Dr. Vonda Wright

If we're doing plyo, that's also a sprint-type training, so you're getting a metabolic stress.

So you're hitting all the major factors in one one-hour workout.

Yes.

Yes, you can.

And the other thing that isn't really brought up into these conversations is when you hit perimenopause, not only is estrogen sort of the stimulus for satellite cell or building muscle cell, but it has a distinct function.

I guess, influence on myosin.

So myosin and actin are two contractile proteins.

So if you think about a sliding filament or coming together, you have myosin and actin that bond together to then pull and move and pull and move, and that's how you have a muscle contraction.

Estrogen is responsible for how tightly myosin bonds to actin.

When we start to lose estrogen or we start to have variability in our estrogen, we get myosin dysfunction.

So that means we're not going to get a very strong contraction.

We get weaker.

And this is one of the very first things that people complain about to me.

I don't have power.

I don't have strength.

My grip strength's gone.

I don't know.

But their body composition hasn't changed yet.

So if we think about lifting heavier loads, it's a neuromuscular response, and that direct stimulus creates the adaptive change in myosin that now estrogen isn't responsible for.

It's a different external stress that creates that change in myosin to go, yep, I have to grab onto actin and have a very strong contraction.