3 Ways to Assess Your Leg Strength (and why it matters for women’s health)

Betty Rocker (00:16):
What’s up, rock stars Coach Betty Rocker here. Thanks so much for spending some time with me today. So last time we talked, we went in depth about one of the important indicators of our strength, which is of course, grip strength. And just to recap, grip strength is really important because it’s a good indicator of our overall strength. So it’s a good one to use to kind of gauge where you’re at now. Last time we talked, I went over five ways to test your grip strength. And what we looked at were squeezing a home bathroom scale to see how many pounds of pressure you can grip using a dynamometer device, which measures your grip strength hanging from a bar and timing yourself doing a farmer’s carry with weights at your sides as you walk and picking up weights by the heads using a pinch grab.

(01:05)
So those were all of our tests, and the reason it’s a great idea to check in on it periodically and why we should care about it is just because of the associated risk factors that are related to poor grip strength, which are literally everything from increased risk of bone breaks to poor immune health, lower cognitive function, and so much more. And as we age, hormones like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone start to decline. We’ve talked a lot about this on previous episodes and how the loss of these key hormones really impacts our strength, making us more prone to muscle and bone loss, and really affecting our flexibility as that ligamentous tissue becomes less pliable. The good news is if you’re using Betty Rocker training programs and eating guidelines, you have essential tools to stay ahead of a lot of the age related degeneratio the body is really prone to. I mean, use it or lose it, right?

(01:59)
If you’re training with me, you are consistently strength training and you’re working on your explosive power, you’re eating enough protein for your age group and you’re prioritizing those fiber rich carbs and that healthy fat. You’re making your self care a priority like taking the rest days between your high volume training sessions, and if you’re in perimenopause or post menopause, you’ve got a more customized schedule for your training in my programs that really is gonna benefit you the most. You’re prioritizing your bedtime and you’re stretching more around your training. You’re keeping an “all or something” mentality in mind so that you can stay consistent. And you know that our health and fitness are this holistic process that we work on over time, just like we work on ways to talk to ourselves with kindness the same way we would talk to our friends. And really, making friends with yourself and speaking to yourself with kindness is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your health.

(02:54)
Sometimes it’s really helpful to think about the little version of you, and remember that when you speak to yourself, you’re also speaking to her. I know you have a lot of love to give, so give that love to yourself too, and remember why you’re showing up to do the stuff I talk about. Like we gotta be exercising and caring about our food for more than just that hot bod, right? I mean, you could still have that too, but it goes deeper, right? These days when I train, I think about the person who I’ll be in 30 years and I wanna really set her up for success. Everything I do now is going to help with that. I wanna hold on to strong bones and have the muscle in my body to be able to move and hike and enjoy life, and I wanna stay as flexible as I can.

(03:38)
So really these days I’m taking action for two people. I’m doing it for the little kid version of me. I wanna make her proud of who I am, and I’m doing it for the older version of me. I want her to look back and say, damn girl, you set us up to be strong and and look at how much we can do, right? I just found myself really inspired with the grip strength test and how much I could do. And you might think, oh, come on Betty Rocker, you’re a trainer. Of course that was easy for you and normally you’d be right. But I did have a bad fall about six months ago now, and I dislocated my elbow. And ever since then I have been slowly and methodically rebuilding my strength around that joint. It’s crazy, but it just changed how I was able to do all kinds of exercises and I had to really take it slow as I came back after that injury.

(04:25)
And I was just so glad to have that muscle and strength that I had built before to draw on. And I was definitely thanking my past self for all her hard work. Let me tell you, (laugh). So anyway, after I was sort of checking in on my strength with the grip strength test, it got me thinking about the other things we want to check in with ourselves on periodically when it comes to our strength and our mobility, because we also wanna have strong legs, a strong core, good flexibility, and a solid ability to balance as we age. One popular test you may see online that really targets all of those things is the sit to stand or sit to rise test. A study published in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology assessed over 2000 adults, over 50 years old, performing this test, and they found that those with lower scores had higher mortality rates from any cause, and people with higher scores had longer survival rates.

(05:24)
Now, this test really sizes up the strength in our glutes, our hamstrings, inner and outer thigh muscles, plus our mobility, our balance, and our coordination and our core. So you can do this one right now if you want to, and if you’re watching the video version of this podcast on the show notes page on my blog or on my YouTube channel, you can see a demonstration, but you can also just listen along ’cause I’ll explain it. There are two parts to this test. One is the sitting down and the second is the standing up. We’ll start out with five points for each part of the test for a total of 10 points. We’re gonna start out standing, and then we’re gonna sit down cross-legged on the floor using as few points of contact with the floor as possible to bring ourselves down, meaning your hands, knees, elbows, or any other part of your body using as few of those body parts as possible to bring yourself down to that seated position.

(06:15)
And we start with those five points and we deduct a point for every point of contact that we need to use to bring ourselves down into that seated cross-legged position. Now, part two of this test is to stand up from that cross-legged position using as little support as possible from our hands, knees, elbows, or other points of contact with the floor. And once again, you start with five points and you deduct a point for every point of contact you need to use to help you stand up. So if you’re someplace that you can do this, go ahead and try it out and be sure that you’re next to some furniture so that you can reach out to support yourself. We’re just assessing where we’re at. Just notice if you need to put a hand down, if you need to use your knees to come up, or if you felt stiff or had trouble being in the cross-legged position and coming into it or out of it, how did you do?

(07:03)
Now you’re gonna take your points from each part and add them together to see where you fall on that total one to 10 scale. And if you needed to use some help to bring yourself up, remember that’s okay. The point of the test is to just find out where we need to focus. We need a lot of flexibility in our tissue and mobility around our joints to come from a seated position to standing or from a standing position back to seated as the legs are bent and the tissue that crosses over the joint spaces of our hips, ankles, and knees, all needs to be able to move freely. We need a lot of leg and core strength as all of those muscle groups work together to help us rise up and come down. And we need balance, ability, and coordination, a lot of which comes from our core strength to help us in that in-between phase right of the stand or the sit.

(07:54)
Now, if you found that you struggled with this one, that is totally normal. It just may be that you need to work on your flexibility a little more and just maybe start stretching around your workouts more consistently. As we age, we lose our collagen and our elastin and the things that help us be more limber. Our ligaments become less compliant as our estrogen levels go down. So getting a little more proactive about your self-care around your workouts, whether it’s a three minute warmup where you’re just moving dynamically or even doing some of the moves from your workout with your own body weight, or you’re doing say a five minute stretch after you train with those warm muscles, or you’re adding a little yoga or mobility work on some of your rest days throughout the week like we do in all of the Betty Rocker programs.

(08:39)
That can be a great way to improve your joint health and really keep your body limber and loose and along with flexibility, some of the exercises that can really improve all of those areas of your body that help with sitting and standing include moves like the it’s, this one’s got a couple of names, the knee drop lunge, which is also known as the prisoner squat. And that’s where you place your hands behind your head and you lower yourself down to a kneeling position and then you step right back up again, keeping your hands back behind your head. And another great move that I love to include in my programs is the Turkish getup. That’s where you start out lying on your back with one arm straight up in the air, you lift your upper body up almost coming into a situp using your core strength, and then you bring your legs under you coming into either a kneeling lunge or a low squat, and then you come up to a standing position holding your arm up overhead the entire time.

(09:35)
This move is a super spicy move, but it really helps to strengthen everything from your rotator cuff to your core, your legs, glutes, and it helps improve your balance and flexibility as you’re getting up from the floor and coming back down to the floor. It’s a featured move in the Ripped Rockstar Challenge series in Rock Your Life over the course of that particular challenge series in parts one, two, and three, we continuously work to improve our Turkish getup in one workout each week. That’s a really fun program in Rock Your Life. You should definitely check it out, but another great body weight move to improve your sit to standability and keep your balance flexibility core and legs strong is the burpee (laugh). That is where we bring ourselves down to a plank pose, do a pushup, jump to our feet, and then jump up in the air and then we repeat it.

(10:24)
Everyone loves to hate the burpee, but I have really come to love it for the versatile ways we can use it to improve so many aspects of our strength. You’ll see a lot of really fun burpee variations in my challenges and programs. Everything from a low impact burpee to uh, one you can do with your hands elevated to help you build up that strength. You can do a double jump burpee. That’s where you’re gonna do two jumps at the top. You could do a reverse burpee that when there’s no pushup in, but it’s also really tough to come down and come back up. And then there’s even a warrior burpee where we add a mountain climber at the bottom and two kicks at the top, right. I started sweating just thinking about burpees, (laugh), but they’re just such an amazing move to really include in your training regularly that really helps you maintain so many important aspects of your fitness.

