Kelly
As we are aging, the more muscle mass that you have, the better brain capacity, mood regulation, sleep regulation, all the things. We have to, as women, unlearn this idea that we have to be small at any price.
Stephanie
I’m doing Pilates multiple times a week. I’m still doing pole and other cardio dance. My body did not change at all, and I joined a gym. My hip pain is completely gone.
Kelly
Everybody always talks about muscle. Nobody wants to talk about joints and tendons. We also have to think in terms of longevity. We have to think about the adaptation that the muscle needs. Even in perimenopause, there is some research to suggest that it also provides a healthy progesterone to estrogen balance in the second half of the cycle. Every time you are going to the gym, you are investing in a short-term, medium-term, and long-term version of yourself.
Welcome to the show, Stephanie.
Stephanie
Oh, I’m delighted to be here, Kelly. Thank you for having me.
Kelly
So I was telling you before we started recording that the timing of this conversation is so divinely orchestrated because if I had spoken to you, I would say even like six to eight months ago, I would’ve been such an annoying skeptic and you probably would’ve been like, you know, fuck this conversation. I’m outta here. And in that time, for reasons that I think I understand but of course are probably far more lofty and meta than I can fully appreciate, I have come to see you as the expert in this arena of conversation in the realm of, can we say, like, women over 40 and what fitness looks like for this very magical stage of life.
And I’ve also come to, I mean, ask anyone in my life, I am now like a walking door-to-door salesman for gym memberships. I should get a commission off of my own gym because I’m so passionate about it. And that’s my nature. I’m a double Gemini. Like I get into things, find the shiny object, go chase it, and like really grab hold.
So I’ll share a bit about my story. I want to first hear about your journey because you’re way ahead of me in understanding and appreciating the nature of body composition, mechanics, myth-busting. You know, that’s what I so appreciate about the overlap in our regard for the human body, her intelligence, and not necessarily taking the fear-mongering bait around so many tropes regarding aging and health and illness when it comes to women’s journeys.
So I’d love to back up and hear about your awakening, right? Like how is it that you came to believe in the essential nature of strength training for women? I know you have many, many nuanced beliefs because your content and your newsletter is one of my favorites of all that I consume. So you’re such a treasure trove, but I wanna focus in on this because it’s something I, as a dancer, as somebody who loves to sweat and do choreography and move, I never appreciated. And it’s literally been like an awakening for me to come into my body in this way and discover all of this potential that was just beneath the surface. So how did you get to this point?
Stephanie
Oh, many roads. I would say one of the things that, I mean, I will, in the spirit of truth and transparency and honesty, I got into the gym because I wanted to look good. You know, it was totally a vain pursuit. It was like I wanted to look good in jeans, I wanted to look good in bathing suits, et cetera.
What I found was, yes, building muscle makes you look great. You can build curves. Like, you know, we know that we can’t spot reduce, but you can certainly spot build, right? So if you wanna build more glutes, you wanna build more shoulders, you wanna build, you can certainly direct your attention to muscle building in that way.
So I totally got into it for looks. What I found that it gave me was a sense of confidence that I never learned in society. It was never given, and I started to develop a trust and reverence for myself, for my capacity. Honestly, there were times, it often happens on leg day for whatever reason, sometimes back day as well, I had these absolute releases of pain and rage and things that I had stored in my soma, you know, in my body, that were completely cathartic and healing for me. And so I really got into it for the looks, stayed for the mental grit and for the confidence and for the self-love that I was able to forge by pumping iron, really.
And that’s been many, many years. When I first started lifting, gosh, probably it was like 2007 maybe, and my first thing was like, I’m gonna enter into a competition, like a physique competition. And at the time, the competition that I entered was called Figure. So by today’s standards, how I looked on stage, you know, over whatever it was, 15, more than that years ago now, would not be the figure that you see today. It would sort of be more what you might qualify as bikini, but I trained really, really hard and I was able to, in I don’t know, six to eight months, completely shift my body composition and my relationship with lifting heavy.
So I probably, like most women listening, was very afraid of getting bulky, didn’t want to take up too much space, and didn’t wanna look like those scary orange dudes that were screaming, you know, in the corner of the gym. Very quickly realized, as someone who was trying to actively put on muscle, that as a woman, physiologically that is, you know, it’s like a girl can continue to dream, right? It’s very, very difficult to get bulky. But what we do need as we age is, and I’m sure we’ll get into this as well, is as we’re aging, the more muscle mass that you have, the better brain capacity, mood regulation, sleep regulation, all the things.
So I guess that’s sort of a long and short answer. You know, there’s many different routes that I had and experiences that I had in the gym. Got into it for looks originally, competed, you know, so literally got up on stage in a bikini and asked people to judge my body next to other women who were also in bikinis, and then stayed for what it gave me in terms of self-respect, self-love, and capacity.
Kelly
I mean, who would imagine that those could be found at the gym, right? I know that you talk about strength training as the most important investment that you make in your future. I love that phrase because I often think of, and I talk to my daughters about, loving my future self, right? It’s like changing the toilet paper roll that’s empty and not leaving it to the next time. You know, from the simple, mundane, all the way to the more profound, and it comes not from an energy of fixing something that’s wrong with you, right? It comes from this energy of offering. And that really serves me, you know, when I’ve heard you describe that, even when I’m in these little micro journeys, ’cause that’s what it is, right?
Like within the sets and then the whole experience at the gym every single time, it’s like this micro journey of developing intimacy with the parts of yourself that say, you know, just cheat a little bit or you don’t need to do any, it’s fine. Nobody’s watching, whatever those parts are. At least in me, I never really met them before when it came to physical performance, because I’m not an athlete. I never had to play with that. I’ve always just exercised for the fun of it, never actually for my—I live in Miami, so I mean, most women here go to two exercise classes a day. You know, it’s very much a part of the culture to maintain a certain physique.
But that’s never been my motivation. It’s always been mood related and energetic and just feeling like, I mean, even literally metabolic, like I will have cold hands and feet if I don’t work out in the day. But to meet those little parts, I think you call it progressive overload or pushing yourself with heavy weights, right? It is a very, very different psychology than Pilates. And it sounds like you developed a relationship to this kind of dynamic with your body so early. But then it evolved over the decades to be something sweeter, right? Like something more.
Stephanie
Yeah. I would love for people to look at lifting weights as a love letter to yourself. It is certainly a short-term investment in how you look, a medium-term investment in how you feel, and a long-term investment in terms of how you perform. And so every time you are going to the gym, you are investing in a short-term, medium-term, and long-term version of yourself, to your point around looking into the future and investing in your future self.
