Stop Blaming Menopause for Muscle Loss (Here's What's Really Happening) | Ep 434
If what worked in your 30s isn't working anymore, it's not your fault. Your body and life have changed. The Fitness Lab app adapts to your sleep, recovery, and stress so you can actually build muscle and lose fat over 40. It also now syncs with Apple Health (iPhone version only).
Podcast listeners get 20% off at bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20
--
Does menopause cause muscle loss or make it harder to build muscle?
The fitness industry loves to blame hormones for everything. Wellness gurus want to sell you special programs, protocols, and supplements for perimenopause and postmenopause.
But the research shows that postmenopausal women build muscle and gain strength with resistance training just as effectively as younger women. The stimulus-response relationship doesn't break after 50 (or 40).
So what's really happening?
Learn why the "menopause steals muscle" narrative is mostly a timing coincidence, and what's actually driving the decline.
We break down the 5 factors that "drift" during midlife, where hormone replacement therapy (HRT) fits into the picture, and specific strategies that work for women over 40 regardless of hormonal status.
If you've felt like your body stopped responding, this episode offers both the evidence and the practical framework to test that assumption. Building muscle after menopause isn't about fighting your biology, it's about adjusting your inputs.
Episode Resources:
Take the free 2-minute quiz to see if Fitness Lab is right for you
Timestamps:
0:00 - The dangerous menopause muscle loss narrative
3:50 - What the research shows about strength training after menopause
7:30 - Life changes vs. hormones (correlation vs. causation)
10:52 - 5 factors that actually drive midlife muscle loss
18:45 - How to train for muscle building over 40 (not just "staying active")
22:10 - Protein targets and meal distribution for women over 40
24:55 - Why sleep and recovery become non-negotiable in midlife
28:05 - The body composition feedback loop and metabolism myths
31:15 - Where HRT fits
38:15 - How negative messaging creates the outcomes it predicts
41:20 - Weekly training structure for building muscle
Many women over 40 are told that muscle loss is an unavoidable result of perimenopause and menopause, but the research paints a different, more empowering picture. Muscle can be built at any age when the right inputs are in place: progressive resistance training, adequate protein intake, sufficient daily movement, and consistent, high-quality recovery. The idea that hormones alone switch off your ability to respond to training creates a nocebo effect that discourages action, weakens consistency, and leads to lower protein, easier workouts, and fragmented routines. This mindset becomes a loop: you change inputs because you believe change is futile, then the outcomes confirm the belief. Breaking that loop starts with evidence-based habits and clear targets that you can control day to day.
The science on postmenopausal training is encouraging: resistance exercise reliably improves strength, muscle mass, and physical function. Studies comparing responses across hormonal statuses show that, on average, adaptations to training are not significantly different. That means the stimulus still works; muscles remain sensitive to progressive overload. What changes in midlife is often everything around training: heavier life stress, caregiving duties, career demands, and disrupted sleep. These shifts reduce training volume and intensity, lower daily movement, and erode recovery. The net effect resembles an age or hormone problem, but it’s largely behavioral and environmental. This is good news because behavior can be shaped, measured, and improved without waiting on perfect labs, exotic supplements, or specialized protocols that overpromise and distract.
Five drivers explain most midlife muscle loss: lower training volume or effort, inadequate protein, decreased non-exercise activity, compromised sleep and stress recovery, and body composition drift that raises inflammation and reduces training tolerance. Each driver is actionable. Training must be hard enough and progressive: about 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, performed 1 to 3 reps shy of failure, using mostly compound lifts like squats, hinges, presses, and pulls. Protein intake needs to rise to overcome mild anabolic resistance: aim for 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of body weight per day, distributed across meals with at least 25 grams at breakfast and lunch to spark muscle protein synthesis and control hunger. Daily movement targets of 7,000 to 9,000 steps improve insulin sensitivity and recovery capacity, helping you handle harder training sessions.
Recovery quality often decides whether your training pays off. Hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, and sleep apnea can fracture sleep architecture, blunting progress even when workouts look perfect on paper. Tackle the specific disruptors: a cooler bedroom, consistent wind-down routines, evaluation for apnea, and scheduling heavy sessions with enough days between to restore performance. If you are actively dieting, be conservative—keep protein high, avoid aggressive deficits, and remember that under-eating is under-recovering. Body composition also feeds back into performance: extra fat mass can raise inflammation and lower energy, which makes training feel harder and encourages inactivity. Addressing nutrition quality, steps, and strength work together reverses this loop without defaulting to “slowed metabolism” as fate.
Where does hormone replacement therapy fit? Think of HRT as a modifier, not the foundation. The foundational inputs are training, protein, movement, and sleep. HRT can improve quality of life and may nudge some markers in the right direction, but evidence for consistent, direct muscle or performance benefits is mixed. When combined with resistance training, training drives the change while HRT can be additive for symptoms that hinder recovery. If symptoms are severe, work with a qualified clinician and make decisions based on how you feel, not just labs. Either way, the path to more muscle still runs through progressive overload, adequate protein, daily activity, and deep, regular sleep.
