell you that. And no one else can really. They may suggest, "Well, between this and this," but that's only age-related. And let me tell you, age-related averages suggest you're average. Girlfriend, you're nothing but average, right? And for most adults over 40, seriously, the calculations like that underpredict. They don't give us enough credit. And so they're suggesting we should be at a level below where we actually need to be. So how you feel never lies. So if you're getting breathless, you're probably working a little too hard and you're into that, you're developing more cortisol in that middle zone, unless you're really going for breathless, which is at the top of the pyramid. And we'll talk about that too. Long, slow aerobic exercise is the best foundation. 80% of your exercise time when you're doing quote unquote cardio would be there. That means spend a lot of time going for walks, okay? And number 2, HIIT, high-intensity interval training. Now you can say sit-sprint interval training, you can say high-intensity repeat training. All of these things really mean the same thing. If you listen to this, what you want to know is between 15 and 30 seconds you're going to get breathless. So don't put a label on it and say, well, I thought you weren't supposed to do that. You're supposed to do this, get breathless in 30 seconds or less, and then it's truly HIIT. That's what we want. We don't want a long extended— it's going to take you 2 or 4 minutes or 1.5, or should I keep going? No, you just got to find that thing that will get you breathless like you're sprinting to a finish line, and that's it. So you want to do HIIT. And one other thing about the other 20% doing high-intensity exercise— HIIT you might do between 5 and 10% of your exercise time. And here's what we're doing. So strength training is the last one. You didn't think I was going to get through a whole video not talking about strength training, did you? Right. So strength training actually does kind of operate in your body like HIIT, like high-intensity interval training, because think of it, if you're doing a squat You're going up and down, or it could be a leg press if you're on a machine weight for about a minute, maybe less. You are working really hard. Your heart rate goes up and then you put that weight down or you get off the machine, you rest, and the heart rate comes back down. So it was like up and then down and up and then down. The same pattern that you create with high-intensity interval training when you might be doing squat jumps or something else that gets your heart rate up, sprints on the bike. On the elliptical. So those two high-intensity activities you want to spend less time at. There's more muscle damage, there needs to be more recovery, but you do want to do them and they do count. So they extend and count for about 20% of your exercise intensity. If you're kind of looking at base foundation for cardio, low level, and then high-intensity work happens a little bit more, that's how you want to spend your time if you're focused on VO2. Make sure you get breathless a little bit every week. Doesn't have to be much, but it needs to be there, and that's prioritizing it. So improving both your fitness, that oxygen delivery, and the use of the oxygen. When you get more fit, you start walking more, you're doing interval training, you're doing your resistance training, your body, your heart muscle number one is stronger and it pumps more blood and more oxygen with every single beat. It's more efficient, so it doesn't have to be as high a heart rate. Your resting heart rate comes down. And there's the second piece that happens with VO2 max. It can't just be the oxygen passing through. The oxygen has to stop and get absorbed, and that extraction also happens. If you've ever noticed with triathletes, somebody who does a lot of endurance activity, They're very vascular, meaning you can see their veins, you can see it in their legs, and that means they're probably really good at pulling that out. They've got a lot of vascularity. It shows right now. Not all of us are going to be that lucky to be able to see it because they got that little extra something on top, and that's okay too, as long as it's happening. So when you improve your fitness level, and if you were to reduce your weight, like your body weight, maybe you lost a little body fat— we don't want to lose muscle— it would mean that your VO2 improved. And let me tell you why. Hey, this is Debra Atkinson. I love creating the Flipping 50 podcast for you, and I have for over a decade. I also love helping midlife women shift not only their physical energy, but their beliefs about what effective exercise looks like and how much it can positively and powerfully impact your life. How you menopause and exercise in menopause determines how you live, not just now, but decades from now. If you're not exercising right now, you're getting tired, not stronger, or you think you don't have time or the energy to exercise, do a 5-day flip with me. I'll send you one short video a day for 5 days. It's just 15 to 20 minutes long. So you can see exactly how I plan out a fitness plan for myself and for thousands of clients I've worked with. You can get this at flipping50.com right now. What are you waiting for? Let's start flipping 50 together. VO2 is a measure of milliliters, like that's the container. How much milliliters of oxygen? Milliliters per kilogram. So we can convert that, of course, from pounds to kilograms so you understand. Milliliters per kilogram per minute. It's saying, what's the volume of oxygen that based on your body weight you can consume per minute? That's how VO2 is scored. So let me give you a, a kind of comparison or a way to gauge. For a co-ed in college, the average for females is probably about 42. For males, it's a little bit higher, might be 48. I have had some— I've tested 15 years. Every semester we would test students doing this, so I had to be the instructor in the room, and we let them be their own guinea pigs and learn how to administer tests, I would teach them how to do that. We would have sometimes