Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Women Are Not Small Men | Dr Stacy Sims

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

What has been the cost to women of relying on research that was never designed around female physiology?Dr. Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and bestselling author of ROAR, which challenged the idea that women should train and fuel like men, and Next Level, which focuses on health, performance, and physiology through perimenopause and menopause. Over two decades of research, she has become one of the leading voices reshaping how we understand women's health, with a message that has become synonymous with her work: women are not small men. That line started as a throwaway teaching point during her postdoc at Stanford, and it has since become a paradigm shift.At the center of this conversation is a quiet, costly problem. For decades, much of the science on training, nutrition, and medicine was built on male bodies and then applied to women as if they were simply smaller versions of men. Stacy walks through what that gap has cost, why the literature thins out for women between the ages of thirty and fifty, and how a hormone fluctuation can get mistaken for a panic attack, leading to solutions that were never going to fully work.Stacy and Mike then move into what to actually do about it. They get into why "eat less, train more" often backfires and drives the body into a low energy state, why fasting through the morning for women can dysregulate appetite and stress hormones, and why lifting heavier loads may protect not just muscle and bone but the aging brain. They also draw the line that runs through the whole conversation, the symptoms of perimenopause are the physiology, not the person, and explore why this episode isn't just for the women in the community. Stacy explains why having men in the conversation helps drive action, what partners can actually do... listen first rather than rush to fix... and why the rising noise around menopause online, along with AI tools built on outdated male data, makes clear thinking here more valuable than ever.In this conversation, we explore:Why so much health and performance research was never actually done on womenWhat "women are not small men" really means in training and nutritionWhy "eat less, train more" often backfires for women through midlifeWhy fasting through the morning can dysregulate appetite and stress hormonesHow lifting heavier loads may help protect the aging brainWhy men belong in this conversation, and how to show up for the women in their livesWhy most AI health tools still run on outdated male dataWhether this conversation is about your body or the body of someone you love, it offers a science-backed way to understand what's happening and what to do next.Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our YouTube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletterDownload Dr. Mike’s Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XDr. Stacy Sims’ Books: ROAR and Next LevelSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And the woman is just so frustrated because it doesn't understand what's going on. because every system in the body is affected by this change in hormones. What has been the cost of women by relying on research that was not designed around female physiology? So many times I've been told, why do you want to study women? We don't know enough about men. Or, oh, yeah, we study women. And then you look and all the results are included with men so they're not teased out. One of the biggest ways that we can attenuate or slow the rate of those risk factors that start in perimenopause is...

Welcome back. We're welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jervais. A high-performance psychologist named Michael Trevei, who head coach Mike McDonald and former head coach Pete Carroll brought into work with the Seahawks. Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project. Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough. Today's guest is the brilliant Dr. Stacey Sims, exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and bestselling author of Roar. She

also authored Next Level. Through her research over the past two decades, Stacey has become one of the leading voices reshaping how we understand women's health and performance with a very clear message that has become synonymous with her work, women are not small men. You can't study women. They're too complex. They have a menstrual cycle and that skews the results. The publication rate for women is lower than men. Funding for women's research and health and biomedical science is just a very small percentage of the total funding that's available. So we're still a huge uphill battle to close the gender gap. This conversation is not for just the women in our community. If you know a woman and you love a woman, or you have a daughter or whatever,

this is for you with that. Let's jump into this week's conversation with Dr. Stacey Sims. Stacey, one of the most favorite insights that you've shared, and there's lots that you have, is that, and I wrote it down, make sure I get it right, women are not small men. Yeah. So can we just start with where that came from and what that means to you? Yeah, so that was a tagline that wasn't really a tagline when I started using it. When I was at Stanford doing my postdoc, I also picked up some teaching. And it was training principles and practices, and we're talking about all the systems,

and it was in the afternoon. And I would wake up the kids, or I shouldn't say kids, the young adults, the undergrads with women are not small men. Why? Because this is a difference in the cardiovascular system, and it would be how I would open it. And so people started calling it the women are not small men class. And then at the same time, I launched a new sport nutrition company,

and we were very specific. We had a women's line, and the tagline for the women's line was women are not small men. And that kind of took off and resonated with so many female athletes. Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, Nice job breaking through. Thanks. I do want to understand, you've made a massive difference.

And so I hope you can kind of just let that wash over you a little bit. You know, because you're also grinding. You're on the frontier. You're doing your best to make a difference. And like, it's cool. It's really cool. The question is, like, for me, is this what you set out to do? Or was this a natural accident that happened that's like,

like, of course I need to mention this or talk about this. I am what they call an introvert, where I'm an introvert extrovert, and I never imagined any of this. Like, I caught up with a friend that I've known for over 25 years just the other night because she lives in San Francisco. And she's like, I remember back in the day you were very adamant about like making things known about women and why things had to be different. And I was like, well, I didn't remember that.

She goes, no, you've been passionate about this the whole time. And I think it is just one of those things where it's like this deep drive to find equality for men and women. But I never meant to be the face of anything. It's just kind of evolved. Where did that come from? Wanting the passion to drive. Well, yeah, I'm glad that you picked up. There's two.

I realize, as I said, there's two questions I was asking. Yeah. Where did the passion drive come from? And where did the focus for equality come from? Passion and drive, I think, is modeled from my parents. my dad was a career military man and my mom was following and supporting and they never said that we couldn't do anything and so it was real like okay let's go let's do this and then the competition of trying to make friends fast fit in when you're moving around also school you want to get to a good

university and people around you were in the same mindset and it just kind of fell into that And then the equality part came when the one point in time my dad actually told me I couldn't do something. And it was what I wanted to do after I graduated from high school is I wanted to be an Army Ranger or Navy SEAL. And he said, you can't because you're a girl. And right there, I was like, what do you mean? No one's ever told me I can't do something.

Like, if I want to do something, I'm going to do it. And if someone says, no, I'm going to prove them wrong. But at that point, there was a blockage because it wasn't my dad saying I couldn't do it. It was the way the patriarchy had developed this where they still had the mentality that women weren't as good or as strong as men. So they couldn't do the same kinds of things. And that sat with me when I went to university and then when I was in exercise phys and seeing the representation of who was in the PDFs or in the textbooks or the examples of what was being shown as being successful in sport versus sick in sport. There were no representation of women being successful.

it was all about being anemic or losing their periods or stress fractures. And the representation in the textbooks is always he or they. There was no mention of female athletes being successful. But being a female athlete and pushing just as hard as our male colleagues for rowing, it just didn't make sense. So that kind of, you know, when you're 17, 18 years old and you want to take on the world, that was a seed that was planted. And then everywhere I looked, I was like, that's not right. That doesn't work for women. And then

questions that I had wouldn't be answered. And so many times I've been told, why do you want to study women? We don't know enough about men. We, you can't study women. They're too complex. They have a menstrual cycle and that skews the results. Or, oh, yeah, we study women. And then you look, and all the results are included with the men's and they're not teased out. So it's just a series of things that happened earlier on that really kind of made this point in time where I was like, this isn't right. And I know that I work just as hard as the men. And my teammates work just as hard as the men. So why are we not able to get the same output and outcomes? And why are we not represented in any of the stuff that we're reading? And when you think about the future,

so you had a model for drive and passion, you had a moment in time when, you had a, you had a moment in time when your father said you can't. And it wasn't his opinion. It was actually the law at the time. And so you bumped up against literally a sealing of potential. And then there was an agitation in there. Was there, but there was nothing you could do at that time really about that law. Yeah. About becoming a ranger seal. And then, but it stoked something in you. Were you frustrated? Were you optimistic? Were you on a mission, what was the tone of how you were engaging? Or was it like, okay, well, hmm, that sucks. I don't know. And then something else flashed in front of you. And then something else flashed. And at some point,

it was like, this is too much. Like, what was that state like? It was frustration and a bit of anger. It was. Yeah. And how did you, how did you work with that or express that? So. Because when I'm, when I'm agitated and angry, like, I'm not, I'm not great. I get too barbed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I don't get that. from you. No, focus. You get more focused. Yeah, to prove a point. Yeah, okay, cool. I don't want to be, I don't want to be wrong in some assumptions. Yeah. So I need to do all the steps to either prove to myself that what I'm doing is wrong or prove to others that what they are doing is not appropriate. So it's that touch point of I'm angry and I'm frustrated and I need to get the answer. I love it.

So that's where the drive comes from. Okay, so that is at the seat of your drive. There were ceilings, there was frustrations, and it was an injustice, and you're like, no, hold on. If not me, then who? Right. Where did the if not me, then who type of thing? So that's called self-efficacy, this idea that if I point my attention here, I think I can make a difference. And you have high self-efficacy, obviously. Where did that come from? I'm not sure. If you talk to my family, they never would imagine where I am now. I was this super quiet and shy child, like very intrinsically motivated, very focused. And, I mean, there was a point where we would have substitute teachers when I was a young kid. And I would vomit.

My mom would have to come pick me up because I was just so nervous of something being different. And I know. And look at you on the frontier in this way. It's weird, isn't it? So how did that happen? This gives hope, you know, a lot of hope. Yeah. I think I found my voice really when I had to kind of fend for my life.

myself, meaning that I was under the shadow of my older sister for most of my childhood, and she was more of a protector. And then she went to university and moved out of the house. And then I faced going to a brand new state, never been there, going to university. It was a completely new environment and had to really find that confidence. So growing up in San Francisco, for the most part, when you walk downtown, you would just pretend to be confident. So you could walk downtown and not be prey, so to speak.

you know, so that's one of the things they teach you as a girl. You want to walk with confidence so that you don't seem to be meek, so you don't become a mark or anything like that. So then going to university, I kind of instilled that as like, I'm going to walk with confidence so people think that I should be here. And then that kind of developed into, well, if I'm going to pretend I have confidence, I need to say something in the room. And then really trying to overcome that fear of having been sheltered to now having to make a

mark for myself. Yeah. If you were to design a path for high school slash college women, would you want them to do it that same way or do it differently? I think part of the missing link for a lot of women who are going to university is they don't have any kind of sociological, I guess, skill uptick, meaning that they don't actually have the ability to interact in different environments because we're all sheltered and we're told to fear things and to watch out, don't go walking at night. that kind of stuff, but no one ever really empowers them to say, you know what, culturally, these are things we've learned, but this is how we can interact in that not quite so safe space so that when you go to a new university or a new town, you can really get involved in the culture quickly. And I find that wherever I go, I don't want to stay in a resort or a hotel. I want to actually

be in where people are actually living so I can understand their perspective and get something from that to help build my confidence as well. Okay, cool. Now that you've, let's fast forward to kind of where you are now is you've got, you're resting on good science, you've bifurcated the difference between male versus female research, and you are pointing strongly to gender-appropriate research-based findings. What is most interesting to you right now that you wish that men, women, people would understand about your findings? that when we look overall at the scientific databases that are out there, there's just a very small amount of literature that is appropriated to women still.

Because we think about who are the PIs, not very many women. The publication rate for women is lower than men. We see that the funding for women's research and health and biomedical sciences is just a very small percentage of the total funding that's available. So we're still a huge uphill battle to close the gender gap. And if I have the numbers right, according to your research in your book, one billion women right now at the time that is marked this conversation about one billion women are in menopause.

And let's hold the athletic and the sport industry at bay for just a moment because that's where you cut your teeth. But then you're onto this huge population. Yeah. And is that research also dearth or is there ample research there and you're just amplifying it? No, there's also a lack of research there because if we look at the schematic of research, there's this big hole between ages of 30 and about 50 for women because that's where it becomes very complex to create studies unless it's a public burden disease, meaning that it's going to drain on the health care system. So we see that there's a lot of research in parry and postmenopausal, obese women, diabetic women, women with osteoporosis, but there's not a lot for women who are generally healthy or women who are actively trying to promote their health in this age span.

Okay. So we're trying to close that gap with research. What is the lack of research cost women? Oh, so much. I mean, I see it all the time where they get gaslit because they're physically. might not know everything that's happening or the symptomology that they're having for parabenopause is similar to someone who's just highly stressed. So for comparing male data to female data, if we're looking at two 45-year-old individuals, one male, one female, and they both have a very

high-stressed job, and they might be single parents, so you have the stress of parenthood, and they're both having somewhat a little bit of panic attack or anxiety. They both go to the physician. the physician would say, oh, you're having panic attack, anxiety, we have to decrease the stress. But in actuality, it is a hormone flux that's invoking this and creating a bigger stress response and a trigger. So the actual solutions that are there are not going to be as beneficial or robust as a woman until the conversation of, oh, there's hormone flux going on, so we have to unpack this and see how we can bring sympathetic drive down because that sympathetic drive is so elevated

from this fluctuation of estrogen progesterone. Yeah, okay. So in training, good psychologists, the ones that are properly trained, will not make a diagnosis without understanding biology. It's just fantastic. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah. And my supervisor, Dr. Valerie Maxwell, was exceptional before any time, any time before I was about to make a diagnosis. She's like, have you looked at the bloods? Have you called for bloods?

And I go, no. But this is me earlier in my career, like being supervised. No, it's classic. Look at the seven symptoms. Dta-da-da-consistency over time. Like, that's the profile. And I'll never forget early on. She goes, what's the difference between anxiety?

and hypothyroid. Good question. Yeah, hyperthyroid, meaning like an active thyroid. Right. And I go, I'm not sure. You said, right, you should sort that out, Mike. And so it was the beginnings of a really important understanding of the difference between gender and similarities. There's lots of similarities.

And there's real structural differences. So can you just open up? What do you think? Do we go perimenopause, menopause, and kind of open some of your best practices and findings up Would that be good? Or would you rather go, would you rather speak to the application of what to do if you are in one of those two? I think people need to understand what it is before they can take the steps because depending on how your symptomology is and how you're feeling will indicate what kind of steps you need to take. There you go.

Okay. So let's do structural stuff first. Yeah. And let's hit perimenopause while we're at it. It's the, you said the 10 years before the onset. And look, this conversation. is for both genders, all genders. Yes.

This conversation is not for just the women in our community. This is for, like if you know a woman, and you love a woman, this is, or you have a daughter, whatever, this is for you to understand. Okay. Teach us. And the other thing is women have a bit of a ceiling when it comes to advocating for themselves because it's more of a male-driven society, especially the medical community. So having men in the conversation also helps drive action.

And what do you hope men would do more or better or less? So I think instead of trying to fix things, we see that happens a lot where you'll have your partner saying something and then it's the fix it or they ignore it. And we don't want that. We want to vent. We want to have someone just listen so that when we come back and say, I think I have a solution or I need help finding a solution, then that's when action can be. taken. But when someone first starts yelling at you for rage or, you know, having really

bad panic attacks, that right there's the physiology. It's not the person. And I think that's one of the things that really confuses marriages and partnerships when women are going through perimenopause. We see a high uptick of divorce rates in this age group. And people are saying, oh, it's because the kids have left, but no. It's because there's this disconnect where the men are saying, wait, this isn't the person that I knew what's wrong. And the woman is just so frustrated because it doesn't understand what's going on and has severe mood swings or night sweats or body composition change because every system in the body is affected by this change in hormones. It's, it's an agitated state to say the least. And it's, look, the symptom list is remarkable.

Right? You read it. Anyone who reads it, it's like, oh, I'm in parimenopause. Even men. They read it. And they're like, oh, yeah, that could be me. That could be me too. Yeah. But to be clear, do men have a quote unquote menopause? Is there a thing where things change hormonally other than maybe a testosterone drop? Is there a thing? Body Master is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs.

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When we look at aging and looking at the scope of aging, most things are scaled in a linear fashion. And then when you get to the ages 40 to 60, we see a discernible effect of aging in both sexes, but it's more pronounced in women because in that, period is a significant ovarian shutdown. So we're seeing this downturn of these ovarian hormones, which again affects every point in the body. For men, we start to see a little bit of functionality decline, total body functionality decline in, you know, around 50, 55, and then we start to see a decrease in testosterone, which then exacerbates a lot of the functional decline. And functional means, I don't know, when I'm working out, I don't put on muscle or burn fat as easily as I want

did. Yep. But maybe I need to adjust my methodologies to be more efficient with like, I know we'll get into it like hit training or sprinting or something like lifting heavy weights as opposed to a moderate sledge of zone two, whatever. Yeah, we'll get into that. Okay. So it's different for men and women, Jack.

And for women during the paramedopause cycle, there's a hormonal flux. And we're talking about estrogen and progester. And somewhat testosterone as well. Right. So testosterone decreases as well. It's not associated with the ovarian function, but when we're under high states of stress, we see testosterone takes a dive. So we see a lot of natural levels dropping in women or a perimenopausal. And then people are like, but it's not associated with the ovarian shutdown, what's going on. It's because when you are so tired but wired all of the time from that sympathetic drive,

your body's under a significant amount of stress. And it interrupts our natural pulses through the day or the 24-a-ro cycle. So testosterone starts to come blunted and drop off. Okay. And sleep is compromised. Now you've got like a snake eating at stale because we need sleep. Yeah. You've got a sleep issue that's coming on from the irritation, the agitation, the higher cortisol, the sweat.

you know that so there's that there's a compounding effect that takes place when hormones change as well which of course affects psychological and emotional slash behavioral outputs okay do you want to get into the hormonal changes and what actually is happening is that a value to you yeah to explain sure yeah please yeah i always bring people back to puberty because everyone talk you know knows the teenage angst of kids growing up and we see around age eight or nine girls start to become a little bit more self-conscious, and then boys start to become more aggressive. And this is when we start seeing what we call an epigenetic change from expression of sex hormones. So there isn't a lot of progesterine yet for our girls because they haven't started their menstrual

cycle. But we start to see these changes. And we see the mood changes. We see body comp changes. We see interactions within society is different. We see the efficacy is different. At eight and nine. Yeah. And it starts. to progress and then when they talk about hitting the teens, especially 13, that's a really significant point in time where you really do start to see all these changes is right on the cost of girls starting the menstrual cycle and boys getting a boost of testosterone so that you have this really dichotic switch. So if we're talking about we know all of these things that are happening in puberty, including body composition change. We get to the other end in perimenopause. We have about

10 years of the body winding down all the hormones that have been hitting every system of the body. Why do we wind those down? That's something no one really knows yet. It's 2026 and no one is really sure why women go through menopause. I heard a really, I heard it was a super thoughtful, non-scientific opining from somebody that, an opinion, from somebody that I really have high regard for. and it was a conversation that two people were having about they were both men that were like 55 and they're like okay let's talk about peptides let's talk about HRT hormonal replacement therapy let's talk about like and one of the folks in this conversation said you ever think that we're supposed to not have this all this testosterone and the other two look I'm like get out of here right it was like a kind of a moment a banter

and he repeated, he's like, look, I don't know about you guys, but I want to be more sensitive. I want to be more connected. I don't want to be kind of in this rage hormone kind of alpha male thing. Like, I want wisdom. I want to be more of who I'm supposed to be as a wise man than like this young kind of lion or this old lion that's trying to be a young lion. I just, I really appreciate that. Again, there's no evidence.

there's no real science there that this conversation is pointing to. If you are philosophically going to think about that for women, what would that be? Well, I always work in the social, cultural context of things, right? One of my colleagues is a really good sociologist, and so she's a sociologist in the female athlete space. So we work really closely together. So when I think about it, it's like, why do we have this drive to stay young, right? Why is it that we're now saying men, you need to use testosterone and women you need to lean into menopause hormone therapy?

And everyone should be on the peptide bandwagon. We want to live to be 150. But that is a social construction right there where there's these images that people need to be young to be successful. And we know that that's not true. We can look at other cultures. We look at more of the Asian cultures and the wisdom comes with the elders. And there's no press really to stay young because it's not about you're no longer important. You are very important.

We can look in the wild too. And we know I like the whale analogy. I'm sure people have heard whale analogy before. So whales also go through menopause. And then when the female whale that has gone through menopause, she becomes the one that chaperones and herds and oversees the entire group of whales. So there is different pockets within biohospels. and within other cultures that don't have this press like Western culture to stay young and viral and angry and productive in the sense that we see it. So if we're thinking about borrowing from other cultures, it's more of that relaxed of now women are in other cultures like, you know what?

I don't care. I am me. I have all these experiences and I can share my experiences with you. And we can talk about what you're going through because I've already done it so I can help you. But I feel like especially in the U.S., there isn't an eye to that, meaning that there isn't the want for women to share their experiences to the younger, but we'll share experiences in our own population group or our own age group, or we'll share what we did with someone who's older, but it doesn't seem to trickle down the other way. Yeah, I'm nodding my head to everything you're saying. I think that that idea, you're describing a wise woman.