Adopt a simple weekly operating system to create momentum. Train two to three days per week with focus and progression. Eat 25 to 40 grams of protein at each meal and front-load it at breakfast. Walk daily and park farther away. Guard your sleep window and schedule deloads or lighter days when life gets heavy. Then audit your week with three yes-or-no questions: did you progress a lift, did you hit 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch, and did you sleep at least seven hours? If two answers are no, you’ve found your next lever. This is not about perfection; it’s about regaining agency. Your muscles still listen. Give them a clear signal, and they will respond.
Have you followed the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or all other platforms.
Then hit “Follow” and you’re good to go!
-
Philip Pape: 0:00
If you're a woman over 40 who's been told that muscle loss is caused by peri and postmenopause, this episode is for you. Menopause is real, of course, and the symptoms are real. The frustration is real, and I'm not here to dismiss any of that. But what I am going to show you is that the story you've been sold, that your body has stopped responding, that building muscle is now close to, if not impossible, is not supported by the evidence. And believing that it is maybe the thing holding you back. You're going to learn five hidden factors that drive mid-life muscle loss. Most of them you can control. Why post-menopausal women respond to resistance training just as well as younger women, and the exact protein and training targets that work at any hormonal status. The women I see who build muscle in their 50s and beyond, they're not biologically advantaged, they're just doing specific things differently. I'm your host today, Philip Pape, and I want to start by acknowledging something. Yes, I'm a man, to state the obvious, and I'm talking about menopause. I'm aware that I've not lived this experience. I haven't had hot flashes at 3 a.m. I haven't had the brain fog or the feeling that your body has suddenly become unfamiliar to you. And these are real things I hear from women and they matter. But what I can offer is the research and the patterns that I've seen working with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and hopefully a perspective that feels empowering rather than dismissive. I've been accused of being too positive, but I hope that comes into play today to benefit you. Because this is what I've observed. Many women are being told a story, a narrative about menopause and about muscle that is making things harder. It's not making it easier. The story goes that once your hormones shift, your body stops responding, right? The drop of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, that building muscle becomes close to impossible or, you know, at least dramatically harder, and that you're now fighting your biology. And that, you know, when you believe that story, and I get that the industry thrives on negativity, uh, often to sell products and services, you often then stop doing the things that would actually help. It kind of becomes a scapegoat, and your training might become something that you feel is not as beneficial. Your protein, you know, you may not feel like you have to eat as much protein and like all the little things add up. And then because all these inputs change, the outputs tend to get worse. And then it's a vicious cycle that seems to confirm the story. So today I want to offer a different narrative. Not one that dismisses what you're experiencing, of course, but that separates what is genuinely caused by hormones from what is actually changeable. Because there is more in that second category than many of us are being told or sold. So I'm breaking it down into five factors that actually drive midlife muscle loss. Where HRT fits into that, right? Hormone replacement therapy, spoiler alert, it's not the first thing you're necessarily having to do. And then specific practical things like training protein targets that work for really work for everybody, but specific to postmenopausal women because there might be some subtle differences that might be helpful. And the research here is extremely encouraging. And then at the end, I've got three quick yes or no questions you can ask yourself to tell you exactly where to focus this week. Takes like 30 seconds. So stay until the end for that. All right, let's get into it. And I want to talk about the narrative, right? The menopause narrative, post-menopause, pre-menopause, whatever. It's it's it's a common pattern out there. You know, many of you women are in your mid-40s, 50s, and you notice some changes, right? This is perimenopause can start as early as mid to late 30s and goes all the way the time you hit menopause, which is one year without uh period, and all the time in between, there are changes that happen with hormones and then the symptoms that occur from that, like lower energy, like all the other symptoms that some of which I mentioned in the in the teaser, maybe your scale has gone up. Resistance to weight loss is a big, widely reported frustration, right? Your clothes fit differently because of the different body fat distribution, right? Maybe more belly fat. And right around this time, you know, simultaneously, all the other symptoms are happening along with the physical changes. And so it's easy to say that menopause causes these changes. And I understand why that's very appealing because it does provide an explanation that, okay, it's not your fault, it's your hormones. And we don't want to say any of this is your fault, right? It's it's not about fault, really. It's just about understanding what how things work. Where I think it gets complicated is that the fitness industry, the wellness industry, that to me is kind of a dirty word these days, has taken this and run in a very harmful and dangerous direction because now there is kind of a Wild West, you know, cowboy or cowgirl or whatever set of functional doctors and hormone panels and menopause-specific workout programs and supplements targeting all your hormones that may or may not be safe or do what they they purport to do. And we're all chasing lab work instead of symptoms. It's just kind of a mess. And at the same time, you have a lot of great people, doctors, professionals, healthcare people, uh coaches that are trying to do the right thing and do it in the right way, but it's hard to separate