Postmenopausal women deal with the struggles of managing their weight, their cholesterol, and many other health related issues. A new study in The Journal of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) found dancing effective in lowering cholesterol levels, improving fitness and body composition, and self-esteem in postmenopausal women.

After menopause, weight gain, body adiposity increases, and metabolic disturbances, such as increases in triglycerides and bad cholesterol, are not uncommon, leading to increases in cardiovascular risk. Combined with the likelihood of diminishing physically activity, postmenopausal women often suffer from decreased self-image and self-esteem.

This study is important in addressing one aspect of training considerations for menopause. It was designed to analyze the effects of dance practice on body composition, metabolic profile, functional fitness, and self-image/self-esteem in postmenopausal women.

Although the sample size was small, the study suggested some credible benefits of a three-times-weekly dance regimen in improving not only the lipid profile and functional fitness of postmenopausal women but also self-image and self-esteem.

Dance therapy is seen as an attractive option because it is a pleasant activity with low associated costs and low risk of injury for its practitioners. Additional confirmed benefits of regular dancing include improvement in balance, postural control, gait, strength, and overall physical performance.

All of these benefits may contribute to a woman’s ability to maintain an independent, high-quality lifestyle throughout her lifespan.

The post Dancing to Better Health appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

As a man in his late thirties, I’m no expert on menopause. And, I’m probably not the first person Amanda Thebe, the author, had in mind to review her book: Menopocalypse – How I Learned to Thrive During Menopause, and How You Can Too.

As one of her other readers more bluntly put it, “Amanda takes the idea of thriving as you go through the menopause shitstorm to a new, super-practical level.”

Menopause isn’t something that I will go through personally, but I have multiple female clients who have been through or will go through menopause.

It is also something my wife will eventually experience.

Being informed on the subject will help me to understand what they are going through. In the past, when I have tried to do some research on menopause to discover what my clients are dealing with, I’ve found a limited amount of honest, useful, practical advice.

Amanda fixes that with her book. It’s refreshingly honest. Instead of the sterile, textbook-style books or the random blog posts I was limited to before, I now have a far better understanding of what women have to deal with who are going through menopause.

Amanda writes with brutal honesty and humor about her personal experience. She details the confused and frustrating journey from a super-fit 43-year-old personal trainer to struggling with debilitating fatigue, nausea, and extreme mood swings and how she overcame this.

She explains how she figured out that changes to diet, exercise, and mental health were the key.

Sharing her story helps the reader gain insight into what it’s like to live through menopause. This candid account of her menopause experience combined with the latest scientific evidence to support her personal experience is an invaluable guide.

Menopause isn’t a funny subject, but Amanda manages to make you laugh with no filter, straight-talking humor.

Before reading this book, I would have assumed that menopause was something to be survived, suffered, and endured, but Amanda’s book puts a surprisingly positive spin on things.

She shares how she:

• Lost weight
• Improved her sleep
• Ditched depression
• Found the time and motivation to exercise
• Overhauled her diet

She accomplished this not just to survive but thrive.

She also provides a step-by-step guide for you to achieve the same.

While Amanda’s story should give women a sense of hope and positivity about menopause, none of it is sugar-coated.

She doesn’t try to convince you it’s all sunshine and rainbows.

Instead, the proactive, positive steps you can take are all delivered in a frank, informed, and witty fashion. Making this an essential, informative, and entertaining guide on how to thrive through menopause.

The post A Guide to Not Just Survive, But Thrive During Menopause appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When it comes to menopause, there have been conflicting reports, some saying women who are very active, workout a lot or other physical endeavors, may be less likely to experience menopause before the age of 45, while some have found evidence to the contrary.

Thankfully, this study, published in the Journal of Human Reproduction¹, analyzed data from over a 107,000 women and found that just because you exercise a lot at any age it doesn’t mean you’re susceptible to early natural menopause.