You're describing of wisdom. So let's get into like what happens when a woman goes through a paramenopausal cycle or experience? So if we're looking at how long perimenopause is, like I said, it could be up to 10 years. And we start to see early symptoms in our late 30s. And how that develops for a lot of women in their late 30s is they might stop sleeping as well. They have changes in their appetite. They're putting on more body fat at a faster rate than what they ever have. have before. And there's a change in gut microbiome diversity. So we have a decrease in the gut

bugs that allow us to stay thin for the most part and overgrowth of the phyla that really encourages the body to hold on to body fat. Why? Body's super stressed. High stress. Oh, so because of the stress, not the hormone. But also because of cortisol is a hormone, right? Yeah, but also because of our sex hormones, we start to have a decrease in our sex hormones. And the gut bugs that would unconjugate them. So what happens is your sex hormones are released in a pulse and they hit some of our target tissues in action. So they go to certain receptors in the body, but then there's still some that's circulating that didn't quite hit those receptors that they needed to. So they get shot to the liver where they're bound by sex hormone binding globulin. And so this little composition of sex hormone

binding globulin and our sex hormones gets pushed into our intestines through bile. And then we have gut bugs that will unconjugate or release the sex hormones from the sex hormone binding globulent and shoot them back out to do a job. So you want your sex hormone binding goblins to be low in general. Yeah. Let's stay here. I know it's a super narrow thread, but how do you, what is a set of best practices to help that happen? I don't know. Neither do I. That's why I asked. I'm like, that's a good question. There isn't, like, it's one of those things where you get your blood's test and you follow over time. We do see that. the more diverse your gut microbiome is the better profile you have across the board.

Yeah, to detangle or what did you call it, deconjugate? Unconjugate. A new word for me. I like it. So that would be an interesting bit of research, men and women alike, I think. But that's a really nice one. Okay. Because we're chasing the increase in estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, but actually the thing

that is not allowing it to be effective, we don't know much about. Correct. Right. Okay. Let's go back to the winding down. Yeah. Some of the more important understanding so we can get to some maybe solutions or steps folks can take. Yeah.

So we start seeing this wind down. And we see changes in brain and brain structure. And we see changes in blood lipids. All of a sudden, women who didn't have a problem with cholesterol, all of a sudden have high low density, lipoprotein, or LDL, and a high total cholesterol. And they're like, what's going on? Like, I don't, I haven't changed anything. It's the same.

And we start to see changes in muscle mass. We start to see changes in bone density. Soft tissue, soft tissue injuries come up all the time. People are like, why do I have planar fascia? Why am I, you know, starting to get these calf niggles? Because our muscles are getting weaker. We lose power first. A lot of the mood and mood changes as well is part of the brain and the way the brain is changing.

The decrease in our gut microbiome is also a, how our body is producing neurotransmitters, especially dopamine and serotonin and melatonin. The feel good and sleep good. Right. Yeah. And then unfortunately right now, because of the way that most of us grew up who are in this 45 plus age group, is the social construct was you're starting to put on body fat, so you need to eat less and train more. Let's do calories and calories out, which is the opposite of what you should be doing.

because you're already putting on more body fat by the signal your body's highly stressed. And you start restricting calories. It's going to exacerbate it. So we see an increase in the rate of lean mass loss when people start really restricting calories and increasing their training load or their exercise load. So they get in what we call low energy availability state. It's a really prevalent and people don't realize how prevalent it is. Is there a difference between men and women on this piece?

we're starting to see that low energy availability is becoming relatively rampant in men too can you talk about time restricted feeding and eating like the interval yeah can you talk about that a bit and the difference between gender yeah so if we're looking at what we call intermittent fasting versus time restricted eating so intermittent fasting is the trend to hold your fast or not eat from like 7 p.m. to noon the next day so you're getting this really long period of time where your body is supposedly resting from digesting. We see from population research that when you break your fast late like that, you are effectively phase shifting your circadian rhythm, which is a bigger deal for women than men,

because women's circadian rhythm is a little bit shorter than men's. So we start to see this change or a shift in the way our body is normally pulsing its hormones. Wait, you're blowing my mind. there's, this is why I was so excited to sit with you. There's a difference between male and female circadian rhythm. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's.

That's a little bit of a mindbender for me. That's really cool insight. And it makes sense, right? If you and your wife are watching TV at night and she's like, oh, I'm really tired. It's not a clock. You're like, what's going on? I'm not tired. It's because her melatonin is starting to rise and she hits a first wave peak about nine.

And the second one's at 11. Yours is at 10 and at 12. So there's about an hour difference. I see. So when you're like, oh, my wife gets out of bed really early and gets out, it's because her body is ready to go. She's a little bit off kilter than what you are because of the circadian rhythm change. Very cool insight. And so when we're starting to look at the way that we change our circadian rhythm,

through light and dark exposure and food. So if you're getting up and although you're seeing the light, you're still not eating, your body's like, whoa, what's going on? And we start to see with women specifically, we have a higher cortisol peak in the morning, which is our cortisol awakening response. Both men and women have that to wake up. Yeah, so you can do some good work with a little bit of cortisol in your system. Right, exactly.

It's not the evil hormone that everyone puts it out to be. For women with that rise, we also have an increase in what we call our assolated garrulin. So that's the active form of our hunger hormone. At the same time, we also have a rise in peptide y-y-y. which is an active form of a satiation hormone. So the hunger hormone kicks up, girlin. Yep. And so you're naturally hungry.

Okay. But you also have peptide Y-Y that's kind of blunting that hunger, which is why women will say, I don't feel hungry in the morning. Oh, yeah, very cool. Okay. When you have cortisol that's coming up, there's an association with cortisol and the acylated garrin.

So you have hunger hormone that comes up with cortisol. If you don't eat and cortisol cells elevated, then there's no message to the brain that there's food coming in. So what happens is because you also have the elevation of your peptide, Y, Y, Y, you don't feel hungry. So you kind of keep pushing it out. And this is causing a misstep in the way that your body normally has cortisol responses throughout the day. So your response to a stress is going to be higher from a cortisol perspective. So that's why we see more astute kind of responses to daily stressors.

We also see there's a change in our luteinizing hormone pulse or testosterone pulse because hormones aren't released in a linear fashion. They're pulsed throughout the day in response to environment, but also your circadian rhythm. So if women aren't eating within that first half an hour or an hour of waking up, then that cortisol stays elevated and your appetite hormones become dysregulated. So we start to see this when women are holding their fast until 12 or after, they actually don't get any metabolic control that they're after from fasting. We don't see a better glucose uptake.

We don't see any change in blood lipids. We don't really see a change in body composition. So if your last morsel super applied, if your last morsel was at 7 p.m., dinner's done. And you wake up at 6.30. You're suggesting, or the data suggests, to eat before, if you're female, to eat before noon. Definitely. Within a half an hour to an hour waking up. If you break your fast early, so maybe it's 8 or 9 o'clock and you have food, then you will get

a lot of the metabolic control from the fast because what we say is time restricted eating is you have dinner and you don't have anything after dinner and then you have food when you wake up. So you're getting a 12 to 14 hour overnight fast. If you're holding that overnight fast longer period of time, that's where you start to have this dysregulation and disruption. And what happens for folks, women that do that? So it's effectively phase shifting. So what we mean by that is we start to see a change in melatonin production.

So instead of that nine and the 11, it's blunted, so it's not as potent and it's delayed. So this interrupts sleep. People can't get into proper sleep because they don't have the melatonin to really tell the brain, yep, okay, we're phasing into sleep. So if melatonin normally would be produced around 9 o'clock for a woman, and you've prolonged the drop of melatonin at 9 p.m. because you've changed your fasting from, let's say, 8 a.m. to, I don't know, 11 a.m. Then you're literally pushing back two hours, the melatonin will help you sleep. You're literally creating an environment where your brain can't get into good

sleep because you've blunted how much melatonin is being produced and you've changed when it is being produced. So if we were to tell women, you're having really a lot of problems sleeping, I always say, let's see where you're eating. Let's back up the food. Let's front load the calories. And then if you really want calorie restriction or to have a fast, we do it from 6 p.m. to when you wake up. So that could be 7 or 630 or 7. So you are getting at least that 12-hour fast that's beneficial for health.

But you are not phase shifting your circadian rhythm. It's like they're in perpetual jet lag. So when you can do that, then you start falling into a normal circadian rhythm. rhythm and you start feeling sleepy at nine. You can fall asleep by 10 or so. You can catch the next wave of the melatonin as it rises and then starts to come down. Your core temperature follows that same signal so that your core temperature will drop the way it is supposed to get into a deep sleep and you don't have all these awakenings throughout the night. Somebody wakes up, maybe they're not exactly hungry, but they could eat. Maybe the family's eating is your recommendation. And let's say

that that woman at this point has the opportunity to go to the gym early in the day. Work out before, or eat before working out, or wait and work out in a fasted state. Having something small before she works out is the ideal. Protein mostly based, like cottage cheese or kefir. It doesn't have to be a lot. A couple eggs. Yeah. So if we look at Abby Smith-Ryan's research from UNC, she's done quite a bit in this area.

and found that if you're going to do a strength training circuit, then you're looking around 15 grams of protein, so that's not a much at all. And if you're going to do some cardiovascular work with the strength, then you just add 30 grams of carbohydrate, which is not a lot at all. So it's just a very small kind of pre-training snack. Is the research still that there is a window, an optimal window post?

Or is that just male? This is the argument, right? So if we look at it, we see that most of the research has been done that way, has been done on young men, for the most part, and a very small amount of younger, reproductive year of women. When we're looking at the optimization for adaptation, you want to provide fuel as close to the end of exercise as possible

because your body's gone through a breakdown state during exercise. So it needs the building blocks to rebuild. And if we are looking at as you age, you become more what we call anabolicly resistant to both exercise and protein. So that means your body doesn't respond as fast or as well to those. But if you provide those building blocks pretty close to the end of exercise, then you're going to get more of the feedback signals for adapting. So it's not so much the window that's necessary.

It's an age-related thing. Like how old are you and what adaptations do you want? We know that the older you get, the better it is to fuel close to the end of exercise. Okay. When you're younger, you can get away with a little bit of a gap. But I try to tell women, you want to eat breakfast pretty close to the end of exercise if you're doing your first thing in the morning. Because, again, we're trying to front load our calories and prevent any kind of energy

availability misstep because we want to keep our hormones in this pulse and keep our circadian rhythm pretty sound so that we can sleep. because you can't do any kind of body composition change if you have poor sleep. Full stop. Full stop. And if you are not getting the right benefits from nutrition, hormonal benefits from nutrition, you got a problem. And if you are waiting to eat one meal at 7 p.m., you're probably not going to get

enough macros in, and now you're in a compromised state throughout the day. And your micronutrients. We see like very short eating window. people are not getting enough of their micronutrients. So they become micronutrient deficient. So that's low vitamin D, low copper, low selenium, just a lot of the trace elements, which then can affect your entire system.

