Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity | Dr. Stacy Sims

0:00 welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Stacy Sims Dr Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist and a nutrition scientist and a world expert in all things training and nutrition specifically for women in addition to working at Stanford and with numerous professional a letic teams Dr Sims has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed studies on exercise physiology she has not only evaluated existing protocols for nutrition and fitness that are specific to women versus men but she has also developed many new protocols that are now in

0:46 practice with professional sports teams but that can also serve people who are generally interested in Fitness and Longevity and in doing so the general public the tools that Dr Sims shares with us today are applicable to Fitness to to changing your body composition and to overall health today we discuss how hormones and hormone Cycles impact nutrition and fitness needs specifically in women of different ages we of course discuss the menstrual cycle perimenopause and menopause but also female specific nutrition and training as it relates to things independent of hormones for instance we evaluate the evidence that women may not want to train fasted and the reasons for that we talk about how training might vary according to different phases of the menstrual cycle and we discuss how women

1:33 can design nutrition and training programs that are optimized for their specific needs not just because they are women but because they are women of a particular stage of life and women with particular goals as you'll soon see Dr Sims is exquisitly skilled at explaining the human universals of nutrition and training that is the things that do not differ between men and women and their needs in terms of nutrition and training but she is also exquisitly skilled at highlighting the data showing that there are specific areas of nutrition and fitness for which women and men differ and women have specific needs so today you will learn what those are and you will learn how to apply those specific protocols such that by the end of today's episode You Will Be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge about the biological mechanisms and the

2:18 specific dos and do Nots that can guide you towards your female specific health and fitness goals before you begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Maui Nei venison Maui Nei venison is the most nutrient dense and delicious red meat available I've spoken many times before on this and other podcast and with several expert guests on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be seeking to get about one gram of highquality protein per pound of body weight every day not only does that protein provide critical building blocks

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5:21 and Australia again that's eights sleep.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by waking up waking up is meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs mindfulness trainings yoga NRA sessions and more I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life and by now there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our Focus managing stress and anxiety improving our mood and much more in recent years I started using the waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to to really be consistent with my meditation practice many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits but many people

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6:53 access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial and now for my discussion with Dr Stacy Sims Dr Stacy Sims welcome thanks our podcast and I put out a lot of content about Nutrition Fitness cold exposure heat exposure hydration topics that are very near and dear to your heart and for which you have a ton of expertise but for which you have an extra degree of expertise as it relates to females specific yeah so I'm excited to talk to you today because very often I will get questions in the comment section on social media or on YouTube was this study done in both men

7:40 and women how does it differ for men versus women and on and on and I rarely if ever have answers but you have answers I have answers for you great so just to kick things off because this is a question I get really often fasting oh yeah inter mittent fasting y we need to distinguish between the two of course perhaps the most common question I get as it relates to males versus females is is intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding as it's sometimes called an 8 Hour feeding window a six-hour feeding window a 10-hour feeding window is that something that perhaps differs in terms of its impact and how well it works for men

8:30 versus women yeah that's a short answer great yeah yeah um 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 um 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 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 unless you have PCOS or you have some other subclinical issue and the reason for

9:17 that is we as women have more oxida fibers so we hear about all the things about fasting to be to improve our metabolic flexibility to improve telal length to improve parasympathetic activation but by the nature of women having more oxidated fibers we are already metabolically more flexible than men interesting yeah didn't know that um could you elaborate on more oxidative fibers what that is and how how it relates to metabolic flexibility sure sure so oxidated fibers are are muscle fibers that are more aerobic capacity so those are the ones that you you can go long and slow for a 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

10:03 acids so 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 and so when we're talking about overall stress we're talking about cortisol increase and they can't hit intens 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 fast did work out and holding that fast for a long period of time increases cortisol but then when we look from like

10:49 a hypothalamic point of view and we're looking at how the brain reads it we know that there's one area of kisspeptin 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 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 kisspeptin neurons and downregulate them and so when you start downregulating them we see that after four days you have a a disregulation 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

