Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond

It’s been a while since I have reviewed a book here. I read a lot of health/nutrition books but not nearly as many fitness books, at least not anymore. But I came across this one and bought it immediately. Next Level was written by Stacy T. Sims, PhD, and Selene Yeager. Their first book was Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health and a Strong Lean Body For Life. The basic concept behind both of these books is that women athletes are different from male athletes due to our hormones. The majority of exercise physiology studies have been done on men, so most of the advice given is actually geared toward male physiology. I have not read Roar but from reading Next Level, Roar is geared toward younger women. Next Level is for women athletes who are in perimenopause, menopause and post menopause because our needs are different from those of younger women.

This book was exactly what I needed. I am not an “athlete.” I do not compete in sports or run marathons, triathlons, etc. But I do “train” daily. Plus, I am 52 years old and post-menopause. I went into chemically induced menopause in 2018 when I went through chemotherapy. I was 47 years old at the time. As far as I know I wasn’t even in perimenopause. Chemotherapy abruptly stopped my menstrual cycle. My symptoms were violent and miserable. I experienced all of the side effects for several years. 5 years later it has calmed down a lot but I still have the symptoms of no female hormones. And since my breast cancer was hormone positive, I obviously cannot do hormone replacement therapy.

Anyway, that’s my story. This book has completely changed my thoughts about how I should be training, eating and supplementing post-menopause. The first part of the book is invaluable. We all know what menopause is but Dr. Sims breaks it down in detail, including what estrogen and progesterone do in our bodies and how the lack of them affects training. I had no clue about some of these things. I attributed some of the things I now experience to just getting older. But to me, 52 isn’t that old! As it turns out, much of the joint pain and stiffness I now experience is due to lack of estrogen and progesterone. (Which technically is due to aging.) Next, Dr. Sims takes you through everything you can do to counter these changes. She obviously does not promise to make you perform and feel like you are in your 20s or 30s again, but she gives you the tools you need to perform at your peak in your late 40s and beyond. She covers what you should eat, when you should eat, how you should train, and how you should supplement. She doesn’t give you a diet to follow. She focuses on macronutrients since we all eat differently. I am vegan so I obviously am not going to eat any of the animal foods she recommends but she is a vegetarian, so she addresses that and veganism as well. One thing she touched on that I really liked was that she acknowledged that many athletes that train hard do not like to take rest days and that as we get older, sometimes taking rest days makes us stiffer when we train again. So she gives us alternatives. The alternatives are kind of common sense things I should be doing anyway (but I don’t…), but they are even more important for older women (mobility and flexibility training, and foam rolling, etc.).

I have not implemented many of the changes yet, but I plan to overhaul my training. I am even more excited about Cathe‘s STS 2.0 since her first STS actually contains a phase that plays directly into one of the training techniques that Dr. Sims says is essential for older women and that is Lift Heavy Sh*t (LHS). Phase 3 of STS is exactly what Dr. Sims says we need to do. This means lifting so heavy you can only do 4-5 reps of the exercise. Not every strength training session should be LHS but at least once a week for your large muscle groups (glutes, hamstrings, quads, back and chest). You have to read the book to get all of the information but another thing I am going to have to change is how I eat around my workouts. I intermittent fast and have for years. I also workout very early in the morning in a fasted state and do not eat for hours afterward. I do take BCAAs after my workout but that is all. This was fine when I was younger but it does not work for an older woman’s body. We begin to catabolize muscle quickly after a workout and she stressed the need to eat and replenish protein within 30 minutes after finishing a workout! I cannot change my workout time so I will have to change the way I eat. This is truly a PIA because I am very set in my ways, but she convinced me that it is something I need to do, so I am working on how I will implement it.

Now, I am post-menopause, so that is what I focused on in this review but she also addresses the fluctuating hormones you will experience during perimeopause. So don’t assume this book is just for women who have come out on the other side. I want to share the one change I have done and my results so far. During and after cancer treatment, I spent a great deal of time reading everything I could get my hands on about cancer and prevention. One of the many things I started doing as a result of all this research was to start taking adaptogens. I take quite a few but Dr. Sims recommended a few I do not take. One of them is Holy Basil. I sleep like sh*t. This adaptogen is supposed to help you sleep better (in addition to other things like reducing stress/anxiety). So I figured why not? I started taking that in the evening right after I read about it. I wear an Apple Watch that tracks my sleep and prior to that I wore a FitBit. In the many, many years I have been wearing them both, they have shown that I do not even get an hour of deep sleep a night (usually in the 40-47 minute range). When I do, it is never more than 90 minutes and even that is rare. Within a few days of taking Holy Basil, my deep sleep has increased almost daily to where I now average 2 hours and 45 minutes of deep sleep a night! And last night I got over 3 hours of deep sleep! I have never seen such quick results from a supplement and I take a lot of them.

In conclusion, if you workout hard like I do, whether you are an official athlete or not, and you are perimenopausal, menopausal or post menopause, I recommend reading this book. This is just a review. There is so much more information in this book than what I am sharing. And as I said, I plan to put it to good use. ***03/19/23 Update: I found a 13 minute Ted Talk by Dr. Sims that distills  this info really well: Women are not Small Men. And here it is on YouTube.