[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere today, a woman in her early 60s is standing in a gym holding a pair of five pound dumbbells, because somebody she trusts told her to put the heavy stuff down, or maybe not even start.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could have been a trainer, could have been a wellness coach with an aesthetic looking Instagram page, maybe even her own doctor, and the reasons all sounded so modern.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your bones are fragile now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your hormones are a mess.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your cortisol is already through the roof, and lifting heavy is only going to make it worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: So walking only, light weights, be careful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Keep her in the back of your mind because the advice that she just got is about 2,000 years old and it has been wrong many entire time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me show you how wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go back to the second of August, 1928 in Amsterdam at the Olympic Games.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nine women line up for the first women's 800 meter race ever run at an Olympics and you might already know the story of what happened next because it got retold on Moss for the next 90 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a massacre.
[SPEAKER_00]: Women collapsing on the track, bodies down across the finish line, living proof at last, that the distance was just too much for the female body.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now there's one problem with that story.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's complete fiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nine women did start the race.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nine women did finish, and the winner, Lena Radke, of Germany, ran two minutes 16.8, and set a world record that would stand for the next 16 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first six finishers actually all beat the old record pace too, and the scene at the finish line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, one runner stumbled, a couple sat down to catch the breath, which if you've ever run a 800 meter race before, is the only rational response to running 800 meters.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one woman from Canada, most she cried, because she'd lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the entire catastrophe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that is not what sold the newspapers.
[SPEAKER_00]: A sports writer named John Tunes described, and I'm quoting him directly, 11 Rechid women, five dropped out and five collapsed after the tape, 11.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they were nine, and they all finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: The papers actually ran photos of women crumpled on the ground in apparent agony, and those photos were pulled from the hundred meter heats.
[SPEAKER_00]: The collapse didn't happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody more or less made it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: The women's 800 ran that day and then it disappeared.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the years right after, with this coverage ringing in everyone's ears, the men who ran the sport quietly took it out of the program, and no woman rubrun on 800 meter race at the Olympics again until 1960.
[SPEAKER_00]: 32 years later, and it returned based on the strength of the finish line that the actual film footage shows
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's why I'm starting in 1928 instead of with our friend at the dumbbell rack.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because 1928 isn't some weird one-off.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the template.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over and over for centuries, Western medicine is looked at women and hard physical effort and is reached the same verdict.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's dangerous, especially for the baby's women were presumably carried.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every single time the verdict came first and the science got bolted on afterward, wearing whatever lab coat was in fashion that decade.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Greeks blamed the humors, the Victorians blamed energy, and the vital force, today we blamed hormones and cortisol.
[SPEAKER_00]: The costume changes, but the verdict is always the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every time some woman had the audacity to be living proof that the verdict was wrong, the woman who ran the distance or lifted the barbell, she got explained away and relabeled as a freak instead of counted.
[SPEAKER_00]: On today's podcast, we're going to chase that verdict across 20 centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to watch the medical establishment finally change its mind, and then figure out what the heck is going on in the menopause influencer space.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Dr. Jordan Faganbaum, and this is the Barbom Edison podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, stop one.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the modern claim is that hard exercise wrecks a woman's fertility, the first move is to check where that idea supposedly came from.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, everybody points at the ancient Greeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's actually look because the Greeks do not say what you've been told they say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's start with Galen, one of the most influential doctors in Western history, the man whose word was basically medical law for the next thousand years in change, while he wrote an entire book on exercise called, on the preservation of health.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the single most useful fact in the segment, and it's the fact about something that's missing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no passage anywhere in his book saying that vigorous exercise damages the female reproductive system.
[SPEAKER_00]: None.
[SPEAKER_00]: His big exercise treatis is built around the young male body, and a close sea comes to warning anyone off of hard training is warning everybody, men included about the excesses of full-time professional athletics.
[SPEAKER_00]: The, quote, Galen told women not to exert themselves, is a quote that doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, but what about the wandering womb?