(11:14)
Now, those moves I mentioned, the prisoner squat, the Turkish getup and the burpee are all going to help you improve your leg and core strength, plus improve your ability to balance. And they will all help you with that sit to stand test, which isn’t really why we’re training, but it’s a fun way to test yourself to make sure you’re staying on top of important aspects of your health. They also recruit a lot of your posterior chain musculature if you’ve never encountered that term. It just refers to the muscles that run up and down the back side of your body, like your back, your glutes, your hamstrings, and your calves. And these muscles are all involved in your ability to jump and balance and move well. And you can find a lot of fun posterior chain specific workout videos on my blog on thebettyrocker.com, and they’re also built into my Rock Your Life challenges and workout programs. And leg strength in particular is so important for us as women –

(12:08)
We carry over half of our skeletal muscle in our lower body. So really keeping that part of our body strong is enormously important for us. And remember that muscle tissue is what determines our resting metabolic rate. AKA how many calories or how much energy you’re gonna burn even at rest. So the more muscle we have, the more efficiently we burn body fat. And this is one of the reasons it’s easier to gain weight as we age and start to lose our muscle tissue if we’re not taking steps to support holding onto it. So a fun test, you can try to assess your leg and core strength is a simple wall sit test. This is where you’re going to brace yourself against the wall and lower yourself down so your knees are bent at a 90 degree angle and your back is flat against the wall.

(12:59)
Then you’ll just time yourself to see how long you can hold this position. A great benchmark to aim for is a full minute, and it is tough. Anything more than that is just a bonus and an indicator that you’re really strong. If you’re not up to a minute when you do the test, that is a-okay. If you can hold it for 45 seconds, that is still good. The average is 35 to 45 seconds. So anything above average is great. If you’re below that, it’s just something to work on, right? There’s so many great exercises to help you build your leg strength like squats, deadlifts, lunges, and tons of variations of those as well. Starting with body weight variations all the way up to weighted options, there are jumping and high impact exercises too that will strengthen your legs. And speaking of jumping, another really fun test you can try that will assess your leg strength is the standing broad jump test.

(13:52)
You might have done this back in gym class or remember measuring your jump length, but it’s a great assessment of your power potential, especially in your glutes and legs. And it’s one where we need a lot of that posterior chain strength. Now, this test is typically done for athletes who need their leg strength for their sport, but it’s also just great to check in on ourselves and see where we’re at too, because explosive power means that you’ve got a lot of strength in your legs. So what you can do is lay out a tape measure, or you can simply put down markers for several feet or meters out and make sure that you’re gonna do this on a giving surface like your lawn or a mat. Do a little warmup like some walking lunges or some body squats and some high knees, and lay out your tape measure and come to the zero end with your feet slightly apart.

(14:40)
Swing your arms and bend your knees to help give you as much forward drive as you can get. And then you’re just gonna jump as far forward as you can and land on both feet without falling backwards. Your distance is to where you land at the back of your heels. You’re gonna make three attempts and mark down your distance each time. The average distance for women is five feet, seven and a half inches to five feet 11 inches. Excellent is a little over six feet. If you’re below the average, this is just an indicator to work on strengthening that posterior chain and the leg muscles in general. Some of the best ways to improve your leg and glute strength are with strength training moves. So you can do deadlifts, there are squats, there are hip thrusts, lunges, and those are all the slower resistance training leg and glute strengthening moves, which are amazing for your leg strength.

(15:29)
But we can’t forget the importance of plyometrics or explosive cardio moves for developing the fast twitch muscle fibers that really help you have the power for short, forceful contractions for moves like a broad jump. So you can also do moves like jump squats, jump switch lunges, box jumps, sprints, and of course, actually just practicing broad jumps themselves. They are such a great exercise, even when you’re not measuring how far you can go! And this type of explosive leg strength and the muscles that it calls on is one of the reasons we have a lot of plyometric moves in my programs that really balance out the resistance training. We wanna load the joints and then explode, which helps really improve our muscular power. Like we were saying, it boosts our bone density and it improves our cardiovascular health. Not to mention this kind of explosive cardio really improves our ability to balance and our agility and coordination.

(16:25)
Plus, it improves our mind-body connection and our daily functional movement. So this is why I always have it in my programs, unless they’re specifically labeled low impact. Like we have a whole series of low impact challenges in Rock Your Life because some people do need to take the jumping out for different reasons, but otherwise we’ve got it in there because it’s so beneficial. Now when it comes to jumping and explosive movement, this is why I’m always going over form and alignment and actually why I created the Free Foundations of Functional Fitness workshop series to help you pay attention to your body mechanics. You can get that at thebettyrocker.com/fff/. If you wanna grab that, just like we don’t wanna load the joints with weight using poor form, we don’t wanna jump or explosively move with misaligned hips or knees or ankles. And sometimes you don’t know you’re not aligned until something starts to hurt.