Okay, this is great. If you're going to work out early in the day, prime something, a little bit of protein. If you're going to do cardio, add a little bit of carbs to it. Work out. Fuel is, if you're in your 40s, 50, 60s, or later, fuel as soon as you possibly can. and you are not interested then in intermittent, the benefits that I know, let's say,

from the early research on intermittent fasting. You're saying that's mostly male researched and or beneficial for men. Yes, and it's primarily clinical, and a lot of it is still done on rats. So what about autophagy? So atopathy. So atopathy is some of the parts of your cells. So you break down and you have cellular debris, and your body will, pick up that debris and excrete it or use it for the sum of the parts. It's kind of recycling

in a good way. You want to get rid of the kind of senescence, the zombie cells, the non-useful cells. Parts, yeah. And that's where the whole idea of fasting and calorie restriction and everything came from. It's like, okay, if we do this and your body is going to have the drive to use the sum of the parts because you're not feeding it. But if we look at exercise and one of the massive feedback that happens after exercise is a tough. Because what's happening during exercise, you're not building during exercise. Yeah, you're breaking stuff down. Yeah, you're creating a pretty stressful environment.

Exactly. So that's how you, I mean, that's the stress. And the response to the stress is let's go in and clean up. Let's repair. Let's rebuild. Let's clean up. So autophagy from exercise can be a greater response from an autophagy standpoint than fasting. Oh, very cool.

So this is another reason why fitness is so important. Yeah. Right. Okay. So let's go, let's kind of float up a couple levels really quickly. There are hormonal flux happening in the paramedipause phase. And you've already pointed to the power of nutrition from a cadence perspective. You're pointing to the power of sleep.

Now, sometimes sleep is compromised if you've got hot flashes or there's some stuff happening there. So I think we should knock that down. And you are pointing to the power of fitness for efficiency of your system running, let alone we haven't gotten to bone health and muscular strength and mobility and all that stuff. But so what's the big, what are the big rocks? The way that I scope it is we need sleep first, right? So sleep and then movement and physical, or movement nutrition are kind of the next steps, depending on personality and motivation. And then the one that is not rated at all, but is important across all of them is your social support being in nature and mindset. Because we see that the research of doing a run or walk outside versus on the treadmill, you have massive differences with regards to how you feel and how your body responds.

100%. That research just for folks that are unclear, can you walk through the benefits of being in nature? When we are in nature, we have the natural light, right? And so that allows our body go, oh, okay, I'm outside. what am I doing, the fresh air. And it creates a greater dopamine response. We also see that we have a better ability to take on stress, so we're more stress resilient. There's the whole grounding trend that came from people feet on the ground itself, again, because the touch of nature to the skin creates a sensation

and a feedback response that is more relaxing and parasympathetic-driven. If you were to bring that inside to a gym or a treadmill, you don't get any of that. Yeah. And the parasympathetic is that rest and digest the recovery mechanism. And the, there it is. And the wonder that comes from like being outside with things that are living and breathing, has the grounding research moved from fringe to mainstream? It's still a bit French. It still is, yeah. It's getting traction, but it's still a bit French. Yeah. I grew up surfing and being in this, you did as well, the saltwater, there's something, we're calling it grounding because you're. walking on grass or something, but there's something about the sand, there's something about the

Mother Nature's ocean, you know, that is like remarkably, I don't know, grounding. I'll use the word, but you're actually in water, so it sounds like it's a weird thing. Finding Master is brought to you by David Protein. Travel a lot at Finding Mastery, and sometimes travel makes it tricky to eat well. Best intentions, and then you're at the airport. And then suddenly, the only options around you are the ones that you'd rarely choose at home. Something I come back to often is that discipline isn't really about willpower in the moment. It's often about choice architecture, setting up your environment ahead of time so that the easy choice and the good choice are the same one.

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It says that they're waking up more. rested than they have in years. Right now, they're having a July 4th sale. Go to Lisa.com for 30% off, select mattresses, plus you get an extra $50 off with the promo code mastery, exclusive for our listeners. That's Lisa, L-E-E-E-S-A.com, and use the promo code mastery for 30% off, select mattresses plus an extra $50 off when you use the code mastery. I know, but one of my things that I love to do the most in the summer is ocean swimming. I'm not a big swimmer. I hate the pool. I'm so slow in the pool and I get so bored. But ocean swimming, it's the slush-slush of the water and you're seeing things and you're going and you're

exploring. Yeah, this is a terrifying part for many. The seeing of things. Yeah. No, that's good. Or on the board and you're paddling. It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there is some research that just seeing mother nature, there's a kind of second tier benefit and then seeing a picture of Mother nature. There's some benefit there as well, but it's obviously weaker. Yeah. Yeah. So be out outside. Yeah, with nature. And I also just maybe remind myself that I am nature. Nature is not just the ocean or the pond. Like, we are nature. Yeah. We are organic. Yeah. Completely organic. And people forget that. Yeah. I think they're an algorithm or a linear progression. And so if I do X, then Y will happen. Yeah. And it doesn't work.

that way. Okay, so sleep. What are some best practices to help people outside of what you just laid out is get your nutrition in early so that you get the melatonin drop appropriately? What are some other things? If somebody is working through hot flashes or they're struggling or they're waking up in the middle of the night, what are some guidance for women? One of the things about awakenings throughout the night that are not related hot flashes is people aren't eating enough. We've done some CGM glucose monitoring through the night. with looking at awakenings, and there's a really high correlation between hypoglycemic effects and awakenings.

So this is one of the first concerns I have when a woman is like, I'm not sleeping and waking up a lot. That's why we look at diet and make sure that she's eating enough. And if she still gets a point where she's not eating enough, then we might have her eat some yogurt half an hour before bed so that she has slow release proteins that are going to help prevent that hypoglycemia. So I just want to put that in the nutrition box. When we have things like severe night sweats, hot flashes, inability to sleep well.

There are tools and toolbox for that. You can look at using some pharmaceuticals. You can look at using adaptogens, which are really potent. I mean, we see the use of aschagonda, rodeola, holy basil, all of these really help. One of the other things is... I love that you bring those. Sorry to interrupt in a row. I love that you bring those up because you and I were introduced by Jeff Byers from Momentus,

which you trust Momentus. Yes. I trust Momentous. And they have all three of those. Well, no, they have two of them. They have Aschaganda and Rodiola. Yeah. And what was the third one you mentioned?

Holy Basil. Yeah. I don't think they have that in their stack. Not yet. Oh, not yet. Nice job. Yeah. So do we need to be careful with the brands that we are choosing for Aschaganda or Rodeola?

100%. Yeah. Meaning that if you go get something off the shelf, you're not sure what you're getting. Right, because supplements aren't regulated. for the most part. And unfortunately, people will gravitate to the less expensive one. And most of the time, those have fillers and flow agents, maybe some metals and stuff in it.

So that's why, I mean, I'm not plugging momentous, but I am plugging momentous because I love them. Oh, yeah. Because they're super clean and very careful what goes in their stuff. So when you're reading the label, you know that it's there. And they're third-party tested. NSF for sport, meaning what's on the label is inside the bottle. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's really important when you're looking at the supplement industry. Coming from high performance world, we're like, you can't buy anything off the shelf. You have to have something that's NSF or certified for sport. I'm like, everybody should have that opportunity. Like, you shouldn't just go buy something off the shelf. Full stop. I can't even begin to have a conversation about supplements with anybody without it being NSF

because they're mostly elite athletes or whatever. It's the standard. Yeah, it's the standard. So can you take too much? ashwaganda and maybe explain what aschwaganda does and rodeola. Yeah, can you explain how they work and why they're important for sleep? Yeah, so if we're looking at adaptogens, and that's asha ganda, rodeola for the most part that we're talking about, they are plant compounds that come from plants that are stressed. So we see they're in high deserts. They're in really extreme

conditions. So they have to adapt to those kinds of stressors. So these plant compounds come from this naturally derived adaptation that the plant has. So they come into your body and they read the stress, so to speak, in your body. And it's like, oh, there's lots of cortisol, but it doesn't necessarily need to hit all the receptors. So we're going to go blunt some of these receptors. So you don't have as strong a response. So with Aschaganda, it's really good at helping with that.

And with rodeola, it can work two ways. you can either bring you up and make you focus, or if you are just on the cusp of, like, needing to wind down, it'll help you wind down. It's amazing. I know. Both of those are amazing. Ashraganda, for me, like, just takes this edge off. Now, can you take too much?

You can. So I go to the lowest effective dose. Don't go the pharmaceutical route or the Western route of Moore is better because it's not. Is it 150? What is the milligram? I can't remember. So for Aschagonda, it's 400 total in a day. 400 total in today.

Yeah. And do you split it? I do. You do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Afternoon, you start to get that high stress from everything it's going on and you

also start to lose energy. I use Aschagonda to level me out. And you'll take 200? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I also use Shichandra. I don't know this. So this one is, does the opposite. It really brings you focus. So it works on some of your serotonin. receptors as well. So instead of having kind of a flattening, it just makes you focus. All right. Fantastic. So let's keep going. So what are some ways to work with hot flashes?

Yeah. So we see that you do want a cool room, definitely a cool room. And one of the things that we found using environmental stress, this was a study that I did with one of the top complementary alternative medicine researchers from Columbia. She came over, she's best friends with my mentor at Stanford, and she was really interested. She's the one who told me about adaptogens, and we did some research on adaptogens, but also she wanted to understand what were hot flashes. So we put women in a heat chamber, and we were able to kind of mark what the onset of a hot flash was and be able to quantify it through skin temperature and internal temperature.

So we quantified it, and then we had them do controlled hyperthermia. So that means small amounts of time in the sauna to bring their temperature up. They would have massive hot flashes in the sauna, but then over the course of five or six exposures, it became less and less severe. And when they got out, they didn't have as many or as severe. So if we're talking about the temperature control of the hypothalamus and the way that we start to have a misstep in the way that our estrogen progesterone or not in the way. the brain anymore. The hypothalamus is like, what's going on? Do I need to vasodilate? Do I need to

constrict? I don't know. So when you are increasing the blood temperature that goes through the brain, the hypothalamus gets hypersensitized to that heat. And then it starts to understand that's what hot means. So when you get out into a natural environment, you don't have as much of that perturbation of the hypothalamus. So it works. What is the difference between men and women when it comes to sonnas. So heat exposure is interesting. In the reproductive years for women who are naturally cycling, they have a change in their core temperature on a monthly basis. When progesterone comes up, it increases a core temperature, and the body naturally shifts its onset of sweat the way it feels hot. So you have a new baseline. So when we start looking at heat exposure, there are sex differences,

not hormone differences, but actual sex differences that happen. So women will vasodilate first. So that means that the blood comes to the surface and the blood vessels open up and you're trying to offload heat first. Then they will start to sweat. Men sweat first. So they are losing body water pretty quickly in a hot environment.

