Exercise to energise, not exhaust

Experienced health writer Nicky Pellegrino offers a funny, frank, optimistic, refreshing and up-to-the-minute guide to menopause and perimenopause for the modern woman.

If you google the words ‘exercise, menopause, midlife', what you'll find is a whole lot of websites offering the advice that you should exercise more, much more.

Lift heavier weights, increase your heart rate, up the intensity, exercise harder, longer, faster. The assumption is that you're a middle-aged woman so you're probably struggling to get off the sofa. But quite possibly you are already doing a lot of high-intensity exercise and it isn't feeling as good as it used to.

The current generation of middle-aged women grew up with gym culture. We had the leg warmers for our Jane Fonda workouts in the 1980s. We did a ten-minute sweat with Richard Simmons. We tried step aerobics, high-impact, low-impact, bodypump, combat and jam, Jazzercise, Zumba. Some of us ran marathons or did triathlons (not me).

Many women have never slowed the pace. These days they're trying CrossFit or F45, they're doing ocean swims and cycling round Taupō. Injuries tend to happen more often than they used to, muscles take longer to recover, and many women, despite healthy eating and all that activity, are still struggling not to gain weight.

When I first came across the idea that in midlife highly active women might find that they need to exercise less, I thought it was a bit of a con. Then I talked to Wendy Sweet, and things started to make sense.

Wānaka-based Wendy is a former nurse and personal trainer who re-invented herself in midlife, becoming a women's health and ageing educator. She studied for a PhD in Health, Sport and Human Performance at the University of Waikato, where she has also lectured in the Faculty of Health. And she created My Menopause Transformation, an international online programme with lifestyle changes that women use alongside, or instead of, HRT to support themselves through the midlife transition.

Wendy is very interested in reducing inflammation by eating well, managing stress and staying active in an appropriate way for your age and stage. She says that exercise should energise you, not exhaust you.

Yes you need balance, strength and flexibility, yes you need cardio fitness, but you don't need to be pushing yourself in a programme that has been designed for a high-performance male.

There has been a lot of focus on younger female athletes who exercise intensely and don't consume enough calories, adversely affecting their hormones and bone density as a result (it's known as the female athlete triad).

Midlife women seem to have been overlooked, however. No one is thinking too much about anything except the fact that exercise is good for us because it builds bone, is vital for cardiovascular health and can prevent weight gain. Hence the ‘do more' message that we've got used to hearing, rather than specifically tailoring workouts to us.

Wendy describes having a light-bulb moment when she realised that most of the research around sport and exercise science has been conducted with men, younger people or Boomers over the age of 65.

There is a gap in the knowledge, and midlife women are falling right into it. We're losing oestrogen, our joints and muscles hurt, we're hot, not sleeping and exhausted, and yet we're trying to push just as hard when we're exercising.

Speaking to women who were doing a lot of high-intensity exercise, Wendy heard over and over that it wasn't going well for them. Their bodies hurt more, their hot flushes were worse, and many were still putting on weight.

This reflected her own experience of being a long-time fitness advocate who in middle age, still exercising and eating the way she always had, found herself gaining 15 kilos, struggling to sleep and feeling sore.

Wendy now believes that this is all a part of the female athlete triad, just at a different life stage; a time when our muscles are ageing and changing, and very intense exercise on a daily basis isn't necessarily the best thing for our bodies.

She isn't suggesting that anyone stops being active. But if you're exhausted and not sleeping, if life is super-busy and you're feeling overwhelmed, if your menopause symptoms are severe, then it's a sign that you may need to pull back on physical activity, at least for a while.

Rather than lifting very heavy weights, you might be better off for a time with body resistance exercises like Pilates, which will also build core strength, flexibility and balance. Or taking a brisk walk in nature rather than pounding kilometres of concrete pavements at a run. While you need to keep moving, quite possibly you don't need to be swinging from ropes in a CrossFit session.

An exercise prescription for women as they age is only just emerging, especially in the area of heart health. And Wendy argues that a lot of this information isn't getting to women because it is rarely taught to health professionals. Also, the difference between ‘exercise for healthy ageing' and ‘exercise for performance' is often not recognised within the gym environment.

The perfect amount of exercise for you depends on your level of fitness, how busy you are, how well you sleep, how exhausted you feel, how active or sedentary your job is, and how much your muscles ache. That's true at any stage of life, but at this point get the balance wrong and you'll start to feel it more, especially with your menopause symptoms.

Extracted from Don't Sweat It

By Nicky Pellegrino

Published by Allen & Unwin NZ

RRP $36.99