[Dr. Eric Helms]
Many women I run into, they are encountering information right now for the first time encouraging them to get into the weight room to consider taking supplements for creatine. If you are thinking about lifting weights and getting serious about your fitness and training, it's never too late to start. You absolutely can build substantial strength and substantial muscle mass starting in your 40s or 50s.

[Angela Foster]
Dr. Eric Helms, you spent your career studying muscle strength and body composition.

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Any type of resistance training, whether it's moderate load, heavy load, or even relatively light load is far and away the most important thing.

[Angela Foster]
Protein. I have heard multiple different things around protein recently.

[Dr. Eric Helms]
It's a very, very reasonable target if you're aiming to build muscle.

[Angela Foster]
For women who really enjoy just working in a slightly higher rep range, they don't want to do five by five. Is there a reason that they need to get close to that one rep max?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Frankly, no.

[Angela Foster]
For the woman who gets her seat right, she does progressively overload her training, she eats well, she gets enough sleep. Do you think she can achieve the same body composition results in her 40s and 50s that she can in her 20s?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Pretty damn close. It's quite literally never too late and your body can still adapt if you are still alive.

[Angela Foster]
Dr. Eric Helms, you are a coach, athlete, researcher, author, and educator, and you spent your career studying muscle strength and body composition. For the woman listening to this, who's in perimenopause or postmenopause, and she feels like she's doing everything right. She's training hard, she's eating nutritious food, she's sleeping reasonably well, and yet her body composition is going in the opposite direction than she wants to.

What's actually happening physiologically?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Well, it could be numerous things, and it could be that it's just currently happening in this perimenopausal phase, but it could also be something physiological for sure. This is a massive transition. The menopause transition can be quite rough, and one of the things you mentioned is often not a given.

You mentioned assuming she's sleeping well, and I think one of the things that I see most commonly is that sleep does get quite disrupted because of many of the effects of perimenopause. Sometimes the change in body temperature, night sweats, mood, and also menstrual cycle, and the way that impacts the person can be amplified, varied, and becomes much more almost bipolar, if you will. One of the most consistent things you'll see reported anecdotally, as well as in the literature, is that sleep quality and quantity do become quite impacted.

You might be waking up at a similar time, going to bed at a similar time, but not feeling as well-rested. That's something I would keep an eye on. Many of the symptoms that people associate with perimenopause and the transition that do have wide-ranging effects and everything are often secondary to poor sleep.

Typically, one of the things that I see is most effective in terms of if all I knew was, hey, things aren't working well, they used to be going fine, and now they're pretty crappy, one of the first things I look at is, all right, let's take a look at your sleep. Let's see what's going on here. I think that that can be that slow-building element that contributes to a lot of things.

Even if we were to say, hey, let's take perimenopause off the table and just look at how would you be impacted by sleep, the amount of things that overlap and co-vary are pretty consistent with all the things that people experience. That is, in the literature at least, one of the things that does seem to be one of the primary drivers of some of these experiences that people have.

[Angela Foster]
If someone is not sleeping well, kind of it's fragmented, they're waking up or they're not getting enough sleep duration, how would that affect the results that they're getting with their training or their nutrition?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Yes, it would just make everything worse, basically. The importance of sleep really can't be overly hyped. It's pretty wide-ranging.

Memory consolidation, mood stabilisation, adapting in terms of physiological ability to actually get the adaptations you're looking for in training, so building muscle, losing fat, getting better cardiovascular endurance, all of these things are pretty hinged to some degree upon sleep. Now, certainly, you can sleep five, six, seven hours a night. It's not ideal, probably closer to five or six and be chronically sleep restricted.

It won't be a complete barrier to making progress, but it certainly will reduce your capacity to adapt. It really depends upon what your goals are, what other things you're facing, how much time and energy you're dedicating to your nutrition and diet. One of the most critical things that I think people struggle with is that getting insufficient sleep changes your hunger signals.

There are pretty consistent relationships if you look at the data where people who are chronically sleep restricted tend to have more metabolic issues, poor appetite regulation, and generally struggle more with body weight and weight gain and struggle more to lose body fat. If you look at acute trials, that's just associational data. If you look at acute trials on sleep restriction, people will just consume more food ad libitum, meaning that if they're left about to their own devices on days when they're sleep restricted versus days they're well-rested, their baseline intake of calories will be higher and typically an energy surplus, depending upon other factors, of course.

It's easy to have this slow slide towards weight gain when you are chronically sleep restricted. That's something that people frequently report is that their body composition is getting worse. Like you mentioned, it's going the wrong direction.

When you overlay that with other things that people experience, like regional changes in body fat distribution and seeing your body is not necessarily gaining fat where it normally would and you're seeing it go on in other places, that could be quite disheartening. Absolutely.

[Angela Foster]
Yeah, very disheartening. I think the other thing that I hear so much from women is that they feel puffy or bloated. They don't have the same definition.

It's then obviously they can do things like body composition analysis and look at it, but they feel like their belly's bloated in addition to feeling like maybe they're gaining weight in that area or they're not seeing the same definition they used to because they feel puffier. Is that inflammation that's driving that? Do they need more recovery?

What's causing that?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Yeah, it could be caused by several things. For example, let's imagine that perimenopause wasn't even happening, but someone got less sleep and then they experienced changes in their appetite regulation. That led them to eating different foods slightly.

That alone, if you're drawn to more savoury or salty foods, for example, although some data would indicate getting less sleep draws you towards, say, sweet foods, but it doesn't really necessarily pan out that clearly. If your dietary habits change or even just the amount of food you're consuming change, that could lead to that. Another thing to realise is that let's put menopause back on the table.

