4 Fitness Mistakes That Fail Us Over 50

I can't think of one woman over 50 who hasn't said this to me. We're doing all the things and it's still not working. So if that's you too, that tired statement that we say, we think, we wonder, this is for you. I'm gonna go over the basics of 4 mistakes, and actually I'm gonna flip it. I'm gonna give you the answer before I give you the mistake in an acronym that I'm using for a brand new book coming out. So I'm going to share it with you here first. 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. I'm going to dive right into this content, really. But I want to tell you a little story that will lead us right into it. A woman in our community recently shared that she was thrilled with the results she was getting, experiencing in the program. It was very impressive, and quite honestly, it was a surprise even to me. She had lost like 11 pounds and significant inches in— I think she was maybe a little over halfway through the program, so that would be 6 to 7 weeks. She explained just before joining she had done a program that was built around HIIT, or high-intensity interval training. No doubt it was promised and promoted as a fat-burning program because that is what HIIT is known for. It's why it's so sexy and attractive, but can backfire. And, you know, because HIIT is supposed to burn fat and it's actually documented scientifically at burning visceral fat for women post-menopause, but Clearly, this is not the case, not in this case. So this is not to scare you off from HIIT. There's a right time for it. But what you have to know is, "How do I decide? Is now a good time for me to try HIIT or to return to HIIT if you've been doing it before?" This episode highlights the when and why of things that you hear or are sold and why they just may not work for you, at least right now. Or might not work for you forever. Influencers gonna influence. They share what works for them. And often the dangerous thing is they're sharing what they've heard, not studied. So it's a bit like they're relaying something they heard someone else who might be an expert say. But you know what happens in that game of telephone? Something is lost in the interpretation. So they heard what they wanted to hear, they heard what might happen next, but it's not necessarily what really needs to happen. They didn't hear the whole story. They didn't hear the, here's why this is true with everyone or not true with everyone. So this is really important. They're not necessarily telling you what they've studied, applied, and tested on hundreds or thousands of people just like you, living real life and real-life obligations, which is really the most important thing. And I think any research we have to take with that grain of salt. We have to look at not only who are the subjects and are you like them, what were the situations and the instances true during the study and can you do that or replicate that protocol? But how controlled was it? You know, were these people volunteering and they were retired and they could exercise? And here you are juggling a family, got to be at work early, got to be there late. Then there's more things for you waiting at home, job number 2. So it's, it's very easy, I think, to judge ourselves. And why aren't we responding in the same way others do? Something's wrong. 'What's wrong with me? I'm doing it wrong.' Or you're not trying hard enough. I think that's where so many of you who are listening might go. And I want to encourage you to— I think that's worth exploring, but often it's there wasn't enough likeness and maybe you've tweaked it in a way that won't work for you or might not work for anybody. So I'm going to flip things. I promise I'm gonna tell you the answer before I tell you the problem. Interesting, right? But let's start with this acronym, and it is called FLIP. So the FLIP method is basically the opposite of all of these mistakes, and then I'll go into what the mistake is. So if we use FLIP as the acronym, I'll give you the secret right away, so if you're in a hurry, but F stands for fuel. L stands for leverage load, and I stands for intentional recovery, and P stands for purpose. And I like P a lot, so I could end with two Ps, but I like purposeful power. And it has really, for me, it has two meanings. The psychological meaning of you and having purpose and power and really making sure that every move in your workout has a purpose, and most importantly, that you know what it is. All right. So let's start with the first mistake. If the right answer is to fuel, what we've done is all wrong. So the message you've heard, the message you've probably said inside of your little head to yourself at least, is, "Eat less." And I think it's really hard to shake that. I think even as a very intelligent, articulate woman, it's hard for you to shake it if you've heard it over and over for so long. But you've also seen it in media, and it goes full circle, doesn't it? We see these celebrities right now just with these stick-thin bodies that I feel like I could put my hands together in a big circle and put them around some of those celebrities' waists, and it's just crazy. Like, what are you all doing right now. But low energy availability, it's L-E-A and REDS, and that is energy deficiency, metabolism stress, micronutrient sufficiency. I mean, those are all dead ends for the goals we have. If we have low energy availability, we have insufficient energy ready to supplement our sport, if our metabolism is slowing because of what we're doing, if we are overloading ourselves with stress because we're not giving it enough fuel, if we are suffering from micronutrient insufficiency because we're not eating enough to take in the number of micronutrients we need, that is a dead end for every goal that we have. If we want to be stronger, we want to be more energetic, we want to have better skin, we want to have glowing bright