Episode 340: Protecting Your Longevity

Intro:

Welcome to The Healthy Catholic moms podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority, so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson, a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer, and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want. Without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting, I’m going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy, and strong to carry out your life. Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals, and how to get them on the table make food that kids will actually want to eat, mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly, and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where we’re striving to steward our bodies. Well, in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Main Episode:

Hello, ladies, how are you? I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Thank you so much for pressing play and for joining me today. And all the time. If you are here twice a week, I pop on Tuesdays and Fridays to share with you everything from health and fitness tips to some practical time management strategies and home management strategies. Because, you know, we could have all the knowledge in the world of health and fitness. And if we can’t actually apply it can’t actually fit it into our lives. It’s just not going to happen. So I used to get frustrated listening to podcasts where it was like single males telling me about four hour morning routines. And I was like, well, this does not work for me. So I tried to just share with you, you know what I’m doing what I’ve heard from other moms works, all that goodness. So today, kind of along that line, we’re talking about longevity. And this is something that as a 21 year old trainer I was definitely not thinking about. So I will be honest about that up front. Like I definitely wish for my own training. And for my clients, I could go back and tweak some things. And I did learn pretty quickly. Like I take very seriously professional development and always continuing to learn and grow and whatnot. So probably by the time I was 24, or 25, I changed a lot of the ways I’ve trained already. But what I started out doing, you know, for myself was a lot of box jumps, a lot of jump squats, like I just got a lot of my information and my inspiration for my own workouts and for my clients from fitness magazines and from YouTube and that kind of thing. I don’t think Instagram was even really, I think it was just becoming a thing. But, you know, I was not at all It wasn’t even on my radar to be concerned about how I was going to be moving at 50 6070. You know, and hopefully beyond God willing, you know, I was just worried about losing the last five pounds or less 10 pounds or doing even just things that looked fun and exciting and whatever. And before I’m a total buzzkill because I definitely have some 20 Somethings listening being like yeah, like what’s wrong with that? I do think that there is still it’s still okay to have some things in the rotation that aren’t best for you. Like, for example, box jumps is one of those things that I know, box jumps are a great exercise. If you don’t know what this is basically like just picture you’re standing in front of literally a box, you bend your knees like you’re going to take off and then you jump landing two feet on the box, you stand up straight, and then you jump or step down. So I’ve always loved doing them. I think they’re fun. I think they’re challenging. It’s fun to see how many boxes you can stack or if you can go to the next highest box, whatever. It’s just a athletic move. Now here’s the thing, no one needs to be doing box jumps, unless you need to specifically train for explosive movement like that. So like very few athletes and things like that, like the average. I’m an average 31 year old mom, I don’t really need to be doing box jumps. Okay, I just think they’re fun and cool. Now So back when I would do these often I do like at least once a week. I would jump up jump down. Now if and when I keep them in their routine which I don’t even know if I did them between baby number three and four. I usually About after a year, you know, working back to my fitness level, then I will integrate some of that kind of fun stuff. And then I don’t do that obviously pregnant, or again, repeating the cycle postpartum. I don’t even know if I did that between babies three and four, I think I probably I definitely did after baby number one, you know, you want to see if you still got it. And then I think I did after baby number two, I don’t know about between these last pregnancies. So anyways, the point is, when I was doing them again, I changed it to at least I didn’t very sporadically, like once every couple months to see if I could still hit like, do it, it’s kind of like trying to whip out a back handspring or a handstand or Kurt wheel or something, you just want to see if you still got it. And instead of jumping up jumping down, I would jump up and step down. So if I was to do a box jump, say, a year after this baby’s born, that’s how I would do it is jump up with two feet, and then step down, and it would be few and far between. So you can make those kind of modifications where it’s not throwing out everything fun for the sake of, you know, hoping you can move on when you’re 90. And you don’t even know if you’ll live that long, I get that. But hopefully Lord willing, you have a lot of years ahead of you no matter what, and you’re listening to this, if you’re 3040 5060, you know, and you we want to move well into those years, like we’re not going to care about box jumps, we’re going to care about getting up out of bed, getting into cars, like very functional movements, functional movement, that term gets thrown around a lot in the fitness world. And you know, especially with kettlebells, and things, it’s all functional movements. functional movements mean like what you literally need to do to function, like how you move to get through life. So squatting down, picking something up. That’s the kind of thing we are going to care about when we’re 7080 90 we’re not going to care about shredding those last five pounds, and all that stuff. So there’s, you know,
