4 Exercise Mistakes Hijacking Your Menopause Fitness (and how to fix them)

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. If you think carbs are the devil, this is for you. If you love your carbs, this is also for you. And if you are somewhere in the middle or you have a love-hate relationship with carbs, this is for you.

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 and 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.

You're doing it all. You're watching fats, you're increasing protein, you're lifting weights, you're doing high-intensity walking. Why isn't it working? How can you do this and be this active and not be more fit? So disclaimer alert, this podcast episode could trigger you. The mistakes hijacking your menopause fitness you could be doing on purpose because you were told once that this is what you should do? Recently, a colleague and very reputable expert in his field posted a funny reel on Instagram spoofing doctors who gave bad advice to their female patients about exercise and diet. But the shocking thing was how many women commented revealing they didn't see anything wrong with it. They knew that the video was intended to be a spoof given his history and knowing that he was poking fun at it, but they didn't understand the joke because they too thought that that bad advice was what they should be doing. So I'd estimate 50% didn't comment or didn't understand the spoof, and I'm talking there were thousands when I first came to this post, there were thousands of comments. So I made a single comment trying to very briefly sort it out and explain to one person, and within a couple of hours, 100 people had liked it, commented on it. Very interesting and directly points to the need for this type of information being disseminated so much more. So no doubt, because they've been told to do that too, or have simply believed it for years, this episode is for all those women and for you, because there's a good chance you struggle. You're being told not to eat carbs, not to eat them at night, to eat them at night, and you're being told that one by me. You're being told to do high intensity in the afternoon and not to by me. So let's unpack these mistakes hijacking your menopause fitness. Before we dive too far into anything, I'm going to say this to you. Measure. You're a study of one. I'm a study of one. We can definitely collectively, and we've come up with the blueprint for menopause fitness that we have first derived over a decade ago and then tested and tweaked with hundreds of thousands of women that have come through different programs. Hey, so let's figure out what's going on with you right now, because you can look and say, here's my weight, here's my body fat, here's my skeletal muscle mass, here's my lift of energy, 0 to 4 ratings of muscle mass, digestion, elimination, energy, the way I'm thinking cognitively, sleeping. All those things provide clues for you what's happening, and they say, here's the habits that you've most recently had, here's the results they're giving you. If you want to change those outcomes, we're going to have to change some of those habits, and then you'll know. So since 2022, it's been really obvious that we should all have a smart scale in our bathrooms. But you can get a DEXA scan. You'll need to repeat the DEXA scan so you're comparing apples to apples if you're doing a pre and a post-test. So realize that there's an investment there. It's probably not covered by insurance, at least yet. Maybe your HSA, but not insurance. And if you're using your smart scale, realize that what matters less is, is that really right? What matters most is that you're measuring change. You're going to see if it goes up, goes down, or stays the same so that you can use your decisions based on that data to change your habits, tweak variables, and get better results. So I do have on a resources page of Flipping 50, I recommend 4 different scales, all price ranges. If you want to look at what's recommended for this year, you can hit flipping50.com/resources. But not right now. Stay with me. Let's go. 4 habits starting with number 1. I'm going to give you them all. Spoiler alert. So if you're curious, you've got them. Number 1 is not consuming enough fuel, but I'm going to unpack that for you. Number 2 is never really recovering Recovering from hard interval training or hard workouts. Number 3 is scrolling down. Sorry, it's a long list. Relying on caffeine barcodes or overemphasis on packaged foods. And number 4 is always high and always hard. So there's a theme here. Have you figured it out? Number 1, let's talk about this. So not consuming enough fuel, by the way, is really related to not recovering. That's That's a truth we can't eliminate. Let's focus on carbohydrates though, not just fuel overall, not even just protein today. I'm gonna link to a just previous episode. We've done many, by the way, on protein. We have an entire little playlist. We'll hand it to you if you want the top 10 most recent podcasts on protein. You can get that too at the website. But I wanna focus on carbohydrates today, the poor little carbohydrate, not just the potato, but You know, they've been abused. We've abused them pretty good. But let's talk about why research is showing, number one, intermittent fasting is more likely to cause impaired responses in women but not men. Let's also talk about why carbohydrates are more important for women than they are for men, and their type, of course, and their timing is important. So when Talk carbs, I'm not talking chocolate cake and the icing on the cake, which is actually my favorite. The cake is just a delivery vehicle, but I'm talking about the quality carbs. You and I grew up calling them complex carbohydrates, and we now call a lot of those resistant starches, having learned that they are— they have certain enzymes, they're resistant to storage as fat because they're higher in fiber, takes more to break them down, slower chain release, like that complex carb we learned about. But there are certain things like a more green