Exercise in PCOS: What's Important, What's Not

Struggling to hit the gym with PCOS? You're not alone. The dance between exercise and PCOS is intricate, but I've discovered that movement is an essential rhythm in the music of a PCOS-friendly lifestyle. This episode is a deep dive into why those of us with insulin resistance can't afford to sit it out, and how the right kind of physical activity can be a powerful ally in regulating blood sugar and safeguarding our mental health. 

We all know that one size rarely fits all, and that's especially true when it comes to PCOS and exercise. Some of us need to slow down and breathe a little deeper, while others need to find that sweet spot of consistency in their workouts. This episode unpacks the myths and truths about cardio and strength training, and why a sustainable and enjoyable fitness routine trumps a rigid regimen every time.  It's all about balance, rest, and not letting your exercise ambitions steal precious sleep.

 I’ll share why any exercise is better than none and how to move from inactivity to activity without sacrificing joy or health. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Exercise Benefits and PCOS Management
• 11:03 Understanding the Impact of Exercise Categories
• 20:10 Importance of Strength Training for PCOS
• 32:44 Finding Joy in Exercise for PCOS
• 37:50 Podcast Reviews Needed for Growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:37

Hello everyone, welcome back to An Amber A Day, the functional PCOS nutrition podcast. I'm your host, amber Fisher, and thanks for being here. Today we're going to talk about exercise and PCOS. I've been seeing some controversial opinions online so I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and give you guys my opinion on exercise for PCOS. Oh, how are you guys? You doing good, I'm doing good.

Speaker 1: 1:02

I've been sticking to my little organized schedule here. So I think you've been seeing there have been more podcasts coming out lately. So you know I'm very proud of myself for that. It's not easy for me. I'm not historically a super organized person, but just sticking to a schedule has really, really helped me. So if you have ever been curious about like, how to do that or you know need some tips or whatever, I interviewed a friend of mine named Renee Claire who does a lot of work on time blocking. She's been on the podcast a couple of times. So if you go back and scroll back, I think I way back in season one. I interviewed her like back in 2020, I want to say and then I interviewed her like back in 2020, I want to say and then I interviewed her last year sometime. So those are really interesting podcasts if you need some help getting organized.

Speaker 1: 1:49

Okay, let's talk about exercise. Have you ever wondered what kind of exercise you should be doing? There's a lot of stuff out there, right. So the reason I decided to record this one today is because this morning I was on stories and I saw some people getting in a fight about exercise for PCOS, because there is this one particular influencer who has really capitalized on marketing slow, weighted workouts for PCOS and it upsets a lot of other people, other nutrition professionals. So I saw this little argument happening online and I thought let me talk about exercise today, because I have been thinking a lot about exercise lately and just how important and helpful it is, how much it's been really helping my mood lately. I talked to you guys a couple weeks ago about my struggles with depression, and exercise has been my real saving grace throughout that process. Without it I don't know where I'd be right now mentally. So I think the importance of it for that aspect of PCOS is not to be denied, and there's some truth to the fact as well that there are some things that tend to work better with PCOS or tend to be more supportive of hormone health than others. But then there's also this kind of element of like people around PCOS and throwing off your hormones even more.

Speaker 1: 3:31

So let's talk about some of the benefits of exercise first. So exercise in and of itself, separate from nutrition, plays a big role in PCOS. It's like one of those pillars there's kind of three big pillars of a PCOS-friendly life, and those pillars are healthy diet, exercise, consistent exercise and stress reduction stuff. So in and of itself, even if you didn't alter the other two things, just incorporating a regular exercise routine could make a big difference for your PCOS, especially if your PCOS is driven a lot by insulin resistance. So some of the cool things that exercise does is not only does it kind of like burn starches and things that are in your system that you're digesting or whatever. It helps clear out your blood sugar, but it also helps clear space in your storage areas.

Speaker 1: 4:32

So our muscles and our liver as well can store glucose, which is a well, they store glycogen. Sorry, glycogen is like a storage form of glucose and glucose is the sugar that's like in our blood. So when you say blood sugar, that's glucose in the sugar in the blood and glycogen is when our body takes it and puts it into storage form and then stores it in our muscles, and the cool thing about that is that it's there when we need it. So we um, we store it in case we need to run away from something or in case, and this is why, when you get stressed, sometimes your blood sugar spikes. So this is why sometimes, when you're stressed or you know something stressful happens, you you'll spike your blood sugar because you store sugar in your body and your body's going to pull on it when you might need some energy. Sugar is energy. Your body's going to pull on it when it needs energy. So glycogen is the storage form of this and we're storing it in our muscles. And the cool thing about exercise is you can clear out some of that glycogen that's stuck in your muscles. So the next time you eat after you exercise, instead of the sugar having to kind of directly be processed or put into like made into fat or whatever, it can just go in the storage place because you've got room.

