Brad Brown 0:00 Welcome to The Female Athlete.
Today we're talking about strength training for menopausal females.
Why is strength training so important?
My name is Brad.
I'm from CoachParry.com.
You might be wondering, why am I on The Female Athlete Channel?
I can tell you that Haley Nixon recently had a baby.
So I'm just filling in for a couple of weeks.
I'm going to be joined by Shona Hendricks, the head of our Female Athlete programme,
sports scientist, on today's video to talk about everything strength training.
For the menopausal female, it becomes so, so important once you hit menopause to keep
doing strength training, and we're going to find out exactly from Shona why that is, talk
about some of the types of strength training you should be doing, as well as the frequency,
how much strength training, you need to be doing as a postmenopausal female?
So today, we're talking about strength training, particularly for menopausal females.
And you often talk about it as strength training in general for athletes over 50 in particular,
how important it is.
But for menopausal females, it almost becomes a non negotiable, why is strength training,
postmenopausal so important?
Shona Hendricks 1:02 Yeah, Brad, it's such a great question.
And it really comes down to the fact that even before perimenopause and menopause, essentially,
you start ageing in your, in your third decade of life and so your, your general kind of
strength starts decreasing as it is, and that sort of happens quite linearly between 30
and 40, and then 40 to 50.
But then from 50 Plus it becomes quite exponential and, and so that the lean muscle mass loss
and, and the bone mineral density loss is really extreme.
And so utilising strength training will really just help you maintain that and in some instances,
you can, you can reverse some of the lean muscle mass loss, within when it comes to
bone mineral density, what we often find is that you have to have exerted certain forces
on the bone for the bone to get a little bit stronger.
However, in order to make that even more effective is that, that force on the bone needs to be
multi directional.
It's very often people will say, Oh, well, I'm running and I'm not doing necessarily
cycling and swimming, which is non weight bearing, I am putting that force on my bones,
but we really would need that multi directional force.
And so strength training just plays such a vital role from, from that perspective.
Then as we going you know, from meno, perimenopause into menopause, with the hormone fluctuation,
the eventually the loss and absolute flatline of oestrogen and progesterone, it becomes
even more critical to be including strength training within your, within your week.
Brad Brown 2:25 Shona, let's talk about the type of strength
training.
When you talk strength training, what do you what are you talking about?
Shona Hendricks 2:31 Yeah, so when we say strength training, and
we also ask people this, I mean, any any female I'm sure will tell you that strength training
is important.
So yes, 100% it is.
But it's the type of strength training that you're doing.
So I mean, strength training specific to runners is doing exercises that are using, you know,
working on your your natural prime movers, but also really the stabilisers.
And so, from that perspective, that becomes an injury prevention perspective as a runner.
But the strength training where we were looking particularly for peri and postmenopause, is
to essentially elicit similar responses hormonally that you're missing out from like I mentioned
with that, that fluctuation on progesterone and oestrogen.
And so the type of strength training that you do is vitally important.
And so we say resistance training, so specifically lifting weights and, and, and you know, using
loads to do training.
And then high intensity interval training is vital as well, however, it's really important
that you can't just go in and jump in and do those.
And so all forms of strength training, so to build you up and to get you back to that
point is really, really key.
You can't just sort of jump in and get involved because yeah, there's an inherent injury risk
with those
Brad Brown 3:42 Shona.
I see this question quite often in the forums on the Coach Parry training app, but but also
some of the webinars that we've done, where people are asking things like I cycle is that
a form of strength training? is swimming, a form of strength training, what about Pilates
and yoga?
What are your thoughts?
Is that good enough for for postmenopausal females from a strength training perspective?
Shona Hendricks 4:02 I think, I think those forms of strength are
excellent.
So I mean, yoga, yoga is phenomenal from a mobility perspective, Pilates does a lot for
core and hamstrings and glutes.
But they just they don't have that, that compounding impact on the bones.
And so that's why resistance training is so so so important.
So I'm not saying that people must stop doing those forms of exercise, they must continue
doing them.
But, but they need to complement that form of strength training with resistance training,
and eventually some some high intensity interval training, just to really start eliciting that,
that effect on, on the bone so that the bone mineral density can improve and so can your
lean muscle mass.
And I know there's always going to be this resistance, excuse the pun to the resistance
training, because women want to you know, they're so worried about bulking up, but you
really, really really need to do very heavy resistance training combined with an extremely,
extremely high protein based nutrition diet to be bulking up extremely, and because you're
running, you're not going to be bulking up, you're just going to be getting stronger.
And looking after your bones and muscles.
Brad Brown 5:06 And Shona, the swimming and cycling are great.
