[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (0:00 - 0:16)
The messages that tell women to avoid cardiovascular exercise in any form is actually some of the most harmful content out there. It doesn't make sense because the act of endurance exercise itself is an anabolic breakdown or an energy-consuming process, so it wouldn't make sense that it's telling your body, hey, gain weight, store fat.

[Angela Foster] (0:16 - 0:22)
Common point of confusion is that running is making us fat or giving us more belly fat. Why is that not true?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (0:22 - 0:41)
We look at exercise trials where they have women participate or add in cardiovascular exercise. We don't see additions in body fat or belly fat, or if anything, we see the opposite. We see reductions in that.

The cortisol released from exercise are not only necessary for exercise, it is coming to our body and saying, hey, we need carbs, we need energy to fuel the activity that we're asking ourselves to do.

[Angela Foster] (0:42 - 0:46)
Women around the time of menopause have a slightly blunted fat-burning response.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (0:46 - 1:01)
A lot of that is because oestrogen is a very fat-oxidising molecule, and we lose that in the menopause transition, we do see some of these reductions in fat oxidation. One of the things that we can do to really improve fat oxidation, keeping up our mitochondrial health, is honestly cardiovascular exercise.

[Angela Foster] (1:01 - 1:42)
For the woman who is just kind of starting out, where would you have her start in terms of workouts across the week? I would say... Alyssa, you have a PhD in exercise physiology, and you do research into women's fitness, metabolism, and performance.

I personally love your content. I love the way you break down a lot of the myths surrounding exercise, fat loss, muscle metabolism. Super excited to have you here today.

Firstly, welcome. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. One of the things that you have put on your Instagram page is, let's stop telling women to not do cardio.

A common point of confusion is that running is making us fat or giving us more belly fat. Why is that not true?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (1:43 - 5:02)
I will give the general disclaimer here to everyone that whenever I talk about being such a big proponent for cardio, that I am a weightlifter muscle monster by trade. I always like to give that context to people who are listening to this, I'm not some cardio bunny endurance junkie. I'm someone who kind of does a little bit of both.

But I largely think the messages that tell women to avoid cardiovascular exercise in any form is actually some of the most harmful content out there, especially I know your audience is midlife and beyond. They have some of the highest risk factors for cardiovascular and cardiometabolic disease across the entire lifespan, and or greater than men once you get through that menopause transition. It's really disingenuous to tell women in general to avoid one of the most important things that they can do for long-term metabolic health and reducing cardiovascular disease.

So first of all, from a health standpoint, I find it to be really harmful and disingenuous and goes against tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of fundamental exercise physiology literature showing that it is net positive for these health outcomes. But in general, the messages that get targeted to women are telling us that it's bad for us because it's making us fat, it's making our cortisol, it's causing belly fat, it's harmful, and all of these other narratives that go around. And the reality is, especially if we want to talk specifically midlife and beyond, we look at exercise trials where they have women participate or add in cardiovascular exercise, simply meeting the exercise guidelines or going beyond that.

We don't see additions in body fat or belly fat, or if anything, we see the opposite. We see reductions in that. Now, we know in general exercise itself, independent of diet, doesn't do as much as we want it to for body composition or fat loss.

We really need kind of both together. But in general, we don't have any data that's suggesting that addition or inclusion of cardiovascular exercise is making women gain fat. And honestly, from a physiological standpoint, it doesn't make sense because the act of endurance exercise itself or cardiovascular exercise itself is an anabolic or breakdown or an energy-consuming process.

So it wouldn't make sense that it's like telling your body, hey, gain weight, store fat. Now, the mechanisms often that people use for this is this spiking cortisol is making you gain weight and it's causing belly fat and blah, blah, blah. And it's really important for women to understand that the cortisol released from exercise and or all of these other endocrine releases that we have are not only necessary for exercise, it is basically coming to our body and saying, hey, we need carbs, we need fat, we need energy to fuel the activity that we're asking ourselves to do.

But it's also an adaptive response. So if you do something over and over and over again, one, that stress response is going to be less, you're going to adapt to it, or you're going to need more in order to elicit that same response. And two, it's also something that is tied to your nutrition state.

If you are someone who's adequately eating, fuelling your performance, fuelling your training sessions, your body is going to need less strong of these signals to say, hey, we really need carbs, or we really need fat to fuel the activity that we're doing. So it's not going to need as strong of a signal for that, so to speak. And it's not inherently bad.

It's a necessary adaptive response to exercise training that often just gets blown out of proportion in the online space because it's the cortisol boogeyman, and cardio is bad, and it sometimes comes to this hypercorrection of telling women to lift weights, which is important. But cardiovascular exercise, at least meeting and exceeding the exercise guidelines in midlife women, just shows that it reduces adiposity. And or if anything, it's a neutral effect.

There's no weight gain that's coming in response to that.

[Angela Foster] (5:02 - 6:38)
Very interesting. I mean, it's funny because I was thinking as you were speaking there, I was thinking back to back in COVID, which now seems so long ago, right, when the gyms were closed. And I've always been massively into weightlifting and stuff.

And so when the gyms were closed for a bit, I took up running and got a running coach, and I hadn't been a runner. So then like loading on like three or four runs a week, I didn't have time. I didn't have the recovery, if you like, because I was relatively new to it to then kind of lift weights from home on top.

So I stopped for a bit. And then I did notice changes in my body composition, but it likely had nothing to do with the running and everything to do with the fact that I had stopped lifting at that point. And so then, you know, you notice that you're not as lean, you're not, you know, you kind of feel a bit softer, you don't have the same definition.

And as soon as I picked that back up, it kind of all came back. And I would say, I've personally at 50 found a really nice way of combining the two, which is why I was so excited to have you on, because I would like more women to do that. When we look at cortisol.

So you were saying that and by the way, for everyone listening or watching this, Alyssa has very good video breakdowns on her Instagram, which I love. So I was watching one of your videos earlier and you were talking and actually showing with a whiteboard, I believe on how cortisol facilitates the breakdown of glycogen. What would you say?

So it's helping us in terms of access fuel for the training that we're doing. What are some of the other myths around this? Do we need to pre fuel before doing high intensity?

My understanding is performance is better if we do. Is it because cortisol is high in the morning? Is there a benefit to exercising when cortisol is already high?

What are some of the things around this?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (6:38 - 10:05)
Yeah. So for one, my take on the fasted versus fed training is one, if you have performance goals or performance outcomes, or you want a better workout, like having some nutrition in you is going to be helpful. It's never going to be harmful, right?

