Truths and Myths: Lifting Heavy in Menopause for Bones & Body Comp

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function.

And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine.

And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites.

What are you waiting for? Good night. Lifting heavy for bone density and/or body composition optimization— I think we'd all be like, yes please! But stay tuned to this episode because I answer the question that someone asked when they're in a program doing higher conditions, but yet they're reading, I keep thinking we're supposed to be lifting heavier, but I'm not. So where should I really be lifting? And it becomes an issue of, I don't know quite what to do. I'm hearing conflicting information. Now what? I answer all that in this episode. 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. In this episode, I'm answering a question that came in from one of our Insiders. And actually, this may have been one from someone in our Stronger program. And just to give you an insight, the rep range in our Stronger program is 15 to 20. And the reason being, the majority of the people who come in through it are women in midlife and beyond who are not consistently doing a strength training program and haven't for the last at least 6 or more weeks and need to ramp on. And with that on-ramping, we don't start Here's where we want you for optimal bone and muscle. We can't do that, but let me explain it to you step by step in this episode. And I wanted to share my response to this individual with all of you, because I think it may be a question that you're asking. And if it's not, potentially you should be from both sides. And you'll understand what I mean as we go through this. So here was the question. Quote unquote, I keep hearing about the importance of lifting heavy for menopause and for postmenopausal women, such as lifting a weight you can lift 3 times and do that 5 times. And I would suggest she actually means the opposite. So if you can only lift it 3 times and you're lifting at 5, you can lift it 5, right? So the— it's the opposite. So that you can only lift 5 times and you're lifting 3, and we call that 2 in reserve. Okay, so it's that you can only lift 7 times and you lift it 5, so you stop before you're at complete fatigue. So just wanna— I'm correcting the answer or the asker, I know, but for clarity it will make more sense to all of you who might be listening to that question. So lifting a weight I'm going to fix it— that you can do 5 times but only doing it 3 times, and on that last repetition should be really hard to do. And yet we're doing weights that we can do at— and here's where she's talking about being a part of our program— we can do 10, 12, or 15 repetitions. Can you please explain? Thank you. I'm not always able to make it to the live calls, but we'll listen for it on replay. So she was inevitably, or is someone who's in one of our programs. Because she mentioned 10, 12, or 15, she's probably in not our Stronger Tone and Define, she's in another program. So let me mention this to you. So I'm a 40-year fitness professional, certified strength and conditioning coach, which means I could be working in the weight room in a Division I college, and as a minority, a woman, and an older one, I'll bite that. You know, I— that's where I could be. I chose not to do that, but I chose that certification in a way to support students in the Department of Kinesiology who were looking at what certification should I get. So I took a number of certifications for that purpose as well as for my own benefit. But I'm also a medical exercise specialist. That means that I've been a group fitness instructor, was a personal trainer, and on top of personal training, Everyone that I was working with had a quote-unquote, what we used to call special condition. And we are all special at this point, right? We have a knee issue, an ankle issue, we have arthritis, we have osteoporosis, we— some of us have had cancer. We need to look at how do I exercise with fibromyalgia? What about with situs? What do I do about my shoulder issue, my rotator cuff problem? Numerous things. But almost everybody, as it turns out, out had at least one, if not up to 6 special conditions. And that means you have to color outside the lines with exercise prescription. But the goal is not that you're just randomly starting with a plan, that you have one. So hence the medical exercise specialist. Now, since that time when I took that first— I was one of the first individuals to ever sit for that exam when it came out in 1999. And since then, I've become a subject matter expert who writes the exam questions and reviews them periodically for that exam, as well as personal trainer, group fitness instructor, and health coaching fitness certification. So I know what happens behind the scenes. I know what trainers are asked to know, and potentially what you think they know is It's a lot less than that, but I wanted to give you a basis of why I answer this question, as well as being the founder of Flipping 50 and working behind the scenes with women in midlife menopause for the last 40 years, and exclusively for the last 11, diving into the research not only with the women but with the trainers, the health coaches, the fitness pros who serve them, and working closely with doctors as well as functional, trained doctors supporting their clients and patients. So the answer comes from the basis of all that, to give you a little bit of background. So who's talking? Now at least you know if you're new here. So the answer to the question is yes and. So she's on the right track, and yes, that's true, you do want to lift