3 Workout Studies Every Woman Over 50 Needs to Know

Okay, two things. If you have a shorter walk and you need a little motivation and you want a little science, I've got ya. This is exactly what you're gonna get. I'm gonna share three scientific studies that pertain specifically to you if you're a woman over 50. Now look, if you're over 40, you can stay, okay? And if you're over 60, you're over 50, so you qualify, okay? So Get ready. Tie your shoes. Get your lifting gloves on and let's go. You're in perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause and you're not slowing down. You're just getting started. But the old rules don't apply anymore. The workouts that worked before, they're working against you now. The advice you've been given, incomplete at best. I'm Debra Atkinson, and I'm the founder of Flipping 50, the pioneer in fitness for women in midlife. For more than 40 years, I've been in the trenches with women just like you, and for the last 12, right here on this podcast, and, and the founder of Flipping 50: The Stronger Way app and membership. Welcome to Flipping 50: The Stronger Way, where science meets strength, where you'll find the tools, research, and real talk to build the body and the life you want in your second half. Each week you'll get evidence-based exercise and nutrition strategies, conversations with leading experts, and honest answers to the questions your doctor didn't get answers to in medical school and doesn't have time to answer in an appointment. This is your show. Let's get stronger. All right. In this episode, I'm sharing 3 workout studies that every woman over 50 needs to hear. And if you think it's too late or you think you don't know how to start, I'm going to invite you to join me for 90 minutes. Not today. I told you it'd be a short one, and I promise it will. But if you really are— that's your excuse, like, I don't know where to begin, I don't know what to do, I don't know who to believe. And if you trust my voice and you're here, you tune into the podcast regularly, or for some reason serendipity dropped you in today, consider this. I do a 90-minute, what we call an ultimate assessment, and it's seriously— it's a terrible name. I I get it. If you have an idea and you have a marketing hat on and you wanna put something into words that frames this, please do. But let's figure out a plan together. What happens during these 90 minutes? And 90 minutes, will you agree, that's a long time, and it's for a reason. We do a very thorough intake. You have homework before. As soon as you book it, I will send you a series of forms to fill out, a survey basically that's asking you not the boring generic health and activity history, although I'm going to get a little of that too. I'm going to get things that hint at me what's going on for you and what should be our first priorities. And it has a lot more to do with whether you loved aerobics back in the day or you play pickleball 4 days a week, but it has a lot to do with what's going on with your digestion, elimination, your libido, your focus, your concentration, your muscle mass, your everything. And I don't need to do labs. I'm not a doctor and I don't necessarily interpret labs in a way that I certainly can't prescribe for you and I don't diagnose. Labs can be helpful if you have them and I can look at them from the lens of, okay, that's reinforcing, but I still am gonna ask you these questions that I do. The 90-minute assessment. I use a special process called the Halo Method. That is a proprietary system that I teach to our trainers who become Flipping 50 Menopause Specialists. I teach it to physicians so that exercise prescription becomes easy for a population of very well-educated medical practitioners who didn't have an hour of exercise in all of their medical school. We take into consider during that Halo Method application 4 crucial things about you and where you are right now. And once we determine your highest priorities, we can craft a plan to tackle them for you one by one. And the magic of doing it that way is that by solving for one, we often get to the second and third, the underlying ones come along for the ride. For women between 40 and 60, resistance training shows gains in muscle strength fairly equally. That is a woman who is 40 and a woman who was 60, and let's just say ish, plus or minus a couple of years either way. Gained muscle strength pretty evenly. But for postmenopausal women, there were not the body composition changes that did occur in younger women. Volume greater than 6 to 8 sets per muscle group per week may be required for postmenopausal women to achieve positive body composition changes. That was the conclusion of the researchers in a particular study. Why? Why would that be true? So we're talking about you, especially if you have some level of experience, meaning you've been exercising consistently or inconsistently. Because let's, let's realize we all have a window sometimes of time when we get busy, things get in the way. It's not as consistent as it was or you'd like it to be. But if you are someone who's most of her life she's been active in specific ways, intentionally, consciously exercising for bettering her health, you will notice that what you did when you were 40 and 30 will not work the same way at 60. Even when you were 50, if you were consistently exercising, what you did then may not work when you're 60. Couple of things are happening. A combination of greater anabolic resistance, and that is you're resisting the gaining of