More Simple Strategies for Effective Short Workouts in Menopause

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What are you waiting for? Good night. Okay, what if you spend all your exercise time focused on your biceps and your triceps to go sleeveless and you never get the biceps and the triceps that you want? What the heck? And why would I say that? Answers coming up in this episode.

I'm Debra Atkinson and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness and menopause and beyond before you know to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with the science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy you want, need, and deserve.

Introducing more tips for effective short workouts in menopause. I know some of you listeners are addicted to your arm work because you want to go sleeveless. And by the way, the way to do that is put on a sleeveless shirt. I know, a little cheeky, but Here's the thing, you know, you don't have to hide under sweaters or long sleeves and suffer. Just go sleeveless. And I will tell you some of the easiest ways to get more arm confidence at the end of this episode, so stick around to the end. Because notoriously, I've been doing fitness instruction for 41 years now, and it This is an eternal wish for a lot of women. Like, it's like genetic. It must be something genetic. But I wanna tell you that we make a lot of mistakes in seeking it. And I'm here to tell you what the real answers are. So I know some of you are addicted to the arm work that you think is going to get you the results they want. But here's the other thing I want you to think about. Who has time? And I'm going to propose that in a way that you might not have thought about it this way. This is the way I think about it. Who has time for that extra 20 minutes that should be thought of in this way? When you do arms, the order of your exercises should dictate that arm work comes at the end. So little baby muscles need to come at the end of the workout, not at the beginning. And here's why. So your biceps or your triceps, so we're talking front Popeye muscle, back, what we all call second wave goodbye, right? And it's actually not the muscle sometimes, I gotta say that. But the challenge is that many of you, like that is what you wanna do and you go into the gym and maybe you're with a friend or a spouse or even a trainer and you're like, my number one goal is what I want toned arms for blah blah blah, for the dress I'm wearing to my daughter's wedding or my son's or blah blah, you know, and I get it. I, I do get it. However, that's not the way to do it. So I'm gonna blow some smoke on the theory and the thing you thought and show you, although if you're listening only and you're going for a walk, you're not gonna see it. So I gotta give you that, okay? But what I want you to know is that we really have to be rethinking what's the order of the exercises that we should go through. Your chest muscles— so those are responsible for— I say you were going to do a push-up. I don't, I don't— not a huge advocate of a lot of push-ups because, you know, blindly trying to lead hundreds of thousands of women through push-ups, it's probably one of the most risky exercises or the most often completed incorrectly with poor form, which can lead to shoulder issues. And of the two points that are most common after 40 for risk of injury, it's knees and shoulders. So let's not go there if we don't have to, right? But chest press, dumbbells. So we just flip you over instead of a push-up. You're going to lie on your back on a bench, on the floor, on a ball, and you're going to push dumbbells or push a machine. So maybe you're sitting upright, but you're pressing away. You're using your chest muscles. When you're pushing away, you're also Elbow extension uses your triceps, so you're going to use those muscles doing that kind of action. They do movement extending the shoulder as well. So we could do a lot of different things that we can get creative, but you want to be careful with that one. But it is really important that you're looking at the sequence of exercise. Put the small ones last because the chest doing those chest press needs that secondary team member to participate to make that safe, especially if you are lifting weights over your head. And likewise, when you do a bent-over, uh, row— so we do a bent-over row for standing, we could do that seated in a chair at home or on a bench at home, or we can do it upright against resistance of other— a machine or a cable if we're at the gym. But we need the back muscles to work, but we also are flexing at the elbow and movement that happens at the shoulder as well. We're working the biceps. We don't want to fatigue them, you know, too many times or too frequently. We don't want to fatigue them first. Now, every once in a while it's okay to break the rules and let's do something different and kind of shake it up. If you're stale, you're at a plateau, you're not getting results, and we need just for it to feel different, there are moments when I will say, okay, we're do these first and then we're gonna go to this because you keep telling me you're only feeling it in your triceps. I will have somebody do tricep exercises first so they can feel it in the chest muscles. And the ones, the muscles they've already worked, get out of the way. They don't participate because they don't want to play anymore. So that's one decision that you may not know to make for yourself or know when it's not appropriate to make unless you're working with a coach who knows you really well. So in a recent short strength training strategies episode just last week, I believe— so we'll put this in the show notes— I said I would share how I sneak in these ancillary exercises. And that's what I call bicep work and tricep work or shoulder work. I don't work my shoulders every day in an isolated exercise, and that is those that I would say are lateral raises, front raises, reverse flies. Those are specific deltoid exercises, or a shoulder press. I don't do those every time. In fact, there are many times I go through a week and I don't do those other than demonstrating for you, but you're working them independently and doing other things. And let's say you're going to put in a 30-minute swim, you're using your shoulders a lot. So I wouldn't beat my shoulders up in weights before I was going to go and do that. So you've got to think about what sets do you do? Are you using them? When do you want to lift and work out? By the