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Top Fitness Expert Reveals Best Workout Techniques for Women
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Get ready to transform your fitness journey with insights from Dr. Alyssa Olenick, a certified sports nutritionist and exercise physiologist. Have you ever wondered how to fine-tune your workouts for maximum efficiency? In this episode, you'll uncover the secrets of zone two training, strength training, and the nuances of fasting as it relates to exercise. Dr. Olenick’s extensive research on human metabolism, especially concerning sex differences and menstrual cycle physiology, will shed light on optimizing fitness routines for both men and women.
Dr. Olenick takes us on an exploration of cardiovascular fitness and fat-burning thresholds, explaining how training zones can enhance mitochondrial efficiency and cardiovascular health. You'll also learn practical ways to incorporate zone two training into your routine without breaking the bank on fancy equipment. We discuss the 80-20 rule in endurance training and how to balance high-intensity workouts with lower-intensity sessions to achieve optimal results tailored to your fitness level.
We dive into the complexities of balancing extreme endurance training with strength training, especially if you're gearing up for an ultra marathon. Dr. Olenick shares essential tips for women on navigating training around menstrual cycles and menopause, debunking myths and emphasizing personalized approaches. Finally, we dissect the benefits and potential pitfalls of CrossFit, and discuss the intricate relationship between nutrition and fasting for women athletes. This episode is packed with expert advice that promises to elevate your fitness game.
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Today we're talking about zone two training, strength training, should you work out when you haven't eaten, and so many other things regarding health and fitness. My guest today is Dr Alyssa Olenek and y'all. She's fantastic. You are going to learn so much from today's episode. Alyssa is a certified sports nutritionist. She's, most importantly, a doctor of exercise physiology. She's been a CrossFit level two trainer. She's, most importantly, a doctor of exercise physiology. She's been a CrossFit level two trainer. She's completed her doctoral training, which we talk more about in the episode. She's fascinated with metabolism. She's done a lot of studying on women's menstrual cycles and if that affects their workouts and so many other things. You're definitely going to get a lot out of today's episode.
Speaker 1:You may want to listen to it a couple of times or just be ready to take notes, because Alyssa goes in depth on several different things and really helps to. She doesn't just give a. Here is the set prescription of what you should do. She really talks through things that you need to consider about who you are, how you train, how well trained you are. She gives protocols for if you are just getting started with working out. She gives different protocols for you to think through if you're more well-trained and gives, honestly, some flexibility and some breathing room to some of the things that are out there right now regarding how do you know how to do zone two training correctly? What about strength training and all of that stuff? Let's dive in to today's episode. Alyssa, I am super excited to have you on and have all the questions and talk about all the things, especially when it comes to strength training, cardio training, maybe even some CrossFit, but specifically with women. So thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1:I first want to start by talking about your doctoral training. So you studied exercise and human metabolism, sex differences and menstrual cycle physiology. What did you do in your doctoral research? That, I mean, that's a lot. What did?
Speaker 2:you do in your doctoral research that I mean, that's a lot, yeah. So yeah, I know it's funny, I was a super nerd in all of my academic endeavors. So yeah, I have a master's and a PhD in exercise physiology. So tried and true. You know I'm an exercise scientist to the core. I always joke that my bias and disclaimer lies in the fact that I'm an exercise physiologist, like I'm going to see everything through the lens of, like pro exercise, which you know I think it's a good bias to have. So, um, I did, I started getting into human metabolism and my master's and I kind of brought that with me into my PhD and kind of kept doing that work and then started integrating that a little bit more into the exercise setting.
Speaker 2:So a lot of my, my training and my research, my research through my master's and my PhD, was either in postprandial metabolism, so how we respond to the food that we eat, or exercise metabolism, how our exercise responds or shifts or supports us during exercise. And so I always kind of had this interest in human metabolism, metabolic health, energy systems, all those things. And so I had started doing research with women in my master's and I kind of continued that forth in my PhD and I didn't really realize at the time there was such big discrepancies in sport and exercise science and researched on a woman versus men. It was more so just me following my interest and passions and all of those things. And so as I got throughout the process and started working and looking more towards my dissertation, I realized that there's a lot of gaps in the area of the menstrual cycle and birth control use and all of those things, and so I started to get more interest in sex differences and then menstrual cycle effects on some of that exercise metabolism that I had alluded to earlier.
Speaker 2:So in my PhD my dissertation work was a study looking at postprandial meal response and exercise response to high-intensity interval training between men and women and looking at how those were related someone's meal response and then exercise response and then sex differences between those. And then for my final dissertation project I essentially looked at the metabolic response to hit across the menstrual cycle in birth control and non-birth control users, and so I did a lot of that menstrual cycle work there with that and then I finished up formally my postdoc but I'm still finishing the papers where I kind of wanted to transcend that education and training into still metabolism and metabolic health and human physiology, but more so in the areas of menopause, because I wanted to kind of get that breadth and depth of the entire lifespan within that. So I've spent the last few years then after my PhD, continuing my training, doing more work in that menopause time period and metabolism as well.
Speaker 1:So for many of the listeners, this may be the first time that they have heard that there are two different types of metabolisms Full disclosure. It is the first time I am heard that there are two different types of metabolisms full disclosure. It is the first time I am hearing that there are two different types of metabolisms. I've probably like read over it at some point in my life, but it just didn't register. So what I mean, you explained what they were, but to the average, like everyday person living their life, who's not an exercise scientist like you are, yeah, is there is. What do we need to know about post-prandial?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the fancy word post-prandial just means post-meal, post-meal.
Speaker 1:Yes, and exercise yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's all the same metabolism but it's responding differently to different like. You can think of them as stressors, and when I say stressors I don't want people to think like eating is stressful for my body or exercise Like they're just a stress on your system and your body responds to stresses and shifts our physiology to adapt or respond or flux for them. And so when you eat something, your body has to respond to all those nutrients coming into your body. And so how it does that is this shuttling of fats and carbs either to storage or in your bloodstream and or using them for energy or shifting your body to burning more fat or burning more carbs in response to what you're eating. So there's this response to what you're bringing in, and so you might think of that like people talk a lot about, like post-meal glucose spikes, is a postprandial spike.
Speaker 2:A lot of my work was looking at the fat response and fat metabolism, so triglyceride or fat oxidation, elevation and then clearance, and so the fancy term a lot of us have probably heard of thrown around nowadays is metabolic flexibility, and that's really what my dissertation stuff was on metabolic flexibility. And so you have this stress of how you respond to what you eat and people who are more metabolically flexible or more metabolically healthy or whatever it is, you have a more favorable response. Your body has an easier time clearing out, storing, burning and using carbohydrates and fats and or shifting between those as needed, where somebody who has metabolic inflexibility is going to have a harder time doing that, so they might have elevated blood glucose or triglycerides that don't clear as rapidly or as quickly in the time period after you finish a meal and or heighten beyond when maybe we would expect from those time periods. And so really you can think of conditions like type 2 diabetes or metabolic disease, as you know, diseases that are either exacerbated or contribute to this, like inflexibility in our response to what we're eating and how we're eating, and so then our bodies though a secondary stressor that causes our bodies to have to shift if we're using carbs versus fat and or storing them or shuttling them as exercise. So when we're eating, we're obviously trying to burn or store the nutrients that we're using or shift our metabolism in response to those when we're exercising. Similarly, the same thing happens, except for your body is then trying to release and use and burn and or shift the metabolism towards whatever is the most favorable, based off the intensity that you're doing to allow you to support the demands of the activity that you're doing. So it's kind of a slightly opposite stressor in your body. So you might have, you know, you're going to have a lot of increases in your fat oxidation potentially if you're doing lower intensity exercises. But if you get more high intense you might have a shifting or an increase in carbohydrate oxidation. In general, when you increase exercise you're going to have an increase in carbohydrate oxidation to begin with.
