Sep 13, 2024
Things I Wish More Women Over 40 Knew About
Exercise
This is what I wish more women over 40 knew about exercise and
that it starts when women are teenagers. So, I’ll start there.
I’ve worked with women for 40 years in private sessions, partner
sessions, group sessions, with both husbands and wives, and with
17-year-old volleyball players and 14-year-old golfers, with
pregnant women, those who recently had breast implants and those
who wanted to lose weight and were already a size two and those who
needed to and were a size 20. I’ve done thousands of fitness tests
and consultations and trained trainers and fitness instructors to
do the same.
I have seen a big slice of what women, including fitness
instructors and trainers, think about themselves, their bodies and
exercise. I’ve seen exercise be a way to burn off cookies and earn
dinner or not. I’ve seen exercise be addictive and despised.
What I wish more girls over 10 knew about exercise is that the
women to aspire to be like were more like those represented at the
Paris Olympics than the runways in New York. That fast and strong
and fit and unapologetic about winning or wanting to is not
something that stays with their younger years.
Things I Wish More Women Over 20 Knew About
Exercise
- The confidence you want comes easier strong vs skinny.
- The window for most easily laying down bone density is still
open: use it
- The secret to looking and feeling good and healthier babies
someday is in the weight room.
- Get a smart scale and understand the value of knowing skeletal
muscle, body fat percent together with weight.
- A 20-something woman who can do a pull up is more likely to be
a 50-something woman who is aging like a badass.
Things I Wish More Women Over 30 Knew About
Exercise
- Strength will help balance your hormones if you change your
workouts with your monthly cycle
- Get a baseline bone density scan at least and a hormone
level.
- Right now, you’re making your next 60 years better or
worse
- Oh, and there is still time to get that pull up that your
menopause self will thank you for.
Things I Wish More Women Over 40 Knew About
Exercise
- There’s a chance of losing 27% of your muscle from early to
late stages of perimenopause but isn’t inevitable if you’re
resistance training and maintaining protein.
- Measure your success by your handgrip, your skeletal muscle
mass, body composition and waist measurement, not simply by the
scale.
- Walking and weight training together may be two of the most
powerful components for supporting your hormone balance (and
avoiding muscle loss, fat and specifically belly fat gains).
Things I Wish More Women Over 50 Knew About
Exercise
- Strength and muscle losses can accelerate significantly during
the menopause transition. That’s the last two years of
perimenopause and first two post menopause. Prioritize strength
training and recovery time and habits to help it.
- Bone density losses also accelerate from between 1-3% prior to
3-5 % during the 2-4 years that are the MT.
Things I Wish More Women Over 60 Knew About
Exercise
- Aging causes an accelerated loss of muscle and strength at 60
and a slowing of metabolism, if you don’t offset it with strength
training (and protein).
- You don’t need to reduce intensity; you need to increase
it.
- You may need more recovery time (between exercises, between
sets, between high intensity life and workouts, and between
workouts.
- If you haven’t added power, agility, dynamic balance, mobility
training regularly to an existing strength training program, now is
the time to start.
- You lose fast twitch muscle twice as fast with age as you do
slow. So only moving slow in exercise is actually accelerating
aging and increasing risk for falls compared to using fast twitch
regularly.
- Resistance training is indeed everything that resists gravity
but using external loads that require few repetitions with heavier
weights to reach or get close to muscular fatigue is still most
tied to bone density, metabolism, and strength.
- Overdoing exercise frequency will cause couch compensation that
causes you to lose a critically important “total energy
expenditure.”
- Underdoing exercise frequency or intensity costs you the boost
in strength and metabolism and potentially bone density and total
energy expenditure that you want for body composition, and
reduction of health risks.
- You’re not too old for bHRT if you want to consider it.
(Click
here to know more about bHRT)
- Falls over 60 can be devastating. But most often they occur in
women who don’t lift weights, don’t train power, agility/reaction
skills. (50% of women over 60 who fall don’t walk again)
- You will tolerate volume better than your perimenopause self.
So adding another HIIT day or another set of resistance exercise
could be very beneficial and you’ll tolerate it.
Things I wish more women over 70 knew about
exercise
- It’s not just muscle and bone or balance and avoiding falls,
you also help your brain fire better and improve sleep.
- Just because you “don’t need to lose weight” doesn’t mean you
don’t need to exercise.
- Blood sugar levels, mood, memory, will also improve.
- Your ability to stay in your home and drive a car and remain as
independent as you like are directly related to your muscle
strength.
Things I wish more women over 80 knew about
exercise
- There’s still time. The research has been clear for more than
40 years, that even 90-somethings beginning to strength train, gain
strength and benefit.
- You can start now even if you’ve never done it before.
- Risk of injury is still greater in those who don’t strength
train compared to those who do.
- If women over 40 knew about exercise what I do, they’d know
that until very recently there has been very little research done
featuring them as subjects. They’d know it’s not great skincare, or
staying out of the sun, or great sleep is the secret to looking and
feeling younger and carrying confidence into every decade.
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