Today I’m speaking with Dr. Stacy Sims, a leading expert in exercise physiology and nutrition science, to delve into the unique physiological differences between men and women. In this episode, we explore how the menstrual cycle impacts women’s training and performance, and the critical need for personalized exercise regimens tailored to different stages of a woman’s life. Dr. Sims shares her groundbreaking insights on optimizing health and performance for women through science-backed strategies.

Dr. Stacy Sims is an acclaimed researcher, author, and speaker specializing in women’s health and performance. Known for her mantra, “Women are not small men,” Dr. Sims focuses on empowering women with the knowledge to harness their physiology for optimal training, nutrition, and well-being. With years of experience in academia and practical application, she is a pioneer in redefining the approach to female-specific health and fitness.

Follow Her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drstacysims/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Female Health and Exercise
02:46 Understanding Female-Specific Physiology
05:54 Differences in Exercise Protocols for Women
09:04 The Impact of Menstrual Cycle on Training
11:58 Training Through Different Life Stages
14:49 Nutrition and Iron Needs During Menstruation
18:09 Building a Sustainable Training Routine
20:54 Creating a Community for Female Health Optimization
27:15 The Importance of Strength Training and Recovery
30:31 Training Cycles and Adaptation Strategies
32:21 Mobility and Stretching: Key to Injury Prevention
33:46 Empowering Women Through Compound Movements
36:34 Bone Health and Strength Training for Women
38:57 Nutrition: The Best Approach for Women
44:06 Recovery Modalities: Sauna and Cold Plunge Benefits
47:54 Sleep Needs and Circadian Rhythms in Women
50:40 Essential Supplements for Women's Health

Transcript

[00:00:00.270] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Welcome to the Longevity Optimization podcast, where we discuss longevity, optimal health, nutrition, peak performance, cognitive excellence, and so much more.

[00:00:10.920] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Dr. Sims, it is such a pleasure to have you here with me today. Thanks, Kayla.

[00:00:14.630] - DR. STACY SIMS
I'm looking forward to our conversation.

[00:00:17.070] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Same. So today we're going to be talking all about female exercise protocols and nutrition. I was just telling you before the podcast, I am so excited to talk to you, and I'm just so impressed and excited by the way that you communicate female science. Thanks.

[00:00:35.520] - DR. STACY SIMS
My husband says it's my superpower. I'm like, Okay, I'll take that as a superpower.

[00:00:40.570] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
It is. And we need so many women in this space, right? Talking about.

[00:00:47.530] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah. The more that we can keep the conversations going and the more that we're all in line with the science and discussing it, the more I feel women are empowered and stuck in a gaslit, which is a big thing.

[00:00:59.670] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I love your tagline. Actually, I was just speaking at a conference and I used it because it's so good. We were talking about female health, and women are not small men. So thank you for creating this.

[00:01:15.640] - DR. STACY SIMS
You're welcome. Yeah, I find it funny that it became such a tagline because it just used to be how I would wake undergrads up in an afternoon class when I was teaching.

[00:01:26.100] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, it's amazing, and it's so true. Well, real quick before we dive dive into it all, how did you get so interested in this female-specific side of exercise, physiology, and nutrition? I'm a girl. What? Yes. Okay, yes. Same.

[00:01:42.260] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, I know. No, really, it was I grew up as a kid that always asked why, and there were never really boundaries with regards to being put in a patriarchal box. Even though I grew up in a military household, we were always encouraged to try to reach our performance potential, whatever that meant. Then when I got to university and I encountered a blockage of, well, we don't really study women. We throw women's data together. It just didn't make sense. The more I started thinking about that and getting angry or about the fact that we are just rolled into one thing when I'm an athlete, and I know that we have more issues as female athletes with regards to peaking at certain times to races versus what the men had. There are a lot of things that came together once really made me go, wait a second, what's going on here? That drive to understand and try to find a representation of female in the health space, even when you're looking at the Vesuvius man that all the medical people refer to of the longitudinal and the latitude and all those things, it's all based on a man's body.

[00:02:51.770] - DR. STACY SIMS
But we know center of gravity is different. Learning all these things about the morphological differences between men and women, and you're looking at center of gravity differences, biomechanical differences, but yet you look at the pictures and you look at the research, and none of that is teased out. None of it made sense. That was like the seed that was planted so many years ago to keep pushing to try to really understand what we know about women and what we don't know, and then get out of surgery. I have the same dosage of pain meds as my husband, who is not my size at all. You see all of these things. It's still the driving factor of we don't know enough about women in general. When we're looking at women putting so much effort into getting to be the healthiest version of themselves, yet some of the protocols they're doing probably don't optimize. That's why I'm like, Okay, we got to unpack all of this and push out what we do know and then try to tell people what we don't know.

[00:03:49.620] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah. Well, we should definitely talk to how we can figure out more of what we don't know because I'm in the same spot. I've been really doing a lot of help optimization for many years. I have a longevity clinic here in the States, but I was doing the same thing. I was doing all these protocols that were for men, and I was just doing way too much in the wrong ways with too much cold, too much fasting, all the things that we're going to talk about today. But I'm so grateful for you and other women as well, just helping women to know what we should do for ourselves because we're so different.

[00:04:25.240] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah. I sit back and I laugh because on the surface, you go to any You shop, and you see there's a clothing section for women, there's a clothing section for men, and there's the whole diet and supplement industries. There's one that's geared for women, there's one that's geared for men, right down to deodorant and all that stuff. But then when it comes down to the real nuts and bolts of it, like what's happening on the internal angle, it doesn't matter. You're all the same.

