Dr Stacy Sims: Exercise strategies that actually work

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Why is it so hard to get real answers about your health? If you've been told that everything looks fine, but you know that something is off, well, you're not imagining it. That's why I created Vitality three sixty to help you better understand what's going on inside your body so that you can take the targeted action needed. With a functional health approach plus testing, we go beyond the guesswork to uncover the root causes of your symptoms. I've teamed up with Dotty Asmina, an incredible integrative GP and together we will help you decode your body's signals and answer questions like why am I always exhausted? What's really causing my stubborn weight? Am I inflamed? Insulin resistant? Or maybe missing key nutrients? Because when you understand your body better, you can transform your health. Visit v three sixty dot health.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: Or check out the show notes for more.
00:00:52
Speaker 1: Every year, on my birthday, I gift myself a Dexa scam Happy birthday to me, and I have been doing this now since two thy thirteen. So if you're a data girl, oh my goodness, I have this gorgeous spreadsheet where every year I pump in the most important metrics out of my DESA scan, and really my goal has been to fight the clock. My goal has been to keep my body composition about the same more obviously even improving as I've been aging so ideally maybe losing a little bit of body fat and then of course gaining that beautiful lean muscle mass. So last year I decided to really focus on getting stronger. I'm a little bit of a pipsqueak, and I was like, this is my year. I'm gonna lay down some more beautiful muscle.
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Speaker 2: I'm a crossfitter.
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Speaker 1: And then on top of my CrossFit, I went and downloaded, which I've done.
00:01:50
Speaker 2: Before, this great app.
00:01:51
Speaker 1: It's called Smolov Junior and it's just a really simple protocol that you follow for three weeks, so you do it for dead lifts. I did it for dead lifts, I cycled through twice actually, and then I did it for squats as well, and boy did I get stronger. I actually managed to hit my goal last year, which was triple digits in the deadlift.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: I got to one hundred kilo deadlift.
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Speaker 1: And it's only now a few kilos off deadlifting double my body weight. So I'm pretty proud of that, saying as I'm forty six and I'm also got to my goal of squorting one and a half times my body weight as well. So so so chuffed. So here I go walking in Chess, proud to my DEXA scan on the birthday. Can't wait to see this great lean muscle that I have laid down. Well, you want to know what? I gained one hundred grams of lean muscle in that twelve months, like nothing like hello, oh my goodness. My body fat had stayed the same, and I just like, it's measly, you know, insignificant amount of muscle mass, And I just.
00:02:57
Speaker 2: Thought, wtf. I'm a hard exerciser. So it just reminded me.
00:03:05
Speaker 1: How hard it is to lay down lean tissue in your forties and beyond.
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Speaker 2: And the other thing it got me.
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Speaker 1: Questioning was even though I didn't add a single kilo of muscle, I am so much stronger. I mean, I am physically stronger. My performance in the gym proves that. So I want to know is my body still healthier.
00:03:26
Speaker 2: Even though I didn't add any more muscle? This is healthy? Heer with Amelia Phillips.
00:03:42
Speaker 1: As this episode goes live, it is officially spring. Yeah, hey, music to this exercises is I just love the excitement in the zeitgeist around exercise in spring. Bring it on every single year. And look, when you've been in the health industry long enough, you know that this really does mean two things. Number one, more hay fever, but number two, busier gyms, more people out and about training, really wanting to maximize their results in of course, the shortest time frame possible.
00:04:17
Speaker 2: We want those quick wins.
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Speaker 1: So what better time to bring in one of the world's leading experts on exercise, nutrition and female physiology, doctor Stacy Simms. Now, if you're not familiar with doctor Stacy, first of all, hello, where have you been, my friend? Because you are in for such a treat today. She is a world renowned exercise physiologist, a nutrition scientist, and a speaker who specializes in female specific training performance and hormonal health, which we all need. Is actually recently on the Mele Robins podcast for goodness sake, So guys, we are in the.
00:04:57
Speaker 2: Realm of queenhood here. Can I just say?
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Speaker 1: She completed her post doctoral research at Stanford University really focusing on the sex differences in environmental and nutritional physiology, and she's got over twenty years experience helping women to optimize our fitness, recovery, and of course longevity. She's also the author of Raw and Game Changes, books that really empower women to train smarter, which clearly I need after my recent results. And she's recognized internationally for translating some really complex science into practical strategies for women of all ages. And of course I'm very passionate about women in midlife. Please guys follow her on the Instagram she's got almost a million followers and sign up to a newsletter. You are going to be educated and inspired, just like you would not believe. So if you are ready to get the most out of your exercise sessions, to learn how to recover smarter, and to really work with your body instead of against it, then my friend, you are in the right place. In today's episode is for you, Doctor Stacey. Thank you so much for coming on Healthy Her today.
00:06:06
Speaker 3: Before we finish this podcast, I need the name of that app because that sounds amazing.
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Speaker 2: Oh it's Molov Junior. OMG.
00:06:17
Speaker 1: I've done it about four times in my life. Smolo v anything with an Eastern European name in it, smallov Bulgarian squats, Romanian deadlifts. You know is going to hurt, Sure it is. And so it's basically a calculation. You type in what your one RM is for a big compound move, like it works really well for squats, deadlifts, bench press. You type in your one RM and then it asks you do you want to improve by five or you put the percentage you want to improve by five percent over three weeks, and then it calculates your training protocol and it's just the one move. So basically you deadlift four times a week, but the sets and reps completely change in the weights and so it's super clever because the week starts quite light and so you're like, oh this, it feels totally manageable, and then by the end of the week you're doing a lot less reps but a heavier weight and more sets, and so it kind of creeps up on you. It's a really good one. Not for beginners because it is the same move, repeat it, but oh my gosh, it it gets you stronger. But as you can see, maybe not lying down more muscle.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, building muscles. So I know it's it's like what, Yeah.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: I laugh so much when we talk about strength training and one of the first things women says, I don't want to bowl up, and I say, you wish look.
00:07:43
Speaker 3: For you.
00:07:44
Speaker 1: I know, I know, If only all right, doctor Stacy, I'm going to float a scenario with you. I want you to take yourself out of your amazing athletic body and I want you to picture this. You are a pery menopausal woman. You would call yourself an intermediate exercise U. So you know you've had bouts of high intensity exercise, you've had a big break, you know, you've had kids, maybe an injury here that you're intermediate.
