# Menopause, Part 2: The 2,000-Year-Old Lie About Women and Exercise

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Barbell Medicine
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU
- **Дата:** 05.06.2026
- **Длительность:** 40:46
- **Просмотры:** 192

## Описание

The story goes that hard exercise is risky for women, and that the idea is ancient. Both halves fall apart on contact. In this solo episode, Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum follows the claim that physical effort harms the female body across twenty centuries, and shows that almost every version of it arrived as a verdict first, with the science bolted on afterward.


It runs from antiquity to the present: what Galen actually wrote, why Sparta trained its women on purpose, the Victorian “vital force” panic and Edward Clarke’s claim that studying would sterilize girls, the doctor who prescribed bed rest to women and the wilderness to men, and the 1928 Olympic 800m that was erased for 32 years over a collapse that never happened. Then the correction: the research that finally tested heavy training in older women and women with low bone mass, and what it found. The episode closes on 2026, where the guidelines say lift and the menopause market often says don’t.
What we cover


•    Why the “ancient Greeks” origin story for the no-hard-exercise rule doesn’t hold up.


•    How a Victorian energy-budget idea became a medical case against women lifting and studying.


•    The real story of the 1928 Olympic women’s 800m and the 32-year ban.


•    The strong women who were relabeled as freaks or exceptions instead of counted.


•    What Fiatarone’s nonagenarians and LIFTMOR actually showed about lifting heavy later in life.


•    The cortisol panic, the fasting scare, and cycle syncing, examined against the data.


•    Why the cautious messaging now comes from the market, not the medical guidelines.






Timestamps

  •  00:00 The 1928 Olympic “massacre” that never happened
  •  03:37 Antiquity: what the Greeks actually said
  •  06:50 The Victorians and “vital force”
  •  10:02 Mary Putnam Jacobi tests the claim, and is ignored
  •  11:53 1928 in full: who killed the women’s 800m
  •  13:53 The double standard, and Alice Milliat
  •  15:39 The strong women history relabeled
  •  20:26 The correction: what the evidence shows
  •  22:27 LIFTMOR: lifting heavy with low bone mass
  •  24:35 2026: guidelines, the market, and cortisol
  •  28:34 Cycle syncing, and naming the pattern
  •  30:40 What to take away





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References


Cahn S. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport. Harvard University Press; 1994.


Clarke EH. Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company; 1873.


Colenso-Semple LM, McKendry J, Lim C, et al. Menstrual cycle phase does not influence muscle protein synthesis or whole-body myofibrillar proteolysis in response to resistance exercise. J Physiol. 2025. PMID: 39630025.


Daly W, Hackney AC. Is exercise cortisol response of endurance athletes similar to levels of Cushing's syndrome? J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 2019. PMID: 31371847.


Eastell R, Rosen CJ, Black DM, Cheung AM, Murad MH, Shoback D. Pharmacological management of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women: an Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2019;104(5):1595-1622. PMID: 30907953.


Fiatarone MA, Marks EC, Ryan ND, Meredith CN, Lipsitz LA, Evans WJ. High-intensity strength training in nonagenarians: effects on skeletal muscle. JAMA. 1990;263(22):3029-3034. PMID: 2342214.


Fiatarone MA, O'Neill EF, Ryan ND, et al. Exercise training and nutritional supplementation for physical frailty in very elderly people. N Engl J Med. 1994;330(25):1769-1775.


Galen. On the Preservation of Health (De Sanitate Tuenda). 2nd century CE. Various translations.


Jacobi MP. The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons; 1877. (Awarded the Harvard Boylston Prize.)


Latella C, Teo WP, Spathis J, et al. Using powerlifting athletes to determine strength adaptations across ages in males and females: a longitudinal growth modelling approach. Sports Med. 2024;54(3):753-774.


Maudsley H. Sex in mind and in education. Fortnightly Review. 1874;15:466-483.


Plutarch. Life of Lycurgus. Approx. 75 CE. Various translations.


Schultz J. Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women's Sport. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; 2014.


Sinaki M, Mikkelsen BA. Postmenopausal spinal osteoporosis: flexion versus extension exercises. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 1984;65(10):593-596. PMID: 6487063.


Soranus of Ephesus. Gynecology. Approx. 2nd century CE. Translated by Temkin O. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1991.


Switzer K. Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women's Sports. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press; 2007.


Todd J. Various publications. Iron Game History. Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas at Austin.


Tunis JR. Women and...

