Most Efficient Way for Women to Train for Overall Fitness | Dr. Stacy Sims & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I asked some different women that I know, you know, if you could ask the world expert in

00:00:07.240 | exercise physiology, hormones, and nutrition, et cetera, as it relates to women, one question,

00:00:13.780 | what would it be? And one of the most common questions I got in the 50 and up category was,

00:00:20.300 | what is the most efficient way for a woman older than 50 to train for the maximum healthspan and

00:00:27.560 | lifespan benefits? I love this question because I get it all the time. We have to turn our brains

00:00:33.440 | away from everything that's been predicated before to this point. So if we're looking for longevity

00:00:38.840 | and we're looking at what we want to do when we're 80 or 90, we want to be independently living. We

00:00:43.700 | want to have good proprioception balance. We want to have good bones and we want to be strong. So this

00:00:49.500 | is where we look at 10 minutes, three times a week, jump training. So this isn't your landing softly in

00:00:56.420 | our knees. This is like impact in the skeletal system. A colleague and friend of mine, Tracy

00:01:02.540 | Klissel did a post, not a postdoc, but post research on this and is developing an app on it to show

00:01:11.640 | women how to jump to improve bone mineral density. Over the course of four months of this type of

00:01:17.080 | training, people have gone from being osteopenic to normal bone density. So it's a different type

00:01:24.500 | of stress. So if your concern is that, which a lot of women do have a concern because they lose about

00:01:29.940 | one third of their bone mass at the onset of menopause. Wow.

00:01:33.840 | Yeah. Significant amount. One third?

00:01:35.460 | Yeah.

00:01:35.820 | Goodness gracious.

00:01:37.100 | If you don't do something as an intervention. So we see a lot of women are like, oh, I'm going to go

00:01:41.660 | on menopause hormone therapy to stop bone loss. Yeah, it can be a treatment, but I always look at an

00:01:49.060 | external stress that we can put on the body that's going to invoke a change without pharmaceuticals.

00:01:54.660 | So jump training, heavy resistance training, and sprint interval training. Those are the three key

00:02:01.180 | things. And from a training standpoint, and then from a nutrition standpoint, getting protein. Protein

00:02:08.000 | is so important. When you start telling women, they need to look at around one to 1.1 grams per pound,

00:02:15.520 | which is around that two to 2.3 grams per kilo per day. They're like, whoa, that's a lot of protein.

00:02:21.340 | It is because we haven't been conditioned to eat it.

00:02:24.400 | It's a few scrambled eggs. It's a chicken rest at lunch. It's a

00:02:28.020 | small steak at dinner. Plus other things.

00:02:30.580 | Right. Exactly. And it doesn't all have to be animal products. I mean, you're looking at all

00:02:33.960 | the different beans and things that you can put together. And that's the other big thing that

00:02:37.880 | in order to build the muscle and to keep the body composition in the state that we want it to keep

00:02:43.660 | going for longevity, those are the big rocks. The sprint interval training, the heavy resistance

00:02:49.400 | training, the jump training, and the protein. I'm thinking about this. And I'm thinking about my

00:02:54.060 | mother who's 79 years old. She'll be 80 at the end of June and is in good health, walks a lot,

00:03:01.060 | gardens, does some yoga, but does none of the things that you're describing. So mom, please,

00:03:06.320 | I'm going to send her to listen to this. I got my mom to switch.

00:03:09.340 | In the same vein, what about the women out there age 20 to, maybe we make it the 20 to 40 bracket.

00:03:19.500 | And if we need to divide that more finely, we can. What is the most efficient way for them to train

00:03:26.540 | for health, vigor, and longevity?

00:03:29.400 | Making things fun for the most part. I don't want people to think that it's a chore. So if you're

00:03:35.840 | someone who's been told you need to run and you hate running, then don't run. Like that's common

00:03:40.240 | sense. And I say that because I see little kids in non-US countries that have to run across country.