00:08:09
Speaker 2: You're hot and cold.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: In the last few years, you've noticeably gained body fat and you're feeling a lot weaker. Now it's spring, you've decided this is it time to get back on the exercise bandwagon.
00:08:22
Speaker 2: You've got four hours a.
00:08:24
Speaker 1: Week to dedicate to structured exercise and maybe a little bit of incidental outside of that, and you'd really like to strip this extra body fat and also exercise for overall health span. What do you do in your four one hour sessions?
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Speaker 3: Love this question? This is great. You think about spring, A lot of people want to be outside and then we often see like the weaker might not move back and do so for being outside, So we do want to incorporate some of the outside time to have the benefit of being with nature for stress release, especially with perimenopause and are tired, but why you're drive and we know that if you're getting more pair of sympathetic activation through that mental stress release of being outside, it helps with body comp because we're able to drop that sympathetic system that tired but wired and really feed forward to getting better sleep. That's where I'm going with us, because we need to really look at sleep and sleep optimization because we don't get good sleep. We can't budge the needle on any metric. So if I had four hours a week to dedicate, I would have at least one outside that would be really kind of low intensity stress release, going for a walk in green space if you can, or run or ride or something that's outside, and then I would have one that could either be outside or inside that was strength oriented. So if we're looking at an outside strength orientation, it could be going to a playground and using resistance bands to add load with confidence to be doing lunges, pull ups, any kind of body weight action. That's going to give you the tendon and the ligament and the muscular poll that you want for that strength. And if it's inside, you can do the same thing with resistance vans on a rig or in your garage. And then I'd have two dedicated sessions in the gym, and the two dedicated sessions would be a mobilization warm up, so you're actually working to mobilize the joints, so you're not stretching. You're trying to open up all the joint capsules, get better range of motion. Yeah, and then I would have a knee forward, squat focus, heavier session. When you're first phasing in, it's going to be more reps, lighter load, getting that motion in.
00:10:42
Speaker 1: You just say knee forward. Can you just explain what you mean by knee forward?
00:10:46
Speaker 3: We think about lower body. We have squat and lunges, and we also have things like hip thrusts and deadlifts. So we're talking about the knee forward. It's more of our lunges, our step forward lunges, squads, anything is going to be more quad dominant but also works the glutes.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: And why is that women.
00:11:07
Speaker 3: For the most part are quad dominant, but we don't necessarily have the quad strength for appropriate reception and being able to be reactive to side steps. And if we have kids or we're going for a walk on a trail, we need to have that appropriate reception for some of that cutting motion, and we need to have really strong quads in and around and muscles around the knee to protect the knee and become bulletproof. The other thing we see in perimenopause is there's an upsurge of joint pain and osteoarthritis. So if we're creating bulletproof knees through more knee forward motion and ned forward strength, then we are feeding forward to preventing pain in the joint and offshooting some poor muscle patterns that might occur with joint pain or osteoarthritis.
00:11:54
Speaker 2: Oh, that makes so much sense, And sorry I interrupted you. You're in the middle of explaining the the gym.
00:12:00
Speaker 1: Focused workout, so sorry, let's just circle back to that.
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Speaker 3: So we do our mobilization and that's maybe ten minutes, and then we have twenty in to twenty five minutes of a really focused need forward workout, So that could be front squats, back squats with like volt garan split squats, so it's not a lot of different movements, they're just very focused. And then we finish with some jump training, so it's either plyometric type stuff or maybe if we're just starting to learn plio, we're doing band assisted pogos, which is going to give us some high intensity work, but it's also going to work on strengthening the joints and the ligaments and the movement patterns for jumping, and jumping is important for bone health. The next gym session would be very similar in the mobilization and the plio or jump focus, and in the middle will be more posterior chain. So this is where you might be doing hip thrust and bent over row, so you're getting that hinge motion, but you're strengthening upper and lower body of the same time.
00:13:00
Speaker 1: And so why posterior when you talk about knee forward in that previous day, now you're talking about more posterior training. Can you give us a little background as to why you want to focus on that.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, so women are, like I said earlier, quad dominant, and we don't really tend to turn on our glutes, and we tend to very weak ham strings. We want to be bulletproof in the knees and the hips. We also have to have strong reactive hamstrings and also work the glutes. We sit most of the time all day and that turns the glutes up, makes the hamstrings soft, so we want to be able to activate that right, and we also need some upper body kind of pulling you back.
00:13:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we spend our whole life rounded and leaning forward. So posterior work is opening up.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. When we open it up and feel that space, it allows us to stand up stronger, breathe better. And as I like to tell people, you want to be able to take up and have that confidence. So if you're walking on the footpath and there are three coming towards you, don't move, have them move because you know you don't want to have to step down off the curve. So if you have that confidence around you from being strong and open, you're just like, yeah, I'm not moving. Yeah. So it's a confidence building thing with that postural change.
00:14:20
Speaker 2: Okay, ah, that just sounds amazing.
00:14:23
Speaker 1: All right, So we've got out ten minutes of mobility, we've got our kind of twenty to thirty minutes of strength, slightly different focus on each day.
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Speaker 2: What else have we got in those two gym sessions and.
00:14:33
Speaker 3: Then we finished with the high intensity work. So it's apply o work, or it's jump training, or it's sprint interval work. And the reason for that super super high intensity but short bout is it allows our body to understand a very strong, super strong stress, but it's not something that is going to necessarily be overly taxing to cause injury or burnout. So the other when we think about that high intensity work, it's one of the fastest ways to signal the body to stop storing visceral fat and it also works with brain health.
00:15:10
Speaker 2: Is that right?
00:15:12
Speaker 1: So in our little scenario here where intermediate exercises and we're kind of coming off probably a bit of a lull through winter, what would you see as a good high intensity finisher that maybe we don't feel confident doing these big jumping moves right yet, what's a couple of examples of what we could do instead?
