Latest / What The Peri? - With Kirsten Cooke / Perimenopause & Exercise - The 3 Jobs Nobody Told You About (Ep 9)

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Perimenopause & Exercise - The 3 Jobs Nobody Told You About (Ep 9) · What The Peri? - With Kirsten Cooke

0:07
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to What the Perry.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host Kirsten Cook, personal trainer, menopause coach, and a woman living it right alongside you.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: This is the podcast for women navigating peri-menopause and menopause.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: The change you didn't ask for, but the conversations you need.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: There were weeks only a few years ago when I was still teaching five days a week, where my alarm would go off at 4.15 a.m.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: so I could be in front of a room full of people teaching a class by 5.30.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: Some weeks that added up to 12 or 15 high-intensity classes.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: Indoor cycle, HIT, boot camp.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: And on top of that, I had my personal training clients and I had Pilates.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: That was an ordinary week for me for years.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: And I want to say the next bit plainly because it changes how the rest of this story reads.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: That was not a program I picked out for myself.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: That was my job.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: It was my income and it was my livelihood.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: The training I was doing was the work I was being paid to do.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Then somewhere in my 40s, my body changed.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: Nothing about the way I was eating had changed, and nothing about the way I was working had changed.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: But the body I was living in did.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: It was looking in a mirror and the body staring back at me, not matching the level of effort that I put in day in, day out.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: And let me be honest about what that was and what it wasn't.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: In clothes, you couldn't really tell the difference.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: Most people would have said I was fit, and they'd have been right, I was fit.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: But I knew my body, I knew what it used to do, and I knew what it was doing now.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: And somewhere along the line, those two things had come apart.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: So I did exactly what nearly 30 years in the industry had taught me to do, which is also for a long time what I'd told clients to do.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: I ate less, I trained more on top of the 12.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I pushed extra sessions into a week that already had no room left in it.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: And nothing happened.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's not quite right because things did happen.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: I got more tired, I got more sore, the sugar cravings kicked in through the afternoon, and almost every day there was that three o'clock crash where I could barely keep my eyes open and felt like I'd been hit by a truck.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: What didn't happen was the one thing I was actually chasing.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: And it was not my discipline and it was not my willpower because you don't teach 12 to 15 classes a week with low motivation.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Whatever was going on in my body, it was not that I wasn't trying hard enough.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Now I knew about muscle.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Any trainer knows about muscle, and it isn't as though the information was hiding from me.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: But knowing a thing and doing a thing are two very different animals when your week is already full to the brim.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: There was no room in mine and no recovery.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: A boot camp class, however hard it was, and mine were hard, is not a strength session.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: So what was missing wasn't knowledge and it wasn't effort.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: It was a name.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: In all those years, not one person sat me down and said the word perimenopause to me.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Not once.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: And before we go any further, I need you to hear this properly because I don't want the rest of today landing the wrong way.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: I loved those classes.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: I loved the rooms and I loved the people in them.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: Some of them I'd been training the better part of a decade, and we were like a big family.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: That was good work, and I was good at it.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: But it was burning me out and it had stopped suiting the body I was in.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: And both of those things can be true at the same time.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a mistake, it just wasn't serving me anymore, and nobody had told me why.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to What the Perry.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm Kirsten Cook.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: Last week we pulled apart where the weight goes in perimenopause and why.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: You can be gaining fat and losing muscle at the very same time.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: And the fat goes and sits somewhere it's never sat before, which is why your shape changes even when nothing else about your life has.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: And what do the scales do while all of this is going on?
