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Two Badass Moves For Women on the Verge of Perimenopause.

Deadlifts.

Pullups.

I ordered a barbell and plates—175 pounds’ worth—on Amazon. I aim to lift that beast ten times a day, five days a week. It doesn’t always happen. Some weeks I pull only one or two days, but I no longer beat myself up for missed workouts, or missed anything else, like when I forget to fetch my kids from school. That happened. Twice. One day I will share my secret recipe for not beating myself up anymore, and yes, it includes drugs. Another day I will share my findings for how to remember important things, like fetching children from school.

But back to our feature—

I started deadlifting only recently. My most recent and successful (i.e., long-lasting and effective) fitness foray started with boot camp, which led to kettlebell training and now to the bar. I started with much lighter weight, say 80 pounds, but over time, with consistency have been able to pull 175 for five reps. I’m going for two sets of five with minimal rest between sets; then I’ll order more plates and start all over again with one rep at a time. According to some strength experts who I trust, pulling three times your body weight is a fantastic strength goal. For me, that would be about 380. Holy shit.

When I first pulled 175 I could do ten slow sets of one rep each. That’s 50 reps a week. With consistency, you can’t not get stronger. Deadlifting develops your back, butt, hamstrings and lats. Beauty muscles. Hit-that-MILF muscles. If you don’t have a barbell you can deadlift your children, spouse or mother-in-law.

Pair that deadlift with pull-ups—same 50 reps a week split into 10 reps a day—and you’ve got a total body workout that takes about ten/fifteen minutes, including the rest breaks. If you can’t do a pull-up, climb under your dining table (seriously) and do “aussie” pullups (from down under—get it?). Grip the ledge and pull your chest to the table in a stiff plank position. Once you can bang out ten reps, get on a chair and cheat your chin over a pull-up bar. Hang there for a beat or two and then slowly lower yourself till your arms are straight. This is called a negative. Over time a heap of negatives will turn into positives and you WILL have real live pull-up action that you can impress your friends with, intimidate your enemies and stave off decrepitude.