The Finest Perimenopause Coaching Tweaks for a Robust, Sculpted Physique

Betty Rocker (00:17):
What’s up, Rockstars Coach Betty Rocker here. Thanks so much for joining me. I wanna get right into it. When it comes to training in perimenopause, there are some simple, really important tweaks we need to make to make the workouts that we do really pay off in supporting our muscle tissue, our bone density, and lowering our body fat levels as well. And bonus, the tweaks that we make during perimenopause are going to be the things you’ll want to be doing post menopause as well. So you’re setting the stage to be even more successful when you get to that next level. So what are those training tweaks and why do they matter so much? As women, our body tissue, including our muscle tissue, our body fat and our bone and the tenderness tissue as well as our organs and our brain are all so influenced and affected by our levels of estrogen and progesterone, which circulate back and forth on this even keel Throughout a lot of our lives, they drive our menstrual cycle, right?

(01:21)
And once our cycle stops at menopause, which is typically in our early fifties, those hormone levels are just no longer cycling or being produced the same way. But years before menopause, as many as 10 years give or take, our hormone levels start to fluctuate and gradually go down. And this is of course the perimenopause life stage. And this stage is really challenging for a lot of us because it’s such a transition with a lot of variance. It’s not a single year or even a single event, and it’s often at a really busy time in our lives, our forties typically, where a lot of other things are happening. So it can be kind of hard to pinpoint, you know, we don’t always know that perimenopause is even part of the equation and how we feel or that these gradual changes in our hormones are responsible for the symptoms we experience because those symptoms really aren’t always easy to attribute to just one thing.

(02:23)
Some of the symptoms we see happening in perimenopause, perhaps not all at once, or even altogether, include things like sleep disruption or more stress and anxiety, more moodiness, hot flashes, brain fog, low energy, dry skin, a lower libido. You might start to notice your period changes in some ways. Maybe it’s heavier than it used to be, or it starts to come a little sporadically, but you might not even really have many changes there for some time. Different women really experience perimenopause in different ways with different symptoms and go through stages where we have almost no symptoms and stages where we have a lot of symptoms. So it’s not like you would necessarily know that this is even going on at first. Not to mention, you know, perimenopause wasn’t even talked about that much in the past. So, so many doctors still don’t really support it or have much in the way of resources for you.

(03:20)
But I believe that that will change the more that we talk about it. And women, you know, we are so resilient, right? I feel like a lot of those symptoms I just described, I mean, as women we deal with a lot of those symptoms of PMS and just being a woman our whole lives. And a lot of these perimenopause symptoms are things we kind of recognize or relate to things we’ve already experienced as part of life. So it’s almost easier to just accept them or take them on board and deal with them and we don’t even realize they might be connected to something new or a new life stage. If your doctor is also telling you it’s just aging and nobody in your life is really connecting the dots for you or talking about your hormones or even seeing there’s anything amiss, why would you know that your symptoms are all connected to something specific?

(04:09)
It can almost feel like perimenopause, this stage of our life becomes almost an extended version of PMS, right? . And so we’re just going along in life dealing with all these symptoms, not really thinking, oh yeah, now I’m in perimenopause, so now I need to start doing X, Y, and Z with my lifestyle and my training and eating. And that will really help optimize my experience. And because we don’t realize that it’s perimenopause or that it’s happening, we might actually end up losing some ground in those early years because we’re still doing things the way that we used to do them. And one thing I think a lot of us notice at first, especially if you do work out regularly or you’ve been eating really well for years, is that we start to gain weight. And this is a big frustration of course, because we’re doing all the things that we know help support our body, and it can just be really unsettling if and when that starts to happen.

(04:59)
There’s this sort of, you know, slow creep up in body fat or if you’re looking at the scale, a slow increase in your weight. And this is where we really start to lose ground, right? Because the things we used to do simply aren’t having the same impact on our body. And the reason may be that it’s perimenopause and those lower levels of hormones. This is exactly what happened to me. I was actually using a smart scale, um, since I don’t really weigh myself for the overall number, I was looking at body composition numbers on my smart scale like muscle tissue and fat mass, which any simple smart scale can typically show you. I’ll link to the one that I have in the show notes for you. It’s a really useful tool. And of course they’re never gonna be a hundred percent accurate, but they’re really good for seeing trends and data over time.

(05:46)
And that’s what started to make me concerned because I noticed that I kept creeping higher and higher in body fat and lower and lower in muscle. And while I couldn’t necessarily see that on the outside of my body at first, I did start to see it over time. And I saw it in that, um, data point at first. And I, I didn’t get it. I, I started to go down the rabbit hole thinking, oh, maybe I need to start eating less and exercising more. Even though logically as a trainer, I knew that that wasn’t a great approach for me. I, I felt so at a loss to understand why my body was changing, that I sort of reverted to those defaults, but it really just made me feel terrible. It ran me down and it had zero impact on my body composition other than maybe I gained even more body fat.

(06:31)
Now, fortunately, when I did finally realize I was in perimenopause, it coincided with this real emergence of a lot more women specific scientific research and evidence and continuing education that became more available. And as you can imagine, I dove right into that. I took advantage of it and I have continued to pursue that study for the past several years. And here I am about six years into my own perimenopause journey, fitter and stronger than ever with a real handle on navigating these transition years. And I’m here to tell you that there are simple things that you can do and tweak and they make a big difference. And I wish that I had known them right when it started. So you, you really can help your body hold onto your valuable lean muscle tissue. If you’ve lost it, you can get it back and you can improve your bone density and your tendon strength.

(07:21)
You can more easily start to lose your body fat and keep it off. And you can also support your energy levels and your sleep and all the other things we wanna do to sort of shore ourselves up to be better prepared for our next decade of our life. You know, the next life stage, even as our hormones are changing, all of this is possible and it’s not too early to start doing this stuff. Even if you’re in your late thirties, these methods are gonna support you at any time and they’re gonna create a kind of compounding effect that will help you navigate the perimenopause years much more easily. And then you’ll have a well established set of habits that will carry you forward through post menopause. So if you’re listening to this, just ’cause you’re interested in anything to do with menopause and you’re already post menopause, all of this stuff is relevant to you.

(08:07)
So I’m gonna go through some of the training techniques and why they’re so important today and I’ll also cover nutrition techniques in our next conversation. So you may wanna get out your notepad and take some notes as I go because this was all the stuff that I needed to really engage with multiple times as I was learning it and understanding why it was so important helped me really overcome my tendencies to just revert to what I maybe had done in my twenties or at other times in the past where I wasn’t very healthy or knowledgeable about balancing out my training. So we always have to stay open, right? And evolving and growing and learning new things If we wanna succeed because this life is a one way ride, we can’t go back. So let’s take the best care of ourselves that we can and set ourselves up for a stronger future together so we don’t crash and burn along the way.

(08:56)
And seriously, when I say crash and burnout, what comes to mind immediately and relevant to this conversation is our adrenals and the stress response because that is so connected to the tweaks that we want to make to our training in perimenopause. And that’s because our adrenal glands help to regulate our response to stress. But they also make some of our sex hormones, a small amount of them, but they make some testosterone and they make some estrogen. And as we’re getting into perimenopause and our ovaries are slowing down their production of estrogen and progesterone and also testosterone, our adrenals can sort of help mitigate some of the impact that this has on how we feel and how that affects us because they’re making some of those hormones too independent of our menstrual cycle. And that kind of can help keep us on a more even keel in regards to how we feel.

(09:51)
Because remember that I said earlier, just about every part of our body is impacted by our levels of hormones from our brain to our other organs and all of our body tissues. And that backup hormone source in our adrenals only really works to support us if we’re not already working our adrenals hard with high levels of constant stress. So if we’re overly stressed out, our adrenals are gonna be pumping out a lot of cortisol and this can dampen our ability to make those backup hormones as easily. And this is why you’ll hear a lot about the cortisol connection and why in perimenopause we want to be conscious of not over training or not doing too much cardio because exercise is a kind of stress too, right? It’s a healthy stress when we have the reserves to come back from it stronger. But it can also be a negative stress if our body stress levels are already higher than normal.

(10:45)
And one of the reasons we’re actually more sensitive to stress in perimenopause is because our progesterone levels have started to drop down and progesterone has all these really cool jobs, but one of them is serving as a sort of buffer for the cortisol response, which means it helps us deal with stress and it does this quietly behind the scenes for years of our lives. And we probably had no idea that it was doing all that work for us, helping us to manage the stress we experienced, right? But then in perimenopause, there’s less of it to go around. So the stress we experience just hits us harder, whether it’s stress from our lives or stress from a workout or stress from anything. And that’s one of the reasons we may start to feel more anxious or feel like smaller things can set us off in our perimenopause life phase.

(11:33)
And it’s not that we can’t handle stress, it’s just that we have to be more conscious of the things that can be stressors to our system and be a little more balanced and proactive in our approach to things like our training and recovery. And maybe start to think about adding things in that ground us or build our resilience to the general stress of life. So to recap, so far in perimenopause, we make less and less of the hormones that affect how our body tissue and our organs respond. Most of those hormones are made in our ovaries, though some of them are made in our adrenals, which can act as a sort of backup system that helps reduce perimenopause symptoms a little bit. If however, our stress response gets overactivated, our adrenals produce more cortisol and less of those backup hormones. And since we have lower levels of progesterone than we used to, we’re extra sensitive to the impact that cortisol and stress have on us, including the way it makes us store body fat and lose our muscle.

(12:35)
Stress can of course, come from many sources, including too much exercise or too much cardio. So one of the major tweaks that we wanna think about here when it comes to our training is not overdoing it, not pushing the cardio workouts up to 11 every time and not ignoring rest days and self-care activities that help to ground us because we don’t want to be overwhelming our system. In years past, you might have skipped the stretching or the yoga or you’ve been able to go nonstop days in a row with your workouts without any real detriment to your system, but now it’s actually gonna have a really direct benefit to your nervous system and help reduce the stress response to take those recovery days on purpose and to work on more intentional self-care, which will also be wonderfully supportive for our joint health and our flexibility.

(13:29)
And this more balanced approach directly impacts our ability to lose body fat, preserve and strengthen our muscle tissue because of course being in an overly stressed state won’t allow either of those things to happen. And I feel like one of the really frustrating things about weight gain in our forties is that in our minds we’re still 25, right? , we remember how it didn’t take much to drop an extra five pounds by adding in some extra cardio or by doing some extra workouts. You know, we saw our body respond pretty quickly when we put that effort in. Maybe we did double workouts a few days a week or we added some extra workout days in the week and let’s not forget all the salads we ate and the diets we did that really seemed to work so well. But the thing is, we had higher levels of hormones like estrogen and progesterone back then and they were actually a huge part of why our body was able to respond and recover the way it did even when we were kind of beating on it.

(14:24)
And, and that was really the the difference. But in perimenopause, a lot of those strategies like extra workouts not only don’t work the same, they can actually backfire and have this sort of opposite effect of what we intend, which leaves us way more run down and depleted and exhausted, not to mention does not move the needle at all on our body fat. We’ll just gain more weight from over training with those lower hormone levels because of how it puts our system under greater stress than it can handle. And a lot of us are also complicating this process by eating less or doing some kind of crash diet which further depletes our body of the nutrients it needs just for the building blocks of our body tissue and to have energy to thrive. So we’re really setting the stage to lose even more muscle tissue than we mean to, and that we can rebuild.

(15:12)
And I’ll definitely be going more into the eating tweaks that are gonna help you have strong bones and muscle tissue and what specifically supports your training, your microbiome, your gut health and your body tissue. So much more detail in our next conversation, but I mention it here because of course everything is so connected. So now we know why doing too much exercise creates more stress than we can handle and the impact that the stress is gonna have on our body and why we don’t get the best results from training more in perimenopause so that we can avoid that tendency, you know, when we see some weight gain to just start training all the time. But so when it comes to our training that we do, you know, what kind of workouts are gonna be the best and how do you structure your training schedule so it’s really well balanced for you.

(15:57)
I got you. Number one, we wanna make sure that we’re including two important elements in our overall workout plan, either on the same day or on different days. It just depends on the plan you’re following. But these two components will really support you in building strong muscle and bone tissue and lowering body fat. And they of course are resistance training and explosive cardio. Now this does not mean that other types of exercise aren’t good for you. It doesn’t mean you have to stop doing the other things that you enjoy. It just means that by including resistance training and explosive cardio in the mix, or as your training foundation, you’ll be able to get the most out of the perimenopause years and beyond. And resistance training and explosive cardio are good for us at every life stage, right? But they become especially helpful and really crucial to ensure you’re including in these years in particular because of how effective they are for stimulating the tissue to respond the way we want it to for seeing body composition shifts, even with lower hormone levels.

(16:56)
Now the same thing goes for the balance in the training schedule you follow when it comes to the pacing of workout days to rest days, a balanced training schedule that paces you is appropriate and effective at every time in our life, right from high school to retirement. But using it on purpose and learning how to have a balanced plan that really incorporates key training types becomes especially important once we hit perimenopause and into post menopause as well. So a couple of great training schedules, just for example, that I see really great results with for perimenopause and on into post menopause include number one, a three day training split where you’re dividing your high volume days between say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with real recovery on the days in between. And maybe some flexibility on the weekend for things you enjoy like hiking or running or swimming or cycling, but that you’re taking real recovery days around those tough dedicated workout days and not sneaking in extra workouts around them and that you’re really making sure that the workout days that you do are really challenging for you, that really meet you where you’re at that really are tough, right?

(18:05)
So that your recovery is even more productive for you in rebuilding your tissue and bringing you back stronger. That’s what’s gonna give the body space, right? It’s gonna give the body space to come back stronger. It’s gonna support your nervous system response and the recovery of that as well as your body tissue, both of which are really affected by those lower levels of estrogen and progesterone. Now, another effective training schedule that I love in the menopause life stage, uh, both peri and post is a four day training split. And this is where you do two days of workouts in a row. You take a rest day, you do two days of workouts in a row, then maybe you take one or two rest days. And remember rest days can be walking, they can be yoga, they can be mobility drills, they can be low key activities, but they’re not a bonus cardio session.

(18:49)
They’re not an extra run because then where does your body get the space to repair, right? How does it come back strong so you can hit the next workout hard? It really can’t, you end up kind of constantly inflamed with more achy joints and more, you just are more prone to injury. A four day split should ideally include, you know, different muscle groups being trained on back to back days if you have two days in a row. So for instance, one, one example would be an upper body on one day, a lower body on the next day, or you could divide it into um, lower impact strength training on one day and explosive cardio on the second day. You could also put the explosive cardio right into your workout too. And along with the resistance training, whether you’re doing a three day or a four day sort of split, as I call it, like you could use the beginning of your workout to get even more warmed up with some timed tabatas or plyometric moves or sprints.

(19:39)
And this is easy to do actually if you have, for example, purchased one of my training programs in the past and now you’re in your menopause years because my training plans have always included resistance training and explosive cardio. And they have always incorporated rest and recovery days with lots of self-care options. Some of them were already written as three day or four day splits because those are very common and effective balanced methods of training that serve women well at every age. They just become especially impactful if you’re in perimenopause or even postmenopausal because of the things that I just described to you about our nervous system and are muscle tissue needing time to recover. And I’ve even gone into programs that weren’t originally written that way and added bonus schedules to follow. So that any program you have for me from lioness to the 90 day challenge to home workout domination to every one of my 70 plus rock your life challenges has options that are ideal for you in the menopause years.

(20:39)
And of course I also created PerimenoFit recently, which is a dedicated program with an ideal training schedule and workouts for perimenopause, eating guidance and many more features specific to you learning what you need to know and thrive in this important life stage. Now when it comes to the resistance training, the trick with getting it to really be effective, which I sort of alluded to earlier, is to meet yourself where you’re at with whatever type of resistance or weight you’re using, and then gradually progress over time continuing to build on and challenge yourself from a strong foundation, because we really wanna make each workout really challenging for us. We wanna push ourselves right so that the workout is effective and it won’t be effective if we don’t come to it rested and recovered, right? We won’t be able to push to our capacity and it, it won’t be effective for us in really adapting to the load we place on it if we don’t push ourselves up to a certain level of, of challenge.

(21:38)
Now I’m not sure where you are currently at. So basically if you’re beginning or you’re rebuilding your base, it’s always a good bet to go for body weight training. You know, working against the resistance of gravity in your own body, building core strength and protecting your joints with good form. Now once you aren’t as challenged by some of your body weight exercises anymore, you’re gonna wanna add weight to your workout moves and get really specific about challenging yourself against a load that could be dumbbells and bands that could be machines in the gym, a barbell and weight plates, what have you. What’s important is to pay attention to how much resistance you’re working against and that it’s challenging for you. And you’re always gonna have that through line of core strengthening of paying attention to your form and alignment of, of always thinking about your foundations, right?

(22:24)
No matter what amount of resistance you are working against. And what you wanna do if, if you start working with with weights is you wanna start working within rep ranges to help you calibrate the amount of challenge for yourself over time because it’s gonna change as you get stronger. So let’s use a common example that’s eight to 12 reps, that’s just one rep range that you might wanna explore that works really well if you’ve got like three or four sets to do of a circuit of an exercise program, you wanna pick any amount of weight that you can do at least eight repetitions of the exercise with, but that it’s really hard, almost impossible to do more than 12, right? If it says eight to 12, you don’t wanna just do 12 reps because it says to do 12 reps, you want choose the amount of weight that makes it so you cannot go past 12.

(23:14)
And then you might have to try out a few different amounts of weight to find out what puts you within that range, right? And it’s really helpful to write down how much weight you used on any given move in a workout so that the next time you do that move you can reference that amount easily. Then gradually as you get stronger, you’ll notice you can do more repetitions with the same amount of weight. And then when you start to see that happen, that means you’re getting stronger, your body’s adapting to the load you’re giving it and it’s building strength as a result. And this process can happen regardless of your hormone status, right? Your hormone levels, your body can build muscle, but it needs enough recovery time in order to do that. And that’s what gets different in perimenopause. And then also in post menopause, because we need a little bit more recovery in order for the body to come back stronger.

(24:01)
We also need nutrient building blocks and we’ll get into that soon. So what do you do when you start to feel like it’s no longer challenging you? The load that you have, you just add a little more weight the next time and over time you watch your body respond to this and it creates more lean muscle and it builds more strength. Eight to 12 reps is just one example. It’s a great place to start. And as you get comfortable picking up heavier weight, you could explore rep ranges that were lower, like six to 10 reps or a five to eight or four to six, and you might need different equipment in order to do that, but it’s just really important that you have excellent form as you load more and more weight on your body as we don’t wanna cause injury or stress or strain our joints or, or hurt our back or anything, right?

(24:43)
So starting out, I think it’s great to work with that medium rep range, like an eight to 12 rep range and get specific and build from there. And then work your way into some lower reps with moves you feel comfortable with. I’ve got this great workshop called the Foundations of Functional Fitness, where I teach you form for all the key lifts and moves and help you stay really aligned and protect your back and your hips and your shoulders. And I’ll link to that in the show notes for you as well. But all of my programs have guided videos as well where we go over form as we train so that you can stay safe. Now, the load and resistance we work against creates these small micro tears in our muscle tissue as we exercise. And this causes an inflammatory response that helps the tissue recover and come back stronger.

(25:27)
And that’s why it’s so important not to be over training in the menopause years, right? Because those lower levels of estrogen than we used to have mean we don’t repair and recover that tissue as easily as we did in the past. So we just wanna borrow these resistance training tips that the pros use, which is what you’ll be doing in any of my workout plans and train different muscles on different days or put your recovery days in place between your workouts so that you get to make the workouts you do challenging enough to stimulate that response. And in those menopause years, we’re really playing a game with preserving the muscle we have, right? Because it’s easier and easier to lose it, especially as our hormone levels go down and our estrogen just played such a big role in the health and rebuilding of that tissue, especially the muscle tissue.

(26:15)
So as it decreases, we just don’t bounce back from our workouts like we used to. Not that we don’t recover, we just need a little more time than we did before. You’re not gonna get big and bulky lifting weights. You’re not gonna get big and bulky challenging yourself in pushing yourself. You’re going to create and preserve your muscle. Muscle that surrounds and supports your joints, protects you from injury, provides you a greater metabolic advantage when it comes to fat loss because you remember back last season on the podcast when I was explaining how fat burning potential works and how you’re resting metabolic rate, which is responsible for the greatest amount of your daily calorie burn is actually impacted by how much muscle you have. That’s the key here. You don’t wanna lose your muscle. The more of it you lose, the easier it gets to gain weight and the less protected your entire body structure is, plus the lower your immune response is gonna be.

(27:11)
There’s so many things that our muscle does for us really. And the other piece that I want you to think about incorporating in your overall balance training is the explosive cardio piece. And here’s where I’m referring to high intensity interval training, which can include any number of things like plyometric exercises where we’re jumping sprints that you can do running or on a bike, tabatas, or any kind of timed session where you’re working at a high energy output. These types of high volume explosive cardio are short and efficient and they get your heart rate up while also loading your joints and strengthening different muscle fibers in your body. Both resistance training and explosive cardio are so beneficial for your bone density as well as bone tissue also responds to load being placed on it. And some days you won’t wanna be doing any explosive cardio because we’re still having a cycle in perimenopause, right?

(28:07)
Even if it’s changing, there’s still a phase of our cycle where our energy levels are lower and we don’t need to be doing the high output cardio on those lower energy days, but we can do our strength training and our lower impact movement. So for instance, in the PerimenoFit program, I actually help teach you how to work with your body throughout the course of your cycle, even if your cycle is changing. It really helps you because the explosive cardio is built right in at the start of your workout so you can easily bypass it on a day where your energy is just lower. That is such a great program to use and it lays everything out for you and really helps you understand why and how these different training techniques work in perimenopause so well. And with that foundation in place, once you’ve done that program, you’ve got the blueprint for perimenopause training and you’ll feel so much more empowered and confident to use other workout programs and know exactly how to tweak them for yourself as needed.

(29:06)
And of course, like I mentioned before, if you’re using one of my other programs, I’ve built the tweaks in there for you so you have the templates to use. But I love the PerimenoFit program because it has it all laid out like a blueprint with the options to do either body weight training, training with home workout equipment like dumbbells or training with heavier equipment like barbells. So you can start where you’re at and even use the program again as you ramp it up and build your strength over time. Now, I also just wanna mention the importance of walking more in perimenopause and beyond. I can tell you,I didn’t use to pay attention to my step count like I do now. Walking really helps to reduce the stress response. It’s gonna increase the amount of fat we burn, it improves and supports our digestive function.

(29:51)
It helps support our bone density and preserve our muscle tissue. It lowers our blood sugar response. It’s a total win. And these rest days you take, they don’t have to be days. You do nothing. I don’t want you to do nothing. I want you to see and start to see that the self-care practices like walking and stretching more and maybe doing some mobility work or yoga are just as important to our workout effectiveness as the workouts themselves. They, they really are, especially in this stage of our lives, we have to have practices that proactively support our stress response and our nervous system. And we need to have more care for our joints and our muscle health built right in. It’s a great idea to stretch around your workouts now more than ever, either before or after or even both. And to be doing some kind of flexibility movement on your non-scheduled workout days because we do start to lose our collagen and elastin as we age.

(30:45)
You know, our body tissue can lose some of its flexibility. You’ve probably heard the expression use it or lose it, right? This is so true of our flexibility. We wanna keep stretching because that will keep our tissue pliable and that directly creates more space and mobility and range of motion around our joints. And this will also really help you in strength training and your higher impact workouts because your body will be more resilient to the impact of your training with more flexibility around your joint spaces and you’ll be safer and more able to stay aligned and use good form in your workouts. Now, you don’t have to be doing tons of extra stretching. I don’t want you to feel like you’re suddenly piling all this extra work on yourself. No, it’s more of a give and take. It’s about creating balance, right? I, I love that phrase, use it or lose it because it’s so true about so many things.

(31:36)
And it’s true when it comes to our muscle tissue and our bone density. So really be consistent with your training. It’s so important. I really recommend following a well-designed workout program that will help you balance all of these important components. It’s what I do every day. Design and create these types of plans for women. I have a lot of plans you can purchase separately. And I also create new plans every month inside Rock Your Life, my online fitness membership program, which I highly recommend. Whether you need more body weight training to build your base or you’re adding in more weights and equipment, or you wanna start lifting with heavier equipment than handheld dumbbells. I’ve got all the different options built into our amazing challenges inside rock your life so that you could get started, you could start where you’re at, you could build where you are, you will really find all of the resources within that program.

(32:26)
It is amazing. And you can find a link to that in the show notes page. If you haven’t checked that out yet, I’d love to welcome you there. You can find all the links to my program options on the show notes page as well. And, and also free to reach out anytime to me at [email protected], my email if you have any questions or you need any help. So to recap what you need for successful training in perimenopause and beyond. Number one, include explosive cardio and resistance training as a foundation of your overall training plan. Number two, when it comes to your resistance training, focus on ramping it up slowly over time. Meet yourself where you are at and challenge yourself effectively in the workouts that you do. Number three, create a true balance of recovery around your workouts. Making your workouts effectively challenging, relies on you coming to them recovered and ready to give your all.

(33:27)
And with lower levels of hormones, we need just a little more space to ensure we can take advantage of the potential strength a workout can help us build and really support our nervous system as well. Number four, I want you to think about incorporating more aspects of self-care into your routine. Whether it’s a quick stretch before or after a workout, or adding in more stretching or yoga or mobility on your rest days, or any other grounding practices that help lower your stress response, help support you in building resilience to stress and just caring for your body in general. And last but not least, number five, walk more. It’s so great for your health, it’s great for your digestion, it’s great for your heart health, it’s great for your bones and your muscle tissue. It’s gonna give you back the edge in the perimenopause years and beyond when it comes to fat loss as well, which is a total bonus.

(34:22)
And I would also suggest following a plan that really helps you do all of this in balance. And I’m here to help. I want you to succeed, my friends, and this is where I’m gonna leave you for today. This is an ongoing conversation and I look forward to reconvening so that we can talk more about the nutritional aspects that support us at this stage of life. I encourage you to use the show notes page for links to different programs. I mentioned different resources that I mentioned throughout this episode, and I hope you got some good notes and I hope this gave you some great ideas and insights. If it feels overwhelming, just take a beat. And remember, you don’t have to know it all today. Master it all at once or put every single thing that I said into practice this week, , right? The more you hear about this stuff, the more you think about it, the more it it will make sense. It’s, it’s all or something, not all or nothing, right? And we wanna take things one day at a time and gradually apply things to ourselves. I’ll be back again very soon. So until then, I’m Betty Rocker and you are so awesome, flawsome and amazing. Bye for now.