the muscle strength and the muscle mass with aging. That occurs to both men and women, but more dramatically to women because of the fall and decline of our estrogen levels. And yes, our growth hormone, our testosterone fall off as well, But our estrogen really has the greatest impact on us. So when men go through andropause, about a decade later, they're already in their 60s. So, and they also come in kind of slower, you know, and they decline a little more gently than we do. We kind of hit that boom, critical mass, and it's like, oh wow, okay, things really changed right during this short window of time. So combination of greater anabolic resistance that occurs with aging, less estrogen post-menopause, which some would call estrogen deficiency. Like, we had it, it was sufficient, now it's no longer. The bottom line is to optimize your body composition post-menopause, lifting weights or otherwise doing resistance training and eating protein for muscle synthesis is required But the bigger caveat is it will take more than younger you took. We will have to really focus on that protein intake. We can't just guess and say, ah, most of the time I get it. But we also have to look at the exercise and say, did I actually— was I committed to that? Have I gotten as much? And if the answer is no, that would be the first two places to start, not another supplement. Not even creatine, not your essential amino acids, not whatever somebody is selling online that they started and this made all the difference. If you don't have the protein and the stimulus for the exercise, those two things really have to come first as your foundation. So realize that if I'm talking to you and you're listening and you are a beginner— beginners, we all need to have you start in the same place. So we start with light weights and we progress, and you won't need to look yet at greater volume because you're just, you're just getting to the point where you're accumulating that volume. So you don't want to look at what are other women doing and, you know, comparing a 40-year-old to a 60-year-old and jumping in where that 60-year-old has been active for 30 years, is doing more, because you have to start where you are. Start at the beginning. You start with fewer sets, you add more sets. You start with lightweight, higher reps and gradually over months, even a full year, to actually get up to the point where you're adding heavier weight, you're adding power. And all of those things have their place, but take your time if you're a beginner. If you're someone who's exercising for years and you're finding this phenomenon to be true, don't toss in the towel and say, "Oh, it doesn't work anymore. I, you know, what do I need?" It's not a weight-loss med. You know, right? But, and not to put those down, but that's really not the challenge. The challenge is if you're doing what you used to do, it won't— you are absolutely right, it won't work anymore. You need greater stimulus. Okay, next study of over 2,500 women. And we like this, right? Because that's at least 1,000 people. That's a big pool of people. Women between 45 and 80, the average age was about 66, showed lifting either 2 or 3 times per week, 7 exercises per session, 11 repetitions, doing total body. So this was both upper body and lower body for about 50 minutes, 5-0 duration. Now that's tricky and I'm gonna come back to duration. Resulted in improved body strength, body composition, and muscle for every age, 45 to 80, right? They all improved strength, body composition, and muscle. Boom. No excuses. If you think it's too late, if you're 80, it's not. I've shared previously with you studies with Subjects divided into two groups. This will ring a bell. 65 to 85, and then 85 plus. And both groups increased strength and muscle mass, but it was the 85-year-olds that gained the most, the highest percentage of strength. Now we're talking relative, relative to where they were, not absolute. If we compared How much? What was the weight? And this is one of the reasons why it's really important to me when people see me doing lifting in a video and they ask, "What are the weights that you're using?" I'm like— strategically, I don't answer the way I want to. So I used to answer, "None of your business. What I'm lifting is none of your business because you don't know what else I've done that day. You don't know that I've lifted for 4 decades. You don't know that I don't have a shoulder injury. You don't know You don't have my background, you don't have my history. And so for me to tell you that and you go into comparison mode, it's just not a good thing. So I— the better way to answer is, in this particularly, this demo, I used a weight that helped me reach close to muscle fatigue by 12 reps or 15 or whatever it might have been. But I want you to be cautious. It's important that you know relative weight. Don't compare yourself by absolute weight, right? This episode is sponsored by the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. It is the framework that we designed our entire membership and program based on. Since 2013, I've been developing that after 30 years of working with women in midlife. That was born, and in 2018, we rolled out the Menopause Fitness Specialist to train other fitness and health pros on how to actually prescribe exercise. Here's where we're going next, in case you want to get started now, that we're actually training physicians on exercise prescription, knowing they get very little of it in medical school, and hoping that it also