Your physiology changes as your hormones fluctuate, but there’s never a “bad day” to nail a personal best.
My life’s work is largely devoted to helping women work with their unique physiology to train and perform their best. That means adjusting training sessions to leverage how our bodies respo...
Resistance training triggers hormones that increase abdominal fat burning.Â
When women come to me wanting to change their body composition, I direct them straight to the weight room. Contrary to the old “cardio to burn fat” “resistance training to build muscle” dogma that mainstream fitness maga...
Heavy lifting. Sprint training. Plyometrics. They all have one thing in common—they’re essential for menopausal health and performance.
Society has taught women to devalue their power. That’s especially true during menopause when we’re told it’s time to slow down and are pointed to the cultural ...
Why your recovery scores may not be what they seem depending on your cycle.
Many women tell me that they use heart rate variability (HRV)—the variance in time between beats of your heart—for tracking recovery. HRV is the metric that Whoop Strap, Oura Ring, and other recovery tracking devices use...
Endurance sports have their place, but for long-term health and longevity, you need to hit the weights.
As a former Ironman triathlete and bike racer, I’m not about to tell anyone to hang up their racing flats or rack their bike. Endurance training can improve cardiorespiratory fitness, lipid pr...
Men do, too. Research shows another downside to low-carb training.
Women perform best in a fueled state. That means eating carbohydrates. That shouldn’t be a radical concept. Carbs are the preferred fuel source for our brain; they’re necessary to fuel high intensity efforts, and they improve exe...
Research shows the perimenopausal period is the best time to adapt your training to prevent unwanted menopausal metabolism and body composition changes.
I’ll say up front that it’s never too late (or too early!) to start lifting heavy sh*t and upping intensity to improve strength, power, body c...
Building the foundation of your diet on plants builds a strong foundation for health and performance, especially for women.
Since I spend so much time helping inform how other people should eat for optimal health and performance, many women ask me how I eat. I have been a plant-centered athlete ...
Research shows that female athletes have the same relative energy requirements as their male counterparts.
As anyone who’s been following me for more than 3 days knows, I’m all about women fueling properly, because the fact is that most active women do not eat enough to support their performance...
A study finds higher intensity exercise helps relieve anxiety.
I am a huge proponent of high-intensity exercise, especially short, sharp high-intensity training like sprint intervals of 30 seconds or less because it's like powerful medicine.
Sprint interval training (SIT)Â fires up your fast-twit...
Post-workout fueling matters even more for women than men.
Low energy availability is extremely common in women athletes. A 2019 survey of 1,000 female athletes across more than 40 sports published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine estimated the risk of low energy availability in women a...
Women heat up sooner, sweat less, and have hormonal fluctuations that impact how we keep our cool when we crank up our efforts.Â
I have been studying hydration my entire adult life (the basis of my PhD was sex differences in hydration in the heat!), both as an athlete myself in endurance running...
