Dr. Stacy Sims
Appearances
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So when we start losing the higher doses and pulses of estrogen, and we have more and more anovulatory cycles, so we don't necessarily produce progesterone, every system gets affected, specifically bone and muscle. So we'll have women who are complaining about waking up feeling squishy overnight and they can't even open like the jar of pickles because they don't have the strength.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And they're like, what's happened? That's an estrogen effect. Because when you look at how estrogen affects skeletal muscle and the feedback mechanism for strength and power development, it's in every part. It's on the satellite cell to develop more muscle fibers. It's on the nerve endings to be able to say, yep, let's create a really fast nerve conduction mechanism.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
across the gap junction to be able to fire a lot of fibers to create a strong contraction. And it's also part of the contractile proteins itself to be able to grab together to create a strong contraction. So when you lose estrogen, you're losing the impetus for those three main points of strength and lean mass development. So when I start explaining this, people are like, shit, now what do I do?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
It's like, okay, well, now we want to look at a nervous system response. Because if we can find an external stress that's going to create the same cascade feedback mechanisms that estrogen did, then we can keep progressing. And that is strength training. But it's not lightweight, going to failure type stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
We have to take a page out of the power-based work where we're looking at zero to six reps. We're doing heavy loads. We have lots of recovery between those loads because we're trying to really stimulate the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system to say, you know what?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
I've got to have a lot of muscle fibers and I need to be able to recruit them quickly to have a very strong contraction to withstand that stress and load. So now we can build lean mass, strength and power without estrogen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So when we're looking at perimenopause, we have to look at all the systems that are being affected and we have to look at that external stress to apply to the body to create the adaptations that we want. So when we look at it, it's all about the intensity and the quality of the work. It's not about volume.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So like I said earlier, where zone two is not really appropriate for women, at this point, it doesn't really do much for women at all. Because when you take away our sex hormones, we're really endurant. We're really fatigue resistant. We burn a lot of fat. So we have to look at how do we polarize it. We want to do some true high intensity work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So that's 30 seconds or less, as fast and hard as you can go with two to three minutes recovery to have full recovery to be able to do it again. Might do that two or three times. Or we do true high intensity interval training.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And that is a little bit lower intensity and a little bit longer, but you're still really polarizing where when you go to do your interval, you're doing it at the intensity you're supposed to. And the recovery, you're fully recovering so that you can hit that intensity again. So the three big things there are proper strength training. and the intensity of your sprint or high intensity work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So like I said, it's not a lot of volume, it's the quality. Because each one of those factors affects the body in a way that will cause positive change. So strength, like I said, you know, you're going to get that central nervous system response.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
to build bone and muscle when we're looking at that high intensity interval training which is not full intensity but maybe 80 percent this is causes more of a cardiovascular and a blood glucose improvement and then when we're doing that high high intensity sprint interval work It causes a cascade of what we call myokines.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah. So I started as an athlete and an academic and an academic in sports science and nutrition. And all the things that we are learning in class didn't really apply to me as an athlete or my teammates. So that really started the question of what are we doing? And as you started digging in, realizing that there really wasn't very much research on women.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So these are little hormone and feedback molecules that go from the skeletal muscle to the liver and the storage area of body fat and says, you know what? We don't need to store body fat. We don't need to take these circulating molecules. fatty acids and make them visceral fat. We need to use them and store them in really active tissue.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So the aspect of doing those three things is the mainstay during perimenopause is to benefit body composition, our metabolic health, our cardiovascular health, and then most importantly, our brain health. Because if we're doing strength training and creating neural pathway plasticity, we're doing lactate training to improve brain metabolism.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Then again, we are able to support the brain when it is starting to lose the receptor sensitivity of estrogen, progesterone, because we don't have those sex hormones anymore.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
When you look at those classes, it feeds into the mentality that we've grown up with where you have to feel smashed, absolutely smashed and burnt out when you finish a class to make it worth anything because it's about the, quote, calorie burn and the smash aspect. I think Orange Theory even has splat points or something like that, trying to navigate how hard it is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
But the length of those classes and the speed at which those movements are done is really a precursor for injury with how fast the movements are underweight. And you can't really recover well enough to hit that 80 plus percent for your interval. Because if you're looking at a 45 to an hour long class, you cannot hold high intensity for that long. That puts you in moderate intensity.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Now, the problem with moderate intensity is our bodies, when we're perimenopausal, are already under a significant amount of sympathetic stress. So this means we're tired but wired. We have a really difficult time coming down from that anxiety and that boredom. awakeness, flight or fight sensation, and moderate intensity perpetuates that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
When we look at what it does from a metabolic standpoint, it doesn't have a post-exercise response that true high intensity does of increasing growth hormone and testosterone that drops cortisol. So when we're doing this moderate intensity stuff, we end up with a higher circulating amount of cortisol, which becomes our new baseline. And we don't get any of the metabolic change.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
We're not going to see a dissipation of our minnow bellies or visceral fat. We're going to see an increase in that. We're going to be completely tired all the time, which means we are not sleeping well. And if you can't sleep well, you're not going to invoke any change. So when we're looking at that moderate intensity work that people feel is high intensity, I feel like it's such a disservice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And even when you're looking at the textbooks and textbook pictures of representation, they're all male, male bodies. So that was so many decades ago. And ever since then, I've been really trying to dig into both research and the application of research to get women to understand that their bodies are different. We have different physiology from birth. We have hormone fluctuations.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And what makes me angry about these classes is that they are really marketing to women 40 plus. And I'm like, this is just not appropriate. These women are coming, wanting help. They want to do some strength training. And the protocols you're throwing in there are specific for men. And you're not looking at what's happening when women hit 40 onwards. So when we talk about true high intensity,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
We look at taking a page out of High Rocks or CrossFit where they're doing every minute on the minute for four minutes and then one minute full recovery. And you might do two or three rounds of that. And that is true high intensity work because each minute you're going to go as hard as you can. It might be 40 or 50 seconds, 20 seconds to get to the next one.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Then you do that four times in a full minute to like come down. Maybe it's two minutes to come down. Repeat that again and maybe a third time. So all up, it's 20 minutes of work. And that is true high intensity work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
It wouldn't necessarily make them worse off as you're looking at it, comparing to someone who's just doing low intensity work all the time. But what happens in those classes and low intensity or sitting around is there's a really high incidence of being skinny fat. So that means you might look lean, but you don't have a lot of really good quality lean mass and you have low bone density.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
There are so many women in the past about six months that have come saying, I don't understand what's going on. I got my DEXA scan and I go to these classes. I go to boot camp. I go to Les Mills. I go to Orange Theory. I'm osteopenic and I have a very high amount of visceral fat. I'm like, okay, well, there's two things. One, you're probably not eating enough.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And two, you're putting yourself under this moderate intensity load almost every day and Your body has no chance to recover and polarize and understand that it needs to step up its game to be able to answer the challenge of exercise because it's not getting the feedback to actually adapt. It's getting the feedback to stay tired but wired and in a stressed state like you have to run from a bear.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Sure. Yeah, no. I get this in too. Because of the weighted vest. So if we look at the weighted vest, that changes your biomechanics. Because like I was saying earlier, our center of gravity is down in our hips. So if you're putting a weighted vest on, you're putting all the weight up here, which is not where our center of gravity is. So that changes your biomechanics.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And this is why you see a lot of women are like, oh, I've got a tendon issue. I've got an Achilles issue, which then develops into plantar fascia problems. It would be better to get on that treadmill without the weighted vest, but holding two heavy dumbbells and trying to do farmer's carry five minutes on, two minutes off on that incline.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So you're getting strength, high intensity work, and then some recovery in between.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And these affect every system of the body. And we respond to training differently than men. We respond to stress differently than men. And the more we dig into it, the more we realize there's a lot of research to be done. So the research that we do have, I'm really adamant about getting it out so women can be empowered to understand what is going on.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah. So polarized means that you go top end capacity and recovery is really low. So when you first start doing high intensity work, you might find you need more recovery in order to hit that top end capacity. And that's fine. Women underestimate recovery all of the time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So polarized means that you're staying out of that middle zone so you can go super hard when you need to and you recover super easy. So we look at the moderate intensity stuff as it's too hard to be easy and it's too easy to be hard to invoke change. Stay out of that. You want to be hard to invoke change and you want to go easy to recover so that you can go hard again.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Bare minimum, we see two sprint interval sessions or one sprint and one high intensity session and three lifting sessions a week. But you can combine the sprint and the lifting for one day in the gym. So you might do lower body posterior chain work. We're doing hip thrusts and deadlifts. And then we finish off with some sprints on the bike. And then you're done and dusted.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Or maybe you do box jumps instead of sprints on the bike as your high-intensity work, and then you're done and dusted. So like I was saying earlier, it's about the quality of the work that you're doing rather than the volume of the work that you're doing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
When we look at how bones respond to stress, we need multidirectional stress to invoke actual bone regeneration and increasing our bone density. Jumping does that because you're landing and it's complete... stress in all the different planes that go up through the skeletal system, which then causes a cascade response of I need to be stronger through the entire bone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
If we look at just running, it's very uni-planar and it doesn't cause that multi-directional stress. We look at walking, it doesn't either. Strength training does, but not to the extent of jump training. So if people can't jump, strength training is going to help improve bone density, especially the heavier work that you should be doing. But just plain running doesn't do it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
You can do that. When we're looking specifically at building bone, it's a landing, not how we've been taught with soft knees, but absorbing the impact through our bones. We're not jumping really high.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
We might be on a low box and jumping off as a depth jump and landing kind of flat footed hard or doing pogo, pogo jumping where you're flat footed and absorbing the impact through your skeletal system. And it only takes 10 minutes, three times a week at the most to invoke change.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Because face it, we put as much work into our training and we take time out of our day to really work on our health and well-being. So it should be appropriate for us. We shouldn't be fighting the battle against our own bodies because of protocols based on male data.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
but you're not getting the impact from the ground. Because our body moves when it hits the ground, the ground doesn't move. Whereas the trampoline, it moves. So you're not getting the same kind of reactive force through the skeletal system.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
If I were to use the buzzwords of fasting, I would say you do your 12-hour overnight fast. That's what you do for fasting. But when we look at it from a hormonal response, reducing stress, improving body composition, brain health, all the things that people want with fasting, for women, we need to eat within a half an hour of waking up because we have a cortisol peak and we need to drop that peak.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
We also see from circadian research that fueling throughout the day improves sleep, but it also improves the feedback for increasing lean mass development and dropping body fat. So when we have a big hole of no food and what happens for the most part is women will start a fast and they'll try to hold their fast till noon and then they end up working out fasted.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And the brain, especially the hypothalamus, is like, what's happening here? There's no fuel for this exercise. I'm going to start breaking down lean mass because I need some amino acids for some fuel. And I can't support really metabolically active tissue when there's no fuel coming in.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So when we start looking at what's the best way to counter the body comp changes that are happening in perimenopause... train smart, eat. Eat during the day. Stop eating after dinner so you don't have nighttime snacks and making sure that two to three hours before you go to bed was your last meal so that you can get into a deep, reparative sleep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And I know sleep is fleeting for lots of people in perimenopause. So we need to work on the sleep hygiene and maybe it's adding supplements like apigenin and L-theanine. Maybe it's cycling progesterone to help with sleep so that you do get into that deep parasympathetic activation so that your body knows that it can change body comp.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Because you cannot create change without enough calories and without good sleep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So that's my mission across the lifespan is to get women from puberty all the way through postmenopause up to speed about what their bodies are doing and how they can modify or alter what they're doing to get the best benefits.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Absolutely. And from a physiological perspective, women have two areas in the hypothalamus that is very sensitive to nutrient density. The two areas are the arc areas, and we have what we call cispeptin neurons that get expressed. When we don't have enough food coming in, we don't have all those pepton neurons being expressed. So we have a hit on our entire endocrine system.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So that's not just estrogen and progesterone. It's also things like thyroid and our appetite hormones. Men have one area. So their sensitivity to nutrition density is not nearly there. as sensitive as it is for women. And I'd like to scope it down to calories per kilogram of fat-free mass.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Women need a bare minimum of 35 calories per kilogram of fat-free mass to be able to maintain some endocrine health. Ideally, you want to see people up to 40 for minutes 15. When you start to drop below that 35 for women, we start to see a lot of subclinical disturbance in endocrine and sleep and body comp. For men... Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, for sure. I like to kind of start this conversation when we look at the sex differences that exist at birth. So that's like without our hormone fluctuations from our menstrual cycle and stuff. So when we look at XX versus XY, because that's the primary area of research that we have. Very binary, but that's all we have at the moment.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
,,,,,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
If you are born XX, then you have more endurant type fibers. So your slow twitch, your oxidative, very aerobic type fibers. And with that comes a lot of mitochondria work. So that means your body's really able to take fatty acids and use it, use oxygen and go long and slow.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, part of it's misinformation and part of it is people become inherently lazy and don't want to... And I say that and I'll take full ownership of that statement. Because when we look at exercise, regardless of intensity, duration, mode, whatever it is, it's a super powerful stress that gets put on the body and the body responds in kind.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
When we look at XY, they're born with more of the fast-twitch glycolytic power-based fibers, so good at speed, good at quick reaction time, good at doing super high-intensity work, and they have to work on developing that aerobic system.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So yes, you're going to have inflammation after exercise, but the subsequent response is your body upregulates its anti... inflammatory and antioxidative responses. So the chronic use of exercise improves oxidation and inflammation. It also improves autophagy.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So all the things that people are talking about by using pharmaceuticals for longevity or trying to biohack by using microdoses of this and peptides and stuff, you can use exercise. And it's just understanding what kind and dosage. It's not the blanket ACSM 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity, which is based on male data, right? So we have to be very nuanced in what we're talking about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
You have to be very dedicated to the strength training and eating protein. Because when we look at protein, protein and a high protein diet induces satiation and increases our natural production of our GLP-1s. So if we are looking at using Ozempic as well as strength training and high protein, you're going to get better body composition, better appetite control, better appetite hormone regulation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And it's going to allow you to get off the Ozempic when you get to a certain point, which is decided by you and your doctor or whatever your lifestyle choice is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
This is a time. Yeah. Well, this is a time where you can play. You can play a little bit. You can try a lot of things. It depends on your hormone profile. It's like what kind of if you're using hormonal contraception, what kind is it? Is it oral contraceptive? Is it a Mirena? Is it a copper IUD?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
All of those have different responses within the body, which is going to affect the kind of training and how you feel about training. Naturally cycling, are you finding changes in your bleed pattern? Are you finding changes in the length of your cycle? Well, those are beginning stopgaps and warning signs that you're putting your body under too much stress.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
But for the most part, you want to find a goal and the basic idea of periodization of both cardiovascular and strength. is beneficial. If you're someone who wants to go the endurance route, sweet, you can. But put some strength training in there. You don't have to put it your mainstay, but you want to have a strong, resilient body regardless of where you are in your life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So as we feed forward and see at the onset of puberty what happens is there's another divergence where with what we call the epigenetic exposure or the situational change that happens with estrogen, progesterone, to some extent testosterone in girls, we have a change in all of our biomechanics. So our center of gravity goes from being up in the chest area down to the hip area.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And you can pepper it in your 20s and your 30s with different adventures.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