some really fit students in class, and I've had somebody in class once who was over 65. I mean, that was crazy. He was endurance cyclist, and it was like, I've never seen those numbers before and I may never see them again in my life. So thank you. But when we look at how do we compare, you and I, you know, we're probably— we've slipped back, maybe not lost a percent of our VO2, every year since 25, but we're probably not at our, our peak, whatever that was. And if you didn't, didn't major in kinesiology, you probably didn't do that testing necessarily. Now, if you have been a triathlete or other kind of ultra-endurance athlete, you may indeed have gone in and done some testing because often we will use VO2, we'll use heart rate as coaches who train athletes to do things like that, and it will keep them in their parameters. But the rest of us normal humans probably don't do that. But think about when you improve your fitness, the oxygen delivery and extraction gets better. If we were to lose weight, then we're delivering more oxygen to less weight. Our VO2 suddenly goes up. So there are two ways to approach it. Now, you may not want to or stand to lose weight, so that's not going to change things. But definitely, again, we don't want to lose muscle ever. Keep that real estate. It is yours. Let's come back to the value of VO2 for reducing all-cause mortality, meaning reasons to die. Let's not do that. A moderate increase of 3.5 milliliters per kilogram per minute. That is what we call a MET, a metabolic equivalent, or a MET level. This is really taking me back to the years that I taught in kinesiology. Met levels are kind of like how hard is an activity? And we would say, well, that's an equivalent of, say, 3 mets, or that's an equivalent of a 6-met level. And by the way, 6 mets is going to make both you and I cry. That's hard. It's really hard. So 1 met might be we're climbing the stairs and we're climbing a couple flights of stairs. We had to keep going. It would get maybe more challenging, but we can do that. Not that big a deal. 2 MET levels, now we're talking maybe we're running up the stairs. It's a much bigger deal. We're gonna make it far more difficult and so on. So it gets much more difficult, but 1 MET level. And you know, as we get aged, really aged, we're probably 1 to 2 MET levels is where many older and frail individuals who lose muscle mass, remember where we deliver the oxygen and extract it from. They don't have a lot of VO2 max anymore. You and I need to keep it. Number one, we need to keep our muscle and do that strength training so we have it to deliver, and we're also increasing that vascularity by doing that. And we need to do cardiovascular activity. I know you hear us emphasize strength training, and it's true, we want to do that, but we want to walk on a regular basis as well and then get breathless just a little bit every week. That's a great combined overall fitness program and one that won't throw you under the bus. We don't have to go hard, go hard or go home every day. We go hard sometimes, and then between we recover and get lots of movement in. That's the secret. So a modest increase, just 1 MET level. What does it take to do that? I'll tell you in a minute, but here's the deal. That's all it takes to reduce all-cause mortality by up to 25%. Cut your risk of dying by 25%. That's pretty good. All right. So how do you know you're improving? Let's talk first about what you would do. So over the course of a week, every day, try to get some activity in, walking 30 to 60 minutes a day. Can be in one lump, can be in two, could be in three, could be multiple, breaking it up during the day as you need to. On the days you're doing high-intensity interval training, maybe you're walking just a little bit less. You don't have to fit them both in at long extended periods of time. On the days you're strength training, again, maybe you're walking less, balancing it. Say, hey, I'm doing something good already. I'll just get some steps in, in addition. But maybe you don't have as much time. That's okay. You've still got a well-rounded, program that's going to boost your VO2 max. If you don't want to go into a lab, and it's not going to be free, you're going to have to pay for that. And the ideal would be, if you're going to test once to find out what it is, you test again after and in between of programming to improve it on purpose so we know you're becoming more fit and efficient. But if you don't want to do that, go through the discomfort and and then have to do it again and know you're going to go through that discomfort. It's always worth the second time because you know it's coming, right? So here's ways you could do this— testing your fitness level at home. And I've got a whole battery of tests you can get, but I'll tell you some of these and then tell you how you can get your hands on the PDF. It's an e-guide that will give you 7 categories of testing that you can do pretty easily at home. Number 1 is your resting heart rate. So if, if you're wearing a garment or a watch and maybe already telling you what it is, but first thing in the morning while you're lying horizontal. So if you don't sleep with your watch on, you're going to need to just stop, take your heart rate and look at what is your resting heart rate per minute while you've been horizontal all night. It's at its lowest. That's truly your resting heart rate. So even in the day, if you've been sitting for a while reading a book, that might be okay. If that's the first time you remember it. But if you've had caffeine, you've had stress, you've had, you've had other things going on, probably isn't at its low. But when you see a change in your resting heart rate, you see it go down from where it was, that's an indication that your heart has become stronger and your VO2 very likely has increased. Second, recovery heart rate at the end of an interval. And I explained how to do this in the Longevity Scorecard, so grab that But you would do an interval where you get breathless within 30 seconds and you mark, what is my heart rate when I get breathless right now, when