heavy. I'm going to address that number of repetitions. That's not exactly, not exactly right. And you can tell in the ask on that question, if you can lift a weight 3 times but do it 5, we've already got something a little bit backward and we're a little bit confused on it. So if you are listening and you're wondering, should I be lifting that heavy? If you have not been consistently lifting, progressing to that, you're not anywhere close to ready to do that. So it's all relative. And I wanna make sure that everyone listening understands that first and foremost. So you could be an absolute beginner and still pick up a weight that you could only lift 5 times. But I would never suggest that to you, not as a responsible and trained and knowledgeable fitness professional. Who, number one, abides by what doctors do, and that is do no harm. We want you safely progressing to it, not just getting you results for, like, a lot of challenges, shall we say, extreme boot camps, getting you somewhere fast so that you get results in 10 days or 14 or 21 and then gain all the weight back. Lose it, get injured, because that's what we've laid as a foundation for injury. We know we need to start you at a starting line that is safe, progress you very slowly, and I'll explain why we need to do that. So you need about 12 weeks to slowly ramp up. Now the research will actually say about 6 to 8 minimum By the way, I want you to hear that because most of the time you and I don't hear it. We ignore it. We don't hear minimum. We don't think that applies to us until potentially you're in your 5th or your 6th or your 7th decade and you have had some injuries. Now you're like, oh no, I'm gonna take it a little slower than that. And we sometimes may err on the too conservative side. Because here's what I believe: we're not broken. We're a little older, we're with joints and ligaments that are a little less resilient than our 20-year-old joints and ligaments were. We could get away with things and we would bounce back, you know. Now it's going to take a little more sleep, a little more nutrition, a little more time between, and a little bit more thought about how's my form. Right? We've got to get it right. But you're not broken by any means, and you can work hard. You just have to define that— what's appropriate for a beginner hard versus for someone who's a veteran and experienced and has that foundation laying in their heart. So during the first 6 to 8 weeks Really, what's responsible? So we start a new exercise program, the first 6 to 8 weeks of that program, any progress that you make, any, is basically due most to the neural connection, your brain rewiring and sending the message to the muscle so that it's recruiting more muscle fibers, more numbers of them, and it's recruiting more a bigger percent of each muscle fiber. So it's not just that you got stronger during the first 6 to 8 weeks, although you may feel like that's what's happening. What's happening is the muscles were like bears in the winter and they were on vacation, right? Or they were hibernating, and your brain is like rewiring them. It's like, hello, Come on, show up, come to work, let's do the job. And now you're moving more efficiently, more effectively. And so, of course, you feel stronger. There's more players on the team. More of those players are paying attention. And so you're recruiting them. That's the neural connection. It occurs in the, the muscle to the brain to the muscle in the first 6 to 8 weeks. The majority of all results are attributed to that, and we can't hurry it up. If you pick up a heavier weight, you don't get more of that connection going on. So this means there's no reason to pick up a heavier weight before you've actually laid that foundation. So you can go a little bit lighter, and should you feel like, okay, yeah, it was a little bit of work, I was getting to the point where I was very aware of those muscles, But there's a sweet spot, I will tell you, and I'm betting if you have any exercise experience at all, specifically with lifting weights, you know this sweet spot. There is a point where if you go too heavy, you actually can't feel yourself contracting the muscle. You can't feel— and I'm doing this, I'm in my imagination, and I'm grabbing an imaginary weight and pulling back You can't feel yourself retracting. You can't feel yourself drawing the shoulder blades closer together. When you go too heavy, it's just like a big lug that thing up, and it's kind of like all the muscles pull, but there's also probably a little momentum. And that's not all bad, by the way, as long as it's under control. However, we don't want that when we're first starting, because again, if you are pulling it up and you can't actually feel the contraction and feel that you're in good shape— and I mean by that good form, good technique, good strategy, not overall good shape— you're probably putting your ligaments, your connective tissue, at risk because we've just powerfully pulled it up there. And, you know, I mean, look at this. Even in someone who is not in great shape, we might say, you could hold your arm up and you can make a muscle. And we're going to see the belly of that muscle. So if I'm doing a bicep flex, you see my Popeye muscle right here, but it is in this place here where it's inserted into my elbow, and the origin of that muscle up here on this joint. These are the places that are weaker and they're smaller, right? So we have to give some time to that. Now, we could pull a bag up. We do it all the time, you know, if we're not in good shape or we're in good shape, we still have to pull the groceries up out of the car. Or out of the cart, or we have to get