00:15:36
Speaker 3: And if you're coming back from injury or you have store joints, you don't necessarily want to do box jumps or anything like that. So, like I said, we could do band assisted pogos. But more to the fact, that's a little bit easier to kind of get people's head around as doing an explosive kettlebell swing. So it's a little bit heavier than what you would want, and you're only coming up to eye height. You're not going all the way overhead. Maybe you're doing battle ropes. We'll be doing really heavy ropes to get that high intensity. Yet you could do peace.
00:16:06
Speaker 2: You could do no one lacks you right now? What about buy can row?
00:16:13
Speaker 1: What about just getting on a stationary cardio machine and just going hard twenty seconds on, ten seconds off, well forty five seconds on fifteen seconds off.
00:16:22
Speaker 3: When we talk it sprinted interval training. In this age group, we're looking at thirty seconds as hard as you can or less, So twenty to thirty seconds as hard as you possibly can and a full two minutes recovery, because we want each of those intervals to be as hard as you can possibly go. And if you're doing Tobata style or you're only having ten to fifteen seconds off, it puts you more in a moderate intensity, not a super high intensity. So you could do as salt bike, you could do the rower. I would not say treadmill because you can't really jump on treadmill confidently and run at top speed for thirty seconds and jump off it's too dangerous. Yeah, it's really proficient. But even then it's something that you can't really get up to speed.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: You might become treadmill roadkill, which we've all we've all done at.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: Some point in our life.
00:17:08
Speaker 1: I've been scrolling on my phone and half my foot's gone off the belt and the other half is yeah, yeah, stop suddenly, and yep.
00:17:17
Speaker 2: It's always pretty, isn't it.
00:17:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we leave the treadmill alone. So really, it's any mode that you feel confident, and the more that you do it, the more confident you get, the more you can get into it. But I would really urge everyone to put a little bit of jump work in. So that's why I really like resistance bands. You could have a resistance band tied around the rig and then around your waist and you could do jumping lunges to help you with that, or you tie it above on the pull up bar and you're holding onto it and you can do jump motion that way. Because it's not about how high yet or how explosive you are. It's about getting that kind of rebound information and ground reactive force through the bone, the tend in through the ligaments and get that muscular component ready for you to be able to independently jump.
00:18:07
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on a couple of I guess precursors to jump training? For example, a slam ball where you might pick a heavy slam balls. They're a bit different to a med ball because they're just these really heavy, dull balls that you pick up over your head, super heavy, and you just peg them down on the ground as hard as you can.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: Would you see.
00:18:30
Speaker 1: That as a type of I guess explosive training as a precursor.
00:18:36
Speaker 3: Yes, in high intensity, but it still does not work the same as the jumping motions, okay, because the goal that we want from a jump motion is to have the ground reactive force go through the entire skeletal system, and that means landing hard. Doesn't have to be high, but it should be hard.
00:18:56
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:18:56
Speaker 1: So another precursor for you, love your thoughts is if you're doing it dead hang So whether you're the outdoor person in the kid's playground and you find like a monkey by area that you can maybe jump up, and you know your feet are maybe thirty centimeters or less twenty centimeters off the ground and you're hanging there dead hang for your thirty seconds or whatever you can do, and then you let go and you drop to the ground. Is that does that get the doctor Stacey tick of approval?
00:19:22
Speaker 3: It does? It does because when we talk about jump training for bone health, you really aren't jumping that high. And it could be a very low depth jump, which is kind of like a dead hang to drop into the ground. It could be stepping off a stair hard right, one foot down, two feet down. It's not a full box jump. If you start putting a full box jump in, that's more applyometric, high intensity with a little bit of that ground reactive force. But yeah, because we forget how to jump, and we forget how to land. Because if you think about kids skipping down the road, when was the last time you were skipping?
00:19:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, not a pretty site hour.
00:20:02
Speaker 3: So we forget and our body forgets how to generate force and absorb the impact. And I mean even skipping is a good precursor for a jump training.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, and actually it is fun.
00:20:13
Speaker 1: We do do a little bit of skipping, and besides getting whip marks all over my legs and arms, it is actually quite enjoyable. Thank you first of all for giving us that snapshot, and I hope for those of you that do fit that intermediate exercise bucket that gives you a lovely framework from which you can build.
00:20:33
Speaker 2: And if you're sitting there.
00:20:34
Speaker 1: And you're hearing these words back squats, Bulgarians, splits, Pogo and you're going what what what what? You know this could be your wake up call to say maybe it's time to invest in a personal trainer.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: And maybe you.
00:20:45
Speaker 1: Say you scribble down doctor Stacy's little framework and you go to this trainer and you know, chat to them about this is the kind of program. I want you to write me and teach me some of these really foundational moves because it is money well spent, don't you think.
00:20:58
Speaker 3: Absolutely looking at move And the one thing I have found when women are not confident in the gym and they go hire a personal trainer, they're afraid to speak up with what they want, so they end up filling an entire hour in doing things that are not really optimal because a personal trainer feels obligated to fill that whole out. But if you go with a framework and say, hey, I want to do some mobilization. I want to do some heavy lifting and I want to do some jump or high intensity work. At the end, it gives them the opportunity to go great. Now I have the framework. This is perfect and so you know it's going to work for you. They're going to teach you how to do this and keep it interesting. Yeah.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: Well, your mantra, which I love and it's really taken off around the world is women are not small men, and it really has reshaped how we as exercise professionals think about training. Can you maybe run us through the most critical physiological differences that we need to be aware of and nurture in our beautiful female bodies.
00:21:57
Speaker 3: Well, we start with the X X versus X Y chreminosome, right, and unfortunately we only have the binary type of research available. But if we start with the knowledge of a female assigned or a person assigned female birth or XX, we have morphology differences. So that means that our muscle fibers are different from birth, so we have more of those endurance type fibers. We have better capability of burning free faty acids. We have better oxidative and inflammatory responses, meaning that our body really tunes into dampening those two effects pretty rapidly. And how that transfers out is that women are really good going along and slow and burning fat.
00:22:46
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, I feel my listeners would be challenging that going on. I don't know how good I am at burning fat, but hey, it sounds good.
00:22:53
Speaker 3: Yeah. We don't have a lot of the fast twitch fibers, so those are our glycolytic power based fibers to lose the more as we get older.
00:23:01
Speaker 1: Is that maybe why when never going to compete with you saying bolt in the one hundred meter sprints, We're probably not going to get there.
