Dr. Vonda Wright

We get fitter from the stimulus of exercise and the recovery from it.

So if someone's doing high intensity interval training every day or five days a week, they're not ever going to get that subsequent recovery to be able to hit those high intensities and that stress that we want.

We talk about high intensity during our reproductive years.

You can pretty much get away with whatever you want to do during your reproductive years because you have the benefit of our hormones working for us.

We start getting into perimenopause and we start getting into menopause.

This is where we have to really carefully look at volume versus intensity.

So that means if we're doing lots of stuff, or are we doing really purposeful high intensity versus low intensity?

Because we're trying to create what we call a polarization of the training so that when we hit high intensities, we're actually hitting the intensities we need to create change.

But on the other side of it, we want to hit really low intensity so that we can have recovery.

It gets harder to recover as we get older, regardless if you're male or female.

But in perimenopause, we don't have the benefit of estrogen supporting anti-inflammatory responses.

So we have to be very cognizant that we need more recovery.

There are whole brands built around mid-intensity and... And that falls into the whole sociocultural thing where we've grown up that if you don't have a good sweat sesh and feel completely smashed when you leave, it wasn't a good workout.

But that's a misconception.

Right.

There's a social aspect to it.

Yeah, because we did this reel talking about how Pilates was not appropriate as strength training, especially as rehab.

When we look at Pilates, it's a complement to true strength training.

What I mean by true strength training is you're lifting a load that's heavy in multiple planes.

With Pilates, it's really good for isometric control, core strength, balance, proprioception, but it isn't a stress that's going to create adequate muscle gain and strength of the bone, which is what we want from strength training.