If you are experiencing these hormonal changes, hormonal changes are relatively wide ranging in their impact. We often put hormones in boxes. We think, oh, cortisol, stress, testosterone, muscle building, but they do far more than that.

When you are seeing a change in your ovarian hormones, there's a change in other hormones as well. Yes, estradiol and progesterone may be changing a little bit, but certainly that's going to impact other things. They have downstream effects and feedback loops that could impact the way you regulate water balance and the intracellular to extracellular ratio there.

If water retention is occurring or shifting, or if you're noticing that you used to have kind of mild degrees related to your menstrual cycle of water retention in certain phases, and now that seems exacerbated, unpredictable, or longer, that absolutely could be part of that experience. That wouldn't be necessarily uncommon by any means.

[Angela Foster]
For the woman that's experiencing this, what can she do?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
In general, I would encourage you to listen to people who do have specific expertise in this area. My colleague, Dr. Lauren Colenso Semple, great example, but there's many others out there, and specific expertise on the thing you're talking about. With that said, I'll kind of stay in my lane to a degree and provide some helpful information.

I think the first thing is that many women I run into, they are encountering information right now, for the first time, encouraging them to get into the weight room, to consider taking supplements for creatine, because not only for brain health, but also they've been told it's good for combating sarcopenia, osteopenia, and the potential body composition, and muscle mass, and bone losses that they might experience that could even be more exacerbated by the menopause transition, and the lowering amounts of oestrogen that they might have, which could impact bone health. If you are thinking about lifting weights and getting serious about your fitness and training, it's never too late to do it, but some of the messaging out there is not necessarily giving you the information you need if this is a relatively new pursuit. For example, I do get concerned when any information that's out there is informative, but also limiting.

So yes, it's true that as we age, men and women, we are more likely to lose bone mass, and specifically experience the loss of type 2 fibres that are more powerful, and it is important to then lift heavy weights to try to combat that. But heavy is relative. If you've never lifted weights before, you don't need to be necessarily doing axially loaded barbell back squat 5x5 with the heaviest weight you can lift.

I think it's really important to understand that the data we have, as an example, would indicate that any type of resistance training, whether it's moderate load, heavy load, or even relatively light load, so long as you're training sufficiently hard and it is progressive from where you currently are, so it's not just repeating the same weights each time, but it is trying to put more weight on the or more on the cable stack, or heavier band resistance, like whatever form of weight training or resistance training you're doing, it is progressive in nature. That is far and away the most important thing, so long as you're getting a sufficient dose. So I guess I have a bit of a cautionary tale of if there's a message out there that encourages you to start training and to try to, you know, take fitness by the reins and make some positive improvements, you really do need to try to find the path of least resistance and the thing that's going to lead towards consistency, because it's important that you maintain that more active lifestyle that includes resistance training for not only just this period of the menopause transition, but throughout life, as it'll ensure, you know, quality health span and lifespan.

I haven't lifted weights like that. It's been a while. I'm not comfortable with my body.

I don't want to go into that portion of the weight room. Do I need to hire a trainer? Well, okay, let me get this plate for at home.

I can walk around my neighbourhood with, you know, a weighted vest. I can take creatine and hopefully that's good enough. And I think if the barrier to entry was lowered for what qualified as progressive, you know, resistance training and the big rocks we're focused on rather than the time of when you lifted as to getting in a reasonably high protein intake and looking at your diet and what things you can do to make it a little easier to not be in a slight energy surplus.

And then what can we do to improve your sleep quality? You know, these are important big rocks that apply in all phases of life. They're more important right now, but most importantly is you want to set up these habits to be enduring so that they can help you throughout your life.

And I think the largest concern I have right now is that a lot of these messages overcomplicate um the matter and create a few additional barriers to entry that I don't think are needed and can sometimes turn people away from the most important big ticket items that they should be putting their energy into.

[Angela Foster]
Yeah, that's a great point. For women who really enjoy just working in a slightly higher rep range, they don't want to do five by five. They enjoy going to the gym, lifting somewhere, depending on the exercise between 8 and 15 reps.

They like mixing in a little bit of hit. They like doing something that's low intensity. If they're, I don't know, they wake up more tired or they just want to go out for a walk in nature.

Is there a reason that they need to go and lift five by five or three reps and get close to that one rep max? Do we need to do that?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
I would say frankly no. The main way that we stimulate bone to grow is higher mechanical tension on those bones, but the amount that it takes to actually stimulate that bone growth is not necessarily the most amount you can put on your body, right? I would say that especially if you're getting out and doing things like hikes, walking, and you're getting some degree of some type of impact, it doesn't need to be like jumping or plyometrics which is sometimes proposed and just so long as you have for the other bones in your body besides like your spine and your hips and your legs, you have some ability to generate force because the way that we primarily produce tension on bone is by the two tendons that attach to it pulling towards the centre of the muscle contraction.

I think here's the litmus test that I would ask the audience to ask themselves. Let's say I do like training in the 8 to 15, maybe even 15 to 25 range. Are my loads changing over time or am I doing kind of the same 8 to 15 or 15 to 25 reps?

Is it still the same weight that's on the bar, on the cable stack, same band tension, whatever load I'm using? When was the last time I opted? If that number is progressing at the pace that you can and it hasn't been stagnant for a while, you're doing it right.

That means that there is some type of adaptation occurring. You are getting stronger. If you're getting stronger, that means you're upping the load within that rep range.

That means it is steadily providing that higher tension stimulus to your bones and that is fabulous. You can get stronger in any rep range. Is gaining strength slightly more efficient if you're lifting heavy weights?

Well, if you define strength as say your one rep max, absolutely. When I was still competing in competitive strength sport powerlifting, which I've done like 20 meets and I've coached 100 plus people to the platform, if they said, hey, Eric, if I prefer to lift in the 8 to 15 rep range, could I do that? I'd say, I mean, we could, but you realise when you get on the platform, you're going to have to do a one rep max on squat bench and deadlift.

The thing is that a specific sport performance goal or achieving maximal strength are not necessarily the same thing as getting your body to continually adapt. That really comes down to progressive overload. That just means that as you gain more fitness, you have to meet your body where it's at.

Now, it's at a higher place, which is a wonderful thing. If you are new to lifting weights and you're not used to it, it can be a little bit of a difference in mentality. It's never meant to get easy.

The weights are never meant to get light. It's meant to always be continually challenging. It's just that each time you build more strength, then you go, all right, well, now I get to up the challenge.

I think you have to learn to get addicted to the dopamine hit and the self-efficacy building of going like, oh, wow, my old 10 rep max is now my 20 rep max. How cool is that? That's totally fine.

There is no data to indicate that that is insufficient to prevent the age or hormonal change-related losses of bone mass that people can get and subsequent impact on sarcopenia. All the data would indicate that if you're in there and you're training progressively, and all the trials would show interventions, that that does have massive impacts. Could I make an argument that maybe it would be slightly better if we wanted to maximise bone growth to be a competitive master's powerlifter versus someone who consistently liked to get their pump on?

Sure, but now we're talking about trying to major in the minors. If you're trying to win the bone mineral density Olympics, that's a little different than I want to live healthy and never have to worry about this. If I fall, I'm strong enough to catch myself.

Even if I wasn't, I probably wouldn't get hurt if I did hit the ground.

[Angela Foster]
If you're getting value from this show, the single best thing you can do to help us keep bringing you the highest calibre guests is to subscribe or follow wherever you listen or watch. It takes 10 seconds, but it genuinely makes a difference to the quality of the guests we bring you week after week. That's a great point.

I think for women listening to this, that would be their concern is the longevity aspect around bone. When we're looking at shape, I think it's something different. I think when women listening to this, women's clothes are tailored.

What everyone wants, and I think this is where women can feel that their body starts to betray them, is they feel like they don't have the same shape, the same curves, the fat's being redistributed, so they're not getting their waist come in. They might not feel like their glutes are developing at the same rate that they want them to. When we're looking at that from an aesthetic perspective, because I think that's important to many people, what kind of rep range and frequency should we be looking at?

[Dr. Eric Helms]
Great question. Yeah. This is where the data on just how to build as much muscle as possible, which is for sure the best way to change your shape and your aesthetic.

More specific place, but I think a lot of people have shame around their body, don't like what they see in the mirror, and they want to change that. I think the first thing to really acknowledge is that good things sometimes come from a place of unease, dislike, but ultimately, you want to get to a place where it is a joy to feel like you have the agency to change your body and move. Even though you might be doing that for the purposes of aesthetics, that's ideally where you want to get to for this to be a long-term enduring habit that does really become part of your life and give you the functional but also awesome looking cool body that you have.

I see it like my continual art project as a bodybuilder. With that little bit of cautionary tale on the front end, just because I can see how this can always become a negative, it's easy to focus on the part that you don't like, which is often, I don't like the body fat. I don't like the body fat here, and I want it to go.

You can find people telling you to do certain things to get it to go, and then you will often become focused on repeated diet cycles, cardio, and the fat loss part of this. My recommendation would be to really invest in the muscle building side of things because if you haven't seriously approached lifting weights or trying to build a whole lot of muscle mass before, you can make some pretty awesome changes in the short term. The newbie gains are something that all of us bodybuilders look back on with fond memories of how we gained 80% of the muscle we ever built in the first couple of years of weight training, but we did it eating a sufficient amount and coming into it with optimism and our wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, young lifting mentality where we were excited every day about the ability to put just another rep in that set or another two and a half kilo plate on the bar. I think that mentality is really, really important and fun.

The amount of muscle mass that someone can build is much higher early on. It doesn't matter that you're doing this now in your late 30s, 40s, early 50s, even later than that. We have robust data showing that in this age range, you can build a tremendous amount of muscle relative to your total potential and strength with progressive regular training.

What does that look like? Well, it should basically be a relatively balanced cross muscle groups approach where you are training anywhere in the 6 to 20 rep range, I would say in most cases, and coming close to muscular failure on most of your sets. What you should see is an actual visible and you should feel that the bar speed or the cable speed or the dumbbell speed is slowing down by the end of that set even though you're trying to move it faster.

I think when people are new to lifting weights, it's difficult to tell when they're at their max capacity. If you have a spotter or if you're using a machine, it's good to actually test yourself. Do as many reps with that load as you can do until you can't even move it.

You're actually failing a rep. It's unsafe. If you do have a spotter, you can maintain form and especially on machines where it's only going to move in one plane or direction.

That will help anchor what does failure look like because ideally, you're doing most of your sets in that 1 to 3 reps from failure range and occasionally, when it is safe to do so, training to failure. That's how you know whether or not you're training, quote unquote, hard enough on a per set basis. In that rep range, pretty much anything can work.

You're going to find that certain combinations of exercises, rep ranges, and proximities to failure make a whole lot more sense than others. If you're doing a full body compound lift like a deadlift or a squat and you're training to failure in that 20 rep range, that is also now a huge cardio metabolic challenge. That is going to be very, very tiring and it will be a challenge in other ways which if that's your jam, go for it.

