ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: Change how you exercise during menopause | Dr Stacy Sims

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Navigating the twists and turns of menopause can be a challenge. Hormone fluctuations bring about significant changes in your body - including how it responds to exercise. So, how can you adjust your workout routine to best support your body through this change? Exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims tells us how we can optimise fitness during this unique stage of life. 🥑 Make smarter food choices. Become a member a zoe.com - 10% off with code PODCAST 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ 📚 Books from our ZOE Scientists: The Food For Life Cookbook by Prof. Tim Spector Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Free resources from ZOE: Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition  Gut Guide - for a healthier microbiome in weeks Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Listen to the full episode here

Hello and welcome to Zoey Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing fitness during menopause. Navigating the twists and turns of menopause can be a challenge. Hormone fluctuations bring about significant changes in your body, including how it responds to exercise. So how can you adjust your workout routine to best support your body through this change? Exercise physiologist Dr. Stacey Sims tells us how we can optimize fitness during this unique stage of life.

When we're looking at perimenopause, women age very differently during this time period because it depends on how the ratios of estrogen progesterone start to shift. Because when we're in our reproductive years we have primarily a regular cycle every 28 to 40 days and you have times when estrogen progesterone are low and then you have ovulation, estrogen progesterone come up, you don't get pregnant, you shed the lining, so you have this cyclical pattern. And your body's really used to a certain amount of progesterone and estrogen. When we get into perimenopause, we start to have more and more anovulatory cycles. So if we're not ovulating, we don't produce progesterone.

We're still producing estrogen, but because we don't have progesterone, the ratios of those two hormones are shifting. Some weeks where you have more estrogen and it would be akin to a normal menstrual cycle. But when you don't ovulate and you don't have the counter of progesterone to estrogen, that changes the way estrogen functions in the body. Estrogen acts on a woman, like testosterone acts on a man when we're talking about lean mass. We know that lean mass is one of the first things to go, because there's a lot of women who say, you know what, I feel like I woke up squishy overnight.

I don't know what happened. I've been doing the same things and all of a sudden I'm squishy. It is really because when we look at estrogen, estrogen is really responsible for stimulating the satellite cell or that very basic muscle cell to grow and develop. It's also responsible for how strong two proteins come together.

They're called actin and myosin and they cause a muscle contraction. Myosin and actin bond together and shorten the fibers and that's what causes your muscle contraction. Estrogen is responsible for how strong myosin attaches to actin. So when we start to have different levels of estrogen, that combination of actin and myosin is thrown off. So we don't have as much strength because we can't stimulate the muscle fibers to contract as strong as they used to. So this is why women feel I'm not very strong anymore. Estrogen is really responsible for our strength and power and

our muscle and we're losing it. Well, what do we do? We need to look at lifting heavy and people are very hesitant in this age bracket. I know because all of us grew up with the Jane Fonda cardiovascular don't touch weights because you're going to bulk up. But it is so important for resistance training. It is the big rock here when we're talking about building muscle. But we can't go in and do like 10 reps of something or 15 reps of something because that's not the kind of stimulus that's going to allow us to build muscle. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a central nervous system response. So if we think about muscle contraction it's all driven by a nerve response. So if we are looking at going to the gym or not even to the gym to start off because we're not

looking at a training block here or not looking at a short burst of time, we are looking for the rest of our lives. So when we're talking about lifting heavy it's relative. If you're not used to lifting and you've never done it before then I don't want you to go to the gym tomorrow and try to deadlift 50 or 60 kilos. Right? That's just gonna set you up for injury. It's very intimidating for women who've never been in the gym to do that. What I do want you to do is I want you to learn to move. I want you to do mobility. I want you to learn how to squat properly. I want you to learn how to do some single leg deadlifts or standing on a single leg.

I want you to learn how to step off a box and it doesn't have to be a high box, could be a stair and land properly. I want you to learn how to move first. And you can work with a physio who can look at your sticky points. And this is also the time where you have an up current of soft tissue injury and joint pain

because of the way estrogen interacts with these parts of the body as well. So the first and foremost is people need to learn to move well. Once you know how to move well well then we can start adding load. So by adding load it is doing an exercise so I'll take deadlift because that's picking the bar off off the ground so it's akin to picking groceries up to move. You want to be able to do three reps, so that's picking it up one down two down

three down, and do that five times. But by the fifth time you do that you might only be able to do one with proper form. That's what we're after. We're looking for fatigue. We're looking for that to failure with good form because what we're doing there is we're telling our nerves that we have to recruit a certain amount of muscle fibers quickly to be able to lift that load. So if we're having the central nervous system come in and say I need to be able to recruit more muscle fibers, I need to activate all these muscle fibers, they all have to coordinate, they all have to be able to contract the same time to

lift this heavy load Then we also get the stimulus for building more muscle because we need more muscle to lift that load so instead of estrogen telling muscle to grow and instead of estrogen telling myosin and actin to come together and Be really strong to lift this load. We have a nerve response grow and instead of estrogen telling myosin and actin to come together and be really strong to lift this load, we have a nerve response. So this is how we can build muscle and strength without the hormonal influence. The key thing you're, you're saying here, I think, is that you need to be really focused on something that is really heavy.

So you're describing something where, you know, you lift up the equivalent of these heavy grocery bags, which, you know, might be your deadlift. You're saying you do three of that, that already was hard. You have a little rest, you do it again, that's getting harder. You wanna be able to do that five times. By the time you end up to the fifth try, like you can't even do it three times.

That's almost your test of whether this thing is heavy. And that is a sign that it is really heavy because, you know, otherwise, you know, that's not very many times you're lifting. And what you're saying is that is really important because suddenly the loss of, of, of estrogen means that you did have these hormones that were really supporting, you know, your muscle maintenance and suddenly that's gone. And so unless you're doing this, you're going to basically be losing muscles where in fact,

I think you're saying you really want to gain them for the benefits for the rest of your, in this sort of perimenopause and menopause state. Is that right, Stacey? Yes, and it is incredibly difficult to build muscle. So one of the biggest myths out there is that if I lift like that, Stacey, I'm going to get super bulky. That is almost impossible if you are perimenopause into postmenopause. So if we look at like Train by Joan or

Train with Joan, she's a woman who's very inspirational in this space. She was almost obese when she's in her 60s, pre-diabetic, not healthy at all. Her daughter has been a personal trainer for most of her adult life. So she got to this crossroads and she turned to her daughter and said, I don't want to go on medication. I need you to make me healthy. So now you fast forward 15 years and she is deadlifting on a regular basis 80 to 100 kilos. She's bench pressing 50 and she looks amazing and she's super strong but she is not bulky. If you are really wanting to put that bulk on you have to do no cardiovascular work. You have to be in the gym for hours at a time every day, and you have to eat a lot. And I don't think women listening to this podcast for most general population is

going to put that time and commitment in. You're saying that for a lot of people, there's actually a concern that, that actually I'm going to look in this way. I don't want to look at so you you put all these muscles on and you're saying, truthfully, it's not much of a concern. Exactly. It's driven by a lot of our sociocultural constructs. If you're going to go join a gym and you're a woman and you walk in and you say, hey, I want to get fit,

I want to join your gym. The person who's taking you through the membership person is going to say, first, how much weight do you want to get fit. I want to join your gym. The person who's taking you through the membership person is going to say, first, how much weight do you want to lose? And this is the list of our group classes. And there's the cardiovascular equipment. If you're a guy who comes in and says, hey, I want to get fit and I want to get healthy. What can you do for me? They'll say, OK, well, how much weight do you want to put on, muscle-wise, right? And here's the trainer, if you want a trainer, and here's the squat rack and all

the weights and go through all the hammer strength equipment. It's just an automatic thing. So we're conditioned to think that women need to gravitate to cardio to get the fit, toned body that they want. And men should be in the weight room which is an automatic barrier when someone like me goes in and says hey wait no women need to be in the weight room we need to be lifting we're not going to get bulky we're not going to turn into the Hulk but it is so incredibly important for longevity it's incredibly important for you know glucose control because the more muscle you have the better you have blood sugar control. We see how it changes the diversity of our gut microbiome,

so it improves brain health. And yes, you're going to look better. You're going to get some definition, you're gonna be stronger. And it's just so important to break that sociocultural idea that women shouldn't be in the weight room, because they're delicate flowers.

I think we get a lot of questions from our listeners, actually, men and women saying that the gym is really intimidating and particularly they're thinking about the idea of going over to like the place where the weights are, which by the way, I understand because I think it's quite intimidating when I go into somewhere new because you can see these people hanging around with like Enormous muscles and like that feels quite scary as opposed to going and like going on some sort of group class or treadmill Or something like that. And so I think that is That is definitely true What is your advice for anyone who is maybe?

And I think you already talked about first of all learning to move. But let's say they've done that part, but they're maybe still feeling intimidated about the idea of going to the gym because they feel like they're not at that, maybe they don't feel good enough about themselves and they're not confident. What's your advice? The next step forward for that is a lot of women through COVID found the love for working out at home, right? So if we're looking at someone who doesn't have a history of lifting, wants to get more involved in it, learning how to move, then there are plenty of apps and online

coaching and programs that we can turn to. If you want the group dynamic, you can go to something like Les Mills because they have strength development classes on demand or virtual classes that you can join. Then you can also look at someone like Haley Happens Fitness where she is specific to training women 40 plus from beginners all the way through. So there's some really fantastic resources as that step to be in the comfort of your own home getting direction and not having to have a lot of equipment. You can have a dumbbell and a kettlebell,

or you can have a backpack that you're putting home things in to add some weight. So there's definitely that stepping stone to do the resistance training without actually having to front up and say, oh gosh, I need a trainer to go into the weight room, kind of as my guardian into the weight room kind of as my guardian in the weight room to show me what to do. I mean I've been in a

weight room since I was 16 for my sporting history but I too can walk into a foreign place and knowing what the gym culture is and walk back and feel intimidated and I am way older than 16 now, let's put it that way. So I completely understand that fear is real. But it's understanding how your body moves, becoming confident in your movements and looking at these stepping stones of how do I incorporate this resistance training in if I know I'm not going to go to the gym. And one of the good things about COVID

is it opened up this whole parameter of how am I going to do my exercises when I can't get to a gym or I'm locked down and I can't get outside. So there's an influx of really fantastic resources out there. I think that's fantastic. I know, you know, the one thing I've also heard a number of other guests talk about exercise outside of this space talk about is, you know, often, you know, getting a trainer even for a short period of time for somebody who's new to this can be really great because it helps you to understand the things

you're describing about how to move, gives you the confidence, can help you to understand what to do. And certainly at a personal level, I would say, that was sort of transformational for me as someone who had never set foot in a gym, basically until they were probably 40, that really enabled that transition,

which I would have found very difficult otherwise. But of course it has a cost, but I think as you're thinking about what you're describing, this is for the rest of your life and the impact that it has on your health. I think that's also something potentially to think about. Yeah, I mean, I've done some work with lower socioeconomic classes where there are women who are experienced the same thing.

Like menopause is the aging thing. It doesn't discriminate. We have women who are wanting to get healthy, but they cannot afford to go to a gym. They have kids, so they don't have childcare. But we can go to a playground. We can go to a playground and we can use the equipment there as some resistance training You have monkey bars for pull-ups you have Cargo nets for being able to pull yourself up and over you have

the seesaw that you can do with your kid you can use it as kind of a Jumping squat so there's lots of things that we can do on a playground that incorporates the physical activity that we want that is also free. Thank you for listening to today's recap episode. I want to take 30 seconds to talk about something that's not talked about enough. Menopause. Over half the people on the planet experience perimenopause and menopause, yet symptoms are often misunderstood or dismissed. At ZOE we're moving menopause research forward. We recently conducted the largest study of menopause and nutrition in the world and our study showed that two-thirds of

perimenopausal women reported experiencing over 12 symptoms. Symptoms like weight gain, memory problems and fatigue. The good news is, the results also show that changing our food habits may reduce the chance of having a particular menopause symptom by up to 37% for some women. We know how important it is for you to be able to take control of your own health journey. So we've created the Menoscale Calculator to help you score the frequency and impact of your menopause symptoms. Go to zoe.com slash menoscale to get your score. The calculator is free and only takes a couple of minutes.

And by the way, we've spoken about perimenopause and menopause many times since starting the Zoey Science and Nutrition podcast. To find these episodes, simply search Zoey Menopause in your favourite podcast player.