Exercise & Nutrition Scientist: The Truth About Exercise On Your Period! Take These 4 Supplements!

Women's physiology differs significantly from men's, impacting exercise & nutrition. Dr. Sims highlights crucial variations impacting training, diet, and injury risk. Videos emphasize women-specific approaches, addressing hormonal fluctuations, optimal nutrition (protein, vitamins, omega-3s), the impact of keto diets, and menopause/perimenopause management, advocating for personalized strategies and open communication. like, okay you know what? You piss me off. i'm going to beat you up and we're going to get on with it But girls are very self--aware and they hold things to themselves in a more negative fashion and this creates a lot of mood changes and this also creates a feeling of of of negative body positivity. So they don't feel that comfortable with how they look or who they are And society doesn't help that either. So this all perpetuates in a sociocultural as well as a biological change which regards to exercise. and as it relates to we'll talk about the Q angle a little bit more in a second when we talk about exercise. But the, as it relates to the other changes, um, fat differences in men and women? Yeah. So if we see essential fat for men is around 4 to 8%. So that means what we need for our nerves and just survival. Yeah, for women, essential fat is around 12%. Okay. So this is for nerves and and looking around our essential organs to survive, we look at body composition itself. We see that women tend to sit around 20 % as a normal healthy individual. Although the data has changed over the years, Um, and men sit around 15%. And what about the heart? How is the heart different in men and women? So women have smaller heart and lungs? Yeah. Relative to relative body size to men, we also have less hemoglobin. So that means our oxygen carrying capacity is lower, uh, because if we are looking at our red cells and we have four different what we call HeeM molecules in a red cell and each one carries oxygen. Our red cell count is lower as compared to men because the red cell count is driven by testosterone. So men have around 100% more, um, aromatized testosterone as compared to women. So this increases the carrying capacity of oxygen, which means it goes to, the muscles can deliver more fuel to the muscles, to be able to contract better, have more power, more strength. Does that mean women breathe more exercising the same, not that they breathe more. When we're talking about oxygen carrying capacity. this is the amount that you're taking into the lungs, how it transfers to the red cells to then be able to go to the working muscles to give the muscles the available fuel to do a contraction. So it's not a respiratory rate, it's the ability for you to breathe in and how fast that can be conducted to the muscle. So there's going to be an impact on endurance, then it's more of a power and speed factor. Okay Okay Okay because the speed in which the oxygen can get to the muscles is what's being impacted and the volume of oxygen that can get to the muscles. Yep okay fine. And then you said the lungs are sort of I read 25 to 30% smaller than a man's lungs typically. Yeah. And what's the impact of that as it relates to exercise? So when we're looking at um I guess world world records right that have been kept and we see there's a gender gap there MH And this is slowly closing in the endurance world but that has to do with muscle morphology with regards to being able to go long and slow. we're looking at the sprint capacity where we have to have a quick transference of oxygen and quick muscle contraction. that gap isn't closing and that is because we have smaller lungs, smaller heart, we have less blood volume, we have less red cells. So the overall capacity for quickly developing power and speed is at a smaller, um, I guess it's a limited capacity in women versus men. And in your book Raw and page four in the opening of the book you talk about how women are 52% as strong as men in their upper bodies and 66% as strong as they are in their lower bodies. When women train, they can become 70 to 80% as strong as men. MHM. So we're looking at resistance training itself. We see that women relative to men can accommodate and develop muscle just as well as men in the lower body, but upper body, not so much. Okay. Um, we talked about this Q angle thing. One of the things that I've I'm really fascinated by is there's been a big conversation recently around ACL injuries and sport. Yeah. And from reading your work, it seems that and just doing some research online, it seems that this increase in women getting ACL injuries linked somewhat to this Q angle situation, which again is the, I don't know how to explain it for someone that is listening on audio and can't see, but I will link it in this description. So I highly recommend you look at this picture, cuz The minute you see it makes a ton of sense, but it's essentially like, and this is me probably butchering it as a man because my hips don't widen my legs are effectively quite straight. Yep. So from my hip down to my toes, it's quite straight, which means that I'm going to be more sturdy. Say if I jump up in the air when I land this I know this cuz my dad's engineer, the center of gravity being straight means that I'm less likely to get injured but if you're is that right right? Yeah. cu your forces are going to be in a more linear fashion. So you have more um, even distribution of the force through the knee mh But for women as you're going to describe our hips are wider. So we have more of an angle to the knee and the forces aren't distributed evenly when we land. So we look at that as well as the quad dominance develops For women Because so that means that we use our um, front muscles of our legs our quads a lot more than our hamstrings our posterior chain So we don't use our glutes and our hamstrings by default um as well as men do so we're being pulled forward more and we let we put more emphasis on the front of our body um, because those tend to take the the quads tend to take the bulk of the muscle work that we're trying to do Unless we're really trying to train hamstrings and glutes to fire which isn't the default for women's bodies because center of gravity again is lower and you tend to lean forward So when we're looking at acl injury again, it comes down to one training stress two mechanics and if we're not taught again how to land how to run how to jump with The new angles, it predisposes people to severe ACL injury and how much more likely is a woman to have an ACL injury than a man, it is a higher rate. But the thing about the research is that there hasn't been a direct comparison, because we hear incidentally that women tear their ACL. And so we see a lot of observational studies that women have torn their ACl and we have lots of retrospective studies that are going back to, uh, where are we in our menstrual cycle when we tore ACl? But there hasn't been a definitive comparison between men and women. If we were to look at the current research, we see a 3 to four to one ratio of ACL tears of women versus men, So three to four, so either three to one or four to one, depending on the research that you look. So three women for every one man or four women for every one man. Okay, so 300% difference. Yeah. Okay, so interesting. I absolutely never knew that. And in fact, it wasn't until I was looking through your work that I i'd seen, Um, I went and did some research and there's a big conversation online, a lot of sort of news coverage around women's football because it's I think it's the fastest growing sport in the world. But I read that this the probability that a woman tears her ACL muscle is significantly like hundreds of percent more likely than a man because of this in part because of this Q angle in professional sport is not as much as when we're looking at recreational sport because when we're getting into professional sport, we have specific warm-ups, especially for football. Um, um, put up a Fifa to prevent ACL tear to make sure that you are actually properly warmed up and engaging the right muscles and learning how to stop pivot because it's a it's a a mechanism in action usually is a twisting angle but if we're looking at more age group or grassroots sports because people aren't aware of this Q angle they aren't aware of the quad dominance women haven't been taught again how to work with these new mechanics Then we're seeing a greater incidence of acl tear 30 female football players missed women's world cup in 2023 due to acl injuries including in the UK lioness Beth me and Leah Williamson um which is staggering to me yeah it's very high incidence y so is there something that can be done if you're a woman that's exercising that's doing things like jumping and running and sprinting and the fast sort of twitch uh sports is there something you can do to avoid having an acl injury? It's all about being strong. so if we're looking at how what is the biggest thing for ACl prevention and I'll bring in one of my Phd students that's graduated looked at um, acl rehab after surgery and it comes down to the definitive difference between quad and hamstring strength So if we're looking at improving the um, strength capacity of the hamstrings then it offsets some of the default strength that the quads are taking so we able to balance it from being front-loaded to being more even loaded. It comes down to you know, how we were talking about distribution of forces through the knee with men being more linear and women having an angle. Well, if we're able to take that angle and we can evenly distribute the load between the muscles of the hamstring and the quad so the front and the back Yeah, then it pulls the forces more centrally. Okay, which reduces the stress of one point of contact. So if we're developing the strength through the whole posterior chain we're looking at glutes. we're looking at hamstrings we're doing a lot of calf work and we can develop that whole posterior part. It reduces the incidence of being pulled in one direction and the misalignment of forces. the other is the cutting motion where we're looking at at um lateral movement. So a lot of times when we're looking at warm--ups and you're observing on like kids sports there's not a lot of lateral development so if we're looking at at um, prevent prevention of acl tear, we have to work a lot of the exp exposive lateral movements as well as jumping and single l single leg jumping and these are things that aren't really done in grassroots, but as we start to get more into professional sport is becoming more and more apparent that we have to do specific mechanism of injury prevention. So they're looking at the sport. We're a football player. We have a high incidence of ACL potential. So we have to really develop our posterior chain. We have to work on our power for our lateral movements, our step and our jump. So this is part of what FIFA's put in for the warm--up because there is such a draw. And as you're saying that 33 women in the World cup for their ACL part of it is loading part of it is a little bit maybe overtrained before they go into the World Cup. But a lot of it has to do with, um, this imbalance between the muscles and now having to address it, did science just look at women as a different version of men? Like, sorry, did they just look at women as like a smaller version of men? Is that what, How they looked? Yeah, for the most part because I mean, a lot of the stuff when I was going through school and even now textbooks. So I was standing in the Metro in DC, Uh, a few months ago and there was a young girl who has just gotten into exercise physiology and I overheard a conversation and she was talking about some of the experiments that they were doing, but it never, she never talked about like we have to make, Dr. Stacy Sims highlights that hormonal variations throughout a woman's life (puberty, reproductive years, pregnancy, menopause) significantly impact how women eat and train. These differences are not considered in research often based on male data. Men are born with more fast-twitch muscle fibers (higher anaerobic capacity), while women have more slow-twitch fibers (better aerobic capacity). These differences, along with others, influence responses to calorie restriction, fasting, and other training methods. , Dr. Sims explains the inherent sex differences present from fetal development through puberty, focusing on muscle morphology, fat composition, and hormonal influences. She emphasizes the significant changes in body composition and center of gravity that occur in girls during puberty, often leading to discomfort and dropout from sports. This segment details the significant obstacles in conducting research on women, including recruitment biases, limited funding, and the discomfort associated with certain research procedures. Dr. Sims' personal experience as a participant in a metabolism lab where her results were discarded due to their deviation from male data is particularly impactful. This segment focuses on preventative measures for ACL injuries, emphasizing the importance of strengthening the posterior chain (hamstrings and glutes) to balance quad dominance and improve force distribution. It also stresses the need for training lateral movements to enhance stability and reduce the risk of twisting injuries. This segment explains the higher incidence of ACL injuries in women compared to men, attributing it to the Q angle (the angle between the thigh bone and the kneecap) and quad dominance. The wider hips in women lead to uneven force distribution during landing, and the tendency to overuse quads over hamstrings further increases the risk. This segment highlights the significant disparity in ACL tear rates between female and male athletes, particularly in sports like football. It discusses the lack of direct comparison studies and the higher incidence in recreational sports due to a lack of awareness of proper warm-up techniques and biomechanics. This segment discusses the historical bias in research, where women were often treated as smaller versions of men, leading to a lack of understanding of sex-specific differences in physiology and health outcomes. It highlights the need for more women-specific research and the recent shift towards acknowledging these differences. This segment explores the impact of sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone) on injury risk and recovery, emphasizing the differences in how the hypothalamus (the brain's appetite control center) regulates energy balance in men and women. It explains why women may have different caloric needs and respond differently to various training methods. This segment focuses on the importance of resistance training for women of different ages and hormonal stages. It emphasizes the unique physiological changes women experience throughout their lives and how resistance training is crucial for mobilizing abdominal fat, building lean mass, and improving body composition. The speaker also addresses the historical societal biases against women engaging in strength training and the growing recognition of its importance for women's health. This segment highlights crucial differences in how men and women respond to fasting, emphasizing that research often generalizes male data to women, leading to ineffective or even detrimental strategies for women's health and fitness goals. The speaker explains how women's bodies react differently to calorie restriction and various fasting protocols compared to men's, impacting metabolic function, hormone levels, and overall well-being. This segment contrasts the effectiveness of exercise and fasting in inducing autophagy and promoting overall health. The speaker argues that exercise is a more potent stimulus for autophagy and other health benefits than fasting, challenging the prevalent focus on various restrictive diets. The discussion also touches upon societal factors contributing to decreased physical activity levels and the importance of prioritizing exercise over restrictive diets. This segment details the differences in post-exercise nutritional needs between men and women. It explains the varying metabolic recovery rates and the optimal timing and amount of protein intake for muscle protein synthesis in each sex. The speaker highlights the shorter window of opportunity for women to maximize muscle building and recovery compared to men.This segment discusses the potential negative impacts of ketogenic diets on the gut microbiome, particularly for women, and the importance of gut diversity for sex hormone metabolism. It also explores