And I think that if you are someone like yourself, who described, like, I worked out for the fun of it, for the energetic feeling good in my body, I think that can also be translated into lifting weights. And we’ll talk about what progressive overload is, because heavy is also a very subjective term. Like what’s heavy for you is gonna be different than what heavy for me is. And even in the singular person, that is going to fluctuate over the, you know, as we see that sort of hormonal—for women who are still menstruating, you’re gonna see fluctuations in your mood and your affect and your sleep and your desire and your motivation.
So you’re gonna see over the menstrual cycle, you’re also gonna see some aberrations in terms of that as well. Your stress levels, you know, if you have a really big deadline, maybe you’re not able to push the deadlifts or the squats or the whatever that you were doing last week, but you’re still going to push yourself to whatever heavy means for you right now, because you will still elicit that same adaptation.
So I would love everybody, especially if you are a very, you know, I like to call them my type-A Bettys, you know, very achievement-oriented, success-driven individuals who probably grew up in the cardio section of the gym, who probably grew up on the treadmill and the elliptical and every fitness group exercise class. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like, I still do step class to this day. Like me and my best friend every Saturday, we are in a step class because I love it. It brings me, it’s like my soul food, right? I love it. I’m not saying to get rid of those things. I’m saying it’s a yes-and.
So you’re going to continue doing, like, I remember watching you doing African dance, you know, on social media, and the way that you’re moving, and then even the pole dance and the beautiful way that you were able to express your humanity. And I would say you can also add onto that heavy lifting in the same way that maybe pole dancing or the African dance or the moving of your hips is a love letter and a celebration of life. I would love us to also consider that in the realm of strength training.
And maybe you can actually help me with the marketing here, because whenever my CMO and I are talking, I’m constantly trying to push this envelope of lifting heavy, what that means for everybody, and my CMO always says to me, like, the way that you lift weights is different than when I see other women who are almost using it as like a punishment, right? So it’s like, it’s a punishment for what I ate. It’s a punishment for what I didn’t do, a punishment for I didn’t restrict my calories enough. And she said to me, like, the way that you lift weights is almost sensual.
Not in a sexual way, but like, you know, I’m giving to myself, you know? And so maybe you and I can maybe have an offline conversation around how to, how to—
Kelly
I absolutely see that. And I think that’s why, yeah, you’re somebody that I take inspiration from. And maybe I’ll just talk a little bit about my journey, because I used to love to market from—and by market, I mean even the way I used to talk to my daughters about things, right?—from the fear-mongering, right? Like, if you don’t do this, then you’re gonna become a rickety old, withered husk of a human, okay? And obviously as I’ve matured, I now know that the yes is the most contagious force.
So if I share a bit of my trajectory, I’m sure you’ll see confirmation of so many of your beliefs. So basically, yes, as you mentioned, I’ve always been into cardio dance, all types, from hip-hop, you know, African, pole, any sort of cardio dance class, I’ll be there, and would do that like five-plus times a week. I never really got into pretty much anything else, right? So I had tried Pilates and barre. Oh, I also grew up doing ballet, right? So that was my foundation until I was like 14.
And then in 2022, I did a nine-day water fast, water-only fast. And I did so inspired by a male colleague. I also, at that time, still had a lot of spiritual thrill-seeking energy in me, right? So I would love to push myself to do courageous things spiritually. And, you know, I had also signed up for a dark room retreat and, you know, have done many—I pushed myself in many ways that I felt very proud of, I can do this, right? So when he suggested, and he had done like a 21- or 26-day, I was like, I can do that. I wanna try that, right? I was also in a very spiritually challenging dark night of my life.
So I do this thing, right? And I sit on my couch for a week, but I had already started pole dancing, so I already was in, like, I think I was quite fit right when I started this. And I was doing just like calisthenic type stuff, but I was motivated to, you know, had a little set of weights at home, light weights, like eight pounds or something like that, and I still had never been to a gym.
So anyway, I do this fast and it is one of the—I mean, I’ve birthed babies in my living room, okay? It is one of the most harrowing experiences of my life that I have had spiritually. Physically, I don’t know. I came out of it with a lot of spiritual alchemy, but I lost 17 pounds, okay? I had been the same weight my entire adult life. You know, my mentor would describe me as sympathetic dominant. It’s just like how I be, okay? And that’s also why I was not motivated to exercise in that way. I never was, ’cause I always was like the same body. Like, it doesn’t matter. So I’m not gonna do it for that reason.
Anyway, so I lost this weight. I was like, oh, that’s a little undesirable. But I never saw much of it. And then not only did I gain it back, but then I gained another like 15-plus pounds that I’ve never had on my frame before. And then also interesting things, right? Like my eyesight, my near sight, started to go. I started to develop like kind of weird aches here and there. The quality of my skin became almost kind of crepey, and I just—you know, I still was like thin, so nobody wants to hear complaints, right, from somebody who’s generally well, but it just wasn’t me.
And so I started messing around with nutrition, right? I know a lot about nutrition, and I started experimenting with different things and nothing seemed to move the needle at all. So I was like, okay, this is a higher-level autonomic nervous system thing. Like, there’s something going on here that’s way bigger. So then I went more into like the spiritual nervous system layers of it.
Anyway, two years. Okay. In this two-year period, I also started doing Pilates, ’cause I’m like, okay, maybe my body wants more structure, whatever. And then I, of course, go full throttle. I’m doing Pilates multiple times a week, okay? I’m still doing pole and other cardio dance. I did not, okay, I love Pilates. I was there this morning. However, I did not notice a damn thing. Literally, my body did not change at all. And it wasn’t like I was trying to lose the weight. It was more just sort of like, this isn’t the optimal place I started from.
But I didn’t connect. I just didn’t know. If I had talked to you in 2022, you would’ve been like, Kelly, you fucking lost 17 pounds of muscle because you were like 10% body fat to begin with. That’s a huge problem in your mid-forties, right? Like, it’s a challenge, let’s say. I did not connect those dots because it’s not my world. Like, I just wasn’t even thinking about it.
So I was inspired. I often talk about this little yes, right? So these little impulses that come from, you know, who knows where, and I’m very practiced at listening to them. Okay. So out of the void comes the little impulse. Now, one of my best friends is a gym rat. She’s been trying to get me to go to the gym because I would go to the gym with her and like go straight to the class, like the women’s class, right? And she’d be lifting weights. I’m like, this is just so boring. You can’t do it to music. Like, you know, it’s not choreographed to the beat, like, who wants to do that? Anyway, I didn’t get it.