11:37 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 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 Improvement M ments 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 then when you look at population research that's coming out now they're showing in both men and women who hold their Fest till noon and then have an eating window from noon to maybe 6: p.m. have more obesogenic outcomes than people who break their

12:23 fast at 8 and finished their eating window by 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. 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 super interesting two questions is there a protective effect of starting the eating window and here I'm asking for both men and women starting the eating window at say 11:00 a.m. or noon and ending it a little bit later so not a 6our eating window or 7h hour eating window but extending that to

13:09 8 or 900 p.m. under those conditions do you still see the obesogenic effect 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 quol 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 so when we're looking at that obesogenic outcome the actual timing hasn't been tested yet to see how can we ex expand or contract that eating window for men but for women because of that cortisol Peak that right after waking up women tend to be already sympathetically

13:55 driven so then they walk around more tired but wired and have a really really difficult time ACC 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 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 and so you have to look at where's the peak of cortisol how does estrogen flux how does lutenizing hormone flux progesterone all these things that have this tight interplay 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

14:40 availability stance regular listeners of this podcast will know this but just to remind everybody a sympathetic state has nothing to do with emotional sympathy it's the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system which drives more arousal and alertness and at higher levels stress sometimes called the fight ORF flight response parasympathetic being the other arm of the autonomic nervous system sometimes called the rest and digest arm of the autonomic nervous system they work sort of like a seesaw or a push pull pick your analogy in any case it sounds like intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding unless it's very well aligned to the Circadian rhythm is not going to be advantageous for women that's what I'm hearing I'm also hearing that if a woman trains

15:26 while fasted so in the non-feeding window so wakes up maybe has some uh hydration and trains that's going to further exacerbate the stress response in a way that's not going to be good exactly and I have to imagine that if she also is drinking caffeine in order to do that training because caffeine is a stimulant of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system that it will further exacerbate all these issues so this is a opener for me because I've had female training partners for years I don't eat until 11:00 a.m. I like to hydrate and cinate before I train in the morning and then I like to eat starting around noon several of them have hopped on that

16:13 schedule with me some of them eat breakfast first some of them don't they do as they choose of course but now I'm thinking that's probably the worst way to go and it gets worse as you get older because if we're seeing as women are getting into par menopause 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 and because it's a point where you really need to polarize your training to get any kind of body composition change not having any fuel before a high-intensity workout puts them in moderate intensity they just can't hit the intensities they need to same with

16:59 resistance training like you go in and a lot of women are now working on sessional rpe or rating perceived exertion where you go in and say okay we need you to hit an eight on this squat so you have two reps in reserve and a sessional RP of an eight well if they're not fueled then we are 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 let's get um people sorry to interrupt let's get people up to speed on rpe because this is a term that's starting to um circulate more outside the physical um training community and to the broader kind of you know recreational exerciser Community which I consider myself part of UMO I mean I train regularly and half for years but I'm not an I'm not an athlete I don't get paid to train and I you know and so

17:46 forth so rep repsen Reserve perceived effort maybe just um explain this I think probably 95% of our listenership has never heard these terms okay so if we're talking about 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 so eight repetitions in good form and the person doing the exercise could in theory if they really dug in there grit their teeth could complete two more repetitions in good form before hitting failure the inab to move the weight anymore in good form exactly okay but

18:32 they're stopping at eight so they have two reps in reserve 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 1 to 10 of rating perceived exertion we see it correlates with um 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 as opposed to looking at um say percentage of one repetition maximum yeah saying you're going to move 70% of your one repetition maximum for six repetitions seems like that's a great thing as well but it's a little bit more complicated because you need to know your one repetition maximum doing one repetition maximums can be dangerous if you're not skilled in that especially with compound movements like

19:18 squats and deadlifts okay so is there an across theboard recommendation for most people that they should generally train their sets in good form to failure to leave a couple reps in reserve what do you suggest for let's say women but this could also pertain to men uh and then that also depends on the age of the woman so if we're looking at the reproductive year so you know 20 to 40 then it doesn't matter so much you can periodize pretty much how normal periodization works with your mesocycles and your micro Cycles so you're looking at what you're doing across the few months what are you doing in the week are you lifting heavy power Based training but when we start to get to per menopause and we're losing all the flux

