Why Certain Exercise Intensities Work for You (and Others May Not)

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 25 milligrams of CBD and 25 milligrams 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. If you are exercising right now and it seems not to be working, like in fact seems to be backfiring, stay tuned to this episode. We're gonna talk about different exercise intensities and actually why the intensity that you're using right now may be what's not working for you. It's not just exercise itself is not working, but it's the intensity that you're doing right now together with the status that you're in, the situational moment. More about that coming right up. You're in perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause, and you're not slowing down. You're just getting started. But the old rules don't apply anymore. The workouts that worked before, they're working against you now. The advice you've been given, incomplete at best. I'm Debra Atkinson, and I'm the founder of Flipping 50, the pioneer in fitness for women in midlife. For more than 40 years, I've been in the trenches with women just like you, and for the last 12, right here on this podcast, and, and the founder of Flipping 50: The Stronger Way app and membership. Welcome to Flipping 50: The Stronger Way, where science meets strength, where you'll find the tools, research, and real talk to build the body and the life you want in your second half. Each week you'll get evidence-based exercise and nutrition strategies, conversations with leading experts, and honest answers to the questions your doctor didn't get answers to in medical school and doesn't have time to answer in an appointment. This is your show. Let's get stronger. If you've experienced results from exercise that are nothing like what you want, this episode intends to explain why certain exercise intensities work for you right now and others that that maybe previously did may not. This episode comes right on the heels of another episode about 2 weeks ago about exercise mistakes that fail us. It hit home for a lot of listeners. So this episode backs that up. And if you haven't listened to that one, go give it a listen potentially afterwards and just kind of catch up. And you will realize there is a lot of overlap, but there's also potentially some nuances here that weren't quite explained or didn't resonate with some of you. And my hope is that this time it all lands well. What I wanna make clear is this, you want intensity and effort. Effort levels matters for success long-term, but short-term, sometimes you have to pivot. Something may be hitting wrong. Your hormones may have naturally taken a pivot, and so you have to with them until you can regulate again. Times you'll know what this is, a sudden life stressor, or your sleep disrupted, even with the best habits, you are making big changes in life, even if good ones. And other times it's more of a mystery to you until you test using your labs to know and see literally what the numbers are telling you. From one test to another, and we don't do that daily, weekly, even monthly. And so we want to learn to adjust the data that the body is giving us every day. When your body senses stress, it rallies, and the stress hormone, and also the energy hormone, cortisol, rears its sometimes nice, sometimes ugly head. When your body senses stress, that is what happens. It releases cortisol to mobilize glycogen stores stored in muscle for glucose to be used as fuel. It creates a positive response in skeletal muscle. Women working at high intensities have greater growth hormone and insulin response compared to men and compared to women doing endurance training. And I know that firsthand. With this higher intensity, there's also increased signaling to our skeletal muscle. So here's the lowdown of that. You work at higher intensity, you do it for a shorter period of time. You work at higher intensity, you get greater stimulus for lean muscle mass and potentially for fat burning because you have greater stimulus for lean muscle mass. So why doesn't that work for you? Because all of that packaged up would sound really good, like, "Send me that over," right? But when you're really under higher stress levels, that works if, if your body is able to handle it. But when you're at really higher stress levels, your body is handling that and perceiving it as a workout, even though you and I know it's not. It's not a positive stressor in the form of, lifting weights or doing high-intensity interval training that is going to get us the outcome that we want. It's not the same thing. So it works if your body has a surge of cortisol release because you are about to exercise intensely. It works beautifully. So you have fuel available for muscle contractions and work, and you're getting that stimulus for greater, better muscle contraction. Excellent. But if you're in a work meeting and you're stressed, it doesn't serve as well. If cortisol rises because you have coffee in the morning, too much of it anyway, then the blood sugar spike—yes, possible even with black coffee, all of you virtuous people—may not be helpful and could contribute to weight