Speaker 2:But what I was really interested in is people's fitness statuses will really dictate when and where those crossovers of moving from fats to carbs occurs.
Speaker 2:And the intensity of what you're doing and or your own fitness status will dictate what you're burning or using at any given point in your exercise training session.
Speaker 2:And some of this is people worry about it from a fat loss standpoint versus more from a fueling and performance and or metabolic health standpoint. You can also look through that lens as well. So you're kind of just thinking these are two different stressors that we can put in our body to cause a metabolic shift or metabolic response. We're not at this homeostasis of where we wake up kind of fast in the morning and you don't have any stimulus on the system yet. But if you were to start sprinting or you were just to eat something, your body's going to have to respond to either that demand of intensity or exercise or physical output or whatever you're putting into your body and your system. So it's the same metabolism. So there's like the same metabolic pathways and the same energy systems, but it's just them fluxing or shifting or responding differently to whatever demand you're asking them to do, or responding differently to whatever demand you're asking them to do.
Speaker 1:This is a perfect time for me to ask you about zone two training. So, uh, the zone two is something that I feel like, depending on where you listen to, the content from it's going to shift in the prescription or the understanding of it, or how they define it, like what it is. So, what is zone two training? And I'm asking this here, like for the listeners, because this has to do a lot with like ideally. I just read something about it this morning and in zone two, like you're, you're mainly trying to do fat. You're mainly trying to keep it at a level in which you're not getting high enough intensity that it's going over to carbohydrate, carbohydrate. You're keeping it low enough that you're burning fat. But it's also not necessarily because you're trying to like, lean out. It's more so for mitochondrial health and you know a whole slew of things that I'm not smart enough to understand. But can you talk more about zone two, what it is, and does it differ for genders?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when we're thinking about zone two, training I know it's the rage and you guys have heard everything good, bad, left, right up and down, so I'm going to try to make this as like, helpful as possible. So our energy systems that I just talked about also relate to your zones and your intensities and your training. So when you're thinking about your exercise, training and zones, it's going to be on the spectrum of one to five and these are basically, when you break them down, physiologically related to these different physiological points during exercise, and that's how we're classifying them. But most of us aren't going into a lab and doing formal exercise testing and knowing where these things fall. So then we're using heart rate, because heart rate is generally an indirect measure of these things that are happening. So when you're thinking about your zone two, your zone two training, or zone one, which is the zone below that, we have five of them. So right now we're at the first two, zone one and two. That cutoff point at the end of zone two to the start of zone three is typically where you're trying to stay below something known as your first lactate threshold or your first ventilatory threshold. So when you start doing exercise training, your body will start using carbohydrates, start using your energy systems, increasing energy metabolism across the board. You will increase fat oxidation and carbohydrate oxidation simultaneously during this point in time, but fats are still rising with carbs because it's not so intense that it's being cut off yet. So you have blood lactate. People tend to associate lactate with like that made me fatigued, that made me sore, that made me slow down. None of that's true. That's a conversation for another day.
Speaker 2:Lactate can be thought of as actually an energy molecule. So when you're breaking down carbohydrates, your body either shuttles those carbs and they're broken up pieces into the next step in the energy system, or it makes lactate. And if you are in an aerobic state where you have lots of oxygen available, you can keep metabolizing it. You'll just take that lactate and keep turning it into energy metabolism and you will keep going. It won't accumulate and it's not making fatigue. So you're always making lactate and clearing it out.
Speaker 2:So at this point in time, the cutoff between two and three in your zones is usually your blood lactate is thought to be below two millimoles per liter and that means nothing to anyone if you don't have a lactate meter. It's just the physiological marker of what you're trying to stay below. So that's kind of an indication of exercise fatigue or stress in your body that we can look at. And it's also associated with this increase in ventilation that we have. When your body is starting to become more anaerobic or use more carbohydrate or have less oxygen dependency, you will start breathing heavier because you're going to start producing more CO2 as a byproduct of that energy metabolism going on further down in our mitochondria and our muscles and things in our body. So it's a point at which people often allude to the talk test. Once you can't start sustaining like 15, 20, maybe 30-word conversations calling someone on the phone while you're doing cardio kind of things. That's kind of an indirect association then to that lactate or that heart rate. So a lot of people will say this is about 60 to 70% of your max heart rate or heart rate reserve. Give or take. Roughly. This is not a bad general recommendation.
Speaker 2:The thing that when it comes to zones and that lactate that we were talking about, is that your fitness status impacts the point at which you have that increase in lactate and so when we think about then the next zone, we have zone two to zone three and there's that cutoff there and then zone three to zone four. So that cutoff between zone three and zone four is going to be the secondary lactate threshold or the secondary ventilatory threshold, and that's when you start having a lot of rapid breathing, a lot of rapid increase in respiration, and or your blood lactate starts to shoot up from this break point of like four millimoles per liter and so at this point in time anything above this lactate is typically not being able to clear itself out, at a rate to at least somewhat keep up with its production, and you have this rapid increase in blood lactate beyond this point in time. That is kind of your threshold pace or your threshold intensity. And when we are thinking about your own individual physiology, the point at which those lactate thresholds, those two different ones, occur, whether in relation to each other or on their own, or your true lactate threshold, which is that point where it breaks off and starts to increase, is related to your overall aerobic fitness status. So while that's 60% to 70% for generic regular people isn't a bad recommendation, it is also going to be variable, because people who are lower fitness might reach their lactate threshold or that point of that cutoff where they start burning a lot more carbs and less fats at, say, maybe 55, 55 to 65% of their VO2 max, their maximal pace intensity that they could sustain. It's the most amount of oxygen that you can use as your VO2 max, where someone who has a higher training status or fitness status, they might go up to 65 to 75% of their VO2 max. Or, like those elite, elite, crazy marathoners, they might be able to oxidize fat and use oxygen efficiently up to 80 plus percent of their VO2 max. So this is a shifting. So as you get more fit, that heart rate of what you can still be oxidizing fat or being in like a zone two or not producing extra lactate, can shift so that 60 to 70% is a rough guideline For most general people who don't have a lot of cardiovascular fitness and training.
Speaker 2:I do sometimes think that is an easy and good recommendation to start with, because generally if you have lower fitness status, you're going to have to exercise at a lower intensity relative to your max anyway and that feels frustrating and hard for most people and we can talk about prescription application and when to ignore that versus use that maybe later. So that's what we're thinking of when we're talking about zone two and so when you are in a zone two state of training, you are typically using a larger percent of fat for fuel production or energy production. And then as you increase to that zone three, to zone four, you essentially have this increase in energy expenditure. Across the board, fat and carbohydrate oxidation increase and then you start increasing in energy expenditure in the moment because you're going harder, faster, whatever, but that fat point starts to rapidly shut down and the percentage of what you're burning becomes more 80, 90, 100% carbohydrate. So this is called the crossover concept, and so the point at which your body kind of starts using a lot of carbs and switches to fat kind of also falls in relation to similar to the lactate threshold, where the more fit you are, the later in that process or exercise or activity you switch from burning a lot of fat or using a lot of fat into carbs. But, as we alluded to already, you don't need to obsess about this from like a fat burning standpoint.
Speaker 2:This is often when people talk about like the fat burning zones that was on treadmills or mapped in your local YMCA 15, 20, 30 years ago. That's what they're talking about, because you're using a higher overall fat concentration as a whole for your energy expenditure relative to the total calories that you're burning, but we don't want to worry about that from that standpoint. Yes, there's benefits to improving cardiovascular fitness from a body composition standpoint and metabolic flexibility or fat burning standpoint, but what you really want to focus on during this type of training is staying in that lower relative effort and intensity, because what you're doing is you're improving your body's capacity to build the physiological systems, whether that's through mitochondrial biogenesis, which is just making more in mitochondria, your mitochondria's ability to use oxygen more efficiently, and or the capillary systems that deliver the oxygen to our muscles so that they can take it up and use it in our muscle cells. That's what we're developing when we are doing that zone two training, and the reason this really works is because it's not that higher intensity training doesn't also help support mitochondrial benefits or any of these things is that you can only do a little bit of that and it does have some extra benefits that we do want to get in both of these. But with zone two training you're able to get in a lot of volume, so you can think of it as the lifting equivalent of like you don't one rep max every single day. You go through phases in training where you do sub-maximal effort, work for higher reps or more sets or more volume to build a quote-unquote base of lifting, and then you can refine that with that higher intensity stuff. I think a lot of people with cardio they just think more intense, better, all the time when we really want to think about these classifications and how we're doing it. And so with zone two training, you are using a lot of fat and or training your body to use or burn or develop more of a engine to your body or your system. So it's almost like going from like a four to a six cylinder car over time. That's what you're kind of looking to do, right, and so that's what we think about when we're thinking about zone two training.
Speaker 2:Now, when it comes to males versus females, at least in the premenopausal state, so when there's still the presence of estrogen in our bodies, there are some studies that show no-transcript, a little bit more type two muscle fiber dominant. And so when we're thinking submaximal, like under 65, 75, maybe 55% of your VO2 max, like lower efforts and intensities, we do see greater fat oxidation rates from females. So when we think about like sex differences between zone two males and women. I know there's a lot of confusion around this right now. There is this advantage, at least in the premenopausal state, for us being more fat oxidative, already having more type one muscle fibers, maybe potentially needing less volume of that zone two stuff or cardiovascular stuff to get similar adaptation to our male counterparts.
Speaker 2:When it comes to like mitochondrial benefits and capacity, maybe a moderately trained female might have similar mitochondrial capacity or components to that of a male. But the one thing I really want to add here too and this is like a little bit of my bias because this is my dissertation's works thesis answers, questions, solutions I think that there's also a major component that we ignore about. We look at sex, but we don't look about fitness status too. So it's not that just an untrained female magically is just protected and going to be from all this metabolic health stuff or going to be a magically amazing at zone two training just because she's a female. Training status and training response in females is still important for increasing that capacity to use and burn fat similar to males or in general, it's just that we naturally have a little bit more of a predisposition to favor that within our metabolism when we're exercising and training.
Speaker 1:In my ideal life, I would be able to like go to a lab and be hooked up to all these machines and like exercise and then do my lactate. I've literally looked at buying a lactate meter, like I'm super obsessed with this kind of stuff, but we don't have the ability, like for for every person to be able to get that granular. So then and all of that is so like it's such good information, it's so helpful to understand why this is important and what we're talking about, and you know a lot and you're really good at talking about it Um, but, like, how do you boil? So, okay, then, how much zone two? Like, how much zone two should I be doing, doing per week? If I can't, you know, if I don't want to spend the 600 or $400 or whatever for the lactate meter and the $2 per strip, um, then how do I know, like, what is the zone that I'm? Is it the talk test? Is it an RPE? Like, is that good enough, kind of how? How do we do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so most people nowadays are getting so hyper obsessed with this, and it's funny because you know, I spent years in labs doing this and I paid out of pocket and no one talked about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was like you know how many lactate strips I've gone through in my life A lot. But most people don't have this fine-toothed data and the reality is, unless you really are refining your performance or are pretty, you know, intermediate plus to low advance, even if you're not like an elite athlete, it probably doesn't matter. I think a lot of people are putting too much pressure on regular people to be so granular with these things. And I'm a fan of heart rate, I'm a fan of talk tests, I'm a fan of RPE. I think it needs context.
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to know, everyone's like RPE is better, talk test is better, heart rate is better, I'm like. Well, they all are pieces of the puzzle here, and so for most people the reason heart rate is helpful is because it's an indirect marker of that physiology. So if you were to go to a lab and do a lactate test or a VO2 max test, they would track your heart rate with your metabolic response, with your lactate, and they could tell you exactly what heart rate you are at each zone and classify that for you. But for most of you you don't need to do that. So I like to use something called a threshold test, which shameless plug to your audience. I can give you the link to my freebie opt-in for my zones calculator here for you guys that I have.
Speaker 1:We would love it.
Speaker 2:I have a zones mini guide that breaks these down a little bit more. I know I'm like pitching my stuff here, but like I just, you know people want to learn more about these things. I have this stuff a little bit more, but I like to use something called a threshold test, and this is an easy, indirect way for the regular lay people to just figure out that cutoff of that zone three to four that threshold, and then, from there, figure out their zones up or down from that. These tests, though, work better if you do have a baseline of fitness, because what happens for a lot of people if you have a low fitness status, if you spike intensity, a lot of people say well, my heart rate just spikes up to like a million beats per minute, I can't do zone two, and that's just because you're not fit enough to worry about that yet. So for people who are of lower fitness status you're new to cardio training, you don't do a lot of it, you maybe can't sustain like 30 to 60 minutes of consistent cardiovascular training of any intensity or pace or speed 60 minutes of consistent cardiovascular training of any intensity or pace or speed and or you just simply are exercising below the exercise guidelines. So if you're doing like less than 150 minutes per week of like cardiovascular activity and training, I would not obsess and worry about if I'm in zone two. Am I doing zone two? Is my zone perfect? The thing that matters the most and is most important there is that you're getting in that exercise guideline advice of 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise and or you can trade off to 75 minutes of vigorous, which is your higher intensity stuff I'm a big fan of. I think everyone should try to get a little bit of both. But if you're just trying to get it in for the minimum health benefits, start there and don't worry about that.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're trying to do an easier day of cardio, maybe you are pulling back your intensity. If you're a runner, you are running a little bit slower. You're not sprinting all of your training. Or maybe you're doing some easier training, but don't freak out if your heart rate's higher, even if it seems perceptually easier, because you just have a lower level of that fitness and one of the things that's going to help shift that line forward to you is just doing cardio and getting more fit and doing fit. It's not like I think people paint this picture that if you do it like you end up in this zone three to four for your regular cardio, you will immediately implode on the spot. If you're not doing that much cardio, that becomes more of an issue for people who are doing a lot of cardio every single week. So you hear the 80-20 rule thrown around a lot.
Speaker 2:And so if you are just and I'm not trying to say like you're a bad person for not having cardiovascular fitness or not being at the exercise guidelines, but just start there, don't worry about it. And that's where I think like RPE can be more helpful for people in this position, because your heart rate is going to be high, because you just your body is responding to something that's very stressful to it. And exercise adaptation is just your body going, hmm, I don't like this, and then seeing it again and going, ok, let's make this easier the next time I see it, but you have to do the thing. And cardiovascular adaptations you know everyone rants and raves about how slow muscle gain is. Cardio is just as slow of a process. You just don't see it because your muscles are adapting in kind of like an invisible manner kind of way instead of like growing outwardly.
Speaker 2:And so if you're at this state, thinking about exercising your easy training, maybe at a three to five range of effort, is probably a good place to be, and for some people, this may be walking. For some people, walking might not be hard enough, so you have to have a delineation there. This is where heart rate can be helpful. Is your heart rate at least getting up to 50% to 60% of your max heart rate, regardless of fitness status? That's a good indication that whatever you're doing is stressful enough. So if walking does that for you, great. If not, let's hop on a bike, let's incline walk, let's go on a rower, let's do something a little bit more stressful for us and just trying to have that as a bare minimum and just accumulating volume or frequency or being more active and improving your cardiovascular fitness and training over time.
Speaker 2:So then, once you're past that point, I think a great goal for people is the next step when it comes to exercise dosing is building up from 150 to 300 minutes per week, because when we think about health benefits, you do get additional and additive benefits up from that 150 to 300, and then potentially up to like 500,. 300 to 500 minutes per week, you start to get a lot of benefits. But 300 seems like it's a really good goal. That if that's realistic but for a lot of people that isn't realistic. And that's where we can start mixing in some intensity with easier stuff so we can kind of get a little bit of the best of both worlds. And so then as you start doing more total minutes of cardio per week, you can start thinking about delineating between easy and hard.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people throw around the 80-20 rule, and 80-20 has merit but it's also relative. So a lot of that 80-20 stuff comes from the fact that it's not even 80-20. It's 10 to 30% of total volume of endurance athletes in studies they've done, or historically ends up being higher intensity work. That's either zones three, four or five or just four and five, depending if they're doing something called a polarized model, which is either just zone two and then zone four and five, or a pure middle model that has zone two and then three, four and five are the upper intensity zones of that. And so these people that they are basing these percentages off of, they are doing astronomically higher volumes of cardio than most of us are ever going to be doing in a week.
Speaker 2:And so you have to think about who you are. So if you're doing 150 to 300 minutes per week but you're doing one day of high intensity effort per week which I think is a good goal for most people there maybe one day or whatever that is maybe you're splitting it up between two higher intensity days. Some people can tolerate three just depending on who you are and what you're doing. The less you're doing, the less that percentage or magical split matters. It's good to have a little bit of both. But you're probably going to be maybe off balance of that 80 20, because if you're doing three days of cardio and one of them is high intense, well then you're already at 33% of your total minutes or volume or whatever you're looking at. So it's more. So if you're doing less, you can get away with that little bit of that off ratio, because the reason zone two is so beneficial is because you can do a lot of it and it's recoverable and it's not as fatiguing on your body and it's a great way to drive up volume in your overall training. But if your volume is lower, your recovery demands are lower and your fatigue is lower, of course, relative to your own training and fitness status. If you take my sedentary mother and give her three days a week of cardio and one of them being hit, she's going to have a really hard time recovering from that. So, just taking into consideration who you are and working up to what you're doing, but that's going to be off balance.
Speaker 2:On that 80-20 rule Mixed with for those of you unfamiliar with me, I'm crazy. I'm training for my first 100-mile ultra marathon. I'm doing like 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 to 15 hours a week of cardio right now, depending on the week and what I'm doing, and so I might be doing maybe only 10% of my workouts being intense minutes, but that's still actually a pretty big percentage of my overall training versus when I was doing maybe five, six, seven hours a week and I had a little bit more intensity that might've been higher. So you have to just keep in the context of that with the person that you're doing, and so it's not so much like being like, oh, I have to exactly count my minutes that I'm doing each week. 80-20 is a good rough line guideline. The moral of that is you need to be doing a lot of the easy stuff and a little of the really hard, really specific stuff that's more intentional and that's kind of the goal there of that. So I think people get too hung up on the percentages and it's like, well, if you're not even exercising enough for minimal health, then don't worry about that. But as you add more and more, what you can do is you can add more and more of the easy stuff because that allows you to increase the volume or total minutes of what you're doing and get more of those adaptations and add that to it and do it in a way that isn't as fatiguing and recovering. So if that helps the audience I know that's not as specific Thinking of 10% to 30% of your overall minutes, think about it in minutes, not days per week.
Speaker 2:I think that's a lot easier for people Starting at the closer to 10, building up to 20, up to 30. And then I'll add the note here of when it comes from a sex differences perspective. Women may need or benefit from potentially a little bit more high intensity minutes per week because of those physiological differences that we have. But you don't want to just jump to it. Just because women can potentially benefit from more Doesn't mean you go from doing no high intensity minutes per week to 30% of your week at high intensity minutes or three days per week of high intensity minutes, working up and titrating up like you would with any sort of progressive exercise training and programming.
Speaker 2:But I think that when we think about that from a rough guideline lower volume people you might be closer to that 30% of that 80-20.
Speaker 2:Higher volume people you might be more 10 to 20 because you're just doing so much. And then women in general, kind of across the lifespan, might benefit from being a little bit more on that high end or at least making sure they're including that in. Like you want to make sure you have the sprinting or the high intensity stuff as part of your training, but the exact percentage it doesn't need to be as dogmatic as people are making it. Do a lot of the easy stuff, do some of the hard stuff, and that's really what we want from this type of training. You're kind of building the engine with the easy stuff volume, low, recoverable and then refining your ability to like accelerate in speed and or those types of characteristics of the high intensity stuff. So you kind of want that polarization of both in your training and so I think the one to two days of the higher heart intensity stuff mixed in with the rest being easy and recoverable is an easier guideline for people to kind of follow.
Speaker 1:I agree, I feel like I can breathe after hearing you talk. I'm like, oh okay.
Speaker 2:I've had a lot of practice with people panicking about zones to me for like cause it got really popular really fast and I've been talking about this since 2018. I my first ebook, was like running by zones and all of a sudden I had all my clients and all my followers panicking and I was like okay, guys, like yes, it's fun and exciting and it's cool, but like sometimes you just need to tape your watch. You know what I mean. Like just tape your watch, it's going to be okay, right, exactly Like just tape your watch, it's going to be okay.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly, just just go exercise and you know, stay in these general, in these general guidelines, yeah. So how are you training? What led you to want to do a hundred mile ultra marathon, and are you still strength training on top of that, 15 hours a week of cardio.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I'm a little bit extreme. So I'm, I love and I'm fascinated with the limits of human physiology and that's part of why I did what I did with school. I love exercise, I think it's fascinating, I like experimenting and trying things with myself, and I've done a little bit of everything over the years. I got really into strength training and I got really, really strong in my early 20s, won some strength training stuff like deadlifted 400 pounds, like I'm built to be a strength athlete more than a runner. But I grew up a runner and I missed that and I kind of fell into the trail and ultra running scene. And so I started my PhD, started my business and ran my first ultra marathon in the first semester of school. As one does, right, and so as one does, why not as one does? And so for me it was just endurance. Is this different area of fitness that require? It's not just physical, it's very mental, but it's also very logistical, is the best way to describe it. So it really.
Speaker 2:Ultramarathons are not just well, are you tough enough? You have to be fit, you have to be smart, you have to have nutrition, you have to have strategy, and so I've ran over 10 ultramarathons or something at this point in time, and so I did a hundred K back in 2020, kind of fell off of doing the bigger races. Finishing up my PhD was very time demanding. I had an Achilles injury eased back into it. I did a 50 miler last year, knowing that I kind of had the goal of like, okay, I have a little bit of a break from being in academia for a little bit, and so what better time to fill all your time with to finally committing to 100 miler? I feel like it's a rite of passage in ultra running. I think everyone has ends up you don't have to, or doesn't all end up doing it. But I'm on that trajectory of like I knew that I want to see what it's like to try to attempt that, and so, yeah, I am still.