20:04 of estrogen and estrogen is woman's testosterone the key driver for strength and power we have to look at lifting heavy 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 you're finding that when you're talking about reps in reserve then it allows people to lift more on the day 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 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

20:50 not as much strength as if you were to invoke That central nervous system response and that becomes really critical as women get older because we need to def find that external response that's going to cause the same kind of strength and power adaptation that estrogen used to support interesting lots to talk about in terms of exercise but before we move on if the bad situation is a woman fasting drinking caffeine and training intensely but as you told us not as intensely as she would be able to otherwise what's the solution I imagine that solution involves ingesting some fuel MH what is a good example of a you know a pre-training um meal if you will and we

21:37 could put some variation on that for people with different you know Tendencies towards omnivore or vegan or whatever uh but what is the timing of that meal relative to training that works best or and and I'm assuming there's some flexibility there 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 I've heard of people like you yeah mean meaning I tend to move slowly in the morning so I wish I could but the way my life is it doesn't work that way um so but I'm also one of the people that never really has an appetite till 11 o'clock okay so we're similar in that way yeah so how do you how do you square that 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

22:23 it's unsweetened but sweetened for the carb and then the protein powder for the protein because because if I'm going to go do an ocean swim then I need some carbohydrate and protein on board if I'm going to just go to the gym then I'll probably just have the protein powder in the coffee yes I'm caffeinating but I'm also getting the calories for the hypothalamus and getting more circulating amino acids Abby Smith Ryan out of UNCC did some specific work looking at carbohydrate protein before and you know strength or cardio and found that if you're going to do a true strength training session you only need around 15 grams of protein before 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

23:10 Epoch so your resting metabolism stays elevated um giving you a better chance for Recovery post exercise as well if you're going to do any kind of cardiovascular type work up to an hour then you're adding 30 grams of carp to that so it's not a lot of food and it's not a full meal um other people are like I'm starving right before I go training then yes you can have your meal giving yourself about a half an hour before um but it doesn't have to be major food that we're talking about um but that's just enough to bring blood sugar up and 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 as a neuroscientist I find it so interesting that at least some of what you're

23:56 talking about with this pre-workout meal and perhaps most of it relates to how ingesting those calories impacts the brain protects those kisspeptin neurons we'll talk more about kisspeptin very interesting peptide as opposed to saying okay you need X number of calories because you're going to burn X number of calories I hate that conversation right which is a very different conversation um here what we're talking about is the neural aspects of being able to generate intensity also blunt cortisol and get the most out of training without putting the body into kind of a an Emergency State yeah yeah and the longer someone withholds food after exercise and the greater they stay in that catabolic or breakdown State the more the brain

24:42 perceives it as being in a low energy state so the first thing to go is lean mass when you start telling a woman that you know if you're going to do fasted training and 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 m M so once you start really nailing that and then saying look you just need 15 gram of protein to really help and be able to conserve that lean mess it's a small simple fix people try it and they're like oh my gosh I feel amazing so it's 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 it's like two cookies means you have to walk for 30 minutes on the treadmill it's like it doesn't it doesn't correlate like that at all um so

25:27 that's why I was like like I hate the calorie conversation because it's just not applicable right and it has its own kind of um elements of being laced with neuroticism about calorie counting and then that can drift easily into the realm of Eating Disorders I did an episode about eating disorders some years ago and as I was researching that episode um I learned that people with eating disorders women and men um especially anorexia become like calorie calculators their eyes in their brain just are constantly evaluating the caloric load of food and it can be um obviously very intrusive it's also the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions so it's um that's a long way from hopefully what we're talking about here but but there's the opportunity for

26:13 drift whenever we talking about calorie counting in and out we of course believe in the laws of thermodynamics and calories in calories out but I love what you're describing here as getting the brain in a mode that the brain and body are protected so that one can invest in that high-intensity exercise and get the adaptations that one wants but not send everything down this pathway of um kind just becoming a computer of you know how much am I exercising what did I burn what did I earn it's it's crazy it's crazy um as long as we're talking about food and food intake relative to training what is the suggested posttraining um window um in which one should either avoid or make sure they get nutrition um

27:00 meaning how long does one have after let's say a resistance training session of about an hour seems to me that's what most people are doing if they're investing in resistance training maybe plus or minus a what 20 minutes yeah um and they're hitting those um high-intensity sets where they have maybe just one or two repetitions in reserve maybe going to failure on a few of those SES what do you recommend women eat after they train so we know that women who are in their reproductive years need around 35 grams of good protein highquality Lucine oriented protein within 45 minutes and we see that women who are per menopausal onwards are 40 to 60 grams because we become more anabolically resistant to food and exercise as we get older um

27:48 when we look at like the recovery window for food there are definitely sex differences because we hear all the conversation of there's no recovery window it's you know 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 UH 60 minutes and for men it's up to 3 hours 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 women we have this tighter window to stop that breakdown effect and start the reparation um so yeah it's like when we're talking about the protein intake it's really important not only to get

28:34 that Lucine 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 so women should try and get 30 or as M much as 40 maybe 50 grams of protein depending on their age m post training within an hour of training yep men seem to have a longer window they could wait an hour two hours maybe even three hours yeah before ingesting protein what about carbohydrate 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 around3

29:21 grams per kilo um of carbohydrate within 2 hours of finishing so we look at prot and people like well that's a big dose of protein how do I get it all in 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 um yeah there's a time and a place for protein supplementation but if you're getting that real food in 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 as many of you know I've been taking ag1 for more than 10 years now so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast to be clear I don't take ag1

30:07 because they're a sponsor rather they are a sponsor because I take ag1 in fact I take ag1 once and often twice every single day and I've done that since starting way back in 2012 there is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on whether you're an omnivore a carnivore or a vegetarian or a vegan I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources which allows you to eat enough but not overeat get plenty of vitamins and minerals probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health now I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources but the reason I still take ag1 once and often

30:52 twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins minerals probiotics Etc but it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress it's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment not replace quality food so by drinking a serving of ag1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs and I like so many other people that take ag1 report feeling much better in a number of important ways such as energy levels digestion sleep and more so while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome ag1 is found ational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related to mental health and physical health if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to

31:38 claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman at some point there was a lot of discussion about training fasted burns more body fat uh I think now most people accept that that's not the case that perhaps the percentage of fat as fuel is increased when one trains fasted but that overall in terms of loss of body fat it doesn't matter if you train fasted or you train fed correct okay I think um that can't be stated Enough by experts like you um that doesn't mean that if one prefers to train fasted or

32:23 with a minimum of food in their gut that they can't do that I like to train fasted but I what I'm hearing is that women should probably ingest at least some protein high quality protein and maybe drink the protein in a protein shake yeah um form if they don't want to ingest solid food 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're looking at um 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 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

33:10 can see why men do better in a fasted state or a low calorie state 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 kisspeptin up regulation or down regulation preferably up regulation um 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 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 you know 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

33:57 dysfunction when the calories are too low 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 I know some men that basically don't eat all day and then eat one meal in the evening and they'll train in the morning that's inconceivable to me because within an hour or so of training I'm hungry uh which brings to mind what we mean when we say training uh I'm a big believer in people everybody getting ideally two or three resistance training sessions in per week and two maybe three cardiovascular training sessions per week that would be ideal yep um one

34:42 could potentially do more probably not a whole lot less before you run into long-term health issues that you could offset but I think most people can fit those in and I'm very frankly delighted that nowadays there's such a push for women and men to resistance train that wasn't the case when I was growing up for you know I recall taking my sister to the gym for the first time and was like I think she was the only woman in the gym when we were in high school yeah except for a few female bodybuilders and she said well I don't want to look like that and I said well don't worry you're not going to look like that um but now you go to a gym and women are lifting weights men are lifting weights it's great it's terrific I've seen the evolution right when I was 16 one of my friends Brothers was a bodybuilder and he took us to the gym of like what you

35:28 did with your sister and so both of us were like well we want to beat those guys so we got into weight training with them not to be bodybuilder but it's been like the Paramount throughout all of my athletic career 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 yeah it's awesome as I mentioned before I've had female training partners and they they kill it yeah they um it's a lot of fun to have a um female training partner also because um not only is it cool to see the progress they can make really quickly which surprises them often you know I think a lot of women think that okay it's going to require external androgens or it's going you know and and what you pointed out that there are some barriers

36:15 to women putting on mass quickly I think I've noticed that strength increases can come really quickly why is that 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 even now if you go to a gym and you're a new member 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 they still doing that yeah and there's a cardiovascular machines a guy comes in like all right how much do you want to put on here are the lifting platforms all the you know the weight trainings at the back starting to see a

37:02 shift with Boutique type gems but that's still the commonality there so it's still that little bit of taboo 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 are little vesicles that you know hold the ability for the nerve to actually stimulate the muscle fiber all that gets trained really quickly 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 uh

37:48 because the driver for strength training is that Central Nervous System um so it's great when we see higher doses more volume we aren't seeing huge hypertrophy we're just seeing really good increases in strength whenever somebody male or female is concerned about growing too big too fast um I always remind them that resistance training is unique among different types of exercise in that because of the blood flow to the muscle during the exercise session the soc called pump yeah you get a window a transient window but a window nonetheless of what the hyper could look like if you do everything else correctly in terms of recovery so provided that the um the size of the muscle during the

38:34 training session is not aversive to you yeah you're okay you're good yeah um which is unique among you know training it's not like when you go running you get a sense of being much faster you actually get the opposite effect you you feel the burn in your lungs and and the pain of of hitting the wall of your limits and then hopefully if the adaptation takes place then you can push past that next time but with resistance train you get a liter Lally a physical picture and a and a sematic feeling for what that hypertrophy could look like yeah that's why on your physique competitions and bodybuilding competitions they're out the back pumping before they go on stage so we've been talking about training but we haven't really spelled out what you would suggest a novice perhaps an intermediate um resistance training cardiovascular

39:21 training um program would look like in in Broad terms I realize we don't have time here to get into all the DET you WR this elere and refer people to those teric resources and the show note captions but um what would you like to see women doing and maybe we can break up the the age brackets because it sounds like this is something that um is resurfacing again and again here um women let's say 30 and younger women 31 to let's say 40 and then let's say 41 to 60 and then maybe 61 and on in terms of how many sessions of resistance training per week is it whole body training how many sessions of cardiovascular training and what sorts of examples could could you give yeah so if we're looking at

40:08 that 20 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 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 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

40:54 at the most two hit sessions from 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 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 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

41:40 do some compound movements let's look at doing some heavier work let's look at how we are periodizing so we're having you know six we blocks and we're building on those blocks because we want that base foundation so when we get to be 40 plus we can actually go and do our powerbase 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 and ideally when we get there we're looking at that around three minimum three resistance training with compound movement

42:28 and either one Sprint interval or two Sprint intervals and one hit in a week and just to remind people compound movements multi-joint movements squats deadlifts uh chin-ups rows overhead presses bench presses Etc as opposed to isolation movements where only one joint is is moving yeah yeah and for everybody in all those age ranges that you describe are you suggesting they train the same muscle groups three or four times per week or do some sort of split where it's upper body lower body take a day off or upper body take a day off lower body take a day off whatever that what might work for them yeah what works for them if you're looking for 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

43:14 allocate an hour to an hour and a half in the gym then you can do total body with adequate rest um the key when you're younger is working to failure the key when you're older is working heavy interesting yeah 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 because that becomes more important when we're talking about longevity because if you're looking at the strength component from a central nervous system standpoint we see it feeds forward into better appropri reception attenuation of cognitive decline and this is the other thing that you in Neuroscience would understand the

44:01 sex differences in things like dementia and Alzheimer's 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 even some interesting literature about emphasizing some unilateral movements as people get older not just um dual limb movements or dual limb simultaneous movements you always want to train both sides of your body folks but um so if I understand correctly younger women should train to failure try and generate strength and hypertrophy as women get older they should emphasize more strength training leave some repetitions in reserve but train heavier yes it makes so much sense what you're saying yeah um because what we know about the

44:48 nervous system as we age is that there's some atrophy or at least some weakening of neuromuscular connections and the upper motor neurons in the brain that control the neuromuscular Connections in the spinal cord out to the muscle yeah um there's something really sticky about this idea in terms of longevity that I don't think anyone else has ever said 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 where it's that per menopausal 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 and then when we say it's per menopause they like what is

45:35 that and so when we're looking at per menopause it is a huge change in the body because you're having less and less of your sex hormone circulating more and more an ovulatory Cycles means no progesterone or very low progesterone you're having a difference in the pulse of your estrad to those Flatline aspect effects and because every system in the body is affected by it this is why you see more soft tissue injuries like two of the biggest things that women who are in their 40s are going to ptas about her frozen shoulder and pler fascia those are two really indicative issues that are happening in Parry menopause so that whole section of mid to mid 40s to early 50s is a definitive aging point where I really

46:22 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 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 it's a there's a better indication of the timing across the ages of when

47:07 you should start implementing for men I think you have a better bandwidth of when you should start implementing for women who are not on hormone replacement therapy and we did a previous episode about per menopause menopause and hormone replacement therapy but if it comes up again and again today that would be wonderful because these are important underd discussed topics absolutely for women that are not on hormone replacement therapy who decide to train heavier maybe do a bit more training volume not train to failure they're making sure to not let their cortisol Spike too much by making sure they have some pre-workout nutrition some post-workout nutrition would they be wise to be very careful in how much

47:53 cardiovascular exercise they add to that meaning there seems to always be this risk of overtraining and as you pointed out for various reasons cultural reasons historical reasons um around exercise I my observation is that most women sort of unless they know better default to cardiovascular exercise as opposed to resistance training so if a woman in her 40s late 30s to let's say 50 is doing two to four sessions of resistance training workouts per week and they also really like cardio or they feel they want to or should do cardio should they be careful about how much cardio they're doing and is there a best form of cardio should they really

48:39 emphasize the high-intensity interval training should they avoid zone two we should probably also Divine for people what zone two is if they if they don't already know um so I am notorious for slamming things like orange theory and f45 because they mark it specifically to that age group of women and it's not appropriate because it's not true high-intensity work 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 is going to help me lose body fat it doesn't is this things like Soul cycle as well okay I've never done any of these yeah um but I imagine there's a lot of spinning a lot of moving a lot of sweating and a lot of quote unquote

49:25 calories burned emphasis yes there is but it's it puts women squarely in moderate intensity where they're so used to leaving one of those classes feeling absolutely smashed 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 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 1 to four minutes of 80% or

50:12 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 you're not doing it every day because you need to have enough recovery to hit those intensities trly 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 you know doing my spin classes 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

50:57 come from a long background of endurance 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 at low conversation and that's fine for mental health and being out in nature 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 I have family members who are

51:44 women who are thin because they love to walk and they just walk a ton um and they eat well um and enough but they are resistant to resistance training and if they do pick up a weight it's usually some very light dumbbells do a few curls a couple tricep extensions and aren't really um leaning into the higher intensity work yeah I think this is pretty common and my observation is that it's common not because they couldn't be incentivized to do the higher intensity work but that learning the complex compound movement like how to squat properly or even leg

52:30 press properly y um deadlift properly can be a bit overwhelming especially when one walks into a gym this is true for men too like all this stuff all this equipment all these bodies and these people look like they know what they're doing it's like if I were to go into an advanced like kitchen or or um Symphony and you know all these instruments I don't know how to play yeah so what's the best line of attack for somebody who really wants to overcome this uh longevity barrier because clearly resistance training proper nutrition work yeah and the cardiovascular exercise piece is a little bit more intuitive walking you do it faster you're jogging you do it faster you're running yeah yeah um the bike the soul cycle class Etc it's just it's easier in terms of the mechanics one can still get hurt but it's just more straightforward

53:16 is there a way that in the absence of a budget for a personal trainer that somebody can learn how to do these movements and as you said ease into them over the course of even up to four months in a way that they can be confident that they're unlikely to get hurt yeah and really build up their capacity to do real work that can benefit them 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 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