gain or belly fat. Midlife, this is more likely if we have unnecessary rises in blood sugar. So those that are because of foods we eat or the sequence we eat them in or the stress level we eat them in. Anybody go looking for a snack when you're a little stressed, just even as a distraction? It's usually not salmon, right? It's something else. Normal rises in blood sugar with meals is natural. High spikes indicate a change in content, maybe in the sequence of your foods. And that would help you monitor it or manage it. For our conversation though, let's stick with exercise and not a nutrition discussion today. Why is everyone and their dog telling you to walk for any possible reason? Little bit stressed, go for a walk. Can't get to sleep, go for a walk. Were sleep deprived last night, go for a walk. Had a meal, go for a walk. Blood sugar a little bit high on your glucose monitor, go for a walk, right? All kinds of reasons. Everybody's saying, go for a walk, go for a walk, go for a walk. 7 kinds of walks that you should do. That post, everybody knows, will get a lot of scrolling. And so influencers are not silly and they're not stupid, and they are actually spouting the truth when they're talking about walking. But there's a secret. They're telling you that because walking benefits are really pretty magical. I mean, when you think about the cost of walking, not much, right? I mean, everybody's got shoes. Nobody said it has to be a certain kind of shoe. Just walking helps. You go to the airport, you're not necessarily in your walking shoes, but it still works. So because walking benefits are so magical, benefits without risks— anything can go to extremes, by the way, but if you're reasonable, you can get so much good out of it. Walking at low-level intensities is good, really good. Walking for 10 minutes, walking 30 minutes, or even an hour can be amazing for you. Power walking above your comfort zone, like you're making yourself go as hard or fast as possible for durations beyond hours long without having earned the conditioning level to do that kind of a walk may not work so well for you. Now, either or of those cases could go wrong, too high intensity or too long, but most definitely when you pair both of them together, you'll probably have a challenge. Exercise at greater than 75% of your VO2 max. VO2 max is, this is the highest volume of oxygen that your body can handle in a 1-minute period of time. It's a measure, it has to be done by fitness fitness testing either on a bike or on a treadmill, and use of equipment to measure your oxygen in and out matters. Otherwise, we wouldn't really know it. Now, we can do some tests, we call them field tests, that might predict it so that we can give you an exercise prescription if we wanted you to exercise at certain levels to optimize your fitness. But we can also say, okay, feels like, and in terms of testing, we don't necessarily use heart rate zones very much unless you are someone who's interested in competing and/or fitness level is being monitored because it's really low and your oxygen capacity is really low. But what we want is we wanna know that at 75% of VO2 max, this is important for you to understand. Your body can handle it without too much stress. It's readily able to provide that. But at greater levels than 75% VO2 max, the energy demands surpass the rate at which your aerobic pathways can efficiently supply energy. The energy is called ATP, adenosine triphosphate, for a very good reason. We call it ATP. What that means is if your aerobic pathways are able to do it, you can— your body can work very functionally, very easily while you are just moving along and talking and going throughout your day. It's a lot like on a moderate day in summer, your air conditioner can keep up really, really easily. But when it is really hot for many days in a row or really hot and really humid, your air air conditioner is going to work overtime. And that is the kind of summer that your heating and cooling company get swarmed and swamped, and you least likely want that air conditioner to go out, right? So think of your body as the same way. Your air conditioner or your VO2 max, your aerobic pathways work really well when exercise is at a moderate level. But when you surpass about 70% it starts to have to really work and the aerobic pathways can't do it anymore. And the talk test would be the point where you are like really getting out of breath, cannot talk in full sentences, wondering how much longer, how much further, right? So you can hear the difference in my voice. That's how things change in terms of talking. You are probably starting to breathe out of both your mouth and your nose, maybe leaning toward your mouth breathing a little bit more as intensities get higher and higher. In aerobic, you can talk through your mouth pretty easily in pretty smooth sentences. And you know that point where it begins to be more anaerobic. Without oxygen, then aerobic. Things get choppy, mouth breathing becomes necessary. So realize that you've experienced it. I just wanted to describe it so you know the feels-like area. Cortisol is released when that happens because it's part of your