As long as you can digest it and handle it. And I give the disclaimer here that you don't need to eat like a full seven course meal before you go and train in the morning. You can have a little bit of carbohydrate, a little bit of protein.

It doesn't need to be this like massive meal that takes you time, like hours to digest. And especially like if you are runners here, one of the things that I do, if I have like a really quick turnaround in the morning, if I can't really get a tonne of fuel in before I might get a little bit, I might just take some with me, even if it's only a shorter session, an hour run, not a really long extended session. So I'm still getting that during my training session.

There's still ways to kind of fuel the performance that you're doing. That's what I might like kind of work arounds with that. But in general, if you are someone who's just exercising for health, just regular, you're squeezing it and you don't have these big performance goals, or you're not training with this intention of improving these X, Y, and Z metrics.

If you do a fasted training session here or there, but you match it with adequate fuel across the day, the biggest thing is that you just need to make sure that that fasted training session isn't putting you in an energy deficit that is bigger across the day because you skipped that meal or because you didn't eat beforehand. That's where more of the issues kind of come into it, but it's not inherently harmful on its own. But yes, if you have performance goals or you're training for a race or an event, or you're training a little bit more intentionally, a lot per week.

I usually tell women, if you're training five to 10 hours a week, you really should start thinking of yourself a little bit more like an athlete than maybe you do because it's a good bit of training and stress and strain on your body. And being fuelled will allow you to have better training sessions. It will allow you to recover better.

And or yeah, it will help support your body because essentially what cortisol and the other adrenal responses to exercise training are doing is they're being released into your bloodstream and going across your body and saying, hey, we need you to release glucose or start breaking down glycogen and or releasing or utilising fatty acids stored in the muscle or typically glucose is what we prefer, but fatty acids can contribute to this as well. And essentially signalling that, hey, we need this to match the demand of the activity that we're doing.

Blood glucose will rise during physical activity because it's necessary. It's not a harmful effect. Like if you're having an excess blood glucose rise, like in response to a meal or any other scary things we see online, it's because your body needs that to fuel and sustain and or essentially give you the energy that you need to do the activity that you're trying to do.

So cortisol alongside these other responses in the body are there to signal that release into our bodies because your body needs that to fuel the energy and activity that you're doing. This idea that we're like going to nullify this response entirely is actually physiologically like not favourable. We want this response to be happening.

Now, I think where this gets exacerbated or, you know, gets bucketed into the wrong thing is that if you have chronic life stress and you're stressed all the time and you're sleeping really poorly and then you're hammering a tonne of intensity and a tonne of fasted training and a tonne of all these things that are just pulling from the bucket of your life or adding to your overall net stress, yes, you might find that some of these training sessions leave you feeling worse or you don't feel great in general because you have this chronic stress across your day. But there is a big difference between chronic or life load stress versus acute stress from exercise training that is a positive outcome that we adapt to over time. And you need that stress from physical activity in order to adapt to it.

That is the purpose of that physical activity and or to signal the nutrients that you need to sustain and fuel that. Now, there was a second part to your question and now I'm totally forgetting it. So I'm going to ask you to repeat it because I definitely went down my little tunnel rabbit hole there on that cortisol thing.

And there's definitely a part two.

[Angela Foster] (10:05 - 10:16)
You were sharing so much. I've got follow-ups on that. The second question was because cortisol is high in the morning because of the cortisol awakening response, is there any benefit to exercising while cortisol is high?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (10:16 - 11:29)
I would say that for the most part, to keep it simple, when you exercise and when you train and getting that in matters more than the timing across the day. For some women, especially those in midlife who might be more sensitive to cortisol and or stress in general, sometimes you might find that exercise in the late afternoons or evenings might impact your sleep onset or your ability to fall asleep. And in that circumstance, I would say, yeah, if you're someone who finds that that high-intensity training, more aerobic or higher intensity work leaves you not being able to wind down or able to fall asleep or able to get good sleep, then that would be a benefit of shifting it to earlier in the day.

But for the most part, my stance is get it done when you can get it done and or whenever makes sense for you because the act of getting that exercise done matters more from a physiological adaptation standpoint than necessarily trying to catalyse on this cortisol timing. And honestly, some of the exercise data shows that early afternoon is the best time of day to exercise anyway. And honestly, for most people, none of that matters because it's about when you can get it in because the act of doing exercise itself is going to be far more significant than some myopic training of it, other than if it is disrupting your sleep, which is probably already disrupted for many of you, making sure you shift it to a time of day where you don't find that to be true for you.

[Angela Foster] (11:29 - 11:45)
Perfect. So do it when it's convenient, as in when you're most likely to do it most consistently. Fat loss versus fat burning, not the same thing, even if you're training fasted in the morning.

I think a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to lose more fat because I'm training fasted. Can you clear that one up for us?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (11:45 - 16:06)
Yeah. So this is really confusing for people listening. So bear with me for a second here.

So fat burning and or in the sense of in this, in the lab, a scientist, it's actually called fat oxidation. And essentially when your body is utilising substrate, which is a fancy words for burning carbs, fats, or protein, it is selectively alternating mostly between carbs and fat. Sometimes we use protein, but that we don't really want that to happen.

Your body doesn't really want that to happen either. So most likely switch between utilising carbs or utilising fats across the day. And that process is when it's essentially breaking those, those foods down to their tiniest molecular breakdowns and using them for energy metabolism.

That's called substrate oxidation. And you are oxidising fat during that standpoint, which just basically means that you're using a larger percentage or some sort of contribution of what you're using during that activity or across the day. You sitting there right now, you're probably oxidising more net fat than you are carbohydrates because you're at rest.

And it's just basically your body's contribution of what you're burning from a, an energy metabolism standpoint coming from carbs or from fats. And so lower intensity exercise itself typically utilises more fat, right? It's a lower intensity.

You're not as demanding. You don't need as much carbohydrates. So you'll have a higher percent of fat oxidation, but that also is less energy expenditure overall, which is less caloric expenditure because it's just an oxidation of how many like grammes per minute of fat you're using.

It's not telling you about total energy contribution in that same standpoint. Whereas fat loss is the release of triglycerides, which are stored in your adipose tissues because there's a net energy deficit somewhere in your day, weeks or month that over time reduces the size of that storage because you have a net negative energy balance in your body and, or that leads to true body weight loss. So that's scale weight loss.

Now, fat oxidation is a part of that process. You have to oxidise fat, release it, utilise it from its storage units across time. But these acute changes in a single training session, like a single workout or a fasted workout, they really are not as much as you think they are.

We're talking grammes. I ran so many metabolic tests during high intensity interval training or continuous exercise training or any of these things with exercise and women and men and people all the time in my PhD. And we're talking like during a high intensity interval training session that was fasted in the morning.

And these, these were premenopausal younger women. We're talking grammes of a difference and our best fat burners, grammes of a difference, right? But the thing that actually contributes more than people realise to you being a good fat burner or good fat oxidiser in exercise as your training status, how aerobically fit you are.

And I wouldn't really worry about like if you're eating or not and trying to maximise that because your body doesn't just lose that fat that it's burning and using in that exercise session, which again, we're talking grammes, like very, very minimal effects and differences, but it can oscillate throughout the day. So just because you're utilising more fat in that training session, that doesn't mean that you're going to utilise more fat the rest of your day. Your body's smart.

It's going to shift between carbs and fats across the day based off what you're eating, based off what you need and, or based off what like your body is telling it to do. And it's not inherently bad to be in a state where you're utilising glucose or needing glucose or any of that stuff or carbohydrate. It's just very helpful to be able to flex between those states rather than obsessing about being in one all of the time.

And I think we see that a lot in the online space of like avoiding X, Y, and Z or doing X, Y, and Z to become a better fat burner or anytime you're consuming glucose, it's inherently bad. And really what we want is that ability to utilise both efficiently, not only utilise fat. We want to be able to switch between them when it's appropriate and necessary, both during exercise and in response to how we eat.

And those things do contribute to our overall metabolism, but that doesn't mean that like just because you burn nine more grammes of fat in your fasted workout session in the morning, that you're going to lose 10 pounds in a couple of weeks of doing that kind of thing. It is not the same. You're burning versus like weight loss on the scale.

I know that was kind of a little bit of a confusing answer because metabolism isn't this like linear path of just burn fat equals fat loss. You're kind of shifting through these systems across the day all of the time. And I think trying to control them in isolation is just honestly like chasing your tail when the bigger rocks are going to be nutrition, sleep, and honestly just improving your underlying baseline fitness status, which will make you more efficient at anything metabolically that you're worried about doing both in response to eating and during exercise training.

[Angela Foster] (16:06 - 17:07)
I'm going to circle back to baseline fitness status. What I heard from you there is we want to encourage metabolic flexibility, right? And I think a lot of women are tempted that when they start seeing the fat gain, which does happen a lot around midlife, is then they go into a ketogenic diet thinking that will be the answer, but actually you're removing that metabolic flexibility when you do that because now you're just good at burning fats and not necessarily body fat.

You're just burning the fats that you eat unless you're in a deficit. Talk to us mums, okay? Me in particular and the other mums like me, who the only time of day that I can put the training in is first thing in the morning.

So I go fasted and then once I've done my workout, I arrive home, depending on how long I work out for, somewhere between 6.30 and 7. And that window really matters because that's the difference between me having time to refuel or whether I'm straight into showering, getting ready for my own day and getting breakfast ready for my kids, taking my dogs out, all of these things, which then delays when I eat. How important is it to refuel soon after exercise development standpoint, getting results?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (17:08 - 19:45)
Yeah. So I think that in general, if you can fuel sooner, it's going to be helpful to have those nutrients available for your body, the proteins and carbohydrates, especially from a refuelling and repairing perspective. But what you do across the day in the broad sense matters more than these acute little windows, as long as you're getting in enough protein, enough fuel, enough carbohydrate across the day.

With some caveats there being that menopause might reduce some of that anabolic sensitivity or you might oxidise protein a little bit more. And you also do have some blunted fat burning that does come with the menopause transition. So it might be helpful at the least for you if you're not going to eat for hours and hours afterwards to try to get in a protein shake or a protein shake and a little bit of carbohydrates and things like that.

It does need to be like, hey, I need to have a full meal because you're busy, right? You have kids, dogs, pets, responsibilities. I think that so much of the confusion in the online space comes from women thinking they need to be perfect and all those things.

And that's not my message here whatsoever. But if you're not going to be able to eat, say you get home at seven instead of 6.30 and then you're not eating until nine, but you finished your training session at 6.30, maybe we're trying to get in just a shake or something that has a little bit of protein and carbs really quickly within that. And I don't have kids and or nor am I midlife, so I'm not claiming to know this, but some days I have these really busy turnarounds and it's me taking a protein shake in the shower with me, which sounds crazy, but that's the difference between me recovering, refuelling, and also just giving myself the energy to get through busy mornings or days or things like that.

It doesn't need to be perfect. Same with me saying the pre-exercise meal doesn't need to be like this four-course breakfast that takes three hours to digest because you're an elite athlete. You're not.

If you're doing it fasted, though, I would encourage you to try to shorten that window of when you're fuelling or eating or just making sure that across the day, if you're not matching that with that deficit from the morning, just making sure that you are meeting that through your other meals when you eventually do get breakfast, lunch, an extra snack, dinner, and making sure that those morning deficit windows aren't leading you to these large deficits in either nutrition if that's important.

We don't want to under-eat aggressively. I know that everyone's obsessed with being at energy and calorie deficit, but we don't want these huge gaps that lead us to under-eating below what we really need to be doing even if we are in a deficit. Also, if the difference between you getting in 100 grammes of protein a day or not is that shake in the morning, then that can be a big difference for you or making it up later.

It's a barn door is what they like to call it instead of a tiny window for that refuelling is what the literature says. Again, if closing that window in the morning leads you to a bigger deficit across the day, let's try to match that sooner than later and if we're going hours before that next meal.

[Angela Foster] (19:45 - 20:06)
Okay, amazing. What I'm hearing there is we don't want keeping that window open to lead to a bigger calorie deficit or even any deficit if we don't want one than we're trying to achieve. Also, we're probably going to recover faster and be ready quicker for another workout say the next day or the day after if we have refuelled quite soon afterwards.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (20:06 - 20:26)
With everything with this, the spectrum of importance here comes from how much you're doing and how important it is to you. Keeping that in mind for the women listening, the woman doing three little tiny exercise workouts a week, she's probably going to be fine. The woman training every day for an hour, fuelling probably becomes a little bit more important there.

It's always a spectrum of who we're talking to as well.

