Plyo and Strength Development for Women Over 40

Podcast – Steph Gaudreau

True strength development isn’t something that should be skipped at any age. However, when you are a woman over 40, these training tools become key assets to your overall training, health, and longevity. When you understand the key components that go into making a proper strength training program, you can better equip yourself to obtain your goals in the best way possible.

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Key Takeaways

If You Want to Harness Strength Development, You Should:

1. Start small and with an approachable amount of jumping in plyometrics
2. Use strength development to keep your strength as you age and reduce strength limitation
3. Get a program that is well-designed and understands the nuances of exercise progressions

The Why and The How

Understanding why and how I program certain exercises into Strong with Steph is crucial for me to help you understand. The rationale behind these important components will not only help you better understand the training you are doing, but it will also help you pick the program and trainer that aligns with your goals and understands how to help you succeed. If you notice that you are feeling slower, I want to help you improve and make strength training approachable in all aspects.

Make Your Programming Work For You

As you are evaluating programs, I want you to ensure that your approach to strength training is helping you become more well-rounded regardless of your goals. Strength training plans are meant to help you learn what you need to do. The specific rep, set, and load ranges are designed to work on maximum force development. Plyometric training, lifting appropriately hard weights, starting small, and incorporating unilateral and rotative moments in your training are all key components that can make a huge difference in your overall results.

Anyone looking to be athletic, but especially women over 40, needs to be aware of these key aspects so that you can use strength training as a way to understand your strength journey better.

How does strength training play into your overall health goals? Share your story with me in the comments below.

In This Episode

• Why these types of exercises are simply something you cannot skip as you age (4:45)
• Understanding plyometrics, jumping, and how it can help you improve your overall training (16:34)
• Specific quality over quantity tips when it comes to power and plyometrics (30:38)
• How to get over the fear around strength training by understanding the parameters (41:00)
• What you can do to help your body perform at its best through every stage of life and training (51:30)

Quotes

“It’s not that we are saying there is some magical strength training that only women over 40 will benefit from. Of course not. We know what the parameters of strength training are, and we are going to talk about that in this episode. It’s just our ability to skip that and not see those negative impacts because we are aging and going through these hormonal changes, we can’t avoid it any longer. Strength training is one thing that we have in our arsenal of tools.” (8:08)

“Our tissues adapt, and they don’t stop adapting. The problem is we have stopped doing these exercises.” (19:50)

“Strong with Steph Programing does include strength development. This is a key aspect for women over 40.” (35:57)

“We know this stuff is critical for anyone who wants to build their actual strength, but when you are over 40, it becomes something that will have more negative outcomes if you skip it.” (36:46)

“Just like any other kind of training y’all, progressive overload is critical.” (41:01)

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Related Episodes

FYS 434: Progressive Overload: How to Keep Getting Stronger

FYS 435: RPE & Autoregulation: Smart Tools for Strength Gains Over 40

FYS 436: Movement Prep & Balance

FYS 427: Your Fitness App Calls it Strength Training, But Is It? With Nikki Naab-Levy

Plyo and Strength Development for Women Over 40 Transcript

Steph Gaudreau

Every weekend, I comb through client lifting logs in the Strong With Steph program, and I’m looking for their progress. How are they doing? What’s going on in their lifting world? And I stumbled across a comment yesterday that really stopped me in my tracks, and my coach heart was absolutely beaming.

One of my clients wrote under a specific exercise that she was finally starting to feel more athletic than she ever had since her 20s. It had been 20-plus years since she was feeling athletic, quick and agile, and it might surprise you what this exercise is. It’s a plyometric exercise, along with the strength training, especially that she’s been doing in just a few short months, she has seen such a change in her movement, in feeling strong and explosive, and quick and ultimately more athletic.

So on this episode, I’m going to be walking through as the next in this podcast series, how and why I program these types of exercises into my signature strength training program, which is called Strong With Steph. If you’ve been curious, because you’ve heard, oh, okay, as a woman over 40, I know these are essential parts of my training, but you don’t really understand why or how you would put it all together. Then definitely keep listening. You’re going to learn a lot in this episode.

If you’re an athletic 40-something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself and doing hard shit, the Fuel Your Strength podcast is for you. You’ll learn how to eat, train, and recover smarter, so you build strength and muscle, have more energy and perform better in and out of the gym. I’m a strength nutrition strategist and weight-lifting coach. Steph Gaudreau. The Fuel Your Strength podcast dives into evidence-based strategies for nutrition, training and recovery and why, once you’re approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s. We’re here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and let’s go.

Thanks so much for being with me. I’m excited to have you on this, and if there is one thing in my life that I will geek out on, and if I meet you in public or at a party or something, I’ll probably talk about, it’s strength training. So this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Personally, it is something that has transformed my life, and I’ve been lifting now for almost 15 years.

And of course, it’s something that I love to teach to other women, and programming in my templated program, for example, and then seeing clients like the one I just shared about, go and implement it and go see that they’re feeling better, they’re noticing they’re getting stronger, they’re moving better. Is so incredibly gratifying. I can’t even tell you what joy that brings me. So on this episode, this is the next in a series where I’m really walking you through the rationale behind how I program and why and what are some of the important components.

So if you haven’t yet heard this series, I want you to go back and listen to first First of all, progressive overload. You’ve probably heard it, but do you really know what it means? Then I’ve talked about auto-regulation, reps and reserve, and rate of perceived exertion. So that’s all in one episode. Next, I went into movement and movement prep and balance and why those are important. And then today we’re arriving here at Plyometrics, power and strength training.

