I'm a big believer in people, everybody getting ideally two or three resistance training sessions in per week and two, maybe three cardiovascular training sessions per week. That would be ideal. I'm very frankly delighted that nowadays there's such a push for women and men to resistance train. That wasn't the case when I was growing up.

I recall taking my sister to the gym for the first time. I think she was the only woman in the gym when we were in high school. We've been talking about training, but we haven't really spelled out what you would suggest a novice, perhaps an intermediate resistance training, cardiovascular training program would look like in broad terms.

I realize we don't have time here to get into all the nitty-gritty details. You've written about this elsewhere and we'll refer people to those terrific resources in the show note captions, but what would you like to see women doing? Maybe we can break up the age brackets because it sounds like this is something that is resurfacing again and again here.

Women, let's say 30 and younger, women 31 to let's say 40, and then let's say 41 to 60, and then maybe 61 and on. In terms of how many sessions of resistance training per week, is it whole body training, how many sessions of cardiovascular training, and what sorts of examples could you give?

Yeah. If we're looking at that 20 to 30-year-old, a lot of times I really try to get them to focus on the whole movement aspect first. We phase them in. Same with older women. Phase them in, learn how to move, learn complex movements, so that when you are going in to do resistance training, preferably three to four times a week, you can look at moving well, and it doesn't have to be a long period of time.

If you're doing to failure, which works really well when you're younger, to increase strength and a little bit of hypertrophy, you're going to have to spend a little bit more time in the gym, so it might be 45 to 60 minutes. When we're looking at doing that four times a week, you can add in a sprint interval training at the end of one of those to get that super high intensity, or you can look at putting in, at the most, two hit sessions on separate days.

If you're training specifically for something, so if I work with a lot of endurance athletes still, and they're like, well, how do I fit it in? It's like, okay, well, we look at the quality and how that fits into your training. So if you're training for a marathon, you're training for a triathlon, or other endurance stuff, you can take that high intensity work and put it into your training program.

So ideally, we look at three to four resistance training with really good movement when we're in the younger set with two high intensities. When we start getting into our 30s, we start having an eye to how are we actually doing that resistance training. Instead of just going and doing a circuit, we're really focusing on let's do some compound movements.

Let's look at doing some heavier work. Let's look at how we are periodizing. So we're having, you know, six week blocks and we're building on those blocks because we want that base foundation. So when we get to be 40 plus, we can actually go and do our power-based training.

If you're in your 40s, you've never done resistance training at all, then we take between two weeks to four months to really learn how to move well, because there's a higher incidence of soft tissue injury and overall injury as we get into our 40s because of perturbations of estrogen.

And ideally, when we get there, we're looking at that around three, minimum three resistance training with compound movements and either one sprint interval or two sprint intervals and one hit in a week. And just to remind people, compound movements, multi-joint movements, squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, rows, overhead presses, bench presses, et cetera, as opposed to isolation movements where only one joint is moving.

Yeah. Yeah. And for everybody in all those age ranges that you describe, are you suggesting they train the same muscle groups three or four times per week, or they do some sort of split where it's upper body, lower body, take a day off, or upper body, take a day off, lower body, take a day off, whatever, what might work for them?

Yeah. What works for them? If you're looking for short amount of time in the gym because of busy lives, then you can split it. If you're looking at, okay, well, I can allocate an hour to an hour and a half in the gym, then you can do total body with adequate rest.

The key when you're younger is working to failure. The key when you're older is working heavy. Interesting. Yeah. So when we're looking at working to failure, we're trying to get more of that lean mass growth with strength. When we get older, because it's so difficult to put on lean mass, we really want to focus on the strength component because that becomes more important when we're talking about longevity.

Because if you're looking at the strength component from a central nervous system standpoint, we see it feeds forward into better proprioception, attenuation of cognitive decline. And this is the other thing that you in neurosciences would understand, the sex differences in things like dementia and Alzheimer's. There's some really interesting research looking at strength training and that power-based stuff when we're getting into our older ages because we get more neural growth patterns and more neural pathways.

Even some interesting literature about emphasizing some unilateral movements as people get older, not just dual limb movements or dual limb simultaneous movements. You always want to train both sides of your body, folks. But so if I understand correctly, younger women should train to failure, try and generate strength and hypertrophy.

As women get older, they should emphasize more strength training, leave some repetitions in reserve, but train heavier. It makes so much sense what you're saying. Because what we know about the nervous system as we age is that there's some atrophy or at least some weakening of neuromuscular connections and the upper motor neurons in the brain that control the neuromuscular connections in the spinal cord out to the muscle.

There's something really sticky about this idea in terms of longevity that I don't think anyone else has ever said. No, the thing about it is men age more in a linear fashion, whereas women, we have a definitive point in our late 40s, early 50s, where all of a sudden things go to shit, where it's that perimenopausal state.

And I can't tell you how many emails and DMs I get in a day from women who are like, I'm 46 or I'm 47. I'm putting on body fat. I don't know what's going on. I can't sleep. And then we say, it's perimenopause. They're like, what is that? And so when we're looking at perimenopause, it is a huge change in the body because you're having less and less of your sex hormones circulating.