a time in place for flashy moves, which is very few and far between, I’ll get into what that looks like. And for those who are my older and wiser ladies listening, my more seasoned ladies, I know, like you’re, you’re understanding this as well. And you’ve maybe gotten to a point your workouts were like, Yep, I can’t train like I’m 20 anymore. And I don’t want to. So all this to say is whatever stage you’re at, I encourage you to train like you are in your 40s or something where, you know, you’re being more mindful, being more careful. The first time I really became aware of this, before I got into the specific exercises that would would be best to avoid and would be best to do. I was at a dinner for a gym that actually I wasn’t working at my husband was working at at the time, I think we were dating or engaged. And he was working at two different gyms. So it was the one that we did not work at together. And we were at this dinner and we were sitting with a lady in her 60s Who teaches aerobics classes and things like that. And at this time, she was teaching mostly like chair exercises, and that kind of thing. SilverSneakers those kind of programs. And she said that she couldn’t even squat anymore, because she hammered her body so much with step aerobics in the 80s. And in the 90s. And, you know, when all those things became big, and there’s just a lot of impact to the jump up, jumped down the jump around. So that’s when I kind of was like oh man like and she was fit all the time like she was fit from her 20s on and it just even if you’re doing what we think is quote unquote, a good thing like exercise, we can be still really beating up our bodies, even with you know, if you look at different types of exercise, pretty much the extremes, always put you in a more risky category, I shouldn’t say always, I should say tend to put you in a more risky category. For example, running and cardio and things like that are good for you to an extent Ultra running. Like if you look up how many ultra runners need knee replacements, hip replacements, that’s that gets into, like their body just takes a lot on takes the toll of all those miles. So for me personally, I want to be able to move well, that’s what this is about. I do want to stay healthy way to have a good quality of life. And all of that these things are not mutually exclusive, so you can still absolutely lose fat, maintain fat loss, I just don’t want you to do the crazy, jumpy, twisty moves that you don’t have to do so. My basics for protecting longevity, and for best health overall for the long haul. I’ve got 12345 for you today. So this is whatever age you are to start right now and to try to put into practice for life so that you are just overall healthy and can move and and are great physique and all that stuff. Okay. Number one is to eat adequate protein. Adequate is subjective. What I personally recommend is between 100 grams and your ideal body weight. So it’s a really big range for some of us. If you’re 250 300 pounds listening to this, I’m not suggesting you eat 200 pounds of protein if you know if you’re 300 pounds, and your ideal weight would be to lose 100 pounds and, you know, hit 200 200 grams is a lot of protein eat. So I think it’s a sliding scale from 100 grams to your ideal body weight. And this is on the higher side of most recommendations. But if you follow, like the higher level fitness professionals who are looking at things like in the whole context of with strength training, which I’m going to get to in a second, that is a very typical recommendation, it’s just not typical for the world that we live in, where the average protein consumption is, like 40 to 60 grams, I just read a study the other day that said something like that. So if the average person is taking 40 grams of protein a day, then yeah, it sounds like a lot to tell you to eat 120 or something like that, you know, but protein has so many benefits. And I’m not even gonna list them all here. I talk about this all the time. One other person that I love as a resource for this is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I found her more recently, and I’ve talked about her a lot. But in recent podcast episodes, and I just loved it when I found her stuff, because it validated everything I’ve been saying for a long time. So and she’s way he has way more, you know, degrees and whatnot behind her name. So she’s another resource you can tap into for this, but I think she even recommends more than that, but I do 102 ideal body weight. Now, number two, is strength training that is excellent for protecting your body for the long haul, you are training your body how to move, like I just said, standing up to get out of bed, like squatting down to use the toilet. These are all things that you do in strength training, so your body knows how to do them, well. deadlifting is just picking things up safely. And there’s so much more to it, where as you age, we lose bone density, right, and we lose muscle mass. So the more we can replace the muscle that we’re losing, the better off we’re going to be to protect ourselves against falls and osteoporosis and all those things. Strength training is something that we can do for our overall bone health and just preventing injury. Okay, number three, this one I kind of alluded to already is to eliminate or minimize jumping. So it’s just more impact on your knees, right. And we do want to treat our joints with care, because hopefully these are the joints that we’re gonna have forever not having to be replaced or knees or hips or whatever. And this is just one of those like, there’s not really a you need to do this unless you are some kind of elite athlete who like specifically needs this explosive training, you probably don’t need to be jumping. So I’m very careful about that. Now, like I think step aerobics is really cool. I