What We're Still Getting Wrong About Women's Health & Fitness: Dr. Stacy Sims Live

“I think, a lot of people don't really understand, like, the biological and physiological factors that make us x x versus x y. We know that most of the research in health and sports science has been done on men and generalized women, even small things like aspirin for heart attack. There were no women who were in the original study. So they're looking at men and generalizing to women.”

“If you're going to create a stress without food, you're not going to create a really strong stress. You feel like you are. But from the body, from a cellular level, it's not as strong of a stress to create the adaptation that you want. You're gonna have more catecholamine, so that's your cortisol and your breakdown hormones that are being produced so that it can fuel your workout. Let's just take that negative stress away by putting a little bit of food in before you go training.”

“We also see that about four years before that one point in time in menopause, there's an incredible decrease in our gut microbiome diversity, which then exacerbates the body's ability to store body fat because we start having an overgrowth of the phyla that is obesogenic or prefers to grab all of the energy out of all the food they're eating and make you crave simple carbohydrates.”

“If anyone's ever been to an f forty five or an Orangetheory, I know they already have targets on me, so I'm happy to just talk about them now. You're sitting forty five minutes at an intensity that isn't high intensity. It feels that way because we've all been conditioned to come out of a workout feeling really sweaty and wasted, but that's not effective. So it's not hard enough to be hard to invoke change. It's not easy enough to be easy for recovery.”

“We see from a randomized controlled trial that came out last month that those people who lift on the heavy end, both men and women, lift on the heavy end get more prefrontal cortex neuro conductivity. So that means they're actually empowering the neurons in the prefrontal cortex more so than those people that are lifting moderate weight or body weight. Only the heavy end of lifting really does affect the prefrontal cortex.”

“If we want to improve bone density, we need a multidirectional stress coming up. When I talk about jump training, so many people, especially perimenopausal women, like, I can't my joints hurt. It's like, I'm not talking about plyometric high box jumps. It could be something as simple as a toe raise and a hard heel slam because you're dropping hard and absorbing all those forces. That's a multidirectional force to the skeletal system.”

“Cold plunge. Oh, yeah. I caused an international shit storm with this one. The ice water, the ice bath that comes along is way too cold for women. It causes more of a sympathetic drive. And once we get over that sympathetic drive, then the responses for parasympathetic still are not as robust as we see for men. So we're looking at 55 degrees Fahrenheit, around 14 to 16 degrees Celsius. It is in the research.”

“There are a 153 studies in the systematic review. Of it, the conclusion was women 18 to 60 should be using three to five grams of creatine supplementation to optimize and improve overall health. Anything about the brain, the heart, the gut, the bone, everything requires creatine. For women, by the nature of being women, we have less lean mass than men, so we have less stores.”

“When we look at wearables, the algorithms are based on male data. There are a lot of women who are like, what's going on? My Garmin's yelling at me. You're in the red. What's going on? You're sick. But, actually, they just ovulated. And these algorithms are not picking up the fact that when we look at physiology for women, there's an inherent change across the menstrual cycle with regards to autonomic nervous system.”

“When I was back in the day when Interbike was in Las Vegas, I was sharing a cab back to the airport, and this guy got in and he didn't look healthy at all. And he was talking about how he's gonna go on a bike ride, but he had to use his beta alanine and beet juice first. And I was like, what are you talking about? He goes, oh, yeah. Well, that's how I can go hard on my bike. I was like, have you tried training without it? He goes, why would I do that?”