[Angela Foster] (20:26 - 22:10)
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Yeah, a hundred percent. And obviously a lot of midlife women have a lot on. And what I noticed, Alyssa, from doing this is that when I am a bit more disciplined about refuelling soon afterwards with protein and carbs and getting enough nutrients in across the day, I do recover better.

Like my sleep is better. And I think carbohydrates are so important. My heart rate variability is higher and I just feel better.

I have better cognition, focus, everything. And I'm then more patient. Do you know what I mean?

With my kids and everything else. So there's massive benefits.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (22:11 - 22:34)
Yeah. And I like to say like fuelling more stringently never has a negative side effect. I like to just give the flexibility to people to like, it's not this hard cut rule that you're a failure and you're going to lose all of this progress.

If you like have an extra 30 minutes in your window, it's not that dogmatic, but rather just thinking about like, how can I make sure I'm fuelled and feeding myself and taking care of myself across the day in some capacity and adjusting that to like what works best for you.

[Angela Foster] (22:35 - 22:46)
Yeah. I love that. You mentioned something there that women around the time of menopause have a slightly blunted fat burning response.

What is the best way to tackle that?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (22:47 - 24:35)
Yeah. So unfortunately that is one of the real observations that we do see in menopause, right? Like there's some stuff that we say, Hey, menopause isn't really affecting this.

And you know, women get very upset because they have a lot of negative experiences with that transition. But one thing we do see is that with oestrogen declining, we do see this potential reduction in fat oxidation or reduced fat oxidation during exercise or in general. And a lot of that is because oestrogen is like a very fat oxidising molecule.

That's one of the reasons that women oxidise more fat probably in exercise than men in the premenopausal state and or when oestrogen is higher, we might have, you know, influences or effects of fat oxidation across the menstrual cycle. Obviously when you lose that in the menopause transition, we do see some of these reductions in fat oxidation. So you're not going to wholly replace what is lost from just a physiological transition that everyone's going to go through.

But one of the things that we can do to really improve fat oxidation, keeping up our mitochondrial health and or efficiency and all this stuff is honestly cardiovascular exercise, of course, paired with resistance training, but endurance training, cardiovascular exercise, that aerobic fitness status that we were talking about earlier, having a greater aerobic fitness status in general is tied to greater ability to oxidise or utilise fat.

That's one of the positive adaptations of aerobic exercise training. And then just being active across the day, just moving frequently and or being as active as you can. I know not everyone has time for extensive amounts of aerobic activity.

I know it's a huge limitation for people or, you know, for those that are short on time, not thinking of like an endurance athlete who's doing 10 hours of running or triathlon training or whatever that is a week, but even like short intensity sprint interval training, high intensity interval training can improve the same underlying systems, but just improving your fitness status and keeping those systems kind of sharp is probably one of the best things that we can do during this time of life to kind of preserve that as best as we can.

[Angela Foster] (24:35 - 24:48)
Does menopause hormone therapy, so oestrogen or even testosterone, does oestrogen or testosterone improve our ability to gain muscle or lose fat?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (24:48 - 25:52)
So at this time, we actually don't see that with hormone replacement therapy. These, like because for one, testosterone typically physiologically in women is not going to be as high as if it was in men or women like truly went down like the bodybuilding steroid pipeline, right? So you're not going to need to see these supraphysiological effects.

And as much as we would think that oestrogen replacement would help some of these things, what it likely is doing is maybe helping indirectly with symptomology that allows you to train harder, feel better, maybe have less discomfort with certain things. I know a lot of women report connective tissue or recovery struggles, things like that. It might help alleviate some of the symptomology that lets you train harder, but on itself in isolation doesn't result in significantly more muscle mass or greater muscle retention and, or again, changes in body composition across the board, including fat loss.

Unless of course, you're improving symptomology, you're improving sleeping, you're improving your ability to eat better, train harder, then of course, indirectly, you're going to see positive effects of that. So it's not that it can't help you. It's just on its own in isolation doesn't appear to itself be the thing that's contributing to those improvements.

[Angela Foster] (25:53 - 26:15)
Got you. But if it's making us feel better and reducing symptoms, and we're more likely to take the healthy behaviours, then it can help. So indirectly, you mentioned quite a few times cardio respiratory fitness and how important it is.

If we have a target of 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week, how should we split that between moderate intensity, high intensity?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (26:15 - 28:32)
Yeah. So I like the part of the exercise guidelines that says 150 minutes of moderate or 75 vigorous. I am someone who's of the stance that if you are willing to, you tolerate it, you enjoy it, because of course, exercise adherence first and foremost comes down to what you can do.

It's practical and enjoyment. I like including at least some higher intensity stuff in whatever you do across the week. So usually I tell people one higher intensity day can be enough to really put a big dent in those exercise guidelines for you.

And for a lot of people, what is classified as vigorous in the exercise guidelines is what most people think of like almost even as moderate. So zone three, four, and five almost all fall into that vigorous bucket of the exercise guidelines. There's kind of an overlap there.

So even going for a run for an hour really starts to put a big dent in that, depending on if you do it slightly at a higher effort. So one, I'm on the stance of let's do a little bit of intensity somewhere. Even if that's just one day a week of high intensity interval training, sprint interval training, something a little bit more zone three to zone four, like right there on some of your aerobic physiological thresholds.

Let's do something a little bit harder, at least one day a week, two days a week. The rest can then be filled with whatever else you want it to be. Playing with your kids, walking your dogs.

Now with walking, we want to make sure it's slightly intense enough, not just leisurely passive. We want to make sure we are getting our heart rate and breathing up a little bit with that or easy aerobic training, whether that's zone two, hiking, cycling, your group fitness class that you love, kind of filling it in with whatever else you want that to be to meet those guidelines. And those are minimums.

I think it's really important to acknowledge that meeting those minimums is a great standard for most people, but that's not where health benefits are capped. That's where we start to see the most meaningful decreases in causes of disease risk and death and all cause mortality and all that stuff. But it does continue to increase to 300 minutes of moderate and or 150 minutes of vigorous.

So it's not that more is harmful or more isn't better. It can be better, but what matters most is getting in what you can. But I personally like at least one, maybe two days per week of slightly higher intensity stuff.

You probably don't really need more than that. Some people might not tolerate more than that. Easing in from where you're at and then filling the rest of your weekend with whatever other activity that you can that contributes to that total overall volume of what you're doing.