If we're looking to put together the most effective training session for building muscle, you probably want to be more in the moderate range, a few reps from failure on something like a squat or a leg press or a lunge initially and then as you move through other exercises that train a little bit less muscle mass at once so it's not as much of a cardio respiratory challenge, that's when you can push closer to failure, do higher reps.

This gives you opportunities to deal with your own personal injury history, any kind of pain or discomfort you get in any given joints, you can reduce the load train slightly heavier, train slightly lighter. You want to train across muscle groups and essentially what you're trying to do is give yourself a sufficient volume which we describe as the total amount of work you're doing to produce an adaptation. The adaptation itself of hypertrophy is largely built on just having sufficient mechanical tension which is a complex way of saying getting that muscle to think it needs to grow so it actually needs to reach the point of fatigue in moderate or high rep ranges so long as it gets there and then be exposed to enough of that to get a pretty solid growth stimulus.

In terms of reasonable ranges of volume and frequency, if you can train each muscle group somewhere in the range of I would say a good starting place would be say six to twelve sets per week per muscle. Direct sets is a useful way of doing it and taking those sets reasonably close to failure, having two to three exercises per muscle group so you can train it and get different skills and different angles because the body is complex. You have some muscles that do certain things, others that do others and you have different compartments in them so a few different angles, unilateral, bilateral, pick your poison and enjoy.

I find that if you're looking for that number of sets per muscle group per week as a starting point you'd probably be training each muscle group one to two times a week so you could have an alternating upper lower split where you train anywhere from two to four times a week. That's a pretty basic and an easy way to set it up and then from there you can just see if you can progress and if you can't you can kind of get a bit of an audit on different aspects of your life. Is your nutrition supporting it or are you being really restrictive struggling with sleep and maybe you don't have enough of a good enough recovery environment or do you think it's gotten quite easy maybe you had a background as an athlete you're doing your 10 sets and you're not seeing much growth and you know what I could do another day it may be just a dosing issue and you could just push a little more and nothing wrong with that either so that's a good kind of generalised guideline starting point for most people.

[Angela Foster]
If I can just drill into that a little bit because I think people may have heard this just so they really understand it so if we take for example somebody's trying to get stronger get their let's take pick an area of the body they're trying to make their back develop their back right muscle strength and muscle mass and so you were saying six to twelve reps two to three different types of sorry six to twelve sets two to three different types of exercises so for example that would include maybe a lat pull down a row so now we're doing something else and then maybe one other exercise I don't know a face pull or something like this right that would be doing would that meet what you're saying and then what would then be the gap if they were doing say three sets of each of those exercise we'd get to nine so we're not quite up to the sort of 10 to 12 we've got above six would they then need to repeat that again that week or is once a week enough how much they need to from there yeah once

[Dr. Eric Helms]
a week is enough is it is it the best or the optimal way of doing it not necessarily I think it all depends upon how much time you have so I really like taking a constraints-led approach and how much time and effort does someone want and will they enjoy and will they consistently apply to their training so I mean personally I train almost every day except when I'm like ill and I alternate a full body push full body pull so I do like back and then glutes and hams and then I do like press quads calves and then there's some muscle groups which I train almost every day and I'm accomplishing more than 20 sets per muscle group per week and most of them are close to failure but I'm also a competitive bodybuilder and that is what I can fit into my life based upon my schedule and also I love it but if someone else is like yeah I don't love training but I enjoy the feeling and I like what it's doing for me that'll look a little different especially if they only started training six months ago so what's your training background what's your injury history how confident are you in the gym how far do you have to go are you sitting in traffic so I think it's really important when you give guidelines like this that people understand that yeah more is more but there's diminishing returns you know you're going to get a lot more from going from say five to ten sets than you do when you go from 10 to 15 sets based upon the data and then you get even less when you go from 15 to 20. It is a you know basically a dose response curve in terms of the dose of training you do but it's what we describe as diminishing returns you're getting a poorer poorer and poorer return on investment there's a certain point where you're doing more but it's imperceptibly better and it is maybe not worth it for most people so in the example you gave let's say they're doing a cable row and a lap pull down three sets of somewhere in the 8 to 15 rep range on Monday and if they had no more time to train that that week all good you know you're kind of in that range you will see some some pretty decent progress especially if you're pushing those sets hard but if you have the time absolutely come back in a couple days later you know generally you you could train on back-to-back days and train back-to-back muscles you'd probably be a little bit sore but you'd still progress we actually have data showing that when you get information on lifting weights just know that it often comes from that lens or you can't train muscle group two days in a row or then if you'd really drill down it's like well you can but it's not ideal and why would you do that it's like okay well maybe because that's my schedule fine you know so it is a general rule taking your volume and splitting it up across multiple days per week is the way to do it most of the time i'd recommend training each muscle group two to three times per week to get to the volume you want to get to and that's going to be dependent upon how long you have in the gym in each session if you have four hours a week you can actually achieve a pretty high volume programme you know you can be getting maybe you know 15 plus sets per muscle group especially if you have good respiratory recovery and then you can just have some type of alternating upper lower but yeah in the example you gave let's say you wanted to get to those 12 sets let's say on tuesday and friday you come in and you do some variation of a horizontal pull and a vertical pull so you're pulling in the vertical plane like a pull-up or a pull-down and then some type of row and you can switch up the exercises or you could switch up the rep ranges or you could repeat the same thing twice and just see if you can make a small incremental improvement there's not a wrong or right way to do it there but i think you do want to make sure that you get some good guidance on how to move if these are if this is a new challenge and a new pursuit for you but yeah the common splits or the approaches you'll see will be upper lower or you can take a full body approach where you're kind of just dedicating maybe one exercise to each major muscle group there's also more kind of bodybuilding centric approaches that are like body part splits chest and back legs and shoulders and arm rinse and repeat or a legs push pull things like that or more creative splits if you're trying to accomplish higher volumes like the one i mentioned that i personally do but really what you're looking for is just trying to find that balance between giving the muscle groups a little bit of time to recover and then also being able to distribute the amount of total work you're doing across the available sessions you have in a day and one of the more straightforward and often universally good fit ones are alternating upper lowers so four days per week two uppers two lowers you can spread the exercises up a little bit differently you can have a slightly higher rep day a slightly lower rep day those tend to be a little more palatable in terms of what's you can see progress a little easier because you're training in two different rep ranges you might find you trend better towards one versus the other or you enjoy one versus the other certain exercises match one one more than

[Angela Foster]
the other etc and what about um cardiorespiratory training so where does this fit for someone who wants to look good and live a long time how much hit how much lower intensity exercise should they

[Dr. Eric Helms]
be doing yeah i think it's important just to think about what does your life demand of you where are you starting so there's a lot of information out there on oh you need to be in this zone or you must be doing this type of exercise etc and this is one of the ones where i think you have the most opportunity to be flexible and the main thing you want to do is just make sure that you are actually physically active if you want to just count steps versus actually do formal cardio that's totally fine so myself personally i i don't really enjoy doing cardio and my all of my blood markers are in a great place my blood pressure is good and i am able to train the way i want with my level level of cardiorespiratory endurance so that's totally fine you know all of our data on health would indicate that you know maintaining good cardiorespiratory endurance and staying physically active in combination with resistance training is the best things you can do for health but i think there's probably much like there's too narrow and specific advice that tends to be a little more limiting around resistance training when you can do it how heavy you have to lift like i talked about before that also exists in the cardiorespiratory training world people think they need to start getting heart rate monitors and being in certain zones for certain amount of time but if you can get you know one to two hours of total like cardiorespiratory training per week that would be amazing and that's above the physical activity guidelines especially if we're talking moderate to vigorous activity but i find that's pretty easy for most people to achieve and that can be done after you lift weights they can be done on different days i wouldn't do it immediately before your resistance training especially if you're doing it as formal cardio but just pushing yourself to the point where it is a challenge same kind of deal as it goes with resistance training like if you want to go on a jog try to see if you can get a similar distance in less time or see if you can go a further distance in the same time and then you know keep on slowly pushing that up as you go and that can be applied to any modality or if you're not really that interested in pushing yourself super hard just make sure that it's kind of maintains this moderate level of difficulty where you couldn't just easily talk to someone you'd have you know one of those conversations that kind of sound like this and you maintain that for for a few days or sorry for 20 30 minutes a few days per week then that's all good and if you do choose swimming don't try to talk while doing it i've seen that go poorly for people because you know you'll drown that's a joke but yeah so just anyway you whatever you want to do whether it's swimming biking hiking uh you know go wild with it and just be consistent or just count steps um if you enjoy just getting in and amongst things or if you don't like just park further away to take the first parking spot you find don't you know take the stairs more often you can gamify it get it get a fit bit so long as it doesn't become like too obsessive if we look at the data on health and healthy ageing and metabolic impacts and all-cause mortality data somewhere in the six to eight thousand steps per day is where you start to see all of the negative effects of being sedentary go away and then kind of like the the volume literature and resistance training you do get a little more from getting more and more and more and more steps but the the drop-off in terms of the uh prevention of ill health or the benefits that you see for positive health become lesser and lesser and lesser as you start to get over you know that that kind of six to eight thousand steps per day range into the 10s 15s you know insanity ranges of steps per day

[Angela Foster]
do you think um from what you've seen in the research and from your experience of working with women um for the woman who gets her sleep right she applies what you're saying she does progressively overload her training she gets the right steps in she eats well she manages her stress she gets enough sleep do you think she can achieve the same body composition results in her 40s and 50s that she can in her 20s you know pretty damn close uh and i think

[Dr. Eric Helms]
there is the pragmatic answer and there's the strict answer and there's the one that matters so if you were someone who was say competing in physique sport in your 20s and now you're competing in physique sport in your 40s you might notice it's a little harder to get to the same place but the other thing is unless you took a break between those two time periods you actually will be probably more muscular in your 40s than your 20s because it takes that that much time to build that much muscle and this is a truth for men and women when i look at who are the champions in physique sport and in power lifting it is people who stuck with it for a long time period and of course were also genetically gifted and did all those things but it is not necessarily a young man or young woman's game and it is the people who have been able to stay injury free push hard and stay in the game a long time if you look at natural physique sport champions and natural power lifting champions now if you didn't train when you were in your 20s i think and you're looking at for the first time getting into it i think the most important message is that you don't really get to compare i i understand that it is easy to look back and be like man this feels so much harder i remember being in sport i remember doing a little bit of lifting and now it's it takes more effort and it's more painful um i have less time and i'm not recovering as quickly ultimately there does need to be a bit of grief with that but then the goal of grief is to get to a place of acceptance you know and that's true in all forms of grief because we don't get to go backwards unfortunately you know um you acknowledge it and then you go well you know this is actually even more important for me now than it was then and uh it's never too late to start and the good news is that you absolutely can build substantial strength and substantial muscle mass starting in your 40s or 50s i see it happen all the time the data shows it and it's actually not that much of a step back if we look at the objective outcomes than it was in your 20s when we look at data on middle-aged women who are start training if we look at data on masters power lifters so this is 40 plus so m1 is 40 and over m2 is 50 and over m3 is 60 and over we see consistent strength gains in power lifters there's some pretty cool studies that were done on the open power lifting data set this is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of lifters who have registered for competitions and they put in their age and then they've been tracked for years and we see that it's all female age categories and m1 2 3 4 even 5 when they start competing for the first time in that age group they do make an average increase in strength so it's quite literally never too late and your body can still adapt if you are still alive and it is increasingly more important to get it to do that the older you get when the fall risk becomes higher and the fall consequences become higher as well as the the likelihood of having other potential threats to your life and health span like cardiorespiratory disease metabolic disease and other impacts on one's life so even after menopause you know i i think it's it's really cool to see that you can actually even build bone and muscle if you've never been exposed to resistance training and there are also other other things you can do you know you don't need to take a one-pronged approach speak to your your gp get a referral to an endocrinologist there's an argument that um that it may be good to consider things like hrt or working with a nutritionist there there's a lot of options out there as as women go through this transition the biggest rock and obviously i'm biassed is going to be you know resistance training and building muscle and building strength but that process is existing in a whole host of of options that someone has that are evidence-based so long as you are well educated and well informed and you're not kind of falling down the tick tock or instagram rabbit hole where you can make some pretty notable changes in life quality fitness as well as body composition and strength that don't just include you know lifting weights so yeah i would say to get back to your question i've seen some pretty impressive transformations of people who do not even start lifting until they're in their midlife and the data reflects that my personal coaching experience reflects that and most importantly is you don't have a time machine anyway so let's get