Believe it or not, this is exactly the flow of the workouts that I programmed. So that’s kind of going in order of what you would see when you open up my Strong With Steph app, or if you look at the workout sample, which is the seven-day sample, plus a strength training guide for women over 40, so you can get that sample at stephgaudreau.com/workout and of course, if you’re loving these episodes and appreciating them, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, including YouTube.

Hello, you’re watching me over there. Thanks for being there as well. Hit subscribe and ring the bell for more notifications, so that you get notified of brand-new episodes when they come out. Okay, so you’re probably listening to this and thinking, Well, how is this relevant or specific to women over 40? That’s obviously who I help in my coaching practice. It’s me. I am a woman over 40, and here’s the thing I’ll probably repeat a bunch of times, it’s not that people who are under 40 should skip strength training like that, or there’s some mystical, magical way that we strength train that’s only applicable to people over 40, in this case, women over 40, because that’s who I work with.

It’s not that people under 40 can’t or shouldn’t do plyometrics or power exercises, absolutely that should be part of your program. It’s simply more important you cannot skip it. I shouldn’t say more important. It’s something you really can’t skip because as you age and go through the menopause transition and experience that hormonal shifting. There is a degradation in your physiology. There’s a degradation in your anatomy unless you do something to address it.

I don’t say that from a shame or blame point of view. It’s just simply stating facts, right, if we don’t train our muscles, we don’t train our bodies, then we’re going to lose that function, and we’re going to potentially lose that muscle mass, the bone density, etc, etc. So there’s a ton of positive stuff that we can do to intervene. And so when I’m talking about this from the context of a woman over 40, is simply hammering home that time is of the essence. If we don’t use it, we’re gonna lose it. And again, I don’t say that in a mean way, or the Debbie Downer kind of way.

It’s just saying, there are positive things we can do, but we have to take action. And that contextually in our lives, in this chapter in our life, there are challenges that a lot of people, for example, who are not going through this perimenopause and menopause transition will face. And of course, the ages of onset of, for example, perimenopause can vary widely, as early as generally age 35 but can go up from there, and this is a long transition.

The average age of menopause, which is the day that marks 12-months of no menstrual cycle, is 52 to 53 so it’s a long period of time, and then once you’re past that day, you’re post-menopausal for the rest of life. So this is relevant to a huge, huge portion of the population. This is stuff that a lot of cases, our moms and grandmas didn’t learn about, that we haven’t heard about up until fairly recently. So it’s important. It’s relevant. You know, hot flashes. There’s no 20-year-olds having hot flashes. So right, osteoporosis can occur in younger people, certainly, but it will, the risk of that will increase, especially in that perimenopause, to then post menopause window and beyond.

So I think it’s important to keep reminding you that it’s not that we’re saying there’s some magical strength training that only women over 40 will benefit from, of course, not strength training. We know what the parameters of strength training are. We’re going to talk about that in this episode. It’s just that our ability to skip that and not see those negative impacts because we are aging and going through these hormonal changes, we’re not we can’t avoid it any longer. So strength training, for example, is one thing that we have in our arsenal of tools to help us.

Power and plyometric training are certainly things that are helpful, so helpful across all ages, but definitely not something that we really want to skip now that we are getting older. So first and foremost, let’s talk about what the idea of plyometric and power training so in Strong With Steph the way I lay out the workouts, movement preparation, balance work, I talked about that in the previous episode. We talked about why those things matter in terms of physiology, what’s happening in our bodies and how we can sort of counteract some of those changes.

The next thing that is included in the workouts is plyometric slash power training. They’re not exactly the same thing, but I’m going to talk through that on this episode. I hear this question constantly. Women who are listening to podcasts or you’ve read books, you’re like, oh, they said that I should do Plyometrics, but I don’t really know how, or I don’t really know how I should approach it. I haven’t been doing much in the way of jumping. I’m afraid of what could happen. I don’t want to get hurt.

They don’t really know the difference between power training and strength training, or how to actually train for strength because not everything involving a weighted exercise is going to really help us with max strength development. Okay, and we’ll kind of get into that in a little bit, but force production raise is really what we’re talking about here. So not every weighted exercise or body weight exercise is going to help us to to train that.

And so how do you look for that in a program, or why is it programmed the way it is? And how do you then implement that? And how do you kind of approach it and understand it? So first and foremost, let’s talk about power and plyometrics. Kind of together, and then we’ll sort of talk about how they’re a little bit different, all right. So again, important for all ages, especially if you’re wanting to improve your athleticism and feel quicker and more springy and more reactive, and, you know, more agile and all these things.

But as we are thinking about women over 40 here, we know that aging is going to lead to a decline in power output and our fast twitch muscle fibers, of which there were really kind of two types, or sort of a hybrid, and then a true explosive fiber. So that’s our type one, which is our slower or slow twitch fiber, and we have our type two right, our fast twitch, In type two, we have type two A, and then type 2x generally, is how those are denoted, with two a being a little bit more of a hybrid, and then 2x being those true fast twitch, most explosive fibers.

And I’m using a lot of common language here, in some technical jargon. I may not be 100% saying in clinical research terms, just trying to get this across in the most approachable way possible. And so as we are losing that explosiveness, that ability to generate power and those fibers, in which case we see sometimes that slide toward type one, we can experience slower reaction times, difficulties with coordination, feeling less quick or less able to kind of shift direction or change direction on our feet, catch ourselves if we stumble, and we might just be feeling a little bit slower overall.

And I’ve told this story many times. I’ll tell it again, super quick one time we were walking, we lived down the street from elderly housing, so there’s a couple of towers with elderly housing, and there are lots of people that walk to and fro because there’s a grocery store past our house, so they’re walking back and forth. And there was a lady crossing the street. The light started to change, so she was losing the little walk signal, and she started to sort of shuffle faster. It was the slowest stumble sequence. It was like she was in stumble mode for I’ve never seen somebody stumble for as long as she did.

