Stop the All-or-Nothing Fitness Cycle: Megan Dahlman's Sustainable September Reset
Show Snapshot:
Anyone else have a summer of rosé and disrupted routines? Time to (re)enroll in the school of sustainable fitness and create habits that stick. Fitness trainer Megan Dahlman returns to teach her proven syllabus for women over 40—no cramming or gym all-nighters required. Discover the difference between "regress," "progress," and "maintenance" exercise modes and how to avoid falling into the "all-or-nothing" exercise trap. Longevity alert: Megan schools us in three balance exercises that protect future you from life-changing falls, plus how to build a happy back in just 5 minutes daily. Plus, what's the "magic number" of weekly exercise hours that truly works? We cover simple, doable fundamentals that keep you strong, steady, and unstoppable for decades. Class is in session, beauties!
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Quotable:
The very best way to get out of regress mode is to make slight adjustments to your daily behaviors that simply get you pointed in the right direction. So these are not huge overhauls. These are slight adjustments.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty [0:03]: Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty.
Beauty's summer always feels endless when it begins, and then whoosh, it is over. I actually love September. I'm here for its cooler temps and its back-to-school vibes. I love and need the structure of routine.
Today we're offering a jump start to your post-summer fitness and wellness routines. Summer fun sometimes gets us off track. I know we all love a scenic detour to a beach towel, a hammock, a barbecue, but there comes a time when we need to get the trains back on the tracks, and today is that day.
I am thrilled to welcome back to the show one of your favorite guests, and mine, fitness trainer Megan Dahlman, who specializes in creating simple, sustainable exercise routines for women over 40 who have focused on being strong, pain-free, and body confident in midlife and beyond. If you are looking to jump start a simpler, more effective fitness routine, stick around. This show is for you.
Welcome back to A Certain Age, Megan.
Megan Dahlman [1:07]: Katie, thank you so much for having me. I love you, I love your audience, and I am so excited for this conversation.
Katie Fogarty [1:15]: I am excited too. When you were first on the show, it was January, and you helped us kick off 2024, which is a time when people really focus on fitness. But I know for myself, I'm coming out of a super fun summer. I had a high school graduation season, we had moving parties because I've moved to New York. It was a lot of fun, but there was rosé, there was ice cream, there was barbecue, and there was really a disrupted schedule due to my packing and moving.
I know I'm looking to get back on track. I know my listeners are as well. We are refocusing after months of fun. So you talk about different types of fitness phases that we can often go through. There's a regress mode, progress, maintenance. Let's talk about getting out of regress mode, because that's the help that I need.
Megan Dahlman [2:03]: Yeah, and you know, I think that we hit this moment at multiple times of the year. January 1st is definitely one of those moments, and after Labor Day, right when we're looking into a new season, is another moment where I like to call it kind of the "rock bottom motivation."
Katie Fogarty [2:27]: Megan, that is exactly where I'm at. You have looked into my soul. That's where I'm at.
Megan Dahlman [2:27]: And it's highly motivating. You get to the point where you're like, "I can't live like this anymore." I feel the physical effects of what my habits have led me to, and I don't like that. It's a very highly motivated time, which is great. We capitalize on that.
But I really want to start by saying how to NOT get out of regress mode. Because if you've spent the summer on trips, traveling, enjoying the barbecues, the ice cream, all the rosé, all the things, it's really important to know how to not move out of this season inappropriately, because that's what we usually do. When we feel like the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, you're so far off track, you have fallen so far off the wagon, we have a tendency to overdo it and go just as far in the opposite direction.
This is the classic all-or-nothing mentality, and I know that we all are guilty of that all-or-nothing mentality, and this is extreme behaviors rather than simple, sustainable changes. And so what we want to make sure of is, as we're coming off of summer, that whatever mistakes we may have made in the past when we're, you know, the January 1st extreme changes, the post-Labor Day extreme changes—"I'm going to do all the things, I'm going to eat perfectly, I'm going to exercise eight times a week"—like all of those things that we've done in the past, we are going to all collectively commit to not doing that this time because it doesn't work.
Katie Fogarty [4:04]: I love that reframe—like, let's start by what we're choosing not to do, which is to set ourselves up for failure by thinking we need to be perfect, or we need to be holding ourselves to, like, really an unattainable standard.
Megan Dahlman [4:19]: Exactly. And the truth is that the very best way to get out of regress mode is to make slight adjustments to your daily behaviors that simply get you pointed in the right direction. So these are not huge overhauls. These are slight adjustments.
So let's say with fitness, if you have gone a week or two without any sort of workout routine, don't suddenly jump back in with a 60-minute workout session and convince yourself that you're going to do this every day for the next month. Just start by saying, "I'm just going to move again somehow, every day intentionally. I'm going to start doing some sort of intentional movement every day."
