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Welcome to Strength Renewed, the podcast that celebrates new beginnings for women 40 and beyond. This is your go-to space for empowering conversations about building resilience, strength, and confidence—inside and out.
Discover how to fuel your body with good nutrition, train smart, and cultivate a strong mindset to thrive in midlife and beyond. Whether you're navigating hormonal changes, starting (or restarting) your fitness journey, or simply striving to feel your best, Strength Renewed offers expert advice, real-life stories, and actionable strategies to help you live a vibrant, powerful life.
It's never too late to redefine your strength.
00:19
Hi, Max. How's it going? How's it turning into autumn yet? No, we are entering into summer season. We had summer, now we're like, you know, now it's quite, it's a late summer. We had a fairly, we had like a super like moderate temps, was like not very hot at all. And so I think for like the next couple of months it'll be.
00:46
But it's a nice way to ease back into the school year and it's kind of fun. The kids are still sort of swimming and going to the pool and that feels good. So it's nice. You have the stress of the school year, but then you also have the sun and the serotonin. Oh, lovely. Lovely. That sounds lovely. It's just getting into spring now, like soon. And so everything's getting lighter. It's getting fresher. It feels fresher.
01:18
And we are like less than four weeks away, three and a half weeks from starting our run. I know, I'm thinking about you like every week. Tell everybody what you're doing. Well, at the minute I'm nursing an injury. Oh, shit. Yeah. what happened? What did you get? What is injured? Well, on Sunday, I went, we had our last 50K run to do.
01:43
And we started and I felt great, like energy wise felt great, stomach felt great. But then after about 7K, it was quite cool. so sometimes when you're cool and you can't really feel your legs warming up, you're you know, you're running and it's fine. But I started feeling this pull behind my knee where the hamstring inserts. And I'm like, I can't tell if it's just the cold, because sometimes it can feel similar or if it's actually a pulse. I started feeling it about 7K.
02:12
At about 11K, I'm like, okay, no, this is a definite thing. And I had to own up. Like the last thing you want to do on a run is own up to having something not go right. Like, because you're almost admitting it to yourself. You're like, okay, this is not great. And I might not be able to finish this. And so it was with Hubster and our friend Andrew. And I'm like, guys, something's going on with my leg and I don't think I'll be able to, I'm going to continue to run, but you guys might need to run a little bit.
02:42
And they didn't and they're like, what's up? And I said, and I said, you know, I've got this pole and I don't think it's going away. And ultimately I ran to about 17 K and we were doing a two 25 K loops. So it was quite good because I knew that at that point I could actually turn the first 25 K loop into a 21 K. And then I didn't have to do the next one. Like, okay, I'm going to drop off here. I'll see you guys back at the car. Cause they'll continue to run.
03:10
and I'll just walk it in. And it's just so gutting not to be able to finish. Albeit I've done almost all of the training. So it's fine for the actual event. And as long as I take this sort of slight injury seriously. it just, I basically, when I was pulling my knee up, sort of flexing, just, the hamstring was just really sore right behind the knee joint. And so I was unable to like just pull my foot up.
03:40
to my butt actually because of that like pain. So yeah, so definitely disappointing. And- you like, did you start walking then or like at what point did you like, I you're a very rational person. So at what point you were like, I don't know where I want to keep pushing this. Like at what point did you say, I'm just going to start like, I'm going to walk the, did you walk the rest of it or what'd you do?
04:08
Yeah, I walked from 17K back to the car. Yeah. So 21K. Yeah. I took the short route, walked it in. I could still walk. um But then of course post, it always feels, this always happens as well. Once you're sort of out of the running environment and everything sort of stiffens up, like it just got so much more sore and I couldn't lift my leg, lift my knee up to go up a stair. And I'm like, ah, so gutting. And then on Monday I went to see my physio and she's wonderful, Emma.
04:38
um And she's like, okay, I think you've got a bit of a tear just down in the insertion. And there was a big bulge. And so she did some needlework and some massage. And I love Emma for her ability to give me instructions because I love my osteo as well, but he's not as good at giving me direction as to what he's, you know, he's a little bit more like, well, don't run of us hurts, but run other one, you know, so she's like, love people like Emma. Yeah. Cause I need a man. Yeah, I need a road man. m
05:07
Yeah. And so she's gotten me to, I'll get an ultrasound tomorrow for it. She did the needles and then over the course of the last couple of days, Like acupuncture needles or like what kind of needling would you do? Dry needling. So different to acupuncture. Yeah. um And it's just super tight down there, but over the last couple of days, I've been able to, I'm now walking normally, which is great. um And she did, I had another session with her today.
