Revitalize Your Path to Fitness After 50: Tips from Rita Jenkins-Wolcott

In Episode 4, I interview fitness expert, Rita Jenkins-Wolcott. Her journey from ballet and dance to becoming an influential figure in fitness is truly inspiring. Rita candidly shares her struggles with body image within the rigid dance standards and how discovering strength training at 47 became a pivotal moment in her mindset and career. Her story is a powerful testament to resilience and the importance of embracing one's strengths.

In this episode, we delve into essential fitness strategies for women over 50, highlighting the transformative benefits of strength training and holistic health. Rita discusses the shift from traditional fitness models to personalized online training, addressing common myths about weightlifting and concerns about "bulking up." These insights are particularly relevant for those navigating perimenopause and menopause, offering practical advice for maintaining health and vitality.

Listeners will learn how personalized coaching and nutritional guidance can empower women to reach their fitness goals. Rita emphasizes the importance of nutrition, rest, and recovery, providing a well-rounded approach to health. Her insights are sure to motivate anyone seeking a healthier lifestyle, no matter their age.


Rita's Bio: Rita Jenkins-Wolcott is a menopause fitness specialist, personal trainer, certified nutrition coach, and a former fitness studio owner. She is also a former licensed massage therapist and professional dancer and has over four decades of teaching experience in dance, movement, and fitness. She is the Founder of Living Bolder (an online fitness and wellness company) and creator of Bolder BARRE.

RITA specializes in creating at-home fitness programs designed for the unique needs of women over 50, in perimenopause and beyond, to help them build muscle, burn fat, regain their fitness, strength, and energy - and get lasting results without excessive cardio, restrictive diets, or a huge time commitment.


Connect With Rita

Website: livingbolder.com/
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Chapters

• 0:08 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott's Journey in Fitness
• 7:32 Fitness Strategies for Women Over 50
• 21:37 The Importance of Strength Training

Transcript

0:00:00.0 Lauri Wakefield: Hi, welcome to the Inspiring Journeys podcast. Thanks for joining me today. I'm your host, Lauri Wakefield, and I've invited Rita Jenkins-Wolcott to be my guest today. You wanna say hi, Rita? 

0:00:10.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Hello. Happy to be here.

0:00:12.5 Lauri Wakefield: Thank you for joining me. So in this episode, we're gonna discuss Rita's journey from a fitness and nutrition perspective, dating back to her childhood days of dance. Was it ballet that you did? 

0:00:23.6 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I did all of it.

0:00:24.9 Lauri Wakefield: Okay. And then we're gonna talk about what you're doing in the fitness industry today. Let's start out with when you actually got into dance. You were young, you were a kid, right? 

0:00:36.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah, very, yeah. I must've been about six, and I think it was because I was shy. So that quickly remedied that. So I danced all up through, really through my mid-20s.

0:00:46.2 Lauri Wakefield: Okay.

0:00:47.8 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah.

0:00:51.1 Lauri Wakefield: And then, but you continued to dance. You continued to dance yourself, and then you actually taught dance, right? 

0:00:55.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I did. I started out in a regular dance studio doing all the things, tap, jazz, gymnastics, ballet, all of that stuff. And did segue into gymnastics for a while before realizing I could really get hurt doing this. And then what I really wanted to do was ballet, and that was my love. However, you need to be born with a very specific body type, and I was not. And so I kept getting forced into, they kept trying to gear me toward modern dance because I wasn't built like a ballerina, chubby, and that does not fly in the dance world. So I did start teaching at a very young age. Probably when I was about 15, I took over the advanced classes at my studio and started, I was just thrown into that and was naturally pretty good at it. So I enjoyed doing that, and then I majored in dance in college.

0:01:41.5 Lauri Wakefield: Okay. So then let's get into how you continued with the dance, right? Like throughout? 

0:01:49.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I did. I danced in college. I did finally eventually switch over to modern dance, which is a little bit more forgiving of bodies in those days. And I graduated and I got my fine arts degree in dance and choreography, dance performance and choreography. I was in a traveling dance company in college and then moved to New York City. The typical, I'm gonna move to New York and dance.

0:02:12.3 Lauri Wakefield: I'm gonna be famous.

0:02:13.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah. With every other little girl from Nebraska to Kansas. I danced professionally for a few years in New York before I just bagged it all and went to massage therapy school.

0:02:26.3 Lauri Wakefield: Okay. Okay. But you continued with fitness even at that point, just maybe did something different or? 

0:02:32.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Well, I went, at that point, I stopped dancing. I went to massage therapy school 'cause I thought I know about moving bodies. And so that became my career for the next 15 years. And somewhere in the middle of that, in my mid-30s, I got guided back into the dance world again, this time primarily through musical theater. And I did a lot of musical theater. And then very ironically in my early 40s, went back to dancing professionally for a few years, which is pretty unheard of, but I was living in Boulder, Colorado, and they had a couple of professional companies for adults. And so I got to do that again as an older adult, which was pretty special.

0:03:08.7 Lauri Wakefield: So you went through, you completely transferred your body. I think you put that on your website. At the age of 47. So what exactly did that look like? 

0:03:22.7 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Because of my background in dance and because I didn't have that stereotypical dancer's body, the messaging that I got from a very young age was weight. And it really did a number on me for many years and severe body dysmorphia. I did all kinds of ridiculous and stupid and even dangerous things to lose weight, to look like a dancer. So on top of the messaging that women get, that we should all fit into this specific mold, I had finally, eventually, ironically, after I stopped dancing, lost weight.

0:03:55.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Probably not in the most healthy way, but then I found Barre fitness. When I moved out to Colorado, I became a bar instructor and I was doing Barre probably six days a week. And my body changed a little bit. And when I left teaching Barre, my stepdaughter had left a P90X DVD, a set of DVDs at her house. This was back in 2012. And my husband said, why don't you do those? And I said, I'm not gonna work out to a fitness DVD.

0:04:21.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: This is stupid. And I tried it and I was immediately hooked. And that was when I really first started following the strength training program. So I did that for 90 days and it completely changed my body. I started getting the definition I wanted. I started adding muscle and that got me hooked on strength training and just really changed my body in ways that I could never change it before. And also mentally, physically, strength wise. I mean, it really, not just my body, it literally transformed my whole life and ultimately my career.

0:04:58.6 Lauri Wakefield: Right. So when you say that you're overweight, I mean, you weren't really that much overweight. I mean, it was...

0:05:02.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I was. In fact, yesterday I was looking through a box of old photos I just told my husband. And so I said, I found a piece of paper and it said 1988. And so in 1988, I was 23 and it said I weighed 136 pounds. I'm only 5'4". So I probably weigh about 117 now. So I'm about 17 pounds lighter which if you're, when you're that small, I remember that I was probably a size 10, 11, and now I'm 4. So it's more body composition change than anything. Right. Ratio of fat to muscle.

0:05:37.9 Lauri Wakefield: So when you were talking about power, that's Pilates? 

0:05:41.0 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: It has some crossover effects to Pilates. Barre is a low impact workout. It's what they call a toning workout where you use lightweights, high repetitions. It uses a lot of terminology and some of the postural standpoints from dance, but it's not, it's Barre because it has a Ballet barre. You're not throwing anything up on the Barre. You're basically using it for balance and rather than a support, it works the entire body. It's a full body workout system. And when I found it, I found an ad that said, do you love Barre and ballet and Pilates and yoga? And I thought, I do. And I went to this class and I was immediately hooked and I loved it. I loved the atmosphere of it. I eventually ended up opening a Barre studio several years ago.

0:06:21.2 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. So you had your fitness studio, and how long did you have that? 

0:06:26.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I opened that. I started teaching Barre in 2010. I moved back to Florida, and I opened my studio, because there was no Barre in this area in Florida where I lived. I opened my studio in 2016 when I was 51. So we in my studio, we had primarily Barre, but we also did some mat Pilates. We had yoga and a couple other formats, but they were all very complimentary formats. And I had that studio until August of the pandemic of 2020, I closed it.

0:06:54.2 Lauri Wakefield: Okay. Okay. So now you transition into working with clients one-on-one, and you do, you work, like you can work with them in a center, in a fitness center or, like, locally, or you can, or you work with them online, like virtually. Right? 

0:07:10.6 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: During the pandemic, when we were shut down, I realized my clients had nowhere to go, and my staff was going to get, have no income. So we immediately threw everybody into a Facebook group. We started doing live classes, Facebook live classes five days a week. I was able to keep several of my instructors employed through the shutdown. And so then I transitioned to putting my workouts on an online platform and running it as a membership.

0:07:36.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: When I wanted to make the pivot into strength training from Barre, which was a hard sell for women that were picking up two to three-pound weights thinking, if I lift heavier, I'm going to bulk. The irony was that even though I owned a Barre studio and I promoted that, because I did believe in it, I would come home and lift heavy weights. So I started creating strength, mobility, and cardio programs for perimenopausal and menopausal women. So I do those programs as group programs or standalone programs.

0:08:06.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I also do some one-on-one personal training in my home studio. I do teach a couple of group fitness classes a week now. I've only been doing that for about the past year. And I do one-on-one like VIP one-on-one coaching, where I give custom fitness programming and nutritional support and lifestyle habit changes, which is more about a 360 VIP experience for someone that wants a total transformation. So that way I can work with women anywhere.

0:08:34.7 Lauri Wakefield: You actually got certified in menopause fitness, personal training, and nutrition coaching.

0:08:40.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah, all of those. Yeah, I became a personal... I got my personal training certification in 2012, right when I got into P90X and fitness and lifting and all of that. And the nutrition course, finally, it took me a while to finish. Happy I did. That tends to be something that trips women up, sometimes even more than the fitness component.

0:08:58.6 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah, definitely. The clients that you work with, what's the average age of your client? 

0:09:04.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Probably between 45 and my oldest client is in her mid-70s. I do have clients that are younger, and sometimes when I say that I work with women over 50, it trips people up. 'Cause they'll say, "I'm only 42, do I qualify?" and I'm like, look, yeah, of course. These all apply, the principles I teach would apply to women of any age. And frankly, the sooner you start on getting your protein up and getting muscle and bone built in the bank, the better you're going to age.

0:09:29.9 Lauri Wakefield: Right, exactly.

0:09:31.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Primarily Barre markets to a certain demographic. And I also, because my demographic, I'm postmenopausal, I like to work with women going through menopause.

0:09:42.2 Lauri Wakefield: Right.

0:09:46.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Because when my studio, that's about the average age of my clients when I had my studio was 45 and a third of my clients were over 60. And when the studio shut down and they went through perimenopause or menopause with the pandemic, I saw a lot of bodies change, not for the better. And a lot of women are struggling right now. So that kind of showed me that I was really on the right path here.

0:10:07.7 Lauri Wakefield: So the menopause certification that you got, and that they've been included perimenopause anyway.

0:10:12.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah.

0:10:12.8 Lauri Wakefield: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the 50-plus age group. So what do you see as being some of the top fitness mistakes that women in that age group make? 

0:10:24.7 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Several, actually. And I think a lot of this is due to the messaging that we've received for decades, which is women tend to gravitate towards more cardio and less strength. Because for years, we were told to exercise more and eat less, and that's just a poor prescription. And now we know better, we teach better, hopefully. But women have gotten that message that when, then if they have a weight loss goal, which most women do, we tend to gravitate towards cardio over weight. So focusing more on strength training, not underestimating how much weight they can actually move. And some of that is also messaging. If I constantly feel like I'm constantly telling women, you're not going to bulk. We just don't have the hormone. And even if you did when you were younger, when you go through perimenopause and menopause, we don't have the hormones to support that.