00:23:07
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, you can train them specifically, but we're still going to miss the mark against the true x Y. And we don't produce as much lactate either. Our lactate responses are different than men's because we don't have as many of those glacolytic fast switch fibers. Why that's important is it transfers into how our ability is to withstand those super high intensities. Also brain health, because the more that we can produce lactate as we get older, the more we're able to teach our brain to switch between glucose and lactate, so that helps slow the rate and risk of dimension Alzheimer's. We bring in also back down to bone density. Women have not as strong or as dense bones as men. We also have a different Q angles that means the angle from the hip to the knee. So we have to be careful about our quad dominancy for our running and are jumping in her cutting motions, especially for chasing the kids. I've had quite a few friends who have jumped into kids' soccer games or have chased the kids and have torn in a meniscus or an acl on just because differences right.
00:24:18
Speaker 2: Now, Q angles are really interesting.
00:24:19
Speaker 1: One if you imagine you're walking down the street and you've got a lady and a man walking towards you, and let's say there's an X ray machine, and so they clothes disappear and you can just see the skeleton walking towards you.
00:24:32
Speaker 2: You see the.
00:24:33
Speaker 1: Man's fema and his thigh bone will be just very much vertical up and down, you know, like yeah, parallel to the ground. Whereas the lady it's a little bit more of that triangle shape, isn't it. She's got the slightly wider hips and then that fema just angles in almost like a little v subtly, and you see that in you know, in X rays and in diagrams, you can go, oh, that's no wonder women and knees can be such an issue, and no wonder we.
00:25:03
Speaker 2: Get these super tight itvs as well.
00:25:05
Speaker 1: And I don't think a lot of women realize that Q angle, which is great for birthing babies and you know, great for Kim Kardashian and her hourglass figure, but not so great if you try to do some athletic moves.
00:25:17
Speaker 3: It's great for sprinting, running, all those fun things that we like to do, which is why we have to really focus on doing things like lambshells, which you know are kind of boring and important to really get strength and around the glot mead and the glop max and all those things again. Bulletproof knees.
00:25:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, hearing you say a lot of those things makes me feel like women are quite hardcore in the sense that, like, I mean from an evolutionary perspective, like we're endurance baby, We've got like lack date tolerance, where got a lot of innate systems in our body that are just tuned for survival.
00:25:56
Speaker 2: How cool is that, you know?
00:25:59
Speaker 3: And that's we're can change the narrative right because we think about all the fitness and sports stuff, the man is the default and the woman is the anomaly, even in the language where we go the ladies bar instead of the thinner bar for smaller hands, the girl push up instead of a modification of a push up, because it makes everyone in that subconsciously or less than think that women aren't as strong or they can't do the same, and that you don't really want to be like a woman. But in fact we are the more endurance and we're more stress tolerant. We are the reason why there are still humans on this earth because of evolution, the fact that we can birth babies and still keep going and our bodies are set up for that.
00:26:55
Speaker 1: Why is it so hard to get real answers about your health if you've been told that if everything looks fine, but you know that something is off, we're not imagining it. That's why I created Vitality three sixty to help you better understand what's going on inside your body so that you can take.
00:27:11
Speaker 2: The targeted action needed.
00:27:13
Speaker 1: With a functional health approach plus testing, we go beyond the guesswork to uncover the root causes of your symptoms. I've teamed up with Doctasmina, an incredible integrative GP, and together we will help you decode your body's signals and answer questions like why am I always exhausted? What's really causing my stubborn weight? Am I inflamed? Insulin resistant? Or maybe missing key nutrients? Because when you understand your body better, you can transform your health. Visit V three sixty dot health or check out the show notes for more. I hear you saying these words, and it makes me want to get up and move. It makes me want to celebrate my body. It makes me want to take up space in the weight room, and even though he's deadlifting a weight much heavier than me, it makes me want to own what I am doing. And you know, motivation and inspiration to exercise is one of the biggest barriers I find, and so even just hearing you educate us on that, it actually lowers that barrier because it increases our motivation and it makes us respect our bodies so much more, don't you find.
00:28:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, women understand and they go, my body is capable way more than what I'm letting it do. It breaks a barrier in a mental state because we're so conditioned to blaming ourselves and negative self talk. And if we take away the comparisons to the quote norm, which is the male norm, and we look at what our bodies are capable of and challenge our own selves, then it opens up a whole world of confidence and that feeds forward to every aspect of our lives.
00:29:06
Speaker 1: And it's funny because you're one of the few people that really advocates for high intensity exercise for women, and it is a little bit of a challenge because you know, a lot of the women I speak to are exhausted and they're worried about injuries, and the thought of pushing themselves to the max just does feel incongruent. So I guess, how can we help our ladies fall in love with that feeling of, you know, that fast finish and that higher intensity activity rather than feeling like, oh, this is going to drain me and deplete me, and I'm going to feel useless and hopeless and unfit because I get puffed out and red faced and you know, ugly sweat.
00:29:48
Speaker 3: Another thing that we need to educate women on when we're talking about high intensity. We're not talking about the forty five to sixty minute boot camp classes. We're not talking about the spending classes. We're not talking about all of those that really make you super sweaty and exhausted, because that's what we've expected to feel like once we do high intensity. If we do high intensity work, it's hard enough to be challenging to the body, but with the recovery between intervals, your body is getting the Okay, I can do this again. And if we're doing it properly, the post exercise response is a boost of growth hormone, it's a boost of testosterone, it is a drop in cortisol, and a few hours later it's that extreme parasympathetic AH response. You get the runners high for some people call the Northern Run, and then that feeds forward into this is great, I feel great. If you're doing a session and if you'l absolutely smashed at the end, that wasn't the right session. So if we're thinking about high intensity and talk about high intensity finisher, and we're doing twenty to thirty seconds as hard as you possibly can with teoish or more minutes recovery, you might really only be able to do two maybe three of those intervals for the first month or two that you're doing it, but you never really want to go beyond five of those because then they're pointless. You really can't recruit the types of fibers and nerves that you need to to hit that high intensity. So it's very effective, and yes it's challenging, but it's not challenging in a way that we're used to in the fitness world. You're absolutely drained and smashed.
00:31:29
Speaker 1: I had neuroscientists Paul Taylor on recently and he was educating us on hormesis, which is the you know, the healthy stresses and everything you've just described there reminds me of what he was saying around these are stresses that elicit a healthy adaptation and response afterwards, such is what you said, you know, you're calming down your quartersold levels reducing It's basically you've done the fight or flight.
00:31:58
Speaker 2: You know you've fought or you've run away, and then you get to relax at the end of it.
00:32:03
Speaker 3: A friend and mentor who is a top theology often egos to conferences and one of the conferences that he opened recently, he's like, we're sitting in a room that's going to kill us. And everyone's like, what are you talking about. We're in an air conditioning conference room. He's like, we're sitting in a climate controlled room. We have water accessible at all times everywhere. There are nibbles at the back, we're sitting down, we're in an inert state. We're not challenging our body at all. And this is exactly the environment that kills us. We don't challenge our bodies. And I was like, that's exactly it. If you want to live a really good health span, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable in different parts of your life, especially around exercise and how that affects your stress levels with regards to high stress and the overcoming reduction of stress that occurs after something like high intensity or heavy resistance training session, because you've put your body out of that comfort zone and it's adapting to that. If we don't adapt, then we don't. Actually, it's in your health span.
00:33:05
Speaker 1: It makes sense to hear you say it, but then when you look out in our world, there's just comfort at every single point that it really does take conscious effort to go, Okay, well, what are those healthy stresses that I'm going to really focus on, which I know are then going to move the needle of my health and my longevity as well. And obviously exercises such a silver bullet in that.
00:33:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean we look at the four main things. It's sleep that you can't budge anything without really good sleep, so important for metabolic control and blood glucose homeostasis and all of those things. Then we have physical activity and nutrition, right, and they're kind of hand in hand because you need to have doses of both in good amounts to actually progress and change your body camp get healthy all those kinds of things. And the very last one is the mindful and community because we're not designed to be isolationists. We're not designed to be alone all over the time. So that's why it's like, you want to get out in nature, you want to be with your community, have a friend, go for a walk, because then you're getting the light exposure, you're getting to be out away from all the mod conveniences in you're connecting with a friend. So those are the four big touches, and then everything else is kind of incidental.
00:34:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm so with you, And it's funny how we're always looking for that biohack or that you know, really novel, new innovative tool, which I'm all for and don't get me wrong, but we've got to make sure we've got those foundations. First, I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier when we were talking about how awesome the female physiology is, and I'm so with you, but there is one part that you did mention, which is our bone density, and that maybe one that our male counterparts don't struggle with all those lots of them do, but not to the extent that we do now when it comes to bone health, and I'm so glad bone health is having a moment. We know that strength training is super important, and I do want to ask you about that, Like first question will be about where the pilates cuts it. But then I want to also talk and get your perspective on the second part of bone health and exercise that you alluded to earlier. Can you talk through the best strategies to support our bone health with exercise that's.
00:35:20
Speaker 3: Not looking at bone It is adaptable, just like our muscles are, and it needs a very strong stress. So if we go back to the harmonic stress aspect, we need a very strong, reactive response for the bone to have turn over and get denser. So we think about strength training. Yes, it holds in multiple directions and it causes strength to increase in the bone, but it's not strong enough to cause multidirectional responses up through the bone itself. So strength training yes, but we're not having a ground reaction for us. So what I mean by that is when you jump and land the landing, your body moves in response to that impact. The ground doesn't. So that's the kind of impact that we need to go up through the entire skeletal system to create strength in all different directions. Strength training and resistance training. As long as it's a heavy enough load to pull on the tendons and the ligaments and the bone and through the range of motion, yes, that does help. We see that that does. But the more intense we are with purpose of loading and jumping, the better we are with bone and bone strength. The other really critical thing is vitamin D because if we don't have vitamin D, then we are missing the mark on some of the key components for building bone. So those are the things that I'm always telling people, like, Yes, resistance training perfect, that's the entry point to maintaining or trying to build mass. We're looking at resistance training. What's the loading. If we can increase the loading and have higher loads, it's great. There's some really cool research that's coming out showing that women who are in their seventies doing the higher loads actually help with bone density. Then when we are getting through and we have a good grasp on all of that, then we start adding in the jumping. That's why when we're going back to the avatar the start, if we are bringing in some of that jump training or the pliometric or the faster, higher intensity stuff towards the end, is preparing us to be able to do a true jump training type program. Yeah, and it doesn't take a lot. It could be three minutes a few times a week that you're actually getting that impact.
00:37:35
Speaker 1: And again coming back to confidence, a lot of this is around confidence, isn't it.
00:37:39
Speaker 2: It's like I haven't jumped since my kids were babies or since before I had children. My pelvic floor has never been the same, and so it is around building that confidence that there is a starting point for everybody shape, isn't there There is?
00:37:54
Speaker 3: And I mean full disclosure, I can't do box jumps like I can't do a twenty inch box jump because the very first time I saw people doing box jumps, a woman missed mark and broker leg and I was first unseen. So now every time I look at that height of a box jump like, ah, I can jump up on plates, but it's a box.
00:38:14
Speaker 2: Isn't that funny?
00:38:15
Speaker 3: Yeah?
00:38:16
Speaker 2: It is self preservation, self preservation.
00:38:18
Speaker 1: And look for those of you that are really fascinated with bone health er, I love this topic. I actually interviewed professor Belinda Beck not so long ago, who yeah, founded o'neiro and did all that amazing research that completely made a mockery out of myself and other excise professionals who, for I'm embarrassed to say, many decades used to tell people that you cannot improve bone density over the age of fifty. And I'm sorry to my previous clients.
00:38:45
Speaker 2: Who I said that to. I was wrong. Belinda Beck has proven that you can.
00:38:51
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:38:51
Speaker 2: Isn't that amazing.
00:38:52
Speaker 3: People used to say you couldn't build yeah, oh yeah.
00:38:55
Speaker 1: Like you can prevent the decline of bone density, but you can't build more bone after I mean.
00:39:01
Speaker 2: That's what that's it's terrible. You can and Belinda's doing it with seventy year olds.
00:39:07
Speaker 3: The tame is you can't build strength, then you shouldn't be lifting heavy past the age of fifties. Yeah, yeah, you feed yourself in Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
00:39:15
Speaker 1: I want to quickly also ask you about my challenge at the start of this episode where I'm stronger, but I don't have lean muscle mass.
00:39:26
Speaker 2: Am I healthier or was that just a waste of time?
00:39:29
Speaker 3: Lean not a waste of time, because if you think about the precursor for strength, right, it's a neuromuscular connection. And one of the very first things that women lose in perimenopause, especially late perimenopause, is the ability for myosin and actin, which are contractile proteins, to bind effectively for a very strong muscle contraction. So by doing what you did, you were effectively creating a better environment for my to be reactive, because the problem with it when we start to lose estrogen is myosin becomes dysfunctional so it can't grab onto actin. So by doing the heavy loads and working specifically on becoming stronger, you're doing that neuromuscular and you're keeping the integrity of myocin. It is incredibly, incredibly difficult to put on lean mass, build muscle like you have experienced.
00:40:25
Speaker 1: Sight like physical mass, like where the actual muscle. If you measured my bicep with a tape, measure the mass of it or my quadricep, it's physically hard.
00:40:36
Speaker 2: Are you going to say over forty or just in general?
00:40:39
Speaker 3: It depends on really when you hit perimenopause, so we could say average age of forty for sure, yeah, okay, and some younger, some older. And when we're talking about doing hypertrofee sins where we're looking at our ten to fifteen reps at a lighter load, it doesn't It does create a little bit more lean mass, but not as much as you would think when you were younger. So what we have to focus on really to build that lean mass with the conjunction of strength is how we are looking at our cardiovascular work and how we are fueling ourselves. Because as we get older, we become less responsive to resistance training and protein, so we have more of an anabolic resistance to both of those. So if we're going to do strength training, then we have to make sure that our protein intake is adequate in and around the training and throughout the day, and people are worried now because the high protein conversation is coming into play and it's crossing over into the clinical world, and the clinicians are saying, no, you don't need that much. But when you are an active woman perimenopausal, you're trying to change a body composition, you're trying to build lean mass, you do have to be egging up to that one point eight two Graham's per kilo per day.
00:41:58
Speaker 2: Which is hot.
00:42:00
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're a seventy kilo woman, we're talking over one hundred grams of protein per day. And really, if you sit down and work it out, you basically have to build every single meal around thirty grams of protein. And so I'm starting to get a lot better at and with our members on our programs as well to go, well, you know, have you got five or six thirty to forty gram protein combos that you can just a whip out of the cupboard and the fridge and chuck them together. Like, for example, I'm so lazy, right, so when I'm too busy to have a proper prepared lunch, I know that my tin of tuna and the same size amount of cottage cheese mixed together is thirty five grams of protein. So in my brain, I'm just like, what can I put with tuna and cottage cheese. Oh, here's a bag a salad that a pre made salad, and it, you know, comes in these little separate packets of the sauce and the topping, so I can decide how much a little I want to put on that.
00:42:55
Speaker 2: And so I feel like, if you just go, okay, what's.
00:42:57
Speaker 1: A bunch of combos that's thirty or forty grands of protein for breakfas, what's a couple that suit me for lunch and a couple for dinner. Once you've got I don't know, five or six combos, it starts to become manageable. But if you don't focus on it, you will not hit that number.
00:43:10
Speaker 3: And women can eat less than they should. And so you know, by the default of having the whole calories in calories are calorie restriction, we've gotten into this whole massive women not eating enough for what they need to be doing. So that's the other thing. If we start really focusing on having protein and fiber at every meal, then we are actually increasing all the good things that our body needs, and you start to hit that mark of one hundred grams or more relatively easily, even if your plant forward, Yeah.
00:43:40
Speaker 1: And you are so full, like a big amount of and particularly if you do have dairy products, which I'm also on a bit of a calcium bandwagon at the moment. Is trying to get your thirteen hundred milligrounds of calcium a day, and if you're not a dairy girl, it's ten times harder.
00:43:55
Speaker 2: But I don't. I do have a bit of a dairy.
00:43:57
Speaker 1: When you are upping your protein and upping those dairy based proteins as well glass adding some fiber in with the veggies and the rainbow of vegetables. I'm never hungry, but my calories are probably actually, if anything lower compared to say when I was just not worrying about it and having big ficutcia sandwiches and you know, ultra processed cereals and things like that. But I do want to ask you about women that struggle with body fat. And we in our programs, we do a lot of blood work, and we do see a pattern of a woman who is overfed.
00:44:35
Speaker 2: So we see this.
00:44:36
Speaker 1: Pattern of a woman who, you know, blood sugar control, insulin resistance, non alcoholic fatty liver disease starting to show up, cholesterol rising, she is, her body is, you know, thyroid TSH starting to climb up. Her body is showing a pattern of overfed. So how do you reconcile what you're talking about now with that profile of a person here back?
00:45:00
Speaker 3: And I'm like, that's identifying a lot of the women I know who are in relative energy deficiency in sport. There's a rebound effect. So if we're talking about someone who is having a really poor metabolic profile, we really want to look closely. Eating a lot of ultraprocessed foods, that's the first thing to really consider and clean up. Then we have to think about the timing of the food. So how are we eating throughout our day. Are we trying to follow the trends where we're overnight fast holding till eleven or twelve, or are we actually eating according to our circadian rhythm. So when we start really digging in saying okay, here's a woman who has a really poor metabolic profile and we need to improve insulin sensitivity, we need to really look at the AC one. We need to look at changing the lipid profile. When we start putting parameters around. Okay, let's have breakfast within a half an hour or so when you wake up, or some food within a half an hour or so when you wake up, and then we fuel strategically throughout the day and we have dinner, and we stop eating with dinner, and then an overnight quote fast and we keep that pattern for a week to two weeks. We see changes in the blood.
00:46:11
Speaker 2: Markers, positively healthy change.
