Fit or Fat? Training and Measuring Fitness in Menopause

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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. Measuring fitness in menopause is complicated. Maybe tricky is the better word. I'm going to take a stab at this and let you know that if you're not measuring beyond your weight, body composition, inches, and muscle mass at regularly scheduled intervals, you're doing a disservice. Now, I said a mouthful already. So beyond your weight and the way your clothes are fitting, I want you to look at your body composition, the inches and the lean muscle mass. That is your skeletal muscle. That is different than total muscle because that total muscle includes everything— smooth muscle in your gut, your internal organs, and skeletal muscle. So we want to look at skeletal muscle that you're using when you go to the gym or you're picking up bales of hay or small children. We want to know that we're doing good thing where that is concerned. So we're gaining more. We're boosting the amount of skeletal muscle mass we have. We're boosting our strength often, and we're boosting our metabolically active tissue, decreasing our risk of inflammation and of disease. But look, we get all up in the business of burning calories— wrong goal, by the way— having it feel hard— sometimes wrong goal— and forget to measure strength. Did you see the Olympians test strength? They were testing grip strength on some of those memes that appeared in social media. Super fun, by the way. They were very impressive, very impressive. And how well your training is actually helping your heart. We need to get all of it, so let's go there today. Yes, you want to gain lean muscle. It immediately improves your body composition and takes stress from your heart and from your joints, but it also boosts your metabolism, which is what you want— your energy, your blood sugar balance, decreasing insulin resistance that are so very common to women in midlife, and your metabolic health improves. But your heart fitness is important. More coming. Stay tuned. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal to to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. So I'm gonna break down a few mistakes in measuring fitness in menopause and beyond. And you don't want or need to know your pace when you did a mile walk while you're doing it. Why? Well, because number one, it's going to give you a false impression of good or bad, and it means zero. Means zero, right? When you're going uphill, you're going to go slower. When you're doing an interval workout, you also won't go as fast as when you're simply walking on a steady state, because to do an interval right You should be working at a much higher level during that interval, and then you're going to recover at a much lower level. But in the end, you actually may be going slower while you're doing interval training if you were covering ground and looking at it and/or getting that, that equate to on your Garmin or whatever it is that you are wearing. But here's the deal. You know, it's been such a curiosity when someone is actually wearing a watch when they're doing a workout, they're on a trail, and I know they're going as fast as they can. They're not lollygagging, but it will tell you, you did this mile in X minutes. And I'm like, why are we listening to that? We don't need that report. You know, unless we were on a flat comparing our time in doing the exact same route and flat route another day to, you know, today, there's no real value of knowing that because lots of things change. So I just want to be sure here because I hear this so very often that women are, here's how many steps, or here's how many this, or here's how fast, here's what my pace was. You know, unless you were trying to go fast and failed, you know, then we break it down and we figure out why. It doesn't matter. And I wanna make sure that you're measuring the right things and the right metrics. Okay, so let's talk about this. When, if you only personally were doing the exact same trail or the exact same route that you've done, you're going as fast as you can, that might be important. Might be a way for you to look at it. But again, if you're doing the best that you can, knowing in the moment that you're behind, will it help you? Or for some of you, this is the way our brains work cognitively. We're all wired a little bit differently. For some of us, knowing that we were behind would be motivation. We want to catch up. For the others of us there would be, we're behind, and we quit just a little bit on ourselves. Like, it's too late, I can't catch up. So I don't know who you are, but I do know a little bit about my own motivation, and I'm hoping you know about yours. But realize that there couldn't be any positive about this, not really. So looking at it after the fact may be a better way to do it. So consider that, all right? You wanna make sure that, you know, it's not your pace or where you did, how long it took you to do a mile while you were doing it gives you that false impression of good and bad. So unless you're comparing a specific trail that you've done before to a specific trail and you are coming back in a pre and then a post-test assessment, And I would leave that. Not knowing what your heart rate being higher or lower than normal exertion rates mean, you may interpret it incorrectly or also as good and bad, but it's data. So let's say you're doing a regular workout and you could also, by the way, just be in bed, just be in bed, waking up and looking at your heart rate first thing in the morning compared to what it was same day, same time last week. Could be different. And what does that mean? Could mean you're under greater stress. Could mean you're dehydrated, also a form of stress. Could mean you didn't sleep as well, also a form of stress in sleep deprivation. So there's lots of reasons why, and there's reasons why, okay, I'm collecting this at the same time every week to know what's going on. Similarly to weight, You know, measuring my weight on a scale. Is there value in doing that at the same day, same time every week? I would say yes, in order to pick up the clues, solve the problem. What does this mean to me? So let's talk heart rate training. So unless you've been tested, unless you've been tested on the treadmill or a bike, most often by an experienced trainer who can monitor your stages and interpret the results, The zones shown on, say, an elliptical or a treadmill, they're based on average. And you, my dear, are not average. For adults over 40, age predictions underestimate significantly where you should be. You're then going to get a red flag that tells you, oh no, you shouldn't be above this. And you may say, but I feel fine. And you know, sometimes we need to override that. There are times when We're really poor judges of what our exertion level is and how much recovery we need. And someone will say, I don't even feel sore, I feel just fine. You probably still have some damage there. You have some repair that needs to happen. And if you're not eating well, still counting calories, you're still going low carb, you're probably doing a bit of a disservice to yourself without knowing it. This is why we want to track things at a slightly different level. Most women over 40 undereat. They don't overeat. Now I know there's an anomaly and you may be it, but most of us are not eating enough. It's not that we're eating too much, and that has slowed metabolism, not to the extent that it's caused tremendous weight gain, but that it's caused at least weight loss resistance. You're not getting in enough to accommodate for your activity level or for the lean muscle mass that you have and the supply that it needs. And so your body will conserve energy every way it possibly can. So let's look at this. On an interval training day, in regard to heart rate training, you're not working too hard simply because you're breathless. It, it exceeds maybe some arbitrary heart rate that's not based on you, if it doesn't feel like a good fit for you, get tested. And there's some more on that below. But here's where, you know, things will tell you, or in the past we would've said, you know, I want you in this moderate range. We don't want you working too hard. Now there's a simple truth to that. There are days when your exercise is supposed to be recovery.. And if you allow your heart rate to creep up during exercise, that is recovery, you are doing yourself a disservice. But it's not when you're working hard, you're doing high-intensity interval training, your heart rate is not too high, quote unquote. It's when you're supposed to be really low that you're doing a disservice. And again, this is a lot like the mistake women make with calories. We do this wrong. We don't take recovery. We say, no, no, no, I'm going to push all the way through. I'm going to push through. I'll push through. Yeah, it's not good. It's, it's not an intelligent way to exercise. And that doesn't— it is not intended to be an insult, by the way, or condescending. But what I want you to do by the end is to understand that every workout has a purpose, and some days that purpose is recovery. It is resting, it is meant to. Let's increase circulation. I accelerate the level. Accelerate is a hard word to use right there. It's why I hesitated, but I accelerate the recovery that I'm going to do. I improve it, I amplify it, better word. If you are staying low with heart rate, so we increase the circulation, we allow that to happen without any additional stress. Those things have to happen. And if you look at elite athletes, it is what they do. And some would say, well, that's not a good example because I shouldn't exercise like an Olympian. And yet, with the intelligence that they do, with the calculated way that they exercise, in a way, women in menopause, midlife, and beyond, we need to— we don't have as much resilience as we once did. So no, we're— we may not be able to gold medal on the platform the way some did, but we do want to train wisely, recover really wisely, so we continue to be active at our sport, sport of life, for as long as we can. So on a recovery day, you absolutely could be working too hard even if you feel fine. You know, all signs should be assessed. Not just one. So it might be your heart rate, might be your breathlessness, right? Might be your libido, might be your mood, might be your hunger or lack thereof, cravings or lack thereof. So how do I know this? It is honestly, it's less than the 40 years of exercise physiology education, 25 of it as an educator and master trainer of other trainers, and it's more from my own personal experience as a triathlete over the last 20 years. From day one that I decided I wanted to be a triathlete, and that was 40 years ago when I was 20, I was working at a health club in the South during my summers in college. And to the point that I actually did begin training, you know, and I thank my 40th birthday for making me take a Action. You know, it was like, what am I waiting for? Like, I, I should start doing this. And I think honestly, I was maybe 38 or 40 when I first did my first sprint triathlon. And a colleague in my department had started at about that time and he's like, I'm gonna be 40. And I'm like, when am I gonna do this? I better get going. And I was like, yeah, that's really a good idea. Like, I think I might do that too. And so I did, right? And I was working with a science geek coach from the very beginning, and he daylighted and moonlighted as an engineer at a university and as a USAT— that's United States Athletic Training— triathlete coach to some pros, as well as age group weirdos like me who want to do this. And, you know, I go to the country club pool to swim laps during that time. And I got up at 3 AM at United States golf events for my son to run miles in the dark before his tee time at whatever early time in the morning that was. You get the idea. This was not most single women's aspiration, you know, at 40. Had I not experienced the ability to test both in clinical settings, so in the labs where I actually administered the labs, the VO2 testing for students for 15 years in spring and fall, less so in summer, smaller, smaller groups. So we didn't have that happen. So there was that, you know, as well as my undergrad and grad school. I did a ton of testing there. And would have done that in non-clinical settings in private health clubs and kind of adopted, you know, what we weren't going to do in our private setting, you know, was hook everybody up into a lab with— you breathe in the oxygen, you expire, and we're measuring that in a metabolic cart. You know, we weren't doing that in a fitness center. People, number one, were not that motivated to be that uncomfortable. The testing is not comfortable. And it can be expensive, but it also requires, you know, medical presence. You've gotta have somebody who can interpret it. And yet there are ways to, okay, how can we simplify this? I hate to say dumb it down, but simplify the test so that we can give an estimate. And it's similar but different to say doing math in an age-predicted heart rate. The difference being we're actually testing you to observe how do you respond, what is happening, what happens to your heart rate as we increase the intensity of the exercise and the stage of exercise, what happens with your response. Because we know the prediction, we know what should happen, and we know when that no longer does, we know at what point you are at This is at your peak, we're done. Or you may say, nope, my legs are giving out. It's not my heart, but I can't go any further because my legs are hurting. We at least have a good indication of what was trending. How were things going? How close to the end were we? We still learned a lot. So these things are really, really important. Hey, it's Debra Atkinson. Can you think of one person who would benefit from this episode? Would you pause right now and share it? Send it directly to an individual or share it to your social media. This is how we, you and I, get a movement going and surround ourselves with women who are doing and thinking exactly what we want to do and think. The greatest work we have to do is in believing that it's possible, believing what it can look like now, in 10 years, in 20 years, and beyond. We are the first generation that collectively will strength train our entire lives, and that can change the way we all age. When you surround yourself with other women who are creating strong futures, we all win. But had I gone purely into my triathlon training using heart rate monitors but age-predicted heart rates, I would have severely been undertrained. I wouldn't have been reaching enough. So during that time period, so this was in my early 40s, you know, I needed to, when I was running outdoors and running intervals, I needed my heart rate to get up to about 164 to 178, you know, at peak. And an age-predicted heart rate would have had me far lower, and I would have been getting those signals, your heart rate's too high, back off, back off, you know. And so you've really got to test in order to know for yourself where should you be. So my post here is to help you avoid undertraining. We also don't want you to overtrain, so there's recovery days. I'm hoping you got that message as well. And I want you to avoid what you think is ideal based on peer pressure from social media that may be less supportive than it is destructive. So measuring fitness in menopause— this is what we think. We think always working as hard as possible when exercising. We think completely relying on feels like for recovery status between sessions. Getting heart rate high in long endurance workout, also not good. That we call cardiac drift. The heart rate will continue to climb, so you have to decrease your speed in order to stay in the heart rate range that should be recovery. Many women will not do that. They'll— no, no, I feel fine. Doesn't matter. Do you want to get stronger and fitter? So the more intervals, the better. Not so true. Doing weightlifting and cardio intervals alternately, meaning in the same session of, say, 20 or 30 minutes, you're going to go battle ropes, weightlifting exercise, high-intensity interval training, box jumps. Weightlifting exercise back and forth. Bad idea. It washes out the results of both. You don't get that high-intensity interval training benefit, and you don't get true strength training, which increases lean muscle mass or strength. So you're compromised in both cases. It feels hard, so it must be hard. Not so much. And it makes me lose weight. We say that's a good definition. But again, let's say you're losing mostly lean muscle mass— going to backfire. Measuring fitness in menopause and