0:11:17.3 Lauri Wakefield: Exactly.

0:11:17.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: That would take a tremendous amount of time and effort and focus and energy and food. And sometimes supplementation.

0:11:26.9 Lauri Wakefield: Exactly.

0:11:27.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: It's just simply not going to happen. In fact, I'm smaller and more compact the more I lift, 'cause my husband just said, now I said, you're leaning out. And I said, I'm eating so much, which is actually a nice benefit. I used to always be worried about that and counting every calorie. So, I think that skimping on protein, for sure. I think if I had to narrow down my message to two words, it would be muscle protein.

0:12:13.9 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: We tend to do that, dietary skimping on protein, and then cutting out carbs. We really, we need carbs. Our brain needs carbs. Our body needs carbs. And then also maybe thinking, I think the last mistake I see is thinking more is better. And so women that are working out and doing things like Orange Theory or F45 or CrossFit or Peloton, like day after day. As we age, we need more intensity in our workouts. We need more volume in our workouts than ever, but we don't need that volume in more days of the week.

0:12:19.1 Lauri Wakefield: Right.

0:12:23.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: So we have to work out hard, but we have to rest and recover hard.

0:12:23.6 Lauri Wakefield: So looking at the nutrition component, you said that you're like you're eating more and that we need carbs. So you're talking like about vegetables and like fruits and things like that for carbs. What else are you talking about? 

0:12:35.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yes, yes. And also real carbs. So I like to teach a balanced plate method where you're looking at first, every time you're sitting down to a meal or a snack saying, where's my protein and being protein first, and then filling up your plate with vegetables and fruits. But I also, I was somebody that fell into the being afraid of carbs. And it was about seven or eight years ago, I happened to mention on Facebook that I wasn't sleeping.

0:12:45.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I was waking up at night between 1:00 and 3:00 and my brain was racing. And a friend of mine that was a nutrition coach said, why don't you try eating a couple handfuls of carbs with your dinner? And I thought, he doesn't know what he's talking about. [chuckle] He said, you're waking up, 'cause your blood sugar is dropping. He said, I'm telling you, add the carbs in and you'll sleep. And so it took me a long time to not be afraid to do that.

0:13:23.8 Lauri Wakefield: Right.

0:13:30.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Now I do like sweet potatoes and brown rice and any kind of complex health and carbohydrate. And I sleep better. I'm able to keep muscle on. I'm able to think. We do become more insulin resistant as we lose estrogen. So we need to be judicious about the carbs. We need to be strategic, but we can't count them out. So keto is not a great answer for women in perimenopause and beyond. It's just, it works well for about three months, and then it tanks your thyroid and your adrenals. And it's not pleasant.

0:13:58.1 Lauri Wakefield: And I think one thing that I've noticed with keto is that I could be wrong about this, but doesn't it limit the amount of fruits that you can eat. 'Cause of the sugar content.

0:14:02.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Absolutely.

0:14:02.6 Lauri Wakefield: Which like when you look at the sugar and fruit, do like the sugar in a soft drink or a cola or whatever, it's a different sugar. And it's, I don't, I would never wanna feel like I could eat fruits or limit fruits that I eat. 'Cause I know with my protein shakes, I do the vegan protein and just because my stomach...

0:14:24.1 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah. It goes well.

0:14:24.2 Lauri Wakefield: It doesn't like the way protein. So I do vegan protein. And then I had chia seeds and I had some type of fruit.

0:14:29.6 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: That's great fiber.

0:14:30.9 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah.

0:14:30.9 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: And that's the other thing, like second to protein...

0:14:36.8 Lauri Wakefield: Fiber exactly.

0:14:39.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Is getting enough fiber.

0:14:40.8 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah.

0:14:40.9 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: And the combination of having protein and fiber together can significantly reduce cravings and create that afternoon crash and that cravings where you want, you want sugar, you want fast energy. It's usually because we're not eating enough earlier in the day. So it can find like you hit that 3 o'clock slump. If you front load your day with a lot of protein or protein and fiber, it really can help significantly cut down those cravings for carbs and sugar. And it's really good for digestive health as well.

0:15:07.1 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was going to say, I know for myself with just being like being a breast cancer survivor, one of the things that I've really been urged to do is to eat more fiber and up to 25 to 30. Does that sound right? 25 to 30g, something like that.

0:15:19.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: That's exactly it. Yeah.

0:15:22.9 Lauri Wakefield: And the thing with that, and it may not matter to some women, but women who are where they don't want, they don't wanna be too, they don't wanna have too much estrogen in their body. It helps to get the estrogen out so that your body's not reabsorbing it. So yeah, one thing I wanted to ask you about too, do you ever do fasting yourself or recommend it for your clients? 

0:15:43.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: That's touchy. I'm going to say yes, but not as a personal level strategy. I got into trouble with fasting. I started doing it years ago. And to some extent we all fast, because we sleep, but I take a much more moderate approach to it now, because I'm a very black and white, all or nothing thinker. I started fasting and I would extend the fast. And I really do believe that's what caused my thyroid issues. It's a stress to the body. And we're already less resilient to stress. It also extended fasting, it puts you in a muscle protein breakdown state.

0:16:30.0 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: So as we're in menopause and going through that transition, we're much more likely to be in a muscle protein breakdown than a buildup stage. We have anabolic resistance. So people that are skipping, a lot of women do fasting to skip meals, to lose weight. And I just don't recommend that, because you have to know how to nourish your body and how to eat well within that eating window. The other part to that is if you're doing extended fasting or even like one meal a day, there's no way or it's very unlikely, you're going to hit your protein target.

0:16:51.3 Lauri Wakefield: Right.

0:16:58.9 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: So, I eat probably upwards of 120g of protein a day. If I had to do that in one meal, I'd have a Fred Flintstone steak [chuckle] or something like that. It just would be too much.

0:17:04.3 Lauri Wakefield: Right.

0:17:09.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: I prioritize that. So now it was a big mindset shift for me to do that, but it stresses the body. And if you're working out in a fasted state, you're even stressing the body even more. So you're just breaking down that muscle. I recommend a reasonable fast is 12, maybe 14 hours and a real easy way to do that. Not that I've been really successful at this, but a real easy way to do that is just stop eating a little earlier in the evening. And then when you wake up after an hour or so, if you're hungry eat.

0:17:32.0 Lauri Wakefield: Right. Yeah. I think what I was asking, I mean, you're probably talking more like on a daily, are you talking more on a daily? Okay. And I didn't clarify what I was talking about, but I'm talking about maybe like doing a 24 hour fast once a month or doing like a 48 hour fast every few months.

0:17:48.9 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Personally, I'm not a fan. I always ask my clients why. Doing it for detox purposes. That's why we have a liver really. I know there are people that promote it. There's somebody very famous that promotes extended fasting like that. And I just don't see the... And there was a study that came out just in the recently in the past couple of years saying that fasting is no more effective than a calorie deficit for weight loss. I just think a lot of women fast as a way to dump weight quickly. And I just, I don't think it's very effective as a first level strategy.

0:18:22.7 Lauri Wakefield: So one thing that happens when women get into probably even period menopause before, before their 50s is, I don't know if it's maybe it's more prevalent when they're going through menopause, but like the middle weight gain, which like the body kind of changes and it's like the toned belly, it's what the heck happened to my stomach.

0:18:42.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Exactly. Yeah. It moved my cheese. Yeah. Yeah. And that's all estrogen. When estrogen starts going haywire and perimenopause and then eventually just tanks and leaves the building and that influences where we store fat, so sadly it moves from the hips and thighs or where women generally tend to carry weight right to the belly. And that visceral fat is dangerous. It's not just unsightly that you can't zip up your jeans. That leads to, can lead to metabolic condition.

0:19:14.5 Lauri Wakefield: Even things like breast cancer, other types of cancer, GERD-ish, and stuff like that.

