You lost the weight. Your hormones are dialed in. You are doing strength training. So why are your joints tighter than ever in menopause? In this episode, I am answering the question Peter Attia and Dr Abbie Smith Ryan left open in their conversation on Women’s Health and Performance. The tendon fear. The fall risk. The Type II muscle fiber loss. The metabolic flexibility piece. All of it leads back to one upstream cause nobody is testing for. Your joint capsule and the Silent Shutdown Cycle are running in the background of your body. Here is what you will learn. What metabolic flexibility actually means and why it lives inside your skeletal muscle. Why your Type II fast-twitch muscle fibers are the ones that catch you when you trip, and why menopause accelerates their loss. What is happening to your tendons after estrogen drops, and why Dr Abbie was right to fear the Achilles tear. The upstream piece neither Peter nor Abbie discussed. The joint capsule restriction and Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition determine whether your training builds you up or breaks you down. The five-step order that protects your movement system through perimenopause, menopause, and the years after. I am a Stretch Mobility Coach. I test joint mobility. I unlock what has been lost. I help women in midlife move with confidence again. This episode brings the science of the joint capsule to a conversation that has been missing it. Ready to find out where your body actually is. Book your Unlock Healthy Joint Mobility Session at our Beckett Ridge studio. In person or virtual. One session. Every joint is tested. Your Mobility Health Score and your Movement Age in your hand.

CHAPTERS

• 0:00 Why am I answering Peter and Abbie’s open questions
• 2:30 What metabolic flexibility actually means
• 8:00 The fall risk Peter Attia warned about
• 15:00 The tendon tear fear, Dr Abbie raised
• 22:00 The upstream piece they both missed
• 30:00 The five-step order that protects your movement

The science I reference in this episode is from peer-reviewed research. Full citation list available on request.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Stretch Mobility Coaching Podcast. I am Kim Nartker, and I am the founder of the Stretch Mobility Coach and the creator of the Stretch Method.

This podcast is about one thing, the science of healthy movement and why your body is not moving the way that it should. Every episode, I’m going to dig into the research on joint mobility and muscle health. I’m going to talk about what is really happening inside your body when you feel tight, stiff and sore.

And I’m going to give you the truth about what it takes to move well for the rest of your life, every day of your life and to feel amazing when you do. Let’s dive in, shall we? Hey guys, welcome back to the show today.

And today I’m going to be continuing our conversation on menopause. When I say menopause, I’m also sort of talking a little bit about paramenopause and postmenopause as well. But this series, I started last week in the show.

And this week, I’m going to pick up with women’s health, which I’m going to call this women’s movement health and how menopause affects your joints, muscle health and your movement quality. Now, this past weekend, while I was working out in my flower beds, I listened to Peter Attia’s podcast. He was talking with Dr. Abbie Smith Ryan, who is an exercise physiologist at the University of North Carolina.

And the title of the episode was Women’s Health and Performance and How Training Nutrition and Hormones Interact Across Life Stages. And if you haven’t heard the podcast yet, it’s a great one. It’s a great conversation between two people who are deeply serious about what is actually happening to women’s bodies through perimenopause, menopause, and the years after.

Now, I listened to that episode and caught two moments where both of them asked a question, but both of them had no clear answer. One was on tendons, specifically about loading and jumping in a perimenopausal body, and the fear of tearing something, and the other was about balance and falls, and what happens when an older post-menopausal female is bumped or she trips and cannot catch herself, so she falls. And I want to bring my science to those questions today, the science around movement health, because there is a piece of this picture that lives upstream of the muscle, the hormone, and of the tendon that did not come up in their discussion.

And in this conversation I have with women in menopause, I talk about these things in my studio every day. And today I want to talk about this same subject with you. I also want to bring to the table a new word.

They mentioned a new word in the podcast, and I want to teach you what that word is and what it means for your movement health. And the word is metabolic flexibility. Now I have not heard that term before.

I’ve heard of metabolic dysfunction, but they really in this podcast talk about metabolic flexibility and inflexibility. And I had to go back to the research after listening, and I want to share what I learned with you. Now a quick word about what I am bringing before I start.

I am a movement specialist, and I focus on the healthy movement and how you can control the decline that happens in your joints and muscles before it becomes a diagnosis and causes you to experience pain. Now some of you have experienced pain already. I do work with those people because they’ve been through the health care system and have been discharged or didn’t work.

So my focus of care is testing movement and tracking movement that is not healthy. And I offer programs that help you get back lost joint mobility that you thought was gone for good. And the hormone therapy and medical pieces I mentioned are from their show.

They’re just to help you connect the dots for your movement health. I am not a doctor or a scientist. What I am bringing today is the Joint Capsule and the Movement System Science that I have not heard connected in this conversation yet.

And that’s my lane. And I think it completes the picture they were drawing in the show. Now I guess I need to ask you first, have you heard of the word metabolic flexibility?

I had not heard of it. I had to look it up. And this is what I found out.

This is how it affects the things that are going on in your body right now in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause, okay? And this word is key for that. And here’s what I found when I dove into the research.

The term was coined by Kelly and colleagues in 1999. And the modern definitive review was by Good, Pastor, and Sparks in Cell Metabolism in 2017. And the definition of metabolic flexibility is the ability of your body to switch between burning fat and burning carbohydrate based on what is available and what your body is demanding at that time.

After a meal, a healthy body switches into glucose burning and stores away the excess. Between meals and overnight, it’s going to switch back on to fat burning. And that switch is automatic and seamless in a person who has metabolic flexibility.

Now when the switch breaks down and you stay stuck, then glucose stays elevated after meals because your body cannot get it out of your blood and into the cells that should be burning it. Fat does not get access between meals because your body cannot toggle back to burning fat the way it used to when you’re in perimenopause and postmenopause. Now the broken switch has a name in the literature.

And that broken switch is called metabolic inflexibility. It is the engine underneath insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and most of the metabolic decline that shows up in all of us in midlife. And the site of metabolic flexibility, I bet you’re not going to be able to guess this.

Skeletal muscle. Yes, specifically type 2 fast twitch fibers. And I want to dive more into these type 2 fibers and their role, but right now I want to break down muscle because muscle is the largest insulin sensitive organ in your body.

And if your muscle is smaller and weaker, your switching capacity is smaller and weaker. And if you’ve been listening to my show, you should recall me breaking muscle into muscle health category. This is to help you see the complexity of skeletal muscle and what the muscle requires to be healthy.

A healthy muscle can build strength, an unhealthy muscle feels weak, but the engine underneath the muscle is causing a muscle decline and a loss of muscle function that is larger than what we perceive as weakness. It is that I want you to better understand as I break this down today. Now, body composition changes in midlife due to many things.

Aging is only one of those things, but a large change in body composition, changes come from the loss of skeletal muscle. As women in midlife, this loss seems to cascade for us. Body composition is the visible result of a muscle system that lost some of its switching capacity.

Many of us are not as hungry as we used to be, and because we are gaining weight, most of us are okay with eating less during this time of life, because we want to lose that weight. But I want you to know it is important to look at the research here and choose things that help improve your metabolic flexibility. The fix is not eating less.

Try to resist this urge because to be able to build muscle, which is your end goal, you are going to have to eat enough protein. And even if you are hungry or not, you are going to have to get protein in. And that is a very hard thing for females at many ages.

And certainly, you know, midlife and beyond. The fix is preserving and rebuilding muscle so that your switch can be turned on like it should be. And then, you know, it can switch back and forth.

Now, after a meal, a healthy body switches into glucose burning and stores the excess. Between meals and overnight, it switches back to fat burning. That switch is automatic in a metabolically healthy person.

And when it breaks down, you are going to stay stuck in sort of one fuel pattern. Your glucose is going to stay elevated after meals because your body can’t get it out of your blood and into your cells. Fat does not get accessed between meals because the body can’t toggle back and forth.

Okay, the switch is broken. And this is called metabolic inflexibility. And it’s the engine underneath insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and most of the metabolic decline that shows up at med life.

And here’s the part that connects this to everything to your joint and your muscle health. The site of metabolic flexibility is your skeletal muscles, specifically the type 2 fast twitch fibers. Muscle is the largest insulin sensitive organ in your body.

And type 2 fibers have most of the glucose transporters that pull glucose out of your blood after a meal. So if you have less muscle and especially less type 2 muscle, your switching capacity drops. Now that’s the simplest version of what I learned.

Metabolic flexibility conversation is a muscle conversation and specifically a type 2 muscle fiber conversation. Now here’s why metabolic flexibility matters for you. When you hear people talk about metabolic flexibility, they’re talking about whether your muscle can still do its job as the switching engine for your fuel.

Body composition changes in midlife and it’s during this time we see decreased wellness health scores, increase in visceral fat and fat around your abdomen. We also see muscle health, joint health decline. They are the visible result of a muscle system that has lost some of its switching capacity.

Again, the fix is not for you to eat less. The fix is preserving and rebuilding the muscle that runs the switch. Specifically, the type 2 fibers are what we’re going to be talking about, and I’m going to get into those type 1 fibers as well because there’s two types of muscle fibers.

Now let’s talk about these falls. Falls are actually an epidemic in the senior population. Now I want to talk about how does a fall relate to metabolic inflexibility, joint and muscle loss.

Now in the episode, Peter raised something that I could have answered, but of course I was not the one being interviewed. He talked about how an older adult who gets bumped or trips often cannot catch herself. So she or he will fall and this fall is the beginning.

It seems minor and most of our parents will have this type of fall and or maybe you’ve fallen and they’re going to laugh it off as not knowing what happened. Now guys, our body cannot recover the balance fast enough. So during this time period in our lives, Peter framed this as a concern.

Most Americans having lost the type 2 muscle fibers that is needed to react in these moments. He wanted to know what the research said about it in the show and Dr. Abbie told him that people should go to see a PT or a personal trainer. And then Peter said, there’s a large gap of experience with the midlife population when we’re talking about personal trainers and I felt the listener was left with what do I do to gain these type 2 muscle fibers.

So that I can help my parents decrease their fall risk and help me and my family prevent falls as we are all going through this midlife change. Guys, we start losing muscle in our early 30s and for someone who is also hypermobile, it can be sooner due to the laxity in their joints. The muscle loss is triggered by the joint and this is the area that is not addressed at the source and it’s not addressed consistently and under what it needs to be dressed as far as frequency is to make changes.

So let’s dig into the muscle fibers for a bit here so you can better understand them. The fiber you lose first is the type two fibers. Now your skeletal muscle is made of two main fibers.

Type one, which are your slow twitch and type two, which are your faster muscle fibers. Type one, slow twitch handles your endurance and your posture. Type two, the fast twitch ones handle power, speed, propulsion and reaction time.

And type two fibers are the ones that fire when you start to fall and your body has to throw a hand out to catch a counter. They are the ones that fire when your foot catches on a sidewalk crack and you have to have like that second to put your other foot down before you hit the ground. They are also the ones that fire when you reach to grab something falling.

Type two is the catch yourself fiber, okay? It’s also the propulsion. That’s where our power goes.

And this fiber also handles our speed, our power. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to lose any of my power, but I have felt that loss over the last few years. And you’re already feeling it too.

And you’re already losing it. If you’re in that perimenopause, menopause and postmenopausal midlife time period. I guess I want to raise a hand of those of you who are already feeling that loss of power.

