Bill Campbell, PhD, has spent his entire career as a fat loss researcher. So when his wife hit menopause and wanted help with body composition changes, he thought it would be easy. Spoiler alert: It was not. Which made him realize his field had a lot to learn, especially about active women whose bodies change even when their training and nutrition has not. Now he’s on a mission, diving into the literature and conducting research of his own to further our understanding of body composition changes...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 213
Running through the menopause transition can be challenging. If you feel like throwing in the towel sometimes, you’re not alone. This week’s guest, distance runner and blogger at runandbebrave.com has faced it all: injuries, setbacks, poor sleep, fatigue, vanishing motivation, hot flashes, and all the joint pain that accompanies the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. Through it all, she found a way to keep going, and she believes you can, too. She talks all about how this week. Normi Coto, P...
Feb 05, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 212
Welcome to Menopause Research Review! Now that menopause has hit the mainstream, we’re swimming in a steady stream of studies, which is great and can also be overwhelming. So for 2025, we’re introducing a regular segment called Menopause Research Review where we break down key research as it comes out with resident reproductive endocrinologist and menopause performance specialist Dr. Carla DiGirolamo. This week we kick it off with a study published in Menopause: The range and variation in serum ...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 211
Spikes, crashes, excursions, and elevated numbers. Blood sugar is on a lot of active midlife women’s minds. But what do we really know about what this all means…and what it doesn’t, especially when it comes to long term health? This week’s guest Oxford nutrition scientist and globally recognized type 2 diabetes expert Dr. Nicola Guess helps sort through all things elevated glucose and helps separate what we need to worry about with what we don’t. Nicola Guess, RD, MPH, PhD, is a dietitian based ...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 210
Women are often accused of being “too emotional”, whether it’s PMS, perimenopause, or just plain life. Worse, we’re made to believe those emotions make us weak. What if the opposite were true? What if our emotions were our super power, a force we could channel to give us strength in and out of the gym? This week’s guest Aimee Anaya Everett is living proof we can do just that, as she has channeled her own emotional turmoil into a world class Olympic coaching and lifting career. Now she helps othe...
Jan 15, 2025•52 min•Ep. 209
For the longest time, endurance athletes avoided the weight room, afraid unwanted muscles would weigh them down, while strength athletes all but kicked cardio to the curb. Now we know that no matter if you’re running an ultra or competing in a CrossFit competition, the right blend of cardio and strength is the secret sauce for success–especially once you hit midlife and menopause. This week, renowned exercise physiologist Dr. Alyssa Olenick dives in on how our hormones impact our muscles, metabo...
Jan 08, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 208
Supplements get a bad rap. And to be fair, there is a lot of trash out there. But there are some treasures, too, especially for midlife and menopausal women who often can use some extra help building bone, recovering from injuries, and hitting it hard during training and events. This week we break down the best ergogenic aids for active women in and beyond the menopause transition with Kristen Arnold of Sports Nutrition for Women. Kristen Arnold MS, RDN, CSSD is a board-certified sports dietitia...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 209
Here we go again with the bombardment of “New Year, New You” ads and messages to “eat this, not that,” or “do this specific workout for 30 days to get amazing abs.” You know the drill and they’re probably in your feed as we speak. In this first-of-its kind episode, Feisty Media podcast hosts Kathryn Taylor (Girls Gone Gravel), Sara Gross (Women’s Performance Podcast), Kelly O’Mara (If We Were Riding), and Selene Yeager (Hit Play Not Pause) unite for a candid conversation about these societal pre...
Dec 27, 2024•57 min
The conversation around hormone therapy for menopausal symptoms is pretty clear. Hormone therapy is the gold standard for treating hot flashes and night sweats and can help with many other common symptoms that come with the menopause transition. It’s very effective and broadly safe. But recently, the conversation has evolved past symptom management and into preventative health with many experts suggesting that hormone therapy may play a larger role in extending a woman’s healthspan, if not lifes...
Dec 25, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 208
A healthy lifestyle doesn’t mean you won’t suffer during peri or postmenopause. Many women are led to believe that if they exercise, eat healthy, and practice all the right lifestyle habits that menopause won’t really affect them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if you’re doing “everything right” you can still be blindsided by hot flashes, sleepless nights, joint pain, mood swings and/or other symptoms, and if you are, pharmaceutical tools like hormone therapy are there for you. Th...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 207
If you’ve ever felt stiff and stuck like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz after being left out in the rain; have tight, sore knots that restrict your mobility, or have battled issues like frozen shoulder, this show is for you. We’re learning all about fascia–the unsung connective tissue that holds our muscles in place, facilitates healthy, dynamic movement, and transfers energy throughout the body. When it gets stuck–which it's more likely to do during peri and postmenopause–we do, too. This week...
Dec 11, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 206
Menopause doesn't mean that you will automatically be slower. It does mean you may have to change the way you train, especially since we don’t bounce back from hard efforts the way we used to, and we’re more vulnerable to injury. This week’s guest knows all about all of that as she recently worked her way back from surgery for a blown ACL to running and qualifying for the Boston Marathon 22 months later. This week we dive into her story and the adaptations in exercise programming, strength train...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 205
Horrible periods. Crippling anxiety. Weight gain. Rage. Sheet-soaking night sweats. This week’s guest, elite runner, triathlete, and endurance coach, Phaedra Kennedy had all of it, and unfortunately at the time, had no idea it was perimenopause. Because that’s just how it’s been for women. We get the birds and the bees talk as kids, but then we get to this age, and it’s just like, figure it out. You're on your own. Phaedra has devoted her life to changing that reality and to helping midlife and ...
Nov 27, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 204
Midlife and the menopause transition can leave us breathless, with stress, rising anxiety, and for some an accelerated decline in lung function. The good news is help is right under your nose–your breath. Many of us think of breathing as something that just happens–so we really don’t think about it at all. But as this week’s guest, human performance specialist Erin Carson explains, deliberately thinking about and using our breath gives us the power to calm our nervous system, decompress our join...
Nov 20, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 203
November is National Diabetes Awareness Month, and many peri- and postmenopausal women have questions. Like why is my fasting blood glucose and/or AIC going up? What role do hormones, diet, exercise, and lifestyle play? What does it mean (and not mean) for my current and future health? So, this week we sat down with midlife health and nutrition specialist Val Schonberg to explore “prediabetes” (which, spoiler alert, is not recognized as a diagnostic category by the World Health Organization) and...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 202
Primary ovarian insufficiency (POI) sends about 4% of women into premature menopause before the age of 40. Yet, the condition is little understood and for those experiencing it, incredibly isolating. This week we talk about the struggles women with premature menopause face with athlete and entrepreneur Christy Napolitano Wernau, who experienced premature menopause at age 38. We also talk with her doctor, national expert and leader in menopause, Jewel Kling, MD, MPH, about the unique care women w...
Nov 06, 2024•59 min•Ep. 201
We’re celebrating four years and 200 episodes together at Hit Play Not Pause! It’s like we’re finishing up peri/menopause high school and now we’re off to college. Actually, it is a lot like that when you consider how much our knowledge about this pivotal life transition has grown and keeps expanding. So, this week host Selene Yeager sits down with Hit Play Not Pause producer Carrie Barrett to talk about what we’ve learned, our hopes for the future, and a whole lot more. Here’s to four more year...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 200
We don’t have to tell you that menopause can be a real sleep wrecker. Recent research finds that half of women aged 45 to 64 say they experience sleep disruption due to menopause. One of the biggest culprits is hormonally-driven symptoms like night sweats, so hormone therapy can help. But it’s not a guarantee to a good night’s sleep, as this week’s guest, holistic sleep coach Morgan Adams can attest. Morgan went from relying on prescription sleeping pills for nearly a decade to doing the work to...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 199
The messages we see and hear about hormone therapy are often head spinning, as headlines seemingly say one thing and guidelines say another. Medical experts themselves spend days arguing on Instagram. And women are left wondering how to make the best decisions for their health and well being. We feel it, too. So this week, host Selene Yeager opens up about her own journey through menopause and hormone therapy and has a sit down, candid conversation with the podcast’s resident hormone specialist ...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 198
Female athletes of our generation have been told a lot of bullsh*t stories about what we’re supposed to look like; how much we’re supposed to weigh; what we’re supposed to eat (or more often not eat), and what we should or shouldn’t do in sports and training and life. We’ve lived through diet culture, sport diet culture, menopause diet culture. It is really hard to unlearn all those messages, but we owe it to ourselves to try. To liberate ourselves from the old bullsh*t that wasn’t even ours to ...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 197
For literally decades, active women like Natalie Perkins have suffered through night sweats, mood swings, low mojo, injuries, and disruptive symptoms because everyone was scared off hormone therapy by outdated information. Unfortunately, though the tide is turning, it’s been a slow process and millions of women are still suffering for no good reason. That’s why Natalie became a midlife women’s health advocate and founded PAUZ, a company devoted to empowering and educating women through and beyon...