4:21
SPEAKER_00: Well that varies enormously woman to woman.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Mine barely moved.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: So last week was one half of this conversation, which was the food.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: Today is the other half, which is the exercise.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: And before I go any further, I want to say who this episode is for, because I don't want anyone switching off thinking it isn't for them.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: This is for women in perimenopause and menopause.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: If you already train, this is for you.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't done anything in years, this is for you too.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: And I mean that, not as a polite add-on at the end.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Now here's the thing that changed underneath us, and nobody announced it.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: At 25, one kind of exercise covered everything.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: You went for a run or you did a class, and that one thing was quietly doing your fitness, your weight, your bones, your muscle, and your mood all at once.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: You never had to think about which job you were doing, because the one thing was doing all of them.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: That's over.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Not because you got lazy and not because you got old, but because the hormonal support that was doing half of that work for free isn't there anymore.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: So now there are three separate jobs your training has to do in perimenopause, and no single kind of exercise does all three.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: The three jobs are these build and defend your muscle, keep your bones, look after your fat and your heart.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole thing.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Three jobs.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: And I'll name them again every time we come back to them because I don't expect you to hold a list in your head while you're driving.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: So here's what we're covering today.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: What this actually feels like.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: Then there's what's actually happening in your body, and then today we cover the priorities, the three jobs one at a time.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Then what to do if you love your classes, because a lot of you do, and I did too.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: And three things to do this week at the end.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: And I'll make one promise before we start.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: Nothing in this episode asks you to give up something you love.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: So let me start with what this stage of life actually feels like from the inside.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: What it feels like to be living in a body that has started behaving differently, because you need to hear it said out loud before we go anywhere near the why.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: For some of you, it looks like this.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: You've been doing the same thing for a year.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: You've trained through Christmas and you trained through the cold of winter, and you even trained right through the school holidays.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: You didn't miss a session.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: And then at the end of a whole year, you feel like you have very little to show for it.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: And for some of you, it looks like nothing at all, and I don't want to lose you here.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: Some of you haven't trained in years, some of you had a go at starting three times this year already, and each time the body didn't answer the way it used to, so it stopped feeling worth it, and you stopped.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Both of those women are in the same episode today, because both have, somewhere along the way, been handed exactly the same piece of advice.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Move more and eat less.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: That's the lever.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: For a long time it was the only lever anybody ever handed us, and it gets handed to you when you're already exhausted.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Now, moving more is not the wrong idea.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: We talked about last week how much less we move at this stage of life, and more walking is genuinely one of the answers, and I'll be asking you for some more before the end of today.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: What doesn't work is more of the same.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: More of the hard sessions you're already doing stacked on to a week with no room in it.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: Some of you do a morning class and you're absolutely wrecked by the afternoon, and the advice on offer is another session, so you add on one, because more is the only thing you've ever been told to do, so of course you do it.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: Then there's the Sunday night maths.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: You've had a good week, a really good week, five or six days of doing the right things, but then you had a blowout on the Saturday, and now you're sitting there wondering if you've ruined your good week and if any of it counted.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Do a month of that and you feel like you get nothing back.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: And for some of you, it isn't a training problem at all.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: It's a getting started problem.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have been told to move more by somebody who has no idea how tired you already are.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have thought about walking into a gym and stopped at the thought of it, because you've got no idea what you're doing in there.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: The place is packed and it feels like every single person is looking at you.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: And your body already hurts and you're already tired and you're anxious before you've even parked the car.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: If that's you, hear me.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: That is not laziness.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: That's a very reasonable response to being handed a lot of instructions and almost no information.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: And then somewhere in there quietly, you stop blaming the program and you start blaming yourself.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Because whatever you've been doing, the four classes, the running, the extra sessions you squeezed in on a Sunday, it isn't working and nobody's offered you a reason.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Nobody says it out loud.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: You just decide privately that the problem must be you, that other women must be doing something you're not doing or wanting it more than you want it, or simply built better than you were built.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: So let me get to that before we do anything else because it's the whole reason I'm making this episode.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: It isn't you, you haven't been doing it wrong.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: The job changed and nobody told you that it had.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk about what's actually going on, and I'm going to keep this simple.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: You don't need a physiology degree, you need the bullet points.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: There are two clocks running in your body now that were not running at 25.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: One of them is your muscle and one of them is your bone, and they behave completely differently.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: So let's take them one at a time.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Muscle is a slow leak.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: It starts declining somewhere around your 30s, but so slowly you'd never feel it happening.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: A little bit less each year quietly in the background.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: Then around perimenopause, the leak picks up pace because your lean mass starts falling from about two years before your final period and keeps on falling until roughly two years after it.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And across that very same stretch, your fat is going up.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: So that's a run of about four years where the two things move in opposite directions at once.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: And that's why so many of you say the same sentence to me.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing everything I was before, and my body is behaving like it's a stranger's.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: It isn't a stranger's body, it's yours, and it's changing faster right now than it has in a very long time.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Now, bone, and bone is a different animal altogether.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Bone is not a leak, bone is a cliff.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: You build your peak bone in your 20s and it holds up pretty well until about 40.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: Then, about a year before your final period, the rapid loss starts and it runs for roughly three years at around 2.5% per year.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: Across that decade, you can lose something like 10% of the bone in your spine.