More and more anovulatory cycles means no progesterone or very low progesterone. You're having a difference in the pulse of your estradiol to those flatline aspects. And because every system in the body is affected by it, this is why you see more soft tissue injuries. Like two of the biggest things that women who are in their 40s are going to PTs about are frozen shoulder and plantar fascia.

These are two really indicative issues that are happening in perimenopause. So that whole section of mid to mid 40s to early 50s is a definitive aging point where I really tried to get women to get into the heavy lifting and get into the patterns of polarizing their training, not putting an emphasis on zone two, just really looking at how am I polarizing?

How am I affecting my central nervous system? So that when they get into that one point in time of that perimenopause, their body is already conditioned for the stress that's coming. Whereas men, we see that kind of stuff happens in their late 50s, early 60s. So the soft tissue injuries, the change in body comp comes at a later time.

So yes, looking at how we're scoping our strength training, definitely something to think about in a longevity factor. But for women, there's a better indication of the timing across the ages of when you should start implementing. For men, I think you have a better bandwidth of when you should start implementing.

My observation is that most women sort of, unless they know better, default to cardiovascular exercise as opposed to resistance training. So if a woman in her 40s, late 30s to let's say 50, is doing two to four sessions of resistance training workouts per week, and they also really like cardio or they feel they want to or should do cardio, should they be careful about how much cardio they're doing?

And is there a best form of cardio? Should they really emphasize the high-intensity interval training? Should they avoid zone two? We should probably also define for people what zone two is if they don't already know. So I am notorious for slamming things like Orange Theory and F45 because they market specifically to that age group of women.

And it's not appropriate because it's not true high-intensity work. When we're looking at women who are really trying to maximize body composition change and longevity and unfortunately default to cardio because they think, oh, that's going to help change my body composition. It's going to help me lose body fat.

It doesn't. Is this things like soul cycle as well? Yeah. Okay. I've never done any of these. Yeah. But I imagine there's a lot of spinning, a lot of moving, a lot of sweating, and a lot of, quote unquote, calories burned emphasis. Yes, there is. But it puts women squarely in moderate intensity where they're so used to leaving one of those classes feeling absolutely smashed that when you tell them, actually, that training doesn't work for you because it's putting you in a state of intensity that drives cortisol up.

But it's not a strong enough stress to invoke the post-exercise growth hormone and testosterone responses that we want to dampen that cortisol. So this is why we have that hyperbole of women who are in their 40s plus shouldn't do high-intensity work. It's like, well, actually, they shouldn't do moderate intensity.

They need to avoid that. Polarizing, absolutely. That's what we want. We want true high-intensity work, which is one to four minutes of 80% or more. Or if you're doing sprint interval, it's full gas for 30 seconds or less. And you're doing that a couple of times a week. You're not doing it every day because you need to have enough recovery to hit those intensities truly because those are the intensities that are going to give you those post-exercise hormonal responses to drop cortisol.

When we're looking at women who are like, oh, well, I love going out for hours and hours on my bike and I love, you know, doing my spin classes, it's like, okay, but we need to look at the big rock here. If you are looking for longevity and body composition change and cognition and all those things, you have to polarize your training and that has to be the focus.

But soul food, like I come up with a long background of endurance. I now love riding my gravel bike on the weekends for long periods of time, which is not optimal for me, my age, that kind of stuff for all the things that I want to see improvements in.

But mentally, it's great. So when we talk about going out for that long stuff, zone two is at low conversation and that's fine for mental health and being out in nature. But for optimal health and well-being, we don't want to do that. We want to look at resistance training as a bedrock and true high-intensity work to help with body composition change, metabolic control, insulin sensitivity, brain health, and dropping that cortisol.

So you've mentioned polarized training. If I understand correctly, this would be a woman doing three or four days of high-intensity resistance training for 45 to 60 or 45 to 75 minutes per session. And then at the opposite extreme, maybe just walking a lot or jogging a lot. So is that what you're talking about, polarized training, as opposed to these other forms of training where it's designed to get people sweating like crazy, breathing hard for long periods of time, but neither putting them in the landscape of inducing muscle strength adaptations and hypertrophy adaptations, nor really taxing the cardiovascular system enough to create an increase in longevity, for instance.

When I talk about polarizing, I look at the high-intensity strength. That's really hard on the central nervous system. And then we look from a cardiovascular standpoint of doing true high-intensity work. So the walking is more of the recovery. So if you're going to go out and do something long, it has to be very, very easy.

If you are looking at cardiovascular and you want that big sweat, then we are talking true sprint interval training. So what I have a lot of women do is a 20-minute lower body heavy set, and then they'll go on the assault bike and do as hard as they can for 30 seconds, and then recover as much as they need to, to go then do another 30 seconds as hard as they can.

Most people go, oh, I can do four or five of those. After two, they're completely gassed because it's that hard of work. And that's what I mean by polarizing. You have very, very low intensity for recovery and super, super high intensity for metabolic and cardiovascular changes is what we're after.

You have very, very low intensity for recovery and super high intensity for recovery and super high intensity.