Menopause, Part 2: The 2,000-Year-Old Lie About Women and Exercise

0:00Austin and I wrote a book, and it's called Signal What Testosterone Levels Are Telling You About Your Health, and it is available for pre-order right now with copies shipping in June. Here's why we wrote it. The testosterone conversation right now is a mess. About a quarter of testosterone prescriptions in the United States are started without any lab work, and over half of men who meet criteria for low testosterone see their levels normalized on their own without any treatment. And at the same time, nearly 40 % of men who are 40 and older who have low testosterone, only about 1 in 10 of them are actually getting treatment.

0:30So some men are getting medicated for problems that they don't have, while other men who would genuinely benefit from treatment, or at least an evaluation, well, they're not getting it. And everyone is trying to make decisions about testosterone, whether it's lifestyle, medication, or otherwise, without a clear framework for what testosterone even does. Signal is the book that we wrote to sort all of that out. It covers the physiology of testosterone from the ground up, how levels trend across the lifespan, and what has been driving them down at the population level over the last 50 years, with a surprising increase in the last decade.

0:58We get into what testosterone actually does to exercise outcomes and what exercise does to testosterone, because those are two different questions that get conflated constantly. There's a full section on female hormonal physiology rather than treating it as a footnote. We cover how to interpret labs, when the testing itself is unreliable, lifestyle measures that can move the needle before medication enters the conversation, in a detailed chapter on TRT for the people where it is appropriate. This is the book we wished existed when we started out. Right now, you can pre-order the hardcover, the Kindle version, or bundle both together.

1:28And there's a pre-order special right now where you can add the Barbell Medicine testosterone course taught by Dr. Austin Brocky with a significant discount. The course is normally$124.99 and you can get it for$49 if you pre-order before June 17th, which also happens to be my birthday. So a little birthday present to me and help support what we do here at Barbell Medicine. Head over to barbellmedicine.com and pre-order Signal today. That's barbellmedicine.com. Look for Signal in the shop. Somewhere today, a woman in her early 60s is standing in a gym holding a pair of five-pound dumbbells because somebody she trusts told her to put the heavy stuff down or maybe not even start.

2:02Could have been a trainer. Could have been a wellness coach with an aesthetic-looking Instagram page. Maybe even her own doctor. And the reasons all sounded so modern. Your bones are fragile now. Your hormones are a mess. Your cortisol is already through the roof and lifting heavy is only going to make it worse. So walking only, lightweights, be careful. Keep her in the back of your mind because the advice that she just got is about 2 ,000 years old. And it has been wrong the entire time. Let me show you how wrong. Let's go back to the 2nd of August, 1928 in Amsterdam at the Olympic Games. Nine women line up for the first women's 800 meter race ever run at an Olympics.

2:38and you might already know the story of what happened next because it got retold en masse for the next 90 years. It was a massacre. Women collapsing on the track, bodies down across the finish line, living proof at last that the distance was just too much for the female body. Now there's one problem with that story. It's complete fiction. Nine women did start the race, nine women did finish and the winner, Lena Radke of Germany, ran two minutes 16.8 and set a world record that would stand for the next 16 years. The first six finishers actually all beat the old record pace too. And the scene at the finish line?

3:12Well, one runner stumbled. A couple sat down to catch their breath, which, if you've ever run an 800-meter race before, is the only rational response to running 800 meters. And one woman from Canada? Well, she cried because she'd lost. That's it. That's the entire catastrophe. But that is not what sold the newspapers. A sports writer named John Tunis described, and I'm quoting him directly, 11 wretched women. Five dropped out and five collapsed after the tape. 11. Well, there were nine and they all finished. The papers actually ran photos of women crumpled on the ground in apparent agony. And those photos were pulled from the 100 meter heats.

3:47The collapse didn't happen. Somebody more or less made it up. But it worked. The women's 800 ran that day and then it disappeared. In the years right after, with this coverage ringing in everyone's ears, the men who ran the sport quietly took it out of the program. And no woman would run an 800-meter race at the Olympics again until 1960, 32 years later. And it returned based on the strength of a finish line that the actual film footage shows was completely, boringly normal. Now, here's why I'm starting in 1928 instead of with our friend at the dumbbell rack. Because 1928 isn't some weird one-off.