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: 10% of your spine, and not one person is going to ring you up and tell you it's happening.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: Because bone doesn't hurt while it's going.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't ache and it doesn't stiffen up and it doesn't give you a single warning.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: You find out about your bones on the day something breaks or on the day someone measures you and you're shorter than you used to be.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: And one thing about where those two numbers come from, this work is done in women going through it, not in women decades past it.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: So it's describing where you're standing right now.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Now here's where the one lever you were handed starts costing you something.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: There's research in women past menopause when they spent a whole year in three groups, one dieting, one exercising, and one doing both.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: On the scales it went the way you'd expect.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: The group doing both lost the most.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: The dieters came out next, not far behind them, and the group who only exercised barely moved at all, a couple of kilos across the entire 12 months.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: But the exercise group gained lean muscle while they did it.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: So on the scales, that woman looks like she wasted a year, and underneath it she's swapped fat for muscle, and the scales cannot tell those two apart.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: They never could.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: They give you one number for a body that is doing two completely different things at once.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: So she didn't waste a year, she was just looking at the wrong number.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: And there's something else that comes off when you cut hard, and hardly anybody mentions it.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: Bone.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: There's a Sydney trial where women past menopause were all put on a diet, every one of them, but half of them on a severe cut and half on a moderate one.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: The severe group lost more bone from the hip, and that happened even where the muscle held up much the same.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: So a hard diet can quietly take bone off while the scales are telling you it's all going beautifully.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: So let me put the two clocks together because this is the part I really want you to walk away with.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: Right now you are losing muscle faster than you ever have, and you're losing bone faster than you ever have.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: And the one tool you were handed for all of this takes off a little more of both.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: That's not you failing at something simple.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: You were given one lever.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: You pulled it as hard as any human being could pull it, and it was the wrong lever for the job.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: Nobody ever told you there were three.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: Right, three jobs, one at a time, and I'm gonna finish each one properly before I start the next so that nothing gets tangled up.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: Job one is build and defend your muscle.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Job two is keep your bones.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Job three is look after your fat and your heart.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: Job one is your muscle, and of the three, it's the one I'd argue about least.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: When you pull the good research together in women past menopause, lifting was the only thing that reliably added muscle.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: Cardio added none.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: And what the lifting added was about a kilo, which doesn't sound like a headline until you remember the leak we just talked about.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: That kilo goes on at the same time as the losses coming off.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Now, before anybody panics, let me say something about Pilates, because I teach it and I'm not going to tell you to stop.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: Reforma Pilates specifically is still a form of resistance training, and some resistance training is nearly always better than none.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: I know so many women who are so tired and overwhelmed and emotional and so low in their mood, who've lost their confidence and simply don't have the energy to exercise because of perimenopause and the joint pain and the lack of sleep that if it weren't for Reforma Pilates, they may not be doing any resistance training at all.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: So it absolutely has its place.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: It might be the thing that eases you back into a fitness routine, or it might be the thing holding your mental health together this year, or it might sit alongside your strength training program and complement it beautifully.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: All three of those are real and all three count.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: What it won't do on its own for most women is load you heavily enough to cover the whole of job one.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: So think of it as a part of your answer, not the whole of it.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Now I need to slow down and split something up because the word lifting can have a lot of different meanings.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: There are three different goals you can train for, and they're not the same session.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: Different weight, different repetitions, different rest.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: Blur them together and you'll work extremely hard for a watered down version of all three.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: The first goal is strength, and strength is heavy and brief.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: You're picking a weight you could only manage a handful of times and doing a few repetitions with it.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: And then, this is the bit that most people skip, resting properly.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: At least two to three minutes between sets and up to five minutes if it's properly heavy.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: Not 30 seconds while you look at your phone, at least two to three minutes.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: And I know that feels like cheating because you're standing around not out of breath.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: It isn't cheating.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: The rest is what lets you lift heavy enough for the next set to count, and the heavy set is the entire point.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Shorten the rest and you'll have to drop the weight, and then you aren't training strength anymore.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: You'll feel the burn and feel the muscle fatigue, but you're not training strength.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: And here's some good news.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Hold on to this one because there isn't a great deal of news handed to women our age.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: When women either side of menopause did the exact same program, strength went up the same in everyone.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: The same.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: Whatever else is changing in your body right now, your ability to get stronger is not on the list.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Now the second goal is muscle size, actually building the muscle rather than getting better at moving it.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: And this is the one I most want to clear up because it's often taught poorly.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Whether you build muscle is not solely the number of repetitions.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: It's how close to your limit the set finishes.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: The last one or two repetitions have to be genuinely in doubt.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: You have to be honestly not certain you'll get them.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: And that can happen at eight repetitions, and it can happen at twenty.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: The number isn't the thing.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: The difficulty at the end is the thing.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: And you don't need the long rests for this one.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: A minute or two is plenty.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: What matters here is where the set finishes, not how long you waited before it.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: And here's what I see consistently, and I say it with a lot of love.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: At the higher end of repetition, say 15 to 20, women often reach for a weight they already know they can finish comfortably.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: They'll do their 20, they'll put it down with about five good ones still left in the tank, and they've never actually asked their body the question, so the body never bothered answering it.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: Now the third goal is power, a different creature again.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to flag it here and deal with it properly in job two, because power belongs with your bones and with staying on your feet.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: So in practice, what does job one look like across a week?
17:45
SPEAKER_00: Two to three sessions, compound movements, the big ones that use as many of your muscles at once.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: So your squats, your hinges, lunges, your pushes, your pulls, your presses, and your carries.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: And progressive, which simply means the weight or the repetitions go up over time.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: Because if you're lifting the same weight you were lifting six months ago, your body adapted to that a long while back and your results will plateau.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: And let me put one fear to bed because it comes up every time.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Muscle is lean and compact and smooth.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: Fat is big and bulky.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: They're completely different tissues and they do completely different things to your shape.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: So, ladies, don't be afraid to lift heavy weights, because if it's a toned body that you're after, building muscle and reducing body fat is the only way to achieve it.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Now, job two.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Job one was to build and defend your muscle.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: Job two is keep your bones.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: And this is the one I think we all underestimate.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: You probably already know that lifting is good for your bones.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: What I don't think most of us realize is how much it matters and how quickly this particular window moves.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: So if you only listen properly to one part of today, make it this one.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: Here's the first thing to understand, and it's a bit back to front.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: Bone does not care how tired you get.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Bone cares how heavy the weight is.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: You can be dripping and absolutely wrecked at the end of a class or a session and have done very little for your skeleton because the sweat isn't the signal.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: The load is the signal.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: Australia's own exercise guidelines say exactly that.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: You only need a few repetitions as long as the load is heavy enough.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: Now let me tell you about a piece of research done right here on the Gold Coast where I live and work.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: I do love this one.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: They took women who already had thinning bones, eight months of properly heavy lifting, twice a week, half an hour at a time.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: That's one hour out of an entire week.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: And the bone density in their spine went up nearly 3% while the group who didn't lift went down, and their hips held while the other groups fell, one hour a week to put bone back on.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: And before you picture something brutal, the load was five sets of five repetitions.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Nowhere near failure, just heavy with good technique.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: Across thousands of sessions between all of those women, there was one injury, a mild back strain, and she had a week off.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: I'll be straight with you.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Those were older women than most of you listening, but it tells us what heavy loading does to a skeleton, and that's what we're after.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: Now there's a second piece of research, and I'm keeping it apart from the first one on purpose, because they run over very different lengths of time.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: The Gold Coast one was eight months and bone went up.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: Three years on, the women who'd kept going had gained more still.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: The second one is a long one.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: These women were followed for 16 years, and over 16 years everyone loses bone.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: That's simply aging, and there's no exercise on earth that stops it.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: But the women who exercised lost far less of it, and they broke about half as many bones.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Half as many bones over 16 years.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: And that brings me to power, which I promised you back in job one.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: Power is not how much you can lift, power is how fast you can produce force.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Here's why that matters in one sentence.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: Power is what catches you when your foot goes off the edge of a gutter, or it catches the lip of a footpath or finds the one toy nobody picked up.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: Strength is what you use to pick up the shopping off the floor.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Power is what you use when your body has a split second to stay upright.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And here's the honest version of what happens to it, because I went and checked this one properly.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Power fades faster than strength does as we age, but both of them start earlier than anyone expects, from somewhere around 40.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: So this isn't a problem that begins at 65.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: It's already quietly underway, and almost nobody trains for it.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: Training for it is far easier than it sounds, which is the part I love.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Same weight you already lift, same repetitions, you simply move it fast on the way up and control it on the way down.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: You're changing the tempo.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: You're not adding.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Session to your week, you're just changing how one of them feels.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to be really precise here because this gets muddled a bit.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: How much bone you've got and how much muscle you're carrying don't decide whether you fall over.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: They decide what a fall costs you when you do.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: Whether you go down in the first place is the other question.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: And there are two things that matter for it.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: Power is one because that's the split-second catch we just talked about.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: And the other one, which has the strongest evidence behind it for anything preventing falls, is challenging balance work, practicing catching yourself.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: Anything that makes you genuinely wobble and then makes you recover.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: So you want both of them, and they're doing different halves of the same job.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not leaving this section without talking about your pelvic floor, because for a great many women, that's the real reason the heavy weights never get started.