Three years in the making, CrossFit Games champions and close friends Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir’s new 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 specializes in women’s health. The program is a six-week introductory training course designed specifically for women in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause.
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- The program includes four weekly training sessions — three strength training sessions and one interval session — as well as optional recovery and breath work.
- It also includes lectures and educational materials from Dr. Sims to help women understand what’s happening in their bodies during menopause and why they’re training this way.
Women going through the program will have access to a private Facebook page, where they can ask questions to Sims. Finally, the program includes videos of all the movements, including the warm-ups, to ensure everyone is going through the program correctly.
- “Let’s say you have [someone] that has never gone to the gym. I want her to feel like I’m literally holding her hands and helping her feel safe,” Thorisdottir told the Morning Chalk Up in an exclusive interview.
- Although March 11 is the program’s hard launch, it has already been tested by dozens of women, including the 30 women who just participated in their soft launch, Thorisdtottir explained.
- Thorisdottir’s husband, five-time CrossFit Games athlete Frederik Aegidius, is also heavily involved on the programming side of things. He’s gone “all in on knowing everything about menopause,” Thorisdottir said, laughing.
The program’s ultimate goal is to help women in the menopausal stage understand their fitness and nutritional demands so they can gain control of their new bodies.
- “We are all going to go through this journey, and it shouldn’t have to change your life so drastically. You shouldn’t have to be tired all the time and feel uncomfortable and stressed,” Thorisdtottir said.
She added, “There are a lot of things that can be done to make you feel better and be in more control. And by being in control, it also means understanding what it is that’s going on and knowing that you’re not in it by yourself.”
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Worth noting: By the time the first cohort of women finishes the six-week program, Empower by Dottir will begin rolling out their monthly subscription, which will include an ongoing training program.
- In the long term, Thorisdottir also hopes to offer 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 in their menopausal days started during the beginning of the pandemic.
She and Aegidius moved in with her parents into their summer house with a fully equipped gym, where they lived and trained when the world shut down.
This created the perfect opportunity for the 12-time Games athlete to take her mother under her wing.
- “OK, now is my opportunity to help my mom reach her goals, because she had been trying for a while…but (nothing) had really worked for her,” Thorisdtottir said.
- “I’m going to take care of your diet. I’m going to take care of your training program,” she told her mom.
Thorisdottir’s father also decided to participate, and what happened next surprised them all.
Thorisdottir’s dad, whose compliance wasn’t as perfect as her mom’s, started seeing huge gains and soon had a six-pack. But her mom didn’t see nearly the same results.
She felt a bit better and “felt proud of what she had been doing,” but it didn’t really reflect in her body composition or the number on the scale, 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 at the 2015 CrossFit Games, for help and discovered Dr. Sims offered an educational seminar for menopausal women.
The seminar was an eye-opening experience, Thorisdtottir explained, as she realized she had been focusing on all the wrong things with her mom’s training and nutrition.
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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 should have been focusing on 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 same time I was so excited because I now had a plan,” she said.
So she went back to the drawing board, made the training and diet changes she thought her mother needed, and things finally started to move in the direction they wanted.
After one year, her mom was sleeping better, she had more energy, her temperature regulation had improved, and she had lost the weight she wanted to lose.
- “The change is amazing,” Thorisdottir said
That’s when Thorisdottir reached out to Dr. Sims about collaborating with her and Davidsdottir to create Empower by Dottir.
The Bigger Picture
Empower by Dottir is just the first step in becoming a larger platform with a resource hub that provides accurate information to women in all stages of life.
- “There are so many experts on social media, and so much misinformation at the same time,” Thorisdottir said.
This is why she’s so passionate about getting the right information out there: “So it can change their lives the way it changed my moms,” she said.
She added: “I’m hoping that this platform, at some point, is just going to be a female empowerment platform…where we can get access to correct information so that we have the right knowledge to live our best lives.”
Featured image: @empowerbydottir / Instagram
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