So she had been inspiring me for a long time. My eldest daughter is probably gonna become a fitness influencer any minute. Like she’s super into the gym. Her boyfriend is like very fit. So I was surrounded by people who could have sparked it for me and it just didn’t happen. And that’s why I’m a huge believer, as I imagine you are, in, you know, when you’re ready, you’re ready. It’s just an ephemeral thing.
Anyway, I became ready in January of this year and I joined a gym, which also got me into a man-woman space. I’ve never exercised with men in my whole life, ever. And so even just that was like a very interesting energetic.
Stephanie
I’m interested to—I wanna actually double-click on that. I know that you’re interviewing me, but I’m really interested to understand, how is that for you, like working out alongside men? What does that feel like?
Kelly
I don’t think I would have appreciated that, right? Because earlier in my journey, I would’ve been in some sort of like fawn or performative thing, right, in a mixed-gender situation. And now I just feel this amplification. Like when I walk into my gym, the energy in that room is so intense. It’s like throbbing, right? And I credit that to the polarity, right? Like, because there’s almost always—and I’m sure you notice the gym phenomenon of literally the same NPCs are there every single time, no matter what time of day I go. It’s like the same crew anyway. But it’s equal parts men and women.
And I just plug into that, you know, in a way that going to a small class of five women dancing, it’s just a very different thing. And do I imagine sometimes like people are critiquing my form and being like, oh my gosh, she needs a trainer, or, you know, oh, I like her top, or whatever? Like, sure. There’s a part of that sort of being witnessed that is real. You know, I don’t do it in my living room for that reason. I like to be with the peoples. However, it’s more just that I get to enjoy this field, right? Like this collectively generated field.
And, okay, so I’ll mention also that in this time I developed hip pain. I’m not somebody who’s experienced pain. That’s not how I express. Like, I’ve got all sorts of other kinks, but that’s not been my thing. Hip pain, so that I couldn’t sit cross-legged, no injury, no idea where it came from. I’m seeing an osteopath and a chiropractor. I’m doing EGOSCUE therapy at home, like with myself. So I go to the gym in this state.
It was about two and a half to three months that my hip pain is completely gone, completely gone. And I actually stopped going, mostly logistically and convenience wise, to the other practitioners. Okay? My hip pain is completely gone. My body is like all of the sudden—I mean, I feel like I lost 10 to 15 years in three months. It’s very subtle, ’cause it’s not like I dropped like tons of weight. I don’t even give a shit, honestly. It’s literally not about what’s on—I don’t even own a scale. So it’s not about that at all. It’s the quality of my, I don’t know how else to say it, like, of my skin. Like, I look down at my thighs, I’m like, oh, there they are, you know? And this experience of my vitality that I have never encountered.
I mean, it’s totally different than anything I’ve ever done before as somebody who is very exercise-oriented. And every single journey—and I wanna talk about the motivation to go, right? Because when I was with my trainer and had my appointments, like, I would go do the thing, then I stopped working with her. And then I started to encounter the days where I was like, oh gosh, can I climb the mountain today? You know, like, am I really—and I know that you have some perspectives on motivation. I never regret it. It is never the wrong thing. Every single time that I go and I’m there for like, let’s say an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, I feel plugged in and I feel connected to my vitality. And it’s not dissimilar to what I get out of cardio, but it’s a completely different metabolic experience.
And that’s what I came to appreciate was the metabolic nature of muscle. And I’ll tell one last story, ’cause this isn’t meant to be like a solo cast, which I find fascinating, right? Is that I thought of myself as like pretty fit, right? Because I was like thin and had like a sculpted body or whatever. I never really thought like, oh, I need to like build my glute muscle. I don’t know. I’ve never, literally never had the thought, okay? It’s not something that, like—I don’t know. I think a lot of dancers are thinking about it. I don’t know. At least not in my world. It’s not like a specific intention.
So my eldest is a track star, okay? So one day I decide to offer like a plot twist and I’m like, I’m gonna go on a run with you, just a mile into town. I’ve never run. It’s not something I’ve done. I’m gonna go on a run with you. So we go on a run and I’m like, wow, this is kind of interesting. Like I can do it, right? Like, you know, nine-minute mile or whatever. So I start doing like a little mile run here and there. And it’s psychologically extremely difficult for me ’cause again, if I’m not doing choreography and I don’t have a beat to work with, like just being in my body under strain is very psychologically challenging, okay?
So then I go to the gym, as I mentioned, now three months later. I’m visiting my friend, she lives near the beach. She’s the gym rat, okay? So she’s like, let’s go for a beach run. I’m like, girl, I don’t know. I’ve tried this running thing, but beach run seems like very advanced for me, and I just don’t even know if I can do it.
So I’m like, okay, whatever. I’ll give it a try. I’ve never done this in my entire life, so I told you I’ve gone the mile, just the mile into town, never more than that, but I’d been at the gym for three months. So I go on the beach in a bikini and I’m running with her. We run two and a half miles, and I wasn’t even breathless. I could have kept going. I had a revelation. I was like, what the fuck just happened there? And she’s like, it’s your glutes. Like it’s that you’ve built muscle in your quads and glutes and probably elsewhere that is now supporting the momentum that otherwise would’ve been forced, that has made something that was such a struggle extremely pleasurable and almost easy.
And I’ve replicated this actually many times now. I’ve done these beach runs and I don’t know, that feels exciting, right? Like if I can be in better shape now than I’ve ever been before, then that defies a lot of aging programs, doesn’t it? Right? Like that suggests that it’s not this linear decay and decomposition that we are really brainwashed and programmed to believe is the case. So—
Stephanie
Oh, it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. It’s like perimenopause and menopause is gonna be awful. And this is why I love everything. I love everything you’re saying so, so much. I mean, I actually, in my next book, I’m currently writing it right now, there is literally—it’s chapter seven—it’s all about the glutes, okay? So it’s all about the importance of the glutes.
The glutes literally, like just to go on like a little nerd safari, the glutes literally connect your upper body to your lower body. So they will connect to your spine, your sacrum, your pelvis, and lie on the side to your femur and then also to the fibula and the tibia via the IT band. So the glutes literally connect upper to lower body. They are involved in stability. It’s the reason why you can lift one leg up and the other leg doesn’t drop. That’s an orthopedic test called the Trendelenburg test. Like, there’s so many things that the glutes do. They help extend the spine, they help not to overextend, they help to stabilize during flexion, they help with contralateral and ipsilateral rotation. Like, there’s so many things.
And I can tell you, as someone who was a chiropractor in practice for almost 20 years—I retired in 2019, closed the private practice in 2019—so I was in practice for 19 years. The glutes are the key. Like if you have back pain, like you were mentioning, you did this water fast and you would be what we would call TOFI, so thin on the outside, fat on the inside. Like you lost so much muscle. Oh no, I didn’t even know.
Yeah. So that hip pain that you were experiencing, sure, for sure is gonna be some degeneration and loss of cartilaginous material from the joint, and maybe there’s some inflammation in the bursa and some of the surrounding structures. But also if you lost glutes, which is very likely that you did, if you were just doing a—what was it—nine-day water fast—
Kelly
Oh, I only did nine.
Stephanie
Oh, sorry, a nine. Okay. So you’re not gonna be as active, right? So your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, like your desire to just move around, or even just—if you’re watching this on video, I’m making like Italian gestures, right? So I’m like, my husband’s Italian, I’m Portuguese, you know, I use my hands to talk. So all these little movements are gonna be downregulated when you’re in a calorically restricted state, which is what you were for nine days.
And so this reclamation, to use a word that I know is very near and dear to your heart, of training for strength and power, particularly in the glutes—and if you want, we can talk about the different muscle fiber types and why the glutes are important—but I like to think about the glutes like lions on the safari. So if you watch, you know, a nature show or whatever, they’re kind of hanging out, not really doing much, sunning themselves until they see something that they wanna eat, right? And then you see the lion sprinting all out, pouncing and using its power to propel forward. That’s like the glutes. The glutes are the lions on the safari, except we usually sit on them all day long. And so they can atrophy in terms of their power and their strength.
So we often talk about growing muscle. This is something that you would—the cool cats are gonna call this hypertrophy. This is just like growing more muscle. But a separate and distinct outcome from growing muscle is strength and power. So how much force can you generate in a given moment in time? And so we want, for women, especially if we think about aging well, we wanna be thinking about the glutes not only to be able to sprint, which I think every woman should be doing, but I also think for stability, right? If you trip on the corner of a carpet, or if you live on the East Coast as I do and you have icy winters and you’re walking on the sidewalk, you wanna be able to have strong glutes to be able to break your fall, right? You wanna be able to have strong hip flexors so you can get the leg in front of the body before you fall. And then you want the glutes to be your brakes.
If it’s a skill that is not being trained, which is done in the gym as you’re describing, so you’re doing leg day, you’re doing your deadlifts or your squats or your Bulgarian splits or your lunges or your whatever, your hip abductions—if you are not training that strategically in your thirties, forties, and fifties, to your point, I think that humans tend to think linearly, like, oh, my forties are just a little bit worse than my thirties. Oh, my fifties are just a little bit worse. There is an exponential cliff of a drop-off if you are not strategic right now.
And so I think that I love the idea of aging well. I think that there is a lot of talk around like, oh, perimenopause, it’s gonna just be the worst. And you have like, you know, I’m writing a book right now for women in midlife and I’m trying to reframe the narrative. Like it doesn’t have to be this dire, you’re gonna shrivel up and die. And what was the thing that you said before? Just like a—
Kelly
Like wither away, yeah.
Stephanie
Yes, wither away. Like you’re just gonna be this husk of a human. I think that it is absolutely an opportunity to come into exactly who you are meant to be. And you can do that by subjecting yourself voluntarily to difficult things because your growth as an individual, whether that’s spiritually, emotionally, physically, none of that happens when you’re sitting on the couch. Most of that happens when you are putting yourself in a situation where you are mildly, if not moderately uncomfortable. And in some cases, you know, in the case of Bulgarian split squats, markedly uncomfortable, right?
I always love the gym. My Instagram feed always throws me up gym memes, and it’s always like, I love everything except Bulgarian split squats. You know, it’s like one of the best glute growers, right? And full-body, like full lower-body exercises. And because it’s unilateral, you’re also engaging the core and the opposite upper body anyway. So I love this idea of developing strength and power as we age. I think that it’s not the end of the road.
And to your point, all the things—like, there’s so many things that you can garner that are outside of aesthetic from weightlifting. Like you were saying, your skin. One of the best things, you know, with the fasting conversation, one of the big proponents as to why you should fast is autophagy, right? So autophagy is just this big fancy word for the getting rid of old cells that are maybe not working the way that they should, or like nuclear debris of bits of nucleotide and whatever floating around the plasma. And autophagy is this immune event where you have these macrophages that will come and sort of clean everything up. Like if you imagine Pac-Man, if you ever played Pac-Man as a young girl or boy, you’ll remember that Pac-Man is just kind of eating up those pellets. That’s basically what autophagy is.
But training, strength training, is actually arguably at least equivalent to the autophagy that you can experience as someone who’s fasting, and maybe even more so because you’re getting mitophagy, like you’re getting mitochondrial turnover. And you’re getting, in terms of the muscle cells, you are now increasing the length and the girth of the sarcomere. So when we look at the muscle cell, the unit is a sarcomere, so you can actually increase the length and the width of it. So yeah, your skin is gonna look more, you know, filled out, if you will. Like when you were looking at your thigh, it’s like, oh yeah, because your quad and your hamstring, you know, all those things now are not deteriorating.
Kelly
Even my flexibility, right? So I’ve never really been able to land a split, right? Even from my ballet days or whatever. And I noticed after a couple of months—and again, a couple of months at the gym, and who knows what exercise I can thank for this—but somehow weight loading my hamstrings has dramatically improved my flexibility and my capacity in dance in ways that I wasn’t able to achieve through just general stretching and even just the actual dancing itself.
So the side benefits are so vast, and again, they’re physiologic, anatomical, but then they’re also metabolic, right? And this chasing of the hormone balance, right? This concept that I think is like marketing clickbait for so many women over 40, the wisdom that your body has to orchestrate its own hormonal inner physiology can be, you know, assigned specifically to the muscles, right? Like, there’s so much more there. And of course, I even learned this in med school. It’s like, I just didn’t even connect the dots because I was in this reductionist concept of muscle as just like supporting the bones maybe. And it’s nice to have some, but like, you don’t want too much.
So I want to talk a little bit about this sort of bulking and toning myths, right? Like, so these ideas that we have, because so many women, I’m sure you just cringe every time you hear this. It’s like, well, I would like to tone my arms, but I definitely don’t wanna bulk them. And the squeamishness that we have—it’s like, you know, women will do anything but exercise when it comes to strength training. Like, we’ll get any way around it. And in all those days of doing Pilates or barre with, you know, three-pound weights, I mean, there were many classes that I was like trembling, and the burn was excruciating. And to tell me that I wasn’t growing, building, structuring, supporting muscle, I would’ve been like, then what the hell is going on here? Why is that? How—
Stephanie
What am I feeling?
Kelly
Actually, this is just—so I’d love for you to speak a little bit to this, you know, in a myth-busting, because I know that this trope is very, very penetrant.
Stephanie
Yes. I get an angry tick when I hear about this. I wanna actually, before I do that, I just wanna come back to what you said about this metabolic event. And I think that this is—you’ve said it a couple times, and I think it’s worth underscoring here—that every time you are strength training, we’ve talked about mobility, about falling. So I like to think about it as like 3Ms, right? So muscle gives you three Ms. It’s a mobility—we think about as we age, wanna age well, prevent falls and things of that nature.
Muscle also, as you’ve mentioned, gives us a metabolic benefit. So your muscle incredibly can bring, can almost soak up extra glucose in the plasma, in the blood. So consuming carbohydrates or proteins, whatever, a lot of that is broken down—most of that is broken down—into glucose. Your muscles can take up glucose in an insulin-dependent, so in the presence of insulin, and an insulin-independent manner, so without insulin there. And so one of the things that we find as we age, as just a natural function of aging, we can become more insulin resistant, meaning that the cells are not responding to insulin as sensitively as they once were. However, if you have more muscle and your muscles can take up glucose with or without insulin—it’s like the U2 song, like with or without you—you can now begin to regulate and overcome that natural insulin resistance or anabolic resistance that we see as we age.
So that’s the second M: mobility, metabolic. And then the third one that I’ll just quickly touch on is there is a menstrual benefit as well. And this is really around the reproductive hormones and the fallout, the recovery process after strength training. So we know that anytime you’re strength training and you’re building new muscle, you are gonna require more testosterone in order to maintain that muscle. And testosterone is a sex hormone, you know, famous for libido certainly, but also very important in the maintenance of muscle mass. And it is not just sequestered to reproductive function. We have testosterone receptors in the heart and the lungs and the brain. And so in perimenopause and menopause, a lot of women will begin to describe cognitive changes as they become more sedentary.
So things like brain fog and memory issues and mood and affect and even just their ability to make decisions. Like I’ve had so many women who are like, I run these multimillion-dollar companies, and I would just put out fires all the time and I was making decisions. And then all of a sudden I couldn’t. I was like a shell of myself. I could not make a decision. I could not find the right way through. So I think that that’s also something to be mindful of.
And then the last little bit of hormonal regulation, of course, is a lot of women, even in perimenopause who are still menstruating, albeit maybe more irregularly now, will describe, as estrogen is sort of—I mean, the overall trend is downward, but there can be like pretty big oscillations in estrogen as progesterone is sort of trending down as well. And so as you’re lifting weights, there is some research to suggest that it also provides a healthy, we’ll say progesterone-to-estrogen balance in the second half of the cycle when a lot of women will complain of more symptoms that are reminiscent of inflammation. So like tender breasts and water retention and mood and sleep and affect and all these things.
So I just wanted to mention, because you’ve mentioned it a couple times and I think that it’s a really important point that you’re making, that muscle serves, yes, aesthetic, but mobility, metabolic, and menstrual functions as well.
Okay, so you mentioned about the Pilates burn, and I don’t—I wanna distinguish this between hypertrophy, so strength training, and muscle endurance. These are two different functions of the muscle. So I will start off by saying I love Pilates. I think it is wonderful for women’s health. Again, if you’re a woman over 40, you’ve had children, we wanna be thinking about the pelvic floor. We wanna be thinking about the deep muscles of the core that are going to stabilize and support the back. One of the things certainly that we know as we get older is, and if you’ve multiparous, you’ve had many children, that your pelvic floor takes a beating, unfortunately, in being pregnant, in delivery, and then postpartum. Okay. We’re not really thinking about our pelvic floors. We’re like in the throes of motherhood and breastfeeding and not sleeping and all the things. So as we start to lose those hormones in midlife, we can start to see things like incontinence, different types of urge incontinence, stress incontinence. So not being able to jump without, you know, peeing.
This was actually happening to me for a little bit until I was like, what the heck is happening? Like, I would put my keys in the door, like coming home, and I was like, oh my God, I gotta go to the bathroom, like right now, you know? So this urge incontinence was sort of what I was beginning to experience.
So Pilates is a wonderful way to strengthen the core and the pelvic floor, which I think every woman needs. And you are going to feel a burn when you’re doing like the trembling that you were describing when you’re doing Pilates. This is an outcome of endurance. So your pelvic floor all day is working to basically keep your organs inside your body, okay? So that things don’t fall out through your vagina and/or your anus. And we want to train the core to support the spine in a variety of different positions, like you and I—well, I’m sitting right now, you might be sitting or standing, I’m not exactly sure. But we wanna be training for endurance. We wanna be training for being able to support the organs, being able to support the structures for long term. That is not the same as muscle hypertrophy. That is not the same as approaching muscle failure.
So when we are strength training and the goal is hypertrophy—or like I said, cool cats will call this hypertrophy—it’s just like building muscle, like having more muscle than you did before. You are trying to approach muscle failure such that you can no longer do another rep. There’s not necessarily—you might feel a burn, like there may be a burning sensation, but if you’ve done Pilates and strength training, you will know that those two feelings are different.
So strength training, how you know you’re approaching muscle failure, is not just burn. You’re gonna see this with a decrease in velocity. So let’s say you’re doing a deadlift, for example. Let’s say your set is 10 repetitions. That’s what you set up for yourself. Rep number 10 is gonna be much slower than rep number one. So they still look the same in terms of form, and maybe you’re starting to see a little bit of breakdown at rep 10, but the velocity with which you can perform it is also going to be degraded.
The other thing that you’ll notice is your range of motion is going to be affected. So you are no longer going to be able to do the range of motion, whereas in Pilates, you still might be able to do the crunch or the leg circle or the hundreds or, you know, whatever it is that you’re doing. You’re just gonna feel a lot of burn, right?
With strength training, you are no longer gonna be able to perform the exercise in the full range of motion. You may be able to do partial reps, and long-length partials is maybe an entirely different nerd, you know, little side conversation, but full range of motion is no longer possible.
The other thing that you’ll notice is that the subjective—like your subjective, like how heavy the weight feels on rep 10—is going to be orders of magnitude greater than it was when you first started. So rep 1, 2, 3, you know, you can do it with good form, and then when you’re at like 7, 8, 9, 10 in terms of your repetition, it’s gonna feel much, much, much heavier. So these are kind of the qualifiers, the distinguishers, between something that is an endurance activity where you’re constantly feeling the burn but you can still keep going, versus something where you are no longer able to produce something in the range of motion and at the velocity that you once were, and your subjective sort of stamp on how heavy it is is also changing.
So these are some differences for you to maybe think about when you’re trying, because the other comment that always comes up is, well, I do Lagree, or I do Pilates on a reformer, and there’s the little resistance springs. And it’s like, okay, yes, and there’s an upper ceiling to that, right? So there’s only so much resistance that a reformer with resistance springs is gonna have versus, you know, the endless plates that you can continue to load on the bar over time as you’re getting stronger and the muscle is growing.
Kelly
That’s super helpful. First of all, that’s gold. And I’m sort of reflecting on the beautiful balance of that kind of commitment to slow and steady, push yourself. I experience almost like, oh, it’s like a wall that comes at me that I cannot seem to move past, right? And that’s coupled with rest, right? So in between sets, like my daughter called me out on this early on, unsurprisingly. She’s like, Mama, I’m watching you and you’re not resting enough. Like, you know, she literally pulled out a paper that showed like three minutes of rest versus 90 seconds of rest was exponentially more beneficial. I was like, oh my gosh, I really have created a mini me.
Stephanie
She’s like, here’s the RCT that you need to—yes, here’s the RCT.
Kelly
Oh good. And it worked. It worked.
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Stephanie
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Kelly
And then there’s even rest. Like I only do a three-day full body. I do full body each time, and I do three days. That’s the stage that I’m at, and I’ve noticed these benefits that I’m describing. And so in between, learning how to rest, right? So I went to a Lagree kind of Pilates that—that’s not a rest day. That’s not gonna work as a rest day for me. I learned that the hard way, right? So like, I’ll go on a couple-mile walk or, you know, do something slow and easy in the house. So learning how to rest in contrast to that kind of failure-oriented movement, I think also is a very cool polarity that subtends this.
Stephanie
And I think that there is—you bring up a very interesting point because one of the things that I’ve noticed when I’ve coached women is that we have, for some women, again, it’s that type-A, achievement-oriented, like, it’s like, all right, gimme the weights. I’ll totally go at it, I’ll rip it apart, I’ll, you know, have it for dinner. And then when I say, okay, so all of your growth actually happens when you take time off, like the recovery piece, so the rest in between sets or the day off of the gym where you are maybe gonna go into—maybe you’ll just do an active walk, maybe you’ll go in the sauna, maybe you’ll—you know, that seems to be also another point of cognitive dissonance. Like if I’m not doing something, then I’m not worthy. Like if I’m not doing something difficult—if there’s no—
Kelly
It’s not productive.
Stephanie
Right, yes. If I’m not productive, then I’m a failure in some way. And so I think that that is a very astute observation, that again, we are not giving ourselves sufficient rest in order to go at it again. So using the deadlift as an example, it’s a great example. When we finish a set, whatever, 10 reps, let’s say, you need to give not only the target muscles time to recover, you also need the accessory muscles time to recover. So when you’re doing a deadlift, for example, you are locking the lats in and down in order to stabilize the bar as you’re hip hinging. The lats also have to feel ready to go again.
And in addition to that, which I think a lot of people don’t think about, is also the adaptation to tissue that is not muscle. So tendons and ligaments. We often—I mean, muscle, listen, I love muscle. You know, she’s the popular girl at the party. Everybody always talks about muscle. Nobody wants to talk about joints and tendons. But I’ll tell you that if you don’t have good knees, you cannot squat. You know, if your shoulders—if you have frozen shoulder, you can’t do a pull-up or a push-up.
So we also have to think in terms of longevity. We have to be thinking about all of the—we have to think about the adaptation that the muscle needs and the tissue that needs slightly more adaptation. She needs a little bit—she’s like the shy girl at the party. She doesn’t talk too much. She’s in the corner, but she’s collagen. She’s like your collagenous structure. She’s tendons, she’s ligaments, she’s synovial fluid, she’s the articulations of the joint. So we also have to be thinking about those tissues as well in terms of appropriate rest.
And so that means the intra-set rest, like you were describing, three minutes—it can be longer, by the way. When I first started doing hip thrusts, I needed like four or five minutes in between because it was just such a full-body—again, that’s another cathartic, you know, I would have a big release, like emotional release, from doing hip thrust. I needed four or five minutes. Sometimes I would cry. Like, sometimes I would just have this and I just needed to sit with my body and tell her she’s okay. And, you know, four or five minutes is also fine. You’re not gonna lose your gains. Nothing’s gonna happen if you wait longer. You’re just gonna be more ready to go when you decide that you’re able to.
And I think this is something that social media has really stolen from us women, which is this ability to think critically. You know, at the time of this recording, I just put up a post yesterday about—I had a guest on the show and she was talking about drinking tart cherry juice as a way to help with sleep. And people were like, but that has 30 grams of carbohydrates in it. I can’t believe blood sugar spikes. And it’s like, when did we get to the point where we are so deathly afraid of a predictable event, which is a rise in blood sugar after consuming carbohydrates? You know? So I feel like we’ve lost, in some way, women have lost the ability to think for themselves because we have predation on social media that makes people afraid of perimenopause, that makes people afraid of a normal physiological event like a blood sugar rise after having carbohydrates. It’s so sad. And the women that are listening to the show are smart-ass women. Like the women that—like they’re running companies or they’re at home and they’re running the home, or both. And then they’re like, does coffee break my fast? You know? And it’s like—
Kelly
The neurosis, yeah. It just sneaks right back in. I love that you’re bringing this up, because I wanted to talk about this. Because I have never—listen, I’m not trying to get into any sort of like nutrition warfare—but I have never been a keto fan, right? So my protocol is a, if you wanna reduce it to macros, is a moderate-carb. And I have had history-making outcomes, you know, through my protocol. So the keto thing I’m sure has a place. And I used to study all of the neurologic literature and it was always in male subjects, blah, blah, blah. So I’ve never really been interested in the effort to restrict or even label fruit and other things as like sugary carbs. And I love that you’re pointing that out.
Where I started to—I fell into the trap a bit, right? So here I am in this brave new world of the gym, and I was a vegetarian for a number of years before this water fast, okay? And I actually, through this very profound psycho-emotional moment of my life, decided to begin to eat red meat again. I’ve raised chickens. I still don’t touch chicken.
So I started eating red meat again, and, you know, so I would have like beef bone broth or whatever, and I have my trainer in my ear being like, well, you can’t come to the gym fasted, you know, or whatever, without breakfast. Like, you have to start your protein gains in the morning, right? So I started to think about like, wow, like I don’t eat enough protein to be growing the muscle that I wanna be growing now because now I’m into this and I’m definitely not afraid of like bulking up. I am very interested in like seeing how I can watch the muscle take form under my skin. I guess it’s just fucking incredible. And I do get a little worried about like losing gains. So definitely when we went on a two-week vacation, I was like in the gym at the hotel. I cannot believe if you had told me I would be that girl. Okay.