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: A lot of women say pelvic floor symptoms are what stops them exercising, and of the women who name a prolapse or leaking, most of them had simply stopped altogether, not modified, but completely stopped.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: So here's the reassuring part.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: The same research group on the Gold Coast ran another heavy lifting program in women past menopause, and this time they measured the pelvic floor as well.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: It did not get worse, and in the women who already had a prolapse, it improved a little.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Australia's own bone guidance says to get it assessed first and to see a physiotherapist who does this specifically.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Not just any physio, but one who works in pelvic floor.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: And I'm a coach, not a doctor, so that's precisely where we'll leave it.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: But hear what the answer actually is, because it matters.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: The answer isn't don't, it's get it looked at and then go.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: Right.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: Job three.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: Job one was your muscle, job two was your bones, and job three is your fat and your heart.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: This is where all your cardio lives, and there are four different kinds of it doing four different things, so I'm going to name each one as we go.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: The first kind is everyday walking and movement, and it's the most underrated thing on this list.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: It costs nothing, it needs no equipment, and nobody's selling it to you, which is probably why it gets overlooked.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: More daily steps goes together with a smaller waist and a lower body weight.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that surprises people.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: How fast you walk makes no difference at all once you account for how many steps you took.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: The steps are the medicine.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: The pace is optional.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: The second kind is steady cardio.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: Your walks, your rides, your swims, the ones where you're working but you're not dying.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: And I want to go slow here because this is where the advice going around at the moment has tangled itself up.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: Here's what the research actually says, and I'm going to give you all of it rather than half that suits me.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: In women past menopause, cardio took off more fat than the lifting did.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: About two kilos and a bit over two centimeters off the waist.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Lifting on its own took off less, but lifting was the only thing that put lean muscle on.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: And there's a third result in that same work.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: The women who did both got the biggest drop in body fat of anybody.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: Bigger than the cardio group and bigger than the lifting group.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: So it was never cardio versus strength.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: It never was.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: They're two different jobs and the two of them together beat one on its own.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: And here's why that matters for what you actually want, because I don't think many women are chasing a number at all.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: What most of you want is to look and feel firmer and leaner.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: So let me be precise because this one gets said very loosely.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: You can't tone a muscle.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: Tone, the way we all use the word, is an appearance and it has two ingredients.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: Less fat over the top and more muscle underneath.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Two ingredients, and they come from two different kinds of training.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: So if all you do is take the fat off, you get a smaller version of exactly the same body.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: Same shape, slightly smaller.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: If you want to change your shape rather than shrink it, the muscle underneath is what does it.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: And remember what your body is doing to you in the background.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Fat going on, lean muscle coming off at the same time.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: Cardio cannot put that muscle back.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: Lifting is the only thing that can.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: So here's what I do with the women I work with.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: I'll flag this as my judgment after nearly 30 years rather than a study.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: When a woman comes to me doing endless cardio and almost no lifting, we pull some of that cardio back and we put the weights in, and her shape changes every time.
26:27
SPEAKER_00: What I won't tell you is to give the cardio up because it's doing a real job and it's the part of all of this with the strongest evidence behind it for keeping you alive.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you to stop asking it to do all three.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: The third kind of cardio is your easy days, and I want to be really clear about what I mean by it.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean your easier cardio.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: Easy means you can hold a full conversation in complete sentences the whole way through.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: And the moment you're breaking a sentence in half to get a breath in, you've gone too hard for an easy day.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: That's the only check you'll need.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: And then the fourth kind of cardio is your short hard efforts, your intervals.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: And I want to give you two versions of this because there's more than one way to do it.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: The first one is short and sharp, 20 to 30 seconds as hard as you can go, then two to three minutes to recover, four or five times through, once or twice a week.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: And the question I get about that is whether the recovery really needs to be that long.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: Here's the honest answer.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: The recovery is there so that the next effort is as hard as the first one.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: That's the entire reason for it.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: Which means the work and the rest are joined at the hip.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Go flat out for 30 seconds and you need those two to three minutes, or the fourth one isn't an effort at all.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Want less rest?