beyond— what is really good? Okay, knowing how hard to push for 4 minutes versus 30 seconds. So you have an idea of how do I pace myself. So if you want to do a longer 4-minute interval. Now that's really long, and that is aerobic. That's an aerobic interval versus anaerobic. My preference first and foremost for most women is walking and weightlifting, and then adding high-intensity interval training. That is about 15 to 30 seconds of high-intensity bursts of exercise. Knowing how to do recovery day, and in doing so, that means you're keeping your heart rate low while you're doing it. So it could be walking for you, it could be running, but I will tell you that for running, for most people, most women, it is hard to keep your heart rate down, and so it will creep and you're not actually anymore doing that recovery. So if that's you, you're doing yourself again a disservice. So a long hike could be better for recovery than doing higher intensity and doing it in a run. Not allowing your heart rate to creep up during a recovery workout. So again, slowing down. So for me, when I would do a recovery run, I almost always had to start walking because my heart rate would start getting up higher than it was supposed to. And I was like, how am I supposed to— how am I supposed to keep it down? And that is, by the way, a measure of fitness. When you can work at a higher intensity, meaning a faster speed, keeping your heart rate lower, you know, now you have gotten more fit. If it still climbs, you're doing something backward that is interfering with your progress. Using high-intensity intervals on various specific days, right? Not every day, not just when you feel like it. Reaching muscle fatigue with a muscle-specific workout followed by a minimum of 48 hours of recovery. Now, for women over 40— and men, by the way— we do better often with 72 hours of recovery. So I'm suggesting to you, test it, especially if you're a woman who's prone to a lot of stress in her life. You have a tendency maybe toward adrenal fatigue, where you're just— you'd say, I'm tired all the time. You know, if I go to a movie in the afternoon, it's dark there's a good chance I might go to sleep, right? That's you, by the way. That's you. A little adrenal fatigue, right? So just because we're in a movie and it's dark doesn't mean you should go to sleep, right? So if you're reaching muscle fatigue with that specific, remember you do have to take the recovery. Reaching breathlessness in interval training when you're fresh for optimal speed, resistance, or power. So depending on the mode. So if you're doing sprints up the hill, or you're doing intensity, meaning putting it in a high gear on a bike or a lot of resistance on an elliptical, you're able to do that and you're fresh. Understanding bike, rowing, swim heart rates will differ if you're using heart rate training because you've removed gravity, so you're not on your feet. Your running heart rate will be 10 beats higher than what your bike heart rate ideally will be at an interval. Likely with swim as well. Swim even more so because you're horizontal, your heart doesn't have to work as hard. So you may be working really hard, but your heart rate is down. The other complicated thing about swim is it's a skill-related type of thing, so it's a little harder to plan for that. The bottom line is this: a good fitness program in menopause and beyond improves your strength, your absolute skeletal muscle mass increases Your body composition will decrease body fat if you need it. Now, not for those of you who already have it low. Energy levels throughout the day are stable. Your speed increases. Your heart rate response at the same effort— mentioned this earlier— is lower. We can throw things at you. You're more resilient. You can go at that jog and still not have that heart rate climb up. Your heart rate recovery rate after exercise is faster. So back in the day, do you remember we'd have everyone do a 3-minute step test, which I always struggled with because I would have older adults— I usually was given the older adults, and it was like they couldn't even do a step test because their knees bothered them. Why would we ever have them do this? We have to have an alternative, I said. Finally, we do. But, you know, at the end of the test— it wasn't during the test, it was at the end of the test— like, sit down immediately, we're going to see what your heart rate is, and then we're going to see how long it takes you to come back to your resting heart rate, or 120 or below at very least, right? So the quicker you come back to a recovery heart rate zone, the the more resilient your heart and the better shape you're in. So testing that prior at the beginning and then after a certain period of time is also beneficial. So if you aren't testing before you start and periodically, let's get that started right now. In our members area, by the way, for those of you— I know lots of our members are listening— there's a self-test protocol for treadmills that will help you, and we will help you interpret it if you come and report that to us in the Facebook group. We'll help you break that out and say, what does that mean? What does that mean to me? And doing a more comprehensive test, like one using stages of speed and/or incline to record heart rate responses, is the way to determine your heart rate zones. And that's what we walk you through from our members area. So you can do some more informal things. The following options won't do that, but I'm going to provide them because they're better potentially than what you've been doing. And I think we all get curious about ourselves. So they'll give you a way to gather information on how you're doing now compared to averages or not. So a few facts: heart rate on a bike, again, will be about 10 beats lower than the corresponding work on your feet. So if you test on a bike and you're trying to transfer that over to treadmill, remember you're going to have to add 10 to the range that you have or to those numbers or vice versa. So VO2 testing is very uncomfortable. The last time I did it, I think was December of 2018. I'm— I was due to get one recently, but I had a conflict. I had to back out. So you don't have to go to a university, but chances are if they have an exercise physiology lab,, or an extensive athletic program, you can test there most likely. Other fitness and health pros also often offer this, but most often on a bike. If that feels like too much or too expensive to do, it's probably gonna run you, depending on where in the world you live and the exclusivity of the location, probably gonna cost you $125 or upward of that to do the test. You can establish a way to learn if your fitness is working. You know, if you have access to Protocol, our members area, that's one place. But the other thing is this: I want you to keep it simple. So walk you through this briefly, and these are things you can do just today, some of them. First of all, what's your resting heart rate? Do you know that? First thing in the morning, I would take an average of 3 days. If you have to wake up to an alarm clock, you need to roll back over, let that heart rate calm down a a little bit, then take it. What's your heart rate before the test that you're going to do? So you want to know after you've been up and you're walking around and you're ready to go into this test but haven't started it, where's heart rate? Then you're going to do a 1-mile walk test. Now for this, you want a flat surface. The ideal would be you've got a track, you're going to go to the track, it's going to be the same track every time you do this, it's going to be flat, no hills. But if you are, say, going to a park and you're able to measure it precisely. So you can't be about— gotta have a start, gotta have a stop, gotta know exactly that it's the same. As long as it is the same exact trail, you follow it in the same exact order. For a more elaborate test, by the way, that was begun actually in 1987, right at about the time I was done with grad school, between that and my first job, the Rockport Walking Test. I'm sure sounds familiar. You do that on a flat course, and a track again is ideal. You can do it on a treadmill. I don't think that's ideal. Remember, that belt is moving for you, so you're not getting an accurate view, and you know, you're not as likely to go up or down with that speed. So I don't love treadmill for testing, not this test. So If it's a test, remember this, you should be pushing. It's a test, right? So you're trying to go as fast as you can to complete this test without your feet leaving the ground. That would be running. What's your mile walk time? And what is the final heart rate when you finish? You want to know that. And then how soon does your heart rate come back to the rate that you were pre-test? Record that time. And all of those things— and by the way, these things will be in the show notes— but all of these things will help you track. Here's how we did it at the beginning when I did this. Here's 2 months later when I was training and how I'm doing now. They are baselines. So what's most important about a test is that you collect the data, that it's repeatable, and it's not changing the variables. So that you and the data are the variables. So whether you do that simple test I just gave you, or you actually go to the Rockport test— and that'll be in the show notes if you want to do it— you'll begin to understand the components that measure your true fitness. Skinny is not fit. Fat is not unfit. There are health complications for both of those now and later. So what you want, no matter your weight, is strong and fit and vibrant, and getting so will improve your heart too. So now you have data at least to measure whether your fitness is improving. And yes, there's a way to compare yourself to others. However, right now that's not the point. The point is you, you know, are you fitter than you were last year? Is you 6 months from now fitter than at this point right now? Look, life happens. A virus may happen. As I write, we saw just again globally at the Olympics. Your smooth sailing life will have babies and funerals and interruptions. But from time to time, check in and consider how it's going for you. How refreshing is it to actually stop looking at the weight and the fat for just a second and to look at your heart and how that's going? If you want to comment on this one particularly a little bit more in depth, whether you're in a program or a membership, do it there. But if not, join the Facebook group. It's called the Flipping 50 Insiders, Flipping 5-0 Insiders. And the notes on the Rockport test and the resources and links will be there in the show notes today, flipping50.com/measuringfitness. In menopause. What are you waiting for? Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife women. So go and listen right Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell? Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups and the answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group. But it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions or tell your story. 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