4:23It's the template. Over and over, for centuries, Western medicine has looked at women and hard physical effort and has reached the same verdict. It's dangerous. especially for the babies women were presumably carrying. And every single time, the verdict came first, and the science got bolted on afterward, wearing whatever lab coat was in fashion that decade. The Greeks blamed the humors. The Victorians blamed energy and the vital force. Today we blame hormones and cortisol. The costume changes, but the verdict is always the same. And every time some woman had the audacity to be living proof that the verdict was wrong, the woman who ran the distance or lifted the barbell, she got explained away and relabeled as a freak instead of counted.

5:03On today's podcast, we're going to chase that verdict across 20 centuries. We're going to watch the medical establishment finally change its mind and then figure out what the heck is going on in the menopause influencer space. I'm Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum, and this is the Barbell Medicine Podcast.

5:29Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Okay, stop one. If the modern claim is that hard exercise wrecks a woman's fertility, the first move is to check where the idea supposedly came from. Now, everybody points at the ancient Greeks, so let's actually look, because the Greeks do not say what you've been told they say. Let's start with Galen, one of the most influential doctors in Western history, the man whose word was basically medical law for the next thousand years and change. Well, he wrote an entire book on exercise called On the Preservation of Health, and here is the single most useful fact in this segment, and it's a fact about something that's missing.

6:01Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:There is no passage anywhere in his book saying that vigorous exercise damages the female reproductive system. None. His big exercise treatise is built around the young male body and the closest he comes to warning anyone off of hard training is warning everybody, men included, about the excesses of full-time professional athletics. The quote Galen told women not to exert themselves is a quote that doesn't exist. Okay, but what about the wandering womb? the idea that a woman's uterus roams around her body like a lost cat. It's actually a real idea, but it suffered in the retelling. The early Hippocratic writers did describe a womb that could drift towards moisture, but the sensational version, the womb prowling around inside of women like a wild animal, comes mostly from Plato, who was a philosopher, not a physician, and from Ereteus, a medical writer a few centuries later with the real flair for the dramatic.

6:53It was never a medical consensus.

6:55Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:and the ancient doctors who actually specialized in this seranus and galen both rejected it seranus flat out said that the uterus does not and i quote issue forth like a wild animal from the layer he's one of the strongest skeptics in the whole ancient record and he leaned toward moderate exercise the roaming uterus is closer to ancient clickbait than it is to ancient medicine now here's where it gets interesting the ancients didn't just tolerate women exercising the spartans actually required it. Two separate ancient sources, the historian Xenophon and the biographer Plutarch, describe the Spartans putting girls through formal physical training, running, wrestling, throwing the javelin, and when they explain why, it's because they believed strong parents make stronger children.

7:40Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Plutarch's version is even better. He says they trained the girls so that, quote, the fruit of their wombs might have vigorous root in vigorous bodies. Think about that. The ancient argument for women lifting and running hard was that it would make them better at producing healthy children. Contrast that with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Their first guidance on exercise and pregnancy back in 1985 kept women at a heart rate of 140 beats per minute and 15 minutes of exercise at a time and told women who weren't already active not to start. It took about a decade just to drop those limits and decades more before the guidance actively encouraged strength training.

8:17The Spartans were 3 ,000 years ahead of them.

8:19Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Now I should say that almost everything we know about Sparta comes from outsiders who were either idolizing them or trash talking them. So this is probably a little squishy, but the main argument holds. Ancient medicine treated moderate exercise as good for basically everyone, and the one society famous for training its women did it on purpose, for the babies. So if the Greeks didn't invent the ban, who did? You should buckle up because the answer is a Harvard professor with the physics obsession. Okay, stop two. And this is where the real damage gets done because the ban on women's hard exercise really begins here.

8:53Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:It's Victorian and it was sold as the hottest science of its day. Okay, it's 1873. We're in Boston. A man named Edward Clark, a former Harvard medical school professor, publishes a slim book called Sex and Education. His argument is it's completely unhinged. He treats the human body like a bank account with a fixed balance and he calls the currency vital force. And he claims that you can't spend that force on your brain and your reproductive organs at the same time. So a teenage girl who studies hard, especially during her period, is draining the account that's supposed to be funding her ovaries.

9:27Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And the results? Wrecked fertility, sterility. He genuinely believed that education would break women. You got to appreciate where Clark got this because it wasn't Galen and it wasn't in the four humors, You know, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. It was apparently physics. The 1870s were all about the conservation of energy, the idea that energy is finite and it just moves around the system. Clark took the single hottest concept in 19th century science and aimed it directly at the ovary. At the time, this must have felt like cutting edge of science. Here he is in his own words. Boys must study and work in a boy's way and girls in a girl's way.

10:06Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And then describing an actual patient, a young woman who, quote, had two tasks imposed upon her at once, both of which required a large share of her vital force. One was education of the brain and the other of the reproductive system. And in case you only think he meant studying, in another passage, he specifically names muscular effort as one of the things that, during a girl's period, can lead to, and I quote, an abortion of the function and consequent sterility. Lifting, in other words, could break you. This work was widely read. It sold out in about a week and set off a national discussion over whether women should be allowed into college at all.

10:42Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Then it jumped the Atlantic. The very next year, in 1874, an English psychiatrist named Henry Maudsley ran the same play, writing that women are, and I quote, for a quarter of every month in life's best years, somewhat sick and unfit for hard work. But the rebuttal came fast. from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, one of the first women licensed as a physician in Britain who essentially said, I'm a doctor, I have a female body, and for most healthy women, a period is a minor inconvenience, not a monthly disability. So you've got a man theorizing about female incapacity and a woman reporting live from inside the actual experience.

11:19Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Guess whose version the establishment treated as truth? Then things get darker. Around the same time, a doctor named Silas Weir Mitchell gets famous for the quote, rest cure. You take an anxious, exhausted woman and you put her to bed. Weeks of it. Isolation, force feeding, massage, no reading, no work, no nothing. Here's the kicker. Mitchell had a second cure for the exact same diagnosis and he prescribed it to men. He called it the West cure. Go West, young man. Ride horses, hunt, rough it, exert yourself. He literally sent Walt Whitman and a young Theodore Roosevelt off to go be vigorous. When men and women with the same exhaustion saw the same doctor, men got prescribed exertion and women got prescribed the bed.

12:03Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Shortly thereafter, a physician named Mary Putnam Jacoby decided to actually test Clark's claim like a scientist. Her 1877 study won Harvard's Boylston Prize, the university's own top medical award. She mailed out a thousand surveys and crunched the 268 that came back. She hooked women up to a device that traced their pulse and blood pressure across the menstrual cycle. And then she ran strength tests. Her conclusion, and I quote, there is nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity or even the desirability of rest. This was real, rigorously collected science from a Harvard decorated physician.

12:40Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And here's what historians say it did to the debate. Virtually no impact. A woman out-scienced the most influential claim of the era using Harvard's own gold standard and no one noticed. Now women's colleges, to their credit, mostly ignored the idea that women should avoid exercise. Instead, they built gyms and required daily exercise. Vassar had women doing an hour of activity a day back in the 1860s. By 1893, Smith hosted the first women's college basketball game. And a survey of 705 women graduates found that higher education hadn't damaged their health, which anyone could have figured out just by using their eyeballs.

13:17Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:One college president, M. Kerry Thomas of Bryn Mawr, later said that her whole generation was, quote, haunted in those days by the clanging chains of that gloomy little specter, Dr. Edward Clark's book, Sex and Education. That's a great line, and it tells you how much fear that book manufactured and how educated women eventually shook it off like Taylor Swift. Now, the origin of limiting exercise in women was probably Victorian, and it ran on physics. Clark said thinking and lifting would sterilize girls, but Jacoby disproved it with data, won Harvard's medical prize, and promptly was ignored.

