Meno-pot Be Gone! How to Exercise To Stop Weight Gain In Menopause

August 5, 2020

08 / 05 / 2020

When dealing with menopause, Eating Clean and exercising are two big components of looking and feeling better. It’s helpful to consider a formula that addresses where to place your efforts. It’s called the Body Beautiful Body Healthy formula:

80% Eating clean + 10% Exercise + 10% Genetics = How You Look

Your diet accounts for 80% of how you look and feel and by leveraging another 10% of your effort through physical exercise you’re creating the most ideal conditions for staying slim and symptom-free as you move out of your fertile years.

Most women gain between 10-20 pounds over the life of their menopause as estrogen levels decline. With plummeting estrogen levels, healthy fat metabolism is interrupted. In fact, by the time you reach age 25 your metabolism starts to drop along with your muscle mass—that’s when weight gain threatens to take over.

Woman jogging outside in cold weather

Move It to Lose It

The absolute best strategy to offset this decline is to WORK OUT. There is simply no other way to help yourself stay in a high fat-burning mode, shape a lean, healthy physique, keep your sanity, and a long list of other beneficial side effects.

When you combine diet and exercise on a regular basis, the end result is always optimal health.

There’s a problem with working out as you age. Apparently, there’s a misconception that you have to feel strong to lift weights and you may even need to feel somewhat in shape to enter a gym. However, gyms are where the good work of shaping healthy bodies should happen.

By working out, you’ll avoid middle-age spread, the dreaded meno-pot and muffin top, and you’ll stave off top health risks: cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, cognitive decline, and more. Side note: strengthen yourself even more by practicing emotional self-care.

See Also: 5 Exercises to Melt Belly Fat

Home Gym Plan

Time to build an effective workout plan! A solid workout routine will challenge your body by testing your strength to build muscle, challenging your heart/lung engine to build endurance, and activating muscle groups to improve and maintain flexibility.

Consider your exercise routine, not one day at a time but in week-long chunks. In that seven-day period, you will want to incorporate the main elements of a solid exercise plan.  Move your body through these components on varying days of the week to maximize your results.

See Also: Essential Low Cost-High Results Home Gym Equipment You Must Have

Woman exercising outside with resistance bands

The Components of a Solid Exercise Routine

Resistance Training

Resistance training can be anything that puts your muscles under strain and encourages a strengthening response. This can be accomplished through:

  • Weight lifting using free weights and/or machines
  • Resistance band training
  • Kettlebell training
  • Bodyweight training
  • Cellercising or rebounding on a mini trampoline
  • Creative use of heavy objects training (backpack filled with books, stones, etc.)

See Also: Workout With Everyday Objects

Frequency: 3-5 times per week for 30 minutes (if it’s your main workout that day) or a minimum of 15-20 minutes as part of your overall workout.

Cardiovascular Endurance

Anything that puts your heart/lung engine under strain and encourages a greater oxygen consumption capacity. This includes:

  • High-Intensity Interval Training (HIITs): sprinting alternated with a moderate pace 
  • Circuit Training: alternating between different cardio activities (cycling, running, elliptical machine) that work different muscles
  • Speed Play: a mixture of interval training and continuous training. Once you have a good basic level of fitness, you might run a mile at a strong pace, recover by walking, and then do some intervals. (An example of this is Tabata)

Frequency: 3-5 times per week for 30 minutes (if it’s your main workout that day) or a minimum of 15-20 minutes as part of your overall workout.

Restorative Exercise

Anything that puts your entire body into a state of gentle balance, stretch, and physicality through pilates, walking, and gentle cycling.

  • Pilates: a low-impact form of exercise combining deep breathing and gentle stretching to improve strength, balance, and mobility. Workouts target the glutes, abs, quads, and hips. 
  • Dance: a health-promoting physical activity that is a series of steps and movements set to music. It can be considered aerobic exercise.
  • Rebounding: performed on a mini trampoline, this form of jumping burns more calories than other common exercises while activating all cells in all muscle groups on 3 levels: gravity, acceleration, and deceleration. Gentle on joints, highly efficient.
  • Kettlebell training: efficient and effective tools for providing total-body strength and conditioning as well as flexibility and cardiovascular training.

Frequency: 3-5 times per week for 30 minutes (if it’s your main workout that day) or a minimum of 15-20 minutes as part of your overall workout.

Stretching

Anything that helps you lengthen, open, and improve the range of motion in your muscles. The goal is to reduce damage or injury to muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints.

