Coach Kevin Don goes over the do’s and don'ts of training after menopause.
Coach Kevin Don goes over the do’s and don'ts of training after menopause.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a fitness question? Email Kevin at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com or leave us a voicemail at (510) 353-3014.
Find Get-Fit Guy on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to the newsletter for more fitness tips.
Get-Fit Guy is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com
https://www.facebook.com/GetFitGuy
Hi and welcome back to Get Fit Guy, Kevin Don here. Since I took over as the Get Fit Guy 14 months ago, I have had numerous emails asking me about training after menopause. I didn’t want to approach this myself in that time because I won’t ever experience this event myself and didn’t want to be seen as talking to something I can’t ever truly understand. I reached out to a number of ‘female training’ experts to have them on the show to share their knowledge and help my audience. Sadly, they would only come on the show if they could use the show to sell their courses. The most recent expert I spoke with wanted to sell a 250 dollar menopause course. I will NEVER have someone on this show who has profit at the centre of what is happening and not sharing. I do understand that people need to earn an income; I do also. But whenever you create a course to sell, you are locking yourself into a sticky situation because you have removed your ability to change your mind. I change my mind all the time. I get new information, a new study comes out and so on. If you are selling a course, unless you are willing to rip it up and go rewrite it, you have to keep banging the same drum. So, here I am, having spent quite a bit of time researching the topic to bring you my top tips for training after menopause.
As usual, let’s get some background in for anyone that has been living under a rock and might not know what on earth I’m referring to. What IS menopause? Well, the term itself comes from ancient Greek. Men means month and pauein means to cease. In other words, it is when a woman’s monthly cycle stops. Believe it or not, menopause, whilst not a modern phenomenon, is more prevalent in modern society. This is because of increased life expectancy. And with the quality of life and medical care improving in many third world countries, a huge percentage of the global population are now postmenopausal.
Like many things that happen to the human organism as we age, there are some specific hallmarks of menopause. Of course, everyone is different and will have a unique experience, but in general, we are looking at symptoms such as fatigue, aches and pains, impaired cognitive function, osteoporosis, sarcopenia and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Some of these symptoms feed into each other and compound the problem. For example, increased fatigue usually leads to decreased activity levels. Decreased muscle mass leads to decreased metabolism, meaning weight increases and an increase in cardiovascular risk. But menopause doesn’t need to mean a decline. I would propose however, that training smarter and with more specific goals becomes more important.
Many symptomatic females will be prescribed estrogen therapy to help. On top of this, however, studies show that in both medicated and unmedicated women, the most important intervention is exercise. Exercise has numerous benefits:
So what kind of exercises would be best? Well, this is very nuanced, because, again, everyone is different, not just in how they experience menopause, but in what they did prior to it. Someone who was sedentary all their adult life will not approach things the same way an ex professional athlete would. That being said, if we follow the brief set out above to improve cardiovascular and respiratory health, increasing bone mineral density and muscle mass, we can see where we can start.
Let’s look at aerobic activity first. So, I know it’s popular, but if you were first starting on a fitness journey, I would avoid HIIT type training, short functional fitness style workouts, or anything containing the words ‘blast’ or ‘shred’. It is super easy to overdo things (be above your maximum recoverable dose) as a novice, because you have no clue where your redline is. The number of times I have seen people use the assault bike in the gym only to have to run outside to ‘feed the pigeons’…well it's a lot of times. You need to build up to things. Earn the right to max out. I would start with ‘zone 1’ training, which would be about 50% of your max heart rate. You can find out your max heart rate by taking your age away from 220. So, if you were 40, your max heart rate would be 180 and a zone 1 workout would have your heart rate around 90 bpm. Once you have gotten used to this, you can increase to zone 2, or about 70% of max heart rate. I would highly recommend that you do not leave your house, drive to the gym and get on a treadmill like a human hamster on a dystopian wheel. Just open your front door and go for a brisk walk or jog. I say this because vitamin d exposure helps in calcium absorption from our food. This will help a lot with bone health, as well as it's so important for mood.
You won’t need to look too far into my back catalogue to find out how to train for strength. I would recommend 5-8 reps across 4-5 sets of strength work. This is because 5’s are a low enough number to allow you to get some meaningful weight on there, but it’s also a high enough number to get some strength endurance benefits. Focus on using the most number of muscles per lift you can. What I mean by this is that, although the squat uses your quadriceps, the seated quadricep leg extension machine will do LESS for you than the squat will. This is because it ONLY works the quads. It has NO COMPRESSION and top down compression is what we need to develop bone density, because it’s the bones that resist a load squashing you. The muscles, ligaments and tendons resist a load pulling you. So, the lowering phase of a lat pull down or a barbell bent over row is great for muscle development.
Make sure you mix and match your strength and aerobic work in as many patterns as you can. Humans were designed to move forwards, backwards, side to side, inverted, rolling, and to hang, push and pull. Overall health will improve when these patterns are all mixed and trained.
Now, to a listener email.
“Hi, Kevin!
I just listened to your latest podcast about single-set vs. multiple-set workouts, and found it interesting. I was hoping you were going to answer a different question, though: if somebody is doing sets with a moderate number of reps (say, 6-15), what's the value of doing multiple sets vs. a single set?
How would that answer change for an older exerciser (we're in our 60s)? How would the answer change based on whether we're going to failure on each set?
My wife is using EGYM, and generally does 2-3 circuits. Mostly the machines drive her pretty close to muscle failure, although this varies by what phase of the program she's in. We're wondering if she's overdoing it, or if there's value in this level of intensity.
Alan”
Hi Alan, thank you for your email. Regarding single sets vs multiple sets using a moderate reps range, my answer would be the same. I just don’t think you can go to the gym and do 6 reps of anything and continue to improve across time.
At some point adaptation will occur and dose has to increase. You could increase dose with more load initially, but quite quickly, you will find relative intensity gets too high and total poundage across the workout has to increase. I personally prescribe 24 reps for my clients. Which looks like a progression of 8x3, 6x4, 4x6 and finally 3x8. The same load across 4 weeks. When you can do 3x8 at the load you started only being able to do for 8x3, you increase load 5-10lbs and go back to 8x3 and repeat. Of course, there are many many ways to program for strength, that’s generally where I start with my own clients. It’s not a definite answer.
Next up: how would this change for people in their 60s? Older people are anabolically resistant, that is, it’s very hard to gain muscle and strength. Therefore they need a larger dose to get the same response. So I would be even more inclined to say older people need multiple reps.
With your wife and her training and if she is overdoing it, only the linear data has the answer. If week on week, in the absence of a stressful life event making training harder, performance is on an upward trend, then she isn’t overdoing it. The balance would only tip in that direction when sleep is good, stress is low and nutrition is good and yet no improvements are being made. At that point, a new approach may be required.
Hope that helps!