00:46:13
Speaker 3: Positive changes because when we start eating, according to chronobiology, which means our circadian rhythms, the biggest shifts in that circadian rhythm is exposure to light and dark. And when we eat food, when you are looking at holding it fast, you're effectively phase shifting. You are changing your body's hormone profile, so our natural lutinizing hormone pulse, our appetite control as well as our melotone peak at night that allows us to sleep. We're phase shifting it to a point where it's as if we were doing a night shift. And if you're doing a night shift, you get really poor metabolic control.
00:46:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh my gosh, shout out to all my nurses and all I know, how beautiful listeners that are on the night shifts, Hats off to you, guys.
00:47:01
Speaker 2: It's tough on the body.
00:47:03
Speaker 3: Really tough on the body. And then there are ways when we're looking at night shift workers to do some strategic food into it in the overnight to pull that metabolic perturbance back to normal. And that could be a podcast that we could do well.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: I would love to get you back on to talk about nutrition for health, circadian rhythms, fat loss, muscle preservation. So let's park the nutrition stuff because I know you could talk all day, and as a nutritionist, I'm so I want to unlock that amazing brain of yours. But let's get back to exercise, okay, because it's spring and we're all syched and pumped and feeling proud of our amazing physiology.
00:47:42
Speaker 2: I have heard you talk about.
00:47:45
Speaker 1: Zone two cardio with a little bit of an eye roll for women, and so for zone two cardio, just sw you guys if you're not familiar with it. It's training at a particular heart rate zone, which is zoned two, which is what around that sixty to seventy percent of your max the heart right, which is kind of where you can talk but only just love your thoughts on zone two because I did read in your recent newsletter you were like, don't even get me started on zone two cardio. So I'm like, let's get us started on zone two cardio.
00:48:16
Speaker 3: Looking at someone who's trying to maximize your time and their exercise, which is our cohort.
00:48:23
Speaker 2: Here is how.
00:48:24
Speaker 1: Four one hour sessions. We're busy moms, that's all we can do.
00:48:28
Speaker 3: Right if we look at what really budgets the needle imperiment apostle super busy women were you know, older moms like I was a geriatric mom.
00:48:38
Speaker 2: I don't I love that term. How geriatric were you when she popped out? Thirty eight?
00:48:44
Speaker 3: Oh?
00:48:45
Speaker 2: So old? Oh my goodness.
00:48:46
Speaker 3: So so you know, we have this whole population of people who are super busy because there's so many things going on in their lives. Like I have four one hour sessions I can claim as my own during the week. Do you really want to take two of those and go really long and slow, knowing that your body is already super capable of going long and slow. We already have the mitochondria density, and we have mitochondrial proteins that are more robust. We have better mitochondrial respiration. So all that means really good fat burners. The zone two conversation came because men are not metabolically flexible. Women are. By the nature of being women, we can shift between carbohydrate and fat. We do that across the minstrual cycle. Anyway, we start to have a little bit of issues when we are having changes in our ratio of estrogen progesterone. That's where high intensity comes into play. So if we are looking to really budge the needle for body comp for brain health, for propriateception bone health, we need high intensity and resistance training. And when we look at the true high intensity we see in the literature it is better for cardiovascular health because it exerts a stronger pressure through the entire system for blood flow shifts, so we get more robust responses and better blood vessel compliance, better blood pressure control. We see that super high intensity work helps with mayakine expressions. So those are hormones that are released during exercise from the skeletal muscle that is telling the livery you know what. We need these free faty acids to be stored as fuel for at rest. We don't want them stored as a visceral fat.
00:50:25
Speaker 1: I want to ask you something on this because it's very confusing because historically we're taught that actually, if you want to burn the most amount of body fat, you need to do that long and slow, and that's where you're in the fat burning zone. What you're saying is kind of counterintuitive. Can you just explain that?
00:50:45
Speaker 3: So that fat burning zone came from when you're looking at the metabolic fuel systems in the body, because we don't automatically go from carbohydrate right into fat right, so we are always burning some carbohydrate. If you're at a lower intensity, there's a shift where the body gets into a steady state and relies more on free fatty acids for fuel. But that does not necessarily mean that you are going to lose body fat, because if we're burning more free fatty acids during exercise, then the body is like, I need to store more of that if we want.
00:51:19
Speaker 1: Just and I'm saying this because I might listen, is what we think of this? Well, then why a marathon run is so bloody skinny.
00:51:24
Speaker 3: Because they are doing a higher intensity than what you think. If you look at the marathon runners that are the elite marathon runners, they're working at a VIO two that's about eighty percent, So they are tempo running an entire marathon. They're naturally talented, so they are going through a lot of carbohydrate utilization. They do a lot of speed work as well. They're not just long slow distance. Yeah. Okay, look at general pop that is running a marathon and just running to finish. Most of them are not that lean.
00:51:54
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:51:55
Speaker 3: We see that with a lot of ultra endurance runners now because a really fast rising population of ultrarunners are women who are forty plus and we see that bimechanically and from a physiological standpoint, that long slow xx comes into play where they're really good at storing and using fat. And that's the thing if you want to be able to strip body fat down, it's the high intensity work. One. We see these all these metabolic changes that incur through high intensity that then stimulate the body not to store visceral fat and to pour more of the free faty acids to storage into mitochondria in the muscle to be used as fuel at rest. But the other the higher core temperature that comes with high intensity work is a signal to say we don't want to have extra thermal layer. We don't want to have that subcutaneous fat because how am I going to dissipate this heat that's being produced. So there's a thermal response as well. If we're going long and slow all the time, we're not really getting out of that comfort zone that I talked about earlier. We need to have that perturbation.
00:53:02
Speaker 1: I'm just hearing a whole bunch of my members throwing their hands in the air, going, oh, I signed up to that marathon or that trial race thinking it was my ticket to leanness, and now they going, oh, if we're going to go and switch it to high rocks or one of those more higher intensity competitions.
00:53:17
Speaker 3: Here a marathon, it's time in a place for zone too. Don't get me wrong. I call it my soul food, like I'm notoriously out on the weekends riding my gravel bike for hours at a time. It's just when we're talking about the priority and the bread and butter for short time management, we need to be very specific on what we're doing, and that's where your resistance training and high intensity.
00:53:37
Speaker 1: Comes in, the best bang for buck is what you're saying with where we're you know, literally what we said at the top, well the other thing with high intensity, and I wanted to ask your perspective on VO two max.
