Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity 02:28:37

welcome to the huberman lap podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everydaylife， i mandrew Huberman and imaprofessor of neurobiology and optimology at Stanford school of medicine my guest today is doctor Stacy Sims doctor Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist and a nutrition scientist an a world expert in all things training a nutrition specifically for women in addition to working at Stanford and with numerous professional athletic teams doctor sims has authored more than 100 peer reviewed studies on exercise physiology she is not only evaluated existing protocols for nutrition in fitness that are specific to women versus men， but she is also developed many new protocols that are now in practice with professional sports teams， but that can also serve people who are generally interested in fitness and longevity， and in doing so the general public the tools the doctor sims shares with us today are applicable to fitness to changing your bodycomposition and to overall health today we discuss how hormones and hormoned cycles impact nutrition in fitness needs specifically in women of different ages we of course discuss the menstrual cycle pary， menapaas and menapaas but also female specific nutrition in training as it relates to things independent of hormones for instance we evaluate the evidence that women may not want to train fasted， and the reasons for that we talk about how training might very according to different phases of the menstrual cycle and we discuss how women can design nutrition in training programs that are optimized for their specific needs not just because they are women， but because they are women of a particular stage of life and womenwith particular goals as you soon see， doctor syms is exquisitely skilled at explaining the human universals of nutritional training that is the things that do not differ between men and women and their needs in terms of nutrition and training but she is also exquisitely skilled at highlighting the data showing that there or specific areas of nutrition in fitness for which women and men differ and women have specific need so today you will learn what those are and you will learn how to apply those specific protocol， such that by the end of todays episode you will be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge about the biological mechanisms and the specific dos and do not that can guide you towards your female specific health and fitness goals before you begin add like emphasize that this podcast is separate from i teaching in research roles at Stanford it is however， part of my design effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science in science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme id like to thank the sponsors of today spodcast our first sponsor is malwy new evenison Maley new evenison is the most nutrient dense and delicious red metavailable ive spoken many times before on this another podcast and with several expert 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trainings， yoganiger sessions， and more i started practicing meditation when i was about fifteen years old and i made a profound impact on my life and by now there are thousands of quality per reviews studies that emphasize how useful mindfalse meditation can be for improving our focus managing stressing anxiety， improving our mood and much more in recent years i started using the waking up app for my meditations because i find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits， but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice what i and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations so it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice both from the perspective of novelty you never get tired of those meditations theres always 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even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate， i also really like doing yoganidra or what is sometimes called nonsleep depress for about ten or twenty minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical bigger without the tireness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional map if youd like to try the waking up app， please go to wakingup dot com slash huberman where you can access a free thirty day trial again thats wakingupdot com slash Huberman to access a free thirty day trial and now for my discussion with doctor Stacy sims doctor Stacy sims welcome thanks hour podcast and i put out a lot of content about nutrition fitness cold exposure heed exposure hydration topics that are very near and ear to your harden for which you have a ton of expertise but for which you have an extra degree of expertise as it relates to females specifically yeah， so im excited to talk to you today because very often i will get questions in the comment section on social media or on YouTube wasthe study done in both men and women how does it differ for men， versus women and on and on and i rarely if ever have answers but you have answers i have answers for your great， so just to kick things off because this is a question i get really often fasting oh！

yeah！

intermittent fasting yep we need to distinguish between the two of course， perhaps the most common question i get as it relates to males versus， females is isintermittfasting or timerstricted feeding as it sometimescalled an eight hour feeding window A6 hourfeeding window a ten hour feeding window is that something that perhaps differs in terms of its impact and how well， it works for men versus women yeah！

thats a short answer great yeah， yeah， um so ill put some parameters around it right， so we talk about interminute fasting thats where you have like the twenty hour nonfeeding window or youholding a fast until newer after um and then we have time restricted eating and thats the fancy way sing normal eating where you having breakfast and then you stop eating after you dont have anything after dinner right， so you are eating with your circating rhythm during the day if we look at interminute fasting where youholding the fast uptel noon or your having days of really low callery restriction we see an active women is very detrimental， unless you have pcos or you have some other subclinical issue and the reason for that is we as women have more oxidative fivers so we hear about all the things about to fasting to be to improve our metabolic flexibility to improve telemarylength to improve parass thetic activation， but by the nature of women having more oxidative fibers we are already metabolically more flexible amend interesting yeah， didnt know that um could you elaborate on more oxidative fibers what that is and how how it relates to metabolic flexibility for sure so oxidated fibers are are muscle fibers that are more arobat capacity so those are the ones that you know you can go long and slow for very long period of time because it uses a lot of free fatty acids you need a little bit of gluecos in order to activate those free fatty acids so we look when a woman starts exercise， she goes through blood gluecos first and then gets into free fatty acid use she doesnt tap so much into livermuscle glacagen， which is i think another misconception that happens so were talking about fasting or fasted workouts trying to improve that metabolic flexibility it increases stress on the woman， and so， when were about overall stress， were talking about quarters all increase and they cant hide intensities high enough with no fuel to be able to invoke the post exercise responses of growth hormone and testosteron， which then drop cortisol so from an overall stress， perspective that fast did work out and holding that fast for a long period of time increases cortisol， but then when we look from like a hyperthelemic point of view， and were looking at how the brain reads it， so we know that there is one area of kiss pepden neurons in the brain from end， but there are two forwomen so the two areas are distinct where one controls appetite and lootenizing hormoon and the other one is looking at estrogen and thyroid so you start having an exercise stress or a daily stress of getting up and going on with your day without fuel you perturve those custoneurons and downregulate them so when you start down regulating them， we see that after four days， you have a uh disregulation of thyroid we have a change in our lootenizing hormone pulse， which is really important to maintain intercrine function and will hear this oh， Ive been fasting for so many years and it is great for me， but the other side of the question is well how much better would you be if you were to actually pay attention to your circadian rhythm and fuel， according to the streset hand and knowing that youre gonna garner the less stress that way and for a really time in nutrition， according to that profile instead of following a fast， we see better praying improvements as well， we see more cognitive function， we see less diaridous function and overall woman does much better when were not in that fassive state， then when you look at population research thats coming out now， theyre showing in both men and women who hold their fast told noon and then have an eating window from noon to maybe six pm have more obesaginic outcomes than people who break there fasted eight and finished their eating window by four five pm， so whatcoming back to the chronobiology of we need to eat when our bodies under stress and needs it unless we have a specific issue like obcity inactivity， pcos or other metabolic conditions then we can look at using fasting as a strategic intervention to help with those modalities。

super interesting to questions is there a protective effect of starting the eating window and here i am asking for both men and women starting the eating window at se eleven， am or noon and ending it a little bit later so not a six hour eating window or seven hour eating window but extending that to 8 或 9PM under those conditions do still see the obs agenic effect yes！

because were looking at the way quartersal responds we know quartersal has a lot of fluctuations throughout today and it peaks about half an hour after you wake up right， so if youhaving that quarters all peak half an hour after you wake up， but youre not eating then that is that higher baseline sympathetic drive for women for men its not the same so when were looking at that obs agenic outcome the actual timing hasnt been tested yet to see how can we expand or contracted that eating window for men but for women because of that quartersal peak that right after waking up， women tend to be already sympathetically driven so then they walk around more tired， but wired and have a really really difficult time x accessing any kind of pair sympathetic responses down the way where if you have something really small where you bringing blood sugar up？

then its signaling to the hyperthelements hey， yeah， theres some nutrition on board then we can start our day so again has to look at that circadian rhythm and those hormone flexes， which people dont really either understand or talk about， because all of our hormones flex to the day and so you have to look at wheres the peak of cortisol， how does in flex， how does in hormonflux progester on all these things that have this tight interplay and the more were doing the hormone research？

the more were understanding these performations and how important it is to fuel for it to stay out of any kind of low energy availability stance regular listeners this podcast will know this but just remind everybody a simpathetic state has nothing to do with emotional sympathy its the sympathetic armor， the autonomic nervous system， which drives more arousal in alertness and at higher levels stress sometimes called the fighter flight response parasum pathetic being the other arm of the autonomy nervous system sometimes call the rest and digest armor the autonomy nervous system they work sort like a csr or a push pull pick your nology in any case， itsounds like intermitting fasting or timer stricted feeding unless its very well align to the circadian rhythm is not going to be advantageous for women thats what im hearing im also hearing that if a woman trains whilefasted so in the nonfeeding window， so wakes up maybe has some uh hydration and trains thats going to further exacerbate the stress response in a way thats not going to be good exactly and i have to imagine that if she also is trinking caffeine in order to do that training because caffeine is a stimulant of the simpthedic armor， the audiomic energy system that it will further exacerbate all these issues so this is a eye opener for me because ive had female training partners for years i dont eat until am i like to hydrate in caffeening before i trained in the morning and then i like to eat starting around noon several of them have hopped on that schedule with me some of the meat breakfast for some of them dont they do as they choose of course， but now im thinking thats probably the worst way to go and it gets worse as you get older because forseeing as women are getting into parry minapaas。

which is in there forties， and we have more fluctuation of those hormones and an increase in baseline quarters all anyway， then when you look at fasted training， it increases that quartersal drive and that sympathetic drive and because its at pointwhere， you really need to polarize your training to get any kind of body composition change not having any fuel before high intensity workout putsome in modern intensity they just cant hit the intencies they need to same with resistance training like you go in and a lot of women are now working on sessional rpe or rating perceived exertion or you go in and say OK， we need you to hit in eight on the squad so you have two repsen reserve and a sessional rpe of an eight well， if theyre not fuled than where seeing trends that theyre missing around two to five percent of that top load。

so theyre not really lifting in that zone that they need to be in lets get um people started interrupt lets get people up to speed on rpe because this is a term that starting to um circulate more outside the physical um yeah training community into the broader kind of you know recreational exercise or community which i consider myself part of me too now i mean i train reguly in half three years， but i im not an a im not an athlete i dont get paid to train and i beyond so forth so ret repsen reserve perceived effort maybe just um explain this i think probably 95 percent of our listnership has never heard these terms OK so if for time out repsen reserve， this is when you go in and if you say eight means you have two repsen reserve so you finish your eight and you should be able to complete two more with a really good form and then you hit failure so eight repetitions in good form and the person doing the exercise could in theory they really dug in there grit their teeth could complete two more repetitions in good form before hitting failure the inability to move the wait anymore in good form exactly OK。

but theystopping at a so they have two reps in reserve exactly and so we can correspon that with your rating perceived exertion so forsaying we need you hidden eight on our scale of one to tenerrating perceived exertion we see corlates with um that eight with two repson reserve so its a way of quantifying what youre doing in the moment for squad or deadlift or some other really heavylift that youre trying to accomplish as opposed to looking at um say percentage of one repetition maximum yeah！

senior yougonna move seventy percent of your one repetition maximum for six repetitions seems like thats a great thing as well， but its a little bit more complicated because you need to know your one repetition maximum doing one repetition maximums can be dangerous if youre not skilled in especially with compound movements like squats and deadlift yeah OK？

so is there in a cross the board recommendation for most people that they should generally train their sets in good form to failure to leave a couple repson reserve what you suggest for lets say women but this could also pertain to men uh and then that also depends on the age of the woman server looking at the reproductive years so you know twenty to forty then it doesnmatter so much you can period eyes pretty much how normal period ization works with your mesocycles and your microcycles so youre looking at what youdoing across a few months what are you doing in the week？

are you lifting heavy？

parabase training but when we start to get to pair minapaas and were losing all the flux of estrogen and estrigine is womens testosteron the key driver for strength them power we have to look at lifting heavy so this is where we really turn women on to we want you to do something that is two repsen reserve， three repsen reserve because youre one repmax also changes depending on what kind of training block youdoing so finding that when youre about repson reserve， then it allows people to lift more on the day so we can get women to get into that strength and power base type training rather than going lets live to fifty because then it might be twenty raps and that twenty wraps doesnt invoke a big central nervous system response， which is what we want its more that high purchasing muscle tearing you will gain someone mask but not as much strength as if you were to invoke that central nervous system response， and that becomes really critical as women get older。

because we need to find that external response thats going to cause the same kind of strength the power adaptation that estrigenused to support interesting lots to talk about in terms of exercise but before we move on if the bad situation is a woman fasting， drinking， caffeine and training intensely but as you told， this not as intensely as she would be able to otherwise whats the solution i imagine that solution involves ingesting some fuel what is a good example of a you know a pre training um meal if you will and we could put some variation on that for people with different you know tendency stores omnivoor vegan or whatever uh but what is the timing of that meal relative to training that works best or iassuming there some flexibility there yeah i mean like im the kind of person gets up and is out the door within a half an hour to go do whatever im gonna do so its not like im gonna have a follow me on ive heard of people like you yeah then it meaning i dont move slowly in the morning i wish i could but the way my life is it doesnwork that way um so that but im also one of the people that never really has an appetite to levenoclock OK， so were similar in that way yeah so how do you？

how do you square that so i make a double express so at night and i put some omen milk and a scope of perating powder in there so the omen milk is sweetened and usually its unswing but sweetened for the carb and then the protein powder for the protein because if im gonna go do an ocean swim， then i need some carbohydrate in protein on board if im going to just go to the gym， then i probably just have the protein powder in the coffee yes， im caffeening， but im also getting the calories for the hypomessage more circulating mean assets Abby Smith Ryan out of unc， did some specific work looking at carbohydrate pro team before in yeah strength or Cardio and found that if youre going to do a true strength training session， you only need around fifteen grams a protein before you go to really help you get into the idea that yes， you have some fuel on board and also increases your post exercise， oxygen consumption or your e poc so your resting metabolism states elevated im giving you better chance for recovery post exercise as well， if youre going to do any kind of Cardio vascular typework up to an hour， then youre adding thirty grams of carp to that， so its not a lot of food and its not a full meal um other people were like im starving right before i go training then yes， you can have your meal giving yourself about a half an hour before um， but it doesnt have to be major food that were talking about um but thats just enough to bring blood sugar up in and stimulate the hypertelems to say yeah， theres some nutrition coming in and then you have your real food after words you have your breakfast afterwards within 45 minutes as a neural scientist。

i find it so interesting that at least some of what youre talking about with this pre workout meal and perhaps most of it relates to how ingesting those calories impacts the brain protects those kiss peppeden neurons well talk more about kiss peppeden very interesting peptide as opposed to saying OK， you need x number of calories because youve going to burn x number of calories that conversation i， which is a very different conversation um here what were talking about is the neural aspects yeah of being able to generate intensity， also blunt cortisol and get the most of training without putting the body into kind of a an emergency state yeah！

yeah and the longersomeone with holds food after exercise in the greater they stay in that cataboliker breakdown state the more the brain process is being in a low energy state so the first thing to go is mean mass when you start telling a woman that you know if youre going to do fasttraining in and or you in a delay food in take afterwards while you training because the first thing that goes is lean mass and is a really really hard for women to put on lean mass so when she start really enailing that and then saying look you just need fifteen grams opportunity to really help and be able to conserve that lane massive is small simplefix people try it theyre like oh my gosh i feel amazing so its small little things when youworking with the whole system because i get tired especially around Christmas time when youre reading all the magazines its like two cookies means you have to walk for thirty minutes on the treadmail like it doesnt it doesnt core late like that at all um so thats why is like i hate the callery conversation because its just not applicable right and it has its own kind of um elements of being laced with neurautisis about calorie counting and then that can drift easily into the realmofeeding disorders i didnt episode about eating disorders some years ago and as i was researching that episode um i learned that people with eating disorders women and men um especially anarxia become like callery calculators。

their eyes and their brain just are constantly evaluating the chloric load of food and it can be um obviously very interest if its also the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions， so its um its a long way from hopefully what were talking about here but but theres the opportunity for drift whenever talking about calorie counting in and out we you of course believe in the laws of thermodynamics and calories in calories out but i love what youdescribing here as getting the brain in a mode that the brain in body are protected， so that one can invest in that high intensity exercise get the adaptations that one wants but not send everything down this pathway of um and just becoming a computer of you know how much of my exercising what did i burn what did i earn that its its yeah its crazy its crazy yeah um as long as were talking about food and food intake relative to training what is the suggested post training um window um in which one should either avoid or make sure they get nutrition um meaning how long does one have after lets say a resistance training session of about an hour seems to me thats what most people are doing if theyre investing in resistance training maybe plus your mini， so what twenty minutes yeah um， and theyre hitting those um high intensity sets where they have maybe just wanner to repetitions in reserve maybe going to failure on a few of those sets what you recommend women eat after they train。

so we know that women who are in the reproductive years need around 35 grams of good protein， highquality oriented protein within 45 minutes， and we see that women who are parriment apostle onwards are 46 grams because we become more anabolically resistant to food and exercise as we get older um when we look at like the recovery windowfor food， there are differently six differences because we hear all the conversation of theres no recovery windows you know it its old science but we look at the research of when womens metabolisms come back down to baseline， meaning that they have constant straight bloodsugar levels versus men women its within uh sixty minutes and for minutes up to three hours so when were looking at the data that says theres no window per se for getting food and its base on mail data so when were looking at women women， we have this tighter window to stop that breakdown effect and start the reperation um so yeah， its like when were talking about the protein in takes really important， not only to get that lucene content up in the muscle to start the reperation repair， but also again to signal that yeah， were in a building state！

were not holding that catabolic state and increasing all the reprofessions that come with it so women should try and get thirty or as met much as 40 maybe 50 grams of protein depending on their age post training within an hour of training yeah， men seem double longerwindow they could wait an hour two hours maybe even three hours yeah and before interesting protein what about carbohydrate we look at mixed！

but for minutes more important because they go through their liver muscle glackage and so match to faster than women so when we look at women， we want to get around point three grams per keylow um of carbohydrate within two hours of finishing so we look at protein people like wow， thats a big dose of protein how do i get it all in it like yeah well， you can look at how we mix all these things youre also getting carbohydrate in with that so thats why i say he could have your next meal after your training session um yeah， theres a time in a place for protein supplementation but if youre getting that real food and then youre also getting you know your magnesium and your potassium in your sodium and all the things that people supposely lose and youre able to also repair a lot better as many of you know。

ive been taking ag one for more than ten years now so idelighted that theyre sponsoring this podcast to be clear i dont take age one， because theyresponser rather they are responser because i take age one in fact， i take ag one once and often twice every single day and ill done that since starting way back in two thousand and twelve there are so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrishing is but heres there seems to be a general consensus on whether your nominal or a carnervor， a vegetarian or a vegan i think is generally agree that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minumely process sources， which allows you to eat enough， but not overeat get plenty of items in minerals， probiodex， and micronutrients that we all need for physical inmental health now i personally amenominable and i strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally process sources， but the reason i still take ag one once and often twice every day is that it ensures i get all of those vitems， minerals， probiodex， etc but it also has adaptagenes to help me copewith stress its basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment， not replace quality food so by drinking a serving of ag one in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening i cover all of my foundational nutritional needs and i like so many other people that take ag one report feeling much better in a number of important ways， such as energy levels digestion sleep and more so while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome AG1 foundationalnutritiondesigndisupport all aspecsofwellbeing related to mentalhealth and physical health if youd like to try ag one， you can go to drink AG1DOT com Slash huberman to claim a special offer theyll give you five free travelpacks with your order plus a yearsupply of vitamin D3K 2 again thats drinkag 1DOT com slash Huberman at some point there was a lot of discussion about training fasted burns more bodyfat yeah， i think now most people accept that thats not the case that perhaps the percentage of bat as fuel is increased when one trains fasted but that overall in terms of loss of bodyfat it doesnt matter if you train fasted or you train fed correct OK， i think um that cant be stated enough right by experts like you um that doesnmean that if one prefers to train fasted or with a minimum of food in there got that they cant do that right i like your trainfasted but i what im hearing is that i wish probably adjust at least some protein high quality protein maybe drink the protein and no protein shake yeah， but um form if they dont want in just solid food yeah。

i think the easiest way for people to understand the basic idea of what low energy is and how this affects men and women is when we are looking at um， a tipping point for intecrin dsfunction for men were 迁 ingthat tipping point at fifteen calories per kilogram of fat free mass forwominutes thirty so when were looking at baseline， calorie needs before you really get into that indecrindispunction when youre looking at those parameters， you can see why men do better in a fasted state or low callery state but for women are intake and especially are carbohydrate needs are so much higher because we have so many other functions that are relined on that kiss pepten up regulation or down regulation preferably up regulation um so we were just talking the basic callery needs and what were saying its that diecodemy right there fifteen to thirty and when you start telling people that theyre like oh okay， i get it is that a biological aspects like well， you could trace it all the way back where you know men went out to get the calories in most tribes in the women were home it wasnt advantageous to be pregnant under low callery intake thats why you have dsfunction when the calories are too low but you know you can also feed for ten modern day now and yousaying that all the speech urbance of hormoon and the way we regulate hormoon across the circuating rhythm requires more calories for women than it does for men i know some men that basically dont eat all day and then eat one meal in the evening and theyll train in the morning thats inconceivable to me this within an hour or so of training im hungry yeah！

which brings to mind what we mean when we say training uh im a big believer in people， everybody getting ideally two or three resistance training sessions in per week to maybe three cardiovasclear training sessions per week that would be ideal yeah， um one could potentially do more probably not a whole lot less before you run into longterm health issues that you could offset but i think most people can fit those in and im very frankly delighted that nowadays theyre such a push for women and men to resistance train that wasnthecase when i was growing up， you know， i recall taking my sister the gym for the first time and like i think she was the only woman in the gym when we were in high school， yeah， except for a few female bodybuilders and she said what i dont wanna look like that， and i said well！

dont worry youre not gonna look like that um but now you go to a gem and women are lifting weights men are lifting weights its great its terrific have seen the evolution right when i was 16 one of my friends brothers was a bodybuilder and he took a studition kind of like what you did with your sister and so both of us were like oh we want to beat those guys so Wes got into wait training with them not to be a bodybuilder but its been like the Paramount throughout all of my athletic career usebie the only woman on the lifting platform and now its like you have to wait because there so many women on the lifting platforms i love it its great yeah its awesome as i mentioned before ive had female training partners and they they kill it yeah that they um its a lot of fun to have a um female training partner also！

because um not only is it cool to see the progress they can make really quickly which surprises them often you know i think a lot of women think that OK its going to require！

external andregends or its going yeah you know and and what you pointed out that there are some barriers to women putting on mass quickly i think ive noticed that strength increases can come really quickly yeah why is that its essential nervous system aspect is a lot of like if we look at the culture of how a lot of us grew up and im saying us like 45 plus right the women were all the 90 supermodels dont show muscle that kind of stuff， so always been gravitated to cardio even now if you go to a gem and youre， a new member， your signing up for a new member and your woman， theyll say hey great heres all of our spending classes and our boxfit classes still doing that yeah and theres， a cardiovascular machines， a guy comes and like all right how much do you want to put on here？

the lifting platforms all the you know the weight trainings of the back starting to see a shift with both tech type gems， but thats still the commonality there so its still that little bit of tabu so when women start strength training， they havent been exposed to that kind of central nervous system stress before in the whole aspect of getting the nerve and this is a coline， which are our little vesticles that you know hold the ability for the nerve to actually stimulate the muscle fiber all that gets trained really quickly， so the more that you train it and the more muscle fibers that are recruited for contraction you see an increase in strength really rapidly and slowly building on that for increase muscle bulk because it takes a long time for women to put bulk on uh because the driver for string training is that central nervous system， um so its great when we see higher doses more volume， we arent sing huge hypertrify were just sing really good increases in strength whenever somebody mailer female is concerned about growing。

too big， too fast， um i always remind them that resistance training is unique among different types of exercise in that because of the bloodflow to the muscle during the exercise session this will call pump yeah， you get a window， a transient window， but a window noneless of what the high purchaf i could look like if you do everything else correctly in terms of recovery so provided that the um the size of the muscle during the training session isnodiversive to you yeah， youre OK， youre good yeah um， which is unique among yeah training is not like when you go running， you get a sense of being much faster you actually get the opposite you right， you feel the burn yeah in your lungs and the pain of the ofhitting the wall of your limits and then hopefully of the adaptation takes place then you can push past that next time but with resistance ring you get of literally a physical picture in a sematic feeling for what that high purchafeyou could look like yeah thats why on your physic competitions in bodybuilding competitions are out the back pumping before they go on stage， so weve been talking about training， but we havent really spelled out what you would suggest a novice props in intermediate um resistance training cardio vascular training um program would look like in in broad terms i realize we dont have time here to get into all the native details we written about the south where and we were for people um to those terrific resources in the show note captions but um what would you like to see women doing and may we can break up the the age brackets because it sounds like this is something that um is resurfacing again and again here um women lets say thirty in younger women， thirty one to lets say forty and then lets say 4126 and then maybe 61 terms of how many sessions of resistance training per week is it whole body training how many sessions of cardivascular training and when， and what sorts of examples could could you give yeah？

so if are looking at that twenty twenty to thirty year old a lot of times i really try to get them to focus on the whole movement aspect first， so we faze them and same with older women phasemen learn how to move learn complex movements so that when you are going in to do resistance training preferably three to four times a week you can look at moving well and it doesnt have to be a long period of time if youre doing to failure， which works really well， when youre younger to increase strength and a little bit of pipe purchasing， youre gonna have to spend a little bit more time in the gem so might be forty five to sixty minutes when were looking at doing that four times a week， you can add in a sprint interval training at the end of one of those to get that superhigh intensity， or you can look it puttingin at the most two hit sessions from on separate days if youtraining specifically for something， so if i work with a lot of endurance athletes still， and theyre like well how do i fit it in its like OK， well， we look at the quality and how that fits into your training so if youre training for a marathon， youtraining for trasline or other endurance stuff， you can take that high intensity were computed into your training program so ideally， we look at three to four resistance training with really good movement when were in the younger set with two high intensities when we start getting into our thirties， we start having an eye to how are we actually doing that resistance training instead of just going in doing a circuit were really focusing on lets do some compound movements， lets look at doing some heavier work， lets look at how we are periodizing so having you know six weeks blocks and more building on those blocks because we want that base foundation， so when we get to be 40 plus， we can actually go and do our power base training if youre in your forties， youve never done resistance training at all then we take between two weeks to four months to really learn how to move well， because theres a higher instance of soft issue injury and overall injury as we get into our forties because the protobations of estrogen and ideally when we get， there were looking at that around three minimum， three resistance training with compound movements and either one sprint interval or two springnables in one hit in a wait and just remind people compound movements。

multijoint movement， squats， deadlifts， uh chin， ups rows， overheadpresses， bench presses， etc as opposed to isolation movements were only one join this， yes moving yeah， yeah， and for everybody in all those age ranges that you describe are you suggessing they train the same muscle groups three or four times per week or they do some sort of split whereits upper body， lower body take a day off， or upper body take a day off， lower body take a day off whatever that what might work for them yeah？

what works for them if youre looking for short amount of time， in the gem because of busy lives and you can split it if youlooking at OK， well， i can allocate an hour， turan hour and a half in the gem then you can do total body with adequate rest um the key when your younger is working to failure， the key when your older is working heavy interesting！

yeah！

so， when were looking at working to failure， were trying to get more that ly maskgrowth with strength when we get older， because its so difficult to put on lean mask， we really want to focus on the strength component， because that becomes more important， we were talking about longevity as if youlooking at the strength component from essential nervous system standpoint， we see it feeds forward into better reception， attenuation of cognitive decline and this is the other thing that you in neural sciences would understand the six differences in things like dimission all timers theres some really interesting research looking at strength training and that power base stuff when were getting into our older ages。

because we get more neural growth patterns and more neural pathways even some interesting literature about emphasizing some unilateral movements as people get older， not just um duolim movements or dual Lim simultaneous movements you always want train both sides or body folks but um so if i understand correctly， younger women should train to failure， trying generate strength and hypertrophy as women get older， they should emphasize more strength training leave some repetitions in reserve but trainheavier yes， they make so much sense what youre saying yeah， um because what we know about the nervous system as we age is that there some atrophy or at least some weakening of nermoscular connections and the upper motornerounds in the brain that control the your muscular connections in this final core out to the muscle yeah！

um theres something really sticky about this idea yeah in terms of longevity that i dont think anyone else is ever now said now the thing about it is men age more in linear fashion whereas women we have a definitive point in our late forties early fifties were all of a sudden things go to shit where is that pary menopasl state and i cant tell you how many emails and teams i get any day from women who are like IM46 IM47 iputting on bodyfat i dont know whatgoing on i cant sleep and then we say its parry many policy are like what is that and so when were looking at parry minapaas， it is a huge change in the body because youre having lesson less of your sexformen， circulating more， more and avilatory cycles means no progester own or very low progester own youre having a difference in the pulse of your strdial to those flatline aspects and because every system in the bodies affected by this is why you see more soft issue injuries like two of the biggest things that women who are in there for these are going to ptes about our fries in shoulder and planderfo 啥？

this is too really indicative issues that are happening in pary minapaas， so that whole section of mid to MID 40 to early 50 is a definitive aging point where i really try to get women to get into the heavylifting and get into the patterns of polarizing in there training not putting an emphasis on zone to just really looking at how my polarizing， how my affecting my central nervous system， so that when they get into that one point in time of that parry minapaas， their body is already conditioned for the stress thats coming whereas men we see that kind of stuff happens in their late fifties， early sixties， so the soft issue injuries the change in body com comes at a later time so yes， looking at how were scoping are strings training definitely something to think about in a longevity factor but for women its a theres a better indication of the timing across the ages of when you should start implementing for men， i think you have a better band with a when you should start implementing for women。

who are not on hormone replacement there and we did a previous episode about query menapaas， menapaas and hormonreplacemen therapy but if comes up again and again today that will be wonderful because these are important， underdiscussed topics absolutely for women that are not on hormonreplacement therapy who decide to train heavier maybe do a bit more training volume not trained to failure theymaking sure to not let their cordisulspike too much by making sure they have some pre workout nutrishing， some post workout nutrishing， would they be wise to be very careful in how much cardiovascular exercise they add to that meaning there seems to always be this risk of overtraining and as you pointed out for various reasons cultural reasons the storicalreasons um around exercise i my observation is that most women serve unless they know better default to cardiovascular exercise as supposed to resistance training yeah， so if a woman in her forties let late thirties to lets say fifty is doing two to four sessions of resistance training workouts per week and they also really like cardio or they feel they want to or should do cardio should they be careful about how much cardio theydoing and is there a best form of cardio should they really emphasize the high intensity interval training should they avoid zone to we should probably also divine for people what zone two is yeah they dont already know um so i am notorious for slambing things like orange theory and F45 because they market specifically to that age group of women and its not appropriate。

because its not true high intensity work were looking at women who are really trying to maximize body composition change in longevity and unfortunately default to cardio because they think oh， thats gonna help change my body composition is gonna help me lose body fat it doesnt is this things like sale cycle as well！

yeah， ive never done any of these yeah， um， but i imagine theres a lot of spending， a lot of moving， a lot of sweating and a lot of cording code calories burned emphasis yes！

there is， but its it puts women square in moderate intensity where theyre so used to live in one of those classes feeling absolutely smashed that when you tell them， actually that training doesnwork for you， because its putting you in a state of intensity that drives quarters all up， but its not a strong enough stress to invoke the post exercise growth horman in testostern responses that we want to dampen that cortisol so this is why we have that high pervaly of women who are in there for displays shouldndo high intensity work its like well actually， they should do moderate intensity they need to avoid that polarizing absolutely thats what we want we want true high intensity workwhiches one to four minutes of eighty percenter more or fewdoing sprint interval its full gas for thirty seconds or less and youdoing that a couple of times a week youre not doing it every day because you need to have enough recovery to hit those intensities truly because those are the intensities that are going to give you those post exercise hormonal responses to drop cortisol when were looking at women， who are like oh well， i love going out for hours and hours on my bike and i love you know doing my spend classes is like OK， but we need to look at the big rock here if you are looking for longevity in bodycomposition， change and cognition and all those things， you have to polarize your training and that has to be the focus but so food like i come up a long background of endurance i now love riding my gravel bike on the weekends for long periods of time， which is not optimal for me my age that kind of start for all the things that i want to see improvements in but mentally its great so we talk about going out for that long stuff zone to that low conversation and thats fine for mental health than being out in nature but for optimal health than well being we dont want to do that we want to look at resistance training as a bedrock and true high intensity work to help with body composition。

change metabolic control instance itivity in brain health and dropping that quarters all i have family members who are women who thin because they love to walk and they just walk a ton and they eat well and enough but they are resistant to resistance training and if they do pick up a wait， its usually some very light dumbbells do a few curls， a couple tries up extensions and arnt really um leaning into the higher intensity work yeah， i think this is pretty common and my observation is that its common not because they couldnbe incentivized to do the high intensity work but that learning the complex compound movements like had a squat properly or even leg press properly yep um deadlift properly can be a bit overwhelming， especially when one walks into a gym this is true for men to like the all this stuff all this equipment， all these bodies and these people look like they know what theyre doing its like if i were to go into in advance， like kitchen or or um symphony， and you know theyre all these instruments i dont know how to play yeah， so whats the best line of attack for somebody who really wants to overcome this um longevity barrier because clearly resistance training proper nutrition work yeah！

and the cardiovascular exercise pieces a little bit more intuitive walking you do it faster your jogging you do it faster you running yeah yeah， um the bike the sole cycle class， etc is just its easier in terms of the mechanics one can still get hurt but its just more straightforward is there a way that in the absence of a budget for a personal trainer that somebody can learn how to do these movements and as you said ease into them over the course of even up to four months in a way that they can be confident that theyre unlikely to get hurt yeah and really build up there capacity to do real work like a benefit them yeah！

this is where i love technology for one thing but you were staying really basic i look at some of my family members and ive got them started with just body white stuff or loading a backpack with cans to add a little bit of resistance， so they feel comfortable in their own house and they might be doing lunges or squats um just keying them up of like where footplacement and me in that kind of stuff， so theyre getting used to that kind of movement um i love Kelly starrets stuff with mobility so show them like herese how we do some the mobility find where the sticking points are and then you can either direct them to some of the programs that are out there that um like haily happens has some really good ones for women or forty plus so does um uh bre and then sunny Webster down in Australia you can send in a video of what youre doing and he can critique you and tell you things to do there are other programs like that to um so theres lots of ways of getting help if you seek it， the personal trainer is very much a stumbling block for a lot of people， and as much as i am not a fan of planet fitness， i am a fan of the fact that theyve made it really easy for someone to walk in whos interested in resistance training， and they can go to a circuit one of the circuit things that they have the back and they can start resistance training on machines， which is another level up to learning compound movements so theres lots of ways of breaking that barrier to entry you just have to find the motivation factor of whats going to incentifize the person to give up their time walking every day and taking time to go to the gym or taking time to do garage based stuff thats going to improve their lean mass im！

a big fan of machines especially plate loaded machines but machines just create the close to correct or correct Ark of movement yeah that um so for your size yeah， yeah， yeah exactly and to really spend the time adjusting the seat height， adjusting the various um pins on the machine not just the wait in order to make sure that one gets the best range of motion i think this is something small， but that is significant in terms of its impact people just plop down in a machine especially if youworking in with somebody and feel um social beginners will feel pressure to move quickly and they want adjust the seat hide and so is just all wrong for them and all it takes is a little bit of time to you know and ask people yeah how do adjust the machines im also。

a fan of kettle bells in in the garage or lite lighter dumbbells that you can do like thrusters or hang cleans or something like that to get them the momentum and movement feeling and because thats another good learning curve for people um so like， i said theres lots of ways that you can implement things based on someones intuitive like or dislike of resistance training so youmentioned polarized training if i understand correctly。

this would be a woman doing three or four days of high intensity resistance training for 四五 to sixty or forty five to 75 minutes per session and then at the opposite extreme maybe just walking a lot or jogging a lot yeah， so this is that way you talking about polarized training as opposed to um these other forms of training where is designed to get people sweating like crazy breathing hard for long creates of time but neither putting them at the inthe landscape of inducing muscle strength adaptations and high purchasing adaptations nor really taxing the cardiovascular system enough to create you know in increase in longevity for instance when i talk about polarizing。

i look at the high intensity strength， like thats really hard on essential nervous system and then we look from a cardiovascular standpoint of doing true high intensity work， so the walking is more of the recovery so if yougoing to go out and do something long， it has to be very very easy if you are looking at cardiovascular anywent that big sweat， then we are talking true sprint interval training， so what i have a lot of women， do is a twentyminute lower body heavy set and then theyll go on the assault bike and do as hard as they can for thirty seconds and then recover as much as they need to to go then do another thirty seconds as hard as i can most people go oh， i can do four five of those after two theycompletely gsed because its that hard of work and thats what i mean mypolarizing you have very very low intensity for recovery and super super high intensity for metabolic and cardiovascular changes is what were after Ilike to take a quick break to let you know that the Huberman lab team has launched a new podcast with host Docker Andy Galpin Andy is an expert in exercise science and human performance。

and has long been a fan favorite on the huberman lab podcast this new podcast is called perform with doctor Andy Galpin and it dives into topics， such as how to build muscle and strength， how to improve your cardiovascular health and how to optimize recovery and sleep for performance and much more Andy is an absolutely fantastic educator and true expert on all things human performance i know youll thoroughly enjoy his new podcast and learn a ton of useful knowledge from it so please check it out and give it a subscribe wherever youre listening to podcast now again the podcast is called perform with doctor Andy Galbin lets talk about the menstrual cycle yeah， and how that impacts training at the level of psychology and physiology meaning of course， the two are linked theyre inextricably late for instance is there a particular phase of the menstrual cycle where a woman should expect that motivation and or recovery would be more challenging。

so this is the sticky point of recent science because we see all these research studies in menanalysies that are coming out of the sport science literature saying that there is no effect of the MySQL cycle on anything when you look at that population， it is specifically you minerec women might have a subject pool of ten if youll lucky twelve， so this is women who have quotn quotnormal menstrucycles humanorec supposedly obulating so they have a definitive low hormain and high hormain phase。

and this is probably because these studies are being done on university campasses with on with college undergraduate women yes， exactly yeah， which is a typically is in a given age range right？

OK， and they look at performance meaning that one point in time and we know that psychologically you can perform at any point in the minstrucycle unless you have something like heavy minstrual bleeding um more looking at a higher touch and looking not only from a molecular aspect， but also pulling in mix methods and looking at the qualitative we need women to track their own cycle and find their own patterns because we know that there are times where you feel like crap and you cant push intensity but that might be on day 8 for one woman， it might be day eighteen for another from a molecular standpoint we know that the low hormoon phase being day one is the first day of bleating up through obulation， which is midway three year cycle you have a greater capacity for pulling in an accommodating stress physical mental stress so for looking at doing heavier loads were looking at doing high intensity work， were looking at motivation then that low hormoned phase is really optimal for trying to hit a pr， trying to hit a new speed because you can take on that stress and your immune system handles it， your muscle handle it。

your core tempter everything handles it so for most women in the weeks before theyre period theyre going to feel more robust i accept right up until the point of um adminstration or the inverse it is day one ableading up through midcycle that if OK yep this stickypoint comes not every woman orelates and this is the thing we were looking at general pop。

we have lifestyle stress， we have nutrition stress， we know that women for the most part have for to five and avilatory cycles a year so this is where when youlooking at that high hormone phase， we cant say youre definitively in the high horde phase so this is where we need women to track their own cycles and understand their own patterns because in an ideal world， we know that in the ludio phase is were where we have the most change where we have a pro flamatory response from the immune system we have a inability to access carbohydrate as well， we have a higher sympathetic drive so theres lots of things in there that arent so fantastic for acomodating stress so broadly speaking the ludio phase is associated with more cortisol hmm？

more kind of baseline levels of stress would it make sense for a woman to try and offset some of that with a bit more nutritiinjuring that phase a bit more perhaps complex cover hydrate we know that some complex cover hydrate can blunt some of the cordisolo response maybe just even a little bit more attention to eating yeah！

absolutely， i mean core temperature goes up， but the whole goal of the ludio phase is the build tissue so this is where were seeing a lot of shuttling of carbohydrate and amino acids to go to build that into mutual lining and thats a whole goal so yes， you need ee more protein you need eatmore carbohydrate， but again the sticking point is did you owe lator not so if you arent aware of if you ovelated or not youre tracking your own patterns， then just be cutely aware that in about the week before your next period comes you really need to be ampingup carbohydrate in protein um because thats gonna help you hit intensities its gonna kind of level that playing field especially on days where you feel like you can really hit those intensities you feel great but then you go to do something in your hurt rates higher than it should be you dont feel that that you cant hit those if youoffsetting it with some increase carbohydrate beforehand youre gonna hit it so its again its really dying it back down to the individual now because we dont have enough robust resource to make generalize ideas because of the new wants of have you obvelated or not what are your ratios of estaging progester on in that ludio phase so when we bring it back down to the general pop its like the best thing to do is to track your minstrual cycle over sleep over how your feeling find your own patterns and dial in your training in your days according to what your pattern is how hard should a woman push through the mental and may be even physical resistance to train less or not train during a given phase of the cycle getting depends on how she feels what we cant rely on our things like heart rate variability cause we know that changes with the autonomic nervous system change progester and good indication that evovelated because your hurt revariability tanks but its not a good indication of what your body can do if you wake up， i always say its a ten minerrule you wake up and you feel awful and you like ah i really want to do this workout but i dont know how its gonna go give yourself ten minutes if after ten minutes， you cant hit those intensities or you just feel horrible change it drop it down do something thats more recovery do something thats not going to be so taxing because we do have a limited amount of that stress accumen of how much stress we can handle so if youre going to try to exerted all in a high intensity workout what you have left over for the rest of the day and then that compounds because if youll always fighting it， then youre going to increase this baseline sympathetic drive because youre fighting the training your fighting life so give yourself that ten minute roll if it happens three days in a row， thats OK， because this is a very short period of time its not gonna last forever， so a lot of women have this internal conversation of i have to do this and its really based on some kind of external they think everyones watching them， but internally you dont have to if you give yourself permission， you end up training better， recovering better。

and getting better games on the flipside if a woman is feeling spectaccurally good， should she just really push it as hard as she can yeah， or is there anything about the relationship between the hormone fluctuations of the menstrual cycle and feeling really really great that training hard can somehow disrub the cycle and this is actually kind of the uh the old lower um probably myth i would imagine that high intensity resistance training is somehow determental to female hormoncycles i dont think theres any evidence for that， but i hear that from time to time yeah， um what do you think that myth came to be why do you think it propagates and what can we do to extingush it？

if in fact its not true？

its not true， we see it comes from a misstep in food intake and we also see that is a cultural influence because we think about how sport started it started as a way for men to demonstrate how powerful and aggressive they are this is the original Olympics rate there are no women allowed and as we feed forward into sport and how became OK for women to be involved at the high performance level of woman walks and shows any falability than shes immediately put on a lower stool right， yeah， you cant you cant play with the boys because you have a minstrual cycle， your bleating， your a woman， your delecate flower so women would walk into that professional sport space and be excited if there are a minerac or didnt have periods or they trained hard enough in their period when away， because then they were more like men and they could play with the boys if you start bring up minstrual cycle in professional sport now as of the pass about 四五 years， its OK to talk about， which is you know what twenty twenty， so that miss of high intensive resistance training causing issues with the minstrual cycle one its a cultural nuance for push back against women being in that space， but then the reality is women were eating enough to commonday for that stress， which then feeds forward to low energy availability maybe relative energy efficiency in sport protobations in Oliver minstrucycle hormones， so is not the act of the high intense series is since training its the active not fuling appropriately for it and then getting the OK to not have your period because yeah now youre in with your training hard enough youve lost it you more like a man 哇啊！

very interesting history there is it true then that if a woman maintaines either um clerk balance with her basically eating enough to support her energy output or even a slight clerk surplus that is unlikely that um her periods will cease even if shes training very hard and very often correct。

so it basically boils down to calories in calories out fuel for the task at hand because some people want to have a slide callery deficit even in high training and if that deficid is at night away from training maybe hundred fifty to two hundred calories then its gonna help perpetuate bodyfatloss not lean massloss and its not gonna interfere with recovery its the fulling in around the stress meaning the exercise stress its really important， but women have been so conditioned to not eat and not take up space to be small you know， all of these socio cultural things that women are afraid to admit the fact that they want to eat and they should be eating so this is a a uh nuance within the fitness community that were really trying to change and get the mindset around you trainhard， you eat well and your bodyresponsing kind appetite。

body temperature and hormones are very tightly linked yes， they are um far too tightly fresh to uh disentangle all of those in a single conversation here， but as youdescribingthe urgent need for women to fuel enough with the proper fules to train hard enough to stimulate the correct adaptations that they need i imagine that the shift in appetite and body temperature that occurs across the menstrual cycle is also going to play in to this meaning there will be phases of the menstrual cycle where women will be just naturally less motivated to eat enough carbohydrate enough protein yeah， in order to get the most out of the training what phases of the menstrual cycle are those um so that women can pay particular attention to make sure that theyre fuling enough yeah！

um as estrigen starts to come up right before ovelation that estrigen surge really dampens appetite uh it also has a an interplay with our appetite harmonds， which is part of the reason why we dont have that great of an appetite it holds after ovelation astring dips it hungry it comes up and people are like i have some cravings， which are driven by progestering because your body needs more calories， but at the same time with the elevation of estrigene， youre not hungry you have cravings， but youre not hungry interesting yeah， so its trying to disconnect those its like your appetite is something that will come back of course， when you eat， but cravings are more of a of that psychological capacity of yeah， i my body needs more， but not quite sure what so to get women to understand whats happening across the board its always coming back to lets fuel appropriately for the exercise and even if youre not hungry if you are fullingappropriate， appropriately at that point in time if you end up with less at least you stop that breakdown state that catabout state， so we dont get those pertevations in the hyperdelements thats my biggest concern for women is really taken care of that signaling from the brain to the rest of the body and if we have fuel on board， even though we have appetite protobations and if you go do a really hard work out in the heat， youre not going to be hungry either but if youre having a cold protein drink after that hot workout， youtaking care of that immediate need to shut down the signals that we need to break down things lets talk about one of the many third rails of um discussions online。

which is birthcontrol yeah， and we need to define exactly what type of birthcontrol were talking about because there are so many different forms yes， there are uds， there are the copper iuds， theres the ring， theres the you know lets about oral contriceptives that are designed to prevent ovelation hmm so this is quota quote the pill yeah， so were being lets for now limit the conversation to that so that there is in confusion um share with us if you will your fots on these， how they impact any of the things that were talking about or anything else from that for that matter do you have another history lesson？

please all right um i just give a talk at home to some young athletes on contriception， because someone might be on the depot and if theyre on it for more than two years， they get bonementural density loss， so then the question of OK how does the oral countriceptive bill come up？

how does that affect things say well lets look at the history of it initially came from Sanford was funded by um Catherine Mccormick from a comic family and a feminist activist market singer but because there women they couldn get in the lab， so they got a guy from Stanford to develop the pill and hes like you know what we need to put in a placebo week so that women feel like theyhaving bleed so for looking at the three active pills and then the one sugarpeel week， it was by design to make women feel like they are having control over their minstrual cycle and they would still have a blade but is not a true blade is a withdraw blade so this becomes the confusing point for people who on a neural contriceptive pill theylike i get my period like no you dont because the idea of the hormones that are in an oral counterceptive poll is the downregulate your ovarian function so that you dont so you have a whole different hormone profile from someone who naturally cycles so this depends on the type of url contract up， deploy or using for the most part monophysic is the one thats most prescribed so that means the three weeks of the active pill is the same dose of estrogen progester own and then you have your sugar pill week or your withdraw week and then you start again when we look at the reprofessions of using oral contrast of depth in active women， theres a higher amount of inflammatory responses and oxidative responses so from a training standpoint no ones done the study yet but i would be interested in doing this of looking at how that impacts adaptation you do end up with a new baseline of this when you start taking the poll， but were not really sure how that impacts adaptation we also look at the progestin component of the url contracceptive pill， because we have four generations of progesterown first generation was really high dos and has a lot of risk factors not really prescribed that much second generation is the most prescribed and this is the one that people just take its in your iud， its in your oc uh has lease amount of side effects and then we have a thirden a fourth generation the fourth generation is primarily used for women who have a really bad pms or pmdd， which is your um pre minstrual disforia disorder so significant mode issues because that projustin has a direct effect on a lot of the dopamine receptors in the brain as well the third generation is very androginic， so we see that in in simpleminary research that improves speed and power by the second week of intake， because its accumulated， so were looking directly at an oral contracted pill we cant make generalizations， because you have loados high dos estergen we see that a thirty migram dos increases high purchasing but not strength because estrigen increases the satellite cell aspect um so for my power and Olympic athletes Olympic lifting athletes thats a detriment because theyput on muscle mask but no strength so weve had to look at changing the ocr getting them off for women who have breakthrough bleating that higher incidence of or that higher intake of estrigenis is really beneficial， so we look overall at how it impacts women from an athletics standpoint， its so variable in the hormone profile that we canmake journalizations we only look at the very highperformance athletes and whats happening up there because that can make a break an ass late so from the general touchpoint we dont know enough like the beginning of this year 2024 there is a study that came out looking at changes in the amigula that happens with or a contracceptive use its reversible in adults but for young girls。

we dont know because the brain is developing and unfortunately physicians will pass out ocs as if its candy ocs do recall what the direction of the effect was on the omigala for those that i dont recall the omigala bilateral brain structure many one on each side of your brain i literally means， Almond and Latin， its almonshaved， and its part of a larger network associated with threat detection um sometimes its describe the locus of fear in the brain， but its evolves in a lot of other things to both positive valence and negative events， but nonetheless is part of the um threat detection system elevated levels of arousal， which is why its often discussed in the context of fear anxiety。

etc it increased fear in women who are on the oc or contracceptive field made them less um willing to take chances and when they went off it， theyre like what why couldni do that before so thats why they started looking at they mcdela and when i say were looking at young girls and again， we dont know whats happening is it reversible in young girls that are put on it or not because of the brain structure changes that are happening um so when we talk about an oral contracceptive pill， i want people to understand that it has a significant effect on the body not just reproductive we dont know enough about all the other effects so i have parents who say my daughter wants to go on the url countriceptipill shes having a regular period she is athlete we wonbe able to control it and is like if theres a issue with your minstrucycle now， its so gonna be there when you get off it， so we have to look and see what whats going on here if youlooking you get on it to control your MySQL cycle why because we know that you can have an increase in your view to max and other an a an a robot capacity when you are not on it， so you have a better top in capacity when youre not being bleented by these hormones and then the other conversation so my scan is like well， they are really good dermatologist that can help you with that you dont have to go on a neural conceceptical， but unfortunately gps dont understand all of that and of a girl comes in and says im having a regular cycles having install pleading i want to go on the OC here you go so it is a huge conversation still we had um i put in the same category as many posformer and therapy because there isnt enough research to address all the population needs and we see these big handlems switches so before we say everyone be on the oc and i was like maybe not and then it was no one beyond miniposformer therapy everyone should be on it but we need to land at the middle and understand more of whatsapening with these exossions worments is there any evidence that other forms of female contriception can be just say problematic for the types of things were discussing today like the implant in the depot or iud copper。

iud copper！

ide d and the Marino or you know your projustid those are what a lot of my tactic call athletes will use because it doesnt have a systemic effect on adaptation or inflammation moved any of those things um and is a fit and forget so you could put an end for up to three to five years if you have a really heavy bleeding， it really disipates because the whole idea of an iud is that then the end of nature aligning and so then you have a topic that takes care of the endomutual linings you dont necessarily have a blade the copper ied is different because you do have really heavy bleating for the first three cycles and then it attending ways before we get started today you mention some very interesting pioneering studies on evaluating menstrual blood itself as a window into some larger themes about whats going on physiologically！

even psychologically um now， my view a good segway to uh just touch into that we can always return to it again later， but let me just ask it um more directly what are some things that can be measured directly from menstrual blood that are informative for women and it sounds like theres a new generation of at home tests that might be interesting and informative for them to think about yeah well。

if you think about minstrel fluid， everyone thinks about it is a discard product but its a very good it indicator of whats happening from an indicron standpoint gives a really good indication whathappening from endo mutual standpoint so fear looking at all the sidekinds and the proteins and the tissue that comes from it， its a huge indicator thats naturally discharged that were now looking at for determining hpv do you have it or not what about proteins for pcos can we really identify pcos or endo metriosis？

we talk about pcos for moment most people have heard of it by now but uh， polysystem variance in drumats associate with typically elevated androgenes um its becoming more， more common or perhaps detected more based on better detection methods i dont know which the prevalence of pcos seems to be very very high it does and i think its a combination of both uh！

we also see some rebound pc os that happens when someone gets often oral contracceptive pill， its not necessarily true PCS because whathappening now， your overies are producing eggs that have been down regulated for so long so under ultra sound it might look like PC OS， but its not necessarily true indication the other is more more women are starting to eat more and so theyre coming out of low energy availability if you have more carbohydrate you end up with greater ficular stimulation， which also shows up as pcs so the true pcos yes， there is a high incidence from reporting standpoint， but is it that rebound where its not having all the under genetic changes thats still kind of up in the air at the moment um but it is a big concern for women， because it is an indication that somethings going on and they might have some fertility issues uh we see a really high incidence of PCOS in Olympic level athletes， because of the higher Android inic aspect of PCOS so better recovery time a little bit higher baseline test us around um so yeah！

its a population specice specificity as well in the eighties and nineas there was a lot of excitement in the kind of neural behavioral under chronology fields largely based on animal literature， but then expanding it the human literature that certain forms of activities could change hormone patterns and maybe even psychology and that makes sense yeah on the surface of it but is there evidence that um if somebody engages in say high intensity training or competitive scenarios， this has been explored a lot in men， but im wondering if its also been explored now in women that androgends go up you know i mean theres been these studies i dont know how good they are of you know um people on the stock exchange you know watching their stress fluctuations measuring testosterone i think most of those studies were done in men um but other competitive scenarios even showing for instance that exogenus testosterone can increase ultruism in men if men are competing for whos like donating the most money at a flan philanthropic event， but you put them in a different scenario where its far less benevent in goal and then theyll uh exogenes testosterone drives competitiveness towards um things that are more traditionally thought of as mailmail competition uh in other words is all context dependent yeah， um is there anything like i springs to mind of interesting studies as it relates to androgends， or uh estrogenes in women athletes， and as it relates to exercise。

they havent any specific studies like that in women we do see that understress the cortisol increases， and if you have an adequate， uh response to it， your body can overcomment then yes， you get a boost in testosteraround for women， um we see this in a lot of the night mission shift changes in tatical athletes there is also， uh i guess a lessening of circulating estrogenes， so the pulse changes when we start getting to the end of a really strong training block， because were starting have a little bit of a down regulation of our lutenizing hormonpulse on estrogen， um but it shouldnt be severe enough to cosmos function what we want people to do is look at the ratio of the restasion progesterown and keeping track of lootenizing hormoon if they are at that point where they are going to have a really big training block， so we look at pre season， during season， end of season and people who might be at a higher risk factor for becoming a minor react then we keep track that way um because it is the stress component that can down regulate！

not actually causing a permanent change as we talk about monstration we should probably talk about iron stores and um iron yeah！

um do women need to supplement iron given that they lose iron during minstration its interesting because we have a change in hepseden or hepseden opinion on which part of the world you come from uh because it is increased under times of information and decrease under times of iron loss， so we see uh a significant change across the mensial cycle so i tell women if you are concerned with low ferriten， then we want you to take an iron supplement every other day starting in the first day year blade for ten days because thats going to really allow your body to absorb it and stay on top of it um after that every other day you have it youre not going to be observing as much of it， because hebsin starts to come up after ovelation again you have a pro inflammatory response you have greater information do women blank it need to supplement no， because we see fatigue isnt necessarily just ironrelated theres so many other reasons why women are fatics the one problem is the baseline levels for like ferrten for active women if you go when you have a fareten level of twenty to twenty five， theyre gonna say its normal， but wedrather see you up around fifty so if you are in that low end of normal than supplementing。

will help you get up into that fifty and see if it makes a difference if a woman is going to get a bloodtest to evaluate testosterone， estrishing lipids， metabolic factors， etc and she can only afford to do that at one point during her cycle and compare at various times maybe every six months or once a year even at that specific time of her cycle is there a best time in cycle to do that bloodtest i find limited to say that then i would say five to seven days before her next period starts so mid ludio because then you can get a good indication of estrigan progesterone peak testtosterine doesnt fluctuate as much as those two。

so youre going to get a good idea what baseline testosterone is and we know that theres a greater inflammatory response so anything thats outsideof the norm of that upper elevation of information youre going to be able to to pick out um so yeah， i would say if you could only do it at one point in time that would be the time to do it and if she can add a second bloodtest at a different phase of the menstrual cycle where would you place that second test day two of the menstrual cycles the second day of leading to get a really good indication of what your true astring level is at baseline and if she measures her hormones at those two times within the cycle？

do you think thats sufficient to um get 75 percent plus of the relevant data yeah， definitely terrific caffeine yes， in the old days yeah， meaning when i was a kid and not long ago yeah！

ten years ago！

three weeks ago yeah， um， we would hear this crazy statements about caffeine it pulls calcium out of the bones its you know you hear this stuff i did a whole episode on caffeine im a big fan of caffeine but i do warn people that if they suffer from anxiety or theyve going through a particularly stressful life event it can raise the activity of the sympathetic armor， the autonomic nervous system youfeel more nervous youre more prone to panic yeah， when youre drinking caffeine， but um， many people love caffeine i think 90 percent of the adult population of the world in just some form of caffeine every single day i mean that 90 percent yeah likewise making it the most consume drug worldwide is caffeine safe for women i suspect based on what you just said that the answer will be yes but are there um caseconditions where women should be cautious about their intake a caffeine independent of this anxiety thing i mean people probably should uh drink more caffeine than they can uh tolerate right psychologically no one male female younger old yeah！

its more magenetic factor than it is a sex factor uh so i mean both men and women will be fast metaverizer， slow metaverizers， or not have an effect that becomes the bigger rock of them what we do find is in that pary menu puzzle state women will become more sensitive to the blood sugar fluctuations that happen with caffeine so they are used to having coffee in the morning and with something then halfway through the workout they become a little bit high book i see， make because theres changes in um， insulin sensitivity， insulin responses so theres changes also win blood trigger control and caffeine can access re that so if you are someone whos like oh， i always have a double express so before i go workout and then halfway through im really high book i see！

make im really busy in light headed i dont know what to do feel sticker nor should yeah yeah eat some food hmm eat some food with it what about sipping caffeine through the workout um you know taking that coffee in and just having a sip between sets can that offset some of that i dont think so okay i hear a lot that people who drink caffeine before workout you know midway through the like i dont feel good yeah yeah because they dont need that for me that just stimulates the design for more caffeine but um were even there i say a half piece of an a nicketing um which i experiment with but i was told and this is why im not going to continue to do it not only is it very habitforming it actually is such a vasio constrictor that uh i was told by a dermatologist that its terrible for skin even if youre not getting your nicketing by smoking， vaping， dipping or snothing， so this this big trend now toward ingesting nicket as a stimulen and cognitive enhancer and performance enhancer i think people should at least be aware of the negative effects on skin never whatever known because im not a nicketing person， ill tell you that half piece of nicketing is um the first time you do it its a its an unbelievable experience its look the its like your first real cup of coffee oh really wakesh you up yeah and dolls you and i recommend nobody do it because its it feels that pleasant if you like caffeine？

i like shashandra for that reason she shandra yeah whats she John its an adaptagen what should know what this is you should know what this should know well im here to learn OK？

um shashandra shashandra uh yeah so it is an adaptgenic plant so you know like engencing sebrand gensing maca asigonda all those buzzwords out there she shandra is another really well study adaptagin and i friends you say its like at all or you take it and its immediate func focus in function because its main goal is to regulate documen， seritonin and quartersal so gives you its women and men out of that brainfile gives them incredible focus do use it yeah are you on it now？

i put it in my morning coffee OK？

uh you just sent people down the uh the rabbit of the area all right yeah yeah you heard it here first doctor Stacy sims and give it a try because the nicketing thing is an interesting one it there are some cognive enhancing effects of nicketing that perhaps in um people， sixty five and older might actually be beneficial for offsetting some forms of neurlogy generation， but that needs to still be explored in research dont cut that enclip it and put it out there like so thats happened already um very interesting all right caffeine we both agree is great shashandra you get a try check it out let me know all right well， do cold yeah for reasons， i still dont understand people have associated mirrthis podcast with delibrate cold exposure i like deliver cold exposure in the form of a cold shower or a cold plan jira nice bath mostly for the effects that occur afterward meaning more alertness the kind of session you fork buzz goes on a long long time no， i dont think it increases metables im significantly enough to have a meaningful difference， but the long lasting increases in the so called catacolemeans doppaming or up in efr non to me are pretty impressive and i just like the way makes me feel so thats the main reason i believe why people do deliver call the exposure and every time i do a post about deliver call the exposure i get asked understandably so how does it affect women differently than men？