Speaker 1: 5:51

It's like I play this video game called Pallia. Shout out to any. If any of you play Pallia, I don't know, dm me or something, because I want to be your friend on Pallia. I'm obsessed with this game. This is like my new like zone out scroll activity, but it's this free. It's a free game on. I played on Switch, on the Nintendo Switch, but you can play it on the PC as well, and it's like a cozy game, like there's like a farming element to it. You like decorate your plot and you know there's hunting and fishing and bug catching and mining, and you know it's like a cozy game, but there's no monsters, there's no like time pressure, whatever.

Speaker 1: 6:34

Anyway, you have a, you have all these, you have an inventory, okay, and so I'm like my inner nerd is being revealed right now. So you have an inventory and you, the inventory has a limit, right, like it's like 10,000 items that can be in this inventory. So you keep filling it up with different stuff or whatever. Eventually you hit your limit and then you know you can't store any more stuff. It it's going to have to be stored somewhere else. So if you take that concept and apply it to the body, your muscles have a certain amount of storage space and once they're full, then you have to start storing in other spaces, and body fat is another storage space. But if we clear out some of our inventory or some of our muscle glycogen, then suddenly we have all this space where we can like throw some more stuff in there.

Speaker 1: 7:27

So exercise, first and foremost, is really really effective for insulin and blood sugar management. Another thing that it's really helpful for is gut health. So there are some studies that show that even if you don't change your diet, just exercising differently will change the makeup of your gut bacteria. So that's pretty cool, we know. If you've listened to me for a while, you know gut bacteria and inflammation kind of go hand in hand. So it can be anti inflammatory to exercise. It can also be helpful for your stress and adrenal responses.

Speaker 1: 7:54

And this is where we get into some tricky territory, because people will often point out that exercising raises your cortisol, and that's true. But raising your cortisol is not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it this way If you think about exercise as being a stressor, right, it's a stressor that then makes you more resilient to other stressors. So building muscle, for example, you're stressing the muscle out, you're tearing the muscle fibers a little bit, so you're causing some damage, but the repairing of that damage actually makes you stronger and more resilient later on. Same thing with bone density. You do strength training, it increases your bone density by first kind of causing a little bit of damage that, once it's repaired, makes it stronger. There are a lot of things like that, and so our adrenal and stress responses can be a little bit like that too. We bump up our cortisol.

Speaker 1: 8:46

But where the argument falls apart for this sort of like you don't want to bump your cortisol ever with exercise thing is that there's also ample evidence that, let's say you are stressed out, let's say you get like a mean text or something, or you check your Instagram DMs and somebody said something mean to you. You're going to spike your cortisol, right, your blood sugar is going to rise, et cetera. I remember hearing in one of my functional medicine courses and I'll see if I can pull up the exact study for this, but that when you experience a stressor like that, it actually is really helpful in the moment to jump up and down, exercise, run like get some energy out and actually raise your cortisol, because what's going to happen is that it's going to help your nervous system kind of almost get this burst of energy out, which is essentially what it's asking you to do by raising your blood sugar and by raising those like stress hormones. And so if you get that energy out right then and there then the cortisol level comes down lower than baseline. So it actually relaxes you. And if you've ever kind of been through something like that before, you know like, let's say, you're going to give a speech, right, you know how you kind of want to like pace and stuff before the speech, like you don't want to sit down because you're like, ah, and you need to move. It's sort of like that. And so in the context of exercise itself, we're almost priming those responses to be a little bit more resilient to day-to-day stressors. And by exercising we may be raising our cortisol in the moment, but we're also helping our body to have a more balanced cortisol response throughout the rest of life. So the thing about exercise is well, there are many things about exercise obviously, because this is a podcast about exercise but one of the things about exercise is that it's going to be really helpful to do something consistently for your PCOS, even if it's maybe not necessarily the ideal thing. So there's like a lesser of two evils option here. If somebody is naturally more sedentary, then they are going to benefit from really any kind of consistent exercise.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Where we get into trouble with overstressing our bodies with exercise is usually not with that person. So let me go backwards a little bit. I always think of exercise and like folks with PCOS and exercise, as being kind of divided into two groups. One group is like 80% of us, the other group is 20% of us. So the 80% of us are those of us who are dealing with energy issues.

