Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing fitness during menopause. Navigating the twists and turns of menopause can be a challenge.

Hormone fluctuations bring about significant changes in your body,

including how it responds to exercise. So how can you adjust your workout routine to best

support your body through this change? Exercise physiologist, Dr. Stacey Sims, tells us how we can

optimize fitness during this unique stage of life.

When we're looking at perimenopause, women age very differently during this time period because it depends on how the ratios of estrogen progesterone start to shift.

Because when we're in our reproductive years, we have primarily a regular cycle every 28 to 40 days,

and you have times when estrogen, progesterine are low, and then you have ovulation, estrogen, progesterum come up.

You don't get pregnant, you shed the lining, and so you have this cyclical pattern.

And your body's really used to a certain amount of progesterone and estrogen.

When we get into perimenopause, we start to have more and more an ovulatory cycles.

So if we're not ovulating, we don't produce progesterone.

We're still producing estrogen, but because we don't have progesterone, the ratios of those two hormones are shifting.

Some weeks where you have more estrogen and it would be akin to a normal menstrual cycle.

But when you don't ovulate and you don't have the counter of progesterone to estrogen,

that changes the way estrogen functions in the body.

Estrogen acts on a woman, like testosterone acts on a man, when we're talking about lean mass.

And we know that lean mass is one of the first things to go, because there's a lot of women who say,

you know what, I feel like I woke up squishy overnight.

I don't know what happened.

I've been doing the same things, and all of a sudden I'm squishy. And it is really because when we look at estrogen, estrogen is really responsible for

...