I led a session about Managing the Menopause and many an interesting discussion was had.  

One of the questions which came up was ‘How do we train during and after menopause?’.

Menopause is defined as the one day a year after your last period finishes. The average age for this to happen in the UK is 52. A woman may have several years with symptoms as part of the perimenopausal phase and several more in the post menopause phase. Or they may breeze through with no issues.

That immediately tells us that the answer to ‘how do we train’ needs to be very different for different individuals but there are some main guidelines according to current research.

I’d like to split the answer into two sections –

Firstly Functional Fitness for healthy aging. Secondly Training for sport.

The first one forms the foundation for the second and that is an area which is sometimes neglected by athletes. The first gives us functional strength and movement which assist us with efficient movement patterns and improves our resilience to injury. Menopause is part of the aging process, which is inevitable, but it is not a disability.  I know that unfortunately some people have illnesses, conditions or injuries which severely limit them. If this is you please try to focus positively on what you can do.

FUNCTIONAL FITNESS FOR HEALTHY AGING

1 STAY MOBILE

Do as much as you can to move your joints and muscles.

Walk. Walking is amazing exercise, it is weight bearing and non stressful. The recommendation is 10,000 steps a day. So walk to engagements, park the car further from your destination, go for a walk with a friend. Some people find it helps to have a phone/watch/app which records steps so they can track their consistency.

Do ‘exercise snacks’. So if you are desk-bound or quite static in the day get up and move around, walk or run up stairs (if you have them) for no reason. Do calf raises while the kettle boils. Do ten weightless squats. Stretch your ankles. Stick some of those in your day and you will quickly notice that you feel different.

Pelvic Floor – here is another area of our bodies which often becomes less efficient with menopause, especially if we have gone through natural childbirth.  Urge or stress incontinence blights many people’s daily lives and is usually possible to avoid. Pelvic floor exercises or Kegels should be one of our ‘exercise snacks’. They are very easy to do anywhere – lying, sitting or standing. The NHS app Squeezy gives good explanations. If you have done these conscientiously for three months and are still struggling pay a visit to the doctor. 

Balance gradually becomes worse leading to less efficient movement patterns in sport and falls as we get older. Counter this by standing on one leg at times. For instance when cleaning your teeth, get it into your routine. Make sure you do both legs!

Flexibility/Mobility Do some form of yoga, pilates or stretching. No time? Everyone can make ten minutes, again stretching can be done in front of TV or while listening to a podcast or music. Ditch scrolling the internet in whatever form and be active instead. Yes you can go to classes but Yoga with Adriene on YouTube has anything from a ten minute chill out to full on hour long strength yoga, or Patrick Beach does a strength focused yoga on line. Something is always better than nothing.  Watch TV, if you do, in different positions – sit on the floor, sit self supported, sit on the sofa but ring the changes.

Feet – they have carried us around for a long time by now. Foot yoga helps to keep them mobile and can reduce pain. Another one for in front of the telly! This helps with running efficiency. A frozen water bottle makes a great foot roller, especially in hot weather, helping to reduce inflammation around those 26 bones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-gJOwWRAN8

toe yoga

https://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/blog/engage-your-feet-with-a-spot-of-toega?

Toe yoga

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea4MF7IqILA

Adriene

2 GET STRONG

We lose muscle as we age, know as sarcopenia. We also lose bone density which leads to increased risk of fractures.

Strength Train – at any level, something is better than nothing. Again you can do this through Apps at home, go to a gym, work with a Personal Trainer or go to a class. This is the biggest single thing you can do concerning exercise to help yourself in older age. Strength training helps retain muscle strength and the forces placed on the bones through the muscles also helps bone health. This should be backed up with taking Vitamin D3 2000-4000 and eating increased levels of protein, about 1.6g per kilo of a healthy weight for you as an individual.

Apps for this include Her Spirit and Be Mobile. The photo is from the ‘Be Mobile’ website and you can use bags of rice or tins of beans if you haven’t got weights. 

TRAINING FOR SPORT

This section assumes you are doing some of the above and that you are a training athlete looking to complete personal challenges or races. It also assumes you know some training terminology. How should you adapt to the phases of menopause? Well now, that depends! You knew I was going to say that didn’t you. There are some principles, but there is very little research.

Joe Friel’s book ‘Fast After 50’ is worth a read, but remember the lack of research on women in general.  Stacy Sims wrote ‘Roar’ and ‘Next Level’. Both of these are good although some information contrasts with research produced by well respected British researchers.