05:36
And then I've got an ultrasound in the osteotomar. Basically this just add throws a layer of additional time and money spent to rehabbing it to make sure that I can get to the start line of that race and just complete it. And I will be able to, but it's just, is the time that's really important to keep everything in check and make sure I don't do anything untoward like run too quickly or that kind of thing. Yeah, that's right.
06:05
the knee jerk is to maybe you want to go back a little sooner because you're getting closer to the actual race, but you're going to remind yourself to just do what your body feels necessary. And at some point, one of these podcasts needs to be all about that dry, dry needling. All about these like things that happen outside of your, um you know, outside of your runs, outside of your training to keep your body.
06:31
you know, healthy, because I think I think any no one would disagree that the that amount of mileage requires a whole lot of work out outside of running. I know. Yeah, it really just does. Because that's this is a tremendous amount of mileage. But um but I'm so glad that you um have her in your life. And I'm happy that she gave you bit of a road map. And when do you think you'll try running on it? So not this week, and maybe not next week either. The ultrasound will tell.
07:01
um Yeah, so that'll be good. She thinks it's a grade one tier. And so I'll get that done, the ultrasound done tomorrow, and then we can just sort of assess. And then she's quite good at knowing sort of where I'm at and where I need to be. But so outside of the not running, um I can elliptical train without pain, which is great now. I can um exercise without pain. But the other thing which I wanted to remind people of this podcast was the
07:29
collagen vitamin C protocol, which I was just thinking about that. Like everybody thinks about collagen and we'll talk about the ways they think about collagen, but they don't necessarily think about it in this manner that you're about to talk about. So it's, yeah, it's how I got super interested in collagen was in 2016. I was listening to a podcast with professor Keith Barr and there was no published research that I could see at the time, but he was talking about how they'd done some preclinical trials. So Petri dish trials, looking at
07:58
bone tissue and looking at ligament and tendon tissue and the provision of vitamin C and collagen and helping to accelerate healing. And then subsequent to that in 2019, he published a case study series on NRL players, no wait, NBA players, where the NBA, I think there were three of them, had busted their ACL ligament. Yeah, ACL ligament.
08:27
15 grams of collagen with 50 milligrams of vitamin C, so a very small amount of vitamin C. And in addition to a sort of tendon loading rehab protocol, and they did an MRI post-surgery. So they obviously had surgery first, this was on the recovery from surgery. Six months later, they did another MRI and then they got a doctor who was blinded to the athlete, didn't know anything about the condition.
08:55
he was supposed to be busted. He couldn't tell the difference between the ligaments because they put it down to the... So basically they were back almost playing again within, I think, six weeks of surgery or something incredible. They were so bought in, the ethics were bought into the protocol. So they did it 98 % of adherence and it wasn't...
09:20
just the rehab protocol was the collagen and vitamin C as well. let's talk quickly about what the actual protocol is because immediately, and I'm sure a lot of people that are listening to it, when they think of collagen, they probably think of what I'm thinking. I buy my collagen peptides, whatever, my container of that. And for me, I typically put it in my coffee because that's just how I like it. It kind of makes it creamy.
09:48
you know, it adds a little bit of protein, but it gives all these other benefits. That's that's how I typically take collagen. I bet that's how a lot of people like when they think about it. Is that are we talking about the same kind of is it the same kind of collagen or is it like a different kind of collagen? Same kind. OK, so so so for this particular injury prevention, so we can all be NBA players, because in some cases we want to recover and heal like them. We would you would take the collagen and and the vitamin C together like once a day like what?
10:18
So this isn't injury prevention, this is more healing from injury. from an injury. Yeah. And so you put 15 grams of collagen and 50 milligrams of vitamin C, which is a tiny amount. And you have it together. You might have it in a smoothie, you have it in a coffee or a glass of water. I've had mine in the morning with my electrolytes with my coffee before I train. And so you do it about an hour before exercise. Okay.
10:47
because it takes that amount of time for the amino acids that collagen peptides are or provide. takes about an hour for them to peak in your bloodstream. And then when you do exercise, then you've got that blood flow going through. So those amino acids are going to areas of your body where blood flow might be poor and ligaments and tendons often have poor blood flow. So by doing exercise, you're getting that blood flow moving. You're getting those amino acids to sort of be
11:16
traffic to the site of interest. I'm like, well, there's no randomized controlled trial to show that this works. But man, like I've got enough evidence here for me to just, I've got nothing to lose from trying it. So I've definitely instigated that. And to be fair, tell all my athletes who I see who get injured, I absolutely get them on this protocol as well. And they do it in the morning, they put the collagen in, put the, is it a serum, the vitamin, is it like just like a liquid or is it a?