the signal from the noise, let's say. And so the implicit message is this is where I think it's a problem. Your body is broken now, and you need some sort of expensive, complicated intervention to fix it. And I'm the only one that can help you. And that's where you sell products and services. But I think it also strips away agency, all right? Agency, self, you know, efficacy, as we call it, which self-efficacy combined with self-regulation is the way that we do things and get consistent with the lifestyle changes we're trying to make occur. When you look at the actual research, it tells us something different, as you would expect, something a bit more subtle. There's more nuance, and we have to understand that. Okay, so what is the reality from the research? First, yes, muscle loss does occur, roughly three to eight percent per decade after age 30. I actually bring that up a lot on podcasts, not to scare people, but to let you know what's going on with your body so we can do something about it. This is sarcopenia. Now, sarcopenia is not just loss of muscle mass, it's also loss of the function from muscle mass. That's a different topic. But just in general, we start to lose our muscle mass. We've known this for many years, since probably the late 80s in the research. The nuance that we leave out is that this decline is not just driven by age or and or by menopause. It's associated with the changes in behavior, the five factors we're gonna talk about, that tend to happen during this time of life. And they happen to men as well. For women, it does get exacerbated because of some of the hormonal changes, and that's where the reality is, right? We're gonna look at that. And there's a lot of things that are happening as we get older through our 30s, into our 40s and 50s. A lot of them are because life gets complicated, right? It's not just because of hormones. And when we look at studies on resistance training in postmenopausal women, we find always that guess what? Resistance exercise increases skeletal muscle mass and strength and physical performance. And this is in postmenopausal women, okay? Their muscles responded perfectly fine to the stimulus. One of the things I love sharing on podcasts, especially geared toward women, is that women can increase their muscle mass at the same rate as men and at the same rate, regardless of age. And that's really empowering if you're aware of that. There was a study just last year, 2025, that looked at training outcomes across different menopause statuses. And they found that training adaptations were not significantly different based on hormonal status. So, again, the stimulus response relationship still works. And I know a lot of things are not working as we get old. Our joints get a little less pliable, right? We have a little more aches and pains and some other things happening, but this is one thing that continues to work. Your muscles don't forget how to grow in response to that stimulus. So, what is actually happening is more of a correlation causation problem. Okay. Menopause happens to arrive around the same time as a lot of other changes. For example, tell me if any of these sound familiar to you. Career and job demands are often getting super complicated and stressful in your 40s and 50s, especially for those of you who have professional careers. This is where you're really hustling to get, you know, climb the ladder. Maybe you're in leadership and management positions, you have a lot of responsibility, you're negotiating, you're trying to find jobs, trying to take interviews. Like all of that stuff is happening much more at this time of life than it probably did in your 20s and 30s when you were a little more entry-level and just getting into it and had more energy for it. Kids, kids, kids, guys, kids maybe, first of all, having kids, right? You're in your 40s and 50s. I'm 45, a dad of two daughters, and this it takes a lot of your time, devotion, energy. I love it. I love being a dad. And I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is an important part of my life, and it could be part of yours. And then depending on your age, kids may be leaving home, going to college, going to their jobs, living on their own, or they are hitting their most demanding years. Or you had an oops baby, as we call them, where your kids are many years apart, and now you have a younger kid. So there's kids. What about your own parents are starting to get older and maybe need care and attention in your time? Maybe you have to be driving around, traveling, housing them, maybe assisted living, like all that stuff, medical care. What about sleep? Sleep tends to become more fragmented as we get older. Oftentimes it's linked to all these other issues, including stress. Some of you have sleep apnea, insomnia, you know, supplementation medications interfere with it. Maybe your drink, whatever. And then we, of course, we have exercise that tends to become less consistent or training becomes less consistent because life is just harder and you're trying to fit everything into your schedule. So that might be just the tip of the iceberg for a lot of you, but I hope I hit on the big reasons why life may be different in your 40s, 50s, and kind of this age range. Now, let's talk hormones because I'm not saying that estrogen doesn't matter. That's a very important hormone that we should be talking about. It does. Estrogen decline can modify quite a few outcomes. Your recovery, your connected tissue health, some aspects of body composition because of the redistribution of fat. Of course, it creates a bunch of symptoms, but for most women, it's not the primary driver of muscle loss. And that's that's the key for today's episode. The primary drivers are the things that you can actually influence. And that's great news because if it were purely hormonal, you'd be stuck, or at least like everybody would have to have, you know, estrogen replacement just to avoid muscle loss. And that's not the case. That's not the case. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know what, it could be hormones and lifestyle, just like GLP1 meds, it could be medications and lifestyle. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. Now, if it is mostly behavioral and environmental, right? If if you take a pie chart and one slice has hormones, but all the rest are behavioral and environmental, that gives you a ton of options, right? So what are these five factors that I've been mentioning? Because if you identify which have shifted for you, that's like the first, that's the first step toward reversing course, which is probably why you're listening to or watching this podcast. All right. So we know the menopause steals your muscle narrative, is at best incomplete. It's not that hormones are irrelevant, right? They are part of the picture, but they're usually not the main driver. Now, what is? All right. So I'm gonna list these factors, and the goal isn't to make you feel guilty, right? Life in your 40s, 50s, beyond is legitimately harder for many to manage than in your 20s. And so a lot of it's circumstantial or evident environment based, but you still need to recognize them. So factor number one is your training volume and intensity. And this happens gradually. Now, if you don't even exercise at all, well, that's your biggest low-hanging fruit right there. By exercise, I should have said train. If you don't use resistance training in your life, ladies, right now, you probably haven't been listening to this podcast, I'm guessing. So definitely we have a whole library on training, but that's gonna be your probably your biggest lever for many of you, other than maybe sleep and stress, because that is how you build and hold on to muscle, period. Now, many of you have exercised in one way or the other, or you have trained, or you go to the gym. And now it's a matter of are you doing it the right way? Are you training the right amount of time? You know, are you lifting heavy enough? Are you progressing and all of that? Are you doing it in a way where you're you're not avoiding it because you think it's gonna injure you? Or, okay, you have back issues, so that's why you don't train, not realizing that training can help with your back issues. And there's all of that going on. There's also a subtle psychological shift that happens for some women where the menopause symptoms, fatigue and joint aches and disrupted sleep, and there's a lot of symptoms, right? And they they tend to make hard training itself then also feel less appearing, appealing. It seems exhausting, it seems like not something you want to do, you don't like it, so you unconsciously back off. And of course, that's understandable. This is the human condition, right? Responding to those things. But then the result is, of course, you don't have what you need to hold on to build muscle. And again, your muscles don't know your age, they don't know your hormone levels, they will respond. If you go into the gym, train hard close to failure, get that mechanical tension, okay? You know, not just the pink dumbbells for 10 reps every time. You have to adapt and force your body to grow. That's the biggest factor is training, volume, the approach, whether you're doing it or not is a huge deal. And we're gonna touch on this again when we get to the practical tips on what to do. That's the biggest one. Uh, the second factor is your nutrition, especially your protein intake. I just had an interview with Steph Mager. She's an all-time world record squat holder, and she doesn't really track macros and calories, but she does make sure she gets enough protein. She weighs around 180, and so she gets around 180 grams of protein every day, right? One gram per pound. And so this is this is kind of sneaky, right? Because if you haven't been tracking it before, you probably didn't have enough to begin with. And even if you have, the same what you had before may not be enough anymore. This is one thing that can change as we get older, and that we get something called anabolic resistance, where you have a slightly blunted response to the muscle building signal from protein. So it just means you might need a little bit more. Think of it like your muscles becoming a bit harder of hearing. They need a louder signal from the the amount of protein that you eat. But if you have enough protein intake, you know, gram per pound, let's say, or even less than that, 0.8, 0.7, it's it should be more than enough to give you that signal. But for many of you, you're eating even less than that. So if you're a 150-pound woman, that means let's say 100 to 120 grams of protein, you know, on the on the lower end. More than that is fine. It's great. And many women I start working with, you know, they're getting like half that and they don't realize it because they're not tracking. And then also they might try to shove all that protein into dinner. And I always encourage distributing it throughout the day because it's gonna help you with your fullness throughout the day and also help you get the protein. You're not trying to catch up and you're not binging and things like that. Factor number three is just your daily movement. So again, this time of life, we tend to get more sedentary. You know, all the all the movement outside of your workouts tends to decline around this time of year. It's not that you're lazy, it's because we have desk jobs, less physical housework, you know, things are more convenient now with uh ordering things online and driving instead of walking. And we don't, you know, we always try to find the closest parking spot. And, you know, we're not maybe not chasing our kids around anymore, right? There's a lot of reasons for it. Whatever reason it is is personal to you. But you know what? Your muscle and supporting your muscle mass and your strength and recovery and your health and longevity are all affected by your overall activity. It affects your recovery, recovery, your insulin sensitivity, how your body processes nutrients. So we're trying to get up in that seven to nine thousand steps a day minimum, minimum. This is one place where I do like to set a threshold for people, find a way to get there. And if you haven't checked your step count recently, that's step one, just to find out what it is with your phone or wearable. But if you're down in the three, four, five thousand steps a day, that's a big lever for you. All right, then factor number four is recovery, all right, especially sleep. This is where hormones do play a direct role because this it's a chicken and egg, right? For you ladies and peri and postmenopause, sleep often gets more fragmented and difficult to come by because of the hormone changes, or you have hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, racing thoughts, all of these things might, they might prevent you from falling asleep or wake you up. Maybe you have