Dr Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts, USA, who directed the research, said: “Our study provides considerable information in helping us understand the relationship between activity and timing of menopause; this is because of its size, its focus on early menopause specifically, and because of its prospective design, which limited the likelihood of bias and allowed us to look at physical activity at different time periods.

“Several previous well-designed studies have found suggestions that more physical activity is associated with older age at menopause, but even in those studies the size of the effect was very small. Our results, in conjunction with other studies, provides substantial evidence that physical activity is not importantly associated with early menopause.”

The study used US-registered nurses between the ages of 25 and 42 who began their participation as part of the Nurses’ Health Study II started in 1989. They were asked about the time they spent in activities such as walking, running, cycling, racquet sports, swimming laps, aerobics, yoga, weight training and things like mowing the lawn.

The researchers accounted for other factors such as race, ethnicity, age, education, height, the age when the women had their first periods, whether or not they had been pregnant and how often, use of oral contraceptives and hormone therapy, whether or not they smoked, weight and body mass index (BMI), diet and use of dietary supplements.

In order to assess the frequency, duration, and intensity of the activities, the researchers multiplied the hours per week of each activity by its metabolic equivalent (MET) score to create total MET hours per week. One MET equals one kilogram calorie per kilogram per hour (kcal/kg/h), which is the amount of energy expended by sitting quietly for an hour.

During the 20 years of follow-up, 2786 women experienced natural menopause before the age of 45. The researchers found no significant difference in the risk of early menopause between, for instance, women reporting less than three MET hours a week of physical activity and women reporting 42 or more hours a week (the equivalent to four or more hours of running or eight or more hours of brisk walking per week).

The amount of physical activity that the women reported in their teenage years was also unrelated to the risk of early menopause. Granted, all this data is self-reported but, still, quite a substantial dataset.

Environmental Factors Are Associated With Early Menopause

Dr Bertone-Johnson said: “Our work has suggested that environmental factors are associated with early menopause. We found a higher intake of calcium and vitamin D from dairy foods to be associated with lower risk.

Higher intake of vegetable protein was associated with lower risk as well, though animal protein was not. Cigarette smoking is associated with higher risk, as is being underweight.”

Coach Amanda Thebe stresses the importance of exercise in pre and postmenopausal woman here on Breaking Muscle, especially strength training, because of the changes in hormonal activity that naturally occur as everyone ages.

Unfortunately, there are some factors that are out of your control, such as genetics, but in general, there are so many upsides to being active and exercising before, during and after menopause that it has to be viewed as an evergreen palliative measure.

You may not be able to withstand the ravages time, none of us can, but you can certainly give yourself more opportunities to ease the deleterious impact of those changes. Exercising now is like banking ease of burden coins for the future.

Reference:

1. Mingfei Zhao, Brian W Whitcomb, Alexandra C Purdue-Smithe, JoAnn E Manson, Susan E Hankinson, Bernard A Rosner, Elizabeth R Bertone-Johnson. Physical activity is not related to risk of early menopause in a large prospective study. Human Reproduction, 2018.

The post Exercise Volume and Early Menopause: Is There a Link? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Menopause can be a very confusing time for a woman. This might be down to a lack of awareness about what is happening, but it seems that every day brings with it a new physical or emotional challenge, then on top of this our body starts to look and feel different.

My 47 year old body has changed. My 47 year old body has gained some fat.

Menopause can be a very confusing time for a woman. This might be down to a lack of awareness about what is happening, but it seems that every day brings with it a new physical or emotional challenge, then on top of this our body starts to look and feel different.

Menopause comes along with a whole set of ideas of what we should expect and yet none of them seem to meet our expectations and we feel as though more shit is being thrown at us constantly, making the change harder to accept.

I recently sat down and chatted with my good friend, Krista Scott-Dixon, who is the Curriculum Director at Precision Nutrition. The pair of us are experiencing menopause and have chewed the fat on a few occasions about why women find it so hard to accept fat gain on their body.