[00:04:52.940] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
It's the most important one. Just don't accept it. That's amazing. Well, I mean, this is going to be so basic, but what are the differences between men and women when it comes to exercise? Then we'll get into nutrition. But what are the differences?

[00:05:10.920] - DR. STACY SIMS
I mean, there are a lot. I will start from morphological. When we're looking at in utero, there are sex differences. We see that female fetus is more stress resilient and can withstand times of famine and can withstand more times of blood flow diversion from the uterus. Whereas we see that the male fetus most often doesn't survive that aspect. It comes down to X, X versus X, Y. After being born, we know that there are discernible differences in the amount of oxidative muscle fibers. Those are aerobic endurance muscle fibers versus our more glycolytic or fast switch. Women have more of the oxidative. We're thinking about endurance and oxidative. By the nature of having more of those, we already are, I guess, program to have better mitochondria, better mitochondrial function, better mitochondrial respiration. We're also more metabolically flexible. This is before you even get to puberty and the exposure of estrogen and progesterone. When we're looking at all of our childhood development, you can see a definitive point around the age of six or seven where girls start to deviate away from the boys and there's no longer a common play on the playground. It's the early stages of puberty where girls are are going to feel a little bit less confident, and they're not as fast as they used to be.

[00:06:36.120] - DR. STACY SIMS
There's subtle changes that are happening. When you get to actual onset of puberty and you have the estrogen and progesterone exposure, we're seeing changes in specific biomechanics where center of gravity drops for women. No longer is it up closer to the chest, now comes down to our hips, which affects our balance, our proprioception. We don't teach our girls how to run again, how to land, how to throw, how to jump, how to swim in our new biomechanics. We start to see this drop off. We start to see a misstep in the confidence. We start to see body composition changes, but no one tells girls. It's a temporary blip. Then as we go through puberty and into our teens, if we are conscious of the training that we're doing, and we're doing functional training and more resistance training, then our bodies are going to fall into where we want it to be. But because we don't have the education and because we're not changing how we're We're approaching physical activity for boys and girls. We have this constant flow on effect where we're seeing perturbations in menstrual cycle and how that affects women. We have a higher incidence of anovulatory cycles because of a lot of the, I guess, external influences of fasting and ketogenic and time-restricted eating.

[00:07:52.510] - DR. STACY SIMS
When we're looking more at male versus female through our 20s and 30s, we're seeing differences in and how women will respond to resistance training. We see a lot of the resistance training is geared for the higher repetition. We might have two or three sets of 30. If we're doing them together as men and women, the men will have more hypertrophy, they'll get more lean mass. The women won't. They won't change that much. For the most part, women don't need that much of a metabolic stimulus. If we're talking about higher reps, it's more fuel hungry. Women need less recovery between sets, and we need less volume of sets. We do need to work to fatigue, but what I mean by that is heavier load, and you might be working to 10 or 12 when you're in your 20s and 30s. That's going to give you strength and some lean mass development. For men, it doesn't really matter. Because they have more fast switch fibers, because they fuel differently in their bodies than women, then they're able to get more out of the higher reps and all the training modalities we see about putting lean mass on and changing body composition work really well for men.

[00:09:06.070] - DR. STACY SIMS
Because the nuances of when men because the nuances of women go through blood sugar first and then get into free fatty acid use don't really tap into their liver muscle glycagen. We see that there's differences in how fatigable women's muscle fibers are versus men's. These are the things that we're starting to find and tease out so that we can start to look at things like high-intensity interval training and protocols for that. They should be different between the sexes because of recovery differences, but yet they're not. Like a resistance training, there should be different protocols for that as well because of fatigability differences and response to that metabolic stress. So working on that. But we don't have the guidelines or anything because the research hasn't been done. Then the real big change is aging. We see that men age in that linear fashion. We start to see a drop off in changes in body composition in their late '50s, early '60s. But for women, we have this discernible change in aging status in perimenopause. That can happen in our mid-30s to our early '40s. Women will start to see a little bit more abdominal adiposity, so more body fat in and around the belly.

[00:10:14.740] - DR. STACY SIMS
They're not responding well to the training that they have been doing. Unfortunately, it's like, let's put in more training and less food so that we can actually try to get to more of a lean physique, and it doesn't work, it backlashes. It's Because of the change of the hormone. Like at puberty, when everything is changing with the exposure of these hormones, we get to the other end of things, and everything is changing again because of the downregulation of these hormones. Women have that discernible aging factor, whereas men have a longer longitudinal linear plan to aging. Then when we get to our late '60s, early '70s, we're pretty similar.

[00:10:56.090] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, that's often the future. But I know you said there's research quite yet to identify the rest, essentially, for hit or string training. But what do you know so far? What's your inclination? Do women need less rest or more rest in between sets or hit training?

[00:11:15.220] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, so between sets, less rest.

[00:11:17.540] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Less stress.

[00:11:19.570] - DR. STACY SIMS
More looking at that high, high-intensity work, though. If we're looking at sprint interval training or we're looking at high-intensity interval training that's a minute or two minutes, we need a little bit more rest because we are not as glycolytic. We don't have as many of those fast-switch fibers. The recovery time in that, especially sprint interval training, needs to be long enough so that our type 2 Bs, which are our crossover fibers, can learn to be more type 2. We have more ATP, CP, regeneration, more central nervous system regeneration. In the weight room, though, because it's a central nervous system response, and we have estrogen working for us, and we also have our muscle fibers that are more enduring, we need less rest between the sets. It's a nuance. It's like with high-intensity interval training, a little bit more rest between the intervals, with resistance training, less rest between the intervals.

