Alyssa Olenick (00:00:01):

It's a refreshing glass of lemonade on a hot summer day version of fitness, in my opinion, than anything else that is often out there. And then the counter to that is it's often actually more effective than everything else is also out there as well.

Michelle MacDonald (00:00:23):

I am Michelle McDonald. I'm your host and I'm going to introduce you to an incredible guest that I have found and you're going to want to follow her for sure on her social medias. Dr. Alyssa Olenick. She's a PhD in exercise physiology. She's a sports nutritionist, weightlifter like incredible weightlifter and a crazy ultra marathon runner. She's done, I don't know how many, she's probably run around the world a couple of times at this point, and she's known for, I love this. She's known for her high energy, her dsy approach to bringing sites to training in a no nonsense way and literally has helped thousands of women crush incredible lifting goals and race goals. She really marries, we know what's called hybrid fitness trading, so we're going to dive into that in the podcast. You can find her in our online business doc list fitness. She's so passionate. I love this about educating people on science-based fitness. So we're going to dive in today and extract as much information as possible and have a great conversation about the fitness space for women. Welcome to the show, Alyssa.

Alyssa Olenick (00:01:29):

Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Michelle MacDonald (00:01:33):

I love your statement and I'm going to repeat it. You are capable of so many things. Your body is very capable. Go blow your own mind around fitness. Your body is an incredible tool for self-empowerment. The narrative that we're only here to lose fat and restrict our feet until we die is wrong. There is so much more to health and fitness for women than just that. So we're going to open with this statement. It's just my power state. I stole, and I know my audience are all about this. You are speaking to the choir. Can you tell us more about this?

Alyssa Olenick (00:02:11):

Yeah, so I was very fortunate. I grew up an athlete and I grew up an athlete. I definitely had my moments around clean eating and I under ate or restrictive, but it never really came from a thin ideology or being thin for sport, which is a thing, but it was more so I was just trying to be healthy. And young athletes aren't informed on what is health versus performance and eating. And so much of the nutrition information out there is just diet industry approaches take to fitness and performance goals. And so when I played lacrosse growing up and then through college a little bit, and I started away trading at 15 and I just didn't know any better. And then when I came out to the world of fitness, when I left athletics, I realized that my friends, when I played lacrosse, we were the anomalies.

(00:02:55):

We were the women who would eat an entire pizza and not bat an eye and they'll get ice cream afterwards. And we were just like, we didn't think twice about it. My friends were probably even in athletic bubble, maybe I played lacrosse and we weren't runners or more physique oriented sports. I mean these girls crushed food. So I was in this bubble of just women who ate and trained and worked hard and were fantastic athletes. And then when I left that bubble, I realized, oh my God, everyone is out here using fitness only as a tool for self-hate or punishing their body or they're undereating and restricting while doing these things and kind of just spinning this hamster wheel that's coming from shame and hate and guilt or preconceived ideas of what we're supposed to do. And I'm not against body recomposition by any means, but when I fell in love with fitness at a very young age in sport, for me it was like I want to give this gift to everyone, this feeling of how amazing you feel or what this gives you.

(00:03:50):

And so many people aren't sold that version of health and fitness and especially in the narratives given to women. It's a lot of fat lost be body ideology and they're never sold an idea of performance or health in the same way that males are or athletes often are. It's not just males have their own struggles with different things, but they're not given this tool of fitness that is allowed to radically change your life by making you just a better person challenging you and proving your health and proving your stamina and proving what you can do. And I can say the fitness to say yes is one of the things I like to say to my clients. Let's develop the fitness to live a little bit larger in bolder and things like that. And I think if we can pull ourselves away from this idea that fitness is only a tool for fat loss or punishment or being thin or burning calories, but rather a tool for improving our lives or improving our health or just getting better because it's a lot more fun and effective to focus on mat in the gym than just this hamster wheel of everything else.

(00:04:52):

And so I really want to shake up that narrative. I've been trying to do this for years of kind of giving women an option they didn't even know was possible. Unless you grew up an athlete, you have no idea what you can do with your health and fitness because it's just never been sold to you. And I really want to bring to this industry strength and conditioning, which is often given to athletes and males to the everyday general woman who'd never even knew that that was an option. And it's a refreshing glass of lemonade on a hot summer day version of fitness in my opinion than anything else that is often out there. And then the counter to that is it's often actually more effective than everything else is also out there as well,

Michelle MacDonald (00:05:30):

Especially when it comes to the longevity factor. Because if you're really passionate pursuing your athletics versus thinking about the scale and losing weight and looking a certain way, then the chances of you continuing to reignite that flame over the years is incredibly high because continually working on your skill and working on your conditioning and chasing numbers and all of that so it feeds itself.

Alyssa Olenick (00:05:54):

Yeah, and I find that often obviously you have to pair training with nutrition in order to change and reshape your body. And again, I'm not against that. I just think that we need to make that a parallel focus, not the main focus because if you're focused on getting stronger or gaining muscle or improving your skill or getting faster or running further or doing more total work, if we really want to break it down to the bare bones of what fitness is often in the result of that, most people end up improving their body composition, having an easier time losing or maintaining body weight or getting that physique they were looking for just by improving their fitness. But then they spend their time in the gym thinking, how do I get more weight on this deadlift? Can I increase my skill in this? Whatever it is, gymnastics move or lifting move or whatever that is, can I run further or faster or cycle or finish this metcon faster?

(00:06:45):

And those are the things that actually move our fitness forward and usually our body falls with that. Again, it paired with good nutrition and you don't have to go into the gym thinking, did I burn 800 calories today? Did I burn enough? Did I do enough? Am I burning enough fat? Was that workout worth it? Oh, that wasn't worth it. I didn't sweat and didn't feel defeated. And actually understanding how we train in a way that lets our body adapt, which usually then usually when your body adapts body composition often falls as a byproduct of that. Again, it's not always guaranteed that you lose weight when you start exercising. We know that that's usually not the case, but the body composition thing is huge, especially when we think about using adequate strength training and paired with the adequate cardio training through moving those things forward. But it's so much more worth our time and effort and everything we're kind of looking for to just think about those sessions as a time to get better somehow or even maintain during busy seasons of life rather than just expend, expend expend.

Michelle MacDonald (00:07:41):

So this is incredibly nuanced. I mean we could just talk for an hour on this. My mind is just like, and this and what about this and what about this? So this is very nuanced and I know I'm sure that this has happened to you. What people will hear is, oh, so we shouldn't be worried about losing weight. Well, what about the people that are obese or whatever? I'm sure you must get some pushback on that. So do you want to unpack that a little bit because I want to underline that again and you said it, but let's underline it in bold frigging in neon yellow nutrition is part of it. Body recomp, especially if it's necessary for health purposes is part and parcel of it. And we're playing a long game here, so we're not just using weight for 10 weeks and then we're regain it back. We're trying to establish these habits where there's fun and joy and self-efficacy and mastering moves and getting freaking

Alyssa Olenick (00:08:29):

Strong. And so again, everyone thinks because I'm like the performance girl that I'm antibody recomposition or fat loss and I absolutely am not. I just think that giving women the opportunity to make fitness not about that ends up making it more enjoyable, more hearable, more sustainable is the one thing. And even if people have weight to lose, whether that's their own personal preference or they do have more adiposity or whatever that is, I still encourage people to go into their gym thinking about, okay, well how can I get better? And that looks different for everyone. So maybe the person who's very sedentary and has a lot of weight to lose, maybe that's just walking for 10 minutes, three days a week getting better. It doesn't need to be running an ultra marathon or anything like that, but you can still use the gym to focus on how can you just get better or improve?

