I remember being in a high intensity gym session and deliberately trying to keep my heart rate a little lower. I knew my body well enough to know that I did not want to keep pushing and pushing that day, and I was trying to exercise in a way that felt right for where I was hormonally. The instructor noticed and asked why I was not doing what he was telling me to do. So I tried to explain. Female hormones, where I was in my cycle, cortisol, and why there are times when continually pushing your heart rate higher is not necessarily what every woman needs.
He looked at me as though I was speaking another language.
That moment has always stayed with me because it reminded me that not all fitness professionals are the same, and equally, I am not a fitness expert or personal trainer. My work is about supporting the whole woman, mentally, emotionally and physically. What I do understand is how closely all of those parts interact, and movement is an important part of that. It is why MoveHER is one of the pillars within The HER Method™.
For so many women, exercise has always meant doing more. More cardio, more endurance, longer runs, more calories burned. Many of us trained like that in our 20s and 30s and wondered why, once we reached our 40s and 50s, the same approach suddenly did not feel quite the same. Our hormones are changing, our bodies are changing and our ability to recover can change too. That does not mean we stop exercising. It means we start thinking differently about how we exercise.
Women are not small men
Dr Stacy Sims is someone I absolutely love and avidly follow. I am actually reading ROAR again at the moment and highly recommend it. One of the phrases she is best known for is that “women are not small men”, and I think that is such an important message. Women have spent years being given exercise advice that has not always taken female physiology and hormones into consideration, when actually those things do matter.
As we move through midlife, I believe the conversation needs to shift away from constantly asking our bodies to burn more and towards thinking about what we need to build. We need strength, muscle and resilience. Resistance training, bodyweight work and lifting weights become increasingly important because we naturally lose muscle as we age. Research suggests muscle mass can decline by around 3 to 8 per cent per decade from adulthood, with losses becoming greater as we get older. That is one of the reasons I want women thinking about strength now rather than waiting until later.
Lifting weights does not mean you are suddenly going to bulk out. For most women, it means protecting and building the muscle that is going to help us stay strong, capable and independent as we get older. It is about putting some of the work in now so that we are not looking back in another twenty years wishing we had started earlier.
Should you train around your cycle?
Then we have the menstrual cycle itself, and this is where women often become confused. Should we lift heavier at certain times of the month? Should we avoid high intensity exercise before our period? Should we do more restorative work at different points in our cycle? I do believe our cycle gives us useful information, but I do not think it should become another rigid set of rules.
There may be points in the month when you feel incredibly strong and energised and lifting heavier feels good. Then another week might feel completely different. You may be more tired, your sleep may not be as good, you may feel heavy or depleted and the workout that felt easy two weeks earlier suddenly feels like really hard work. That does not mean you have suddenly become unfit. It may simply mean that your body needs something different that week.
That might mean using lighter weights and doing more repetitions, walking, Pilates, restorative movement or simply reducing the intensity. Another woman may feel absolutely fine and carry on exactly as she normally would. That is why learning your own body matters so much.
Even Stacy Sims has moved away from the idea that every woman should rigidly train according to a particular phase of her cycle. Her approach now is much more about understanding the individual woman, her symptoms, her energy and the patterns she notices in herself. I really like that because women already have enough rules thrown at them. We do not need another rulebook. We need to become better at listening to ourselves.
What happens when your cycle disappears
Then perimenopause arrives and the neat monthly calendar can go completely out of the window. Your period might arrive early, late, disappear for a couple of months and then return again. Women understandably ask how they are supposed to cycle sync when they do not even know where they are in their cycle anymore.
This is where I think the focus needs to shift towards how you actually feel. How are you sleeping? How is your energy? Are you recovering well? Do you feel strong today or completely depleted? Does your body feel ready to push a little harder or is it asking you to recover? Those things become part of the information you use.
I no longer have a menstrual cycle myself, so I personally use the moon cycle as a monthly guide. It gives me a rhythm to work with and reminds me to check in with myself. I may put more emphasis on heavier lifting at one part of that rhythm, move towards more endurance work and then start bringing things down again later in the month. I use it as a guide rather than a strict rule, and I am not suggesting that the moon recreates the hormonal changes of a menstrual cycle. For me, it is simply a way of keeping that connection with my body.
Mourning the body you used to have
The physical side of this is important, but I think there is another conversation happening underneath it, and this is something I see regularly with women in my clinic. Women in their 40s and 50s will say to me, “I just want to be how I was when I was 20,” or, “I just want my old body back.”
There can be a real sense of mourning for our younger selves. We keep looking in the rearview mirror at the body we had, the energy we had and the woman we used to be. We remember what we weighed, how clothes fitted or what exercise used to feel like, and we keep comparing the woman we are now with somebody who existed twenty or thirty years ago.
But we cannot go backwards. Our hormones are different, our lives are different and we are different.
And I do not necessarily think that is something to mourn.
I am certainly stronger now than I was when I was younger, physically, mentally and emotionally. There is so much about the woman I am today that I would not trade for the woman I was at twenty. So instead of continually asking how we can get back to who we were, perhaps the better question is, “This is where I am now, so what can I do differently from here?”
That is the mindset I want women to take into this next chapter. Not defeat, and not regret. I want us building muscle, moving our bodies, protecting our strength, understanding our hormones and putting the work in now so that we are not living with regret later.
This is really what MoveHER within The HER Method™ is about for me. It is not about punishment and it is not about desperately trying to make our bodies behave like they did when we were twenty five. It is about understanding the body we have now and supporting the strongest version of the woman we are becoming.
Maybe it is time to stop spending so much time looking in the rearview mirror.
We have far too much life still ahead of us.
References: Dr Stacy Sims, ROAR and her work on female physiology, training and menopause; current research on age related muscle loss and resistance training in women.
Maybe it’s time to stop spending so much time looking in the rearview mirror. We have far too much life still ahead of us.
With love,
Zoë x
Women’s Transformation Architect
Creator of The HER Method™
