20-minute fix for menopause belly fat

Philip Pape 0:00

There is a specific fix for the kind of belly fat that shows up in the menopause transition, and it takes about 20 minutes per session, twice a week. In one of the best studies we have on this, that was enough to drop visceral fat 24% in just 16 weeks. You don't have to change your diet. You don't have to have any hours in the gym. Today I'm gonna walk you through what the research shows about menopause belly fat and this one form of conditioning that targets it specifically. If you're under 40 or you're a guy, this still applies. The mechanism is the same. I think you're gonna enjoy this one. Stay tuned. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app. And today I want to talk about something that I'll say surprises almost every woman that I coach who is over 40, and that is that the belly fat you get during the menopause transition, it happens to everyone. Every woman knows what belly menopause belly is about. There is a fix for this that is actually meaningful, that actually moves the needle. And it's not walking more, it's not just losing body fat, it's not abloaded training, it's not the reducing alcohol or having more sleep. All of those things are good. All of those are goodness. It is not chronic cardio, it's not a new eating protocol. It's something that takes 20 minutes per session, twice a week, and it targets the specific kind of fat that gets redistributed during menopause. I'm gonna pull together two pieces of evidence today for you. The first is data from Dr. Bill Campbell. He's a researcher at the University of South Florida. He is awesome. He's been on the show several times before. He runs a monthly research review. It's one of the ones I pay for called Body by Science. We actually, or he actually featured me a while back, ironically, in an article or an issue related to abs and ab training. And his latest issue and a recent workshop he did looked at this finding from the research, which is that menopause independently lowers your metabolism in a way

Metabolism drop in menopause

Philip Pape 2:20

that aging alone does not explain. It's menopause, it's not aging. It's very interesting because we always say, well, no, it's just the muscle mass, but there is some research suggesting there's something independent going on. The second piece of evidence is exercise research on what reduces visceral fat. That's the belly fat we're talking about when we say menobelly or menopause belly. And this is where a lot of women are headed off in the wrong direction because oftentimes the advice of you just gotta lose body fat, you just have to move more, you just have to lift weights, which again are all great things, it doesn't target this specific problem. So we're gonna talk about that today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a single question test that tells you whether you're doing this protocol correctly. Okay, so we want to do this right once you know what it is. Here's what we're going to cover. I'm gonna walk you through why the metabolism drop in menopause is a real independent factor and what the best study ever done on this looked at. I'm gonna show you why visceral fat is specifically what is driving the my belly fat has gone up even though nothing changed experience. And then I'm gonna give you the 20-minute protocol that I use with my clients and with myself, along with who should start doing something else first before they do this. Okay, so let's talk about the experience of women that I hear. Obviously, I'm not a woman. There's a lot of things I don't experience, including what men experience. So I have to listen, I have to empathize, I have to hear your experiences. And our women over 40, which is roughly 70 to 80% of our clients and our members of Eat More Lift Heavy, are going along, eating about the same as you always have, training about the same. And suddenly there is belly fat that wasn't there before, right? Your clothes just fit differently. The scale might not even be that different. If you go listen to our last solo episode, all about three metrics before summer. If you're trying to lose fat, we talk about the scale weight there. Your scale weight may not be different, but your body distribution has changed. And it feels like everything that you've used in the past to help with this is are not working. Even dieting, even exercise, even moving. And so the intuitive response, though, is to try those things again. You're gonna eat a little less, move a little more, add some cardio. I appreciate the intuition, right? When something has worked in the past, we feel like it should work again. And energy balance still matters. It's physics at the most basic level. But what the research shows that's happening explains a bit why those don't always produce the same results in this window. Let's talk about that. Dr. Bill Campbell, love the guy. Okay, he's he's just such a great science communicator and educator. And in his March 2026 research review, and then he did a workshop for coaches, he looked at a study. The study he broke down followed 158 women for four years. All of them started pre-menopausal. All of them were at least 43 when they entered the study. And a subset of 34 women spent 24 hours inside a metabolic chamber at the beginning of the study and 24 hours inside the same one four years later. And that's kind of a gold standard for measuring metabolism, you know, as best we can, so we can measure the actual calories burned. Here's what they found. Pretty cool. The women who remained pre-menopausal over the four years, they lost about 150 calories a day of their metabolic rate. That's their metabolism went down by 150. And that's just aging, right? And happens all to all of us as we age a little, likely due to due to the loss of muscle mass. So that's kind of its own factor that affects everyone. The women who transitioned from pre- to post-menopausal over those same four years lost 200 calories a day. That's 50 calorie per day difference. And it was specifically attributable to menopause, not to aging, not to activity differences. They controlled for activity inside the chamber. Now, 50 calories doesn't sound like a lot, but think about what that adds up to. Just do basic math. 50 calories a day over four years equals five pounds of extra body fat from the metabolism drop alone, with no change in eating or moving. Right? So, this is that little tax on menopause that we're trying to understand as really good researchers actually study this population, which we haven't studied women in menopause, let alone women, let's be honest, in much of the research for all these years. The second piece of this data that again is not talked about too much, is what fuel your body is burning. Let me explain. They measured something called substrate

Substrate oxidation and fuel preference

Philip Pape 7:06

oxidation, which just means are you burning fat, carbs, or protein for energy? Well, the postmenopausal group was burning significantly less fat to fuel their daily life compared to the women who stayed pre-menopausal. And they were burning more protein, which basically means they were losing lean tissue. So your body has shifted its fuel preference away from fat and toward muscle. Less fat burn, more muscle burn, more fat stored. Again, burn is a very loose, unscientific term, but you get the idea. And then guess where you store that fat? In the belly. Belly fat, yes. So that is the setup to this story. You're dealing with a metabolism that's compensating downward, a body that shifted its preference towards storing fat in the belly, specifically. Your body is really good at compensation, and that's the whole problem here. You can you can add 30 minutes of, say, moderate movement and lose a chunk of that back in reduced movement throughout the rest of your day because your body compensates. Millions of years of evolution optimizing for keeping things in homeostasis. What your body doesn't compensate well against is what we're going to talk about today: a brief maximum intensity signal that could potentially do something about your belly fat. Oh, let's talk about it. Okay. The menopause transition, it doesn't just add body fat, right? We've been talking about the fact that it adds specific fat in your visceral, your abdominal area. There's two main places that your body stores fat. Subcutaneous fat is the fat right under the skin. That's the fat that you can pinch and see. It is, I'll say, metabolically calm or quiet. It doesn't do much besides just sit there. Visceral fat is different. That's the fat in your abdomen. It's wrapped around your organs. It is metabolically active. It pumps out inflammatory signals, which we can measure in the blood. It drives insulin resistance. It's the fat that correlates with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and even cognitive decline. So when we say menopause belly, we're not talking about subcutaneous fat. We're talking about a body-wide redistribution of fat toward the visceral compartment, driven largely by the drop in estrogen. And this is this is not arguable. Like this is not debatable. Menopause research studies have looked at this. We know this happens. Cross-sectional studies, longitudinal, metabolic chambers, they all say the same thing that during menopause, your visceral fat goes up and it goes up quite a bit. So the question is what targets visceral fat? Because if we're going to invest our time and recovery, which is limited, into something, we want it to work on the thing that all of you are frustrated about. So here's where it gets interesting. For about a decade, the research has been pointing to something that now we have pretty good confidence in.

Sprint research in postmenopausal women

Philip Pape 9:58

There was a landmark study by a French researcher named Baylard in 2016. He took 17 postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes and he had them do two short cycling sessions per week for 16 weeks. So these are about 20-minute sessions. They didn't change anything else, not their diet, not anything. The result was that their abdominal fat dropped 8%. Visceral fat specifically dropped 24%. 24% in 16 weeks. That's crazy with two 20-minute sessions per week on a cycle. And for today's episode, the the key here is that those sessions were sprint intervals. They weren't steady state cardio. Because we know this, the moderate steady state group in the same study did not see significant visceral fat reduction. Isn't this incredible? And by the way, we're gonna we're gonna touch on this a few times, but you guys know I've been talking about sprinting for a long time. I just hadn't quite been able to connect it to this specific benefit yet. And now we can, and this is just just this is just incredible. A follow-up study from Dupuis in 2020, why'd I say it that way, 2020, extended this to non-diabetic postmenopausal women, and they found the same thing. Sprint intervals reduce their abdominal and visceral fat, whereas moderate cardio didn't change it in the same way. And then when they added resistance training on top of sprinting, guess what? They got fat loss and they got increased muscle mass. And of course, that's the only combination that did that, which makes sense. We've got to lift weights if we want to add muscle. Now, let's all we always have to be honest about research and how reliable it is. The the broader meta-analysis that compared sprint intervals to moderate cardio on total fat showed them as roughly equivalent when you match for total work. In other words, from the thermodynamics perspective, sprints aren't magic, which is consistent with everything I've been talking about, right? Like the type you do doesn't matter. But in this context, the the way they target physiologically the visceral fat is a difference that matters. And there's a practical aspect here, and that is the time efficiency. So let's start with that one real quick. Sprint intervals can produce the same or better results in about a third of the weekly time. When we talk about conditioning and cardio, okay, specifically. Aside from walking, like a lot of us love to walk, and I encourage walking, and honestly, you can walk a lot. And I don't necessarily like to compare walking to sprinting in terms of time efficiency. It's a different thing, right? So for women in menopause whose recovery capacity is getting more limited, this is a really big deal because your limited time, limited recovery, there's a stress component to this. And then if you have these long, frequent sessions of cardio, now you get compensation on top of an already stressed system. That's why we don't like that necessarily. Why I encourage a lot of women to do less, to be more efficient with their time in the gym and outside the gym. So sprint intervals are a really good tool in that perspective. The second one is more specific, and this is the one that's the most interesting about visceral fat, belly fat. Listen up.

Sprint adaptations and visceral fat

Philip Pape 13:08

In post-menopausal women, specifically, sprint intervals outperform steady-state cardio for reducing visceral fat. Like the Maylard and the Dupuis findings that I just talked about, which are not isolated. The, you know, there's this popular narrative that sprints burn belly fat through a calorie afterburn effect. No, that is not correct. And if I've ever said on this show, I would I retract it and say that I was wrong as well. We call that epoch exercise post-sector, or I never know, I never say this right, but it's like post-uh oxygen consumption. Exercise post-oxygen consumption. And that's burning calories after you do the exercise. It's very minimal. It's like 40 to 50 calories. The real benefit is the chronic adaptation. There is a catecholamine response that occurs over weeks and months. And what it does, this is technical stuff. I had to write it down. It increases the beta, the beta andranergic sensitivity of your visceral fat. All that is, in plain English, it's the receptors that let your body mobilize fat for fuel. That's what it is. So guess what? You're increasing the sensitivity of those. That is awesome. Your skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity goes up. That is awesome. Your mitochondrial function improves. This is energy. That is awesome. These are long-term changes that compound chronically in a good way, in the best of ways. So the summary of this piece is sprinting, it doesn't magically melt belly fat in one session. We don't care about post-exercise consumption or afterburn effect or any of that. You can't just sprint once and boom, there goes your belly fat. What they do is over time, if you do these two sessions, 20 minutes each, there's an adaptive pressure on visceral fat that keeps showing up when we do these studies. And we can't ignore that. That is amazing data. And it's time efficient, so it doesn't affect your recovery. It's actually anabolic when we talk about sprinting as well. It supports your lifting. You can continue lifting heavy in parallel. This is just an incredible combination of things that you can go after as you develop your training and movement routine. Just so good. So good.

