What Is The Fitness Menopause? - #173

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. Today, I am joined by Jonny & Yusef from propanefitness.com, and we are discussing the fitness menopause. This is a concept which I came up with about two or three years ago when I started doing CrossFit, and I realized that I'd never really liked bodybuilding all that much. I'd just kind of fallen into it. And this is a common theme I'm seeing with many bros, and what's a female bro, bro lifter, like a chick lifter, bro, brodette, brunette. Anyway, chicks, chick lifters, bros and chicks, that pivot from doing a classic bodybuilding style split, push pull legs, or, you know, five part body part split. And then they get towards their 20s or 30s, and they think, oh, hang on a second, I never actually really enjoyed this. And they start to do yoga or fighting or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or CrossFit or Pilates or any one of a million other athletic pursuits. And the goal of today is to try and red pill you that your training regime might not be quite what you want out of an exercise routine. It very well may be. You may love bodybuilding. You may absolutely adore doing push pull legs, but hopefully today will give you some food for thought and potentially open your eyes to a world of exercise, which you haven't considered before. But for now, it's time for the fitness menopause with Jonny & Yusef.
I'm joined by Jonny & Yusef from propanefitness.com. Look at that. So good to see you. You doing some boxing?

**Jonathan Watson** (1:59)
I was just enjoying the effect.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
You're like a cat. Today, we are talking about the fitness menopause. It's something that we've dropped on podcasts for the last couple of years. And we keep getting questions about it. And I was recently on a Canbro Conversations podcast and red-pilled a bunch of his audience by teaching them what the fitness menopause is. So we thought we'd have a good discussion about it today. I'll start off. I'll try and give a broad definition so everyone knows what we're talking about, and then we'll take it from there. So fitness menopause was something that I'd identified within myself toward my late 20s, when I'd been doing bro lifting, fitness stuff, bodybuilding for a while, and realized as I became chronically aware of my own mortality as I approached 30, realized that I was getting out of breath, going up a big hill, and I was kind of a little bit bored of just doing, you know, chest Mondays and chest Tuesdays and chest Wednesdays, and curls and stuff like that, and training purely for aesthetics. And I was just disenchanted. I kind of lost my love with training. Certainly lost the motivation to do it without really grinding myself to get out of bed and go to the gym. So then just started trying to do different things. Went and did Thai boxing and normal boxing, started doing yoga, then got into CrossFit. And the fitness menopause describes a period, I think, in a lot of fitness people's lives who perhaps have just entered into the world of training by doing bodybuilding or bro style lifting from just the age of teens or early 20s or whatever, and then never tried anything else. And as they approach their late 20s, they think, oh hang on, like this maybe isn't fulfilling me in quite the way that I thought. What do you think about that as a definition? You reckon that's about right?

**Dr. Yusef Smith** (3:59)
I mean, that's about right. It applies to a very specific subsection of people. And are we millennials or are we?

**Chris Williamson** (4:06)
No, technically, yes, 84 till 96

**Dr. Yusef Smith** (4:10)
Okay, so I think in that case then, millennials tend to fall into this bracket quite well because there was this surge of the popularity of weightlifting, bodybuilding, that kind of stuff, kind of coinciding with like T-Nation's Rise and Fall and then bodybuilding.com and all of these like, like Simply Shredded, remember that?

**Jonathan Watson** (4:30)
Oh, God, Simply Shredded.

**Dr. Yusef Smith** (4:32)
Jesus Christ. So all of those kind of things. And so most 18 to 22 year old guys got swept up in this. And usually it was the only kind of physical activity they did apart from maybe Fiberside, which is the other like most popular young male activity.

**Chris Williamson** (4:55)
I've heard.

**Dr. Yusef Smith** (4:58)
So, yeah, I think most people will have gone through a few years of that. And Jonny and I always say that the minimum entry requirement to even consider having been in the fitness menopause or gone through it is you have to have done three to five years of Peck, Deck and Leg Press.