body's acute stress response. It feels stress if it can't do things on a regular basis. That air conditioning can't run just smoothly and it constantly is kicking in and kicking in and kicking in. In, there's a stress felt, and the cortisol is released as a part of that acute response to mobilize glucose coming from stored glycogen in muscles and stimulates this glycogenolysis, which is the breakdown of glycogen into usable sugar to fuel your muscles. So when you ate, at some point your body broke down all that food and cycled it through blood sugar rises, and then said, "Okay, let's go store that in the bank of muscle for the next time we need it." So if you've got more muscle, it's where you stored it. It might have second gone to your liver, but third is gonna go to fat storage. So hence, more muscle, more storage space, less fat, okay? In case you needed a little motivation. But walking at a low-intensity level does not increase cortisol because you don't really need it. Your body just says, "Well, that's not really a stressor." In fact, you have some circulating cortisol at all times. I don't know what you're doing right now, but unless you're doing really heavy lifting or you are doing sprint intervals, you might just be going for a walk. Maybe you're driving to your job and maybe that's stressful for you. I don't know. But I'm guessing that in terms of the exchange of oxygen back and forth, you're probably not working all that hard. So your body doesn't have to release cortisol for you to handle what you're handling right now. Or I'm guessing if it did, you probably wouldn't be listening to this podcast in this moment you're in. Walking at a low intensity, meaning your self-selected pace, it actually decreases cortisol. Here's why. The exercise is not intense enough to cause a surge of cortisol or the stress. Instead, your body uses that circulating cortisol from your bloodstream because you have some low level of it. Otherwise, you would not, by the way, have any energy. That leads to a slight lowering of cortisol after low levels of walking. You go for a walk and it's 30 minutes, it's 10, it's an hour with the dog, and you come back and your cortisol level is actually lower than when you went. As long as you were enjoying the walk. So unenjoyable, miserable would be probably punishing yourself, making yourself go harder, faster than you really wanted to, making it really uncomfortable. So realize that this is why everybody's saying walk, because if we can lower your cortisol level, we also lower the blood sugar based on everything that I've said. If there's a surge of cortisol, there is a surge of blood sugar. This episode is sponsored by the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. It is the framework that we designed our entire membership and program based on. Since 2013, I've been developing that after 30 years of working with women in midlife. That was born, and in 2018, we rolled out the Menopause Fitness Specialist to train other fitness and health Pros on how to actually prescribe exercise. Here's where we're going next, in case you want to get started now, that we're actually training physicians on exercise prescription, knowing they get very little of it in medical school, and hoping that it also bridges the gap for you who may be a fitness or health professional, or want to be, who works with women in menopause, because there is so much demand and so much room for you right now. If you are working with women in menopause but not getting all the results, don't have a reliable, predictable framework that gets you results over and over that people know, like, and trust, come and talk to us. We'll put the link in the show notes for today. That's the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. And if you want to head on over to fitnessmarketingacademy.com, it's where we have all of the content dedicated to you, health and fitness pros. Now, if you're just in an argument or you're sitting in a meeting at work, that surge of blood sugar is not serving you because the muscles are not going to use it for exercise. Where's it going to go? It's going to go back into potentially storage. So not ideal, right? High-intensity exercise, by the way, is not bad, but you will find that if it's done too often or too long or with too little recovery. It does have a bad or negative effect to the recovery point. The importance of it— lack of recovery, like chronic low-carb diets, because we need carbohydrates for recovery, particularly women do. You may prolong your cortisol levels after moderate and high-intensity exercise. And if you abuse low-intensity exercise, let's say you keep it fairly low intensity, but you go 4 to 5 miles twice daily, that's putting in 8 to 10 miles every day. At some point, there's going to be a price to pay for that. Maybe it's overuse on your hip joints, but it also might be that you can abuse a good thing. A few intervals, like between 4 and 6, done to breathlessness in under 30 seconds, done a couple times a week, can be amazing for helping you increase your VO2 max cardiovascular fitness and increase your fat burning around your visceral belly fat. But done too