eyes. We wanna get— have a good night's sleep and get up rested. None of those things will happen under this circumstance or in this environment that we're creating for ourselves. And it's just so very odd that we can intelligently nod our heads and say, "Yes, I get that," and yet make a decision at the next meal ordering our food that ignores what we know to be true. But again, that is habit gravity, mental habit gravity, and what we've learned so very well. So what happens when you're put in these situations where you don't have energy available to you for the working muscles, the work that you're calling on the body to do? When it's put in that situation, performance suffers. So if you were an athlete, that's the word you'd use— your performance. You didn't perform well today. But if you're not an athlete, that's basically the result. What outcome do you want? Are you trying to lose weight, lose fat weight specifically? Are you trying to lose belly fat? Are you trying to gain lean muscle and lose fat, recomposition, if you will? You're not going to win at weight loss or fat loss or increasing energy or even bone density if you fail to put the energy in that you need. It's been proven that eating before exercise equates to greater energy expenditure during the exercise. I'm gonna let that sink in again. It's been proven that eating before exercise equates to greater energy expenditure during the exercise. And it makes sense. You have fuel in the tank and you will burn it. You will go harder, longer without it feeling longer and harder. Decades ago, this was true, proven in science, and it's been recently proven again. I, I believe it was Dr. Abby Smith-Ryan who did that in her lab. And that false hope that you'll be burning fat since you didn't put any fuel in before your workout, so you fasted and you feel virtuous, it's really false hope. It's not true. It doesn't pay off. You end up burning less because your body basically is, you know, a 2-year-old throwing a tantrum and it's like, "Well, you're not going to give me any fuel, I'm not going to do that for you." So the science doesn't support greater fat burning during fasting after exercise. So the exercise, generally when we look at when is fat burned, if it's a high-intensity exercise session, we don't burn that much fat during, but the fat is burned significantly after, and that's where the total fat burn comes from high-intensity interval training. That 20 minutes while we're doing it, not so much fat, but when we're having to recover for 36 or more hours, that's when we're having the fat burn benefit. But there isn't proof that that actually increases fat burning after intervals if you're fasted during So in fact, if you have eaten, you may actually see that number go up. So the science doesn't support greater fat burn because of fasting, except in sumo wrestlers who ate like 4,000 calories a day and 50% of it was fat. That is not likely what you're doing. Am I, am I right or am I right? So number 1 is eating less in effort to support faster goals or faster progress toward your goal. Number 2, I'm going to give you the answer again before. That was L, leveraging load. And you can leverage activity in so many ways, but load is first. Well, the message we got and the mistake we make is just simply exercise more. And we don't get much specific about that. It's just move more, exercise more. And it makes everybody feel like, okay, If I, you know, failed and I didn't get all my steps in today, after dinner or before bed I have to go for another walk. And we're just getting a little crazy with the step count. So we're comparing ourselves to celebrities or quote-unquote fitness influencer celebrities that are telling us how many steps they get a day and how they look. And we're ignoring the fact that their stress levels may be extremely low. Maybe that's all they did all day is make that video for you. They didn't work, they didn't have kids, they didn't get up early, they didn't put the garbage out, they didn't do much. Maybe you just don't know and you're just seeing their best life in front, the front of the camera. You're not really seeing back. So we have to be careful here. But more exercise, you know, and generally this is worse when it's like, yeah, make mine a cardio workout. That would be a mistake. If a little is good, more is better— big mistake. Burning calories is all why you're exercising— big mistake. Look, over 75%, when you're working at a level that is higher than 75% of your VO2 max, and that is a point where you're starting to get significantly breathless. Now, you're not out of breath, you're not like you're doing an interval going all out, but you're definitely like, it's getting choppy when you talk. It's not complete sentences anymore. You're not like talking with a good friend on a walk in the park. But that's where the body has a significantly greater stress response. So if you're exercising more and part of that is you're going harder, you're going to have a bigger stress response. That's not bad necessarily. In fact, physiologically, you need that greater stress response for the energy to do the work. When stress goes up, the cortisol goes up. The cortisol releases glycogen in muscles that turns to glucose. That is the fuel that does the exercise. Does this sound like The House That Jack Built? Okay, but that is what happens. But when you do that work, those workouts that require that excess, that harder and higher and you do them repeatedly without recovery, your body will be in danger of higher chronic cortisol, and you don't have that surge during the exercise that then comes back down. So the poor recovery habits that we may have and doing frequently hard or longer duration or both in dietary restriction, you simply have this inability to keep up with your fuel needs. The exercise you do does not have a positive effect. Instead of resulting in lower baseline cortisol