(17:21)
But people often ignore early warning signs and just chalk them up to being sore from their workout. But our bodies are dynamic and life takes a toll, whether it’s because of the side of your body that’s dominant, or you’ve had kids or you’ve been in a car accident or been injured at some point and had to rehab and maybe your body developed some compensating type of patterns. And those key joints can get out of alignment easily, like our hips, our shoulders, our spinal column, our si, and so much more. And if you have the opportunity to work with a physical therapist or a movement practitioner who specializes in things like gait analysis or postural alignment, um, or optimization, just periodically and proactively checking your form and alignment with those hands-on assessments can be really beneficial. And if in the past you’ve had someone give you corrective exercises and you’ve stopped doing them, it may be that you just need to start to bring those back into play to really help your body.

(18:17)
Because patterns tend to be stuck for a long time. It really does take a dedicated effort to get the body to move the way that we want it to. Having somebody to help you with this kind of stuff is like someone holding up a very specialized mirror to your body, and this will 100% help you avoid injury and really train safely over time. Because I would say that probably one of the most common reasons people feel hesitant about jumping and doing explosive moves as they age is because either they’re worried they’re gonna get hurt or because they’re having achy joints or aches and pains. And when we’re training, we always wanna respect the body and not push it to a painful place, right? We wanna listen to those cues and back off if something hurts. Now, some great ways to prevent those issues can be training on a more aligned body and staying more flexible.

(19:11)
And these things might need a little more attention as we age, right? It might be that some hands-on care is needed from a practitioner, or we need to dial in our form a bit more in our training, or that maybe a little more stretching is needed around our workouts, like we were talking about before, is that can just really help keep the tissue around your joints more pliable, help you with your mobility and your flexibility. Sometimes people ask me about cardio and peri or post menopause because they’ve heard that cardio is bad for us at this time in our lives because it elevates our cortisol. This is a great question, and the answer is really important to hear if this is you. So number one, any type of workout that really taxes your body will elevate your cortisol and cause a stress response in your body.

(20:00)
That’s a really natural process, and it’s why I talk about exercise being a healthy stress. When we are healthy, we challenge the body against a load and it struggles right? Then it gets stronger. Our cortisol goes up, whether we’re doing a hard resistance training workout or a hard cardio workout, the thing that changes in the menopause years is that we just become more sensitive to the cortisol because of lower hormone levels. This is why all of my programs have custom training schedules for women in these life stages because you simply need a little more recovery around your high volume training so your body can come back strong again. In our cycling years, those higher levels of hormones give us more resilience. Would we also benefit from a more balanced training schedule then too? Absolutely. We don’t wanna be driving ourselves into the ground at any age, but we also recover faster in our cycling years.

(20:56)
So back to menopause and cardio. What really needs to change is the way we use cardio. So number one, we wanna make sure we’ve got the resistance training as a foundational piece of our workout programming, and then we’re adding in the explosive cardio that has so many benefits for us. A great thing about that explosive movement or plyometric training is that it’s short in duration typically. So you work on it in short intervals or bursts. This way, you get all those benefits without straining yourself. And we take appropriate recovery around our high volume training, whether it’s our cardio or our resistance training, and this is how you keep the stress to a level that you can effectively manage and you get all the benefits that those explosive movements bring us. So to recap, on our leg strength assessments today, we’ve gone over the sit to stand test or sit to rise test.

(21:50)
We’ve covered the wall sit test, and we’ve covered the standing broad jump test. And all of these are going to assess your leg strength and power in different ways, and also really help you check in with other important health markers that are essential to our strength, like our flexibility and our balance and coordination. These are all great to check in with yourself on periodically, and I would of course love to hear what you discover and what you’re working on as a result. So be sure to drop me a line either on my blog or on social media, on the show notes page we’re, you know, we’re all works in progress and we have our ups and downs when it comes to getting strong and staying that way. I’m no exception. I mentioned earlier that my accident really set me back and that it was great to have the grip strength test as I was getting myself back and rebuilding my strength.

(22:39)
So it’s really fun to to test these things out and see where we’re at and know that we can always get stronger if we do it safely, if we do it mindfully. So I really look forward to hearing from you about whatever you learn and any questions that you have. And you can get all the notes from today’s episode over on the show notes page on thebettyrocker.com, which includes the transcript and links to anything I’ve mentioned and a video version of this episode. So thanks again so much for spending some time with me today, and I look forward to continuing this conversation. So till next time, Rockstar, I’m Betty Rocker, and you are so awesome, flawsome and amazing. I’ll talk to you again real soon. Bye for now.