0:19:17.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Absolutely. Yep. High blood pressure.

0:19:21.3 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. What do you think, we've been talking about a lot of different things, but what do you think that the top fitness and health priorities in menopause and beyond should be? 

0:19:29.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Preserving muscle, preserving bone and brain. When we're at 25, we're at peak muscle mass. So then we can coast for a few years, but after we're at 30, we start losing muscle every year, unless we're actively working to offset it and actively working to offset it would be lifting challenging weights, progressive overload, and getting adequate protein and adequate recovery, but otherwise we're losing three to 8% muscle percent per decade. And I talked to a friend of mine who just recently turned 50 and she said, that doesn't really sound like that much. I'll worry about that later. But that muscle loss that starts now, it's further and harder for us to get that back. And the good news is, you can gain strength at any point. There's tons of evidence of women that are in their 80s and 90s...

0:20:16.2 Lauri Wakefield: Right, exactly.

0:20:18.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: That build strength. It's harder and harder to build muscle. So we need to do that. We're also losing bone after 30. So a lot of women are being diagnosed with osteopenia or osteoporosis and 50% of women, almost 50% of women over 50 will break a bone due to an osteoporotic fracture from a fall and the recovery rates from that, the one year recovery rates, the survival rates are abysmal. They're really depressing. The more that we can stress the muscle by having strength training and, you know, there's different ways to do that. My client that I mentioned, my oldest client actually raised her DEXA scan or bone density scan by a couple percent because she started in strength training. So we're at an estrogen is also protective of the heart and the bone. And so I definitely would say muscle and bone. That's the, that's our longevity. That's us getting off the toilet without help or not going to a nursing home and being able to carry that bag of dog food in.

0:21:12.3 Lauri Wakefield: So in addition to the strength training, do you have your clients also do some type of like aerobic exercise? 

0:21:19.5 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yes, not as much as before. Now, considering having my next program be weights and walking. I think walking and just more activity during the day is one of the biggest and biggest dial movers are one of the best things that you can do for your body, your health, your longevity, but definitely strength training, total body strength training with progressive overload, meaning that you're adding more reps or weights or volume over time so that you're getting stronger and not six months later, you're still lifting the same amount of weights for the same amount of reps. I do program some short high intensity interval training, cardio, cardio intervals, but I teach the women in my programs when it's appropriate to use that.

0:22:03.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: So if you have somebody that's going through perimenopause and they're just exhausted or they're under a lot of stress or something, that's probably not a time to throw in a bunch of HIIT workouts. So I'll have them back off of that. The good news is that once you postmenopausal and you flatline, your symptoms usually settle down and your energy comes back and you can actually handle more exercise. So perimenopause is the volatile where you need to find your own sweet spot. But in general, the my fitness, my online fitness programs are strength-based and I do have some cardio intervals and mobility, flexibility, and balance.

0:22:40.3 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. Balance is really important. Yeah. So that's what's going to help prevent falls. Like you and I were talking before, I don't know, I think it was last week about how at the age of 60, if you fall and break your hip, your chances of not recovering and actually having it end is a lot higher. So those are the things that we want to avoid.

0:23:01.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: It's a very slippery slope.

0:23:03.7 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. Yes.

0:23:04.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: One of the ways that you can work on a side of strength training and strength training with power, with a power component is jump training or plyometrics, which we've always, for a long time, we were fed like low impact and now they're finding even women with osteoporosis can handle that as long as you haven't had a severe fracture. And I'm talking things like jump roping, stomping, marching, hopping, hopping off a low box, that kind of stuff that ground force impact is really going to help with bone density in a way that walking won't. Walking will help to a point, but if you're already walking a mile a day, walking two miles a day is going to do nothing for your bone density. Same minimal effect of stress. So adding, I have low, like those fake jump ropes that doesn't have a cord. So I never trip over it. And I'll do that several times a week, just for five or 10 minutes, just getting that ground force.