Speaker 1: 11:31

We're tired, we kind of don't feel like it Get home from a long day at work. Who wants to like go out and take a walk Like well, you know, it's no fun. We struggle to get movement in. We sit a lot during the day or maybe we have a job where we're like kind of on our feet a lot, so we don't want to do anything more than that. We're already tired, right, and so the thought of exercising makes us more feel more tired and we're not waking up before work to exercise. You know, it's just like one of those things where it's a constant struggle to kind of motivate ourselves to move. That's about 80% of us, that's a lot of us, right. And on that side of things, like we may or may not be dealing with weight issues, but we tend more commonly to struggle with like weight gain, weight maintenance, weight loss, like, because movement and insulin production and stuff like that is an important piece of managing that. So you know, we don't always do, we don't always, we don't always do the best with with managing that.

Speaker 1: 12:22

And I saying that from a place of total compassion, cause I'm one of those people like I'm with you, I don't want to work out, I just want to play Pali all night. Anyway, then there's 20% of people and this is my I've noticed this kind of makeup in my private practice because I've been doing this for a long time and so I will get different types of people diagnosed with PCOS and they're so wildly different from each other that it's almost funny. This 20% are your people who are maybe they were like college or professional athletes. I see a lot of people who at some point in time were like semi-professional or professional athletes with PCOS. Maybe they're a personal trainer with PCOS or they do some kind of like intense, regular activity, like they're involved in some kind of like really intense hobby or sport or something like there's a they're doing, um, like they've been crossfitting for like years.

Speaker 1: 13:18

You know that type, this type of person over here, has that kind of push through the pain mindset. They often rely on exercise as their stress relief. So I typically will hear them say things like well, I have to exercise, like every day, if I don't like, I just don't feel like myself, I don't feel good, like it's a I don't want to say it's a compulsion, but it's kind of a compulsion. It's different from like, for example, this, the 80% category over here that we're talking about before. You may feel better when you exercise and know that if you don't exercise you're not going to feel like yourself, you're not going to have a good mood. Like it's going to help you a lot, but that knowing doesn't necessarily overcome the tiredness and the lack of motivation to actually do it. Like you might think about how you should do it, but actually doing it is harder, right, there's more of a like I need to force myself kind of vibe. There's more of a willpower sort of vibe that has to be pulled in that category Over here.

Speaker 1: 14:19

This category it's almost like it doesn't require a lot of willpower for them because it's so integral to their experience of themselves as a person. It's like they cannot not exercise, and some of them even to the point where they have to exercise multiple times a day, and oftentimes these people struggle with high anxiety, right, and so exercise calms them down and, you know, without it they feel like there's just a lot of energy inside of them that they just don't know how to, how to deal with or manage. And so they use exercises. They're kind of like anti-anxiety tool and it can be a very effective one for that. And so they use exercise as their kind of like anti-anxiety tool and it could be a very effective one for that.

Speaker 1: 14:58

But the problem in this category is that these people tend to kind of like push and push and push and not know when they need to rest and not listen when they need to rest. So they tend to get injured, and then they rest while they're recovering from an injury maybe, and then they go right back to it. Right, they push and push and push and then they go right back to it, right, they push and push and push, and that kind of level of pushing is what starts to stress their adrenals. These people tend to like to wake up really early and like skip out on sleep so that they can exercise. They tend to like to do bootcamp type stuff or like really intense HIIT exercises, like, like said, crossfit, or they play a sport or something like that, where they're required to practice a lot.

Speaker 1: 15:38

That is a totally different vibe. You know it. If you know who you are, you know which category you fall into. Okay, and there's variation, obviously across categories, right, like there's people like me who maybe fall more in the 80% category where we don't really like to do it but we build up the habit of exercising or we find something that we really enjoy doing, that's exercise related, and find that we can have consistency and actually a desire to go and do it in those circumstances. So we may look from the outside like we fall into the 20% category because we exercise a lot, but it's because we've built the habit of it, not because it's naturally, like it's what we use for our anxiety relief and we're just like compulsively overdoing it. So the reason I'm giving you this example of these two different types of people is that the whole slow, weighted workouts thing and never doing any HIIT and never doing anything intense and never running and never doing any endurance, cardio, et cetera, et cetera tends to be a recommendation that I do have to give for a certain type of person and it's that person, it's that 20% category.