Sprinting protocol

Philip Pape 15:30

Okay. Now, before I walk you through the exact protocol, I do have something that's going to make things a lot easier for you. I do have a written guide called Sprinting for Fat Loss that I try to keep updated with some of this research. In this case, it has the sprinting protocol that I recommend. It's about six pages long, and it has the protocol I'm going to describe now. It has the equipment options in terms of what you should start with, the warm-up, a little bit of a weekly template so you can fit it around your lifting, and even how to track progress. All in a PDF, all free. I've given it to you for free. The only thing I need you to do is join my email list so I can send it to you. So go to witsandweights.com slash email. That's witsandweights.com slash email. Then once you're on the list, just reply to the welcome email and ask for the sprinting guide. If you're already on my list, just reply to any email you get and ask for the sprinting guide. I'll send it right over. And that is it. Okay. Witsandwaits.com slash email. Join the list. Ask for the sprinting guide. Done. I don't have a special link. Sorry, you're gonna have to do it that way. Wits and weights.com slash email. So let's talk about that protocol. All right, the protocol I use with clients and myself, I pull it directly from Brad Kearns, who runs the B Rad podcast. He was on the show back, I think in episode 286. He introduced me to this structure. I've used it ever since. It is awesome. Okay, it's simple. Four to eight sets of all out sprints. Each sprint is 10 to 20 seconds. Never go past 20 seconds, never go past eight sets. Importantly, the rest time is six times the sprint time. So if you sprint 10 seconds, you rest 60 seconds. If you sprint 20 seconds, you're gonna rest two minutes. Make sense? And that's it. Now you can rest longer, but don't rest shorter. So one to two sessions per week, four to eight sets of all-out sprints for 10 to 20 seconds with six to one rest to sprint. If that's confusing, get get the guide. It's all written down for you. So if you do the two sessions, then one of them, in my recommendation, should be flat brown, only one of them should be flat ground sprinting with good minimalist footwear. The other one should be on a low impact machine, like a cycle, a rower, a stair climber. You can do them both on the machine, that's fine. But don't do both as flat ground sprinting until you get adapted to it and you feel like it's appropriate and you can handle that. The progression rule is the most important thing in this protocol, okay? Because just like progressive overload with your lifting, you want to progress with your sprinting. You do not do that by going past the 20 seconds or doing more sets. You do it by getting faster within the same constraints. Now, if your sprints are less than 20 seconds, well, then your goal is to get them up to 20 seconds. If the number of sets is less than eight, well, your goal is to eventually get them to eight. But eventually you're gonna cap out at eight sets, 20 second sprints. Now the goal is just to get faster, more power, more speed, and you'll you'll get adapted and you'll get better, and that's exactly what's gonna happen over time. And that's it. That's it. Now, a lot of people ask me, okay, what do I actually do for the sprinting?

Equipment hierarchy for sprint training

Philip Pape 18:48

Well, let me give you kind of a hierarchy. If you're brand new, start on a bike, an assault bike, stationary bike, spin bike, doesn't really matter. It's the easiest way to get to near maximum effort without any joint risk. You could just quickly get to those fast sprints. And it's also the type of modality they use in most of the sprint studies. So there's a nice correlation there. And then you can progress to something like an elliptical, a stair climber, or a rower, which are all low impact. They're still anaerobic. They're a little bit tougher. They have a little bit of skill involved. If you want to go to ground-based sprinting, like actual sprinting, you can work up to it using hill sprints or incline sprints, which you could do on a sp on a treadmill, but I really discourage a treadmill at all for sprinting just because of the safety factor and the inability to easily get to full speed as quickly. I would rather you just do it kind of on your own with one of these other machines or outside. The incline reduces your max speed, which preserves your hamstring. That's why it's a good way to build your tissue capacity before you go to flat ground. But again, do not use a treadmill. I know people do it. Again, safety and the ability to accelerate, decelerate is very difficult. And you're also not going to go all out on a treadmill. Some part of your brain knows that you can't bail on it. And so as a result, you clamp down on the effort, if that makes sense, as a safety mechanism. And then that's not sprinting, it's just jogging really hard.