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that a woman's uterus roams around her body like a lost cat.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually a real idea, but it's suffered in the retelling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The early Hippocratic writers did describe a womb that could drift towards moisture, but the sensational version, the womb prowling around inside of women like a wild animal comes mostly from Plato, who was a philosopher, not a physician, and from Eriteus, a medical writer a few centuries later with the real flare for the dramatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was never a medical consensus.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the ancient doctors who actually specialized in this serenus and Galen both rejected it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Serenus flat-out said that the uterus does not, and I quote, issue fourth like a wild animal from the layer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's one of the strongest skeptics in the whole ancient record, and he leaned toward modern exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: The roaming uterus is closer to ancient clickbait than it is to ancient medicine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's where it gets interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ancients didn't just tolerate women exercising, the Spartan was actually required it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two separate ancient sources, the historian Xenofen and the biographer Plutarch describe the Spartan's putting girls through formal physical training, running, wrestling, throwing the javlin, and when they explain why, it's because they believed strong parents make stronger children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pluto's version is even better.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says they trained the girls so that, quote, the fruit of their wounds might have vigorous root in vigorous bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ancient argument for women lifting and running hard was that it would make them better at producing healthy children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Contrast that with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, their first guidance on exercise and pregnancy back in 1985, kept women at a heart rate of 140 beats per minute, and 15 minutes of exercise at a time, and told women who weren't already active not to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took about a decade just to drop those limits and decades more before the guidance actively encouraged strength training.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Spartans worked 3,000 years ahead of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I should say that almost everything we know about Sparta comes from outsiders who either idolizing them or trash talking them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is probably a little squishy, but the main argument holds, ancient medicine treated moderate exercise as good for basically everyone, and the one society famous for training its women did it on purpose for the babies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if the Greeks didn't invent the band, who did?
[SPEAKER_00]: You should buckle up because the answer is a Harvard professor with the physics obsession.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, stop, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where the real damage gets done, because the ban on women's heart exercise really begins here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Victorian, and it was sold as the hottest science of its day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, it's 1873, we're in Boston, a man named Edward Clark, a former Harvard medical school professor, publishes a slim book called Sex and Education.
[SPEAKER_00]: His argument is completely unhinged.
[SPEAKER_00]: He treats the human body like a bank account with a fixed balance, and he calls the currency vital force.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he claims that you can't spend that force on your brain and your reproductive organs at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a teenage girl who studies hard, especially during her period, is draining the account that's supposed to be funding her ovaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the results wrecked fertility.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sterility, he genuinely believed that education would break women.
[SPEAKER_00]: You got to appreciate where Clark got this because it wasn't Galen and it wasn't in the four humors, you know, blood, flamm, yellow-bile, black-bile.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was apparently physics.
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1870s were all about the conservation of energy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that energy is finite and it just moves around the system.
[SPEAKER_00]: Clark took the single hottest concept in 19th century science, and aimed at directly at the
[SPEAKER_00]: Here he is in his own words.
[SPEAKER_00]: Boys must study and work in a boys' way and girls in a girls' way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then describing an actual patient, a young woman who, quote, had two tasks imposed upon her at once, both of which required a large share of her vital force.
[SPEAKER_00]: One was education of the brain and the other of the reproductive system.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in case you only think he meant studying, in another passage he specifically names muscular effort as one of the things that, during a girl's period, can lead to, and, quote, an abortion of the function and consequent sterility, lifting in other words could break you.
[SPEAKER_00]: This work was widely read, it sold out in about a week and set off a national discussion over whether women should be allowed into college at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it jumped the Atlantic, the very next year in 1874, an English psychiatrist named Henry Modsley ran the same play, writing that women are, and I quote, for a quarter of every month in life's best years, somewhat sick and unfit for hard work.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the rebuttal came fast, from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, one of the first women licensed as the physician in Britain, who essentially said, I'm a doctor, I have a female body, and for most healthy women a period is a minor inconvenience, not a monthly disability.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got a man theorizing about female incapacity and a woman reporting live from inside the actual experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, whose version the establishment treated his truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then things get darker.
[SPEAKER_00]: Around the same time, a doctor named Silas we are Mitchell gets famous for the, quote, Rest here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You take an anxious, exhausted woman, and you put her to bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weeks of it, isolation, force feeding, massage, no reading, no work, no nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the kicker.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mitchell had a second cure for the exact same diagnosis, and he prescribed it to men.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called it the West cure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go West young man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ride horses, hunt, ruff it, exert yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He literally sent Walt Whitman and a young theater Roosevelt off to Goby vigorous.
[SPEAKER_00]: When men and women with the same exhaustion saw the same doctor, men got prescribed exertion and women got prescribed the bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shortly thereafter, a physician named Mary Putnam, Jacobi, decided to actually test Clark's claim like a scientist.
[SPEAKER_00]: For 1877 study, one Harvard's Boyleston Prize, the university's own top medical award.
[SPEAKER_00]: She mailed out a thousand surveys and crunched the 268th that came back.
[SPEAKER_00]: She hooked women up to a device that traced their pulse.
[SPEAKER_00]: blood pressure across the menstrual cycle, and then she ran strength tests.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her conclusion, and I quote, There is nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity or even the desirability of rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was real rigorously collected science from a Harvard decorated physician.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's what historians say it did to the debate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Virtually no impact.
[SPEAKER_00]: A woman out science, the most influential claim of the era using Harvard's own gold standard, and no unnoticed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now women's colleges, to their credit, mostly ignored the idea that women should avoid exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they built gyms and required daily exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vassur had women do an hour of activity a day back in the 1860s.
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1893, Smith hosted the first women's college basketball game.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a survey of 705 women graduates found that higher education hadn't damaged their health, which anyone could have figured out just by using their eyeballs.
[SPEAKER_00]: One college president, M. Kerry Thomas of Brynmore, later said that her whole generation was, quote, haunted in those days by the clanging chains of that gloomy little spectre, Dr. Edward Clark's book Sex and Education.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a great line, and it tells you how much fear that book manufactured and how educated women eventually shook it off like Taylor Swift.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the origin of limiting exercise and women was probably Victorian, and it ran on physics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Clark said thinking and lifting would sterilize girls, but Chikobi disproved to a data, one Harvard's medical prize, and promptly was ignored.
[SPEAKER_00]: And about 50 years later, the same idea laced up a pair of running shoes and walked on to an Olympic track.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, stop three.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we started in 1928, but I only gave you the trailer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the whole movie because the true version is stranger than fiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: To recap the truth, nine women started the race and nine women finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: A new world record was set.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the first six women beat the old world record pace.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who killed the event and how?
[SPEAKER_00]: The 800 meter race was run in 1928 and then pulled from the next Olympics, and the decision was messy, spread across a few years and a few meetings with two different organizational bodies involved.
[SPEAKER_00]: The International Track Federation and the IOC.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see a specific vote count for the various meetings, but the details here are disputed.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's not and dispute is the outcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: The race was gone, and the IOC briefly floored it with scrapping women's track and field entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be gone for another 32 years before the women's 800 meter came back in Rome in 1960.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the media coverage of the event in 1928 is so strange that it's the serious contender for the origin story of the phrase fake news.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tunis gave us the 11 imaginary, wretched women, the New York Times reported that six of the nine runners fell headlong onto the ground, and that race made, quote, two great a call on feminine strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: Newt Rockney, yeah, that Newt Rockney, the Notre Dame football coach, was moonlighting as a reporter and called it, not a very edifying spectacle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's the Alzheimer, the claim that women have, quote, a layer of fat around the heart that makes attempts to emulate men, positively dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds authoritative, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It traces back to an anonymous physiologist quoted in an Australian newspaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole provenance.
[SPEAKER_00]: An anonymous source, not a cardiologist, not even confident enough in their claim to put their name on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, interestingly, at the same Olympics, the most famous runner-alive, Paavo Nermi, finished a men's race and collapsed onto the grass, completely wrecked.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was celebrated.
[SPEAKER_00]: The times described another male runner being sent, quote, sprawling headlong onto the track, and they meant it as praise.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, a man face planning at the finish was grit and glory, but nine women finishing on their feet was a public health emergency.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you want the perfect book end, let's go to 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first Olympic marathon ever opened to women.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Swiss runner named Gabriela Anderson-Shis comes into the stadium for her final lap visibly cooked.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's weaving all over the track.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's waving off the medics so they wouldn't pull her from the race.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, let her finish.
[SPEAKER_00]: The crowd gave her a standing ovation.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole world called at Courage, the exact same image that supposedly proved women were two fragile in 1928, which again was fiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 56 years later, we finally celebrated the performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the buried hero of 1928, because the only reason women were at those Olympics at all was due to a French woman named Elise Mia, who got so fed up waiting for a place to compete that she actually built her own international federation and ran her own women's world games.
[SPEAKER_00]: Four of them, throughout the 1920s, she forced the door open from the outside, and once women's events were safely inside the Olympics, the IAAF and IOC absorbed her federation
[SPEAKER_00]: So the massive collapse of women after the 800-meter race at the 1928 Olympics was basically fake news, but the ban was real and it stuck for 32 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now before we move on, picture our friend at the Dumbel Rack again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact instinct that watched nine women finish a race and saw catastrophe is the instinct that looks at a strong six-year-old today and gets nervous about her getting injured.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the same reflex built upon misinformation that keeps showing up in a different outfit.
[SPEAKER_00]: and in the decades that followed, women kept showing up and doing things that the medical establishment had declared impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: The system's response wasn't to update.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was to find new ways not to count them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we're on a stop for, so the counterfactuals kept showing up, and the interesting question isn't whether or not strong woman existed, obviously they did.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the machinery that the culture built to avoid counting them.
[SPEAKER_00]: A historian named Susan Khan nailed the move, a strong woman gets labeled masculine, a freak, an Amazon, where she gets grudgingly accepted only if she's pretty enough to reassure everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Khan calls that last one the female apologetic, real strength
[SPEAKER_00]: Around 1900, a showman named Bernard McFadden is loudly promoting female strength, and even ran a most perfectly developed woman contest at Madison Square Garden, sounds progressive, but even he sells it as beauty and motherhood, not capability.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the biggest cheerleader of women in exercise is running the female apologetic line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then comes Puggy Stockton, the Queen of Muscle Beach in the 1940s and 50s.
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote a national magazine column for 10 years and helped run an early sanctioned women's weightlifting meet in 1947.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her numbers add around 115 pounds of body weight, well she could clean and jerk 135 pounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's out there in public doing the thing that everyone's war was impossible for a woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, people used to say, according to her, that if women worked out they looked masculine or wouldn't be able to get pregnant, but the culture accepted her, mostly because she was considered gorgeous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strength would be allowed only with the beauty permit attached.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the marathon is the famous one.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Katherine Switzer, in 1967, registered as Kay V. Switzer, and an enraged official literally ran on to the Boston Marathon course to tear her number off mid-race.
[SPEAKER_00]: It made for an iconic photo.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two corrections here, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bobby Gibb had already run Boston the year before in 1966 with no bib, and she beats Switzer by almost an hour in 1967.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Switzer's real distinction is the official number and the photograph, not for being first or the fastest.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the warning switzer wrote down later are wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: A doctor warning her about a prolapse uterus from pounding the pavement and a coach insisting that too many jump balls and basketball could displace the uterus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then there's Beth Francis in the 1980s.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's the first woman who benched over 300 pounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: 330 pounds to be exact in route to multiple IPF world championships.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1985 film, Pumpine Iron II, you can literally watch the judges have a meltdown about how to score her in bodybuilding because she was said to be too muscular for the sport.
[SPEAKER_00]: The people familiar with her history say that she wasn't punished for looking like a man, she was punished for not being feminine enough to offset the muscle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, she would spend years trying to reduce her muscularity while wearing more feminine clothing and changing her hair to appease the judges, but she never did win that misalimpio title.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then one of my favorite stories, it's about Jan Todd.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1976, she became the first woman to deadlift over 400 pounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: A year later, she would be the first woman to squat over 400 pounds in competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: She would go on to set a record in every meet she ever did except for one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she becomes a historian and builds the actual archive, the Stark Center at the University of Texas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that makes Latin episode like this, actually possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman who broke the record also wrote down the history so that it couldn't get erased or told incorrectly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her take on the whole women must train differently thing?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the quote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Try to think of strength as an aspect of humanity and not something that's gendered.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of women, even now, are limited in their pursuit of strength by our cultural identification with strength as masculine and weakness as feminine.
[SPEAKER_00]: But strength is no more masculine than its speed, and I can't imagine anyone anymore who believes that women should not run as fast as they can.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how recent is all of this?
[SPEAKER_00]: The sport itself, women's Olympic weightlifting, doing the snatch in the clean and the jerk, well that had existed for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Women had their own world championship starting in 1987.
[SPEAKER_00]: What didn't exist until the year 2000 in Sydney was women's weightlifting at the actual Olympic Games.
[SPEAKER_00]: Men had been lifting at those games since 1920, it was one of the very last doors to open, and when it finally opened, it opened with the crash.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first gold medalist got stripped for a band diuretic, and her entire national team got sent home, and the gold ultimately went to an American named Tara Nott.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final frontier of women can't arrive with a drug scandal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the proof was always right there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stockton, Gid, Switzer, Francis, Todd, the culture just kept relabel in it, freak or exception, or fine, but only because she's pretty, instead of updating the textbook.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one was a counterfactual, but each one got filed as an exception.
[SPEAKER_00]: The female apologetic, again and again, until the women's Olympic weightlifting podium finally opened in 2000.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, stop five, and this is the good part because this is where the pattern finally snaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: This time, the establishment didn't double down.
[SPEAKER_00]: It updated on the record and we have receipts.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's 1984, the NIH held its first consensus conference on osteoporosis and landed on the famous trio for prevention, calcium, estrogen, and physical activity.
[SPEAKER_00]: They encouraged weight-bearing movement, but said nothing specific about heavy lifting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The advice was on the cautious side of vague.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1995, the American College of Sports Medicine published its first position stand on osteoporosis and exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: The actual text said, weight-marin activity is essential for skeletal health, and muscle strengthening may also be beneficial.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was cautious, but never a band.
[SPEAKER_00]: The don't pick up more than a couple of pounds rule was curbside advice from clinician to patient, never written down as policy.
[SPEAKER_00]: A UK consensus group later put, I should never lift more than a kilo on a published list
[SPEAKER_00]: So where did the fear come from?
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't pure invention.
[SPEAKER_00]: A 1984 study by Sonaki and Mikkelsen put 59 women with osteoporosis through two different exercise programs.
[SPEAKER_00]: The flexion group, bending the spine forward under load, had a vertebral fracture rate of 89%.
[SPEAKER_00]: The extension group, bending backwards, had a fracture rate of 16%.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are real numbers, but the study was about the direction the spine was meant, not how heavy the load was.
[SPEAKER_00]: The finding got repackaged, though, into heavy weights are dangerous for these women, which is not really what it showed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Six years later, in 1990, a study published in JAMA Flip the Script.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Maria Fiatarone trained nine people with an average age of 90.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight weeks of progressive resistance training, and their strength would up by an average of 174 muscle size also went up, walking speed improved by 48%.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've known since 1990 that 90 year olds can get dramatically stronger.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fiatarone repeated the study in 1994 on a larger and more diverse group, including women, and the result held, people can get meaningfully stronger, well into their later years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the big one.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2018, a trial called Liftmore was done out of Dr. Belinda Bex Group in Australia.
[SPEAKER_00]: They took 101 postmenopausal women with low bone mass, their average age was 65, but they didn't hand them pink dumbbells.
[SPEAKER_00]: Great months, twice a week, they performed sets of 5 reps at around 85% of their 1 rep max on the deadlift, the squad, and the overhead press.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus they did some jumping chinups where they dropped and landed with straight legs.
[SPEAKER_00]: The results, the Lumbar spine bone density went up 2.9% of the lifters, while the control group dropped 1.2%.
[SPEAKER_00]: Femoral neck bone mineral density basically held steady while the control groups dropped, and the number that should end the conversation about injury risk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Across more than 2,600 supervised training sessions, the total injury count was 1.
[SPEAKER_00]: One minor back tweak, in the author's own words.
[SPEAKER_00]: Contrary to current opinion, this was effective and produced no adverse events under
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I should note, bone density is a proxy measurement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the real outcome we care about, which is fewer broken hips and fewer falls.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lift more did not study fracture rate, it didn't study falls, and no lifting study has done this to date yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can say that heavy lifting and older women with osteoporosis is relatively safe and it improves the bone mineral density markers, but we don't really know what it does for falls and fracture rate.
[SPEAKER_00]: We think that helps, but we need that study to show up first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, one more, and just because I love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A 2024 launch a two-millimeter analysis of competitive power lifters found that women over the age of 59 who kept training and competing were still getting stronger at about 2 to 5% per year.
[SPEAKER_00]: While the general population their age was getting weaker at a rate of 1% per year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now most people don't notice it because they aren't losing visible muscle mass at the same rate, despite getting weaker nonetheless.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the 80s and 90s were cautious, but it was never really a ban on exercise in women.
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1990s proved that the very old can get strong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 2018, that proved that women with low bone masks can lift heavy, safely, and get real results.
[SPEAKER_00]: The current guidelines now recommend the exact thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Women were warned away from 20 years ago, which leaves us in a strange spot for 2026.
[SPEAKER_00]: The doctors changed their minds, but what about the internet?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, stop six, and this is where we finally get back to our friend at the Dumbbell Rack because the fear of harming her body didn't suddenly disappear when this new science emerged, it did what it always does.
[SPEAKER_00]: It changed outfits one more time, from humor's to vital force to now hormones and cortisol, and this time there's a multi-billion dollar industry making sure that it sticks around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's start with the part that may surprise you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd assume that the cautious, fuddy-duddy voices today are the medical guidelines, and the bold empowering ones are the influencers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's actually the exact opposite.
[SPEAKER_00]: The medical bodies are the ones telling women that they can train.
[SPEAKER_00]: The endocrine society's guidelines tell postmenopausal women to do, quote, weight-bearing muscle strengthening exercises.
[SPEAKER_00]: Acog signs off on the standard targets, 150 minutes a week of conditioning, plus strength training.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not one major guideline tells menopausal women to go easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: literature.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you compare that against the market.
[SPEAKER_00]: Manopause is now something like an $18 billion a year industry heading towards $24 billion and the single biggest slice of supplements.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a huge chunk of Manopause fitness content is built on one message, pull back.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't train like you used to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hard exercise spikes you're already fried cortisol and if you're premenopausal then you must sync your work out with your cycle otherwise something bad is going to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to proprietary
[SPEAKER_00]: First, let's talk about the cortisol panic.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that a menopausal women stress system is already maxed out, and heart exercise floods her with cortisol and tips her into metabolism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Muscle loss, belly fat, the works.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about cortisol because it's a real hormone that's essential for living, and the story being told about it is mostly wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: cortisol is a steroid hormone that your adrenal glands make.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are tiny little glands, let's sit on top of your kidneys.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now cortisol runs on a daily rhythm, highest in the morning, lowest around bedtime, and you need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: People who don't make enough of it get very sick.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fear being sold around cortisol is having too much of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: While genuinely pathologically high cortisol is a real condition, we call it cushion syndrome or cushions disease, it's relatively rare.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the order of 2 to 8 people getting newly diagnosed per million people per
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the state that actually causes the muscle wasting and the central fat position and the thin skin that everyone's scared of.
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes from tumors or from taking pharmaceutical dose steroids for months, not from a hard workout.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does exercise raise cortisol?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the part the fear mongers get right is that intense exercise can drive cortisol up to levels close to what's seen in cushion patients at peak.
[SPEAKER_00]: A 2019 paper by daily and hackney entrained
[SPEAKER_00]: Running at 75% of the O2 Max for 85 minutes, cortisol rose to near cushions range levels at exhaustion, so the influencers aren't making up this spike, where their wrong is what happens next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Within 90 minutes after exercise, cortisol in the athletes was back near baseline.
[SPEAKER_00]: By 24 hours, one day later, it was lower than the resting controls.
[SPEAKER_00]: The athletes had suppressed cortisol the next day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chronic cushions is sustained elevation in cortisol, 24 hours a day, week after week.
[SPEAKER_00]: Art exercise is a transient spike, followed by a return of baseline, and then an undershoe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two completely different physiological situations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daytime exercise lowers your overnight cortisol.
[SPEAKER_00]: Resting cortisol drops as you get fitter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cortisol is somewhat trainable.
[SPEAKER_00]: A review specifically looking for cortisol harm and trained in overtrained athletes didn't even find it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fasting training scare is the same error.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fasting nudges cortisol up while you're fasting because you're mobilizing energy.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the system working as designed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't reliably affect estrogen or other reproductive hormones in women, and dieting studies show that cortisol ticks up at first and then settles back to baseline within a couple of weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fasting will fry your hormone story is not supported by evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now on to cycle syncing, the idea that you have to train differently in each phase of your cycle in order to get results.
[SPEAKER_00]: On this one, there's actually quite a bit of data, and specifically a line of work led by Dr. Lauren Collins of sample and her colleagues has found that the cycle phase does not meaningfully change how muscle response to training.
[SPEAKER_00]: The broader literature finds no reliable phase effect on strength either, and there's a little tell here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The researchers publishing the data seem to get piled on by the influencer space for publishing it, and you know, if you follow the money, you can tell why.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the complaint that women have been understudied in sports science is real, but the fix for that is more and better studies, not selling protocols built on data that doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm not saying that a trainer who's terrified of cortisol in a woman is quoting Galen.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no secret pipeline running from the wandering womb to an Instagram reel, and I'm not going to pretend that there is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the story is identical.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You take a perfectly normal female body, you declare it as being fragile, and you prescribe
[SPEAKER_00]: Point at a sciencey sounding word, cortisol today, vital force in 1873, and the humors before that, to make it sound rigorous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when somebody shows you a counterfactual or suggests that it's wrong, you have to ignore or attack it, mostly to preserve your profit margins.
[SPEAKER_00]: For about 20 centuries, the question of whether a woman's body could handle hard effort got answered as settled fact, despite never really be contested.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Greeks didn't ban it, sparta, in fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: They prescribed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Victorians built the ban out of thermodynamics, and the woman who disproved it, one Harvard's medical prize, got ignored.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1928, they killed an Olympic event over a collapse that never even happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thread running through all of it is that none of this was ever based on evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was eminence.
[SPEAKER_00]: A confident man with a title says what's true and everyone writes it down and that's the standard of proof.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually testing the claim, what we now call evidence-based medicine barely existed until recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when people finally ran the experiments, looking at how women respond to exercise across the lifespan, what changes occur in menopause, and even putting women with low bone mass under heavy barbells.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old verdict didn't get gracefully corrected.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just fell apart because there had never been anything underneath it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which brings us back to her, the woman in the dumbbell rack holding the five pounders because someone she trusts told her to be careful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what I'd want her to hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The instinct telling her to take it easy was made up, wrong, and she do best to ignore it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The real question for the rest of this series isn't whether she can train hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or she can.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's how much of what's already changed, the body she's got at 60 was actually due to menopause, and how much was the bill coming due for decades of being told to take it easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two have very different outlooks.
[SPEAKER_00]: The menopause part is mostly behind her, the detraining part she can still take back.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's next time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll take the body composition and health changes everyone blames on menopause, the way the belly fat, the heart, the bone, and the brain fog, and put real numbers on how much of it actually comes from menopause, because knowing what's changing and what to do about it is how you take control.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Dr. Jordan Fuyg and Bob.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Barbell Medicine.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll see you next time.