What’s Best Total Body or Split Routine in Menopause

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. Okay, this is an age-old dilemma. This comes up among bodybuilders, strength lifters, casual exercisers even, and personal trainers. And sometimes it gets a little feisty in the conversation. But the reason I unpack this today is mostly for those of you who are wondering which is best, meaning which is really best for me right now in menopause. So I unpack some research, I unpack why the research might not give you all the insight that you want, and I unpack the questions that you should be asking when you're making the decision for yourself.

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

Okay, let's get right into this, and it could be a little heated because if you're arriving and you already have an opinion, it could differ from what I share with you. And I'm going to tell you, how about right out of the gate, just to be fair and honest, my preference personally and professionally has been and who knows what will be total body routines. And not that I haven't tested in the last 3 to 4 months, I played a little bit more again and have in the past with split routines. And I have found that even in a very minimal basis, and I call that minimal because what I've done is not total split routine but split only one instead of a total body workout, done upper and lower body. So that means I did one total body per week, and then at the end of the week did an upper and then a lower body back to back. I found that even— not, not that it wasn't potentially just as effective— there were some parts of it that I actually liked more in that just felt a little bit more energetic having done just just the lower body, for instance, or just the upper body and been able to dedicate a little bit more time to more exercises, more sets. But what I found is I just got off so quickly that my schedule rocked things off. I couldn't stick with it that I was, I was like, I can't get 2 days back to back to do these 2. And so now that throwing another loop into it, I haven't stimulated that second time, those muscle groups again within, you know, a week period. And it threw off the next week as well. So even though I'm an entrepreneur, I live 6 minutes from a gym and I have all the equipment here in my own home gym that you would think that I might be able to better fit in exercise, particularly as, shh, I'm a professional, right? And yet I didn't find that to be true. You know, we all get schedules where we may choose our work, and yet on that work we've chosen, we have appointments on those calendars and things change. Yeah, your total slow controlled morning and relaxation and way of starting changes sometimes based on other people's goals, for you. So I found it's difficult, and that's why I keep coming back to total body. It's easier to fit in, to manipulate, to move around. I will tell you some other reasons why, for some of the clients that I've worked with, it helps a bit more with the very much needed recovery time in between. But I want to come back to that after sharing with you a study and a little backstory before we get into the actual So previously published studies, not just the one that I'm about to really unpack and dissect with you here today, showed that muscle mass and hypertrophy could be built by either split routine or total body. There was a study that I shared, probably 2013 or '14, and that did say there was 8 times the metabolism benefit in a total body workout versus a split routine workout. Meaning, you know, if I were going to work my upper body or my lower body, didn't matter which of those, compared to a workout that was total body, the total body workout was actually going to give me 8 times the metabolism boost. Now you might be thinking in your math, you know, that, okay, but you know, I'm not quite getting the total metabolism boost, but I'm getting more of them during the week with split routine. So wouldn't that be the equivalent or even better, actually. And although that's a valid question, that kind of begs the question, are you able to recover enough that you're working hard enough during each of those? And did you get enough muscle protein synthesis in each one of them to get up and over the top, as you might say? So very much like protein, You know, if you under-eat that protein, you don't get that 30-35 grams of protein at each meal, you didn't quite hit that, that goal of muscle protein synthesis that we need, and it would be bumped up if you got a little higher. Now, if you've had a