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When approaching or going through menopause, it can get confusing with all the advice that’s out there of what you should be doing to support yourself.
You have probably heard it’s important to exercise but why? And what type should you be doing?
Todays article will hopefully help simplify this and leave you feeling clearer on what outcomes you should be aiming for from the exercise you are doing and how best to support yourself during this big time of change and transition for your body.
1.Maintain Or Gain Strength, Muscle And Bone.
This is super important due to the acceleration of age related muscle loss known as Sarcopenia, and age associated bone mass and density known as Osteopenia (which can develop into Osteoporosis) which occurs during menopause.
It’s actually estimated that 40 percent of women will experience an osteoporotic fracture at some point post menopause.
With this in mind, we need to make sure that a progressive strength training program is a major part of your exercise each week. Especially because it has actually been shown that both menopausal and postmenopausal women can gain muscle. And it has also been shown that through strength training, it’s possible to increase bone density.
So get strength training for stronger bones, increased muscle mass and function, and an overall feeling of strength, empowerment and energy!
2.Develop Or Maintain Cardiorespiratory Fitness.
This is the ability of the lungs to provide oxygen and the heart to pump blood to working muscles. It is also a marker of overall health.
During and after menopause, due to the hormonal changes that occur we have a significant rise in cardiovascular disease. In fact, a postmenopausal woman has the cardiovascular disease risk of a 70 year old male!
If we maintain or develop our cardiorespiratory fitness however we can help reduce this risk as well as gaining many other benefits including reduced hot flushes, improved mood, reversing weight gain, and an improvement in our ability to work hard in our strength training.
A good starting place for this would be to incorporate 20-40 mins low intensity cardio in to your weekly routine and then you can build up from there. Looking at your resting heart rate and seeing it come down over time is also a good way to measure your improvement!
3.Improve Function Of Pelvic Floor.
Your pelvic floor, just like any other muscle, needs to be trained and strengthened. This is even more important for women going through menopause due to its impact on the health and function of the pelvic floor causing a thinning of tissues and loss of strength leading to conditions like incontinence, pelvic floor prolapse and overactive bladder.
A big focus should therefore be establishing your mind muscle connection with your pelvic floor but then also training the muscle in a variety of ways targeting both fast and slow twitch fibres. This simply means a combination of both contractions held for longer periods of time and quick 1-2 second contractions. These can easily be built into your exercise routines making it more likely you’ll get them done and helping prevent health issues from impacting your quality of life.
4.Improve your balance
As women age, our risk of falling increases. Some of the reasons for this include the reduction in strength that comes with ageing as well as the decrease in postural stability and functional mobility if exercise is not done consistently and with purpose. And as we’ve already discussed this decline speeds up with menopause.
This can become a bit of a vicious cycle as if you start to lose endurance and strength and then start to feel less capable you can also become less confident to increase activity or go to the gym and as a result, suffer more decline in ability and increase your fall risk even higher.
Talking about falls might sound decades away from you but if you start doing the appropriate training now, this never needs to become a reality. Your future self will thank you!The stronger you make your bones and muscles now, the less likely you are to ever suffer a fall but you also prevent the outcomes from being so sever.
I hope you have found this article useful and if you have any questions or would like to talk about coaching to support your health and fitness please drop an email to lizzie@onepercentclub.info.
Have a great week
Lizzie
The One Percent Club
