Three years within the making, CrossFit Games champions and shut friends Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir’s recent training program — Empower by Dottir — launches on March 11, 2024.
The details: Empower by Dottir is a partnership between Davidsdottir, Thorisdottir, and Dr. Stacy Sims, an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist from Australia who focuses on women’s health. The program is a six-week introductory training course designed specifically for ladies in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause.
- The program includes 4 weekly training sessions — three strength training sessions and one interval session — in addition to optional recovery and breath work.
- It also includes lectures and academic materials from Dr. Sims to assist women understand what’s happening of their bodies during menopause and why they’re training this manner.
Women going through this system could have access to a personal Facebook page, where they will ask inquiries to Sims. Finally, this system includes videos of all of the movements, including the warm-ups, to make sure everyone seems to be going through this system accurately.
- “Let’s say you’ve [someone] that has never gone to the gym. I would like her to feel like I’m literally holding her hands and helping her feel protected,” Thorisdottir told the Morning Chalk Up in an exclusive interview.
- Although March 11 is this system’s hard launch, it has already been tested by dozens of ladies, including the 30 women who just participated of their soft launch, Thorisdtottir explained.
- Thorisdottir’s husband, five-time CrossFit Games athlete Frederik Aegidius, can also be heavily involved on the programming side of things. He’s gone “all in on knowing all the pieces about menopause,” Thorisdottir said, laughing.
The program’s ultimate goal is to assist women within the menopausal stage understand their fitness and dietary demands so that they can gain control of their recent bodies.
- “We are all going to undergo this journey, and it shouldn’t must change your life so drastically. You shouldn’t must be drained on a regular basis and feel uncomfortable and stressed,” Thorisdtottir said.
She added, “There are quite a lot of things that could be done to make you’re feeling higher and be in additional control. And by being on top of things, it also means understanding what it’s that’s happening and knowing that you simply’re not in it by yourself.”
Worth noting: By the time the primary cohort of ladies finishes the six-week program, Empower by Dottir will begin rolling out their monthly subscription, which can include an ongoing training program.
- In the long run, Thorisdottir also hopes to supply programs for young girls going through puberty and for pregnant women.
Why Thorisdottir Created Empower
Currently seven months pregnant and still an elite CrossFit athlete, Thorisdottir’s interest in helping women of their menopausal days began in the course of the starting of the pandemic.
She and Aegidius moved in together with her parents into their summer house with a completely equipped gym, where they lived and trained when the world shut down.
This created the right opportunity for the 12-time Games athlete to take her mother under her wing.
- “OK, now could be my opportunity to assist my mom reach her goals, because she had been trying for some time…but (nothing) had really worked for her,” Thorisdtottir said.
- “I’m going to handle your weight-reduction plan. I’m going to handle your training program,” she told her mom.
Thorisdottir’s father also decided to participate, and what happened next surprised all of them.
Thorisdottir’s dad, whose compliance wasn’t as perfect as her mom’s, began seeing huge gains and shortly had a six-pack. But her mom didn’t see nearly the identical results.
She felt a bit higher and “felt happy with what she had been doing,” but it surely didn’t really reflect in her body composition or the number on the dimensions, Thorisdottir explained.
- “This is so ridiculous. This is just so unfair,” Thorisdottir said of the difference in results her parents saw.
So Thorisdottir dug deeper.
She turned to Dr. Sims, whom she first met when she suffered heat stroke on the 2015 CrossFit Games, for help and discovered Dr. Sims offered an academic seminar for menopausal women.
The seminar was an eye-opening experience, Thorisdtottir explained, as she realized she had been specializing in all of the improper things together with her mom’s training and nutrition.
Thorisdottir had been largely designing longer, fat-burning-style metabolic conditioning training sessions and higher-rep bodybuilding-style lifting for her mom. She soon realized she must have been specializing in shorter, interval-style sprint work, power work, and lower-rep strength training.
Thorisdottir was frustrated she didn’t know this information before, but “at the identical time I used to be so excited because I now had a plan,” she said.
So she went back to the drafting board, made the training and weight-reduction plan changes she thought her mother needed, and things finally began to maneuver within the direction they wanted.
After one 12 months, her mom was sleeping higher, she had more energy, her temperature regulation had improved, and he or she had lost the load she desired to lose.
- “The change is amazing,” Thorisdottir said
That’s when Thorisdottir reached out to Dr. Sims about collaborating together with her and Davidsdottir to create Empower by Dottir.
The Bigger Picture
Empower by Dottir is just step one in becoming a bigger platform with a resource hub that gives accurate information to women in all stages of life.
- “There are so many experts on social media, and a lot misinformation at the identical time,” Thorisdottir said.
This is why she’s so captivated with getting the precise information on the market: “So it may possibly change their lives the way in which it modified my mothers,” she said.
She added: “I’m hoping that this platform, in some unspecified time in the future, is just going to be a female empowerment platform…where we will get access to correct information in order that we’ve got the precise knowledge to live our greatest lives.”
