The ONE Thing Your Menopause Fitness Routine Is Missing

You're eating right, you're lifting weights, you're walking, you're doing everything they— by the way, who's they— say to do, but your results have flattened. Sound familiar? This episode, I am going to reveal the one missing thing, the missing ingredient that most midlife women overlook in their fitness routine. And I'm going to tell you that it's not unique to midlife women, but midlife women need it potentially more than others. And it's not another supplement, it's not diet tweak or a workout app. I'm not going to be talking about to eat before or after or how soon. It's the game changer that reignites metabolism, supports your hormones, prevents injury, and makes every minute of your workout actually count. But before we dive into this episode, I'm Debra Atkinson. Welcome back. You're listening to another episode of Flipping 50. If you're an OG and you're coming back, that is. And if you're brand new to the show, this is a perfect episode. To launch into. There are some that I might not say that for, but this is definitely one. So I'm hoping you're here. What I'd love to share with you very transparently is my shelves behind me. If you see this on a video, are bare except for the dust apparently that accumulates in Arizona, but I won't have to worry about that anymore. We are moving and Moses is nervous. So every once in a while he'll come in and need to be pet. So there's that going on too behind the scenes. Now you've got the full screen. Scoop, let me tell you about what we normally do here, and that is share insights on hormone-centric exercise for women over 40. That is women who may be pre-menopause, peri, and not know it, or know it, and post-menopause, and all of the things that means for us, either wanting to reduce symptoms or optimize them, optimize your journey if you're starting early. And we love that you are. Some of us didn't know to do that. And post-menopause, all of the concerns we've got for muscle, for bone, and for brain health, they become far more urgent because we now realize that, you know, taking a break, taking a vacation, having a break or a fracture or a vacation we didn't ask for means a loss. It means a loss for our side of the scoreboard and we can't afford it. So how do we get the most from the time and the energy that we put into exercise? And leave time and energy for life. That's really the goal. So that's what we're doing here. And I hope that if you benefit, you'll share it. Let's dive in here. And I'm going to give you the takeaway before we even start. You okay with that? You don't need more workouts. You need well-planned workouts and smarter workouts and smarter recovery. Strategic rest and sleep and stress reduction are all a part of you getting the results that you want to need right now. And exercise can either be a part of that helping you to do so or hurting you and getting in the way of you getting those results. So what I'm going to talk about in this episode is why your workouts may be working against you if you're skipping this one thing I will reveal very quickly, how your midlife hormones change your recovery needs and how to match your exercise to your hormones and what's going on and what science says about strength and protein and the restore before more rule that call our number one tenet of Flipping 50. A simple, doable way to weave this missing piece into your week and actually your workout and months and quarters of your year. So I want you to be empowered by the end of this to understand much more fully what you're doing or haven't been doing that might be coming back to bite you. I'll share some real stories from Flipping 50 women who've turned fatigue into fire by fixing this gap. I'll also tell a couple horror stories of people who didn't until too late. We have to often learn it the hard way. So here it is, I'm gonna give it to you right away. So number 1, we all want results, but here's what's missing. It's called periodization. So if you've ever said, I'm doing everything right but not seeing results, this one's for you. Most women do plateau in midlife more than even ever before. Now we might have gotten away with not necessarily planning really well earlier. But you have to remember, we were at the peak of our muscle mass, so it was like we could do no wrong, right, for a while. And that may not be true about every one of you listeners. And I realized that if you struggled with weight or metabolism your whole life, that you may feel like I'm overlooking you or skipping you, and I don't, don't intentionally mean to. I know we have women out there of all kinds who actually need or want to gain weight and are too small to maybe make them concerned enough about being frail in the not-too-far-off future. But this is what they've done. You've outgrown your program. The best possible program, if I could say for you, this would be it. This is the best possible program. If you're still doing it a month from now, Maybe you're still okay. 3 months from now, not so much. You're gonna slide backward. A year from now, oh my goodness, you've wasted time and energy not doing something that could have been more productive for you. So every menopause fitness routine needs periodization, and that is the secret sauce of athletic programming that keeps your body adapting and hormones balanced and results coming. I often will say you need to train like an athlete, and I've heard someone, someone I respect, to actually say, "Absolutely, you do not. We don't want that to happen." And you know, I think in defense of both of us that he, it happened to be a guy, really meant to defend women that we've got to listen to them and we don't want to just go, pardon my French on this, but it's balls to the walls and just ignore how you feel and just go all out all the time. That is actually the way to periodization and the way to injury or exhaustion or illness, and for us, we're more vulnerable to it. So let's go into breaking this down. So most women repeat some really good routine month after month, or say, I want a really good workout, and just kind of gauge that by, you know, how well things clicked during the workout, how well they followed along, how well they were able to master it and get done and through it, even if they were like twisted and torqued at the end, or, you know, no matter how felt, call it a good workout because I got a good hour in, or I got a good 45 minutes in, or whatever it might be. And the gauge of a good workout really can't be told until, you know, months later or weeks later. But the one thing that is telling is you should have energy. You should feel good after that workout. You're not supposed to be wrung out, put away, sore. And, and limited in your life habits for the next few days. That's really not a gauge of a good workout. And I know some of us have that maybe lingering feeling that might be it. I think it's time to shake that because we're a little more vulnerable to injury. And I'm not wanting to plant seeds for you that you're going to get injured, because I think the opposite. If you do your warm-up adequately, you do plenty of mobility work, you don't have to fall into that trap of getting injured before you get better, or on your way to getting better. But science shows women over 40 who don't vary their intensity— meaning, yeah, go hard, but also go light and, and kind of go moderately and vary that high intensity and recovery phases— they experience higher cortisol levels, lower muscle protein synthesis, and increased injury risk. So especially vulnerable would be rotator cuff issues, knee issues, lower back issues. But I will throw in there hip issues and plantar So now we have a whole long list, right? So what is periodization, you may be asking, and you may have heard about it. You may have, you may be a trainer or a coach and you're like, oh, I know what that is. And I'm going to ask you, could you turn around and tell it to somebody, define it in a way that they easily understand it? That's really, I think, the best gauge. And I also want to say to, say to you, You have at your fingertips ChatGPT or Claude or whatever your grok is, but I wanna know, can you do it? Because unless you're living your life with those guys and you don't think or use your brain at all, I think we're living in a dangerous place where we will stop thinking. We will stop the learning that we've had and stop putting together things that are in our long-term memory and using them in our day-to-day, which cannot be good for our brains going forward. I'm just gonna say, if we can dump some of the menial labor tasks off to Claude and Chat, try to put those two words together apparently, I'd be all for that. If they could have done most of the heavy lifting during my moving, and I don't mean pun intended, I mean literally, that would've been great. But you know, some of that is not going to happen. They did, I'll tell you, walk me through buying and selling of a house. Some of the things related to mortgage and interest rates and when would be a good time and when is, when it's not a great time. And what about making the offer? Of course I leaned on them for all of that. And yet, you know, I think you've got to think for yourself about certain things and you need to know this, like you need to know it, not just, oh, I can look it up and now here's the answer to that. And then it's gone because you never owned that. I want you to know this. So hopefully you'll play this one back. Sorry to go off on a tangent there, but I feel pretty strongly about you've got to, you've got to have read and committed to the owner's manual for the body you live in. Periodization is cycling your training through different phases, not unlike having a period as a female, but we have build phases. We have peak phases where we want to be in peak condition and we have recovery phases. And it does not matter if you're not an athlete, but we could say maybe you love to play golf. Well, if you wanna play golf and enjoy golf, really, you probably wanna get better. You know, you want to at least not get worse. Maybe you wanna hit the ball a little longer, you wanna hit the ball a little straighter, you want to somehow improve. More power can help you do that. Not straighter, that's a whole nother problem I can't help you with. I'm working on my own problems over here or there. But hitting it further, I can do that. My problem is I can hit it further into the wrong fairway. And so just saying, if you ever ask to play with me, you're, you're, or maybe you will decline that right now. But what you want is probably to work on power and strength during the off season, which is probably winter months. And then you wanna be at your peak during the summer months and just kind of maintain your strength, but not necessarily work on it quite as hard. And then you're gonna recover, right? And if you are, that's gonna be much more true if you are somebody who likes to train for endurance events. So I was once an endurance athlete. I think I'm done. I have paid for an Ironman in Cozumel that will go on without me. There will be a backpack with my name on it that I don't get, but I deferred last year and I'm pretty sure you can't defer 2 years in a row. So, um, this could go on for decades. So I'm— I think I'm just done. I've gotten smarter or realized this is probably not the best thing for me if I want to love my joints and muscle and life and, and keep everything so that I'm not accelerating aging. I just think for me it's probably the best decision. And it's sad, but if I were training for that, I would want to peak right at race time and then it would take weeks of recovery. So how big the thing is you're training for matters. I've had clients who've done half marathons. Now they walked, but still the walking 12 miles was a big deal for them. And so that was a lot of training, a lot of endurance, but they wanted to peak then to do really well, to finish, and to finish with a good time. So there was recovery afterwards. So similarly, I want you to think about that. Now, if you're just training for results, that's still— you want to treat it like cycling. We want to cycle through periods of time when we're working a little harder and then we back off. So you have to kind of pick your peak and you pick this by every 3 weeks. You incorporate maybe that 4th week, a recovery week, and I'll talk more about that. But this is how athletes train all the time to be at their peak for certain events. It's equally crucial for women in menopause. To optimize muscle metabolism and hormones and decrease risk of injury. So instead of random workouts— and, and I know that you may not think these are random, but if you are, you don't have a— I go from A to B and then C and D, and what I did for A determines what I'm ready for, for B. And I do B knowing this A got me ready and C is coming next. They are related. That's really what good programming is. Now, if you are randomly exercising and say, I'm going to go pick a workout I like on YouTube, you know, and I have to be totally transparent, I have a program. I, I have a reason to make you believe you need to be doing something otherwise. But I have those programs because we know scientifically that they are much more helpful in helping you get the very specific results that you want. Doing very specific programming to get there. So it's almost humorous though, don't you think, if we'd say you want very specific results and you're kind of doing random exercise that feels good, whatever. I like that one, I like this one, kind of don't feel like it today. And right, do you see what I'm saying? We can't necessarily expect that we're going to have the best outcome if we are random. Now I do think there is a time and a place to say drop the structure, just go out and play. Go do things you enjoy. Go, go drop into a yoga class. Go drop into this or that or the other thing. I think that is valid and important in terms of progress. So it's strategic progression though most of the time, probably 80% of the time, that includes both push and pull back phases. Meaning pull back, not push pull, right? We're so used to saying push pull exercises, but push and pull back and kind of recoil, regroup, and let yourself not plateau. Some of you would think, well, that's plateauing cuz I'm not pushing, but it's not. It's strategically growing again and again and again. Where we plateau is most of the time, if you think of it as like dieting. If you've gone on a diet, you got really great results for a while, then you probably didn't, right? You, number one, may have, may have binged because it will cause that, or it's you realize that you just are stale, like you're sick of the diet, like you have to have something else, or you're just not getting the results anymore. You may have lost weight initially, which was your goal, but then suddenly you, you can't and you're not losing weight. That is a plateau, very like exercise. You're doing the same thing. You're not going to see the same results. Now you may feel, I'm not doing the same thing. I'm going to a different class. You know, I'm going to classes and getting it. The workout isn't exactly the same in those classes, but it may be the same level of stimulation. You're not getting enough of stimulation. I don't mean always heavier. I mean that it has to always be changing. And that might be changing the sequence of the exercises, changing the number of repetitions, It might be changing the holding pattern or the tempo of an exercise. So for instance, you hold it and you slowly lower down. So instead of just doing a push and then slowly lowering down in an easy rhythm, you instead change. So the tempo of the push and the hold and the pullback or letting it come down and the hold is completely different. So same weight, gonna feel very different if you're doing that. And we overload in different ways. Think of it as stress, recover, adapt. So the science-backed formula for growth is just that. We have that stress stage, it's adaptation to it, and you have to have the full recovery or you don't get it. Well, we need that within a workout, right? So you go from set to a little rest before you come back and do another set for that muscle group. You're already putting it in there, periodization of sorts. Well, we need that between one session and the next as well, right? Between, say, doing it Monday and doing it Thursday. But we also need it like in a month. We look at how are you resting, what, what's your rest week, right? And so you may not have ever thought of it that way, but then in the larger story I told you when we first started is if golf season is your thing, then winter is really your push on strength so that you're at peak season to enjoy it. But then there will be recovery from the exercise workout that you're having at that point as well. So let's talk about the hormone connection to all of this and why, why in midlife am I bringing this up and making it a bigger deal? Number one, because I think we're at a good place and I probably have your attention. We're at a place where something isn't working, or it's not working the way it used to. Like, you'd start a program and make progress, period, end of story. But now it's like, I start a program and I have to wonder, is this another gamble? Will it work for me? And why isn't it working for me if I'm quote-unquote eating right, doing all the right things? Estrogen helped to build muscle, protect muscle and connective tissue. When it dips or declined, so does your recovery speed. And so does your ability to have connective tissue. So it's just not as juicy in there. The joints are not as comfortable or resilient. They take more time. There's less blood flow to them. So we need a longer warmup and cool down. We need more mobility work probably than we ever have. And some of us short-sheeted that our whole lives. Even though we may love yoga, we don't necessarily stretch really well at the beginning or end of workouts. So there's a difference there. Periodization protects you from overtraining syndrome, which can look a lot like menopause— poor sleep, weight gain, mood swings, fatigue. So when you match training cycles with your hormones, you can reduce inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, and balance cortisol. So training cycles with what's going on in this period of time that we're in. If you're in menopause, perimenopause specifically, and we don't know exactly for a lot of us, but if we say between your 40s and 50s on average, it's a good guess that that's where we are. Unless you've reached menopause early, which, you know, sometimes does happen, and that's definitive. Now you have an answer, but If you are kind of in that, that phase, we know that we probably don't want to go as hard for as long. Can you do hard workouts? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But you probably are not gonna wanna spend a whole lot of time there, not a whole lot of volume doing that. Because again, though, you need the stimulus, you're potentially on a roller coaster and you're more vulnerable to negative effects of stress. A woman post-menopause can actually handle more volume because no longer longer on that roller coaster. Now estrogen is declined, but is predictable. And so we've kind of established a normative of what kind of energy levels do I have. So don't go crazy thinking you can lift heavy during the week before your period, or think you shouldn't go high impact drills during week 2 after your period. There is a way to cycle during your cycle if you're still having a period, but I don't think we have to overdo it. There are a lot of people who will say cycling workouts with periods is complicated and it just makes things harder. And I agree with that, it can, but I would just say lean in and listen. So in that last week where you're right before your period, most women feel some fatigue. They're tired that week, that last few days at least prior to, for some women it's the whole week, week and even the first few days of their period, but generally it's the last few right before they don't feel as good or as high energy as they do other times. That may be the week to take it easy, go on walks, do more yoga. Don't try to push through the workout and go ahead and by the way, lean into the carbs. Your body is actually burning calories. You're in a high metabolism phase. As strange as that sounds, you're in a higher metabolism phase even though your energy level is dipping. Because your body's just working hard trying to do a lot of things right there. So be careful and cautious also that week, about 7 to 10 days after your period, because you can lift really heavy because your ligaments are really rigid. That means they support more weight. However, you're more vulnerable to, uh, ankle sprains because that rigid and lax joint together. So you're lax in your tendons or ligaments, and they're going to give way. So if you're going side to side in agility ladders, for instance, stuff we need during that week might not be ideal because you can do heavy and probably get really great results and feel a little bit stronger, feel really good after your period. Most women will report they do. Even just starting makes them feel good. But if you're doing high-intensity or agility drills with rapid changes of directions, your ankle is more likely to roll. It's got a little bit more laxity to it. So it's an odd combination— more rigid tendons but more lax ligaments. And I think I messed that up earlier, or mixed the two and inverse them, so I'm sorry about that. But you can have both those things going on at once at 7 to 10 days following a period. So you want to be careful about that. So longer warm-up, longer cool-down, a little more mobility work— all very valuable. Pushing hard all the time backfires. Your body interprets more all the time anyway as just stress, more stress, and stress equals cortisol. Cortisol and low estrogen means more breakdown of muscle, more stalled fat loss if that was a goal, and sluggish recovery rates. So without de-low- load weeks is what we call it. Like, you're not going to lift as much, maybe not as much weight, not as many sets, maybe not as many reps, maybe all of that together. Or it's maybe organized in a different way. Maybe you're doing more total body yoga instead of actually doing resistance or strength training. So what I will have to tell you is the most often sore, most frequently sick, tired, and injured are the ones that don't take breaks so that their body gives them one. I'll say that again. If you don't take a break, your body will give you one. If you are extremely sore, you're sick more frequently than you should be, or you're tired and injured frequently or repeatedly, that recurs, That is Mother Nature giving you the rest that you won't take for yourself. So we really have to get good at either one, listening to your body, or two, ignoring it. Because some of you will say, but I feel it, I feel good, I want to keep going, I'm going to do it again. So you have to know, who are you? Are you a Type A who actually needs to be held back just a little bit occasionally? So I would make sure that on a calendar you're looking and saying, where's where's my recovery week? And month by month, take it— it doesn't necessarily have to be always week 4. If you're going on vacation and you know, I, it's— I would really look forward to only walking on the beach and not having to worry about anything else that week, great, make that your recovery week. Is that week 3 in a month? Perfect, that's fine. But make sure that you're regularly getting it. Your body will be fine if sometimes you go 5 weeks until you get one. But think about not taking vacation days at work. You lose them, right? Because work, even work knows that you're gonna be more productive and you're gonna be probably have less, fewer sick days if you take those regular vacations. So realize that you want to give yourself those little breaks. Here's how to build it into your routine. If you're doing it all by yourself and not following a program with us, you alternate 8 or 12 weeks of big strength phases. So we're really firing it up with recovery or maintenance phases. So you can take bigger blocks of time, but I want you to know yourself within a week. Look at it this way. So you do 2 or 3 strength sessions during a week, you do 1 or 2 interval training, but you should have a day of totally just low intensity is all you do. You're just going for a walk or yoga. You have a full day of recovery where you're playing, you're you're golfing or doing something else, but you're not quote unquote working out. And every fourth week, I want you to have a deload week. That's my preference for you. That's how I program. Some training coaches will do every 3 weeks. If the workouts are really, really intense, you might need that. And you might think, huh, well, maybe if I've had adrenal fatigue and I'm just coming back from that, I might want to do that too. Take 2 weeks, work a little harder, and then take that third and really back off and go a little easier. After 12 weeks, reset. So we have 12-week blocks of programs, and we do that so it's long enough, but within the 12 weeks, keep in mind that there's, you know, 3 different months. In each of those months, the 4th week— so week 4, week 8, and week 12— are lighter. They are deload, they're recovery weeks. So you'll notice we do a lighter weight, we do do less repetitions. We might have functional workouts that we don't otherwise have, and you can do it that way as well. But we also encourage, if somebody has done, say, one of our stronger programs with 15 to 20 repetitions, then the next one they may go for a program that has somewhere between 8 and 12 repetitions. And later they may do another quarter where It's, it's pretty heavy. It's 5 to 7 or 5 to 8 reps. But after that one, we kind of want them to come back down. And that doesn't mean they're gonna lose the progress that they've gained, but it does mean they're gonna set themselves up for a bigger picture long-term. I'm in this for the long haul. I'm working on longevity. And you're not losing anything by doing that. So it's important to look at where's my big picture and have I just tried to push and push and push, or am I doing something where I'm cycling through enough? We have a favorite favorite program. It's— you're not supposed to have favorite children, but I do. And in it, it is, um, one of those that actually helps you to cycle through. Week 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all different. So your body is getting a real load in week 3, I think it is, getting a real recovery in week 4. But week 1 and 2 are kind of a build and then build a different way. And so there's so much variety in that. Somebody could repeat that program multiple times and still feel like there's a different experience every time because you're getting stronger. It's not exactly going to feel the same. So in this episode, I'm going to make sure you've got all of the references that I've used to compile this, learning a little bit more about periodization. If you're a prove-it-to-me science girl, that's here too for you. But realize it's not the workout that makes us stronger, it's the recovery from the workout. It's the between sessions. After you've had that really great stimulus where you have really great recovery that really gets you what it is that you want, which is better shape, better conditioning, better resilience, more power, more strength, more powerful aging, and more energy to do the things you love to do. I hope this has been helpful. I hope that right now you feel like you could turn around and say, not only here's what periodization is here's how I do it in my routine. Here's where I see it every workout, every week, every month, and every quarter. All right, what are you waiting for? Let's start Flipping 50 today.