STRENGTH TRAINING THROUGH PERIMENOPAUSE: A COACH'S STARTING POINT

Somewhere in your late thirties or forties, training can start to feel like it stopped working. The sessions that used to leave you buzzing leave you flat. Recovery takes an extra day. Sleep gets patchy, the scales move without much explanation, and a body that used to respond predictably suddenly does not.

That is not you losing your edge or lacking discipline. It is perimenopause, and it changes what your training needs to do.

What Is Actually Changing

Perimenopause is the stretch — often several years — before periods stop altogether, when oestrogen and progesterone stop following a predictable monthly pattern and start fluctuating instead. It is the fluctuation, not the eventual decline, that makes it feel so inconsistent.

For training, a few things follow:

• Muscle gets harder to hold onto. Adults lose meaningful muscle mass each decade from around thirty, and that loss tends to accelerate as oestrogen falls.
• Bone density starts to matter more. Oestrogen is protective for bone, so this is the window where loading it becomes genuinely important rather than a nice extra.
• Recovery slows down. Not dramatically, but enough that a week built for a 30-year-old stops fitting.
• Sleep and mood get less reliable, which affects how any given session feels on the day.

None of that means training less. It means training differently — and, for most women, training heavier than they have before.

Lift Heavy. Heavier Than You Think.

If there is one change worth making, it is this one.

The instinct when energy drops is to go lighter and do more — more classes, more cardio, more circuits. That is close to exactly backwards. Light weights for high reps do very little for the two things most under threat right now: muscle mass and bone density. Both respond to load.

Practically, that means:

• Two to three strength sessions a week, built on compound lifts — squat, deadlift, press, row, hinge.
• Working in lower rep ranges with real load, not endless sets of fifteen.
• Progressive overload that you actually track. If the weight on the bar has not moved in three months, the stimulus has not either.

This is what our Compete and Train classes are for. Compete is the heavier, more technical lane; Train focuses on strength, shape and posterior chain work without Olympic lifting. Same session, same time, two lanes — you pick.

If you have never lifted seriously, this is a better time to start than you would think. Strength is one of the few things that responds well at any age, and beginners make the fastest progress of anyone in the room.

Protein And Fuelling

Two things worth knowing, without turning this into a nutrition lecture.

Protein needs go up, not down, and most women in this stage are eating well under what would actually support the muscle they are trying to keep. Spreading it across the day tends to work better than one big hit at dinner.

And under-fuelling around training gets more costly here. If you are training hard, sleeping badly and eating less to manage a shifting body composition, something has to give — and it is usually recovery. Eat for the session you are about to do.

Rethink Intensity, Not Effort

High-intensity work still belongs in your week. It just cannot be every session.

A pattern that works for a lot of women through this stage:

• Two or three strength sessions — the priority, protected first.
• One or two harder conditioning sessions — Sweat or Peak, where you genuinely go hard.
• Easy aerobic work — walking, easy running, steady erg work. This builds the base without adding to the recovery bill.

The mistake is making everything moderately hard. Five sessions a week at seven out of ten leaves you permanently under-recovered and never actually training hard. Go properly hard twice, go genuinely easy the rest, and the week starts working again.

Recovery Stops Being Optional

Through your twenties you could skip sleep and train anyway. That bill comes due now.

Sleep is the big one, and it is often the thing perimenopause disrupts most. Protect it where you can. Beyond that, the boring things carry more weight than they used to — rest days that are actually restful, walking, and time in the recovery suite. Ice baths, sauna and Normatec are not magic, but they help you back up week after week, and consistency is what makes any of this work.

The Part Where We Say See A Professional

We are coaches, not doctors. Training is one lever and it is a good one, but it is not the only one.

If you are dealing with heavy or irregular bleeding, significant mood changes, sleep that has genuinely fallen apart, or symptoms that are affecting your daily life, talk to your GP or a women's health specialist. There are options — medical and otherwise — and they are worth having a proper conversation about. Good training works better alongside that, not instead of it.

If pelvic floor symptoms are part of the picture — leaking when you run or lift, heaviness, or pain — our guide with the physios at Four Physio is a good place to start, and a women's health physio is the right person to see.

What This Looks Like In A Week

A realistic week, assuming four training days:

• Monday — Strength, total body. Go heavy.
• Tuesday — Easy aerobic. Walk, easy run, or steady erg.
• Wednesday — Strength, lower body focus.
• Thursday — Rest, or recovery session.
• Friday — Strength, upper body — or conditioning if you would rather go hard.
• Saturday — Optional harder session, or a long easy walk.
• Sunday — Rest.

Adjust it to your life. The non-negotiables are the strength sessions and the genuinely easy days. Everything else is flexible.

Start Where You Are

You do not need to overhaul everything. Pick the heaviest lever — two or three real strength sessions a week — and hold it for three months. That alone changes more than any amount of fine-tuning around the edges.

If you would rather not work it out alone, come and train with us. Our 21-day trial is $99 and includes coached strength classes, conditioning and the full recovery suite. Every class is scalable and every session is coached, so you are not guessing at load or form on your own.

Exercise is for everyone, at every stage. This one just asks you to train a bit smarter than you used to.

Jess McGregor,

Coach.