11:45
pill or capsule or really doesn't matter. It could be a kiwi fruit. And the key is to have it. It can come in the form of food. Yeah. Amazing. No, seriously. I'm thinking I know this is how your brain your brains like, I don't understand. But there's a lot of people that are not thinking like just in randomized controlled studies, right? They're literally going like, does this but I need you talk about the roadmap, Mickey, this is the roadmap, right? Like, the exact thing. So the collagen, but the vitamins,
12:15
the vitamin C can come in a form of a kiwi. So you can have collagen in your coffee, you can eat a kiwi, which would seem fitting that you would say kiwi. Yeah. That's because it's the one thing I think about when it comes to vitamin C. you do it an hour before. So that's the key. Okay. I probably need to remind myself of a list of like really high vitamin C foods because I always forget that kiwi is also kind of a magical food. has a lot of like...
12:42
everything in it, I should just buy more kiwi because it's kind of perfect. But I like oranges and you you think of like the basics of the like vitamin C type heavy things, I am I just people need to be reminded that by the way, you can also get this through from food. Equally, I've got a powder, can use a powder. And often when people get like a vitamin C tablet, they're often 500 milligrams. So you can see that 50 milligrams is a really tiny amount compared to what you would otherwise get. But
13:11
It doesn't matter how you take it, but what matters is that you have it together. So I mean, if you caveat to this is that this isn't a definitive will help you, because we can't say that, but we can say that it won't harm you. ah To your point with collagen, it doesn't contribute to protein. If you've got a low protein intake, I don't rely on it for protein. But if you're well in excess of 100 grams a day, sure, count it towards your protein intake.
13:41
I like, cause I feel like it gives me a head start. If I put it in my coffee, just to me, I see it as like I'm revving my engine up, know what I mean? Kind of getting my body primed for a day of protein. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Um, and, but I think the timing and the amount is critical. 15 grams an hour before exercise. So if you were training, let's say you sprain your ankle and you're doing something in the afternoon, then you would have it as, you know,
14:09
of a mid-afternoon smoothie or something. I see. And I guess the other thing too, because timing is, you know, it's hard to always nail the timing, but in the spirit of all this, it's, you know, do it as close to an hour before exercise as possible. So even if you aren't exercising in the morning, would you then not take it in the morning? Yeah, exactly. Because the key is that the amino acids are peaking in the bloodstream. So there's no point having them peak it.
14:37
7am if you're exercising at 3 o'clock. you'd want to have it at 2 o'clock. That protocol would be, so still have your collagen or coffee if you're like me because you like it. if you're doing it for this particular protocol, then collagen and the vitamin would be an hour before exercise and no big deal. You can put the powder in if you want to, mix collagen and put it in water, put it in a smoothie, boom boom. It can be quick and easy or have a kiwi and have some collagen. But it's about having vitamin C and the collagen together an hour before you.
15:07
exercise and just you'll get, okay. you, and we've talked about this, there's lots of supplements that just work better when they're timed properly, but there's, but fear not if like a multivitamin, if you don't just remember to take them. Sometimes it's what I say to myself, like I found a perfect time, but, but that's, but that's really good to know. So there's clearly many collagen is also one of those kinds of like things that I'm making sure is stocked in my pantry because I think there's a ton of benefits to it. um
15:36
you know, in the same way that I'm starting to believe in magnesium and creatine too. So a big warm hug to that particular supplement. It's nice to know there's multiple uses, multiple uses, lots of ways you can you can put this into your body. And I hope that it continues to help you and getting back to running and keep my fingers crossed for a healthy ultrasound. Thanks, whatever is happening tomorrow. I believe in my heart. Yeah.
16:06
um I hope so. Like I had my other session with Emma today and all the swelling had gone. She's just got a tiny little divot where she thinks the tear is. And so that will be, that's what we'll figure out tomorrow. Yes. I know it well. What are you grateful for? um Well, I'm grateful for both Emma and collagen today, actually. It takes a lot of things and a lot of resources to keep her body healthy.
16:35
but it's all worth it. Yeah. What about you, Jis? I am grateful for you and your um inspiration with all of your miles. I think it's very cool that you're doing what you love and I want everybody to do the sports that they love and bring them so much joy. So grateful for that. And yeah, I'm grateful for college. I'm grateful for I'm grateful for things that make us healthier and stronger and are
17:03
not that difficult to incorporate into our life. I, you know, I've been honestly, I made an iced coffee the other day and I always put a little half and half and I put a little bit of collagen in it and people are like, well, you know, that's it. Does that change the taste? I was like, no, it makes it even like creamier. And so it's always fun when you put something that you know is good for you and it just makes it better. It doesn't even make it, it's not, you're not like squeezing your nose and you know, like drinking it down. like, actually this is delicious.
17:30
coffee tastes even better and I'm doing something good for myself. So amazing. Hey, there it is. Lovely. I look forward to seeing you on the other side. See you later. Bye.