Speaker 2:I am still lifting on top of my training. I would say like last weekend I ran 15 hours, but that's because I did like a training camp weekend. It's still not that much better. My weekly volume the week before was probably 11 hours of running, but I have maintained on average, for the most part, three days of lifting. Unless I'm traveling, I do two on this entire year, which has been very time demanding. It is very hard. When I was busier in school sometimes I would drop to two a little bit sooner. But yeah, I'm still doing my heavy compound lifts and strength training and, honestly, I really use strength training as a tool to both support me for being strong for the mountains, but also keeping my body healthy, injury-free, in one piece, so it's a big component for me there too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how long does it take to run the hundred mile?
Speaker 2:My goal is 28 to 30 hours. The cutoff is like 32. I think um we'll see Just through the night, you don't stop at night.
Speaker 2:I mean it depends on the course and the train and how fit you are, um, and there's a lot of that, it's not just the running. You're stopping at aid stations and how do you feel and uh, it's my first one, so usually it takes longer because you're just learning so much out there as you go. Really fast courses and really fast runners might finish them in like 15 to 16 hours for males and 17 to 18 for women. But more mountainous terrain and mountainous courses can take up to 48 hours if you're back in the pack or how slow they are. It really just depends on the race. But for my race specifically, I would like to finish in 28 to 30 hours and what is the longest you will run before you do that race?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have ran 30 miles on four different occasions this year, so 34 technically. Last month I did a race at 34 miles and then last weekend me and my friend did a 30-mile day and a 20-mile day back to back of part of a 60-mile week. So that's probably my biggest week of training so far. I wanted to try to race a 50K or 100K but I just couldn't find one logistically. So I did that training weekend of 50 miles over the course of two days back-to-back. That was probably my biggest and that will be my biggest. I'll maybe try to do another 30 to 40 mile run next month about five weeks out, or another like 20 to 20 back to back or things like that. I've been focused a lot more this time around on just more volume and more frequency within my training rather than relying on, like, just the long runs. But yeah, I mean not to say not to poo poo. Running 34 miles at one time is still a very long run to do.
Speaker 1:You know what. Get it, girl. I think you're doing great. Let's talk about strength training. So, uh, what are the differences between men and women? Like, how much of a difference does um an active menstrual cycle, so women who are premenopausal, how much of a difference does that make in strength training, or when they should strength train, or how heavy they should lift during? I mean, is there really that much of a difference?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I always disclaimer guys, don't come for my pitchforks, I'm on your side. The research right now basically has there is no legitimacy to a cycle sync specific workout and training plan. There's a tiny little bit of research that suggests that maybe in the follicular phase you might have a slight hypertrophy benefit because of the estrogen, because estrogen is actually a very muscle healing and promoting and restorative hormone. I mean, I think you can see more of a difference of that, not just in the menstrual cycle, but when you think about, like, the response to postmenopause when we have that decline of estrogen, you really see how important that is for muscle health and muscle growth and things like that. So there's a tiny bit like when I'm talking about there's like maybe four or five kind of studies. Half of them are pilot, some of them are single limb. That alludes to maybe like 50% of them say yeah, there's slight benefit to follicular versus luteal phase training, but nothing's concrete enough to say that you should do anything specific around your cycle.
Speaker 2:People find that their performance might be lower in that late luteal into early menstrual cycle phase. A lot of people's reported symptomology with their menstrual cycle is more strongly correlated than their hormones to declines in performance, and there's some thoughts that this might be tied to more of like. Essentially, your hormones are in fact impacting your serotonin in your brain and your pain sensitivity, so things might feel heavier, or your RPE rating of perceived exertions might feel harder. Your pain tolerance might be lower, so similar weights or efforts might feel like they are potentially harder or heavier than it actually be relating to shifts and changes in your hormones, and so there isn't some concrete magical evidence, although the internet will have you say you need to change it week by week, change your programs, do this on this day, this on this day. What you typically need, what I recommend for women, is that you need a good strength training program that's progressive and then uses auto-regulation. So auto-regulation is that rating of perceived exertion that I just talked about and that itself, for most people, is going to capture 90% of variations that you have, just not only from hormones and your PMS related symptoms, but also I always like to say we're more than just our periods. You are a parent, a spouse, you have a job, you have a life, sleep, nutrition, stress all of these things are going to impact your training. It's not like your luteal phase is going to override magically your three hours of sleep and a whiff of air you had for breakfast. You have to think about what other things are you doing to support your body within this process and I would say that maybe people who take care of their body, that they're sleeping less, they're fueling less, they maybe are feeling more heightened shifts with this, potentially Because a lot of my recommendations for working around the menstrual cycle are going to be more, more behavior change or body lifestyle support.
Speaker 2:But to backtrack, writing a perceived exertion is a scale of 1 to 10. And it's basically good. Exercise training programs are typically going to give you for strength training are going to give you an effort level that you should be working out at. Some people use percentages.
Speaker 2:I like RPE because I think it allows for more fluctuation over day-to-day variance. Your training is going to shift and fluctuate for everyone. That happens for males too. It's not a menstrual cycle specific thing. But if you are having fluctuations across the month, not only do I recommend you track your actual cycle to see your cycle and your patterns and your windows and your days, because everyone's cycle phase and length and when they ovulate are going to be at different times, so it's hard to say. Everyone should do this on this day. It's very inconsistent, but your patterns month to month may might even be different from your strength training performance or your own individual symptomology.
Speaker 2:But if you track your cycles and use RPE and are tracking your weight to the gym, you might start to notice patterns for yourself and recognize this is normal for me. I might be, you know, dropping weight this week because I don't feel as good, or you know what? I feel really great, so I'm going to add more weight and I think that that captures if there is benefit to the follicular phase for lifting heavy or if there's going to be impairments of your luteal phase. If you're adjusting based on RPE, you're saying this is what an eight out of 10 is today for me, so I'm going to adjust this. So maybe one week your eight out of 10 is 150 pounds and you feel really good that was higher for you and the next week you feel kind of crummy and you're still lifting in an eight out of 10 and you drop down to 140 or 145 on that lift. You are still over time, probably going to still make progress, but you're adjusting to the stress of the day. The load is relative to your body, your body. To some degree it knows load, but it doesn't just know load, it knows overall stress on the system. So people can adjust or auto-regulate to this and this captures not only shifts in your hormones but also all those other shifts in your lifestyle as well, and I think it's a great training tool for most people. So you can strength train across your entire menstrual cycle, you can do cardio across your entire menstrual cycle.
Speaker 2:But what I think that a lot of women make the mistake, as is they follow very haphazard or regular, erratic or non-consistent or progressive good training programs, so it's hard to capture where individual variations are controllable or maintainable, or finding even patterns within themselves. I mean, how many people say, oh, I just cried out of nowhere and I didn't know what was going on, and then, oh, I got my period the next day, and so if you can start monitoring and assessing those patterns versus your training performance, you might start to be able to identify. You know what? Two days before my cycle, every single month, I have the worst training session of my life. So I'm just going to always put a rest day there, or I'm going to put an easy intensity day there, or I'm going to do maybe something more passive there. That feels better to me and I think that adjusting for your symptoms or your own experience that's not cycle syncing. That's totally fine to do. You have absolute permission to do that.
Speaker 2:If you feel super crummy the first day of your period every single month, plan it to be a rest day.
Speaker 2:Or if you know, hey, this fourth week, the last three days of my luteal phase, into my menstrual cycle phase, really feel terrible to me.
Speaker 2:I'm going to put my higher intensity or my heavier days or my more important days earlier in the week, those weeks, and allow myself to either rest, recover or do easier stuff so you can adjust to your symptomology.
Speaker 2:It's not to say, hey, you know what you feel, like crap, you should power through because there's nothing saying that it wrong, like your perception is valid, even if we're not having this strong, robust response right now to it being like, yes, it's directly hormones that are changing these things. They likely may play a role and for people who have heightened PMS symptoms, they appear to have greater perceived impairments of these things across the cycle. So it's about figuring out your cycle, what's true for you, giving yourself grace, and then I am very about. Let's use nutrition, sleep, behavioral change, stress support, life management to see if we can reduce some of the symptomology impacts that we're having. So we're actually supporting our bodies in this process, because if you're in your luteal phase and you feel like training's hard and you're underfed and you're not sleeping, it's going to feel extra worse versus if you're well fed and supporting your sleep and or, you know, supporting your training and your programming intelligently.
Speaker 1:I'm so. I'm so glad you talked about that and I'm so glad I asked that question. I had always heard that the week of menstruation is also the week where your testosterone is highest. So you should like lift heavier that week because you'll, you have the testosterone in your body to do it. And I remember this was several months ago now.
Speaker 1:But I was like, okay, well, and the programming at the gym that day I wasn't doing CrossFit yet and the programming at the gym that day was like deadlifts or whatever. And I was like, okay, like, I guess, because you know it's, you know it's that time I'll, I'll try to lift heavy. And I almost passed out. I was like I felt terrible. And then I had always heard like, well, even though, like, even if you have cramps or whatever, just work out through it, it'll alleviate it Tried to power through, literally like had to go lay in the recovery room just like writhing in pain at the end of the workout. I was like I don't think this works for me. I don't think this is what I should do. I don't think this works for me.
Speaker 2:I don't think this is what I should do. Yeah, so you know, this is why I sometimes hate these isms, because you get a lot of people who say, well, women are actually the strongest and they perform their best during their menstrual cycle because their hormones are lowest, or you're most like a man, or you should be able to push hard. But for some people that's not true. Some people feel great and fine and can. They're like. You know, I have cramps and I don't feel good, but I like, set a PR and that is true. Like, for some people, that is true, your hormones are actually at their lowest in that first phase of your cycle. But for some people, their symptoms are just horrible and they feel really terrible and they might not feel like you can. You can push yourself or you might just need to adjust for that and that accounts for that and honestly so.
Speaker 2:The bump in testosterone actually comes a little bit around ovulation and I see people always promote that as like. That's why we should lift heavy and stronger and you're like to some degree. Okay, sure, true, but like the bump in testosterone is not something that's physiologically like we're suddenly like a dude for like a day in our training cycle. Like I think it dismisses the benefit of estrogen itself as actually being more of our superpower hormone, the physiological range of testosterone in women. I mean it's an important hormone for all of us, but it's not this like you're not getting a steroid.
Speaker 1:Supernatural.
Speaker 2:Supernatural steroid injection. I think the benefit more is like, hey, you actually have a lot of estrogen here and that's probably like if you feel good, you can push harder. I mean I think that's a fine thing to say and do, but if you feel like, trash your hormones and your PMS is really impairing you. We have some data that cardio or yoga it's like one study that might reduce these things. We have some studies that showing doing HIIT consistently across the month might actually decrease PMS symptomology. But if you're in the middle of a training session and you feel like you are going to pass out because but you feel like you're obligated to lift heavy, like I think that's where some of that information makes people feel broken and not heard versus like.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest message that I think I could give people here is you don't, you don't need cycle syncing or period based training to give you permission to rest or pull back if you need to, like you've always had that permission and everyone's experience of which phase of their cycle impacts them the most is potentially going to be different. A lot of people feel worse around ovulation and some people feel fine during their period and other people feel terrible. Some people the luteal phase is the worst week of their life. For some people their training just kind of keeps on keeping on. And it's about figuring out those patterns and what works for you and then thinking about ways you can either support those things so you can reduce how you feel from those, or just adjusting for what is your, your state or your condition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what about people like women who are, who are post-menopausal?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So perimenopause is a crazy haphazard hormone rollercoaster, so that, I think, is again something where learning RPE and adjusting for that is really helpful, because some days you might have a lot of energy and some days you might have a lot of fatigue and feel really crummy. Where postmenopause? For not all women. Some people have symptoms that carry forth into that phase, but once your hormones are kind of, you know they've lowered you're a year past your last period, all of those things. It might be a little bit easier to simply just work with it and you don't need to cycle sync to your perimenopause or menopause, because you're really going to have a heck of a time trying to track that cycle in peri and then you're not having it in postmenopause. So a lot of those skills and tools that I just talked about I think are important across the entire lifespan, but what is important for women across the entire lifespan becomes more important in peri and postmenopause. So if you are not already doing some high intensity training cardiovascularly, plyometrics, jumping and or heavy strength and resistance training designed to gain muscle and or strength that is the best time to start doing it. It's really, really important that loss of estrogen leads to a lot of changes in our muscle characteristics. So we become you know, we lose a little bit more of that type two, the power output, the fast, powerful muscle fiber typology. That comes both from aging and menopause. It's kind of compounded. That's a normal process with aging too as well. So we can preserve that with some of that high intensity exercise as well as the plyometrics and jumping, as well as the strength training mixed with there's been bone loss and the and the heavy lifting and the and the jumping or plyometric based training can help maintain or preserve that as well. And these are things that, like I, would love for women to do across the entire lifespan. But it's not too late to be doing it now. Building and preserving and maintaining as much muscle mass or bone mass as possible is so important to metabolic health and longevity and maintaining physical function across the lifespan. And so for my peri and postmenopausal individuals, one yes, especially if you're in perimenopause, you're in the heat of it. You're going to have this rollercoaster of fatigue and energy and feeling great, feeling like crap. One advocate for yourself with your doctors if you need the support. I can't tell you if you should do HRT or not HRT or what you should do for your symptomology, but advocate for yourself with your doctors, because I know for some people they just need some extra support or help with what they're doing. But the data's kind of mixed on, like does exercise actually reduce or remove all these symptomologies? But I do think it's going to help with the negative impacts. Well, it does. It does help with the negative impacts that we see vascularly, muscle-wise, metabolically and functionality-wise.
Speaker 2:So the most important thing you can do at this point in time is to adapt a fitness training routine that has a little bit of intensity in your cardio. Start with little build up. I think people think, okay, post-menopausal women, you need two to three days of HIIT and they're jumping into it right off the bat when they have never trained before. Or you need to lift heavy and hard with a never resistance train. Meet yourself where you're at, do what you need to do, ease into it.
Speaker 2:You might have lower recoverability because of that loss of estrogen, so give your body grace.
Speaker 2:You might need to space out your high intensity days a little bit across the week with easier days or recovery days.
Speaker 2:You might need to pull back the overall volume of high intensity that you're doing if you're having issues recovering from it.
Speaker 2:But you really do want to be doing the strength training and or some jumping and then the high intensity stuff and then filling in, of course, the rest Kind of similar to what I talked about, for the rest of your minutes per week with easy activities. That can be whatever else that you want to do. Usually for menopause I recommend doing your one to two days of higher intensity cardio, doing at least two to four days of the strength training and then filling in the rest of your week with basically being as active as you kind of can and maintain, because a lot of that sometimes inadvertently in the menopausal period potentially we have some early data to suggest that your overall, like subconscious inclination to move more goes down. You actually just start moving less and not really realizing that your NEAT or your daily activity starts to go down. So just finding ways to stay active and then implementing these things into your exercise training routine become if not you know they're not important in your entire lifespan, but they become very, very important now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that and I think that's going to be super helpful to some of our listeners. Do you have time for me to ask you two more questions?
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm just procrastinating my own lift, so go ahead Like yeah, I just ran seven miles yesterday but I want to.