And that is a sex difference. That's not driven by hormones per se. So when we're talking about heat exposure, women will get into the hot environment and they'll feel hot and then they'll start sweating and they'll feel cool again. Where men will start sweating and they'll start building up the heat and their tolerance isn't as great when we're talking about sitting in a sauna itself. When we're outracing, there's a little bit of a disconnect.

Women will do better in a humid environment because they've azidylate and then sweat. So there's a little bit of a nuance of being in real life versus in the sauna. So we look at the benefits of heat exposure for both sexes. We see that it increases what we call heat shock protein responses. So that is when you are in a hot environment and you start to have cell breakage, then the heat shock proteins will come and fix that. It's just kind of like autophagy, but it's a heat-induced response. We see better cardiovascular responses.

So that means if you're in a hot environment, your body's going to adapt by increasing the amount of blood that it has, red cells, the water it has, the way your heart is efficient at pumping. We also see that it will prolong training stress. So if you go into a sauna after training, it's a stress that keeps your heart rate up and all the adaptations that come with it. And we see that there are the temperature regulation responses. So if we are having a lot of hot flashes, then it helps with the hypothalamus because your brain

gets really hot from the hot blood. And it also helps if you are going to a hot environment, then you're training for something to race in the heat or say you're living in the southern hemisphere and it's July, which is the middle of winter, and you go to Texas and you're like, oh my gosh, it's so hot. But if you do some sonas exposure, you get to Texas, you're not that hot. Okay. So what do most people get wrong about being great as a healthy paramenopausal slash menopausal woman? Like what do most people get wrong? Following trends. because there's so much information out there

because it tends to be the new buzzword right now, menopause, perimenopause, everyone's out to sell you something. And every woman's lived experience is different. So what I've gone through would be different from what my sister went through, even though we're genetically linked, and that's different from what my mom went through. Everything is individual,

and I don't think that's being communicated. So how do we have a chance? To communicate? Yeah. Yeah, because we don't have, we don't have the same discernment and scientific acumen that you do. So how do we have a chance to get something right if we need to be completely bespoke, which we are?

Yeah. Right. So I always tell women, look, the things that will really budge the needle for you with overall health and increasing health span, because that's where my focus now is, we see sex differences in the last part of the life, right, where women live longer and have poorer health across it, and part of it is things like Alzheimer's and autoimmune diseases. One of the biggest ways that we can attenuate or slow the rate of those risk factors that start in perimenopause is through exercise. So if we're looking at exercise, people look at it as, oh, I don't

want to do that. But it's embracing the ability to take control, where it's not about going to a gym 90 minutes every day or going out for 10K run or slogging yourself is about being efficient in your movement and being very conscious that you are doing it. If you are going to get up early and do some training, then you are an athlete. And that's what I tell women. I want you to have an athletic mentality because you're doing this for you to benefit your health. So you want to have a plan. A lot of women don't have a plan. They get up and they're like, oh, I should be doing something. so they're going to go out for a walk, but they don't really know why they're doing it. They just know that they're supposed to be doing something.

So when we look at exercise, it's a stress to the body, and we want to invoke a really strong stress, so the body adapts the way it should without hormones. Because if we look at something like strength training, and we have all this information right now about how the brain changes because it's estrogen starved, and we're starting to see brain fog and changes in the amygdala, we don't have long-term research to show if that's temporary

because we see that there is a new baseline post-perimenopause. So what are we doing? If we're looking at some of the inherent changes that happened from muscle and a brain standpoint, we know the very first thing that happens in perimenopause is women will lose strength and power. So this is... Is it that order or is it power first, as you mentioned?

We see power first. And with that comes strength, and then we see a drop in lean mass. Okay. So part of that is the way that our contractile proteins work. So we see myosin and actin are two major proteins. Mycin grabs onto actin, pulls it towards it, and that's how you have a muscle contraction, which is stimulated by a nerve.

We have different things called isoforms. So there are so different forms of that protein of mycin. We see a change in that active form of mycine to an isoform that isn't as strong to grab onto actin. and that is part of some of the estrogen or lack of estrogen changes. The way that we can make that step up is nerve conduction. So if we are looking at lifting a heavier load, that's going to create a central nervous system response where the nerve impulse comes down and goes,

oh, wait a second, we need all of these muscle fibers to work synergistically to grab each other so that we have a really strong muscle contraction to lift this load. So now we're not relying on estrogen to drive myosin. We are relying on a nerve factor. Not only that, because it is a nerve factor, we see in some new randomized controlled trials that come out

that women who lift heavier loads have a change to the prefrontal cortex, and that's what we need to attenuate cognitive decline. Because there's this massive sex difference in cognition and cognitive decline when we're seeing women and men in their 60s, 70s, 80s. Is it a fair kind of ramp to say the way you do your 40s is a good predictor for how your 50s might go? The way you do your 50s is a pretty good predictor how your 60s might go. Yeah. Okay. And when you say put on lifting heavy weights or a load, are we talking about half your body weight being able to, you know, how much load?

Yeah. How much load are we talking about? It's a journey to be able to lift heavy. So if no one is, if women who are listening to this or their partners are listening to this and trying to encourage their female friends or partners to lift, if you've never done any kind of resistance training, then I want you to have the eye to a year from now, you're going to be lifting heavy loads. Heavy loads means that you are doing three to five reps at 80% or more of your one rep max,

which means that you're lifting at an eight on a scale of one to ten. you might be able to eke out two more repetitions at a really, really good form, and that is the optimal. But the journey to get there is also really important. So if you've never done any kind of strength training or resistance training, and there's a difference, resistance training is just a push-pull. So that might be your air squats, it might be push-ups against the wall, you're using your body weight to create a resistance. Pilates? Pilates is good for isometric control, balance It's pro preception. Not resistance.

It is a little bit of resistance, but it's not strength. Not strength, okay. So when we talk about strength, this is adding more load to the body, and it is being very conscious that you're trying to create that neuromuscular response. Okay. The way that I'd like to describe it is if we're looking at being able to do 50 pushups and working our way to be doing 50 pushups, are you going to be stronger?

You're going to have more muscle endurance. You're going to have a little bit more neural connection. But if you're going to train to do 10 pushups with a 20 kilo weight on your back, you're going to be strong, you're going to be enduring and you're going to have lots of neuromuscular changes to be able to push the extra 20 kilos in a proper form pushup. Does it matter to you if we're talking about moving kind of the bottom half of your body squats for the most part or upper body where you're doing pushups or pull-ups or it doesn't matter to you. It's the signal to the nervous system and to the brain to say, oh, we need to be strong. We need to recruit and we need to be alive in this experience. Yep. I do find compound lifting, which is your squats, your deadlifts, your binge press, your push, pull overhead,

activates more of our stabilizer muscles. So the weaker muscles also get into the playing field of a resistance training. This is a slippery slope here. I'm wondering how you're navigating it because I, I think you've done it very clearly. You've said, think about a year from now. The reason I'm saying, slippery slope maybe isn't the right language. Let me talk out loud here for a minute because to get somebody to lift safely, heavy weights,

there is a real sophistication to be able to do that and to be able to repeat it, say, in three to five days. Right. Because you and I could go, I don't know, save grandma, we could go lift a car maybe, that idea. and then we're crushed. And we probably couldn't replicate it because all of the stress, you know, that was going into that survival mechanism. But to do it purposely on a daily basis, would you recommend? Not daily, no.

Five days a week, three days a week of... We see one day is minimum minimum to maintain. Two is a little bit. Are we talking about lifting heavy weights or strength training? Just resistance training in general. Resistance in general. Okay. And three is to actually make...

gains. Okay. So three times a week and it doesn't have to be a lot. I think that's the other misconception where people think that they have to go do every body part and they're using all these different machines and supersetting and it becomes really complex. It doesn't have to be like that. You can have a really effective resistance training session in 20 minutes.

Yeah. Where you do some mobilization. You focus on one really good compound movement. Could be squats, could be lunges. So you're doing a knee hinge, you know. So you're just focusing this is what I mean when people need to have a plan. where what is your focus, how much time do you have, and what is the goal of this session

to also match the goal of the month? What does that mean? The goal of the month? When we're talking about resistance training, we have to be very consistent, and we also have to look at adding load, which is periodization. And I'd like people to think,

what am I doing now so that at the end of the month I can do X, Y, C. And the end of two months, I can do this, this, this. So we start by saying, okay, resistance training, for women who've never done it before, I've been saying a lot of this, or this a lot this year. I want you to have three 10-minute wellness meetings with yourself, first thing in the morning.

So we know that we can't cancel meetings. We're just indoctrinated not to cancel meetings. So it's something on your calendar you cannot cancel. For the first week, I want you just to get up and use that time just for you. So you might have a cup of coffee looking out the window, and you're going, okay, I see that tree and it's waving. It's saying hello, good morning, whatever it is. So you take one really positive thing from that first 10 minutes,

and you take that with you all day. So if you get to a stress point, then you can bring yourself back to it. The second week, I want you to add some air squats or maybe some wall push-ups or something else that's a little bit of movement that's going to start becoming that habit three times a week.

And that's how you start your journey. Great. And then you might have a friend who wants to join. You can get an app and work together. You can meet to go do a circuit outside. Or maybe you go together to a smaller, more, boutique gym that's more focused on helping women develop in the whole strength training journey. There's lots of different options.

How do you adjust the narrative, which is like, oh, but I don't want to look bulky. If you're asking me to lift heavy weights, that's what weight lifters do. And I want to fit in my genes. I want to, you know, like, I don't want to have all of the muscularity that, and there's some, I don't know, wild image of like, I don't know. Hulk Hogan, you know, type of thing. Yeah. Right.