high muscle protein stimulating meal prior and then you just bumped it up again with a little less at the next meal, you might still be okay. Is that the same with resistance training? I don't know that we have the answer to that question, so I just put it out there so that you realize all factors considered, we may not be able to consider all factors based on science yet. But the one thing you can do and I can do is monitor our own results. If you're trying something for a period of time fair enough to say in 8 weeks or 12 weeks, this is actually working for me, I'm getting better results. So that's fair, but otherwise I don't think we can say it. But here's what I want you to say. So although those prior studies said that muscle mass hypertrophy could be built by either split or total body routines, fat loss may benefit more from total body workouts based on greater muscle mass protein synthesis and the EPOC, which stands for the excess post-oxygen consumption. That's just kind of paying back after the workout of all the oxygen used. Your body continues to pull in and use more oxygen in recovery, and that is caloric expenditure. It's burning fat for you after strength. However, recently, Brad Schoenfeld showed that as long as the volume is equal, they can provide the same results. So here's how he showed that. The study that he did was about several things. So the total volume is really what he was studying. Full body workout routine trained every muscle group 4 times per week for these study subjects. So Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Very common to take a Wednesday off with the following exercises: a bench press, a cable triceps pushdown, shoulder press, seated row, bicep curl, squat, and a leg curl. Those are very basic exercises. If you're counting, that's 7, right? So he did 4 sets of 7 exercises. Are you doing math? That's 28. They did 4 workouts a week. Now, don't do this at home, right? Because to me, this is like, why would you ever do that? Because nobody is ever going to do total body workouts like back to back to back to back doing the same muscle group. I'd rather see a woman do Monday and Thursday twice weekly, right? Tuesday, Friday twice weekly. And if you were going to do twice a weekly, I would never want you to do Monday and Tuesday are your two days. We want it evenly spread out. We want recovery days in between. And yet they chose to do this to be able to show that if the pure volume was the same, it would still get the best or the similar results. So let's keep going. So when you look at the math, 4 sets done of those 7 exercises equates to 112 sets total in a week for the total workout groups. The split routine training group comprised of— they had an A workout and a B workout. On the A days they did— that was Mondays, Thursdays— and B they did Tuesdays, Fridays. They did 8 sets of each of 6 exercises on each of those days. They were just a different 6 exercises. So think about this, 46 exercises, right? 8 times 6, are you with me? So 46 exercises times 2 is 92. So the A session was bench press, incline press, cable triceps pushdown, triceps kickback, shoulder press, and front dumbbell raise. So if you're looking at that, you've got 2 chest press or 2 chest exercises, 2 triceps, and 2 shoulder exercises there. The B session consisted of pulling exercises for the back, so seated row, lat pulldown, bicep curl, hammer curl, Squat and the leg curl. So think about this again now, right? So 16 sets of exercise per muscle group per week in both groups. That was consistent, right? 12 exercises in the split, 7 exercises total body, right? So research suggests strength gains derived from frequency manipulation are driven by the increase in training volume. When training volume is held constant, increased frequency does not seem to provide additional benefits. However, most studies to date employed resistance training frequencies of 3 or fewer days per muscle group per week. So findings of this study add to the existing literature in that they show resistance training 4 days a week provide no additional strength gains relative to resistance training twice per week, right? So this study really kind of unpacked two different things. And common sense would tell you, even though you may not be a fitness professional, total body 4 times a week, like back to back practically with no recovery— of course that wouldn't give us better results. In fact, it might give us worse. But the fact that it didn't give us significantly worse results is maybe worth mentioning. Hey, this is Debra Atkinson.

I love creating the Flipping 50 podcast for you, and I have for over a decade. I also love helping midlife women shift not only their physical energy, but their beliefs about what effective exercise looks like and how much it can positively and powerfully impact your life. How you menopause and exercise in menopause determines how you will live, not just now but decades from now. If you're not exercising right now, you're getting tired, not stronger, or you think you don't have time or the energy to exercise, do a 5-day flip with me. I'll send you one short video a day for 5 days. It's just 15 to 20 minutes long, so you can see exactly how I plan out a fitness plan for myself and for thousands of clients I've worked with. You can get this flipping50.com right now. What are you waiting for?

Let's start flipping 50 together. So for those of you that are overzealous and like to do more, while that might not work for you quite as well during menopause, if you're dealing with otherwise fatigue or risk of injury, it may not have been as bad, right, as we used to think, not getting as much rest and recovery recovery between. So whether additional training volume resultant from higher training frequency would be ideal or it would be excessive would be unique to each individual. I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say that my hypothetical response to this would say for most women with limited time and energy adding volume without a very direct and absolute, yes, we know this is going to work, would not be worth the squeeze. So, you know, even 3 times per week compared to 2 does not show a significant difference in benefits. So for those of you who are thinking, I don't have time or I don't have energy, getting twice weekly, just getting that minimum, maybe not only enough for you, but it may be a sweet spot so you're not pushing yourself over the edge. The biggest challenge for most individuals, men and women, is time. Time is a huge obstacle. None of us has too much of it and/or disrupted or in a real regular schedule. So again, that's where that choice for total body versus split routine comes in. If you miss one during that split routine, you really will struggle. To make, make it up, get back on track. Something will be missed. So the question on this study, if total body had been done just 3 times a week, allowing some recovery, would there have been better results? But previous to this, if you had that question, it was a great one by the way, but previous to this, they, there were already existing studies showing 3 days a week. So it's why they chose to do 4, just to okay, what will this do? Because nothing existed prior to this to actually throw it out the window or justify it as a means. So now it does exist. So if you'll remember from science, recommendations are to have a minimum of 48 hours to recover between use of same muscle groups. Now recall that many times we've gotten that wrong, and many programs and individuals preferred or thought they should do one every 48 hours. That was never it. It was always about you have to have a minimum of 48 hours rest. That's not to say it's terrible if you have 72. That actually might be better for you. And the way to know would be for you to do a test of you. We've seen women do optimally with Monday-Friday. And I, I give you that as only example, but that idea of 2 full days of recovery— no, not sitting on the couch, but not strength training in between— because now we're spreading this out pretty evenly over the course of a week. So unlike a Monday-Wednesday, we're taking another rest day in between, and a little bit longer than that in between the next workouts, but also setting you up for an active life so that you've more energy. To use on other kinds of activity can be the, the important justification here. Remember, it's not just during the workout, but it's how does the workout get you better for life that is the most important consideration. So 1 to 2 minutes rest between use of same muscle groups can also be very beneficial. Now, if you are, for instance, going back to the example of the exercises in, say, a split routine. Let's just go there. So what those exercises were on one day was a seated row, a lat pulldown, two different biceps exercises, and two different leg exercises— leg curl and a squat. So how might they have been doing these exercises with 1 to 2 minutes of rest per muscle group but still be moving so the workout didn't take all day. By going from, say, a seated row onto, say, a squat, a lower body exercise, onto, say, a bicep exercise, and then coming back and repeating that, that is one way. So thinking that each exercise is going to take approximately a minute to set it up, to perform the exercise, to get off of it, move on to the next one. A minute is reasonable, right? That's not sprinting. It's not like a bootcamp frenzied pace. However, it's just reasonable, something that many of us probably do when we're left to our own devices. Now, like-minded, right? Or like, body part, we're not resting a full 1 to 2 minutes if we're doing a row and we're doing a bicep curl within the same time frame here. But that's different than muscle group. So you still may be able to do it, kind of this exercise to that one to that one, without any sitting and scrolling and twiddling your thumb kind of exercises. Another alternative would be between your exercises doing some kind of a balance exercise or a core exercise. Now, I will do this one when I'm doing, say, supersetting a chest press and a bent-over row, and in between I will do some kind of a balance exercise. So I'm using and firing my glute medial muscle, working on proprioception and balance, and that always means a core as well, spending maybe a minute doing that. So I'll do a chest press, a bent-over row, a balance exercise, and I'm also changing up my weights during that, kind of racking my dumbbells, getting the new dumbbells ready to go. That's giving me 1 to 2 minutes, you know, and bordering toward the 2 minutes between starting again to go. That gives you enough— kind of your nervous system gets to recharge, the glycogen stores come back into the muscle so that you're ready to go again. If you're doing a superset, which is also used as the terminology, but I could do supersetting of chest, chest, chest, chest exercises, right? I could do a chest fly, I could do a chest press on an incline, on a flat, and I could do a push-up, and I could even do a plank, all chest involved. Those would work, but then you would generally be done. Like you've worked them, worked them, worked them, worked them, and now you're done. So it's really almost what we call a monster set. So a huge set, the repetitions don't really take a break, just enough to kind of regroup, take a breath, and then go again. That also can work, and it can work well when it's time for you to shake things up. We would never want to start an ideal workout and then keep doing it for months at a time and say, next year, this time we're still doing the same workout? No, right? So maybe every 4 to 6 weeks you're changing your workout, or every 12 weeks you're changing the focus of a workout. Within a workout, you could do week 1, you're focusing on one thing, week 2 on another, week 3— there are many ways to do periodization. Changing things up, working in different kind of stimulus. And when you begin playing with something, you will probably identify then what works well for you. But until you do, you may not know the reason to that. So I hope that was helpful just in breaking down what is most beneficial. Is it split routine or is it total body? One of the things that I do want you to realize is that a split routine has to be more than just taking upper body and lower body and just, I had this whole body workout, now I'm just gonna take out a part of it and put it there and another part of it and put it here. Generally when it's a split routine workout, we're gonna do a little bit more. So in a total body workout, we probably wouldn't have done 2 chest exercises, 2 presses, and 2 shoulder exercises. We've done maybe 1 of each as we were doing all major muscle groups and didn't have time to, to incorporate all of them. So an important distinction for you there is, you know, what are you qualifying as a split routine? So we don't want total body every day. We don't want necessarily just a piece of a total body workout taken in segments as this is my workout today and that alone, because we do need that muscle protein synthesis. So you need to take the exercises to nearly fatigue, reps in reserve if you will, and or you need to get adequate volume of sets. And that may be more important for those of you who are in post-menopause. Love to hear your questions on this. I would love to hear your point of view, your opinion. Do you love split routine or do you prefer total body? How much time are you spending in the gym?

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