the potting soil out of the car. Now, fewer of us are getting them out of a trunk anymore where we're opening the door and it's at waist level. So it makes it a little easier and safer to do it. But, you know, we still have those things that we do that, you know, you look twice at it. You know, I have to go to the store very soon. I need to get pellets, saltwater pellets for my water softener. And I'm like, you know, I think about that every time. It's like, I hate doing it. And mostly I hate it because it's 110 degrees. But, you know, I think about like, how often do I lift 40 pounds at once, you know, in both hands? I'm like, make 2 trips. I have to tell myself this. But we need that slow and steady on-ramping to allow our muscles to get it. Now, in about 8 weeks all that neural foundation is done if you continue to consistently exercise. Now, if you take a 6-week sabbatical, you can't just enter back in week 7 where you left off. You need to back down on the weight again and slowly ramp up, not as slowly as you did the first time because there is a little muscle memory in there, but I said muscle, I didn't say connective tissue memory. So you still need to give that connective tissue a little opportunity to onboard and get back up there. I want you to think about this if you are a golfer, for instance, or anybody who does a seasonal activity. So this might be also gardening, it might be shoveling. You don't do any work like that except when you have to, right? So you're sweeping, you're shoveling maybe, and you haven't done that. Well, you don't get to choose, right? Mother Nature drops a heavy load of wet snow on you and there you are, you're doing something you have not progressed to. And guess when heart attacks happen? So I'm talking about, you know, muscle more than that, but there's a complicated move in the Reach down, shovel, pick it up heavy, and then let's rotate it and torque your back too. Should we do that? Probably wouldn't do it at the gym, would you? But sometimes don't think about those things when we're, you know, having to do, you know, what Mother Nature ordered us to do. So that neural connection cannot be rushed. We're allowing your connective tissue, your joints and ligaments, tendons, to adapt so you're ready for more stress. They're ready for more stress. And without a slow progression over that time, you just risk injury because you have a faulty foundation, and you do it without any advantageous benefit as far as getting more lean muscle, reducing body fat. You can't necessarily accelerate that either. 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 while you're doing those first weeks, you do want to reach muscular fatigue. You want to understand it, and you want to feel yourself contracting the muscles. So again, if you go really heavy at first, you're not really doing that. If you go really light, there's also a chance you're not really— you don't have to think about it. So you want something heavy enough that engages you, that allows you to think about it. So if we're talking about something for a really small muscle group like the shoulders, you don't have to go very heavy at all. If we're talking about a bent-over row, you're probably stronger than you might give yourself credit for. So for instance, you're not going to get 5 reps of 35 pounds, you know, in a day or in a week, ideally. I'm just guessing. 5 reps of 35 pounds, if we're talking chest press or bent-over row, if you haven't tried that, 35 pounds is a significant load, you need to begin with higher reps, lighter weight, and over time increase that weight first. And here's how it works, by the way, just to give you an idea. You know, in the beginning, yeah, weight training was meant to— you do one set and the results in studies, in research, and this is well documented for decades and decades and decades. So I'm not gonna quote a study or leave a reference here. This is pretty well known, okay? But we know that you'll benefit if you're a beginner from simply one set and doing that 2 or 3 times a week, 12 to 15 repetitions, 15 to 20, doesn't matter. It's 100% more than you did last week. And you might do that especially if you want to be more cautious, you're just not quite sure how you'll adapt. Do an exercise for most of your major muscle groups, and then maybe next week or the week after that, so 1 to 2 weeks doing that, and you would increase to 2 sets. Or you could stay with 1 set and increase the weight. So keeping your repetitions the same, the 1 set the same and increase the weight. The smartest way to change anything is one variable at a time. So if we have the variable of how much weight you're lifting, how many sets you're doing, and how many repetitions, you're only going to change one of them. And then we toggle back and forth. So as a responsible— by the way, personal trainer we should be doing this. I will not hesitate to guess that if you started boot camp, gone to an exercise class, you have fallen into the hands of a trainer who on day one wants to get you results right away and wants to make you feel a little bit sore so you feel like you did something. And they had you do 3 sets right away, first day, and go home and you can barely walk and sit down and stand up and stairs are miserable for a few days. Am I wrong? Okay, tell me if I am, because I'd love to hear from you. But in general, that is the mistake that a lot of trainers will make because they feel pressure. They feel pressure to get you results, to be sure that you felt like you worked out. The problem is we're, we're causing problems, so we're not accelerating you for the reason I mentioned first. It's the neural connection that gives