Best Exercise for Women in Perimenopause & Menopause: Strength Training, Short-Burst Cardio & Soul Movement
Part 2-How I make Dr. Stacy Sims' recommendations happen in my BUSY life.
Today we are diving into exercises that are shown to be most beneficial for women as we age. This is specifically for women who are 35 plus who have big, busy, full lives and want to make the most benefit happen in the short period of time that they have, from the comfort of their own homes, and doing workouts that they actually enjoy and they don’t dread.
Dr. Stacy Sims believes that women are not small men. There are so many studies that have been done on men over the decades and they have been generalized to women. In a nutshell, she recommends two strength training workouts a week, and then two short burst cardio sessions a week, and then the rest recovery days, which we call soul movement.
Soul movement. I did not start and I do not start my clients with strength training and short burst cardio. I start with what I call soul movement. It’s whatever movement feels good to your soul. Maybe this is going for a walk. Maybe this is gardening. Maybe this is jumping on a mini trampoline, which is my favorite thing. And what we do is we start with 10 minutes. We don’t start with 20, we start with 10 minutes, and we work on doing that consistently.
Strength training. We start with body weight, and we work our way up to dumbbells or kettlebells, whatever you have at home. We want to progressively get heavier, but we want to make sure that our form is there first. This can take 6 to 12 months. We do full body twice a week. We’re doing squats, lunges, chest presses, bridge lifts, and we spread the two days apart so that we have time to recover.
Short burst cardio. HIIT is the umbrella term for high intensity interval training. It’s 90 seconds of work where you’re going eight out of 10 effort, and then we’re taking a break. SIT stands for sprint interval training, and it’s a subset of HIIT. Instead of a 90-second interval, it’s a 30-second interval. Instead of being an eight out of 10 effort, you’re going nine or 10 out of 10, with a two to three minute break after that. It doesn’t have to be sprinting. It can be things like kettlebell swings, medicine ball slams, jump roping, jump squats. I recommend in my program that we do one HIIT a week and one SIT a week. I want you to work on your form first before we start doing these.
Recovery. Those recovery days are when your muscles and your bones and everything repairs. You cannot just keep hitting your body hard, hard, hard every day and not recover if you want to actually see the results. What you will hear me say a million times in this program is consistency, not perfection. Betty Rocker, who is an amazing person on YouTube, says, “All or something, not all or nothing.”
I am not a physical trainer. If at any point you feel like you need to see somebody for any pain, please see somebody about those things because we don’t want to add weight on top of that. It’s not too early or too late to start as long as your doc says it’s okay.
Whether you are on supplements, hormone therapy, anti-anxiety or antidepressants, GLP-1s, they all still really, really do need the lifestyle things. The exercise, strength training, and cardio work. You can’t get that from supplements. You can’t get that from hormone therapy. You can’t get that from GLP-1s. GLP-1s actually need more strength training and protein and fiber and those kind of things because we’re more at risk for losing those things.
Watch the full video above for everything I covered. If you have not caught part one, we talked in that video about hormones, we talked about sleep, we talked about nutrition, and many things in between. It’s such a good episode, so please go back and watch that.
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