have a friend and former client who teaches it and we were chatting about it one day. And I was like, you just really have to be careful about the jumpy, jumpy. I know there’s step options where you just step up, step down and step up, step over, not necessarily jump on, jump around. But you know, just watch. That’s what I don’t love when clients will tell me, Oh, I’m just doing, you know, I just want to talk to you about nutrition because I’m doing so and so’s like hit Program on YouTube. Do you? What do you think of it, and then I have to go look it up. Because I’m not going to just let somebody do something that I have no idea if it’s safe or not. And so many times hit equals, jumping around. And it’s not good for you. It’s not good for it. I’m just gonna put that really clearly I and this is again, something that I’ve like evolved into of, you know, I used to think, oh, this stepping options are just for beginners like no, too much jumping is not good for you. So in like the Jason greenness group workouts, I might include like a pop squat or a banded pop squat where we are standing and we we separate our feet not really a jump, it’s like we ease down into a squat and then we step back up or pop back up. It’s very minimal impact because it’s basically stepping together, you’re just have a tiny bit more force behind it. Whereas a jump squat where you go all the way down, jump up in the air and you’re landing on your knees from up in the air. That’s a lot more impact. So I don’t want you to think if you’re thinking through some of my workouts being like, that’s kind of hypocritical she is jumping in there. I limit it very much. So like if I put pop squats in there, I don’t also pair that with like squat thrusts. And I always and I do show like the stepping options for squat thrusts but I don’t put these things in every single month or again then multiple times if I have one exercise that has like a slight jump to it. I will not pair it with another slight jump exercise. So eliminate it or minimize it to more so number one was eat adequate protein number two is strength training number three, eliminate or minimize jumping and number four for your longevity and overall health is to stop yo yo dieting says so bad for metabolisms confused Is them does not know when we’re feeding it next, when we’re taking in enough calories, so it will store up whatever calories we give it, because it doesn’t know when you’re gonna withhold it from them again. So we really need to, for the long haul, feed our bodies, the right balance of carbs, fat and protein. So that’s your macros, if you’re newer to that, and figure out what that Beyonds is, and maintain that balance. Whether you’re eating in a deficit taking in less than you’re burning, or you’re just trying to maintain to equal it out. You know, it’s so crucial to not go super calorie surplus super deficit like, and we do this a lot when we’re feeling like we’ve over indulged, then we need to bounce back, quote, unquote, and we’ll drop our calories dramatically slash like, I just need to do a three day detox. No, you don’t, you need to get back to whatever number your body really needs to run well. And try to maintain that if this is totally foreign to you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about. If you go to my homepage, healthy, epic moms.com. There’s a freebie right on the homepage, that’s free download about how to figure out your macro targets. And this will walk you through what I’m talking about. Alright, last tip is to get enough sleep. I know this past year, I’ve really been talking about sleep on the podcast a lot. And it’s like, the most frustrating thing I know. It’s the most frustrating thing to hear like, okay, great, I’ll just get more sleep. I know, don’t have to tell me, some of us are in seasons where you just can’t help it. Pregnancy, insomnia, newborn little kids, all that if you’re not in the stage where you really can’t help it. Or if you’re in that stage, but like your kids sleep really well. It’s just that you stay up late because you want kid free time, revisit what you’re doing here, because cortisol is the stress hormone, okay, it’s supposed to fall at night. And then if we don’t, if we don’t get enough sleep, our stress level just stays super high all the time, and it doesn’t know it doesn’t come down and then spike, it just stays really high if we don’t get enough sleep. So stress is listed as the cause of so many other health issues. Like you look at that’s one of the first things you’ll tell you, Oh, high blood pressure, try to reduce your stress, oh, heart problems, try to reduce your stress. So it is just for our good for our benefits, like God made us. So we need to sleep. I don’t know why we can ask Monday. But we do. We can just, you know, plug ourselves in and keep going doesn’t work like that we have to stop and recharge. So make sure you are doing what you can truly what is in your control. And put this phone down, put the screen down like have set rules around it do your best to get enough sleep.
Really, there’s just so much that happens in the body cell turnover, all the stuff that we need it. So, so many hormones are affected by our sleep. So I could talk about this all day. I have talked about it a lot. So go back and listen to some of those episodes if you need encouragement to hear. But that is the overall picture that I have for you have training for the long haul and training for to be a healthy grandma and not just you know, health given mom’s health yet the grandmas that’s the next step. Hopefully Lord willing, that we you know, stay mobile and stay well. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, I’d love if you’d share it with a friend or share it on your stories get the message out to more people so they stopped jumping around and doing crazy exercises. And next episode, we’re going to talk about the best ways to measure progress. All right, so until then, have a great rest of your day. I’ll talk to you next time.

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