Up the strength training. This does SO much. Good quality strength training will help prevent injury, keep your mobility and make you strong. This means you can hold your posture running and on a bike for hours, you can move around a mountain bike, you are efficient in your movements which means more speed, less effort. It is an out and out win. There are limits though. You are looking to be an endurance athlete, not a bodybuilder. If you get anywhere near deadlifting or squatting your bodyweight for five that is more than enough. You are strength training to do your sport, not the other way round. Get some help with technique and a programme to prevent injury. Do it twice a week most of the year and once a week the rest of the time! Add hopping and skipping in and it will improve your running. Support your strength training through the intake of some carbohydrate before and possibly during a session and protein and carb within the forty minutes after a session. There is some debate about whether this forty minute window is important, currently I support the view that it is, particularly for females who have a shorter metabolic window than males. Fuel ingested at this time is used more efficiently by the body, and protein intake here helps increase protein ingestion which is a constant battle. If you are training at this kind of level you should be ingesting about 2g of protein per kg of body weight in portions of 20-30g at once. Strength training should follow an annual cycle, like the rest of your training with peak phase just before your main build phase for your event. 

Up the recovery. One of the symptoms of menopause is lack of energy and we can attempt to counter this by being really on it with our diet but there are limits. We need to listen to our bodies very carefully and provide them with the amount of recovery that they need. One of the benefits of maturity is increased wisdom around this! If your mojo is down it might not be hormones, it might just be that you are tired and need to rest. The same for being irritable. If morning heart rate is up you are doing too much. There are lots of over training symptoms you can read about elsewhere but consider whether you need to increase the amount of down time in your schedule. Possibly decrease the amount of aerobic training you are doing to accommodate strength training. Take rest days and take easier weeks, possibly every fourth week. This impacts the strength training verses high intensity training debate. If you are doing the suggested twice a week quality strength training you are unlikely to recover week on week from doses of high intensity training as well.

High Intensity Training – there is much rhetoric about doing high intensity training to maintain fitness and burn fat as you age. However there appears very little research to substantiate this for older women. Yes there are benefits but it also carries high levels of risk especially HITT/cross fit type training and running. If you already do some of this training then fine. But remember that about 90% of your training should be at an intensity where you can chat and strength training counts as high intensity in your week. Higher intensity intervals certainly have a place in sport specific sessions in the few months before a main event. If you don’t already do it and are swayed by the public debate then I advocate a cautious start. These are very hard work and stressful for the body so only do very short high intensity intervals in your sport with lots of recovery time between intervals to start with, build up very slowly and give yourself more recovery time in your week as they will take a toll. You are aiming for sustaining zone 4/5 in garmin. Fuel with carbohydrate before and during and with carbohydrate and protein afterwards. If that doesn’t sound like fun them I’m with you, stick to good quality strength for most of the year. 

This is a balanced podcast from Simon Ward about the subject. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/simon-ward-the-triathlon-coach-podcast-channel/id1286604688?i=1000619312006

So to summarize – do strength work, recover well, consider high intensity with caution and fuel like a ninja. Above all have fun. 

I had the privilege of sitting down with three amazing ultra-cyclists recently to talk about what keeps mad endurance athletes going when ninety percent of your head is saying STOP – quit, go home.

There were some common threads and some opposing thoughts but hopefully we have increased our pool of strategies to help keep us going for a bit longer. All these strategies can be applied to ANY event which is a challenge for you, be that a 25 km sportive or a 400m pool swim, it doesn’t matter. Everyone has their challenge level, anxieties and chimps in their heads. Although one is slightly less likely to hallucinate on shorter challenges I guess.

The company was – Jill Dawes, a client and experienced ultra rider going for GBDuro this year. That is an off road Land’s End to John O’Groats ride covering 1223 miles and 87600ft of ascent. You must finish in ten days.

Mike Pezet – Paris- Brest-Paris veteran, 1,200km with a 90 hours cut off.

Shaar Dixon – Audax rider, 1000km ride in 2021.

And myself with a slightly different take on the endurance experience with five ironman finishes.

In over an hour of discussion nobody once mentioned the pain. How did that happen? I think it’s just one of the multitudes of reasons to stop.

We can and do ride our bikes all year round, but if we wish to train to improve our performance, instead of ride purely for fun, then we need to understand the training process.  Endurance training is cyclical and is composed of periods differing in volume and intensity. Hence the term ‘periodization’ which was originally coined by the Romanian scientist Dr Tudor Bompa.