[Angela Foster] (28:32 - 29:17)
So for someone like myself, who I love high intensity exercise, just because I love the kind of, I guess the neurochemicals that get released from it. But for someone like myself who has dogs that they're walking, if I go out and walk my dogs, unfortunately it doesn't get me into zone two. In fact, I think I was going walking with my dogs on a flat area and my route was telling me that I had a strain of 0.0 and I was like, guys, we've got to walk quicker. I'm trying to figure out like, where does this count? Because yes, I can do some high intensity, but it feels like this is where the time factor I think then comes in for a lot of women, right? Because it's like, well, I went out, I walked my dogs for 45, 60 minutes during the day, but it didn't really get my heart rate up.

So am I still contributing or do I then need to do some of what we call this zone two work and be very deliberate about it?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (29:17 - 32:52)
Yeah. So when we think about the exercise guidelines in general, my boob also registers me walking my dogs as a 0.0 and I'm like, dang, it is. So it doesn't have to be like perfectly zone two.

I think a lot of people don't realise that you have a little bit more wiggle room here of like 50% of your max heart rate is kind of 50 to 60 is kind of that minimum threshold of what we want to cross over to, which is on the lower end of like zone two. If we just do very rough, we don't have to go into the nuances of zone two on this podcast. The rough estimates for most people, it really just wants to be like above 50 to 60.

So for most people, I usually encourage like, again, this is not a clinically backed value. It's just an easy value for most people. Like, can you get your heart rate above a hundred beats per minute?

Or for some of you, depending on how old you are, maybe 90 something beats per minute on those walks. Can you in some ways get that up a little bit, including hills, increasing the pace. Now my dogs like to sniff every three seconds.

So I don't know how anyone with a dog gets exercise from walking their dogs. Cause I'm just standing for half of the walk. I'm not actually walking, but this is one of those things where the fitter you get, the less, the easier stuff can kind of contribute to that because you've surpassed the fitness needed for it.

Where someone who's very sedentary, new to activity, lower fitness status that can contribute to it. Cause it is going to potentially be pushing you into those moderate to higher heart rates, which is a good thing. But as you get more fit, you kind of grow out of it.

Now that's not to say that doing that is inherently bad. Cause now this suddenly doesn't count because the fitness that you have from being more fit is probably what matters more than anything else. Yes, we have these measures of physical activity across the week for contributing to health outcomes.

But when we think about exercise, the thing that really improves our health is the adaptations that we have to that training and having a higher fitness status in general is, is related to those. So that's why we see things like a higher VO2 max is related to better health outcomes or more muscle mass or more strength because it's that fitness status that is largely contributing to that. So it's not that that moving that you're doing across the day is not important or not helpful.

All movement is beneficial. All movement is helpful, but it just might not be specific. That's where I usually tell people that if you are someone who's having to walk your dogs a tonne, or you're doing a lot of this like passive general activity and you're doing high volumes of it, you know, to some point that high volume of that is really important.

You're, you are getting a lot of activity in adding that in with your few specific intense sessions a week because you're short on time is usually the guidance that I'm giving to people in this situation. So let's get a lot of bang for our buck and get these more high intense true specific sessions. And if that is you, and you're only really walking a lot across the week, maybe you are erring on the side of doing two formal higher intensity sessions in a week.

So you're getting more like true cardio and twice a week. And, or then just thinking about like, can I make this more intense? Well, my dogs let me walk faster.

Can we do hills or even something as silly as like the other week I skipped a run because I just didn't have time because life was busy. And I took my dog to a field and I just like ran her up and down. And my heart, my loop had little heart rate spikes for me up and down.

And I remember thinking to myself like, this is so silly, but someone could do this with their kids or their pets or whatever, and get these little boost of like aerobic stimulus. And I got like 20 minutes of like exercising my dog by running her up and down a field and then still getting some of them aerobic stimulus for me. And it wasn't anything like super formal.

I wasn't in my gym. I wasn't doing a training session. I was just getting little nuggets of like slightly more intense stuff into something that I was already doing.

And you can start thinking about that, right? You don't have to think about like just the formality of like this perfect exercise sessions. Just like, how can I get in more or how can I sometimes make it a little bit more intense or if I'm not able to, where and when can I get that into my training that I'm already doing?

[Angela Foster] (32:53 - 33:23)
I love that. I love that. So I'm going to return in a moment back to the basics for someone who maybe has a lower level of fitness.

If we look at people who have a higher level of fitness, you are exceptionally fit. You run like ultras and you lift like super heavy weights. So for someone who is trying to provide that extra stimulus, and then there may be doing a couple of leg days in the gym.

So their legs feel quite heavy and they want to make sure they're lifting heavy enough. And then they're going to do this high intensity. How would you programme that so that they do recover from both?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (33:23 - 36:24)
Yeah. So one, that's a really important place where nutrition comes into play. If you're one of those people who are chasing more of these specific higher volumes trainings, more fitness status, that's where I'm going to say, Hey, it's probably important that you are eating enough and you are staying on top of that a little bit more and timing it because it's going to matter a little bit more.

You're probably doing more total sessions across the week. You have less recovery between them. So that's where to our conversation earlier, wrapping that back in first, you're probably one of those people where that timing matters a little bit more.

And then second, think about keeping your hard days hard and your easy days, easy, especially in midlife, peripost, menopause, people report recovery is harder for them. So you might need to space some of these harder days across the week with easier days or rest days in between them to get them in. And thinking about like quality versus just quantity can be really helpful here.

So thinking about like, if you're doing leg days, maybe you're doing your high intensity intervals after your leg days, or on the same day, if you train a.m. p.m., which some people who have bigger training goals do, or spacing them across the week. So maybe you're kind of thinking about like, every time you have a hard high intensity day, alternating that with like a lower to moderate intensity day, and then having the high day spaced out across the week. So you're not just doing like hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard across the week, and kind of spreading that out.

So I'll give an example for me, which might not pertain to everyone here, but I do two full body lifts a week right now, pretty heavy, they, you know, are pretty intense. And I ran like 33 miles last week, and I did a high intensity sprinting hill repeat, like harder running day within that. And so I did my hard days last week on Tuesday and Friday for lifting.

And then I did my interval day on Wednesday. And then I did my long runs over the weekend. And that, even for me, was like a less optimal schedule.

And it was fine, because I spread it out across the week with a rest day on Wednesday, and Monday was an easier day. And Saturday was an easier day with my dog. Or some weeks I'll do my high intensity interval session, or my hard running session on the same day as one of those full body days, if I can manage to get them both in on the same day.

So then the rest of my training sessions during the week are easier and lower intensity, if that makes sense. So I'm kind of trying to like congregate that higher and harder stuff across the week. So there's days of easier exercise or rest days in between them.

And that's where I usually tell people to utilise like actual periodisation across the week. Like let's think about like what each day is, like what's the stress, what's the strain, how hard it is, and space that out. So you're not just having high hard intents every day, whereas the lower training individual who is less fit, well, they're probably not training that much across the week.

They're maybe getting in three hours of total exercise. So it's the structure and the intensity and the perfectionistness of it matters less, because it matters more that they're getting it in, and they have so much more recovery across the week between those training sessions. Whereas somebody who has higher volumes of training or more serious goals, let's think about can you keep your hard days hard, and then space those with rest or easy days in between so that you can recover, and then making sure that you are fuelling between those sessions appropriately.

[Angela Foster] (36:24 - 37:16)
That answers the question, and it's probably something that people haven't thought about, because they're probably thinking, oh, I shouldn't put my hit after at the end of leg day. What I'm hearing from you is go hard on hard days. And for those of you listening and watching, Alyssa has a really, really great video.

I'll try and find it and link to it in the description on volume versus intensity versus frequency, where you talk about the exact mistake that people make. Because this isn't just people who are training hard, I think. Because of the recovery that's impaired to degree in perimenopause, a lot of women end up pulling back.

And you were talking about the mistake that people start to reduce the intensity instead of reducing the volume, which is what this is for lifting, not for cardio, because it's kind of the flip, isn't it? It's the opposite. But they start to reduce the intensity, whereas what we want and what we need in midlife is a strong stimulus, but we may not need to do quite as much volume.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (37:17 - 40:39)
Yeah. So I think in general, cardio and lifting in midlife, I mean, we need a lot more data to back this. So some of this is just me linking together things from what I've seen.

I think some of the issues are, and we alluded to this a little bit beforehand. We don't have to go a tonne in this here, but if you're listening to this, I'm starting a series on this. You can just learn more on my page.

We might see more muscle quality loss instead of muscle size loss, like we talked about earlier in this. And then we see some of these impairments in fat oxidation and mitochondrial effects on substrate utilisation. Sometimes effort and intensity is the thing that really drives those adaptations.

And I hypothesise based off what we've seen so far is there's this blunted response to some of these in midlife or for older people in general as we age, and that we need slightly more of that stimulus and stress. Or in general, people kind of just stop doing that. They stop training hard as they age, and they don't jump or sprint or do anything hard after 25, 30, right?

There's the statistics that we see. And so preserving that is really important. From lifting, what I mean is an effort of how hard you're taking your sets, an effort out of 10 being an eight out of 10.

I would rather you do two sets that are really hard and pushing yourself than five sets that are at 50% of your effort. There's this mistake that I think women make that doing more because it feels like it's working and it feels like it's doing more is better. But I like the saying less but better or less but better quality is probably going to get you more results, this minimum effective dose that we're seeing kind of coming out.

So thinking about not just doing a million sets and reps into oblivion, but how can you take a few sets, two or three of them to a high enough effort and keep that intensity in, especially if you're struggling with soreness or recovery or fatigue. Taking back all those extra sets is reducing volume, which volume does play a role for strength and muscle gain and cardiovascular volume is an important component in training and fitness. But so much of our muscles response, especially in resistance training, is to the intensity of the effort.

You can almost get more bang for your buck with preserving that intensity. Now on the cardiovascular standpoint, intensity is important too. Having a little bit of that higher intensity dose is a really potent stimulus for our bodies.

We have a stronger adaptation response to it. The issue is we can only do so much of it before we can't recover from it anymore. And that's where the easy stuff fills in.

So that's why earlier I said do a couple days of higher intensity stuff per week and then fill the rest with as much easier light volume as you possibly can because we just can't do an hour of high intensity interval training six days a week. Or one, it starts to diminish and it's not high intensity training anymore. Or two, we just can't recover from it.

Humans can't do that. Even elite athletes can't do that. So that's why we see this obsession with zone two and padding all this volume and doing this extra easy stuff because you can recover from it.

So if there's places in your week that you can't recover from, fill it with the easier volume stuff. Or pull back on the sets and million sets and reps that you're doing in the gym and thinking about how can I go heavier to more reps closer to my failure point. It doesn't have to be all the way at failure but kind of close to it.

And pull back that extra junk volume there and see how you feel, especially if you are struggling with recovery. Thinking about less but more intense can be helpful. And then filling in the rest of that with easier generalised movement can be very helpful for keeping activity up but not really contributing to that overall stress of your training volume.

[Angela Foster] (40:40 - 41:34)
That volume, I think, is the fastest way to fatigue. I was doing a programme not long ago that I'd... Often I'll write my own programmes and then I was like, oh, I'll just do something different.

And I followed this very popular online programme and it just had so much volume in it. And I wasn't getting the results. And my HRV was really, really dropping.

And I was feeling so fatigued. And when I did exactly what you're saying and returned to the way I programmed myself previously, the results are so much better. So I think that's such a good shout, Alyssa, because I think that's the thing.

And then people feel like I should be doing more or I should be trying harder and actually it's having the opposite effect. One of the things I do as well, like this morning, I just went and did a little bit of power-based stuff before I did some deadlifts. Do you know what I mean?

While it was fresh, I'll do like some jump boxes and kettlebell swings. So it reduces injury risk doing it first. I think people can work this stuff in.

It doesn't have to be long. Yeah.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (41:34 - 43:56)
I needed a few minutes. No. So I'm a big proponent of power training.

I think that there's more and more data coming out that suggests as people age in general or midlife women, especially for the benefits of bone and muscle or just remaining powerful as we age is really important. And putting it before your heavy lifts is actually what is recommended, even in a strength and conditioning standpoint. You do it when you're fresh, you do it before your heavy lifts.

So kind of between your workout and your heavy lifts. And yeah, I love that. And I say that all the time because I think when I talk about power training or even cardio, people are like, well, where do I have the time to do this?

Well, how can we fit this into what you're already doing or make it realistic for you? So putting power training within your strength is like one, recommended, but two, the best thing that you can do and doing it before your heavy lifting or even like those high intensity days that we were just talking about, like putting those at the end of your lift, 10, 15 minutes, you can get a lot of bang for your buck with some of these really short protocol sessions. And just doing it once you're done, you don't really need to warm up for a whole bunch, especially if you're doing it like a bike or something that's like a load erg that doesn't really, really require form.