Anyway, I did sort of take the bait around the protein thing for a while, and the way that I worked with it was mostly with like beef bone broth, but still it got in there, right? Like just sort of thinking about nutrition and food as like these very rudimentary building blocks instead of like informational intelligence that’s interacting with my body and trusting my own intuition and my own sense and desire and not under- or over-meeting accordingly, right? So I wonder—I know this is a very complex topic—but what do you wanna make sure women think twice about, right? Like, what are some of the tropes or myths that you wanna just foreground, eating for strength training, like a strength-training lifestyle, let’s say?
Stephanie
Yeah, this is—I’ve thought a lot about this. I think the overarching 30,000-foot view is instead of thinking about all the things that you can’t have and that you need to exclude from your diet, thinking about all the things that you need to include in your diet in order to thrive.
So rather than it be, I can get away with having 1200 calories or 1100 calories or whatever, calorically restricting for eons, what are all the things that must be in my diet in order for me to nourish myself, to nourish myself from the cells all the way up, you know, from cell to organ to tissues to glands to systems? And I think that’s the big idea.
I think that we have to, as women, continue to unlearn this idea that we have to be small at any price. Because what I see is I see constant caloric restriction for decades. And of course what happens when you are in a calorically restricted state is basically you’re not eating enough calories to match the outputs that you have in your life. So just basic resting metabolic—just to keep you alive—there’s a certain amount of calories, a certain amount of energy, that you need to consume. And then of course, if you layer on top of that goals like muscle, you need to be able to give your muscle the building blocks in order to assemble and grow.
So what I most often see is chronic caloric restriction. So this is, you know, a woman maybe in her twenties even. And this is—we don’t know if we’ll get into bone density today, but you reach peak bone density in your late teens, early twenties. So this is why it is so—I think you’re doing such a wonderful job with your daughters, because I think so many women, so many girls, like 18, 22, 25, they’re dieting because they see like, what do they call it, skinny talk or whatever, like TikTok is like all the skinny stuff. And I think that you can’t actually recover from that. Like, you sort of reach a ceiling, like a natty, you know, a natural ceiling in terms of how much bone density you can acquire by about 25. That’s usually the maturity of the skeleton. And then it’s kind of downhill from there. Like there are things that you can do to maintain your bone, to slow down osteoclastic activity, which is like the cells that sort of claw back bone density, but this is why it is so important for us to be not only getting this message to the women who are listening, who are 40 and 50 and 60 today, but also their daughters, so the 15-year-olds, the 17-year-olds, the 22-year-olds. Like, don’t diet, because you are really sacrificing bone, and that’s something that once it’s sort of set in stone, it really is just set in stone.
So that’s one thing. But the low calories—we have this thing called metabolic adaptation, which just means that your body is smart. She’s not stupid. So if you continue to restrict calories, she is now going to have to, with the low—you know, just like if you were to give someone a financial budget, it’s like, I’m only gonna give you a certain amount of money every day. You’re gonna have to prioritize how you’re gonna spend that money to stay alive. And your muscle is active tissue. It actually is a huge glucose gobbler, like the brain is a big glucose gobbler, and then so is muscle because it’s active tissue, it’s contractile tissue.
And so if you are not giving yourself enough calories, your body’s gonna say, okay, well we gotta sacrifice something. We gotta trim this down. And so it turns into the water fast that you were describing earlier, where you might lose weight, right? So this term also—we have to be a little bit careful with our words when we say weight loss. We wanna be careful about the weight you’re losing. Like it’s not just the number on the scale, it’s like what is happening inside. Are you losing weight from your bones, from your brain size, from your glutes? Like these are big no’s, right? Can we lose from our adipose tissue? Sure. But there are ways that you can do that.
So I think, you know, metabolic adaptation is that budget. It’s the equivalent of a financial budget. So if you continue to restrict and restrict and restrict years, months, decades, your energetic output will be lower. So you do the same cardio class—you come to the step class that I come to every Saturday—the calories that you burn, even though it’s the same effort and same intensity week over week, the calories that you burn are gonna be dialed down. Your digestion is gonna slow down because your body is literally trying to not be wasteful of any calorie that comes in. You’re gonna find that you’re constipated. Like your ability to eliminate and have bowel movements is gonna be lowered as well.
And so I think that we wanna be thinking about slowly and thoughtfully increasing the calories that we consume. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve counseled and they’re eating more and they’re like, I can’t believe that I’m eating more and I’m losing more weight. Like, I can’t believe that that is true. And that’s not to say that calories in, calories out is a farce. Certainly there is a law of thermodynamics. We have to respect it. But you can also overdo it. You can ride out the area of the curve and you can become an outlier, and then we get maladaptation beyond that.
So I think that it’s important for women to think about nourishing your body. What are all the things you need to include? Protein is certainly one of them. I think that we need to be consuming protein for the—I mean, you’re not eating protein just because it’s protein. You’re eating it for the amino acids, and that’s the building block of muscle. You don’t need to be having like 500 grams of protein a day. I think any like 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight is gonna serve most, like 80 to 90% of the population.
And again, coming back to the carbohydrates, you also need carbs, ladies. Thyroid, like you—you know, when we think about when we are consuming carbohydrates and you’re driving up insulin, you are now going to also help actively convert inactive thyroid hormone to active thyroid hormone. Women who calorically restrict for many, many years have a much higher incidence of thyroid issues, which is your main metabolic organ.
So we need carbohydrates. I like to think about it as a bit of an oversimplification, but if it just helps visually, when you’re thinking of growing muscle, like net muscle growth is a very simple addition or subtraction equation. It’s like muscle protein synthesis minus muscle protein breakdown is gonna give you your net muscle growth. So muscle protein synthesis is what it sounds like. You’re building new muscle proteins. You’re gonna do that with having sufficient calories and, of those calories, sufficient protein. And then you’re gonna subtract that from net muscle protein breakdown. And what helps with net muscle protein breakdown is consuming carbohydrates. So as we elevate insulin, it is going to protect, it’s going to be muscle-sparing, it’s going to help protect the muscle from being broken down. And so I want people to think about protein and carbohydrates as like sisters. Like we have to be consuming both of them.
And obviously I’m not saying like, hey, I want you to go to your local 7-Eleven and then throw back all the Häagen-Dazs. That’s—
Kelly
Listening thinks that’s what you’re saying.