So how do you adjust that or address that? Women have to work incredibly hard to get bulky. You might have a genetic predisposition for putting on muscle, but it doesn't mean that you can do it easily. And if you want to get super bulky, then you have to really work at it. You have to be consistent in the gym four or five times a week, doing hardly any cardiovascular work, eating a lot, a lot of protein, timed it, making sure that you're getting me. meals all the time. Because if we look at some of the top CrossFit athletes that are relatively

bulky, they work really hard to get that muscle. Just across, when we think about that physique in CrossFit or take the name out, it doesn't matter if it's CrossFit, but that type of training at the competitive level, are they tested? Are they tested? Yeah, they are now. Yeah. So this is a natural competition, right? So you can look like that and be that athletic naturally. Yes. Yeah. So there's a real sophistication to be able to have that type of transformation. Right. And what you're suggesting is like, look, start a journey, wherever you are on your path. Non-negotiable is like three times. Non-negotiable is one. Ideal is three. And then we slot in cardio at the off days. So cardio is interesting because we see that.

the mindset of like zone two and long slow stuff, it's not appropriate for women. So a long walk where zone two is like when you can, you can have a conversation while you're walking. You got a little bit of a uptick and a heart. Yeah, yeah. But you know, zone three is like, you're going a little bit faster than normally like, you know, it's not a race pace by any means, but like it's a little harder to walk, to talk and walk, right? So you're saying zone two and you're saying that's not good for women. So there's, there's, there's, Two ways to explain this. First, when we look at the zones, the zones are based on certain tests that have been done in the lab

to differentiate what a low impact or a low stress on the body is versus a super high stress. When we're testing women and men in the lab, we know that women can work at a greater percentage of their VO2 max or the maximum and still maintain aerobic steady state. What I mean by that is they might work at 88. percent of their V-O-2 max and still be able to be pretty good in tempo. Men can't do that. They fatigue a lot faster at that higher. So they have to actually work.

Because when I look at the sex differences, we have differences in the muscle morphology. So that means that women have more endurance type fibers, so less fast-twash fibers. And with that comes more mitochondria density. So that means we have more mitochondria in there. We also have more proteins within the mitochondria, which allow women to use free fatty acids better. And there's a switch across the menstrual cycle because of estrogen progesterans effect on fueling. So across the menstrual cycle, women are very metabolically flexible. So when we talk about zone two, one, it's arbitrary.

There's no real hard and fast research behind zone two because it's not a really strong stimulus to invoke mitochondrial change. So when we start talking about Zone 2, it's great for recovery and it's great for like getting out there, but for actually inducing metabolic change and mitochondrial change for women just doesn't hold up to the research. Finding Mastery is brought to you by our flagship mindset training course, finding your best. Anytime you feel the pull to reset, to zoom out, to refocus and ask, am I moving toward the person I want to become? It helps to remember this. Lasting change comes from training. Not resolutions, not short-term sprints, but deliberate practice of the skills that shape how we show up.

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healthier, longer. Get 15% off your 90-day subscription starter kit by heading to Faddy15.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout. That's Faddy, F-A-T-T-Y-15.com slash finding mastery. Start investing in your long-term health today. I love this. Yeah, this is, so you would support more of a high interval training. you know, whether it's hit or sit or re-hits or maybe open up some of those. And maybe take it a step further as like why. Why is that beneficial? Yeah.

So again, I'm talking about optimal, right? So any movement is good. So if you're like, I just have the capacity of going for a walk. Great. But in your walk, I want you to pick up the pace a couple of times. Maybe do the old school fart lick training where you're going light post to light post and then cruising, just to be able to implement a little bit more. intensity. Is that like a jog, a sprint, or just like a walk, a faster walk? Okay. And if you feel like jogging,

go for it. It's whatever brings up that intensity. Because optimally, we want to see women doing true high intensity interval training a couple of times a week. And that is also what we call sprint interval training. So we talk about sprint interval training. That's 30 seconds or less as hard as you possibly can go with two to three minutes recovery between our 20 to 30 seconds. Which is different than Tabata training, right? So you're having equal time on to equal time off? No. 20 to 30 seconds, full gas, two to three minutes. Two to three minutes. Okay. So high sprint, long recovery. Yes. Two to three minutes. And this is so that your whole body can recover to be able to

hit that intensity again. Yeah. And that full gas, this is like 85% to full max. Or you say, no, 110% go all the way. All the way. Let it rip. And most of the most. people like, oh, I could do four or five of those after two, they're like, oh, my God. That's right. Yeah. You also need to be thoughtful about when you are ready to sprint. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily mean running sprints.

You could be on a bike. You could be on a rower. You could use kettlebells. You could use battle ropes. Okay. You could do sled push. It's the intent of the intensity that we're talking about with that long recovery. And this is beneficial for women also beneficial for men, but you're saying specifically

specifically for women. Yeah, it works for men too, but for women, because we have this incredible increase in visceral fat, and that's what causes what they say the menopause is, so that accumulation of belly fat. Because there's a disconnect between, because estrogen is anti-inflammatory. So when we start losing estrogen and we have more inflammatory responses, and the liver is perceiving that as, oh, these free fatty acids, they need to be stored somewhere else. So instead of having free fatty acids, there's feedback from the liver to change the form of it to esterified fatty acids and stored as visceral fat.

If we have that really high, high intensity, it creates what we call myokines, which are feedback responses from the muscle, which also feed to the liver and say, no, no, we don't need you to change those free fatty acids because we need those free fatty acids at rest. So it causes an epigenetic response over time to stop storing visceral fat and to help degrade or downplay the amount of visceral fat that you have. Love this. And so this is one day a week, three days a week? One day. Five days is too much. Way too much. Yeah.

So no more than three, twice. So when we talk about the sprint interval, that's super high intensity, you could do one of those a week. And then you also have a little bit less intense called high intensity interval training. So this is like at 85% max? Yeah. Yeah. But you have to be specific with those intervals too. It's not like going to an F-45 class or because we've all been so conditioned to get out of one of those classes feeling super smashed and sweaty.

But it actually puts you in that zone three, which doesn't do anything. For men and women or just women? For men and women. For zone three. Yeah. Yeah. Which is zone three is like, it's hard. It's not overwhelming.

It's hard, but for an extended period of time. Right. And so it's too hard to be easy to create adaptations at an easier level. But it's too easy to be hard to cause the adaptations that we're trying to get from exercise. We call that the junk zone. It is the junk zone. It's a junk mile. Are you familiar with TBS toilet bowl syndrome?

No. Yeah. It's a funny phrase. I don't know if it's local here or whatever. But if you haven't been training for a while and you're deconditioned and you go hit it hard and then you get TBS toilet bowl syndrome. Like it's, you're so full of brain and kinase and lactic acid that you can't, like you can't sit down and get back up like that way too sore.

You blew it. You know, so you want to avoid that. You want to avoid that. Yeah. So you're really being super thoughtful about start where you are and intentionally increase the intensity in a way that's reasonable. Correct. Yeah.

And what is a good resource that you've found other than a local coach? what's a good resource that you point to for folks to be coached. So there's some really good apps out there. For women who are just starting their journey and trying to understand exercise and movement, Betty Rocker is really good because it's all at home. Might use a kettlebell or two, a lot of bodyweight stuff, getting you into the habit. She's some great programs.

Then when you're ready to step it up and you want to work with a friend or a partner or you want to go to a gym and you want to know what to do, but you don't have the funds or want to hire a personal trainer, then you can look at Haley Babcock's, Haley Happens Fitness. She does some co-labs with Wanda Wright, which is a learn-to-lift. You can do that at home or at a gym. She also has a series of power programs that starts a very beginner into very advanced, and it has the lifting and the specific sprint and hit stuff in there.

Same with nutrition. What's a resource that you trust that's important? For nutrition, that's a hard one because there's so many things out there. I probably would lean into a lot of the lifestyle medicine groups that are at the universities because they're really, really understanding what Mediterranean diet is, how to improve gut microbiome. I really do love the Zoe project and the Zoe podcast out of the UK. So, Tim Specter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great resource. Yeah, he was phenomenal. He was on the podcast. He was great. Yeah. Yeah, Zoe, Z-O-E. Yeah. Yeah, and it's his gut biome product as well.

Yep. So, yeah, yeah, okay, fantastic. And even, I mean, just going to their website to read everything that they have, it's a really good reason. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a difference between gut biome between men and women? That's up for debate, actually.

We see there is a little bit of a sex difference, but it's very influenced by environment. And then when you start having the sex hormone changes in perimenopausal women, that's when you really start to see a sex difference in the gut microbiome, even if you're living in the same place. Let's talk about hormones for just a moment, replacement therapy. You've done a nice, you introduced me to the idea of from hormone replacement therapy to menopause hormone therapy. Yeah.

And so I think somewhere early, I swallowed the idea, this was like, I don't know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I learned it. And unfortunately, my wife thought that it was best practice to avoid or not use hormones because of the risk for cancer and Anne. So can you speak to the best, the most current, the most sound research around hormones and therapy? Yeah. I want to give some context to the Women's Health Initiative, which is the big study that came out in the States it scared everyone off. I worked on that data set at Stanford. My mentor was one of the PIs,

so I understand that study and how it was misrepresented. So that study was initially designed to see if women who were well-past menopause would benefit from using hormones. And they did not. And that's what, we missed that slight nuance. That nuance was not played up in the press.

Although at the very same time, there was a study going on in the UK called the Million Women's Study. And they are looking specifically at perimenopausal women and gave them exogenous hormones, and they benefited. So now you have this discrepancy in the conversations where people are Commonwealth, so that's New Zealand, Canada, UK, other places in Europe, they're very pro-menopause hormone therapy. Everyone should be on it for all these benefits.

And then people in the States are like, oh, Women's Health Initiative causes cancer, all sorts of scary things. But then there's new research coming out. So if we can tease out those two groups and say, let's look at the research as it is now. We know for sure that the new formulations are relatively safe. There are nuances where you have to talk to your physician about your own risk factors for it. But we have transdermal, which is your gels and your patches. We have vaginal cream for estrogen.

We have progesterone that is micronized, and it's an oral or a transdermal. So we want to look for micronized because this is more what they call body identical or bioidentical. But the caveat there is because you are bringing in externally, either through the skin or you're ingesting it, it doesn't hit the receptors the same as your endogenous or natural production. And that's the part that also is not in the conversation. We talk about target tissue. So we see that when we are using exogenous hormones, so those are our external hormones, that the receptors don't get activated the same as the pulse from our ovarian hormones.

Because when you whack a whole bunch on at once, it is a flurry. It floods it. Yeah. And then it drops off. This is a little bit like, let's say, cocaine and serotonin. Yes. Right? Like you just flood it.

So there's a great feeling. But then there's not how it's supposed to work. Right. I got too much in the system and there's problems from that. Right. Yeah. And it's kind of the same thing. Yeah.

So we see from when we're tracking hormone and bioavailability, like with a patch where people are told they have to change it every two to two and a half days. It's because you have this massive uptick and then it starts to drop off. And if you don't change the patch, then you get to this significant lull and you have side effects and issues. Yeah. So this is the conversation that isn't being had. We do see from Lisa Mascone's work that she has a massive grant to look at the brain

during parimenopause. And initially she saw that when women are doing fMRI, so functional MRI for the brain, the estrogen receptors lit up. Like, I need estrogen, I need estrogen. That was perceived in the media as the brain needs estrogen all the time. So everyone should be on menopause hormone therapy. Not as this is a natural thing. The body is using what estrogen has. And there's going to be a time where these estrogen receptors kind of wind down.