Despite being conscientious about my exercise and nutrition, my body has more fat on it today than usual. I am a lean woman who has never had weight struggles, yet I have seen my body change. I follow my base habits around nutrition and movement, my good habits, but other stuff has been taking its toll, there has been a constant state of just handling my everyday stresses. Fat gain was one of the end results and this happened for a reason.

Interestingly enough for me this change in my body wasn’t as horrendous as I expected it to be. The symptomatic side of menopause has been nothing short of hell, but I have not been so disappointed with a little extra softness and curves. I had inherently always been afraid of getting bigger, or the number on my scaler getting larger, yet this weight gain which resulted bigger boobs and a softer belly have surprisingly found me quite enjoying the way it looks. Now I am only 5lbs heavier than my normal, but as individuals any change is often hard to accept. My point here is, even though I was dreading it and I feel different and that different is not that bad.

This change was the driver behind my conversation with Krista. Why is it that women are so ashamed of fat and how can we change this narrative from an evolutionary standpoint, not just a body positive point of view.

Let’s start at the very beginning. From an evolutionary process, fat is seen as a wondrous substance. Fat is adipose tissue, which is an active endocrine organ. Whereas the misconception is that fat is purely used for energy storage and thermal insulation, yet it is so much more than that.

Most women have at least 20% body fat, usually in the range of 25-35% and there is a reason that ¼ of our body is fat. Adipose tissue contains numerous other cells that are able to produce certain hormones in response to signals from the rest of the organs throughout the body. Through the actions of these hormones, adipose tissue plays an important role in the regulation of glucose, cholesterol and the metabolism of sex hormones.

Obviously, during menopause our ovarian production of hormones declines, so our adipose cells picks up some of the slack. It produces a different type of estrogen, but it does help to preserve our hormone production, so it really is quite a wonderful thing.

There is a problem that modern day sees body fat as a problem. We see fat as a way of the body rebelling and turning against us. Our social context is to despise fat and look to thin lean role models as our inspiration, yet from an evolutionary perspective, these role models would signify starvation. We are talking about 2 million years of evolution and we have reached the place where we consider fat to be a problem, instead of looking at the ways fat can aid our health.

How Can We Reframe What Is Good About Fat?

Firstly, lets just put it out there, we are looking for that sweet spot when it comes to fat. Clearly too much fat can lead to major diseases that are plighting our health. The point of this conversation is to understand that some fat is good for you and demising fat looking for the pursuit of an overly lean body, might not only be detrimental to your physical and mental sanity, it is also doing your body a disservice.

We must be better at interacting with our body. If you think that your body is working against you all of the time then you will never accept the process your body is undertaking from a natural perspective. It is not trying to mess with your head, it is trying to survive and thrive. Whereas if you change the narrative to, “we are in this together as partners” and then realise that evolution is doing it’s thing and then your fat storage will regulate itself.

End goals for not being ashamed of fat. Here are some positive things to remember about fat:

• Fat is not just some icky, unwelcome substance that we should try to rid ourselves of, its an active sensing, dynamic responding tissue. We need some fat in our body.
• Fat on your thighs and butt will tell the brain how much energy we have available.
• It makes us soft, juicy and curvaceous, it’s what helps our sex drive. Our sexual health, pleasure and desire need fat to secrete the good loving hormones.
• Bone density is impacted by fat production. Bone is active tissue and it needs a lot of help and body fat can help with that.

Menopause is hard. It’s like going through another rebirth, a new dawn. With this comes some fat gain on our body. Let’s learn to be in a new body as we age, it’s going to keep on happening the older we get and that is perfectly ok. By refusing to be frustrated and instead learning to live in the new body, when this happens then you can start to thrive again. It is then that you can start to create the life makes you the best version you can be of yourself.

Look at fat gain as part of this new body process. Keep in mind why your body needs fat. Stay healthy and educated in your pursuit of happiness and know that leanness and our societal constructs that drive our desires are not always the healthiest option for your body.

The post It’s Time to Stop Being Ashamed of Fat appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When I started writing about menopause and its impact on women’s health this year, I wasn’t expecting to reach as many people as I have. Women who read my articles are celebrating the fact that we are talking about this very misunderstood and underserved topic. The men who read them, are reading about menopause and finally understanding the issues that the women in their life are facing. Male and female trainers, with little experience in this field, are reaching out to me to find out more about how they can serve their over 40 female clients who are likely to be experiencing some menopause symptoms. The conversations are happening!

Is it true, have we finally made menopause sexy? Wouldn’t that be fun!

For the women experiencing menopause, this is quite liberating. Women over 40 are finally being heard. I have been sent so many articles, newsreels, advertisements from women in prominence in the media who are starting the dialogue and not being embarrassed about the subject any longer. It seems that menopause and midlife are now trending! Hell yeah!!

The Importance of Raising Awareness About Menopause

As a fitness and nutrition coach, it’s my job to find out what women need and then offer them solutions. That means I often reach out to my community of followers and clients to find out what their challenges are, especially during menopause. In addition to the physical symptoms that they experience, other issues affect them that are rarely discussed and often are too embarrassing or taboo to mention. Things like anxiety, depression, lack of self-worth, incontinence, weight gain, losing forward vision and ability to thrive again amongst a few.

When dealing with these issues and then trying to write about them, I am faced with the reality that I am not reaching everybody who needs to know about this stuff, because let’s face it, Menopause is boring and unsexy, it’s not relevant to a 20 year old man or women, it’s for old ladies with wrinkly, soft skin, who are over the hill and past their prime. This is the cultural view of what menopause looks like.

The problem with this short-sighted stunted view of menopause is that it is far from the truth. I am 4 years into menopause and I think I still look hot at 47 years old. I personally feel too young to be going through menopause and so do most of the women who I speak too. My group of women at Menopausing So Hard, are posting photos of them beating their own PR’s in deadlifts, doing weighted chin-ups, doing more push-ups than their husband and kids (that’s me actually) and still looking absolutely fabulous.

Menopausal Women Are the Hot New Warriors in Fitness

It’s time to show us some bloody respect, and this is why!

Invisibility Phase

Changes in family dynamics, work-place, caring for aging parents or young children, can leave women feeling invisible and frustrated at this age. Combined with the fact that she is probably exhausted from insomnia and is likely feeling she is going doolally-flip because she has ridiculous problems with short-term memory loss.

The way to help a woman out of this rut is to know she still needs to be heard.

Menopausal women have experience, maturity, and wisdom that you should tap into.

I can totally relate to this on a personal level. I often hear myself shouting, “can anybody hear me?”.

I can’t keep up with the number of times my kids have realized that I could actually be quite cool! I’m a black-belt in karate, I own my own business, I have a blog and a podcast, I have good taste in clothes and scrub up pretty well when I slap a little bit of makeup on. I know nutrition and exercise at a level that can help improve my kids’ athletic performance.

Yeah, I know some shit, so start respecting me for this, instead of passing me by.

Misrepresented Phase

Maturing women are not represented or respected in the media. I would love to see that change take place. The typical fitness model on magazines is either ripped with a six-pack, half naked, airbrushed, usually white and always young. It is time for the HNW to be celebrated, we come in all shapes and sizes, have wrinkles and grey hair, have cellulite and muscles, and happened to be the biggest population of gym-goers in North America, so let’s see some real women in media, talking about real women issues.

Menopausal women are facing challenges that other people probably couldn’t even grasp. The symptoms that are thrown at us each day can be hellish, yet we forge through with little complaining (you are not allowed to challenge me on that!) with grace and strength that would crumble most mere mortals.

Want some tips on how to celebrate and respect menopausal women in your life?

• Tell her she is amazing because she is!?
• Remind her of her beauty.?
• Embrace her wisdom and knowledge.?
• Celebrate her grace.?
• Know that she is strong and capable.?
• Listen to her.?
• Appreciate all she does for you.?

It would be really great for this community, as well as trainers of this community if we did have more conversations about this phase of a woman’s life. It would make the transition for them a little smoother and having the acknowledgment that they have support during this time can be a game changer. I often joke with my clients that they are the real hot chicks of the fitness world, exercising with hot flashes is no joke. Wouldn’t it be great if we could make that happen!

The post Find the Warrior Inside During Menopause appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There are few things women like to talk about less than menopause. But to optimize your health and fitness results during this critical time, you need to think, and yes, talk about it. Your body is going through many drastic changes that, among other things, will have an effect on your ability to train and the results you can expect from that training.

As a man, I have never and will never go through menopause. However, my experience with numerous clients experiencing menopause has given me insight into what to expect from your training. While I cannot speak to the daily realities of navigating menopause, I offer guidance for understanding how these changes affect your fitness and weight-loss journey.

Regardless of your age or gender, the quickest way to derail your training motivation is to compare yourself to others. Comparison leads nowhere but to discouragement or false pride, depending on who you choose to compare and how you each perform on a given day. Both options are meaningless. If you are approaching or experiencing menopause, you have probably discovered the futility of comparing yourself to the younger women in class, let alone the men. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of comparing yourself to your direct peers, especially close friends at a similar stage in life.

Know that menopause is like puberty; it is simply a broad term that we use to describe a whole set of physiological changes. Everyone will experience these changes at different times, in different ways, and to drastically varying degrees. We find several universals, but menopause is much more defined by the immense differences and unpredictability than by the similarities.

All women begin menopause at different ages, and the symptoms and severity vary widely. Your personal genetic makeup and reproductive history play key roles. For instance, women who have many children tend to enter menopause younger, and women of Asian descent tend to experience less frequent and less severe hot flashes (although many studies credit this to dietary factors; more on that to come). Your lifestyle and diet also play critical roles in how and when you experience menopause. This article aims to offer guidance for understanding how you can adjust your habits and practices to optimize your health and happiness as you navigate this transitional period.

Menopause: Insulin Sensitivity and Carbohydrate Tolerance

Many women experience significant and seemingly unexplained weight gain during menopause, while others do not. Many factors could explain this, but decreased insulin sensitivity is a likely culprit. This is a complex process but essentially, insulin is the hormone that instructs your body what to do with blood glucose. Our bodies produce insulin to communicate to our cells to take up blood glucose to use as fuel or store as glycogen.

Decreased insulin sensitivity (also referred to as insulin resistance) means that your body is less sensitive to the effects of insulin. This means that your cells will not take up blood glucose as effectively, leaving higher amounts of glucose in circulation eventually to be stored as fat. While this occurs naturally with aging (in men also), it seems to become especially noticeable during and after menopause. Your relationship with food becomes ever more important as you move into this period of your life.

Related to your insulin sensitivity, carbohydrate tolerance describes your body’s ability to utilize carbohydrates. Carbohydrate tolerance describes roughly how many carbohydrates you need in a day, at one time, and at which times throughout the day.

Your carbohydrate tolerance and insulin sensitivity vary with the hormonal environment in your body. In addition to during and post-menopause, you become much more susceptible to storing body fat and feeling low energy from stresses such as alcohol, insufficient sleep, and a stressful lifestyle.

If you have an established nutritional plan but notice that your body is responding differently as you move into menopause, you probably need to re-examine your carbohydrate intake. Avoid high carbohydrate meals at all times except post-exercise. Prioritize non-starchy vegetables and proteins for these meals.

Use the following guideline as a starting point for how to fill your plate:

• Fill more than half your plate with vegetables. Seek a wide variety, but avoid starchy vegetables such as potatoes, yams, etc.
• Fill about a quarter of your plate with a protein source: red meat, chicken, eggs, or seafood from humane and natural sources, or a vegetarian source such as beans/legumes.
• Use healthy fats to reach satiety. Fill the rest of your plate with healthy fat sources; as much as you need to feel satisfied but not full. Seek roughly an even one-third split between monounsaturated (most nuts, olive oil, avocado), polyunsaturated (fish oil and most seeds like flax, hemp, and chia), and saturated fats (coconut oil, palm oil, and animal sources).