sleep apnea, lots of things, reasons, right? And this is genuinely a difficult thing. It's it's a challenge, and I don't want to minimize it. But I also want to frame it as another problem that we can solve, right? Rather than just an inevitability that we can't control that we have to accept. Because all of this stuff is in your control. The stoic philosophy of what can I do, not what can't I do. When recovery is compromised in any way, and that could be the amount of sleep, the amount of deep and REM sleep, interrupted sleep, too much stress, too much training and fatigue and not enough rest or deloads or whatever, then your capacity to build muscle is just reduced. It's reduced. You could do all the things right in the gym, and you're not gonna see the results you want if you're chronically under-recovered. By the way, not eating enough is also a form of under-recovery. So simply stop dieting for a while and fix on fix these things when you're in peri postmenopause. That could be the solution. And there are interventions, there are hacks, there are tips, there are strategies. Having a cool bedroom, having a wind-down routine. You know, some of you may need medical support for severe symptoms or a CPAP machine, right? Whatever it is, the point is that poor sleep is a direct constraint on your muscle building activity. Factor number five is actually the body composition changes themselves. Now, this is another kind of interesting chicken and egg situation because fat gain is probably happening as you get older, right? Because we gain a little bit of weight, it drifts up over the time for most people, because you're not not, I'm not gonna explain why you're doing it. You know why. It's it's overconsumption combined with the lifestyle changes and everything else. And then it creates a feedback loop that makes it even harder. Now, for women in perimenopause, for example, the changes in estrogen will change body fat distribution and could make it more difficult to, you know, you have more body fat than than you'd like. And this is this then leads to it's harder to lose weight and et cetera, et cetera. And then having more body fat, and for men, this might be like you've got the beer gut, maybe you drink too much, you've just had, you know, more sedentary lifestyle. This then increases your inflammation and your insulin resistance. And Might reduce your tolerance to training, right? You just can't do as much and it's kind of a vicious cycle. It also makes you less motivated, you have less energy, you're down on yourself, maybe talking bad about yourself and you don't like how you look, right? It all adds up. This factor, though, it often gets blamed on a slowing metabolism. But that's not really what it is. These are cause correlation, not causation. The slowdown in people's metabolism is largely caused by the lack of muscle mass and the lack of movement, uh and all like a lot of the things we just talked about. Because if those things were held steady, we know that people's metabolisms are also pretty steady from the age of 20 to 60. Okay, and so the loss of muscle caused your metabolism to drop, the the loss, the lack of movement, et cetera. Okay, but so those are the five factors. Now, here's what I want you to notice. Every single one of those five factors is something you can address. It's not necessarily easy. I'm not pretending that fixing your sleep during menopause is simple, ladies. But it's possible. You're not powerless, you can get help. There are tools. Some of this is just a matter of intention, and some of it is a matter of understanding how do we get friction out of the path. All right. So the question now for you becomes which of these five factors has shifted the most that you want to start with? And we'll get back to that self-check at the end that might be helpful. But first, I want to talk about HRT. All right. Now, before we talk about HRT, I do love tools that can help you track and hold yourself accountable with less friction. All right. And I have an app called Fitness Lab that is like having a coach in your pocket. It's like having an intelligence layer that takes all of this stuff happening in your life, your training volume, your recovery, your biofeedback, how you're sleeping, your hormones, everything. And it gives you a few simple tasks to do each day. It helps you breathe, helps reduce some stress so you know what to do, what things are drifting in the direction we don't, and the app will gently nudge you back. We recently added the Apple Health integration. It was in beta. Now it's out to the public, so it's in everybody's version if you want it. It can pull in your sleep data, your steps, your workout history. So again, that also reduces your stress because you don't have to think about that stuff. It pulls it in. The app is available on Android. We don't have the health stuff integrated on that yet, but I thought I'd mention it. And the thing about the five drifting factors in midlife that I just mentioned is a lot of us are just not aware of them. They are accumulating over months, but probably over years. And it's great if you can catch them by measuring the right thing. So my app Fitness Lab, I think, helps with that tremendously. A lot of women have been reporting how helpful it's been as an assistant for them in taking off the stress and allowing them to finally make progress. And it's built on these principles and the evidence and body composition, you know, thinking about how do we get your training and nutrition to give make this the best time of your life. So there is a special link exclusive to podcast listeners in the show notes. Click that link to check out Fitness Lab and get a nice discount for listeners. All right. So let's talk about the hormones. Hormone replacement therapy specifically. And I know this is a charged topic today, right? This is a lot of a lot of controversy, a lot of opinions on it. I've had guests talk about it here. I've gone on podcasts about HRT. My own thoughts have been coalescing over the years. Many of you are on HRT, or TRT is specific testosterone for men, for example. Maybe you're considering it. Maybe you have strong opinions about it one way or another. Okay. This isn't going to be an HRT episode. I think HRT hormone replacement, especially the big three, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, in a few limited ways, right? Creams and patches and things like that. There are some methods that I'm not a big fan of from what I've learned from healthcare professionals and how they work. But again, we're not going to solve that here. I think if you need it, it can vastly improve your quality of life. It can reduce all the symptoms. I think it should be symptom-based primarily, not just lab work-based. You can have labs that are a little off, but if you don't have the symptoms, you may not need as much treatment. But if you have the symptoms, who cares what your lab says? You may need help with that. And I think really good menopause professionals will focus on the symptoms. So we're talking hot flashes and night sweats. And then, of course, you've got osteoporosis you're worried about. And then, of course, you're concerned about weight gain, weight loss, body composition, muscle, all of that stuff. There's a million other symptoms I'm not even going to go into. There's libido issues, all of that. And if your doctor has recommended it or the professional you're working with and it's working for you, right? Thyroid Medicaid, there's so many, then that's awesome. Like I want you to pursue those things and be very in control of your destiny and very educated on this and talk to enough people. And look, if you're not sure who to talk to, please reach out to me. One easy way to do that is on Instagram at Wits and Waits. And I can point you to a few professionals I really like, some of whom helped me and people in my own family. And I trust them to do that. So you know that I'm giving you a good recommendation. But it HRT is not a replacement, right? It's not a replacement for doing the lifestyle. And the best hormone experts I've talked to on the show have the same message. It is an additive thing, it's not foundational. You need the tools to support you along with the lifestyle changes. And don't roll your eyes at that, please, because if you're not doing the lifestyle changes, the hormones are just going to have a very minor impact. Maybe they'll reduce some of those symptoms, but they're not going to help with the big things, with the muscle mass and the strength and the function and the health and longevity long term into your 80s, 90s. You know, what you want to be your golden years is when you're older. And when we look at studies on HRT and outcomes for muscle mass, for grip strength, for physical performance, it's kind of mixed. Right? You thought I was going to say, oh yeah, everything improves. It's kind of mixed, right? Some markers improve in some studies and some in others or go the other direction or don't improve at all. I'd say there's currently today the body of evidence doesn't say, hey, HRT itself reliably improves strength or physical performance. All right. It helps with many, many other things. But also there are methodological issues and variability and how these hormones are given during these studies. So it's just hard to say. And so if something's hard to say, you can't make a claim. That's my point. There's uncertain benefit for muscles specifically. There was a randomized controlled trial last year that combined estrogen replacement with a resistance training program. And that's a very useful combination. It sees it lets us see how those two things interact. And what they found is that resistance training drove the improvements. The HRT was additive for some markers, but training was doing that heavy lifting, pun intended. Okay. So here's how here's let me tell you how I think about it and my mental model, so to speak. Think of your muscle building capacity as having a foundation and then it has like modifiers on top of that. So the foundation is, of course, your training, your protein, your recovery, your movement. So those are the like the big rocks. HRT is a modifier, optimizer, right? It can nudge certain outcomes in a positive direction for some women in this area, in this area. But if the foundation isn't solid, if you're not training with progressive overload, not eating enough protein, not sleeping well, the modifiers kind of like on a squishy pit of slime, in that it has not nothing to work with. I don't know how good of an analogy that is, but you know, here's another one. If you have a car and you put gasoline in your car to get it to run, but you have never changed the oil and never changed the tires. And I actually know somebody I'm thinking of who had that. So of course her car didn't get as nearly as many miles as it could have because she ran it into the ground despite putting gas in. It's like the gas is not the problem and it's not the solution, right? So I think of HRT that way, where if you're taking it, but you're still having issues with your physical self, with your body fat and your muscle mass and everything else, it's probably not more hormones or different hormones, probably the five factors we discussed earlier, which is again where I'm trying to go with this episode without too many words. I hope. I do want to say something about the the menopause fitness space. Okay. Some of the content out there is it functions as a nocebo. You ever heard of the term nocebo? You've heard of placebo. A nocebo is like doing nothing. And I think it makes women afraid to train hard sometimes. And I hear it in the language of like, I'm worried about training too heavy for whatever reason. Now, some of it is about getting bulky, some of it is about injury or safety or thinking that you don't need to or whatever. I don't know, I don't know the exact reason it is for you if that if you've told yourself that, but you know, your body, just because it changes in that way, it can still respond quite incredibly. And by saying that it can't, it's a very discouraging message, and then it creates the outcome that it describes. Because if you believe something, then it's true. You've heard of that, right? If if you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're true. It's true. So if you believe you can't build muscle, that's your identity, and you're not gonna train in a way that's gonna build the muscle. You're not gonna eat in a way or live, live that way. And that's the identity shift that we talk about here. It's not a woo-woo thing. It literally is like I can do this, so I'm gonna act the way that expresses who I am, as opposed to I'm gonna try to force behaviors on myself to get an outcome. That that's not sustainable. What is sustainable is yeah, I can build muscle, I want to get stronger, I want to be athletic as I as I age. So I'm gonna do the things that that need to be done to get there. Obviously. Like, obviously, I'm gonna eat better now because it feels better to eat better, and I train better when I eat better. So that that that's like the menopause space, it just drives me crazy. The principles, the principles don't change. I'm all about principles, first principles. Like how you get it done can change, but the principles don't. You know, do you have enough mechanical tension when you train? Do you have progressive overload? Do you have enough protein? Do you have enough recovery? Right, all of that. I'm kind of repeating myself, but they work after menopause, just like they did before. The margins might be a little different. You might be a little night might need a little more protein, a little bit more recovery, more attention to sleep, right? But that's just adjusting the inputs, which is very different from oh, my body's broken now. All right, so enough about what doesn't work as well as advertised. Let's talk about what does work practically. All right, I'm gonna give you some just specific things. Talked about these before on the show. It's worth repeating, and they work as well for post-menopausal women, pre-menopausal women, men, anyone. Okay, it's just gonna work. That's the great thing about it. So training. Minimum effective dose for training is probably at least two, if not three days a week. And you're using resistance training of some kind, whether it's barbells, dumbbells, machines, probably around 10 hard sets per muscle group. Anywhere from five to 15, depends on your responsiveness and whether you're in a fat loss phase and all that. But say around 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, and then go up or down based on your recovery. And you're gonna prioritize compound lifts, ideally, especially when you're a newer lifter. That would be some sort of squat pattern, a deadlift style pattern, could be Romanian deadlift or even hip thrust, but you know, a hinge type pattern, a press, benching, and overhead. I like both. And then maybe a rowing pattern eventually or pulling pattern, like pull-ups. Some people also like loaded carries and core work and all that. I think that gets more on the hypertrophy side, but we can we can have that argument. Execution of this is training within two to three repshive failure. Now, you might have heard me say two to four, one to three. Training pretty darn close to failure. Okay. Don't leave gains on the table and make sure you go up in weight, reps, or sets over time. Something needs to progress. So that's the first fix. Protein, we already talked about it. I'll just give you the range again 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. Don't overthink lean mass, target body weight, all that stuff. Just 0.7 to 1 grams a pound of your current body weight, and then work from there and really use your biofeedback and experience to adjust. And this is where, by the way, other people, whether it's coaches, communities, training partners, can be really helpful. I mean, you guys should be talking to and thriving in and among a group of like-minded people are trying to do the same thing. It's gonna accelerate your results. So that's protein. And then I think I mentioned before, like distributing your protein throughout the day, it can be really helpful for hunger. And yeah, it's helpful with for muscle as well, but it's really more about the practicality of making sure you get enough protein. Well, you have recovery, and that's just getting enough sleep and good sleep. If you're disrupted because of hot flashes or night sweats or something, you're gonna have to address those things. Now, there are a lot of over-the-counter and supplement and herb-based solutions to some of these things, like hot flashes, night sweats, even like vaginal dryness. And I don't know why I threw that in because it has nothing to do with sleep, but I'm just thinking of all the conversations I've had with the menopause experts. There's a range of potential solutions. You've got to go with the symptom and try to address that and then do before and after. If it doesn't help your symptom, then it probably isn't the right solution, regardless of what your blood work says. Okay. So you have to address all the things that are disrupting your sleep. Don't just accept it. You know, I have a client who like thought she says she snores a lot. And I said, Well, that may be sleep apnea. You should probably get it looked at. She did, and she's like, Yeah, that's what it was. CPAP machine, boom, so much better sleep, right? Little things like that can go a long way. You just have to address them. And stress management, you know, rest days, deloads, they all are part of this whole recovery thing. Stress is its own thing. I did a whole article, a whole episode recently about sleep and stress in the context of hunger hormones. But really, what we're talking about is how do you get yourself to get into that rest and digest mode on a regular basis, whether that's breath work and meditation, walking, therapy, some sort of relaxing movement or practice. Okay. And then, of course, rest days. You have to have the right balance of training days and recovery days. And if you really train hard, you know, you may have to be creative about your training schedule. I spoke to Steph Mager, powerlifter, and she was talking about how she puts her heaviest days on like Monday and Friday, so they're far apart, and then two lighter days Tuesday and then like the weekend. You kind of have to get smart like that to maximize your recovery. Now, if you're dieting, if you're in a fat loss phase, just be extra conservative about all this stuff. Don't assume you can't do them. Don't like give up or use it as a cop-out or excuse, but just understand that that's an extra stressor to all of the other things we've talked about. Protein needs to stay higher. You don't want to cut too aggressively. And, you know, you have to be smart about how often and how aggressively you're in a fat loss phase. Okay, here's what I want you to take away from this episode. I started by acknowledging that I have not lived the menopause experience. But what I have seen through working with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, through the research, through hundreds of conversations, is that the defeatist narrative isn't going to serve anyone. It's not helpful other than the people making the money off of it. Yes, of course, menopause is real, perimenopause, all the symptoms. I would I have people that are close to me who I love who are dealing with these kinds of issues, and it's hard to find the support you need. It's getting better. Some of the research is getting better. Women's health, though, is still somewhat in the dark ages compared to just general health. I'm not even gonna call it men's health, just general health, just women haven't been studied as much for a variety of reasons. And so I totally acknowledge all of these things as being a frustration, right? The symptoms and the challenges that result. And I'm not dismissing it, but the other thing that's real is your capacity to build muscle. And the research showing post-menopausal women that gain strength and lean mass because they're training are right there to look up yourself. The evidence that protein, progressive overload, recovery, they work no matter your hormone status. And so don't worry about your genetics or your biology or your metabolism or anything else. All right. Test the narrative. Ask, may say that I'm gonna see if my body still responds by trying it out. That's the best thing you can do, okay? Because you're gonna discover that it does. Uh, we had Lauren Calenzo Semple on the show quite a while back. I love her work. Check her out because she's been making the point for years that the fitness industry profits from complexity. Telling women that menopause requires new approaches, special protocols, specific supplements, cycle-based training and food, which I get questions on all the time. It sells products and programs, but what matters is the principles and how you, as an individual, need to apply the principles, right? Your menstrual cycle may be erratic or maybe extreme and cause you to have to change the way you do things. And that's true for you, but it's not necessarily true for the next woman. The principles, though, are the same. What changes is the method and the margin for error, right? You may have to be more intentional about certain things, like how much protein you have, how much recovery you have, how consistent you are with training, all those. You may have to be more intentional, but that to me is an empowering thing related to self-efficacy. It doesn't limit you. It means you have levers to pull. It means you are not at the mercy of your biology. So the question isn't can you build muscle after menopause? The research says yes, absolutely. The question is whether you will do the things that make it happen because you have the power to do it and I know you can do it. And before I share one final thing, I've got I've got three quick yes or no questions that will tell you where to focus this week. And we're gonna get to that in a second. But I will say, if this episode resonated with you, if you like my message here, if you agree with it, if you think it's positive and empowering, and you're looking for a tool to help track these things and help you before they accumulate, and you want the same voice and style that I bring to this and the evidence-based nuance that I'm trying to inject into this process, check out my app Fitness Lab. Use the link in the note show notes. You can take a free quiz to see if it's right for you. It's one of my favorite tools available because of how it works. You get daily briefings and tasks that are unique to you. You and the next person using the app will have completely different tasks because it's like having a coach who is watching your training and your biofeedback, your recovery. If you have Apple, it's now integrated with Apple Health as well. So it can pull all that data in sleep steps, resting, heart weight rate, activity data. Um, and and I'm but I'm behind the design elements of it. So I'm continuing to add features, and then we have a great support team in case there's any bugs or things like that. We're getting great feedback on it. You don't have to manually log a bunch of this stuff, and you don't have to guess at what to do next. It tells you what to do next. It says, today is your day. Here are the few things you've got to do to be successful. Let's get them done. If you don't, no judgment, but we're gonna talk it through and figure out how to get it done. So go use the link in the show notes for 20% off, exclusive to you, the podcast listener or viewer on YouTube. All right, here is that quick check in. I promise it's three questions yes or no. One, did your last training session include at least one exercise where you added weight or reps from the previous session? Two, did you eat at least 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch yesterday? Three, did you sleep at least seven hours last night? Very simple questions. Okay. Did you have an exercise where you added weights or reps? Did you eat at least 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch yesterday? Did you sleep at least seven hours? If you answered no to two or more of those questions, you found your starting point. Okay. Pick one of those and fix it this week. And I know it's easier said than done, but you've got to start from awareness. And I don't want you to fix all of them. Just pick one. That's it. That's it. That's where you know your support for this lifestyle is going to come from. Just those. All right. I want you to run those questions over each week if you want to stay honest with yourself. Obviously, there's a lot more you can track and you can think about. If you don't want to think about, grab my app, link in the show notes. The bottom line is that menopause does change things. That is true, but it doesn't close the door completely on building muscle because the principles are still going to work for you. Margins might be tighter. You might have to be more intentional. That's it, right? More intentional doesn't mean impossible. It just means more intentional. And honestly, we could all be more intentional about things. That's probably what got us here in the first place. Just, you know, even besides things like menopause, age, and whatnot, if we are truly honest with ourselves. So I hope this episode gave you the evidence, but also the encouragement to test this theory out for yourself. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that your body is capable of building muscle at any age. It just needs the right inputs. My name is Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