[Angela Foster]
the most out of yourself that you possibly can i love that that's so reassuring what does the data and your coaching experience show around hormone therapy menopause hormone therapy and whether women find it easier to gain muscle or easier to lose fat when they're taking menopause hormone

[Dr. Eric Helms]
therapy versus the women who are not yeah so the data doesn't actually indicate that it's going to have a tremendous or massive impact directly on things like body composition or fitness adaptations but quality of life perceptual differences and the negative symptoms associated with perimenopause are are notably impacted i think it's also important to make sure we're talking about the same thing when we talk about hrt there's a pretty large popular push towards testosterone replacement therapy in women during the perimenopause transition and right now i would say that's still in its early days depending upon the location you're in in the region that is something that may or may not be approved or accessible but the data on it is actually far weaker than just your your more typical estradiol and progesterone hormone replacement therapy so when we look at the data on testosterone specifically the only thing it seems to consistently impact and not even with a you know a fantastic rate of of reliable change is libido so there are some data indicating that in a small majority of women taking or getting trt specifically that they do notice a improvement in their sexual desire so that is something that could certainly be explored or talked about but what you'll see online and a lot of this is because of the data or the perceptions that come from actual anabolic you know hormone use which is all testosterone derivatives or men taking testosterone replacement therapy and sometimes like wink wink nudge nudge doses is that of course it's going to build muscle of course it's going to help you build a lot of strength but we have to think about the kind of doses we're talking about here that would be in true testosterone replacement therapy for women and it's actually a very very small amount and it is not the driving factor for muscle growth in women when we look at men versus women this is we're now we're talking about multi-fold differences in normal testosterone concentrations we actually see similar rates of growth similar proportional increases in muscle mass so you know think about your mate and you guys both start lifting weights he puts on 10 kilos you only put on six but then think about that as a percentage of his current level of muscle mass versus yours it might be quite similar and that's what the data reflect so men and women after they've finished maturation build very similar amounts of muscle mass on average even though the absolute values are different but they're starting from a different baseline and it's not dependent upon testosterone even when you look at men within normal physiological ranges you would think the guys with higher basal testosterone levels would build more muscle but they don't they might be walking around slightly higher but they don't necessarily build a level of muscle mass proportionate to what they have so the premise that you know testosterone replacement therapy will be a massive muscle building you know boon for the women who take it that isn't founded and it also doesn't make sense mechanistically when we're talking about the doses we're seeing so that's currently being pitched as a bit of a panacea online sometimes and it is a being explored and b has relatively narrow effects in terms of what is shown in the data on sexual desire libido the other data though is relatively promising looking at you know progesterone and oestrogen for reducing symptoms related the negative symptoms that are related to the menopause transition sleep being improved and also seeing improvements in mood stabilisation and also reducing some of the disruptions to the to the regularity of the menstrual cycle and the experience of its severity so i think that is definitely something to to look into anecdotally and subjectively you'll get a pretty broad range of impacts but for women who are experiencing pretty severe negative side effects of going through the menopause transition many of them will report game-changing experiences from from going on on hrt you're more traditional you know some variation of oestrogen and and progesterone there are things you need to consider related to your family history and other comorbidities but right now the data are indicating that it's largely safe and even for long-term use so this is definitely something to consider it's not for everyone and you should definitely not do it based upon uh things you are exposed to on social media but more so having a conversation with your gp or a referral to a specialist but um yeah the data are with the data are this is not medical advice and i think i've done enough disclaimers for myself i think you have i'm gonna ask you just

[Angela Foster]
a few last questions in relation to nutrition because these are kind of slightly i'd say yeah again there's just so much on social slightly contentious so the first one is protein i have heard multiple different things around protein recently one is you don't need any more than 1.6 grammes per kilo of body weight in order to gain muscle then there's the nuance of actually if you are in a caloric deficit then in order to hold on to muscle or you're trying to do a body recomposition where you're trying to gain muscle lose fat at the same time then you should think about going higher the other one is menopausal or peri or post-menopausal women both need to have at least 30 to 50 grammes of protein in a single serving in order to stimulate muscle protein synthesis can you tell us which of these are factually correct yeah they're they're all kind