Speaker 1: 16:45

Those people often need to step back. They need to incorporate more actual rest days not active rest days, but actual rest days where they're not doing a lot. They tend to do a quick 45-minute hot yoga sesh and that's their recovery day. I'm like no, that's not recovery. These people need to actually rest. They need to sleep more, they need to relax more. They need to probably work on mindfulness and use their rest days as a chance to work on mindfulness, meditation, stress reduction. That is not exercise-based, because that constant pushing and pushing and pushing now that's what's damaging for the adrenals, that's what's getting those stress hormones up, that cortisol up all the time and eventually kind of like causing the body to make a lot more androgens from that adrenal mode.

Speaker 1: 17:36

So if you have high DHEAS, then you may be kind of in that category that tends to sort of go along with it, but not always. But that is one way that sometimes people will develop worsening PCOS sometimes is because of overdoing it. And so where this sort of recommendation of like only do slow, weighted workouts comes from is acknowledging that that is a very real category of people that does exist. But remember when I put you into two categories and I said 80 and 20, because the reality is that the majority of us with PCOS are not in that 20% category. Some of you listening right now are are not in that 20% category. Some of you listening right now are, and you know, take a rest day, babe, take a nap. Some of us are in that category, even some of some of you who are listening right now but most of us are going to fall more in the 80%. Like we just kind of need to to to do more movement. We need to put more effort into that movement.

Speaker 1: 18:32

So telling the majority of us that the only thing we can do to not spike our stress hormones is slow, weighted workouts is well, number one, it's a little bit misleading. And number two, it's just like a little silly, honestly. So what I saw was you know another nutritionist kind of being like. So what I saw was you know another nutritionist kind of being like you don't need to do that, like that's like overkill, like any kind of exercise is going to spike your cortisol. And that can be a good thing. Like spiking cortisol is not necessarily a bad thing and, yeah, I fully agree, but I do think that there is a type of person that needs to kind of calm down a little bit with the exercise. I usually think they kind of know who they are, though Sometimes they don't want to admit it, but they know in their soul that that's who they are. So you know, you know.

Speaker 1: 19:21

But for the rest of us, what I guess I want to get across is you don't need to worry so much about exercise from the standpoint of, like, what's okay to do, what's not okay to do. So I get asked this question a lot and reasonably realistically. I'm not a personal trainer, like I don't have any kind of fitness certification. So I may be speaking a little bit out of turn by doing this, but a lot of personal trainers talk about nutrition too. So I think we you know our fields overlap a lot. But this is what I've seen over the years with people is that the real issue with PCOS exercise is not that the type of exercise we're doing is bad. It's that we don't have enough consistency with them, and I think we kind of sometimes stress ourselves out about that too, which can be hard on our adrenals, but it's not the exercise itself that's causing the problem.

Speaker 1: 20:11

What I have seen be kind of not effective over the years, as often is when people do just do cardio. So I see a lot of people want to take up running. They want to do like a couch to 5k situation, which I've done before, so I understand the impulse. So I see a lot of people kind of want to do something like that. Or a lot of people want to join a gym and they go get on the elliptical. You know it, a lot of people kind of want to do something like that. Or a lot of people want to join a gym and they go get on the elliptical. It doesn't tend to do very much, it doesn't tend to be that helpful for their PCOS in general, and I don't necessarily think it's because those things are bad. I think there's a way to do them well and a way to not do them well, but I don't think they're necessarily bad. I think the reason they're not effective for PCOS is because they're not paired with any strength training.

Speaker 1: 20:52

And one thing that is true is that strength training is very important for PCOS. I mean, I think it's important in general because it's important as a woman to increase your bone density, and strength training does that. It's important to increase your muscle mass, especially if you're trying to lose weight, because that changes your metabolic rate. And if you have insulin resistance, it's really important because strength training does a lot more than cardio for managing your insulin resistance and it's more effective at clearing out glycogen and all that kind of stuff and it also impacts you for longer. So where cardio is kind of like helps you today, strength training will help you for the next three days because it upregulates your muscles. Strength training will help you for the next three days because it upregulates your muscles, because it upregulates your metabolic rate for like 72 hours after strength training.