[00:12:13.160] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
That's amazing because I also feel like, just based on personal experience that that tracks. That's amazing. If you were to doing a VO2 max workout, for example, so I'll do four by fours, do you think that is that also just potentially based on men? Do we need a little bit of a longer rest period?

[00:12:32.440] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, we do. When we're looking at the idea of a VO2 max and pushing to improve our lactate threshold and our inflection points, our lactate threshold inflection points are different than men. All the research about your functional threshold power and where you need to be to be anaerobic and the markers of that are different between men and women. Women have more of a delay response with lactate development because we less of those type 2 glycolytic fibers. We're trying to do perturbation between just above threshold and VO₂. We need to understand that our threshold with regards to all the markers that are out there with heart rate and lactate production are different, and we need to understand that it's different. We have to push a little bit harder and maintain that, but then we also have to have more recovery. If we're doing 4 by 4 or doing the five-minute VO₂, we need to look at maybe a one to one and a half rest. Instead of four by four, it's four on, six off. Okay.

[00:13:39.180] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I feel like you just said something revolutionary, and I can't wait to share it with all of my female listeners, because I mean, anytime you look up the O2 max training, it just says the same thing.

[00:13:50.860] - DR. STACY SIMS
That is exciting. When we're looking at the metrics of the O2, I have conversations about this all the time. From a lab standpoint, we want know what the O2 is because that way we can quantify everybody. But out in the real world, it's more important to understand your threshold, because if we can work aerobically to a higher % of our max, then we are looking for better longevity. But also for women, by working in around that threshold and producing more lactate, we are encouraging better brain health and reduction of any Alzheimer's risk factor or reducing cognitive decline. But when we look at the typical VO₂, it doesn't allow us to stay in a lactate-producing area long enough to actually get that a response. We're increasing our lactate, sure, but we're not really pushing to the point where the brain is like, Okay, we're going to uptake a lot of this and use it as fuel. There are nuances in that VO₂ workout that we have to understand and tease out a bit more. There's some research coming about it, but it's not solid enough to write out protocols yet.

[00:15:05.080] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, I can't wait until it is, and you share- I know everyone. Because that's the big game changer. Big game changer. How do you feel about training with your cycle, maybe taking it a little bit easier at the end. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:15:20.660] - DR. STACY SIMS
I used to really buy into the idea that we had follicular and luteal phases, and we can really nail down what we should be doing because of the molecular components that we understand. When we look at those molecular components, they still hold. The nuance is we don't know if we ovulate or not. There are more and more in ovulatory cycles, and you will still bleed within an ovulatory cycle. We might be paying attention to our menstrual cycle, and that's great, and we start to see our own patterns. It's more important to understand your own patterns rather than take the high touch and say, I ovulated because you don't know if he did or not. I'm going to take it easy a few days before my period starts. Because there are some women who either they ovulate or they don't, but the few days before their period starts, they feel bulletproof, and others don't. When you know your own patterns, that's how you can dial in your training. You can also use something like Prove, P-R-O-O-V, which is a new FDA-approved fertility app that you can use urinary dipstick with it to see a progesterone metabolite to say, yes, you ovulated or not.

[00:16:37.090] - DR. STACY SIMS
There are ways of really dialing in your cycle and understanding that when you are truly in the follicular phase, you are more like a man. You can do more intensity and your immune system is better, you recover better, you can access carbohydrate better. Then after ovulation, we have to increase our protein intake, we have to increase our carbohydrate intake because our body needs more of that. If we have more of that on board, then we can hit the intensities that we want to. It's that nuance of, did you ovulate or not? There are now ways that you can figure that out through some of the new devices that are out there instead of trying to keep track through basal body temperature. An ovulation predictor kit is just a prediction, but it doesn't confirm.

[00:17:23.480] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I'm really excited about some of the new technology that's coming out for women. I've been talking to founder of another company, Ellie Health, too, and it's a tongue swab, a saliva sample. The idea is to be able to track all the hormones at home, which would be really exciting. And cortisol.

[00:17:43.090] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah. I love that idea, but we've been doing a lot of validation stuff about saliva and hormones. The only one that's robust is estrogen. Progesterone is not so robust, and cortisol, that depends on timing what the swab is like. Just know that there is some issues in the validation that comes with it. But when that gets sorted, it's going to be amazing.

[00:18:09.410] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I know. It really is. What do you think? Do you think that there's any truth to meeting? If you were going to have steak, for example, would you want to have it while you're actually menstruating because you're losing blood? Or more iron-rich foods? Do you think that that is worth exploring for women or not so much?

[00:18:26.590] - DR. STACY SIMS
Not so much because we have biological responses to menstruation. We see that when you're on the bleed phase or you're on your period, the hormone hepsedin or hepsedin, depending on where you come from in this world, which is a response to inflammation and inhibits iron absorption is actually downregulated. We see your body is reducing the factors that don't allow you to absorb iron very well. After ovulation, we see that that factor comes up because you have more systemic inflammation. If you are someone who is always on the low end of normal for iron, then it is beneficial to look at supplementing every other day, starting the first day of your period, and only do that for 14 days. Because that's going to work with those physiological mechanisms that allow you to absorb iron.

