My Post Menopause Workout Week Experiment | What I’m Doing

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My post-menopause workout has been working. Let me just say that before I dive into this episode. So when I say it's been working, what I mean is I'm about as lean as I want to be comfortably. For me, could I get leaner? I think so. But I, I'm also not one to want to be really restrictive, really obsessive. And I think any woman can have a tendency to do that. I have enough things going on in my life I can be obsessive about. I don't need to do that. Thank you very much. So let me just say I'm as lean as I comfortably want to be and my muscle mass remains high. So I go in that bathroom every either Monday or Friday. It kind of depends. Some weeks I forget and I'm looking at less so my weight. I can't say I don't look at it. I do, and you need to. But I look at what's my percent body fat and what is my skeletal muscle mass in pounds. That number I want to know absolutely is where it should be. Now, you have to know this: if you're looking at your smart scale and you're measuring your skeletal mass, if you are dehydrated, that muscle mass will go down. We store water in our muscle, and that's the way it should be. So if you're well hydrated, you're going to actually see the muscle there. Don't confuse this with the more water you drink, the more muscle you will have. You're not drinking it or not drinking it making the muscle come or go. It's just going to show up. So we've got to have the water in you. You need to be hydrated in order to see it. That also may be something good to remember when you want to be a little bit stronger because you're going to function better. Those muscles are going to function better that way. But, you know, I'm not losing any muscle. My muscle is maintaining, staying the same. If anything, in the last 2 years I've gotten just a little bit more serious about really lifting heavy. I always back off, so I always do a cycling within a week and or definitely within a month and within quarters. I'll have entire quarters. This quarter I'm really working hard. Another quarter I might not work quite so hard. And let me give you an example. So I'm here, I was training for a couple long-distance hikes, so leading up to June, but more so leading up to September, the Grand Canyon. I mean, that is a— pardon my French— a kick-butt hike. And leading up to That means I was in season. I was doing a lot of time on my feet when I could. It was really hot here, so that was a little challenging. I did do more strength training than I had intended to. But if you're in season, you're playing a lot more golf, for instance, you're swimming, you're biking, you're outdoors, you may back off of your strength training a little bit. So in season for you might be during colder months, as it is for me. But I wanted to pay attention to bone density, just kind of getting over the hump and gaining some bone density as well as muscle. They're tied together and did. So I reversed bone loss, have one little spot still remaining that's still kind of dipping into osteopenia. My intent is to kick that away by the next time I test. But, you know, I bumped up more volume within workouts. That's important. That's not more days per week. That's not necessarily a longer session, it's more organized. But more volume means more sets, and it's more sets, more muscle groups. And I know you might be thinking, well, doesn't that extend your workout a little bit? Not if you're more organized. So generally, in and out, if I'm going to a gym, warm up to cool down, no more than an hour. And a lot of times I have a gym 6 minutes away, and if I have a really busy day, you all, I have to get out of the house because I work in the morning kind of solo, working on creative things. And then I will jump into meetings which occur on my house right here on Zoom or recording on a platform like this. I need a break away. And if it's really hot, I'm not going to be able to go for a walk. I'm going to get it. By just 6 minutes to the gym, in and out. But that workout might be 35 to 40 minutes, you know. And before, it's really easy to play that game. Is it even worth it? Absolutely it is. I have no hesitation doing that. I jump in the car, I get out of there, and I, I think of it as 30 minutes in the door, really organized. I can get a great workout in in that time. Absolutely. Do I hit every single major muscle group? No. Do you need to? No, to stay consistent. As we get older and older, will it be helpful? Yes. My recovery time between my strength training sessions, by the way, also had to increase. So as the intensity did, I made sure— I mean, I wasn't slipping in a Monday-Wednesday workout. I definitely was Monday-Thursday, sometimes Monday Friday just to be sure I'm totally recovered because I really wanted to be able to go heavy and to reach muscular fatigue safely. I'm not trying to increase my injury risk, and I, I know you're not either. But recovery time, let me make it clear, between your strength training sessions, that is not couch potato time. It's sprint intervals, whether that's on a bike or it's on a treadmill for me. Agility, mobility, walking or hiking, all those things. So I'm extremely active, but I qualify strength training. That is where I am going to prioritize my energy, my time. I'm buffering that, making sure I've got recovery time in days. So the day before, the day after, it's simply a walk. Maybe it was a swim during summer. So think about recovery time is important, but it's active. So in doing it, I had the opportunity to see my readiness score soar. The more recovery time I had, the better my scores were. So I'm embarrassed to say this, so I have used a Garmin for a really long time. Gosh, I don't even remember the first time I got a Garmin, but it was probably 2014, and I got one. Something happened, it broke. I had to get a second one. The band broke. I got a new band. I was very attached to that. And then it finally died, and that model was no longer available. So I now have a Garmin. It's white, it's not red. I still have the red one in the drawer. I can't part with it. That is sick. More attached to that than I ever have been to a car. But you know what I've seen, you know, in heart rate variability— that's our recovery score, the readiness to exercise again. So I've always seen, you know, prior to the workout, oh, here's your recovery rate. Sometimes it's 0, that's not very good. -1 means go back home. You know, a +1 or a +2, and I've seen +3s pretty consistently. And I know great. I'm really ready to go. I had been really busy for a couple of weeks and working out less frequently, and I finally finished some projects. But then I was prepping to go away, so I had some days off, you know, and I was doing things but not doing a whole lot. I one day got to a conference, I was at the beach, I'd set my watch to say, okay, run wore walk, and it said +6. I was like, what? I didn't even know it went that high. Like, +6? Are you kidding me? And I'm like, oh my gosh, I've been short-sheeting myself. I'm never that recovered. So I'm playing with that. I'm playing with recovery more. I'm playing with maybe I need more time total between to actually get better workouts during to get better results, you know. And indeed, you know, that week was, you know, a lot of time spent at the beach, which is— gosh, it was one of my favorite places, and I've returned there a couple of times this last year. And, you know, I mean, that says a lot too. But I think that looking at doing less but making it more effective. For women in perimenopause, this is absolutely the key. But if you are postmenopause, you might want to consider being sure you're doing that and not just, I have to do more, do more, do more. You're hearing yes, and I agree wholeheartedly. You should move more throughout your day. And that might mean quote unquote going for a walk, but more often it actually just means Be on your feet, clean your house, vacuum. Somebody in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but, you know, you know, walk the dog, go get your own groceries. Don't call Instacart. Be moving, be doing things you enjoy, things that you wanted to get done. And don't let your exercise where you're thinking, I've got to go work out, I can't do that. Maybe working in the yard for an hour or two. Is actually as beneficial as doing a strength training workout at the gym. Now, I don't want you to sacrifice that necessarily, but I want you to realize that it is that moving that really has the biggest positive impact on what it is that you're going to do as far as your longevity and/or mortality. So I've had that opportunity to see that I was making a assumptions that my skeletal muscle mass was good, my body composition is pretty good overall, I'm doing pretty good, sleeping pretty good. I was making assumptions that this is it, but I haven't questioned, is that the best it could be? So this 90 days, this last quarter of 2024, I'm questioning it, right? So even 42 years of consistent exercise outside of injuries, Maybe it's time to say, whoa, maybe every assumption I've made isn't quite right and to re-examine it. So here I am using the last 90 days of 2024 to see if I've misjudged. 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 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. All right, let's dive back into that. I know that was an extraordinarily long introduction, but I really wanted to give you a really good handle. That was how it started. That was how this 90-day experiment started. And just so you know, we do 12-week programs here at Flipping 50, and we've done that for as long as I can remember. 2015, '16, we actually started the 12-week programs and we flipped them out, changed them a little bit here and there, but they're always out there. And we do that regularly because they're long enough and yet short enough. And that's what I needed to just mentally— okay, I can onboard. It's now to the end of the year, which I don't know about you, but maybe from the first quarter of the year This last quarter feels like, oh, it's fleeting, it's gonna go so fast. So you understand now how it started. I just, I had kind of somebody slap me up the side of the head, myself, and say, you've been assuming that your recovery score was as good as it gets, and it wasn't. So what else have you been missing? So what I'm trying And I'm a total believer in total body versus the split routine for women in menopause, for women in midlife, especially who are really busy or who are in perimenopause and struggling to do much at all. I definitely think, and science tells us, we need to be strength training so you don't lose muscle mass. Up to 27% can be lost from early peri to late stage post-perimenopause, but you may not feel the energy to do it. But what I'm doing is testing my own theory on total body versus split routine to see if the greater volume that we know postmenopausal women need— so pretty recently, 2023, in 2024, we're hearing that postmenopausal women need more stimulation and we're actually getting it quantified. So studies that look at women in menopause, breaking women into perimenopause group versus postmenopause— perimenopause group, they made progress, they did this, but it wasn't enough stimulus for the women postmenopause. So the number seems to be around 80. 80 and above sets of strength training per week. So what does that mean? Let's say you and I go to the gym and we have been working out together for a long time, because I would never do this to somebody in the first week or two, right? We're gonna do 5 sets for each exercise. So we're gonna do 5 sets of chest press, 5 sets of bent-over row, we're gonna do 5 sets of a leg press. Would do 5 sets of triceps, 5 sets of biceps. So I just ticked off 5 different exercises, but essentially these are also muscle groups: the back, the chest, the triceps, the biceps, and lower body or glutes, quadriceps, a little bit of hamstrings there. 5 times 5, that's 25 sets. The stimulus that postmenopause women need suggested is 80 or more. So if I did something similar twice, I've only got 50. I haven't quite made it yet. So my workouts do have to expand a little bit, right? So if I take 2 more exercises or muscle groups, so I do hamstring curls for 5 sets and I do, say, a lat pulldown for 5 sets, and I've got 7 times 5. Are you doing math with me? 35. 35 and 35 is 70. We're still not quite there, right? So maybe we add calf muscles. Calf muscles, fairly small muscle. We could also add something for shoulders. You could— I probably personally wouldn't do shoulders 2 times going heavy because you're using those shoulders at other times. But maybe one of those days you do shoulders and the other of those days you do calves. Smaller muscle groups, but we're still hitting them. Okay, now we've got 8 times 8 exercises, 8 muscle groups times 5 sets. We have 40. And are you doing math? All right. I sat for a long time at the kitchen table when I was a child. Doing math, and here we go. So that's 80. We hit that. Now that's 2 times a week total body. That's kind of how it would look like. You know what that means is if you don't want to spend an hour and a half in there, you better be organized. You have to know how do I sequence it so I get adequate rest between sets. If you are not familiar with how you program exercise This is something you could easily get wrong. Certified strength and conditioning coaches are no joke. You know, we spend, you know, a better half of a year at least. And you, at least in the past, and this may not be true anymore, but you had to have a 4-year degree in order to sit for that test because they know this is not an easy test to pass. But then the studying of that book, that textbook is thick. There's a practical component to it as well. You're not actually working out, but you are looking at people who are working out and you are detecting what's right, what's wrong. What am I seeing here in that practical component? It's an exhausting task to tell you the truth. I think it's a, it may be a two-parter either. It's like blocks of time in the morning or afternoon. It's been a long time and I probably blocked it out 'cause it was a little stressful. Painful. But you want to take a look at how well planned you are if you're going to do this. So the reason I love total body is because at least it's boom boom, and I, I don't have to think about it the rest of the week. There has to be a lot more planning if you're doing split routine. It's not as easy as saying, okay, here's my total body, I'm just going to take out my chest and my triceps and some shoulders. I'm going to do that on this day. I'll do the back and the biceps on this day, maybe a little core, and I'll do lower body on this day. It doesn't work like that because you need more stimulus. Otherwise you don't hit that metabolism boost. The muscle protein stimulus may not be enough to get you up and over that hump. So yes, you're exercising frequently, and that increased your volume, but not the kind of volume that gives you the muscle stimulus that you need. That's why I've always challenged it. The research tells us that there is 8 times the stimulus in metabolism for total body versus a split routine. However, that research is done on men. So do we know exactly for females in midlife We don't. I think this is one of those things that with 40 years of experience, with a lot of that experience working with midlife women, I do think we can extrapolate it and say that probably this is going to be true. And knowing my work with midlife women and the physiology of menopause plus physiology of exercise, we know that adrenal fatigue and cortisol are real issues for women who've had that decline in estrogen. That means any stage of perimenopause and postmenopause, even if you do HRT, you're probably somewhat better off, but you're not at your industry standards that you had when you were, you know, in your 30s or 35. But it's important that you look at, am I getting all the stimulus I need, or am I just getting tired because I have more days a week that I'm going hard? My muscle and bone might be getting a break because I'm not using the same muscles. However, your endocrine system, the adrenals, the cortisol, that's not getting a break. You're still stimulating that. So that is still going to be a factor for those of you that are tired all the time. May not be the ideal. So that's something. But again, that has been personally for me, my hypothesis about me, and I'm willing to say I'm wrong. So I wanna see what is going on. So why I'm personally testing is this, number one, not to assume for anyone. And who do we care most about? You and I, you and I, right? So I wanna know, am I doing myself the best possible good? And I also am willing to say that like a diet that I would never recommend somebody go on and stay on, Keto may have its place short-term to reset for 3 days or for a week or maybe even 2 weeks. Intermittent fasting for a short period of time or some days of the week still is going to be beneficial, but this may be beneficial part-time. It may be a surprise to my muscles, to the overload that I'm getting, and I will know if I'm more tired that I need to back off. So I will keep you posted on what are the results. I will let you know the results so far. So I'm only a few weeks in at this point that I'm recording. So as we go through the remainder of the year, you'll hear me update. And at the very end of the year, I will update completely. Number one, this is keeping me honest. So thank you very much. I'm not going to pay you for this session, but it is accountability. We all can use that. No matter who you are, what you're doing, change is one of the hardest things we as humans do. That's just it. It's truth. So what I want you to do here is to look at where I'm starting, what I'm doing now, and then where I'm going. And this may change, but my total body workout, just to give you an idea of where have I come from, and this is every workout changes a little bit. You heard me describe it earlier, but if you want to literally see it. It will be in the show notes. We're going to leave it in verbatim. So I might do walking or 10 minutes of brief interval training, kind of a jog, walk, alternating. Then I'll do a functional warmup, walking lunges or a lunge matrix. And that means lunging backwards, sideways at 45 degrees, direct lateral, sideways. I might do spiders, which is your runner's lunge, rotating one arm and then the other. I'll do light core engagement during those times a little bit of plank, maybe a bridge. So any of that, you know, bits and pieces. So a functional warmup is very important prior to doing strength training or anything else, something similar to the way that you will be moving. I might do 3 sets each of a wall sit alternating with a single leg squat. Now, truth be told, I usually have to do this when I go to the gym because I'm waiting for a leg press. And it— you got to be there, like standing there breathing over them to get them off. Stop them from scrolling on their phone. You know what I'm talking about, right? So I will often do that, but it's also a great warm-up for the muscles I'm about to be using. Then I'll do 5 sets of the leg press. When I'm at the gym, I do a monster set, and if you're not sure what that is, it's also called drop set. You start at your very heaviest and then you immediately get up, pull the weight off, and you're slightly lower. You go again, 4 sets at least of 15. I do 5 in this case. So it's boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I can get off of that machine. I don't have to also get up, irritate somebody by scrolling through my phone, or get up, try to do something else and have somebody say, are you done? I— does it look like I'm done? But I'm just using it efficiently and effectively. And I like doing that if I'm at a gym and it's busy. If you're in the, say, a hotel gym, it's not busy at all, you know, you can do whatever you might like to do. I will then do 5 sets of chest press and 5 sets of bent-over row, and I'll superset that. And that means I'm going to do chest press and then bent-over row, and then in between I will put some kind of a dynamic balance exercise. So I have adequate rest before I come back to that same muscle group again. Again, that is careful strategic planning. If I just went boom boom boom boom boom, AB AB AB AB, I'm not going to get enough rest between. So I like between 1 and 2 minutes of rest between sets. And, you know, prior research used to say maybe between 3 and 4 minutes, 3 to 5 minutes is ideal. We no longer know that we were— we know that we no longer need that. Within the last year, some newer studies came out saying no, the studies were done on males and females recover faster. So we are ready for more volume often before men. Now, we don't know that to be true about women in menopause. So if you feel like, man, I've gone too fast, I'm not feeling as strong in this set, take a little longer to rest. You're not going to hurt things, and you may improve them. I'll do 5 sets of triceps. The way I do my triceps most of the time, I will do a superset of tricep, tricep, tricep, tricep, tricep. That's it. So I'm going to muscular fatigue, but I might start with a really heavy weight, you know, in just 6 repetitions, and I might do another one of those different exercises, 6 reps. Then I might do 12 reps with 2 different exercises, and then I might do 25 reps and just get strength, hypertrophy, and endurance all there. I generally do only about 3 sets of biceps, and here's why I don't do as many biceps as triceps: because we're holding things, we're using our biceps just all the time during the day. Not so true of our triceps pushing away, unless you are a swimmer or you're doing something with a lot of triceps. I'll do 4 sets of lat pulldowns. I'll do 5 sets of ham curls. Just so that you know, between the lat pulldowns, I will stand up and do side lunges. I'll alternate side lunges. The next time I do it, I'll do all side lunges to one side, up to a knee, and I'll play with that. So I'm doing something productive while I'm giving myself the rest. I don't generally do a monster set on lat pulldowns because it involves the shoulders, and I think the shoulders are more prone to injury. You know, women over 40, men over 40, shoulders or knees are the first thing they start to struggle with. So I hit them, I just don't hit them too hard. 5 sets of hamstring curls. In between doing my hamstring curls, I will stand up and do standing calf raises. In between to be productive there and get the rest. 3 sets of limited range of motion leg extension. Now, I may or may not do those all the time if I've done the wall sit, because that's quad dominant. You always want to keep somewhat of a balance between quad dominant exercise, and that leg press, by the way, is quad dominant. So when you do those heavy weights with that do a hamstring curl with heavy weights because you've got to keep those in balance. Otherwise, our knee problems often stem from— we don't keep the balance from the strength in the front to the back. So key there. But if I do a leg extension machine, I will do limited range of motion. That's the last 20 to 30 degrees range of motion. So I'm focused on the vastus medialis, the quadricep that is interior that keeps our kneecaps in alignment. So there's that. Every once in a while I will bump it from 5 to 6 sets or from 3 to 4 sets. So I'm reaching 40 total sets in that workout and I'm changing it up at the same time. So I may do less lower and more upper body exercises on a certain day, but it's almost always total body and it has been for me forever. And part of it is the research, the literature pointing to total body, but it's also been, I have a busy life and I'm living it. I'm active doing other things that I don't want to be so tired or sore that I can't do the activities. And we can't, can't we? We can drill ourselves into the ground if we're not careful. If we get obsessive about, I did this, now I have to do this plus next time. You know, I have that personality too. I will push myself and push myself. And, you know, at midlife and beyond, at some point I think I started to get a little smarter, thank goodness. So I don't do that so much anymore. And I know it doesn't help and pay off anyway. So you want to be sure you are, you know, doing all the things to pay attention to the back of the body. I also, in the show notes, you'll see that you want to fire up that rear kinetic chain so you're not doing over, over stimulus of the quadriceps, top of your thighs. Those wall sit, leg extensions, and leg press all are quad dominant. So if you're somebody who also spends a lot of time on a spin bike, you're quad dominant. This is not going to bode well in the future. Let's keep our knees selfie or healthy by doing hamstring curls, hip thrusts, deadlifts within your safe range of motion. Okay, so for me, switching to only upper or only lower body workouts is really hard for me, but I'm going to do it. So it ties me to the gym. This is why I don't like it. I love a flexible schedule and I need it, but I'm finding a compromise. So this first month, here's what I've done. I do one day a week total body where I do get the upper, I get the chest, I get the back, and I get that lower body in during that session. I'll do a little bit of core as well, but I don't do a lot of core with overload of weights. Not necessary. You're doing core if you are lifting with good form, particularly if you're using free weights. So next, what I'm doing is one total body and one leg day and one upper body day. And it takes everything I have to walk out and not try to do the other body part because I feel like I'm not done, something's missing. Here's what my leg day looks like though, just so we can do math together. So remember, with total body, I'm hitting about 40 sets. Our goal is 80. So leg day looks like this. 6 sets of leg monster pressing. So it's that heaviest weight, the next heaviest, the next heaviest. I just get up, pull the weight plate off, sit down again and go. Get up, pull it off, sit down and go. And if you truly reach fatigue in the first set, each of those sets of 15 should help you reach muscular fatigue. I do 6 sets of hamstring curls, 5 sets of limited range of motion leg extension. 5 sets of side lunges, 5 sets of single leg squat, 3 sets of seated calf raises, and 5 sets of hip thrusts. How many sets is that? 34. Okay, listen to the upper body day. So right now, where are we at? Are you doing math? 40 plus 34. 74. So I don't have to do too much on leg day, but— or, or my upper body day. Let me take that back. So upper body day looks like this: 2 sets of a chest fly and/or a push-up. Now, I don't do a lot of chest fly. That means it's here, it's a long lever, just on the shoulder. Shoulder's already one of those vulnerable joints. That's why I don't use it a lot. I'm not trying to be a bodybuilder, trying to be safe, trying to age to 100 with no injuries, thank you very much. So if you're going with me, you know, just be cautious. If you started doing a lot of single joint— we love compound movement. So a chest press, shoulder and your elbow coming into play. Flies, just really at the shoulder joint, so it's got a much lighter, and you got to be a little bit more careful about it. It will cause you to be more sore, especially if you're not used to it. But I'll do 2 sets of that, and here's one of the reasons why. Then when you go to chest press, you will feel your triceps a lot more because you pre-fatigued your chest muscles. So there's a method to the madness. You're going to alternate that chest press again with bent over row, or I do because it's very time efficient. Let's go. 5 sets then of lat pulldown with 5 sets of bicep curls. That is a— not an opposing muscle group, but a complementary muscle group. When you do your lat pulldown, you're already working your biceps. Now if I do a bicep curl between, it's going to make those lat pulldowns more interesting, my mother would say. That means she didn't really like it, but she didn't want to say so. And we loved her for that, by the way, and it is still the source of laughter today. But. If you go back and forth again, 5 and 5, that'll be challenging. 5 sets then of triceps, and I will superset just the tricep exercises. I love doing that. That might— that's 1 set of each of 5 different kind of exercises. I'm not repeating it again. So I might do a set of dips. Be careful with that depending on your shoulder situation and your elbows and your ability to support your own body weight with great form. I will do a tricep pushdown. I will do an overhead press. I will do a straight arm pushdown, and I will do a rope overhead. Those are just some of the examples. So I'll do them all in a row. Yeah, and that you'll feel by the end. Then I'll do 4 sets of shoulder exercises. With my shoulders, I'm not just picking a shoulder exercise and doing 4 sets of this same. I will generally do something like a front raise, a lateral raise, a rear or reverse fly, and then I will do one overhead. So they're different, not always the same. Now, I'm not always going to do it that way. You want to trip it up, you want to vary it, but that's an example. 3 sets of a cable row, alternating that with 3 sets of a 1-minute hang. So with cable row, you can do that in a seated position. That means your legs are extended like you were on a rowing machine almost, and then I'm doing one. So it's like you're rotating. For me, as a swimmer and a triathlete, you run and you swim, and both of those cause rotation. You want strength in that rotation, and you do them either side. You learn a lot about your strength in the balance from one side to the next. And I'll alternate that with 3 sets of a 1-minute hang. Grip strength, y'all. This sounds so easy. Do it. I want you to come back and tell me how'd you do, right? And so once you've done that whole workout and you are a little bit fatigued going on, how long can you hold that hang? You don't have to hang up here like you did in high school. Did you hate that as much as I did? You know, don't have to hang up here. I hated that. I wanted to be sick on that day every single time. But you're just hanging here, okay? Just at length. So that, 37 sets. And again, I know talking exercise while you're on a hike and we're sitting here, it's like, what, what is that? What does that look like? So you can, you can see it on paper, and if you're watching this via YouTube, you're also going to get a better idea of examples. But that's $37,000. So $34,000 and $37,000— can you do math? That's like, uh, $71,000 plus the other one was $40,000. Essentially, we are way over $80,000. So we're over the hump of what we need in terms of stimulus, and we're not so high that it's outside of the zone. The range for postmenopausal women was between 80 sets and 144. Now, why that 144, I don't know, but what I suspect is that if we do more than that, we're going to risk exhaustion, strain, and that's it really. We're going to be straining, not training. You do not want to make that mistake, so don't just push yourself, force yourself through it. If it's not feeling good, you feel tired, you feel like I'm losing form. We only train the good ones. This is really important. Just train the good ones. And you and I are going to have days when we have all the discipline in the world and we're just going to stay consistent because we keep hearing that's what you've got to do. But you want to only consistently do high-quality workouts. Let me say that again. You want to consistently do high-quality workouts, nothing else. Just getting into muddy, murky workouts that are just putting your time in is not going to help us, peri- or postmenopausal. So during month 2, I want to cry because I'm not going to like it. So this will be starting in November. So if you're listening to this, by the way, I could also already be here in this moment. I will do 2 leg days and 2 upper body days. Hmm. I can tell you right now that this will be hard and my attitude right now sucks. Pardon my French, but I'm already premeditating. It's not going to be fun and it's not going to be fun just because I am really tied to it. So I'm probably going to have to call my good friends Helen and say, I need a little motivation. Thank you. But this will look like potentially Monday and Thursday would be leg days. Tuesday and Friday, or I have a little wiggle room, I could do Tuesday and Saturday will be my upper body days. Now, each of those days won't look exactly alike, but if you get a game plan. So you take that blueprint of what I put up here for upper body and for lower body. You now you've got something and you can edit it and you can go with it. And I wanna tell you that if you are using ChatGPT, you know, I don't know about ChatGPT, but I don't think it has a 4-year degree. Don't think that it has a, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist recognition. I don't think that it has 40 years of experience. Maybe you could get by with even 20. I don't think it has intuition and knowledge about your adrenals and your cortisol level and how you feel today. So ask it for suggestions if you must, But override it and know that you as the human have more that you need to offer in order to really get a good program and not one that throws you under the bus. All right, everything here will be in the show notes so that you can come over and look at it, see it, borrow it, steal it, try it with me if you want to. But again, I wouldn't shift this unless you were already in a good space. We say something here that is, don't fix it if it's not broken. But my little discovery of +6 when I thought +3 was good makes me wonder, what am I assuming? What do I need to test just to be absolutely sure? Because look, I'm not going to lose out on bone density benefit by doing this. And if I get, you know, one more month in and I find this is not working, I can also change my mind and I can come back here and just honestly dish and let you know, here's how it happened for me and here's, here's where I'm at. But my goal is to finish out the year like this, and I will do another episode as we get close to December And I am not committing yet to what I'm going to do in December. I want first to see how does my second month go, how does November go when I'm doing 2 and 2, 2 upper body and 2 lower body, totally committing to split routine. You heard it here first. Okay, show notes will be flipping50.com My post-menopause workout. Can't wait to hear your thoughts on this and find out what you're doing and what you found works the best, whether you're in perimenopause or post-menopause. I'd like to know that too. Thank you for listening. 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