levels after acute bouts and a commitment to long-term exercise, there's more of a, a deleterious impact on cortisol, it's reverse of what it is that you want. You're going to instead elevate your cortisol. It's not going to come down. It's not going to make you more resilient. It might make you less. This episode of the Flipping 50: The Stronger Way podcast with Debra Atkinson is brought to you by Alloy Health. Let's be honest, aging can come with some unwelcome changes. Sleep disruptions, hot flashes, brain fog, weight gain, and decreased libido can hit hard. Menopause is inevitable, but it's also treatable. So this, however, I find shocking, and I hear it every day. Over 50% of women wait 3 or more years to seek relief, and the reason why is almost that many never get offered hormone therapy by their physicians, and over 40% will say, I'd consider it, but I need education. That's where Alloy comes in. 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Head to M-Y-A-L-L-O-Y dot com and use code FLIPPING50 to get $20 off your first order. So results for athletes when they're in that situation are often burnout. They're exhausted. And this would be like somebody who is playing in lots of tournaments where, you know, you go to a tournament and it might be extended days and you're having to perform again and again and again. And, you know, you don't get a whole lot of break. So you've got to, you know, put things, put space between things, eat well, sleep well, control all other things, and really be ready for that. But that would be one example. They would even have central weight gain. And by the way, if you're thinking, "I'm not an athlete," But if you are exercising for a specific result, you're athletic, right? So I would call you, if you exercise 3 to 5 times a week intentionally with a specific purpose of getting better, whether that's bone density, stronger, something, you're athletic. So I would call you an athlete in that way. But again, you too have to recover or you may find burnout, exhaustion, even central weight gain, meaning belly fat. Poor recovery scores, and we could use heart rate variability, or what we call HRV, or just simply feelings of exhaustion, fatigue, feeling flat when you work out. Do you know the difference between that? What I mean is a lot of times people who start to exercise, maybe you didn't feel this way at first about it, but when you get hooked, you're really in. Often you look forward to it and it feels good while you're doing it. You're actually enjoying the doing it, not just the being done and the benefit that you get from it. But often if you're overdoing it or you're under-recovering or both, you will be in that workout just feeling like, ugh, can't wait to be done. And it's not feeling good. You're not feeling stronger with each exercise or each set. So You want to watch for that to be a sign that this is potentially what's happening. It also can happen to you afterward, but potentially happens pretty quickly during as well. And you have no energy afterward, that is common when this combination of, you know, exercise too frequently and under-recovery, meaning not just the time between, but You know, you could get by with that if you were somebody who was trained, you're in-conditioned, and you were going to have something where you back-to-back were competing. If you ate really well, you rested really well, hydrated really well, you'd probably get by with it and be okay. But you wouldn't want to do that all the time. But if you're short-sheeting yourself on calories or content of those calories, that won't work. So I want to say that again. Exercise that occurs at greater than 75% of VO2 max causes energy demands to surpass the rate which your aerobic pathways can efficiently supply ATP, meaning it's no longer aerobic, it's what we kind of call anaerobic slightly. And cortisol is released as part of the body's acute stress response to mobilize glucose and stimulate glyco— glycolysis. Glycogenolysis. That's a breaking down glycogen into usable sugar to fuel your muscles. There's a marked difference in cortisol concentration between 45 and 120 minutes. That's 45 minutes or about 2 hours of endurance exercise. Somewhere between that point, you and I would hit a wall with our cortisol rising, and greater concentrations occur during longer duration. And that is true for a study done on male athletes. For midlife women, that occurs— that elevation of cortisol concentration generally occurs more at 45 to 60 minutes. Somewhere in there, there is a pivotal elevation of cortisol if you're in that moderate range. Now, if you're doing high-intensity interval training, your session won't last that long. It shouldn't last that long. It's 20-25 minutes tops. That's a warm-up and a cool-down and the time for hard and easy in between. If you're doing it at 45 minutes, something's wrong. Your intervals are probably longer than they need to be for your ideal goal, but it does depend on your conditioning level. So if you are conditioned to do longer endurance exercise, you may be well, but I'm going to tell you this. Many athletic women, well-trained, conditioned, experience a significant change in the way their body responds to exercise that they should be readily adapted to when certain hormonal changes occur at just what I call this critical mass, meaning who knows when you're going to reach it, but at some point you're going to reach a point where Okay, that was it. My body is now telling me that I have to pay attention. I can't get by just doing anything anymore. All right, let's go on to the next one. So far we've looked at the mistakes related to fuel and the mistakes related to leveraging load or exercise, and those two are very tied together. I think you can agree because if you recover really well, you are fueling, you could probably get by with greater frequency of exercise and maybe higher intensity exercise at greater frequency. But if you're not recovering, you're not gonna get away with that. And there we go. The third one is intentional recovery. This is what winners do. This is what those in midlife who are winning do. The problem, what fails us, is skipping recovery. We jump into these programs where it's telling you to do something every day, and you know, that something was probably derived by a well-intended trainer who wrote the program. But that well-intended trainer isn't there to tell you, you need to pivot. If this, then that. If you're tired or if stress was really high this week, or if you didn't sleep last night, here's how you change. So skipping recovery is a huge mistake. Not recognizing what recovery can be is the first problem. You should be recovering even when you don't feel the need to recover. What? I'm gonna say that again. You should be using recovery in your plan even when you don't feel the need to recover. I used to have this conversation with my significant other all the time. And he was, you know, busy with his industry and work, and he would say, well, I, I get disrupted often enough by my work that I just try to be pretty religious about going every day, and I let, you know, the disruptions be my days off, you know. And I thought about that for a while, but thought better of it. So it was kind of a constant source of, "We don't talk about that because we can't agree on that." But planning recovery is very important. If you're going to do a couple hard days in a row, you at least need to then say, "Okay, well, today's going to be an easy day for me. I'm going to do it lighter," or, "It's more moderate. It's going to be a lower impact, less muscle damage caused by it." So that That is, you can still go to the gym and move if you want to, and that's a habit you don't want to break, but there should be a distinct difference in the duration, intensity, and often the activity type during your recovery days compared to your work days. In a balanced week, you might do, say, a challenging strength training session on Monday. That would be hard. And then Tuesday you might do HIIT. Now that's hard and hard back to back, but while it is challenging, it challenges in a different way. And it's short. It also— the HIIT would improve circulation, which help recovery from the strength training session you did and any lingering soreness that you had from Monday. Wednesday, you walk, and that should be a daily staple, by the way, but maybe it's a longer walk on Wednesday because that's just a recovery day. And you could do a yoga session instead or in addition to the walk. Thursday, you're back to strength training. So again, hard. Friday, if you built up to it, you want a second HIIT, great. Otherwise, maybe you do some alternative. You do a yoga session again, or you go swimming, or maybe on that day or the weekend, you're doing things that you enjoy and love. Maybe it's walking, 18 holes of golf, or in your garden. Going for a long hike with a friend. So you're finding days to move every day, but you see there punctuations where this is really hard, really hard for the muscle or really hard for the cardiovascular system, and others where, okay, this is fairly easy. I'm allowing the muscle tissue to repair and/or cardiovascular system not being taxed nearly as much. That rhythm helps you stay in the game. Longer and get the benefits you want. So there are all different ways to plan a week. That was but one example, by the way. But the goal is alternating your days of hard, your easy, and I'm gonna throw in moderate because if we don't talk about it, you'll wonder about it. So moderate offers the least value compared to your high and low intensities, meaning those little stints and sprints of getting breathless. Remember, they're probably lasting a total cumulative amount of 5 minutes a week. Yeah, right? If you do 2 high-intensity interval training sessions a week, you do say 5 30-second sprints. And I mean in the swimming pool, on a bicycle, on your StairMaster, on your elliptical, or on a treadmill sprinting, or any other mode of exercise you want and like. But that's 2.5 minutes on one day and 2.5 on another, that's 5 total minutes of high-intensity interval training a week. And the other is recovery and warm-up and cool-down to get you there safely. So with moderate exercise, it is not hard enough to elicit a real stimulus for growth hormone and testosterone that's necessary for muscle, but it is too hard to allow recovery and that base building. When cortisol improves acutely from doing it, which is actually what happens when you're walking at a low level. There is no need for your body to release cortisol because it has what it needs for energy. So if it's using circulating cortisol while you're walking, then after you're done, your cortisol level is decreased. So that's why we know that walking is so good for cortisol levels and for blood sugar. And those two are very closely tied. In midlife and beyond, you may find that middle zone or middle moderate workouts that you used to do on repeat and you loved don't love you back. It happens for a lot of active women, and that doesn't mean it will for you, but I want to brace you and prepare you. So now you know you can pivot if it does. So you may also be— and fill in the blank here— wondering, Why does blank work sometimes for you and not others? And why does blank work for some women but not for me? And this question about your own status is so very important. Your hormone status, your life stressors, they're all different than somebody else's. And that's why you're at a tipping point in a bucket that you can fill so high with stressors. And then it's going to tip over. And you're reaching a tipping point at a different point than a friend would. And you may be the lucky friend who's finding these things are still working, but my friends say they don't work for them. This also