I asked some different women that I know, you know, if you could ask the world expert in exercise physiology, hormones, and nutrition, et cetera, as it relates to women, one question, what would it be? And one of the most common questions I got in the 50 and up category was, what is the most efficient way for a woman older than 50 to train for the maximum healthspan and lifespan benefits?

I love this question because I get it all the time. We have to turn our brains away from everything that's been predicated before to this point. So if we're looking for longevity and we're looking at what we want to do when we're 80 or 90, we want to be independently living.

We want to have good proprioception balance. We want to have good bones and we want to be strong. So this is where we look at 10 minutes, three times a week, jump training. So this isn't your landing softly in our knees. This is like impact in the skeletal system.

A colleague and friend of mine, Tracy Klissel did a post, not a postdoc, but post research on this and is developing an app on it to show women how to jump to improve bone mineral density. Over the course of four months of this type of training, people have gone from being osteopenic to normal bone density.

So it's a different type of stress. So if your concern is that, which a lot of women do have a concern because they lose about one third of their bone mass at the onset of menopause. Wow. Yeah. Significant amount. One third? Yeah. Goodness gracious. If you don't do something as an intervention.

So we see a lot of women are like, oh, I'm going to go on menopause hormone therapy to stop bone loss. Yeah, it can be a treatment, but I always look at an external stress that we can put on the body that's going to invoke a change without pharmaceuticals.

So jump training, heavy resistance training, and sprint interval training. Those are the three key things. And from a training standpoint, and then from a nutrition standpoint, getting protein. Protein is so important. When you start telling women, they need to look at around one to 1.1 grams per pound, which is around that two to 2.3 grams per kilo per day.

They're like, whoa, that's a lot of protein. It is because we haven't been conditioned to eat it. It's a few scrambled eggs. It's a chicken rest at lunch. It's a small steak at dinner. Plus other things. Right. Exactly. And it doesn't all have to be animal products. I mean, you're looking at all the different beans and things that you can put together.

And that's the other big thing that in order to build the muscle and to keep the body composition in the state that we want it to keep going for longevity, those are the big rocks. The sprint interval training, the heavy resistance training, the jump training, and the protein. I'm thinking about this.

And I'm thinking about my mother who's 79 years old. She'll be 80 at the end of June and is in good health, walks a lot, gardens, does some yoga, but does none of the things that you're describing. So mom, please, I'm going to send her to listen to this.

I got my mom to switch. In the same vein, what about the women out there age 20 to, maybe we make it the 20 to 40 bracket. And if we need to divide that more finely, we can. What is the most efficient way for them to train for health, vigor, and longevity?

Making things fun for the most part. I don't want people to think that it's a chore. So if you're someone who's been told you need to run and you hate running, then don't run. Like that's common sense. And I say that because I see little kids in non-US countries that have to run across country.

And you see these kids when they're six years old and all running around the field. And they're the kids that hate running that aren't natural runners. And then they hate physical activity for the rest of their life. So I put that in, like when you are exercising, you want to find something that you find fun.

When you're in your twenties to forties, you have more room to get away with things that might not be optimal for you when you start to get older. Big rock again is resistance training. It doesn't have to be heavy resistance training. Like I said earlier to failure, you're periodizing.

If you want to do a block of Olympic lifting, go for it. If you're like, I'm not comfortable doing that kind of lifting. I want to do more machine stuff. Great. But we want to make sure that you're changing it up all the time to keep things moving and shaking with regards to strength and hypertrophy.

And then it becomes more of, are you training for something that's endurance? Are you looking for just longevity for brain health? We need to have some lactate production because women, as I said, at the beginning of the podcast are more oxidative. We don't have as many of those glycolytic fibers.

So what we're finding in older research is that there's a misstep in brain lactate metabolism because the brain hasn't been exposed to it, especially for looking at women who are being studied now. It hasn't been in a societal context to do that kind of work. The younger we are and the more that we can keep our glycolytic fibers going by doing high intensity work, the more we're exposing our brain to lactate, the better we see fast forward to attenuating cognitive decline and reducing the plaque development of Alzheimer's.

This is why women who are in their forties plus, I want them to do the sprint and the high intensity work for that lactate production. Start early because then you can take some of those type two B fibers that could either go more aerobic or anaerobic and make them more anaerobic.