Comment, let’s get a discussion going on this so that you can learn more. Now, the research is clear that type 2 fibers atrophy. That means they get smaller, they lose muscle mass and they lose muscle function and muscle health.

And this happens preferentially with aging. Now, some of the reviews, there were some research that described type 2 fibers as 10 to 40% smaller in the elderly compared to a younger population. Now, type 1 fibers stay relatively similar in size.

So, you lose the fast catching fibers first and you keep the slow endurance fibers longer. But by the time most of us are in our 60s, we have already lost a significant portion of the type 2 muscle fibers that we had when we were 30. And guys, this is compounded for us because estrogen also drops at menopause.

And the hormone estrogen, that decrease is global throughout our skeletal muscle along with the joints and the tendons. And the muscle research suggests that estrogen helps preserve muscle contractile speed and quality. So, when our estrogen drops, the type 2 muscle fibers atrophy, this will actually accelerate beyond what age alone would do.

Now, Peter’s concern about people being bumped and falling is exactly the right concern and most of us are unaware of the role of the loss of estrogen at menopause and how it affects our movement throughout our lifespan, especially that five to seven years after menopause. Let’s dig into this metabolic flexibility and these muscle fibers and how and what it means for you specifically

“. Metabolic flexibility as it relates to the health of your skeletal muscle is key during med life at all stages, okay?

And strength training alone will not rebuild your muscle and stop the muscle loss that is already happening. You can maintain, but you’re not going to build that extra and it’s because the health of the muscle is not there. It’s not functioning the way that it’s supposed to function anymore.

And if you’ve had weight gain and you can’t seem to get rid of it, that is already your first sign that your muscle switching is delayed or it’s not working properly at all. And as discussed above, this is metabolic inflexibility based on the literature. Now muscle loss is occurring 3 to 8% during med life and it increases when we reach the age of 60 and beyond.

It’s like we’re on a cliff and we’re about to fall over guys. And what you don’t know is that you’re thinking when you fall over, there’s something there to catch you. But I’m here to tell you guys.

I see these ladies postmenopausal go into rotator cuff tears, go into hip dysfunction within just a few days because of a cycle that happens in your body. Now this muscle loss relates to your deep muscles that support your joints and your larger muscles that move your joint. Both of these muscles are in decline.

And when your joint and muscle are in decline, I call this the silent shutdown cycle. When you add menopause to the top of that, then we have aches and pains and stiffness in our joints. And you can feel it more when you’re sleeping, it disturbs your sleep.

It’s so many things. Menopause really just sucks. Now your type 2 muscle fibers are lost with the loss of end range joint mobility.

So what that means is the joint mobility that you’re losing in your thoracic spine, in your hips, in your ankles, in your wrist, and all of those joints, all of them comparatively, you’re losing end range joint mobility. And the ones we’re seeing it in right now are thoracic spine, shoulders, hips and ankles. So if you have lost joint mobility, and you’re not going to know that you lost it, and I’ll go through that again, but when you’ve lost that end range joint mobility, your body sort of takes away.

It’s sort of like this glass, you know, let’s say this is your joint mobility. And by the time you hit menopause, you know, you’ve already lost this much of that end range. And now your joint mobility and those, you know, shoulders, thoracic spine, your hips and your ankles, you only have this much available range to move in.

And this is a limitation, okay? Until you get all of this back, you’re not going to get those type two fast twitch muscles because you can’t gain that on a system that’s being inhibited. You can practice it and you can learn things, but you’re not going to gain it until you gain that end range joint mobility.

That is driver one of the five drivers of movement health. And when someone bumps you in a crowd, your type two fibers are what stabilize you. They’re what are required to prevent a fall, along with making sure that you have good joint mobility.

Now, it’s during midlife we lose bone due to the cascade of the silent shutdown cycle and the loss of muscle health and strength. We need to preserve muscle during this time to prevent the loss in skeletal muscle and prevent the loss of joint mobility decline, as well as that global aspect of the cascade that happens with menopause. Now, this is the cascade Peter was pointing at and it’s the most underestimated cycle that is not being addressed in midlife.

Most of us have no idea except for we know we’re achy, we know we’re not sleeping well, we know we’re having hot flashes, we’ve got the changes of life going on. And while we’re going through that, there’s a lot more that is being taken away from us. And I want you to understand that because this has huge ramifications on your movement health.

And the type 2 loss is completely silent. You will not feel pain, it does not hurt, and there is no symptom that tells you that it is happening. The first symptom is the fall.

Now, the falls don’t stop with just balance training, and balance training is the most utilized treatment for fall prevention. We need to look more at the joint and muscle health. Another unaddressed important factor is the general loss of muscle mass.

Now, this is the function of the muscle we’re losing. But we explain this loss of function more as weakness, and this is what we need to pay more attention to. Metabolic flexibility is a new term for me, but it comes down to muscle quality and muscle health.

You don’t just turn metabolic inflexible overnight. This is part of the silent decline I discussed that happens starting at the joint level, then turns off the muscle cascade that leads to falls and joint and muscle conditions. Now, I want to talk about Abbie’s concern.

The second thing that she talked about was the fear of a tendon tear with loading. We know the research supports loading our joints to preserve tendon health, and she was concerned about this because she is already feeling tightness in her joints and relating it to muscle health. Now, she was speaking about her own concern around this loading aspect, and she presented the research on jumping and loading and how important it is for hypertrophy and tendon health.

She is a researcher who actively trains, and she talked about the fear of tearing her Achilles tendon if she pushed too hard into jumps or loading during this stage of life. That is an

“informed researcher saying she has seen something in the literature that worries her about her own body. And I want to validate what she is concerned about because she is not the only person who has this fear.

In fact, fitness shows us to push harder and also gives us ways to tape our joints for protection. And this is the gap that Stretch Mobility Coaches address, and we address this through proven methods that improve end-range joint mobility in the hip and the foot system. And this is an important misstep, and I want you to see that you do have the things that you can do during this time.

You just need to have the right things and do them in the right order. Let’s talk about what happens to your tendons during menopause. Tendons are made largely of collagen.

Estrogen supports collagen synthesis and tendon health. Before menopause, women actually have lower tendinopathy rates than age-matched men, and that advantage disappears after menopause. Now, the Ganderton and Collies systematic review in the Journal of Musculoskeletal and Neuronal Interactions, it was in 2016, they documented that as estrogen declines after menopause, collagen production can decline, tendons become thinner, and rates of tendon pathology and rupture increase.

Estrogen receptors are present in tendon tissue, and when estrogen drops, the receptors that were supporting tendon maintenance, they lose their signal. Now, post-menopausal women, and again, guys, this is after age 52, it’s going to vary for many of us. It’s five to seven years after our last cycle, but that does change, different surgeries and such.

But post-menopausal women have lower collagen density in their tendons, and it’s slower and harder to heal after microtrauma, and it takes us longer to heal than it did when we were in our 30s. Now, Cook and colleagues in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science and Sports in 2007 found that physically active post-menopausal women on hormone therapy had different Achilles tendon characteristics than non-users, and this just suggested that hormone therapy may support tendon health in this population. This is not me supporting or not supporting something, I’m just giving you the data.

Now, the research shows that red light therapy can aid in tendon health and muscle recovery, as well as having bone benefits. Research also shows that limited ankle dorsiflexion is a proven risk factor for Achilles tendinopathy. Restoring in-range ankle joint mobility, and guys, it’s not just the ankle here, okay?

Because without in-range, your tendon cannot be loaded through its full length, which is what the research shows is required for tendon adaptation. So when Abbie said she was scared of tearing her Achilles with loading and jumps, she was reading the research correctly. The tendon environment in a post-menopausal body is more vulnerable.

Pushing high-impact loading into that environment without preparation is a real risk for this population. I want to break down what Dr. Abbie and Dr. Attia did not fully understand or conclude in the episode that I listened to. Peter wanted to know how to train the fall risk away.

Abbie wanted to know how to load without tearing her achilles. Both of them were in the same problem from different angles. How do you build type 2 fibers and load tendons in a post-menopausal body that it needs desperately and also the body is more fragile than a body that trained at age 30 or 35?

They both correctly pointed at strength training and progressive loading as the answer. They are both right. But there is a piece they did not discuss and it’s the piece that determines whether the loading gives your tendons fully what they need or it ends in the exact tendon tear that Abbie was afraid of.

And that piece is upstream to the muscle, upstream to the tendon, and it is the joint. And it is this conversation that is so important and there’s a huge gap currently when we discuss treatments and programming for this population. Now, here’s what completes the picture.

This is the part of the conversation that is mine, okay? I’ve not heard either of them or anyone else in the high-performance menopause space talk about it yet. I think when you hear it, the tendon fear and the fall concern stop being two different problems and become more of one problem with a known upstream cause.

Now, when we look at the five drivers of movement health and the silent shutdown cycle, all of the falls, the tendon tears, they decrease with addressing these five drivers. The first driver is joint health. Making sure to maintain joint in-range mobility is key to loading a tendon through its entire range in a healthy way.

And for falls, we can keep joints strong and mobile, and we can keep them from losing more joint mobility. Now, let’s dig into the silent shutdown cycle. Long before menopause, your daily life of sitting, driving, repetitive desk work, sleeping on one side and that same side, all of these things place pressure on your joints and your body.

And this leads to a joint restriction of the moving joints, which are your thoracic spine, your hips, your shoulders, and your ankles. Now, the joint capsule is a sleeve of tissue that wraps around joints, and what wraps around the bone, shall we say. And I don’t have one here in front of me right now.

But this is a sleeve of tissue that wraps around the bone, and it loses its normal in-range mobility year over year. And you will not feel pain or symptoms during this time, because pain is what shows up last. And by the time pain signals, you already have many joint and muscles that are in decline throughout your body.

And when a joint capsule restricts, there are mechanoreceptors inside of it that send altered signals to your nervous system. And then your nervous system responds by quietly turning down the deep, stabilizing muscles around the joint. And this causes your joints to be unsupported.

And it primes them for restriction. This is documented in the neuromuscular phenomenon. And the medical term is Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition.

The foundational reference is Hopkins and Ingersoll in the Journal of Sports Rehabilitation in 2000. The deep stabilizers are delayed or absent because the nervous system is called to protect the joint that has lost normal capsule mobility. Now in my work, I call this whole process the silence shutdown cycle because it runs silently for years without any pain.

Now here’s how it connects to the tendon fear. Now neither Peter or Abbie raised this that I’m about to talk about in the episode. A jump and a heavy load do not go through your muscle in isolation.

It goes through your joint. And if the joint capsule has lost mobility and the deep stabilizers that are supposed to protect that joint have been shut down by Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition, which is also AMI, the joint can’t center itself under that loaded pressure. And it absorbs the force in a compensation pattern.

Your larger muscles, those are like your biceps, your quadriceps, your hamstrings, your glute max, those muscles take over jobs they weren’t built for. The tendon attachments to those muscles end up loaded in positions and at angles they were not designed to absorb. And they’re not going through that full range they need to impact that the research shows us that is required.

Now when you layer that on top of a tendon that is already more fragile because estrogen is dropped, you have a tendon with weakened collagen being loaded by a body that cannot center the joint above it and that is the recipe for an Achilles tear that Abbie was afraid of. And it is not that loading is wrong because the research supports loading, but loading is what post-monopausal women need most. It is also loading into a shut down movement system that is what I’m saying is wrong.