answers, why does it work sometimes for me and, and not others? And it's going to be very, very true for any of us. We're going to run into a point where everything doesn't work all the time. So HIIT elicits a peak cortisol response, but that sounds bad at first, but it's not. It's short and then it's mitigated by complete recovery when it's done optimally, right? And I want to emphasize this. The old way we learned Tabata and HIIT workouts where it was imposed on you. You do the work there and here's your recovery, now start again, right? And somebody was policing you. We don't recommend that anymore. I don't recommend that at all. I recommend you sprint and then you recover. And when you feel totally recovered and breathing through my nose, I am ready to go, then go again. But don't just start when you're already exhausted. And I know that there is a, well, maybe I just want to deplete and deplete and deplete deplete. But I find for women in midlife, it works so much better to improve your fitness level, not just be concerned about it feeling hard, but improve your fitness level, which is going to elevate your metabolism and still improve your sleep and not make you miserable or risk injury. So when we do intervals on repeat before we're actually ready, we're gonna get sloppy. We're gonna lose our form, and that's where we tend to get injured. Or we'll make a poor judgment, we'll be caught up in the moment and that adrenaline, and potentially we'll pull something because we're not really paying really good attention. So the last P in BLIP, right, the last letter is P— purpose for all exercise. Here's what we tend to do: random exercise. And I know there is this, "Let's encourage everybody to move. We don't care how they move, they just should move more." Yes, and I have to say yes, and to that, because if you have very specific goals, you want to increase your bone density, then I'm going to release a video on YouTube and tell you, here's what the research says about rebounding. So if somebody's telling you that you can increase your bone density by rebounding, I would just push back a little. If you have limited time and energy, that's probably not your best investment of time and energy if bone density is your number one priority. So I wouldn't say that rebounding is even in the top 5 for activities that I would suggest that you do. So that angered a lot of people who were dedicated rebounders. I didn't say it wasn't good overall. That there was something to be said for an exercise that's fun and that you'll do consistently. But when you have a specific goal, random exercise, just moving more, is not the answer. As long as you know you're choosing this exercise, even though the benefits may be— you can't see them, they're not proven yet. We don't see them in science proving that lymphatic flow increases all that much. We don't see that it's a real benefit for, you know, X, Y, and Z. If you love it, it's a mood boost for you, you're getting some cardiovascular exercise, you can tell you're breathing a little bit harder, all of that is good. But it is just important to know exercise is amazing. I've spent my life doing it, teaching it, teaching trainers to teach it, applying the science to the practical application of it for your everyday workouts. But random exercise is no longer going to serve you if you have specific outcomes that you want. And most of us do. So we want very specifically, often weight loss or fat loss, to be sure, tighter, firmer bone density, the ability to maintain our dependence later. We want to continue to do the things we love, but random exercise won't get specific results. So you can answer the purpose. If you can do that of each exercise session and each exercise within, say, a strength training session, then you're way ahead of the curve. Look, you wouldn't— if you were going to, you needed to turn a screw, you wouldn't grab a hammer, right? It's a tool in the toolbox, but it's not going to do it like the screwdriver will. So you want to use the right tool for the exercise outcome that you want. So as your bandwidth of time and energy shrink, the target of exercises that we do should narrow if you want something specific from it. So if you struggle to start and to stick with it, then absolutely rebounding may be the way, or something that you love that maybe is not the first in alignment with your goal, but you've got to do something regularly first. That's important. So if you can't jump or you can't walk or, um, on the ground with ground forces because you have bone on bone or other reasons, rebounding may be then, you know, a softer option for you and a great place to start. So didn't mean to necessarily highlight rebounding exclusively, but that could apply to anything. It just gave that as a demonstration, but if now I've made you curious about the rebounding video, then go check it out. You can find that on flipping50.com and, um, where you'll find the podcast notes, we'll drop the link to the YouTube video there, or you can find us on social media, all channels, @Flipping50TV. So I hope that was helpful. 4 mistakes, but the right answers are this: FLIP—fuel, leverage load, do intentional recovery, and then make sure you have purpose to everything that you're doing. Understand why and how this is helping you so that if you point back to, "I'm not getting the results that I wanted," that maybe there needs to be a greater tie to the purpose of the exercise that you're doing, the purpose of each exercise and the exercise session collectively as well. I hope that that was helpful. You can head over to the show notes at flipping50.com/podcast for all show notes or get all the episodes on the platforms that you prefer. And I'll see you on the flip side. The information shared on Flipping 50 the Stronger Way is for educational and informational purposes only and not 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.