For post-exercise meals, make a few tweaks:

• Up your protein portion to roughly half of your plate.
• Make an allowance for starchy vegetables and grains.

These guidelines will help you to mitigate the fat-storing effects of decreased insulin sensitivity and ensure that you get sufficient dietary fat. Do not be afraid of dietary fat; your body requires it for many key functions, especially during menopause. Saturated fat will aid in the manufacture and balance of your hormones. Dietary fat also helps absorb and transport fat soluble vitamins, many of which aid in mineral allocation. This is a key function for building and maintaining bone density, perhaps the more prominent physical effect of menopause.

During menopause, deepen your relationship with your body and increase your commitment to health and wellness. [Photo credit: J Perez Imagery]

Menopause: Nutrition for Bone Density

You will likely lose bone density during menopause. This is perhaps the most universal symptom of menopause. Fortunately, you can mitigate or forestall this effect with some adjustments to your nutrition and training.

Peri- and post-menopausal women lose bone density because their calcium absorption drops drastically during this time: as much as 50% from when they were an adolescent. Before you run out and buy calcium supplements, understand the root cause. Quite often the shortage of calcium is a problem of absorption and allocation rather than of insufficient intake. It is possible that you are not consuming sufficient calcium, but it is far most likely that the calcium you do eat fails to reach your bones.

To ensure optimal calcium absorption and usage, prioritize vitamin D. Natural, unfiltered sunlight remains the absolute best source of vitamin D. To produce vitamin D, we need UVB rays to directly contact our skin. Note that glass and sunscreen can block as much as 99% of UVB, rendering the sunlight you absorb through these media virtually useless for vitamin D production. Get outside and soak up those rays! As little as 20 minutes of unfiltered sunlight can provide sufficient vitamin D each day (this depends on your skin tone, time of year, and location on the Earth).

Vitamin D supplements (both D2 and D3) prove effective for those who cannot produce enough naturally. The recommended amounts vary significantly by individual and supplementing in excess can have ill effects. For accurate dosing consult your doctor.

Now that you have ensured optimal vitamin D, we can talk about calcium itself. As with vitamin D and every other nutrient, the Earth-grown forms are best. Seek foods naturally high in calcium such as leafy greens, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Perfect, these are already on your plate from moderating your carbohydrate intake! Calcium supplements can help those with very low absorption but most everyone can fill their calcium need through natural sources.

The final and most critical method to maintain your bone density comes through avoiding a net-acidic diet. Meats and grains have a net acidic effect as we break them down, while fruits and vegetables have a net basic or alkaline (the opposite of acidic) effect. Your body has an amazing ability to balance the acidity of your nutritional intake to create the level it requires. Unfortunately, to balance acidity your body uses its stores of minerals, the most abundant of which is your bones. Your body will actually draw calcium and other minerals from your bones to use in neutralizing an acid diet. Prioritize significant portions of fruits and vegetables to balance the acid/base ratio so your body does not need to use minerals to do it for you. Also, avoid large quantities of pro-acidic foods like meats and grains.

Menopause: Exercise for Bone Density

Many women nearing menopausal age have an established regimen of yoga and cardio-focused classes. I would never advise removing classes or exercises that you enjoy. However, if you fall into the category of women who do not incorporate any resistance training into their program, you are doing nothing to mitigate the almost certain loss of lean mass and bone density. Sorry, those 5lb dumbbells and 10lb kettlebells from your cardio classes do not provide enough resistance or loading.