[00:19:20.980] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Wonderful. Thank you. When it comes to training for different life periods, can you walk us through what that would look like? I mean, I'm 33, so I'm out of the 20th stage, but I'm in my 30s, and I'm assuming training should look different. Can you walk us through what that would look like?

[00:19:39.280] - DR. STACY SIMS
The blood rock for anyone at any age is resistance training, but that changes really As we get older, we need more of that power-based stuff. In our 20s, we're pretty lucky. We can get away with a lot of stuff. We can try a lot of things and see how our body responds. But when we get into our 30s, we have to be more aware that we can get into a catabolic state or a breakdown state a lot easier. We have to definitely think about fueling for what we're doing. Then from a training aspect, we want to look at changing from more high reps and the idea of hypertrophy to doing the lower reps heavier load and looking at where our muscle imbalances might be. We start working on those because we know that when we hit our late 30s, early 40s, and we start hitting perimenopause, that we will significantly lose our power and strength. If you have a muscle imbalance, that becomes exacerbated during that time. When we're looking at the intensity work we're doing, for general health, we know that you want to do 2-3 days a week of true high intensity work because that works not only for brain health and body composition, but also for cardiovascular health.

[00:20:54.560] - DR. STACY SIMS
There's also a room to play with endurance. If you feel like you want to go out for a zone 2 because of the conversations that are around, sure, go for it, but don't make it the precedence. It definitely does change up where we have to look specifically at the quality of the training that we're doing. There's a lot of women I know who are in their late 20s, early 30s that are very much into the community aspect of their gym. They'll go five, six, seven days a week, and they continuously do the same training. They might go and do a CrossFit type class or a high Rocks type class, or they might go and they're doing Pilates every day, and there's no real challenge to the body. The body gets really used to what it's doing. You can stay in a modern intensity. You can get a little bit overtrained. You're not going to see any real repercussions from that until you get into your mid to late 30s, and then you're going to start seeing repercussions. What do those look like? It depends on what you're doing. But for the most part, you're not going to have any body comp change.

[00:21:56.800] - DR. STACY SIMS
You're not going to progress really well in your training at all. You're going to start finding some sleep issues that come up, finding more sympathetic drive that comes up. When we're looking at the body, the body likes to be constantly challenged. If we can start polarizing our training in our early 30s, where we have some days that we're going full on and other days where we're really, really low, and that can be through cardio or can be through resistance, your body is going to try to adapt to those two different things. You're going to get a lot of changes, both from body comp, but also longevity. When we start thinking about longevity and the pathways for longevity.

[00:22:33.960] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I love that. What would you say is the ideal split? How many days of cardio or high intensity? I guess we could break it into low level movement and then high intensity. And then strength training.

[00:22:46.940] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, it depends on what your training history is. If you're someone who has always been doing low-intensity work, then trying to put in one high-intensity session a day, or not a a week is going to help benefit, right? We look at over the course of 4-10 weeks, you start upping up that intensity. First, it's one day a week, then it's two days a week. Ideally, we want to have three days of resistance training as the bare minimum. That resistance training, we want to look at progressive overload, and you can do that through lots of different ways. You can look at the way that you're actually doing the lift with tempo. You could do cluster sets. You can play around with blocks of training, lots of ways of making that challenging to the body. You're not consistently doing the same thing every Monday, every Wednesday, every Friday. You want to mix it up. Then from a high-intensity aspect, doing a little bit of plymetric work is really good, and that can count as your high-intensity, or you're looking at one through high-intensity interval training session a week. It's not a lot.

[00:24:00.280] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Hi. We're taking a short break from the podcast to discuss a new community that I have launched. I want to preface this by saying that I will continue to post content on my social platforms and conduct interviews on this podcast that are both free and applicable to both sexes. But as a woman, I have unique insights and perspectives on female health. I recently launched my first ever paid offering, and this is a female-only health optimization and longevity community. If you are a male You can skip... Let me re-do that part. If you are a male, you can skip this portion of the podcast, or you can forward this information to a female that you think would be interested. I set out to create the most valuable longevity optimization community for women. I have spent over the last decade dedicating my life to human optimization and have dived deep into the female-specific optimization and protocols. This is a place I want you to learn everything you need to know about optimizing your health, longevity, and mindset. I made this a community only for women because I wanted us to be able to be open, which I didn't feel could be done in the comment section of my Instagram.

[00:25:11.020] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I also love the idea of women sharing protocols of what's working best and everybody within the community can offer valuable insights to each other and support. Members get weekly and bi weekly Ask Me Any Things, exclusive content and protocols like articles, videos, and a whole host courses, and you'll receive up to date, Female Longevity is Science. You'll also get community and connection with like-minded women, access to virtual and in-person events with me, and your membership will help support female human studies in the very near future. You can learn more about this membership on my website, kailabarns. Com.

[00:25:52.430] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Do you want to work up anything past that, or even if you're a beginner or if you're pretty well-seasoned in exercise, Is one high-intensity training session good for anyone in their 20s, 30s or beyond?

[00:26:06.230] - DR. STACY SIMS
We look at this bare minimum, right? When we're talking about what a bare minimum is, it's what we need to do now to keep ourselves healthy. But what is a bare minimum? So 10, 20, 30 years down the line, we're still reaping the benefits. If I'm looking at that 30 years down the line, so someone who's 32, 33, and now we're looking at 62, 63, what am I doing in the 30s is going to help me maintain my life and my independence when I'm 60. You need to have that strength training, and you need to have at least one really good exposure of lactate a week because we need the brain to understand what lactate is, keep those lactate metabolism signaling pathways going? Because all of that helps with brain health. If we're looking for a bit more, so we want to have better cardiovascular outcomes, we want to be able to We do something specific that requires strength, like a big hike, or we have a bucket list of something that we want to do, that's when we modify what we're doing. We might put in a little bit more strength work, we might put in a little bit more cardiovascular work, depending on what our goals are.

[00:27:15.460] - DR. STACY SIMS
But we know for bare minimum from now for 30 years is you need that strength training three times a week and at least one of those high-intensity sessions for lactate.

[00:27:23.590] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Is there a maximum that you don't want to necessarily exceed for high-intensity for a week?

[00:27:29.380] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, I mean, that really is difficult in the fact that there are some people like, Oh, I can do high intensity every day. But when we are actually looking at the intensity, it's not true intensity. It's about the recovery. The older we get, the more time between those high intensity sessions we need with regards to recovery. If you're in your 20s and you can hit those metrics of true high intensity every other day, then every other day, go for it, but it's going to start slowing down. The best way to look at it is if I am supposed to do 110% of my maximum for this interval, can I do that? Yeah, I can do that. Can I do that for the next interval? Yeah, I can do that. Third one, not so much. Then you stop. Then you see how you feel the next day. Most likely, you're not going to be able to do high intensity. As we get older, we look at it as high intensity, two days off, high intensity, two days off. You can move that around a little bit. But because the idea of high intensity is creating such a strong stress on the body, you need it to be strong when you go to do that high intensity.

[00:28:40.020] - DR. STACY SIMS
This is where a lot of people get that misstep because they end up working at that moderate intensity that makes you feel smashed, but it's not really true high intensity.

[00:28:48.570] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Interesting. Why does that moderate level make you feel so bad, but you're not getting all the benefits that you would with high intensity?

[00:28:57.380] - DR. STACY SIMS
Modern intensity creates more of a sympathetic drive because your body is exposed to more cortisol. Cortisol is always released when you exercise. But the issue with modern intensity, because it is not a really threatening stress to the whole system, brain, cardio, muscle, you don't get a post-exercise response of testosterone and growth hormone, which drop cortisol. With moderate intensity, you are always going to feel fatigued and smashed because you're not getting a subsequent response to drop cortisol. If we think about cortisol as an essential hormone, which it is because we need it throughout the day and it perturbs throughout the day, an adaptation from exercise response is to have a lower set point or a lower baseline of that, just like your heart rate. When you start getting fitter, your resting heart rate drops. As you start doing more polarized training, you'll find that you can hit higher intensities, and then you get a better parasympathetic response. That's because your baseline cortisol is lower. If you stay in that moderate intensity, you don't get that adaptation. People walk around feeling tired but wired all the time, even though they're trying to sleep and they're doing contrast bath and they're doing all the things that are supposed to enhance recovery and parasympathetic, they still aren't getting there.

[00:30:17.420] - DR. STACY SIMS
It's because they're spending too much time in that moderate intensity.

[00:30:20.440] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, that is so helpful. Going back to switching up the training, what would be the ideal? Is it changing it every week or every couple of weeks? A lot of people, I feel like, including myself, get on a program, and we end up doing the same thing on each Monday, Monday again. How often should you be making tweaks to that to keep the body really getting those adaptations? We look at six blocks.

[00:30:47.730] - DR. STACY SIMS
If we're looking from the training principles and, I guess, methods from an education component, we look at six week cycles and we go, we We have a mesocycle, a microcycle, and a macro cycle. The macrocycle will be the whole year, and you're looking down like, How am I dividing my calendar up to these blocks? For people who are working and have kids, maybe you're dividing the blocks up between school vacation and summer vacation. You can really focus when the kids are at school and you have work and you want to get your training in. Then when the kids are off, that's more of a recovery. If we're looking at just generalizing going, Okay, well, here's winter, and these are the things that I can do in winter, and these are the things I can do in spring and summer, then we can break those blocks up accordingly. That's your macro cycle. We're looking more of a meso cycle into a micro cycle. Meso cycle be, Okay, well, I have this muscle imbalance. My right side and my left side. Right side is a lot weaker. For over these six weeks, I'm really going to do a lot of single leg and uniplane or work so that I can get that balance up.

[00:31:56.420] - DR. STACY SIMS
After that, I want to work on my overall strength. So six weeks of You're seeing I'm fixing that muscle balance. The next six weeks, you're changing it up and looking at how am I going to develop that pure strength. Those six week blocks is really adequate to get adaptation, and then your body is like, Yeah, I need something else.

[00:32:13.380] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
How important is stretching or mobility work, and how much time would you allocate to that?

[00:32:19.850] - DR. STACY SIMS
Mobility is super important. Stretching is a subset of it. A lot of people stretch to warm up, but it's really about mobility. We want to get that full range of motion in all the joints. That's really important, especially for women, as we get into our mid-30s and older, because we start to have perturbations in estrogen, which affects collagen, collagen production in our tendon and the way that our joints are responding. If we keep that mobility, it reduces the risk for soft tissue injuries. If we're doing the same thing over and over, we're having that repetitive motion, doing the mobility also helps reduce injury. So mobility is super important. You can warm up with mobility work for 5 to 10 minutes, or you can finish your session in your cool down with five minutes of mobility, just being very specific for what that looks like. Stretching feels good, but if we're thinking about trying to increase end range, it's more about mobility rather than stretching.

[00:33:21.800] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Can you talk a little bit about compound movements for women? I feel as if a lot of women, maybe the ones I know, tend to avoid compound movements.

