So can you talk about proper nutrition going into a workout? And then what's our recovery meal look like as well?

Yeah, so when we have our hormones working for us, we can get away with a lot.

That's why we look at all these trends and people are like, I don't really have an issue.

What are you talking about? But as we get older, our bodies become more sensitive to things.

So eating beforehand is really important.

I'm not saying a full meal.

we look at the research and we see that 30 grams of carbohydrate with 15 to 20 grams of protein before a session that has cardio and strength is optimal because what we're doing is we are now telling the hypothalamus which is really where our energy systems are that there's some nutrition coming in so that we can raise our blood sugar We have enough nutrition coming in so that we can hit intensities.

yeah.

What's your opinion on wearables? for sleep and then in general?

With wearables, they're only as good as the collected and how that data is collected is the best way to put it.

And when we lean into it, the algorithms that are written for wearables are based on male physiology.

So full stop, we know that they are not a device that is built for her.

So this is one of the problems we have with the algorithms is when you are looking at something like heart rate variability, which is something that everyone wants to look at because it dictates stress resilience.

For a woman in perimenopause, you're going to see it all over the show because sometimes you have progesterone, sometimes you don't.

And you're having changes in your sympathetic nervous system because, yes, now we're more highly sympathetically driven because our body's undergoing all these changes.

So the woman that wants longevity, good heart and good health as she ages, what are those movement protocols going to look like?

I know there's infinite, infinite examples, but we'd love to hear some of the top ones that you hear about day to day.

So one story I really like to share that kind of puts everything into light is the whole 90 minutes of no caffeine thing.

after you wake up, right? People hear this all the time, the influencers and everyone's like, oh, you should just have hot water with lemon.

Don't have any caffeine because it spikes your cortisol.

As a scientist, I know that that's not true.

Like I've studied physiology.

I know the way the body works.

to make sure it is true research.

Yeah

... we are losing our hormone pulses, our estrogen, progesterone pulses because we're flat lining.

The hypothalamus is in a little bit of a dysfunctional state 'cause it's like, "Hey, wait.

Uh, I, I don't have to create this pulse every day, but I still have that stimulus for it." So you're bringing food in to also let the hypothalamus work a bit better.

So if we are having that-

Oh.

Like, I wouldn't use soy milk because it gives me too many of the negative side effects, but other people don't.

So the Western idea of soy is very nuanced as well, because unless you are really following the ethos of the Japanese lifestyle and all the benefits it has, then you could potentially have issues with soy.

Yeah.

Let's get that fast movement.

And those are the types of, of training that we have to think about, and people look at me and say, "What? I can't do that.

I've never done anything." I'm like, "I don't want you to do it today.

I want you to get your tendons and your ligaments under load by doing some body weight and some isometric stuff, then we're gonna add a little bit of load, and it might take you a year, maybe a year and a half to be able to do that.

But I'm not looking at a training block right now that's gonna get you injured.

I want to phase you into it, and it doesn't matter how old you are." There was a study that I was reading last, last week where they took 60 to 80-year-olds versus our 20 to 30-year-olds and was looking, they're both novice in strength training, and looking at neural development.

So we, if we take this discussion we just had about a 42-year-old, are there any changes you would make for a 62-year-old starting out?

You know, you're on podcasts, you're talking to people all day a lot, but what do you notice between the mentality of women and people from Europe, from the islands and to the States? What are some common threads and what do you think we can learn from them and they can learn from us?

I think the pace of life is completely different.

Because if we look at like what's happening in New Zealand, Australia, Pacifica, even UK, everyone's productive, but it's not this crazy like go, go, go 24-7 that we have in the States.

One of the reasons that my daughter was excited to move here is because she could have Amazon in three hours.

Like that doesn't happen anywhere else, right? Shopping, 24-hour shopping, because it's just this go, go, go, go.

And there's no indication of fallibility.

And it's OK to take a pause.

Do you have anything that's specific for women that they could start tomorrow or for young women I'm referring to?

What are those must haves in these facilities that are now being built?

I think the number one thing is language, because we see there's quite a discrepancy in the language that we use around women, primarily because if it's coming from the sport and fitness world, the old school idea that women couldn't have any kind of fallibility is still there.

You had to be aggressive and powerful and muscular and, you know, really defensible in your position of being there.

And the language has morphed around that.

So we see like I like to bring up the ad differences between like what Nike did versus what Dove did during the Olympics, where Nike was very black and white, aggressive, you know, highlighting one particular athlete.

And no one resonated with it.

They're like, you're showing female athletes, but you're not showing it in a lens that lets us relate to it because it's just so brought up in the bro culture that that's what that imaging imagery projected.

Like I'm, I'm close to this on a number of levels, but let's start with girls, teenagers who are playing sports and, From diet to practice habits, like what are the main things that they should be focused on and that their parents should help them be focused on? Because they're still young people.

Talk to me about why that is, and what should we be eating before we go work out?

Yeah.

If we're looking at chrononutrition, so we talk about our circadian rhythm, and women's circadian rhythms are a little bit shorter than men's.

So when we're looking at the way that the body responds through our circadian rhythm, we have certain hormone pulses that rely on our circadian rhythm.

So when we first wake up, we have what's called a cortisol awakening response.

Women's peak is higher than men's.

It's also attached to some of our appetite hormones.

Yeah, me too

Mm-hmm.

As much as I love Darwin, I also hate him for saying women have smaller brains so they're not as intelligent.

They don't deserve a, a seat at the table.

So when science was starting and they're looking at methods and how to design and how to answer questions, it's all through a male lens.

It still exists now.

So we didn't have women at the table to ask the questions about, well, I'm 20, or I'm 30, or I'm 40, and I have a menstrual cycle, or I have all these issues, to be able to incorporate that into scientific design.

And so it's just been excluded.

[laughs]

Yeah.

When we look at intermittent fasting, this is where it gets a little bit crazy, 'cause you have d- people that are, you know, doing the fasting mimicking type diet where they have days of really low calorie intake and then we have days of normal eating, or we have the 24 or the 16/8.

There's all sorts of different ways of people not eating, with the, with the idea of increasing metabolic flexibility, increasing our mitochondrial dens- um, respiration and mitochondrial density, telomere length, all this kinda stuff.

When we look at all the positive outcomes, it's based on male data.

When we look at what happens for women, completely different story.

We don't have an increase in parasympathetic drive.

We have an increase in sympathetic drive.

Not because humans aren't enough, but because they're everything.

Not that they don't know high intensity interval training, but that a lot of things are labeled that that are not exactly that.

Yeah, that's the other thing that's out.

We put a post about polarized training and no zone two and got so much pushback about, oh, well, what do you mean about cortisol? Cortisol is released every time you exercise.

Well, yes, it is.

But the problem with the difference of true high intensity interval training and High-intensity interval training that's really just modern intensity is that when the cortisol comes up, it stays elevated in the modern intensity and increases stress on the body.

Your body's already stressed.

But with true high-intensity interval training, the post-exercise response is an increase in growth hormone and testosterone, which drops cortisol.

What to expect, how to navigate, a little more sleeplessness, lack of blood sugar control, I'm losing muscle on my body, and how

What inspired you to create NexGen, the program, and why now?

Um, it's kind of been in the back of my head, like, you know, when we start looking at my life evolution, you can kind of follow it through my books and programs.

Living across the street from an elementary school, which is where my daughter went, and just watching the social interactions change from year to year, it's like, well, why are we, like, categorizing the boys and the girls in the same capacity? 'Cause we see that the older girls, now they're not playing on the monkey bars.

They don't have a field to play soccer.

They're walking around.

They're not being physically active, and it's all because of the way it's been constructed on the playground.

So going and having a conversation with the head teacher, who's a phys ed teacher, he's like: "I see this happening, uh, but I didn't really realize what was happening until you said something." So we were able to commandeer a field for the girls to play.

Why do you think they drop out so early?

Mm

... we grew up in the same era, right? Of, of seeing the heroin chic, and then started getting really excited when that no longer was...

Like, we had body confidence and all different sorts of body shapes and sizes coming out to celebrate the differences in body shapes.

And then we had the strong is the new skinny, which is fantastic, being strong and powerful and taking up space, which is my mantra in our house because I also have a teenage daughter.

And, um, [lips smack] now we're seeing all the, uh, misuse of the GLP-1s to create that heroin chic super, super skinny look again.

And I navigate it with my daughter and her friends to say, uh, to take kind of a page out of Vonda Wright's new S- Skeletal Longevity, where she's like, "You can have skeletal frailty," which is what the Ozempic and heroin chic look is, because we see that there's a, a drop in muscle mass, there's a drop in, uh, our bone mass, and all of that leads to frailty, and we're not going to be independent.

You can have skeletal longevity, which is looking at all the systems that create strong, powerful, robust women.

Mm.

And it was in New York, and, you know, very excited to go and learn because, you know, I'm now treating patients in those last few decades of life, and what is the science saying? What's out there? And it was basically a menopause conference-

conference-And people trying to sell gray market peptides.

Like, there was no [laughs] longevity science.

Like, at least as far as what I was hoping for.

Right.

And I'm like, "Is this what women's health- It's growing fast ...

in our last three decades has become?" Yeah.

Why?

Yep.

Yeah, absolutely, which is a pretty far cry from the, um, you know, two moderate, moderate exercise resistance training sessions that things like ACSM have out there.

We're starting to see more and more research on the benefits of resistance training.

Not only that, but resistance training does give you metabolic changes.

As we talk about zone two and mitochondria and that kind of stuff, we still get mitochondrial changes with resistance training.

And when we're talking about cardiovascular and, like, reducing things like visceral fat, we need a really high intensity work for that.

We know that short bouts of really high intensity work improve cardiovascular because, one, we're having to really shift blood rapidly to the muscles in the heart under high load.

Right.

Where did the passion drive come from, and where did the focus for equality come from?

Passion and drive, I think, is modeled from my parents.

My dad was a career military man, and my mom was in, following and supporting, and they never said that we couldn't do anything.

And so it was real like, "Okay, let's go.

Let's do this," and then the competition of, of trying to make friends fast, fit in when you're moving around.

Also, school, you want to get to a good university, and people around you were in the same mindset.

Uh, and it just kind of fell into that.

Right? So-

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Which is a pretty far cry from the, you know, two moderate exercise resistance training sessions that things like ACSM have out there.

We're starting to see more and more research on the benefits of resistance training.

Not only that, but resistance training does give you metabolic changes.

As we talk about zone 2 and mitochondria and that kind of stuff, we still get mitochondrial changes with resistance training.

And when we're talking about cardiovascular and like reducing things like visceral fat, we need a really high intensity work for that.

What's that mean, by the way? You mean between sleep and wake?

All those system work together as a whole body circadian rhythm.

Okay.

So if we talk about whole body circadian rhythm, within that we have our different hormone pulses.

So we'll see, you know, you have cortisol that rises, that allows you to wake up, and then it comes down, and then it pulses throughout the day, depending on different stresses.

It starts to go down, and we have a, a kind of a, a lull time about 4:00, and then it might start to come up, and then it, it plateaus and goes down a little bit more so we can go to sleep.

Melatonin we see starts to peak around 9:00 or starts rising about 5:00.

Starts to peak about 9:00.

Floating around

Talk about why you dove down this rabbit hole.

Um, so there is a history of dementia and on my dad's side of the family.

So I've always been interested in how do you preserve the brain and brain health? I had the benefit of meeting Maria Shriver and she's part of the, or actually the head of the women's Alzheimer's movement and driving that.

So we start looking at the risk factors and we go, well, it's 2026 and we don't actually know why women are more predisposed to it.

We see differences in the plaque tanglements.

We see differences in brain metabolism.

But what we do see from some population randomized control trials is strength training actually helps with neural connectivity.

creatine a day especially like um if we're looking at things like cognition and brain health and stuff like that so this leads me into the next um thing i want to talk to you about like why why do you think creatine is this this thing that is so monumental for women's cognitive function

Is that enough for her to age well and be well?

If we're talking about the walking component of movement, and that's what she's doing, no, it's not.

'Cause if we're looking at walking, we're falling into the idea that we're doing cardiovascular work, which is good.

I mean, we want that.

But when we start looking at what does it mean to age well, we need to look at, uh, how strong and powerful we are just to be able to carry groceries when we're 80.

Think about our bone and bone density, and we also really want to examine what does cardiovascular fitness look like.

Because when we start getting into perimenopause onwards, because we've lost the epigenetic exposure of estrogen and progesterone, and to some extent testosterone, that affects every system of the body, we have to really understand what that means.

Okay.

Can you explain to us why we're at this point where we're suddenly going, "Oh, we don't understand half the population on a deep physiological level"?

Yeah.

So I bring it actually to the pandemic, to COVID, to really enlighten what's going on, especially in the biomedical world.

We had the global representation of female athletes coming out and talking about the menstrual cycle before the pandemic, and then we started seeing things like Ambien dosage still made women really drowsy and narcoleptic when they woke up the next day s- because the dosage was too high.

But when the pandemic hit, and we started seeing sex differences and responses to the actual disease and virus, and we saw sex differences in the recovery, and sex differences in the response to the different vaccines, then the whole medical community, because everyone was focused on the same exact thing, the whole medical community woke up and said, "Oh my gosh.

You're right.

There are sex differences.

Mm.

Okay friends, I have tea.

Actually, I shouldn't build this up so much because it's really not

Are we actually skipping over the fundamentals by going straight to HRT, in your opinion?

Yes, because we've seen the pendulum swing from WHI saying, let's not use it at all, and a whole generation of women have missed out, to now all the women saying, yes, we all want it for as long as possible.

But we don't have the long-term data.

What we do have specifically is if you are 60 and younger, then there can be some cardiovascular benefit.

We see that it does definitely help with bone.

We see that it can slow the rate of change of body comp, doesn't stop it.

Um, what would you say here for women? Like, where should our focus be, and does that research hold its own in relation to women?

Those are all typical high-intensity interval training sessions.

Those are true high-intensity interval training sessions.

People think they're new and novel because they're just now hitting the mainstream.

They've been around in high-performance sport forever.

And when you're thinking about what is high-performance sport versus the general pop, general pop thinks that high-intensity's a spin class or a Barry Boo- Bootcamp, right? And that's what they're used to with high intensity.

So then when you come out and go, look, if we're doing a really hard workout that's a true high-intensity session, like the Norwegian 4x4, this comes stock standard out of endurance racing and high performance.

Because, like, if you're doing a sprint, it won't even show the heart rate until you've finished, and then you're in recovery and you're like, "I don't even know if I'm recovering quickly enough." Do you know what I mean? It doesn't-- I find that if I'm looking at heart rate, it has to be with a chest strap.

So if we think about inside the body,

A lot of women, well, I'll contextualize it.

The way that we grew up and seeing the emphasis of the 90s supermodel, calories in, calories out, fat burning, all of that is still rife, right? We see this.

And as we're seeing the uprise of the misuse of the GLP-1 for more aesthetics rather than health, we're being pushed back into that skinny is really what we want to aim for.

And that is one of the biggest missteps that we have.

Because if we start looking at that whole aesthetics, I want to be thin, I want to be lean.

If I were to ask women who are in their late 40s, early 50s to give me the results of their DEXA, even though they look lean and fit on the outside, we're going to see, for the most part, low bone density, an increased amount of visceral fat, And, you know, maybe body fat percentage is okay, but the visceral fat is the worrying part.

Yeah, 100 percent.

And so it really changed my life, but I wanna know, because people who are listening now will know of you because I talk about you and you're everywhere, what drives you, my friend? Why have you just spent the last six weeks in the US? Why are you here? Why are you working night and day to change the world for women? What is it?

I think there are two big things.

One of the drivers is I am so tired of the way society makes women feel inferior if they aren't very small and petite and fit into this, like, little box.

It makes me mad, because we are more than that.

We are more than what a weight is on the scale.

We are more than what we look like in clothes, and I feel like that's being projected.

And now that we see this microdosing and misuse of the GLP-1, it's coming back, and that just makes me so incensed because that is not how we want to navigate through life.

Okay.