(featured photo via UNC Athletics Communications)
“Excellence Unveiled at UNC with Chancellor Lee Roberts” is a series on 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each episode shines a light on members of the Carolina community and the outstanding work they do. Listen to the full episode below, or read the complete transcript.
In the tenth installment of Excellence Unveiled, listen to Abbie Smith-Ryan, professor and associate chair for research in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science, discuss tangible and achievable improvements in the health and quality of life made possible by study in movement, activity and metabolism. Smith-Ryan’s specific focus on women’s health and perimenopause provides unique insight and progress toward better health outcomes.
I am very passionate about improving health and quality of life for all people, with a special interest in women. And I think my passion started as a young, active girl searching for more knowledge, and, as I’ve been more in science, really using the evidence to find more questions that exercise and nutrition doesn’t have to be hard. So really inspired by the ability to make it more translatable and usable in day to day. The hard part is we never have enough time to exercise. And so one strategy that I’ve researched is the use of high-intensity interval training. That’s not because it’s necessarily any better than other forms of exercise, but it’s more time efficient. So, in reality, 10 minutes of exercise at a high intensity can have huge impacts on our heart health in a short period of time. It also can help metabolic health and metabolic function. And so this approach to exercise has really allowed a feasible and effective way to implement exercise into very busy lifestyles and dramatically impact our health over time. I think we’re in a really cool place at UNC that a lot of my work is funded. But I also have the freedom to do some interesting work based on the resources that we have.
I think one of the most exciting projects is the one I’m currently working on, looking at protein or fasting before high-intensity interval training in perimenopausal women, to understand what’s happening metabolically, cardiovascularly and for their muscles — really with this idea of how can we optimize exercise and nutrition to really have an impact on health and metabolic function.
We are about to start one of the first studies with resistance training in perimenopause, as well as a group including creatine supplementation. It will give us some really good insight on how women in midlife, how their bodies change and can change based on different lifestyle behaviors — which I think, and I hypothesize, will be very well received and will have a good impact.
So I think there’s so many gaps, and one that I’m in the middle of is really trying to help women identify and advocate themselves in perimenopause. And really that’s because it’s hard to identify when you’re in perimenopause, and a lot of the symptoms are both brain and body. And so we’re trying to understand when does perimenopause start and what are those physiological changes. I think it’s a huge opportunity because now there’s a lot of conversation about hormone therapy, which is great and empowering for women. But regardless of that, we still need these lifestyle behaviors. We still need exercise. We still need nutrition. And there’s so much noise, and it’s so hard to know what should we actually do. And my research is really aimed at how do we narrow this down into ways that you and I can implement in our day to day, — with full-time jobs, as moms — to really have an impact on our health that is not hard and that is effective and that we can still enjoy our health and quality of life.
Abbie Smith-Ryan (photo via UNC)
Click here to learn more about the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at UNC