Speaker 1: 21:47

So the reason I think that running and elliptical and stuff doesn't tend to be that effective for PCOS is mostly because a lot of us don't really want to do the strength training part and there's a lot to that right, sometimes we just don't want to like we're embarrassed. That was a big thing for me, was like I don't necessarily know how to use these machines or like certainly I don't know how to use the free weights and I don't want to embarrass myself. A lot of us are just like just trying, like it's a struggle enough just to get through the door of the gym, right, let alone go and like actually have to interact with the gym bros, like they're always by the free weights, you know. So that's a big piece of it. But my point here that I'm trying to make is that with exercise, there needs to be two things involved. We need to have cardiovascular exercise and that can look different for different people and we need to have some strength training. So let's talk about the strength training and what that should look like.

Speaker 1: 22:43

The thing that I've seen to be most effective is two to three days a week of full body heavy strength training heavy and slow. There's something called the super slow method that I've always done with strength training with my trainer she's the one that taught me that and basically put a timer on for two minutes and I do the weight. It's a heavy weight, but I do it as slowly as I possibly can, and so it's like the going back and forth. That's really good and I don't exactly know why it's so effective, but it works. So two to three days a week I see that more effective than people who do like four sets of 12 reps and they go like today's upper day and tomorrow's leg day and they go like four days a week. That also can be effective. You just again consistency. So the real problem with exercise and PCOS is finding something that we can keep doing over and over and over and over again, and the gym often is not the best place to find. So the gym can be a great tool for getting your strength training in if you struggle with getting that. But going to the gym and walking on the treadmill and then doing strength training there's a subset of people who love that and they can consistently stick with that.

Speaker 1: 23:59

I think the majority of us find that really boring and triggering and after a few weeks or a few months or whatever, we burn out on that. I know I certainly have. I've joined a gym many times and I cannot make myself go to the gym with any sort of regularity or consistency because I just don't enjoy it. I just don't find it fun and a lot of us are like that, you know. But we do need to get some strength training in and I do find that like slow and weighted, like heavy weighted workouts are more effective. I think this particular influencer likes to talk about like lightweights, like I always see their videos they're doing like two pounds or five pounds, like really lightweight. I don't necessarily think that that's as effective. But if you have that's what you have at home and you're doing it at home like and it works for you, I mean cool.

Speaker 1: 24:47

Some strength training is important, but when it comes to the cardio piece, that's where a lot of misinformation happens, because you're often told and I'm pretty sure I've said this in the past like don't run, don't do cardio. My opinions on that have changed a lot over the years because I found that, you know, doing some cardio, as long as it's paired with weights and appropriate rest times and it's not overly focused on endurance, training can be really effective. So running we get in trouble with running when we start wanting to run miles and miles and miles every day and not giving our body appropriate time to rest and not pairing it with strength training and proper nutrition. Running is it's hard on your body, it's hard on your joints, it's hard on your feet. It's well known that running is hard on your body. It's not necessarily known as a very effective exercise.

Speaker 1: 25:37

Now, some people love running and if that's you cool, I would say that with running, we want to avoid too much endurance, because that's where we start to get into overstressing our bodies. I think so I tend to recommend people keep it to like max of like three miles and that they have like at least a couple of rest days throughout the week, that they're not doing that every single day. And, you know, more focused on like, almost like if you can do more like speed based stuff, so we call that sprints rather than like just jogging. But it's so, if you like jogging, then go jogging. Just try to make sure that you're listening to your body about when it needs rest. And I would also say don't sacrifice your sleep for it. Blanket statement for any exercise. Do not sacrifice your sleep for exercise.

Speaker 1: 26:34

I know, with working full time, it can be really really hard to find a time to actually do exercise. I'm so lucky that I work from home so, if I wanted to, I could get up right now and do some exercise. I'm so lucky that I work from home so I can like, if I wanted to, I could get up right now and, you know, do some exercise. But the reality is that, even though I'm at home and some of you are at home as well I'm working and I don't want to take a break in the middle of my workday and work out, so I work out in the evenings Now, is that ideal? No, not necessarily. The ideal time to exercise is probably about 10 o'clock in the morning, but who can do that If you can count your blessings?