Speaker 1:So I want to ask about CrossFit and I want to ask about fasting for women. So, with if someone theoretically were to be doing CrossFit and also trying to do zone two, like peppered in there first of all, like, what are your kind of, what are your overall thoughts about CrossFit as a training program to follow, as opposed to just like a standard strength training protocol, and how would you recommend doing Zone 2 training in addition to CrossFit?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I am of the standpoint of all the mixed modality group fitness type trainings for regular people who are trying to get a little bit of everything. I'm actually very pro CrossFit in that sense. I think it gets a lot of crap, but I think it gets a lot of people active and gets them under heavy loads, gets them doing some sort of power-based training and it gets them doing cardiovascular training and I think for Gen Pop regular people it's a great solution to a lot of their fitness needs. I think for Gen Pop regular people it's a great solution to a lot of their fitness needs.
Speaker 2:I think that some gyms and some programs do the programming better than others. So there's always that caveat of like one bad gym ruins the reputation for a lot of really great programming and or, potentially, applications of it. I think CrossFit works best when you pair it with either seasons or periods or other forms of formal resistance training and strength training. No, it's not the tried and true methodology of CrossFit of rotating, but most CrossFit classes actually don't even follow the tried and true methodology of CrossFit. They kind of do their own mix of strength conditioning CrossFit. So I do think that it's a perfectly fine thing to do, but you might want to pair it specifically with maybe two days of formal resistance training or it just depends Some classes program strength and then a Metcon, some just program a Metcon. And so I usually recommend to people, instead of doing six Metcons a week because CrossFit's methodology was never to do six Metcons a week, it was peppering in maybe a couple Metcons a of strength days and a couple of gymnastics and skill days, that's more of the tri-entry methodology is maybe picking two to three days of doing the higher intensity Metcons per week, just depending on what they are and what you're doing, because of course Metcons fall on a spectrum of like some of them are more aerobic, some of them are more strength-based, some of them are more high intensity-based Pairing that with some formal strength training, whether that's just some barbell work before a MetCon or some bro work, accessory work, muscle building stuff after or on its own.
Speaker 2:You kind of have the options of doing it like strength and or extra lifting before or after a MetCon or class kind of thing, or doing like independent strength drays from independent MetCon days. I think both of those work we shameless plug. Build a Metcon program for clients, for ourselves, that kind of. Has that built in and that flexibility for people. So it has that strength training and component with the Metcon. But they can like shift the days of it. But we have people who do their classes but just follow that strength component of what we have so they can supplement that in if they wanted that, because a lot of classes aren't offering people that and there is limitations to just doing Metcons will help you get some strength and muscle to some degree for a lot of people for a while. But there is a ceiling of plateau because you aren't loading heavy enough for low enough reps and ranges. So yes, if you go from nothing to that you're going to gain. So I do recommend at least two full body-ish days of work or potentially three, like maybe half days per week added on to those classes. Maybe pulling back the Metcons, not doing six a week, doing like three a week, and then that would be good and leave room for more of that formal long duration.
Speaker 2:Zone two cardio. Because in CrossFit, unless you go to the extra like aerobic capacity classes which people still end up redlining half the time and treating like an aerobic Metcon, you're not getting in like true zone two training and I think for a lot of people that's the missing link of like why am I not recovering during the run or the row interval of this workout? Or why am I having such a hard time getting my heart rate down in between intervals? Or why am I, you know, just gaining accumulative fatigue across this Metcon instead of being able to like kind of sustain and that's that aerobic base which you know. I don't think that everyone who's more specifically focused on CrossFit needs to obsess over that. Once you have it, there might be more merit to refining those characteristics of high intensity functional training people are trying to go for.
Speaker 2:But if you have none of that, then it's going to make it really hard for you. So you might need to either spend a period of time I think most people is like you really suck at one characteristic of fitness. Sometimes you need to spend like a chunk of time really prioritizing that. So maybe you're doing only two Metcons per week and three days of zone two training to really develop that base or whatever that looks like for you. And then you can like pull that back and ramp up the Metcons but say we're doing our hypothetical week of two to three days of some sort of strengthening training two to three Metcons, maybe four, mixed in with maybe two to three days of steady state boring.
Speaker 2:Zone two cardio. If you're a CrossFit fan, do cyclical. So go like, hey, I'm going to do like I don't know. 50 calories on a row, 50 calories in a ski, 50 calories on a bike and rotate it, but just keep your intensity lower. Or you can take like the CrossFit style approach to it and do like cyclical training, where you're going between a bike and maybe a few strengthish training, like some kettlebell swings or sandbag carries or farmer carries or sled pushes, just to break up the monotony, but keeping your overall effort low and keeping that cardio component in it as part of the training. Or, hear me out, do your classes aerobic stuff and just don't redline it right, like you could just go to the aerobic fitness day and treat it as a don't do day right.
Speaker 2:So there's ways to mix that in. And so it really depends because when you're doing the high intensity functional stuff it's usually like moderate to higher intensity stuff, but it's sometimes more muscular, sometimes it's more cardiovascular. It kind of depends on, like the goal of the training of the gym. But I really like for most people, like three Metcons per week I think is a good spot. We don't eat five or six. That's actually tried and true, classic, like CrossFit prescriptions.
Speaker 2:Like two or three Metcons with some strength and some gymnastics work across the week, mixing in the rest with that easy stuff and the strength stuff, and you can really kind of pair it around. Maybe you're lifting in your zone two on one day or zone two is on its own day, or you're lifting your Metcons on an independent day. The nice thing with CrossFit is you kind of have that across the week and a good class and training program will help you balance that Um, and so I'd recommend for people if you're like well, that seems like a lot of things to do in your week, like talk to your coach at your gym or whoever else you're working with, and have them figure out like a way to lay this out across the week. So it makes sense with your gyms, actual training and programming, cause if you're doing a squat cycle in the gym before your wads, you probably don't need to do a squat cycle on your own lifting day outside of that. But you might want to fill in other things that you're looking to build.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's super helpful. Okay, what about women and fasting, intermittent fasting specifically? I don't want to get into the whole, there's probably a whole thing, but like intermittent fasting, so you know, not eating from like 7 am training while you're fasted. Is there anything that women should be aware of with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this gets a lot of controversy and hot takes from people, and typically I am of the stance of if you have any sort of specific athletic goals, you're training at a moderate to high level, you're doing a good bit of high intensity stuff. I'm typically not a fan of fasting for women, simply because we are more sensitive to energy deficits. And energy deficits aren't just like dieting, it also can be within day. And so there's this thing called low energy availability, which is more established in athletes, but I like to think of, like any woman who's doing pretty high levels of activity. I think they forget to classify themselves as athletes. They take what I call a dieting mindset to a performance approach. I'm like why am I not getting better? I feel like crap. I feel all over the place, my hormones are destroyed, Cortisol is killing me, and you're like well, no, you're just over underfeeding and overstressing your body sometimes. And so you know, this low energy availability is essentially a mismatch between your exercise and total daily activity and the food you're bringing into your system. And we can think of that, yes, in your chronic sense of like, what's your calorie balance at the end of the day or the end of the week, but also acutely within your day to day. So being underfed for a long period of time during the day itself can also be perceived as low energy availability by our bodies. Similarly, low carbohydrate intake can also be perceived or reflect some of the similar things in our bodies, and females are just more sensitive to these fluxes. We have higher thresholds, of which this starts to impact our hormones, than males. Males can have like their cutoff is like 15 calories per kilogram of fat-free mass, like lower than ours. We just have smaller windows of what we can get away with with this. So because we're more sensitive to these things, I typically don't recommend it because it can have negative impacts on your body for recovery, muscle support, your hormones being them downregulated, things like that. So I don't recommend it. There is some literature that shows that in women that are maybe overweight or have extra adiposity, it might be beneficial. It might help with some of that insulin sensitivity or may or may not impact hormones negatively. But we have to think about that's where I think that conversation gets murky, because for some people, yeah, it maybe is good because you're managing caloric intake or body weight shifting and that can impact these outcomes. But if we're thinking about performance, hormonal health and or any fitness or athletic goals or endeavors.