Oct 02, 2024•49 min•Ep. 196
Frozen with fear. That’s how many active women can find themselves on mountain bike trails, ski slopes, and wherever they recreate as our hormones fluctuate and decline in the menopause transition. That’s something high altitude mountaineer Jeannette McGill knows all too well as she summits some of the tallest mountains in the world and sets her sights on Everest. She’s also come to learn that fear can be trained like a muscle, and instead of giving into it–and giving up on her lofty goals–she w...
Sep 25, 2024•59 min•Ep. 195
Menopause is a confusing, sometimes isolating time. We have more information than ever, but can still feel in the dark about exactly what’s going on and what we should or maybe shouldn’t be doing about it. To help, Feisty Menopause and Hit Play Not Pause host Selene Yeager have created an 8 week course called Navigate Menopause that guides women through menopause physiology, hormonal and other therapies, and the exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle strategies that can help smooth the transition, a...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 194
Of all the things women worry about when it comes to hormone therapy, breast cancer, for many, tops the list. Our current understanding of breast cancer risk–even among at-risk women–has changed dramatically in recent years and continues to evolve. To fully understand hormone therapy and breast cancer risk, we need to understand that hormone therapy is not all the same, nor is breast cancer. There are many forms and formulations of hormone therapy and there are many variations of the disease we ...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 193
Many of us going through menopause at the moment were the latchkey kids of Generation X, who came of age without a whole lot of supervision and (though it certainly wasn’t all bad!), more than our share of angst, body image issues, eating disorders, and cultural BS about how women were supposed to look and behave. It wasn’t always easy, but it also taught us how to fend for ourselves, be resilient, and forge our own way–qualities that are very helpful as we navigate the menopause transition and ...
Sep 04, 2024•50 min•Ep. 192
Many of us grew up with implicit–and sometimes explicit–messages to be small, both in our physical selves and in our power. Now, as we hit midlife, we’re increasingly rejecting those BS limitations and seeing just how powerful we can be. That’s exactly what two-time Olympian Gabrielle Rose did in her mid-40s when she set her sights on the 2024 Olympic Trials, were she achieved personal bests in both the 100- (1:08.32) and 200-meter breaststroke (2:30.13), advancing to the semifinals as the oldes...
Aug 28, 2024•54 min•Ep. 191
Menopause can be challenging. Menopause for women who have been through trauma can be exponentially harder. Few know this better than political refugee and abuse survivor, Mirella Russell, one of the “House Wives” of Hip Hop who found hip hop dance when she was 40 and has used it to bring joy through her grief and struggles for the past 10 years. She’s joined this week by fellow team manager, Alexa Uhrich, who along with the rest of their midlife squad has been dancing through sleepless nights, ...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 190
Women and girls have historically been overlooked when it comes to ADHD. Now experts understand that many girls and women do indeed have ADHD. It just looks different, and estrogen has a big role in how it plays out and in how we treat it, which becomes especially important once we hit the menopause transition. For women with ADHD–and many are just being diagnosed for the first time in midlife–the fluctuation and decline of estrogen levels can make their condition much harder to manage, which is...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 189
The New York Times recently called Ozempic a “new match for menopausal weight gain”. But is it? These drugs can be a godsend for those who need them. But there's a lot we need to understand. How do they work? How well do they work? Who benefits from them? What are their risks? What impact do they have on muscle, bone, and performance? How do they affect training and racing? We dig into all of that and more this week with endocrinologist and Ironman triathlete Dr. Jody Dushay who has been researc...
Aug 07, 2024•1 hr 15 min
*This episode originally dropped on January 3, 2024* As we roll into a brand new year filled with goals and aspirations, this week’s guest, fan-favorite Peloton Cycling instructor Christine D’Ercole would like to remind us that we are bigger than a smaller pair of pants, and the most powerful thing anyone can say to us is what we say to ourselves, and we have agency in that conversation. Now 52, Christine has started using her enormous platform to share her experiences with the menopause transit...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 11 min