it, right? So if we could instead go slower, teach you form, maybe do a set with no weight at all but going through proper form and what it feels like, where you should feel the work, where you shouldn't feel the work, all of that is potentially beneficial, laying a foundation that you're going to build on for the rest of your life. So as you increase— so now we're at 2 sets, say, and we kept the weight the same. And now in the third or the fourth week, if we feel like no undue soreness, feel pretty good, feel like I've got great form, good confidence, you're going to progress a little bit faster. There's no— nobody's going to say do this for 2 weeks and don't change that for 2 weeks. In the first few weeks, you will probably progress faster than you will later, but you don't want to go so fast that you negate this foundation. So your 2 sets, now what I would say to you is, okay, let's decrease the number of repetitions. So instead of reaching 15, let's only be able to reach 12. And if it's a 10 or it's 11 or it's a 12, we're still good, right? So now you have to pick up heavier weight and figure out what is that so that I fatigue there. And keep it at 2 sets. That's going to be more work, that's harder, that's more stress for the joints, ligaments, and the muscles. You stay there, and then maybe we keep it right there and we say, okay, same weight, same reps, 3 sets. Now, as you do that, 1 and 2 you're used to doing. The 3rd set, you might feel like, I can't quite get all the repetitions on this one because we're adding more volume, and that's okay. So you stop a little earlier, or you stop earlier, put it down, lighten the load, and continue and finish the set. That's another way we do it. But we do that until we're up to the point at 2 to 3 months later where, okay, we feel like safely we've got a great foundation built. And what's happening? We can decrease repetitions to 10 or fewer at that point. Because we've earned it. Now the muscles, the joints, and the ligaments are ready to go. But again, I wouldn't get somebody to 5 reps probably in 12 weeks. It would take, you know, between 3 and 6 months before I would go there with somebody. And some— one listening, maybe you, will find that they shouldn't be doing something that heavy because they start to have issues. They start to, you know, I slept wrong on my shoulder, they think, or it was related though not to their shoulder, but it was related to going heavy with the weights. And just, they're now also causing issues with, you know, the way they sleep, and they're feeling a little hesitant. And, you know, it shows up differently for people. So I want you to realize that This is part of ramping up slowly, is you catch these things before they become a problem. If you jump right in and you haven't gone up the stairs and you're just trying to jump up steps, you'll probably find that you come in for an injury. Now you have to go back way downstairs and start again after a period of rest. You can also add power within workouts, and we do that when we're still doing higher repetitions. And the reason we do is so that we can add bone density benefit and metabolism benefit. So the literature on power— and by the way, that is referenced in You Still Got It, Girl, the book I wrote in 2015. So again, this research has been out there for a while. It's still used. It didn't go away. Other sources are citing it, and we're still finding power can outbeat slow and controlled. And that's new for a lot of people who thought slow and controlled is the best way to go. It's a way to go, and there's nothing wrong with it, but adding power, which is the combination of strength plus speed, that puts them together. So you've earned a degree of strength and you have the motion really well. We're going to back off of that heaviest weight you can lift slightly, and then we're going to move with power and then control it as you lay it down. So it's coming into a stop sign, you decelerate so that you stop before the intersection, not so your nose is out in it. Similarly with a lift with power. We decelerate, we don't overdo it. We decelerate with control, pause there, and then lower it down really slowly. So power works for both bone density, it works for energy expenditure, so it boosts the metabolism benefit of a particular workout. If we boost energy expenditure during the workout, we also get that boost after the workout. That's a two-for-one. So for those who feel vulnerable lifting heavy, sometimes power can still be a way to boost their bone benefit if they reach that— this is the top, I can't go any further in terms of weight-wise and the load that I can carry. So that can work really well. All right, so with adrenal stress and cortisol issue, let me say this. So on the 3 times a week frequency, and that was a part of the question as well, I wanna say that yes, and 3 times a week will be more stimulus. However, there's other things that come into play that we have to look at, and that is that sometimes left to our own devices, you're not under the microscope of a clinical study. You may not be recovering well enough. You're not getting adequate rest, like sleep. And de-stress between sessions, and maybe not adequate protein or total calories. Now, during a study, things are probably a little bit more controlled, and you're probably being a little bit better and rigorous. Wouldn't you be if you were part of a scientific study? But for ourselves, what we often are trying to do is work harder in the exercise and cheat the system with our diet and our nutrition. I'm going to cheat, not have so many calories because I want to lose weight. I'm going to, I'm going to not have quite so much