You're listening to the Human Kinetics Podcast, the leader in physical activity and sports publishing, providing authoritative coaching resources for over 50 years, featuring educational and engaging conversations on the most relevant topics in fitness, strength and conditioning and sports performance. I would say good morning but depending on when you're listening to this or in the case of my guest here today that is in a completely different time zone, good afternoon. Again, my name is Aaron and we have a very interesting and I have no doubt very informative conversation for you today. Joining me is Nehem Dailey who has been teaching yoga since 2004, I believe, under the banner of Jensink Yoga and I'll let her kind of explain that part too. As I understand it, she has used her own life experiences to kind of direct her career and kind of find a more, I guess, specific need and specific area that she has been practicing under. So I will let her tell you all about that but I'm very glad that she has joined us today to talk about yoga and her book, Yoga for Menopause and Beyond. So again, thank you so much for spending part of your day here today. It's an absolute pleasure, Aaron. It's my absolute passion project, this Perry Menopause, post-Menopause phase of a woman's life and actually, of course, as I do my work, I've become more interested in the later years of men's lives as well because there is a lot that unites, of course, the later years. But yes, this passion project began around 2015 when I began to notice that in my own body there and biopsychosocially, everything but every bit of me was changing and my yoga practice began to change with it because I was lucky enough to have the confidence to instinctually use my yoga practice and also temper my yoga practice in ways that nourished my body whereas a lot of teachers and a lot of practitioners feel that they have to stay within the framework of what they've learned as yoga teachers or that their teachers is telling them to do and that change is not really acceptable but it became obvious that it was required and so I noticed that there was basically tumbleweed in the yoga for menopause space. There was a few articles, there was a few teachers who'd written even a book or two had been written but they were very much just, does yoga as it is support menopause or, you know, thinking about yoga, menopause through a yoga lens rather than yoga through a menopause lens if you get my point. So I just thought there was a big gap to be filled which I did through very much a research-based approach because once you start to research menopause you recognize that the biochemical changes mean that we really need, you know, very much evidence-based robust support rather than a kind of wishy-washy experiential thing, I guess, yeah. So yeah. Very interesting and I think a lot of women are probably very happy that you've kind of dove into this a little more in detail. In looking through the book, of course, you mentioned a number of symptoms that people going through perimenopause might experience and some of those are, I think the ones that a lot of us are familiar with the common ones like fatigue, you know, low mood, anxiety, sleep disturbances, brain fog, weight gain, headaches. I mean, these are some of the more common ones. I know you have another list of maybe less common ones that you can talk about. So I guess what I know of yoga, it seems to, I guess it would be seem like a perfect remedy for some of these symptoms, but you mentioned kind of your studies and, you know, doing more research into this. So I guess what makes yoga for menopause so important or such an important part of the process. Yeah, thank you. So some guidelines for menopause care will, obviously, most guidelines for menopause care will mention, of course, homo and therapy, which is the medical approach. And that has the most consistent beneficial results for symptoms. Then there will also be mentioned of things like looking after nutrition, looking after exercise and doing things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which has a good amount of research behind it for supportive menopause symptoms. Yoga kind of appears way down the line in terms of holistic recommendations and has just talked about as a way to relieve stress. To my mind, yoga, as it already is, should be higher up the list of holistic interventions for menopause because our nervous system can get hyperaroused during perimenopause and beyond. So that means that we are more in a hair trigger and we are less likely to be able to settle into the rest and repair, rest and restore parasympathetic nervous system. We're much more likely to be in sympathetic. Therefore, we have higher levels of cortisol, which can chew away at our bone tissue and our muscle tissue, maybe adding to those symptoms like osteoporosis and muscle loss. And if we can try to help regulate the nervous system, the HPA axis in perimenopause and even a little bit sooner, then I believe we would have a much less symptomatic journey. But what I think is lacking in normal yoga is a recognition of the existential shift that occurs when one reaches perimenopause. Also, the social aspects, even the biochemical and some of the physical changes that make, for example, the physical practice of yoga, a little riskier or need to be adapted. So that's this wide sense of the real reduced self-esteem, sense of what am I here for, sense of dawning, sense of one's own mortality, sense of self-judgment and even hatred of the self, which I really hear in my clients. Just those on the non-physical level really necessitate, to my mind, an understanding that the yoga teacher needs an understanding of what her students might be bringing in their hearts to their yoga classes because yoga is a biopsychosocial existential practice. It's not like pilates. So I think they need to understand that. But even if a teacher doesn't recognize the need for that, we have to recognize the need for the physical adaptations because we are looking at, alongside the symptoms you mentioned, we're also looking at reduced and more fragile cartilage. And even as a non-yoga, you know that yoga is a lot to do with joint movements and some quite extreme range of motions. And cartilage doesn't have nerve ending, so we don't know we're damaging cartilage till the damage is done really. So thinking about how do I protect more fragile cartilage in my students? We are more quick and ready to injure in-parion post-manopause and slower to repair. And remember that getting an injury is not just, oh, she's got a bit of a pain for a while. It also really reduces your ability and desire to exercise, which means that you might be putting your health on the back foot while you recover it, recovery is slower. Then we have more vulnerable ligaments and tendons, we have reduced collagen, and we also have sometimes collagen that's laying down more thickly so that we get stiffness in the tissue. So it's less resilient to stretch, which is a big part of yoga. We have all over aches and pains, joint pain that nobody knows what it is and not even the doctor can give an answer. And we have a more hair trigger inflammation response or sort of excessive inflammation response. So on a very logical level, purely from the physical perspective of yoga, these things need to be taken into account. Also over 50% of women over 50 have low bone density, and so knowing how to care for people with low bone density and asana in postures is so essential. So I hope that would convince people that we need something adjusted at the very least on a physical level, if not more, and I believe much more needs to be adjusted. Everything you just said makes perfect sense when presented that way in terms of what we're talking about here. I guess a follow-up question or a couple of follow-up questions there is, why do you think when you were researching the history of this, why do you think it was so low on the list as far as remedies for menopause or period menopause? And also from your perspective in being in this, why do you think it has taken so long or why don't more, I guess yoga professionals teachers focus on that? Is that just their own personal interests maybe in the area that they want to go into or maybe it just hasn't been researched enough? I'm not sure. What a juicy, many-layered question that has such a huge resonance. So yes, it can be that teachers aren't interested until they start to meet that phase in their life or they see students at that phase in their lives in their own classes. And that's understandable, of course. Do you need to learn about menopause when all your students are 20? You probably don't. But at some point as you age, your students are going to age and we usually attract students around the same age as us. Then why is it not been in the general conversation? That's the bit that's huge. And I think it's partly to do with a sense, okay, this is sometimes controversial, that in the yoga world we're sometimes resistant to change and we're resistant to the idea that yoga might need to adapt for people rather than people adjusting themselves to fit into yoga. There is a sense sometimes a slight defensiveness of like you don't need yoga for menopause. Just do yoga. Yoga is perfect as it is and that it's an insult to the great tradition. And the great tradition is incredible. There is stuff in yoga that you're like, how did they know this? How did they figure this out without any scientific research into what they've done? It's quite extraordinary. But there's also lots that we do know that nobody 2,000 years ago or 100 years ago knew and that's where the adaptation comes in. And I think so it's partly the tradition and the people who are maybe very faithful yoga teachers. A lot of teacher trainings are sort of faith-based. They're handed down in a lineage style and a teacher repeating the same lineage is doing the job that she's trained to do and she's being a faithful yoga teacher. And to change from that sometimes feels like a betrayal of her lineage or whatever. But the other thing I think maybe a bigger thing is that menopause in general is associated with age and with aging. And we still have age stigma. We have aged stigma globally but we have aged stigma in the yoga world. And I don't think we're having that conversation enough that there's this sense of, no, my practice must not change. My practice must not need to change. If my practice needs to change, I'm less of a yogi. And all of that is in denial of the natural changes that come into the body as you move through the years. There are the super yogis who are in their 70s and still doing all the crazy shapes. But for the majority of people, their practice needs to change in peri and post-menopause. And for older men, it often needs to change too. But older men are less prone to some of those structural difficulties than women are. So I think it's a mixture of yoga being less inclined to look into where it needs to change. And then the ages thing that makes us uninterested and unwilling to change. I think what you said right there is something that a lot of people can relate to though in the sense of when we get into our careers or maybe we're studying a specific field. We tend to adapt and learn new things and kind of rethink our approach to different situations where there's certainly nothing wrong with the way that other people are doing things, for sure, very successful, very beneficial. But yeah, you've just taken that different approach and kind of, I guess, it sounds like anyways, maybe stepping out of the box a little bit and exploring this new area here. Was that kind of your goal there, I guess? Just step out of the box. Well, I guess to step out of the box, but really just to kind of continue evolving in what you're doing and the way that you're helping your students. Yes, that's a big part. I find, well, we all know that if we stagnate, it's less beneficial for every bit of us. So if we stagnate in our yoga practice or in the gym or in our intellectual learning, things go downhill pretty quickly. And for longevity and strength and resilience, we need change. We need newness. So for building bone density, we need to increase the level of weights we're lifting to improve our brain health. We need to keep learning. So I think it's partly Aaron, it's because I think with the people in my classes and the teachers that I hope will influence other people deserve me to keep learning and keep exploring. But it's partly because I'm a restless, curious spirit. So it's partly personal and partly about my care of my clients and students. But I do think that this is an area which is now being loudly shouted about. It wasn't when I started this work. And we need to keep on top of it because it's gotten a bit messy. So I think we need to keep on our toes and keep studying what's really definitely the case. There's a lot of weird stuff creeping in that as a yoga teacher, I think we need to offer the middle ground, the truth, the multiple study-based evidence-based stuff rather than the magic silver bullet that may come from a nutritional therapist or a medical professional or a pharmaceutical company or a herbalist. There's a lot of crazy stuff out there. So keeping curious and staying outside that linear box is very important to me. Yeah. Okay. And you might have just answered my next question there. But when I began looking through this book, I noticed that maybe different from a lot of other similar resources, you do mention research studies and kind of diving into the research a little more. So I guess maybe explain a little more your perspective there, whereas my experience of my knowledge of yoga seems to be a little more laid back. You know, kind of go with the flow, but which I think is good, probably something that I need more in my life to be honest. But at the same time, you kind of take this different perspective or at least that's kind of what you explain in the book. Yeah, that's a great way of saying it. You know, yoga is a bit more go with the flow. And when you go to a teacher training, you're learning to disseminate yoga as a whole. You're not kind of diving. Well, it depends on the training. Traditionally, it's not some most schools are not about direct health benefits from direct practices. But there is a school of yoga mostly influenced by, you may have heard of Iyengar, where the idea of ascribing particular health benefits to particular poses and particular breathing practices, for example, became quite strong and a lot of teachers will go and train in that way. And then they want to sort of go and fix their students or support their individual struggles. But with that came a bit of a frenzy of trying to claim that certain positions influenced particular areas of health. But when you look into it, it doesn't make a lot of logical sense. For example, a shoulder stand can support your hypothyroidism. But actually, the stimulus of tyroxen is not from the thyroid, it's from the brain. So the principle behind this was the neck position in a shoulder stand or in a bridge. But what that's just doing is compressing perhaps the thyroid. So maybe there's a little squeeze compression and a little release and a little new fluids coming in from the lymphatic system. We don't really know. But to claim that it helps with hypothyroidism is a leap pretty far or that cobbler pose where we lie back on bolsters with our knees apart helps restore menstrual regularity makes no sense. Because again, menses is led by biochemistry, it's not led by the physical position of your body. And so I was starting to see that there were those kinds of recommendations and articles about yoga, applying yoga for menopause that this posture would relieve menopause symptoms. But we don't actually have evidence for any single posture in the entire yoga canon for any one health benefit, except there was one study done into side plank helping see curved scoliosis. That's it. That's it. So I was really keen to ensure that when women are at a phase in their life, when they need so much, that they would not be offered half troops or hoped for truths, that what they needed was something achievable based on a decent level of possible positive outcome. So for me, unfortunately, Western science is it doesn't, it can't research everything, it doesn't measure everything, but it is the best we have at the moment. And there is lots of research from Western science into parts of yoga, just not individual postures. And I was able to see which bits were really perimenopause and post-menopause relevant, which bits might be completely irrelevant, but people were jumping on the bandwagon of saying, this will fix your hot flush, but actually not so really, not making sense in terms of research. And sort of bringing in the bits that we have the research around, just because I think we have a responsibility when women are often in really desperate need, Aaron, really nearly going under, they need to not walk away thinking, oh, well, I didn't do it well enough, it didn't work for me, or yoga is rubbish if it didn't work for me. So that's why it's so important to me. And there's loads, and it brought me away from yoga in a bit of anger, seeing the claims that were made, and it brought me right back, seeing the unbelievable stuff that yoga has in it that has research around us. Okay, so I'm interested what are, so it sounds like there are differences between maybe traditional yoga and yoga specifically for menopause. What, I guess if you could explain or maybe give some examples of what you would do differently, maybe in a yoga class, what kind of makes that stand out a little bit more? Yeah, so I guess one of the most important things is that there is an information element to it. So there's a, I think called the information support method, which is something delivered to people when they've had a diagnosis. Now, perimenopause isn't an illness, but it is a life struggle. And the information support method is about explaining the diagnosis to the person, telling them that it's not the end of the world, and then letting them know what they can do for themselves. And this information support method is known to be empowering and to assist in outcomes. So part of what people learned from me when they come to my yoga teacher training, and I really believe I put on the whole flipping thing in the book, you know, I've kind of possibly done myself out of a job by making the book so comprehensive. So what a yoga teacher will learn is how to help someone understand what's going on in their body. So they'll be able to say to them, that sounds like it could be a perimenopause symptom that maybe not maybe go to the doctor. But the way we do that is usually through a sharing circle at the beginning. So the women will ask the women to talk about their experience and then based on what's in the room, the teacher will expertly return with some information that helps the woman feel less alone, less crazy, less fearful. So we're able to say, yes, I know those hot flushes are grim, but just know they don't affect your health badly. You know, they're there, but they're not going to kill you. And we might say, oh, yes, that dizziness you're experiencing is not because you've you're developing a neurological disorder. It's quite common in menopause. And then, and here's some tools that can help. So that's the opening circle community. And then on a physiological level, we do a lot of practices that are about pleasure to induce the feel, good hormones, because we do have power to induce those. We don't have power to induce estrogen and progesterone. So a lot of somatic practice in yoga for menopause, where there's the idea of moving for pleasure, but also really developing interaception to help people know their body, know when enough is enough, but also know, am I sick or is this just perimenopause? So interaception building on a much more robust and targeted level. And then with us and I with the postures, there would be definite intention to build muscular strength, because we know that muscular strength is really important for longevity, protects the bones. We don't claim that yoga for menopause or yoga in any way can increase bone density, because we do not have research for that despite a famous study that created a wild myth in the yoga world. So we don't claim that it protects, it builds bone, but protective of reduction of fracture risk and muscular strength. And then it would also, there'd be stuff in there that my favorite bit is brain training exercises. So we add lots of eye exercises and contralateral movements and things to keep the brain going, because those are the main health concerns, and then extra rest. Right, which I think is something that we could all benefit from, that extra rest for sure. So, yeah, this has been a very intriguing conversation. I'm definitely even more interested in it now. I promise not to take up too much of your time, and I know we do have a little bit of a time difference with being in that different time zone, but definitely thank you so much for your time today. Thank you everyone for listening. If you haven't got your copy yet, definitely go pick up your copy of yoga for menopause and beyond. You can get on our website, us@humanconnects.com and know it's available on Amazon, probably numerous bookstores as well, if you don't want to wait for it to be shipped to you there. You are going to get all of the information that we're talking about today, so much more. There are full color photos with poses, helping explain and kind of direct you through that. I would encourage you, even if you are a person who will never experience personally menopause or period menopause, I as a man know that I have women in my life, I train women, so this is something that I need to be more knowledgeable about too. So as a trainer and coach myself, I would encourage everyone that even if this is something that you won't experience yourself, get a little more into the readings and kind of educate yourself a little bit more so that you can help other people and maybe be a little more understanding of what people might be going through there. So thank you again so much for your time. I will give you the last word here again, so you can kind of wrap it up and maybe make sure that everyone knows where they can follow you and keep up with all the great work that you're doing. Thanks Aaron, yeah, it's, you instinct yoga is my profile on social media, and it's the name of my website instinct with a Y in front, and I do online classes and I train yoga teachers in yoga for menopause, I train psychotherapists and menopause awareness for psychotherapists, and I also sometimes do some training for people like you, personal trainers, and so yeah, that's it really. I'm in Ireland, just in case anybody didn't notice the accent, and my dreams I guess for the book are that individuals will buy, but I would love, love, love to see it one day on curriculums in yoga to teach teacher trainings everywhere. I want to do myself out of a job and not run the training myself, but that is everywhere across the board and that that would be the textbook, that would be such a joy. Yeah, again, an awesome, very intriguing conversation. I definitely learned a lot of know everyone else did as well. So again, thank you so much and I will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you for listening to the Human Kinetics Podcast for more information on this and other topics. Visit our YouTube channel as well as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Acre. For additional resources, visit our website us.humankinetics.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]