Stephanie
But sometimes I feel like that super Captain Obvious statement needs to be like, I’m not saying throw back all the chips. I’m not saying throw back all the cookies and the crackers in your pantry. I’m saying fruits and vegetables are carbohydrates, right? So are potatoes, so are yams and rice. And these are things that for centuries humans have thrived on and we’ve demonized them. And I think that there is a conscientious and strategic way that we can be consuming our food as a way to nourish ourselves, as a way to nourish our goals, our brain, our body. And I think that there’s nothing—I would love to just begin to remove some of these layers of stigma around food. I am one of the—I have sort of evolved my thinking as I’ve been in this space and I feel like there are—like, I have some chocolate every day. You know, like I don’t really believe that there’s anything bad that you can consume. Like, yeah, do I have Oreo cookies here and there? Yep, I do. You know, it’s like, and it’s fine.
Kelly
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this I’ve actually learned this from my children as they grew into like tween-teen hood. It was a very humbling education for me on the power of taboo, because I’d been, for 15 years, a very, very—not rigid generally, and I actually never thought about the word calorie my entire adult experience. However, I was very rigid about these boundaries, right? I’ve even recorded a whole podcast about it, like the no gluten, no dairy, no sugar, no pesticide, you know, whatever, to the extent that I would maintain that rigid boundary everywhere I went, no exceptions, literally for 15 years. And I raised them with those boundaries, and I was asked to soften them.
And so I watched my daughters, who literally are like growing into Sports Illustrated. I mean, the gorgeousness level of these humans and their bodies is like—it’s like I don’t even know what to do with it. And they eat pretty much whatever they want. So they’re definitely not on the diet train. However, they’re already, and I would say particularly my eldest, who’s the athlete, very aware of the problems of caloric deficit. So she’s always thinking about like protein, protein, protein, you know, like we joke about it. So they somehow are more in touch with, again, that uncontaminated, I guess, lens that most of us, certainly at this stage of life, are struggling to wipe clean.
Stephanie
Proud mama moment, though, Kelly.
Kelly
Oh, I know. I like—
Stephanie
Take that in. That is so great.
Kelly
Go on and on. So I for sure will be having you back on to touch on so many more of the nuanced subjects that you take on. I know that most women listening wanna know what you do. I mean, if they’re not watching on YouTube, I mean this gorgeous, vital—I mean, it’s like you look at you and you can—I love whoever gave you that feedback about the sensuality that you bring to this, because I see it throughout all of your movements. I’m very perceptive about this kind of energy in women because I’ve been on this journey of relaxing my own system, recognizing that there—these threads, I call it the container, but like the threads of strength that we weave into the fabric of our feminine softening are just as essential, right? Maybe more essential to foreground.
So I know a lot of women are like, well, what do you do, Stephanie? And I know that you recently actually shared that very specifically. Like you shared a four-day split that you do and all of the details and video and everything. It’s called Lift, right? Are in there. I just got it. And I’d love for you to sort of give a framework, because I also think you’re very—there’s like a graciousness and compassion, for lack of a better word, in your expectations, right? So you really have pared down what is necessary to see the kind of enjoyable, pleasurable expansion, right? And it’s really not that—so I’d love for you to just speak a little bit about your routine and how women can learn more about it, learn more about what you’re up to.
Stephanie
Thank you. I really appreciate that. So yes, Lift is the program, and it is designed as a foundational strength-training program for women. So you could have never lifted weights at all, ever. We have a two-day-a-week course. You know, it’s like choose your own adventure. So it could be two days a week. If you are someone who wants to do three days a week, we have a path for three days a week. If you wanna do four days a week, there’s four days a week in there.
And it is joint-friendly, form-focused. I’m a very big proponent—I’ve mentioned it already—it’s like you can’t squat if you don’t have knees, right? So it’s very joint-friendly. It’s thinking about our joints and the tissue tolerance of our structures that are muscle and that are not muscle, for us to lift and stay injury-free for a lifetime. And it is also very form-focused. So again, we hear this idea of like lifting heavy and women should be—we shouldn’t be cardio bunnies, we should be muscle mommies and we should be lifting heavy. And it’s like, okay, great, yes, and we are going to master your technique first because that is the single biggest predictor of whether or not you’re going to be injured or prevent injury in the future. And if you are someone who is new to lifting, forties, fifties, and beyond, your rate of recovery from an injury is a little bit slower. Not that it’s not there anymore, but it’s not the same as it was when we were 20. So we really wanna try to avoid that.
So it’s form-focused and joint-friendly, and it does use the principles, as you mentioned, of progressive overload. So it is designed not as a—I was sort of saying this as we were launching it—it’s like, I did something crazy. I’m not selling you like a six-week bootcamp. Because everybody really loves that in the marketing world. It’s like that’s what sells, like seven pounds in seven days. And, you know, I was like, no.
Kelly
We’re not gonna—this is like one program for life.
Stephanie
It’s not a crash. And it evolves with you, right? Because if you are a two-day-a-week, eventually you can graduate to three days a week if that’s what you want, or four days a week. Or if you are like, no, I really just have time for two days a week, then we can implement the progressive overload into the program. So you will continue to make gains and you will continue to get stronger. And I have seen so many women with phenomenal results with two days a week. So three days a week is wonderful. Four days—like whatever your capacity and your desire is, the program will meet your needs.
So that’s sort of my love letter to women in midlife to strength train for a lifetime. And we can drop the links for you, but you can find it at drstephanieestima.com and there’s lots of different—I think there’s another link that I’m not recalling off the top.
Kelly
Yeah, we’ll have her in show notes for sure.
Stephanie
We’ll have it in the show notes, yeah. So you can find me there. And if you’re just like, hey, I’m not ready to jump in yet, you can find lots of free content on my Instagram, @drstephanieestima. You can sign up for my newsletter. As you mentioned, it’s called The Mini Pause. It’s a weekly newsletter where I will just—you know, right now I’m talking about weighted vest. Yes—
Kelly
Yes. Scandalous, controversial.
Stephanie
Scandalous. I know, I know. It’s so funny. Some of the things I thought were gonna be controversial, like I never thought oats would be as controversial as—
Kelly
Oh my God.
Stephanie
Or like weighted vest. It’s like, really? We’re fighting about weighted vest? All right, let’s look at the evidence, you know? So I will explore topics du jour and things that are relevant for women in midlife around strength training and fitness. What is a life well lived, you know? So yeah.
Kelly
Amen. It’s such a pleasure to connect, and I know that this won’t be the last chat that we have. I’m looking forward to future collabs, and I’m just very grateful for your voice in the mix out there.
Stephanie
Thank you so much. I appreciate this and appreciate the time that I get to spend with you, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
