Menopause & Training

If you've hit your mid-40s and your hips are stiff getting out of the car, your shoulders ache every morning, and something hurts in a way it never used to, you've probably had one of two responses. Either you were fobbed off entirely, or you were told it's the menopause and left there. Neither one gives you anything to do. Joint pain rises sharply through perimenopause, the mechanism is hormonal, and as of 2024 it has a proper clinical name. What to do about it is where most

Reformer Pilates is one of the most misunderstood options when women start looking for the best exercise for perimenopause. Most people hear "Pilates" and think gentle. Low-impact. Recovery work. Something you do when you can't do real exercise. What it actually is: precise. And precision is exactly what the perimenopausal body needs. In 2024, a meta-analysis of 11 randomised trials involving 1,005 women found that mind-body exercise, the category Pilates sits in, produced la

The most common thing I hear from so many women arriving at my Ealing studio is some version of the same sentence: I am doing more than I have ever done, and my body is going in the wrong direction. More classes. More steps. More early mornings. And less to show for it. The assumption is almost always that effort is the problem. It is not. The type of effort is. Perimenopause changes the hormonal environment your training sits inside. The same sessions that built strength and

Most women I work with who are going through perimenopause are not doing nothing. They are training regularly. Some of them are training harder than they ever have. And it is not working: not for weight, not for energy, not for the belly that appeared with no obvious explanation. What I tell them, and what I wish someone had told me during my own perimenopause, is that the problem is usually not effort. The relationship between cortisol and menopause is the part of this pictu