Fuel Your Strength: Strength Training Changes for Peri-Menopause and Post-Menopause w/ Dr. Stacy Sims

Key Takeaways

If You Are Looking to Change Your Training Routine as You Enter Your 40s, You Should:

Remember that women are not small men and most guidelines out there need to be adjusted for your changing body
Drop the moderate intensity crap and focus on high-intensity speed and power to see the results you want
Take a step back to re-learn the difference between being tired from exercise or tired from stress

Women Are Not Small Men with Dr. Stacy Sims

Stacy T. Sims, Ph.D., is an applied researcher, innovator, and entrepreneur in human performance, specifically sex differences in training, nutrition, and environmental conditions. She is a regularly featured speaker at professional and academic conferences, including those hosted by US Olympic Committee, High-Performance Sport NZ, and USA Cycling, she is a Senior Research Associate at AUT University and resides at the beach in Mt. Maunganui, New Zealand with her husband and young daughter.

Listen To Your Body and the Research

When a woman enters her 40s, her body composition starts to change. Many people associate the symptoms of these changes with low sleep, high stress, and try to do more training to counter it. None of these are the appropriate types of stress that your body needs in order to mitigate these changes. Women need specific changes to their training routine, along with nutrition, to support their bodies throughout their 40s and beyond. Proper sleep, high-intensity workouts, and polarizing your training in order to recover are key.

Change Is a Good Thing

Often as women are approaching peri-menopause they are nervous about getting bulky or are told to switch to moderate intensity workouts. Dr. Stacy is here to say that is absolutely not the case. Physiologically women respond better to speed and power, and if anything we should be increasing the intensity of our workouts when we can, and bookending them with softer workouts for our recovery. This is just one example of the necessary ways you need to change your training routine in order to support your changing body and hormones.

Are you excited for Part 2 of Dr. Stacy Sims' knowledge and experience? Share which of her tips you loved most from this episode with me in the comments section of the episode page.

In This Episode

Why the phases of your menstrual cycle should impact how you train (11:35)
Some of the changes that you can expect to see when entering peri-menopause (14:49)
How to shift the way that you strength train as you enter your 40s and beyond (18:42)
Why the ‘moderate intensity’ for women in their 40’s is the exact opposite of what you should be doing (26:22)
Tips for changing up your training and eating routine in order to stress your body and see results (33:52)

Quotes

“They attribute it to life stress, but it's not. Well, some of it is life stress of course. But when we pull it back to physiology and we see this change over these ratios, and our bodies are also trying to adjust.” (16:26)

“What we are trying to do when we get into our 40s is look for an external stress that is going to help support what the hormones used to do, or augment what the hormones can do.” (19:55)

“You need to work with someone who knows how to do proper movement.” (23:26)

“We don't know what it is like to be uncomfortable. We have air-conditioned houses, we have heating in the winter, we go outside in the summer, and we don't know what it truly means to be uncomfortable, so our bodies never adapt.” (32:05)

“We are really trying to get people to understand what it feels like, and teach themselves because we have lost that. We have lost what it feels like to be tired from physical activity, versus being tired from stress. So we are trying to teach that.” (37:41)