How Women Should Actually Train, Eat & Recover: Dr. Stacy Sims’ Best Advice

If you’ve ever followed a fitness or nutrition plan that was really built for a 25-year-old man’s physiology, exercise scientist Dr. Stacy Sims wants you to know: it’s probably working against you. Sims has spent her career researching how women’s hormones fundamentally change the way they should train, fuel, and recover, and in her “Best of 2025” conversation, she breaks down what that actually looks like at different life stages. Here are the five biggest takeaways.

1. Lift heavy, and train in a “polarized” way

Sims is blunt about strength training: it’s non-negotiable, and the old advice to stick to light weights and high reps doesn’t serve women well, especially as they age. She recommends a minimum of three resistance training sessions a week, built around compound, heavy movements. The nuance is in how effort should shift over a lifetime, as she puts it, the key when you’re younger is training to failure, but the key as you get older is training heavy. If you’re new to lifting, she suggests giving yourself two weeks to four months just to learn proper movement patterns first, since women have a higher rate of soft-tissue injury when jumping into intensity too fast.

The broader framework she advocates is “polarized training”: alternate between genuinely high-intensity strength sessions and genuinely low-intensity recovery activity (easy walking, light jogging), and skip the moderate-intensity middle ground that so many workout routines default to.

2. Ditch steady-state cardio for true sprint intervals

This is one of Sims’ more counterintuitive points: moderate-intensity cardio, the classic “zone 2” jog or steady cardio machine session, isn’t doing women many favors. She argues it can raise cortisol without delivering the metabolic or cardiovascular payoff people expect. Instead, she pushes for real high-intensity work, think 30-second all-out sprints on an assault bike, repeated two to three times, or short HIIT bursts of one to four minutes at high effort. The idea is to get a strong, concentrated stimulus and then genuinely recover, rather than spending long stretches in a moderate zone that stresses the body without much return.

3. Fuel around your workouts — don’t skip it

Sims is emphatic that female athletes and active women often under-fuel, particularly around training sessions, and that this backfires. Her guidance: aim for roughly 15 grams of protein before a strength session, and if you’re also doing cardio, add carbohydrates on top, up to 30 grams for sessions approaching an hour. That pre-workout fuel helps raise blood sugar and engage the hypothalamus properly.

Post-workout timing matters just as much. Sims recommends eating within 45 minutes of finishing exercise, because the longer the body goes without refueling, the longer the brain perceives it to be in a low-energy state, and in that state, lean muscle mass is often the first thing sacrificed. She suggests around 35 grams of quality protein post-workout for women in their reproductive years, rising to 40–60 grams for women in perimenopause, alongside carbohydrates to replenish glycogen (roughly 0.3 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, or more depending on cardio intensity).

4. Respect the menstrual cycle — and skip the fasting trend

Because estrogen and progesterone fluctuate across the menstrual cycle, Sims explains that training capacity, recovery, and appetite shift right along with them. Rising estrogen before ovulation, for example, can suppress appetite, which is exactly when women need to be deliberate about still getting enough protein and carbohydrates rather than letting hormonal appetite suppression dictate intake.

This ties into one of her more pointed warnings: intermittent fasting isn’t a great fit for active women. Sims argues it can add unnecessary physiological stress and disrupt hormone regulation, and she instead encourages women to pay attention to circadian rhythms, eating earlier in the day rather than pushing meals later, which she notes is associated with more obesogenic outcomes. The overarching message is that women are more metabolically flexible than men, thanks to a higher proportion of oxidative muscle fibers, but that flexibility doesn’t mean skipping meals is a smart strategy.

5. Perimenopause changes the rules — prepare for it early

Perhaps the most urgent point in the conversation is what happens hormonally in the late 40s and early 50s. As sex hormone levels drop during perimenopause, Sims notes that essentially every system in the body is affected, and soft-tissue injury risk climbs. Her recommendation is to build a foundation of heavy strength training and polarized cardio before this transition hits, so the body has the resilience to handle the added physiological stress.

This is also where nutrition needs shift upward, hence the higher post-workout protein target (40–60 grams) for perimenopausal women compared to those still in regular reproductive cycling. The goal isn’t just avoiding menopause-related bone and muscle loss; Sims frames strength training and proper fueling during this window as a long-term investment in health span, not just a short-term fix for symptoms.

The takeaway

Sims’ core message across all five points is that women aren’t just smaller men, their hormonal patterns, metabolic flexibility, and life-stage transitions demand a training and nutrition approach built specifically around them. Lift heavy, sprint hard, fuel deliberately (especially around workouts), sync with your cycle instead of fighting it, and treat perimenopause as a training checkpoint rather than a wall to hit unprepared. It’s a shift from generic fitness advice toward something more precise, and, according to Sims, more effective for the long haul.

****This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and is not a substitute for a conversation with a qualified healthcare provider. Individual health needs vary. If you have questions about your health, we invite you to schedule a consultation with one of our providers.