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As women who’ve grown up steeped in diet culture, we often give away our agency to books, apps, and strict food rules rather than trusting ourselves to know what to eat and what our bodies need. During menopause, when our bodies are changing, we can doubledown on those rules, making life harder. This week we talk about ditching diets and restrictive rules and using our knowledge and intuition to f...

As active, athletic women, we know ourselves better than anyone. We know our pace, our power, and our mindset for training and competing. Perimenopause can make all of that change out of the blue. It can rob us of our confidence and knock us off our game, just when we feel like we’re really hitting our stride. Elite cyclist and coach Jill Patterson, 42, lived that reality for months, wondering if...

The New York Times recently called Ozempic a “new match for menopausal weight gain”. But is it? These drugs can be a godsend for those who need them. But there's a lot we need to understand. How do they work? How well do they work? Who benefits from them? What are their risks? What impact do they have on muscle, bone, and performance? How do they affect training and racing? We dig into all of that...

Most women don’t expect menopause symptoms to start until age 50. Neither do many of their healthcare providers. That’s a problem because, as this week’s guest Nina Coslov’s research shows, women can actually start experiencing symptoms associated with menopause during their late reproductive years before their periods become noticeably irregular and they’re officially in perimenopause. Yet when t...

As we roll into a brand new year filled with goals and aspirations, this week’s guest, fan-favorite Peloton Cycling instructor Christine D’Ercole would like to remind us that we are bigger than a smaller pair of pants, and the most powerful thing anyone can say to us is what we say to ourselves, and we have agency in that conversation. Now 52, Christine has started using her enormous platform to s...

This episode originally dropped on May 24, 2023. I’m too old. Nothing works for me. My best days are behind me. I just have to live with (fill in the blank). I’ll never feel better. When we’re really going through it, it can be easy to slip into a personal cave of limiting beliefs that can conspire to keep us there in the cold and dark. But where do these beliefs come from? Are they even true? Wha...

This episode originally dropped on April 5, 2023. What does it mean to be fit? Deadlifting your body weight? Running a 10K? Doing an Ironman? Most of our notions about fitness spotlight the big thing we want to do while glossing over all the smaller, equally important, but less “sexy” stuff like joint mobility, breathing practices, balance, and nutrition it takes to get you there strong and injury...

As active women, we’re so used to our bodies being considered “other” or “less than” in health and fitness media, we barely notice it. Our bouncing breasts are a problem. Our wide hips are a problem. Our periods, boy oh boy, big problem. And when we hit perimenopause and menopause? Well, until very recently nobody even bothered talking about us…especially exercise physiology researchers, who, as t...

Women generally talk about what they see and feel during menopause. Symptoms like hot flashes, joint pain, and vaginal dryness grab our attention while our bone density silently slips away. Women can lose up to 20% of their spinal bone mass through the menopause transition. Thirty-five to 50 percent of women have low bone mass by age 50. Your lifetime risk of having a hip fracture is higher than b...

A few years ago, elite Canadian runner Sasha Gollish started experiencing some symptoms that had her wondering what the hell was up with her body—crime scene (or as she called them firehose) periods, strange memory lapses, times in races when her legs were flailing and her muscles were not responding the way they typically would as she struggled to find her stride. She wondered if she was sick. As...

Women in menopause get a lot of nutrition and fitness advice. Some of it is sound. Some less so. Quite a bit of it is downright predatory. That is why the best nutrition and fitness advice for menopausal women is often not about grams of protein or hours of exercise, but rather a hard look at our own attitudes and beliefs about how we eat (or don’t eat) and move our bodies. What narratives form ou...

We exercise and train for hours each week (and sometimes each day) to build our physical fitness. We work on our mental toughness. But how much time do we devote to our spiritual fitness? To exercising our soul? For many of us it’s not so much. And we can suffer for it, getting lost, sad, and stuck, especially during menopause and midlife when we can find ourselves looking around going, “Is this i...

Tummy tucks, insomnia, hormonal headaches, training post breast cancer, anxiety-calming supplements…you had some questions! And we have some answers! This week we dig back into the Speakpipe voicemail box and address your questions regarding menopause-related concerns and performance with host Selene Yeager. We are not medical professionals, of course, so this is not a substitute for medical advic...

Fasting is often recommended as a solution to the metabolic health and weight management challenges menopausal women face. And while it can be an effective health tool when done properly, there are numerous pitfalls that active women can encounter when layering the stress of fuel restriction on top of other stress in their lives. This week we break it all down with autoimmune and precision medicin...

When we reach menopause and midlife, we’re sometimes leery of trying new things. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves. We feel afraid. We don’t want to get hurt. Whether hormonal, societal, or a blend of both, we can easily succumb to the urge to stay on the sidelines. But the real magic happens when you jump (maybe literally) into something new, especially an activity that builds skill, confidenc...

Millions of women will tell you they feel like their muscle disappeared overnight once they hit the menopause transition. It may not technically happen in a 24 hour period, but muscle tissue really does slip away quickly over the perimenopause period. That’s a problem because muscle is our metabolic engine and helps us live, play, and perform our best. This week, we sat down with exercise scientis...

We’ve been fed a narrative that you can’t get faster after a certain age. We used to say 40. Definitely not after 50. Could you possibly get faster after 60? This week’s guests say, “Why not?” When it comes to women in midlife and menopause, we’re more active than ever. We also know more, have better coaching, and have more information at our disposal. This week, during a special educational sessi...

Menopause is not a monolith. We all experience this stage of life differently and require unique care. So this week we sat down with Dr. Heather Hirsch, author of Unlock Your Menopause Type to talk about the six basic types she sees in her practice, including premature, sudden, full-throttle, mind-altering, seemingly never-ending, and silent and the care they require. We also dig into the controve...

Ultra running sensation Camille Herron is currently smashing world records, including a new woman’s 48 hour running world record set earlier this year where she logged a whopping 435 kilometers (270.5 miles) around a 400-meter track(!), which also made her the first female athlete to surpass a Men’s American record, all while managing the hormonal havoc of perimenopause, something she has recently...

Nina McGowan didn't begin freediving until she was in her late 40s and sliding into the menopause transition. With the help of her background in meditation, yoga, dance, the arts, and eventually hormone therapy, she’s reached depths she would have only dreamed imaginable, setting multiple Irish National Records as well as securing a World Record in the 50-54 age division with a dive of 43 meters (...

The conversation around menopause is moving at lightspeed these days, with a wave of misinformation following quickly in its wake. So this week we sat down with the medical director of The Menopause Society (formerly the North American Menopause Society), Dr. Stephanie Faubion, author of The New Rules of Menopause to catch up on where we are with our understanding of menopause, menopause therapies...

Amanda Thebe was so frustrated by her two-year odyssey to find out what was behind her bone-crushing fatigue, vertigo, incontinence, rage, migraines, depression, and other symptoms that were outright derailing her life (spoiler: it was perimenopause), she wrote what would become an Amazon best-selling book, Menopocalypse: How I Learned to Thrive During Menopause and How You Can Too! to help other...

Menopause is all over mainstream media these days. But too many women are still missing the message that they don’t have to needlessly suffer, especially Black women who on average go into menopause earlier and have worse symptoms such as hot flashes, depression and sleep disturbances than White women, but are less likely to receive hormone therapy, as well as medical and mental health services. T...

Of all our hormones, cortisol might be the most misunderstood and maligned. We’re told this stress hormone is the culprit behind excess belly fat, high blood sugar, accelerated aging, and a host of menopausal and midlife woes. Menopausal and midlife women sometimes are afraid to exercise too much because they’ve been told it will raise their cortisol, which can already be elevated during this time...

At this point, you may have been doing your sport for a decade, maybe two…or more. It’s easy to fall into a rut or lose your spark. The hormonal changes that come with the menopause transition also can make training more challenging and put a dent in your motivation. Trying a new challenge and/or working with a new coach can help you find your why and feel fired up again. This week, we pull back t...