[Dr. Eric Helms]
of sort of based on some kernel of truth so taking a big step back and this is my area this this is something i this is actually my entrance in the peer-reviewed literature and what i do my master's on and what i still research now much like the dose of exercise the dose of protein that you get within a day if you're exercising and trying to produce changes to the amount of muscle mass you're carrying has a bit of a diminishing returns effect so it's really important instead of thinking about just what is the optimal dose in the literature that we will sometimes you know give to practitioners to report or to dieticians is where are you currently starting and one of the most powerful things you can do is actually just even if it's not with an intention to change it actually go through the process of tracking your nutrition looking at nutrition labels get a little bit of education and then see where am i currently at many people are sitting around say like the one to one point three grammes per kilogramme range habitually in the west if you are let's say more vegetarian or you don't like meat as much or you come from certain cultural backgrounds it might be lower if you're someone who is not that way it might be higher and going from say a low quote-unquote category let's say under 1.2 grammes per kilogramme of protein to something in the more quote-unquote moderate range not even yet at the 1.6 gramme per kilogramme mark you you mentioned you will see a positive benefit that is larger from going from that moderate range to 1.6 or higher right it's very difficult to say there's a specific gramme per kilogramme protein intake range where after that you'll get no more benefits without also talking about who are you and what are your goals and how much of a small change are you interested in so when i'm talking to a competitive bodybuilder versus someone who's interested in lifting weights and eating more protein and adapting and doing it maybe uh you know like in the constraints we talked about i'm going to start lifting weights two or three times per week you know i'm in my 40s and i think i really need to start thinking about this seriously i would be happy to tell them that they never need to worry about going over 1.6 because they're not looking to gain every ounce of muscle that their body could possibly hold you know over time right so the differences in the magnitude of benefit you get from going to high high high protein intakes or to moderately high protein intakes is is a it's very diminished and unclear so i think for people listening to this unless you are considering doing like a master's you know figure or women's bodybuilding competition 1.6 is a very very reasonable target that you don't need to go above but there's no downside to going over if you're aiming to build muscle now if you're in an energy deficit especially a pronounced one and you're trying to lose a substantial amount of body fat the leaner and leaner you get the more your body will rely on amino acids which we get from protein for fuel and the more there's a risk of of not maintaining as much muscle mass as you get leaner and leaner and stay in this prolonged energy deficit so it's not a bad idea to make sure that you're at least at that 1.6 range or maybe getting closer to 2 grammes per kilogramme if you are dieting now if you're someone who is reasonably high in body fat and you're also therefore relatively high in body mass that gramme per kilogramme conversion can give you probably more protein than you would necessarily benefit from and make your diet harder to follow and you can essentially just bump these figures up by about 0.4 so we're looking at like say 2 and 2.5 ish or somewhere in there as you're kind of not dieting and dieting kind of target intakes but that would be for every kilogramme of lean mass that you have and if you don't know how to calculate your lean mass you could you know look to get a like a dexa scan if you wanted to get a decent amount or a decent precision measurement or if you're unsure there a decent proxy for this that doesn't work for everyone but works for a lot of people is you can take your height in centimetres as a decent target for grammes per day of protein and that almost always falls in a decent range and that's if you're pretty high in body fat and you're pretty high in body ultimately the reason why we're consuming protein is to have an impact on our fat-free mass our lean mass component of our body and if you are high in body weight it can kind of inflate that number more than it needs to be so you can certainly benefit from higher protein intakes but it is diminishing and i think a decent target or range is somewhere around you know 1.5 1.6 or higher if you're in an energy surplus and then a little closer to like say two grammes per kilogramme if you're you know trying to diet and preserve as much muscle as possible but then again just to go back to my initial point if you're currently around one gramme per kilogramme it is an improvement and you will get better outcome even to get up to 1.2 1.3 1.4 regardless deficit or surplus and especially when you are early stages in your lifting career if you are pushing hard progressively and training with intensity then that is going to be a much more important component to building and maintaining muscle mass than maxing out the potential benefits you can get from protein we're talking about you know 80 of what's going to produce that growth versus the kind of 20 percent at best on the on the nutrition side of things and protein so the final piece to that that question was that if you need 30 to 50 grammes in a given sitting to max out that dose this is based upon studies that last hours and i think it's important to put that into context you can actually label amino acids with certain certain techniques which is a fancy way of saying we'd be able to trace where it goes through your body in a lab and either looking at a biopsy later or some other techniques we could figure out at what point did we get the highest rates of new muscle proteins being built in your body based upon where they're going and how many were incorporated but those four or eight maybe at best 12-hour studies have almost no relationship to actual long-term muscle growth they're essentially looking at a metabolic snapshot of what's going on they're useful for us to generate hypotheses but they probably shouldn't be used to inform applied practise when we look at studies in various age groups and also when we look at epidemiological data on different trends and ways that people eat you'll see that if you're consuming a sufficient amount of daily protein so your grammes per kilogramme per day so long you're distributing it it's across at least say three meals in a relatively even fashion you've probably done everything you need to do to max out the benefits of a per meal dosing strategy so that means let's say that you are consuming say 1.6 grammes per kilogramme of protein and that puts you at say let's say 120 grammes of protein in a given day okay so if you were to split that between say three meals that's getting 30 to 40 grammes per meal that's totally fine and the data

[Angela Foster]
would would bear that out what if it was 20 what if you're below and you're like actually i've distributed this because i don't like to eat as much in one sitting so i'm going to have one meal that has i don't know 50 grammes because i'm having a whole kind of chicken breast and then i might have a small sack that has 10 or 15 grammes and then i'm having 25 grammes at lunch but across the day