My habits. Well, full disclosure, I tried my very first high rocks on Sunday here in Auckland. Yeah. Was it good? It was super fun. Yeah, it was super fun. Super hot. I did end up tearing my meniscus.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah. And I'll share the story is I was not strong enough in the posterior chain to do the sled pull and then run. And I went into it after being in the States under a high amount of stress and not having been able to train on the sled very much. I came back. I had 10 days before the race. So that's my full disclosure. But I'm now at a point where it's all right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
No, I haven't seen a sports doc or surgeon yet. So I'm like, I'm doing all the rehab things that I know. And I have to get on a plane next week and fly to the States and be gone for a month. So we'll see what happens. I am going Houston and then Boston, Boston, D.C., D.C., Denver, Denver, L.A., L.A., San Francisco.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
No, I wish. It's not vacation. Doing some podcasts and some board meetings and some filming for a project and looking for houses.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Because the L.A. trip was really fully booked until someone just canceled. So that's why we're going to try to see what we can do when I'm there in L.A. Okay, perfect.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
My habits. Yeah. So I am a kind of person that needs to get up before anyone else in the household so I can have 10 to 15 minutes of absolute no noise because that's how I can reset and recenter. Then I'd like to do some training, either go for a swim in the pool or the ocean. A couple of days a week. Strength training, definitely three to four times a week.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
After training, come home, have food, do the email thing, go through all the meetings, have some quiet time, get some work done. Then my daughter comes home from school. We do some stuff and I do some more work. Then I take the dog for a walk, make dinner, have dinner, have conversations and maybe read with my daughter. And then I try to be in bed by 9.30, 10 o'clock.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
I get up maybe 6.30, 7, but I'm also the most fatigued person at the end of the day and I want to go to bed before everyone else. But I make a priority. I'm like, I need to go to sleep now and I need to sleep. I might do some reading before falling asleep, make sure it's a cool, dark room because I don't like to be hot when I'm sleeping.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
and I get very agitated if my sleep is disrupted because I'm like, I need sleep. I need sleep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
No, I don't. I advise people who do train. And every once in a while, I'll take someone on, especially if it's a really complex, like sticky moment where people are trying to do all the things and they're stuck. I wish I had the bandwidth to be able to get out there on boots on the ground to help more people on individual basis. But there's only one of me at the moment.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Our hips widen, our shoulder girdle widens, but we're not told about this. So we feel ungangly in our bodies. We aren't taught how to run again, how to jump, how to swing, how to land or any of those things. They're just, well, you are at this point, you get your period. We know girls drop out of sport, but it has to do with the fact that the actual biomechanics of the body have changed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
myth trend out there yeah i think the most underrated is the intuition i think people have forgotten what it feels like to sleep well to eat well to have energy because we've been told by wearables what we're supposed to be feeling and what we're supposed to be doing and people have lost that connection to themselves
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So that intuition of actually understanding our body and using things like rating a perceived exertion without any of the tools, I think that's one of the most underrated, but one of the most effective means of invoking change. When I look on the other end of things, it's all those top end, like the 1% that you should be looking at, like peptides or fasting. Let's just bring it back to basics.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
How are you eating? What are you eating? When are you eating? How are you sleeping? It's like the big four is the mindfulness, the sleep, the physical activity, and the nutrition. If we focus on those, then we can start to really see change.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
It's when we start going outside the box and really focusing on all the biohacking and the bro science that's out there is when we start to lose sight of where we should be and get into the overrated trends that tend to take over everybody's mentality.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Saunas, I love. I started as an environmental exercise physiologist. So I look at how the heat can invoke positive change on the body. It doesn't have to be a large dose. It could be 10 to 15 minutes in a finished sauna three times a week because we start to see massive cardiovascular improvements, blood pressure improvements included in that, metabolic changes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
We have better blood glucose control. We have better gut health, brain health. So many great things happen with the heat. When we think about cold plunge for women, it's cool water. It's around 15 degrees Celsius, which is around that 56, 57 degree Fahrenheit mark. Ice is too cold and we don't get the same kind of response that men do when we get into ice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
It's too strong of a stress and the body rebounds with too much sympathetic drive. too much constriction, where if it's cool water, we're going to invoke initially a vagal response, which is that, and then the body's going to get that more parasympathetic relaxation response that we're looking for, for cold plunge.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So if you're a woman, you're jumping in. Yeah. So you're jumping into that icy cold water and you're getting that shock. And that shock is a sympathetic so that you have your flight or fight sensation, which is your sympathetic drive. And you have that deep relaxation, which is your parasympathetic drive.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
For women, we get that shock and that sympathetic drive, which increases cortisol, increases our blood glucose and our free fatty acids because the body's like, ah, what is this incredible shock? I've got to get out and run away. For cool water, it's not as intense. So you don't get that sympathetic. You get the initial, and then the body's like, okay, I can deal with this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
I'm going to do some vasoconstriction. I'm going to put more blood sugar to the brain so that the brain understands what's going on and stimulates what we call the vagal nerve. So the vagal nerve is what that parasympathetic nervous system is attached to. So it invokes that calming and you can stay in it, take some deep breaths.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So when we start looking at all of these trends that are out there and about doing like zone two work and improving our aerobic capacity and trying to do ketogenic diet for improving our fat burning capacity, all that's based on male data. Because being born that XX, you already have all of that capacity.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
But that said, heat does so much more for a woman's body than cold plunge. So if we're looking for increased parasympathetic drive, we're looking for better metabolic control, we're getting better hormonal control, it's all instigated by sauna work, not by cold plunge.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So the thing with the infrared is it really bypasses when the initial thermoregulation control centers. If you get to a point where it's hot enough and you get that sweat onset and you feel really uncomfortable, then you're hot enough. But you don't have to like stay in there for a half an hour or more being uncomfortable. You bring it up to your sweat response and then you can get out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And I think that's what people don't like. They're like, oh, I get an infrared and I get warm, but I don't sweat. I'm like, but you need that. You need that uncomfortable heat and uncomfortable sweating to invoke the change.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, my stepdad has one, but we have a finish sauna. So I use our finish and then I go to my parents' house and I'm like, I'm freezing in your sauna.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Red. Yeah. Maybe you put on one of those sauna suits they sell in like Kmart or Walmart and you wear the sauna suit in your sauna.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Get a new sauna. Yeah. Do that. That's the best way to do it. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, me too. It's great to see you. It's great to see you. And yeah, have a great day and give LA hugs for me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
What we need to work on throughout our entire life is working on that power base and the fast twitch. And I say that because we want to be able to produce power. We want to be able to run fast, to jump, to land, to have good coordination. But more than that, when we look at longevity and we see this is really important in peri and postmenopausal that we keep producing lactate for brain health.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
The second edition that was just released last year.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And then we have Next Level that is specific for peri and postmenopause. Oh, perfect. Perfect.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, perfect.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, it'll get there. It's just, there's no pain. It just catches. So there's instability, but no pain. I'll take that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
I'm not running. I went for a swim this morning.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
It was a happy place, but yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Because if we keep producing lactate from that fast twitch and that higher intensity work that we've been trying to build throughout our life, we are slowing the rate and the risk for Alzheimer's and dementia. So when we see that sex difference in Alzheimer's and dementia, it comes down to the type of muscle fibers and the metabolism that we've been exposed to throughout our life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So that's why it's like, okay, if we look from birth all the way through to the end of life, There are unique things that women need to do to keep progressing and improving their health for longevity and performance, whereas men are more of a linear because they don't have all of these changes that women have with regards to biomechanics and hormone exposure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So, of course, it makes sense that you see all this data that comes out for men and men are scribing these protocols and they're improving, that when you take that and put it into certain points within a woman's life, they're not going to respond the same way because physiologically and biomechanically, they are not the same as where that data originated from.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So women are more quad dominant, just the way our posture is and our center of gravity. So this already predisposes us to change of direction injury, soft tissue injury. That's part of the reason why we see a greater predisposition in ACL injury, because we don't have the hamstring strength to counter some of those cutting motions that causes an ACL tear.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So when we're looking at that and what we need to do is we need to put that focus away from the knee and the lunge and all that quad dominant type work, put it posterior. So you're looking at developing the glutes and the hamstrings, a lot of extension work. And we see that when women start to do that, they reduce their injury risk and they have better posture and cutting motion.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And when we're looking at things like what FIFAS put out for warm-up, it's all about warming up the posterior chain and trying to get those muscles firing as a counteract to some of those cutting motions that predispose women to ligamental tears. We also see that as we get into perimenopause, there is a definitive increase in plantar fascia issues and frozen shoulder or bursts in your shoulder.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
And that has to do with the changing of the tensile strength in the ligaments as well as a weakening in the muscle contraction. So again, we're looking at what do we need to do to prevent that. We need to keep the strengthening and the faster type power-based action to create an environment that reduces injury, reduces the inflammation of the tendons, and allows better range of motion.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So when we look at men who are in their 40s, rarely do we hear about a plantar fascia issue. You look at women in their 40s, it's one of the leading issues that make them go see a physical therapist or an osteo or a chiro. It's an inherent sex difference, right? I can see you're like, you've probably experienced it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, so frozen shoulder has to do with we have a wider shoulder girdle because our hips have widened. But if you think about all the metrics that we've taught to do push-ups, pull-ups, they're all in a grip strength or a grip width that's based on male data.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
male physiology because you know if you go to do a pull-up and you're a bit wider like no more narrow so it puts a lot of strain where it shouldn't same with push-ups they're trying to teach you to be really tight and use more tricep but our shoulders as women we need to be wider so it's just that inherent that we're and we tend to like when we get our 40s we're like okay yeah i really i most of us have a challenge and we want to accomplish so it could be a push-up or pull-up or we start doing more up
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
and push-pull motions, and even like lifting things overhead, groceries and all that kind of stuff. It's just the mechanics that we are not taught how to actually maximize with our wider shoulders. And you couple that with changes in our estrogen-progesterone ratio, which changes tensile strength and the actual texture kind of of our tendons and our bursa, and it just comes on.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So I'm always trying to reteach from a young age From puberty onward, how we move in these new mechanics to reduce injury risk at the onset of puberty, but also as we get older into peri and postmenopause.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So a lot of it is you're dropping your traps and you're pulling back. So you're doing a lot of rhomboid work. You're also looking at where you're placing to be able to use more of your back muscles when you're doing a push-up. Also back muscles when using a pull-up instead of relying on the shoulders. And the same when you go to lift something up.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Most of the time we're lifting, we're hitching our shoulders. If we're thinking about dropping our traps and we're using our back muscles to pick something up and then extending through the hips to lift it up, we're reducing the load in our shoulders and in that rotation. which reduces the whole onset of injury or soft tissue damage that can perpetuate injury.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
All the glute work where you're thinking about deadlifts, you're thinking about Romanian deadlifts, you're thinking about hip or glute bridges, hip thrusts, all of those things, right? And really focusing on getting the hips strong. And a lot of other things that can perpetuate it is we have weak and tight hip flexors.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So really working on developing that hip flexor strength so we can lift the hip and the leg up and over instead of stumbling.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, absolutely. And it's scary because the conversation has not been out there. And now it's a buzzword and everybody's grabbing onto it. And there's a lot of misinformation that's being spread. And...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
from a scientific point of view where I've been in the whole perimenopause, menopause research world for 15 or so years to all of a sudden see the conversation out there and people are misconstruing a lot of the research or they're in one camp bucket of pharmaceuticals or one camp bucket of suffering through it and none of it's actually right. And then there's just so much, it's just so noisy.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So I'm like trying to cut through the noise and go, okay, ask me what you want to know and we're going to unpack it for you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
Exactly. Exactly. That's it. Yeah. And I'm finding that a lot of the and I don't want to put people on the bus, but unfortunately, those with some of the loudest microphones tend to not stay in their lane. And what I mean by that is like if you're an endocrinologist or you're a medical specialist and you understand things like hormone therapy, then talk about that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
If you're someone who's like me, who's an exercise physiologist and a nutrition scientist and understands that and environmental stress, I talk about that. I can give a high touch on hormone therapy, but I'm not going to be a definitive person on that because that is not my area.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
I'm going to refer you to Jen Gunter or Mary Claire or some of the other experts that are out there who actually know the nuances of hormone hormone therapy and how it can be applied to you as an individual.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So that's part of the confusion, too, because everyone's kind of in their silo and trying to be an expert in everything instead of saying, you know what, this is my lane and these are the things that I know. And I can talk at a high point on some of the things I don't know. But I really want you to seek out these experts who know what it is in that lane.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 435: Dr. Stacy Sims: Workout Like a Woman Not a "Little Man" + How To Train Based on Hormones
So as a physiologist, I'm going to explain what's happening on the undercurrent of everything. So we look at estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, and they affect every system of the body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And because it's at a point where you really need to polarize your training to get any kind of body composition change, not having any fuel before high intensity workout puts them in moderate intensity. They just can't hit the intensities they need to. Same with resistance training. Like you go in and a lot of women are now working on sessional RPE or rating perceived exertion.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Or you go in and say, okay, we need you to hit an eight on the squat. So you have two reps in reserve and a sessional RPE of an eight. Well, if they're not fueled, then we're seeing trends that they're missing around two to 5% of that top load. So they're not really lifting in that zone that they need to be in.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay, so if we're talking about reps in reserve, this is when you go in and if you say eight, it means you have two reps in reserve. So you finish your eight and you should be able to complete two more with a really good form and then you hit failure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Exactly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Exactly. And so we can correspond that with your rating perceived exertion. So if we're saying... We need you to hit an eight on our scale of one to 10, avoiding perceived exertion. We see it correlates with that eight with two reps in reserve. So it's a way of quantifying what you're doing in the moment for a squat or a deadlift or some other really heavy lift that you're trying to accomplish.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then that also depends on the age of the woman. So if we're looking at the reproductive years, so 20 to 40, then it doesn't matter so much. You can periodize pretty much how normal periodization works with your mesocycles and your microcycles. So you're looking at what you're doing across a few months, what are you doing in the week, are you lifting heavy, power-based training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But when we start to get to perimenopause and we're losing all the flux of estrogen, and estrogen is the woman's testosterone, the key driver for strength and power, we have to look at lifting heavy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this is where we really turn women on to, we want you to do something that is two reps in reserve, three reps in reserve, because your one rep max also changes depending on what kind of training block you're doing. So we're finding that when you're talking about reps and reserve, then it allows people to lift more on the day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So we can get women to get into that strength and power-based type training rather than going, let's lift to fatigue because then it might be 20 reps.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
and that 20 reps doesn't invoke a big central nervous system response, which is what we want, it's more of that hypertrophy and muscle tearing, you will gain some lean mass, but not as much strength as if you were to invoke that central nervous system response.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And that becomes really critical as women get older because we need to find that external response that's going to cause the same kind of strength and power adaptation that estrogen used to support.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. I mean, like I'm the kind of person that gets up and is out the door within a half an hour to go do whatever I'm going to do. So it's not like I'm going to have a full meal.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I wish I could, but the way my life is, it doesn't work that way. But I'm also one of the people that never really has an appetite till 11 o'clock.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So I make a double espresso at night and I put some almond milk and a scoop of protein powder in there. So the almond milk is sweetened and usually it's unsweetened, but sweetened for the carb. And then the protein powder for the protein, because if I'm going to go do an ocean swim, then I need some carbohydrate and protein on board.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If I'm going to just go to the gym, then I'll probably just have the protein powder and the coffee. Yes, I'm caffeinating, but I'm also getting the calories for the hypothalamus and getting some more circulating amino acids. Abby Smith-Ryan out of UNC did some specific work looking at carbohydrate, protein, B4, and strength or cardio.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And found that if you're going to do a true strength training session, you only need around 15 grams of protein before you go to really help you get into the idea that, yes, you have some fuel on board and also increases your post-exercise oxygen consumption or your EPOC so your resting metabolism stays elevated. giving you a better chance for recovery post-exercise as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you're going to do any kind of cardiovascular type work up to an hour, then you're adding 30 grams of carb to that. So it's not a lot of food and it's not a full meal. Other people are like, I'm starving right before I go training. Then yes, you can have your meal, giving yourself about half an hour before. But it doesn't have to be major food that we're talking about.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But that's just enough to bring blood sugar up and stimulate the hypothalamus to say, yeah, there's some nutrition coming in. And then you have your real food afterwards. You have your breakfast afterwards within 45 minutes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I hate that conversation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. And the longer someone withholds food after exercise and the greater they stay in that catabolic or breakdown state, the more the brain perceives it as being in a low energy state. So the first thing to go is lean mass.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When you start telling a woman that if you're going to do fasted training and or you're going to delay food intake afterwards while you're training because the first thing that goes is lean mass and it's really, really hard for women to put on lean mass.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So once you start really nailing that and then saying, look, you just need 15 grams of protein to really help and be able to conserve that lean mass. It's a small, simple fix. People try it and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel amazing. So small little things when you're working with the whole system. Because I get tired, especially around Christmas time when you're reading all the magazines.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like two cookies means you have to walk for 30 minutes on the treadmill. It's like it doesn't correlate like that at all. So that's why I was like I hate the calorie conversation because it's just not applicable.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So we know that women who are in their reproductive years need around 35 grams of good protein, high-quality leucine-oriented protein within 45 minutes. And we see that women who are perimenopausal onwards are 40 to 60 grams because we become more anabolically resistant to food and exercise as we get older.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we look at the recovery window for food, there are definitely sex differences because we hear all the conversation of there's no recovery window. It's old science. But we look at the research of when women's metabolisms come back down to baseline, meaning that they have constant straight blood sugar levels versus men. Women, it's within 60 minutes. And for men, it's up to three hours.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we're looking at the data that says there's no window per se for getting food in, it's based on male data. So when we're looking at women, we have this tighter window to stop that breakdown effect and start the reparation. So yeah, it's like when we're talking about the protein intake, it's really important
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
not only to get that leucine content up in the muscle to start the reparation and repair, but also, again, to signal that, yeah, we're in a building state. We're not holding that catabolic state and increasing all the repercussions that come with it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We look at mixed, but for men it's more important because they go through their liver and muscle glycogen so much faster than women. So when we look at women, we want to get around 0.3 grams per kilo of carbohydrate within two hours of finishing. So we look at protein and people are like, well, that's a big dose of protein, how do I get it all in?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like, yeah, well, you can look at how we mix all of these things, you're also getting carbohydrate in with that. So that's why I say you could have your next meal after your training session. Yeah, there's a time and a place for protein supplementation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But if you're getting that real food and then you're also getting, you know, your magnesium and your potassium and your sodium and all the things that people supposedly lose and you're able to also repair a lot better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. I think the easiest way for people to understand the basic idea of what low energy is and how this affects men and women is when we are looking at a tipping point for endocrine dysfunction. For men, we're seeing that tipping point at 15 calories per kilogram of fat-free mass. For women, it's 30.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we're looking at baseline calorie needs before you really get into that endocrine dysfunction, when you're looking at those parameters, you can see why men do better in a fasted state or a low calorie state.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But for women, our intake and especially our carbohydrate needs are so much higher because we have so many other functions that are reliant on that kispeptin upregulation or downregulation, preferably upregulation. So when we're just talking the basic calorie needs and what we're seeing, it's that dichotomy right there of 15 to 30.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And when you start telling people that, they're like, oh, okay, I get it. Is that a biological aspect? It's like, well, you could trace it all the way back where men went out to get the calories in most tribes and the women were home and it wasn't advantageous to be pregnant under low calorie intake. That's why you have dysfunction when the calories are too low.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But, you know, you can also feed forward to modern day now and you're seeing that all this perturbance of hormone and the way we regulate hormone across the circadian rhythm requires more calories for women than it does for men.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's great.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I've seen the evolution. When I was 16, one of my friend's brothers was a bodybuilder and he took us to the gym, kind of like what you did with your sister. And so both of us were like, oh, we want to beat those guys. So we got into weight training with him, not to be a bodybuilder, but it's been like the paramount throughout all of my athletic career.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Used to be I'd be the only woman on the lifting platform. And now it's like you have to wait because there's so many women on the lifting platforms. I love it. It's great.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's a central nervous system aspect. There's a lot of, like, if we look at the culture of how a lot of us grew up, and I'm saying us like 45 plus, right? The women were all the 90s supermodels, don't show muscle, that kind of stuff. So always been gravitated to cardio.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Even now if you go to a gym and you're a new member or you're signing up for a new member and you're a woman, they'll say, hey, great, here's all of our spin classes and our box fit classes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. And there's the cardiovascular machines. A guy comes in like, all right, how much do you want to put on? Here are the lifting platforms, all the weight trainings at the back. starting to see a shift with boutique type gyms, but that's still the commonality there. So it's still that little bit of taboo.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when women start strength training, they haven't been exposed to that kind of central nervous system stress before. And the whole aspect of getting the nerve and the acetylcholine, which are little vesicles that hold the ability for the nerve to actually stimulate the muscle fiber, all that gets trained really quickly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So the more that you train it and the more muscle fibers that are recruited for contraction, you see an increase in strength really rapidly. And slowly building on that for increased muscle bulk, because it takes a long time for women to put bulk on. Because the driver for strength training is that central nervous system. So it's great when we see higher doses, more volume.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We aren't seeing huge hypertrophy. We're just seeing really good increases in strength.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. That's why on your physique competitions and bodybuilding competitions, they're out the back pumping before they go on stage.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, so if we're looking at that 20 to 30-year-old, a lot of times I really try to get them to focus on the whole movement aspect first. So we phase them in. Same with older women. Phase them in, learn how to move, learn complex movements so that when you are going in to do resistance training, preferably three to four times a week,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You can look at moving well, and it doesn't have to be a long period of time. If you're doing to failure, which works really well when you're younger to increase strength and a little bit of hypertrophy, you're going to have to spend a little bit more time in the gym. So it might be 45 to 60 minutes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we're looking at doing that four times a week, you can add in a sprint interval training at the end of one of those to get that super high intensity. Or you can look at putting in at the most two HIIT sessions on separate days if you're training specifically for something. So if I work with a lot of endurance athletes still and they're like, well, how do I fit it in? It's like,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay, well, we look at the quality and how that fits into your training. So if you're training for a marathon, you're training for a triathlon or other endurance stuff, you can take that high intensity work and put it into your training program. So ideally, we look at three to four resistance training with really good movement when we're in the younger set with two high intensities.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we start getting into our 30s, we start having an eye to how are we actually doing that resistance training. Instead of just going and doing a circuit, we're really focusing on let's do some compound movements. Let's look at doing some heavier work. Let's look at how we are periodizing. So we're having six-week blocks and we're building on those blocks because we want that base foundation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we get to be 40 plus, we can actually go and do our power base training. If you're in your 40s, you've never done resistance training at all, then we take between two weeks to four months to really learn how to move well because there's a higher incidence of soft tissue injury and overall injury as we get into our 40s because of perturbations of estrogen.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And ideally when we get there, we're looking at that around three, minimum three resistance training with compound movements and either one sprint interval or two sprint intervals and one hit in a week.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, what works for them. If you're looking for a short amount of time in the gym because of busy lives, then you can split it. If you're looking at, okay, well, I can allocate an hour to an hour and a half in the gym, then you can do total body with adequate rest. The key when you're younger is working to failure. The key when you're older is working heavy. Interesting. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we're looking at working to failure, we're trying to get more of that lean mass growth with strength. When we get older, because it's so difficult to put on lean mass, we really want to focus on the strength component first. because that becomes more important when we're talking about longevity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Because if you're looking at the strength component from a central nervous system standpoint, we see it feeds forward into better proprioception, attenuation of cognitive decline. And this is the other thing that you in neuroscience would understand, the sex differences in things like dementia and Alzheimer's.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There's some really interesting research looking at strength training and that power-based stuff when we're getting into our older ages because we get more neural growth patterns and more neural pathways.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No. The thing about it is men age more in a linear fashion. Whereas women, we have a definitive point in our late 40s, early 50s, where all of a sudden things go to shit, where it's that perimenopausal state. And I can't tell you how many emails and DMs I get in a day from women who are like, I'm 46 or I'm 47. I'm putting on body fat. I don't know what's going on. I can't sleep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then we say, it's perimenopause. They're like, what is that? And so when we're looking at perimenopause, it is a huge... change in the body because you're having less and less of your sex hormones circulating. More and more anovulatory cycles means no progesterone or very low progesterone. You're having a difference in the pulse of your estradiol to those flatline aspects.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And because every system in the body is affected by it, this is why you see more soft tissue injuries. Two of the biggest things that women who are in their 40s are going to PTs about are frozen shoulder and plantar fascia. These are two really indicative issues that are happening in perimenopause. So that whole section of mid-40s to early-50s is a definitive aging point.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
where I really tried to get women to get into the heavy lifting and get into the patterns of polarizing their training, not putting an emphasis on zone two, just really looking at how am I polarizing, how am I affecting my central nervous system, so that when they get into that one point in time of that perimenopause, their body is already conditioned for the stress that's coming.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Whereas men, we see that kind of stuff happens in their late 50s, early 60s. So the soft tissue injuries, the change in body comp comes at a later time. So yes, looking at how we're scoping our strength training, definitely something to think about in a longevity factor. But for women, there's a better indication of the timing across the ages of when you should start implementing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For men, I think you have a better bandwidth of when you should start implementing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So I am notorious for slamming things like Orange Theory and F45 because they market specifically to that age group of women. And it's not appropriate because it's not true high intensity work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we're looking at women who are really trying to maximize body composition change and longevity and unfortunately default to cardio because they think, oh, that's going to help change my body composition. It's going to help me lose body fat. It doesn't.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yes, there is. But it puts women squarely in moderate intensity where they're so used to leaving one of those classes feeling absolutely smashed.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
that when you tell them, actually that training doesn't work for you because it's putting you in a state of intensity that drives cortisol up, but it's not a strong enough stress to invoke the post-exercise growth hormone and testosterone responses that we want to dampen that cortisol. So this is why we have that hyperbole of women who are in their 40s plus shouldn't do high-intensity work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like, well, actually they shouldn't do moderate intensity. They need to avoid that. Polarizing, absolutely. That's what we want. We want true high-intensity work, which is one to four minutes of 80% or more. Or if you're doing sprint interval, it's full gas for 30 seconds or less. And you're doing that a couple of times a week.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You're not doing it every day because you need to have enough recovery to hit those intensities truly because those are the intensities that are going to give you those post-exercise hormonal responses to drop cortisol. When we're looking at women who are like, oh, well, I love going out for hours and hours on my bike and I love doing my spin classes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like, okay, but we need to look at the big rock here. If you are looking for longevity and body composition change and cognition and all those things, you have to polarize your training and that has to be the focus. But soul food, like I come from a long background of endurance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I now love riding my gravel bike on the weekends for long periods of time, which is not optimal for me, my age, that kind of stuff for all the things that I want to see improvements in. But mentally, it's great. So we talk about going out for that long stuff. Zone two is that low conversation, and that's fine for mental health and being out in nature.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But for optimal health and well-being, we don't want to do that. We want to look at resistance training as a bedrock and true high-intensity work. to help with body composition change, metabolic control, insulin sensitivity, brain health, and dropping that cortisol?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, this is where I love technology for one thing. But if we're staying really basic, I look at some of my family members and I've gotten them started with just body weight stuff or loading a backpack with cans to add a little bit of resistance so they feel comfortable in their own house and they might be doing lunges or squats.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Um, just keying them up of like where foot placement and knee and that kind of stuff. So they're getting used to that kind of movement. Um, I love Kelly Starrett's stuff with mobility. So show them like, here's how we do some of the mobility to find where the sticking points are.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then you can either direct them to some of the programs that are out there that, um, like Haley happens has some really good ones for women who are 40 plus. So does, um, Brie and then Sonny Webster down in Australia, you can send in a video of what you're doing and he can critique you and tell you things to do. There are other programs like that too.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So there's lots of ways of getting help if you seek it. The personal trainer is very much a stumbling block for a lot of people. And as much as I am not a fan of Planet Fitness, I am a fan of the fact that they've made it really easy for someone to walk in who's interested in resistance training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And they can go to a circuit, one of the circuit things that they have at the back, and they can start resistance training on machines, which is another level up to learning compound movements. There's lots of ways of breaking that barrier to entry.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You just have to find the motivation factor of what's going to incentivize the person to give up their time walking every day and taking time to go to the gym or taking time to do garage-based stuff that's going to improve their lean mass.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For your size.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm also a fan of kettlebells in the garage or like lighter dumbbells that you can do like thrusters or hang cleans or something like that to get the momentum and movement feeling because that's another good learning curve for people. So like I said, there's lots of ways that you can implement things based on someone's intuitive like or dislike of resistance training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When I talk about polarizing, I look at the high intensity strength, like that's really hard on the central nervous system. And then we look from a cardiovascular standpoint of doing true high intensity work. So the walking is more of the recovery. So if you're going to go out and do something long, it has to be very, very easy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you are looking at cardiovascular and you want that big sweat, then we are talking true sprint interval training. So what I have a lot of women do is a 20-minute lower body heavy set, and then they'll go on the assault bike and do as hard as they can for 30 seconds and then recover as much as they need to to go then do another 30 seconds as hard as they can.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Most people go, oh, I can do four or five of those. After two, they're completely gassed. because it's that hard of work. And that's what I mean by polarizing. You have very, very low intensity for recovery and super, super high intensity for metabolic and cardiovascular changes is what we're after.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this is the sticky point of recent science because we see all these research studies and meta-analyses that are coming out of the sports science literature saying that there is no effect of the menstrual cycle on anything. When you look at that population, it is specifically eumenorrheic women might have a subject pool of 10, if you're lucky, 12.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Supposedly ovulating. So they have a definitive low hormone and high hormone phase.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yes, exactly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Right. Okay. And they look at performance, meaning that one point in time. And we know that psychologically you can perform at any point. in the menstrual cycle unless you have something like heavy menstrual bleeding.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we're looking at a higher touch and looking not only from a molecular aspect but also pulling in mixed methods and looking at the qualitative, we need women to track their own cycle and find their own patterns because we know that there are times where you feel like crap and you can't push intensity. but that might be on day eight for one woman, it might be day 18 for another.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
From a molecular standpoint, we know that the low hormone phase being day one is the first day of bleeding up through ovulation, which is midway through your cycle, you have a greater capacity for pulling in and accommodating stress, physical and mental stress. So if we're looking at doing heavier loads, we're looking at doing high intensity work, we're looking at motivation,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