Fitting sprints around lifting

Philip Pape 20:12

So, how does this fit into your schedule? If you're lifting, all right. I would use a, for example, three, three-day full body lifting split as an example here. Let's say it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Sprinting could be Tuesday and Saturday. Not the morning of a lift day, not right before the lift. Ideally, 24 hours removed from a lower body session. If you're on a four-day upper lower, you can sprint on your upper days or your off days. If you're on a five day, like a bodybuilding, power building type split, you could sprint on your off days or a few hours after upper body training. Two quick rules. One, you have to feel fresh before the sprint session. If you're already fatigued, if you didn't sleep, if you're coming off a hard lifting day, push it to another day, right? Sprinting while fatigued, that is how you get injured and you're not gonna be at your best performance. The second rule is if your speed drops off during the session, like you get to set, I don't know, five, and your speed drops way off, you're done. Stop. Don't just rest longer and keep going. Stop. The session is over. That's the session is over. This is gonna tie to what I talk about at the end of the episode. So I'm gonna come back to it. Also, warming up. Warming up's important. If you're doing machine sprints, you could go say three to five minutes on the machine at a moderate speed. And then you could do some 10-second buildups if you'd like. If you're doing flat ground, you could do again three to five minutes of just light jogging or leg swings or high knees or butt kicks or any of that stuff. And then maybe two or three progressive accelerations and then get into it. Okay. If you're cold, you got to warm up. The more adapted you get to this, probably the less warm up you need. And then the whole session ends up being maybe 15 to 25 minutes, including the warm up, the sprint sets, the cooldown, all of that. Two of those a week, that's 30 to 50 minutes. Of sprinting, excuse me, per week. And that is a fantastic dose for being correlated with a massive drop in visceral fat. So everyone listening, especially ladies, especially in peri postmenopause who have the belly fat, who are writing in about this, who are curious about this, do this protocol and try it out and let me know how it goes. One more thing shout out to Dr. Bill Campbell again, because he said on a recent interview that for menopausal women specifically, he prefers short sprint sessions with fewer total sprints as opposed to a high rep hit because of the recovery burden of the hit. The goal is not to get your heart rate up. The goal is to get a brief maximum signal to trigger the adaptations that we're talking about today and then let your body recover and adapt. That's really, really important. All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the beginning I was gonna give you one single question test that tells you whether you actually sprinted or if you just ran hard and you're not getting all the benefits. That's coming up in just a minute. But if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I get the sprinting, but I also know my lifting is inconsistent or my protein's probably too low. And nothing has worked for me in the last two or three years of trying to get leaner, especially if as I get older, maybe I'm over 40, 50, beyond. That's who we built Eat More Lift Heavy for. Eat More Lift Heavy is my 26-week coaching program along with Coach Carol. It replaces our old physique university. It is a huge upgrade. The core premise is that most women over 40 or adults over 40 who are stuck with their physique are under-eating and under-recovering. They're under-eating, under recovering. It's not on you. It's not a discipline problem or will problem. We've got to eat more, especially protein, sometimes carbs, sometimes calories in general. We have to lift heavy with progressive overload. Heavy doesn't mean too heavy or unsafely heavy. It means the right level of intensity to push the strength and muscle growth. So that is what it's about. Eat more, lift heavy. It's structured in three phases. Phase one helps you stop guessing. You set up your measurement system so you know what you're working with. Phase two is the eat more, lift heavy phase, where you execute the plan along with our support and live coaching. And phase three is to trust yourself. You graduate with the skills to manage your own physique with everything you've learned. There are monthly coaching calls, there are training programs. You get one assigned to you on day one. There's coaches who respond in the community within 24 hours. We have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. All of that go to eatmore liftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Let's get you out of this cycle for good. Get you on your way to a wonderful life, a wonderful physique, happiness with who you are in your body. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. All right,

Bonus: speed drop test

Philip Pape 24:48

here's a question that tells you did I actually sprint the way Phillips talked about on this show that reduces belly fat? Or am I pushing it hard but not quite getting there? The question is, did my speed drop more than 10% across my sets? And this is where data is helpful that you need to measure. If your first sprint was a 15-second effort, and by the fourth set, you're two or three seconds slower over the same distance, you're done. Do not rest longer, don't push through another set, stop the session. The reason that sprinting works is because of neural recruitment of your fastest fibers. Once those fibers are fatigued, any additional set is just practicing running slower. You're not getting the sprint adaptation anymore. You're actually piling up fatigue. It's kind of like junk volume of running for no benefit. So the test is simple here. You need to time your sets, track your sets. If your top speed is holding, keep going. If it drops more than 10%, the session is over. Go home. You're done for the day. You need to adapt to get a little faster and stronger so you can go further next time. That's cool. That tells you where you are. And that's the difference between training and working out, just like when you lift weights. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, Menopause belly does have a targeted fix, and it's more in your control than you think. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.