So those are the two big things for women who are younger. And then you can play around with the other things if you want to be an ultra endurance athlete. Yeah, not really ideal, but yeah, you can do that. That's fine. You'll recover well. Now, forgive me because you've said it several times throughout today's discussion, but I really want to drive home a key point that I think for most people, men and women, is not obvious, but is really important.

When you say high intensity, you don't mean a class or a run where you're drenched in sweat and gasping for air at the end necessarily. Let's disambiguate high intensity from what most people think of high intensity, which is a really hard workout, a tough class where they had me moving the whole time, doing a circuit, et cetera.

What is the appropriate high intensity workout look like? Okay. So if I talk about true high intensity interval training, if you're a runner, it's going to the track and doing sets of 400 and 800s. Okay. So 400, a lap. Yep. 800, two laps. Right. So you're looking at between a minute and four minutes of hard work at 80% or more with variable recovery.

So that's why I use a track as an example. So if you do one lap and you're like, oh, I'm going to walk half a lap and then do it again, that's adequate recovery. Very tough. Yeah. It's hard. Right. But it's not like you're going to be there for 90 minutes doing as many 400s as you can.

Because you have that variable recovery, it might take a half an hour to 40 minutes max. And then you're gassed out. You can't do it anymore. If you're looking at a gym gym situation, I like to look at something like every minute on the minute, where you might be doing 10 deadlifts at moderate intensity weight.

And it takes- 10 repetitions. Yeah. So it takes you 50 seconds to complete that. Then you have 10 seconds to move to the next exercise that might be thrusters. So a squat, clean thruster. So it's a squat pulling the weight up overhead. So you're doing maybe eight of those in that minute and you might have 10 second recovery.

You go to the next exercise that might be kettlebell swings and you're doing explosive kettlebell swings and you'll finish, you know, 10 seconds to go. You go to the fourth exercise, I don't know, toes to bar or some other kind of V-up, some other high intensity. And then you have one minute completely off.

So you've had four minutes of really heavy work with maybe 10 seconds to move to the next exercise. One minute completely off. And then you repeat that three times. And this is high intensity interval training. This is not what you would consider resistance training for sake of building muscle or strength.

Correct. You're using these loads, these machines, the, the pike, you know, hanging from the bar and bringing your knees up or L-sit or something as a tool to get the heart rate up continually. Yep. Yep. Very different than resistance training the way most people think about it. Correct. So this is the cardiovascular high intensity interval training.

And the subset of that is sprint interval training. And this is something that's really, really hard and people don't get it. I don't necessarily mean running. It can be whatever mode of activity, but it's 30 seconds or less as hard as you can go. So this is your nine or 10 on your rating and perceived exertion, 110%.

It's max effort. On the rower, on the airdyne bike. Yeah. Running if you like. Yeah. Okay. Any of those things. The skier. Yeah. Battle ropes. Battle ropes are big. So 30 seconds all out, then rest, what, 10, 15 seconds? Repeat? No. No. You want to, because now we're looking at that top end where we want regeneration of your ATP, you know, all of that system and central nervous system recovery.

So this is 30 seconds all out. It could be two or three minutes of recovery. Oh, nice. Because I'm not looking at Tabata where you're 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off, because that's not the intensity we want. We want you to go all out and recover well enough to be able to go all out again.

You're not leaving anything in the tank. So those are what I mean by high intensity interval training, or when you're looking at polarizing your cardiovascular work, that's the top end. Those are the two examples of your top end. And then your recovery is that long, slow walking on another day where you're not going and doing a tempo run.

You're not doing a 5K easy jog because that puts you in that modern intensity. And if I heard you correctly earlier, you are suggesting most women do one or two days of high intensity interval training plus three to four days of resistance training for sake of building strength and muscle, which looks very different.

It's more warm up, do a couple work sets, you know, two to four work sets of, you know, an overhead press, two or four work sets of maybe a barbell curl, two or four sets of some dips or whatever, whatever, um, one's, you know, personal choices. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Got it. Um, very different, far and away different than what most people, men or women are doing out there, which is, um, a lot of Stairmaster treadmill jogging, maybe some lifting for hypertrophy. Because I look at the general consensus of what's out there in the fitness world is all based on aesthetics and body composition.

So people have this mentality of, I need to be hypertrophy to get swole and I need to do long, slow stuff on the cardio machine to lose body fat. But that isn't what we're after. We're after let's create really strong external stress to create adaptations, not only from a neural and a brain standpoint, that's understanding it, but also feeding down to metabolic change.

. you