00:03:48.020 | And you see these kids when they're six years old and all running around the field. And they're the

00:03:53.640 | kids that hate running that aren't natural runners. And then they hate physical activity for the rest of

00:03:57.260 | their life. So I put that in, like when you are exercising, you want to find something that you find

00:04:02.480 | fun. When you're in your twenties to forties, you have more room to get away with things that might

00:04:08.040 | not be optimal for you when you start to get older. Big rock again is resistance training. It doesn't

00:04:14.280 | have to be heavy resistance training. Like I said earlier to failure, you're periodizing. If you want

00:04:18.840 | to do a block of Olympic lifting, go for it. If you're like, I'm not comfortable doing that kind of

00:04:23.520 | lifting. I want to do more machine stuff. Great. But we want to make sure that you're changing it up all

00:04:28.440 | the time to keep things moving and shaking with regards to strength and hypertrophy.

00:04:32.940 | And then it becomes more of, are you training for something that's endurance? Are you looking for

00:04:38.860 | just longevity for brain health? We need to have some lactate production because women, as I said,

00:04:45.640 | at the beginning of the podcast are more oxidative. We don't have as many of those glycolytic fibers.

00:04:50.380 | So what we're finding in older research is that there's a misstep in brain lactate metabolism

00:04:55.520 | because the brain hasn't been exposed to it, especially for looking at women who are being

00:05:00.020 | studied now. It hasn't been in a societal context to do that kind of work. The younger we are and the

00:05:06.560 | more that we can keep our glycolytic fibers going by doing high intensity work, the more we're exposing

00:05:12.780 | our brain to lactate, the better we see fast forward to attenuating cognitive decline and reducing the

00:05:19.460 | plaque development of Alzheimer's. This is why women who are in their forties plus, I want them to do the

00:05:24.900 | sprint and the high intensity work for that lactate production. Start early because then you can

00:05:30.100 | take some of those type two B fibers that could either go more aerobic or anaerobic and make them

00:05:35.000 | more anaerobic. So those are the two big things for women who are younger. And then you can play around

00:05:41.440 | with the other things if you want to be an ultra endurance athlete. Yeah, not really ideal, but yeah,

00:05:47.980 | you can do that. That's fine. You'll recover well.

00:05:50.660 | Now, forgive me because you've said it several times throughout today's discussion, but I really

00:05:54.960 | want to drive home a key point that I think for most people, men and women, is not obvious, but

00:06:01.940 | is really important. When you say high intensity, you don't mean a class or a run where you're drenched

00:06:12.120 | in sweat and gasping for air at the end necessarily. Let's disambiguate high intensity from what most people

00:06:19.460 | think of high intensity, which is a really hard workout, a tough class where they had me moving

00:06:24.500 | the whole time, doing a circuit, et cetera. What is the appropriate high intensity workout look like?

00:06:30.420 | Okay. So if I talk about true high intensity interval training, if you're a runner, it's going to the

00:06:37.460 | track and doing sets of 400 and 800s. Okay. So 400, a lap. Yep. 800, two laps.

00:06:44.040 | Right. So you're looking at between a minute and four minutes of hard work at 80% or more

00:06:51.900 | with variable recovery. So that's why I use a track as an example. So if you do one lap and you're like,

00:06:57.860 | oh, I'm going to walk half a lap and then do it again, that's adequate recovery.

00:07:01.720 | Very tough. Yeah. It's hard. Right. But it's not like you're going to be there for 90 minutes doing

00:07:06.020 | as many 400s as you can. Because you have that variable recovery, it might take a half an hour

00:07:11.140 | to 40 minutes max. And then you're gassed out. You can't do it anymore. If you're looking at a gym

00:07:16.680 | gym situation, I like to look at something like every minute on the minute, where you might be

00:07:23.380 | doing 10 deadlifts at moderate intensity weight. And it takes- 10 repetitions. Yeah. So it takes you

00:07:31.020 | 50 seconds to complete that. Then you have 10 seconds to move to the next exercise that might be

00:07:35.880 | thrusters. So a squat, clean thruster. So it's a squat pulling the weight up overhead. So you're doing

00:07:42.680 | maybe eight of those in that minute and you might have 10 second recovery. You go to the next exercise

00:07:48.640 | that might be kettlebell swings and you're doing explosive kettlebell swings and you'll finish,

00:07:55.900 | you know, 10 seconds to go. You go to the fourth exercise, I don't know, toes to bar or some other

00:08:02.040 | kind of V-up, some other high intensity. And then you have one minute completely off. So you've had four

00:08:08.120 | minutes of really heavy work with maybe 10 seconds to move to the next exercise.

00:08:12.260 | One minute completely off. And then you repeat that three times.

00:08:15.520 | And this is high intensity interval training. This is not what you would consider resistance training

00:08:19.920 | for sake of building muscle or strength. Correct. You're using these loads, these machines, the,

00:08:24.640 | the pike, you know, hanging from the bar and bringing your knees up or L-sit or something as

00:08:29.100 | a tool to get the heart rate up continually. Yep. Yep.

00:08:32.780 | Very different than resistance training the way most people think about it. Correct. So this is the

00:08:37.720 | cardiovascular high intensity interval training. And the subset of that is sprint interval

00:08:42.380 | training. And this is something that's really, really hard and people don't get it. I don't

00:08:46.840 | necessarily mean running. It can be whatever mode of activity, but it's 30 seconds or less as hard

00:08:53.320 | as you can go. So this is your nine or 10 on your rating and perceived exertion, 110%. It's max effort.

00:09:00.320 | On the rower, on the airdyne bike. Yeah. Running if you like. Yeah. Okay. Any of those things. The skier.

00:09:05.800 | Yeah. Battle ropes. Battle ropes are big. So 30 seconds all out, then rest, what, 10, 15 seconds?

00:09:12.200 | Repeat? No. No. You want to, because now we're looking at that top end where we want

00:09:17.580 | regeneration of your ATP, you know, all of that system and central nervous system recovery. So this

00:09:25.740 | is 30 seconds all out. It could be two or three minutes of recovery. Oh, nice. Because I'm not

00:09:30.660 | looking at Tabata where you're 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off, because that's not the intensity we

00:09:35.300 | want. We want you to go all out and recover well enough to be able to go all out again. You're not

00:09:42.180 | leaving anything in the tank. So those are what I mean by high intensity interval training, or when

00:09:48.720 | you're looking at polarizing your cardiovascular work, that's the top end. Those are the two examples

00:09:53.480 | of your top end. And then your recovery is that long, slow walking on another day where you're not

00:09:59.920 | going and doing a tempo run. You're not doing a 5K easy jog because that puts you in that modern intensity.

00:10:05.440 | And if I heard you correctly earlier, you are suggesting most women do one or two days of high

00:10:11.940 | intensity interval training plus three to four days of resistance training for sake of building strength

00:10:18.700 | and muscle, which looks very different. It's more warm up, do a couple work sets, you know, two to four

00:10:26.460 | work sets of, you know, an overhead press, two or four work sets of maybe a barbell curl, two or four sets of

00:10:32.920 | some dips or whatever, whatever, um, one's, you know, personal choices. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:10:37.900 | Okay. Got it. Um, very different, far and away different than what most people, men or women are

00:10:46.280 | doing out there, which is, um, a lot of Stairmaster treadmill jogging, maybe some lifting for hypertrophy.

00:10:53.760 | Because I look at the general consensus of what's out there in the fitness world is all based on

00:10:59.100 | aesthetics and body composition. So people have this mentality of, I need to be hypertrophy to get

00:11:05.400 | swole and I need to do long, slow stuff on the cardio machine to lose body fat. But that isn't what

00:11:12.220 | we're after. We're after let's create really strong external stress to create adaptations, not only from

00:11:19.880 | a neural and a brain standpoint, that's understanding it, but also feeding down to metabolic change.

00:11:26.140 | .

00:11:33.140 | you

Most Efficient Way for Women to Train for Overall Fitness | Dr. Stacy Sims & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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