#159: Do Women in Menopause Need Different Strength Training?

If you're a woman in midlife and you’ve wondered whether you actually need a strength training program designed specifically for women in menopause this episode is for you.

There’s a big debate online right now about this. Some people say that programs for midlife women are just marketing and that women in menopause should simply train the same way as everyone else.

And after helping hundreds of women in midlife start strength training, and studying what actually works in this stage of life, I do think there is value in choosing a program designed with midlife women in mind. 

By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to make a more informed decision about whether following a program designed specifically for midlife women makes sense for you, or whether a generic program might work just as well.

Enjoy the show!

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Transcript

#159: Do Women in Menopause Need Different Strength Training?

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40 Plus Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach. And if you are a woman in midlife, which I'm assuming you are, if you're listening to my podcast and you've been wondering, do I actually need a strength training program designed specifically for women in midlife, or can I just follow any program out there? Well, this episode is for you. 

 So there's a big debate out there about this. Some people say the programs for midlife women are just marketing and that we should just do the same programs as everybody else. And after helping hundreds of women get started with strength training and really spending all my time focusing on understanding and learning what works [00:01:00] in midlife, the research and what I see in real life and my own experience, I have an opinion on this.

So by the end of this episode, you'll understand whether you should actually follow a program made for midlife women or whether some generic program is right for you. So let's get into it.

So the fundamentals of strength training don't change in midlife, but how we apply them absolutely does. The rules are the same, but the context is different.

Yes, we should absolutely be training progressively and lifting heavy for us. But the journey to get there can take years. Our muscles strengthen faster than our tendons and ligaments do. And if we ramp up too quickly, things that we would've been able to tolerate in our twenties and thirties, we really risk injury [00:02:00] a lot more. , we need to face the reality that we're not 20 anymore and adjust our expectations, our ramp up, and our training and recovery accordingly. And that really is the recipe for long term success and will bring you amazing results. So let's go into this in a bit more depth.

All right, so let's first talk about the things that don't change. Muscle is still built the same way through mechanical tension. We still need to apply progressive overload so that we continue to challenge our bodies as we get stronger. We need to be training with intensity so that we're actually pushing the envelope to trigger our bodies to build and maintain muscle. And eventually, lifting heavy is important.

We are not fragile. I mean, I don't want you to get the impression that I think that, oh [00:03:00] my God, we're gonna break if we train like normal. That's not the the point. But what I have seen from working with so many women in midlife is that we are starting out. Weaker, right? Because we've been losing muscle through all these years. Even if our cardiovascular health is really good, even if our muscular endurance is really good, we're weaker. You notice it. You pick up your grocery bag and you're like, oh, this feels heavy now.

And you're happy to accept help from somebody with your heavy suitcase, right? Our muscles have gradually gotten rid of those lifting heavy and being powerful muscle fibers. As we've aged, it's harder to get the jar lids open, for example.

And you know, it's honestly, it's no wonder because life is really busy and when you start to have kids and you have a career [00:04:00] and all the things you just kind of forget about yourself. Plus the education hasn't been there for us. To realize even that we should be strength training for real. I sure didn't know. I thought going to the BodyPump classes was taking care of that, and it turns out it's actually just muscular endurance. So it wasn't helping me maintain my strength. So the fact of the matter is that we're starting out weaker 

and then there's the fact of many of us are in perimenopause and menopause. And as that estrogen level starts to drop and then flat lines as we go into post menopause, our tendons and our ligaments get weaker. And that is something that we need to take into account when we start strength training because if we ramp up too fast, it may be that our muscles can keep up with that. But our [00:05:00] tendons and our ligaments may not be able to, and then we end up with tendonitis and other injuries.

Which brings up an excellent point, which is that we may have old injuries haunting us, right? We have lived some life, we've fallen, we've, um, hurt our ankle, our knee, there might be arthritis. All kinds of things that can affect how well we can train, and injuries can work in very mysterious ways with us.

 I dislocated my hip when I was really, really young and it has haunted me as an adult because that side, my left hip is always weaker than my right, and my body just, it wants to protect that, so it'll always have my right side assume more load, which means that I become uneven in my strength between my left side and my right side. And I'm not alone with this. I have [00:06:00] run into plenty of women who have the same issue, and this is something that is good to be aware of when you start strength training that for example, your programming has built into it unilateral exercises, so it's not always both of your sides working at once, because that allows your stronger side to hide the weakness of your weaker side rather than forcing your weaker side to work and get stronger.

So all kinds of things that are going on with us because of how old we are and the fact that we're in this stage of life called menopause.

And the fact that our bodies are maybe a little bit weaker, our bones are maybe weaker tendons, ligaments, we may have arthritis, old injuries. All the things it will affect things like exercise selection. So choosing exercises that aren't, for example, compressing our spine and doing things, [00:07:00] like unilateral work so that you can even up any kind of side issues. You know, one side being stronger than the other side. So, I mean, these are, these are the kinds of things that. That I think about all the time or that I wouldn't necessarily think about if I was talking to a 20-year-old, you know,

and this wonderful phase called menopause also brings with it the fact that our recovery is. Different. Okay. Whether you're in perimenopause, post menopause, there are so many things that can be going on with you. For example, if you have symptoms like you are not sleeping well, you're having hot flushes it's really, really common to have poorer sleep. You have worse sleep. You have worse recovery, your stress load may be higher because we're the sandwich generation, right? We've got our teenagers on the one hand, we've got our aging parents on the other hand, and it's a lot of [00:08:00] stress on us who still need to be, you know, getting through the day, taking care of everybody and taking care of ourselves and our job and all the things.

The challenge with this stress management in midlife is that because we're losing that estrogen, we actually have lost kind of our friend in helping us with stress management. Estrogen helps to control cortisol in our blood, and when estrogen disappears or starts going haywire in perimenopause. Then that means that it's not helping us manage stress and we have to learn to manage stress better ourselves.

And stress can be good stress and bad stress, right? So exercise is a good stress, but it is still a stress. And then there are, you know, of course the bad stress, like worrying about your parents or your teenagers who are out past curfew or whatever. And we just need to learn to manage that better because in order for [00:09:00] our bodies to take advantage of the exercise, we also need to be able to recover.

So I, I just think back on. When I was a division one lacrosse player at Dartmouth College, I could train hours every day. . We'd have two hours of practice. We also had our strength training coach. I did running in addition to that. and you know, I was out partying a lot. I was definitely a work hard, play, hard party, hard girl back then. And I recovered just fine. I had no problems. If I tried to do that today. Yeah. No, and I think you'll agree with me. It's a little different in this phase of life. Not to say that we can't have it all right? We can party, we can work out, and we can work hard. All the things, but we need to maybe do it in a little bit more manageable way and maybe not just go crazy overboard.

So given all [00:10:00] of that, which is the context of who I am training when I'm talking about midlife women, and my goal, which is to get you stronger and not just. For three months, but get you into a strength training habit that you can continue for the rest of your life. That is really my goal, is to make this something that can become a part of your every week so that your body stays strong, fit, functional, and healthy for the decades ahead. Plus you look great too with muscles and feel great. I actually, I'm digressing for a moment, but I actually just before I started recording this, got a message from a woman who's been in my program for two years now and she was like, I. This is amazing. She sent me these amazing pictures of herself and her, the muscle that she's been able to develop, [00:11:00] and she says she feels so great and she's so happy and she's so grateful that she's been able to start this thing that she can keep going with. And that is exactly, that is like, oh, that makes me feel so good. And that is exactly what I am striving for.

So what makes my programming a little bit different, or how do I do it differently because I am thinking of midlife women? Well, the first thing is that I definitely want it to be sustainable for you. And I know from the research and from results that twice a week of strength training is plenty but you do need to hit all your muscle groups. So I am trying to make it really sustainable by offering two, three, and four days a week workout splits and paying really close attention to making sure that your whole body is being trained, because [00:12:00] that's what we want. We want that our bodies are fit and functional, the whole body, so very different from.

For example, I was watching, uh, a mom and son training the other day and it was wonderful. I mean, definitely so nice. I'm always jealous like, oh, I wish my sons would train with me, but the son is showing the mom what to do. And as I was just following them because they were so cute, um, I, I saw that actually they spent probably about half an hour training chest. In many different ways. And if I think about what is the goal of that mother, probably not to have the best pecs, right? Not very many women are like, yes, I want great pecs, you know? But guys, that is their goal. They wanna have great pecs and great arms, right? Women, they, and this is a generalization, I [00:13:00] realize that, but women generally want. Some booty, they want their arms to be toned, maybe some shoulder muscles and, and overall to have more muscle on their body so that their metabolic health, their metabolism, all the things are in better shape, right? And they wanna strengthen their bones, especially in their lower body, hips, legs, so that they don't have to deal with fractures later in life. So, you know, the program is very. Different, depending on who your audience is, right? So a generic program for a guy is probably gonna have a little bit different, goals in it than it would be for you or me.

So I really try to make the workouts short enough, like very efficient, effective, sustainable. I have a slower ramp up of how fast I want you to be [00:14:00] lifting heavy. Because we are not so strong, our tendons and ligaments are not so strong and they take longer to get strong that our muscles do. I recommend that women start with a two or three days a week program, not with a four days a week, even though a lot of women would want to like, oh, gungho, yes, I want results as fast as possible. Lemme do it all the time. Lemme do more is better, you know? But what I have found is that the women who ramp up really fast, they're the ones who end up with some tendonitis issues, in their wrists, in their elbows. So it actually is better to do a slower ramp up to let your body kind of catch up and get strong.

And then exercise selection. So not just the fact that yes, I wanna train the whole body and so I, I need to choose for. Each workout and for each program, a set of exercises where every major muscle [00:15:00] group is going to get trained, right? And it's like a little bit of a jigsaw puzzle to put those together in efficient way.

But then I also think about things like, how easy is this one to set up and do correctly. And also, how easy is it to recover from, because there are certain ways of training, and I won't go into all the details that make it a little bit longer the recovery period,

and picking exercises that don't compress the spine that aren't technically difficult to learn. So I wouldn't do a barbell back squat, for example, because I would want you to be with a. Personal trainer there in the room with you watching you learn that, plus it does compress your spine the heavier you get. I mean, think about it, you're putting a whole lot of weight on your shoulders and you end up putting a whole lot of weight on your shoulders so you can get the same movement pattern trained, for example, by doing a leg press or doing some [00:16:00] different lunge, variants without the spinal compression.

So those are the main things that I do in my programming differently, to really accommodate the needs of midlife women. I am doing proper strength training, like real strength training with progressive overload and with a goal of lifting heavy. The journey is towards lifting heavier after you've done the ramp up period. 

Delivering it in a way that makes it more sustainable by allowing for two to three days a week of strength training and enabling women to even do shorter workouts. So I've designed my programming nowadays so that you can just train for a half an hour, twice a week and already see a lot of benefits from that.

So to summarize the reason why my program would be a little bit different than, for example, some generic strength training program out there [00:17:00] is that I'm thinking about the context of being a woman in midlife with your hormones being different with you being, this age and therefore your muscle mass being a little different than somebody who's younger or a man. Your bone density, what's going on with your tendons and your ligaments because you're in perimenopause and menopause. So, you know, those are the kinds of considerations that I give and a huge goal of mine is to make this really sustainable for you. And I do that by making the workouts really efficient and effective by choosing exercises that really move the needle and train your whole body. So the goal really is to have a stronger, healthier, fitter body so you can feel comfortable in your own skin today, and you can live the life that you want to live in the years and decades ahead.

So in my [00:18:00] view, midlife strength training is not about lowering the bar, it's about setting women up so that they can clear it.

So I hope that helped, and if you wanna test out this kind of strength training, I do have this. 10 day program called Lift It. It has four mini sessions so you can try out strength training. It's also got a few lessons in it it has really helped a lot of women to get clear on, oh yeah, okay, this is something that I can do, or, nope. Is not for me. You know, so you don't have to dive into a full course. You can test it out like that. Okay? And with that, I leave you until next week and wish you happy training