00:53:47
Speaker 2: Okay, it's really great.
00:53:49
Speaker 1: Now we don't have to go to a lab and put on a mask and do a maximal effort to estimate our votwo max. If we've got a wear a ball, then you just have to go to your app and it's accurate enough.
00:54:01
Speaker 3: Your woman, it's not accurate?
00:54:03
Speaker 2: Oh is that right? Oh?
00:54:05
Speaker 1: Tell me on this because then I want to talk about using VO two and high intensity and VO two and longevity and energy and health.
00:54:12
Speaker 3: So when we're looking at wearables that are out there, we have to remember the algorithms are designed for the male physiology because it's learning from the existing data. And most of, if not all, of the engineers that originally designed the algorithms were men. Because that two's in the room. The engineers are male. Like I went to interview at Apple for an ex fist position back in the day and it was nothing but men in there. I was like the only woman. And so when you're thinking about the wearables, all the algorithms are designed to pick up the nuances of male physiology. It's very apparent when you're looking at things like heart rate variability, that women's physiology is not included because there's a natural shift in our nervous system between our follicular and our luteal phase. So if you're looking at a wearable there's no way you're going to get ready to exercise high intensity five days before your period starts or if you're in perimenopause, because it's not reading all the changes that are happening. So when you're looking at VA two max and the algorithms that are there for VIO two max, it's ten percent error up or down either way, especially for women.
00:55:18
Speaker 2: Are we going to change this?
00:55:20
Speaker 1: Is there are there researchers out there testing a whole bunch of ladies with their VO two max and we're going to have some updated algorithms.
00:55:27
Speaker 3: Please say yes, yes, we are working for sure.
00:55:31
Speaker 1: Amazing All right, Well, we're touching back on VO two max because we hear a lot about it in the longevity space as far as a great mortality predictor. And if you're in the advance to elite VO two max levels compared to the very poor, you know, I can't remember the stats off the top of my head, but eighty percent mortality changes. Do you think that that's a metric that as a woman could be helpful for us to understand and something like high intensity into wal training might improve.
00:56:04
Speaker 3: Yes. No, So I always like the VIO two is a really good lab based parameter because you can have a high VO two but not work optimally in that if you look at I always like to use cyclists as an example. If you have someone who is a really fantastic hill climber, part of it is that they can have a really high VO two and yet work at a very high level of that VO two without tapping into a lot of carbohydrate use. But you can also have someone who has the same high VO two but doesn't maximize their aerobic capacity, so they can't climb as fast or as hard as the person who's in front. So when we're looking at VO two, that's a really good benchmark, Yes, we see it, and it's also a measure for intensity. And for women being able to do high intensity work and have better oxygen uptake, that's really important because then that means it's feeding forward to better brain metabolism. And for women, it's all about the dementia and cognitive sex differences that we see as we get older.
00:56:59
Speaker 1: And also just on a very super simple level, don't you think it equates to having more energy in the day. If I've got a twin that's got a VO two max that's forty percent worse than mine and we're both mirroring each other running up and down those stairs chasing after kids, I'm going to be less exhausted at the end of the day than my lower VO two max twin. Right, So, even just as simple as it don't give me a bit more energy to get through the day.
00:57:23
Speaker 3: So your body is able to be more efficient in oxygen use. So that means like running up and down the stairs. Your people aren't going to want to hear this, but you're going to not use as much to get up and down those stairs as your sister who has the forty percent less.
00:57:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:57:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, and more. Thinking about this sympathetic versus parasympathetic drive and all the things that lead into better health, that's a great thing. But when we pull back into the old school idea of burning calories, not such a great thing. Yeah, So I always am like, let's not talk about calories, Let's think about the nervous system, the economy of movement, how we're feeling, how we're sleeping, all of those things.
00:58:02
Speaker 2: So yes, VO two does come into Yeah.
00:58:05
Speaker 1: I like that because it's like, all right, okay, strength training goals. We can kind of see that we're getting stronger, either because our weights are going up in the gym or we're having a dexter and hopefully getting a better result than I did high intensity interval training. Maybe we can look on our app and see our VO two max ticking over and you can see it has climbed by ten percent, And Okay, maybe it's not the most accurate thing in the world, but at least it's a metric we can say, wow, we're getting fitter, which is kind of what I really like.
00:58:30
Speaker 3: Trinds over time, not absolute numbers.
00:58:32
Speaker 2: Yes, trends over time. I'm so with you. Well, look, Dr Stacy, we have covered so much.
00:58:37
Speaker 1: I am feeling super motivated to exercise, and I'm really hoping that our listeners are and have enjoyed nerding.
00:58:44
Speaker 2: Out with us. But I wanted to just wrap up with a final question, and I want to come back to our beautiful listeners and for a woman listening who is ready to really ramp up and mix up her training. What is one partying piece of advice that you have for her.
00:58:59
Speaker 1: She's going to hang out the headphones from this and she's off and ready to go.
00:59:04
Speaker 3: Look at it at a lifestyle change. Don't jump in and think about it as a training block, because I don't want people to get injured and more demotivated. So you want to phase yourself into anything new and know that listening to your body intuitive intuitively is way better than using any wearable because when we actually listen to our body, understand our rating and perceived exertion, how hard we're pushing ourselves, then we're able to progress. But if we're like looking all around us and being distracted on those external cues, then we tend to go too hard, too fast and burnout.
00:59:39
Speaker 1: Doctor Stacey Simms, such beautiful, wise advice. Thank you so much for your time today.
00:59:46
Speaker 3: No, thanks for having me, it's been great.
01:00:06
Speaker 1: Why is it so hard to get real answers about your health? If you've been told that everything looks fine, but you know that something is off, we're not imagining it. That's why I created Vitality three sixty to help you better understand what's going on inside your body so that you can take the targeted action needed. With a functional health approach plus testing, we go beyond the guesswork to uncover the root causes of your symptoms. I've teamed up with Doctasmina, an incredible integrative GP, and together we will help you decode your body's signals and answer questions like why am I always exhausted? What's really causing my stubborn weight? Am I inflamed? Insulin resistant? Or maybe missing key nutrients? Because when you understand your body better, you can transform your health. Visit V three sixty dot Health or check out the show notes for more