It could be just going for a walk for 10 minutes. It could be doing a five-minute stretching routine. It could be doing that circuit of core exercises. It could be doing something that simply starts getting you pointed in the right direction.
It could be bringing some rhythm back into your meal times and food choices. If those food choices have been, like, so haphazard, what's not going to work is to say, "Okay, now I'm going to go on a diet. I'm going to spend the next two weeks detoxing. I'm going to do whatever the crazy thing is." It's like, let's just get back to, "Hey, let's eat meals at normal meal times. Let's start adding some protein and produce to your meals again, intentionally."
So these small, slight adjustments are going to get you pointed in the right direction, and it's going to make sure that you don't outkick your coverage—right, for all of our sports listeners—like you don't want to push yourself faster than you know is sustainable.
Katie Fogarty [5:56]: That's such great advice. And so I'm taking all of that on, and I feel like I've been doing a little bit of that by accident, you know, where I've been trying to move and walk more and do some simple stretching routines, particularly before I go to bed, because I'm missing my yoga classes.
So this advice feels so doable and attainable, which is why I wanted to have you back on. You really break things down so clearly, and this feels manageable for me and for my listeners.
So once we get out of regress mode, whatever it is for whoever it is that's doing it, how do we move into the progress mode, where we start to see some of the fruits of our labor, where we start to feel like, "Ah, yeah, like I am—I'm feeling changes, and I'm feeling stronger"?
Megan Dahlman [6:41]: Yeah, so progress mode is exactly that. It's where you're doing habits that actually elicit changes. So physical changes are actively occurring. There's some sort of forward motion towards a goal, and I think it's really helpful—sometimes we skip the goal-setting part. We have this vague idea in our brain, like, "I want to be healthier, I want to lose five pounds," or our goal isn't very clear of what kind of progress we actually want to make.
And so before you make any changes to your habits, if you know you want to make progress, be really clear with yourself what that actually looks like. That way, you have a really strong bullseye. You've got a target. It's not a moving target. It's not this vague thing that's intangible. You have something really clear that you're going to be working towards.
Progress mode does require quite a bit of discipline and willpower and focus, so just be aware—progress mode is not something that you should be in your entire life. Most of us go through life either in progress mode, or because that requires so much effort and focus, we flip back to the regress mode, and we just kind of spend our lives bouncing back and forth between "I'm going to make progress" and "now I'm regressing."
And I'm going to realize that there is a mode in between—maintenance mode—and that's actually where we should be spending the majority of our life: just maintaining our habits.
But when we want to make progress with your fitness, it does require about five hours total of physical activity over the course of the week. That's where most women are going to see the biggest changes in their muscle mass, in their movement mechanics, and their joint health, in their cardiovascular health. The five-hour mark is this magic number that's been shown in multiple studies.
It doesn't mean that it's five hours of highly intense activity. Usually it's just like 90 minutes of that is up in those higher zones or the higher intensity, and the rest of it—like three and a half hours of that—is like walking pace. So this is not huge, okay, but five hours total.
And with your nutrition, we see a lot of progress happening in the 90/10 rule space—that zone where 90% of the time you're eating food that is nutritious, it's improving your health, it's the right quantities, 10% of the time you're splurging, you're enjoying whatever you want. Okay, so kind of living in that realm, you can be confident that you will probably see some slow forward progress. And I like to say slow, because especially in midlife, progress is usually a little slower than what we may have experienced in our 20s, and that is perfectly fine.
So that's progress mode. Maintenance mode—like I said, this is where a majority of us should be living the majority of our life. It's just not mentally healthy to be bouncing between progress and regress. This is like the yo-yo dieting. So I find that for myself, just knowing what it requires just for my body to just maintain—so I'm not seeing big, noticeable changes, I'm just maintaining my health, I'm making sure I'm still showing up. There's less discipline here, but it does still require intention. These are habits that are sustainable.
Your fitness might be more like three to five hours of total exercise, especially if you have good training history. Usually you can do like two strength training workouts a week or two workouts a week. They're kind of up in those higher zones and still be able to maintain your fitness and feel strong and healthy.
The nutrition side of things, just following more like the 80/20 rule. That's where we hear that 80/20 a lot. It's a perfectly great place to maintain your health, where 80% of your meals are really full of good, nutritious ingredients, and 20% of your meals are the ice cream, the rosé. So that's kind of the difference between progress, maintenance, and—
Katie Fogarty [10:39]: This is such a great framework, because it feels doable. You know, I mean, I'm joking—I'm not completely in regress mode, but I'm a little bit there, if I want to be totally honest with my listening audience. But I like that you use the word "slow," and I like that you really broke it down into something that feels to me somewhat manageable. Five hours over a course of a week—we get seven days in a week, and we can make that work.