way, if you're listening and you're in post-menopause, the volume of sets for the stimulus that you need is considerably higher than it takes for a woman who's pre- or in perimenopause. And that time and that energy can be a real challenge. You're struggling with the need for volume and the need for staying in that sweet spot or the need to get the testosterone and growth hormone stimulus with the need to avoid adrenal and cortisol stress that you could cause by doing it. I'm going to say that again. So we juggle this need to— okay, like teeter-totter, up, down. I need adequate stimulus. I have to stimulate the muscles enough so that after that workout, what I've done is stimulated the release of testosterone and growth hormone. If we just do a meh, kind of good workout, kind of moderate, kind of flat, just showed up, went through the repetitions, we probably didn't get adequate stimulus to get the testosterone and growth hormone release. We just kind of put it in, right? It's not really great, right? But on the other hand, if we're really going for volume and we're doing that quantity thing over quality, we do risk adrenal fatigue and our cortisol level potentially going higher than it needs to. So we, we need to kind of walk a fine line of— this is, this is a sweet spot right here. This is really where you want to be. So we juggle that need getting adequate stimulus and not getting too much. So a really good quality workout, 45 minutes to 60 minutes, and then adequate recovery between, at least 72 hours is what I like to see instead of just 48. And I know that changes the game because you can't get on such a regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. You can't get on Monday, Thursday. And if you have to shift because of work or family obligations, changes things a little bit, but it is far better to be really adequately recovered than not. And if you keep overdoing, overdoing, overdoing, a lot of women tend to get injured, injured, injured, and that takes you out of the game altogether. All right, so a little different to do if you're listening to audio— a completely— I'm talking a lot about exercise, exercises, about sets and reps. If you happen to be watching this and you want to come over to YouTube, we'll release this one as a video. We don't often do it on the same exact day, but it will be out in about the short— same period. So you can subscribe to the channel if you want to get that. So let's talk about triceps, because that is the second wave goodbye. It's usually the first thing, or one of the first things, that come up. So choose— this is one way that I sneak this in. Remember, we're talking how do I make it short and effective. You're going to choose 5 or 6 different tricep exercises. Now there's There's probably 10 that we could choose, and you can change grip, meaning you can hold on to the weights and you can do palms up, or you can do palms in neutral. You could even do palms down, and that changes the use of the biceps. Remember, there's two biceps, number two, bi. So changing from one grip to the other in the exercise changes a little bit of the dynamic on the arm and where you're actually feeling it. But let's talk triceps. Triceps. So 5 or 6 different triceps exercises, do them in rapid succession. Meaning, I mean, don't run and get breathless and get sloppy, but you're not going to take a break. You're not going to say, okay, I'm going to put that down, I'm going to rest for 1 to 2 minutes. No, no, no. You're gonna say, all right, I'm gonna take a dumbbell, I'm gonna do an overhead press, and as soon as I'm done with that, carefully I'll the weights down. I'm going to go and do dips. Now, dips may or may not be appropriate for everybody. Don't get hung up on the exercises. Think about or list the tricep exercises you know, whether you're at home or you're doing this at the gym. So at a gym, I would also go to a cable machine and I would pin the weight down low. I'd get a rope and I'd take that overhead. It's a little different than your dumbbell. Overhead press. I would do a skull crusher lying down on a bench, bringing it right to the forehead, not actually crushing the skull, by the way. Don't take some things so literally. You could do a tricep kickback with a lighter weight. You could do a long lever tricep kickback. You can use a bar at a cable with a long arm. That triceps, by the way— try 3 muscles, but but they also cross the shoulder. We often forget that long arm tricep can give you a lot more definition if you work that one in. It's kind of a little secret, so I love that one. Then you can do short, much more common. You'll see that happen a lot if you combine a long and then you combine a short right in there and sneak them together. You've got lots and lots of differences, so long lever, short lever, overhead, lying down, pressing down. So you just take what you know, 5 or 6, and you— if you think, gosh, I can't think of 5 or 6 exercises for the triceps I know, take the 3 that you know and go 1, 2, 3, and then 1, 2, 3, and just go boom and boom and boom and boom. You can do those all with, okay, I'm going to try to get 10 repetitions of each and stay right there. There are other ways that you could say, all right, I'm gonna do 6 repetitions to fatigue, so it's going to be really heavy, right? And then the next set, I'm going to do 12 repetitions to fatigue, so it's kind of moderate, but you just did that 6, so it's actually going to be heavy. It's going to feel heavy. And then the last or the third set you do might be you're going to do 25 repetitions, so you're going to get endurance. And remember, it's a cumulative effect. You just did that 6, then you did 12, now you're doing 25. It's going to be hard and if you're going to repeat that again, you're going to go through them all over again. And it, it will be humbling because you might put those weights down and get smaller ones, and that's okay. It's reaching muscular fatigue in each one of those sets that really matters. And when you do them in rapid succession, as opposed to when you've taken a good rest period between, it will change the game. Now, we call that supersetting as in all exercises for the same muscle group. And there are lots of ways to superset. Most frequently when I do that in a workout, it's opposing muscle groups, and we'll do A, B, A, B, A, B, back and forth. But this is another way to do a superset with either same body part or same muscle group in this certain case. So let me give you another idea for biceps.