[Dr. Eric Helms]
you're hitting the target is that still as good it is it is so close to being as good i as a scientist i can't say it's as good but as a practitioner and i think meeting people where they're at and thinking about things and not a binary good bad but a like good better best mentality it's pretty close to being ideal you know when we look at protein kinetic data the most recent studies we have on this if you eat a massive serving of protein what essentially happens is digestion slows release of amino acids into the blood slows and then incorporation of those amino acids into muscle occurs over a longer time course so it's kind of a cool thing that our bodies are able to adapt in this way and it makes sense you know you you probably couldn't just eat every three hours when we were moving across the savannah uh you know hunting gazelle or whatever our ancestors were doing rather than stopping by the corner store to grab you know a protein bar or something like that right so it makes sense and if if you are at or exceeding the type of protein intake recommendations that we talked about earlier 1.5 1.6 especially or higher then the timing and distribution becomes less important um so now we're we are kind of like you know majoring in the minors if we're going well you know what now i want to get us into relatively even distributions across at least three meals per day awesome if you can do it but truly will not lessen the impact of the of that that first bigger rock in place so yeah if you're trying to to maximise every single variable and you've already you're already training you know five times a week with 15 plus sets and they're all taken near failure and you've got a trainer you've got a nutritionist you're eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and you're clocking 1.8 grammes per kilogramme of protein per day and now you want to make sure that you get your timing perfect go for it but that's the type of thing that i would focus on when everything else you've you've nailed and all the other habits you

[Angela Foster]
you've knocked out thank you for clearing that up final question i believe you've written a long article or someone in your mass research review has that i've read collagen does taking collagen

[Dr. Eric Helms]
support connective tissue and or skin health maybe is is the answer where we're at so there are a couple meta-analyses out right now which are aggregations of many studies together which are our highest form of evidence which suggests that it could help in terms of some functional fitness-based adaptations potentially via mechanisms related to connective tissue and this is something we're learning more and more about the initial concerns with collagen would be that it wouldn't make it through the gut but some of the actual collagen peptides do seem to make it intact and actually get delivered to the the connective tissue and or muscle and even if they don't a lot of people tend to be relatively low in their daily consumption of glycine and glycine is an amino acid which is an important contributor to the synthesis of collagen so that independently or together those two things could be driving this effect versus the actual hard hard data or even the study design itself could be set up in a way that stacks a deck a little bit for for lack of more specific wording so anyway i think it's just important that we get more high quality data and the final thing i'll say is that i am a meathead bodybuilder so all this is related to connective tissue strength adaptation functional adaptations performance and bone if you want to know about skin i acknowledge that i have it but i don't often think about it in terms of supplementing or making it look better that is slowly changing though i will admit now that i'm in my 40s yeah i look in the mirror and i go like that skin doesn't look exactly the same so i might start reading up on that out of purely uh vain selfish reasons but i haven't done enough to be confident on the collagen and skin data to to make a statement on it yeah it's funny actually because

[Angela Foster]
i take um glycine twice a day and eat lots of fruits as well yeah and that has been super interesting thank you so much for coming on and and just sharing all your wisdom and knowledge there's so much to unpack here i think what i'm hearing is that we can do a lot right by exercising a few times a week progressively overloading our muscles is a really strong foundation for both health performance all three and longevity making sure that we're getting enough protein across the day counts more than worrying about what is in each individual meal and i think just the reassurance that you've given us eric around the fact that we still can build a very functional and if we want beautiful body well into our 40s 50s 60s and beyond that is a fantastic

[Dr. Eric Helms]
summary and if that's what you got out of it then i did my job and i hope it was helpful

[Angela Foster]
it was super helpful um there's a lot of detail that i would definitely encourage people to go back and listen to because i think you know the depth of what you shared is really important that was just kind of my my summary we will also link to all of the work that you share because you head up with the other scientists the mass research review which i think is a fantastic resource for people your book the muscle and strength pyramids you have another one on nutrition and you're constantly sharing new science where can people find you connect with you and everything you're

[Dr. Eric Helms]
doing eric yeah no thank you so much for that and yeah i'd be honoured if people would be interested in checking those out i know there'll be helpful resources to your listeners and uh if you're looking for following me on a more kind of day-to-day basis follow me at instagram that's probably where i do the most work at helms3dmj amazing thank you so much we will link to all

[Angela Foster]
that in the notes for today thank you

If you've been told that menopause means muscle loss, weight gain, and declining strength are inevitable, the science says otherwise.

In this episode, world-renowned strength scientist Dr. Eric Helms explains what actually drives body composition changes during perimenopause and menopause and why progressive strength training, good sleep, and consistent nutrition matter far more than chasing the latest social media trends.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

- Why sleep disruption during perimenopause may be the biggest hidden driver of fat gain, poor recovery, and stalled progress

- Why progressive overload not lifting the heaviest weights possible is the key to building muscle and protecting bone health

- Whether women really need to train with heavy 5x5 programs or if moderate weights and higher reps work just as well

- How many sets, reps, and weekly training sessions are actually needed to build muscle after 40

- Why muscle building should take priority over endless fat-loss cycles if you want to improve your shape and body composition

- The biggest myths about training timing, fasted workouts, cortisol, and "optimal" exercise routines

- How much cardio you really need for longevity, metabolic health, and body composition

- Whether women can build significant muscle in their 40s, 50s, and beyond even if they've never lifted weights before

- What the evidence actually says about menopause hormone therapy (HRT), testosterone therapy, muscle growth, and body composition

- How much protein you really need for muscle growth, fat loss, and healthy ageing and why total daily intake matters more than perfect meal timing

Whether collagen supplements truly improve connective tissue and skin health according to the latest research