How the Magic begins

Whether you see this as a project, or a programme, or a challenge, it is designed with the busy woman in mind, with options to go more or less intensively depending on the many factors of your life: what your end goal is, how much time you have available, how fit you currently are, how interested you are in the supporting evidence and background information, how long you are planning to do this for, and so on.

Where possible, I will try to give the essential information upfront - so that in every article or video if you don’t have time to watch or read or listen all the way through, you get the most important information straight away. I don’t intend to give you anything that I don’t think is interesting or relevant, but some information is really “need to know” and some is “good to know” and I will attempt to differentiate between the two.

Apart from outside information that I link to, all of the content will be presented in three formats - written, spoken and visual, just for your ease in accessing!

Each day you will receive an email, with a link to the day’s exercise. Some days there will be an additional article for you to read/watch/listen to, or a process to consider. Everything is optional, an invitation, but obviously if you decline that invitation too often you won’t get much out of this! Sometimes something won’t resonate with you straight away, but it might call to you later, and all the previous content will be available for you to return to when you want. Indeed, unless you are one of the early pioneers, you will find all the information to date is available. You could if you wanted peruse all of it. But that’s part of the point of doing it like this - there is *so* much information out there, and knowing where to start is one of the biggest difficulties! I see my role partly as a guide, and a filter - I find the “five best shoulder exercises” or “five best menopause supplements”, so you don’t have to. Of course, if you are really interested in something, you might find yourself pursuing it in detail, but this is designed so that if you just follow the programme, tweaking as you need or like, you will see positive and noticeable results in terms of your health and wellness.

So, the exercises! These are designed to be very simple. So you don’t have to follow along to a complicated sequence watching on your phone or computer. You don’t have to get changed, and you don’t have to shower afterwards. You don’t have to do them all at once, you can fit them in throughout your day - indeed, that’s preferable. Obviously, this means you aren’t getting very hot or sweaty, and there is definitely a place for that. As we move through this process, it will be appropriate to add in some more challenging exercise, but for now we are looking at really beneficial exercises that if you do really regularly, you will feel noticeable results from.

So on day One for example, I will show you two exercises. You can either do these, alternating, as a “ladder” in a single workout, with a bit of a warm up (I’ll give you options for this) and the whole thing could take 20 minutes or less. A ladder is where you do ten reps of the first exercise, then ten of the second, then nine of the first, nine of the second, eight of the first eight of the second, and so on. Or you could do them regularly throughout the day. Perhaps OTHEH, or as you can, when you can. In this case, you take care to ease into the exercises slowly, so the first few reps of the exercise *are* the warmup. These can be done waiting for the kettle to boil, for instance, or in any of those odd little spare moments throughout the day (you might find there are more than you think). Or you could do 15 minutes in the morning, and then little exercise snacks throughout the day. Perhaps a little stretch and mobility in the evening, to help you sleep. There is clear evidence that little and often is more effective than big power workouts at the gym from time to time, especially in terms of your blood sugar control. If you eat lunch, for instance, and then sit at your desk, and just jiggle your legs, you can drop your blood sugar by 30%! The key is to engage your large muscle groups regularly throughout the day. This diverts glucose from your blood stream into your muscles, and therefore lowers the glucose in your blood -which is generally a good thing!

The first two exercises I am showing you are very effective, and if you did just those two every day for the rest of your life, with a bit of incidental activity, like brisk walking, dancing, carrying shopping, running for the occasional bus, and so on, and a bit of targeted mobility and core work, you’d have a pretty reasonable maintenance programme to adhere to! You’d have to have quite a high boredom threshold, but it would probably become as normal as walking. We don’t start walking sideways because we are bored of the “one foot in front of the other” protocol, do we? So maybe it’s worth not expecting exercises to be too exciting. Doing something regularly also means we can keep a good eye on progress.

But just in case you don’t have a super high boredom threshold, or in case the first pair of exercises don’t work too well for you yet, on Day Two I will send you a second pair of exercises. Again, these will be effective exercises that involve large muscle groups and can be done as a single workout, OTHEH, or a combination.

On Day Three, you get a core sequence to do. A lot of core is done on the floor, which makes it potentially a little harder to fit in to your day, so I’ll give you standing core options as well.

On Day Four, you repeat the first pair of exercises.

On Day Five, you repeat the second pair of exercises

On Day Six, you work core again,

And on Day Seven, I’ll send you a stretch/mobility sequence. This could be done every evening, before bed, if you wanted.

In addition to the exercises, each week I will send you relevant information on topics such as nutrition, hormones, the gut microbiome, matters relating to the menopause, and so on. There’ll be a curated “Just One Thing” suggestion, a little something on Mindset, to help with the motivation and stress (stress is one of the biggest areas to address), and there’ll be the opportunity to check in with the community, and ask questions. This is all designed to help improve your health and well-being, and it all fits in together. Exercise will have limited value if your gut microbiome is unhappy, or your hormones are all over the place. It sounds like a lot, perhaps, but it should all be quite manageable, and fit in around the rest of your life. The more of the programme you are able to engage in, the more benefit you will find.

And then the pattern repeats for Week Two, week Three, week Four, and so on.

In this way, the library of exercises and other resources available to you builds up every week.

Additionally, you are likely to find more and more opportunities to fit good movement into your life, as you become more attuned to the needs of your body and mind. This might be brisk walking, a little jog, swimming, cycling, dancing (can just be around the kitchen), a Pilates class or yoga. That sort of thing.

And although this is designed to be easy to follow along to, you can tweak it as well. If you love one pair of exercises, do those more. If you feel it isn’t challenging enough, add weights, do more reps, add in core more.

For most people, it’s easier to develop an exercise habit if you something every day. Even if it’s just a short walk. Even if and when we get into more strenuous exercise later in the programme, it would be still be appropriate to do something as an “active recovery”. Unless you are ill, or recovering from an operation, doing some version of these exercises every day will be beneficial.

This also doesn’t have to be an either/or. If you are working with a Personal Trainer, this would be an excellent way of supplementing that - because what you do in your hours outside of that training is always going to have a bigger impact than those sessions. You might do this alongside Couch to 5k.

[So, I ad-libbed a few words of encouragement here, and the ipad lost them! They just disappeared. So I’ve recorded them again. But the lighting is probably a bit different!]

I just want to reiterate that women face a lot of challenges when it comes to health and fitness.

Women are usually super busy, with so many demands on their time and energy that finding any time for themselves can be really difficult.

Women are often struggling with hormone imbalances, and maybe undiagnosed deficiencies (Vitamin B12, Vitamin D, Iron and so on)

And, there’s so much conflicting information out there, and very little research on women through their life cycles - mostly the supposition is that women can be treated like small men, but this is really not the case. It actually means that sometimes the regimes they are following are not only not very helpful, they are actually counterproductive.

And it’s for these reasons that I created this programme. I think we all deserve better. And you are here, for which I mightily applaud you, and that means you are up for some self care, and that in itself is quite a radical act.

The challenges that women face don’t get easier with the onset of menopause, quite the contrary, and adjusting to the hormonal changes can be life-changing, and not in a good way.

But! It doesn’t have to be like this. The menopause can be the start of something wonderful. We could celebrate our wisdom and maturity. Our increased willingness to set firm boundaries, to ask for what we want, to take no (or at least less) shit. The end of the reproductive years can be incredibly freeing. Society may place a very high value on youth, but we should know the true worth of the older woman.

Having said all that, it’s hard to step into your power as a wondrous crone if your joints all ache, your brain is so foggy you can’t remember your name, let alone the brilliant lessons you’ve learnt through life, and you would get out there and lead from the front, if only you weren’t so bloody knackered, and all the laundry didn’t need doing.

So let’s change all that. This could be the start of something transformative. I am so glad you are here. You deserve to take some time for yourself, and you deserve to feel well and powerful. Let’s boost each other up, support us all as we grow stronger, and celebrate who we are. We’ve got this. Let’s do it.