So we're going to move ourselves—me—out of regress. I'm going to look to make a little bit of progress. I can move into maintenance zone, which I think is a wonderful space to be in, like we want to continue to practice daily intentional habits that keep our trains on the tracks.
So in a minute, we're heading into a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about some of the specific exercises that you think that we might incorporate sort of once we're in maintenance mode. Like, what do we need to work up to? What do we need to be doing regularly, consistently, to take care of our bone health and our muscle health as we age—as we're at 45, 55, 65 and beyond. We'll be back in just a minute.
Katie Fogarty: Megan, we're back from the break. When we went into it, you had really given us a wonderful framework about the sort of three different zones of fitness that people tend to operate in. And we're all committed—we're like, this is a group chat. We're making a group pact. Actually, we all want to be in maintenance mode and just take care of our bodies so we can continue to do the things that we love: travel the globe, hang out, pick up our grandkids, and like, have active, vibrant lives.
So let's talk about strength. Because you mentioned that before. You said two times a week at least. Let's talk about focusing on sort of muscle building, strength training. How would you encourage us to think about that?
Megan Dahlman [12:27]: Well, I think strength—it's really helpful, once again, to go back to why is this important for you? And you mentioned a couple things that I think a lot of women can really connect with. You know, being able to travel, being able to pick up grandkids. I would add another one to that list of being able to simply climb down on the floor and get back up again.
There's something about that motion of climbing down and getting back up with ease that helps you feel mobile. And it might be surprising to some people to realize how many women can't do that anymore.
Katie Fogarty [13:00]: I want to say men too, Megan. I'm gonna throw my husband under the bus here. Like recently, we all—one of my kids brought this up, and we all do the thing of standing in our living room, sitting down without using our hands, cross-legged, and standing up. And the only person who couldn't do it was my husband, and my 18-year-old son was like, "Dad, you need to get on that." So yeah, we also have to poke our husbands, our brothers, our spouses. Okay, so you go. Keep going. I interrupted you.
Megan Dahlman [13:27]: Yeah, so having that clear distinction of, "Why am I doing this?" I think we have spent so much of our lives thinking exercising and doing a workout is to make sure I don't get overweight or take care of my excess weight, which, yes, there is a place for that, but I think there needs to be a transition in our minds to recognize that fitness needs to be so much more than that for us—for men and women.
What you do today determines whether or not you're going to be able to climb down on the floor and get back up again, whether or not you're going to be able to pick up your grandkids, or have the balance, or to be able to go on a trip.
Way back in June, we traveled to Italy, and we spent 10 days walking all over that country. And for anybody who's ever been to Italy, it is not flat. It's a workout—cobblestone streets, so everything's uneven. You need a fit, strong body. So your workouts are no longer about just your weight. This is so much more than that.
So being physically strong—we have to think, we have to recognize that physical strength comes from having both strong muscles, having strong nerves, and also having mobile enough joints. So my guess with your husband in that situation is that he might have had the strength, he just might not have had the mobility to be able to get deep in those deepest ranges of motion, to be in a deep squat, to pull his leg up underneath him, and you're just so tight that you can't bend your joints enough to get up off the floor.
Katie Fogarty [15:10]: Yes, for him, it's a knee issue, and that's common, too. And I know you talk a lot about—because I follow you on Instagram, and everyone who's listening to this needs to make sure they're following Megan over on Instagram, because she shares wonderful visual exercises each and every single day that really walk you through what you need to do. And I know that you talk a lot about knee pain and back pain, and this is very common in midlife.
Megan Dahlman [15:31]: Yeah, and they're very limiting factors. And I want everyone listening—if they have knee pain or back pain or hip pain, those are kind of the big ones, shoulder pain too—that's not the end. Okay? This is just something that you need to pay attention to right now and do what you can to make that joint strong and mobile again, because your future depends upon it. Your ability to climb down and up, your ability to pick up grandkids, your ability to travel. It depends on how healthy those joints are, and there's so much we can do.
I just recently got off a coaching call with a lady who's in some of my programs, and she recently had a total knee replacement, which was a great thing for her, because her very arthritic knee was preventing her from being as active as she could. And what's cool is that she went through my programs and then had her knee replacement, and her doctor, her physical therapist, they're like, "We need to put you on the accelerated path here for recovery. You're outpacing anybody else who's ever had a knee replacement. You're recovering way faster than anybody, and we can graduate you far sooner," simply because she went into that massive surgery being fit and strong.
So even if you need new joints, that's okay. There's so much that we still can do. But noticing your health and your fitness—it's more than just having strong muscles. That's part of the picture. We need to make sure that your muscles are strong. Resistance training is very important for that, and there's multiple ways to resistance train—you don't have to just lift heavy. But also training your nerves, making sure that you're doing balance work and coordination work, and also training your joint mobility. How flexible are all of your joints? So all of those things contribute to someone feeling fit and strong. If they're feeling weak or old or achy, chances are some of those components are missing.
Katie Fogarty [17:31]: So let's talk about things—which is so great to hear. I mean, the progress can be made. I love that you made the point that even heading into a surgery, doing some of these exercises is going to drive benefit and reward. You are going to bounce back faster. So anyone who's got a surgery coming up, let's think about what you can do in advance.
So let's talk about nerves. I love that you mentioned this. I know balance is so important because nobody wants to fall over. I spent a lot of time with both of my parents, who are in their early 80s, and they're anxious about falling because they know the repercussions. What are one, two, three, maybe balance exercises we should have on our menu?
Megan Dahlman [18:11]: Well, the first one is the obvious one, where everybody thinks, "If I just stand on one foot during the day," that's your bare-bottom baseline. Like, if you have zero balance, that's a great place to start of just practice standing on one foot. But I would say, let's not just do that. When you go to stand on one foot, let's connect some muscles together. Let's make sure that you're not just haphazardly doing that.
So what I always say when you go to stand on one foot, before you lift your other foot off the floor, exhale firmly, okay, as if you're going to blow up a balloon. And what that's going to do is it's going to engage your deep core muscles, the ones that kind of connect to your spine and your pelvis, so that they get stable. And then when you go to lift your foot up off the floor, and you do that single-leg stance, there's more stability there. And you're teaching the nerves that are going to your core, the nerves that are feeding your leg, that this is how we work together.
And so if you're doing it with just a single-leg stance, and all you are practicing is holding one foot off the floor for as long as you possibly can, we're not training that piece of it. So adding that exhale first is really important. So exhale, pick your leg up, once you release, once you're done exhaling, set that foot down and do the other side. So that's the first thing to start with. That's just static balance. That's where you're just holding still.
Nine times out of 10, when someone needs balance in daily life, it's not in a static—most people aren't falling over when they're just standing up. Most people are falling over when they're doing something active. They're stepping up onto a curb, they're reaching down to put their shoes on, they're bending over to grab something off the floor. That's what we would call dynamic balance, where your body needs to learn how to control the movements while you're in motion. That I would argue is probably the most important thing to be training.
So a very simple exercise that you can do that will work on your dynamic balance is standing on one foot, but then taking your other foot, tapping in front, tapping that foot to the side, tapping your foot behind you, and even crossing behind like a little curtsy tap. And so you're creating some motion around your body that your center of gravity, all those nerves and muscles, are having to talk to each other to make sure that you don't tip over. That's another really great one.
One final, third exercise I would have you practice is what we call a single-leg deadlift. If anybody knows the single-leg deadlift, it's usually everybody's least favorite exercise, simply because it does require a lot of balance. This is where you're just standing on one foot, and you hinge at the waist and kind of fold your torso over and back up again. This exercise alone, if someone can master this, it will probably save them decades of heartache of finding themselves in a situation where they fall down, break a bone. We can talk about bones too, but that exercise alone is really important.
So those would be my top three. And I do have a full balance master class that's really, really helpful. I can make sure that your audience has the link to that because we cover all of those things and that core coordination—so important.
Katie Fogarty [21:34]: Megan, this is a great time for us to let our listening audience know where they can find your master classes. So if somebody wants to take that balance master class, where would you direct them?
Megan Dahlman [21:44]: So my website, vigeofit.com/balance. It's totally free, and we cover the top five balancing exercises that you should be working on every day, and even if you don't get to them every day, once a week is still better than nothing. But it really guides you through movements that could quite literally save your future.
Katie Fogarty [22:06]: I'm gonna put that in the show notes, but Vigeo is spelled V-I-G-E-O, for listeners. Okay, so those are three very simple balance exercises. I've been doing that deadlift since I think you and I talked about it the first time you were on the show. And sometimes I do it a little bit like where I hinge down and I'm like a Superman arms, and then I'll try to pick something up and stand up with it. So I'm trying to incorporate something beyond even simply hinging, but also picking up, because I know that that was another thing that you mentioned that we need to work on.
The best thing about these exercises is they're free and you can do them in your home. You don't need a gym, and so we love an easy button here, or at least I do. So I love those.
Okay, so those are some good ideas for nerves. You mentioned joint mobility. I talked about my poor husband with his knee issues. But other people have stiff ankles, they have stiff hips, and this impinges on their ability—and my ability, I've got stiff hips—to do certain exercises. Is there one type of exercise that helps all sort of joint mobility exercises, or do we have to go specifically by body part?
Megan Dahlman [23:14]: You know, my favorite exercises, whether it's a mobility exercise or a strength training exercise, is an exercise that combines a lot of things in one. I am here for efficiency. Like, that is my motto. If we can check off 10 boxes with one exercise, let's do it. And honestly, that's how our brains move our body anyway. It's very rare that we go through life and only use one joint at a time.
When we walk, if you just take walking, for example, as you walk, your ankle flexes—actually, all of your toes are flexing and extending. Your ankle is flexing and extending. Your knee is doing that too. Your hip, your pelvis is shifting, and even your torso is going side to side. So even the simple act of walking, we're not just using one joint. There's so many things that are working together. So if we can do mobility exercises that use a lot of things at once, that's fantastic.
One of my favorite mobility moves is getting into a deep lunge. And this is my yoga coming out in me. I'm not a yoga instructor, but I love practicing yoga a couple times a week. One of my favorite things is getting into a deep lunge and just planting your hands on either side of that front leg. And you're gonna know what I'm talking about here, Katie. Hands go on either side of that front foot. Just take one of those hands and reach it really high up to the sky. Bring that hand down. Reach the other hand up to the sky. So you're kind of doing this windmill effect with your arms while you're in this long lunging position. That front knee is deeply bent. The back leg is extended out. The back ankle is—every joint on your body is mobilizing in that movement. So that's a really great, simple one that we can work on every day that would really help.
Katie Fogarty [25:01]: And it feels phenomenal. I mean, I do that exercise because I do have such tight hips. I do more than my fair share of sitting at a desk due to my job, and doing that stretch is such an incredible release of tension. You feel afterwards this freedom in your body. So I think that, and again, simple to do. You can use a yoga mat, maybe a towel. You could do it on a plush carpet to protect your knee. So I love that.
So that was some joint mobility, nerves. You mentioned strength as well—resistance training. How are we pulling our muscles into this?
Megan Dahlman [25:37]: It can all be done together. The beauty of doing the balance work and that mobility stuff is that your muscles aren't on the sidelines watching you do those things. They're in there with you. Like, they're making those movements happen. So I think it's important for us to recognize that strength training does not have to always look like walking into a gym and picking up a really heavy barbell. It can look like that, but sometimes the most effective strength training is perhaps just using your own body weight.
A push-up is a great example of a really heavy, loaded upper body exercise. Most women have a hard time getting to 10 push-ups, so we're maxing out at six to eight reps of that exercise. That is a range that's really going to load up those upper body muscles. No equipment at all. And so when we're thinking about training our muscles, the most important thing is that we're simply putting them under some kind of load where they're pushing and pulling under some type of load.
And the load can be gravity, the load can be your own body, the load can be dumbbells, the load can be bands—whatever the load is. We want to have something for your muscles to push and pull against that's a little bit outside of their comfort zone, a little bit more than what they do just going about your daily life where you're sitting on chairs and standing back up again one time. So that's all strength training, and that's all really valuable to be doing.
Katie Fogarty: Let's talk a little bit about achy, because I know from being on your Instagram that you had some great content recently about lower back pain, because this is a true issue for many people, and it can prevent people from exercising. It really compromises your quality of life if you're suffering. Are there a handful of simple exercises that we can look to prioritize if we want to either prevent this or protect our back?
Megan Dahlman [27:44]: Yeah, back pain is plaguing millions of people right now, and probably, if I had to guess, 40% of your audience listening right now has some form of back pain, either completely debilitating or they're just living with it. And I would say, if your pain is at the point where you're just kind of going about your life and you're just living with it, you're kind of pushing through the pain, that's probably a pain that we can easily get to disappear just with the right things. Like, you don't have to live with this. This is something that we can get rid of.
So a happy back—to have a happy back, it needs at least two things. It really needs some stability through your core and through your trunk. If your spine is loosey-goosey, if it's really wobbly the moment you go to pick something heavy off the floor and you don't have stability through your trunk, that's where it makes your back ache. All your low back muscles, all of the tiny little muscles that have to support your spine, they're going to have to get overworked. They're going to work way harder than they normally should. So building a strong core is essential for a happy back.
And the other thing that your back is craving is mobility. So mobility in your hips, your upper trunk, your pelvis. So the things that can accomplish both of those, I would say a plank is like—you can check off that stability piece right there with just doing a simple plank. If someone listening is like, "I can't do a plank, though," a great exercise to begin with is what I call bear crawl. So you're just on your hands and knees, and all you do is pick your knees off the floor, so they're hovering a couple inches, and pause for the length of an exhale. This goes back to what we were talking about—getting, like, actively telling your core to turn on. For some of us, the core is out to lunch. The core is like, "We haven't worked in years."
Katie Fogarty [29:39]: I mean, my core is still at the barbecue, Megan. It's like—
Megan Dahlman [29:45]: Having hot dogs. Yeah. So the easiest way to get your core to, like, come back—like, let's get back into action—is to do a really strong exhale. If you've ever, like, blown up a bag of balloons for your kid's birthday party, you know that that's a core workout. Like, your abs can sometimes be burning after the fact. So whether you're doing a plank or that simple bear crawl, where all you do is hover your knees, by adding that strong, firm exhale, we're getting all of your deepest layers of core muscles, including your diaphragm, including your pelvic floor, including the ones that are surrounding your spine—we're getting them to fire up, and that's what we want.
So that move right there, if you do that every day, that's going to start to transfer to having a much happier back that doesn't ache as much. And then the stretch that we mentioned earlier, that big lunge motion, where we add the upper body rotation, that right there is also going to make your low back so much happier, because we're releasing tension through the hips. We're releasing tension through the upper spine, and when those areas are tight, the low back has to overwork. So those things right there will make your back so much happier.
Katie Fogarty [31:02]: We all want a happy back. And so I'm so delighted that we're having this particular conversation. So you've given us two great core ideas. I love this idea of adding that breath in. How often should we be thinking about doing core work? Is this something that we should be doing every day? Is there a maintenance mode for core that you recommend?
Megan Dahlman [31:22]: You know, when you're working on actively seeing that progress, right, you really want to see progress with your core strength, and you're really learning how to ride the bike—like you're teaching those nerves, you're trying to get your core to come back to the—like, step away from the party. Let's come back to business. It is helpful to do it every day. You don't need much—five to 10 minutes a day. I've got a really great core training program too, another free product. It's like 10 minutes a day. That's really good to do. That will just start to tell your core, like, "Let's work now. Now we just work. This is now our norm."
Once your core has reached a pretty good baseline of it's activating, it's back to business, you don't have to do it every day after that, if you simply incorporate it into your workout programs over the course of the week. If you're strength training twice a week, doing a good first circuit before you get into your full-body stuff, if you do some good core work in there, that's sufficient. You can also incorporate it with certain strength training movements. Anytime you do an exercise where you maybe have load on one side of your body, let's say you do a squat where you're holding a dumbbell in just one hand, your core is working hard there. That's a full-body exercise where your core is also participating.
So once again, if you're just getting your core to come back to you, doing it every day can be helpful, but we don't want to be maxing it out every day either. If that makes sense.
Katie Fogarty [32:58]: You've given us some great ideas about how to work on our core, to help strengthen our back, to help fend off achy. And I don't think we can talk about aches and pains without talking about recovery, right? So what are some—we're talking a lot about working out, and I know we're gonna try to remain calm and not like overdo it, because we're so excited to try to look and feel different. So we are going to be trying these new exercises. We're going to be implementing some of these ideas. But what are steps that we can take in between, to recover, to maximize our workout and to really lean into the power of recovery?
Megan Dahlman [33:38]: Yeah, this is really important now, probably more than ever, because as we get older, our bodies still have the potential for pretty much the same amount of strength. However, our bodies become less efficient at healing and recovery, so you need to be more intentional about how you recover. Gone are the days of like blasting through a workout and then running out the door and not cooling down or not working on your recovery intentionally. You can't do that anymore. It's too mean. You're just being mean to your body. So be kind to your body now.
And with exercising, you can avoid a lot of very unnecessary soreness and muscle aches and pains and also tendinitis, which is very common when women start exercising again, if you ease in and gradually build up. We're superwomen. When we show up to something, we want to go full force. We want to do the whole thing that we used to do before, and we can't do that. We need to ease in, gradually build up, see that this is a long road. This is a journey, and ease in. That's going to help with a lot of the unnecessary soreness.
But also with the workout itself, after your workout, spend about five to 10 minutes winding your body down. I always like to follow this pattern: do soft tissue work first. So that would be like foam rolling or massage type of stuff. So do that first as part of your cool down. Then transition into dynamic-style stretches. These are the types of stretches like we talked about where you're moving in and out, you're moving with the stretch. You're not just sit and hold—it's like yoga, okay? So pick your three or four favorite yoga moves and do them as part of your cool down, and then finish with the sit-and-hold style stretches.
They're not going to be the thing that's going to improve your flexibility the most. The dynamic work is going to improve your flexibility, but what the sit-and-hold or the static-style stretches do for you is that they really help to tone down your nervous system. Okay? And we know a lot—like right now, our nervous system, we need to pay attention to that and make sure that we're not keeping it always highly engaged. So those holding sit-and-hold style stretches will help to tone it down and will start to encourage your body to begin the recovery process.
So I kind of like that three-phase part for a cool down. Start with the rolling, go into some dynamic stretches, and then a couple sit-and-holds. You can do all that in about five minutes.
Katie Fogarty [36:19]: Yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic advice. I've never even thought about this sort of three-part structure to the cool down. So I'm excited to implement that, because I do love the stretch, and I do love sort of finishing. One of the reasons why I think I love yoga is that it ends with savasana, and there's sort of this intentional way that it ends. It's not like abrupt. And so to incorporate that into our workouts at home is something I hadn't really thought about, and it's something that I'm looking forward to incorporating into my own routine.