You need heavy resistance training to maintain and improve your bone density. Understand heavy as heavy relative to your size and strength. Know that you do not need to lift tons of weights or bulk up. You simply need to test the limits of your physical strength. Use movements like the following to safely apply heavy loading to your system. Prioritize using the heaviest load you can handle safely. These movements are all about full engagement and time under tension.

• Deadlifts: If you feel comfortable and confident, use the barbell deadlift. For a safer option try suitcase deadlifts with a heavy kettlebell or dumbbell (or bag of groceries or jug of milk) in each hand. You can make these safer still by starting with the weights elevated on a small box. Move slowly and even add a long pause at the top to increase your time under tension.
• Farmer’s Carries: Pick up a heavy weight in each hand (suitcase deadlift) and carry them. This will add stability challenges to your heavy loading.
• Yoke Holds or Walks: Stand or walk with a barbell or yoke on your shoulders. As with the farmer’s carries, walking provides a great challenge to your balance, focus, and stability. For safer loading, skip the walk and just bear the weight and stand. Focus on your posture and position. Simply being under heavy load will stimulate increases in connective tissue strength and bone density.
• Sleds: Push or pull a heavy sled. You can do this fast or slow as long as the primary focus remains on work capacity.

Your body might naturally be losing bone density, but you do not need to accept this as a sentence of osteoporosis or frailty. With a few adjustments to your habits, you can maintain strong bone health late into life.

Menopause: Maintain and Build Lean Mass

Like bone density, most women begin to experience losses in lean muscle mass as they enter menopause. Also as with bone density, this does not have to mean an automatic sentence. Maintaining a strong (not to mean huge or bulky) amount of lean mass helps optimize health for everyone regardless of age or gender. Mid-life and menopause both typically lead to significant loses in lean mass. Maintaining and building lean mass is now more important than ever.

Muscle mass is not only important to maintain your strength and vitality. Muscle tissue demands fuel and will take up blood glucose when instructed to. Building and maintaining lean mass are great ways to stave off the effects of decrease insulin sensitivity. This in turn supports a healthy level of body fat.

Incorporate heavy resistance into functional movements to get the greatest benefit in building and maintaining your muscle mass. Favor movements that support your everyday activities. Some of the best options are:

• Weighted Lunges: Walking lunges provide the best challenge to your stability. Scale with stationary lunges (split squats) to progress toward walking lunges.
• Push Ups: Full range of motion push ups with chest to the floor. Scale these by elevating your hands on a box or wall or performing them from your knees, rather than shortening range of motion.
• Ring or TRX Rows: These offer an infinitely adjustable scale for pull ups. You can walk your feet forward and back to adjust the difficulty. Add a static hold at the top and a slow decent to increase the muscle-building benefit.

With a few tweaks or additions to your exercise program, you can maintain and even increase your lean muscle mass during menopause.

Menopause: The Final Piece – Stress

Controlling stress will help mitigate the other emotional and physiological symptoms like insomnia, irritability, and hot flashes. It is more important than ever to eliminate (or at least moderate) the stressors in your life. Avoid high amounts of caffeine and alcohol. Avoid foods that cause inflammation like sugar, grains, and dairy. Get plenty of sleep, and take up stress relieving activities like walking, meditation, or yoga.

Menopause: Layered Strategies for Compounding Effects

Remember that your experience of menopause will be entirely unique. Understand what types of symptoms you can expect, and the patterns you can change or introduce to mitigate them.

Most of the recommendations herein are interrelated. For example, if you adjust for increased insulin resistance by eliminating starches, sugars, and grains and prioritizing vegetables, these habits will also help to maintain bone density by providing more dietary calcium and reducing the net acidity of your diet. Taking a walk outside is both stress-relieving and an opportunity to catch some rays to up your vitamin D production.

Menopause means many big changes for your body. But menopause also offers the opportunity to deepen your relationship with your body and bring your commitment to health and wellness to an all-time high.

You don’t have to be along for the ride:

Menopause Is Not a Weight-Gain Sentence

The post Training and Nutrition Considerations for Menopause appeared first on Breaking Muscle.