Okay, the order matters more after menopause than it did in our younger years. And this is what I want you to walk away with today from this episode. Now let’s connect this to the falls where Peter had his concern.

Peter talked about the type 2 fast twitch fibers and what we lose first with aging and how they are critical for catching a fall and the research backs this. Power declines before strength and strength declines before size. Now type 2 fibers of these muscles atrophy, they get smaller, they lose function and they atrophy faster than type 1 with age which is why an older adult can lose the ability to react fast enough to recover from a stumble.

And the muscles that actually generate the force to catch a fall are the larger type 2 dominant muscles. These are your quadriceps, your glute max, your gastrocnemius. These are the explosive power muscles Peter is talking about when he says train these type 2 fibers to prevent falls.

These are the layers of the specific muscles. Okay, but guys, you can’t prevent a fall in a joint that doesn’t have full mobility because then you’ve got that silent shutdown cycle happening. So you can’t get rebuilding and strength in a muscle that can’t get the full load through the tendon that also can’t get that full mobility through the joint.

Now here’s layers of the specific muscles, okay. Layer one is type one deep stabilizers. Those are like your multifidus and your transverse abdominus.

Those are the first ones that are inhibited by this silent shutdown cycle. The multifidus is one of the deep muscles that protects your spinal joints posteriorly, and the transverse abdominus protects these joints anteriorly. And these are the feed forward muscles that pre-activate before you move.

Now, when they shut down, your body loses its early warning and stabilization system. You stop sensing the stumble with this shutdown of the deep muscles. Now, layer two are the type two larger muscles like your quadriceps, your glute medius, your gastrocnemius.

They actually get inhibited by AMI as well. And these are the muscles that Dr. Attia is talking about when he says you need fast power to catch a fall. And when they shut down, you do not have that explosive recovery force even if you sense the stumble.

And many of you have been here before. You sense that stumble and you just keep going down. It’s like this slow decline to the ground.

Now, when both layers are shut down, you cannot detect the fall coming and you cannot generate the force to catchb it. And that’s the silent shutdown cycle in full effect. And that is why it’s not a fitness problem.

It is an operation systems problem. Now the silent shutdown cycle inhibits both deep stabilizers that fire before you move and the larger type 2 muscles that catch you when you stumble. And Peter Attia is right that we need to train type 2 fibers as we age.

But guys, the missing piece is that no amount of fast twitch training will overcome a nervous system that has been shut down. And when those muscles are shut down through AMI, you have to restore the system first. Now a type 2 fiber that is being told by the nervous system to stay turned off, to stay inhibited, it does not fire.

And because you have been strength training the muscle around it, it doesn’t turn it back on. The strength you build in a body in shutdown reinforces compensation patterns and it leaves your deep stabilizer shut off. The corrective step that should catch the fall is still missing because the muscle that produces it is still inhibited.

You can lift heavy three days a week and still go down when

“you trip if your deep stabilizers are not reactivated. Then you have to address the larger muscle groups. In this silent shutdown, they are holding the joint, those larger muscles, and they are losing mass and losing health and they are getting tight.

And these require addressing Driver 1, which is the joint, along with Driver 2, deep muscles and larger muscles. Both are going to make it a more complete process, but you also need to address the other drivers for movement health. Every single one of them are important.

Now that’s the piece that completes this conversation. Train Type 2 with loading, yes. Load tendons progressively, yes.

And restore the capsule mobility and the stabilizer activation first, so that the loading lands on a body that can absorb it. Make sure your body is not strengthening in compensation. Now the order is testable and the missing piece is measurable.

And this is what I do. Now here’s the order that would complete their protocol that they’re talking about. If I could put my work in the middle of their conversation, here is the order I would offer for a postmenopausal woman.

Who wants to do exactly what Peter and Abbie are prescribing. Train hard, load tendons safely, build type 2 fibers, catch yourself when she falls or when she trips. Stay metabolic, flexible and avoid the surgery list.

Now here’s how you go about doing that. Number one, you need a mobility health assessment. And this is going to test every joint in your body and not just painful joints.

This is going to measure whether the small joints in your spine, your hips, your shoulders and your ankles have lost in-range mobility and rather the deep stabilizers around them are firing or not firing. And it’s going to produce a mobility health score and it’s going to produce a movement age. Now this is the baseline that tells you what kind of body you can load and if it’s safe to do that.

Overloading a weak muscle and a tendon in decline can cause a tear. We’ve seen that in the literature. Step two is to unlock these joints, okay?

This is where the assessment shows capsular restriction and then we restore mobility with hands on work matched to where the restriction is. And the guys, the capsule has to be addressed first because it is the input that’s keeping the deep stabilizers inhibited. And once the capsule moves, the nervous system stops sending that shut down cycle.

Step three is you have to reactivate these deep stabilizers that have gone quiet and have to be brought back before any explosive or heavy loading goes through the joints. Now, your daily homework once you have addressed driver one and driver two is to do five to ten minutes of targeted activation. Now this is the unglamorous step of every loading program and this is what every loading program skips.

Most programs show us activation drills of larger muscles but do not follow the complexity that is required to activate and keep those muscles activated. Unfortunately, guys, the inhibition is not a one-time occurrence and you cannot gain all-in range mobility in one session and keep it. It is way more complex programming and testing that is required to successfully do this and it is also the step that decides whether your tendons absorb the load safely or whether they tear under stress.

Step 4 is to load including your type 2 specific ones. This is what Peter and Abbie were prescribing you can actually load. Resistance training for muscle, impact loading for bone in the doses the research supports and it is critical for type 2 fiber preservation and reaction time, fast and powerful loading.

You want to do plyometric work where it is appropriate, Olympic style movement at appropriate doses. The Lift More Randomized Controlled Trial by Watson and Colleagues in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research in 2018 showed that postmenopausal women with low bone mass who did supervise twice weekly high intensity resistance and impact training for 8 months gained about 4% lumbar bone density. Now the work is going to work but the key is that the body is prepared for your in your movement system so that it works efficiently.

Now step 5 is to maintain and guys estrogen doesn’t come back and that’s why you need to consult with your doctor to see if estrogen is something you need to add back in or not. That’s the conversation you have to have with your doctor. The silent decline cascade does not stop no matter whether you take estrogen or not.

In fact, we see it return after small activities, stress, anything. The biggest thing here is understanding this cycle and this becomes key because maintenance is not optional and the frequency is set by testing and not by how you feel. You test, you check your in range mobility, you adjust and you progress your programming and the mobility health score and the movement age are just instruments and that is how you know that your work is holding.

Now, I want to close this up today and I want you to walk away with the word metabolic flexibility, how it lives in your muscle and especially in your type 2 muscle fibers. Type 2 muscle fibers is what catches you when you trip, type 2 is what disposes glucose after a meal. You are losing it faster after menopause and Peter and Abbie are right that you need to rebuild it.

Tendons are more vulnerable after menopause and Abbie was right to fear that Achilles tear. The research supports her concern. Post-menopausal tendons are thinner and slower to heal and more prone to injury.

Both of those are real and both of those are addressed by training, but the piece that determines whether the training builds type 2 fibers safely or whether it tears the the tendon is what Abbie was afraid of, is the joint capsule and the deep stabilizer inhibition and the compensation that lives upstream of the muscle and upstream of the tendon. Now that’s the upstream conversation that did not come up in their episode, and it is the one that completes this picture. And if you are training your body and it feels off, you’re afraid to load it like Abbie said she was, and if you have been bumped lately and you notice you almost didn’t catch yourself, like Peter described, your joint capsule and your deep stabilizers are sending you a signal, guys.

You need to book an Unlock Your Healthy Joint Mobility Session. You can do that at Beckett Ridge here in the studio, or I also offer in-person and virtual sessions. One session you’re going to get your mobility health score and your movement age, and that’s going to tell you a lot, okay?

Then you have the upstream picture that the highest level menopause performance conversations are still missing. And then you can load with confidence without fear. Peter and Abbie gave you a great conversation, and I’m bringing the piece they couldn’t answer.

Now you have everything that you need so that you are set up for success. I look forward to seeing you in the studio, and I’ll see you next week here on the show. Until then, keep moving well.

Thanks for joining me today on the show. If this episode resonated for you, please consider sharing it with someone who is tight, stiff or sore. Want to share your own healthy movement story with me?

Email my team at support at thestretchmobilitycoach.com. Now here are a few quick things before you go. I now offer virtual sessions nationwide.

I also have a new app that delivers a daily workout of the day. This new app gives you the tools you need to stop the silent decline that is happening in your body right now. Connect with me to gain access to this new app and to schedule a virtual session with me.

If you feel called to work in the field of healthy movement, head on over to the website at www.thestretchmobilitycoach.com/careers, and apply for our studio coach position. Want more info? Head on over to our resource page on our website for free articles and other topics to support your healthy movement journey.

Now guys, I’m happy to say my book is almost ready. Keep your eyes out for it. It’s called Healthy Movement, The Breakthrough Science of Moving Well for Life.

I am excited to share the book with you. Until next week, keep on moving, and please feel amazing when you do. See you next week.

Peter Attia and Dr. Abbie Smith Ryan had a powerful conversation on Women’s Health and Performance. They covered training nutrition and hormones across life stages. But two questions hung in the air without answers. Why are older adults falling when they get bumped? And why is Dr. Abbie afraid of tearing her Achilles tendon when she trains?
I am bringing the missing piece. The joint capsule and the deep stabilizer shut down that lives upstream of every muscle and tendon conversation happening in menopause health right now.
In this episode, you will learn what metabolic flexibility means for your muscles and your joints. Why are your Type II fast-twitch fibers the ones that catch you when you trip? Why do tendons get more fragile after estrogen drops? And the five-step order that protects your movement system so you can train hard and load safely without ending up in the surgery line.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• 00:00 Why this case matters for every woman over 45
• 03:00 The Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause
• 07:00 Why estrogen withdrawal hits every joint at once
• 12:00 The Silent Shutdown Cycle in a menopausal body
• 17:00 Why the suitcase did not cause the tear
• 22:00 The 5 Drivers of Healthy Movement
• 27:00 Why 3x per week is the new minimum after menopause 32:00 What to do before your shoulder tells you anything

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Stretch Mobility Coaching Podcast. I am Kim Nartker, and I am the founder of the Stretch Mobility Coach and the creator of the Stretch Method.

This podcast is about one thing, the science of healthy movement and why your body is not moving the way that it should. Every episode, I’m going to dig into the research on joint mobility and muscle health. I’m going to talk about what is really happening inside your body when you feel tight, stiff and sore.

And I’m going to give you the truth about what it takes to move well for the rest of your life, every day of your life and to feel amazing when you do. Let’s dive in, shall we? Hey guys, welcome back to the show today.

And today I’m going to be continuing our conversation on menopause. When I say menopause, I’m also sort of talking a little bit about paramenopause and postmenopause as well. But this series, I started last week in the show.

And this week, I’m going to pick up with women’s health, which I’m going to call this women’s movement health and how menopause affects your joints, muscle health and your movement quality. Now, this past weekend, while I was working out in my flower beds, I listened to Peter Attia’s podcast. He was talking with Dr. Abbie Smith Ryan, who is an exercise physiologist at the University of North Carolina.

And the title of the episode was Women’s Health and Performance and How Training Nutrition and Hormones Interact Across Life Stages. And if you haven’t heard the podcast yet, it’s a great one. It’s a great conversation between two people who are deeply serious about what is actually happening to women’s bodies through perimenopause, menopause, and the years after.

Now, I listened to that episode and caught two moments where both of them asked a question, but both of them had no clear answer. One was on tendons, specifically about loading and jumping in a perimenopausal body, and the fear of tearing something, and the other was about balance and falls, and what happens when an older post-menopausal female is bumped or she trips and cannot catch herself, so she falls. And I want to bring my science to those questions today, the science around movement health, because there is a piece of this picture that livesupstream of the muscle, the hormone, and of the tendon that did not come up in their discussion.

And in this conversation I have with women in menopause, I talk about these things in my studio every day. And today I want to talk about this same subject with you. I also want to bring to the table a new word.

They mentioned a new word in the podcast, and I want to teach you what that word is and what it means for your movement health. And the word is metabolic flexibility. Now I have not heard that term before.

I’ve heard of metabolic dysfunction, but they really in this podcast talk about metabolic flexibility and inflexibility. And I had to go back to the research after listening, and I want to share what I learned with you. Now a quick word about what I am bringing before I start.

I am a movement specialist, and I focus on the healthy movement and how you can control the decline that happens in your joints and muscles before it becomes a diagnosis and causes you to experience pain. Now some of you have experienced pain already. I do work with those people because they’ve been through the health care system and have been discharged or didn’t work.

So my focus of care is testing movement and tracking movement that is not healthy. And I offer programs that help you get back lost joint mobility that you thought was gone for good. And the hormone therapy and medical pieces I mentioned are from their show.

They’re just to help you connect the dots for your movement health. I am not a doctor or a scientist. What I am bringing today is the Joint Capsule and the Movement System Science that I have not heard connected in this conversation yet.

And that’s my lane. And I think it completes the picture they were drawing in the show. Now I guess I need to ask you first, have you heard of the word metabolic flexibility?

I had not heard of it. I had to look it up. And this is what I found out.

This is how it affects the things that are going on in your body right now in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause, okay? And this word is key for that. And here’s what I found when I dove into the research.

The term was coined by Kelly and colleagues in 1999. And the modern definitive review was by Good, Pastor, and Sparks in Cell Metabolism in 2017. And the definition of metabolic flexibility is the ability of your body to switch between burning fat and burning carbohydrate based on what is available and what your body is demanding at that time.

After a meal, a healthy body switches into glucose burning and stores away the excess. Between meals and overnight, it’s going to switch back on to fat burning. And that switch is automatic and seamless in a person who has metabolic flexibility.

Now when the switch breaks down and you stay stuck, then glucose stays elevated after meals because your body cannot get it out of your blood and into the cells that should be burning it. Fat does not get access between meals because your body cannot toggle back to burning fat the way it used to when you’re in perimenopause and postmenopause. Now the broken switch has a name in the literature.

And that broken switch is called metabolic inflexibility. It is the engine underneath insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and most of the metabolic decline that that shows up in all of us in midlife. And the site of metabolic flexibility, I bet you’re not going to be able to guess this.

Skeletal muscle. Yes, specifically type 2 fast twitch fibers. And I want to dive more into these type 2 fibers and their role, but right now I want to break down muscle because muscle is the largest insulin sensitive organ in your body.

And if your muscle is smaller and weaker, your switching capacity is smaller and weaker. And if you’ve been listening to my show, you should recall me breaking muscle into muscle health category. This is to help you see the complexity of skeletal muscle and what the muscle requires to be healthy.

A healthy muscle can build strength, an unhealthy muscle feels weak, but the engine underneath the muscle is causing a muscle decline and a loss of muscle function that is larger than what we perceive as weakness. It is that I want you to better understand as I break this down today. Now, body composition changes in midlife due to many things.

Aging is only one of those things, but a large change in body composition, changes come from the loss of skeletal muscle. As women in midlife, this loss seems to cascade for us. Body composition is the visible result of a muscle system that lost some of its switching capacity.

Many of us are not as hungry as we used to be, and because we are gaining weight, most of us are okay with eating less during this time of life, because we want to lose that weight. But I want you to know it is important to look at the research here and choose things that help improve your metabolic flexibility. The fix is not eating less.

Try to resist this urge because to be able to build muscle, which is your end goal, you are going to have to eat enough protein. And even if you are hungry or not, you are going to have to get protein in. And that is a very hard thing for females at many ages.

And certainly, you know, midlife and beyond. The fix is preserving and rebuilding muscle so that your switch can be turned on like it should be. And then, you know, it can switch back and forth.

Now, after a meal, a healthy body switches into glucose burning and stores the excess. Between meals and overnight, it switches back to fat burning. That switch is automatic in a metabolically healthy person.

And when it breaks down, you are going to stay stuck in sort of one fuel pattern. Your glucose is going to stay elevated after meals because your body can’t get it out of your blood and into your cells. Fat does not get accessed between meals because the body can’t toggle back and forth.

Okay, the switch is broken. And this is called metabolic inflexibility. And it’s the engine underneath insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and most of the metabolic decline that shows up at med life.

And here’s the part that connects this to everything to your joint and your muscle health. The site of metabolic flexibility is your skeletal muscles, specifically the type 2 fast twitch fibers. Muscle is the largest insulin sensitive organ in your body.

And type 2 fibers have most of the glucose transporters that pull glucose out of your blood after a meal. So if you have less muscle and especially less type 2 muscle, your switching capacity drops. Now that’s the simplest version of what I learned.

Metabolic flexibility conversation is a muscle conversation and specifically a type 2 muscle fiber conversation. Now here’s why metabolic flexibility matters for you. When you hear people talk about metabolic flexibility, they’re talking about whether your muscle can still do its job as the switching engine for your fuel.

Body composition changes in midlife and it’s during this time we see decreased wellness health scores, increase in visceral fat and fat around your abdomen. We also see muscle health, joint health decline. They are the visible result of a muscle system that has lost some of its switching capacity.

Again, the fix is not for you to eat less. The fix is preserving and rebuilding the muscle that runs the switch. Specifically, the type 2 fibers are what we’re going to be talking about, and I’m going to get into those type 1 fibers as well because there’s two types of muscle fibers.

Now let’s talk about these falls. Falls are actually an epidemic in the senior population. Now I want to talk about how does a fall relate to metabolic inflexibility, joint and muscle loss.

Now in the episode, Peter raised something that I could have answered, but of course I was not the one being interviewed. He talked about how an older adult who gets bumped or trips often cannot catch herself. So she or he will fall and this fall is the beginning.

It seems minor and most of our parents will have this type of fall and or maybe you’ve fallen and they’re going to laugh it off as not knowing what happened. Now guys, our body cannot recover the balance fast enough. So during this time period in our lives, Peter framed this as a concern.

Most Americans having lost the type 2 muscle fibers that is needed to react in these moments. He wanted to know what the research said about it in the show and Dr. Abbie told him that people should go to see a PT or a personal trainer. And then Peter said, there’s a large gap of experience with the midlife population when we’re talking about personal trainers and I felt the listener was left with what do I do to gain these type 2 muscle fibers.

So that I can help my parents decrease their fall risk and help me and my family prevent falls as we are all going through this midlife change. Guys, we start losing muscle in our early 30s and for someone who is also hypermobile, it can be sooner due to the laxity in their joints. The muscle loss is triggered by the joint and this is the area that is not addressed at the source and it’s not addressed consistently and under what it needs to be dressed as far as frequency is to make changes.

So let’s dig into the muscle fibers for a bit here so you can better understand them. The fiber you lose first is the type two fibers. Now your skeletal muscle is made of two main fibers.

Type one, which are your slow twitch and type two, which are your faster muscle fibers. Type one, slow twitch handles your endurance and your posture. Type two, the fast twitch ones handle power, speed, propulsion and reaction time.

And type two fibers are the ones that fire when you start to fall and your body has to throw a hand out to catch a counter. They are the ones that fire when your foot catches on a sidewalk crack and you have to have like that second to put your other foot down before you hit the ground. They are also the ones that fire when you reach to grab something falling.

Type two is the catch yourself fiber, okay? It’s also the propulsion. That’s where our power goes.

And this fiber also handles our speed, our power. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to lose any of my power, but I have felt that loss over the last few years. And you’re already feeling it too.

And you’re already losing it. If you’re in that perimenopause, menopause and postmenopausal midlife time period.

I guess I want to raise a hand of those of you who are already feeling that loss of power.

Comment, let’s get a discussion going on this so that you can learn more. Now, the research is clear that type 2 fibers atrophy. That means they get smaller, they lose muscle mass and they lose muscle function and muscle health.

And this happens preferentially with aging. Now, some of the reviews, there were some research that described type 2 fibers as 10 to 40% smaller in the elderly compared to a younger population. Now, type 1 fibers stay relatively similar in size.

So, you lose the fast catching fibers first and you keep the slow endurance fibers longer. But by the time most of us are in our 60s, we have already lost a significant portion of the type 2 muscle fibers that we had when we were 30. And guys, this is compounded for us because estrogen also drops at menopause.

And the hormone estrogen, that decrease is global throughout our skeletal muscle along with the joints and the tendons. And the muscle research suggests that estrogen helps preserve muscle contractile speed and quality. So, when our estroge drops, the type 2 muscle fibers atrophy, this will actually accelerate beyond what age alone would do.

Now, Peter’s concern about people being bumped and falling is exactly the right concern and most of us are unaware of the role of the loss of estrogen at menopause and how it affects our movement throughout our lifespan, especially that five to seven years after menopause. Let’s dig into this metabolic flexibility and these muscle fibers and how and what it means for you specifically. Metabolic flexibility as it relates to the health of your skeletal muscle is key during med life at all stages, okay?

And strength training alone will not rebuild your muscle and stop the muscle loss that is already happening. You can maintain, but you’re not going to build that extra and it’s because the health of the muscle is not there. It’s not functioning the way that it’s supposed to function anymore.

And if you’ve had weight gain and you can’t seem to get rid of it, that is already your first sign that your muscle switching is delayed or it’s not working properly at all. And as discussed above, this is metabolic inflexibility based on the literature. Now muscle loss is occurring 3 to 8% during med life and it increases when we reach the age of 60 and beyond.

It’s like we’re on a cliff and we’re about to fall over guys. And what you don’t know is that you’re thinking when you fall over, there’s something there to catch you. But I’m here to tell you guys.

I see these ladies postmenopausal go into rotator cuff tears, go into hip dysfunction within just a few days because of a cycle that happens in your body. Now this muscle loss relates to your deep muscles that support your joints and your larger muscles that move your joint. Both of these muscles are in decline.

And when your joint and muscle are in decline, I call this the silent shutdown cycle. When you add menopause to the top of that, then we have aches and pains and stiffness in our joints. And you can feel it more when you’re sleeping, it disturbs your sleep.

It’s so many things. Menopause really just sucks. Now your type 2 muscle fibers are lost with the loss of end range joint mobility.

So what that means is the joint mobility that you’re losing in your thoracic spine, in your hips, in your ankles, in your wrist, and all of those joints, all of them comparatively, you’re losing end range joint mobility. And the ones we’re seeing it in right now are thoracic spine, shoulders, hips and ankles. So if you have lost joint mobility, and you’re not going to know that you lost it, and I’ll go through that again, but when you’ve lost that end range joint mobility, your body sort of takes away.

It’s sort of like this glass, you know, let’s say this is your joint mobility. And by the time you hit menopause, you know, you’ve already lost this much of that end range. And now your joint mobility and those, you know, shoulders, thoracic spine, your hips and your ankles, you only have this much available range to move in.

And this is a limitation, okay? Until you get all of this back, you’re not going to get those type two fast twitch muscles because you can’t gain that on a system that’s being inhibited. You can practice it and you can learn things, but you’re not going to gain it until you gain that end range joint mobility.

That is driver one of the five drivers of movement health. And when someone bumps you in a crowd, your type two fibers are what stabilize you. They’re what are required to prevent a fall, along with making sure that you have good joint mobility.

Now, it’s during midlife we lose bone due to the cascade of the silent shutdown cycle and the loss of muscle health and strength. We need to preserve muscle during this time to prevent the loss in skeletal muscle and prevent the loss of joint mobility decline, as well as that global aspect of the cascade that happens with menopause. Now, this is the cascade Peter was pointing at and it’s the most underestimated cycle that is not being addressed in midlife.

Most of us have no idea except for we know we’re achy, we know we’re not sleeping well, we know we’re having hot flashes, we’ve got the changes of life going on. And while we’re going through that, there’s a lot more that is being taken away from us. And I want you to understand that because this has huge ramifications on your movement health.

And the type 2 loss is completely silent. You will not feel pain, it does not hurt, and there is no symptom that tells you that it is happening. The first symptom is the fall.

Now, the falls don’t stop with just balance training, and balance training is the most utilized treatment for fall prevention. We need to look more at the joint and muscle health. Another unaddressed important factor is the general loss of muscle mass.

Now, this is the function of the muscle we’re losing. But we explain this loss of function more as weakness, and this is what we need to pay more attention to. Metabolic flexibility is a new term for me, but it comes down to muscle quality and muscle health.

You don’t just turn metabolic inflexible overnight. This is part of the silent decline I discussed that happens starting at the joint level, then turns off the muscle cascade that leads to falls and joint and muscle conditions. Now, I want to talk about Abbie’s concern.

The second thing that she talked about was the fear of a tendon tear with loading. We know the research supports loading our joints to preserve tendon health, and she was concerned about this because she is already feeling tightness in her joints and relating it to muscle health. Now, she was speaking about her own concern around this loading aspect, and she presented the research on jumping and loading and how important it is for hypertrophy and tendon health.

She is a researcher who actively trains, and she talked about the fear of tearing her Achilles tendon if she pushed too hard into jumps or loading during this stage of life. That is an informed researcher saying she has seen something in the literature that worries her about her own body. And I want to validate what she is concerned about because she is not the only person who has this fear.

In fact, fitness shows us to push harder and also gives us ways to tape our joints for protection. And this is the gap that Stretch Mobility Coaches address, and we address this through proven methods that improve end-range joint mobility in the hip and the foot system. And this is an important misstep, and I want you to see that you do have the things that you can do during this time.

You just need to have the right things and do them in the right order. Let’s talk about what happens to your tendons during menopause. Tendons are made largely of collagen.

Estrogen supports collagen synthesis and tendon health. Before menopause, women actually have lower tendinopathy rates than age-matched men, and that advantage disappears after menopause. Now, the Ganderton and Collies systematic review in the Journal of Musculoskeletal and Neuronal Interactions, it was in 2016, they documented that as estrogen declines after menopause, collagen production can decline, tendons become thinner, and rates of tendon pathology and rupture increase.

Estrogen receptors are present in tendon tissue, and when estrogen drops, the receptors that were supporting tendon maintenance, they lose their signal. Now, post-menopausal women, and again, guys, this is after age 52, it’s going to vary for many of us. It’s five to seven years after our last cycle, but that does change, different surgeries and such.

But post-menopausal women have lower collagen density in their tendons, and it’s slower and harder to heal after microtrauma, and it takes us longer to heal than it did when we were in our 30s. Now, Cook and colleagues in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science and Sports in 2007 found that physically active post-menopausal women on hormone therapy had different Achilles tendon characteristics than non-users, and this just suggested that hormone therapy may support tendon health in this population. This is not me supporting or not supporting something, I’m just giving you the data.

Now, the research shows that red light therapy can aid in tendon health and muscle recovery, as well as having bone benefits. Research also shows that limited ankle dorsiflexion is a proven risk factor for Achilles tendinopathy. Restoring in-range ankle joint mobility, and guys, it’s not just the ankle here, okay?

Because without in-range, your tendon cannot be loaded through its full length, which is what the research shows is required for tendon adaptation. So when Abbie said she was scared of tearing her Achilles with loading and jumps, she was reading the research correctly. The tendon environment in a post-menopausal body is more vulnerable.

Pushing high-impact loading into that environment without preparation is a real risk for this population. I want to break down what Dr. Abbie and Dr. Attia did not fully understand or conclude in the episode that I listened to. Peter wanted to know how to train the fall risk away.

Abbie wanted to know how to load without tearing her achilles. Both of them were in the same problem from different angles. How do you build type 2 fibers and load tendons in a post-menopausal body that it needs desperately and also the body is more fragile than a body that trained at age 30 or 35?

They both correctly pointed at strength training and progressive loading as the answer. They are both right. But there is a piece they did not discuss and it’s the piece that determines whether the loading gives your tendons fully what they need or it ends in the exact tendon tear that Abbie was afraid of.

And that piece is upstream to the muscle, upstream to the tendon, and it is the joint. And it is this conversation that is so important and there’s a huge gap currently when we discuss treatments and programming for this population. Now, here’s what completes the picture.

This is the part of the conversation that is mine, okay? I’ve not heard either of them or anyone else in the high-performance menopause space talk about it yet. I think when you hear it, the tendon fear and the fall concern stop being two different problems and become more of one problem with a known upstream cause.

Now, when we look at the five drivers of movement health and the silent shutdown cycle, all of the falls, the tendon tears, they decrease with addressing these five drivers. The first driver is joint health. Making sure to maintain joint in-range mobility is key to loading a tendon through its entire range in a healthy way.

And for falls, we can keep joints strong and mobile, and we can keep them from losing more joint mobility. Now, let’s dig into the silent shutdown cycle. Long before menopause, your daily life of sitting, driving, repetitive desk work, sleeping on one side and that same side, all of these things place pressure on your joints and your body.

And this leads to a joint restriction of the moving joints, which are your thoracic spine, your hips, your shoulders, and your ankles. Now, the joint capsule is a sleeve of tissue that wraps around joints, and what wraps around the bone, shall we say. And I don’t have one here in front of me right now.

But this is a sleeve of tissue that wraps around the bone, and it loses its normal in-range mobility year over year. And you will not feel pain or symptoms during this time, because pain is what shows up last. And by the time pain signals, you already have many joint and muscles that are in decline throughout your body.

And when a joint capsule restricts, there are mechanoreceptors inside of it that send altered signals to your nervous system. And then your nervous system responds by quietly turning down the deep, stabilizing muscles around the joint. And this causes your joints to be unsupported.

And it primes them for restriction. This is documented in the neuromuscular phenomenon. And the medical term is Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition.

The foundational reference is Hopkins and Ingersoll in the Journal of Sports Rehabilitation in 2000. The deep stabilizers are delayed or absent because the nervous system is called to protect the joint that has lost normal capsule mobility. Now in my work, I call this whole process the silence shutdown cycle because it runs silently for years without any pain.

Now here’s how it connects to the tendon fear. Now neither Peter or Abbie raised this that I’m about to talk about in the episode. A jump and a heavy load do not go through your muscle in isolation.

It goes through your joint. And if the joint capsule has lost mobility and the deep stabilizers that are supposed to protect that joint have been shut down by Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition, which is also AMI, the joint can’t center itself under that loaded pressure. And it absorbs the force in a compensation pattern.

Your larger muscles, those are like your biceps, your quadriceps, your hamstrings, your glute max, those muscles take over jobs they weren’t built for. The tendon attachments to those muscles end up loaded in positions and at angles they were not designed to absorb. And they’re not going through that full range they need to impact that the research shows us that is required.

Now when you layer that on top of a tendon that is already more fragile because estrogen is dropped, you have a tendon with weakened collagen being loaded by a body that cannot center the joint above it and that is the recipe for an Achilles tear that Abbie was afraid of

And it is not that loading is wrong because the research supports loading, but loading is what post-monopausal women need most. It is also loading into a shut down movement system that is what I’m saying is wrong.

Okay, the order matters more after menopause than it did in our younger years. And this is what I want you to walk away with today from this episode. Now let’s connect this to the falls where Peter had his concern.

Peter talked about the type 2 fast twitch fibers and what we lose first with aging and how they are critical for catching a fall and the research backs this. Power declines before strength and strength declines before size. Now type 2 fibers of these muscles atrophy, they get smaller, they lose function and they atrophy faster than type 1 with age which is why an older adult can lose the ability to react fast enough to recover from a stumble.

And the muscles that actually generate the force to catch a fall are the larger type 2 dominant muscles. These are your quadriceps, your glute max, your gastrocnemius. These are the explosive power muscles Peter is talking about when he says train these type 2 fibers to prevent falls.

These are the layers of the specific muscles. Okay, but guys, you can’t prevent a fall in a joint that doesn’t have full mobility because then you’ve got that silent shutdown cycle happening. So you can’t get rebuilding and strength in a muscle that can’t get the full load through the tendon that also can’t get that full mobility through the joint.

Now here’s layers of the specific muscles, okay. Layer one is type one deep stabilizers. Those are like your multifidus and your transverse abdominus.

Those are the first ones that are inhibited by this silent shutdown cycle. The multifidus is one of the deep muscles that protects your spinal joints posteriorly, and the transverse abdominus protects these joints anteriorly. And these are the feed forward muscles that pre-activate before you move.

Now, when they shut down, your body loses its early warning and stabilization system. You stop sensing the stumble with this shutdown of the deep muscles. Now, layer two are the type two larger muscles like your quadriceps, your glute medius, your gastrocnemius.

They actually get inhibited by AMI as well.

And these are the muscles that Dr. Attia is talking about when he says you need fast power to catch a fall. And when they shut down, you do not have that explosive recovery force even if you sense the stumble.

And many of you have been here before. You sense that stumble and you just keep going down. It’s like this slow decline to the ground.

Now, when both layers are shut down, you cannot detect the fall coming and you cannot generate the force to catch it. And that’s the silent shutdown cycle in full effect. And that is why it’s not a fitness problem.

It is an operation systems problem. Now the silent shutdown cycle inhibits both deep stabilizers that fire before you move and the larger type 2 muscles that catch you when you stumble. And Peter Attia is right that we need to train type 2 fibers as we age.

But guys, the missing piece is that no amount of fast twitch training will overcome a nervous system that has been shut down. And when those muscles are shut down through AMI, you have to restore the system first. Now a type 2 fiber that is being told by the nervous system to stay turned off, to stay inhibited, it does not fire.

And because you have been strength training the muscle around it, it doesn’t turn it back on. The strength you build in a body in shutdown reinforces compensation patterns and it leaves your deep stabilizer shut off. The corrective step that should catch the fall is still missing because the muscle that produces it is still inhibited.

You can lift heavy three days a week and still go down when you trip if your deep stabilizers are not reactivated. Then you have to address the larger muscle groups. In this silent shutdown, they are holding the joint, those larger muscles, and they are losing mass and losing health and they are getting tight.