protein or not quite so much fat and carbohydrates. And I'm really busy, so I might go to bed late and get up early, you know, and all those things are going to contaminate whether 3 times a week works. So although we increase the frequency, we increase the stimulus, it may backfire. So what we found with Flipping 50 is that so many women were coming in already fatigued, already depleted, that it helped them recover better after exercise to do the twice a week because during each of those sessions they worked harder. They were able to pick up heavier weight. Reach one more repetition or increase the weight a little sooner than they would so that they were truly reaching muscular fatigue, not just getting tired doing it. And if you are not fully recovered when it's time for that next workout, you're not going to work as hard during it. Your muscles are still partially broken down and haven't completely repaired. You're at a disadvantage, not an advantage. And so what we look at is, for adults over 40— this can be true for males and females— we may do better with 72 hours. Remember that 48— I've shared this many, many times, and this is in a piece of literature as well that is very well known, but not or very well ignored as well. I'll say it that way. 48 hours between workouts is not the recommendation. 48 hours between the workouts is a minimum. And that means that not everyone will be recovered in that amount of time. So many older adults, again, about the less resilience between the muscles, the bones, and the ligaments, not so much the bones, joints, ligaments, tendons, we do better with 72 hours, feel fully recovered, less overall fatigue, less achiness, soreness, and we're ready to go again. And even though strength and HIIT can be different, if you're doing a lot of high-intensity interval training, it may also be a part of too much fatigue. There's too much tearing down, especially if you do a lot of it with high impact. But endurance training could also interfere. So if you're doing something and you're going out for 3 and 4 hour bike rides, remember that we are really terrible. We're lousy. You to you and me to me, we're terrible judges of whether we're really under stress. We think, I don't have a stressful life at all, but then we go out and we're regularly doing 4 and 6 and, you know, long hikes and long bike rides and we're not eating. And we're pretending, I don't like carbs, I do better on keto. And please tell me that you're at perfect body composition, you have tons of energy, and all cylinders are firing up here first before you say that you're doing really well on keto, because otherwise I'm not buying it. If your body's not releasing fat, it's not working. This is a little crazy talk. So we don't necessarily judge really well for under stress. We'd probably do better, all of us, to do a cortisol saliva test 4 times a day just to check on how we're doing. If we think that everything's going well and we're kind of in denial about our exercise being a part of the problem, we might want to look at that. So 3 workouts a week is impossible if you're recovering 72 hours. So there is a way to do this. There's, you know, do a heavy workout Monday and Friday and do a more functional light workout on Wednesday. So you're getting the best of both worlds there, getting rotation with a functional workout. I have people do unilateral work, one leg, one arm, and that way we are not causing too much stress because we don't have to lift quite as heavy. So it doesn't interfere with recovery from Monday, doesn't interfere with the workout that we're going to do on Friday. So hope that helps. I just want to come back to You know, say 5 reps for those of you who are looking at metabolism and bone density. And I wrote about this also in You Still Got It, Girl. The book still plays through today that energy expenditure and bone density benefits are happening from the same thing. 5 reps has been shown in the last 8 years to be beneficial and safe for women who have osteoporosis in postmenopause. But we don't get there overnight. In clinical studies, they take 18 months to get a woman to that point. 18 months, not even just 12 weeks, right? So realize that it takes some time because we want to first, again, do no harm to ourselves, right? So doing 7 repetitions That means there's two, and you may reach a point where you've got an old shoulder injury, and at some point you reach the tipping point. I can't go any heavier than that, or I feel vulnerable. I start to feel it talking to me. So hopefully that was helpful. That was an answer to a question maybe you didn't know that you had as well. And I want to let you know that if you liked this episode, next week in the Friday session I'm going to answer, what about wearing a weighted vest with osteoporosis? Anything that I should know about that? So stay tuned for that one. You'll find the show notes for today at Flipping50.com/LiftingHeavyInMenopause. Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit Flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about. How much protein do you need? Weight loss and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you midlife women. So go and listen right now. Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell? Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups and the answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group, but it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions or tell your story. Would you like to be a guest. So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset, and looking forward to every new year, join the Flipping 50 Insiders group. That's Flipping 50 Insiders on Facebook.