Exercise for Women

How the Approach to Exercise for Women is…well…complicated!

I was an avid – you may even say addicted Crossfitter – for the past 7-8 years.

The energy – the competitive spirit – the beast mode persona that took me over – was LIFE to me.

I decided to quit last summer.

Well, truth be told, I actually had to significantly scale back my Crossfit workouts over the past 3 years because of my health…so stopping altogether sort of made sense when my free membership was expiring. (Crossfit’s expensive!)

It was the perfect time for a change – even though I loved it and truly loved all the people there.

What happened 3 or so years ago is a perfect illustration of the impacts MENOPAUSE can have on our stress resilience and weight.

I was starting to experience signs of adrenal dysfunction – more accurately Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis (HPA) dysregulation – you can throw in the Thyroid and Ovarian axis too – because it was all a hot mess.

I was NOT doing well on all fronts.

I put on 10 pounds of BULK and inflammation – despite eating Paleo/Low Carb (and eventually Keto with Intermittent Fasting) and working out intensely 5 – even 6 days per week. I just kept packing on the pounds.

My body wasn’t losing fat with high intensity training and weightlifting – it was storing fat and bulking up. I couldn’t get any of my long sleeve shirts or blazers on and that really bothered me.

I’d also get aches and pains, injuries – all signs of poor recovery. I’d experience unrestful sleep and wake up exhausted and crash by 3pm everyday. Even when I scaled down my workouts to 3 days per week, I still felt off.

How could I be so “fit” and healthy and yet be such a mess?

One word: Hormones!

They can only take so much…and in menopause, as the ovaries dial down their production of sex hormones, your body then must rely on the adrenal glands to pick up the slack. BUT I had no slack because of overtraining (I had no slacks that fit either ).

More specifically, the almost daily activation of my nervous system going into fight or flight (sympathetic), paired with the menopause transition – and let’s not forget that Hashimoto’s is always in the mix – led me to this cortisol – insulin – pregnenolone, DHEA, sex hormone dampening that just left me tanked.

My physiology just read all of this overtraining/overstress as a real survival threat:

Something’s wrong with this older female.

She’s chronically stressed.

She needs to survive famine. She no longer needs to reproduce.

So let’s turn down all of her reproductive hormones that make her feel sexy and hot and turn up the fat storage hormones to allow her to live off of fat stores.

~ You’re Welcome!
My physiology

Thanks, Evolutionary Physiology!

This was the perfect recipe for fat storage, inflammation and all the other symptoms I was experiencing.

It’s been about 8 months since I stopped Crossfit. And although I miss my buddies, that beast mode persona and the adrenaline rush; my weight is back down, I’m not inflamed – and my blazers all fit.

I just feel more balanced.

So what does this mean for you?

This absolutely doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t exercise – and it doesn’t mean that women going through menopause shouldn’t do Crossfit or exercise intensely. If this is you and you feel awesome, you keep on keepin’ on.

BUT…If you’re not feeling great or NOT seeing the body changes you expect for your efforts, you may want to reconsider your exercise approach.

Keep moving everyday – but experiment with intensity, scaling back, take a break and/or weave in more restorative exercise or slower paced weight training (versus Crossfit’s AMRAP – as many rounds as possible – or competitive ’rounds for time’ approach while lifting the heaviest weight possible). Insane!

Just remember, similar to overly restricting food intake and that extreme diet mentality; extreme exercising has that same unsustainable – compensatory potential – especially for women over 40. Find your Goldilocks SweetSpot and you’ll be…golden!