the differences in responses to cold plunges between men and women, emphasizing the need for adjusted temperature protocols to achieve similar benefits. This segment details the optimal creatine dosage for women (3-5 grams daily), highlighting its benefits for gut health, brain health (reducing depression and anxiety), and maintaining the integrity of the intestinal mucosal lining. It contrasts this with the higher, loading dosages often used by men for muscle performance, emphasizing the different physiological responses in women. This segment explains how insulin sensitivity changes throughout the menstrual cycle, particularly due to fluctuating hormone levels (progesterone and estrogen). It details how these hormonal changes affect glucose metabolism and the body's ability to store glucose, impacting exercise and nutrition strategies.This segment provides practical advice on adapting exercise intensity and nutrition based on the different phases of the menstrual cycle. It emphasizes the importance of considering hormonal changes and individual responses to stress, suggesting strategies for optimizing training and recovery throughout the cycle. This segment discusses the common issue of iron deficiency in women, explaining its symptoms (fatigue, dark circles, etc.) and the importance of maintaining adequate iron levels for optimal health. It also explains how to supplement iron effectively, considering bioavailability and timing relative to training, and addresses the shifting reference ranges for iron levels in blood tests. This segment focuses on the importance of Vitamin D3 supplementation, particularly during winter months when sunlight exposure is limited. It explains the difference between Vitamin D2 and D3, highlighting D3's superior bioavailability and its positive impact on various bodily systems, including recovery, muscle function, and brain health. This segment focuses on the crucial role of estrogen and progesterone in maintaining bone health in women. It explains how fluctuations in these hormones throughout the menstrual cycle, as well as the absence of a cycle (amenorrhea), can negatively affect bone density, increasing the risk of fractures. The speaker also touches upon the differences in bone density between men and women and how hormonal changes influence bone health.This segment explores the importance of sleep for overall health and recovery, particularly highlighting the differences in sleep patterns and circadian rhythms between men and women. The speaker explains how hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle affect women's sleep quality and quantity, and how these differences contribute to variations in sleep needs and susceptibility to conditions like jet lag. This segment discusses the significant impact of stress and inadequate nutrition on the menstrual cycles of recreational female athletes. The speaker highlights the prevalence of low energy availability among these athletes, leading to disruptions in their cycles and potential long-term health consequences. The importance of monitoring menstrual patterns as an indicator of overall health and the need to address underlying issues before they escalate into more serious conditions are emphasized. This segment discusses the societal shift in understanding and discussing menopause. It highlights the previous lack of awareness and the resulting inadequate medical advice women received, often leading to misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment. The speaker emphasizes the growing importance of open conversations about menopause, empowering women to seek accurate information and advocate for better healthcare. This segment details the various physical and psychological symptoms women experience during perimenopause, highlighting the lack of a definitive blood test for diagnosis and emphasizing the importance of considering individual symptomology and sociocultural factors. It also touches upon the impact of pre-existing health conditions and genetics on symptom severity. This segment focuses on the importance of high-intensity exercise to mitigate perimenopausal changes. It explains how high-intensity workouts, including sprint intervals, plyometrics, and resistance training, can improve insulin sensitivity, enhance mitochondrial function, and reduce visceral fat gain. The importance of shorter, higher-quality workouts over longer, lower-intensity sessions is also discussed. The benefits of sauna use are briefly mentioned. This segment provides specific advice on exercise and nutrition for women with PCOS and endometriosis. For endometriosis, it suggests cold water therapy to reduce inflammation, while for PCOS, it recommends high-intensity exercise and resistance training to manage insulin resistance. The importance of using heart rate variability as an indicator of stress in women with PCOS is also highlighted. This segment emphasizes the need for a higher protein intake during perimenopause to counteract anabolic resistance and promote muscle and bone health. It also highlights the importance of a diverse gut microbiome through the consumption of colorful fruits and vegetables for blood glucose control and body fat regulation.This segment clarifies the distinction between menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) and hormone replacement therapy (HRT), emphasizing that MHT aims to attenuate the severity of menopausal symptoms rather than replace hormones to a youthful level. It addresses societal pressures and misconceptions surrounding hormone therapy and aging.