Menopause Workouts: Why Fewer Days and Straight Sets Help

Nikkiey: What's up, you guys? Nikkiey Stott here with WarriorBabe, and welcome to our viewer Q&A that we do every single Friday. Happy Friday. I take four questions from the live Q&A that I do every single Tuesday at 6pm EST over at facebook.com/WarriorBabeNikkiey, and I bring them here for you right now. If you're as excited as I am to dive into this Q&A, smash that like button and be sure to subscribe to this channel, because every single Friday we are dropping this Q&A.

Maybe next week more questions will pertain to your own fitness journey and give you confidence and clarity as to what to do next for yourself and your journey. With that being said, let's dive into it with question number one.

Jordan asks: the signs of being ready to start a cut phase. This answer will solely depend on who you are and where you're at with your journey, and the overall lifestyle, body type, stressors, etc. that you have.

Everybody is going to experience their own journey moving forward in the fitness space. The answer to this is very, very individual. But let's say that you have been working to build up lean muscle. You have been working to eat at a higher caloric intake, maybe around your maintenance level. If you don't know what maintenance is, or you don't know any of these phases I'm talking about, cutting, maintenance or building, definitely check out the videos we have on this page, because I dive into each of the phases. But let's say you have been eating at the higher caloric intake, and you've been really stacking on some lean muscle.

You want to see more of that muscle definition. You want to see more striations. You want to see all the hard work that you're putting in be revealed. This is where I would say, if your sleep is in alignment, if you have really spent some time at maintenance, if all your stressors are in alignment and you're not overly stressed, this would be a really good point to say, okay, I want to reveal what my hard work has done, and start to put myself into a cut, into a deficit, whatever you want to call it. That's where I would say this is a good spot for that individual to start that journey.

Let's move into question number two. Robin asks: what are some signs that we should switch to pre-menopausal workouts? I am almost 47 and just not sure what's best for me at this stage. That is such a great question to ask, because I know there are a lot of you out there who are 40, 50, 60 years old, and you're wondering, do things change as I get older? And yes, they do. What you were doing at 20 years old and 30 years old is not what you're going to be doing with your nutrition and your workouts as you reach 40 and 50 and 60.

As your body is going through specific hormonal changes, what I say to women at this stage of life is less is more. Keep in mind, exercise is a physical stress. It's a good physical stress. You're doing good for your body with it, but it's still a stressor, and your body is still under stress. Cortisol levels rise, and cortisol is a fat-storing hormone. So you're going to start seeing results you don't want to see if you're doing too much. Start scaling back, from a six-day workout plan to a four-day workout plan.

I can almost 80% guarantee that you will start seeing the results you actually want to see when you start implementing that kind of workout routine. Second to that, a lot of people do supersets, which is a great and effective strategy when you're working out. You pair two exercises together and do them back to back with no rest in between. That causes a lot of stress in the body. So something we preach to women who are in the pre-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal world is that we do fewer supersets and more straight sets.

There's more rest involved within those workouts. If you scale back, you're definitely going to see more of the results you want to see.

All right, question number three: I'm having such a hard time hitting my protein goals without going over my fat allowance per day. Any go-to food options you recommend that are high protein but low fat? The way you can hit your protein numbers without going over your carbs or your fats is by really focusing on lean protein sources: cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, egg whites, hard-boiled eggs, beef jerky, protein shakes.

Also chicken, ground beef at the higher percentage, ground turkey at the higher percentage. All of those examples are lean protein sources, meaning they don't have carbs and fats involved in the makeup of them. When you incorporate those more on a daily basis, it's going to help you focus on hitting your protein macros overall. And I guarantee that once you start incorporating more lean proteins, you're probably going to end up going over your protein numbers and have to adjust the quantity of protein you're having in each meal.

What also happens is that when people go over their fat and carb numbers because of their protein, it's mainly coming from protein bars or processed protein sources. Keep in mind, those aren't going to give you the nutritional value that lean protein sources will give you.

Question number four: do you think the scales that measure body fat are accurate enough to rely on? This is a great question, and I hear it a lot. What we say inside of WarriorBabe is that the numbers on the scales, specifically with body fat and all of the different calculations they do, are not accurate.

I remember for me specifically, when I stepped on one of those types of scales, I remember exactly what it was. It told me that I was 28% body fat. And I'm like, I know too much to know that's not true. No way. Me, 28% body fat? If you have an accurate one that you know is pretty spot on, I'd welcome hearing about it in the comments below. I would love to know. If you want to use a scale, understand it's not accurate. But if you do use it, you're still going to have a number you can rely on, right? Whether it goes up or down, the number is going to change if you're consistently following the right program.

It's just not going to be true to your actual body. As for the best ways to measure your body fat, you can get the Amazon Halo, which is really good, and from what I've known from using it previously, it is pretty accurate if you want an easy at-home method. Other than that, getting an InBody scan at your local gym, if they have it, is pretty accurate. Also, going in for a DEXA scan is one of the most accurate ways to tell what your body fat is. When you are measuring your body fat, make sure you're treating it the same way you would measure your number on the scale.

You're doing it on an empty stomach. You're doing it first thing in the morning. You're doing it after you go to the bathroom. And you're doing that every single time you measure your body fat, because if you do it in the afternoon, it's probably going to give you something that isn't in alignment with your last test.

So I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, remember to subscribe to this channel, because every single Friday we're coming in hot with four new questions, and you never know, it could pertain to what you need to hear in your journey. Subscribe to this page and I will see you next time.