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU) The 1928 Olympic “massacre” that never happened

Austin and I wrote a book and it's called Signal: What Testosterone Levels Are Telling You About Your Health. And it is available for pre-order right now with copies shipping in June. Here's why we wrote it. The testosterone conversation right now is a mess. About a quarter of testosterone prescriptions in the United States are started without any lab work. And over half of men who meet criteria for low testosterone see their levels normalized on their own without any treatment. And at the same time, nearly 40% of men who are 40 and older who have low testosterone, only about one in 10 of them are actually getting treatment. So some men are getting medicated for problems that they don't have. While other men who would genuinely benefit from treatment, or at least an evaluation, well, they're not getting it. And everyone is trying to make decisions about testosterone, whether it's lifestyle, medication, or otherwise, without a clear framework for what testosterone even does. Signal is the book that we wrote to sort all of that out. It covers the physiology of testosterone from the ground up, how levels trend across the lifespan, and what has been driving them down at the population level over the last 50 years with a surprising increase in the last decade. We get into what testosterone actually does to exercise outcomes and what exercise does to testosterone because those are two different questions that get conflated constantly. There's a full section on female hormonal physiology rather than treating it as a footnote. We cover how to interpret labs when the testing itself is unreliable, lifestyle measures that can move the needle before medication enters the conversation in a detailed chapter on TRT for the people where it is appropriate. This is the book we wished existed when we started out. Right now, you can pre-order the hard cover, the Kindle version, or bundle both together. And there's a pre-order special right now where you can add the barbell medicine testosterone course taught by Dr. Austin Brocky with a significant discount. The course is normally $124. 99 and you can get it for $49 if you pre-order before June 17th, which also happens to be my birthday. So, a little birthday present to me and help support what we do here at Barbone Medicine. Head over to barbell medicine. com and pre-order Signal today. That's barbell medicine. com. Look for Signal in the shop. Somewhere today, a woman in her early 60s is standing in a gym holding a pair of 5 lb dumbbells because somebody she trusts told her to put the heavy stuff down or maybe not even start. Could have been a trainer. It wellness coach with an aesthetic looking Instagram page, maybe even her own doctor. And the reasons all sounded so modern. Your bones are fragile now. Your hormones are a mess. Your cortisol is already through the roof. And lifting heavy is only going to make it worse. So, walking only lightweights, be careful. Now, keep her in the back of your mind because the advice that she just got is about 2,000 years old. And it has been wrong the entire time. Let me show you how wrong. Let's go back to the 2nd of August 1928 in Amsterdam at the Olympic Games. Nine women line up for the first women's 800 meter race ever run at an Olympics. And you might already know the story of what happened next because it got retold on Moss for the next 90 years. It was a massacre. Women collapsing on the track, bodies down across the finish line, living proof at last that the distance was just too much for the female body. Now, there's one problem with that story. It's complete fiction. Nine women did start the race. Nine women did finish. And the winner, Lena Radkkey of Germany, ran 2 minutes 16. 8 and set a world record that would stand for the next 16 years. The first six finishers actually all beat the old record pace 2. And the scene at the finish line, well, one runner stumbled, a couple sat down to catch their breath, which if you've ever run an 800 meter race before, is the only rational response to running 800 m. And one woman from Canada, well, she cried because she'd lost. That's it. That's the entire catastrophe. But that is not what sold the newspapers. A sports writer named John Tunis described, and I'm quoting him directly, 11 wretched women. Five dropped out and five collapsed after the tape. 11? Well

