43: December Q&A | Am I making progress in my weight training? | What counts towards daily steps? | What happens in post-menopause?
[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ fitness for women. I'm Lynn, your host. And today we're going to do a question and answer session. So I've been getting more and more questions from my followers and listeners. And I answer people when they contact me and ask questions. And a lot of times I think they are really, really probably questions that a lot of you are wondering about.
So I thought it'd be great to share them in these kinds of Q & A episodes. So today we have one question that's about menopause and hormonal changes. Another that's about weight training and progressive overload. And then the third one is about step count and doing your fitness group, fitness and step count and how to count your steps.
But before we go into that, I'm just looking out my window here. We have snow. So this podcast [00:01:00] episode will be released probably a couple weeks after I record it, but it is now middle of November. Yesterday, I was in town at downtown Helsinki as they opened up, um, all the lights and all the decorations that they do every year for Christmas.
And oh my God, it felt really Christmassy because there was this gentle snow falling. And now there's a bit more snow falling today. So I guess that is the end of my stair sprinting for at least a little while, cause they tend to get really slippery. They don't keep them, you know, uh, de iced over the winter, but at least now until it maybe warms up later this, this year.
Anyway, so on to the questions. So question number one was, can you explain what you mean by post menopause? Is there no getting back to normal hormones like before menopause? The hormones are gone [00:02:00] at menopause and they stay gone, right? Yes. So this is a really good question. I think this is something that people get really confused also about the terminology.
I will say that I did a podcast episode, which goes through all the basics of menopause. It's episode number 37 called menopause 101. So if you haven't heard that one yet, that's a good one to go back and listen to. But yes, so post menopause. Premenopause is the time after you haven't had a period for a year.
So perimenopause is when your body is kind of winding down, your, uh, estrogen and progesterone levels are fluctuating in unusual ways as your body kind of shuts down its reproductive function. Then. You hit, uh, menopause,
which is actually one day on the calendar. And it is the day [00:03:00] where you have not had a period in the previous 12 months.
And then after that one day, you are in post menopause. So you will spend, hopefully, if you live a light, nice, long life, decades in post menopause. And it is true that when you're in post menopause, there is no getting back to the kinds of hormone levels that you had pre menopause. So in your reproductive years before the perimenopause phase started.
And so that perimenopause can take anywhere from three to even 10 years that you have this fluctuating hormone levels that can cause all kinds of symptoms. Now, even hormone replacement therapy, though it does help with a lot of the symptoms, it does, it doesn't, you know, even though it's called hormone replacement, it is not.
Bringing you back to where you were before [00:04:00] and in post menopause, it really is that your hormones are pretty flat lined. And especially the estrogen is one, the estradiol form of estrogen is the one which causes a lot of the changes in your body. And if you go back to the episode on menopause, there's so much more information on this, but yes.
Going through menopause. You gradually lose your hormones. And then in post menopause, your estradiol has pretty much flatlined. Okay. Question. Number two is about weight training. And I think this is a really great one because it's about practical things in the weight room. So I have been applying a progressive overload in my training, but in the last few sessions, I'm not able to match my reps, even though I'm pushing close to failure.
Am I doing something wrong? And will I still make progress? [00:05:00] Okay. This is excellent. Now I had an episode that's all about progressive overload. It's episode number 18. And in there I described what is progressive overload and how you do it. But basically what you're doing with progressive overload is you are continuing to challenge your muscles as they grow and get stronger by increasing the number of reps you do or increasing the weight that you're doing.
Okay. So if you're at a certain weight, you'll keep increasing how many reps. And then once you reach your rep range target, the max, uh, reps that you want to do, then you increase your weight and then start increasing your reps again. Now, progress is not linear. And when you are weight training, you will notice that you will go one day and you like kill it in the weight room and you're able to hit your reps and do more reps than [00:06:00] last time or, or do well, even if you increase the weights.