0:23:56.4 Lauri Wakefield: I think, did you, do you want to add anything else? 'Cause we're about 30, maybe 30 minutes into the discussion. [0:24:03.4] ____ Yeah, Jen.

0:24:06.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: The only thing I'd say is I wear, when I film my workouts, a lot of times I'll wear a shirt that I say is my motto and says, age is no excuse. And really, if you haven't, if you're a woman over 40 or 50 and you haven't started strength training, there's still time. There's no time that's too late. I'd say get started on it now. If you're going through perimenopause and it, and just feel like crap, it does get better, it really does get better. And we do need more intensity, but the good news is that we don't need more days of the week. So I actually can eat more now and exercise less than ever. And it's working for me. So it does get better. You have to put in the effort and it's worth it.

0:24:48.3 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. One thing I was going to say, we were talking earlier about the perimenopause. I must have been estrogen dominant at that time. Looking back at the time of it, it never occurred to me. I didn't think about hormones at all. I don't even know if it was really something that people were that talking about that much, you know what I mean? But looking back and yeah, being estrogen dominant is not a good thing. So.

0:25:08.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah, that does tend to happen in perimenopause because progesterone is the first to tank and it balances estrogen. So when estrogen, when progesterone goes down, your estrogen will come up. And I was the same way. I was postmenopausal for years before I went, oh, that was menopause. I was lucky that I didn't have a lot of the typical symptoms, but looking back, knowing that how many symptoms there are, I look back like, oh, I did. I just, I didn't know.

0:25:32.4 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. And the good thing about it now is that there's so much more of an awareness that as they get into that age group, they can, somebody can explain it to them or teach them certain things that will help them coach them, things like that. So.

0:25:43.2 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah, menopause is definitely having a moment. When I started really delving into this about three years ago, I didn't see it as much and now it's really being talked about, which is great.

0:25:53.2 Lauri Wakefield: You see it everywhere.

0:25:54.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: You get the talk about your periods when you're that awkward talk in gym class when you're in seventh grade, but nobody sat me down and told me what to expect with menopause.

0:26:04.3 Lauri Wakefield: Exactly. Yeah.

0:26:05.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: So I didn't know.

0:26:06.3 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. Definitely a journey. So, yep. Yeah. So that's going to wrap things up for this episode. Thanks so much for joining me today.

0:26:13.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: My pleasure.

0:26:14.3 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. If you'd like more information about how Rita can help you achieve your fitness and nutrition goals, you can check out her work with me section at her website at livingboulder.com, which I'll leave a link to the website and the show notes. You'll see a list of the fitness programs she offers. And if you're not sure which option is best for you, you can book a discovery call with Rita to discuss the different options. If you'd like to see the show notes for today's podcast, you can find them on my website at inspiredlivingforwomen.com. The show notes will be listed under podcast show notes, episode four. I'll include a link to Rita's website in the show notes and to your free offer. You have a free offer that you're, that you want to, do you want to just say quickly what it is? 

0:27:00.4 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Yeah, it's just, it's a free week of classes. It's going to give you five different fitness classes. They're all follow along classes. It'll be just like I'm working out with you, queuing you in real time. You'll get body weight, strength with weights, mobility, and some cardio intervals there. And I'll give you a taste of what it's like to work with me.

0:27:16.3 Lauri Wakefield: Yeah. Yeah. One thing I wanted to add too, is that you have a resources section on your website that, that has different fitness related things that people can, well not buy from you, but buy. They're just that you would recommend.

0:27:27.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Is that I've used and recommended.

0:27:29.4 Lauri Wakefield: So anyway, if you'd like to join me as they continue my conversation with other guests, exploring topics for women over 50, please be sure to subscribe to the Inspiring Journeys podcast. Also, if you have your own inspiring journey to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, you can reach out to me using the contact form on my website, it's on the podcast page, but I'll also link to it in the show notes. Thanks again and have a great day. Thanks Rita.

0:27:54.3 Rita Jenkins-Wolcott: Thanks Lauri. It was great talking to you.