Before you start to construct your plan you need to know what you are aiming for and when you are starting. That gives you a date and a timescale. Your goal might be an event, a cycling holiday, a race or just being fitter than last year by the start of summer riding in May. It doesn’t matter. You also need to know where you are starting from, which can be hard. The best way perhaps is to look at how you were riding at your fittest this year and start by aiming to do about 60 – 70% of that in base phase.

There are at least five phases to the endurance training cycle as seen in the diagram – base, build, peak, taper, race, recovery. As it is presented here, it is circular so after recovery you start again. Similar to heart rate zone discussions you may find different terms and sub divisions used but the general principle holds good. In each of these phases what you are doing alters. Base is steady, easy stuff, general technique training, endurance rides. Build is where specificity starts to enter the picture and training increases in volume and intensity depending what your aim is. Annual strength training is maximised in Build phase. Time trials, audax events or hilly sportives will all require different approaches at this point. Peak is where the final hard work is done. Taper means everything reduces back so that you arrive at your event fresh, with good form, so that you can perform well. the length of taper will depend on the length of event. This is also true of the length of recovery which may take anything from a day to well over six weeks for a multi-day enduro event.

Continue reading “How do you plan your own training?” →

Training is a complicated puzzle and it is very hard to be objective about one’s own performance. Staying safe and getting the most out of our training process is a constant balancing act.  Here are some guidelines to help –

CONSISTENCY

Consistency is key. The route to healthy, sustainable fitness is through the consistent application of the minimum amount of effort to produce the desired adaptations in our bodies. The boom and bust model so many of us find ourselves caught in does not produce long term, sustainable results. We should be aiming to see year on year improvements up to ten years after we start focused training. So if your heart rate is up a bit one morning take a couple of easy days until it balances out again. You could save yourself three weeks out with a chest infection. If you don’t have much time, or can’t be bothered, 20 minutes on the turbo spinning your legs out is better than nothing. Do that twice a week for a month and you have 2 hours forty minutes of training you wouldn’t have had otherwise. As a bonus you may find once you get on the turbo it’s not so bad and you can manage 45 minutes instead.  Just keep chipping away.

Continue reading “The Golden Rules of Training” →

‘I’ve gone to all this effort and I’m not even fit enough to achieve xxx’

This upset statement from one of my athletes on a downer really made me think and question ‘what is fitness?’

How do we measure it? What do we really mean when we think someone has a high level of fitness? Was it rational for the athlete to expect to achieve xxx? 

‘I want to go faster.’ Perhaps this seems a simple enough statement and is probably one of the ones we hear the most often.  But does that mean measuring and working to improve our FTP ( Functional Threshold Power) and successfully time trialling, or practicing VO2 max intervals to improve our ability to go with a break, or doing lots of endurance work to go faster over an ironman bike course. All valid aspirations, all variations on going faster and all need training for in very different ways.  Success at one will mean failure at the others….. so we need to be very clear where we are heading.

Continue reading “What is fitness?” →

Pedalling 

Aim for a cadence of between 80 and 100. Therefore if you are cycling inside I suggest aiming for 90. Just in case you have forgotten, cadence is the number of times you turn your pedals over in a minute. Cadence will fall when riding outside due to variations in the terrain, so practice higher cadence inside to accommodate this.  Practice cadence and variations in cadence. Pedal at a high cadence (100 – 120) in an easy gear to refine technique and train your neuro-muscular system to be more adaptable.  This makes holding a cadence of near 90 for general riding easier.

Think about more efficient pedalling. This is how you propel the bike and you do an awful lot of it, so the better it is the better your cycling. A two hour ride involves turning your pedals over 10,800 times if your cadence is 90. Think about pushing across the top of the stroke to improve the force in the drive downwards. These two are the most important parts of the pedal rotation. In order to put the power on early you need to have flexible joints so don’t forget that yoga and mobility work. Also don’t forget a decent bike fit.

Position

Elements of style – toes pointing more or less ahead, knees pointing forwards, sit bones on your seat, bending forwards from hips, not middle of your back. Engage your core to hold a good position, this also takings strain off your back. Shoulder blades are down and shoulders relaxed, elbows slightly bent to act as shock absorbers and hands covering the brakes but relaxed. Look forwards to where you are going. Continue reading “Cycling Technique hints” →