You can kind of just go because you're coming off your workout and get that done in a really relatively short amount of time. So there are ways to sandwich this into what you're already doing. Or even if like you do an hour of easy cardio every week anyway, well, can you put in a few hill repeats or a few surges of harder intensity stuff mixed within this?

Think about again, where can you add to what you're already doing or tweak up that intensity in what you're already doing rather than asking yourself for more time for yourself. One of my favourite interactions I actually had recently online was this woman was saying, I'm walking five hours a week. I'm a caretaker.

I have kids. I'm so busy. Please don't tell me I have to do more.

And I said, well, instead of walking for an hour, five days a week, what if you walk for an hour, three days a week? And two of those days, you did like a 20 minute higher intensity session. And she's come back to my comments so many times.

She goes, oh my gosh, I feel fitter. I feel better. I'm saving time.

Like I didn't even know that that was an option that I have. And that's what I want people to see is that it's not about doing more. It's about how can you make what you're already doing more efficient and work for you more, give you more bang for your buck or showing women where they can actually do less and get more results because they're just spinning their wheels trying to do more, more, more.

And I think a lot of that comes from the like bootcampy cardio bunny calories for fat burning type culture a lot of us grew up with, we're often like sometimes less is more and less is better because it's done at a true intensity that we can adapt to and no more. And we back off and go home.

[Angela Foster] (43:56 - 44:23)
I love that. I love that. So aligned.

We are on that. I love it. Let's talk about carbohydrates because I think traditionally we've been taught we must earn our carbs.

I saw a post where you were talking about train more, eat more for the purposes of fuelling right for our lifestyle and also helping with recovery, which is important in midlife. How should we look at protein and carbohydrates? Do you match those equally?

Do you encourage more carbohydrates? How would you determine that?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (44:23 - 47:21)
Yeah. So I'll start with protein first because that's the easiest. Let's try to aim for upwards of 1.6 grammes per kilogramme of body weight. You might not really need more going above that, doesn't hurt. It does not hurt to go above that. If you struggle with satiety, recovery fullness, feel free to experiment with more.

But I already know a lot of women struggle with even getting 100 grammes in. I think that's a good baseline for a lot of people. But I think giving women the permission that they don't need to go to bodybuilder two grammes per kilogramme of body weight per day, alleviate some of that stress of what they need.

But thinking about spacing it across your day, across your meals, balancing it within everything that you're eating, one, it'll make it easier and two, you're getting a little bit all the time. But after that, once protein is at protein, it's locked there. Say you're meeting that, you're matching that or you're at that, that's great.

Let's keep that there. Carbohydrates are one of those things where the amount of carbohydrate you need is dependent on your total activity level. That's not saying you need to earn your carbs.

That's saying that the more activity you do, the more carbohydrate your body needs, it's actually dosed by grammes per kilogramme. Now, I will acknowledge most of the literature in sports nutrition is based off of young men and women. There's a huge gap in this field for highly active peri and postmenopausal women.

That's a huge gap in sports literature to begin with. But in general, the more active you are, the more carbohydrate you need in order to sustain that activity, have enough energy to support it and recover from it. Yeah, my eat more, move more is like you move more, so you need more fuel, but then more fuel allows you to recover from that and that allows you to push harder in your next session.

I think getting women out of this idea that restrict, restrict, restrict, less, less, less, and then sometimes, it sounds counterintuitive, but if you give yourself more fuel, you're also giving yourself more energy to move more or push harder in your sessions or give yourself more energy to non-consciously move more across your day because your body's not trying to conserve energy and pull back from you because you're restricting, restricting, restricting.

Carbs aren't bad. I think one of the important caveats here for midlife, menopause, perimenopause is a lot of women might be struggling with insulin resistance and or any things related to that. It's not that you can't eat carbohydrates.

It's like, let's think about in general for all of us, for people across the board, how can we eat more whole foods, keeping our fibre up. I know there's a tonne of chatter about fibre and menopause, but there is good data to suggest that it is helpful for all of us and or quality carbohydrates, but then you don't need to be afraid about also simple carbohydrates around training, especially intra or immediate post if you're doing high volumes of training. It is still going to be helpful and beneficial and just the more active you are, the more that you need, but if you are struggling to recover and you're feeling crummy all the time and you've kind of matched protein, let's look at your carbohydrate and see if there's more there because a lot of women have been kind of trained to eat the least amount of carbs possible and they don't realise how good they feel and how much better their training sessions feel when they do take more of that in.

[Angela Foster] (47:21 - 47:31)
Yeah, I love that. And so really it's about what finding out where that balance is for you that you feel really well recovered. It's going to be pretty individual according to how much training you're doing.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (47:31 - 47:57)
Yeah, it really does. It depends on body size and it depends on training level, right? So like what I eat in a day is not the same as maybe what my mom is going to eat in a day, but that doesn't mean my mom needs to avoid carbohydrate.

You know what I mean? And it fluxes too. So right now I'm training a little bit less than I was this summer, so I'm still eating a good bit of carbs, but it's not as much as it was this summer because it just pools down in response to like what I'm doing in totality.

[Angela Foster] (47:57 - 48:11)
And so returning to the woman who is just kind of starting out, she's been listening to a lot of content that she needs to start lifting some weights and doing some cardio. Where would you have her start in terms of workouts across the week?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (48:11 - 51:30)
Yeah, so I would say for people who are totally new, I kind of give them this permission and out that if it feels overwhelming to do everything at once, pick the one that you can do and you will do and you'll start with and feels realistic and build that habit there and or that routine there or the comfort level there and then add on to it as you kind of have that baseline. I think that gives people like it's a little bit more behavioural and physiological, but like giving them that permission to like meet themselves where they're at, start with where's realistic and add from there. But from a protocol standpoint, you know, lifting at least two days per week for roughly 30 to 60 minutes full body is going to give you the majority of the health benefits.

And if you can take that to heavy enough and hard enough in the effort of what we just prescribed and talked about earlier, you can see a lot of results there. Now, some women find in midlife greater frequency sometimes works for them a little bit more. So maybe going to three days a week or something like that, you can go up to four.

I don't think most people need five, six days a week of resistance training. And I feel like that's really intimidating for people who are starting, but two or three days a week full body is an amazing and effective split for so many women. And when I say full body, I mean, thinking about doing a lift for every major muscle group.