often, remember, you're elevating that cortisol level, you're elevating the stress. And if there's no opportunity for recovery in between because you happen to be on a keto diet, not eating carbohydrates, maybe getting too much of a caloric deficit, your body just says, "Oh, stressor, stressor, and another stressor. Hmm, not good. We should probably store fat for a rainy day because it seems to be raining right now." So you've got to make sure that your body feels safe and that when you're ready to do— mentally ready to do a high-intensity workout again, that your physical body is actually ready too. There is a marked difference in studies between cortisol concentration between about 45 minutes and 120 minutes of endurance exercise. Now, this was done with athletes, and I believe most of them were male. So there were greater concentrations of cortisol occurring in longer duration exercise. Researchers measured that with cumulative cortisol exposure through hair samples in athletes. Now, by the way, if you wanted to test your own cortisol levels, my preference of testing is saliva testing. You do that at 4 different points of intake over one period, one day. You do it in the morning, you do it at noon, you do it at dinner, and then you do it before you go to bed. Those 4 points, then you send that saliva, those test tubes back in, and you get kind of a bell curve. Of what do you look like? What does your cortisol look like? And yes, of course it's a snapshot, but it's a real day, real-time snapshot. And I prefer that over, say, a blood test only takes it at the moment that you took it, and you're looking at otherwise potentially a dried urine test. It's called the Dutch test. Many of you have heard that term lately. That's also potentially not the right now and in the moment. And there are all kinds of arguments for all kinds of tests, but My preference still is saliva. When I do it on myself, that's what I do to double-check that a blood test or a wet or dry urine test actually measures what was true or suggested from it. A backup test is also a good idea. So, amateur endurance athlete. What is that? Well, that's you and me if we really like those, you know, 5 or 6 mile runs that maybe we've always done and gotten away with. That used to be my go-to. That's my loop. I know that 5-mile loop. I'll go down there, I'll come back. And, you know, no longer did that continue working for me very well at a certain point. But even you who don't run, you walk, but walking that 4 to 5 mile and walking that regularly every day potentially is not doing you the best service. Mixing it up, going shorter, going longer, going faster, going slower, gives you a little bit better fitness variety in stimulus and therefore in the 3 energy systems that you should be training. So if you are not recovering because you don't give yourself either enough time in between doing that same kind of stimulus or not sleeping, you're not eating well, total calories or total carbohydrate more important during recovery, especially from your cardio kind of training, than your protein might be, that could be problematic. So you're thinking, but I never had problems before, so why did it change? Well, hormone shifts, of course, is the answer. So all things that impact hormones you can change, you will probably want to optimize. You can't control that hormonal change that's going on with your body on its own timeline. However, maybe you can supplement with hormones if you're choosing that. You can change what you do with your dietary intake, the type, the timing, and similarly with the sleep and the exercise type and timing that you get. By no means would I say stop doing high intensity, not long-term, but maybe be short-term. If you need a reset, you do want to look at, "Okay, wait, I can't necessarily go for that lifting heavy, high-intensity intervals, or jump training all at once right now because if I do, I'm exhausted." And if you're exhausted, you're ill, or you're injured, the fitness is not happening. The fitness you're after is not happening. And you've got to see, "Wait a minute, short-term I'm going to have to stop so that long-term I can get what I want, you know. And I think it's important that you realize it isn't— the, the most magic doesn't come from a shot, a pill, a patch, or a cream. Those help most to mitigate symptoms. Lifestyle habits are both the foundation, ideally the foundation before you do hormone therapy, and then enabled more so when you have that hormone stabilization out optimal levels again, you'll be able to get the results and reap the rewards from doing them. Everything works in an integrated way. So if it's working against you at the moment, look at how you can optimize it to work for you. For some women, that is support through hormone therapy because the habit foundation that they have or are trying to implement isn't working. Without quality sleep, for instance, will struggle to get optimal results and may struggle difficult to comply with the exercise we want to do in the first place. Progesterone, in the estrogen-progesterone balanced relationship, may support your sleep and make all of the difference for you. Women in midlife also, it needs to be said, have higher cortisol levels compared to younger women. Mostly younger you is what matters. You have a greater cortisol response. It's related to blood sugar levels. We know that in midlife, a woman's blood sugar level on average are 5 points higher than previously. Estrogen played a major role in supporting stabilization of blood sugar, and without it, blood sugar regulation requires some additional support. And that might be changing your eating habits, the sequence of the foods you eat, the— take a breath before a meal, put your phone down, put the screens down, and just pay attention to what it is you're doing. When stress is up, cortisol is released, releasing sugar for mobilization so you can fight that stressor, even if it's not physical. So problems can happen with unused blood sugar by muscle. So just imagine the stressors in your own typical day. Maybe your kids, and really, it doesn't matter if they're not living in your same household. I don't think so. Your job, your schedule. Sleep schedule or your sleep quality. Is that a problem? Your diet or skipping or skipping meals, even in the name of fasting, caffeine intake, your HIIT, your weights too often or too long for you, your hydration or lack thereof. Actually, you know, all of those things contribute to stressors on a typical day, and I think you need to realize you got to take it all in in and look at collectively where's your stress level right now, in addition to you're a woman in midlife where hormonal change is adding a stressor even if you didn't sign up for it. You got that one. So how do you know you're in a cortisol challenge? And it can be, by the way, both low and no energy cortisol, or high. And though high is more common Those of you with low cortisol levels, we see you. So you stop sleeping as well. That's one sign. Digestion changes. Maybe you become more constipated. For some, it's diarrhea. Constipation is much more likely if you're overly stressed. Elimination becomes less regular. So you're short or you're distracted. You fly off the handle quickly. You can't focus. You may be sick or injured more. And guess what? What? More stress combined with all of that. So why does HIIT sometimes work for you and sometimes not? Why does HIIT work for others, your bestie, but not for you? And also, you should be able to answer this question by now. Why does HIIT work sometimes but not others? Well, this is exactly why. It elicits a peak cortisol response. But it's short, and then it's mitigated by complete recovery when at least you're doing it correctly. Okay, in the previous episode that I shared, a woman joined our program and she reported she was having great success after doing her first Stronger program partway, having lost weight and inches. Although we don't suggest that we are a weight loss program, if you're inflamed and changing what you're doing for the better helps you, you may lose weight. In her post, she shared that she just previously joined a program that she was doing. It was built around HIIT, high-intensity interval training, and she gained 14 pounds in 3 weeks. And, and I reported earlier that that is crazy. It's almost unheard of. But even for her though, that gain was likely temporary. It was likely she was in a perfect storm. Hormonal changes just happened, maybe all at once. Maybe she was exposed to some toxins. She was unaware of. Then the hit coming right on top of that, potentially too much too soon, but definitely we see too much too soon for her. And when you are potentially at this like critical mass, and it's collectively of your bucket of stress is like overly full, the tipping point, you've reached it. It's just too much. It's all catching up with you. Whatever positive habits that we know to be, this is a good hormetic stressor, meaning we're stressing the hormones on purpose for the result we want, even that can backfire. So a good hormetic stressor may not be good in certain times. That could be ice baths, that could be infrared sauna, it could be high-intensity interval training, it could be heavy weightlifting, could be going for power walks and doing it too often, or going for those endurance hikes that you love but too often and too little recovery. Any of that and all of that put together could tip the scale. How would you know you're not going to benefit from HIIT or sprint interval training right now? It's a tough one, and sometimes you're not going to like this answer. It's trial and error. And you realize, I don't feel good after. Like, in fact, I feel like I could take a nap. Frequently you're tired, exhausted, even though you're exercising. And that's the opposite of desired effect, right? I mean, we're exercising to feel better, to have more energy. And if you don't, well, let's take that notable and say, mm, better change something right now. You haven't yet established a lower pyramid of your walking on a regular basis. You're moving, getting lots of steps in, at least doesn't have to be going for walks. Maybe you work in retail and you're getting it that that way. And you're doing resistance training a couple times a week regularly, and those things are going well, you already feel good. That's an indication, okay, your body says, well, maybe I'm ready for more. Try it. Signs you're not recovering well from your exercise would be your sleep is worse or it's not improving even though you are exercising, because usually exercisers sleep better, deeper, if not longer. Waking rested heart rate is 5 beats or more higher than it normally is. Now, a little hard for you to tell, right, if you don't normally look at that first thing in the morning. So I would start. Constantly you're on edge, you're flying off the handle quickly, and people are starting to notice. You could take a nap after exercise of any kind. Mentioned that one earlier, but I'm gonna say it again. That is It is not a sign that you're doing really well. You know, the only people we know that do that and get away with it are elite athletes, you know, who generally have sponsors paying the bills and they get to go home and take a nap and eat grapes and get a massage or put their legs into recovery sleeves. And then they work out again because that's their job. But for most of us, We want to exercise so that our jobs and our at-home and our play is better and easier and more fun, and our mood is better, and we sleep deeper and love life more. And that's really the goal. And if you're not getting those signs, I would say your exercise is not helping you at this point. And it's not that there's anything wrong necessarily with what you're doing. That routine may be great for you at another time and point— point in time. How's that? Or right now, temporarily, you need to just change it, flip the switch a little bit. Maybe it won't— that routine won't be good for you again, but you have to be willing to say, "Why would I make myself fit into that program when what my body is saying is it wants a different kind of program?" So if you could visualize this and you think well in pictures, think with me about this one. Think peaks and valleys. Peaks and valleys are good. We want highs and we want lows, both within a week and within your high-intensity interval training, because it's naturally what you get in strength training. You work really hard, get breathless, and then you should totally recover. That's the valley. That's a high-intensity interval training. When you do strength training, you lift, you're working really hard for maybe less than a minute, and then you put the weights down and you're transitioning to the next one. You're getting rest and recovery. So you have that peaks and valleys. Within a week, you should have days that— Monday is strength training, Thursday is strength training. Those are my peaks. In between, I'm going to go for a walk, maybe I'm going to do some yoga. Those are valleys. So you see this reflected all the way through. When we pull back and, as a programmer, as a strength and conditioning coach— sorry about the noise, flipping my chair around— I also look at quarters or years and seasons. So you could think of it in terms of seasons instead of quarters, but I look at— I want you to work really hard some seasons to get in shape and build strength and power, and other times I want you to go out and play and use it. So your summer season, if you're in a northern climate, might be go out and play and use it. Go play golf, go spend time in your garden, on your lake, doing stand-up paddleboarding. Be ready for those kinds of things. Maybe you just tune up in the weight room. From. But during the winter, when you're inside anyway, you're going to focus more on strength and more on power so that every year you're still— when you start that season again, you're comparing yourself and you're saying, hey, I'm staying right where I need to be, I'm doing great. Those are important. I want you to think rolling hills in your mind and see that. I would say bad, although I hate to use good, bad, I'm going to— that's kind of moderate exercise. And then it tends to drift upward in a negative way. We're not controlling it. We're not getting a peak. It's just drifting upward. So this is a point where you don't get enough stimulus to really do yourself some good in the muscles or the VO2 max, and you're not doing low enough where there's benefit to reducing your cortisol level. You're not recovering. It's in the middle, and that middle zone is what we've called for years no-benefit zone. So when you're training for something, if you're an athlete, an endurance athlete for sure, we recognize those zones as, you know, middle zone where you have to spend a lot of time. There is the biggest risk probably for midlife women to have a cortisol response that's negative, where you'll experience weight gain, sometimes sleep disruption, because you're kind of causing it. You're causing an inflammation storm that you can't keep up with. I experienced it myself. And not every woman experiences it just because she's in her 40s or 50s, but often at a critical mass of hormone change. I've heard many women who are, you know, everyday endurance athletes— you love to do endurance and you hit that wall where, yeah, I'm getting the message that no longer should I be doing that as my staple, that maybe that is— and I think