Speaker 1: 27:11

The reality of the world we live in is that we have two options. We work out before work. We have three options Work out before work, don't work out at all, or work out after work, don't work out at all, or work out after work, and a mix can be fine, but I wouldn't want you to sacrifice your sleep for exercise. So, in order to exercise before work, if you have to wake up at like 4 am, just don't. Don't Try to do it as close to after work as possible so that you can still get home and have a reasonable bedtime. But that's neither here nor there. This is a very rambling one, guys. I'm sorry. I hope I'm not following my notes at all. So I hope, I hope you're still getting something out of this.

Speaker 1: 27:50

The biggest point I want to make here is that exercise is good for you, no matter what kind you're doing, as long as it's the difference between you doing nothing and you doing something. So if you're coming from a place where you're doing, as long as it's the difference between you doing nothing and you doing something. So if you're coming from a place where you're not exercising or not doing much and you're bumping it up and the way you're bumping it up is by doing a couch to 5K do it. It's the movement that's important. There may come a time, if you get really into exercise, where you start acting like the 20% crowd and it starts to really affect your sleep and your hormones and you'll know when that happens because you'll start having an increase in your PCOS symptoms, you will start having sleep issues, you will start having hair loss, You'll start having stubborn weight gain. That doesn't make sense. All that kind of stuff can happen in that department too. But there's a nice middle ground that a lot of us can meet and still do the things that we like to do. And I also want you to think outside the box with exercise a little bit.

Speaker 1: 28:58

I've been really into dancing for the last five years or so I guess I don't know four years but first it was pole dancing, you know, and I did like tango lessons, and now I do Latin dance, I do salsa and bachata. That's a type of endurance exercise. There's a lot of endurance there. It's similar to running in a lot of ways, but it's also a really great mindfulness practice. It's really fun, I love it and it helps a lot with keeping my blood sugar balanced. So, and the biggest benefit for me is that I like to do it enough that I look forward to going and I actually go and I actually do it. And for me that makes a big difference, because I'm the type of person that if I don't want to go do something, then I'm always looking for excuses to find a way to not do it and then I end up not exercising that much and my hormones suffer a lot more by not doing anything. And maybe dancing or running or whatever it is that you like to do is maybe not the most ideal thing for your PCOS hormones, but at least, if you like what you're doing, you'll get joy out of it, and don't underestimate the positive effects of joy. You'll get joy out of it and you'll be helping your PCOS hormones by helping your insulin resistance and keeping your blood sugar balanced, and those benefits are huge. So try to find something that you really like. Try to think outside the box, because a lot of things can be exercise but maybe are not billed as exercise.

Speaker 1: 30:36

Look outside of the gym Now. I will say the gym often has like classes, zumba things like that. That can be really fun and you can build a community. But for me, having a community of people that I feel connected to and that I enjoy spending time with and hobnobbing with and all of that, that's what keeps me going and keeps me going back to exercising, and I often find that in hobbyist type stuff and not necessarily at the gym. The gym is a collection of people who, most of them, are not going to be consistently going there. The reality is that a lot of people join the gym, do it for a few months, cancel their memberships right, the types of people who go to the gym all the time and just keep going and going and going forever and ever. You know, there's not that many people like that and a lot of them are gym bros who no offense to gym bros but like they're not really the types of people that we're like making BFFs with. So try to find something that is outside of the world of the gym. Look into things like Pilates. Pilates can be a great exercise for PCOS. Look into things like, yeah, yoga studios. I mean you can get a great workout doing yoga. What else Dance? Of course pole dancing. I love pole dancing for PCOS, but also I've been enjoying Latin dance a lot and I found that it's really helping me a lot. So there are lots of other things, sports, you know. Find something that Okay.

Speaker 1: 32:03

Hey guys, I'm popping in here with a little editor's note so that I can inform you of what's going to be happening the rest of this podcast here. So you may have noticed that I published this and then had to take it down, and I just wanted to kind of first of all explain what happened and then let you know and then thank those of you who reached out to me, emily being one I can think of off the top of my head, anyway. So what happened was I edit in two times speed, and I do that so that it doesn't take me so long, and I, you know, usually remember to change it back. But this particular time I didn't remember to change it back, I think, because the first like minute of the podcast was still on regular speed. So trip me up.

Speaker 1: 32:45

Anyway, I published the thing, then didn't realize till later that evening that it actually was like that, and so I was super embarrassed but I came and took it down. It probably took a while to come off of Spotify, but anyway took it down and I would have just republished it with the new audio file. But unfortunately, in the meantime between when I published it and when I realized that it was messed up, I actually deleted some of the original files because I needed space on my SD card to record new ones. So the last little bit of the podcast here I had to bring in from the exported file and then change the speed down and unfortunately when you do that it's like it messes the audio quality up a bit and so it just doesn't sound as good and it's a little bit like there's like I don't know, it's just not going to sound as good. So I just wanted to let you know I still think it's worth listening to, but it may not be as enjoyable of a listening experience. But if you make it to the end, you know. Thank you, I appreciate you and sorry for the inconvenience of all of it. And yeah, that's all I wanted to say. Okay, bye, main point I'm making with this extremely rambling podcast. Thank God for you.

Speaker 1: 34:24

If you've made it this far, I guess my point is the best exercise you can do for your PCOS is the one that you actually do for your PCOS, the one that you actually do regularly and the one that brings you the most joy. Um, so, whatever that is, whatever that looks like, and then watch out, watch yourself, watch how your body responds. If you're responding in a positive way, you know if you're, if you're losing weight and your skin's clearing up and you're feeling more energetic and you're feeling happier and like all these good things are happening. Wait, keep doing what you're doing. That's working for you.

Speaker 1: 35:01

If eventually, you know you start feeling like you don't, you can't wake up anymore to go exercise. Like, let's say, you decide to start doing boot camps before work, which I don't love, but let's say you start doing that and suddenly it becomes harder and harder and harder to get up. Your body's fighting you. You're tired during the day that you're going to do a bunch of things to push through. Like that's when you're probably doing something that's not ideal for you and especially if you start like losing hair and things like that. You know you may be pushing too far in the other direction, but for most of us it's really just about the thing that you enjoy enough to be consistent with, and consistency doesn't have to last forever. You don't have to put the pressure on yourselves to like find the thing, find the exercise that's going to be your exercise for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1: 35:51

Um, something that I've had to learn is to not make things my saving grace. So much like to not be like okay, this is the thing right. Because for a long time I was like oh, this is the thing, like I'm gonna. For a long time I was like oh, this is the thing, like, I'm going to do pole dancing forever. And then I started feeling, I started getting injured, I started not feeling good having to force myself to go and just not like enjoying it as much anymore. My therapist was like I mean, were you going to be doing pole dancing when you're like 90 years old? And I was laughing because I'm like yeah, I guess I couldn't do it forever. But in my head I was like oh, I loved this so much, it helped me so much. I have to do it forever Like it's my thing Right, and that's just like not true.

Speaker 1: 36:32

You know, I did it for a time. It was really fun. I loved it for so long I loved it and I thought I would never want to do anything else. And then I didn't love it as much anymore and it started to be harder on my body and so I decided to do something different. And right now I'm doing this, and who knows how long I'll be dancing.

Speaker 1: 36:49

You know, I I mean personally at this moment in time I think I'll always be dancing, at least in some capacity. But who knows? But open yourself up to the fact that, like you can enjoy something for a time and then move on. And when you start feeling that desire to not do it anymore, to do something different, that's when you start working. What have I not tried? What can I try next? What could be my new thing? Hey, just do, just do something. Just do some exercise, even if it's just walking around outside. Don't worry about all the semantics of like oh my god, does it have to be slow? Does it have to be fast? Does it have to be hit? Does it have to not Whatever? Just do what speaks to you and try to find a balance. And I have reached out to a very popular PCOS fitness influencer very recently and she said she'll come on the podcast, so hopefully we will get her on here and I will ask her her opinions about this and she's more of an expert. For now, let's see what's on. And thanks for listening. Guys, thanks for hanging on this one.

Speaker 1: 37:51

Now I saw some of some of you have left me some reviews. Well, I saw one new review, so thank you to to you who gave me the review. I really appreciate it. This podcast like desperately needs reviews. Um, because the podcast is so old it it? Uh, it doesn't get pushed as much. Um because, like it wasn't very, it wasn't that popular for the first few years. I wasn't super consistent with it. So in order for it to like actually reach the bigger audience it needs, like, we need reviews to kind of show that the podcast is still. You know, we're growing it's, it's improving and sound quality is better, all that kind of stuff. So if you have not left a review for the podcast on iTunes specifically is where it's the most helpful, but you can also review on Spotify, please, please do. And I would love to. You know I love when you guys type a little note for me about what you like about the podcast. It makes me feel so good. So thank you to those of you who have done that and thank no-transcript.