and then i usually get questions about renodes syndrome oh， yeah， yeah， so is there a difference in terms of how deliver call exposure impacts women i have to managing the answer is yes， given what you said earlier about vasoconstriction versus vazodilation but deliver cold exposure like it hate it what do you think？

do you recommend it for women i recommend it for open water swimmers who might experience at vegal response when they first dive into the cold， i prefer heat for women everyones responder to the heat you get better adaptations so Sona yep Sona yeah tab yeah preferably a true finish Sona infra doesnt it warms the skin but not the core we want thank you for saying that im not a big fan of information get hot enough no yeah you can bring an inforred light into a traditional Sona if it can tolerate the heat yeah！

but finish Sona would be what something between a hundred and eighty five degrees Fahrenheit and maybe to ten if youre really heed adapted yeah！

i still working on metric let me do the conversion oh sorry yeah youliving down in new Zeus yeah， so sixty to eighty degrees i need to look every time ive try to do math on the flying this podcast right now has like you know okay times nine divided by five different process yeah！

the people can look it up yeah！

OK， look it up um so the thing with cold water exposure is the whole conversation about ice cold， ice paths and how cold it is its too cold for women because we were looking at that severe immediate jump and to that ic cold it causes such severe constriction and shutdown so women do really well and get that whole dopamine response and everything if the water is around sixteen degrees c， which is fifty five to fifty six degrees Fahrenheit！

which is chilly its chilly not warm no！

its go diven samerce is gobay right and that is enough to offset that severe construction survival， but it is cold enough to invoke all the changes that we want with cold water exposure， so its a temperature new wants thats that sex difference and like i said when i have open water swimmers， who are going to do a long swim or theyre going to do a triassaline in the waterscoder i have them do cold water exposure， especially face exposure into the cold water， um to get them habituated to that initial severe constriction and simpathetic activity that we dont want to happen before arise with heat being the truth like true heat they were targemout with Sona we see a lot of metabolic changes for women so were having better insulin and glucos control were sing a a better um expression of our heat shot proteins and uncoupling in and the rebuilding of those proteins better cardiovascular responses and then for women as we get older and have the offshoot of hot flashes night sweets that kind of stuff if youdoing heed exposure， youre sending a stronger stimulus to the hyperthelements and youre also getting a better seritonin production from the guts whois we have 95 percent of our server turn and produce from the gut。

which leads to better temperature control and shuts down hot flashes i think some people might be confused by the idea of using Sona in order to reduce the hot flashes um so ill just remind people that your brain has a set of neurons in the media preopticaria that sort of a therma stat if you will controlling core body temperature and if you heat the surface of your body， your medial preopticken around say oh lets cool down the core of the body now if you stay in that heat too long， you talk your your body take or your body temperature will go up， but conversely if the surface of your body is made cold， the internal million of your body will heat up because those media preopting neurons will say oh you know this is this is like putting a nice back on the uh thermostat， which is what um？

graduate students in post docs used to do in the labside working because it was the battle over the the heater right something were in hot something or in calls those business in any event um so its not that you disapprove of the co of using deliver cold exposure you just recommend that women do deliver cold exposure with temperatures that are maybe in the um low fifty degree fair in height um range as opposed to the really frankly just painfully cold yeah for anybody um you know thirty eight to you know fifty degree temperatures yeah！

right we did a pilot study looking cause whimhoff has been down to New Zealand quite a bit and so you know his breathing and ice bat stuff has been making the rounds and working in the high performance people wanted to do that， but we have a few athletes that have really severe intermeet reosis say well， we could look at using cold exposure to help control that and what we found over the course of this study was that if we were to do deliver cold exposure around ovelation and then hold it for ten days over the course of three minstrual cycles， it attenuated the endometriosis casinder metriesis is an implementory disease right， so for looking at inflammation process in growing the tissue if we can dampen that information and creator response that learns that information and dampance it， then it helps with intermitriosis very interesting thats another avenue that we really want to take more looking at cold deliver cold exposure fascinating as a cautionary note if anyone is going to explore whimhoftype methods。

um， please， please， please do not combine cycliciper ventilation um or hyperventilation of any kind with breathholds and water exposure not even in the depth of a poddle um， there have been drowning so associated with people doing sicklikiper ventilation in various context， not just related to off breathing but um basically people who are not skilled um and even some who are skilled combining cycliper ventilation breathholds and water in any form cold or warm water bad idea she dont if youre going to do any kind of cycliper ventilation breathing in my labs actually published on this in a clinical trial do it on dry land or dont do it at all and if you going to do deliberate cold exposure um limit your breathing to slow deep breaths make sure that your um well supervised and um just stay alive please yeah！

so yeah we didnt incorporate any of the whimhock breathing we just incorporated the data liberate water cold。

water exposures cold and temperature generally， a search of potent stimulus and its exciting that people are trying to explore this， especially the in my opinion， the the sonowork uh， a one thing i suppose that we should um discuss very briefly before we move on， since weve been talking about resistance training webintalking out deliver cold exposure there is evidence that doing deliberate cold exposure not so much in the form of a cold shower， but in the form of a um， submersion up to the neck post strength or resistance training say in the four， but probably the eight hours after resistance training because of the attenuation of the implementary response what sounds like a great thing it actually can inhibit some of the strength in high purchar free gains that one would otherwiseexperience so if yougoing to do， deliver cold exposure best to not do it in the eight hours or even on the same day after resistance training gearedtoards developing strength and hypertrophy increases no problem to do it first， in fact may be even some performance enhancing effects of doing it first， there some at least stand for doing that， but just want to throw that out there so anything else you want to add to that um？

which is different from heed exposure， because heed exposure you want to do afterwards， because the base of dilation yeah， because it extends that training stimulus and also the passive dehydration from training will stimulate greater blood volume improvements oh！

interesting so after a good way training session if one has the luxury of doing。

it get into the Sona for up to thirty minutes make sure your hydrating you want slow rehydration because part of it is that dehydration and the decrease of oxygen at the level the kidney distimulate more epo so with more red cell production you have natural increase in plasm volume so its a blood volume expander whos an hour getting into real performance enhancement is this true formenn for women yeah！

ah lets walk through this protocol i like i like this， this is uh this is not been discussed on this podcast so， um， somebodydoes there resistance training finishes up drinks 86 ounces of water with a little saltment maybe and then hops in the Sana yep 4 how long up to thirty minutes okay no longer！

no longer， no longer yeah！

theyll probably be a little bit thirsty in there youlooking for a low low level dehydration is that right yep OK， um the ranges that ive seen published in the finish studies are as i recall and ill double check these numbers hundred eighty six areas fair on height up to about two ten fair and height um and the higher and only beingfor those that are headapted yeah， one can cover their head with a tower and actually feel more comfortable because the brain is insulated the surprises people they think putting a C yeah， you know something on their head would make it excessively warm yeah！

but you actually are protecting your brain from some of the heat and people will put a tower over so that they when they breathe that doesnt burn the inside of their nose their mouth either， um im always like if youre gonna be in its that hot just move down a level hmm so than the floor yeah！

um and this stimulates the production of more red blood cells OK？

which then translates to what in terms of athletic performance you have an increase in your cardiovascular effort and because you have greater amount of blood volumes you you have greater amount of pretty much blood circulating， so you have more available for um muscle metabolism heat loss um so its again to going to altitude so people will go to altitude to get that blood volume boost， but not everyone response out sued because you have responders， not responders over responders OK， this why when i go to Colorado im gasping for air while i do a walk but then i come back to see level and i feel better my endurance is better but some people might not experience that effect true this is i study the guys before we started that ive been in our Sona at home in preparation for going to perc city because i live at a beach down and going to park city i am a significant responder to altitude and i wont be able to have coherent meetings that altitude if i am not adapted， so OK？

yeah， so this explains why when Ive gone to meetings in Colorado at altitude some people can never drink that first night and theyre privately fine even though they normally live at c level and im trying to trying to see the stairs correctly， even though i dont drink yeah， that would be it very interesting so you can use post resistance training sonexposure to improve performance yeah！

you can use it um post cardio as well so anything that is giving you that passive dehydration from training because youre not because you will become passively dehydrated when youre training right， you cant keep in as much fluid so im saying passive as an youre not able to stop that dehydration and then you go in to the Sona and you are extending that training stimulus because your heart redesivated your putting your body under stress from dehydration and the body response in kind of we need more blood volume so lets lets jump start that i love it logically water type and and um im gonna give it a try yeah what other training tip tricks tips do you have up your sleeve doctor sims what you wanna talk about um？

i do you have any favorites， i said i i delight in these um and i know other people will as well um do any come to mind？

i mean you test about shaoshandra um about post training sonexposure to improve performance by increasing red blood cell account yes or anything else they can springspot no， no！

no pressure uh im a fan of what i call the track stack that we used to use for track athletes， but then for really significant high intensity work so track stack is kind of the idea from the old bodybuilding set where youre taking two hundred milligrams of caffeine uh lotos babyasprin！

but then i add beta Ellen in used to be a fedrin i know so im im old enough to remember when they would sell it as the triple stack with a fedrin yeah！

but some people drop dead and they took it off the market yeah！

hit came back on the market in New Zealand last week did it really yeah！

it gets you going yes， it does its um its speedy yeah！

um its dangerous yeah！

but the trackstack which has beta alanine and not effedrain is really good at encouraging an extra top end effect 就是 having the caffeine youre， having a little bit of the blood thin from the ass brand and the visible dilatory properties and the carnicine aspect for muscle contraction from the beta， alanine and so like training for gravel races in the top and sprint you do a couple of sprint sessions with that and its increasing your training stress during the training so your adaptation is to that higher stress should anything be done in terms of recovery to make sure that you offset that additional stress thats achieved with this trackstack yeah， um just making sure that youre not stacking 2 days in a row of high intensity work like really making sure that youre recovering well！

cause it is a significant stress on the body about sleep we hear so much these days about the imports of sleep for mental health， physical health performance i think this is a great thing， a great trend are there female specific requirements for sleep that very across the menstrual cycle and or by age or just generally you know do many women need to think about the need for sleep differently yeah！

um part of it is the obvious like when you are talking about sleep temperature， right women and men have variations in there sleep temperature and whats optimal so looking at that like you need to create an environment for you that is cool comfortable， which is probably going to be different from your partner who might be sharing your bed so that becomes a sticky point we talk about the minstrual cycle there are definitive changes in sleep architecture were saying that in around the mid Lu Dio to the premenstrual so you know that about ten days before your period starts significant change in your slow wave sleep theres less of it legency is increased so you have a longer time to get to sleep and you have more light sleep so overall you know less of that deep recovery sleep and this is where women tend to have more of their mood issues to because of estrigens play with seretone in in the brain so we really need to nail down our sleep paging in that time period um so looking at things like altheanin and apidin and looking at your room temperature and the screens and all the things that youve talked about for the most part about sleep in sleep ijing super important and then， of course， as you get older in both men and women， you comes more difficult to sleep but we see a significant issue with insomnia and women who have really bad hot flashes and significant um minopasl symptoms and again this has to do with lots of the pertervations from temperatures of night sweats， increase sympathetic load， um not being able to get into a pair sympathetic state， so this is where working with a specific sleep specialist might come into play we can also look at using some adaptagenes the rudiola stact with cnn um and looking at the cold temperature getting people to use the nonsleep， deep rest or yoga need a or some other kind of meditative property that they can then access when they are in bed so theres a lot of different things that we had to be aware of um and again in that paring in a positive state， we see that significant change in sleep and sleep architecture and quality of the sleep but men dont have the same thing， so women have to be a little bit， more aligned with what happening from a hormonal profile standpoint because it does definitively affect saretone in melatonin and sleep architecture because of the interplay that esrojin has on the brain and the receptors makes very good sense well！

put a link in the short captions to some zero cost um nonsleep debreast eogenegeras weput out a couple with my voice if you prefer a another voice， i a big fan of the ones by a Kelly boys， whois contributed to um the waking up app it also has terrific um nonsleep deep breast youcan need us out there， and there are others as well， um you mentioned a few supplements theanin um apigenin， which is chemomile extract yeah， um maybe lets just have a general conversation about supplements whats your fought on supplements？

um how do you place them into the landscape of nutrition they are after all supplements not replacements but um the word supplements i i believe is a little bit misleading because there food base supplements you know， like a protein powder hmm um， there supplements design to achieve a specific outcome and then there are supplements that are kind of a um design to be a more you know support for a bunch of things you know campaign surance policy um what are some of your favorite supplements in any of those categories specifically for women and perhaps even specifically during certain faces of the menstrual cycle and or query menapaas manapaas i just throughout in nine questions at you OK！

the number one is creating creatine for women doesnmatter what h its really important were sing a lot for brain mood um and actually get health so five grams of creating monohydrate per day serve three to five！

three to five yeah um preferably of course。

crea up your because the way is produced so if youlooking at creator peers， the German company that produces it uses a waterbased wash to produce the createen interesting whereas others using acid base wash and we see a lot of side effects with the acid base wash like just yeah so people are like awm really bladed and have Naxia and stuff from taking creating and my visa crea up your actually know like switch to create appear and so they switch and theyre like oh， my gosh！

i feel so much better noted yeah！

um and then vitamin d three really important especially， um， we were looking at all the information this coming out from party， vacular muscle brain everything it goes with vitamin d， also with iron so vitamin d is really important for observing in maintaining iron stores， uh so those are the two big ones and then sorry！

ill i just want to stop you out from moment um as a release to create in i hear two general lines of concern one i hear more often from women minor chaining is that because creating brings water into the muscle， as well as supporting the fosher creator in system of the brain the water into the muscle component means yes， people who take create three to five grams per day will gain a few pounds of body weight thats solid body wait in the form of water within the muscle so solid in air quotes yes！

water but its within the muscles um so they should know that um its not a given now interesting its not a given theres some women on the lower dos of three that dont experience the water gain OK！

and this is not bloat like water subcutaneous water this is water within the muscles right so it will be stored within lean tissue um and then i do here concerns about creating uh causing hair loss？

i my understanding is there is zero evidence for that evidence there is a smigenof evidence that it might increase die how drone levels but its like one study marginal increase and then people linked the hydra testosterone the hair loss and so then the the conclusion people drew was that somehow creating increases hair loss but yousaying zero evidence no evidence we see that women whostart taking it midlife are complaining about it。

but its actually a progesting driven thing we see progester and fluctuation progester can exaserate any hair loss so with women are experience in that theyre saying oh！

its creatine of red all the stuff on creating no its not OK so we get creatine de three um thousands per day five thousand i use i guess it depends a little bit yeah！

uh being very close to and article and the southern himisphere in the winter um very low sunlight exposure um looking around the five thousand same with upper northern hemisphere uk that kind of stuff close you get to the quater the less you need the one concern is like a day here where is foggy and supposed be sunny and people are like great i dont you know， dont have to worry about going out some exposure but then the next day is bright and sunny and theyre like oh sunscreen so they put sunscreen on and not getting the right sunexposer so then again it is a lifestyle thing so basic is two to five thousand great OK？

so weve got creatine vitamin d three what are some of the other supplements that you um， that you take or that you dont know if we say suggest， but that you um perhaps suggest women consider yeah！

so protein powder a really good high quality uh because the amount of protein that women should be getting is often difficults to eat um so again supplementing not using in as the mainstay uh thats one to consider and then again im about adaptagenes so looking at the different adaptagenes asiganda is a good one holy base or tolthies another one shushandra and then getting into some of your medicinal mushrooms lines main rishi this is the two big ones that i look to and often have women use if these adaptagenes blunt cordisol？

because certain ones do like ashwaganda， which by the way， i do think people should cycle if theyre going to take it highdoses yeah right because there are some issues with liver and thyroid and thyroid problems if people take actually on that highdoses for too long， so thats um important to note， but assuming that the adaptagenes or reducing quarters all levels um in addition to doing other things is there a particular time of day or night that people should consider taking them should they avoid taking it early in the day？

my underchaying was that you you want a bit of that court is all uh bump early in the day but you certainly want cortisol lower later in the day yeah and i think the problems people think that they dont want any cortisol they think that would be bad that would be bad they dont understand that the body has fluctuations of cortisol throughout the day and thats normal if were looking at having issues with sleeping and that anxiety provoke from that sympathetic drive in elevation accordance all let it peak in the morning after your waking up and look late afternoon like 4 clock when starts to dip to take your adaptagenes， then cause then it feeds for to being able to relax more， which feeds for to better sleep for something like to change where youlooking for that brain focus you can have it in the morning it doesnt necessarily have this bigit impact on quarters all that you see with something like toxy or asiganda cause she shoundis more stimulatory the other two are more calming um i put some in my morning coffee and then the afternoon when i need to pick me up instead of more caffeine i used shandra because it gives you that boost without the effective caffeine and it doesninterfere with sleep so there is a time in a place to take them and yes something need to be cycled on some need to be cycled off but i tell women what are your main symptoms？

what are the things youlooking to control and we can look and see what kind of adaptagenes we can use in how we place them whats the story with pregnancy and training yeah？

no um is there an official word on this at you know uh assuming a woman knows that shes pregnant from the very beginning of missing a period where shes in a position to make decisions about training or not training training at a given intensity or or not what are your recommendations the human bodies really interesting and when you get pregnant your body？

tells you what you can do， so we see that you have a reduction in your anarobit capacity on purpose your bodys trying to be protective you do have an inexpansion of your blood volume so endurance is really good， but you cant do high intensity um when were looking at the general guidelines that are out there， theyve gotten rid of the heart rate rule and they are now telling women to be as active as they can be without creating injury and without trying to make gains so that means if youre in the waiting room， youre not looking to improve your looking to maintain if youre doing cardiovascular work and you have a specific class that you love to go to yeah， but dont beat yourself up that you cant hit that high intensity youre going for the social aspect youre not trying to gain fitness youre trying to maintain i think the very worst possible scenario is someone is superactive and stops doing everything because they are afraid， because then they get deep conditioned， and then they end up in a worst state then someone who was sedentary whois now encourage to walk during exercise um it hasnbeen well research because you cant get ethics to study pregnant women very well， so we go on a lot on um case studies in case， study。

notes and the bottom line of it all is you stay active and you can do resistance training you can do all the cardiovascular work and your body will tell you what you can and cant do ive been asked whether or not pregnant women can do deliver cold exposure probably no fewer than 25 hundred times on social media and i never have an answer and i but i always default to the cautious answer which is please dont until you talk to somebody who actually has an answer yeah， it just because it sounds like a very precarious situation but in all on see i dont know im just biding time there and and yeah， please go out somebody who can give you a defend of answer yes！

so we see women you have a high risk for miscaradch that anything that they do thats incredibly stressful for the first weeks will put them at a higher risk for it so being very cautious， especially with cold because we know that there are so many different nuances doing something like hot yoga when your pregnant is not there is research so its not detrimental because yeah， because were looking at blood flow diversion that way when you have a slight hypoxia to the placenta and to the baby there is a rebound effect that increases the vascularization so that the baby has better nutrients we see this also with like exercise in exercise intensities this is why people are announce and you need to have some kind of blood flow change and increase in core temperature to create these vascular effects within the plus center to improve nutrient and nutrient delivery to the developing fetus so hes good cold im not so sure of but probably not extreme heat not extreme heat so thats why i mean like hot YOGA is not going to the Sona hot YOGA sits around 40 degrees Celsius so what is that just around a hundred degrees fairing height and in that situation if you feeling too hot， you leave you lie down on the floor dont try to stay for the whole class um but its not going to be detrimental unless youpushing yourself too much again everything in moderation。

especially when your pregnant almost the inverse of what we know formales， which is if men want to conceive， they should avoid the Sona because we know that he does detrimental the sperm viability in a in a real way so much so that i tell guys if they are trying to get， there partner pregnant that they should bring an ice back into the Sona they should insulate that ice back yeah， dont put it directly on the strodo for for other reasons but that its a you know that the effects of he， the negative effects of he on sperm are are real yeah， but theres also an interesting its not just a trend theres actually， some research showing that um cooling the testicles leads to increases in testosterone， which is on the Facebook， kind of um counter intuitive， because turns out that its about the vasio construction， causing the subsequent increase in blood flow， increased vaso dilation so eg the universe of what you just said， which is that during the heating process the hypoxia induces more vascorization of the of the presenta yeah， so um when talking about temperature， one always has to think about the surface of the bodyversus the brain responses we talk about earlier， and then whathappeningduring the deliver heater， deliver cold versus whathappening after the delivery heed or deliver cold alright everything biology is a process not to inevent yeah right and i should make full disclasure i started as an environmental exercise physiologist in my PhD was all in heat in heat research so im a little bit biased towards heat but ive done a significant amount of research in the hot cold thank you for the disclosure i i see it more as a as an indication of of real knowledge so thank you this is an aspect of your training i i knew a little bit about based on your publications but i didnrealize the depth of knowledge so were all benefitting here including this earlier protocol of sonapost training you can bet a lot of people are gonna starting corporying that i think we might need to name that ive done this from time to time name protocols um because people are reluctant to name them after themselves maybe we call that the um， the the seams protocol or something like that the yeah anyway， your discomfort will be other peoples uh benefit now seems like a good time to address some specific questions related to the age brackets that you mentioned earlier um in anticipation of sitting down with you today i ask some different women that i know you know if you could ask the world expert in exercise physiology， hormones and um and nutrition， etc as a relates to women。

one question what would it be and one of the most common questions i got in the fifty and up category was what is the most efficient way for woman older than fifty to train for the maximum health span and life span benefits i love this question because i get it all the time we have to turn our brains away from everything thats been predicatedbefore to this point so for looking for longevity and were looking at what we want to do we were eid or ninety we want to be independently living we want to have good perpriorception balance we want have good bones and we want to be strong so this is where we look at ten minutes threetimes a week jump training so this isnt your landing software in ournees this is like impact in the skeletal system uh a colleaginfront of mind traceclizzle did a PhD and um post not post doc but post research on this and is developing an app on it to show women how to jump to improve by mineral density over the course of four months of this type of training people have gone from being osdio um pinic to normal boundentity， so its a different type of stress so if youconcern is that which a lot of women do have a concern because they lose about one thirds of their bow master the onset of Minapaas yeah yeah significant word yeah goodness query she dont do something as an intervention so we see a lot of women are like oh im going to go on a minute possiment therapy to stop um bondloss yeah， i can be a treatment， but i always look at an external stress that we can put on the body thats gonna invoke a change without pharmacyticles so jump training， heavyresistance training and sprint interval training those are the three key things and from a training standpoint， and then from a nutrition standpoint getting protein， protein is so important when you start telling women， they need to look at around one to one point， one grams per pound， which is around that two to two point， three grams per keylo per day theyre like wow thats a lot of protein it is because we havent been conditioned to eat it but re scramble eggs yeah， so chicken rest at lunch its a small stake at dinner yeah plus other things right exactly and it doesnt all have to be animal products i mean youlooking in all the different beans and things that you can put together thats the other big thing that in order to build the muscle and to keep the body composition and state that we wanted to keep going for longevity those are the big rocks the sprint interval training the heavyresistance training the jump training in the protein im thinking about this and im thinking about my my mother whos seventy nine years old should be eighty at the end of June and is in good health walks lot gardens doesnyolga but does none of the things that youdescribing so mom？

please im gonna im gonna send it a listen to this which in the same vein yeah what about the women out there age twenty to may we make it the twenty to forty bracket um and if we need to divide that more finally， we can um what is the most efficient way for them to train for healthbigger and longevity？

uh making things fun for the most part i dont want people think that its a sure so fear someone whos been told you need to run and you hate running then dont run thats common sense and i say that because i see little kids in nonuscountries that have to run across country and you see these kids when there six years old and all running around the field and there are the kids that hate running there are not natural runners and then they hate this a collectively for the rest of the life so i put that in like when you are exercising you want to find something that you find fun when youre in your 2040 you have more room to get away with things that might not be optimal for you when you start to get order bigrock again is resistance training it doesnt have to be heavyresistance training like i said earlier to failure your periodizing if you want to do a block of Olympic lifting go for if youre like and that comfortable doing that kind of lifting， i want to do more machine stuff great but we want to make sure youchanging it up all the time to keep things moving and checking with regards to strengthen high purchaf i and it becomes more of are you training for something thats endurant？

are you looking for just longevity for brain health？

we need to have some lactate production because women as i said at the beginning of the podcast are more oxidative we dont have as many of those fibers so what were finding an older research is that theres a mystep in brain lactate metabolism because the brain has a been exposed to it especially for looking at women who are being studied now it hasnt been an sociable context to do that kind of work the younger we are and the more that we can keep our are like fibers going by doing high intensity work the more we are exposing our brain to lactate the better we see fast forward to attenuating cognitive decline and reducing the plac development of all timers this is why women who are in there forties plus i want them to do the sprint and high intensity work for that lacked ate production start early because then you can take some of this type to be fibers that could either go more Arabic or an arovic and make them more an erobic so theres the two big things for women who are younger and then you can play around with the other things if you want to be in ulter endurance athlate， yeah， not really ideal， but yeah you can do that thats fine youll recover well。

now forgive me， because youve said it several times throughout todays discussion but i really want a drive home a key point that i think for most people， men and women is not obvious， but is really important when you say high intensity， you dont mean a class or a run uh where your drenched in sweat and gasping for air at the end？

necessarily create lets dissimbiguate high intensity from what most people think of high intensity， which is a really hard workout a tough class where they had me moving the whole time doing a circuit， etc what is the appropriate high intensity workout？

look like OK？

so uh if i talk but true high intensity interval training if your runner is going to the track in doing sets of 4 a hundreds OK？

so 4 a lap yep 8 laps right？

yeah see you looking at between a minute and four minutes of of hard work at eighty percent or more with variable recovery so thats why is a track as a as an example， so if you do one lap and youre like uh im gonna walk half a lap and then do it again thats adequate recovery to yeah yeah its hard right， but its not like youre gonna be there for 90 分钟 doing as many 40 you can because you have that variable recovery it might take half an hour or forty minutes max and then youre guessed out you can do it anymore if re looking at a gym situation， i look i， i like to look at something like every minute on the minute where you might be doing a ten deadlifts at modernintensity wait and attend repetition yeah， so it takes you fifty seconds to complete that then you have ten seconds to move to the next exercise that might be thrusters so you know a squat to clean thruster so its a squat pulling the waitup overhead so youdoing maybe eight of those in that minute and you might have ten second recovery you get to the next exercise that might be um cattle bell swings and youre doing explosive cattle bell swings and youll finish you know uh ten seconds to go you get the fourth exercise i dont know toast a bar or some other kind of v up some other high intensity and then you have one minute completely off so youhad four minutes of really heavy work with maybe ten seconds to move to the next exercise one minute completely off and then you repeat that three times and this is highintency interval training this is not what you would consider resistance training for sake of building！

muscle or strength correct theyre using these loads these machines the the pike you know hang from the bar and bring your knees up or else it or something as a tool to get the heart rate up continually， yeah， yeah！

very different than resistance training the mo the way most people think about it correct so this is the cardiovascular high intensity interval training and the subset of that is sprint interval training and this is something thats really really hard and people dont get it i dont necessarily mean running it can be whatever mode of activity， but its thirty seconds or less as hard as you can go so this is your nine or ten on your rating and perceived exertion a hundred and ten percent its max effort on the rower on the airdine bike yeah running if you like yeah any of those the skear the yeah battle ropes battle robs are big so thirty seconds all out then rest what ten fifteen seconds repeat no you want to because now were looking at that top end where we want uh regeneration of your atp you know， all of that system and central nervous system recovery so this is thirty seconds all out， could be two or three minuteserverrecovery oh nice， because im not looking at tobotta where you 20 seconds on twenty seconds off， because thats not the intensity we want we want you to go all out and recover well enough to be able to go all all out again youre not leaving anything in the tank so those are what i mean by high intensity， interval training， or or when youre looking at polarizing your cardiovascular work thats the top end， those are the two examples of your top end and then your recovery is its long slow walking on another day where youre not going in doing a Tempo run youre not doing A5K easy job because that putyouin that modern intensity and if i hurt you correctly earlier？

you are suggesting most women do one or two days of high intency interval training plus three to four days of resistance training for sake of building strength and muscle， which looks very different its more warm up do a couple worksets you know， two to four worksets of you know overheadpress， two or four worksets of um？

maybe a barbell curl two or four sets of some depth or whatever um ones you know personal choices yeah， yeah！

yeah OK， got it um very different far and away different than what most people men or women are doing out there？

which is um a lot of stairmaster treadmail jogging may be some lifting for high purchasing because i look at the general consensus of whats out there in the fitness world is all based on esthetics in body composition so people have this mentality of i need to be high purchasing to get swol， and i need to do long slow stuff on the cardio machine to lose body fat， but that isnwhat were after were after lets create really strong external stress to create adaptations not only from a neural in a brain standpoint thats understanding it， but also feeding down to metabolic change because if you have a really significant high stress， we see a b genetic changes within the muscle that increase the amount of what we call the glute for gates， so you know the proteins that open up that allow carbohydrate to comment without insulin， so were expanding that acute um glue crossuptake through an apigenetic change the other thing that it does is it causes a an acute inflammatory response that your body learns to overcome and its really important for women to do that because as we start to lose estrigine， we lose a significant antiflametory agent， so this is why we see that increase in the viserial fat， especially when were hitting your your mid fordays onwards is because now you have this increase in free fatty acids and the inability for information to come down so the muscle cell is going oh， my dont know what do with this so get circulated to the liver and the liver stores it as the zero fat whereas if you do that high intensity work， it creates that change， within the muscle to understand pull that in lets use it lets also bring more carbohydrate and more glucos and use that which helps use free fatty acids and it also creates a significant antime flametory response at the level of of the macandria and within the sell itself， which is what estugenused to do so we look at those external stresses its not about bodycompanies that expse is about the molecular changes that we want to invoke to get that body composition and the brain health that allow us to be eighty or ninean independently living and in terms of nutrition you mentioned women should shoot for one point！

one point， two grams of quality， protein per pound of body wait what other types of foods do like to see women in justing， so um are you a fana fruit yeah great well these days see if we sort have to ask these circles uh vegetables， yeah， yeah fiber is important， yeah， uh absolutely and then in terms of starches to um to replace clickaging especially， people are doing these high intensity interval training sessions and the resistance training what are your preferred？

sources depends on here are marking with uh？

i have some people who love coco pops in kids year oh！

i cringed that stuff but you know i prefer i prefer rice in oatmeal and i like a really good sour doe bread with butter olive oil yeah you know good to get that yeah but there are some people will like the ultra process stuff so im like OK？

if you really really need it， then you can put on top of your yogurt after training as part of your carbohydrate update the only time because glued for levels are so high youre basically pulling everything in degree agent at that point anyway um， but ideally carbs are all the different colorful fruit in vege and for looking at sweet potatoes or krumor of your from other parts the world yams all those kinds of things sprouted bread fantastic keen MA Amris all of those different types of things its just staying way from the ultra process and when we look at women， its really important have a very significant diversity in the get microbium， so we see theres a definitive decrease when we start to have hormonal shifts becauseof the way， the gut bugs help de conjugate or unwrapped some of our hormones and shoot em back out in the circulation so as much fiber colorful fruit and vegeas you can but also its the ad twenty year all right eighty percent of the time your spot on twenty percent is life because otherwise where do we get our chocolate and our whisky and theres some data that chocolate is good for us it is brushy the the low sugar dark chocolates why look it is how makes you feel make she feel good right yeah yeah we one has to live yeah！

um and fats um where do you like to see women get their fats from again？

ill do a full disclosure i have been um the instance i was in high school because of an incident of a field trip to pixelotherhouse and driving down the five but thats my own preference so when were looking at fats， um， it can be from a lot of different sources i prefer women to have most their fats from plant based of not because i am plant base， but because of the effect has on the body， but there is a time in a place for animal fats to um the whole fear mongering of saturated fatty aces from dairy has been disproven so for looking at what kinds of fats you want a conglomerate， but you want most of them become from whole food plant based not for multiprocessed um and then of course， you reaching for some real butter youre reaching for some four percent fat， yogurt or something like that to compliment your avocados， your nuts。

your seeds and your olive oils that all sounds very rational and delicious in in my opinion， yes！

its too common sense people dont do it i think if people hear it from you。

theyll do it um i think people just need to hear it in the context of a non diet um context any of done amazing job today of explaining how nutrition fules training， training fuels changes it level of the muscle level etc that allow one to injust more fuel in factor， a lot of what im hearing is that women should probably adjust more quality fules in order to offset these cortisol spikes absolutely and feel better while training and to trainmore which um everyone agrees provided its done properly is is great for us kind of a fun hopefully fun question for you if you had a magic wand and you could get all the women uh on earth now and going forward to make a change or changes you dont have to pick just one in terms of nutrition how they think about their hormoncycle exercise， health ban， lifeban what would you be？

i think i would have everyone understand there in transic sells because we have been indated so much with socics， cultural。

rederic。

and so much external noise that women have forgotten what it means to listen to themselves in their bodies i mean thats the one thing that i have to reteach women to do so often so if i could have a magic wand and have everywoman understand what their bodies are saying and what their cycles are saying and pary menapos is normal its everyones gonna go through it if you have had a menstrual cycle， just a intransically understand what their bodies so then they have the tool to be able to implement external stressors thats going to be beneficial for them well！

doctor Stacy sims this has been tremendously educational for me and i know for everybody listening and or watching um youre taking us on an amazing tour of the best ways to train with cardivascleartraining and resistance training those tailored specifically for women as well as touching into some protocols for both men and women that are immenslie powerful talk a lot about the menstrual cycle i get asked about the menstrual cycle on how it relates to training in viceversus so many times and um thank you for providing clear actionable answers and youve also educators on caffeine supplements including um revealing some supplements that i didnknow existed， which is a， which is a uh not a common occurrence for me yeah yeah wint and um many wins many many wins thanks to you and on and on so just such a rich data set here presented with such clarity and in an actionable way so im behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching i just want to say thank you i know， i know， youve come a very long way from the other side of the equator not just to see us but given that your time is so precious um that youve come to visit us and share with us your knowledge i just want to say uh a really deep heart felt thank you yeah thanks for having me its been fun yeah we have to have you back again maybe well come to New Zealand you should come down yeah definitely thank you thank you for joining me for todays discussion with doctor Stacy sims to learn more about her work please see the links in our shownote captions if youlearningfrom and or enjoying this podcast， please subscribe to our YouTube channel please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify an apple thats a terrific zero costway to support us and on both Spotify an apple you can leave us up to a fivestar review please also check out the sponsors that i mentioned at the beginning and throughout todays episode thats the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guest， youd like me to consider for the huberman lappodcast， please put those in the commentsection on YouTube i do read all the comments those of you that havenheard i have a new book coming out its my very first book its entitled protocols and operating manual for the human body this is a book that ive been working on for more than five years and thats based on more than thirty years of research and experience and it covers protocols or everything from sleep to exercise to stress control， protocols related to focus in motivation and of course， i provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by presale at protocolsbook dot com there you can find links to various venders you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols and operating manual for the human body if youre not already falling me on social media i am Huberman lab on all social media channels， so thats Instagram axformally notice twitter threads， LinkedIn and Facebook， and on all those platforms i discuss science and science related tools， someof which overlap with the contentto the huberman lab podcast， but much of which is distinct from the contents of the hubermann labpodcast again thats hubermanlab on all social media channels if you havent already subscribe to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zerocost monthly newsletter that include podcast summarys， as well as protocols in the form of brief PDF of one to three pages where i spell out the specific dues and in some cases do not， but mostly dos related to things like how to optimize your sleep， how to regulate your dopamine levels theres a protocol for neural， plasticity and learning， as well as protocols for fitness， which we call the foundationalfitness protocol includes everything sets， wraps， cartivascular training again all available completely zerocost you simply go to hubermanlabdot com， go to the menu tabscroll down to newsletter and provides your email， but i should point out we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for todays discussion with doctor Stacy sims and last， but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science。