Perimenopause: How to Use Exercise to Reduce Your Symptoms

Hormone changes, a slower metabolism, and changing health risks can all add up to weight gain in the run-up to and during menopause. Because of this, it’s super smart to switch up your fitness routine as perimenopause looms.

Exercise in general is the perfect way to boost your mood and get some feel-good endorphins. It’s also hugely important for keeping menopause-related weight gain in check and tackling belly fat.

Beyond this, certain types of exercise can help counteract some of the side effects of perimenopause.

You may not feel like doing a ton of exercise — especially if you’re experiencing hot flashes — but the right type of fitness routine can make perimenopause a whole heap easier to deal with.

Here’s how exercise can help ease the transition through perimenopause and beyond.

Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise helps reduce the risk of developing heart disease, which is often higher during menopause. Changing estrogen levels are a key factor in this, and aerobic exercise is a great way to keep your heart healthy.

Cardio work gets your heart pumping faster and your lungs working harder. This helps make your cardiovascular system stronger.

Aim for 30 minutes of aerobic exercise most days. Walking, jogging, running, dancing, and cycling are great choices for this.

If you’re new to cardio, ease yourself in with lower-intensity exercises to start with. As you get fitter, you can up the intensity and length of your workouts.

Strength Training

Strength training helps improve bone density, which can become lower after menopause. Doing strength training in perimenopause is super important for keeping your bones healthy and decreasing the risk of fractures and broken bones.

Muscle tone is also super likely to decrease during menopause, too and this is another area that strength training can help with.

A lot of women are hugely reluctant to get involved in strength training — it does tend to conjure up images of overdeveloped muscles, after all! This is a big myth since strength training won’t automatically give you epic muscles.

It is super effective for toning the body and helping prevent weight gain, though. If you want to stay in shape during perimenopause, strength training is super smart.

If you’ve never lifted before, it’s smart to get advice from a personal trainer or another fitness professional to make sure your form is right and that you’re not risking injury.

Interval Training

Alternating higher-intensity cardio exercise with rest periods helps burn fat — especially belly fat. This can be super effective for reducing body fat compared to doing a moderate form of exercise that stays at the same tempo and intensity.

Including interval training some days can help avoid weight gain during perimenopause and improve heart health.

Switching between walking and jogging for differing time periods is an easy way to do this. You can get more intense if you prefer but the key element is to vary the number of minutes that you perform specific parts of your interval training — for example, walking for 3 minutes and jogging for 1 minute.

Yoga and Pilates

Yoga and Pilates can be super helpful for reducing your stress levels. Menopause is a hugely stressful time, but this type of exercise can help you deal with it in a healthier way.

Doing yoga regularly may also help improve insomnia. This is a super common side effect of menopause for a whole heap of women.

Even hot flashes can potentially be reduced, according to some research. Yoga can also help with fatigue, irritability, mood swings, and anxiety linked to perimenopause.

Restorative yoga poses can be perfect for perimenopause symptoms. These likely won’t over challenge or overheat your body in the same way that more intense yoga poses can.

This is significant if you’re experiencing a ton of hot flashes since the more vigorous yoga poses can make them worse.

Stretching

Stretching is often overlooked as part of a fitness routine but it’s super important as you get older.

Stretching for just 5-10 minutes per day can increase your flexibility and range of motion — especially if it’s part of a broader fitness routine.

Including stretching in your sleep hygiene routine may help to cope better with perimenopause too.

In one study, stretching for 10 minutes before bedtime helped menopausal women to reduce their symptoms, compared to women who did no stretching at all before going to bed. It didn’t reduce hot flashes, but participants self-reported that their psychological symptoms such as anxiety, mood swings, and sleep problems were improved.