This is an older, elderly woman, and she fell. And luckily, you know, we all kind of like ran to make sure she was okay, if she was fine. But that’s just sort of one example of daily life. Is you kind of stumble? Can you catch yourself from falling? So this isn’t just if you’re an athlete, or you really like a certain sport, competitive or otherwise, this stuff impacts daily life, right? And we’ve talked in the past episode why balance is integral for fall prevention, but also this ability to react quickly and prevent yourself from falling, is certainly an aspect of that.

We also know that in power training, the ability to move quickly or the velocity of that movement, is very, very important. So when we train power and or Plyometrics, to some degree, right? We are trying to maximize the speed at which we’re able to apply force, and this can help us to move loads quickly. It can help us to address, like I was saying, quick movement, explosive movement, jumping, and so on and so forth.

So not all of the exercises that fall into this category involve jumping, which is another kind of common misconception, jumping, we tend to think repetitive jumping, a little bit more is plyometric, but power exercises can include things like throwing a medicine ball, doing a kettlebell swing, doing a power clean. There are tons of examples of more power-based exercises, of course, you can, of course, jump, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit as well.

But those are all really important in order to work that element of producing quickness, right, to move quickly, to have speed or velocity, we also know that rate of force development is important. Is how quickly you can produce force. So it’s not just how fast you can move, but how quickly that you can do, that you can you can do that work.

So power work trains your body to activate muscles quickly to reach sort of peak force output in a shorter period of time, which is important for those things again, which give you a sudden burst of quick movement, of quick energy, rate, jumping, sprinting, those sorts of things and working that training that is very, very important. So how quickly can your nervous system fire, to say, contract, as quickly as you can without training. If we don’t train those things, we will start to lose that and see degradation in that.

We’ll start to feel slower, move slower, and find it more difficult to react quickly. So this is and I’m not talking about reflexes per se, although that could certainly be lumped in here. But. Yeah, intentional. I want to move quickly, so if you’re noticing you’re feeling slower, this is not just all in your mind, and this is something that a lot of people are noticing even before the age of 40, if they’re not training, but with loss of muscle, with changes to the nervous system, with aging, with the impact of hormonal shifting on muscle mass and strength, for example.

This is all stuff that my clients will notice when they’re coming in, and we can help you improve. So we’re going to train it right. We can absolutely affect that before we dive in. If you listen to this episode and you’re like, Okay, I am ready to get to work. I want to take my strength, muscle, energy, and performance and take it up a notch.

I want to take it to that next level. I want to feel like a badass, but at the same time, do it in a way that works with my physiology as an athletic woman over 40, with coaching and community support. Then go ahead and check out Strength, Nutrition Unlocked, this is my group program. We’re going to lay out the framework for you and guide you as you implement and really customize it to all the things that you’re doing, your preferences, your likes, and the places you want to go with it. Then go ahead and get on board.

You can start your process by submitting an application @stephgaudreau.com/apply. We would love to hear from you and see you inside the program. Now, when it comes to stuff like Plyometrics, again, just to kind of focus on that aspect, we want to target those same fast twitch fibers. We want to respond quickly. We want to have that coordination of the nervous system with our muscles and there’s the added benefit, specifically for plyometric training, which is sort of like repeated repeated impact or repeated jumping, that we have a benefit to bone density and overall joint health.

So impact-based plyometrics will help to stimulate bone strength training also as well, but this can have a positive effect on preventing further loss of bone and there is some research to indicate that bone density can be improved. We can actually add bone density back through specific types of training, so it’s best to prevent but if you’re you’re in that age where you’re post-menopausal, you can still have a positive impact, because we know that bone density continues to decline over time as we go through the rest of life with that lower estrogen level.

And I’m not speaking here for people who are on medications to impact their bone density, or on hormone replacement therapy, or anything of that nature, or menopause hormone therapy, as it’s now being more commonly called, but just in general, right? We’re seeing those declines, we can train those things and make a positive impact. No pun intended. I think a couple of the biggest worries or myths or things that come up for people that make them super reluctant to do plyometrics and power exercises.

They think it’s only for younger people that hey, this is only for people who are trying to compete in a sport or trying to be maximally athletic. And I just gave you an example of that lady crossing the street. She could have been an athlete, I don’t want to assume she’s not, but likely not and moving quickly certainly was important to her daily life, quality of life and preventing falls so this is not just for young people. It’s just not for competitive athletes.

The other thing that I hear probably as the number one rebuttal is that jumping and or impact is unsafe or bad for the body. What we train and we allow for proper recovery if we’re managing load and progressing wisely, this is how our body strengthens in these aspects, in these aspects of, for example, our joint health, or our ability to sort of build the elasticity of the tissues involved in jumping, for example, really make them more resilient.

Right, thicken things like tendons and ligaments and strengthen the muscle and make it bigger, right? Our body is going to adapt. You would, you would strength train and lift heavier weights to improve your strength. You’re going to add, you know, potentially more time under tension or more mechanical tension, and really push the reps a little bit more if we’re looking for hypertrophy, right? So we know that’s a big range. We’ll talk about that next time. But we know that our tissues adapt, and they don’t stop adapting.

The problem is we have stopped doing these exercises, and so when we try to start again, especially if we’re not, we don’t have guidance, and we’re like, I’m just gonna go do a giant box jump on day one. Yeah, the likelihood that that’s a great idea for somebody who’s been super inactive in terms of jumping, plyometrics and power in general is probably not the best choice if your joints are already a bit more sensitive and they talk back to you a lot, because some people who are going through the menopause transition especially, we’ll notice an uptick in things like joint sensitivity, stiffness and aging in general, especially with disuse.

If your knees are already talking to you and you haven’t done anything, then we’re gonna scale it to a place that makes sense for you, but just thinking that it’s unsafe across the board and not something that you should do just further. Means that that aspect of training, that quickness, training, that ability to absorb and then transfer force, if we’re talking about Plyometrics, is only going to decline.

The quickness, the speed, right, that power is going to decline, right? That rate of force development is not going to get better on its own. And again, I don’t say this in a mean way. It’s just simply looking at physiology. If we don’t train it, it’s not going to get better. And so oftentimes people have had a really big gap. They come back in. They’re like, oh shit. I heard I should be doing jumping, or I heard I should be doing power exercises. They don’t really know how to dip a toe in, if you will, and get going again.

And that’s one of the things I really took a lot of thought. But as I was laying out Strong With Steph, I really was thinking, how, what do I need to do to ease people in, to make it more approachable, also from a mental aspect, right? If you have fear about jumping, or you have fear about impact, then that’s not going to be a great place to come into it. But also, what makes sense in terms of progression, right? We want to manage progression.

We want to manage form. We want to manage your stability. In a lot of cases, if you haven’t been doing this stuff, how do we help teach your body to stabilize, right? How do we help you absorb the impact of a plyometric and then transfer it back up in a more efficient way? We’re not going to have you do cycling box jumps, which is where you’re going to jump up and jump down and jump up and jump down multiple times in a row for like, 50 reps on a 24-inch box on your first day.

If you haven’t been doing this stuff. Now, you could build up to that over time, certainly, but you don’t come in doing that. And so how, how do you do that? That’s what a strength training plan will show you how to do and in this case, Strong With Steph does bake that stuff right in so I want you to start thinking about not This is dangerous and unsafe across the board. Now, if you’ve been given a particular notice from your surgeon, your PT, your doctor, that XYZ exercise isn’t right for you for whatever reason, of course, we want to consider that.

But just generally across the board, saying that people over 40 shouldn’t jump or shouldn’t do any kind of power exercise is coming from a really fear-based point of view, and not empowering people to move in more challenging ways over time and build these aspects of their strength, their athleticism, their day to day life. Right again, it’s not just all about athletics and sport, which happens to be near and dear to my heart, but this is also a quality of life issue as well.

Okay, so that’s just kind of a little bit about some of the benefits, some of the myths. And I would say, you know, one of the things you want to think about, especially with Plyometrics, is, how do we how do we start? I just, kind of, referenced this, but you start small. You start with lower impact. If you haven’t done any jumping Now, if you’ve been jumping for a while, and this is old hat to you.

Certainly, we can challenge you with multi-planar movement and jumps and hops, which jumps are just generally two feet hopping with just on one foot or one leg, right? So multi-planar, we can make things harder, in terms of, how high you’re jumping. There are multiple ways to make this harder, especially if you’re very experienced and advanced. If you are new, we do you do not come into Strong With Steph on day one.

I am not having you box jump on day one. It just it doesn’t make sense, right? Make it make sense. So especially if you’re a beginner, you can start with lower-impact or modified versions of this. So you can hop or jump a little bit off the floor. You can modify the movement, right? So do? You can do slightly fewer repetitions. You can jump or hop less distance off the floor. Do? Do simpler variations of this. Focus a lot on landing mechanics, and we do that toward the beginning of the program, especially to help you develop the elasticity.

Sort of the this like elastic transfer of energy, is how I would summarize this right being able to absorb and then transfer impact back up in an effective and efficient way in terms of building the sort of like resilience of the tissue, right? So the muscle, the ligament, especially around the feet, and a lot of people have feet are just, just need a little bit of love, right? Maybe you’ve had foot or ankle injuries, or lower leg injuries, or you just live a lot in very restrictive shoes.

Their feet aren’t as used to moving, etc, etc. So we have you start lower to the ground. We’re not pushing the reps out too high, right? Making modifications as necessary. And that is super successful. And I would say 90% of the people that I work with, in some cases, they have really specific contraindications for a particular kind of jumping or kind of movement.

For example, as some people were lateral movement, they had to really be super-mindful because maybe they’ve had a previous injury that leaves lateral jumping or lateral movement a little bit more, for example, a knee is a little bit more vulnerable. But that doesn’t mean that we avoided 100% we just scale it to a level that’s appropriate, unless somebody’s medical team has said, you’re just not this is not something I want you to do, so we want to respect that. But also, if you have a green light, is is like we need to challenge you, but we need to start you in a place that makes a lot more sense.

Some of my clients, for example, will start with sort of toe taps, just without the jumping to get the movement pattern down. And then they’ll start to do toe taps onto a ball really, really fast, where they’re switching their legs. Another element I want to bring up too with jumping and plyometrics is pelvic floor and issues with urinary incontinence, or fecal incontinence, or just pelvic floor discomfort in general. And probably will not go super into depth on this in this episode. But suffice to say, if you’re having issues with, for example, urinary leakage as you’re jumping.

There are things that you can do to try to connect more to the pelvic floor through something like a connection breath type of exercise. There are ways you can work on strengthening the pelvic floor, but ultimately you may need a pelvic floor screening and potentially something like pelvic floor or physical therapy. So don’t suffer in silence. Don’t sit on the sidelines and think I can’t jump because of my pelvic floor. I’m leaking when I’m jumping.

Whether you’ve you’ve gone through a pregnancy or not, the incidence of pelvic floor issue and sort of eurogenitary concerns, especially in women as they go through the menopause transition, is a very large percent, somewhere up around 50% of women may have some kind of genital urinary issue with pelvic floor, and that can be exacerbated through exercise made worse. So there are sometimes concerns that we need to work with, and in some cases, that means going in and getting a pelvic getting a pelvic floor floor screening, working with pelvic floor PT, or making modifications to the exercises.

So I completely, completely get it, but also something like seven years is the average amount of time that people will deal with pelvic floor issues before seeking help and treatment for those so I just wanted to mention that as something that is super common, and one of the reasons people will say it, they they don’t want to jump. They’ll oftentimes say other things because it can still feel taboo or like something we don’t want to talk about. It’s a sensitive area of the body.

Sometimes people don’t feel comfortable talking about it, not even to their coaches or trainers, so this is one of the reasons why being menopause informed is super important, especially as a fitness professional, and just knowing that this is super common in your clients, and if they’re saying, I don’t want to jump, or I can’t jump for XYZ reason, having you know as much of an open line of communication, or knowing what to ask or resources to have to recommend to them is so critical.

So just wanted to put a little side note in terms of plyometrics, so start small, right? Start with an approachable amount of jumping. You know, short, shorter jumps, closer to the ground, using other modifications, focusing on landing, we do a lot of landing, landing, landing, landing, and figuring out where your body is in space, right? We know that’s an important part of the plyometric process. It’s that deceleration in the eccentric phase that we’re then going to like have to transfer to that concentric, explosive up phase of of the jump. So that’s very important for control and especially when you’re newer and you are not as used to these types of movements.

So you know, making sure you’re giving yourself enough rest and time in between sessions as well. It can vary in terms of how many sets and reps and so on and so forth that you might implement, but something like three to five sets per exercise. I do generally a little bit less, because we’re programming it on each day of the program.

We’re not doing a million and a half reps, right? We want quality and especially when it comes to power. Now plyometrics like let’s say we’re doing jump rope, we might not do three jump ropes. That doesn’t even make sense, right? And they’re like, Oh, I’m doing like, three reps. But if we’re really training for power, which is that maximum explosiveness, we’re really working on rate of force development, and we’re really trying to be explosive, we do not need a shit ton of reps.

And in fact, if you do a ton of reps because you’re thinking, well, more is better, it generally means that your ability to actually move quickly and get the most out of the training starts to decline. So you don’t need 20 box jumps in a row, and especially if we’re talking about a strength format where we’re not talking about something that’s more of a CrossFit setting, then less is more better.

Quality is important, and resting at least a minute, sometimes a little bit longer, just depends on what you’re doing. But resting afterward is important as well because then your muscles are ready to go again, right? You’re ready to kind of keep those things moving quickly. So rest. We don’t need to do this every single day. So two, three times a week. Three, three to six reps per exercise.

I tend to find four to six is a pretty sweet spot for a lot of my clients, I should say four to six reps per set, and then generally, I tend to go on the lower side, especially for people who are newer. So something like three sets, and that’s it. We’re done and dusted, and then we’re on to strength training. So that about does it for power and plyo again, knowing that the exercises you might do are a little bit different, right?

A kettlebell swing is not a plyometric exercise. It’s for power. Some types of jumping will fulfill both right, power and plyometric we’re looking at even things like power cleans, one of my favorite, favorite, favorite things to program for power are med ball throws. So medicine ball throws, whether it’s with more of a Dynamax, kind of bigger medicine ball, or a something like a D ball, or sand filled, or usually are full of something that gives it more weight and so it won’t bounce.

But really working on that rotational power or throwing, don’t neglect the upper body in this as well. You know, there are tons of sort of power exercises that you can do with your upper body. So don’t forget about that. That’s another place I see oftentimes people will forget if they’re left to their own devices. They’re doing like a fuck ton of squat jumps. They never do anything you know, power-related for upper body/core to extremity.

So rotational med ball throws, one of my favorites as well, working in multiple planes, right, not just forward and back, side to side. Rotation, super, super important overall. And it doesn’t mean you’re going to do all of that in one day, but just in terms of the programming, and that’s how I program strong with staff. Okay, so we’re going to go on to now the strength training aspect. I need you to hear me very clearly here when I say this, that we’re talking about how much what is strength? What is strength work or strength development?

And I understand there are tons of things that people will refer to as a catch all in terms of strength training or resistance training, weight training, but what I’m referring to here is specific rep and set ranges and load ranges that are designed to work on maximum force development. In other words, can I generate as much force against some kind of weight or resistance? That is what I’m referring to in terms of strength training or strength development. Not every exercise you do with weights will fulfill this.

I did a long episode with Nikki Levy on this topic, where we looked from a very balanced point of view, frankly, about a. Are common, very popular apps in the fitness space that are, you know, have tons of VC funding behind them, and are very popular with people because they tend to be very cheap, very, very affordable, no cost, which is fine, but a lot of them will label their classes as strength, and it is not what you’re getting, you’re not getting strength development or force development in any of that stuff.

You’re generally getting a circuit, maybe some hypertrophy, but you’re not lifting heavy enough with appropriate rest to qualify. So I’ll link that episode. It’s a long one, but I think it’s important that you understand where we’re coming from on this, and where I’m coming from in terms of talking about strong with staff. So strong with staff, programming does include strength development. This is a key aspect for women over 40. Is it a key aspect for frankly, you know, being well rounded, having well rounded strength.

You know, if you’re a power lifter, certainly if you are looking to be athletic, you know athletes for sure, including some strength development in your programming is key. Sometimes it depends. You know, if you’re more on the endurance side, you should still do this. You may do it a little bit differently in terms of less frequency. You might treat it more seasonally, but it’s still important for you as well.

So we know this stuff is critical for anyone who wants to build their actual strength, but when you’re over 40 again, it becomes something that is will have more negative outcome if we skip it. You know, it’s important. It can help us offset age related losses in strength. Sarcopenia is what we call when we have a reduction, there’s a clinical level of muscle and or strength loss, muscle and or power loss. So muscle loss along with strength loss, that is sarcopenia.

Technically, the muscle loss with loss of power is called dynapinia. If you think of the word dynamic, it just refers to the loss of explosive strength. But sarcopenia is something that we can avoid. We can make inroads against, right? We can positively impact, I know I’m using a lot of negative words. We can positively impact our strength as we’re aging, even when we’re seeing age related declines and hormonal shifting, that’s then making those declines exacerbated.

So as we go through the menopause transition, again, estrogen is very important in terms of maintaining muscle mass and also in terms of strength. So if we don’t address it through our training, we will see those losses and those, there are those key periods right where we’re sort of starting perimenopause, so sort of mid 40s, and then also once we hit that menopause/ post menopausal, we start to see those rates of decline accelerate in a lot of people.

So sometimes you’ll hear the statistic, you know, three to 8% for example, we’re talking muscle loss, which is different than strength, but three to 8% loss per decade once you’re 30 years old. And that’s not necessarily the same rate across time. So as we age, that rate of loss tends to accelerate. So there’s tons of stuff that we can do.

So why is that strength training important? Is because it’s going to help us force our muscles to contract powerfully, or I should say, with as much force as possible, and that mechanical resistance like that actual contraction, is incredibly important in that strength domain, especially once we start to see the decline of estrogen.

So without the signal of estrogen coming through as strongly, we start to see that that loss of strength generally accelerates. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who’s kind of like bucking all trends, and they’re not strength training, but in general, right?

We’re seeing that lacking that estrogen signal, that being a really important part of strength and muscle, we need something to stimulate our muscle to to contract and then ultimately to also grow. We need both. So strength training is going to help us with that, it’s also important for all the other things we’ve talked about so far, right?

We need strength for well rounded balance, stability, coordination, we talked about fall prevention, important in bone health. So we need to actually pull on the bone. Muscles pull. Pull on the bone. And when they pull on the bone, because we’re challenging them through moving against resistance, we stimulate those bone cells, right?

So bone health and things like our actual amount of bone cell turnover and the mineralization are all slightly different things. So I’m kind of using this as a catch all here and talking about bone density, but pulling adequately strongly enough on the bone, especially in different planes of movement, as we’re including that in our program, very well rounded.

That’s all very important in terms of our bone health. So that’s also important. And so when we talk about strength training, this is where people get a little bit confused, or like, well, I don’t know how heavy is heavy. I was told I should lift heavy shit. I don’t know what that means. I’m scared of that. That sounds scary. I’m not ready for that. So I’m going to attempt to give us some parameters here on in this next section to kind of have you start thinking.

But just like any other kind of training, y’all, progressive overload is critical. It’s critical if you haven’t been lifting and you haven’t been including strength development in your program, do you just walk in on day one and put 250 pounds on the bar and try to squat it?

No, you don’t do that. So knowing where to begin is oftentimes the thing that’s holding people back the most. And though sStrong With Steph isn’t for Uber beginners, like if you’ve never touched a weight, I generally recommend people start with my dynamic dumbbells program, or work in person with a trainer, even for a couple of sessions. If you can do a few months, even better.

But Strong With Steph is really intended for people who have three to six months or more of experience, but if you’ve taken a break or you’ve never lifted before, you don’t just go in and deadlift 300 pounds. It doesn’t make sense. We wouldn’t start there. So we have to start easier, but within certain parameters. So when we’re talking about here, exercises that fall into the main categories, and these are the things you want to include in your programming.

And you’ll also see if you get a program, hopefully it’s well designed. If you’re getting strong with Steph and working off that, you’re going to see these across your week. So squatting, dead lifting, or hinging like a hip thrust right, pressing, and that includes horizontal I did. I just did the up motion with my arm horizontal, which is pushing away from your chest, basically vertical, which is pushing overhead and pulling.

Those are the really fundamentals. Of course, we have things like a lunging or sort of unilateral pattern, split stance, that sort of thing, which is kind of a subdivision. And then we have other aspects that people will oftentimes include, things like carrying, you know, loading their body in terms of axial skeleton loading and all those things rotation, sometimes people include, but the basics of that squat hinge, push, pull.

We need to hit those in our strength training, so that’s important. And of course, there are a multitude of exercise progressions. For example, if somebody hasn’t been doing Bulgarian split squats from a deficit, they haven’t been doing any Bulgarian split squatting. They’re really unfamiliar with a unilateral or split stance movement. I’m generally not going to give them a deficit Bulgarian on day one, right? It just doesn’t make sense.

Make it make sense, right? It’s a big, bigger range of motion, for example, if you’re doing it from a deficit. So occasionally, a lot of people that are, you know, super, maybe athletic, coming in from, you know, doing a sport, or they have previous experience, they might be able to jump to a harder variation. But all things considered, we’re, we’re generally not going to start you with the most advanced variation, and we’re not going to start you with the most weight.

So we have a multitude of different exercises and options under that, and it just depends what the program is, what the goal is, and so on and so forth. So for example, in strong with Steph, oftentimes, if people are much newer, when they come in, they’ll start with a goblet squat for a little bit, and then we might move them to a variation of a front squat.

But I’ll tell you, a lot of my clients struggle with a typical front squat, front rack variation, because their wrists aren’t used to be in extension, or they have a hand issue. There’s something else going on with their upper limb, like their elbow or their shoulder, which makes that classic front squat I can’t even there we go.

My I was lifting my elbows very unevenly. I’m probably tight on one side, but it makes that classic front squat, front back position pretty hard. So there are other ways that we can load more of a front. Coated squat position heavier than a goblet squat with other variations. So there’s lots and lots of in between, obviously a back squat, but not every client will back squat.

And frankly, if a program is like, you have to back squat, there’s no other kind of squat that you can do again, especially as we’re getting older and are sometimes people’s bodies just are not ready for or will tolerate a particular squat super well. Coming up to a program that says, you know, you have no options, and unless you back SWAT here like you suck or you’re just not doing it right, it just doesn’t make sense, right?

So we need to provide variations, and those are certainly things that we look at in Strong With Steph. Every exercise that is in the program comes with at least two options, two variations with full video attached and descriptions of those exercises so you’re covered. You’ve got lots of options, but within each movement pattern, we have different exercises available, and how they’re sequenced out, for example, in a program is going to vary, so we tend to start with the simpler variations first and move to things that are more complex, like I was saying to a deficit if you’re a bit more advanced.

Another example would be making sure you have enough unilateral movement, and also you’re moving in multiple planes, and I’ve mentioned this in previous episodes. We don’t want to just move forward and back, forward and back or bilaterally. Want to introduce unilateral or semi unilateral movements that are biased toward one side of the body, for example, using a B stance or a kickstand variation, which is used interchangeably, to talk about that idea where we are offsetting the back leg a little bit, so we’re loading the front leg a little bit more, but we’re still, we’re still shifting.

We’re moving toward a unilateral or a single leg, even movement, right? So you know, we have, from there, a split stance, right or lunge stance, that we can do things from. We can do things on a single leg. I mean, there’s an amazing progression that we can do forward and back, side to side, right. So lateral movement, I see, is largely missing when people are left to their own devices and are programming for themselves. It’s just an area that a lot of people aren’t thinking about or they’re not looking out for so lateral motion and also rotation. Right.

We know forward and back is one plane, satural. We have side to side, frontal. It’s called frontal plane. And we have rotation so transverse, so very, very important that we include at some on some level in our programming, or it doesn’t have to be week to week or day to day, but in some level, we’re hitting those movement patterns, right? So we want to look for a program that’s going to challenge us to work through a bilateral to more unilateral and potentially Single Leg progression.

It’s just challenging us, over time, to work those things in and that’s something that I see oftentimes lacking in the I will say, the accessory work. But again, if we’re talking about the main strength work, we tend to just see a few basics and variations. Now it can be with dumbbells. It can be with a barbell. Generally speaking, those are the two most common things.

Kettlebells can work for some exercises. They tend to just be a little bit awkward for certain things, although can be better for others. So it just depends what you’re doing, that stuff is all to be considered. But we’re generally, again, looking at squat hinge, so a dead lift, or dead lift variation, or some kind of a hip thrust variation. We’re looking at some kind of a horizontal press and some kind of a vertical press and some kind of pulling, ideally, ideally, some kind of vertical pulling and some kind of horizontal pulling.

The horizontal pulling and vertical pulling can be worked in to strength, but it can also be worked in as accessory work. So as well as all of these different things, we’re going to see those patterns re emerge in our accessory work, and we’ll talk about that in the next episode. But kind of bringing it back, we’re going to see it’s kind of a core set of movements for strength development, because it’s going to allow us to load as load the movement appropriately, is kind of what I’ll say.

So here’s in a nutshell what we want to think about we want a heavy enough load that we can do for two to six reps, two to five maybe we want that load to be challenging enough that we can only do two to five reps. It’s not like I’m going to pick up a lightweight and go, Oh, I did five and oh no, it’s going to be an appropriately hard weight where I can only lift that two to five reps with generally two, one to two reps in the tank.

We talked about. That in the episode of reps and reserve auto regulation and RPE rate of perceived exertion. So go back and check that episode out. But suffice to say, if the weight is appropriately heavy enough, and generally speaking, it depends where you’re you’re looking, but we’re looking at, say, 75% of your max.

Again, how we would work that with RPE or RIR is a little bit different, but somewhere in the realm of seven to nine reps, seven to nine RPE, sorry, or one to two, or in this case, one to three reps in reserve. So seven RPE would be three reps in reserve. A nine RPE would be one rep in reserve. In other words, we don’t have to go to failure to work strength, and there are some downsides to that.

We can we can still get super fucking strong if we’re working to not absolute failure. So to say this doesn’t mean that occasionally you won’t fail a rep I just did a couple weeks ago is doing bench for two and the second rep I didn’t get, which is fine bar got a little out of position. But we don’t always have to push to failure in order to see benefit there. But we’re generally looking at 75% plus of whatever your max would be.

Again, if we’re working off RPE or RAR, we’re gonna have to suss that out a little bit, generally speaking, two to six reps. And what that means is that you need to rest. You need to rest. The number one thing I see with people with strength training is they’re coming off of something like peloton or something of that nature, and they’re used to doing circuits, and then circuits there’s like 15 seconds of rest, or maybe, if they’re feeling generous, 30 seconds or 45 seconds, and you’re like, I gotta go again.

I gotta go again. You need to rest in order to give your muscle the ATP that it needs to contract again. That’s what that rest is for. So we want our sets to really count. We don’t want to just mail it in, phone it in, by cutting the rest too short and then not having enough energy to complete the set because we’re exhausted. So that’s how we would look at that now, in Strong With Steph. We do three sessions a week. You can do your strength training in two sessions a week.

You could do it in four. Three is just a nice, easy number for a lot of people, and a good balance, along with other sports. If you’re heavily into another sport, heavily into another sport, and it’s your competitive season, you might be doing fewer sessions a week, if you’re somebody who isn’t really doing much in the way of other activities, you know, hopefully, you’re getting your cardio in as well, but you might do four days a week and sort of spread things out in terms of your main sets, but

That’s generally how you would approach actual strength work for strength development, right? Heavier weights, more challenging weights, such that you only have a couple of reps left in the tank, two to three, maybe one to three, depending on where you’re at in the program. You need to pick a weight that’s hard enough warm-up for it, right? And rest that is crucial.

The strength work should come at the top, toward the top of your workout. Before you do all your accessory work, you should be doing your strength sets quite often. I’ll see people will do it at the end. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if they’re thinking because it’s the least number of reps. So I should do it at the end. That is not true.

We want to do our strength training toward the top of our workout in Strong With Steph. Strength work comes after power and plyo. So the power work, or the plyometric work, is great, is one of the great things for helping sort of that neuromuscular connection. People are like, I feel more awake. I feel more ready to go. Right?

Little bit of power generation there, right, working on that rate of force development. And then we’re going to recruit the muscle fiber to contract super hard to push against the weights that we’re going to use that are adequately challenging. And then we’re going to rest. And then we’re going to complete our sets. How many sets it’s going to depend on where you’re at in the program, how it’s being periodized throughout your year.

In Strong With Steph, we start with slightly higher reps, simply because we’re trying to help you build capacity. And there’s a lot of tempo work, which means we’re working slowly to help you figure out where in space your body is, especially if you haven’t been lifting in a while. But then we fairly quickly transfer over to those sets of 456, and kind of there’s different overall rep schemes and things like that that we use.

For example, in year two, we do some wave loading, which is pretty fun, where people get to. To experience, say, sets of six, four, and two in the same workout, and then, generally, we’ll repeat that. So there’s tons of ways to bake it in, in terms of variety, the number of reps and sets, but generally speaking, three to five sets, two to six or two to five reps is where you want to live, how we slice and dice, that depends.

But if you’re like I’m doing sets of 15, that weight is not heavy enough to work on force development, because you’re able to move it for 15 repetitions. It’s not heavy enough. If it were truly heavy enough, you wouldn’t be able to move it for 15 reps, if that makes sense. So a lot of the strength training that people say is strength training is more hypertrophy, which is fine. Nothing wrong with hypertrophy training.

We’ll talk about that next episode where we talk about accessory work. But if you’re used to that circuit style and so on and so forth, and you’re like, I use my 15-pound dumbbells for everything, including my lower body. In my my lower and upper body, it’s it’s probably not helping you with force development or actual strength, aside from some beginner improvements, which are fine, right? It’s fine to have those beginner improvements, and then you move on.

And a lot of people who come into Strong With Steph have done that where they’re like, Okay, I kind of hit a plateau with some of my other training, and I need to move to something else that’s really going to keep me progressing over time. So there you go. Ideally, right? The same things apply. We want to prepare our bodies well.

We talked about that in a couple of previous episodes before that, we want to include some specific warm-up sets for our strength work, right? Don’t just jump into a super heavy set completely cold. You want to pattern the movement. You want to wake yourself up. You want to get ready and anticipate heavier sets that are coming. So make sure you do your warm-up sets leading up to your heavier work sets. Very, very important.

Auto regulate in terms of the load that you’re going to pick that day? Well, generally, living in the neighborhood of RPE, seven to nine, depending on where you’re at in the program, or one to three reps left in the tank. Ask yourself after, not after every single set you do, but you know, maybe once per exercise. Hey, how many reps do I think I have left in the tank?

If the answer is 456, or more, add, add load, likely because it’s not, it’s not heavy enough, right? You should see that, hey, I’ve got, I’ve only got, say, three, three good reps left in me, or two good reps left in me. And think about consistency over time again. The most important thing we don’t have to be 100% perfect.

We talked about in a previous episode, why my philosophy is 78% to 80% of Completion is pretty fucking great, and that is consistency in my eyes. For my clients, especially as you’re navigating this change of life, in this season of life, and things are shifting very quickly around you, and how you feel on a given day is up in the air sometimes, right?

And in the next episode, we’re going to be diving into more about accessory work and how we approach that, specifically in Strong with Steph. What does that even mean? How do we figure that out? What are some examples of exercises that fall under that umbrella?

So I hope that you got a lot out of this episode in terms of plyometrics, power and strength training, true strength training for force development, why it’s relevant, especially for us as we’re over 40, why it’s something we want to bake into our program or look for as we’re evaluating programs out there on the internet or even talking to A potential personal trainer or coach, it’s like, how are these things included in your approach, and how do they show up in the programming that you do for your clients?

Really, really important. Because these things do matter in terms of helping us become more well-rounded, whether we are competitive athletes recreationally, like to do different sports and activities or just trying to stay strong for life. Thanks so much for being with me on this episode. If you found something useful here, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform. If you’re watching on YouTube, please like hit subscribe, and ring the bell for notifications.

Your vote of confidence with subscribing is totally free. Is one of the best ways to support the show, regardless of platform, because it sends a signal that says, hey, people who like this kind of content should see this episode too. That’s how it works, and it means a lot. So thank you so much. If you want to get a weak sample of strong with Steph, where you get to see all of this stuff in action, list it out for you and planned out so you can get a sample of what it’s like, along with my strength training guide for women over 40.

Then go to stephgaudreau.com/workout and we will send that right off to you in your email, and you can check it out. Thanks so much for being with me on this episode. Next time we’re going to be covering accessory work and what all. That means, and dive into it for you so you have a better idea when you’re looking at your programming. Until then, stay strong.

Plyo and Strength Development for Women Over 40 | Steph Gaudreau.