TL;DR: Strength training in menopause is the most useful thing you can do for your body right now. Estrogen falling changes where your body stores fat and it lets bone loss accelerate, and heavy load answers both of those at once. Almost every other instruction you are handed at this stage asks you to do less of something.
We ran a workshop on menopause here on a Saturday morning.
The training part landed fine.
What people got stuck on afterward was the food.
They kept coming back to the same question, which was how on earth they were supposed to eat that much.
Twenty years of being told to eat less doesn’t undo itself in ninety minutes.
Maybe you’ve been doing everything right for years too.
Walking the dog twice a day.
Tracking your protein.
Eating well most days, in bed early.
Maybe you’ve already lost real weight on your own, without a coach or a program, which is harder than it sounds.
And your body is still doing something you don’t recognize.
Maybe you’ve never had structured training in your life, and you’ve figured it out alone through your forties and into your fifties, and you’ve gotten results doing it.
What you’ve never had is somebody telling you what your body needs now, instead of what it needed at thirty-five.
I hear a version of that almost every week.
Before any of the rest of this, one thing.
I’m 32 years old and I’m a man.
You know what menopause feels like and I don’t.
What I know is what happens when a woman in this stage starts lifting heavy, because I’ve watched it a lot.
The physiology below comes from the research, and it’s listed at the bottom so you can check it yourself.
Key insights
- Falling estrogen changed where your body stores fat, which is why your waistband notices before the scale does.
- Bone builds in response to load, and heavy lifting is the signal that tells it to.
- Muscle is expensive tissue, and a body in a calorie deficit will drop it unless lifting gives it a reason to hold on.
- Almost every instruction aimed at you right now is a version of less.
- You’re stronger than you believe, and you find that out the day you pick up something heavier than you thought you could.
What is happening to your body during menopause?
Estrogen does not taper off gently across your forties. It holds fairly steady, then falls sharply over a window of about four years around your final period, then settles. That is why this lands as a shock. Two things follow from that drop. Estrogen is part of what decides where your body stores fat, so more of it goes to your abdomen even when your weight has barely moved. Estrogen is also what keeps bone breakdown in check. Remove it, and bone comes apart faster than it rebuilds. Both of those respond to load.
The real problem: you’re being told to be careful
The advice given to women in perimenopause and menopause is remarkably consistent, and it points in one direction. Every piece of it is a subtraction. Each one sounds responsible on its own. Put them together and you spend the exact years your body most needs to build on a program made entirely of subtractions. Being careful is the part that is costing you.
Eat less.
Weigh less.
Cut carbs.
Add more cardio.
Go lighter in the gym.
Protect your joints.
Be careful with your bones.
Bone is where I get the most pushback.
You’re told your bones are getting fragile, so you should be gentle with them.
Bone builds because something demanded it.
Load it hard enough and your body lays down more of it.
Put postmenopausal women who already had osteopenia and osteoporosis under heavy weight twice a week, thirty minutes a session, and their spine density goes up.
Walk on it, take a supplement for it, be careful with it, and you’ve given it nothing to respond to.
The advice withholds the one thing that would help, and it does it while sounding like it’s looking out for you.
Muscle runs the same way.
You’ve probably spent twenty years trying to weigh less.
Now you’ve arrived at the one point in your life where there’s a tissue you should be deliberately adding.
Every habit you built to get here works against it.
A body eating in a deficit will pull from muscle unless lifting gives it a reason to hold on.
You can be doing everything right, eating less and doing more cardio, and losing exactly what you need to keep.
You’re following a set of instructions written for a body you no longer have.
That is the whole reason the food question at the workshop was so hard to answer.
Eating more is the correct instruction, and it lands as the opposite of everything you have been told.
What this looks like if you are living it
There is no single version of this, and where you are starting matters less than you would expect. What every version has in common is that whatever you were doing stopped producing the result it used to produce, and nobody told you the terms had changed. So you assumed the problem was you, and you did the responsible thing, which was less of everything. You do not need to start over. What you need is for the load to go up.
Maybe you’ve never trained at all and the whole room looks intimidating.
Maybe you were an athlete once, went twenty years without touching a barbell, and you’re startled by how much has changed.
Maybe you’re managing joint pain that predates all of this.
Maybe you’re watching a parent lose independence and you’ve suddenly understood what bone density is for.
If you were athletic once, the gap between what you remember and what you can do now is its own kind of frustrating. I’ve written about training as a former athlete separately.
If you’re carrying an old injury into this, that changes what your first month looks like, and I’ve written about training around an injury too.
What I actually see on the gym floor
The part of this I can speak to is the ninety seconds before a heavy lift. She knows the weight is heavier than anything she has picked up before. She is not sure it will go. She sets up and goes anyway, without waiting to feel ready. I see that far more often in the women I coach than in the men, and I have stopped treating it as a coincidence.
I’m describing my gym, not women in general.
But I’ve watched it enough times now to build the coaching around it.
Prideful exhaustion is the phrase I’ve landed on for what’s on the other side of that lift.
More than one woman here has told me she’s started saying I’m not strong out loud about herself.
I say the same thing back every time.
You’ve always been strong. You still are. Strength just looks different in this part of your life.
What actually works: strength training in menopause in practice
Strength training in menopause works when the load is real and the progression is planned. That means a program built around compound lifts you get measurably better at over months. It means two or three sessions a week that you actually attend. It means eating enough protein to hold onto the muscle you are building, which is more food than you have allowed yourself in twenty years. And it means somebody watching your technique closely enough that going heavy is a coached decision.
The programming details matter less than you’d think.
The same five lifts, a little heavier every few weeks, for a year.
That’s most of it.
What matters is that the weight goes up over time, and that you’re still doing it in a year.
That second part is where almost everyone stops.
It’s why we build the whole thing around coached sessions with four people to a coach.
If you’ve started and stopped before, the problem was rarely the exercises. I’ve written more about why people keep starting over at the gym if that pattern sounds familiar.
If you’re judging this by a tape measure around your waist, you’re going to be disappointed early.
You may quit before the useful part arrives.
The changes underneath happen well before the tape shows you anything.
Judge it by what you can lift.
Strength training in menopause at our gym in North Fort Collins
We coach a lot of women through this stage here in North Fort Collins. It comes up often enough that we run workshops on it instead of waiting for it to surface in a conversation. It is also how we ended up with a barbell competition full of women in their forties and fifties. On Saturday, September 5 we are running our Strong Summer Send-Off at the gym. Seven women are competing, and six of them are in perimenopause or menopause.
None of them started out believing she’d ever do something like this.
They’ll be lifting in front of a room of people who know what it took to get there.
Common questions about strength training in menopause
Is it safe to lift heavy during menopause if I’ve never lifted before?
Yes, when it’s coached and the progression is built properly.
Starting from zero is an advantage in one respect, because you don’t have any bad habits to undo.
Your first month goes on movement patterns, and the weight climbs from there at a rate your body can absorb.
Every member here starts with eight one-on-one sessions before they train alongside anyone else, and that exists so going heavy later is a coached decision.
Will lifting heavy make me bulky?
No.
Building noticeable size takes years of deliberate effort and a large calorie surplus.
It also takes a hormonal profile that menopause moves you further away from.
What happens instead is that you get denser and stronger at roughly the same body weight, which is usually what women wanted in the first place.
What if I already have osteopenia or osteoporosis?
This is the group with the most to gain from properly coached heavy resistance training, and it’s also the group most often told to avoid it.
Bring your diagnosis and any restrictions from your doctor to your first conversation with us.
Those change the exercise selection.
Why not just hire a personal trainer?
You can, and for some people that’s the right answer.
What you give up is everyone else.
Training alongside three other people who are in the same stage of life does something a private session can’t, which is that you stop being the only person in the room this is happening to.
Our members know each other’s names, each other’s injuries, and each other’s lifts.
That’s the part people tell us they didn’t expect to care about.
Start strength training in menopause in Fort Collins
If any of this sounds like where you are, come and have a conversation with us about what’s stopped working and what a plan would look like.
Book a No Sweat Intro at RE:GEN Fitness Club
Sources
- Changes in body composition and weight during the menopause transition. JCI Insight, 2019
- Changes in regional fat distribution across the menopause transition. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2021
- Change in follicle-stimulating hormone and estradiol across the menopausal transition. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2011
- High-intensity resistance and impact training improves bone mineral density in postmenopausal women with osteopenia and osteoporosis: the LIFTMOR randomized controlled trial. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, 2018
- Comparing exercise modalities during caloric restriction: a systematic review and network meta-analysis on body composition. Frontiers in Nutrition, 2025
- Effect of different types of exercise on bone mineral density in postmenopausal women: a network meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 2025
Josh Maranian is the Founder and Owner of RE:GEN Fitness Club, a semi-private personal training gym in North Fort Collins, Colorado. The gym specializes in helping adults who want to get strong, move well, and stay consistent without fitness taking over their lives.