Speaker 2:I just am not a fan of fasting for women. I think that if you are someone who's like but I love to fast I want to fast. I want some of the benefits of fasting, even if they can be hit or miss on whether or not they're whatever. I'm more of a fan just from what I've seen with colleagues who do a lot more research in fasting is of cutting off your eating window at night earlier, not in the morning. There is some data to suggest that potentially insulin sensitivity or those types of things might be lower in the evening or glucose regulation, and so there might be benefit to potentially not eating later at night if you're more worried about those things give or take. I don't want anyone here to think that if you eat at night you're going to develop insulin insensitivity. But I'm more of a fan of, if you want to fast, just cut off your eating window after dinner and then eat in the morning.
Speaker 2:I am a fan of eating breakfast, eating before training. I don't like fast training. I know people hate that because they say, well, I'm getting up super early, I'm busy, I can't eat One, you can train your gut to eat. You can train your gut to handle some carbohydrate. Trust me if you don't follow me, I am the queen of GI issues. During races, before races, eating and struggling and sometimes I do I get a nervous stomach so I can't eat a ton before events and races.
Speaker 2:But you can keep it really simple. I mean you can think about applesauce packets, chocolate milk, little bits of cereal and or if you really really really can't stand eating anything beforehand, bring like a carbohydrate filled sugar beverage kind of with you. I usually recommend that. Like, if you're going to train fast and go for a run in the morning, I'd rather you bring a Gatorade type supplement with you in a water bottle and drink that and sip that with you. Similar within your class. But it can be some graham crackers, some dry cereals, some chocolate milk. I think is just easy for people.
Speaker 2:You can use whatever form you want. Obviously, soy and dairy are going to have the protein component of it mixed with the carbs or sugar. But a lot of people do the applesauce packets, but I like getting in a little bit of it. And if you are someone who's like I'm waking up and I'm rolling right out of the bed going to the gym. Think about something that you can either eat 30 minutes before and digest so maybe you wake up and you have something, you can digest it before that workout or do it within the 10 minute window beforehand because then'll miss the like insulin. You'll either have the insulin spike will have passed or you will miss it and you'll start exercising and using it from your muscles.
Speaker 2:Uptake of it Like it's. There's that weird window of like. If you're too close but too far, you might bonk as soon as you start. So you can even think about like, what are things that I can just like kind of get in really quick right before I start exercising, so I have some carbohydrate in my system. And then, of course, making sure you're eating a good breakfast after, or, if you eat an adequate dinner the night before, your carbohydrate stores are filled. You're not restricting carbs and fasting and training hard, and then that itself is just like the perfect storm for not moving your performance, health or fitness goals kind of forward.
Speaker 2:So trying to give all my caveats of here, because I just know some people get really they're like but I love fasting, I can't eat in the morning, I can't even think about eating anything I'll throw up. You can train your gut, you can tolerate it, but start with little. I'm not telling you to go eat a 300-calorie carbohydrate meal for breakfast right now. Start with something simple and little maybe 30 grams of carbs, and build yourself up to maybe you know. Thinking about 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight of carbohydrate is a good pre-workout target. But not everyone's going to get there. I have days where I go for a run and I'm having like two applesauce packets and that's like 30 grams of carbs and that's not great. But I usually just bring maybe some sports nutrition supplements me on that run, so that way I'm supplementing it and supporting that.
Speaker 1:So when I get home I'm not like a bonky low sugar hot mess and I'm supporting my hormones and my body in the process yeah, super thoughtful answers. Alyssa, you are amazing Wealth of information. Tell us again where people can like find you. Download some of these free guides the zones mini guide, the threshold test that you were talking about, or any other good thing that people can find you with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I know I try, thank you. I try to be so delicate in my answers because I feel like people get such polarizing and confusing responses and I want them to realize there's breath and depth, these things. So hopefully I didn't confuse you guys too much. But you want to learn about all of these topics? First of all, just go to my website, doclessfitnesscom, or hang out a lot on Instagram. My YouTube has longer form videos on the menstrual cycle stuff and a lot of the zone stuff.
Speaker 2:My website, doclessfitnesscom. You can find all of my free calculators and free resources mixed with my eBooks to learn more. So if you kind of go there, I kind of have a little bit of everything I've done 40 podcast interviews so you can have my own podcast, my own YouTube. You can just like mass dive into all those things. And then my training programs are called the list method and you can go to the list methodcom to learn more about that. If you're interested in training with us, we have strength, running and cardiovascular training, or we call it hybrid your way. So hybrid training is really trendy right now, but it's more about combining strength and cardiovascular training and a smart and efficient way, and me and my coaches can help you do that if you're interested in doing that as well.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic so many great resources. We're going to link to all of those things in the show notes, whether you're listening on podcasts or whether you're watching on YouTube. Alyssa, fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, greatly appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1:Y'all, this was an amazing episode and I am so thankful for Alyssa and her time and how she so thoughtfully considered the answers to so many of these questions. There's a lot of key takeaways that I could have from today's episode, but here were my top three. The first one is that if you are just starting out with wanting to work out, then a great place to start is getting up to 150 minutes of moderate activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity or, more ideally, a mixture of the two. So then maybe it's 100 minutes of moderate exercise with 25 minutes of vigorous exercise and build a baseline, build a foundation. That's all you need to worry about if you're just getting started. Once you get to where you have a really good baseline and foundation under you, then let's start geeking out about the details. Then we can start looking at upping that aerobic capacity to more of a 300 minutes per week, which is like a long time, right, that's like five hours of working out, and that may seem super overwhelming to you right now. But guess what you don't have to do. You could do anywhere between 150 to 300. If your goal is to increase your aerobic capacity and then from there considering how much you might be training, taking anywhere from 10 to 30% of that total time as what you would be doing in more of your maximum output. So that's more of your sprints, just getting your heart rate up even higher into kind of that zone five that we were talking about. This is where you start.
Speaker 1:Also, remember that Alyssa said that women may benefit more from men with high intensity training, and part of that may be we didn't really talk about this specifically on the episode but part of that may be because women, just historically, as you have been working out in your past, you may have done more cardio, which may be why women have more type one muscle fibers, which are more of those cardiac cardio type muscle fibers to be grossly oversimplifying or undersimplifying what that is, oversimplifying what that is as opposed to type two, which is more of those strength training type muscles. So to say again, gross oversimplification of that, whereas men tend to train more that way. But overall, high intensity interval training is going to be helpful and maybe even more so as you begin to enter into menopause. And, good news, women strength training is not really affected by where we are in our cycles. So I love what Alyssa said, though.
Speaker 1:You don't need to use your cycle as a reason to need a rest day. Sometimes you just need a rest day, and it's always helpful to understand how you feel in certain times during your cycle, especially if that is what happens month after month after month, and be able to base your training around that. That is what matters more than knowing if you're in your luteal phase, your follicular phase, on day one of your cycle or whatever it is. That's really what you want to follow and be keenly aware of and route your training around that. So many other great takeaways. I would love to know yours. I would love for you to leave a comment in the video below or post about it on social media, Share this with a friend, Share it maybe with a female friend, a mom, a sister, a best friend who you believe could benefit from this episode and, as always, if you would leave a review, that's one of the best ways that you can help the show grow. Until next week, stay strong.
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