then that low hormone phase is really optimal for trying to hit a PR or trying to hit a new speed because you can take on that stress and your immune system handles it, your muscles handle it, your core temperature, everything handles it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It is day one of bleeding up through mid-cycle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The sticky point comes not every woman ovulates. And this is a thing when we're looking at general pop. We have lifestyle stress, we have nutrition stress. We know that women, for the most part, have four to five anovulatory cycles a year. So this is where when you're looking at that high hormone phase... we can't say you're definitively in the high hormone phase.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this is where we need women to track their own cycles and understand their own patterns. Because in an ideal world, we know that in the luteal phase, this is where we have the most change, where we have a pro-inflammatory response from the immune system. We have inability to access carbohydrate as well. We have a higher sympathetic drive.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So there's lots of things in there that aren't so fantastic for accommodating stress.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Mm-hmm.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, core temperature goes up, but the whole goal of the luteal phase is to build tissue. So this is where we're seeing a lot of shuttling of carbohydrate and amino acids to go to build that endometrial lining, and that's the whole goal. So yes, you need to eat more protein, you need to eat more carbohydrate, But again, the sticking point is, did you ovulate or not?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if you aren't aware of if you ovulated or not, you're tracking your own patterns, then just be acutely aware that in about the week before your next period comes, you really need to be amping up carbohydrate and protein. because that's going to help you hit intensities. It's going to kind of level that playing field, especially on days where you feel like you can really hit those intensities.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You feel great, but then you go to do something and your heart rate's higher than it should be. You don't feel that you can hit those. If you're offsetting it with some increased carbohydrate beforehand, you're going to hit it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So again, it's really dialing it back down to the individual now because we don't have enough robust research to make generalized ideas because of the nuance of have you ovulated or not? What are your ratios of estrogen and progesterone in that luteal phase?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we bring it back down to the general pop, it's like the best thing to do is to track your menstrual cycle over sleep, over how you're feeling, find your own patterns and dial in your training in your days according to what your pattern is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It depends on how she feels. What we can't rely on are things like heart rate variability, because we know that changes with the autonomic nervous system change of progesterone. It's a good indication that you've ovulated because your heart rate variability tanks, but it's not a good indication of what your body can do. If you wake up, I always say it's the 10 minute rule.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You wake up and you feel awful and you're like, I really want to do this workout, but I don't know how it's going to go. Give yourself 10 minutes. If after 10 minutes, you can't hit those intensities or you just feel horrible,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
change it, drop it down, do something that's more recovery, do something that's not going to be so taxing because we do have a limited amount of that stress acumen of how much stress we can handle. So if you're going to try to exert it all in a high-intensity workout, what do you have left over for the rest of the day?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then that compounds because if you're always fighting it, then you're going to increase this baseline stress. sympathetic drive because you're fighting the training, you're fighting life. So give yourself that 10-minute rule. If it happens three days in a row, that's okay because it's a very short period of time. It's not going to last forever.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So a lot of women have this internal conversation of, I have to do this. And it's really based on some kind of external motivation. They think everyone's watching them. But internally, you don't have to. If you give yourself permission, you end up training better, recovering better, and getting better gains.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's not true. We see it comes from a misstep in food intake. And we also see that it's a cultural influence. Because if we think about how sports started, it started as a way for men to demonstrate how powerful and aggressive they are. And this is the original Olympics, right? There were no women allowed. And as we feed forward into sport and how it became okay for women to be involved, it
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
At the high performance level, if a woman walks in and shows any fallibility, then she's immediately put on a lower stool, right? You can't play with the boys because you have a menstrual cycle. You're bleeding. You're a woman. You're a delicate flower.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So women would walk into that professional sports space and be excited if they were amenorrheic or didn't have periods or they trained hard enough and their period went away. because then they were more like men and they could play with the boys.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you start bringing up menstrual cycle in professional sport, now as of the past about four or five years, it's okay to talk about, which is, you know, what, 2020. So that myth of high intensity resistance training causing issues with the menstrual cycle, one, it's a cultural nuance for pushback against women being in that space.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But then the reality is women weren't eating enough to accommodate for that stress, which then feeds forward to low energy availability, maybe relative energy deficiency in sport, perturbations in all of our menstrual cycle hormones. So it's not the act of the high intensity resistance training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's the act of not fueling appropriately for it and then getting the okay to not have your period because, yeah, now you're in with your training hard enough. You've lost it. You're more like a man.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Correct.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
fuel for the task at hand, because some people want to have a slight calorie deficit, even in high training. And if that deficit is at night away from training, maybe 150 to 200 calories, then it's going to help perpetuate body fat loss, not lean mass loss, and it's not going to interfere with recovery.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's the fueling in and around the stress, meaning the exercise stress, it's really important, but women have been so conditioned to not eat and not take up space, to be small, you know, all of these sociocultural things that women are afraid to admit the fact that they want to eat and they should be eating.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this is a nuance within the fitness community that we're really trying to change and get the mindset around you train hard, you eat well, and your body responds in kind.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yes, they are.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. As estrogen starts to come up right before ovulation, that estrogen surge really dampens appetite. It also has an interplay with our appetite hormones, which is part of the reason why we don't have that great of an appetite.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Thanks.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It holds after ovulation, estrogen dips, you get hungry, it comes up and people are like, I have some cravings which are driven by progesterone because your body needs more calories. But at the same time with the elevation of estrogen, you're not hungry. You have cravings, but you're not hungry. Interesting. Yeah. So it's trying to disconnect those. It's like your appetite is something that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We'll come back, of course, once you eat. But cravings are more of that psychological capacity of, yeah, my body needs more, but I'm not quite sure what. So to get women to understand what's happening across the board, it's always coming back to let's fuel appropriately for the exercise. And even if you're not hungry, if you are fueling appropriately at that point in time,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you end up with less, at least you've stopped that breakdown state, that catabolic state. So we don't get those perturbations in the hypothalamus. That's my biggest concern for women, is really taking care of that signaling from the brain to the rest of the body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And if we have fuel on board, even though we have appetite perturbations, and if you go do a really hard workout in the heat, you're not going to be hungry either. But if you're having a cold protein drink after that hot workout, you're taking care of that immediate need to shut down the signals that we need to break down things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Can we have another history lesson?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
All right. I just gave a talk at home to some young athletes on contraception because someone might be on the depot and if they're on it for more than two years, they get bone mineral density loss. So then the question of, okay, well, how does the oral contraceptive pill come up? How does that affect things? It's like, well, let's look at the history of it. Initially came from Stanford.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It was funded by Catherine McCormick from McCormick family and a feminist activist, Margaret Singer. But because they were women, they couldn't get in the lab. So they got a guy from Stanford to develop the pill. And he's like, you know what? We need to put in a placebo week so that women feel like they're having a bleed.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if we're looking at the three active pills and then the one sugar pill week, it was by design to make women feel like they are having control over their menstrual cycle and they would still have a bleed. But it's not a true bleed, it's a withdrawal bleed. So this becomes the confusing point for people who are on an oral contraceptive pill. They're like, I get my period.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like, no, you don't. Because the idea of the hormones that are in an oral contraceptive pill is to downregulate your ovarian function so that you don't ovulate. So you have a whole different hormone profile from someone who naturally cycles. So this depends on the type of oral contraceptive pill you're using. For the most part, monophasic is the one that's most prescribed.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So that means the three weeks of the active pill is the same dose of estrogen, progesterone, and then you have your sugar pill week or your withdrawal week, and then you start again. When we look at the repercussions of using oral contraceptive pill in active women, there's a higher amount of inflammatory responses and oxidative responses.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So from a training standpoint, no one's done the study yet, but I would be interested in doing this, of looking at how that impacts adaptation. You do end up with a new baseline of this when you start taking the pill, we're not really sure how that impacts adaptation. We also look at the progestin component of the oral contraceptive pill because we have four generations of progesterone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The first generation was a really high dose and has a lot of risk factors, not really prescribed that much. Second generation is the most prescribed. And this is the one that people just take. It's in your IUD. It's in your OC. It has the least amount of side effects. And then we have a third and a fourth generation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The fourth generation is primarily used for women who have really bad PMS or PMDD, which is your premenstrual dysphoria disorder. So significant mood issues because that progestin has a direct effect on a lot of the dopamine receptors in the brain as well. The third generation is very androgenic.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So we see that in some preliminary research that improves speed and power by the second week of intake because it's accumulated. So when we're looking directly at an oral contraceptive pill, We can't make generalizations because you have low dose, high dose estrogen. We see that a 30 microgram dose increases hypertrophy but not strength because estrogen increases the satellite cell aspect.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So for my power and Olympic athletes, Olympic lifting athletes, that's a detriment because they'll put on muscle mass but no strength. So we've had to look at changing their OC or getting them off. for women who have breakthrough bleeding, that higher incidence of or that higher intake of estrogen is really beneficial. So when we look overall at how it impacts women from an athletic standpoint,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's so variable in the hormone profile that we can't make generalizations. We only look at the very high performance athletes and what's happening up there because that can make or break an athlete. So from the general touch point, we don't know enough.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Like the beginning of this year, 2024, there was a study that came out looking at changes in the amygdala that happens with oral contraceptive use. It's reversible in adults, but for young girls, we don't know because their brain is developing. And unfortunately, physicians will pass out OCs as if it's candy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Or a contraceptive.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I have answers for you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It increased fear. in women who were on the OC or a contraceptive pill made them less willing to take chances. And when they went off it, they're like, well, why couldn't I do that before? So that's why they started looking at the amygdala.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And when I say we're looking at young girls, and again, we don't know what's happening, is it reversible in young girls that are put on it or not because of the brain structure changes that are happening? So when we talk about an oral contraceptive pill, I want people to understand that it has a significant effect on the body, not just reproductive.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We don't know enough about all the other effects. So I have parents who say, my daughter wants to go on the oral contraceptive pill. She's having irregular periods. She's an athlete. We want to be able to control it. And it's like, if there's an issue with your menstrual cycle now, it's still going to be there when you get off it. So we have to look and see what's going on here.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you're looking to get on it to control your menstrual cycle, why? Because we know that you can have an increase in your VO2 max and other anaerobic capacity when you're not on it. So you have a better top-end capacity when you're not being blunted by these hormones. And then the other conversation is, oh, my skin.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like, well, they have really good dermatologists that can help you with that. You don't have to go on an oral contraceptive pill. But unfortunately, GPs don't understand all of that. And if a girl comes in and says, I'm having irregular cycles, heavy menstrual bleeding, I want to go on the OC, here you go. So it is a huge conversation still we had.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Oh, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I put it in the same category as menopause hormone therapy because there isn't enough research to address all the population needs. And we see these big pendulum switches. So before it was like, everyone be on the OC. And now it's like, maybe not. And then it was no one be on menopause hormone therapy. Everyone should be on it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But we need to land in the middle and understand more of what's happening with these exogenous hormones.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Like the implant in the depot?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Copper IUD and the Mirena or your progestin-laced IUD, those are what a lot of my tactical athletes will use because it doesn't have a systemic effect on adaptation or inflammation, mood, any of those things. And it's a fit and forget. So you can put it in for up to three to five years.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you have a really heavy bleeding, it really dissipates because the whole idea of an IUD is to thin the endometrial lining. And so then you have autophagy that takes care of the endometrial lining, so you don't necessarily have a bleed. The copper IUD is different because you do have really heavy bleeding for the first three cycles and then it attenuates.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, well, if you think about menstrual fluid, everyone thinks about it as a discard product, but it's a very good indicator of what's happening from an endocrine standpoint. It gives a really good indication of what's happening from an endometrial standpoint.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if you're looking at all the cytokines and the proteins and the tissue that comes from it, it's a huge indicator that's naturally discharged that we're now looking at for determining... HPV, do you have it or not? What about proteins for PCOS? Can we really identify PCOS or endometriosis?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It does and I think it's a combination of both. We also see some rebound PCOS that happens when someone gets off an oral contraceptive pill. It's not necessarily true PCOS because what's happening now your ovaries are producing eggs that have been down regulated for so long. So under ultrasound it might look like PCOS but it's not necessarily true indication.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The other is more and more women are starting to eat more, and so they're coming out of low energy availability. If you have more carbohydrate, you end up with greater follicular stimulation, which also shows up as PCOS. So the true PCOS, yes, there is a high incidence from a reporting standpoint, but is it that rebound where it's not having all the androgenetic changes?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
That's still kind of up in the air at the moment. But it is a big concern for women because it is an indication that something's going on and they might have some fertility issues. We see a really high incidence of PCOS in Olympic level athletes because of the higher androgenic aspect of PCOS. So better recovery time, a little bit higher baseline testosterone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So yeah, it's a population specificity as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. That's a short answer. Great. Yeah, yeah. So I'll put some parameters around it, right? So if we talk about intermittent fasting, that's where you have like the 20-hour non-feeding window or you're holding a fast until noon or after. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
They haven't done any specific studies like that in women. We do see that under stress, the cortisol increases. And if you have an adequate response to it and your body can overcome it, then yes, you get a boost in testosterone for women. We see this in a lot of the night mission shift changes in tactical athletes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There is also, I guess, a lessening of circulating estrogen, so the pulse changes when we start getting to the end of a really strong training block, because we're starting to have a little bit of a down regulation of our luteinizing hormone pulse and estrogen. but it shouldn't be severe enough to cause menstrual cycle dysfunction.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What we want people to do is look at the ratio of their estrogen progesterone and keeping track of luteinizing hormone if they're at that point where they are going to have a really big training block So we look at pre-season, during season, end of season. And people who might be at a higher risk factor for becoming amenorrheic, then we keep track that way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Because it is the stress component that can downregulate, not actually causing a permanent change.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's interesting because we have a change in hepcidin or hepcidin, depending on which part of the world you come from, because it is increased under times of inflammation and decreased under times of iron loss. So we see a significant change across the menstrual cycle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So I tell women, if you are concerned with low ferritin, then we want you to take an iron supplement every other day, starting at the first day of your bleed for 10 days. Because that's going to really allow your body to absorb it and stay on top of it. After that, every other day, yeah, but you're not going to be absorbing as much of it because hepcidin starts to come up.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
After ovulation, again, you have a pro-inflammatory response. You have greater inflammation. Do women blanket need to supplement? No. No. Because we see fatigue isn't necessarily just iron related. There's so many other reasons why women are fatigued. The one problem is the baseline levels for like ferritin.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For active women, if you go in and you have a ferritin level of 20 to 25, they're going to say it's normal. But we'd rather see you up around 50. So if you are in that low end of normal, then supplementing will help you get up into that 50 and see if it makes a difference.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then we have time-restricted eating, and that's the fancy way of saying normal eating, where you're having breakfast and then you stop eating after or you don't have anything after dinner, right? So you're eating with your circadian rhythm during the day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If I'm limited to say that, then I would say five to seven days before her next period starts. So mid luteal, because then you get a good indication of estrogen progesterone peak. Testosterone doesn't fluctuate as much as those two. So you're going to get a good idea what baseline testosterone is. And we know that there's a greater inflammatory response.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So anything that's outside of the norm of that upper elevation of inflammation, you're going to be able to pick out. So yeah, I would say if you could only do it at one point in time, that would be the time to do it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Day two of the menstrual cycle, second day of bleeding, to get a really good indication of what your true estrogen level is at baseline.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, definitely.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If we look at intermittent fasting where you're holding the fast up till noon or you're having days of really low calorie restriction, we see in active women it's very detrimental, right? unless you have PCOS or you have some other subclinical issue. And the reason for that is we, as women, have more oxidative fibers.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm in that 90%.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. It's more of a genetic factor than it is a sex factor. So, I mean, both men and women will be fast metabolizers, slow metabolizers, or not have an effect. That becomes the bigger rock of them. What we do find is in that perimenopausal state, women will become more sensitive to the blood sugar fluctuations that happen with caffeine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So they're used to having coffee in the morning with something, then halfway through their workout, they become a little bit hypoglycemic because there's changes in...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