I mean, we are huge fans of cross training here at Coach Parry.
So again, as you say, the Pilates and yoga, if you are swimming and cycling, don't stop
it.
But it's not fulfilling the purpose that we're talking about here today, if I'm correct in
saying that?
Shona Hendricks 5:21 Yeah, 100% that is, yeah, excellent forms
of cross training.
And we love that.
But from a strength training perspective, yes cycling does build a little bit of strength
in the legs, but it's not, it's not exactly what we're talking about yet.
We wanting to have strength, but we wanting to have pressure and force on the bones and
we're wanting to build lean muscle mass.
And so because of cycling essentially is also an endurance activity, it's not always going
to be the strength that we're looking for.
So continue with your cross training, for sure.
But make sure that you're adding in specific strength that's going to be specific to you
as a female and help you through, through this phase.
Brad Brown 5:55 And frequency?
I mean, how much should we be doing?
Shona, I mean, obviously, we all love running and and then to add strength training on top
of that, how much how much, or how many sessions strength sessions should we be doing a week.
Shona Hendricks 6:09 Um, ideally, and I know, I'm gonna have eyes
rolling in the background, ideally, I'd like to see three string sessions a week, over
and above your cross training and you're running.
I'm well aware that they'd life happens and people are busy.
And so there is always the you know, the bargaining kind of well ok, if you can't get in three,
two, you know, two is better than one and one is better than none.
For sure, but, but ideally, we'd like to see three strength sessions, and particularly
for a female over 50, as I mentioned, you know, it just becomes a vital component because
of the, the lean muscle mass loss and, and that sort of loss within bone mineral density.
And so I almost would say that you're probably better off even dropping one of your running
sessions and adding in another strength session, you're going to benefit so much from that.
And also, eventually, when you've built up that strength enough, and you're getting towards
a high intensity interval session, that session can be shorter.
That sessions 20 to 30 minutes.
And so, you know, they aren't all hour, hour and a half long, sort of sessions, and they're
not all needed to be done in a gym.
You can do these, these sort of exercises and things at home.
Definitely.
And so you can save a little bit of time from that perspective.
Brad Brown 7:14 Yeah, Shona.
And you talk about eyeballs rolling, particularly the runners.
Runners love running.
So when you talk about strength training, they just don't want to do it.
But it's also you've got to bear in mind that there are going to be, I'm guessing that there
are phases in your training.
If you look at a year, for example, there's going to be times where you training for a
specific race, there's going to be times when you just building your base, and your training
is not going to be exactly the same all year round.
So there might be a focus at one stage within a year where you may be focusing less on running,
which gives you more time to focus on strength training, and vice versa.
You could be in the final 12 week build to a race where you've, you've built the strength,
but you're now able to dial back slightly and focus more on the running.
Am I correct in saying that?
How would you go about sort of getting that balance, right, you're not doing three sessions,
strength, four or five runs every single week for 52 weeks of the year?
Shona Hendricks 8:03 Yep, exactly, you'd periodize your year at
in that way.
So find your target race or two target races for the year.
And you know, at the beginning, when you're starting to prepare for that race, that's
where you put your strength phase of work in.
So definitely maintaining a lot more strength and perhaps a little bit less running.
And as you get closer to your race that you know, so the strength training would sort
of taper down and the running maybe would taper up in that regard.
It's really, really key that that you do that because you also want the strength training
to be built up so that you become strong enough that you don't get injured through that when
you increasing the loads of running.
I would still almost say that that for the menopausal female that there is a little bit
more of the maintenance of perhaps the higher intensity and the resistance stuff and you
start dropping some of those, those other aspects but yes, definitely you'd be periodizing
that across the year.
And I think particularly for, for runners in the Northern Hemisphere where winters aren't
as great as ours down here in South Africa you know, that's a great time to be working
on your strength because you're not always managing to get out and go out and run in
the in the in the cold or in the snow and so perfect time to be doing some strength
training at home and building up for that upcoming season.
Brad Brown 9:13 Absolutely Shona as always great to catch
up.
Thanks for your time today.
Shona Hendricks 9:17 Awesome.
Thanks, Brad.
Good.
Good to chat.
Brad Brown 9:21 Thank you so much for watching this video.
Don't forget that a few months ago, Shona did an incredible webinar on menopause for
the female athletes called running through menopause.
You can click on the link right over here and watch it.
It is absolute gold.
You don't want to miss out if you haven't watched that yet.
And also make sure that you do subscribe to The Female Athlete YouTube channel.
You can click on it over here so that you don't miss any of our upcoming videos.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai