When you talk about your research in relation to HIIT, are these short intervals that they were doing? Would they have quite long recoveries? Are they HIIT sort of on its own in terms of a cardiovascular based activity or are they using weights or can it be all of the above? Are there any specific requirements we should be thinking of?

Yeah, I love it.

Thanks for bringing it back to what matters most.

And it really is, it can look a lot of different ways.

Typically in a laboratory-based setting and what we leverage a lot of work on is with high-intensity interval training of one minute hard, one minute rest, up to 10 times.

That's kind of our base model based on several things that we've looked at.

One interesting thing, we've actually looked at some genetic mice models that between male and female mice and women and female mice respond always to this exercise approach.

So if we look at kind of the Norwegian 4x4 that's typically talked about in terms of improving VO2 max with the four minutes on, three minutes off, will that pull as efficiently from things like visceral fat and improve metabolic health as well as the one minute on, one minute off?

controversial.

Yes.

Okay.

So here's what I would say is like, if you have the option to, I have to eat or train and you want to train, go train.

However, you know, especially on days that are, let's say you're doing high volume resistance training and you're fasted.

We know that your training will suffer.

But, you know, you have a lower volume, lower effects, but the training is still going to outpower everything.

What does the research say, Abby, what should we be doing with creatine?

Okay.

And so creatine in women is not new.

Uh, and what we have learned, if I look back even at that study, we didn't control for menstrual cycle.

We didn't control for hormones.

That doesn't mean it's bad research, it's just how do we continue to evolve and understand.

And that's honestly why I have spent more time, uh, looking at female health and performance, is because we start to see, not more gaps, but there's a difference in how women respond than men in some scenarios, not all.

So back to your question, there's this stat that's thrown out.

Would you recommend a DEXA scan? Would that be the thing? Would you recommend weighing yourself on a scale or any other method? And then after they do that, like, what do they do with that data?

So I was just wondering how you feel about that.

All right, so I'll give you a science take on this from someone building the science.

I think AI has so much potential, but, uh, and I think we've talked about this a little bit, I also feel more confident than ever that I have job security, meaning that the AI has to be built on model of data.

And so if we don't continue to produce more good data, the models get stuck.

And I think we need to be talking more about that because if we don't feed more money back into the research that fills the model, we're stagnant.

At the same time, it's accelerating research and translation, which I think is really exciting.

Uh, we heard from Dr. Hill, like sometimes I'll take a paper and say, "Hey, give me the key takeaways." And I usually edit it in a way that is meaningful from my view or what we're trying to do, but it is, um, accelerates that process.

I know, isn't it great?

Athletes talk about being cooked and, you know, fried and, uh, y- you know, and, and I think sometimes people are confused, like, are we talking about the brain, the body, poor recovery, under-fueling, hormone disruption? And are we taking all of this and lumping it into different, you know, into one thing? Um, so maybe we can just sort of start there when we talk about being in your sympathetic and your parasympathetic and from a loose term, what's really happening.

Yeah, so I'm gonna just break it down real simple in a way that right now I'm midlife, and when I think about a lot of the conversations I have is around sympathetic nervous system and caffeine and getting people ready to go- ... oh, which I love, and sometimes we need that.

Like, caffeine's amazing.

But the conversation around that is that's how I was, I was th- I always was th- thinking, oh, we need to be sympathetically ready.

You know, we're gonna stimulate.

It works.

I mean, don't get me wrong, love that.

I wonder if it ever shows up in athletes.

Wow.

So like bone takes a really long time to build, so I'm not gonna like put my feather in that cap, but, uh, a trend beyond measurement error of increase in bone, not only from whole body DEXA but from pQCT.

And so some good pilot data to say like, "Oh, we might actually be able to help these midlife women with bone, uh, before we start worrying about it in post-menopause," which is typically when, when we're allowed to get that, that in- information.

Yeah.

Um, and then you think about, uh, changes in sleep and duration in perimenopause due to hot flashes or whatever it may be.

Uh, and so when you think about the application, creatine ha- has been shown to help with sleep.

Um, actually, a recent study by Dr. Anne Brown, um, after resistance training, on the days that women resistance trained, creatine helped improve sleep, uh, duration and quality.

We have creatine stores in the brain.

Can you explain what is actually happening when you take creatine, what the fluid is, where it is, and why it's important?

Yes.

Okay, so I think one of the things that there's more clarity now, but still misunderstood.

So creatine and the most widely studied is creatine monohydrate, which is creatine plus a water molecule.

And so creatine with the water molecule essentially pulls water from the extracellular space into the muscle and your muscle is mostly water, so that's a good thing.

It often brings other things with it.

It often brings glucose with it.

How do you take it and when? What's the reasoning? Okay,