STRENGTH: LIFTING HEAVY SH*T
During menopause, we lose the strength-building stimulus from estrogen. Estrogen is essential for regulating satellite cell function in females; it helps us regenerate muscle stem cells (also known as satellite cells because they appear to orbit the muscle fiber cells), which help us maintain our muscles. When scientists take estrogen from animals in the lab, their ability to regenerate these cells drops by up to 60 percent. The same is true in women during menopause–estrogen levels are linked to the number of satellite cells. Resistance training is the best way to generate those muscle-making cells, and lifting heavy provides the strength-building stimulus you need as estrogen declines. Heavy lifting is also good for improving fat-burning metabolism, building bones, and maintaining cardiovascular health.
Heavy lifting. Sprint training. Plyometrics. They all have one thing in common—they’re essential for menopausal health and performance.
Society has taught women to devalue our power. That’s especially true during menopause when we’re told it’s time to slow down and are pointed to the cultural sidelines.
Embracing heavy lifting is a powerful step toward optimizing your health during menopause. To truly harness these benefits, it’s essential to integrate a diverse training regimen. Here are the other principles we build our training on:
PLYOMETRICS:
Whether you jump, hop, or bound, plyometrics gives your bones and muscles the extra stimulus that comes when you push off against gravity and land back down. It is those impacts—big or small—that generate important physiological changes. For one, they help build bone, which we lose during the menopause transition. Plyometrics also trigger epigenetic changes or changes in your genes. When you do plyometrics, you wake up some otherwise very quiet genes inside your muscle cells that stimulate those cells to improve power and even the composition of the muscle itself in a way that improves the integrity of the muscle, its contractile strength, and its response and reaction time. They also improve your mitochondria function and insulin sensitivity—both of which are important for menopausal women.
SPRINT INTERVALS & HIGH INTENSITY INTERVAL TRAINING:
If you want to maintain your top end, you need to train your top end. That’s especially true during the menopause transition. The best type of high-intensity interval training for menopausal women is super short, sharp sprint-style intervals lasting about 30 seconds or less. When you extend intervals past 60 seconds, you can get greater increases in the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is good for a surge of energy, but you don’t want those stress-hormone levels to stay elevated longer than necessary to get the job done, especially in menopause when cortisol can already be elevated. With sprint intervals, you still get the benefits–improved insulin sensitivity, stronger mitochondria, improved fat burning (especially deep visceral fat), and an ever-important boost of growth hormone after you finish!