(00:09:16):

Does it feel easier over time? Can you go further? Can you do more? Whatever that is, whether that's weight training in the gym or starting the skill of something new that is getting better, but we need to pair that with nutrition and you hit the nail the head there with this part of this comes pulling away from this idea of crash dieting and yo-yo dieting and extreme energy deficits to lose a bunch of fat really fast. But then we end up, we know the rates of this, you return and you gain it back. With this approach, it's more of the slow burn, it's more of the long game. Sometimes it's not as flashy and makes it not as easy for adherence. So sometimes there's a time and the place to maybe we are ramping it up for your own personal efficacy or whatever that looks like, but we need to be pairing these goals with nutritional changes that compliment that.

(00:10:02):

And I always like to say we need to be eating enough or fueling adequately for our goals. And fueling adequately means yes, not undereating, but it also means not overeating to the extent of it's potentially a detriment to our health and or impacting our blood lipids or our metabolic disease and things like that. Eating adequately is kind of meeting yourself for what you need for the demands of what you're doing. And people often think when I say that too, that I'm telling everyone to go overeat. I'm like, I'm not, because also overeating are periods of high intake. There's nuance to that too of healthy people can handle those better than potentially metabolically less healthy people, but eating adequately and eating enough, whatever that means for you paired with focusing on getting better or improving in some way in the gym rather than just expending often over time is yes, a slower game.

(00:10:51):

But that's the goal. You want to have sustainable long-term body and especially for those who have fat to lose or they desire to lose fat, we don't want these extreme do a ton of cardio restrict food a lot of times because you end up losing muscle mass in the process of this extreme energy deficits or extreme fat loss or it's unsustainable and you either rebound back, but if we are doing that, we don't want to be losing that muscle tissue. You want to be preserving it. And so the physical fitness component in the gym of maintaining or gaining that we'll paired with appropriate nutrition, moderate to high protein, calories based off needs, et cetera, et cetera, it's kind of the sweet spot to do that. And obviously the small details are going to look different on everyone. What a lean individual who's potentially under muscled and under fat might need is going to look different than somebody who's potentially overweight.

(00:11:39):

But really at the end of the day, we're trying to move us all forward to how can we get better in the thing that we need for most people gaining some muscle and improving cardiovascular fitness in one way or another. And then how do we adjust our nutrition uniquely based off of where we're trying to drive needle forward for us? And it doesn't have to be this big, people are like, well, it doesn't have to be this big crash diet extremist unhealthy approach to things. Often it means improving the composition of the food that you're eating, less processed foods, healthier foods, creasing, protein intake, spacing that across the day carbs based on activity level, right? Carbs aren't bad, but they need to be adjusted. And then caloric intake based off activity level, which again might need to be adjusted and titrated and things like that.

(00:12:21):

But then sleep, stress management, all of those things. So this isn't to say you can't do that, but we have to pair triangles with behavior and lifestyle and nutritional things that compliment that so that we can move the needle forward in which whatever direction we're trying to go, whether that's needing to gain muscle tissue or lose fat tissue or both or whatever that is. For most people it's a compliment of those things. But I still think I often will say, leave the fat loss to your nutrition, sleep and behaviors across the day. Let your gym sessions still be intentional and focused on getting better. I think it's just such a healthier approach no matter what your goal is at the end of the day. I

Michelle MacDonald (00:12:58):

Absolutely agree there. So if you do have some pushback from people, sure, especially even maybe the older gals that are afraid to not focus on that fat loss first. And I'll be honest, we actually do focus on the fat loss first. We get rid of the body fat, but our clients usually the stimulus of training is so novel that we ride on those newbie gains, we get them. It's crazy. I'm jealous as somebody who's been training for a long time, I'm like, I don't get that effect. I have to eat to build muscle

Alyssa Olenick (00:13:26):

And there's nothing wrong with tackling fat loss. I think people think that I'm saying, you got to wait six months till you do that. No, you can start doing that, but try not to go into the gym when you have that fat loss goal as that being the only reason that you're there. Find another reason to be there while you're focusing on that goal.

Michelle MacDonald (00:13:45):

So this brings in another question I have for you. So what is your most convincing argument for gals that really do need to focus on gaining muscle? So body recomp. So we're not going to go into this big deficit, maybe a small deficit, but we're really going to focus on skills and strength and performance and let that drive the changes that they want to see, the tone that they're looking for.

Alyssa Olenick (00:14:10):

So often, most of the time style of training you need to gain muscle and get stronger is the style of training you need to get the body look that you're looking for. Usually I think this is for women across the entire lifespan. I know this is even harder with the older populations who came from a very different dicentric generation. The body that you think that you want probably weighs more than you think it does. That's usually the first thing I say. People especially putting a muscle, muscle doesn't weigh more than fat, but it takes up less space. You're more dense. Nobody looks at me and thinks, man, that girl's 145 pounds, but it's compact at five one, someone might say, oh, you're overweight by BMI standards. Well, no, I'm just compact. I'm muscular. My body composition is lean. That's what we want to be looking at is that that body composition ratio is fatness to leanness and we want to think about increasing the lean tissue mass of that. That pushes that down too. Yes, fat loss there too, but start thinking about that as the ratio of them being two different sides of the same equation, not just focusing on the fat component of that

Michelle MacDonald (00:15:13):

Or just the weight component. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick (00:15:15):

Yeah, just the weight component. Focus on comping your body. Don't get married to a number on the scale because that number of what you're thinking you should be at is likely going to be very different when you start to gain muscle and or lose fat. It might not really budge, it might end up higher than you think it is or that idea that you should weigh what you weighed 30, 40, 50 years ago is probably not realistic. I even weighed 20 pounds heavier than I did, you know what I mean when I was in college. But it's a healthy weight, it's muscle tissue, it's performance, it's power. So start thinking then about how do you train in the gym to improve muscle mass, to improve power, to improve strength, to improve performance. Because usually in order to move those things forward, you have to be lifting heavy enough, having enough mechanical tension on your muscles and actually doing enough of it to adapt.

(00:16:03):

And usually that results then in that improved muscle mass or tone or lean mass that people are looking for. And so usually it's easier to sell people on the body composition thing because at the end of the day, I could sit here and tell you everything that's good for health, but people really just at the end of the day, they want to look good. I know people value and care about health, but they're more likely to do something sometimes when you're like, Hey, but this is the thing that's going to actually make you look better. But the great thing is the byproduct of improving your fitness is it actually, I think of fitness as a metric of health too. Your muscle mass is a metric of health. Your strength output, especially as we go older, your ability to move weight and have muscle or sprint or be powerful is itself a direct reflection of your ability to maintain independence and or move more freely as you age.

(00:16:54):

And we want to maintain that because when we're thinking about midlife and on more of that health stuff starts to become more convincing like, oh shit, I see it now. I'm moving slower. I can't move as well. Things hurt. Things don't feel as good. And some of that happens with age to begin with, but when we think about this, we want to be maintaining and preserving that powerful strong output if our muscles and keep taming and regaining that so we can live functionally and longer and better. But coincidentally, by focusing on just getting stronger and gaining muscle and being more powerful, you also maintain that for health and longevity, but you're usually having to do that stuff in order to get the body and physique that you want so they go hand in hand health and performance up to a point. Elites sometimes sacrifice health for performance, but none of us are trying to be that elite probably.

(00:17:45):

You know what I mean? We're not in that 1%, but we're thinking about that. It's kind of moving the needle forward on both, but you're not going to get bulky. I know that's the thing, and everyone gets mad at people when they're worried about that too, but I think we have to sympathize with people's understanding of why they're saying that and they're worried about that. It takes a lot of work to do that and especially if you're midlife and beyond, it's going to take even more work. It is harder. You're less capable maybe than your 20-year-old estrogen filled sack of a body kind of thing. But it doesn't mean it's impossible, but the thing that you want because your body is going to be breaking down that muscle and breaking down your strength and making you more fragile year by year after that point in time, unless you fight against it or give it a stimulus telling it, no, we need to maintain where we're at.

(00:18:32):

And so if you're motivated by fragility or long-term functionality, that's the way to do it. But if you're only motivated by the body composition and you're frustrated with your menopause body or whatever that looks like, well the solution there is still going to be focusing on getting strong as hell and gaining as much muscle tissue as you can. If you are one of the very few unicorns, there are women out there who gain weight or muscle a lot easier than a lot of people. I'm one of them, but I still have to work really hard to have the muscle tissue that I do. You can choose say, Hey, this is enough. But for the most part, most of us aren't going to be doing that, at least with the volumes and intensities that we're doing that at. And if you ever push up on that ceiling, guess what?

(00:19:15):

You can just maintain. You can just be like, you know what? I am the female on our Schwarzenegger. We're just going to maintain here. You can do that, but give it a chance. Give it a chance because most likely the body that you're looking for and the functionality that comes with that is going to come from putting on the muscle tissue from the strength training and that muscle tissue is going to make it so much easier for you to maintain metabolic health and kind of fight against. You're not going to fully ever change or remove the body fat shifts and changes that come with menopause. You're going to age, I'm going to age, you're going to age, we're all going to age, but that's going to make it easier for you to maintain a body composition or physique or leanness that you're looking for over the course of the second half of your life.

(00:20:03):

And so if you don't believe me, give me six months, just give me six months of going all in and seeing what happens, right? Because most likely I see people being like, oh my gosh, this changed my life. Oh my gosh, I should have done this sooner. Oh my gosh, this is like I'm so excited about all these performance goals. And then I just realized, wow, my butt's growing and or my legs are more muscular or I am fitting things better, but the scale isn't going down. And those things sometimes to get them to click, you have to go through them. It's so easy for me at 30 and muscular and lean to say to people, oh, trust me. And I know people don't trust me. I haven't gone through it, but when I see it with clients, it's so much of a just you have to buy into it long to let it work. And then usually you're convinced, but you have to have that blind trust going in to show yourself that the heavy lifting in the muscle building is actually not as scary as you think.

Michelle MacDonald (00:21:00):

Well, I can say as somebody who's 53 hearing from somebody who's in their thirties, especially somebody that's already put a stake in the ground in the sphere of exercise science, again, it's music to my ears and it makes me so excited about the future for women so excited. And you're probably going to find that when you're in your fifties as I am, because of all the things that you do and how you understand female physiology and the actual strength in the female body, it's an incredible body. It gives life for crying out loud that you're going to experience your fifties. Like people 20 years ago could never have imagined was possible. And you'll start to hear things like, that's not possible. You must be doing some kind of drug or what's the gimmick or what's the hack? And it's like, no, I'm just doing these things that are very athletic. I coach the athlete mindset. I take gals that have never trained before, probably were never an athlete. And I'm like, let's fix diet culture and let's learn how to develop an

Alyssa Olenick (00:21:57):

Yeah. And that's exactly what I think if women take on. That's exactly the whole point of my whole first rant was taking on that athlete mind spec, stop taking a diet culturally centric mentality to your health and performance goals. You need to take a health and performance focused nutrition and lifestyle approach. And generally that gets you a lot more results. And what's interesting you say about that, there was a recent study that just came out from Abby Smith, Ryan and Sam Moore, a good friend at UNC. They're brilliant female researchers do a ton of work in the space and they were looking at perimenopausal symptomology and looking at body composition or high intensity interval training. And there's a great rate up, came out by recently by Christine or Christina, I can't remember her last name. She's amazing. She's so supportive of me. I feel so bad.

(00:22:43):

I'm blinking right now. And it really emphasized that so much of their study's takeaway was like, it's not about the fat, it's about the muscle. And we want an improved body composition or more muscle, and that might reduce some of that symptomology going through midlife and exercise might help counter that. I don't think the data right now shows that exercise completely will reduce those symptoms, but I think having a more muscle and a leaner body composition, so to speak, whatever that looks like for you by leaner, I just simply mean having more muscle tissue, even if you do care, a little bit of extra fat is probably going to make you more resilient If you're listening to this coming in from your late thirties or early forties or you're just starting Perry or that might make some of that a little bit easier for you. The data's not conclusive, but it's there to say, you know what? This might actually help blunt some of this. And there's definitely people who are fit and healthy their whole life and menopause smacks them sideways. And that's not to say there aren't other things too, but it's kind of your best fighting chance for both aging and the hormonal shifts that come or have already come to you and it's not too late if you're already past that.

Michelle MacDonald (00:23:44):

Yeah, for sure. We're seeing some really interesting stuff coming out with cardiovascular disease and now resistance training is up there as one of the major levers that you can pull and the cardiovascular associations are saying, Hey, we got to put this up here as something that we've got to encourage people to do risks. And I know hi training or high intensity training has been shown to with very overweight people, and I think to myself, gosh, is that safe? But it's been shown to really have a positive effect on insulin sensitivity and I believe blood triglycerides, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Alyssa Olenick (00:24:18):

Yeah, no, I mean, so HIIT is one of those things where it is very effective and short, small doses that intensity, that stimulus of that intensity, especially when it's novel on people, it's really powerful and we don't need to make all of our workouts hit every single day of the week. Their counter is always, what about the women who abuse and overdo cardio? I'm like, okay, yes, that is a thing. We need to teach them polarization periodization and bring in oral bed zone two and easier, more moderate stuff or dividing up their intensity. But for a lot of people, a couple hit sessions a week can be really powerful for moving that needle forward on health. You're training the body at these high heart intensities and it does appear to improve insulin sensitivity and glut glucose disposal and VO two max and all the subsequent disease that are related to those things like cardiovascular disease and VO two max itself is a major predictor of metabolic health and long-term mortality.

(00:25:12):

And so of course we need volume and there's all these other nuances to cardiovascular training. But yeah, no, it's a really potent and powerful tool and if you do it on something like a bike where people are locked in or an air bike is really great for this where there's not so much this variation of skill limiting people like running might be, especially if you're overweight the bike or the air bike is a great mode to do that where you can lock in that intensity and it's a little bit more, I don't want to ever call any exercise risky or unsafe, but it's a little bit easier to get that intensity up without being limited by skill or inability to kind of execute something. So yeah, it actually can be for people, obviously if somebody is very undertrained or very sedentary, sometimes we want to ease them in on easier stuff to get them to that harder stuff just for familiarity and confidence and psychologically or just to build some of that aerobic fitness.

(00:26:01):

But you won't die if you go on a bike and do an all out one minute effort unless you have some underlying heart condition that's excluding you from doing that. But you can do that and my mom always worries me. She'll be power walking and she'll walk up a hill and she'll be like, oh my gosh, she's like 50 or 62. She's like, my heart rate spiked. Is that bad? I'm going to have a heart attack. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's good. You want that actually, I want that stress on your roof, on your body, walk up more hills kind of thing. So I don't want anyone to go do this and be like, you gave me a heart attack kind of thing. Obviously make sure you're healthy and cleared, but unless you have some underlying issue, a little bit of high intensity is probably more good for you than it probably feels in the moment.

Michelle MacDonald (00:26:40):

So this brief, let's just dive into it. We're already talking about it. Cardiovascular

Alyssa Olenick (00:26:44):

Treat. Yeah, I feel like we're flip flopping our conversation I think, but it worked. It worked organically. I'm sorry about that.

Michelle MacDonald (00:26:50):

Oh, it's great. It's awesome. I love it. So you really have an expertise in cardiovascular training and of course I talked about this with you earlier offline, I'd like to dive into this because there's still, everything's so extremist like the pendulum goes this way, it goes that way. So now we're in this place still I think where cardiovascular training is, nobody wants to do it. It's bad for you, people are afraid to do it. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because you're an endurance athlete and you're a hybrid athlete and that's what you coach, you coach people how to excel with endurance sports and build strength and build muscle. So could you talk a little bit about cardiovascular training? Explain the different zones why utilizing them could be beneficial, how to incorporate HIIT training into your training?

Alyssa Olenick (00:27:37):

Yeah, so first of all, I'll start with the hard hitters. Cortisol. The boogeyman of cortisol is overstated lower intensity, sustained exercise. Cortisol doesn't really increase that much unless it's a very, very long duration and you're under fed or blood sugar drops like me running an ultramarathon if I don't eat enough during that, two cortisol spikes in response to high intensity training, but it's a part of the adaptive response to exercise and it's generally the cortisol response to exercise is not as high and as steep compared to maybe some other external stressors as people make it out to be. Cortisol does have a relationship in post and perimenopause for increasing visceral adipose tissue potentially. This is a study that I'm working on now, so hopefully I'll have more data on this in the future, but it's not linked to be a conclusive one to one increase of this belly fat that people are looking for.

(00:28:26):

Your shifts in increase in belly fat and the menopause transition are coming from your loss of estrogen and or changes in behavior that are increasing both localization of weight to your stomach with the loss of estrogen, but increase intake or decrease activity or maybe underlying physiological things. We're still kind of trying to pin out cardio, decreases visceral adipose tissue and so does resistance training. So that's my hard hair right there. Cardio isn't making you fat hitting with things that everyone's talking about. Women can do zone two training, but women also benefit from high intensity and sprint interval training, hitting all the boogeyman things that everyone always asks me about here too. But what we need is periodization and polarization of our training. So periodization is slowly progressing and increasing the load or the volume one at a time and not slapping a whole bunch of volume or a whole bunch of intensity on our training all at once. And that also includes thinking about the polarization is balancing higher, harder intensity stuff with the easier stuff. And the amount of time you spend in each of those depends on how much you're doing every single week. And that's a tie into the people of like, well, all my female clients overdo cardio and when they stop, they start losing fat or they recovered better or they gain muscle, blah, blah. I'm like, yes, they were overdoing it. There's a difference between using a tool correctly and using a tool and overdoing it.

Michelle MacDonald (00:29:44):

Beautiful.

Alyssa Olenick (00:29:44):

The pendulum swing is coming from people who overdid it or under eight while overdoing it who now paint it as the boogeyman where they or their coaches or whatever didn't know how to program cardio in a way that balances the high heart intensity stuff with the easy stuff. In rest days, those people are usually doing something like this moderate to high intensity circuit training or cardio stuff like 5, 6, 7 days a week, maybe not adequately eating in response to that or they're not pairing it with enough muscle building activities. And then what happens is all their training, it becomes this moderate to low high intense and they're not driving the intensities differentially enough. So there's two models of cardiovascular training, there's polarized training and peer middle training. For all intents and purposes, for most people listening, all it means is that you spend a good chunk of time doing easy stuff and you spend a little bit of time doing high quality, intentional specific high intensity stuff.

(00:30:42):

You might spend a little bit of time in the middle there, but you spend most of your time either going really hard for short bits and recovering or for a long period of time out of conversational easy effort pace. And so these are usually broken down into zones. So we have zones 1, 2, 3, 4, and five. Zone one is your passive walking, daily living, that's great. That's okay. We want a lot of general activity there, but generally we want something a little bit harder to at least elicit cardio adaptations. We want to get our heart rate to at least 50%, 60% more preferably of our heart rate max. For some of you that might be walking to start, but ideally we don't want it to be only walking, right? We want it to over time shift or if you're more fit, you might have to do something like running or cycling or stair stepping or whatever cardio machines you're doing or some sort of combined type cardio thing that's really recoverable really easy, doesn't really sweat your cortisol unless it's done for very long periods of time. Under fed,

Michelle MacDonald (00:31:39):

Can you explain that? There's two things I want to pull out for you. So one is this idea of enough to drive cardiovascular adaptations. This might get lost this little nuance and what is that exactly then? And then numerically what is too much?

Alyssa Olenick (00:31:54):

Yes, so we want our heart rate to be at least 50 to 60% up to that 70%. This also depends on people and how fit you are, but for undertrained people usually or new to cardio people, that's usually a good gauge. If you're more aerobically fit, that will shift, but that's more nuanced there. So we want that stimulus of at least 50 to 60% of our heart rate to get the adaptations that come from cardiovascular training. Usually if we're below that, it's usually not enough. So for most people it's like try to get your heart rate over a hundred or 110 beats per minute. It's usually kind of like that bear line threshold of what we want for adaptation, give or take. But especially when you're older, your max heart rate decreases, so it's probably good target of being over a hundred to over 110 and whatever it is that you're doing.

(00:32:39):

And then the thing with zone two is you could almost do in a limited amount of it every single week as long as you increase it gradually over time. So just like anything else, being progressive, obviously there's a ceiling on how much you can do with training in a week, but if you adapt to what you're doing, zone two is a great way to build a fantastic base for cardiovascular adaptations. And so when we think about the extremes of the extremes, the elite athletes who elite marathon runners are running a hundred to 130 miles a week or something crazy like that. So much of that for them to be able to do that is this easy recoverable training. And that's just giving an example of how much volume you can build with that kind of over time. So there's not like you can't necessarily overdo this as much as you can overdo doing too much too soon.

(00:33:26):

So if you go from I'm doing no cardio to I'm going to do six hours of zone two training a week, that might be a little bit much for your body to adapt to. You need to ease into that over time. And zone two is very hard. So a lot of people aren't able to really stay in zone two for a long period of time. It takes a year, maybe a year and a half, two years to get really comfortable with doing that unless you're doing a run walk or a fast walk or an easy cycling. So you want, again, that at least that 50 to 60 not making it. You want to be able to carry a conversation. I like the phone call test of like, Hey, I call my family all the time when I'm running and talk to them because I can.

(00:34:03):

And that's how I also keep myself going slower and easier. So that's that easy recoverable type thing, building up slowly over time and the amount of this you do in a week depends on your preference, your goals, and also how much cardio are you doing over time. So on the contrary, then we have zone three, which is this moderate middle intensity zone three gets a lot of crap as being the gray zone and unproductive and zone three isn't bad, but I think we should think of zone three as being in our higher intensity kind of divide that's more of that pure middle where it's zone two on the base, a little bit of zone three and then the zone four and five, which we'll talk about here in a second. I don't think zone three is bad, but it happens with most people is they do their zone two training or easy training in this moderate intensity all of the time and they get this, it's kind of hard and fatiguing and not as recoverable, but it's also not so easy that when they start doing 5, 6, 7 days of it that it starts to become a little bit too stressful.

(00:34:54):

So what we want instead is, again, I like to think of zone three with four and five as these are our harder effort days are what we're doing. And so zone three is kind of your steady state pace. So think about the max effort that you can do without having to slow down. And then zone four is when things start to get harder, you can maintain this pace and effort for generally somewhere around 30 to 60 minutes or short intervals in between there. And then zone five you're starting to get into, okay, maybe you can sustain this for, there's also zone five plus for harder sprint activities, but we're thinking like, okay, maybe you're sustaining this for 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes kind of at most very high hard output and you eventually with the zone four and the zone five, you start accumulating more blood lactate, you get that burning sensation, it's harder for your body to keep moving forward, so you have to kind of slow down or stop in order to keep going and you're big numbers. So

Michelle MacDonald (00:35:51):

I got to because yeah, expecting you to say zone five and four, what you can do for 20 seconds or maybe 40 seconds, but you said 50 minutes I think.

Alyssa Olenick (00:36:03):

So your start of your zone,

Michelle MacDonald (00:36:05):

I would be dead.

Alyssa Olenick (00:36:06):

Yeah, so when we're thinking about running zone three is kind of where your half marathon to marathon pace is kind of are marathons closer to that upper zone two to zone three of what you can sustain for the duration of a marathon. Then half marathons kind of that upper zone three, you can sustain that for maybe a good bit of time before you have to slow down maybe 10 K to half marathon for some people. And then that start a zone four is kind of like, hey, you can kind of maintain that for an hour, give or take. It's right on that line of your steady state and when you're lactate or that fatiguing or burning sensation starts and it starts to accumulate more rapidly if you keep going harder and faster. And so usually that's what we do threshold test efforts with my clients, can you sustain this for an hour and we can figure out your zones from here.

(00:36:51):

And then when we get into zone four plus, that's when we're thinking, okay, maybe the five Ks to the one mile to two mile efforts or that's where the zone five, upper zone five zone five plus is when we get into the sprint interval training where the goal is to go kind of above your VO two max or supra VO two max short acute periods of time that you can't sustain for very long periods of time. So there is training and programming where you're maybe not always doing this stuff for an hour. When I'm programming speed work or intervals, whether that's for runners or not runners, I might say, Hey, let's do four minutes at zone four or zone five rock cover and do it again. It doesn't need to be every single session. Those are the intensities that we're training for intervals. But in a theoretic world, if you were to do max effort for a max extended period of time, that's how long you'd be about able to sustain that.

(00:37:39):

Now the caveat here is training status, right? Because my undertrained lower trained individuals coming to me, if they start even running their heart rate spiking to zone four or five and they can only run for maybe 10 or 20 minutes before fatiguing. So a lot of this also depends on your fitness status and your level and what you can do and what you can build and work up to. Obviously this becomes more refined as you do. What happens if you're a lower fitness status is your zone shift downwards. You have to work at easier lower heart rates to be in that easy recoverable zone and that everything, it's a lot easier to spike yourself or shoot yourself into those higher heart intensities. But when we think about programming and training, which is what you were kind of getting at, the zone two is easy continuous.

(00:38:21):

You can do it where you mix it between maybe you're doing a bike mix to a farmer's carry mix to some other move just to break it up, but you're kind of keeping it all relatively easy or you're sitting on your bike or doing it continuously. I know people think it's boring, so you can kind of mix it up or go to your group fitness classes, you love them, but just don't go all out while you're doing it. That's an option too. You don't have to go all out on all those things all the time. But when we think about high intensity interval training or sprint interval training, that's when we think about, okay, programming 20 to 32nd or one to four minute bouts of training in these zones, four to zone five, doing them for a sustained period of time, resting and recovering adequately and then repeating it again to kind of push that lactate threshold or that point in when things start to go hard forward.

(00:39:07):

So then you could do zone two or easier stuff at higher heart rates or a better paces without the fatigue and spike and then you also are able to shift that forward and then go higher and harder at these harder 10 season and sustain that. And so when we're thinking about that, that's when you have the sprint interval training that's like the 20, 30, 40 seconds all out and that upper zone five or maybe zone five plus, you're going as hard as you can and then you're recovering for maybe a minute, a minute and a half, two minutes in between those intervals like a full recovery going so hard. It's kind of like a lifting set. You're going so hard, you actually have to fully adequately recover from that. Or the more traditional hit stuff, which is one minute, two minute, maybe three or four minutes, and you're doing those somewhere between that threshold kind of at the zone four or upper zone four to low zone five and you're maintaining that kind of max sustainable but repeatable interval and then recovering and resting for another like full one, two or three minutes in between those bouts and doing it again.

(00:40:08):

And so typically you're doing somewhere between three to six intervals for these for people. And again, progression start with less, start with two or three, build up two, maybe three or four over time. But the idea is it's really fatiguing and really hard and you're trying to shift your body's ability to do high and hard intensities and maintain and sustain that slowly over time. So you are correct in that. That's usually what we're doing for programming with these. But if we're thinking about max performance, you're not maxing out your one hour effort every single day of the week in the gym or your one mile effort. These are going to be very high and hard, but they're probably not going to be a hundred percent redlined unless the sprint interval training a little bit more than the other stuff. But we want to think repeatable. You don't want to do one interval completely tank out and then the next interval you can only maintain

Michelle MacDonald (00:40:54):

50% of your effort. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick (00:40:56):

You more

Michelle MacDonald (00:40:57):

Effective dosage. I know our audience, they're very usually successful and right in the peak of their careers, so just getting them to train even with weights four days a week can be challenging. Do you have a minimal effective dose to get the cardiovascular benefits? Because as we were saying offline, for a woman in that older category like death by CBD, that's the number one killer. So

Alyssa Olenick (00:41:24):

Yeah, I usually like to say I really like two to three full day a week body full body lifting training sessions at the minimum there. And then obviously if you can get more, that's great, and then pairing that with one or two, maybe a hit and a sit every single week or just one day, you can just do one day of this and get a lot of bang for your buck if you're keeping high quality and then kind of filling in the rest of your week with the easy longer duration stuff or staying as active as you can externally from there. The minimal exercise guidelines are 150 minutes weeks of moderate to vigorous physical activity or 75 minutes a week of vigorous to very hard physical activity so you can kind of trade off time for intensity. I don't think they're equal in the sense that if you really need to develop an aerobic base, you're going to have to do high volumes of easy training.