Okay, let's talk about bone health. And I know this is such a big topic, and we're not gonna be able to do it all, but millions and millions of women in the US and across the world have osteoporosis. So let's start with designing a workout to help prevent osteoporosis. What is something that should be a priority?
Megan Dahlman [37:06]: First and foremost, just don't be sedentary. Gone are the days where you have long gaps of doing nothing with your body. That's the biggest bone killer right there. It's just not moving. And I know many of us have probably spent years of—you wake up, you read, you feed your animals, you do the dishes a little bit, but then you sit for long periods of the day. So just being far more aware of how much am I actually being sedentary over the course of the day. Because simply getting up and moving your body, we're going to be using, flexing, contracting your muscles, and that's the most important thing for your bones. Your bones don't exist without muscles attached to them.
So the second piece of building the perfect workout for healthy bones is adding in the strength training. So once you're past the point of like, "Okay, I'm no longer a sedentary person. I now move every day. I go for walks every day." Great. Let's go to the next level and start making sure that you're incorporating strength training—strength training through full ranges of motion. This is going to target the muscles in all of the different directions in which they are attached to your bones. This is very important, because your muscles come in and attach to your bones, not always perfectly horizontally or vertically. They attach in different directions.
So doing a strength training program that's putting you through multiple movements and ranges of motion, where you're pushing and pulling overhead, but then also in a rotational pattern, and you're stepping to the side, but also forward and cross behind—that is going to make sure that we are pulling against those bones in all different directions, so that the whole length of the bone is being told to step up, put some more bone right here. So that's going to have the greatest impact on bone health.
And then also, if you can tolerate it, you can try some impact work, working on some plyometrics, some jumping, some bounding. It's okay if you can't tolerate it, that's okay. I don't want you to feel like, "Oh no, I'm doing my bones a disservice. I guess it's osteoporosis for me. Bummer. I can't jump anymore." I don't want you to hear that, because strength training is still the most powerful thing for your bones, but if you have tendons and ligaments and joints that can handle some jump work, feel free to add that in. I love it. I love doing box jumps. I love doing some bounding work, some little bounces here and there. But a lot of women I train can't do that anymore, and that's okay too. So this is what's going to help your bones the most.
Katie Fogarty [39:58]: Such fantastic advice. I have been trying to incorporate a little bit of jump roping. And I'm gonna say, like, I'm not so great at it, but I do understand—like I don't have osteoporosis or osteopenia or fragile bones at this stage. So that's still on the menu for me. But for listeners who are in that category that you mentioned—you train women who cannot do those things right now, I know a lot of people. I'm 55—a number of women in my friend group have osteopenia already. If you have more fragile bones, what are some of the modifications that you can suggest to strengthen and improve bone health? If you've got medically fragile bones?
Megan Dahlman [40:35]: Just know that bone density is a scale. Okay, so there's a wide spectrum. So if you were just diagnosed with osteopenia, don't be afraid to exercise. Fear aversion is a very real thing, and it will hurt your bones more than anything. So don't let this diagnosis paralyze you and stop you from moving. Getting that osteopenia, even osteoporosis diagnosis, it does not mean that you're immediately going to crumble apart the moment you start using your body. Okay? So you need to know, like, this is okay. There's something I can do here, but it doesn't mean I'm about to fall apart.
Okay, so with osteopenia, you can usually still do all of the same exercises without requiring modification, if you have a good trainer that you're working with and you're using really great technique. So keep training as much as you're able to. Start looking into potentially adding in some more strength training and weights in this multi-directional movements is going to be really helpful.
I just got a message from someone just yesterday. She started my Jump Start 30 program, which we're mentioning, about a year ago. She started with that, and then just kept going through all the phases of my courses. Within a year, she was able to move her osteopenia diagnosis, which was on the verge of osteoporosis, back to almost being pre-osteopenia. She gained almost 30% of bone density simply by just moving again and not being afraid to move.
Katie Fogarty [42:13]: That's phenomenal. And I know that your Jump Start program is kicking off in the fall. Tell our listeners a little bit about that.
Megan Dahlman [42:19]: So Jump Start 30 is a perfect place to start. It's phase one of a full series of at-home programs that I've designed for women. And Jump Start 30 gets them going. No equipment needed. We start with like 10 minutes a day. We work on the full-body strengthening. We start with the basics so that you know that you have a solid foundation of technique, and we start to work on that mobility and the balance, coordination, posture work—like all the things that your body has been craving, you just couldn't quite put a finger on it. We do all of those things together, and it just starts to build momentum.
So it's the perfect place to begin. It eases you into everything that your body really needs for this phase of life and for the next 40 years. So it's the perfect place to start. And we gradually ease into the fact—like about three months down the road, we'll be starting to put weights in your hands. We'll be starting to do a little bit more volume, a little bit more intensity, but your body's going to be ready for it, rather than just jumping straight there. Suddenly you have, like, 30-pound dumbbells in your hand. You're like, "What do I do with these?" And now my wrists hurt and I have shoulder tendinitis. "What did I do?" We ease into that, so that never happens to you. So this is a perfect time to just refocus, but make sure, like what we were talking about in the beginning, that we don't go too hard too fast.
Katie Fogarty [43:47]: I love that you mentioned that the woman who started that program was able to kind of improve her bone health and prevent herself from moving into the osteoporosis. I've had a wonderful guest on the show, Barbara Hannah Grufferman, who's very involved with the bone health movement. She serves on a national organization, but she started running marathons at the age of 50 after she was diagnosed with osteopenia, and she has run 18 since. So I'm not suggesting listeners should go out and, like, run a marathon right now, but there is—to your point—you can still move. There are ways. If you're working with a trainer like you, if you're working—Barbara worked with a running coach to make sure she was doing it correctly, and didn't just dive in start running 26 miles. She worked up to it. She's been able to run 18 marathons over the course of her life and really maintain her bone health. So it is not too late to make a difference for yourself, so I love that.
All right, Megan, we're nearing the end of our time together, but I do want to ask you, I mean, you are a fitness pro. You've worked in this space for a number of years. You have worked with thousands and thousands of women. You've got this incredible online program and all of this wonderful material. What are non-negotiables in terms of your own routine? I know people are always curious about, you know, sort of like a peek inside the practice of the doctor or the medicine cabinet of the expert. And how has your own aging experience informed or shaped how you look at your own exercise routine?
Megan Dahlman [45:20]: Yeah, my non-negotiable is that I move somehow every day, and I refuse to let that all-or-nothing thinking ever creep in. And that movement, whether it involves weights or not, whether it gets my heart rate up or not, it doesn't matter. There just needs to be some sort of movement every day, and I try to do something that pushes my joints through their full ranges of motion. You know, walking is great. I like to go for a walk every day, but I try to also do something that's going to bend my knees as deep as they can go. It's going to bend my hips as deep as they can bend, and same with my shoulders. So I always try to make sure I'm doing something for my major joints that move them through their ranges of motion.
And this mindset, especially now I'm in the thick of perimenopause. And let me tell you, menstrual migraines are the worst. And there have been many days where I wake up and I can't even see—like, I need to, like, close my eyes. Like, it just impacts—if you've ever had migraines, they're the worst.
And so coming into this season of life with already having the mentality of, "What can I still do today? It doesn't need to look like this huge, involved workout. Something small is infinitely better than nothing at all." So instead of beating myself up for not doing like the most or the biggest routine, I congratulate myself for doing something in the midst of struggle. So that mentality is really the non-negotiable for me every day.
Katie Fogarty [46:58]: Oh, my God, I love that so much. First of all, I am literally congratulating myself for inviting you back onto the podcast, because you have given me so many great ideas. And I love the spirit that it doesn't have to be hard, it doesn't have to be time consuming. You can start small. You can start with intentions, just to move your body differently every day and work up to it. I love also this notion that you can train yourself to improve by giving yourself time. Your Jump Start program teaches people the basics, allows them to learn the mechanics of the motions before we dive into weights. It makes it digestible and snackable and doable.
So I'm super excited, Megan, that you came back on the show. You've got me excited about my September jump starting of my own workout. I so appreciate your time. Where can our listeners find you and track your workouts online?
Megan Dahlman [47:54]: Definitely come follow me on either YouTube or Instagram. So either place, just search my name and you'll find me. I am posting video content there every single day, multiple times a day, so really easy to follow tips. And then another excellent place to gather information is my newsletter. So my weekly Jump Start newsletter, it's specifically for women over 40, every week you get like a "just one thing"—like, "just do this exercise," "just think about this," and it is already impacting more than 15,000 people on that list now, of women who just need that little extra reminder that's not overwhelming. So just go to weeklyjumpstart.com.
Katie Fogarty [48:40]: Thank you so much, Megan.
Megan Dahlman [48:43]: Thanks for having me, Katie.
Katie Fogarty [48:46]: Beauties, I loved hanging out with Megan. She has inspired me to get in action to start working on my post-summer fitness routine. I love following her on Instagram. She shares terrific exercises every day if you want something that's slightly longer than an Instagram dose of inspiration, and you are interested in Megan's Jump Start 30 course, she has a special offer for A Certain Age listeners. Head to her website, www.vigeofit.com/jumpstart. You can get 20% off this 30-day course, using the code KATIE20, that's K-A-T-I-E-2-0. I will also be including that link in the show notes. So make sure you hop on over to our website at acertainagepod.com, or follow me on Instagram at acertainagepod, I'll be sharing the link there as well.
Thanks for sticking around to the end of the show, and as always, special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties.