This is how I succeed in helping women in perimenopause and post-menopause to lose belly fat.

Let's get right to it!

I love lists and easy-to-remember acronyms, so I developed two acronyms to help women understand our priorities for losing fat quickly and healthfully. The first acronym is FREE, and the second, more updated acronym is FRESH-CC.

FREE stands for food, rest, exercise and effort. Food specifically stands for being in a caloric deficit for a consistent, continued amount of time (at least 90 days). This is the first item on the list because it is by FAR the most impactful element to losing fat. You could do nothing else on this list, and still succeed in losing fat if you just stayed in a modest caloric deficit. Rest specifically means getting adequate sleep on a daily basis to help regulate hormone production and allow your body to naturally cycle through several metabolic processes. The third and fourth letters are exercise and effort. Almost any form of exercise will aid your fat loss journey, so long as it's done safely and consistently. That could be walking, jogging, resistance training, strength training, or any other number of activities. Effort means the degree of work or intensity related to those workouts. This would be sprint interval training or High-intensity interval training versus walking. Exercise and effort level are the two elements where a personal trainer can help a client achieve their goals in the gym, or online via workout plans, exercise "homework", and regular check-ins. The FREE formula applies to any adult at any age who wants to lose extra fat.

FRESH-CC makes the formula even more specific to women in perimenopause and post-menopause. The list is still in order of precedence, meaning the first letters are significantly more important than the last ones. FRESH-CC is food, rest, and exercise (strength training, hypertrophy training, and cardio + core training). Food and rest are still the two most powerful elements, so I typically spend the first three to four days working on that part with a new client. Strength training is absolutely critical to helping a woman build stronger bones and stronger muscle fibers and has an immediate, positive impact on her metabolic wellness. Hypertrophy is a fancy word for building larger muscles, and this also improves metabolic wellness, as your body will retain less fat as you ask it to build muscle. By the way, building larger muscles doesn't mean looking like a bodybuilder. For the majority of women, it just means you look healthy and capable. Finally, cardio + core is a great approach to really targeting belly fat, where we typically spend 29 minutes doing steady-state cardio followed by 16 minutes of abdominal exercise (yes, that part is intense)!

The challenge for a lot of women is that when they try to lose fat on their own, they wind up executing this list backwards. Specifically, they will self-assess that in the food category they "eat pretty well" or "I eat okay", and they will self-assess in the rest category that "I go to bed around the same time and I get up in the mornings", so they skip to the exercise and high-intensity elements. This frequently leads to no meaningful results or a mild injury, which sets them back even further from reaching their goals.

Real, hard numbers: for women between 40 and 60, exercise alone can account for roughly 2.8 pounds of fat loss in 6 months. Diet alone (consistent 20% deficit) can account for roughly 8.5 pounds of fat loss. Diet and exercise combined leads to 10.8 pounds of fat loss in the same amount of time. Many women think they're in the last category (diet + exercise), but unfortunately the numbers on their scales say otherwise.

After years of training people, I have come to learn that "I eat pretty well" roughly translates to "I don't eat like a glutton, and there are people in my life who eat worse than I do." That is usually completely true, but it is not the same as eating in a consistent deficit of at least 10 - 20% of your maintenance calories. When you're in a deficit, you absolutely feel it! Most people feel a serious struggle for three to five days, and many wind up quitting within that time frame or "taking the weekend off because they earned it". Part of my job is to empathetically guide clients through that part of the journey by reminding them of their end goals, and redirecting them when stress, fear of failure, or life events cause them to deviate from their path to success.

Wait for Me! Why Men Need Longer Rest Periods Between Sets

At the start of the year, many individuals and couples renew their commitment to fitness and wellness. Maybe you and your loved one have done it before, or plan to! Sometimes, couples start a new fitness class or program together to improve their health and hold each other accountable. Early on, a pattern emerges: a couple starts a resistance training workout, and the first few sets go well. The husband notices his wife is ready for the next set, while he still feels winded. His first thought is, "she's not lifting heavy enough." His second thought is, "what's wrong with me?" The wife, similarly, notices she's ready for the next set and recognizes the look on her husband's face that says he's not 100% himself. She thinks, "he's not as fit as I thought," along with all the implications that come with it.

The truth is, both the husband and wife are performing within their normal expectations. During resistance training, men require longer rest periods between sets. Scientists have observed this for the past two decades and now understand why this difference exists.

It helps to look at the woman's body as the baseline. Women can sometimes rest as little as 30 seconds between sets, averaging between 30 and 90 seconds before they feel fully prepared for their next resistance training set. A woman's muscle fibers, hormones, and cardiorespiratory system help her recover in about 90 seconds or less. By comparison, a man's body has a higher proportion of Type II muscle fibers, which create more metabolic demands. A woman's higher proportion of Type I muscle fibers allows her to complete a set of exercises without the same metabolic demand. Relative to their overall mass, men have less estrogen in their bodies. Estrogen has muscle-protective properties, reducing damage and inflammation to the muscle fibers. Estrogen also enhances blood flow, delivering oxygen and nutrients to muscles more effectively, which accelerates their recovery between sets. Men's bodies do not have the same density of capillaries near their muscles compared to women, which inhibits their ability to clear out metabolic byproducts and lactate build-up. Finally, because men tend to lift heavier loads relative to their overall mass, there is greater demand on the neuromuscular system and greater use of phosphocreatine, both of which require time to reload, alongside the replenishment of glycogen stores and ATP within the muscle cells.

So, take the rest period that works best for YOU. If your partner is ready to go and you aren't, let them go ahead. They can also wait for you if you'd like to stay in sync throughout the workout session. Women should aim for a 90-second break (or less) between sets, while men should aim for a 2 to 3-minute break for optimal recovery. If you're working with a personal trainer or going to a fitness class, your coach is trained to respond to your needs and tweak the timing of the workout accordingly. And if you do need more time, ask for it!

Celebrate the differences!

Failing is the best way to transform your body? Yes, it is!

Exercising can sometimes seem a little confusing. There are so many options, so many philosophies, and so many contradictions out there that it can sometimes lead to to not want to exercise at all, for fear of doing it wrong. The one thing that always seems straight forward when you're doing an exercise program, and typically the first thing people think about when their trainer tells them to do a certain movement, is how many reps are you supposed to do.

Typically, you'll look at a program designed to transform your body, and you'll see something like 4 sets, for 8 repetitions. Or, it might say 4 sets for 16 repetitions. Most people will feel like they at least understand that fundamental part of the exercise programming. Unfortunately, this is untrue. If your goal is to transform your body in some way, whether your goal is fat loss, putting on lean muscle, or bulking, your objective is to force your muscles to endure a new stimulus, or a novel stimulus. That happens by pushing your muscle to the limits of its current capabilities, so that it grows and adjusts to the new demands that you're placing on it.

With that premise in mind, aiming to complete 4 sets for 8 repetitions is not actually the goal. You want to FAIL while striving to achieve 8 repetitions. This can easily be the most difficult part of body transformation and resistance training to understand. There is no benefit in lifting a weight that you can comfortably lift for 8 repetitions, and then putting the weight down. If your programming is for 8 repetitions, you must select a weight that makes you FAIL at or near 8 repetitions. You should be on the 6th repetition, and your muscles should say "we don't have 2 more reps!" But, more often than not, when people see their rep ranges and goals, they grab a dumbbell or a weight that they know they can comfortably lift, and then lift it. Your workout program is not an achievement checklist-- look at it as a failure checklist. You gain significantly more muscle and reach your goals sooner by failing at or near that 8th rep. There are no gold stars for finishing 8 reps when your muscles could have done significantly more work!

If this were a race, imagine yourself nearing full exhaustion as the finish line is within sight. Achievement would look like you running through that finish line tape, chest high, still going at your race pace. That is not what we want when we're transforming your body through resistance training. Rather, you want to see that finish line in sight, and then stumble just 4 steps shy of the finish line! You catch your breath, gather yourself, stand up and grit yourself through those final four steps as you cross the finish line in last place. THAT is what you're looking for as you complete a set.

Are you familiar with that metaphor for life, the one stating that we learn more from our failures than from our successes? That is exactly what your muscles do, and building that lean muscle is will accelerates your metabolism and allows you to burn more fat, helping you achieve your body composition goals! You are far more "successful" from a body transformation standpoint if you only get 9 out of those 12 reps on the first attempt, and then catch your breath for 10 seconds to get those final 3 reps. If you see yourself approaching that programmed final rep and know that you're about to cross the finish line with your chest nice and high, be sure to select a heavier weight for your next set. What that tells us is that you're stronger than you thought!

Reach your body composition goals-- fail consistently! Once you learn how to fail, you will consistently succeed.