[00:33:30.980] - DR. STACY SIMS
That has to do with the, I guess it's more the gender aspect of being in a gym, right? If we think about historically what it's like to be in a gym or join a gym or go to a PT. Most of the time when you're a woman, you get directed to the small weights, the dumbbells, and the cardio equipment. Rarely are you like, Hey, here's a lifting platform and here's a barbell. It's that lack of encouragement just general society, as well as a lack of confidence, because most of us haven't been taught what it is to deadlift or squat. Even if we were sporty and we were involved in sports in school, most of the time the girls were not invited into the weight room because it was viewed as a very masculine part of what the boys are doing for training. If the girls were to go in, they were never introduced to power lifting, they weren't introduced to heavy compound movements. So it still feeds forward to now. So trying to get women understand that when we're talking about lifting heavy and creating that central nervous system response, we want to build up to doing compound movements.

[00:34:39.110] - DR. STACY SIMS
Because when we're doing those compound movements like our deadlifts and our squats and our overhead press with the barbell, It's not just the isolation of the glutes or the isolation of the hamstrings that you get with machines and small weights. It is total stability. You have to work the core, you have to work all those little muscles, and that's what we're after. Because when we think about how we move in life, we don't isolate muscles when we move. We use everything, and so we want everything to fire together in a continuous chain for that movement. When we're looking at... There was a meme that was going around when it was having an old person pick something up off the ground and put it on the top shelf. Then they move it to that same person picking up a weight and lifting it overhead. It's that idea of that functional movement. When I'm working with women and they're afraid to get into compound movement and they want to reach for the dumbbells, I'm like, Okay, what one do you normally pick up? They go and they pick up the normal dumbbell that they'll use for a goblet squat.

[00:35:43.800] - DR. STACY SIMS
I'm like, No, put it down. Pick the next weight up. They'll pick it up and then like, Oh, this isn't what I usually use. I'm like, Okay, so I want you to do seven to eight reps and tell me how it feels. They'll do seven to eight reps, still good form, and they're like, Oh, that was a little bit harder than normal. It's still too light. Put it down. Then you're working your way up until they find a weight where they can do five reps of perfect form, and then by the sixth one, they're starting to fail. That's what it should feel like. We're going to move you onto the barbell now so that they're starting to get the confidence they can lift more than they thought. Then we can then move them over to teach them the real technique of being under a barbell, what it means to squat with a barbell or how to do a deadlift. Because the gains are so fast with those compound movements, with regards to strength, it builds confidence really quickly.

[00:36:33.250] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I love that. Can you talk a little bit about the bone health benefits of strength training and why it's important for women in general? Yes.

[00:36:41.110] - DR. STACY SIMS
When we're looking at bone and bone density, our sex hormones are really tightly tied to maintaining bone health. We're seeing estrogen, progesterine, they work together to create a really good bone density. When we're looking at times through our life where we have lower levels of those hormones, perturbation through puberty, maybe when When we're pregnant and then after pregnancy and our periods don't come out or come back for a while, definitely perimenopause. Then in our reproductive years, if we're playing around with using different types of contraceptions, these can all impact our bone health. The one constant flow to keep our bones turning over in a healthy fashion is multidirectional stress. This is what happens when we're loading with the resistance training. We're putting multidirectional stress on the bone and the ligaments. You're getting that response that we need to have stronger bones for this load. The other thing is like, pliometrics and other jump training, because it's all multidirectional stress. That's how we keep our bones strong. When we look at bone mineral density and In women, we see up to one-third of bone mass loss at the onset of menopause. That's the 2-3 years before menopause and the few years afterwards.

[00:37:54.990] - DR. STACY SIMS
Really, really important to build the bone. We see that peak bone mass will occur in our mid 20s. We have to really make sure that we keep on top of it through our 30s with resistance training and jumping and all the fun things that can happen. Then we keep that in our plan as we get older. It's not irreversible when you get osteopenia and osteoporosis. If you look at the kinds of techniques that are out there to build a bone without medication, and that is resistance training and jumping.

[00:38:27.980] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I love that. Moving on What's the best nutrition? The internet is a very polarized place. No carbs and keto diets. What is the best nutrition for women, in your opinion, and does it change throughout stages of life or even stages of our menstrual cycle.

[00:38:46.410] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah. So nutrition is like a cult, right? Because when you encounter someone and they're like, I'm keto, I'm paleo, I'm IF. And so when you start saying, when we look at the physiology behind it, Women don't do well in those trendy diets. And when we're thinking about why our brains need carbohydrate, we also have an endocrine system that requires more energy than a man's endocrine system because we have a menstrual cycle. So when we're looking at what's the best way and foods for women to eat, if you want to be trendy and say time-restricted eating, we look at population research and know that if women are eating within a half an hour of waking up, then they can counter that initial cortisol spike, which then sets them up for better, I guess, pulses throughout the day instead of having extreme ups and downs, becomes more moderate, which is really good for then later in the evening having parasympathetic drive. We also see that when you eat more in the morning and then start taking off during the day, so your calories are in the daytime when you need it the most, you end up with better body composition and less obesogenic outcomes.