### [3:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=217s) Antiquity: what the Greeks actually said

there were nine, and they all finished. The papers actually ran photos of women crumpled on the ground in apparent agony. And those photos were pulled from the 100 meter heats. The collapse didn't happen. Somebody more or less made it up. But it worked. The women's 800 ran that day and then it disappeared. In the years right after, with this coverage ringing in everyone's ears, the men who ran the sport quietly took it out of the program and no woman would run an 800 meter race at the Olympics again until 1960, 32 years later. And it returned based on the strength of a finish line that the actual film footage shows was completely boringly normal. Now, here's why I'm starting in 1928 instead of with our friend at the dumbbell rack. Because 1928 isn't some weird one-off. It's the template. Over and over for centuries, Western medicine has looked at women and hard physical effort and has reached the same verdict. It's dangerous, especially for the babies women were presumably carrying. And every single time, the verdict came first, and the science got bolted on afterward, wearing whatever lab coat was in fashion that decade. The Greeks blamed the humors. The Victorians blamed energy and the vital force. Today, we blame hormones and cortisol. The costume changes, but the verdict is always the same. And every time some woman had the audacity to be living proof that the verdict was wrong, the woman who ran the distance or lifted the barbell, she got explained away and relabeled as a freak instead of counted. On today's podcast, we're going to chase that verdict across 20 centuries. We're going to watch the medical establishment finally change its mind and then figure out what the heck is going on in the menopause influencer space. I'm Dr. Jordan Fagenbomb and this is the Barbell Medicine podcast. — Okay, stop one. If the modern claim is that hard exercise wrecks a woman's fertility, the first move is to check where the idea supposedly came from. Now, everybody points at the ancient Greeks. So, let's actually look because the Greeks do not say what you've been told they say. Let's start with Galen, one of the most influential doctors in Western history, the man whose word was basically medical law for the next thousand years and change. Well, he wrote an entire book on exercise called On the Preservation of Health. And here is the single most useful fact in this segment, and it's a fact about something that's missing. There is no passage anywhere in his book saying that vigorous exercise damages the female reproductive system. None. His big exercise treatise is built around the young male body. And the closest he comes to warning anyone off of hard training is warning everybody, men included, about the excesses of full-time professional athletics. The quote, "Galin told women not to exert themselves is a quote that doesn't exist. " Okay, but what about the wandering womb? The idea that a woman's uterus roams around her body like a lost cat. It's actually a real idea, but it suffered in the retelling. The early hypocratic writers did describe a womb that could drift towards moisture. But the sensational version, the womb prowling around inside of women like a wild animal, comes mostly from Plato, who was a philosopher, not a physician, and from Eritus, a medical writer a few

### [6:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=410s) The Victorians and “vital force”

centuries later with the real flare for the dramatic. It was never a medical consensus. And the ancient doctors who actually specialized in this, Serenus and Galen, both rejected it. Serenus flat out said that the uterus does not, and I quote, issue forth like a wild animal from the layer. He's one of the strongest skeptics in the whole ancient record, and he leaned toward moderate exercise. The roaming uterus is closer to ancient clickbait than it is to ancient medicine. Now, here's where it gets interesting. The ancients didn't just tolerate women exercising. The Spartans actually required it. Two separate ancient sources, the historian Xenophan and the biographer Plutarch described the Spartans putting girls through formal physical training, running, wrestling, throwing the javelin. And when they explain why, it's because they believed strong parents make stronger children. Plutarch's version is even better. He says they trained the girls so that quote the fruit of their wombs might have vigorous root in vigorous bodies. Think about that. The ancient argument for women lifting and running hard was that it would make them better at producing healthy children. Contrast that with the American College of Obstitricians and Gynecologists. Their first guidance on exercise and pregnancy back in 1985 kept women at a heart rate of 140 beats per minute and 15 minutes of exercise at a time and told women who weren't already active not to start. It took about a decade just to drop those limits and decades more before the guidance actively encouraged strength training. The Spartans were 3,000 years ahead of them. Now, I should say that almost everything we know about Sparta comes from outsiders who are either idolizing them or trashalking them. So, this is probably a little squishy, but the main argument holds. Ancient medicine treated moderate exercise as good for basically everyone. And the one society famous for training its women did it on purpose for the babies. So, if the Greeks didn't invent the ban, who did? You should buckle up because the answer is a Harvard professor with a physics obsession. Okay, stop two. And this is where the real damage gets done because the ban on women's hard exercise really begins here. It's Victorian and it was sold as the hottest science of its day. Okay, it's 1873. We're in Boston. A man named Edward Clark, a former Harvard Medical School professor, publishes a slim book called Sex and Education. It his argument is it's completely unhinged. He treats the human body like a bank account with a fixed balance and he calls the currency vital force. And he claims that you can't spend that force on your brain and your reproductive organs at the same time. So a teenage girl who studies hard, especially during her period, is draining the account that's supposed to be funding her ovaries. And the results wrecked fertility, sterility. He genuinely believed that education would break women. You got to appreciate where Clark got this because it wasn't Galen and it wasn't in the four humors, you know, blood, flem, yellow bile, black bile. It was apparently physics. The 1870s were all about the conservation of energy. The idea that energy is finite and it just moves around the system. Clark took the single hottest concept in 19th century science and aimed it directly at the ovary. At the time, this must have felt like cutting edge of science. Here he is in his own words, "Boys must study