bridges the gap for you who may be a fitness or health professional or want to be, who works with women in menopause, because there is so much demand and so much room for you right now. If you are working with women in menopause but not getting all the results, don't have a reliable, predictable framework that gets you results over and over that people know, like, and trust, come and talk to us. We'll put the link in the show notes for today. That's the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. And if you want to head on over to fitnessmarketingacademy.com, it's where we have all of the content dedicated to you, health and fitness pros. So the, the real message I think is consistency works no matter the mention. There's, there's no mention in this study, by the way, of specific number of sets or, um, where with this age range being much greater, the farther postmenopause women are, less additional volume may be required. So remember the first study we talked about when we're comparing women 40 to 60? The 60-year-olds, we're going to need a little bit more volume, and that might be one more set for the same muscle group, might be another exercise with one or two sets for the same muscle group. We're just going to need a little bit more and take it to fatigue, that volatile fatigue, it's called, almost not to total failure, in order to overload the muscle enough so that it's like getting a wake-up call. It's like, you know, mentally or cognitively, maybe you go a little hard of hearing as we get older. The eyesight's not quite so good, right? Same thing is happening to your muscle. They're a little hard of hearing. You have to do a little bit more to get them to hear you. Right? And follow through and do something about it. So we might find that with 80-year-olds that we don't need quite as much volume. And certainly if you're a beginner who's starting at 75, 77, or 80, we all start with fewer sets, with lighter weight, focused on form. There's 3 things that I'd like to remind people. That everybody should do these, whether it's starting, restarting, whether it's adapting a new workout routine, a style of workout, or doing an exercise you didn't know or haven't done for a long time. We start with form, technique, the way it's done correctly, right muscles working, wrong muscles not, starting position nailed. Finishing position nailed. That's first. And that takes a while. With a lightweight, going through those things actually helps the neural connection, your brain to your muscle. That message gets stronger. Second step. Now we can start adding load. We've got it. We've been doing it for 6 to 8 weeks. It takes that long for your neural connection to get strong enough that more weight will actually do you good. So we go then to starting to add a little more weight. That means instead of 15 or 20 reps, we're going down now to 12 to 15, or we're going to 8 to 12. And little by little, if I say that to you, I'm saying the weight just got heavier, right? So the weight you would pick up and not be able to do more than 20 is not the same weight that you'd pick up if I said, "I want you not to be able to do 9." Only 8, go up to 8, no more than that. So it's a very different way, right? So realize that over time that's going to change. But if we were women who'd been exercising our whole lives over 80, we may have had a period of time after 60, post-menopause, where we needed more volume. That may not be true for us as we age. We can work hard, But actually doing less actually gets you in better shape with less likelihood of getting injured. I'll tell you a story. So I, 3 years ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, uh, took, and I think 4 and 2 years ago, I took groups to the Grand Canyon and did rim to river to rim. And that means you start at the, and this was South Rim, but it was 2 different trails on the South Rim. So we start and we're going down on one side and then we come up on the other. And generally you come up Bright Angel is the name of the trail. If you've been to the Grand Canyon, you know, and you end like right there, there you are in the village with all the tourists and you can basically walk to your hotel. If you're staying in the park, it's, you know, a couple blocks away and you're in the shower and you've got some food and air conditioning and it's, Awesome. And, and it's crazy that it really happens like that. But, you know, that is not for the faint of heart, by the way. It's not for somebody who takes it lightly either and thinks, well, I'm in great shape, I can do it. It's 17 miles. But friends, it's not 17 miles flat. You're first going down. Now, that may feel like easy, going with gravity. Yes, and you got to watch your footing. You're going down doing eccentric contractions. Now, to some of you who are athletes or experienced, that means something to you. But what it should mean is you will be sore after doing eccentric exercise. It's the eccentric stuff that gets you. So you might be able to run all day or walk all day on a flat, but walking downhill, hiking downhill is eccentrically— you're kind of putting on the brakes the whole time, trying not to go fast, not to faceplant. And that's harder on your joints, for specifically knees in this case. And you're also jamming your toes into your shoes. So you may lose a toenail doing that. So it's about straight down. It's not bad. It's beautiful. It's epic. It's surreal. It's some of the, some of the most breathtaking moments of sunrise I think I'll ever see in my life. And I would love to do it again, but, um, You know, the longer you take lollygagging, stopping for pictures, and I'm all for that, but I like to move. Let's go. I'm here for the workout. I'm not here just to sightsee. You take your time going down, you're going to pay for it going up because we want to start at about 5:00, 5:30 in the morning and we want to start up by 8:00, 8:30 because it's probably going to take you 6 hours easily, and it's gonna be hot by 1 and 2 PM, and that's— it's not going to be fun because that at the hardest part of your day, you're going up constantly for 9 miles, but you're doing it after having gone down, jamming your toes into your shoes, doing eccentric contractions, so your quads are crying. And you know, the heat of the day is just coming up, you're tired of electrolytes flavor no matter what flavor you have, you're The water is warm. It's coming out of the supply at the Grand Canyon. So guess what? It doesn't taste good. Kind of tastes like soap because they've tried to put something in it to make it clean and not contaminated. And that's all good. However, it just doesn't taste good. And when you need it most, you'd least likely want to drink it. So that said, you know how hard it sounds? I barely trained for it. Both of those years. And the reason was I was running a business and I was living in Phoenix at the time training for it, and I just couldn't fit it in before temperatures climbed to 115 during most days. So instead of actually doing the training I gave everybody else to do, I did a lot of strength training, continued to do that, and then I would do like a leg, heavy leg day. I do total body, but I did heavy legs within it. And then the next day I would go for maybe a 6-mile hike so I could be done and not out in the heat too long. And the following day I might do 6 or 8. And that was it. I didn't do any long stretches of 14 miles, 15 miles, even though I was going to do 17, 18 miles the day of the hike and it'd all be uphill. You know, if you've followed marathon running for any period of time or ever were curious about it, it's all about time on your feet. Even if you can't run because your gut gives out, or you want to spend time on your feet because you're going to have to do that during the race and you need to be ready. So that was my thinking. And I was totally wrong, pleasantly surprised that I was totally wrong because I was really feeling good, pretty fresh going uphill. And I didn't realize that I was taking it for granted. Because I felt tired. I felt like it was work. And someone, you know, you play cat and mouse with the same people on a trail, whether you're running or you're biking. You've probably experienced this. And going up, you know, with everybody's going up, I kept doing this. So, you know, somebody would pass me, he'd be stopped at the water hole, the bathroom, and I'd stop. And so gradually you get to— as you get to the top, it's very very steep. And so you spend a lot of time, probably equal time, I'm gonna walk and then I'm gonna sit, and I'm gonna walk and I'm gonna sit, because you're just toast. You're dehydrated, you desperately want to be done, but you're out of breath with everything because, again, dehydration will do that to you. And the heat of the day, heart rate is climbing, it all just gets harder as it gets steeper. And he would say to me, so, you know, where are you from? I'm from Phoenix. And, you know, he's like, yeah, me too. I do try to do this, you know, one or two times every year just to keep myself tuned up. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. And he's like, how are you doing this? How did you train? Because I apparently to him made it look easy. And I just like You know, I don't know. I didn't really have an answer when he asked me. And then I, you know, in my next 20 steps forward, I was thinking about it and realized, you know, it was the weight training. It was the weight training and the high-intensity interval training and the agility that did it. It wasn't walking on a flat in the heat. So maybe a little heat acclimation you know, is helpful, but, you know, there is that. So I want you to be sure that you realize just putting in more time is not what you want. You want to put in the right kind of time. So for aging, if we say, let's liken aging to doing the Grand Canyon, right? It's how do you train specifically for that? I think what we're going to want more of is power. Mobility and agility. We don't just want more, we want more of the right thing and less of anything that is frivolous and is just contributing to making us tired. And part of that is a mind game. We're going to have to let go of thinking about exercise the way we've always thought about it. You know, we don't get a Girl Scout badge for walking extra miles if all it's doing is making you tired or making your knees hurt. It's not getting you fit. So consistency does work, but it's really important that we look at potentially older adults don't need more volume. They need more payoff, more reward from the exercise they choose to do. And you will hear more and more when we talk to masters athletes when you hear them quoted, you'll hear them say, you know, I get breathless several times a week. I do those— do the intervals, or I do a few sprints, and that's all I do for the day, you know. And then maybe they garden all day. So it's movement, but it's not like an all-day exercise thing wasting energy. In the third study I want to share with you, a huge meta-analysis with more than 5,000 postmenopausal women considered aerobic activity and resistance training, as well as activity that included things like tai chi and yoga. And the wide variety of exercise makes it a little harder to discern what was classified as resistance training and what was classified as aerobic activity. So walking, by the way, qualified as aerobic. That I could discern. But there were a lot of studies, and when, when we're talking meta-analysis, that's what we're talking about. So it's kind of a review of a pool of studies that all looked at postmenopausal women and resistance and aerobic activity. The best results across these 5,000 women came from exercise frequency of 2 to 4 times a week. Week, but the range across the board was 1 to 7 days a week, but the sweet spot was 2 to 4. Now, that's not 2 to 4 resistance, it's 2 to 4 times total. And that equates to— my recommendation would always be 2 times resistance training, 2 times high-quality, higher-intensity cardio. I say we move every day, we should walk every day. I'm— as I do this podcast episode. I'm looking out the window. It has been raining all day. It's about 5:00 PM. It's been raining since 10:00 AM. And I just told Moses, who didn't say a word back to me, like, "What if this was snow? Can you imagine?" Like, we would be so much in trouble. All right. So the best quality, the best results came from 2 to 4 times of exercise throughout the day or throughout the week. And that equates to 2 times resistance training, 2 times cardio. And I'm going to back up just one study. Remember I mentioned 2 or 3 times per week? Across the board, I think everybody is realizing 2 times gets it done if they're quality. 3 times may not be better if it's just lower quality and you're doing it more frequently. More volume should also include— this is more quality. Doing 2 workouts a week, maybe you make it last 5 to 10 minutes longer by doing one more exercise for the same muscle group or one more set of the same exercise in order to get that volume. But don't just immediately go with volume to another day a week because that messes with your ability to recover. And that is going to be a huge advantage for us as we age. Our ability to recover at 40 is not as good as when we were 20. Our ability to recover when we're 60, not as good as when we were 40. And that's going to be true when we're 80 as well. So it's going to get steeper in terms of our ability to recover. The takeaways here collectively are this: total body workouts really win. And I think somewhere you and I probably know that. And I know you're gonna say there's influencers all over the place who are doing, you know, 5 days, 6 days a week of resistance training. I get it. But I also think you and I as women in the world who are like living And we actually have other jobs. It's not just make a video for Instagram and go work out and make recipes and do my food prep. That's, you know, for some influencers, that is their job. And so if you've got more going on like that, our resistance before the resistance training is time. Time and energy. We have limited amounts of both. So getting total body workouts, I think, makes the most sense. Start with 2. If you feel fantastic, you're getting great results, you may decide, number 1, I don't need 3, this is actually working. If you feel fantastic and you want to see— I want to push the envelope, I want to see what 3 is like— ride with 2 feeling good for a while and then increase so you have a comparison. You, you look at your baseline of your skeletal muscle mass, your body composition, your energy level, your ability to focus, your heart rate, your heart rate variability— that is your kind of recovery capacity. And if you look at all those things and you, 3 times a week, you're just the same as before, you may say, I really love it, and say I want to do 3. I really like it. Okay, you're not doing any harm, so no reason not to. And then when you get busy, no reason to beat yourself up over not getting that third one either. But I have experience with clients and students and members a lot that they're shocked that when they cut out that third one, or basically they're not thinking cutting it out, they're thinking, I'm going to put in another recovery day, which takes out a third one. You can't add another recovery day and not push the third workout into the next week. It's just the math doesn't math that way. They realize they feel better and get as good or better results. Because when you think about what part of results you want, yes, it's— we want to look a certain way. So many of us want to be a certain size. I get it. And yet we also want a certain level of energy, right? We want to be able to use the body that we've got and have the energy to do it. And most women realize the more I exercise, the more couch time I need. I'm just lazier. I don't actually feel like doing more. So you want to find that sweet spot for yourself. So total body workouts, generally 6 to 12 repetition range for close to muscle fatigue. At that point, 6 to 10 sets per muscle group post-menopause might require a little higher volume. So what does that look like? So if you do 6 and you say 2 workouts, that's like 3 sets each time. Increasing to 4 sets gives you 8. Increasing to 5 sets gives you 10. I like actually 5 exercises, 5 times. I do 5 sets of each, and it's really pretty efficient and effective if you know you're doing it and you can get on a machine. If you're doing it at the gym and you got like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna stand to do this right beside it so nobody's getting that machine in between. You know, you— if you get up and you try to flip back and forth between machines at the gym, inevitably you're gonna come back and somebody won't Somebody's using it. They didn't know what you were planning and don't care, uh, also, but you can really easily do that. Compound exercises matter more. Those are things like your squats and your deadlifts and your lunges, your chest press and your rows. Don't get all caught up in single joint hamstring curls, bicep curls, tricep pushes. 2 times per week is as effective as 3. I'm gonna just sort of throw this in there again, especially to allow high-intensity interval training and walking on all days to come in there and do other enjoyable activities without exhaustion. You know, there are a lot of you who might be listening and you are loving pickleball and, or it's summertime where I am and you're wanting to play golf several times a week, you know, play with the girls, play with the family, play, play, play, play. And you should, right? But you shouldn't be too tired to do it because of your workout. The workout is supposed to make you better. Able to do the things you love. So from a foundation for beginners, this is what I would say. Start with the higher rep range, 15 to 20, fewer sets to start. So then you start titrating up. 1 or 2 sets is enough. In many cases, somebody can start without injury with 3 sets because it's such a common number. However, start lighter. Remember, your goal is not necessarily to reach total fatigue. You're just working on form at first, and you're working on form. You'll add load, that strength, and then thirdly, you'll add power, a speed component. So you're hearing and seeing right now influencers report going to the gym 6 days a week. It's their job, so just remember that. And they're making money by doing that, being paid by brands who sponsor them to look really good. And they get to rest and recover, take naps, sleep, put their feet up, you know. And do you? I don't, right? If you have a job, a business, you run a household, you have interests outside of workouts, don't compare yourself to an influencer your age whose job is to work a couple hours a day, meal prep with the rest of them. It's an unrealistic expectation to place on yourself. In a recent interview that I did with Mark Sisson, who you might recognize from The Daily Apple or from Primal Kitchen products, and I will recap that specifically in an upcoming podcast, he said something that echoed what I found. He was an elite-level endurance athlete, first in marathons and then triathlon. Not likening my athleticism by any means to his. However, there were some parallels there that we both are now thinking. He's, you know, decades after his pro involvement, and I'm not yet a decade from mine, but I feel, you know, that kind of life slipping away. It is all about quality, you know, and getting explosive movement a couple times a week, but it's short and you get power and you do total body strength. You don't anymore work out and be committed to the gym, you're committed to life activities that you love. So be sure you tune into that episode with Mark. If you missed it, go back if it's been released since I'm now releasing this one. So if whatever you're doing right now is not working and you're caught up in this, you need to do more to achieve the fitness you want, you might be wasting your energy that you could otherwise spend on parts of life that you do love more. Get 2 times a week strength training, 2 times a week intervals to improve and maintain your cardio fitness level. And then walk daily and play pickleball, golf, stand-up paddleboard, kayak, swim, garden, sightsee. Be active in so many different ways. These workouts demand just 90 to 100 minutes a week for your strength training, 30 minutes for intervals. That's your warm-up, your cool-down, and your intervals. 5 of that, 5 every week, not every workout, is hard. 5 is the breathlessness. Is it? It's very little. And then it's just about moving, moving versus sitting. Be active. What do you like to do? Stop dieting. Start fueling with more of the right food in the right order at the right time. Stop obsessing about the scale. Just stop. Track. Watch trends—yours, not on social media. And then expect change, but not in 2 weeks. So give yourself a little time, a little grace, a little patience. Right now, if you want to join me for that 90-minute session, It is normally $999. It's now $497. Spend 90 minutes with me, and here's what I guarantee: I will make sure that you leave with a plan, the priorities that I would change first for you or with you, how to do it, what's the criteria for starting with this and knowing when I'm ready to do the next one, so that you can do it yourself. Or if you decide to take a next step I will take that $497 credit and offer it toward that next step with me. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. What are you waiting for? Let's start Flipping 50 today. The information shared on Flipping 50: The Stronger Way is for educational and informational purposes only and not intended intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare provider before beginning any exercise program, making changes to your diet, or adjusting any medications or supplements. Individual results may vary. Debra Atkinson and Flipping 50 are not responsible for any injury or adverse outcomes resulting from information presented on this podcast.