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And I just described this really, so it'll be like reinforcing it for you. Biceps, I don't do as many repetitions typically as I do for the triceps, and here's the it. What I'm doing really is— so what I'm doing is thinking, okay, how do I balance what I do in real life? So in real life, we tend to carry things, right? We're carrying groceries, at least if you order them, go get them yourself. You go get them yourself, you carry them from the front door to the kitchen, But we carry things. We carry maybe the dog, we carry the laundry, we carry, and we're using our biceps unlike triceps. Now, if you swim regularly, you probably get more tricep action than most of us. If you play a racket sport, one of your arms might get more tricep action than the other one, but it's not balanced. So there's different probably careers that are going to use different muscles, but most of us, I would have to say, probably use our biceps more than we do in functional daily activities than we do our triceps. We don't go around pushing, pushing, pushing unless you're in construction or you mow lawns for a living. Okay, so I will tell you this, when I was doing triathlon training, I had, I had great arms. But I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why a lot of people thought I had great arms, and it's probably a combination of the two. But I think the real reason I had great arms is because I rode my bike in aero, and that means kind of down in a plank form on your forearms, and you're leaning in aero. It's called aerodynamic, so that you're kind of letting the wind go over you easier, and you're making yourself kind of smaller pocket. And what you're doing, imagine, if you lean forward, is that's a contraction for your triceps that you're in constantly. And there's a lot of hours that you put in on a bike if you're training for a long-distance triathlon. So there's, you know, probably 3 hours a week just normally, and then you might go for a 3-hour bike ride on the weekend, or 4 or 5, and sometimes it gets to 6. And in addition to that, you're also swimming. So a lot of people will say, well, that's why, because it's swimming. But there is not really a lot of push going on in swimming that happens from there. The work should happen from your back muscles, from your lats, your latissimus dorsi. Otherwise you will get tired fast. So if you don't learn real quick, you swim from your lats, you're gonna probably struggle. Right? So I try not to struggle more than I need to. So that static work that you could do on a bicycle, that is actually, you know, work. So don't discount anything about the tricep work. Interestingly enough, that was like— as an athlete, a triathlete, that was kind of like my job, right? I wasn't efforting or trying to do a tricep exercise. It just was a part of my daily posture or you know, several times a week posture. So similarly, if you think about what do you normally do already there for biceps, you know, by comparison, I spend more time doing tricep exercises than I do my biceps because I'm already using them all day in, in a lot of things. So for biceps, I do those 3 sets I described earlier with 6 and then 12 and then 25. So that's the magic numbers. 6 repetitions to fatigue. So I get a weight that I don't like. And remember, if you're only doing 6, the first repetition already begins to feel heavy. Second repetition feels heavier than that. 5 and 6, you're smiling, but you don't mean it, right? I always tell my students, if I'm teaching a class and I'm smiling or I'm talking a lot, it's because I'm distracting myself, not for you, right? But seriously, you start with 6 repetitions to fatigue, then you put those weights down, you pick up weights that you use 12 to fatigue. Now you have fewer options with your biceps, but you have more than you might have thought. So again, the biceps cross the shoulder as well as the elbow. So I will do bicep curls with palms up with the really heavy ones. That's generally what I'll do. I might do the next set with palms in, in neutral but I also might do a long lever. So I'm holding here, moving from my shoulder as I lift. Now that also gets the deltoid, and so you get a nice shoulder tone from that as well. But because you're messing with your shoulders, then your biceps, you, you have to be careful and you have to have good form. But then from there, you're going to put that down. You've done 6, you did your 12, you're going to go on to 25, and you're going to go to the end of the rack and you're going to put up your very small weight weights and you're gonna say, oh, this is so embarrassing, but you'll feel it even more embarrassing, you know, by halfway through it'd be like, oh yeah, I'm so glad I picked these up. So when you're doing them, either short lever or long lever, when you're doing any of them, tune in, don't tune out, focus, look at yourself in the mirror. It can be very helpful because you will see yourself kind of as an objective third person. So you'll drop your shoulders down, you'll put them back, you'll stand tall, you'll slightly bend your knees if you're standing, you'll sit down but sit tall through your spine. All the important things that actually need to happen. So that is it. So biceps and triceps done, you know. And how long did that take? So if you think about 10 repetitions for 5 or 6 exercises, that's gonna take me maybe 5 to 6 minutes to do the triceps. Done. The biceps, they're really heavy, right? And then going on to 12 repetitions. 12 repetitions should be about a minute if you're going slow and controlled. And then 25, that's a little bit more muscle endurance. It's almost like for our runners, when I was training, teaching how do you run a marathon, you— we have them do, you know, runner arms with 5 pounds or 3 pounds depending on how strong they are. But we have them do that for a minute. You know, you might be able to do that. We're not going quite so slow, but that's probably at least 3 minutes, right? So we've got 8 minutes in, 8 or 9, and we've done biceps and triceps. So maybe that's a quick 10 more minutes, but not the, you know, lots and lots of extra time. If you wanted to do shoulders similarly on a different day, not necessarily on the same one I would choose 3 or 4 shoulder exercises, the ones I named earlier: lateral raise to the side, front raise up, and then rear or reverse fly, as we call it. So you would need to hinge forward at 45 degrees or more and then moving out to the side in that type of a lateral raise with flexed elbows moving from the shoulders. So you could do those, you could an overhead press, we use a single arm. We do them out in front. We don't do them out to the side because of the stress on the shoulder that is not necessary. So if we can choose, uh, where's a low risk, still a high reward, we're gonna go with that one every single time. I know you're gonna see them done the other way on social media. Social media doesn't have a mother, doesn't have a degree. Please don't follow social media. Follow an expert that you trust, that you know has a degree, that you know has worked with women, and that you know has kept them safe. Make your decisions wisely, okay? Just because you see it doesn't mean you should do it. There are an infinite number of ways you could do biceps and triceps same day. You could save, you know, your second workout of week, maybe you choose to do shoulders. So it's— you're stimulating them. Remember, even if you don't do isolated exercises for them, your shoulders are active active when you do chest press and when you do back exercises. Your triceps and biceps are active when you're doing chest press and pulling exercises respectively. So feel like you are doing great work if you're really focused on metabolism and higher volume in your back and your chest exercises. You are getting— those ancillary muscle groups are still getting work. Don't feel like you're not. You're still there. You're getting I always am very conscious about choosing fewer biceps and triceps again, and that's because of our daily activities of life. So if you can think of how do I choose my exercises, what do I want to do— if you're trying to do this programming by yourself, please realize it's not easy. It's not just, uh, um, what I would call a no-brainer. It's a— it takes thought. The exercises that you choose to do, know why you're choosing each and every one of those. Know the order or the sequence of those exercises. Know why that number of exercises may be before you come back to the exercise again. That is potentially that you're building in rest. Know if you're going to put a balance exercise or core exercise in there, because often I will do that when I'm sequencing for someone because I never ever ever want you to sit and have time to scroll ever. If you have that phone with you, I hope— my hope is that it is to change the music so it's more motivating for you. It is to fast forward to the podcast that you really wanted to listen to that's going to be really motivating for you. But it is not to answer the phone. It's not to scroll your social media. That's a waste of time. I want you checked in, checked in, checked in. So make sure that you have this here for a reason, and it's only for the reason that it will help help you right now. Our newest 12-week program coming into our members— it's not even there yet, but coming into our membership— is really advanced. We are using some strategies that will help cut down on the time, but it is for our members that have been consistently working out for 6 months or more, who have feelings like, my joint integrity is really good, that I know that I can do and I want to push myself just a little bit more, but I also would love these to be short workouts, like, you know, 30 minutes and then I'm done. And that's the kind of workout that it is. It's not going to be easy, but it will feel good when you've made that progress. So if you'd like to learn more about our membership, we're only open a couple times a year, but you can get in and sample something for beginners if you're just getting started. Inside of the membership, we have over 10 now with this new one. We have 11 different 12-week programs, and that is because everybody's needs change from time to time. Everybody's needs and goals change. You know, there may be times you really want to focus on body composition, you really need to focus on having really short workouts because life is giving you a lot of other things to do on your plate, and energy and time are limited. So we've created programs to match match many of those needs so that there's a place for you to go even when life gets a little grisly, that you can still take care of yourself. So we'll put links in the show notes to all those. We'll link to last week's episode on— really, it was a little more comprehensive on the total body and what the sequence looks like, ways that I shortchange the time investment on workouts without shortchanging myself on the results that I'm getting. I hope you like this. I'd love to hear from you. Please share it if it was helpful for you.

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