Its no secret that navigating your journey as a female in the health and fitness world is tough, so here are some simple ways to help you understand and hopefully be able to apply to your life going forward and notice the benefits.
Before we launch our first event - Women's Day, 8th June - I thought it might be a good idea to lay some foundations on what to expect and how beneficial understanding these topics can be for you.
Brief explanation of female hormones:
You probably know that the dominant female hormone is estrogen, which plays a huge role in your female characteristics. However, we are more concerned with how it may affect your body composition, your mood, energy and even your motivation.
Estrogen plays a huge role in metabolism, brain states, body fat distribution, water retention, blood sugar regulation. For the sake of easy reading, and practical takeaways, I'm going to talk about my top 3 menopausal effects of reduced estrogen - and leave the rest for Women's Day. So if you didn't know, estrogen is one hormone that is directly affected during the phases of the menopause. After a lot of fluctuating peri-menopause, ultimately estrogen levels drop towards nil and now the body will start to feel that. So heres my top 3 noticeable changes:
Serotonin - "The happy hormone" Estrogen pays a huge role in the production of serotonin, reduces is degradation and inhibits the re-uptake of the neurotransmitter. Serotonin is proven to improve both mood and sleep. Serotonin is the precursor to melatonin, the main hormone organising sleep. Reduced serotonin production will only impair the quality and quantity of our sleep. With lacking sleep, the negative effects of sleep deprivation, reduced mood and less motivation, it is only fair and normal to expect less drive and commitment to your fitness journey. You will probably struggle, thats fine. But you still want results, progression and success right? It's still possible with the right help, guidance and support. (Plug for Women's day again....)
Blood Sugar Control Estrogen improves our ability to control blood sugar. When our body finds it tough to dispose of blood sugar, our energy and appetite will become very unregulated. When blood sugar is low, our energy drops because our most efficient and readily available form of energy is glucose (blood sugar). When your body is so used to using glucose, it wont straight away switch metabolic pathways as it hasn't been used to it. We will then sometimes feel light headed, nauseous, dizzy. When blood sugar does drop, our body will stimulate appetite to try and replenish the energy. However the amount we then eat will be far more than we actually need, and the perfect environment to not exercise, but also over consume, consequently feeling a little down and demotivated.
Fat Deposition When you enter the menopause, while your hormones change, this does also directly affect some physical attributes. As well as the bone density, hair and skin improvements estrogen elicits, it does also affect where we deposit our fat tissue. The textbook female will deposit fat around the legs and buttocks, however when estrogen is on the downward trajectory, the female hormonal ratios start to gear towards androgens (male hormone) which will deposit fat around the midsection. There are many things we can do for this including weight training, building tissue in areas we wish to build and under-taking nutritional approaches to reduce the amount of fat tissue gained and under correct guidance being able to reduce the fat tissue that you have accumulated over a few years of chaos hitting the menopause.
If you would like to learn about many more effects you can experience as a female, especially menopausal stages of life, then get yourself booked on the Women's Day, where an expert female gynaecologist will be holding 2 talks at THRIVE alongside some coffee, cake and a ladies only workout so you can start to recognise your true potential. This will be our first ever Tunbridge Wells Women's Day in our exclusive Personal Training Studio. Come and join the community, and get ahead of the game.
See you there,
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