So something that's like a squat pattern. So step ups, lunges, squats, anything that's using your quads and your glutes, a hinge pattern, anything that's like a deadlift, an RDL, a hip thrust using your hamstrings and your glutes. And then anything that is pulling towards you a row or pushing from your chest or above are presses and pulls and kind of incorporating one movement for each of those across the week over three workouts, two to three sets, anywhere from five to 15 reps is usually, I think eight to 12 is usually an easier target for people to be loading enough, but there isn't a specific rep range that you have to do. Honestly, when you're first starting, anything you do is better than nothing. There's no wrong way to start because it's a stress and stimulus to your body.

You can mess up a lot in the beginning. I don't think a lot of people tell people this. You can mess up a lot in the beginning.

You can do things super imperfectly, but just the act of doing it, you'll start to see more of a response. Then of course, over time, you have to refine that. But two full body days a week, somewhere between two to three sets across four to five exercises that go across your body, and then somewhere between five to 15 reps can work as long as you're taking it to somewhere about a seven or eight out of 10 effort.

It's okay when you first start out, you need to start lighter than that just to get comfortable in moving in the gym. Again, we're not asking for perfection. You can also start with body weight.

You can start with band. You can start with group fitness if that's what gets you comfortable. Work with a personal trainer a few times.

Do what you need to do to get yourself doing some sort of resistance training or load with the goal and intention of building that across time. Then from a cardiovascular standpoint, just working your way towards those exercise guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate intensity and or 75 minutes of vigorous or a trade-off of both. When you are starting out and you're more sedentary and you're not conditioned, you might find some of that higher intensity stuff a little harder to recover from or a little less tolerable.

It's okay to start with more moderate stuff wherever and whatever you can and or do whatever is enjoyable for you and or you're willing to do. If you don't have specific goals like running a race or a specific objective outcome, it doesn't really matter what you do for cardio across the week. It can be variable.

It can be fun. It can be different. It can be the cycling class.

It can be whatever you want it to be or the walking might be intense enough for you to start. That's great. That's totally fine.

Being tennis, right? Something like that.

[Angela Foster] (51:30 - 51:31)
That's just fun, right?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (51:31 - 51:32)
Yeah, exactly.

[Angela Foster] (51:32 - 51:32)
Doing what you're already doing.

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (51:32 - 53:01)
Yes, exactly. It doesn't have to be super formal. Again, thinking about how can you build it into your life.

If you do a hike with your family or a bike ride with your family on the weekends, great. That's contributing to that. Moving more across the day, little things like that.

How can you just fit that in and get to those exercise guidelines is going to be the most important. Yeah, I think the thing that confuses them the most is the resistance training because there's all this chatter about how it has to be perfect and optimised or X and Y and Z or it doesn't count. Really, anything you do at this point is going to be beneficial.

It's going to make you fitter. It's going to make you stronger. It's going to help you gain muscle.

It's going to support bone density, but having that goal over time to moving towards that more formal training if you can, because you will see more results there, but if you just are trying to reach minimums for health and reducing some of these factors, it's okay to start where you're at, but really two days a week of 30 minutes of lifting is fine. It doesn't need to be this crazy bodybuilder split and starting where you're at, don't worry about it being perfect and then planning to build up over time. Then if you're listening to this and you're like, this is really confusing to me.

Honestly, I have this free resource that I made recently. If you guys go to my Instagram, it's pinned on my page. It's the first post.

It says women who promised yourself you'll start lifting, but you haven't started yet. This is for you. It walks you through all of this and then it has a free resource that you can't.

I just send you this little PDF sheet that tells you basically what's important here, the summary, the TLDR of this that will help you work through what we're actually saying here in a way that hopefully feels realistic to you and you can actually incorporate into your week just to get started.

[Angela Foster] (53:02 - 53:14)
Super helpful. We'll link to that in the description. Thanks, Alyssa.

Last question then. As someone embracing this fitness lifestyle, are there any supplements that you use? Obviously being supplemental to good quality nutrition, are there any that you use or recommend?

[Dr Alyssa Olenick] (53:15 - 54:40)
Yeah. I personally take protein powder, maybe not every day, but days that I feel like I need the extra boost. When I can remember it, I take creatine.

It is helpful. It is beneficial. I'm always sometimes really bad about keeping up with it and then I get back to it and I'm like, wow, my lifts feel so much better when I take creatine.

I'm like, oh, even I am shocked by it. I take creatine. I will also take things based off what I individually need.

Things like vitamin D, sometimes if my blood work is low or in the winter, I take magnesium. A lot of people are low in magnesium, so that's often one that's pretty risk-free to supplement. We also see that's potentially more needed in women in midlife, so it could potentially be helpful to take.

Fish oil, I don't take anything super crazy, really just the basics. Then, of course, giving people the general disclaimer of if you're someone who has some sort of nutrient deficiency that you've talked to your doctor or registered dietitian with, you might need things that I'm not taking. I don't need iron supplementation, but some women do, or they're struggling with low ferritin levels and things like that.

Always figure out what you need and works for you. A lot of my stuff is based off of things I've done and worked with with my blood work and doctors, and that's why I take what I take. Really, from a general standpoint, protein and creatine, and then I utilise caffeine for performance sometimes when I need it or just working in general.

Other than that, nothing crazy fringe. I really just stick to the really basic ones that we know have our big bang for our health and performance.

[Angela Foster] (54:40 - 55:13)
I love it. Amazing. Thank you so much and for sharing so much.

I feel like we got through a tonne. This is definitely one to go back and listen to again. Well, thank you so much, Alyssa.

This has been really fun, and we will link to all of that for everyone in the description below. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you.

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.

Dr. Alyssa Olenick on why cardio doesn't cause belly fat, what fasted training really does for fat loss, and how women in midlife should balance lifting, cardio and carbs.

Exercise physiologist and women's fitness researcher Dr. Alyssa Olenick breaks down the most common training myths aimed at women in midlife. She explains why the cortisol released during exercise is a fuel signal rather than a fat-storage trigger, why the extra fat burned in a fasted session adds up to grams rather than real fat loss, and why fat oxidation drops as estrogen declines in menopause. She also shares how to split 150 minutes of cardio between easy and hard sessions, why cutting volume rather than intensity helps recovery in perimenopause, and how much protein and carbohydrate active women actually need.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

- Why adding cardio reduces, rather than increases, body fat in midlife women

- The difference between fat burning and fat loss, and why fasted workouts only shift a few grams

- How to fit one or two harder sessions into a busy week and fill the rest with easy movement

- Why Dr. Olenick would rather you do two hard sets than five easy ones when recovery gets tougher