banana— not, not ripe ones, but more green bananas fall into that category. Sweet potatoes, white potatoes if they've been cooked and cooled, which is very geeky and science-based, but not a hot potato just out of the oven. But if it cools and then you can heat it up again and eat it, it has— the enzymes in it have changed. Very neat, right? So if you know, you know. Males and females differ significantly in their need for carbohydrates. And we can thank Dr. Stacy Sims for some of this information because she's done a really good job of disseminating information in an easy-to-understand way. Right. And she's behind a lot of the studies that come out for International Sports Academy and Association in Nutrition recommendations for athletes and very active adults like you, most likely, dear listener. So this is for us. We get too little carbohydrate and we disrupt our hormones. We do it. Those of you who are eating keto saying, my body loves this, really? You might shed weight, you might be lighter because you're not storing as much water weight. For every 1 part carb, 3 parts water are stored. That's just science. So if you go keto for 3 days, by the weekend you will carry less water weight. Temporarily, that works and may not compromise your health all that much either. But you don't want to be— do this beyond, you know, putting on the dress for the gala on Saturday night. You don't want to do that on a regular basis, especially if you're taxing your body hard, whether you're a woman who's in reproductive years or you're post-menopause. You need to have optimal endocrine or hormone function. So if you think that's not a big deal, that your hormones get disrupted because you're not in reproductive years, you are still influenced till death do you part by cortisol, insulin, thyroid, testosterone, growth hormone. So the endocrine system is very integrated with exercise capacity and results. Tap one, you tap the other. So the amount of fuel that you need per fat-free mass differs significantly for males and females. There's the tipping point where we will experience endocrine dysfunction— hormone dysfunction— again, is so much lower for males. They can get by with fewer. And this may be the reason why intermittent fasting works better for them than it does for women, because it often causes dysregulation in hormones for women. So once you you're there, it's hard to get yourself dug out of that hole. But let's look at it this way: the onset of endocrine dysfunction is about 30-35 calories per kilogram of fat-free mass in women, but it's only 15 calories per fat— per kilogram fat-free mass in men. They only need 15. We need 30. We need far more fuel in order not to have endocrine dysfunction. So let's look at What does that look like in, in doing math? Let's say you're 130 pounds and you have 25% body fat. That's just an average body fat, not, not too high, not too low. It's just boom. That calls for 2,923 kcals. Almost no woman is eating that many calories. I would I would hesitate to say a lot of women are eating 1,500 fewer calories than that. Some women are not eating even 1,500 calories and should, you know, energetically, because what they're trying to do and accomplish and think and decision-making, you know, not just exercise. Most women, we can agree, are living here in this state of compromised endocrine function because they're not getting, they're not getting what is, you know, close to 3,000 calories, let alone 2,000. So let's talk about fueling before exercise and what it should be. So yeah, around the clock it matters, you know, in order to pull in enough calories and to get enough carbohydrate to be fueled before exercise and then to refuel and restore glycogen that's depleted from muscle after hard exercise or long exercise. We need to do that fueling pre and post exercise as well as around the clock. But if we just look at least at pre and post exercise, helping women offset the stressors that come through exercise by fueling, what it looks like is this for cardio. So, and let's include, you know, anything where you might go, you know, 45 minutes to an hour, not necessarily recommended if you're struggling, but Also high-intensity interval training, going out for, you know, a walk. If it's lower and that's your 45 to 60 minutes, you might need a little fuel to do that as well if you're doing somewhat of a brisk pace. For cardio, women want about 30 grams of carb and about 15 grams of protein beforehand. So a boiled egg has about 6 grams of protein, 2 of them 12, so it puts you close enough. And then you might want to have some carbohydrate with that. So maybe that's those 2 eggs on a piece of toast, you know. For strength training, you want to have about 15 grams of protein prior. And you— and if you're a woman, I would suggest this because according to the American College of Sports Medicine, some data and literature review that I'd gone over and shared with you prior The recommendation prior for older adults was a little higher than that, about 20 grams of protein before and then about 40 afterward. And the older we are, the more that's true. We need more, not less, because we have struggle, or we will struggle with muscle protein synthesis at reaching the same level that we could earlier. So utility of the protein we eat is not gonna be as good. We've gotta have more of it in order to get the same benefit. Many women are actually aiming for about 50 or fewer carbohydrates and feeling like, you know, the content I'm sharing right here is counter everything that culture is putting out there about keto and about carbohydrates and about intermittent fasting. If you're following Dr. Mindy Peltz, great content on, you know, looking at um, intermittent fasting. However, you know, I would also say she is pro-muscle. However, doing all the intermittent fasting in the way that you may be doing it following her, it's going to be very hard to get in, number one, all the protein and the carbohydrates that are necessary if you're a very active woman. For very active women, athletes, intermittent fasting is not your friend. So you really have to decide I, I used to tongue-in-cheek say you can't be both an athlete and anorexic. Choose which one do you want because you're not going to get both. That— I mean, you're just not, or you're going to be ill, sick, adrenal fatigue, and, and that, that only gets worse if you don't fix the problem. So thyroid function is often a concern for women over 40. It's more prevalent than ever. Low carb— and I'm talking 100 grams. It's kind of the norm, but it seems to be a pivotal point for lower thyroid function. So if you're an active woman and you're eating 100 or fewer grams of carbohydrate a day, your thyroid function most likely is not what it should be, and you're partially to blame, maybe unintentionally. Maybe you didn't realize, didn't make the connection, but changing what you're eating and how you're eating could help. Serotonin production is also a problem. So it's produced— serotonin Serotonin is a feel-good hormone. It's produced in the gut. It declines with lower-carb diets. Low-carb and balanced-carb diets don't differ in any significant way in regard to weight loss, short-term or long-term. Who knew, right? So it's not so much the carb that dictates whether you will or won't lose weight. It may be, in fact, the, the number of calories you take in per your need and the amount of protein that you eat that determines whether you'll lose fat and maintain your lean muscle mass. So it's easy, you will shed water weight, it's true. I mean, there's, there's no discounting that, but is that a benefit, right? We store water weight in the muscle, it, it hydrates, it keeps us ready to exercise better. The message when you're in a low energy availability from your brain, your hypothalamus to your body is your HPA axis dysfunction. You've probably heard that term more and more often because it's the name for adrenal fatigue. Your adrenals signal the release of cortisol that impacts your thyroid, and things will begin to shut down. If your adrenals are producing and pumping out lots and lots of cortisol, your thyroid ultimately will also be impacted. So it's not just your metabolism, reproductive system if you're still cycling, but it's your thyroid conserving energy, not knowing when food is gonna come again, starts a vicious cycle. The body will break down to find fuel any way that it can. So like you have an ankle sprain, you begin to limp, the body finds a way to compensate. Your need for fuel is the same, and if you don't provide enough fuel, it will limp belong breaking down muscle. It doesn't break down fat to use unless you're working at a very, very low level, like at rest, and then it doesn't burn it very fast, right? So when you try to fast and do high-intensity intervals, or fast and try to lift heavy weights, or fast and you try to go to your high-intensity boot camp class, or simply reduce your carbs, maintain a keto-like lifestyle while increasing your activity level in lengthier walks, more steps, more intense workouts, and fuel stating, I work pretty hard. I'm sure that it is feeling hard, absolutely sure that it is, but it may not be at your capacity. So it's actually at the speed that you would otherwise be able to go if you were fueled, or lifting the weight, or doing a number of repetitions that you could focus on. The strength, the absolute strength— 80% of a 1-rep max equals 10 repetitions. Actually going a little heavier than that to 5 to 7 repetitions repetitions, and you can do 2 in reserve, meaning you could do 2 more and know that you'd be okay doing that, but no more than that. What you're getting is neural components. So you're actually signaling the brain enough so that you can release testosterone and growth hormone. Similarly, if you were doing high-intensity interval training, only if you get to that all-out level in breathlessness in about 20 to 30 seconds do you get the release of those that offsets cortisol. So your neural component is also responsible for you in the first 6 to 8, even up to 12 weeks of your starting a program, then you can go lighter up until that point. You can go lighter until about 10 or 12 weeks in because you're not rushing yourself into greater strength yet anyway. The neural component is trying to get solidified, be stronger, stronger Wi-Fi signal, if you will. Hey, real quick, if you're here and you need help and you really want, want more maybe than it's possible for you to do right now, I have something really special. Our members inside our Flifting 50 membership already have access to this. It's called the Metabolism Makeover 2.0. Years ago, we did this as a group. It was about $700. It was about 6 weeks, and I've gotten rave reviews from people who are still using it as a resource almost 5 years later. So I'm doing it over, calling it a mulligan, not because it wasn't effective, but because it was, and because I realized I want my members to have something more updated, something fresher. There's a lot of carryover, but there's also a lot of new and fresh and angles that we can take from more recent research. And the more we know, the more we can do right, or stop if it's wrong. Look, it's only $49 at a regular rate So if you want in, you get access right now. I'll put the link in today's show notes. Number 2, you never really recover from hard intervals or workouts. This is for those of you, especially that are going to boot camps. You never really will get recovery that you personally need. If somebody else is dictating, we're starting again every minute on the minute, you know, or something Worse, like 10 seconds to recover, like, and then go again. It will feel hard, but you won't be working at capacity anymore and you will get sloppier. And that really— I don't have a whole lot to say about this, but I want you to try this for yourself because I don't want to convince you. I want you to understand it and feel it. So let's do this. If you're going to those boot camps, you swear by them. I know it gives you a psychological buzz. It actually does. It's proven. But it doesn't mean that you physiologically— you're getting what you need in order to increase muscle mass, burn more fat, and release the testosterone and growth hormone that are going to make the difference for you. After a warm-up, I want you to try this. You're going to find a hill, and ideally a hill and not, not a treadmill. And, and a treadmill would work, but it is a moving belt. It's doing some of the work for you. I want you to do this run up a steep hill as fast as you can at all-out effort for about 40 seconds. You can go 30 to 40. Mark the point at the hill that you get up and turn around, walk yourself down slowly. Doesn't care— I don't care what it takes. And only start up again when you're completely breathing through your nose, mouth is closed, you feel like, I can do this again, I'm ready. So I want you to continue going up and until you don't make it to the top in that same spot on the hill anymore, 'cause then your performance is falling off. So we're not training the good ones, right? Now, another day, not the same day, but a different day, I want you to come back and you're fresh, do it again. Repeat the same thing, but this time I want you to return to the bottom and I want you to repeat this. So I want you to really quickly make your way back to the bottom and I want you to start up again. And go, or you can give yourself 60 seconds if you want to, but I really want you to try to go right away and then mark your spot on that hill. And remember the rule, as soon as you can't make it up as high, then you're done. Okay, so which of them did you do better with? That you did more repetitions making it all the way up to the same spot on the hill Which was it? Compare the two. They will both feel hard, but one of them you probably worked at your full capacity and the other one probably you just got tired faster. Your glycolytic fibers, that's fast twitch, that's sustained power, they fatigue really quickly. So if you try to do that, go really hard as fast as you can and then barely recover, go again, you won't have anything in the tank. They won't have fully recovered. So they will fatigue really quickly. They, they recover fairly quickly. Women have few of these glycolytic fibers than we have our slow twitch fibers. We need to work on these. We need this more than we need zone 2. We don't need zone 2 so much because we're already aerobically pretty fit. So you are fooling yourself into thinking you're getting in better shape if you just go and it was a hard workout. So I want you to start measuring progress and that will help. I will lead you to a full test battery that you can easily do at home. I'll provide access to it in the show notes today. It's something that is going to our members and they have access to it on a complimentary basis. We're all doing it together. You won't have complimentary access to it, but you can get your hands on it if you'd like to do it for yourself. Number 3 is relying on caffeine barcodes or overemphasis on packaged foods. So seriously, come on, if you want to get fit and you're just doing packaged protein powders— I sell a protein powder, I use them, but that is an anomaly, and I'm putting whole foods in it. So it's really important that, yes, sometimes those things can get us to the finish line, help us use protein, But if you're standing in your kitchen, you're eating a protein bar, I don't get it. And I think you shouldn't either. There's food in that kitchen that has other micronutrients and doesn't have things you don't want in it. So you already have greater stress. We don't need more caffeine, more processed food, and the combination of all of those can be really backfiring against you. Number 4 is always high and hard. Now, we tapped into this with saying you don't recover, but you have never needed high intensity more in your life than at whatever age over 40 you are now. However, you need true high intensity, but not feels hard. You also need full recovery. It is the partner for high intensity exercise between intervals, between strength training sets, and between sessions of those. Women tend to think strength is the bomb, so that more strength is what I need. Muscle only gets stronger and more resilient between sessions. The exercise is the stimulus. The recovery is where fitness happens. The release of hormones, the repair, and the supercompensation occurs. Then if you are doing well now and you're not getting at least 48 hours between hard use of same muscle groups, consider— humor me for 2 weeks— try getting 72 hours or more recovery and watch what happens. What if you're just a little more fresh? The low-intensity movement between your hard sessions is absolutely important in increasing circulation and your blood sugar stabilization, improving sleep, mood, overall fitness. But it's different. It's helping improve recovery. It's not impeding it. Big, big, big difference. So let's keep it simple. 4 things: spend the majority of your movement time walking at the level below where cortisol negatively spikes so that you can reduce or optimize it. Spend small amounts of time in short, truly high-intensity interval training where you recover completely between the intervals and the sessions. Number 3, spend 2 to 3 times a week hitting all major muscle groups at least twice to total muscle fatigue. If you are in post-menopause, the volume of sets has to be greater compared to a perimenopause woman. Number 4, recover between use of major muscle groups for at least 48 hours. 72 is often best. I hope that was helpful. For those of you that are Prove It to Me girls, the science that we've used inside of this episode is all here. There's what's gonna read to you like a blog if you prefer to read and take, absorb that information as well as to listen. It will all be here, and so will your opportunity to get that test battery. I welcome your questions. You can reach me at Facebook in the group Flipping 50 Insiders. And what are you waiting for? Let's start flipping 50 today.

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 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.