Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity

The key when you're younger is working to failure; the key when you're older is working heavy. When we're looking at working to failure, we're trying to get more of that lean mass growth. With strength, when we get older, because it's so difficult to put on lean mass, we really want to focus on the strength component because that becomes more important.

We know that women who are in their reproductive years need around 35 grams of good protein, high-quality leucine-oriented protein, within 45 minutes [post-training]; and we see that women who are perimenopausal onwards are 40-60 grams, because we become more anabolically resistant food and exercise as we get older.

As much as I am not a fan of Planet Fitness, I am a fan of the fact that they've made it really easy for someone to walk in who's interested in resistance training, and they can go to... one of the circuit things that they have in the back, and they can start resistance training on machines.

If we look at intermittent fasting where you're holding the fast up till noon or you're having days of really low calorie restriction, we see in active women it's very detrimental unless you have PCOS or you have some other subclinical issue.

I think the easiest way for people to understand the basic idea of what low energy is and how this affects men and women is when we are looking at a tipping point for endocrine dysfunction, for men, we're seeing that tipping point at 15 calories per kg of fat free mass; for women, it's 30.

When you look at population research that's coming out now, they're showing in both men and women who hold their fast till noon and then have an eating window from noon to maybe 6PM have more obesogenic outcomes than people who break their fast at 8 and finished their eating window by 4, 5 PM.

The longer someone withholds food after exercise and the greater they stay in that catabolic or breakdown state, the more the brain perceives it as being in a low-energy state, so the first thing to go is lean mass.

When we look at the repercussions of using [the] oral contraceptive pill in active women, there's a higher amount of inflammatory responses and oxidative responses.