Stacy Sims refers to this as your soul food, I call it your junk food You know, you can do that, you can do that because you love it on the weekend, but don't try to do it every day because it'll probably get you in trouble and come back to give you the opposite of desired results. All valleys— if you all do all valleys, you all stay low for a reset, that might be a good way to go to kind of get back to baseline. Restore before more is what we call it, but not permanently. For 3 days, for a week, for a 10-day challenge. I'll tell you more about that if you need a little help. Many of us need some framework to do that resetting because we are like, "Go, go, go. No, I'll push through." But I think many of you may be realizing or will that you will get the message, the memo will come, "This isn't working right now," and you have to make a pivot. With it. So reset may be what you want to do to head it off at the pass. You may be careful and get these in there before you get told, "This isn't going to work." We definitely don't want all peaks, all hard, all the time. You know the saying, "Go hard or go home." It just doesn't work anymore. "Nurture yourself" is actually the new "go hard or go home." Go hard at supporting yourself. Can we just say that? So what really happens with cortisol? Moderate exercise increases cortisol negatively if the duration goes too long. Can you do moderate exercise, kind of that same intensity level you did when you were in your '70s or '80s? And I mean 1970s and '80s, not your age, and you were kind of doing aerobics. Yeah, you can, and you love that memory. Absolutely go do it. But where you hit 45 to 60 minutes Midlife women tend to see that dial up cortisol that doesn't then have that decrease afterward. It stays elevated. HIIT reduces baseline cortisol levels, making you more resilient over time as your fitness level increases. So I want you to realize that HIIT takes it really high and yet brings it back down and over time helps you become more resilient. So take advantage of that when it works. If you're right now having a really low, you're exhausted, life stressors are coming at you right and left. Maybe now is not the moment for you to do that, but be prepared to reenter when it smooths out again. So the amazing human body, repeated exposure to stressors changes the way you respond to stress. That's true for you if you're a woman in perimenopause, postmenopause, or you're 85. That will be true. We will always rally. The human body is amazing. I think we've made the mistake in the past of slowing down because we're getting older. It contribute to more slowing down, right? So think about this, like picking up 5-pound weight. It feels heavy at first if you haven't done that. Then soon after you're lifting 8 or 10 pounds as long as you are ready to handle it. And you'd be getting every indication that you feel good at lower levels. Regularly and you're ready to try more. So individuals may be more conditioned and therefore able to do a longer bout of moderate exercise if they've trained for it with fewer issues, especially if they're recovering adequately. So if you are out there and you just absolutely love long endurance exercise, you may have to go about that conditioning for it to get that up a little bit differently than you would have as younger you. And you also have to consciously focus on recovery, putting time between getting the sleep, getting the carbohydrates. Super, super important. And what we'll try— so I currently have a friend who is 56, she's doing a 30-day water fast, and she's beginning also to train for a significant bike ride where there's going to be a really significant climbing going on. So taxing the body, right? She did not ask my advice because I think she knew what my advice would be and she wouldn't like it. So she wanted to go ahead and do it. And sometimes you just have to find out for yourself. So I would be willing to say, if you are like this, you're listening and logically this all makes sense, but emotionally you're like, "No, don't take that away from me. I really love it. I need it. This is how I negate my stress level." I get you and I see you and I was you. So if you have to make that mistake for yourself, I will not be here saying I told you so, but I will be here. So realize that I'm fully aware of it and I'm fully aware. Sometimes I think, had I had this advice when I was 30, had I known this science, had I known what happens really with cortisol and how it interacts with exercise and estrogen, I wonder, would I have taken that advice if I heard it when I was 30? And I wonder that now, sharing it with my daughter-in-law who is 31, you know. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to be patient. I'm going to hold it out there. If she asks, I'm ready to give it. But I also know that it's much better if they come to the water than if you hose them down with it, right? So there won't be any hosing going on. If you do need help, I'm going to leave you with this today. And here's the— when times are tough, life stressors are high for you, I would shift from your normal routine, ideally before you get the signals from your body that you should have done this. Lower the intensity of your exercise temporarily. It might help you maintain your energy for what is needed that's coming at you. I will say this though, HIIT, high-intensity interval training, might work for you in really small doses. Be willing to take it in the small doses that it's meant for. 20 minutes from start to end, and that's at least a 5-minute warmup. Take your 10 minutes so that you can do 4 to 6 intervals, no more than that, getting breathless within 30 seconds, resting, recovering completely before going on to do the next one. And then you end with a cool down of at least 5 minutes too. That's it. It's done, done, done. Done. Test which one of those work for you— lower level walking and more of that, or HIIT— because it might be different from one of us to the next. Lean into the one that your gut is telling you, and if that doesn't work, try the other one instead. Do stay consistent with resistance training. 10 minutes of compound exercises is better than nothing, by the way. You're stimulating major muscle and if your body is kind of upgraded to put out adrenaline and cortisol because of the stressors you're facing, your workouts should be shortened and shorter. And I will tell you, very recently I just was doing this, taking care of my grandson for 10 days. It's no joke, by the way. There's a reason we don't have children at 62. But loved every minute and wanted to be able to say yes, you know, when help was needed. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. But at the end of each day, you know, I was quote unquote leaving for my job at 7:30 and, you know, not getting home until 6 or after, close to it. And that was, that was a lot. And still running a business and, you know, a dog of my own here waiting for me at the house. So I found I got in 3 different, I think, 10-minute workouts, or 2, and then snuck to the gym on my days off on the weekends. But, you know, 10 minutes of a squat, a chest press, and a row. So major muscle groups, compound exercises means they cross multiple joints. You're still getting 6 to 8 major muscle groups stimulated. Your secondary muscle groups are in there moving as well. But if It is the blood sugar control, it is the staying consistent so you can pick right back up where you left off that could be really important and yet not put you down and out for the count. Recovering after this thing, this episode ends, you're still in pretty good shape. That's where you want to be. So don't just think about it as, "I've got to push through, I've got to keep doing," or, on the other hand, "You've got to stop completely." Do as much as you can, stay as consistent as you can. All steps count, all activity counts, and try to fit in those resistance training workouts as well. If you right now are in need of a support system, a framework for starting, restarting, or resetting, our 10-Day Hot Nuts Bothered Challenge is open. If you're listening in May, we close May 31st because the challenge begins on the 1st of June. You cannot make up days in fitness, right? So if you start on the 3rd, you're only going to get the 3rd through the 10th. You're, you're going to be able to do that when you go to the link, but I would suggest that you don't. You're going to be disappointed. You're going to wonder, "Why can't I get those 3 days?" And the reason is because we are not 18 in high school and we're not in football. We're not going to do 2 a days. So it would do you no good. So what I'd love for you to do is if you need it and/or if you know a friend who needs or wants to get started and wants to put together a plan that includes what do my hormones need right now in this moment in time that I'm in, how do I understand the interaction and why the intensity that I'm doing right now that used to work doesn't work for me. This will help, I promise. We go through in these 10 days, and audio explaining the interaction of 10 different hormones and how the type or timing of exercise we're doing will support them. And so that you can continue on after these 10 days, whether you do it on your own or take a next step with us. There is a registration fee. It's not free because when we pay, you and me both, we pay attention. And we'll reward you if you do decide you want to continue. You will get the entire registration fee credit back to apply to the next step. And I tell you about that on the 11th day. So yes, it's on the 11th day that Flipping 50 created. Yes. So here's how you can get in. You can go to flipping50.com/hnb, standing for Hot Not Bothered, dash challenge. That link will be in the show notes. And I cannot wait to see you. And I hope this has made complete sense out of that prior episode, and you feel far more supported. The information shared on Flipping 50 the Stronger Way is for educational and informational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare provider before beginning any exercise program, making changes to your diet, or adjusting any medications or supplements. Individual results may vary. Debra Atkinson and Flipping 50 are not responsible for any injury or adverse outcomes resulting from information presented on this podcast.