### [10:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=602s) Mary Putnam Jacobi tests the claim, and is ignored

and work in a boy's way and girls in a girl's way. " and then describing an actual patient, a young woman who quote had two tasks imposed upon her at once, both of which required a large share of her vital force. One was education of the brain and the other of the reproductive system. And in case you only think he meant studying, in another passage he specifically names muscular effort as one of the things that during a girl's period can lead to, and I quote, an abortion of the function and consequent sterility, lifting, in other words, could break you. This work was widely read. It sold out in about a week and set off a national discussion over whether women should be allowed into college at all. Then it jumped the Atlantic. The very next year in 1874, an English psychiatrist named Henry Modsley ran the same play, writing that women are, and I quote, "For a quarter of every month in life's best years, somewhat sick and unfit for hard work. " But the rebuttal came fast from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, one of the first women licensed as a physician in Britain, who essentially said, "I'm a doctor. I have a female body, and for most healthy women, a period is a minor inconvenience, not a monthly disability. " So, you've got a man theorizing about female incapacity and a woman reporting live from inside the actual experience. Guess whose version the establishment treated as truth? Then things get darker. Around the same time, a doctor named Silus Weir Mitchell gets famous for the quote rest cure. You take an anxious, exhausted woman and you put her to bed. Weeks of it. Isolation, force-feeding, massage, no reading, no work, no nothing. Here's the kicker. Mitchell had a second cure for the exact same diagnosis, and he prescribed it to men. He called it the West cure. Go west, young man. Ride horses, hunt, rough it, exert yourself. He literally sent Walt Whittmann and a young Theodore

### [11:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=713s) 1928 in full: who killed the women’s 800m

Roosevelt off to go be vigorous. When men and women with the same exhaustion saw the same doctor, men got prescribed exertion and women got prescribed the bed. Now, shortly thereafter, a physician named Mary Putnham Jacobe decided to actually test Clark's claim like a scientist. Her 1877 study won Harvard's Boilston Prize, the university's own top medical award. She mailed out a thousand surveys and crunched the 268 that came back. She hooked women up to a device that traced their pulse and blood pressure across the menstrual cycle and then she ran strength tests. Her conclusion and I quote, "There is nothing in the nature of menration to imply the necessity or even the desiraability of rest. This was real, rigorously collected science from a Harvard decorated physician. " And here is what historians say it did to the debate. Virtually no impact. A woman outscienced the most influential claim of the era using Harvard's own gold standard and no one noticed. Now, women's colleges, to their credit, mostly ignored the idea that women should avoid exercise. Instead, they built gyms and required daily exercise. Vassor had women doing an hour of activity a day back in the 1860s. By 1893, Smith hosted the first women's college basketball game, and a survey of 705 women graduates found that higher education hadn't damaged their health, which anyone could have figured out just by using their eyeballs. One college president, M. Cary Thomas of Binmar, later said that her whole generation was quote haunted in those days by the clanging chains of that gloomy little spectre, Dr. Edward Clark's book, Sex and Education. That's a great line and it tells you how much fear that book manufactured and how educated women eventually shook it off like Taylor Swift. Now, the origin of limiting exercise in women was probably Victorian and it ran on physics. Clark said thinking and lifting would sterilize girls, but Jacobe disproved it with data, won Harvard's medical prize, and promptly was ignored. And about 50 years later, the same idea laced up a pair of

### [13:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=833s) The double standard, and Alice Milliat

running shoes and walked onto an Olympic track. Okay, stop three. Now, we started in 1928, but I only gave you the trailer. Here's the whole movie because the true version is stranger than fiction. To recap the truth, nine women started the race and nine women finished. A new world record was set. In fact, the first six women beat the old world record pace. So, who killed the event and how? The 800 meter race was run in 1928 and then pulled from the next Olympics. And the decision was messy, spread across a few years and a few meetings with two different organizational bodies involved. the International Track Federation and the IOC. You'll see a specific vote count for these various meetings, but the details here are disputed. What's not in dispute is the outcome. The race was gone, and the IOC briefly flirted with scrapping women's track and field entirely. It would be gone for another 32 years before the women's 800 meter came back in Rome in 1960. Now, the media coverage of the event in 1928 is so strange that it's a serious contender for the origin story of the phrase fake news. Tunis gave us the 11 imaginary wretched women. The New York Times reported that six of the nine runners fell headlong onto the ground and that race made quote too great a call on feminine strength. N Rockchy. Yeah, that N Rockchnney, the Notre Dame football coach, was moonlighting as a reporter and called it not a very edifying spectacle. And then there's the Alzheimer, the claim that women have quote, "A layer of fat around the heart that makes attempts to emulate men positively dangerous. " Sounds authoritative, right? It traces back to an anonymous physiologist quoted in an Australian newspaper. That's the whole provenence. An anonymous source, not a cardiologist, not even confident enough in their claim to put their name on it. Now, interestingly, at the same

### [15:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=939s) The strong women history relabeled

Olympics, the most famous runner alive, Pavo Nurmy, finished a men's race and collapsed onto the grass, completely wrecked. He was celebrated. The Times described another male runner being sent quote, "Sprawling headlong onto the track, and they meant it as praise. " So, a man-faced planning at the finish was grit and glory, but nine women finishing on their feet was a public health emergency. And if you want the perfect book end, let's go to 1984, the first Olympic marathon ever open to women. A Swiss runner named Gabriella Anderson Shice comes into the stadium for her final lap, visibly cooked. She's weaving all over the track. She's waving off the medics so they wouldn't pull her from the race. They let her finish. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. The whole world called it courage. The exact same image that supposedly proved women were too fragile in 1928, which again was fiction. And 56 years later, we finally celebrated the performance. And here's the buried hero of 1928. Because the only reason women were at those Olympics at all was due to a French woman named Alise Mia who got so fed up waiting for a place to compete that she actually built her own international federation and ran her own women's world games, four of them throughout the 1920s. She forced the door open from the outside and once women's events were safely inside the Olympics, the IAAF and IOC absorbed her federation and subsequently dissolved it. So, the massive collapse of women after the 800 meter race at the 1928 Olympics was basically fake news. But the ban was real and it stuck for 32 years. Now, before we move on, picture our friend at the dumbbell rack again. The exact instinct that watched nine women finish a race and saw a catastrophe is the instinct that looks at a strong six-year-old today and gets nervous about her getting injured. It's the same reflex built upon misinformation that keeps showing up in a different outfit. And in the decades that followed, women kept showing up and doing things that the medical establishment had declared impossible. The systems response wasn't to update. It was to find new ways not to count them. This podcast is sponsored by Factor. Between finishing our new book, Signal, work, and training, my schedule right now is not exactly relaxed. And when I get home late, cooking is just not happening. Relying on willpower is a problem that even I run into. But staying prepared with Factor is how I've been solving it. Now, Factor offers fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and put together by chefs. They're fresh, they're never frozen, and they're ready in 2 minutes. I've been leaning on the Muscle Pro collection because the protein is there, and the macros fit my current energy needs. But they have over 100 rotating options, whether your goal is weight loss, whether it's health, GLP1 support, and more. I love having this as an option to keep me on track. 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### [20:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=1226s) The correction: what the evidence shows

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### [22:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=1347s) LIFTMOR: lifting heavy with low bone mass

looking for a great resource to have alongside our book, Signal and you want to go deeper on programming and nutrition planning, this would be a great addition to your library. Right now, you can go to muscleandstrengthpyramids. com/bm10 and use code BM10 for 10% off. That's musclestrengthpyramids. com/bm10. Code BM10 gets you 10% off at checkout. Now, we're on a stop four. So, the counterfactuals kept showing up. And the interesting question isn't whether or not strongwoman existed. Obviously, they did. It's the machinery that the culture built to avoid counting them. A historian named Susan Khan nailed the move. A strong woman gets labeled masculine, a freak, an Amazon, or she gets grudgingly accepted only if she's pretty enough to reassure everyone. Khan calls that last one the female apologetic. Real strength conveniently filed as an exception. Around 1900, a showman named Bernard McFaten is loudly promoting female strength. He even ran a most perfectly developed woman contest at Madison Square Garden. Sounds progressive, but even he sells it as beauty and motherhood, not capability. Even the biggest cheerleader of women in exercise is running the female apologetic line. Then comes Pudgy Stockton, the queen of Muscle Beach in the 1940s and50s. She wrote a national magazine column for 10 years and helped run an early sanctioned women's weightlifting meet in 1947. her numbers at around 115 lbs of body weight, well, she could clean and jerk 135 lbs. So, she's out there in public doing the thing that everyone swore was impossible for a woman. Now, people used to say, according to her, that if women worked out, they'd look masculine or wouldn't be able to get pregnant, but the culture accepted her mostly because she was considered gorgeous. Strength would be allowed only with a beauty permit attached. Now, the marathon is the famous one. You know, Katherine Switzer in 1967 registered as KV Switzer, and an enraged official literally ran onto the Boston Marathon course to tear her number off mid race. It made for an iconic photo. There's two corrections here, though. Bobby Gibb had already run Boston the year before in 1966 with no bib, and she beat Switzer by almost an hour in 1967. So, Switzer's real

### [24:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=1475s) 2026: guidelines, the market, and cortisol

distinction is the official number and the photograph, not for being first or the fastest. And the warnings Switzer wrote down later are wild. A doctor warning her about a prolapsed uterus from pounding the pavement and a coach insisting that too many jump balls in basketball could displace the uterus. Then there's Bev Francis in the 1980s. She's the first woman who benched over 300 lb, 330 lb to be exact, in route to multiple IPF World Championships. And in the 1985 film Pumping Iron 2, you can literally watch the judges have a meltdown about how to score her in bodybuilding because she was said to be too muscular for the sport. The people familiar with her history say that she wasn't punished for looking like a man. She was punished for not being feminine enough to offset the muscle. Now, she would spend years trying to reduce her muscularity while wearing more feminine clothing and changing her hair to appease the judges. But she never did win that Miss Olympia title. And then one of my favorite stories, it's about Jan Todd. In 1976, she became the first woman to deadlift over 400 lb. A year later, she would be the first woman to squat over 400 lb in competition. She would go on to set a record in every meet she ever did except for one. And then she becomes a historian and builds the actual archive, the Stark Center at the University of Texas. Now, that makes an episode like this actually possible. The woman who broke the record also wrote down the history so that it couldn't get erased or told incorrectly. her take on the whole women must train differently thing. This is the quote. Try to think of strength as an aspect of humanity and not something that's gendered. I think a lot of women even now are limited in their pursuit of strength by our cultural identification with strength as masculine and weakness is feminine. But strength is no more masculine than is speed. And I can't imagine anyone anymore who believes that women should not run as fast as they can. And how recent is all of this? The sport itself, women's Olympic weightlifting, doing the snatch and the clean and the jerk, well, that had existed for years. Women had their own world championships starting in 1987. What didn't exist until the year 2000 in Sydney was women's weightlifting at the actual Olympic games. Men had been lifting at those games since 1920. It was one of the very last doors to open. And when it finally opened, it opened with the crash. The first gold medalist got stripped for a band diuretic, and her entire national team got sent home. And the gold ultimately went to an American named Tara not. The final frontier of women can't arrived with a drug scandal. But the proof was always right there. Stockton, Gibb, Schwitzer, Francis, Todd, the culture just kept relabeling it freak or exception or fine, but only because she's pretty instead of updating the textbook. Each one was a counterfactual, but each one got filed as an exception. the female apologetic again and again until the women's Olympic weightlifting podium finally opened in 2000. Okay, stop five. And this is the good part because this is where the pattern finally snaps. This time the establishment didn't double down. It updated on the record and we have receipts. In 1984, the NIH held its first consensus conference on osteoporosis and landed on the famous trio for prevention calcium, estrogen, and physical activity. They encouraged weight bearing movement but said nothing specific about heavy lifting. The advice was on the cautious side of vague. Then in 1995, the American College of Sports Medicine published its first position stand on osteoporosis and exercise. The actual text said weightbearing activity is essential for skeletal health and muscle strengthening may also be beneficial. It was cautious but never a ban. The don't pick up more than a couple of pounds rule was curbside advice from clinician to patient, never written down as policy. A UK consensus group later put I should never lift more than a kilo on a published list of menopause myths to bust. So where did the fear come from? It wasn't pure invention. A 1984 study by Saki and Mickelson put 59 women with osteoporosis through two different exercise programs. The flexion group bending the spine

### [28:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=1714s) Cycle syncing, and naming the pattern

forward under load had a vertebral fracture rate of 89%. The extension group bending backwards had a fracture rate of 16%. Now these are real numbers, but the study was about the direction the spine was bent, not how heavy the load was. The finding got repackaged though into heavy weights are dangerous for these women, which is not really what it showed. 6 years later in 1990, a study published in JAMAMA flipped the script. Dr. Maria Fiataron trained nine people with an average age of 90. 8 weeks of progressive resistance training and their strength went up by an average of 174%. Muscle size also went up. Walking speed improved by 48%. So we've known since 1990 that 90year-olds can get dramatically stronger. Fiatone repeated the study in 1994 on a larger, more diverse group including women and the result held people can get meaningfully stronger well into their later years. And then the big one. In 2018, a trial called Lyftmore was done out of Dr. Belinda Beck's group in Australia. They took 101 post-menopausal women with low bone mass. Their average age was 65, but they didn't hand them pink dumbbells. For 8 months, twice a week, they performed sets of five reps at around 85% of their one rep max on the deadlift, the squat, and the overhead press. Plus, they did some jumping chin-ups where they dropped and landed with straight legs. The results, the lumbar spine bone density went up 2. 9% in the lifters, while the control group dropped 1. 2%. Femoral neck bone mineral density basically held steady while the control groups dropped. And the number that should end the conversation about injury risk across more than 2600 supervised training sessions. The total injury count was one minor back tweak. In the author's own words, "Contrary to current opinion, this was effective and produced no adverse events under supervision. " Now, I should note bone density is a proxy measurement, not the real outcome we care about, which is fewer broken hips and fewer falls. Lift More did not study fracture rate. It didn't study falls. And no lifting study has done this to date yet. So, we can say that

### [30:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAlamIOiwU&t=1840s) What to take away

heavy lifting in older women with osteoporosis is relatively safe and it improves the bone mineral density markers, but we don't really know what it does for falls and fracture rate. We think that it helps, but we need that study to show up first. Okay, one more, and just because I love it, a 2024 longitudinal analysis of competitive powerlifters found that women over the age of 59 who kept training and competing were still getting stronger at about 2 to 5% per year, while the general population their age was getting weaker at a rate of 1% per year. Now, most people don't notice it because they aren't losing visible muscle mass at the same rate, despite getting weaker nonetheless. So the 80s and 90s were cautious, but it was never really a ban on exercise in women. The 1990s proved that the very old can get strong. And in 2018, that proved that women with low bone mass can lift heavy safely and get real results. The current guidelines now recommend the exact thing women were warned away from 20 years ago. Which leaves us in a strange spot for 2026. The doctors change their minds, but what about the internet? Okay, stop six. And this is where we finally get back to our friend at the dumbbell rack. Because the fear of harming her body didn't suddenly disappear when this new science emerged. It did what it always does. It changed outfits one more time. From humors to vital force to now hormones and cortisol. And this time there's a multi-billion dollar industry making sure that it sticks around. Let's start with the part that may surprise you. You'd assume that the cautious fuddy duddy voices today are the medical guidelines and the bold empowering ones are the influencers. Well, it's actually the exact opposite. The medical bodies are the ones telling women that they can train. The Endocrine Society's guidelines tell post-menopausal women to do quotewbearing muscle strengthening exercises. ACOG signs off on the standard targets 150 minutes a week of conditioning plus strength training. Not one major guideline tells menopausal women to go easy. Lift more is sitting right there in the literature. Now, you compare that against the market. Menopause is now something like an $18 billion a year industry heading towards 24 billion. And the single biggest slice of supplements and a huge chunk of menopause fitness content is built on one message. Pull back. You can't train like you used to. Hard exercise spikes your already fried cortisol. And if you're premenopausal, then you must sync your workouts with your cycle. Otherwise, something bad is going to happen. You need a proprietary protocol either way. First, let's talk about the cortisol panic. The idea that a menopausal woman's stress system is already maxed out and hard exercise floods her with cortisol and tips her into catabolism, muscle loss, belly fat, the works. So, let's talk about cortisol because it's a real hormone that's essential for living and the story being told about it is mostly wrong. Cortisol is a steroid hormone that your adrenal glands make. These are tiny little glands that sit on top of your kidneys. Now, cortisol runs on a daily rhythm, highest in the morning, lowest around bedtime, and you need it. People who don't make enough of it get very sick. The fear being sold around cortisol is having too much of it. While genuinely pathologically high cortisol is a real condition. We call it Cushing syndrome or Cushings disease. It's relatively rare on the order of 2 to eight people getting newly diagnosed per million people per year. And that's the state that actually causes the muscle wasting and the central fat deposition and the thin skin that everyone's scared of. It comes from tumors or from taking pharmaceutical dose steroids for months. not from a hard workout. Does exercise raise cortisol? Yes. And the part the fear-mongerers get right is that intense exercise can drive cortisol up to levels close to what's seen in Cushing patients at peak. A 2019 paper by Daily and Hackne in trained endurance athletes documented this. Running at 75% of V2 max for 85 minutes, cortisol rose to near Cushing's range levels at exhaustion. So, the influencers aren't making up this spike. Where they're wrong is what happens next. Within 90 minutes after exercise, cortisol in the athletes was back near baseline. By 24 hours, so 1 day later, it was lower than the resting controls. The athletes had suppressed cortisol the next day. Chronic Cushings is sustained elevation in cortisol 24 hours a day, week after week. Hard exercise is a transient spike followed by a return to baseline and then an undershoot. Two completely different physiological situations. Daytime exercise lowers your overnight cortisol. Resting cortisol drops as you get fitter. Cortisol is somewhat trainable. A review specifically looking for cortisol harm in trained and overtrained athletes didn't even find it. The fasting training scare is the same error. Fasting nudges cortisol up while you're fasting because you're mobilizing energy. That's the system working as designed. It doesn't reliably affect estrogen or other reproductive hormones in women. And dieting studies show that cortisol ticks up at first and then settles back to baseline within a couple of weeks. The fasting will fry your hormone story is not supported by evidence. Now on to cycle syncing. The idea that you have to train differently in each phase of your cycle in order to get results. On this one, there's actually quite a bit of data and specifically a line of work led by Dr. Lauren Kenzo Simple and her colleagues has found that the cycle phase