Aging as an Endurance Athlete: Hormones, Recovery, Bone Health and the Changes You Can’t Ignore

I'll actually take the body composition changes.

So that's, that's one that I think is.

Okay.

Let's, if we're going to talk about that, let's talk about, cause I think that's kind of related to a few others.

So like maybe let's just talk first.

Let's do the hormone changes first.

Yeah.

Because I think this is a big one, especially for men, but also for women, because maybe at some point, if we have enough interest, we could do more of a deep dive into perimenopause and menopause.

I mean, it's a topic that does involve a little bit of expertise that I feel somewhat Like, I can talk about it, but I also am not a physician.

We're not going to go into a deep dive into this.

But I do think it's important to kind of mention some of these changes.

And then also with men, mostly testosterone.

But women, I think, unfortunately, we have it a little bit harder because of the... because of the changes.

And then the unfortunate thing about it is as women are going through perimenopause, there's a lot of erratic ups and downs in estrogen.

And so there's, it's not like it's a slow decline necessarily, but a lot of the symptoms that women experience, like the hot flashes, like the sleep disturbances, maybe some of the mental side of it is like it's frustrating because it's, it's kind of going up and down.

There's not a slow decline in estrogen.

It's kind of these like periods of time where there's higher estrogen and lower estrogen.

And then eventually the estrogen levels kind of bottom out and somebody might, or a woman might experience full menopause, but it's that like sort of erratic, you know, hormonal fluctuations that make this so hard.

And if you kind of think about it as a female, um, If you're experiencing this and you're having things like hot flashes and not sleeping well or, you know, estrogen can have other impacts on the body.

Like, I mean, obviously, we'll talk a little bit about bone health, but it can kind of influence glucose levels.

It can kind of have a little bit of a metabolic-like influence.

And changes in body composition can be related to these fluctuations that we'll talk about.

So I think women have... a particularly hard time in this because there's so much up and down.

And so I think we can kind of talk.

I'm not going to talk about...