it's at its highest? And then 1 minute later, you look at where's my heart rate now. That difference— how much did you come down? That recovery heart rate, if it's 20 beats or more, you've done really well. So you recovered quickly. Your heart is resilient. It's kind of saying, yeah, no problem. What else you got? That wasn't that big a deal, right? That I can get breathless and I can recover really quickly. You want that to happen. It means your heart is really good at handling stress. So whether it's an emotional, physical stressor, it doesn't really know. Same response. The third thing is do a 1-mile walk test. Now, if you have a local track that you can get access to. Tracks are great because you can say, okay, I'm on the inside lane, I'm walking a mile, I know this is a quarter-mile track, I'm going to walk it 4 times and then stop. Generally, you can double-check the distance with— if you've got a Garmin or something that's measuring distance for you, that'll also help. If you don't, see if you can find an area flat in your neighborhood and find, you know, a place where you can go and measure it in your car approximately, and then you've got a starting place and a finish place. You want this to be repeatable, so you're going to come back and do it a second time later after you've done some training. So you've done some high-intensity interval training, you've done some strength training, you've done some walking on a regular basis. You're going to come back and periodically repeat that test, maybe once a month, maybe once a quarter. But you want to double-check, am I Am I getting anywhere? Is my program working for me? If you see that resting heart rate come down, if you see your recovery heart rate improve— so at the end of the interval and 1 minute later, and the gap between those 2 numbers is 20 or more, you're doing great. And the 1-mile walk test, whatever that number is when you first test, did it improve later? And you can also compare yourself to norms. How do I compare to other women who are, in my case, 61? How do I compare whether we're looking at recovery heart rate or we're looking at resting heart rate? In those two cases, those are much more relevant to us, to me and you. Your resting heart rate, you may have one you've been born with because of your genetics. You didn't pick your parents well, and it's just what it is. You ride a little higher. But that may be healthy for you and normal for you. So you just need to look at where is my resting heart rate now, and if I am conditioning purposefully to get in better shape, is that coming down? Because it will if your cardiovascular program is working for you. Now, some of you may be on a medication that is blocking heart rate, not allowing it to come up when you exercise, or controlling it when you're at rest. The heart rate and the recovery, those things might not be working, but the mile walk test still would for you. You can still look at, if I'm going a mile, how long does it take me? How quickly can I get that done? Those are, those are great tests. And no matter what happens to your heart rate when you're doing that, you're going to walk as quickly as you can. You don't want to be stopping, starting. You want to find a pace that you can keep this up and get that done as quickly as possible. That mile walk test is very valuable. So just roughly, what would that take you? Anywhere probably between, say, 13, 14 miles. It would be very, very fast. 15 is kind of a, a 15-minute mile, obviously, and 4 miles per hour, or up to 20. Ideally, you're not taking too much longer for a walking pace. To get it done. I hope that was helpful. For the scorecard, you can get it, it's free, accessible, and what you'll get is a scorecard so you can begin that test now, compare yourself to norms, but most of all compare you today to you after you've gone through a training program. So check the link down below, let me know how you're doing, questions about VO2 max or your cardiovascular fitness, I would love to hear from you. So that's it, all about VO2 max. And by the way, if you're listening to it and hearing me say down below, this originally started out as a podcast episode as a YouTube video. So if you want to go and watch the live version and you want to see some illustrations of testing and intervals, get a little bit more entertained, you'll see it there. But that's why all the mentions of you'll see this down below and That would be true if you were looking at this from the show notes, and I know you're out potentially on a walk or you're on a commute, maybe you're lifting weights, and I love all those things. I, well, I love less the commute, but if you're out on a hike or a walk and you're taking me along, I love to live virtually through you, and I'm imagining that I'm hiking in Colorado or on the beach somewhere tropical. So if that's true, let me know that I went to the beach today, 'cause I would love it, and I would so love it If the podcast has been of value to you, if you would share it with at least one friend, if not two, that's how we extend our reach. We help more women, and you and I have better conversations with our friends, our colleagues, or sisters about getting in shape and questions that we have for each other that you can hopefully dig a little deeper and get somebody as an accountability partner while you're doing it. Thank you so much in advance. I'll see you on the flip side. Thank you so much for listening. To listen and access a decade of episodes and the show notes, visit flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all of our prior episodes. And I made it easy for you to make the most of your listening time by selecting 5 specific areas most commonly high priorities for our community and giving you top 10 lists if you let me know you'd love them. If you know a midlife woman or a soon-to-be one who wants to optimize her midlife energy and time with the right exercise and lifestyle changes and a mindset shift about just What is possible? Share this podcast with her, and I thank you. There is no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman.