Things I Wish More Women Over 40 Knew About Exercise

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What are you waiting for? Good night. This is what I wish more women over 40 knew about exercise, and that it starts when women are teenagers. So I will start there. What I wish more girls over 10 knew about exercise is that the women that they aspire to be like were more represented at the Paris Olympics than they will be at the runways in New York. That fast and strong and fit and unapologetic about winning or wanting to is not something that stays with their younger years. We need to carry it over. And don't you wish those of us who were 50, 60, 70 had carried that all the way through? 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. Yeah, 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 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. I've worked with women for 40 years in private sessions, partner sessions, group sessions with both husbands and wives. And with 17-year-old volleyball players and 14-year-old golfers, with pregnant women and those who recently had breast implants, and those who wanted to lose weight and were already a size 2, those who needed to and were at least a size 20. I've done thousands of fitness tests and consultations and trained trainers and fitness instructors to do the same. I have seen a big slice of what women, including fitness instructors and trainers, think about themselves, their bodies, and exercise. And I've seen exercise be a way to burn up cookies and earn dinner or not. I've seen exercise be addictive and I've seen it be despised. So my collective input here comes both from that background, from having seen it all, been there, shared and written and participated in the science as it concerns women in midlife. So I'm going to start at the beginning. You heard my intake for those girls who are between 10 and 20. So here's what— in order for us to get to what I wish women over 40 knew about exercise, we're going to start with the things I wish more women over 20 knew about exercise. The confidence you want comes easier when you're strong versus you're skinny. The window for most easily laying down bone density is still open. Use it. The secret to looking and feeling good and healthier babies someday is in the weight room. Get a smart scale and understand the value of knowing your skeletal muscle, your body fat percent, together with your weight. A 20-something woman who can do a pull-up is more likely to be a 50-something woman who is aging like a badass. Here's things I wish that more women over 30 knew about exercise. Strength training will help balance your hormones if you change your workouts with your monthly cycle. Get a baseline bone density scan at least, and a hormone level test can be super beneficial as well. And I mean that for women over 30. In fact, 30 is the new time to get that first bone scan. Right now you're making your next 60 years better or worse. Hint, hint, there is no neutral. And there is still time to get that pull-up into your menopause self that will thank you for later. Things I wish women over 40 knew about exercise. And here we go. There's a chance of losing 27% of your muscle from early to late stage of perimenopause. For most of us, that's usually 40 to 50, but that's a very rough estimate. Could be late 30s, could be up until your mid-50s, depending on how you go through it. But it isn't inevitable that you will lose that muscle mass if you're resistance training properly and you're maintaining your protein levels. Measure your success by your hand grip. Your skeletal muscle mass, body composition, and your waist measurement, not simply by the scale. And those of you who are thinking, I tell by the way my clothes are fitting, still not enough. Because by the time those clothes fit really well for a while and then don't, it will be that amount of time where you realized, or in what happened is you lost weight Good, clothes are fitting great, and you realize later it was muscle. A large percent of muscle mass lost means this will come back to bite you. You can falsely celebrate. Please don't do that to yourself. Walking and weight training together may be two of the most powerful components for supporting your hormone balance and avoiding muscle loss fat gain and specifically belly fat gains. Things that I wish more women over 50 knew about exercise. Now, I hope that you're way ahead of me and you realize that these are all compounded. So at 50, I'm letting you in on what I wish you'd known when you were 20 and 30. And my guess is hindsight always being so much more valuable. But often hard-earned compared to foresight, that you know that this is a compounding knowledge base here. Strength training and muscle losses can accelerate significantly during the menopause transition. Now, on average, menopause transition happens at 51.3 or 4. However, it's not the same for all of us. But in the 2 years prior to that, the 2 years after that, so your late 40s to your early 50s, if you haven't reached that menopause transition yet, just know you're probably headed toward it. So you may want to be doing something proactive right now. So that's the last 2 years of perimenopause and the first 2 of postmenopause, because your estrogen levels have just boom gone to the cliff and fallen off. Prioritize your strength training and recovery time and habits to help it Bone density losses also accelerate from between 1 to 3% every year prior to menopause to 3 to 5% during that 2 to 4 year of menopause transition. Again, you've got to be doing the right things there. Gut health, check. Resistance training, heavier probably than you have been. Check. High-impact exercise, if you tolerate it, check. If you don't tolerate it, you're making sure you're doing at least a weight-bearing exercise, including yoga, which could help, check. You're on your feet, you're mobile, you're moving more than you're sitting, check. And you are using additional tools. For instance, you're using things that don't require you to go through full range of motion if you don't have the mobility or ability to do it. And if you want insurance like me, you do lift heavy, you do high impact, and yet still struggle with a little osteopenia, you're using things like whole body vibration. My choice is the Power Plate Move option. Totally up to you. Things I wish more women over 60 knew about exercise. Aging causes an accelerated loss of muscle and strength that occurs at 60, and again, that's on average for those who are not doing the thing. But generally, we're all— so your, your level has been good, you've been an active woman your whole life, that's still not insurance. According to the loss that you were incurring or the pushback that you had to give at 60, you have to push back harder because your likelihood of losing is going to still continue to be there. It's a part of aging. It's not related now only to women, but to men and women. So accelerating that loss of muscle and strength that occurs at age 60 and a slowing of your metabolism that comes with that if you don't offset it with strength training that is different from what you did, say, even 3 or 5 years ago, as well as increased protein intake and making sure your body is breaking it down. Those of you out there, I hear you, I see you, I know you're saying I can't fit all that in, and part of it is I feel like it just sits there and it's not getting digested, or I feel bloated, I can't possibly fit that in. That says gut health needs to be addressed. You're a woman who's a mover and a shaker. You probably make a lot of decisions during the day. You're exercising and you're moving. Maybe you're still working. You should be digesting. You should be hungry. You should have a good appetite before each meal. Not starving, not cravings., but actually have a good appetite and be ready for a meal. And if you're not, there's a good chance that you need a little support with protease, which is what helps break down your protein. But you may also need some help breaking down fat or even carbohydrates and digesting those. So you wanna look at getting those in and supporting your own stomach acid with betaine HCL, or even apple cider vinegar can help. Or probiotic types of foods like sauerkraut or asparagus on the regular. Okay, so what else is there? Number 1, you don't need to reduce intensity after 60. You actually need to increase it. Yes, you may need more recovery time, however, between exercises. During your workout, between the sets during your workout, and between high-intensity life and your workouts, and between the workouts. There's 4 different places there that we mentioned. So within the workout, there's 2. So it is becoming scientifically studied and proven that doing a bigger set of more repetitions And yet that means that for a lot of women, you'll only do one set. Maybe you'll do 30 to 35 repetitions. It's not caught on, it's not necessarily a thing, but we are seeing that talked about or discussed. And if you do that, then every 5 to 7 reps, you may take 5 to 7 seconds of recovery before you begin again. If you're somebody who realizes that I don't have a lot of time. That'll save you the moving to the next exercise, the setup, the what— where do I need to start with my weight here versus the one I just finished. It'll spare you some time decision-wise and physically, and it will also help you mentally organize that workout a little bit easier, which is something a lot of us need. We're juggling a lot of balls. We're thinking about so many things and I just had this conversation today. Have you ever said this? I have so many things to do. I'm in such overwhelm that I can't think about which one to do and finish it, just start and finish so it's off the plate. I'm in the moment where I'm well aware of what I'm doing to myself and I keep spinning around and I don't know. Should I— do I have time to do that today? Do I have time to do this today? So if you're there with me, I see you do this with me, right? Prioritize the things. Which one has to be done? What I'm coaching our coaches, health entrepreneurs, you know, it is always which one of these things makes you money or loses you money if it's not done. Those are your first things to do. Finish one of those and then go on to the next. Is anything on fire? Who else can handle those things? Because inevitably, that's what takes our time. But the things we think are on fire, like going to your inbox, not on fire. Nope. People who know you well enough will call you if something is burning. So just let them. All right. So it doesn't mean it's burning in hell anyway, right? It's just burn up a little. All right, I like the crispy parts. All right, so— and it helps to laugh, by the way. You may need more recovery time. So remember that one, drill it in. Think about recovery time within your workout. If you're just moving from one exercise to the other, or you're just going to the open machine and then the next open machine, and you don't have anything organized so that you're stimulating the muscles on a regular basis with a regular intermittent period of rest and recovery, you want to rethink that. This is one of the reasons I dislike the gym, unless you can go at an off time. If you, like me, have the mobility, flexibility to go at 10:30 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon or 3, but not 4:30 or 5, not 9 AM when everybody else is there then you're gonna have better luck walking in with, here's my program, this is what I'm doing. And if you're using dumbbells, even better. But if you're trying to get through machines, you're not necessarily going to have the high-quality workout that you need and want. So everybody else has a different idea about how they're going to use it, and that's a really important distinction. All right, if you have not added power, agility, dynamic balance, mobility training to regularly an existing strength training program, now is the time to start. Let me rephrase that, can't even read my own writing. If you haven't added power, and that is moving quickly against resistance, that can be you standing still doing a big jump forward or up. That's you resisting gravity with your own body weight. That's an example of power. You taking a medicine ball, slamming it down on the ground without falling over, that is also power. You lifting weights quickly with control, by the way. So someone said to me, can you say more about that? I thought you were supposed to do it slow and controlled and never jerky. And I said, Nobody said anything about jerky, right? So slow and controlled, by the way, is yes, it's a great way to begin and lay your foundation. You actually must do that before you move on and progress to adding power. But especially for those of you that feel like you reach a ceiling where I can't go heavier, I feel too vulnerable, like, you know, I'm going to get injured. I feel like there's probably gonna be some aches and pains. And either of those things in your mind will make them true, by the way. So I'm to the point where I know my body well enough, and I also know that my history is there and it's proven pretty stable. I know when I can push, and I know when, you know, I've done enough repetitions with enough weight that doing more is just going to be doing more and throwing me under the bus. It's not going to make me more strength gains. I know that, but I know that because I have a foundation. You need to build a foundation so you've got integrity around your joints, the ligaments and the tendons that are the connective tissue that stabilize that joint so that you can move with power later. Power is shown, number one, to have greater energy expenditure in a workout compared to just slow and controlled all the time. And it's also been proven to have an edge over improving bone density versus always, again, slow and controlled. Hey, it's Debra Atkinson. Can you think of one person who would benefit from this episode? Will 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. So for instance, if I'm on a lat pull-up pull down and my arms are up and I'm going to pull with power. I'm going to go boom. I'm going to pause down here because I'm owning it. I decelerated to get to this point, and then I am very slowly, slowly, slowly going to let that come back up. So I'm going to get value in both the power and the eccentric slow contraction. And that is doing power with control. That is not herky-jerky, okay? So don't confuse power with momentum. They're two very, very different things. So you were taught correctly, but what you weren't taught is probably the use of power. Until probably the last 5 to 10 years, we have not used that widely. We have not used that with older adults. We've used it with athletes forever and ever, but until— and I wrote about You Still Got It, Girl, wrote the book back in 2014 and '15. I was writing that book. You know, other people were not talking about power for older adults and needed to be. It's when, you know, I began talking about fast-twitch muscle fiber, and that's how you keep it. Those are your reaction skills. It's also been proven that you've got to be doing that. But power, by the way, is what will get you out of your chair when you're 85. You may not think you need power right now to do it because you take it for granted. Good for you. Just don't lose it, okay? And you have the opportunity to not. All right, you are losing that fast-twitch muscle fiber. As we talked about, that's power twice as fast with age as you lose the slow-twitch muscle fiber, which makes sense, right? We move slow and controlled all the time. We go for walks methodically. We move around, but we're not like sprinting and like cha-cha-cha-ing our way around our house. Maybe you are. It's laundry is more fun for you than it is for me. I'm certain if that's true for you, but we are used to moving slow. It's just how we get through things. The proportion of our time spent doing agility things goes down significantly. So unless you have adopted pickleball and you're playing people who are better than you, if you play people who are worse than you, you're not getting any better, girl. You're getting worse. You're slowing yourself down. You're aging yourself, right? So you need to play up. You want to play with somebody better than you, so you have to react to the ball. Or badminton— now that gives you a little bit more time to think. Something like racquetball or tennis— less time to think. You have to move laterally and quickly, and those kinds of reaction skills are just so good for you. So only moving slow in exercise is actually accelerating aging. Not the goal, right? And it's increasing your risk for falls compared to using your fast-twitch muscle fibers regularly. Now, there are ways to start using those fast-twitch muscle fibers safely. One idea for you is if you have access to a pool, you know, go and get in water that doesn't bury you up to your chest because very difficult to take advantage of the water and move the way you want to. But in water that is between your nipple and your navel depth. And the lower it is, the more you're going to benefit from this. But you can jump, try to jump forward, try to jump up, try to jump quickly, try to do a jumping jack and go, ah, ah, you know, where your feet don't touch the ground, a star jump. It's safe. You can't fall. Or if you do, you just get wet and the hair gets wet. Okay. You'll be fine. But those are places where you can start those agility exercises if you're worried about falls. You can also put your hand on something and make sure that you've got a little bit of support if you're worried of fear of falling. So important to know there's lots of ways to start it, but you do want to do it. Okay, resistance training is indeed everything that resists gravity, but using external loads that require few repetitions with heavier weights to reach or to get close to muscular fatigue. Now, a lot of people don't like that fully reaching fatigue, and in some research studies it shows that as long as you're within, you know, 2 repetitions, getting 2 in reserve, for instance, or you have 2 in the tank still there that you're still getting the benefit of that exercise, and there's really not that much bonus for reaching fatigue. I personally still like to reach that point where I can't think, can't get that one up. I like to pay a lot of attention to doing unilateral work as well with my right versus my left and make sure if I can get, you know, 5 on my right, I better be able to get 5 on my left. And sometimes, because I know it's going to be a struggle I will get 6 on my left just to catch up because it's my non-dominant arm, and that's where I— and, and potentially you— have a little bit lower bone density over here. It's still qualified as osteopenia. It's better than it was the last time I tested, but I guarantee you next year it's going to be back in normal values because I'm using my Power Plate. I can't go any heavier. I can't do more in terms of impact. I can't eat a more stellar diet, you know. I can only add this one extraneous, and that whole body vibration has actually been very much proven for bone density benefits, as long as you're doing some stabilization directly on the forearm. And I slacked on that. I was doing a lot of standing but not a lot of on my arms and planking on it. So I am back to that, so stay tuned, and by next July of 2025, you will be hearing from me about that. All right, overdoing exercise frequency will cause couch compensation that causes you to lose a critically important total energy expenditure and your lean muscle mass. Now, this is still things I wish women over 60 knew. Will this be true of women over 50 as well? Yes, but the the older you are, the more serious it is. If you have periods of time where you're not exercising, you are suddenly a caregiver for someone else or another dog, or you're otherwise busy and you think, but I'm in pretty good shape and my weight is fine. I don't need to lose weight. So if I don't exercise, it'll be fine. The reason to do this is not because of weight loss. Realize that this is, this is your life flashing before your eyes, and you know, you don't want to have seen the best parts yet. They're ahead. Underdoing exercise frequency, frequency, or intensity costs you the boost in strength and metabolism and potentially bone density and total energy expenditure that you want for body composition and reduction of health risks. You're not too old for bioidentical hormone replacement if you want to consider it. So I will link to a prior episode here where we did a roundup of 7 of my functional medicine doctor friends who are experts in hormone replacement therapy, and/or they're teaching— they're master trainers for other docs. And you know, many of these are females themselves in it. We care about the research. We want to know for ourselves. And then, you know, you've got a vested fitness professional when that's the truth. Falls that occur over 60 can be devastating, but most often they occur in women who don't lift weights, don't train power, don't train their agility and reaction skills. 50% of women over 60 who fall don't walk again. I find that statistic staggering, stunning, impossible. At least when I think about myself, I'm like, you must be kidding. Like, you think I'm going to fall and fracture and not ever walk again? That's not happening, right? So there's a couple things I want you to focus on here. Number 1, yes, we're working on strong bones so that you don't fracture. But number 2, never ever forget that if you're spending your time, you know, focused on going to a, a business that promotes itself for bone density and you're doing isometric static kinds of things, That's one thing, but wouldn't it be better if you practice the agility, the reaction skills, your dynamic balance, so that you catch your toe on the rug, you don't go down in the first place? Let's not fall. That's what we need to do. Just improving your strength is not enough. Balance, especially dynamic balance— and what we're talking about is the kind of balance where You will go down. It's not standing still brushing your teeth. It's not standing still doing tree pose in yoga when it's cool, calm, and quiet. It is when it's chaotic and there are sounds and noise and distractions and you have your arms full and you, you're wearing shoes that are not your ideal balance, or you're not on a yoga mat and a hard floor surface, that you're going to fall. You have to practice not falling in those situations. You have to practice putting yourself off balance in order to be good at it when it happens in life, because it will, friend. Whether you live in a northern climate, you get exposed to ice, you don't, and you're exposed to little puddles of water on the floor and a heel or a shoe with a slippery surface and/or a little dog whose tail you didn't want to step on or a child's toy or whatever it might be. It's really important that you practice this and do not ever stop. A lot of women think they have a really great balance, but when they do balance testing, find that no, they don't. They're really good at standing in tree pose in a quiet room. But again, that's not when falls occur. So it's very, very important. So falls over 60 can be devastating. And now that I have celebrated that 6 O birthday myself. Again, we have to change that statistic, and it's my hope that within 10 years that is gone, it's eradicated, and maybe it will be those women over 70. But then there we will be, ready to change that statistic again. It's up to us. You will tolerate volume better than your perimenopausal self will. So 60-year-old you can actually do more volume, more frequency of high-intensity interval training, or potentially more frequency of resistance training. Say you tolerated twice weekly, you could do that, but doing more made you extremely tired when you were in perimenopause. Well, you're no longer on that roller coaster of hormones up and down. You may tolerate it better, and you may need the additional stimulus of volume of total sets. So adding in another HIIT day or another session of exercise resistance could be very beneficial, and you'll tolerate that just fine. Things I wish more women over 70 knew about exercise: it's not just muscle and bone or balance and avoiding falls. You also need to help your brain fire better and improve your sleep. Just because you don't need to lose weight doesn't mean you don't need to exercise. Blood sugar levels, mood, memory will also improve. And we can't see it under the hood. And I will tell you that till death do us part, God bless us, most of us are going to be moved by our immediate gratification. We want to look better. We want our clothes to fit better. And if that's true, if you don't have the weight to lose, you may be less motivated and think you don't need it. But we cannot see inflammation, and inflammation leads to 80% of diseases. So do yourself a favor, keep yourself going. Your ability to stay in your home and drive a car and remain as independent as you like are directly linked to your muscle strength. There's your motivation. You want to age in place, stay at home, or move to your own next independent living space, having the option but not needing it. This is for you. Things I wish more women over 80 knew about exercise. There's still time. The research has been clear for more than 40 years that even 90-somethings beginning to strength train gain strength and benefit tremendously from just lifting weights. Now, those weights are relative. They're relative to you and me. They may be 2 pounds, 3 pounds, they may be soup cans, but if you're gaining strength, even muscle endurance, you are going to benefit. And it is for your strength, but it's also for your brain. And your blood sugar levels and that inflammation. You've got this. You can start now, even if you've never done it before. Risk of injury is still greater in those who don't strength train compared to those who do. If women over 40 knew about exercise, what I do, they'd know that until very recently, there's been very little research done featuring them as subjects. They'd know it's not great skincare or staying out of the sun or great sleep that is the secret to looking and feeling younger and carrying confidence into every decade. It's actually exercise. So there you have it. I'd love to hear what you would tell your younger self. So if you're seeing this in a post, whether it be on Instagram, you're seeing the post on Facebook, or it may— some of these go live on YouTube, but not all. We select which of those we release on YouTube. You may find that there's something that you wish someone had said to you that maybe now you can say to your younger self and/or to a younger woman who you influence, because we all know that they're out there. All right, I would love to hear from you. 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