27:43
SPEAKER_00: Then the work has to get shorter or the quality of the work drops with every set because there isn't enough recovery in between.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: What you can't do is 30 seconds flat out with 30 seconds off and call it the same session.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: The second version is one I'd hand most of you because it doesn't need a sprint in it.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: Four minutes working hard, then three minutes easy, four times through.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: Walking or jugging uphill is perfect for it, and hard enough means talking is difficult, but that you could keep going.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: Whichever you pick, warm up properly first, and do it for your heart and your lungs, and because it's quick, I'm not going to sell it to you as the fix for your middle because that isn't what it's best at.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: And underneath all four of those, there's a baseline worth knowing.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: The Australian guidelines ask for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, plus something that strengthens your muscles on at least two days.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: Now that's the floor, not the ceiling.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: And if you're nowhere near it, that isn't a failing, it's just a baseline you're starting from.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: And before I let you out of this section, I owe you something I promised you last week.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: Last week I said it isn't fasting itself that's the problem, it's what the fasting crowds out.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: And training on nothing is the clearest example of that that there is.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: If you get up, have half a coffee, go and do a hard session on an empty stomach, you've asked your body to do the work without handing it anything to do it with.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: So don't train on an empty stomach.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Something small beforehand with a bit of protein and some carbohydrate in it, about half an hour before, and it doesn't need to be a meal.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: A tub of high protein yogurt with a few berries or half a banana, vegumide on whole grain toast with a glass of milk, a smoothie with some milk or yogurt and a banana.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: Any of those will do it.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: And if you train early, here's the practical answer.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Split your breakfast.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: Have something before and have the rest of it afterwards.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole answer, and it's the one that works for anybody up before the sun.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: Then eat afterwards rather than leaving it till lunchtime because you got busy and you forgot.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: One thing before I move on, because I want to be accurate with you.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: If you're training longer than 90 minutes, you need something more nuanced than what I've just said, and that's a different conversation for a different day.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, as I said at the start of this, that nothing in the episode would ask you to give up something you love, and I meant it.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about your classes and answer the question that actually matters.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Which of these three jobs are they doing for you?
30:14
SPEAKER_00: So a class isn't lifting, not heavy, not with proper rest between sets, so it can't be job one, which is build and defend your muscle.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: And it isn't heavy, so it can't be job two either, which is keep your bones.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: And it's very rarely easy enough to count as a recovery session.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: What it can do is job three, which is your fat and your heart.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: And I want to be really clear that job three is a real job and a big one, and your class is doing genuine work on that.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: It's not a consolation prize.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: But here's the part that I have to say honestly, and I'll flag that this is my reasoning as a coach more than it is proof.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: An awful lot of group fitness classes sit in the middle ground, hard enough to wear you down, but not hard enough to earn you the adaptation.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: So you're paying for a hard session and not getting what a hard session is supposed to give you.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: And here's why that costs you more now than it did at 25.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: We went through this properly in episode eight.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: Cortisol is already running high in most women our age because of the life and because of the broken sleep.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: So you're not starting from zero.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: And when you aren't starting from zero, spending the recovery you have left on work that doesn't earn you anything is a poor trade.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: At 25 it wasn't a poor trade because you had recovery to burn.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: You don't now.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: I'll put my own week up as the example because it's the clearest one I have.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: 12 to 15 classes, every one of them exhausting, and almost none of them doing job one or job two, because there was barely any real strength work in there, and nothing anywhere near heavy enough to say anything to my bones.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: But I'm not going to stand here and call it a mistake, because it wasn't.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: It was my livelihood, and I loved it.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: The rooms, the people in them, some of them I'd trained for the better part of a decade.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: We were like a big family, and I'd do it all again tomorrow.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: What I wouldn't do again is let it become the whole of my training, which is exactly what happened, because there was never any room left over.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: When you've taught 15 classes in a week, the very last thing you want to do on your day off is more exercise.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: So my own training became whatever was left, and what was left was not much.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: So here's where I land on your classes.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: Keep them, I mean it.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: Keep them because enjoying your exercise is most of whether you're still doing it this time next year.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: And there's no such thing as a perfect program that you hate.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: Just don't let them be the whole of it.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: So, what do you actually do this week?