does not meaningfully change how muscle responds to training. The broader literature finds no reliable phase effect on strength either. And there's a little tell here. The researchers publishing the data seem to get piled on by the influencer space for publishing it. And you know, if you follow the money, you can tell why. Now, the complaint that women have been underststudied in sports science is real. But the fix for that is more and better studies, not selling protocols built on data that doesn't exist. Now, I'm not saying that a trainer who's terrified of cortisol in a woman is quoting Galen. There's no secret pipeline running from the wandering womb to an Instagram reel. And I'm not going to pretend that there is, but the story is identical every single time. You take a perfectly normal female body, you declare it as being fragile, and you prescribe holding back. Point at a sciency sounding word, cortisol today, vital force in 1873, and the humors before that to make it sound rigorous. And when somebody shows you a counterfactual or suggests that it's wrong, you have to ignore or attack it, mostly to preserve your profit margins. For about 20 centuries, the question of whether a woman's body could handle hard effort got answered as settled fact despite never really being tested. The Greeks didn't ban it. Sparta, in fact, they prescribed it. The Victorians built the ban out of thermodynamics and the woman who disproved it won Harvard's medical prize got ignored. In 1928, they killed an Olympic event over a collapse that never even happened. The thread running through all of it is that none of this was ever based on evidence. It was eminence. A confident man with a title says what's true and everyone writes it down and that's the standard of proof. Actually testing the claim, what we now call evidence-based medicine, barely existed until recently. So when people finally ran the experiments, looking at how women respond to exercise across the lifespan, what changes occur in menopause and even putting women with low bone mass under heavy barbells, the old verdict didn't get gracefully corrected. It just fell apart because there had never been anything underneath it. Which brings us back to her. The woman in the dumbbell rack holding the 5 pounders because someone she trusts told her to be careful. Here's what I'd want her to hear. The instinct telling her to take it easy was made up, wrong, and she'd do best to ignore it. The real question for the rest of this series isn't whether she can train hard. Of course, she can't. It's how much of what's already changed, the body she's got at 60, was actually due to menopause. And how much was the bill coming due for decades of being told to take it easy? The two have very different outlooks. The menopause part is mostly behind her. The dtraining part she can still take back. That's next time. We'll take the body composition and health changes everyone blames on menopause, the weight, the belly fat, the heart, the bone, and the brain fog, and put real numbers on how much of it actually comes from menopause. Because knowing what's changing and what to do about it is how you take control. I'm Dr. Jordan Fagenbomb. This is Barbell Medicine. We'll see you next time. — Austin and I wrote a book and it's called Signal: What Testosterone Levels Are Telling You About Your Health. And it is available for pre-order right now with copies shipping in June. Here's why we wrote it. The testosterone conversation right now is a mess. About a quarter of testosterone prescriptions in the United States are started without any lab work. And over half of men who meet criteria for low testosterone see their levels normalized on their own without any treatment. And at the same time, nearly 40% of men who are 40 and older who have low testosterone, only about 1 in 10 of them are actually getting treatment. So some men are getting medicated for problems that they don't have, while other men who would genuinely benefit from treatment or at least an evaluation, well, they're not getting it. And everyone is trying to make decisions about testosterone, whether it's lifestyle, medication, or otherwise, without a clear framework for what testosterone even does. Signal is the book that we wrote to sort all of that out. It covers the physiology of testosterone from the ground up, how levels trend across the lifespan, and what has been driving them down at the population level over the last 50 years with a surprising increase in the last decade. We get into what testosterone actually does to exercise outcomes and what exercise does to testosterone because those are two different questions that get conflated constantly. There's a full section on female hormonal physiology rather than treating it as a footnote. We cover how to interpret labs when the testing itself is unreliable, lifestyle measures that can move the needle before medication enters the conversation and a detailed chapter on TRT for the people where it is appropriate. This is the book we wished existed when we started out. Right now, you can pre-order the hard coverver, the Kindle version, or bundle both together. And there's a pre-order special right now where you can add the barbell medicine testosterone course taught by Dr. Austin Brocky with a significant discount. The course is normally $124. 99 and you can get it for $49 if you pre-order before June 17th, which also happens to be my birthday. So, a little birthday present to me and help support what we do here at Barbell Medicine. Head over to barbellmed. com and pre-order Signal today. That's barbell medicine. com. Look for signal in the

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52277*