[00:39:59.600] - DR. STACY SIMS
When you Hold a fast or hold your food till noon or after, there really is no metabolic or cardiovascular body composition benefit. This is from population research. If we bring it back down to an active woman, then it's even more important to fuel during the day, especially in and around your training, because of the hypothalamus, the area in the brain that is very sensitive to carbohydrate fat protein coming in. If you are trying to do something exercise and you don't have any fuel coming in, then there's a signal to stay in a catabolic state. The first thing that goes is lean mass. If you're not eating appropriately and you're trying to do training, you're trying to get through the day without eating so much, either purposely or just because you're busy, then you're pretty much signaling your body to break down lean mass and bone and store some fat. That's not what we want. We look on a whole, the best thing for women across all ages to do is take care of their gut microbiome. We want a very diverse amount of fibery foods coming in to make sure that our gut stays healthy.

[00:41:09.440] - DR. STACY SIMS
Because when our gut stays healthy, then we have more fertilizer for the brain. We have more BD&F, we have more serotonin, we have better neurotransmitters. So all of those functions work, which then gives us the space to have a pause and go, Okay, well, I want to do this training, and I'm going to go on this work thing. It gives you that space to think and to to breathe and to be able to manipulate the rest of the day to work for you. It's the gut health, and then the other layer of that is protein, because we are constantly reminding people that the recommended daily allowance is the least amount that you need to have per day to prevent malnutrition. If we're talking about the 50 to 55 grams of protein they recommend for women, that is way too low. When we look more, the research is coming out, it's closer to that one gram per pound or that 0.8 per kilogram. That is what allows our bodies to turn over lean mass in a good way, keep building lean mass, have our neurotransitory transmitters, keep body composition in check, and reduce inflammation and oxidative stress.

[00:42:20.710] - DR. STACY SIMS
Within those nuances of diet, gut health, protein, and then eating more in the day and tapering off at night. However else that fits your dietary lifestyle, that's okay. But those are the big rocks.

[00:42:34.140] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I love that. How many grams of protein do you think that we should aim for before the gym and then at each meal?

[00:42:42.190] - DR. STACY SIMS
Before the gym, if we're doing more strength-oriented stuff, we look around 15 to 20 grams of protein. If we're doing strength and some cardio, then you're adding 30 grams of carbohydrate onto that. So it's not a lot. For people who get up first thing in the morning and they're like, I need to get to the gym first I don't feel like eating. It's as simple as a half a banana and protein coffee, or the protein coffee that has some oak milk or some almond milk added to it. So you're getting some carb from that. If we're looking at you've had breakfast, and then you're going to go to the gym within 2 hours of that, then that's good. You just want to have your next meal after the gym. Every meal, we look at around 30 to 50 grams of protein, depending on what you've had If you've been to the gym and you've had your protein recovery, and then an hour later, you're having your meal, 30 grams is good. If you are looking at going to the gym, coming home and having your meal right after, then it's 40 to 50 grams. You want to have that regularly spaced throughout the day.

[00:43:48.620] - DR. STACY SIMS
You're trying to hit that 15 to 20 grams of protein per snack, 30 to 50 grams per meal.

[00:43:55.610] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I love that. Yeah, I definitely prioritize protein, but it can sometimes be a little bit It's really challenging. Moving into recovery, what about sauna? What would your sauna protocols be? What are your favorite modalities or therapies? Obviously, we have sauna, cold Plunge. What are your thoughts on both of those and when's the best time to do them, if at all?

[00:44:18.570] - DR. STACY SIMS
Women respond better to the heat. When we look at cold plunge and the research that's out there, women need not as cold as what is being promoted. We're looking at ice baths, too cold for women. We see around that 55 degree watermark is really effective for women. If you're someone who likes the cold and you want that endorphin response and all the molecular responses that come from cold exposure, it's 55 degree water, not cold, cold. Women respond better to the heat because throughout our menstrual cycle, we're having changes in our core temperature. Our body understands what heat is and how to move thresholds and how to respond to hot environments. It's really beneficial for women who are having significant heat intolerance through hot flashes or hormone changes. Because if you're exposing your hypothalamus to hot, hot temperatures, then it can respond in kind and understand how to create threshold shifts. If we're thinking about sauna, I prefer dry sauna because what we want is to mimic a natural environment. If we look at infrared, it doesn't do the same. It is It's different in the fact that you get some core warming, but it's skipping the first initial aspect of what is happening with our skin.

[00:45:38.910] - DR. STACY SIMS
Our skin needs to really experience that really significant hot environment as we vasodilate, then we sweat, and our cork temperature comes up. This is how we're getting all of our responses, which happens in a dry sauna. With regards to exposure, if you're looking for health benefits, twice a week, 10 minutes at a time. If you're looking for more performance or heat, the climatization aspects, this is where we're looking at a specific protocol where you're going into the sauna somewhat dehydrated from training every day for 9-7 days, and you're going from 20-30 minutes. Then afterwards, you're slowly rehydrating over the course of three or four hours, and that's just one block of training. It depends on what you want to use it for. From a recovery standpoint, I'm always the person that says, If you've done really, really hard session as a woman and you need to optimize recovery, cool water right after, because we vasodilate, so all of our blood goes to our periphery first, and we want to facilitate that coming back to our heart so that we can circulate better nutrient-rich blood to our muscles and uptake all the metabolic waste. That happens with cool water, so you could take a cool shower after the gym.

[00:46:54.750] - DR. STACY SIMS
That really enhances that post-exercise recovery. If you're someone who If you've done a really hard session and you're like, I am not going to be doing something for the next 24 or 36 hours, we can look at foam rolling and mobility as recovery and nutrition as recovery. Each one is a little bit different when we're thinking about that acute recovery, and then we're thinking about longer term effects. You have to be very specific in the temperature of the water. Then I always try to people more towards the sauna for more of the heat shock, protein development, and other cardiovascular benefits you get with that heat exposure.

[00:47:33.710] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Do you have a preference or recommendation on time of sauna? Is morning or evening or right after exercise best?

[00:47:42.090] - DR. STACY SIMS
Whatever fits in your schedule.

[00:47:44.660] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I love that. I've been hearing quite a bit about women needing more sleep than men. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:47:54.110] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, I think it comes down to a lot of the stuff that's coming out from the wearables. Unfortunately, we look at the sleep data from the wearables. The algorithms are based on male physiology. It looks like women have poor sleep and poor quality of sleep. A couple of things that are wrong with that. You talk to any sleep researcher and they'll tell you that the general wearable is not sensitive enough to actually track stages of sleep. That it will tell you every time you wake up, but it's not going to tell you if you're in slow wave sleep or you're in rim sleep or you're in light sleep. It's just not sensitive enough. You have to go to a sleep lab to get that done. Then the second thing with the algorithms being off, by the nature of being a woman or a person that menstruates, you have a change in your autonomic nervous system based on progesterone. When progesterone comes up, you have more of a sympathetic drive. That comes off in the sleep wearable information saying that you've had a poor recovery and a poor sleep. It's not that women need more sleep.

[00:48:58.400] - DR. STACY SIMS
It's the messaging that's coming out from the data from the wearables that is pushing this rhetoric that there's a sex difference in sleep needs. What really comes down to is if you're a morning or a night person and your circadian rhythm. We know that women circadian circadian rhythms are different from men, where ours is a little bit shorter than men's. We have about 23 and a half, and men's closer to 25 and a half. When we're talking about sleep, women are like, I need to go to bed earlier than my partner. It's not because they need more sleep. It's their circadian rhythm is different.

[00:49:34.830] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
That's interesting. But yes, I always want to go to bed first before my husband. Yeah, same. Yeah, I love that. Well, that's so helpful. I had a couple of questions about you recommended something, a Siberian ginseng, and everyone is asking me in my comments, what is the dose for it? Where do you start?

[00:49:56.180] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah, start with the least amount. When we're talking about Siberian ginseng, we want to look at around 200 milligrams. That's a standard. You go and you see the effective. You go to GEA herbs or you go to thorn, and the standard is 200. That's what you want to start with. Being an adaptogen, it does take some time to build up to get effect. Start with 200, give yourself three weeks and see how you feel. If you're like, I don't feel anything, then maybe you bring it up to three, but don't above the 300.

[00:50:31.230] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Great recommendation. What about other supplements that you think might be beneficial for women?

[00:50:37.020] - DR. STACY SIMS
The big three, really omega-3 fatty acids. We want to look at that because we end up with different levels of oxidative stress through our menstrual cycle, and it really helps with cellular integrity. We want vitamin D because even though we might live in a sunny environment, lucky you in California, we still don't get enough because we've all been conditioned to We use sunscreen and hats and protect our skin, and we spend a lot of time inside. Even if we have windows and everything, we still don't get enough vitamin D. It's really important for immunity, for prevention of depression, for iron regulation, for muscle, muscle regulation and quality of muscle and muscle function. Then the other one is creatine. For women, creatine, super important for all the fast energetics in the body. From gut health to heart health, to brain health, we see that just supplementing with 3-5 grams a day really helps with all of those fast energetics. Those would be the big three. Then when you're thinking of individual cases, if you're having issues sleeping, we might want to go with L-Fianine. If we're having issues with iron, then we look at supplementing with carbonyl iron.

[00:51:52.620] - DR. STACY SIMS
There's individual really good supplements, but that's case by case. But recommendation generally for all win would be the vitamin D, the omega-3s, and the creatine.

[00:52:03.380] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
How do you feel about being in the sun? This is also a very controversial issue these days.

[00:52:08.720] - DR. STACY SIMS
I know. I live in a place where there's no ozone, and I'm still like, I need the sun. Because when we're looking at continuous days of gray, it directly affects, like people call seasonal affective disorder, but a lot of times it could happen with just three days of gray. When we're looking at the sun, the sun benefits, again, it's the vitamin D factor, and we get a lot of circadium reset with light and dark. If we're looking at time changes with daylight savings and that stuff, you need to be out there to be able to keep your circadian rhythm in check. When we start getting circadian rhythm disturbance, then we start getting changes in our cortisol pulse, our luteinizing hormone pulse, our estrogen, and all of these hormones are based on our circadian rhythm. Being out in the sun helps maintain that circadian rhythm, helps you with vitamin D, I mean, there are some people who are like, I don't want any sun to do great in the gray. But I'm like, and then there's a whole bunch of us that don't do so well. We don't have sun because we need it for a better neurotransmitter, I guess, production and worth.

[00:53:15.570] - DR. STACY SIMS
We're looking at dopamine and serotonin and how all of those things affect depression and anxiety. Sun is very important for helping maintain those levels as well.

[00:53:26.110] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, I mean, see, that's a reason you might want to consider California.

[00:53:30.850] - DR. STACY SIMS
Of course. I know. I'm like, maybe not in San Francisco proper with all their fog, but on the periphery and down in SoCal, definitely.

[00:53:40.600] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah. Well, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on.

[00:53:46.170] - DR. STACY SIMS
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's been fun.

[00:53:48.320] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Absolutely. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Kyla Barnes, does not accept responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of the information contained herein. Opinions of their guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical issue, consult a licensed physician.