My Post Menopause Workout Week Experiment | What I’m Doing
My post menopause workout has been working. Let me say that first. I’m lean, as lean as I comfortably want to be, and my muscle remains high, I’m not losing it. If anything, I’ve gained more in the last 2 years as I bumped intensity and recovery in my routine. By that, I mean more volume in my workouts but also more recovery time between sessions. It’s about being smart with rest as much as it is with pushing through the actual workouts. Recovery time between strength sessions by the way isn’t just a lazy couch potato time. It's an active recovery. I’m doing sprint intervals, agility drills, mobility work, and lots of walking or hiking. These kinds of activities help me stay conditioned, keep my metabolism going, and ensure that my body remains strong. But in doing it, I’ve also had the opportunity to see my readiness score soar. Meaning, I’m ready for a high quality workout. I'm primed for high-quality sessions. That readiness translates into better results over time. Some accidental discoveries have made me question if I was assuming what worked for me was the BEST for me. So here I am, using the last 90 days of 2024 to testing and experimenting and sharing it all with you. Questions We Answer In this Episode: How it started. [12:25] What I’m trying. [13:35] Why I’m personally testing. [21:15] What are the results - any difference in muscle, fat, mindset, sleep etc. [22:35] I’ll update you on my progress via social media - most often in short stories on Instagram. For a longer video, I’ll summarize it on the podcast. So if you prefer audio you have it and if you want to see a little more demonstration of exercises to help illustrate the video, you’ll have it in the YouTube video which will be short. And we’ll do a cheat sheet for you. My Post Menopause Workout: Total Body Walking or 10 minutes of brief interval walk/run Walking lunges, lunge matrix, spyders, light core engagement 3 sets each wall sit and single leg Squat 5 sets of leg press in a monster/drop set 5 super sets of chest, 5 sets bent over row with a dynamic balance exercise 5 sets of triceps 3 sets of biceps 4 sets of lat pull downs 5 sets of ham curls 3 sets of limited ROM leg extensions Total of 38 sets Notes: You may bump from 5 to 6 sets or from 3 or 4 to 5 reaching 40 and changing it up. Some days, I might do less lower body and focus more on upper body work, but it’s always a total body workout. Never do squats without doing a hamstring-specific exercise. Most people, both men and women, tend to be quad-dominant, and only doing squats can make this imbalance worse. Fire up that rear kinetic chain - —this means incorporating movements like hip thrusts, deadlifts (within your safe range of motion), or ham curls to really target the hamstrings and glutes. Switching to only UPPER or LOWER during workouts is really hard. First, it ties me to the gym. which I’m not a huge fan of. I love my flexible schedule and need it. So for the first two weeks here’s how I did the FLIP. In baby steps. I took a gradual approach, starting with one total body workout, similar to the plan I’ve outlined. After that, I introduced one upper body-only workout and one lower body-only workout each week. This change bumped up my total workout time by about 1.5 hours per week, which allowed me to add more sets and volume to each session. Each of the upper and lower body workouts required additional time because to ensure I was doing enough sets for each muscle group, I had to expand the time spent on both. So here’s what each day looked like. My Post Menopause Workout: Split Routine Leg Day looked like this: (not including warm up because that stayed relatively the same) 6 sets Leg press monster 5 sets hamstring curls 5 sets limited ROM leg extension 5 sets Side lunges 5 sets single leg squats 3 sets of seated calf raises 5 sets hip thrusts Total of 34 sets Upper Body Day looked like this: 2 sets of Chest