And then sometimes it just doesn't happen. Right. And this actually happened to me yesterday, I was, I was in the weight room and doing arms And, my target for my bicep curls was to get nine reps. And actually I only got seven, I mean, no matter how hard I tried to get the eighth, my arms just would not, you know, I just couldn't raise the dumbbell, but I knew that I was getting, in that case, I was at failure, but I know that because I am working close to failure or to failure that I am doing reps, which stimulate the muscle. So there is this stimulating reps model, which researchers have come up with, which explains how [00:07:00] you actually stimulate muscles in order to get them to grow bigger and stronger. And there they talk about, it's really only those five reps. before you hit failure, which are stimulating reps.
And how do you know you're in that range of stimulating reps is that you have an involuntary slowdown of the rate of your rep. Now, if you're very new to this, you may not notice that, Oh, okay. That slowed down a little bit, but when you get very close to failure, you will notice that. You know, at least the last rep or two will be quite a bit slower, but it's these last reps when you're training to failure, these last five, which actually cause the stimulus, which grows your muscles.
While progressive overload is a very good way of thinking about things, [00:08:00] another thing you may have seen online is this concept of reps in reserve. And that is talking about how close you are actually getting to that point of failure.
Well, I guess I won't go into that in so much detail right here, but what I want to say is that as long as you are pushing your muscles to a point where they're close to failure, where you're seeing at least a little bit of that involuntary slowdown, then you are stimulating your muscles. And some days that is going to be unfortunately a little bit fewer reps to get there, then on other days, and it can depend on things like, maybe you didn't take enough recovery days in between.
So I noticed that if I go back like every other day. My session just is not as productive because my muscles haven't fully recovered. So for me, two days in between working the [00:09:00] same muscle groups, works better. And I have had clients who tell me that they experienced the exact same thing, that it really works better for them to take the two days off from working the same muscle groups again.
And then other things like maybe you didn't sleep so well that night, maybe, uh, maybe in the beginning of your session, you really pushed yourself on some
exercise and then that's affecting your ability to push yourself as hard or get the same kind of results as you're used to on a later exercise. So don't worry about that.
Just push yourself. You know, with good form, always with good form, but close to failure. And you'll be sure to stimulate your muscles to grow and get stronger. So question number three is about steps and how you should count them. So it is, how do I count steps? Should I be counting the steps that happen during my aerobics [00:10:00] class towards my daily step count? Okay, so, so I guess there are varying opinions on this, but let me tell you how I think about this.
So if you think about your overall , daily energy expenditure, there are two kind of categories in there. One is your movement, your daily movement. And another one is actually the calories that you expend doing exercise. Now, if you are counting the steps that you are taking in your aerobics class towards your daily movement.
And they're getting counted in your daily exercise, then you're kind of double counting them. That's how I think of it. Uh, you know, that's one reason why I would keep them separate. And the other thing is that the reason that I promote following your step count is not, [00:11:00] you know, say that you would go out and go jogging to get a lot of steps.
But to make you more aware of how sedentary you actually are, and the thing is that even if you're, you know, you do a huge, really, really intense workout for an hour. a day, that is not going to make up for the fact that you've barely moved for the other 23 hours, right? , in order to enhance your general fitness, what you want to be doing is that in those other 23 hours, you want to have more movement.
And for that reason, I would encourage you to think of your steps as Like the movement that you're doing outside of formal exercise, and then, , if you exercise on top of that, you do an aerobics class, you do weight training or whatever like that, then that is wonderful, but that's like a whole separate issue.
Yeah. [00:12:00] So those are the questions for this time. I'm testing out this format. If you have a question that you would like answered, please drop me a message in my, it's probably easiest to reach me in Instagram, in my DMS, but you can also email me. So all the information is in the show notes for reaching me.
And, uh, I think I'm going to try to do one of these, like. Every month or once every two months, because I think this is useful to kind of pull together practically the information that I've been sharing in these various podcasts. All right. And with that, I wish you a wonderful, wonderful week and especially happy training.