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Three things, and not one of them is eating less.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: And if your week is already full of classes, some of this will be a swap rather than an addition, because there are only so many hours and the strength work has to fit somewhere, but nobody is being asked to give up the thing they love.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: Step one, two strength sessions a week and heavier than last time.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Compound movements, the big ones that use as many of your muscles at once.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: The last couple of repetitions should be a genuine struggle where you're honestly not sure you'll finish them with perfect form.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: And then rest properly between your sets, which is at least two to three minutes, not 30 seconds.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: If you do nothing else on this list, do that one because it's doing two of three jobs at once, your muscle and your bones.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: Step two, add a thousand steps a day and let your easy days be genuinely easy.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: Not 10,000 this week.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: A thousand more than whatever you're doing now, and then hold that for a fortnight before you add the next thousand, so it actually sticks instead of falling over by Wednesday.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: 10,000 a day on average is where we're heading in the long run.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: It's just not where we start.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: Step three, add one fast thing.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: That's either something short and hard once a week, the 20 to 30 seconds flat out, or the four minutes hard and the three minutes easy, if you'd rather not sprint.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Or take a weight you're already lifting comfortably and move it fast on the way up.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: Same weight, same repetitions, more speed.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: That's power, and power is what catches you from a fall.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: And if you're starting from nothing this week, then step one is the whole list.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Two sessions and nothing else.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: Don't add the steps or the fast thing until those two sessions have been turning up for a month, because there's no point stacking a third thing onto a week that hasn't held the first yet.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: Some of you will be ready for all three straight away, and if that's you, go for it.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: Three things, and if three feels like too much this week, then start with two and make one of them step one.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: And then give it eight weeks before you judge.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: Not two weeks, eight.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: Then have an honest look at what your body did and look at more than the scales, because we've just spent half an hour on why they can't see what you've changed.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: How your clothes fit, what you can lift, what you've got left at three in the afternoon, that's the report card.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: Everything I've talked about today is linked in the show notes, all of it.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to read it yourself or print something out and take it to your doctor, it's right there and you don't have to go hunting for it.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: Now here's where I want to leave you today.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: For years, I believed my body betrayed me.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: I believed I'd lost whatever it was that made me good at this.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: After nearly 30 years of doing this work, I thought the thing had quietly stopped working for me, while it was still working perfectly for everybody I was teaching.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: It hadn't, and I hadn't.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: I was working extraordinarily hard on the wrong jobs.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: There are three of them.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: Build and defend your muscle, keep your bones, look after your fat and your heart.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: And I know what some of you are thinking right now because I hear it from women every single week.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: Not this week, after the school holidays, after the work things settled down.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: Life has a funny way of always getting in the way, and my experience in the industry has taught me that there's never a perfect time to start.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: If we keep waiting for things to settle down, we could be waiting a decade.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: So the training you do now isn't about the next eight weeks and it isn't about a photograph.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: It's about being the woman who breaks a wrist instead of a hip.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: And to the woman who has trained hard all year and got very little back, you didn't fail at this.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: For those of you already training hard, you don't need to work harder.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: You need to work in different places.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: And for those of you who haven't started yet, it's two sessions.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole ask this week.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: And if you love your classes, keep them.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: I really mean that.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: Just make sure they're not the whole priority.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: Next week, we're doing protein, what you actually need and why it matters so much more now than it used to.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: And if you know a woman who's training herself into the ground and cannot work out why nothing's changed, please send her this one, because she's the one I made it for.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: And right now she probably thinks the problem is her.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't already, subscribe so the next episode just turns up on its own.
37:02
SPEAKER_00: And if you've got 30 seconds, I'd love you to leave a review, because that's genuinely how other women find us.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad you're here.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Look after yourself.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next week.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: Everything I've mentioned today is referenced in the show notes, along with all the links.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: And you can find me at Kirstencookcoaching.com.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: Just a reminder, though, this is education, not medical advice.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: So take these conversations to a practitioner who will actually listen to you.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for being here and for listening to the What the Perry podcast.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: The change you didn't ask for, the conversations you need to do.