(00:42:09):

And easy training isn't the same as high and heart intensity training, but for all intents and purposes of health, doing maybe two HIIT sessions a week and then general cardio or easy stuff or walking a lot or whatever else you love, the rest of the week is probably a good minimum place to get yourself 20 to 30 minute long cardio sessions. You're not doing the exercise the entire time because you're warming up doing the exercise recovering, but it can be effective in even 10 minute doses. Some of my favorite hit or sit protocols are one minute on, one minute off for five to 10 rounds, working up from five to 10, super simple, super effective, super potent, 30 seconds on, 90 seconds off. Again, that's a two minute interval. Let's do five or six of those over up 10 to 15 minutes, maybe 10 to 20 minutes in total.

(00:42:54):

You're done with your training session for some longer duration stuff. One of my favorites we used at my dissertation was four minutes on, three minutes recover for four rounds, but you could start with even two rounds and bulk up to three, pretty hard. Three might be a good spot for you so you can kind of manipulate and play with these over time. But I really like those short, sweet, kind of to the point things that are 10, 20 minutes long for the people who are short on time, busy on time, but also recognizing that getting in a lot of whatever general activity you can across the week. I think a lot of people worry when I'm walking isn't sometimes enough and they're like, oh my God, that's all I have time to do. Well walk a little bit harder or walk in an incline or maybe potentially you're shifting some of one of your days every week on the weekend to something more of a hike or something more challenging or whatever it is.

(00:43:41):

But getting inactivity, however that looks for you is the most important. But if you're doing a lot less, that's where the polarization comes in. If you're not doing a lot of cardio, you're only needing exercise guidelines right then and there. I don't care if you're doing one, two or three days of hit a week to get to that physical activity, that's fine. But if you start doing more and you start getting to like, okay, 3, 4, 5, 6 plus hours a week of cardio, well then we're probably going to have to shift a little bit more to the easy stuff. You can't do high intensity for all of that either going to lose the quality of it, you won't be able to do it all high, I intense, or you're going to start doing too much high intensity all the time and we want to kind of spread that out across the week.

(00:44:20):

But there is a lot of benefit for the high intensity sperum interval training, especially for menopause, post menopause women aging. One, we want to really develop and refine our type two muscle fiber characteristics. Power output and muscle loss is a vigorous with aging and that's why there's such a push for hit and sprint interval training in these populations. And we do have some studies showing that it does improve body composition. We see studies also, you improve body composition similarly with all types of cardio, but HIIT is great for kind of training and preserving that power output both in your cardio and in your training sessions. So there's benefits that are unique to that. So I like saying at least one day a week of that two, if you're doing nothing else and just being active otherwise. Then I think after those two sessions, everything else you add on should be kind of more easier or general or longer sustained activity. So would it be

Michelle MacDonald (00:45:10):

True to say getting all things being equal, and we're not talking about training for an endurance sport, but if you were going to really be confident in cycling in some cardiovascular for the cardiovascular benefits and maybe for improving your ability to sustain your training at a high level, your actual weight training, just having that better cardiovascular health, that getting in some of that higher intensity training and small dosage would be wise versus just always doing zone two. Would you say if all things being equal, could we get one day even of shit in?

Alyssa Olenick (00:45:44):

Yeah, zone two is having a moment, but I think zone two works best for athletes in general, people in health with at least one day of quality work a week. There's nuance with runners where we're maybe not giving them speed work right away, but we're kind of dosing little bits of intensity, but doing one day of hit a week is beneficial and then we do want to develop our aerobic systems, and that does come from some of that zone two stuff. If you only zone two, then maybe only do zone two and then add a few high intensity bouts mixed into it if you're willing to do that. I know some people like they hate the hit in the sprint. Well, I'm like, let's add some little, maybe we have some pushes. I'm like,

Michelle MacDonald (00:46:20):

If you hate it, you probably need to do it. And when we talk about it's like the shuffle run doesn't have the plyometric benefits of speed work in shuttle runs and agility work and those small short doses have a big, big payout in terms of how you handle falls and how you react to things with your body.

Alyssa Olenick (00:46:42):

Yeah, I mean I really like having at least one day of some sort of high intensity sprinting all out, whatever that looks like. And again, if you hate it and you don't want to do it in just a session, do an easy session and then every five minutes on the minute go hard for one minute, or maybe you go hard for 30 seconds and then you recover until you feel good and then you do it again. You sprinkle five or six or seven of those in the course of an easy day, or maybe you're doing an easy bout of training and at the very end you're adding on a few high surges. Just getting that in with people who are just training for health, the specific programming of cardio doesn't matter as much as getting in and getting kind of a little bit of breadth and depth across the spectrum when we're thinking of those things that breadth and depth across the spectrum. But I think we should all do a little bit of high intensity stuff every single week, even if it's only one day a week. And if you hate it, kind of just trick yourself into

Michelle MacDonald (00:47:40):

Do eczema as well, where kettlebell swings and things that are a bit more functional that involves some weights potentially or some kind of agility worth. Like a burpee.

Alyssa Olenick (00:47:52):

I'm honestly a big fan of CrossFit for gen pop people. If people are going to do a group fitness class, I'm going to tell 'em to go to CrossFit over Orangetheory or F 45 or Burn Bootcamp. I think if it's well programmed, they do a much better job and emphasizing a strength component, and then usually they're cycling through the metcons in a way that we have a Metcon program and we do this, at least good programs will do this, where sometimes you're focusing on more of a cardio push. Sometimes you're focusing on more of a power output push, maybe a more of a skill push, but over time it should capture the breadth and depth of what you need. You don't want to only do six metcons a week. Two or three is great. I think for Gen Pop fitness, if you drink two or three a week, don't do six a week.

(00:48:29):

Some people do Yeah, I think if you're doing two or three days a week, this is what we do. We give the clients these all the time. If they don't like to run or do cardio, we give them aerobic capacities, which are just long, slower, metcon, kind of long zone two that have those mixed in components of kettlebell swings or carries or whatever it is or the metcons. And I think those great, especially if you can sneak in a component like a rower or an air bike or skier or a treadmill component into that, making sure if you have something mixed in with that, I think that's a great way to get in a cardio stimulus that keeps it interesting and variable for people and pushing that threshold. And there's some benefit. The high intensity functional fitness appears to have similar adaptations and benefits for health to some of the HIIT stuff as well, but it just has to be more intentional and specific versus this haphazard, random 60 minute long thing. You really want to think about that true CrossFit model of it's five to 20 minutes or 30 minutes and it's intentional and repeatable and not extended out for a very long period of time. That's where it, yeah.

Michelle MacDonald (00:49:29):

Yeah. So just so I can spin it back, so if somebody wanted to, she's listening to this, she's like, oh my god, I've got to be more intentional with my cardio wrapped around my training. Some take homes would be, make sure you're getting some zone two cardio in. Try to get maybe one two of that shorter duration, high intensity work, and potentially even doing a Metcon type of a workout. What about when they should plug it in? Right, and correct me again, I usually plug in because we're focused really on the training and putting on muscles. So I'll put their hit work on, and some of them among my legs are trash, but I'll say, well, I want to put your hit right after your leg day because I don't care about your performance. I want you to be cardiovascularly pushed, but I want you to perform in the gym, so I don't want to put your cardio your HI training the day after legs because then you're not going to recover for your next training day, your leg day.

Alyssa Olenick (00:50:29):

Yeah. So my approach is usually if you're going to do it on the same day, lift first cardio after I got some pushback on this, on the PROOF podcast, people are like, you're being too optimal. And I'm like, that's a very shallow level of advice. So I don't want anyone to take it as me saying, if you don't do this, you'll never get any benefit. But for HIT specifically, I would do that after. If you're doing some easy 10, 20 minutes of zone two before, it's probably not as fatiguing and it won't impact your session as much, but the hit probably will or the high intensity stuff probably will. So yeah, I'm a fan of doing lifting and then your hit, and I'm not against doing them on the same day unless you have enough days. If you're only lifting two or three days a week and then you're doing cardio two or three days a week, just do it all on its own day if you can.

(00:51:09):

But if you're going to do them on the same day, I like the lift and the hit. I also, let's keep our rest days or our upper body days sometimes as a day to give our lower body some rest and recovery depending on how many days of rest you have per week, or if people aren't short on time, maybe they do have all these rest days per week, but we're doubling up like, Hey, they're in the gym and they're getting it done. And I think that's great too. So it's either do them back to back lifting first, that second, put them on a different day or do them a and PM kind of thing. And that's usually my advice and guidance for especially things like HIT and then everything else it's like of the day, it just matters that you get it in. Yeah, there's a study looking at exercise order of cardio versus lifting in a more middle aged population recently, and it found that the results were pretty much similar or the same, you know what I mean? We're not talking all the athletes. I always

Michelle MacDonald (00:51:54):

Wonder, I've always skeptical about those results though. Like I talk to my clients all the time and I said, just be skeptical because has your demographic really been studied before? Women who really want to optimize their bodies as they age, and if we're constantly measuring ourselves against the barometer of what normal is and we look at normal, how normal is aging, well, that's not who we are. And until they start looking at our cohorts,

Alyssa Olenick (00:52:18):

We can't really. Yeah, and this was middle-aged individuals in their forties, which was nice. And it was like, Hey, both of these kind of worked. My professional take is like, yeah, if you're focused on gaining muscle and strength, let's lift first. It's going to be less fatiguing coming into the session. Two people also only have so much mental bandwidth before they start to get bored or distracted in the gym. And lifting takes a little bit more focus than just passively doing cardio. And again, if you're not worried about the specific fitness goal with cardio, I don't care if your hit's a little bit impacted because you're still kind of getting that stress and stimulus from that, from that session

Michelle MacDonald (00:52:55):

Could be through the roof

Alyssa Olenick (00:52:56):

Even if your power output's down a little bit. But also if you're training and you're finding that your output's down, maybe sometimes pull back your lifting volume just a little as your body adapts to that, and then you can increase over time.

Michelle MacDonald (00:53:05):

Exactly.

Alyssa Olenick (00:53:06):

Making sure you're eating enough before you go to the gym. If your sessions end up being 60 minutes or longer, take maybe 30 grams of carbon during your workout, whether that's juice or a carby drink or a pack of fruit snacks or an applesauce packet. If you're starting to train for longer, don't be afraid to put some carbs between your lift and that cardio session. That brings

Michelle MacDonald (00:53:26):

Me up to another point, which is the nutritional component, and I think this is what we're probably going to have to wrap up with is I know, I know. Sorry. You are a wild stallion. Okay, so you had said that your hormones aren't as fragile as social media make us think they are, and I love that. So could you talk to us more about your philosophy around the female body, whether it's fragile and how to optimize it when training, what can they do? What can our listeners do nutritionally and physically to optimize their bodies?

Alyssa Olenick (00:54:02):

I'll give you the cliff notes. I've been wordy on the cardio. I'm sorry. There's just so many caveats to that sleep. I get so much backlash from this sleep seven to nine hours a night. I know perimenopause especially impacts sleep. Try things like tart cherry juice, cooling your environment, getting your pets and children maybe out of your room if you need to. I know that's, that's advice given to me by a sleep expert that came and gave a talk on sleep and menopause to our research group. Don't shoot

Michelle MacDonald (00:54:28):

The messenger. Love my pets. And we actually sent them to camp this week, so busy, and my husband and I had the best sleep last night and I thought, ah, I feel terrible, but it's better sleep at the pups.

Alyssa Olenick (00:54:41):

Yeah, I know. I don't have a dog yet. I want one so badly. But that was the advice was get the things that are waking you up in the middle of the night out of the bed, cool your environment. Maybe take a shower before tart cherry juice has been coming out now,

Michelle MacDonald (00:54:52):

Something potentially

Alyssa Olenick (00:54:53):

That can help with too,

Michelle MacDonald (00:54:53):

Right?

Alyssa Olenick (00:54:55):

Cooling blankets, mattress's huge, especially because if you're having a hard time, that can be very helpful. So sleep hygiene, get off your freaking phone, don't watch the extra 30 minutes of tv. And that's the thing is if you can't get an hour more of sleep, can you get 20 minutes more sleep? Because the issue too with perimenopause, sleep quality goes down and people end up increasing their duration of sleep because quality goes down. But these things can kind of help with quality, and I know that for people. People get so mad at me about this. I'm like, listen, I did a PhD. I know what it's like to get up early and have interrupted sleep and have that. I know, and I haven't gone through perimenopause, but I get it. And so sleep is huge. That will support fat loss, muscle gain, metabolism, cravings, hunger and satiety recovery, all that stuff.

(00:55:44):

Sleep nutritionally. You want to eat to support the activity that you're doing in your training, and that means carbs need to be dosed based off how much you're doing. If you're doing a ton of activity and you're trying to cane muscle and you're trying to do cardio on top of it, you're probably going to need to eat more carbs than you think you do. But of course, keeping them fibrous and whole foods as much as you can, pairing them with fats and proteins in your meals, everyone's like, oh my god, carbs are killing your hormones. Just everyone's just like rebranded, eating a mixed macro meal to regulate blood sugar as a hormone hack, and you're like, this is just a normal piece of advice that we've all been saying for years. It's crazy. You just rebranded it into a hormone hack. But that's great for metabolic health too. Yeah, let's eat our foods as mixed meals, no naked carbs, things like that, especially when we have potentially risk of insulin sensitivity as we age, yada, yada, yada. Brings me to the point of protein, protein, protein, protein, protein. You need to eat more protein moderate to high

Michelle MacDonald (00:56:41):

Intake, which is like for you, because this is always, it depends on who you're talking to, right? I talking to various experts,

Alyssa Olenick (00:56:47):

I'd say at least 0.6 to 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day. For most women, that's probably a hundred grams to 115 grams a day is kind of a minimum. I think 30 grams per day, maybe a snack or 30 grams per meal on a snack is probably a good target for people or one gram per pound of lean body mass is good too. As we get older though, we might want to increase that. So for my peri and postmenopausal friends here, you might want to go closer to that 0.7 to 0.8, maybe up to 0.9. I know that one gram per pound of body weight is really hard for people. I've seen some data also that women don't need that high of a ceiling or it kind of tips off a little bit. We also don't have a ton of data of that, obviously menopause and all that stuff, but it doesn't hurt to go higher, but I know people struggle with it, but try to spread it across your day.