13:50Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And about 50 years later, the same idea laced up a pair of running shoes and walked onto an Olympic track. Okay, stop three. Now, we started in 1928, but I only gave you the trailer. Here's the whole movie, because the true version is stranger than fiction. To recap the truth, nine women started the race and nine women finished. A new world record was set. In fact, the first six women beat the old world record pace. So, who killed the event and how? The 800-meter race was run in 1928 and then pulled from the next Olympics. and the decision was messy, spread across a few years and a few meetings with two different organizational bodies involved, the International Track Federation and the IOC.

14:29Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:You'll see a specific vote count for these various meetings, but the details here are disputed. What's not in dispute is the outcome. The race was gone, and the IOC briefly flirted with scrapping women's track and field entirely. It would be gone for another 32 years before the women's 800 meter came back, in Rome in 1960. Now the media coverage of the event in 1928 is so strange that it's a serious contender for the origin story of the phrase fake news. Tunis gave us the 11 imaginary wretched women. The New York Times reported that six of the nine runners fell headlong onto the ground, and that race made, quote, too great a call on feminine strength.

15:09Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Newt Rockne, yeah, that Newt Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach, was moonlighting as a reporter and called it not a very edifying spectacle. And then there's the Alzheimer, the claim that women have, quote, a layer of fat around the heart that makes attempts to emulate men positively dangerous. Sounds authoritative, right? It traces back to an anonymous physiologist quoted in an Australian newspaper. That's the whole provenance. An anonymous source, not a cardiologist, not even confident enough in their claim to put their name on it. Now, interestingly, at the same Olympics, the most famous runner alive, Paavo Nermi, finished a men's race and collapsed onto the grass, completely wrecked.

15:47Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:He was celebrated. The Times described another male runner being sent, quote, sprawling headlong onto the track, and they meant it as praise. So a man face-planting at the finish was grit and glory, but nine women finishing on their feet was a public health emergency. And if you want the perfect bookend, let's go to 1984, the first Olympic marathon ever opened to women. A Swiss runner named Gabriella Anderson Scheiss comes into the stadium for her final lap visibly cooked. She's weaving all over the track. She's waving off the medics so they wouldn't pull her from the race. They let her finish.

16:19Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:The crowd gave her a standing ovation. The whole world called it courage. The exact same image that supposedly proved women were too fragile in 1928, which again was fiction. And 56 years later, we finally celebrated the performance. And here's the buried hero of 1928 because the only reason women were at those Olympics at all was due to a French woman named Elise Mia who got so fed up waiting for a place to compete that she actually built her own international federation and ran her own women's world games, four of them, throughout the 1920s. She forced the door open from the outside and once women's events were safely inside the Olympics, the IAAF and IOC absorbed her federation and subsequently dissolved it.

16:59Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:So the massive collapse of women after the 800 meter race at the 1928 Olympics was basically fake news, but the ban was real and it stuck for 32 years. Now, before we move on, picture our friend at the dumbbell rack again. The exact instinct that watched nine women finish a race and saw a catastrophe is the instinct that looks at a strong 60 year old today and gets nervous about her getting injured. It's the same reflex built upon misinformation that keeps showing up in a different outfit. And in the decades that followed, women kept showing up and doing things that the medical establishment had declared impossible.

17:33Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:The system's response wasn't to update. It was to find new ways not to count them. This podcast is sponsored by Factor. Between finishing our new book, Signal, work, and training, my schedule right now is not exactly relaxed. And when I get home late, cooking is just not happening. Relying on willpower is a problem that even I run into, but staying prepared with Factor is how I've been solving it. Now, Factor offers fully prepared meals designed by dieticians and put together by chefs. They're fresh, they're never frozen, and they're ready in two minutes. I've been leaning on the Muscle Pro collection because the protein is there and the macros fit my current energy needs, but they have over 100 rotating options, whether your goal is weight loss, whether it's health, GLP One support, and more.