insulin sensitivity insulin responses so there's changes also in blood sugar control and caffeine can exacerbate that so if you are someone who's like oh i always have a double espresso before i go work out and then halfway through i'm really hypoglycemic i'm really dizzy and lightheaded i don't know what to do feel sick or nauseous yeah yeah eat some food eat some food with it what about sipping caffeine through the workout um you know taking that coffee in and just having a sip between sets can that offset some of that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I don't think so.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Because they don't eat.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Never would have known because I'm not a nicotine person.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Oh, really wakes you up.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I like shishandra for that reason.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. What's shishandra? It's an adaptogen.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You should know what this is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Shishandra. Yeah. So it is an adaptogenic plant. So, you know, like ginseng, Siberian ginseng, maca, ashigonda, all those buzzwords out there. Shishandra is another really well-studied adaptogen plant. And I have friends who say it's like Adderall where you take it and it's immediate focus and function because its main goal is to regulate dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So it gives you, gets women and men out of that brain fog, gives them incredible focus.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I put it in my morning coffee.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So we hear about all the things about fasting to improve our metabolic flexibility, to improve telomere length, to improve parasympathetic activation. But by the nature of women having more oxidative fibers, we are already metabolically more flexible than men.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You got to try it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Let me know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I recommend it for open water swimmers who might experience a vagal response when they first dive into the cold. I prefer heat for women. Everyone's a responder to the heat. You get better adaptations.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yep, sauna.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Preferably a true finished sauna. Infrared doesn't, it warms the skin, but not the core.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, I'm still working on metric. Let me do the conversion.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, so 60 to 80 degrees C. I need to look.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's like, okay, times nine divided by five plus 32.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Look it up. So the thing with cold water exposure is the whole conversation about ice cold, ice baths, and how cold it is, it's too cold for women. Because when we're looking at that severe immediate jump into that icy cold, it causes such severe constriction and shutdown. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So women do really well and get that whole dopamine response and everything if the water is around 16 degrees C, which is 55 to 56 degrees Fahrenheit.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's chilly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No, it's go dive in San Francisco Bay, right? And that is enough to offset that severe constriction survival, but it is cold enough to invoke all the changes that we want with cold water exposure. So it's a temperature nuance that sets that difference. And like I said, when I have open water swimmers who are going to do a long swim or they're going to do a triathlon and the water is colder,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I have them do cold water exposure, especially face exposure into the cold water to get them habituated to that initial severe constriction and sympathetic activity that we don't want to happen before a race. With heat being the true heat that we're talking about with sauna, we see... a lot of metabolic changes for women. So we're having better insulin and glucose control.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Sure, sure. So oxidative fibers are muscle fibers that are more aerobic capacity. So those are the ones that you can go long and slow for very... long period of time because it uses a lot of free fatty acids, you need a little bit of glucose in order to activate those free fatty acids.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We're seeing a better expression of our heat shock proteins and the uncoupling and the rebuilding of those proteins that are cardiovascular responses. And then for women as we get older and have the offshoot of hot flashes, night sweats, that kind of stuff.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you're doing heat exposure, you're sending a stronger stimulus to the hypothalamus and you're also getting a better serotonin production from the gut because we have 95% of our serotonin produced from the gut, which lends to better temperature control and shuts down hot flashes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Is that right? We did a pilot study looking because Wim Hof has been down to New Zealand quite a bit. And so, you know, his breathing and ice bath stuff. has been making the rounds and working in the high performance, people wanted to do that. But we have few athletes that have really severe endometriosis. It's like, well, we could look at using cold exposure to help control that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And what we found over the course of this study was that if we were to do deliberate cold exposure around ovulation and then hold it for 10 days, over the course of three menstrual cycles, it attenuated the endometriosis. Because endometriosis is an inflammatory disease, right? So if we're looking at inflammation process and growing the tissue,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we look when a woman starts to exercise, she goes through blood glucose first and then gets into free fatty acid use, she doesn't tap so much into liver muscle glycogen, which is I think another misconception that happens. So when we're talking about fasting or fasted workouts, trying to improve that metabolic flexibility, it increases stress on the woman.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
if we can dampen that inflammation and create a response that learns that inflammation and dampens it, then it helps with endometriosis. So that's another avenue that we really want to take when we're looking at deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. We didn't incorporate any of the Wim Hof breathing. We just incorporated the deliberate water, cold water exposures.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Which is different from heat exposure because heat exposure you want to do afterwards.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, because it extends that training stimulus. And also the passive dehydration from training will stimulate greater blood volume improvements.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You want slow rehydration because part of it is that dehydration and the decrease of oxygen at the level of the kidney to stimulate more EPO. So with more red cell production, you have natural increase in plasma volume, so it's a blood volume expander.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And so when we're talking about overall stress, we're talking about cortisol increase, and they can't hit intensities high enough with no fuel to be able to invoke the post-exercise responses of growth hormone and testosterone, which then drop cortisol. So from an overall stress perspective, that fasted workout and holding that fast for a long period of time increases cortisol.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Up to 30 minutes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No longer.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No longer. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And people will put a towel over so that when they breathe, it doesn't burn the inside of their nose and their mouth either. I'm always like, if you're going to be in and it's that hot, just move down a level. Down on the floor. Yep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You have an increase in your cardiovascular effort. And because you have a greater amount of blood volumes, you have a greater amount of pretty much blood circulating. So you have more available for muscle metabolism, heat loss. So it's akin to going to altitude.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So people will go to altitude to get that blood volume boost, but not everyone responds to altitude because you have responders, non-responders, over-responders. Really?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
True. This is, I was telling the guys before we started that I've been in our sauna at home in preparation for going to Park City because I live at a beach town and going to Park City, I am a significant responder to altitude and I won't be able to have coherent meetings at altitude if I am not adapted. So- Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yep. That would be it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. And you can use it post-cardio as well. So anything that is giving you that passive dehydration from training, because you're not because you will become passively dehydrated when you're training, right? You can't keep in as much fluid. So I'm saying passive as in you're not able to stop that dehydration.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then you go into the sauna and you are extending that training stimulus because your heart rate is elevated. You're putting your body under stress from dehydration and the body responds in kind of, we need more blood volume. So let's jumpstart that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What you want to talk about?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm a fan of what I call the track stack that we used to use for track athletes, but then for really significant high intensity work. So track stack is kind of the idea from the old bodybuilding set where you're taking 200 milligrams of caffeine, low dose baby aspirin, but then I add beta alanine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But then when we look from like a hypothalamic point of view and we're looking at how the brain reads it, so we know that there's one area of cis-peptin neurons in the brain for men, but there are two for women. So the two areas are distinct where one controls appetite and luteinizing hormone and the other one is looking at estrogen and thyroid.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Hey, it came back on the market in New Zealand last week.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yes, it does.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. But the track stack, which has beta-alanine and not ephedrine, is really good at encouraging an extra top-end effect because you're having the caffeine, you're having a little bit of the blood thin from the aspirin, and then the vasodilatory properties and the carnosine aspect for muscle contraction from the beta-alanine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And so like training for gravel races in the top end sprint, you do a couple of sprint sessions with that and it's increasing your training stress during the training. So your adaptation is to that higher stress.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Just making sure that you're not stacking two days in a row of high intensity work, like really making sure that you're recovering well, because it is a significant stress on the body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Part of it is the obvious, like when you're talking about sleep temperature, right? Women and men have variations in their sleep temperature and what's optimal. So looking at that, like you need to create an environment for you that is cool, comfortable, which is probably going to be different from your partner who might be sharing your bed. So that becomes a sticky point.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we talk about the menstrual cycle, there are definitive changes in sleep architecture. We're seeing that in around the mid luteal to the premenstrual. So you know that about 10 days before your period starts. Significant change in your slow wave sleep. There's less of it. Latency is increased. So you have a longer time to get to sleep and you have more light sleep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So overall, you know, less of that deep recovery sleep. And this is where women tend to have more of their mood issues, too, because of estrogens play with serotonin in the brain. So we really need to nail down our sleep hygiene in that time period. So looking at things like L-theanine and estrogen.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
and looking at your room temperature and the screens and all the things that you've talked about for the most part about sleep and sleep hygiene, super important. And then of course, as you get older in both men and women becomes more difficult to sleep, but we see a significant issue with insomnia in women who have really bad hot flushes and significant menopausal symptoms.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if you start having an exercise stress or a daily stress of getting up and going on with your day without fuel, you perturb those caspeptin neurons and downregulate them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And again, this has to do with lots of the perturbations from temperatures, night sweats, increased sympathetic load, not being able to get into a parasympathetic state. So this is where working with a specific sleep specialist might come into play. We can also look at using some adaptogens, the rhodiola stacked with theanine, and looking at the cold temperature.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
getting people to use the non-sleep deep rest or yoga nidra or some other kind of meditative property that they can then access when they're in bed. So there's a lot of different things that we have to be aware of. And again, in that perimenopausal state, we see that significant change in sleep and sleep architecture and quality of the sleep, but men don't have the same thing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So women have to be a little bit more aligned with what's happening from a hormonal profile standpoint because it does definitively affect serotonin, melatonin, and sleep architecture because of the interplay that estrogen has on the brain and the receptors.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And so when you start down-regulating them, we see that after four days you have a dysregulation of thyroid, we have a change in our luteinizing hormone pulse, which is really important to maintain endocrine function, and we'll hear this, oh, I've been fasting for so many years and it does great for me, but the other side of the question is, well, how much better would you be if you were to actually pay attention to your circadian rhythm and fuel according to the stress at hand
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. The number one is creatine. Creatine for women, doesn't matter what age, it's really important. We're seeing a lot for brain mood and actually gut health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yep. Preferably, of course, CreaPure because of the way it's produced. So if you're looking at CreaPure, it's the German company that produces it. It uses a water-based wash to produce the creatine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Whereas others use an acid-based wash and we see a lot of side effects with the acid-based wash.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So people are like, oh, I'm really bloated and I have nausea and stuff from taking creatine. I'm like, is it CreaPure? Actually, no. It's like switch to CreaPure. And so they switch and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel so much better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. And then vitamin D3, really important. especially when we're looking at all the information that's coming out from cardiovascular, muscle, brain, everything that goes with vitamin D, also with iron. So vitamin D is really important for absorbing and maintaining iron stores. So those are the two big ones. And then
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's not a given though.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's not a given. There are some women on the lower dose of three that don't experience the water gain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No evidence. We see that women who start taking it midlife are complaining about it, but it's actually a progestin driven thing. We see progesterone and fluctuation progesterone can exacerbate any hair loss. So if women are experiencing that and they're saying, oh, it's creatine, I've read all this stuff on creatine. No, it's not.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Being very close to Antarctica in the southern hemisphere in the winter, very low sunlight exposure, looking around the 5,000. Same with upper northern hemisphere, UK, that kind of stuff. The closer you get to the equator, the less you need.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The one concern is like a day here where it's foggy and it's supposed to be sunny and people are like, great, I don't have to worry about going out in sun exposure, but then the next day it's bright and sunny and they're like, ooh, sunscreen. So they put sunscreen on and not getting the right sun exposure. So then again, it is a lifestyle thing. So basic is two to 5,000.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, so protein powder, really good high quality because the amount of protein that women should be getting is often difficult to eat. So again, supplementing, not using it as the mainstay. That's one to consider. And then again, I'm about adaptogens. So looking at the different adaptogens, ashwagandha is a good one. Holy basil or tulsi is another one.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And knowing that you're going to garner less stress that way, and if we're really tying in nutrition according to that profile instead of following a fast, we see better brain improvements as well. We see more cognitive function. We see less thyroid dysfunction. And overall, a woman does much better when we're not in that fasted state.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Shashandra and then getting into some of your medicinal mushrooms, lion's mane. Reishi. Those are the two big ones that I look to and often have women use.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yep. And I think the problem is people think that they don't want any cortisol. And they think that would be bad. They don't understand that the body has fluctuations of cortisol throughout the day and that's normal. If we're looking at having issues with sleeping and that anxiety provoke...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
from that sympathetic drive and elevation of cortisol, let it peak in the morning after you're waking up and look late afternoon, like four o'clock when it starts to dip, to take your adaptogens then, because then it feeds forward to being able to relax more, which feeds forward to better sleep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For something like Shoshandra, where you're looking for that brain focus, you can have it in the morning. It doesn't necessarily have as big an impact on cortisol that you see with something like Tulsi or Ashiganda because Shoshandra is more stimulatory. The other two are more calming.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I put some in my morning coffee and then in the afternoon when I need to pick me up instead of more caffeine, I'll use Shashandra because it gives you that boost without the effects of caffeine and it doesn't interfere with sleep. So there's a time and a place to take them. And yes, some need to be cycled on, some need to be cycled off. But I tell women, what are your main symptoms?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What are the things you're looking to control? And we can look and see what kind of adaptogens we can use and how we place them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The human body is really interesting. And when you get pregnant, your body tells you what you can do. So we see that you have a reduction in your anaerobic capacity on purpose. Your body's trying to be protective. You do have an expansion of your blood volume. So endurance is really good, but you can't do high intensity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When we're looking at the general guidelines that are out there, they've gotten rid of the heart rate rule. They are now telling women to be as active as they can be without creating injury and without trying to make gains. So that means if you're in the weight room, you're not looking to improve, you're looking to maintain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you're doing cardiovascular work and you have a specific class that you love to go to, yeah, but don't beat yourself up that you can't hit that high intensity. You're going for the social aspect. You're not trying to gain fitness. You're trying to maintain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think the very worst possible scenario is someone is super active and stops doing everything because they're afraid because then they get deconditioned and then they end up in a worse state than someone who was sedentary who's now encouraged to walk during exercise. It hasn't been well researched because you can't get ethics to study pregnant women very well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Then when you look at population research that's coming out now, they're showing in both men and women who hold their fast till noon and then have an eating window from noon to maybe 6 p.m. have more obesogenic outcomes than people who break their fast at 8 and finished their eating window by 4 or 5 p.m.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So we go on a lot on case studies and case study notes. And the bottom line of it all is you stay active and you can do resistance training, you can do all the cardiovascular work and your body will tell you what you can and can't do.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yes, so we see women who have a high risk for miscarriage, that anything that they do that's incredibly stressful for the first 12 to 20 weeks will put them at a higher risk for it. So being very cautious, especially with cold, because we know that there are so many different nuances. Doing something like hot yoga when you're pregnant is not, there is research, so it's not detrimental.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. Because when we're looking at blood flow diversion that way, when you have slight hypoxia to the placenta and to the baby, there is a rebound effect that increases the vascularization of so that the baby has better nutrients. We see this also with exercise and exercise intensities.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
This is why people are now saying you need to have some kind of blood flow change and increase in core temperature to create these vascular effects within the placenta to improve nutrient and nutrient delivery to the developing fetus. So heat's good. Cold, I'm not so sure of.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Not extreme heat. So that's why I mean like hot yoga is not going to the sauna. Hot yoga sits around 40 degrees Celsius. So what is that? Just around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And in that situation, if you're feeling too hot, you leave, you lie down on the floor, don't try to stay for the whole class. But it's not going to be detrimental unless you're pushing yourself too much.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Again, everything in moderation, especially when you're pregnant.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So it's coming back to the chronobiology of we need to eat when our body is under stress and needs it. Unless we have a specific issue like obesity, inactivity, PCOS, or other metabolic conditions, then we can look at using fasting as a strategic intervention to help with those modalities.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And I should make full disclosure, I started as an environmental exercise physiologist and my PhD was all in heat and heat research. So I'm a little bit biased towards heat, but I've done a significant amount of research in the hot and cold.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I love this question because I get it all the time. We have to turn our brains away from everything that's been predicated before to this point. So if we're looking for longevity and we're looking at what we want to do when we're 80 or 90, we want to be independently living. We want to have good proprioception balance. We And we want to be strong.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this is where we look at 10 minutes, three times a week jump training. So this isn't your landing softly in our knees. This is like impact in the skeletal system. A colleague and friend of mine, Tracy Klissel, did a PhD and post, not a postdoc, but post research on this and is developing an app on it to show women how to jump to improve bone mineral density.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Over the course of four months of this type of training, people have gone from being osteopenic to normal bone density. So it's a different type of stress. So if your concern is that, which a lot of women do have a concern because they lose about one-third of their bone mass at the onset of menopause. Wow. Yeah, significant amount.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you don't do something as an intervention. So we see a lot of women are like, oh, I'm going to go on menopause hormone therapy to stop bone loss. Yeah, it can be a treatment, but I always look at an external stress that we can put on the body that's going to invoke a change without pharmaceuticals. So jump training. Heavy resistance training. and sprint interval training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Those are the three key things. And from a training standpoint, and then from a nutrition standpoint, getting protein. Protein is so important. When you start telling women they need to look at around one to one point one grams per pound, which is around that two to 2.3 grams per kilo per day. They're like, whoa, that's a lot of protein. It is because we haven't been conditioned to eat it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Right, exactly. And it doesn't all have to be animal products. I mean, you're looking at all the different beans and things that you can put together. And that's the other big thing, that in order to build the muscle and to keep the body composition in a state that we want it to keep going for longevity, those are the big rocks.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The sprint interval training, the heavy resistance training, the jump training, and the protein.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Making things fun for the most part. I don't want people to think that it's a chore. So if you're someone who's been told you need to run and you hate running, then don't run. That's common sense. And I say that because I see little kids in non-US countries that have to run across country.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And you see these kids when they're six years old and all running around the field, and they're the kids that hate running, that aren't natural runners, and then they hate physical activity for the rest of their life. So I put that in like when you are exercising, you want to find something that you find fun.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
When you're in your 20s to 40s, you have more room to get away with things that might not be optimal for you when you start to get older. Big rock again is resistance training. It doesn't have to be heavy resistance training. Like I said earlier, to failure, you're periodizing. If you want to do a block of Olympic lifting, go for it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you're like, I'm not comfortable doing that kind of lifting, I want to do more machine stuff. Great. Great. But we want to make sure that you're changing it up all the time to keep things moving and shaking with regards to strength and hypertrophy. And then it becomes more of, are you training for something that's endurance? Are you looking for just longevity for brain health?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We need to have some lactate production. Because women, as I said at the beginning of the podcast, are more oxidative, we don't have as many of those glycolytic fibers. So what we're finding in older research is that there's a misstep in brain lactate metabolism because the brain hasn't been exposed to it, especially if we're looking at women who are being studied now.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It hasn't been in a societal context to do that kind of work. The younger we are and the more that we can keep our glycolytic fibers going by doing high-intensity work, the more we're exposing our brain to lactate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
the better we see fast forward to attenuating cognitive decline and reducing the plaque development of alzheimer's this is why women who are in their 40s plus i want them to do the sprint and the high intensity work for that lactate production start early because then you can take some of those type 2b fibers that could either go more aerobic or anaerobic and make them more anaerobic
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So those are the two big things for women who are younger. And then you can play around with the other things if you want to be an ultra endurance athlete. Yeah, not really ideal, but yeah, you can do that. That's fine. You'll recover well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yes, because we're looking at the way cortisol responds. We know cortisol has lots of fluctuations throughout the day, and it peaks about half an hour after you wake up, right? So if you're having that cortisol peak half an hour after you wake up, but you're not eating, then that is that higher baseline sympathetic drive for women. For men, it's not the same.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. So if I talk about true high intensity interval training, if you're a runner, it's going to the track and doing sets of 400 to 800s.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Right. So you're looking at between a minute and four minutes of hard work at 80% or more with variable recovery. So that's why I use a track as an example. So if you do one lap and you're like, oh, I'm going to walk half a lap and then do it again, that's adequate recovery.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's hard.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But it's not like you're going to be there for 90 minutes doing as many 400s as you can. Because you have that variable recovery, it might take half an hour to 40 minutes max. And then you're gassed out. You can't do it anymore. If we're looking at a gym situation, I like to look at something like every minute on the minute where you might be doing 10 deadlifts at moderate intensity weight.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
10 repetitions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So it takes you 50 seconds to complete that. Then you have 10 seconds to move to the next exercise that might be thrusters. So, you know, a squat, clean thruster. So it's a squat, pulling the weight up overhead. So you're doing maybe eight of those in that minute and you might have 10 second recovery. You go to the next exercise that might be
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
kettlebell swings, and you're doing explosive kettlebell swings, and you'll finish, you know, 10 seconds to go, you go to the fourth exercise, I don't know, toes to bar or some other kind of V up some other high intensity. And then you have one minute completely off.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So you've had four minutes of really heavy work with maybe 10 seconds to move to the next exercise, one minute completely off, and then you repeat that three times.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Correct.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Correct. So this is the cardiovascular high intensity interval training. And the subset of that is sprint interval training. And this is something that's really, really hard and people don't get it. I don't necessarily mean running. It can be whatever mode of activity, but it's 30 seconds or less as hard as you can go. So this is your nine or 10 on your rating and perceived exertion, 110%.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's max effort.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, battle ropes. Battle ropes are big.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No, no. You want to, because now we're looking at that top end where we want regeneration of your ATP, you know, all of that system and central nervous system recovery. So this is 30 seconds all out. It could be two or three minutes of recovery.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Because I'm not looking at Tabata, where you're 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off, because that's not the intensity we want. We want you to go all out and recover well enough to be able to go all out again. You're not leaving anything in the tank. So those are what I mean by high intensity interval training or when you're looking at polarizing your cardiovascular work, that's the top end.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when we're looking at that obesogenic outcome, the actual timing hasn't been tested yet. to see how can we expand or contract that eating window for men. But for women, because of that cortisol peak right after waking up, women tend to be already sympathetically driven. So then they walk around more tired but wired.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Those are the two examples of your top end. And then your recovery is that long, slow walking on another day. where you're not going and doing a tempo run. You're not doing a 5K easy jog because that puts you in that moderate intensity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Because I look at the general consensus of what's out there in the fitness world is all based on aesthetics and body composition. So people have this mentality of I need to be hypertrophy to get swole and I need to do long, slow stuff on the cardio machine to lose body fat. But that isn't what we're after.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We're after let's create really strong external stress to create adaptations not only from a neural and a brain standpoint that's understanding it, but also feeding down to metabolic change. Because if you have a really significant high stress, we see epigenetic changes within the muscle that increase the amount of what we call the GLUT4 gates.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So, you know, the proteins that open up that allow carbohydrate to come in without insulin. So we're expanding that acute glucose uptake through an epigenetic change. The other thing that it does is it causes an acute inflammatory response that your body learns to overcome.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And it's really important for women to do that because as we start to lose estrogen, we lose a significant anti-inflammatory agent. So this is why we see that increase in the visceral fat, especially when we're hitting your mid-40s onwards, is because now you have this increase in free fatty acids and the inability for inflammation to come down.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So the muscle cell is going, I don't know what to do with this. So it gets circulated to the liver, And the liver stores it as visceral fat. Whereas if you do that high intensity work, it creates that change within the muscle to understand, pull that in, let's use it. Let's also bring more carbohydrate in and more glucose in, use that, which helps use free fatty acids.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And it also creates a significant increase anti-inflammatory response at the level of the mitochondria and within the cell itself, which is what estrogen used to do. So if we look at those external stresses, it's not about body comp and aesthetics per se.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's about the molecular changes that we want to invoke to get that body composition and the brain health that allow us to be 80 or 90 and independently living.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
and have a really, really difficult time accessing any kind of parasympathetic responses down the way. Where if you have something really small where you're bringing blood sugar up, then it's signaling to the hypothalamus, hey, yeah, there's some nutrition on board, then we can start our day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, absolutely.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It depends on who I'm working with. I have some people who love Coco Pops and kid cereal.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm guilty of that. But there are some people who like the ultra-processed stuff. So I'm like, okay, if you really, really need it, then you can put it on top of your yogurt after training as part of your carbohydrate uptake. It's the only time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. But ideally, carbs are all the different colorful fruit and veg and if we're looking at sweet potatoes or kumara if you're from other parts of the world, yams, all those kinds of things, sprouted bread, fantastic, quinoa, amaranth, all of those different types of things, it's just staying away from the ultra processed.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And when we look at women, it's really important to have a very significant diversity in the gut microbiome. So we see there's a definitive decrease when we start to have hormonal shifts because of the way the gut bugs help deconjugate or unwrap some of our hormones and shoot them back out into circulation. So as much fiber, colorful fruit and veg as you can, but also it's the 80-20 rule, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
80% of the time you're spot on, 20% is life. Because otherwise, where do we get our chocolate and our whiskey?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Well, look, it is how it makes you feel. It makes you feel good.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Again, I'll do a full disclosure. I have been vegan since I was in high school because of an incident of a field trip to a pig slaughterhouse and driving down the five, but that's my own preference. So when we're looking at fats, it can be from a lot of different sources.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So again, it has to look at that circadian rhythm and those hormone fluxes, which people don't really either understand or talk about, because all of our hormones flux through the day. So you have to look at where's the peak of cortisol, how does estrogen flux, how does luteinizing hormone flux, progesterone, all of these things that have this tight interplay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I prefer women to have most their fats from plant-based stuff, not because I am plant-based, but because of the effect it has on the body. But there is a time and a place for animal fats too. The whole fear mongering of saturated fatty acids from dairy has been disproven.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if we're looking at what kinds of fats, you want a conglomerate, but you want most of them to come from whole food plant-based, not from ultra-processed. And then, of course, you're reaching for some real butter, you're reaching for some 4% fat yogurt or something like that to complement your avocados, your nuts, your seeds, and your olive oils.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. It's too common sense. People don't do it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think I would have everyone understand their intrinsic selves because we have been inundated so much with sociocultural rhetoric and so much external noise that women have forgotten what it means to listen to themselves and their bodies. I mean, that's the one thing that I have to reteach women to do so often.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if I could have a magic wand and have every woman understand what their bodies are saying and what their cycles are saying, and perimenopause is normal. Everyone's going to go through it if you have had a menstrual cycle, just to intrinsically understand what their body is. So then they have the tool to be able to implement external stressors that's going to be beneficial for them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And the more we're doing the hormone research and the more we're understanding these perturbations and how important it is to fuel for it to stay out of any kind of low energy availability stance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been fun.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You should come down. Yeah, definitely.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Exactly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And it gets worse as you get older. Because if we're seeing, as women are getting into perimenopause, which is in their 40s, and we have more fluctuation of those hormones and an increase in baseline cortisol anyway, then when you look at fasted training, it increases that cortisol drive and that sympathetic drive.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And it's one that's going to be really super beneficial.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And when we start looking at it, I did a competition a couple of weekends ago just for fun. And I had so many women come up and go, the first thing that you did to change my life was to tell me to eat beforehand. And now my training's better, my outcomes are better, I have more energy. And I'm like, well, of course, because your brain is like, I can handle this stress.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if you are supplying fuel to the empty tank, of course, you're going to go far. If you think about trying to drive a car and rev it up and get it on the highway at speed with it on E, it's not going to get very far. So I tried to explain to women, if you're going to get up and even if you're going for a walk, Like you want to maximize what you're doing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You want your metabolism to fire on all cylinders. You want to get some aerobic fitness through that. You need to supply just a little bit of fuel. And it doesn't mean a full meal. It could be the protein coffee. It could be a couple of tablespoons of yogurt, half a banana. It's not a lot, but it's enough to bring your blood sugar up and tell your brain, yeah, I've got this. I've got this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Right. And one of the things that has come up recently in conversations where some women who've just started into strength training realm or have dropped all of their big cardio walking, because we all come from the 80s and 90s of, Let's do 90 minutes of aerobics, and that's not appropriate.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So they've gotten out of that mentality, but they'll see other women at the gym who are on the elliptical or treadmill or out running, and they look really lean. And they're like, well, I don't understand. I kind of want to look like that, but I know that I need to be doing strength training, so I'm confused.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
The women that are 40 plus who are doing the cardio, for the most part, they're going to be what we call skinny fat. So that means that they're not going to have a lot of quality muscle. There's going to be a lot of fatty tissue within the muscle and their bones are going to be like chalk.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Because if we are doing all that cardio work and we're not looking at how our bodies are aging and what we need, we need the food before the training, we need to put in some strength training, then we're going to continuously be breaking down the tissue that we want to keep to age well. So when we're talking about that mentality of, well, what do I do?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It's like these small steps of, yeah, let's have some food before. Let's look at how we are dosing our exercise, what kinds of intensities. Let's bring in some strength training because all of those are going to feed forward to having our lean mass. Having really strong bones, having really good neuroplasticity. So that means how your brain changes in a positive way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So as we age, we don't get dementia. So these are all the things that I would rather women focus on than the drive from the 90s to be Kate Moss thin. Because on the outside, that drive to be super thin is killing us on the inside. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yes. So a lot of women don't have an appetite first thing in the morning. I'm one of those, but I know that I need fuel. So I'm very much an espresso addict. I love it. And one of the simple things that I do is I make a double espresso at night and I mix some protein powder into my almond milk or whatever milk you want. And then I put the hot coffee in there and I put it in the fridge overnight.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And then it's my go-to first thing in the morning where then I'm getting my 30 grams of protein. I'm getting my caffeine. It tastes like a latte. I'm good to go. And so that's a first hit. It's a first eating opportunity to bring in some of that protein that we need. And if you're going to go do any kind of exercise, knowing that exercise mutes your appetite.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
then it also helps with that recovery part because you're going to have those amino acids circulating. Your brain's going to say, hey, yeah, okay, I've got stuff to rebuild tissue. So it's a really good way of being able to have what you need without feeling over full and still enjoying some of the good things of life like coffee.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
There's a few things to unpack there. So first we look at eating opportunities because there's so many women who are one, trying to lose weight or two, already in the fitness space and following some of the trends that don't eat enough. So if you aren't eating enough, you're not going to actually change your body composition. So we look at eating opportunities.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
First thing in the morning, 30 grams of protein, boom, that's an eating opportunity that you're not really feeling overly full, but it's such a great benefit to the body and you're ahead of the game by having 30 grams of protein. We also look at some of the newer research that's coming out about our circadian rhythms or how our body goes through 24-hour cycle.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And for people who break their fast regularly, by around 8 a.m., and then they don't eat after 6 p.m., have all these great metabolic outcomes that you would expect from, quote, intermittent fasting. But we see that people who hold a fast till noon or after don't get any of that benefit. So if we look, well, why, why is that?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
We have to understand that half an hour after a woman wakes up, we have a spike in cortisol. That's our stress hormone. If we don't have food to tell the brain to drop that, then we stay in this heightened stress state. And what cortisol is responsible for is that fight or flight, but also providing fuel for being able to fight or flight.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So the first thing that goes is we start chewing into our lean mass, which is bone and muscle, and a signal to keep our body fat, especially as we start to get older.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Are you kidding me? No. No. I mean, when we look at the trends of the fasted training, don't eat before... It's all on male data. And the difference between men and women in this situation is, again, it comes down to the brain. So a man can get by with the fasted training because...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
When we're looking at getting up and holding a fast or going training without food, for a man's body, it stimulates the little molecular structures in the muscles to use more fat because their muscle structure and the types of fibers that they have are different than women's. So men have what we call more glycolytic or fibers that use glucose and not as many oxidative or the fibers that use...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
fat as a fuel. Women, we're born with more of those oxidative fat burning fibers. So when we go and we don't provide fuel, the body's like, I'm going to store fat because I'm going to need it because that's the preferred fuel for your muscles. So men's bodies will start to adapt to be able to use more fat, which is why you see fasting and holding a fast working so well in men, but
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
But for women, it doesn't do the same because we have different feedback mechanisms from the brain. We have different muscle requirements because of different morphology, we call it, or different muscle fiber types.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Because if we're looking at decreasing our overall stress response, so that cortisol, bringing the cortisol down, over the course of time, you're gonna have a lower baseline of that cortisol. If you have a lower baseline of cortisol, then your body can get into what we call parasympathetic. So that's what you need to sleep. If you have this high elevation of cortisol all the time,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
we're always sympathetically wired. So we can't get into deep reparative sleep. So you see a lot of awakenings. The other thing that happens when women front load their food, so we have a lot of our calories in the day, which we should, then when we go to sleep, we aren't waking up with hypoglycemia. So that means we're not waking up with low blood sugar.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Because a lot of women who under eat or hold a fast and they aren't eating enough, their awakenings at night is due to low blood sugar.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I needed me then too. It's taken me this long to be able to acquire all the knowledge and the research. So now I'm hoping that we can hit all of the listeners and so that they will learn what we should have known decades ago.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It's a hard one because people have different food preferences. How about an avatar? What's an avatar? A makeup person. Okay, a makeup person. Makeup person. So we'll say there's a woman who is plant-based but not vegetarian, so she has a preference for plants. Three kids, super busy, wakes up, has been waking up, tired but wired, didn't sleep well. It's like, okay, I need to make this change.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
never hungry in the morning. So we can split her breakfast. It could be overnight oats, which is chia seeds, oatmeal, some milk or oat milk to soak it. Then when she gets up, she's like, I'm going to split that in half.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
The first half, I'm going to add some berries and maybe another tablespoon of Greek yogurt, because then I'm going to get some protein, some carbohydrates, some fiber, and it's going to calm me down. It's going to tell my brain, yep, ready to go. Okay. Then you either are going out for your walk. Maybe you're going to do some home strength training. Maybe you're meeting a friend for a session.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Maybe you're taking 15 minutes of just breath work to bring yourself down, especially if you're the avatar of three kids in a busy life, just taking that moment to put yourself first. And then when you get back, maybe it's an hour, hour and a half later, you have the second half.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
The second half of those overnight oats with a few more tablespoons of Greek yogurt and some nuts and berries, because then you're getting the protein carbohydrate. So you've actually split your breakfast, but you've given your body the benefit of food on different eating opportunities without being overfull. But at the end, you end up with 30 grams of protein over the course of a couple of hours.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah. So it's easy. You can mix it up, do it the night before. You know that I'm not that hungry, but if I have a little bit. And then over the course of a couple of weeks, you're going to find that you're going to wake up going, yeah, I need some food. And this is kind of a reset of your circadian rhythm. Your body is starting to fall in line. You're...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
hypothalamus is understanding your appetite hormones are starting to work properly. And when all of that feeds forward, then you're going to start to see changes in body composition because you're having better sleep. So we can't change anything if our sleep is perturbed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So the more we focus on how are we going to work with our body's natural rhythms and the way that our hormones work, the more it feeds into better parasympathetic drive for better sleep.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah. I always bring it down to what are we doing when we want to exercise, right? We're looking for better blood glucose control. We're looking for better bone. We're looking for better muscle. If you're not eating, then you are not going to get better at any of that stuff because the body again is like, I need fuel for the stress that's occurring and I need fuel for the exercise.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You lose muscle. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Exactly. So the whole flight or fight response that people talk about with cortisol. Yes. we're flighting. We're teaching our body that flight by exercising and your body's like, this is a stress. I need to understand it, overcome it, get stronger. You could also think about it as the fight response too, because if you're in the gym and you're building the muscle and you're
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
ready to go, coiled up, ready to go, your body's learning that stress. Because we're not an algorithm. We adapt to so many different things. So if we put our body into an uncomfortable or a challenged situation, it doesn't like it. So it learns how to overcome that. and get stronger in the process. So when I, as you're explaining, it's like, yes, it's all about stress resilience.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
If we're resilient to stress in a meeting, our immune system is also really resilient to stuff that's going around. And we're also resilient enough to maintain a focus if we're getting ready to lose it and our kid goes off. Like we're not gonna break down and start yelling at our partner or our kid because we have this stress resilience. We're able to take that pause.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah, I wish I had known about strength training way back when. I was introduced to it when I was 16 because my friend's brother was a bodybuilder. And I was like, oh, okay, I'll go because Michelle, you're going, I'll go with you. But I didn't really realize what that meant.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So when we talk about the science of strength training right now, we know that with age, we lose muscle really quickly, start to lose it when we hit 30. And it's really important because one, it's an active tissue, so it helps maintain so many different systems in our body. Not only that, but we think about strength training and how it puts leverage on the bone to improve bone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
But the big thing really is when we think about cognitive decline. So we see that there's a sex difference as we get older in Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline. And it has to do with brain metabolism. So that's the fuel that your brain uses. And what we call neuroplasticity or how your brain adapts and creates neural pathways.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
If we're strength training, then yeah, we're taking care of our bone and our muscle. But it's creating signals to the brain to increase its ability to be really active. plastic. So it's like, yeah, okay, I need to have a new pathway. Let's develop that pathway. And so it's always changing. It's like Sudoku, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You're mentally working on that, but strength training does the same thing, but it also improves overall metabolism. So now your brain is very flexible and it's like, okay, well, I need glucose, but then I can use lactate. So when you start doing all of these things, it reduces your chances of developing cognitive issues.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So for women, I'm always like, yeah, strength training is great because we're building all these things. We're changing our body composition. But for the long term, we want to have a good body and a good mind.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we're doing these things and creating more pathways and developing existing pathways and making the brain very responsive and able to be flexible, then we're going to have a really good sound mind growing. when we're all doing Zimmer frame races when we're 100. What are Zimmer frame races? You know, those frames that old women have to use or old men. I've never seen those.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I don't know what you're talking about. In the nursing homes, you haven't seen those silver walkers?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
No, no.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Well, no, I'll be using a Zimmer frame. I'll be doing the races with everyone else because I can't say that my joints are all that great.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Women are what we call more fatigue resistant. So as I was describing earlier, the differences in the muscle fiber types, right? So women have more of those fat burning, we call endurant fibers. So that means that you can do lots of work and then you recover relatively quickly.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So when we're looking at sets and reps and things like that, women don't need as much recovery time between your sets and reps to be able to have the same kind of training stress. Now, break that down. Please, because I don't know anything that you just talked about. I was like, sets, reps. All that stuff, right. Okay, what are we doing?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So say you have a man and a woman that go to the gym and they're like, okay, I'm supposed to do... Five sets, so that's... Five sets? So, yeah. This is... This is a lot. I know, it's an avatar here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah, I'll get to there, but I wanted to explain the biology. Okay, you tell me the biology. I'll give you the biology, and then I'll give you the actionable where to start. Thank you, Dr. Simms. All right. So if we take a man and a woman, they go to the gym and they have this similar program where they're supposed to do five sets of five reps on the three minutes. So what does that mean?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You do five reps of a squat in three minutes. So however long it takes you to do those and then you rest the rest of the time for the three minutes. Okay. So maybe it takes you 30 seconds to do your five squats and then you have two minutes and 30 seconds to recover. Oh, okay. And you do that five times. So that's five by five.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if a man and a woman both do that, and we look over time, the relative strength gain, so that means relative to sex and body weight, man will acquire better strength gains than a woman. But if we were to change that recovery for the woman to go five sets on five by five on the two minute, so she does it in 30 seconds and has a minute 30 recovery,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Then over a course of time, she'll have the same outcomes because her body is like, I don't need as much rest. So it starts to kind of downturn with so much rest. So you can put more training stress on and less time as a woman.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So this is one of the things that we're starting to really discover in the strength training research because it's relatively new. We're like, okay, we know that there's these sex differences in the muscle fiber types where women have more of these, you know, endurance type fibers, men have more of the fast twitch glycolytic fibers.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we really want to maximize the outcome of our strength training, we need to work to women's physiology where they don't need as much rest to get the same kind of stress and outcome.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thanks for having me. I'm excited. We have lots of fun.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yep.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Right. So this comes back to the, you know, the fasting. And I get really frustrated when more men will drop alcohol, they'll drop sugar, and then all of a sudden their abs are ripped, right? Yes. They're like, whew. belly fat gone. Yes. But for women, we tend to store belly fat. Correct. And if I'm not drinking, I want results. I know, but it doesn't necessarily happen. No, it doesn't, Dr. Sims.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It doesn't.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It's very frustrating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
We have a higher percent body fat. for one. And again, it comes down to food intake and hypothalamus. So if we start taking out food and not replacing those calories with something else, then we end up in a lower energy state. So that could be a whole nother podcast, but basically we're not eating enough to support body composition change, and health outcomes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we talk about abs in the kitchen, if we're eating the same kind of grandparent diet, then we're going to have the same outcomes, right? But if we have the extra 20 bit of life where we're having chocolate and whiskey and all those fun things, man could take it out and get super ripped. Woman takes it out, there's no change. Why? Because the hypothalamus is like, where are those calories?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I need those calories. So if we want to eat a little bit cleaner, we have to make sure that we're actually providing enough calories.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we're providing enough calories and our body's like, yep, sweet, we got enough for all the things that we need to do in a day, overcome the stress, and we have enough to fuel the training and the changes we want with the exercise we're doing, you're going to get those abs. Wow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And then the compound movements, like working abs in a functional way, not doing sit-ups, but doing deadlifts or squats where you have to use your abs as a support mechanism, builds them faster than you see guys on the... floor doing lots of sit-ups or Russian twist, yeah, they're going to get those strong abs.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
But for women, it's better to do this compound for that torsion to be able to use it as support because then it allows us to stand upright and have better posture because our center of gravity is down in our hips, men's center of gravity is up in their chest. So if we're working to control our posture and develop the strength through our core and we're standing up taller, our abs show.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
If we're looking from an age standpoint. Okay. Okay. Let's start with our 20s. In our 20s, you can get away with a lot. What does that mean? So that means that you could do bare minimum a couple of days a week of mixed aerobic and strength training. So you don't have to do that much. Okay. So it could be a total body circuit set twice a week.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
That means like going to the gym and doing the machines? You could do that, or you could do an at-home circuit where you can do, what I say, every minute on the minute. So you warm up with stretches and mobility for five or so minutes, and then you have five minutes where one minute is jumping lunges. The next minute might be some push-ups.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
The third minute might be some overhead thrust, or you're pushing something overhead. Okay. The fourth minute might be some air squats. And then the fifth minute is completely off where you're recovering. You do that circuit two or three times. That's all you need. Wow. And you don't even need equipment. No. That's your bare minimum.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we're talking about going for a walk... That's really good. Like you're walking with a friend. Perfect. Because that's going to allow you to have some metabolic change. It's going to improve your blood glucose. It's going to improve your body's stress resilience. And hey, you get to hang out with a friend. So that's great. It's community. It's connection. It's all of the great things.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So that's one kind of cardio. If we're looking at improving our blood pressure, you can do some walking. But what we find is true high intensity work that's really directed. We call it sprint interval training where it's 30 seconds or less as hard as you can go. And it doesn't have to be running.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It could be kettlebell swings, be air squats, jumping lunges, could be running, could be cycling, anything that's going to make you go as hard as you can for 30 seconds or less and recover for two minutes. You might do two or three of those. And that is such a strong stress that it creates this whole cascade of change that improves your entire cardiovascular system.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I find there's two big things that often happen. One, most women become more empowered and have better body positivity. And two, they have a sense of separation from the stress and their own selves. So they're able to take that step back from the stress of everything that's happening. It's kind of like that pause moment.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Minute and a half to two minutes because we want a full recovery from, it's more of a central nervous system recovery because we want to be able to go just as hard, if not harder for the next interval. And then how many of those am I doing? So you don't want to do any more than five. Oh, I love the minimum. That's it? Yeah. I can do that. That's the maximum. Five is the maximum.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Now we're talking, Dr. Sims. Some people will go, I can do all five. And then they start. And if they're doing it properly after two, they're like, I can't do anymore. That's fine. You've gotten that impetus of stress. And it creates this whole cascade where all of a sudden your muscles are releasing signals called myokines that now is telling your liver, let's not store that visceral fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
We need that fat for other things. It's also telling your body, we don't want to store under the skin subcutaneous fat because We need that fat for other things. It's also telling your muscles to open up and bring carbohydrate in. So our insulin become, or we become more sensitive to insulin. So there's so many great things about that high, high intensity.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And by the way, your blood vessels are going to respond really well. So you get better blood vessel compliance, vasodilation constriction, so better blood pressure control. Because again, your body responds to stress and it's such a strong stress. Your body's like, there's this whole myriad of things that I need to be able to do to do that stress again.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So it's a really effective means of getting heart health better metabolic health and better body composition.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
No. I mean, I come from a huge endurance background and But now I'm traveling, like I live in New Zealand, I'm traveling the world. I have a daughter, I have a business, super busy. And I still want to exercise because one, it helps with stress resilient too. Yeah, I'm like, you know, there's a little aesthetics and vanity in there, of course.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And sprint interval, it's so between lifting three days a week and some sprint training, that's pretty much what I do. Because that's all I have time for.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yep. And sometimes I put that on the end of my strength training because if I'm already at the gym, I might finish with some aerodyne bike, you know, 30 seconds as hard as I can go. So I'm maximizing time. So I don't spend any more than 45 minutes to an hour in the gym.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Because when you are taking care of your body, then it feeds back into a lot of positive metrics. So the big thing that I love is watching women go through an evolution to go from being not so confident in themselves to having such empowerment to be able to stand up and say, I own this space and I'm taking it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So strength training across the board. The type of strength training you do is different. So when we're in our 20s and our early 30s, we can do some of the protocol stuff that is out there for men. Like you're doing your 10 to 12 reps or you're going to failure or you're going in and you're doing a full body workout. You're going to get results.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
As we start to get into our mid-30s and onward, we start to have changes in our estrogen, progesterone, and it doesn't quite work for us. Okay. Because now we need to find an external stress that's going to create the same responses that those hormones used to support. Okay. So now we want to look at more of a power-based type training. What does that mean? Yeah. So 30 and up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So when you're doing the higher reps, it's more of what we call metabolic stress. So that's more like muscle contraction using fuel. Yeah. But it's not an impetus to build lean mass or to become stronger. Right. So this is where I say the power base. So when we're talking about the spectrum of weights and the reps and sets and stuff, power base is zero to six to eight reps. Oh, I love that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I can do less? Yes, but it has to be heavy. Okay. It has to be heavy load. I like that, but okay. Yeah. So that means that you go and you pick up, say we pick up this 20, right? Uh-huh. And you're like, oh yeah, I can do 10 overhead, no problem. Yeah. Maybe I could do two more. Great. So we call that 10 with two reps in reserve. Okay. We want you to be at a six with two reps in reserve.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So that means I would have you put the 20 down and pick up those 30s and see, can you do six? Really good. Wow. Not failing form. And then could you eke out two more? Great. That's the weight that we want you to use. Gotcha.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Because they respond well to metabolic stress. As our bodies get older, we need more of a central nervous system.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah, but I don't want women who are listening to go, oh, I heard Mel's podcast and I have to go lift these heavy weights and do sprint training. It takes time to learn how to do things well without getting injured. Because, I mean, when we get older, we're more susceptible to soft tissue injury, joint injuries. So I always want women to learn how to move first.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if you've never done any kind of strength training, don't be put off by, oh, I heard I have to lift heavy weights. I better not do it at all. No, any kind of resistance is good. Maybe it's just body weight at the start. Maybe you're doing a body weight circuit and then maybe you're putting a backpack with some stuff in there to make it a little bit heavier.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Maybe you're following somebody online that's teaching you how to move properly first. And over the course of time, you can add load because your body is learning how to move and it's becoming stress resilient. So you add load to increase that stress. And then over the course of six to eight months, you're going to be in lifting heavy weights and doing the sprints without injury.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So it's not a training block. Like we've all been conditioned to what do I do every day in and out, in and out so I can get X results. We want to think about what am I doing to improve my overall health, my strength, my bones, my brain, so that when I'm 80, I'm self-sufficient. When I'm 90, I'm self-sufficient. It's not a training block. It's a lifestyle that we want in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So it takes time to build into that lifestyle.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
With machines, I want people to realize that it's hard for a woman to actually get the machines to fit well because they are designed for a 5'8 to 6' guy who's 160 to 190 pounds. So if you are outside of that norm, it's really hard to get the right fit, which can predispose you to injury. Mm-hmm. If you are just getting started, it can be a way because you're not going to put a lot of load on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You're not going to get as injured. For me personally, I'm not a huge fan of something like Planet Fitness, but I do appreciate the fact that they've opened the doors to so many people to make lifting accessible. So a woman can go in and use their machine circuit and get some resistance and some load.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
to start to get them self-resilient so then they can move away from those machines and get into dumbbells. I like more of the free weights where you have a barbell or a dumbbell because you have to use more of your stabilizing muscles which is how we move anyway, because you're not going to go pick up a bag of groceries just with your arm, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if you're looking at bicep curls or tricep dips on a machine, that's not functional per se. Yes, you're adding load, but I like it when people are, okay, I've got to lift the groceries or I've got to lift this overhead. So I'm going to do a full squat, using my abs and I'm going to go from ground to overhead. Could be with a plate, could be with a dumbbell.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It could just be that motion at start because we have to think about how we move in the day.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah, so gyms are super gendered. I sometimes get intimidated. You do? Yeah. So I'll say, like, if I go to a typical bro gym, like a Gold's Gym. Mm-hmm. I'll walk in and I'll see the lifting platforms and there's some big dudes. And I'm like, maybe I'll come back. I'll go do something else first.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So it's still there because the gyms are so gendered and it's a fault of that industry where you walk in as a woman, the front desk person looks at you and goes, oh, okay, how much weight do you wanna lose? Here's the cardio machines. Here are our classes. If a guy walks in, they're like, yo, bro, how much weight do you want to put on? How much muscle?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
The lifting platforms are back there and we have bumper plates and our dumbbells go up to 80 pounds. So, you know, it's all back there. But it's so gendered, even if you feel like I'm going to go to the free weights because you have to walk through all the treadmills and the ellipticals and cardio. And then you like the free weights are here and then lifting platforms are at the back. Yes. So-
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
It's not surprising that someone who's not ever been in a gym situation doesn't want to go into a gym situation. And the way that we can get started in this is put the gym out of your head at the moment, right? So we can look at, there are two main things that allow women to thrive in strength training. One is knowing what to do and two is community, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
We see that working out with someone else is fun for one thing. And two, it allows you to push yourself a little bit harder, right? It's just intrinsically you want to keep up or you don't want to look like the weak link. It's just a psychological thing. So community and working out with someone is super important.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if you're someone who's like, I don't want to go to the gym, I don't know what to do. Well, we can look at some of the online things that are out there. So like if you're really super, super basic and you want someone to work with, maybe one-on-one or maybe a small group, you can look to someone like Loretta Hogg who does Loretta Loves Lifting. She's very, like she trains her mom.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
She trains other people who are just trying to really understand how to do stuff in their house. So it's a very basic way of starting and you can move forward from there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
If you're someone who's like, I got that part, but I want to work out with a friend and we want to set program, then maybe you look at someone like the Betty Rocker where she has specific programs where you can work out with her in her community or you and a friend can work out together together. And that's a way to do more stuff with dumbbells in the house.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Then we can move forward and go to something like Haley Happens Fitness that I've partnered with where it's from the gym where you actually have an app that shows you what to do. You can go into the gym, you know exactly what machines or barbell or dumbbells to use. You bring in a friend, you can both do it together. So you're like, here's my app. This is what I do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You can record everything, keeps progress, and you know exactly what to do. And it's guided for 12 weeks and it's progressive overload. So you get benefit. There's lots of conversations. There's lots of community around it. Or you can even look, if you're really confident and you're like, yep, I got that too. I want to go straight to barbell with some dumbbell.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Then you can look at something like Annie Torres Daughters Empower, which has a page from CrossFit. So there's all sorts of levels that you can find. And the big thing is grab a friend, have a friend and have that ownership to say, Say for 20 minutes, let's meet, have our conversation and do this together because we're going to get strong together and it's fun.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I've been trying to get my daughter engaged in some strength training stuff and she's 12. We have a project coming up where she needs to know how to move properly. And I have her working with one of my friends in a high performance gym, but it's not lifting. It's moving and having fun. So she has another little friend in there who's a surfer and a soccer player, just like she is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And they go there and they have fun. She came back the first day fizzing going, I didn't know how fun it could be at the gym, especially when you have a friend. I'm like, exactly. It's the adult playground, but little kids are being exposed to it. It's like, come into my playground. Oh, I love going at a playground. It is absolutely a playground. Where else can you like jump up and down on things?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And then like there's a rope and you can pull the rope or there's a sled you can push and pretend you're a bear or whatever it is. It doesn't matter. Everyone's there sweating. Everyone's there doing stuff. It's like, make it time to play. Don't make it something that you're like, I don't want to go. This is too hard.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So inherently, women don't need as cold. Thank you. We don't? No. Why? When we're looking at stress response, because that's how I view all of the environmental and exercise things, is what kind of stress it puts on the body.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
When a woman gets into ice cold or cold water and gets in there and invokes such a severe, strong stress response, much stronger than a male's response, that her body goes into a more of a shutdown phase where it invokes a sympathetic drive and it doesn't create the metabolic changes that we see with men.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
If you were to take a woman and put her in 15 or 16 degrees Celsius, which is around that 55 degree mark, she'll end up with the same responses that a man has because it's not as severe shock to a woman's body as it is for a man's. Why is that? Because we have more body fat. So we tend to vasodilate and vasoconstrict first for controlling our temperature or men will vasoconstrict and sweat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
When they're cold? No, we're talking about just in general. Okay. So if we're taking a woman and putting her on ice, the body's first response to environmental change is severe vasoconstriction. And with women with Raynaud's, we have a stronger constriction response because it's a protective mechanism. For men, they'll constrict and then start shivering to induce heat. Women will just constrict.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Okay. If we put ourselves into that 55 to 60 degree water or 15 to 16 degrees Celsius, we'll constrict and then start shivering. So we'll get the same benefit. It's just the ice is too cold for us to start that shivering. So we need the shivering for thermogenesis to get some of those responses. So we don't need ice. We need cool water. I have been doing this all wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
No, just kidding. Thanks. Yeah, it does come from a lot of pushback I've had in my life. So it's like being put into a pretty male dominant situation. You have to find your feet and how do you move through that space? And I found it through exercise, strength, all the stuff that we're going to talk about.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And do you feel uncomfortable when you get in the ice?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yes. Because shivering is an automatic... a response for survival because when we're shivering, we're increasing metabolic heat. So we're able to keep our core temperature elevated so we don't die. And it's a strong response that the body has to cold. For women, when we're vasoconstricting and we're trying to hold heat in,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
we don't have the capacity because water on the cold skin is pulling out the heat so fast that the body's just getting colder and colder and colder. And we won't really start shivering when it's that cold. So when we're looking at, like, if you get in the ice, it's way colder than if you get into a plunge pool that's cold.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we have four degrees plunge pool, four degrees Celsius, so that's about 38 degrees Fahrenheit, and you sit there in a little microclimate and you don't move at all, you'll create a warm bubble around you and then you might start to shiver.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So that's what we say if you fall through the ice and you're trying to swim, it's like, no, just try to bob there to keep this warm microclimate around you. So if you get in cool water and you don't move, then you might start shivering. But for the most part, that doesn't happen. So for women, let's look at a little bit warmer so we get the same kind of responses and adaptations that men have.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So when we look at a cold plunge, the whole idea again is environmental stress. So we start to see an improvement in our parasympathetic sympathetic drive. So now we're able to get into that calming phase. Because again, body becoming resilient to stress. We have an increase in our body's capacity for using glucose. So we have better insulin sensitivity, better blood glucose control.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
We have some signals to lose some of that deep body fat. And we start to see better cardiovascular responses, but women do better in the heat. Okay. Talk to me about this. Okay. So when we look at sauna exposure, women can tolerate heat a lot more than men. So if we get into a sauna that is 80 degrees or 60 degrees Celsius, so that's on the upwards of 50%. Gosh, metric math. Hold on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And science.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Science is Celsius. 130 degrees. Okay. We'll go with that. A woman can sit in there, sit up high, 20 minutes or so, not sweating yet. right? Absorbing heat, vasodilate, it's great. So we're heating ourselves. Our body's responding to it by what we call heat shock protein responses. So these little proteins that will uncouple and then recouple and be better for it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So it's creating a whole cellular change that then is like, okay, now we have better responses within the muscle. The muscle can use glucose a lot better, can use fat a lot better. We're also increasing blood flow to the brain and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
We're also improving our blood vessels so they respond to constriction dilation a lot faster, which is important as we get older and start hit perimenopause, we start having blood pressure problems. And it also allows us to hit higher temperatures on the outside So like summer times and things without having an undue stress because women by the nature of being women struggle more in the heat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So if we, environmental heat on the outside, but when you're in the sauna sitting there, it takes time for the body to heat up because of our thermoregulatory differences between what men do when they get in and they start sweating profusely and then they get dehydrated and they don't have time to adapt as well to the heat as women do because we vasodilate first and then we start sweating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yeah. I laugh when people say women are not small men because when we hear it, we're like, oh, yeah, that's right. But it started from when I was teaching at Stanford and wanted to wake some of the undergrads up after college. And lunch and afternoon sleepies come in and I was teaching about sex differences in training or high performance. So it started with women are not small men.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And people are like, well, of course not. Like that's, you know, women aren't small men. But what I mean by that is everything from what happens in utero until we die is different for women than men.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So when we talk about women are not small men and we see all the guidelines that are out there for exercise, all the guidelines out there for mental health, for the connections, the sociocultural pressures, we experience things differently as women than men do, but that's not ever really explained.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Okay. I always look around the room and I'm like, who's that doctor person?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So when we say women are not small men, it makes people take that pause and ask, well, what do you mean by that? What topic? So today, what I mean by women are not small men is we're going to dive into exercise, especially how what we do should change as we move through our lives.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Stitcher.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
I think... When we look right now at what's being portrayed in social media, fitness trends, the medical trends, all of that data is really drawn from men and just generalized to women, which is a huge disservice.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
So I want women, especially you as a listener on this podcast, to take a pause whenever you see a new trend come up or someone pushing something to just go, well, where does this originate? How does it appropriate for me as a woman in my phase of life?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And when you take that pause, you begin to have an objection to some of the things that are being pushed on you and an objective view of how you should approach things to make it beneficial for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Shrink and pink. So we'll take running shoes or a bicycle. All they do is they make it a little bit smaller, maybe put some pink on it and say it's a woman's product. It's so true. I know. And it's like, wait, that's not really appropriate.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
You'll see in my book, there's some pink and that's an outage to shrink in pink because that's what people think is honoring women by making it a little bit smaller. And let's bling it up with some color and we're going to call it a woman's product. And that is not appropriate.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
They don't get any results and they end up what we call tired but wired. I mean, if you look at most women who make a point to get up, do some training, go exercise, and it happens so often after four weeks of following the same kind of training program as their male partner, their male partner has gotten leaner, fitter, better cognition, focus, all of the things that you want out of fitness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And the woman's like, how come I'm fatter and tired? And I don't have any like increase in my fitness like my partner does. And I see it all the time. And I'm always explaining, well, one, your partner might get up and go fasted training. Women's bodies don't respond well to fasted training. What's fasted training? I don't even know what the heck this is. Like what is fasted training?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Fasted training means you're not having any food before you go do exercise.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
Yep, exactly. And it comes really to the brain, right? So when we start looking at first thing you get up, and our responses are different, where women's brains will start going, okay, where's the food to come in to help bring my stress hormones down and get me started for the day? And men, by the nature of being XY, their brain's like, yeah, okay, I'm going to supply some
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
amino acids and some blood sugar and let's get on with the day. Then we'll find some food. That's fine. But women's brain, specifically what we call the hypothalamus, that is really sensitive to blood sugar and food coming in. So if you get up and you start your exercise without any food, the hypothalamus is like, wait a second.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
This is a stress to the body that I need to really try to figure out. But if I don't have food to counter the fuel that the muscles are needing from a contraction, I need to find a way to supply that fuel. So it goes into a little bit of a tizzy. And one of the first things that starts to get broken down is your muscle mass, because muscle is a pretty active tissue.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Body Reset: How Women Should Eat & Exercise for Health, Fat Loss, & Energy
And the hypothalamus is like, well, I don't know if I'm going to be able to supply the food that this muscle needs. if I don't have any food coming in. So it's a very small amount of food that a woman needs first thing in the morning to then go be successful in her training. And it's even if you're going for a walk, a lot of women will get up and go for a walk on the auspice.