And these require addressing Driver 1, which is the joint, along with Driver 2, deep muscles and larger muscles. Both are going to make it a more complete process, but you also need to address the other drivers for movement health. Every single one of them are important.

Now that’s the piece that completes this conversation. Train Type 2 with loading, yes. Load tendons progressively, yes.

And restore the capsule mobility and the stabilizer activation first, so that the loading lands on a body that can absorb it. Make sure your body is not strengthening in compensation. Now the order is testable and the missing piece is measurable.

And this is what I do. Now here’s the order that would complete their protocol that they’re talking about. If I could put my work in the middle of their conversation, here is the order I would offer for a postmenopausal woman.

Who wants to do exactly what Peter and Abbie are prescribing. Train hard, load tendons safely, build type 2 fibers, catch yourself when she falls or when she trips. Stay metabolic, flexible and avoid the surgery list.

Now here’s how you go about doing that. Number one, you need a mobility health assessment. And this is going to test every joint in your body and not just painful joints.

This is going to measure whether the small joints in your spine, your hips, your shoulders and your ankles have lost in-range mobility and rather the deep stabilizers around them are firing or not firing. And it’s going to produce a mobility health score and it’s going to produce a movement age. Now this is the baseline that tells you what kind of body you can load and if it’s safe to do that.

Overloading a weak muscle and a tendon in decline can cause a tear. We’ve seen that in the literature. Step two is to unlock these joints, okay?

This is where the assessment shows capsular restriction and then we restore mobility with hands on work matched to where the restriction is. And the guys, the capsule has to be addressed first because it is the input that’s keeping the deep stabilizers inhibited. And once the capsule moves, the nervous system stops sending that shut down cycle.

Step three is you have to reactivate these deep stabilizers that have gone quiet and have to be brought back before any explosive or heavy loading goes through the joints. Now, your daily homework once you have addressed driver one and driver two is to do five to ten minutes of targeted activation. Now this is the unglamorous step of every loading program and this is what every loading program skips.

Most programs show us activation drills of larger muscles but do not follow the complexity that is required to activate and keep those muscles activated. Unfortunately, guys, the inhibition is not a one-time occurrence and you cannot gain all-in range mobility in one session and keep it. It is way more complex programming and testing that is required to successfully do this and it is also the step that decides whether your tendons absorb the load safely or whether they tear under stress.

Step 4 is to load including your type 2 specific ones. This is what Peter and Abbie were prescribing you can actually load. Resistance training for muscle, impact loading for bone in the doses the research supports and it is critical for type 2 fiber preservation and reaction time, fast and powerful loading.

You want to do plyometric work where it is appropriate, Olympic style movement at appropriate doses. The Lift More Randomized Controlled Trial by Watson and Colleagues in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research in 2018 showed that postmenopausal women with low bone mass who did supervise twice weekly high intensity resistance and impact training for 8 months gained about 4% lumbar bone density. Now the work is going to work but the key is that the body is prepared for your in your movement system so that it works efficiently.

Now step 5 is to maintain and guys estrogen doesn’t come back and that’s why you need to consult with your doctor to see if estrogen is something you need to add back in or not. That’s the conversation you have to have with your doctor. The silent decline cascade does not stop no matter whether you take estrogen or not.

In fact, we see it return after small activities, stress, anything. The biggest thing here is understanding this cycle and this becomes key because maintenance is not optional and the frequency is set by testing and not by how you feel. You test, you check your in range mobility, you adjust and you progress your programming and the mobility health score and the movement age are just instruments and that is how you know that your work is holding.

Now, I want to close this up today and I want you to walk away with the word metabolic flexibility, how it lives in your muscle and especially in your type 2 muscle fibers. Type 2 muscle fibers is what catches you when you trip, type 2 is what disposes glucose after a meal. You are losing it faster after menopause and Peter and Abbie are right that you need to rebuild it.

Tendons are more vulnerable after menopause and Abbie was right to fear that Achilles tear. The research supports her concern. Post-menopausal tendons are thinner and slower to heal and more prone to injury.

Both of those are real and both of those are addressed by training, but the piece that determines whether the training builds type 2 fibers safely or whether it tears the tendon is what Abbie was afraid of, is the joint capsule and the deep stabilizer inhibition and the compensation that lives upstream of the muscle and upstream of the tendon. Now that’s the upstream conversation that did not come up in their episode, and it is the one that completes this picture. And if you are training your body and it feels off, you’re afraid to load it like Abbie said she was, and if you have been bumped lately and you notice you almost didn’t catch yourself, like Peter described, your joint capsule and your deep stabilizers are sending you a signal, guys.

You need to book an Unlock Your Healthy Joint Mobility Session. You can do that at Beckett Ridge here in the studio, or I also offer in-person and virtual sessions. One session you’re going to get your mobility health score and your movement age, and that’s going to tell you a lot, okay?

Then you have the upstream picture that the highest level menopause performance conversations are still missing. And then you can load with confidence without fear. Peter and Abbie gave you a great conversation, and I’m bringing the piece they couldn’t answer.

Now you have everything that you need so that you are set up for success. I look forward to seeing you in the studio, and I’ll see you next week here on the show. Until then, keep moving well.

Thanks for joining me today on the show. If this episode resonated for you, please consider sharing it with someone who is tight, stiff or sore. Want to share your own healthy movement story with me?

Email my team at support at thestretchmobilitycoach.com. Now here are a few quick things before you go. I now offer virtual sessions nationwide.

I also have a new app that delivers a daily workout of the day. This new app gives you the tools you need to stop the silent decline that is happening in your body right now. Connect with me to gain access to this new app and to schedule a virtual session with me.

If you feel called to work in the field of healthy movement, head on over to the website at www.thestretchmobilitycoach.com/careers, and apply for our studio coach position. Want more info? Head on over to our resource page on our website for free articles and other topics to support your healthy movement journey.

Now guys, I’m happy to say my book is almost ready. Keep your eyes out for it. It’s called Healthy Movement, The Breakthrough Science of Moving Well for Life.

I am excited to share the book with you. Until next week, keep on moving, and please feel amazing when you do. See you next week.

In this episode, I’m talking directly to women in their 50s and 60s who have spent years giving everything to their families and are now wondering where they went in the process. If you’ve been feeling the physical, emotional, and mental weight of that, you’re not alone.
I share real stories, break down the patterns keeping us stuck in guilt and overgiving, and explain what’s actually happening in your body when you start to feel stiff, tired, and out of control. This isn’t about blame; it’s about awareness and taking your life back.

I’ll also walk you through a simple exercise to help you get clear on where your time is going and how to start making space for yourself again.

You deserve to feel strong, in control, and like you again. This is where that starts.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Stretch Mobility Coaching Podcast. I am Kim Nartker, and I am the founder of the Stretch Mobility Coach and the creator of the Stretch Method.

This podcast is about one thing, the science of healthy movement and why your body is not moving the way that it should. Every episode, I’m going to dig into the research on joint mobility and muscle health. I’m going to talk about what is really happening inside your body when you feel tight, stiff, and sore.

And I’m going to give you the truth about what it takes to move well for the rest of your life, every day of your life, and to feel amazing when you do. Let’s dive in, shall we? Hey guys, welcome back to the Stretch Mobility Coaching Show.

And I’m Kim Nartker, and I am so glad that you’re here today because today’s episode is one that has been sitting on my heart for a long time. It’s one for our mothers, okay? And those mothers are us, all of us females that are 50 to 60 years old.

I am talking about us. I’m talking about self-sacrifice, love, caring, generosity. We all give every day of our lives, and we never shut that down.

And now, we’re in our 50s, and our world feels very different than it used to when our kids were smaller. This happened to our mothers, and it is now happening to us. And this show today is about taking away guilt and shame, gaining control of what we have all worked so hard for.

So today, we talk about mothers. And not just any mothers, I am talking about all of us in our 50s and our 60s, all of us who have spent decades pouring everything that we have into everyone around us, our kids, our husbands, our grandkids, our parents, our jobs, our homes. And somewhere in all of that giving, we looked up one day and realized that we had nothing left in the cup for ourselves.

And if that is you, I want you to know something before we get started. You are not alone. I am in the same boat that you are in.

And today though, we are going to talk about where we are, where we thought we would be at this point in our lives and where we want to be. Then we’re going to do the work to start the work we should have started years ago. We’re going to learn to fill our tanks without feeling selfish or guilty.

And it is my hope that this show today, that all of us moms that are in this boat today, turn this boat around to start giving to ourselves unselfishly. And it’s my hope that we can help our children see how much we love and care for them and how proud we are of who they are and what they’ve become and where they are headed. It would also be great if our daughters and sons would learn the lessons we are learning right now so that they can avoid these lessons later in life, because really that’s the reason, right, that we give so much to everyone is because we don’t want them to feel hurt or alone.

So if any of you ladies are resonating, please let me know. So I, most of you don’t even know this, I was married at 18. I had no idea of the world and how things worked.

I knew I wanted something different than what my mom and dad had. But I was from a small town, from parents who had no degree, that they were in lower middle class struggling to raise three children. And I was told, you’re just a dreamer.

And I have to admit that I was. But what I have found in myself is that I am also a very hard worker. I’m dedicated, I’m genuine, and I am someone that makes things happen.

And I don’t give up on family, myself or my work. This show is not about me. It’s about my mother.

It’s about us mothers, and possibly about you. So, guys, it’s sort of like we’re looking at the vision we had of ourselves in our 50s and 60s, you know, when we were in our 20s and 30s. And of course we thought that we were old at 50.

And now we’re 50 or 60 and we don’t feel so old, but we do feel like we don’t have the same control because of the change in our lives. And I want you to think back to when you were in your 30s or maybe your late 20s. Maybe you had kids, maybe you were building something, you’re going to school, you were in college, maybe you chose a different route.

Maybe you chose to have a family or you married late in life. Maybe you were busy with life, a home and somewhere in the back of your mind, you had this image, that picture of what your 50s and beyond would look like. Maybe you imagined yourself fit and strong, doing whatever you want to do, feeling good in your body.

Maybe you imagine traveling with your husband or your girlfriends. Maybe you imagine hosting the holidays for all of your grandkids and your children, being that grandmother who is able to get down to the floor, play with her grandkids and get right back up, going to the lake, take a trip to Europe. Maybe that’s what you envisioned your 50s and 60s to be.

You worked for that vision and you worked freaking hard for that vision, and you believed in that vision of you. And now, here we are. And the mirror is telling a different story than the one you planned for.

I’m doing this podcast today because I’ve heard this in my studio. I’ve talked to many of the women that come in here over the years, and we have some pretty cool conversations, personal conversations, growth conversations. And these women that come through my door, they’re not just tight and sore.

They’re grieving, they’re sad, they’re grieving a version of themselves they thought they would be now. And on top of that grief, some of them, some of us are angry at ourselves for what we see and how we have let things go. And I want to stop this right here before you feel like this is a guilt trip or grieving or angry.

This is not what this is about, okay? I’m bringing some awareness, so stay here with me. If you’re feeling any of these things, then please just resonate with that.

I don’t feel like we’ve let ourselves go. We may have given ourselves away, and I think there’s a very big difference between those two things. And today, I want to talk about how we get back to where we thought we would be.

Let’s learn how to let go of the words. We know that we’ll hear when we stop over giving and over providing and really look at our moms, what they did in their past, and what our current situation looks like. And let’s start off with some of the stories.

And for the sake of my client’s privacy, these names are not correct, and I put a little sway in some of it too. So this first person, I’m gonna call her Dee. Dee came into my studio, she’s in her early 60s.

She is retired, and she’s finally at the place in her life where she can breathe. She has two grown independent children who travel and lead very busy lives. She wanted to take college classes since she retired, just to learn, just for her.

Can you imagine just learning for the sake and the joy of learning something you didn’t really get to take when you were in college or in school, but you have that opportunity now. And I think if you’re looking at that and you’re retired, and I’m not retired, but she is, that version of herself that she was stepping into, I think is a pretty cool place for us to be. You retired and you feel like you have this time and now, you can do some things that you enjoy.

Now, she came in to see me because of her left shoulder, her left hip, and her right groin were tight and bothering her. She wanted to be able to sit on the floor comfortably again, and that was her goal, okay? Something like that, I know for some people seems very simple, but if you haven’t experienced mobility deficits and you’re not able to get down to the floor and sit on the floor when you used to, it is pretty frustrating.

And many people try to stretch and do those sort of things, and it just doesn’t work, so they don’t do it. Now, I tested her mobility health score in January. It was a 32, and her movement age was 75.

Now, she’s 64 years old. Her body was moving like a woman 11 years older than what she was, and that number, it tells a story that most people never get to hear because nobody tests them. Nobody ever measures what the body is actually doing underneath the surface until it becomes a tightness or a pain that you can’t ignore anymore.

Now, she started working with me, and she was very consistent. She was coming in twice a week. Her joints started moving again, and she was actually getting down onto the floor, and she was able to get back up, and she was feeling more like herself.

She was close to being able to move into a membership where she could maintain and continue building. And then one of her children, I think in a conversation, and I don’t know the specific conversation, but she decided to move closer to one of her children because her children wanted her to do that. And as a mom, she said yes.

So she and her husband found a beautiful home at a great price with a lot of land, and she knew it was crazy, but they went for it. The new home was further away from the studio, and the drive didn’t make any sense to her, and the cost to move that far away meant that she was going to have to pause her membership with us. And just like that, the thing that was finally becoming hers, her taking care of her body, because she didn’t get to do that.

She said that in many of her sessions, you know, I really drove a lot with work, and I was all over the country, and I really just didn’t get to take care of my body, and I’m finally doing this. And now all of a sudden, she’s set it aside, as a mom does, to live nil her kids. And when I saw Dee again after her move, her mobility health score had dropped from 32 to 17.

Her movement age had gone from 75 to 88 in a matter of months. It had gone from improving to declining and an accelerated decline at a rate that took her backward faster than we had worked to move her forward. And her last session was last week.

And I’m not telling you this to make you sad. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand something. When your movement system that controls how your body moves is not maintained, it doesn’t just stay where it is just because you’re busy.

It actually declines and the silence shutdown cycle, that’s what I call AMI, which is Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition. That’s what I talk about in this show. It doesn’t take a break because you got busy or your life got busy.

It keeps running and the further it runs, the harder it is to come back from it. Now Dee’s story isn’t finished. I believe that she’ll find her way back.

She comes up here several times a month and I know she’ll come back whenever she can. But I also sit with a weight of knowing that her body needed her to choose herself and the circumstances in her life made that feel impossible. And that’s a mom and that’s why I want to talk about moms here today.

Now this next person I’m going to call Mary. Mary is 59. She has three children.

One of her children is very ill and the other two are happily married and live about two hours away. And I don’t think they live near each other, but I know that they’re just two hours away from where she and her husband live. Now her husband owns a business.

Mary manages that business and she drives two hours each way to help care for her grandkids. And she does that weekly, every week. Mary is in the middle of moving to a new home.

She came in to see me because her hip locked up and she could not move. Now I’ve talked about her in another one of my series. And let me just kind of repeat that.

Her hip locked up. She literally stood up from a chair and her hip said, You’re not going to move. Completely locked up.

And I don’t know if that has ever happened to you. But guys, most of my clients, that’s what happens. That’s the nervous system kicking in and saying, I cannot compensate anymore.

So it shut down that joint so she couldn’t move. She told me it took about 30 minutes for her to walk and get into the car. She was pressing into her leg and doing all sort of things just to be able to make it to the car.

Now, at Mary’s last session, she told me something. And I’ve just heard it through all of these conversations that I’ve had here in the studio. She said she promised herself that she would not gain her weight back, that she lost.

And now here she is. She gained it back, almost all of it. And her body was getting better and moving better and she still had a ways to go.

And she looked at me and she said, how did I let myself get here? And she spoke on how angry she was with her stuff today and how she, how stuck she felt because she had people that relied on her. And what Mary said next, you know, she says, I take care of my kids.

I travel two hours away every week to take care of these kids back and forth. I’m moving to a new home that needs updating and I have to put my home on the market. And I’m managing a business and my body is falling apart.

And I do not know what I can give up because if I give something up, I am letting someone down. Now Mary was angry at herself for allowing this to happen. But also she was exhausted and she was trying to figure out what she could do to get out of the mess that she put herself in because we are so good as moms to volunteer and do stuff that we really have no business doing.

And I love that we can see this and today, I want us to all learn from our behaviors and our choices. I want us to look at our 70s and our 80s and ensure that we are where we want to be when we get to those ages. So here’s the truth about what we do as mothers.

Here’s what I know to be true after years of working with women like Dee and Mary, myself and many others who walk through my door. These two situations for these two, I’ve got 50 more. We became mothers and something shifted in us.

And we stopped seeing ourselves as a priority. And for some of us, we never knew how to be the priority. We started measuring our worth by how much we gave and how little we asked in return.

We build our identity around keeping everyone else okay, helping them avoid costly, harmful mistakes. And guys, we did this to ourselves. Me and my friends talk about this a lot.

We talk about, you know, we worked so hard with so many jobs and we raised our kids and we loved every single second of that. And I’m sure some of you can relate to this too. This feeling of wanting our children, our friends, our family to have the very best while we silently lose our mobility, our health and our sanity.

And our kids grew up watching us do that. We gave everything, money, time, help to allow our kids to live their best lives. And our kids may be far away from the lives they envision too.

And we are their biggest cheerleader. We watch them make the same mistakes and it physically and mentally hurts us to the core. But our children are leading different lives than us.

They have a larger home. Some of them have nicer cars than what we had when we started. Their cars are newer.

Many of them have college educations when many of us were not able to get that due to our family’s income and education. And the education we received, we fully paid for. I remember my husband had to go to school first because we could only afford one of us to go to school.

He had to finish. I had to work two jobs and take care of the kids while he finished his education. And then I got to go to school because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

We sacrifice those little things, nails, hair, gym, memberships, travel to give our children a better life so that they had the life that was better than ours. And many of us worked two jobs, put our kids through college, and then started going to our children’s weddings, paying for the best wedding for our children the way they envisioned it because we want our kids to be happy. And now grandkids, the most wonderful thing, the most beautiful thing in our lives, that sacrifice and all those sacrifices were worth every moment for us to see our children being able to afford a nice home, a nice car, take care of their children in ways we never able to do.

Most of our children travel, they’re building their lives with a spouse, they work out, they have bigger homes than we did, they’re doing the things they want to do because there was a component of that that we made it safe for them to do. We held a net underneath them so they could fly. That was our goal and that is what fills us as parents and moms.

We feel happy at the fact that our kids can do the things that they want to be able to do and we are so proud of them and happy for them. But somewhere, somewhere in the middle of all of that, we stopped asking the question that mothers are not supposed to ask, what do I need? How do I fill my cup?

Many of us are left with grieving our kids because they’re busy with their beautiful lives and we’re still just trying to ensure we are financially stable for the end of our lives. Today, I want to turn this around and I want to discuss for all of us, what do I need? How do I turn this around without our children, our spouses thinking we are being selfish or mean for not continuing to be the wings beneath them?

When we focus on us at the core, I think as moms, we feel our children slipping away from us. They’re busy, they have beautiful lives, but we don’t get to see them unless we’re babysitting the kids or we’re helping in some way. Many of us feel lonely and miss the relationships we once had with our kids because we love our kids to the core.

But now, we need to focus on us because it’s urgent. We are in our 50s, our 60s, and our bodies are sending us the bill for all of those years of deferred maintenance. Our hips are tight, our low backs are tight, our knees, they’re not operating the way they used to, and we move slower than we used to, and we’re bending over a little more stiffer, can you say, without pain, but just, I know that I’m not as flexible as I used to be, and going to sit on the floor, it is not as comfortable as it used to be.

Even just a year ago, we’re also gaining weight around our midsection, and we just feel like all of this feels out of control for us. We want to exercise, but our joints are not letting us feel like we’re able to do it safe, and we feel stuck, because we feel like we have priorities we give to our children, you know, we do things for our children, and all of a sudden, we’re like, well, we don’t have time to do anything but work, eat, sleep, and go back and rinse and repeat that. And, you know, when our kids need us, we’re there, and they do the same for us.

And at the top of the physical piece, there’s an emotional piece that nobody talks about, guilt. When we don’t do everything in our will that our children need, we feel guilty, and that fear that if we pull back even a little bit and say, this time is mine, we’re fearful that our children are going to see us as selfish. And some of you listening right now, you have children who have made you feel that way, and you feel that way because you feel like you are supposed to give more.

It’s not how they’re making you feel, but you are putting that burden on yourself. And some of you have given everything and still felt like it wasn’t enough, and some of you are afraid that if you finally put yourself first, the people you love will see you differently, and for some of you, that fear is not imagined. It is real and it’s painful, and it’s probably what has kept you given more than you should for a very, very long time.

I want you to know I see you, I hear you, and today we’re going to start working through this together. My goal today is for us to find ourselves and give to ourselves and stop worrying about what our kids will think of us because they’re going to be fine. We raise them.

They’re going to be totally fine. They have beautiful, busy lives and they are prioritizing their immediate family. So should we, right?

I want to know if any of you guys are resonating with this. I want you to take out a sheet of paper, grab a piece of paper, grab a pen, and if you’re driving, do this, come back to this part in the show, or you can listen to it and come back to it later. But we’re going to do something that sounds really, really simple, but it may be one of the most clarifying things we can do right now.

And we’re going to get everything out of our head and onto one piece of paper, so we can actually see it and we can make something happen. And here’s what I want you to do. In one column, I want you to do separate columns on this paper.

In one column, I want you to put, where does your time go every single day? Write it down, every role, every task, every obligation that you have, every person who has a claim on your time, whether it’s the grandkids, the business, the driving, the managing, caretaking, cooking meals, going to the grocery, your appointments, the house, write it all down and do not judge it. Just write it.

Now next to each of these items, write roughly how many hours a week that obligation takes from you. Then at the very bottom of that column, write how many hours a week you spend doing something purely for yourself, something that’s about your health or your joy or your peace. And I want you to be very, very honest with that.

And we’re not going to stay right there, okay? Column two, you’re going to put, who are you? I want you to write every role you hold, daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, friend, business partner, caretaker, employee, volunteer, write them all down.

Now look at that list and circle the ones where you are giving more than you are receiving and put a star next to the roles where you feel the most guilt when you even think about pulling back. Now let’s go into the column number three. What did you expect to have by now?

This is the one that might make you cry and that’s okay. Write it down what you thought your 50s or 60s would look like. Did you feel like you should be fit, healthy, happy, traveling, financially ready to wind down, enjoying your marriage or your friendships, moving freely, feeling proud of your body?

Write the vision you had back then for where you are right now, every single piece of it. What did you feel like you’d look like right now? Now there’s a fourth column.

I want you to draw a line and in that column, I want you to put what is pulling you away from that vision of what you want to look like or what you expect it to look like. Not who, but what. Write down the patterns, the obligations that have no end, the guilt that runs your decisions, the fear of being seen as selfish, your body that has not been cared for.

You know, write down the problems that you have. You know, what’s pulling you away from, like, is it your hip and knee, you can’t exercise, you’re not fit, you know, your skin is looser than it needs to, you’ve gained that weight around the midsection, your finances don’t feel like they need to be where they’re supposed to be. Write it all down.

Don’t attach any shame or anything to it. This isn’t about blame or shame. This is literally about clarity, okay?

Now we’re going to start working towards how you need to get to where you’re happy with yourself. What would you need to start doing differently? And what I look at is if you look at that very first column where you see where your time goes every single day and you see those, you know, what can you start, you know, taking a little time away from to actually start doing the things that you want to do.

So if you, you know, drive two hours and you watch the kids, you know, for four hours and then you drive two hours back and that is eight hours in a day and you have to come back home and cook dinner and you’re exhausted, you know, is there a way for you to watch the kids for three hours instead of four hours? You know, is it better for you to spend the night over night? You know, what can you do differently so that you can do something for yourself?

And what would your schedule need to look like to achieve what you wanted to look like? So you want to be fit, you want to be happy, you want to travel, you want to be financially ready, you want to enjoy time with your husband, you know, put those in order. What is the most important to you?

For many of you that I’ve talked to, it’s fit, healthy, and lose weight around the midsection. Most people that I talk to are pretty much happy with everything else, but it’s the fit and healthy component that they’re not. We’ve got to pull that piece back to the top of this column.

So what can you take away from to do 30 minutes of a workout every day? What can you take away from to get your movement health score, to see what your movement age is, and what can you do to gain that control back? Okay?

Now, that paper that you just drew, it’s a map. You just reverse engineer the way you want to look, and truly, what do you need to do to get there? Do you need to grocery shop?

Do you need to learn a better way to eat? Do you need to learn different types of food? How much time does that take?

Do you need to go to the doctor? Do you need to get blood work? Do you need to understand what a walking program would look like if your hip is tight?

What would a workout look like if your hip was tight and your knee was tight? Those things, find out and put in a column, do I need to learn something and do something? Or am I prepared and I’m ready for it?

I just need to allot time to go to the grocery store. I need to allot time to food prep. I need to just be more of control over here.

These are the little things that I can do because if you have that time, and I’m not talking about adding on to the lack of time you have right now. I’m talking about what can you minus to be able to have time to do the things that will put your fitness and your health first. And you need to also give yourself and acknowledge that you give yourself permission that the way things are right now is not sustainable and it is not what you want it.

Now I want to talk a little bit about that guilt, that shame. I want to talk about that directly because I think it’s the one thing that keeps most of us women from making any real change. There is a belief in many of us and we absorbed it somewhere along the way that says a good mother puts everyone and everything else first.

Always, no exception. And if you ever chose yourself over your children or your grandchildren, something is wrong with you. And guys, I want to take a minute and challenge that belief today because I think it’s costing you your health and your life.

Here’s the thing, when we go on an airplane and the cabin loses pressure, the first thing they say for us to do as a mom is to make sure that we put our mask on even before we put it on our child. And every time I hear that instruction, I think, yeah, because a mother who cannot breathe cannot help anyone. And we are not helping ourselves.

Our kids are watching us decline and they don’t like it. That’s not what they want. And you can’t be the grandmother to your grandkids if your hips lock up and you can’t play with them on the floor and frustrated.

And you have to laugh it off before because you can’t get up off the floor. You can’t enjoy your marriage because you’re exhausted, you’re in pain, you’re angry at yourself, and you can’t be present for your child who is ill if your own body is in decline and taking every ounce of your energy just to get through the day. You can’t give from an empty cup.

Guys, taking care of yourself is not selfish and it is the most responsible thing that any of us can do for the people that we love. And for those of you who have children who have made you feel like your needs do not matter, for those of you who have given and given and given and still feel judged or dismissed or unseen by the very people you sacrifice for, for those of you who live with the fear that if you finally say this time that I have to do something for me, maybe you lose that relationship entirely because those children judge you for who you are and they don’t like who you are. That fear, guys, it’s totally real and it deserves compassion.

But it also is not a reason for you to continue to disappear. Our children are watching us and they are watching whether we believe in our own lives and whether we take care of ourselves. They’re watching that.

And the most important thing you can model for them is a woman who decides she is worth fighting for even when it’s hard. Now, you know, I always have to come back into the body and I want to talk about the body piece because this is where I live, right? This is what I see every single day and the tightness you’re feeling in your hips and your low back, your knees, your shoulders.

That’s not just that you’re 50 or 60, okay? What is happening, besides aging, is called the silent shutdown cycle. And it is a progressive shutdown of your movement system that controls how your body moves.

And it starts when one of your joints loses its in-range mobility and the joint capsule tightens up. The nervous system reads that tightness and starts shutting down the deep muscles that are supposed to support that joint. And the larger muscles start to compensate.

And they are put in sort of a holding position when their job is to move. And they take on a job they weren’t built for. And over time, your body starts moving in patterns that feel normal, but are actually causing your body to work harder than it needs to.

And that is a system that is in decline. And it’s not just aches and pains. This is your healthy movement system breaking down underneath you.

And it’s progressive, which means it does not stay where it is. It gets worse over time if it’s not identified and unlocked and maintained. Dee had a mobility health score of 32 when we first tested her.

And after months of not maintaining her score, that dropped down to 17. And her movement age went from 75 to 88. And her body aged faster without care than it did when she was doing something.

And Mary’s hip locked up completely. Her body stopped cooperating and it stopped cooperating because the signals that had been running for a long time before this moment, you know, she wasn’t doing anything about it. She had gone to the doctor.

She had done what she thought she needed to do until she called us. And what I want you to understand with all of this is you’re feeling changes in your body right now and you’re feeling tighter and you’re not moving the same way. This is a signal.

Kind of like your car engine light that’s saying, hey, I need oil. OK, and there is a way to identify and measure this and address it. And not through more fitness or harder workouts, because you cannot build on a broken foundation, but through testing your joint mobility and restoring what has been lost and maintaining a healthy movement score that tells you where your body actually is instead of guessing on how you feel, because how you feel is not the data you need.

The data you need is a score. And here’s what I want you to do with that piece of paper that we just wrote down. And if you haven’t done that, please, it takes five minutes.

Go through, reverse this episode and go through the steps I told you, add those columns and fill this out. This is the practical piece. If you’re in your 50s and 60s and your body is tight and stiff and sore and you feel like you’re working against yourself every time you try to move or exercise, I want you to come in and get your mobility health score and your movement age.

I want you to get your body composition, learn your skeletal muscle mass, learn how much of that muscle have you lost, learn how much of it is visceral fat around your waist. I want you to arm yourself with what you need to really make the change that you’re looking to make. And it’s going to be hard to face, but we can do hard things because we have and because we deserve to know the truth about where our body is right now, so that we can make a real plan to get it where we want it to be.

So I want you to book and unlock your Healthy Joint Mobility Session. And in that session, you’re going to get your joints tested. I’m going to give you a score.

You’re going to get your movement age. You’re going to understand why your body feels the way it feels, and you’re going to leave feeling better than you did when you came in. And after your initial session, we can build a program that will help you lose weight around your midsection and get back to moving like you did 10 years ago.

This is your first step. This is what you need to do. I am a mother, too.

I understand the pull, the guilt. I understand the way that putting yourself on this feels. Okay, I know that sometimes I feel like I can’t pull back on something, but guys, we can all do this together.

But I want you to hear me when I say this. The woman who came into my studio and finally they decide to take care of themselves, do where our body is right now, so that we can make a real plan to get it where we want it to be.

So I want you to book and unlock your Healthy Joint Mobility Session. And in that session, you’re going to get your joints tested. I’m going to give you a score.

You’re going to get your movement age. You’re going to understand why your body feels the way it feels, and you’re going to leave feeling better than you did when you came in. And after your initial session, we can build a program that will help you lose weight around your midsection and get back to moving like you did 10 years ago.

This is your first step. This is what you need to do. I am a mother, too.

I understand the pull, the guilt. I understand the way that putting yourself on this feels. Okay, I know that sometimes I feel like I can’t pull back on something, but guys, we can all do this together.

But I want you to hear me when I say this. The woman who came into my studio and finally they decide to take care of themselves, do not become less of a parent for their families. They become more present.

They show up. They can move better. They’re happier.

They have more energy. Feel like they’re in control when they stop carrying the weight of their own disappointment everywhere they go. They start to feel like themselves again.

And when they feel like themselves, they have so much more to give. That version of you that you imagined in your thirties, guys, she’s not gone. She’s waiting.

She’s been waiting for a long time for many of us. And the path back to her starts with one decision. You are worth it.

And say it, guys. I am worth it. Say it out loud if you need to.

Now pick up that piece of paper. Look at what you wrote down. Look at what is pulling you away from the life you wanted.

Look at what it would take to get it back. What do you need in a week that is realistic? And then decide that you are going to take one little step.

And if that little step this week is just that you go out for a walk, and that’s the little step, and that’s where you start. When you go out for that walk, I want you to think about, you know, is everything moving good? Is it stiff?

Is everything, you know, moving like it should? Or do you feel a little stiff and rickety, like you need some oil? Now, I’m going to put a free download in the show notes for all of you mothers.

And it’s just a starting point to changing where you are, so that this time next year, you will be who you want to be. Stop the quick fixes, because those quick fixes have not worked for you. Stop showing others that you’re strong and that you can handle everything and start choosing you.

Head down to that download, download it’s got a lot of great information. I think I’ve put a four week plan in there for you on starting to get you back out to walking, even though you have some stiffness in your body. Go ahead and do that walk.

Come on in and schedule a Mobility Health Score. I can’t wait to see you. And thanks so much for joining me on the show this week.

If you like this and you know other mothers out there, please share this show with them. If you’re a person who wants to become a Stretch Mobility Coach Practitioner, reach out to us and we’ll get you some information. And soon it’ll be on the website and updated.

And if you want to find out more about the silent shutdown cycle, the five drivers of healthy movement and why your joints are the missing link to everything you’ve been trying to do in your health, follow us on social media. We are here for you. I’m Kim Nartker and I will see you in the next episode.

Until then, take care of yourself. You’ve earned it. Thanks so much for joining me today on the show.

I appreciate you listening in and I appreciate it if you would share this and also connect with us on social media. For the latest research, insights and information on movement health, they are posted on our social media page, on our blog page, on our website, as well as on this podcast. Now, if you want to learn how you can become a Stretch Mobility Coach or how you can find a coach near you, then visit our website at thestretchmobilitycoach.com.

Now, if you want a career in Stretch Mobility Coaching, there are two opportunities for you. One is to become a coach and work for our corporate office so that we can place you at a high-end resort or independent living facility at one of our partner locations or even our Beckett Clinic. Now, if you’re looking to become a Solo Coach and you want to start your own Solo Coach profession, then you can find that information on the website as well.

Please head on over to the website to learn more about how we can help you become a coach or we can help you move better for life. Thanks so much for joining us today.