Frequency: 5 minutes before every workout and 5-10 minutes after every workout.

The Metabolic Catalyst

As you view your workout week, consider the activities you’ll be doing every single day of the week. You’ll want to incorporate all of the components of a workout routine as I have described above, which can be daunting. Who has time to do flexibility work, cardio, strength training, core work, and stretch every single day?

I use one principle to do it all called the Metabolic Catalyst. When you combine the biology of this phenomenon with certain high-efficiency, high-results workouts, you get incredible results.

The Metabolic Catalyst happens naturally when you activate certain muscle groups— the biggest ones in your body like your glutes, quads, and abs. The Metabolic Catalyst is stimulated by the activation of the muscle fibers in your large muscle groups when you train them in any manner that stimulates muscle contraction. 

Training large muscle groups improves athletic performance, stimulates glucose metabolism (which helps to manage blood sugar levels), and catalyzes fat burning. After you’ve finished your workout, your body continues to experience post-exercise oxygen consumption which drives calorie burning. That’s why I include glute, ab, and quad training every chance I get in my weekly workout plan.

Woman lifting weights on a rebounder

Cellercising: A Must-Do Exercise for Noticeable Results

In my career, I’ve discovered the best forms of exercise which harness fat-burning power in the least amount of time for maximum results include kettlebell training and cellercising (or rebounding). Perform them in combination and in intervals or Tabatas and you have got the secret to fat-burning locked and loaded!

A study done by the American Council on Exercise found the effectiveness of kettlebell training for burning calories far surpassed cross-country skiing, long considered the king of exercises for fat burning. According to the study, “doing kettlebell snatches for intervals of 15 seconds of work and 15 seconds of rest was equivalent to the calorie burn of running at a six-minute-mile pace.”

Take note that the caloric burn for those 15-second intervals didn’t include the afterburn effect that happens for hours afterward.

BONUS: Doing the exercise in intervals shortens your training time!

One of my absolute favorite ways to exercise is by using my Cellercise unit (a rebounder).  

I’ve had it for many years and have been faithfully jumping away fat, flab, and fluffiness. There’s tremendous science to support the value of rebounding. Here’s the short list:

  • Cellercising burns calories 11 times faster than walking, 5 times faster than swimming, and 3 times faster than running. It also works ALL 75 trillion of your cells, 100 times per minute.
  • Cellercising increases traditional weightlifting results by up to 26% if you do it for 30 seconds between sets.
  • At equal levels of oxygen uptake where you’re breathing hard, rebounding is 60% more effective than running and also twice as efficient as running.
  • Jogging, running, or skipping on a traditional hard surface is too jarring. It injures joints and other body parts, and creates stress and tension which then results in restricted circulation.
  • Using the Cellercise rebounder is the only piece of exercise equipment in existence that harnesses the three main weight-bearing movements: acceleration, deceleration, and gravity.
  • Cellercising enhances proprioception. The brain spends 90% of your energy trying to figure out where your body is in space at any given moment. This is called proprioception or your body’s ability to know where it is in three-dimensional space.  It’s critically important for your balance and posture. Cellercising is one of the few exercises you can do to improve this. 

All this to say, Cellercising or rebounding is one of the most effective and pleasant ways to build a lean, healthy, injury-free physique during any time of your life.

Time to Get To Work

Now you know my secrets to staying lean and strong, even during menopause! I have harnessed the power of the Metabolic Catalyst and interval training, combined with the efficiency of highly specific and targeted exercises to create your one-way ticket to the strongest, healthiest, most head-turning body you’ve ever owned.

Remember that wellness is a journey, and you don’t have to make it alone. Explore my weight loss guides and programs and make sure you have everything you need to move confidently forward as you age into menopause gracefully and purposefully.

With great love and wishes for wellness,

Tosca

Tosca Reno

Author, columnist, motivational speaker, reality TV star, radio personality, consultant, mother and wife, Tosca Reno has been inspiring millions with the Eat Clean™️ Diet series and sharing the success she's had with weight loss and Clean Eating.

0 Comments

Similar Posts

Loving My Mother

Loving My Mother

A tribute to my mom, Trijntje Dumay Van DiepenAugust 7, 1935 - March 3, 2023 Late winter is always a bit of a climb emotionally speaking. This one is no exception as it recalls the events that would eventually culminate in the passing of my mother. “She wasn’t...