Your body isn’t broken — it’s asking you to listen differently
If you’ve noticed your waistband feels tighter or your shape has quietly shifted, you’re not imagining it. Hormones in perimenopause and beyond change how the body stores fat, builds muscle, and uses energy. Oestrogen and progesterone fluctuate, cortisol becomes more dominant, and muscle mass naturally declines unless you actively protect it.
Sometimes it’s a few pounds; sometimes it’s just a softer outline — less definition where there used to be tone. This isn’t failure; it’s feedback.
The Conversation With Your Body
Training in midlife is no longer about control — it’s about conversation. Every choice — movement, meal, sleep, stress — sends a message to your hormones and nervous system. When you listen and respond wisely, everything recalibrates: energy steadies, appetite balances, strength returns, and your shape begins to shift again.
Listening also means knowing when to pause — to slow down on low-energy days rather than pushing through. That’s where sustainable progress begins.
From 40 onwards, a woman’s physiological priorities shift:
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Improve insulin sensitivity so your body burns, not stores, fuel.
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Preserve and build lean muscle, your metabolic engine.
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Protect bone density, your scaffolding for the decades ahead.
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Regulate cortisol, the stress hormone that influences fat storage and recovery.
Make Friends With Muscle
Muscle isn’t about vanity — it’s vitality. It’s your body’s largest endocrine organ, constantly communicating with your brain, hormones, and immune system. It stabilises joints, regulates blood sugar, and protects against metabolic disease.
Yet most women lose 3–8% of lean mass per decade after 40 unless they actively train it. The big muscle groups — glutes, quads, hamstrings — are where the metabolic magic happens.
If you don’t love the gym (I don’t either), build movement rituals:
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20 squats while the coffee brews
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A few “squat walks” mid-walk
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Lunges while brushing your teeth
Small, consistent signals rebuild strength faster than sporadic intensity.
True Pilates — Strength From the Inside Out
Pilates was the first fitness qualification I chose to teach — yoga came decades earlier, but I kept that for myself. Pilates wove my post-baby belly back together. It was transformative.
Forget the idea of sleepy stretching — true Pilates is precision training: deliberate, controlled, and tough. Each slow, focused repetition improves posture, core stability, and proprioception (your body’s sense of itself in space). It’s strength work for your fascia, spine, and nervous system all at once.
Done right, Pilates lowers cortisol, activates deep stabilisers, and teaches you to move from your centre — protecting you against injury and supporting every other kind of training you do.
Short, Sharp HIIT — The Metabolic Spark
If you’re already conditioned, short bursts of HIIT help sustain muscle and mitochondrial health. I love Tabata intervals — 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, just eight times.
Why? Because brief, intense effort triggers growth hormone, improves glucose uptake, and boosts cardiovascular fitness — all without over-stressing the system. Too much intensity, however, elevates cortisol and stalls progress.
The Base Layer: Walking — Your Metabolic Metronome
Walking is one of the most underrated tools for hormonal health. It enhances insulin sensitivity, improves sleep quality, and when done outdoors, it naturally grounds the nervous system. Aim for 7–10k steps most days. Walking isn’t a warm-up; it’s your base camp. It regulates rhythm, stabilises energy, and supports every other aspect of your training.
For the Joy of It
You hear it all the time: find something you love and stick with it. It’s a cliché for a reason.
For me, it was badminton — the sport I played decades ago. Fast feet, quick reactions, and now, representing my country again in competition. When you rediscover movement you genuinely enjoy, your whole physiology responds. Heart rate variability improves, dopamine and serotonin rise, and recovery accelerates. You train harder because you’re happy doing it.
Fasting Meets Training — The Wisdom to Adapt
Intermittent fasting can work beautifully when done consciously. But fasting is a stressor — and so is training. Stack too many stressors, and the body stops adapting; it defends.
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Light sessions (walking, Pilates, mobility) are fine fasted.
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Strength and HIIT sessions need fuel — either before or soon after.
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If fasting makes you anxious, wired, or depleted, it’s no longer serving you.
The goal isn’t self-denial — it’s metabolic flexibility: your body’s ability to switch smoothly between using fat and glucose for fuel.
From striving to syncing
It’s no longer about how hard you can push, but how well you can listen. Your body keeps an exquisite score. Every night of good sleep, every walk in daylight, every nutrient-dense meal, every boundary you keep — all of it counts. Your midlife body isn’t rebelling — it’s recalibrating. When you learn to listen more — everything begins to change.