We don't have the longitudinal research. yet. We also don't have lots of randomized controlled trials to show, is it beneficial for dementia or not? So we don't have those studies. Cardiovascular stuff, we don't have all the longitudinal data. So right now, when we're looking at the robust data, we know that it's very effective for helping with bone health. If you have a risk factor or low bone density, yes, menopause hormone therapy is one of the ways to go to prevent osteoporosis. If you are looking for mood and anxiety, yes. It is definitely a fantastic tool in the toolbox. Hot flashes, not so much.

We see that it can be beneficial, but also using something like a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor with cognitive behavior therapy is really effective because it's a serotonin response in the brain that is triggering the hypothalamus. So if we're dampening the serotonin receptors or using the mechanism of a re-uptake inhibitor, it helps with hot flashes. With traditional therapy. Yes, with traditional therapy. And I get backlash all the time because people think, oh, you're anti-hormone therapy.

I'm like, I'm not anti-hormone therapy. What I'm anti is everyone needing to be on it because it's a tool in a toolbox. It's very, very effective, but not everyone can be on it. Not everyone needs to be on it. But the rhetoric is that everyone should be on it. I'm waiting for the longitudinal research to show definitively that you need to be on it for brain health. Because if we think that this whole population before, it's like my mom, she didn't have access to it, and she doesn't have dementia, she's fine. Like you see this whole population of women that didn't have access to hormones.

And it's not just this previous population, but all the way back. So that begs the question of the story that you brought up earlier about testosterone is, do we really need to put women on a dose of hormones that, they stay on for life, or do we use it just to help with the symptomology as their body finds its new state? Is there benefit to starting earlier? There is some benefit. Vers, like, yeah, there is. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, so we see women with the APOE4 gene, which is a risk factor for Alzheimer's. The earlier they start, the greater the risk reduction is. So that's the only research we have with regards to dementia and Alzheimer's, is because it's a genetic factor. And that is supplementing with estradiol? Estradial, yeah. Estradile? Yeah. And so E2, as it would be called. And you can get that test done. It's relatively easy. I probably, my wife and I've been testing that for years.

Like it's on a lot of basic panels. Okay, that's good to know. And bone density too. Say it again, for bone density as well. But what it's not useful for, and there have been studies that come out and has shown this, is for weight management. So people think, oh, I'm not going to get the body composition change if I'm on menopause hormone therapy. So in the opposite of that is, I'm paramenopausal or I'm in metapause. I put on some weight. I should take hormone replacement therapy.

And you're saying that's not the reason to do it. Correct. You need to put in the lifestyle interventions to. Lift heavy weights. Do some sprinting. Eat well. Eat properly. Sleep like you are, you know, world-class lion that sleeps around most of the day if you possibly can.

Yeah. Okay. Is the research accurate that there's like this 10-year window for hormones? And then what do we do when we're 62 years old? Yeah. So we don't want to start it 10 years after menopause because we have all the data that shows that your body's gone through this wind-down process and the receptor's not very open to using exogenous hormones. It is an individual thing. So if you are eight years, you can still have a conversation. Why do you need it? What are some of the symptoms? Some women have hot flashes for the rest of their life, so they would benefit using it.

Oh, so there is not a 10-year window. That's been disproven. That is disproven. So if you started, let's say, for whatever reasons, you start at 50 years old, and you're taking a patch of estrogen with some progesterine, is usually how it goes, I think. And you get to be 60, and things are good. Like, you're like, okay, look, I've got my lifestyles in place, nutrition, sleep, fitness. I like the way I'm thinking about aging.

I'm interested in X, Y, and Z in life. I feel generally healthy. Do you stop? How do you know when that window, the benefits of that window have closed? Right now we're just going on anecdotal research because we don't have the long-term studies. That's why you say long-term studies. And part of the long-term studies is knowing when is the efficacy start to fade away. Okay.

Because you'll have a lot of women right now. are like, they're going to pry hormones out of my cold dead hands. Because it's been working really well. Because it's been working. Yeah. But this is even people who are physicians in that space. It's like that's a little bit irresponsible because we don't have the research to show on these existing formulations.

What are some of the long-term effects? Or how long should we be on it? So now it's an individual choice. So if you're that 60-year-old woman and you're feeling great, you could start going, should I be on it, should I not, do a chance to get off it? What should I do? So you could have that conversation. you could look to taper down.

You can taper down the dose and see how that makes you feel, or you just completely go off it. But you do have to be careful when you completely go off it because then it's just like no hormones at all. So there's a, you would want to titrate down. Yes. You would want to like ease into that transition. Exactly. Okay. Just like if you're using a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, you don't stop immediately.

100%. Right. Where are you on peptides? GLP1 peptides. Or the BC-157s. All of them. I am like, I'm trying to understand them because it feels like this is new world is emerging. It is.

And there's complexities. There's like these really wild benefits that seem to be happening. That's right. We don't know long term. And it's uncontrolled. It's unregulated. And so like, where are you? You're cautiously observant or you are actively engaging in research?

So if we look at the peptides that are being promoted for longevity and health, so you're seeing the TB 500s, the BPC 157s, all those named, like, letter named ones, I'm waiting for the research. But the caveat is I did try it because I had a really significant knee injury and everyone's like, you've got to get on the peptides, you've got to get on the peptides. I'm like, well, I can't get them in New Zealand. So I was on a trip and I tried it and I didn't feel like it did anything. And then retrospective of it is like, what were you doing? You don't know what you were injecting in yourself. There's no research behind it. But in the moment, I was so devastated by a torn hamstring and a messed up meniscus and not being able to walk.

I was like desperate. So I can see how it's gotten such. Like, I'm a scientist and I normally am very pragmatic about things. I want to see the research. I want to know where it's coming from. But in the moment of that, that, oh my gosh, what is going on? I'm completely injured. Everyone's telling me these things work.

I tried it. But when I start really looking at it, I can see how it's gotten such gravitas in the media, where you have small claims where the end might be super small of five men, a lot of rodent studies, and there's some efficacy, maybe not. We look at a molecular structure. Why would a gastric juice help? Like, why would a gastric peptide help? Because in the body, if gastric juice escapes, it's an acid that can cause a lot of harm.

So the body has a protective mechanism, which is the BPC-1.5. But we don't actually know if it works outside of that specific environment. So that's the research that needs to be done. So in the whole realm of things right now, it's marketing is stronger than science, except for the GOP ones. Yeah, there's a lot of research. They're coming on their third class. Yeah.

And those are looking really promising and interesting. Yeah. Okay. Use for the right reason. Yes. Use for the right reason. Yes. Not Grammy, microdosing.

And that's right. Yeah. Okay. What are the things that are absolutely still baffling you that you, you just wish that you could communicate with all sincerity and, you know, great potency that you just wish people would get this thing right? What are the things that are most important to you? Maintaining independence for everyone, men and women. And how do we do that by being able to be functional in our bodies? So we now are in an environment where we don't move. I had someone ask me once, oh, just a few weeks ago, why is it that you're saying that we need to do this strength training and this high intensity work and do all this stuff? When people 50 years ago didn't, and they're fine. I was like, well, 50 years ago, life was completely different. We didn't have garage door openers. We didn't have Netflix. We didn't have jobs in front of a computer that made us sit.

We had jobs where we had to get up and move around. And we had to go, like, press the fax button or something like that, you know? So there were things that allowed us to move incidentally more throughout the day. But now we see people are sitting all day. There's this massive episode of young kids not getting their peak bone density because they are not moving. And if you don't get to your peak bone density, then as you age, you're going to have more of a risk factor for osteoporosis. We see a decrease in muscle mass as well because they're not moving. So there's a higher incidence of sarcopenia.

So it's like, how are we going to maintain independence and not be a drain on health care, which in itself is a nightmare to navigate, to be able to be autonomous and be able to live our lives in a productive way through movement? And so all this idea about exercise being a chore, I look at it as it's independence and we want people to be muscle focus and muscle-centric because what do you have to gain when you're focusing on maintaining muscle? you have the opportunity to gain confidence, to gain autonomy, to gain independence, to gain health, to gain cognition. What do you stand to gain if you're focused on weight loss? Aesthetics, maybe, maybe not. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you get better cardio metabolic factors, but exercise does that.

We know that exercise helps with cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors. We know that muscle is a mass. massive glucose sink. So people were having issues with blood glucose control. We have them go for a walk after dinner to use their muscle to be able to pull glucose in without insulin. Is that a good two, is that a good zone two movement? It doesn't even have to be long.

It could be 10 minutes. Yeah. It's a best practice in our family. Like after we will just get up and kind of go for a quick little walk. Walk the dog or whatever. But it's like it just feels like it keeps the whole system. Exactly. You know, advanced.

if you were advancing. Yeah. Okay, so. I'm sorry. And the other B in my bonnet is AI. It's a B in your bonnet. Why is that? Because if you look at the existing AI that's out there, it's an echo chamber of male data.

So if we think about the way that the parameters are set and the human touch, it's still viewed through that male lens. And when we think about the outliers, as we talked about at the start, there's not a lot of research and robust research and women's health in general. And so those become the nuances in that. the outliers. So what's being read is this echo chamber, right? So the outcomes that are coming out for women still not appropriate. We see an incident with open evidence a few months ago, where it was telling women that no one should be on menopause hormone therapy because it causes cancer. It's been disproven. They're just pulling on old research. We see things like our wearables, right? And we see heart rate variability. For men, it's fine. It's actually following that

physiology. But for women, we have a beat-to-beat difference. It's a sex difference. We also see there's a change in heart rate variability over the menstrual cycle. As soon as you have progesterine that comes up, your heart rate variability goes down. And wearables will read that as you're getting sick, you're highly stressed, you're not recovered. How ought women be able to use some of the monitoring data, the wearables, for heart rate variability? Finding Master is brought to you by AG1. Summer is here, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere. You can just feel it, though. Days are longer, pace picks up, and there's this sense of momentum that comes with the season. For me, that also means more travel. It's more early

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Again, that's drinkag1.com slash finding mastery. I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to switch on my mind, to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my morning. That's always in my control. That's always in your control, too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. The best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do.

So just head over to finding mastery.com slash morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to findingmastery.com slash morning to get your morning mindset routine. Trens over time. What does that mean? So you have to look at across the month what's happening and so you can compare month to month so that you can see, oh, well, if you're regularly cycling, you can see where you're in your follicular phase, where you might have ovulated, where your progesterone came up, you're going to see that it's normal to have disrupted sleep. It's normal to have an elevation in your core temperature. How does that affect you, though, is the question.