(00:57:36):

I know that's more of an optimizing strategy, but I actually think that's really important because our protein sensitivity and muscle building capacity is less sensitive as we age and we don't have those amino acids, so you want to always have them available trying to get in 30 grams in your breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then some protein snacks or a shake. Don't be afraid to take shakes. That's really helpful, especially I think for females, getting the protein in is hard because their caloric ointment is a little bit lower, so that ratio kind of tends to be higher relative to them, or they struggle with fullness or satiety within that. But that's a good thing too. Also, the protein will keep you fuller. It'll keep you fuller for longer. It'll help with your blood sugar management help muscle building that helps trickle down to glucose disposal and in insulin sensitivity and metabolic great because it's supporting the building up that muscle tissue and giving you what you need for that. And so that's usually my guidance of that. And of course, it depends if someone has a lot more body weight, I'm not going to say one gram per pound of body weight, that's unrealistic. So we can kind of titrate down a little bit

Michelle MacDonald (00:58:37):

Ever. We talk a lot about one gram per pound of target weight, and I use that word target or ideal weight because if you have a lot of adipose tissue, you don't need a metabolically feed that with protein.

Alyssa Olenick (00:58:46):

No, you don't. And also it's hard. It's hard to get that much in. That's why I usually say one gram per pound of lean mass. If you know your body composition, target weight is something that people say that can be helpful. Or instead of saying, usually the recommendation is 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight, you could just shift that down to 0.5 to 0.8 depending on someone's adiposity because then you're just readjusting the math for the fact that they have less metabolically active fat is still metabolically active tissue, but you know what I mean. They have less of that lean mass to support, so you can just shift it down, but also find where you're at and what you're eating and then slowly build up. Don't try to just find this ideal target you should be hitting. Just find where you're at and start even adding an extra shake or switching out for a few products. Just trying to build that up from where you're at. I think a lot of people freak out because I say 140 grams per day and like, oh my God, I can never hit that. And you're like, okay, well you're at a hundred now. I

Michelle MacDonald (00:59:42):

Laugh because I'm like 140 to me is starvation

Alyssa Olenick (00:59:45):

Protein. I'm funny. Oh my God,

Michelle MacDonald (00:59:47):

I eat

Alyssa Olenick (00:59:47):

A, I struggle to get in protein and I try to hit lean body mass at minimum per day or more, right? Usually my minimum is one 15. I wonder how much,

Michelle MacDonald (01:00:00):

I know this is non sciencey, but I wonder how much there is a physical intuition. I was chatting with a client the other day and she was saying, should I bring my protein down? And I said, well, you don't have to. She's at about 1.25 grams per pound. There's nothing wrong You don't have kidney disease, but if you prefer not to, we could go as low as one 20 if you want. She said, oh, no, I don't want to lower it. I love my protein. I said, it's funny. I'm the same way. The lowest I will personally go 50.

Alyssa Olenick (01:00:26):

The only time I recommend people to lower it if they're in a position where they're eating a lot is if they're doing a ton of endurance activities and it's stopping them from getting in enough carbs, trading carbs or protein, or they're too full usually, then I'm like, okay, let's shift some of those calories to carbs. But that's usually the only time that I've ever, if somebody's happy and feels good about their protein intake, that's usually the only time where I'm like, well, maybe we actually want to pull it back. But that's usually because it's impacting the carbohydrate intake that they need to support their training, so to speak. And it's hard. Your body can make carbs and protein, but it doesn't really want to. It's hard for it to do it, but yeah, it doesn't hurt to eat more and getting higher is potentially better, but let's see where you're at and getting you up to that 0.8.

(01:01:13):

Maybe give or take to one gram per pound of lean body mass or ideal body weight or body weight if you're leaner, et cetera, et cetera. And also, it's not a big deal if you mess it up every once in a while. Just get in what you can, where you can try to get it in. Try to get at least 20 grams in an every free meal. Don't be afraid to supplement with a high quality way or plant protein once a day that for so many people, I got my 63-year-old mom and dad to start drinking a protein shake every single day, and I feel like I changed their lives, but really it was just like 30 milligrams of protein a day can really do that for you. Right? My mom comped a little bit. My dad's recovery from training was doing better. I was welcome to the magical world of protein. It makes such a big difference.

Michelle MacDonald (01:01:54):

So last thing before we wrap up, is there one thing that you're particularly excited about in the space of female health and fitness that's coming? I just

Alyssa Olenick (01:02:04):

Feel like it's a very slow, slow, slow tidal wave and this research is so slow, but I feel like in the next decade to 20 years because of the push of so many incredible female scientists, and especially some of my peers right now, peers and then early career women that I really look up to just pushing in this space, I feel like there's a lot more calls for action for research and advocacy and education. And I will say sometimes my menopausal friends, they get so frustrated and take it out on me or the communicators who are trying our best to say, this is what we have now. And unfortunately it might not come out for those of you who are struggling with it right now, but I feel like my generation coming through and being more educated on lifting and health and fitness, but also the push for science around the menstrual cycle and menopause and birth control and performance.

(01:02:56):

I feel like there's going to be, maybe for the kids being born now or these younger kids as they go through life and get older, there's just going to be so much more data in science and hopefully we'll be able to understand and help people a lot better. It's just science is so slow, but I feel like there's just, in the past few years, there's been this massive push. So I'm really excited for that. And I also am so excited about how much of a push and trend it is for mid-age women to be lifting heavy and training, especially if they've never trained their entire life. That makes me so happy to see. I love seeing it. I think it's amazing. I think we should enable it and encourage it as much as we can. It's not easy to go your whole life, not being physically active and then turn into a muscle mommy, right? But if you are out there doing it, you're incredible. You should be giving yourself way more slack and way more credit than you probably are if you're Jimmy and your training, because what you're doing is just awesome and inspiring. And I think it's leading the way for the women behind you kind of falling in your footsteps. So I'm excited about that

Michelle MacDonald (01:03:59):

There. You heard it from Alyssa first. Yeah. You rock, you go. Girlfriend, thank you so much. I mean, I could talk to you for probably three hours. Know I'm

Alyssa Olenick (01:04:09):

Sorry

Michelle MacDonald (01:04:10):

I I to keep things. No, it's great. The passion is incredible. That's what excites me is knowing that there is this amazing tidal wave coming. I think there's just so much exciting stuff going on, and always, every time I talk to an expert, whether it's a gut expert or a brain health expert or a menopause expert, it just comes down to the same thing. We're animals, we're mammals and there's basic levers we need to be pulling, and we stop pulling those things and blaming things on our hormones and age. We forget that at the end of the day, we're animals. I mean, animals need to exercise. They need sunlight, they need good sleep, they need connection and community like good basic nutrition. These things need to get met. And when we meet those, we're taking care of the big, big levers and we're really drastically reducing our risk of a lot of these diseases that we associate with age.

Alyssa Olenick (01:05:02):

You need to stress your system, you need to stress your system to adapt. And an adapted stressed system is usually a more resilient system. And yeah, obviously with nuance, but yeah, once you stop stressing the system, things start to fall apart.

Michelle MacDonald (01:05:18):

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And guys, you can find out more about Alyssa on her website and on Instagram, and we'll drop all the links in the show notes.