18:14I love having this as an option to keep me on track, and if you can relate, it may be a great option for you too. Head over to factormeals.com slash BBM50off and use code BBM 50 off to get 50 % off and a free daily greens box if that's something you're into. New subscriptions only. This is while supplies last through September 27, 2026. See the website for details. That's factormeals.com slash BBM 50 off. We talk a lot about training and nutrition on this show, but sleep is probably the variable that most people are under investing in. The data on temperature and sleep quality is pretty compelling.

18:48If your sleep environment is too warm, you tend to stay in lighter sleep stages and miss out on the deeper sleep that your recovery actually needs. ChiliPad 2.0 by SleepMe is a water-based mattress topper that lets you set your bed temperature anywhere from 55 to 115 degrees. It sits on top of your existing mattress, and the new version has a quieter dock, a larger water tank, and a nightstand remote for each side of the bed that detects when you get in and starts your sleep schedule automatically. If you share your bed, Dual Zones let each of you set your own temperature. No subscriptions, you buy it, you own it, and there's a two-year warranty, and it's designed and assembled right here in the USA.

19:23Visit sleep.me slash BBM to get up to$255 off your ChiliPad 2.0 with code BBM. You get free shipping. There's a 30-day sleep trial, free returns if it's not for you. That's sleep, S-L-E-E-P dot me slash BBM for up to$255 off your ChiliPad 2.0. Summer's almost here. And that means once again, my wardrobe has to change. I want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable, things that are easy, but still look put together. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high-quality essentials that feel and look great. Breathable linen, soft organic cotton. These are well-made basics without the luxury markup.

20:00Their European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm-weather upgrade, starting at just$34. The t-shirts are soft and easy to wear, and their lightweight cotton sweaters are great for the cooler summer nights here in San Diego. And the best part? Everything is priced 50 % to 80 % less than similar brands because Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen. You're paying for the quality. not brand markup. And Quince goes way beyond just clothing. They've got custom furniture, ceramic cookware, premium bedding. It's the kind of brand you end up recommending to everyone for almost everything.

20:30So far, I've been really happy with all of the clothing that I've picked up from Quince. It looks great and it doesn't break the bank. That's Quince in a nutshell. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash BBM for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash BBM for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash BBM. This podcast is sponsored by FIGS. Now, if you work in healthcare, you already know that the standard issued hospital scrubs are mostly an afterthought. They don't fit well, they're scratchy, and they're perpetually on the verge of falling apart, which can lead to some embarrassing moments in the parking lot when you get out of your car and you're the fresh intern on the block.

21:11Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything. Iggs design their scrubs around what we actually do. They're lightweight, they're tailored so they fit like real clothes, and they're built to handle the kind of laundry abuse that comes with the job. They're also antimicrobial, which, given what we're walking around in all day, it's not a small thing. And it's not just scrubs. They've got a New Balance collab for footwear, compression socks for those long shifts, and outerwear for when the hospital administration decides that the entire building needs to be kept at 58 degrees. If I was still in the hospital, I would definitely wear these at work.

21:41And now FIGS is offering 15 % off your first purchase. Head to wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout to get 15 % off. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX for 15 % off. One of the questions we get asked all the time is what books do you recommend for people who are interested in coaching others or who are taking their training very seriously? And it just so happens that a friend of the show, Dr. Eric Helms, along with Andy Morgan and Andrea Valdez, just released the third edition of the Muscle and Strength Pyramid books. Now, if you're not familiar, these cover the full hierarchy of what actually matters for nutrition and training organized by priority.

22:16So you spend your time on the things that actually move the needle and you get all of the science behind it, too. Over 200 ,000 copies of the book have sold at this point. And for good reason, I read it and it is excellent. So if you're looking for a great resource to have alongside our book, Signal, and you want to go deeper on programming and nutrition planning, this would be a great addition to your library. Right now, you can go to muscleandstrengthpyramids.com slash BM10 and use code BM10 for 10 % off. That's muscleandstrengthpyramids.com slash BM10. Code BM10 gets you 10 % off at checkout.