54:02 starett's stuff with Mobility so show them like here's how we do some of the mobility to find where the sticking points are 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 or 40 plus so does um uh Brie and then Sunny 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 um 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

54:49 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 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 so there's lots of ways of breaking that barrier to entry 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 I'm a big fan of machines especially plate loed machines but machines just create the close to correct or correct Arc of movement yeah

55:37 that um so for your size yeah yeah yeah exactly and to really spend the time adjusting the seat height adjusting the various um pins on the machine not just the weight in order to make sure that one gets the best range of motion I think this is something small but that is significant in terms of its impact people just pop down in a machine especially if you're working in with somebody and feel um especially beginners will feel pressured to move quickly and they won't adjust the seat height and so it's just all wrong for them and all it takes is a little bit of time to you know and ask people you know how to adjust the machines I'm also a fan of kettle bells in in the garage or light lighter dumbbells that you can do like thrusters or hang cleans or something like that to get the the

56:22 momentum and movement feeling um because that's another good learning curve for people um 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 so you've mentioned polarized training if I understand correctly this would be a woman doing three or four days of high-intensity resistance training for 45 to 60 or 45 to 75 minutes per session and then at the opposite extreme maybe just walking a lot or jogging a lot so is that what you're talking about polarized training as opposed to um these other forms of training where it's designed to get people sweating like crazy breathing hard for long periods of time but

57:07 neither putting them at the in the landscape of inducing muscle strength adaptations and hypertrophy adaptations nor really taxing the cardiovascular system enough to create you know an increase in longevity for instance 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 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

57:52 heavy set and then they'll go on the assault but 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 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 I'd like to take a quick break to let you know that the huberman lab team has launched a new podcast with host Dr Andy Galpin Andy is an expert in exercise science and Human Performance and has Longman a fan favorite on the huberman Lab podcast this new podcast is called perform with

58:39 Dr Andy Galpin and it dives into topics such as how to build muscle and strength how to improve your cardiovascular health and how to optimize recovery and sleep for performance and much more Andy is an absolutely fantastic educator and true expert on all things human performance I know you'll thoroughly enjoy his new podcast and learn a ton of useful Knowledge from it so please check it out and give it a subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to podcast now again the podcast is called perform with Dr Andy Galpin let's talk about the menstrual cycle yeah and how that impacts training at the level of Psychology and Physiology meaning Mo and of course the two are linked they're inextricably linked for instance is there a

59:24 particular phase of the m cycle where a woman should expect that motivation Andor recovery would be more challenging so this is the sticky point of recent science because we see all these research studies and met 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 you menic women might have an a subject pool of 10 if you're lucky 12 so this is women who have quote unquote normal menstrual cycles humanic supposedly ovulating so they have a definitive low hormone and high hormone phase and this is probably because these studies are being done on University campuses with with college

1:00:10 undergraduate women yes exactly yeah which is a typically is in a given age range 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 belief um 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 from a molecular standpoint we know that theow

1:00:56 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 then that low hormone phase is really optimal for trying to hit a PR trying to hit a new speed because you can take on that stress and you're immune system handles it your muscles handle it your core temperature everything handles it so for most women in the weeks before their period they're going to feel more robust except right up until the point of um of menstration

1:01:43 or the inverse it is day one a bleeding up through midcycle that feel great yep the sticky Point comes not every woman ovulates and this is a thing when we're looking at will pop we have lifestyle stress we have nutrition stress we know that women for the most part have four to five an ovulatory 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 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 ludal phase this is where where we have the most change where we have a pro-inflammatory response from the immune system we have

1:02:32 uh inability to access carbohydrate as well we have a higher sympathetic drive so there's lots of things in there that aren't so fantastic for accommodating stress so broadly speaking the ludal phase is associated with more cortisol more kind of Baseline levels of stress would it makes sense for a woman to try and offset some of that with a bit more nutrition during that phase a bit more perhaps complex carbohydrate we know that some complex carbohydrate can blunt some of the cortisol response maybe just even a little bit more attention to eating yeah absolutely I mean core temperature goes up but the whole goal of the ludal phase is to build tissue so this is where we're seeing a lot of shuttling of

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