And we know that if you are having poor sleep, it's because progesterone has increased your core temperature. So maybe we look at doing some cooling mechanisms before sleep so that you can get into a deep restful sleep. If we knew what you knew, how would we be better partners to women? Let's call it spouses. Yeah. So I've talked to my husband about that because he's behind the scene,

so he's heard everything and has learned a lot. And he said that one of the biggest things is listening and not trying to fix. Because whenever you try to fix, that's when things go wrong because it's a different lived experience for a man versus a woman. And I even find that with my 13-year-old daughter.

I used to be like, let's fix this. And then I'm like, wait a second, no, because now I'm trying to be her lived experience where if she vents, then I listen. And then later she'll circle around and say, can you help me with this? That's the same with partners and spouses. It's like, don't try to fix in the moment.

Just listen. be supportive, know that you are there for her, or if you're a woman with your male partner, you're there for him. And then later it'll suck around to be a fix. Because I think we have this, we need to immediately do something right away instead of going, this is what's happening. This is a lived experience. It's a little bit different than how you were a couple of months ago.

Let's figure out why. If we knew what you knew, how would we be a better coach to, and I'm thinking athletics or sport to a young athlete, to a, call it like the college-aged maybe pro athlete, and then the advanced, you know, like 30, 40-year-old that's really also on the world stage. Like, how would we coach differently? And I don't know if you'd bifurcate those three in any way. I would. You would.

I would. Especially when we're looking at our young teenage athletes. Unfortunately, the default, again, is the little boy or the coaching. like we would coach boys. But puberty is a massive differentiator. We see biomechanical changes in girls. We have our hips are widening, our center of gravity drops. Our shoulder girdle widens to accommodate for the wider hips.

Body composition changes. We have poor core strength and elongation of our peripheral, so our arms and our legs. And you see that with girls who used to be very confident in the sport and running around and all of a sudden they feel very ungangly and they don't want to participate in sport. So if they are in a sport and they're being coached the same way that boys are, one, they turn off

because the way that we coach girls isn't to pit them one against each other, like we do with boys, for example, soccer and corner kicks. Go, go, go, go, go. Girls are like, uh-uh. But if you have three girls and no one's singled out, it works. We talk about warm up.

We want to warm up the posterior chain and really work on cutting motion. in girls to prevent ACL injury. There's a overwhelming ACL issue for young girls. 12-year-olds having surgery. And we know that it's because it's poor posterior chain strength. So that's your glutes and your hamstrings. Girls tend to be more quadamont.

They haven't been taught how to run again with the new mechanics, how to land, how to do cutting motions. So we have to look at the functionality. How are we coaching our girls for their sport with regards to function? So we do function and functional drills. then we're adding in the speed and everything. We had to bring it right back to make sure that their bodies

are resilient enough to withstand the training where boys don't have that biomechanical change so you can keep loading and loading and loading. The functionality can also be in the weight room. I'm not saying girls shouldn't go in the weight room. Of course they should. At what age?

Any age, really. It's about adding load effectively and not, it used to be, oh, you don't want a weight lift because you'll damage the epithel plates and stop growth. That's not true. No, it's not. It's clear. And that's for men and women.

For men and women. Boys and girls. Yeah, exactly. It's creating a very positive environment that's not gender. Because gender is very real when you're talking about a gym space, right? So you have to make it a non-toxic environment. And you can do that through the coaching mechanisms. Like how are you fostering a positive environment and leaning into the way a girl interacts in her environment versus the way a boy interacts in her environment? So I think if the coaching practices, at that base level were different than the rest of it would be easier too. There you go. And would you coach an elite male athlete and an elite female athlete fundamentally differently? Or are they at the elite level, the 0.05, like the true kind of tip of the spear, are they more similar in your mind? Yeah, they are. The reason I asked you that is I answered the question just like that at a ESPNW conference.

I was like, well, what did I just step into? Yeah. You know, so the question, I was on the panel, the question was the elite level, how do you train differently? And I said, actually, they're more similar than disillard. They're more alike male, female, than the other 99%. And I said, there's some obvious differences. But they are more similar than distantly.

And it was like, maybe I shouldn't have said it. I don't know. Target on your back now. It was like, what this was like, I don't know, 12 years ago. and I'm having, I still from the, like, I have a hard time understanding how I'm off there. So hearing you say it, I go, okay, that's interesting. Like, what does that mean to you? So it means that you're not looking at the gender, you're looking at the individual.

Yeah. Right. So if we're looking at the top of the top, like you have the women's tour de France rider and the man toad de France rider and they're both on the same team, just women's team, men's team. Would you train them differently? a little bit. You have to look at recovery, you have to look at training stress score,

you have to look at intensities, and you dial that in knowing that women can work at a higher threshold of their VO2 for a longer period of time. So you would change the thresholds for them, but the actual threshold work out how much time you're spending

wouldn't necessarily be different. It's just looking at the individual. Menstrual cycle come into play? Yeah, absolutely. Are you changing the training according to menstrual cycle? Maybe not. Because at that elite level,

they're dialed into how they feel so they can say, you know what, on this day, I feel awful. But I'm going to have to race on that day. So let's look at some interventions to help level the playing field. They're more in tune to their body. Yeah. So when you get to the lower tiers, they've lost that or they haven't learned it yet. They haven't figured that piece out. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then so how would you coach the NCAA or pro that's in their 20s, you know, in that age, really? Yeah. So this would be taking account hormone profile. Are they on oral contraceptive or not? Are they naturally cycling? PCOS endometriosis.

All of that has an effect. Yeah, there's a difference there for sure. Yeah. So you're looking at mood, you're looking at injury rate, you're looking at attrition. Like, are they showing up? What kind of training status are they putting in? There was a study that I found really fascinating

where they blinded menstrual cycle and status to the coaches. and they, athletes knew, of course, but didn't tell anyone. And the coaches were asked to rate the performance in that training session for three months, and then they matched it up. And when the rowers had an RPE of lower than five, the coaches didn't know that, and rated themselves as not doing very well because of menstrual cycle-related symptoms, it matched up with what the coaches saw. So there is something there about following menstrual cycle and listening and understanding that it does have an effect.

From a molecular level, yeah, we know, but when we're talking about the whole body, there's so many other factors, but actually listening and knowing your pattern is so important. So being able to explain that to someone who's in their 20s why it's important to track your hormone profile, not so that we can keep tabs on you, but so we know when we can push you and when to pull back, but also if you have to be on on the day that you don't feel so great, we have all these tools in the toolbox. That we have practiced well in advance to level that playing field. Yeah, very cool.

Yeah. How do you think male coaches can become better? Where do they go to study and learn if they happen to be coaching a female athlete? Like, where's a good resource to invest in that? Obviously, read your books, take your courses, and first, please point to the best resource for that. Yeah, so what I'm finding is that the younger, the coach, the more these conversations are happening. So menstrual cycle isn't taboo so much, and they're able to talk to their athletes, even like high school coaches and stuff, because it becomes a conversation amongst the girls. So the very first resource is in yourself, not being afraid, because it's out there.

If we start looking at other coaching resources, we're seeing more and more coming in through the IOC. They have different diplomas for sport and sport coaching for the female athlete. The Australian used to be the Australian Sports Institute of Sport, which has kind of been filtered, but you can still go to the website. And they have some really good stuff about coaching the female athlete as well. And then just listening to your athletes. That's going to guide you too. It was a cool. I don't know if the trend is.

still vibrant, but when I first learned about it, it was a handful of years ago, the red dot, have you, like, I was like, oh, that is so good. Yeah. Just, and the red dot or the red sticker, I'm not sure exactly what it's called, but it was with some athletes I was working and I said, what is that? And they said, oh, I'm just, I'm in my menstruation cycle. And so, like, I was like, oh, cool. Like, like, it's, it was almost a very cool flip badge of honor, like, that's right.

Yeah. You know, and I'm, and I'm absolutely, you know, killing it. Like, I'm great. So it was very cool. Yeah. Is that still happening on a regular basis? I don't know. We're seeing more people use it as like whenever you show up to practice, your coach is like, how is

everyone doing today? Anyone injured? Anyone highly stressed trying to do the wellness check? And some of the questions are anyone on their period, anyone having menstrual cycle symptoms, it's becoming part of the health check. There you go. Which is really cool. That's great.

Yeah. Yeah. Good. All right. Listen, you are a wealth of knowledge. I am super grateful to have your science and your astute explanation of complicated science in simple ways in the world. It's helped me a lot. And this is a real gift to be able to have you here.

So thank you for being here. And thank you for helping me be just a little bit better in my approach. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's been great. And what's the best resource for folks for you? If you go to our website, the Dr. Stacey Sims.com, you can sign up for our. newsletter and we send it out every two weeks has a little bit snippets of science that's been

translated also you can see all the stuff I'm doing yeah and um when's the next book a manuscript is due in September yes you are writing oh fantastic you're writing two right now selina and I are writing one that is longevity for active women because exercise creates epigenetic changes right great and one for the puberty set oh exactly what we just talked Right. Yeah, that's great. I was really, so this is kind of a sad, not a sad, a side tangent, but working with a group in Australia that's equivalent to Sephora in the States. It's called Mecca. And they have a nonprofit called Empower. It's about empowering girls and women throughout everything.

We partnered to get all of the next-gen curricula about coaching girls through puberty into all of the Australian and New Zealand curricula. So that launched on the first of April. Well done. I'm very excited. When do we get it in the States? I know. It's not a nationalized program here is the problem. That's right. You can go state to state. Have to rally to get state to state to state. Oh, geez. Or if there's an organization, a corporation that wants to fund it. Yeah. And I guess you'd have to take it through this. You still have to go through the state, though, through the school system. or yeah yeah listen awesome thank you for making a dent it's it's great to meet you and thank you for the research that you're you're bringing to the table you're welcome thanks next time on finding mastery

we're joined by ross zabo one of the leading voices in youth mental health education wellness director at geffen academy at ucLA founder of the human power project an author of behind happy faces and a kid's book about anxiety how many young people look like they're doing just fine while quietly struggling beneath the surface. Ross shares why parents often miss the signs, why schools need to teach mental health the same way they teach physical health, and how we can give kids the skills to navigate life before they reach a crisis point. Join us for this crucial conversation on Wednesday, July 22nd at 9 a.m. Pacific only on Finding Mastery. All right, thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating

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If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at finding mastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community. Share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your health care providers.

Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.