I Have Loved Every Way of Moving My Body. Perimenopause Taught Me What Each One Was For.

I was the girl who climbed the rope in PE.

Not because anyone told me to. Because I loved it. I loved the effort, the grip, the feeling of my body doing something hard. I played soccer with my cousins, the only girl in the group, and I didn’t think anything of it. I did ballet. I ran. I jumped. I moved constantly and joyfully and without any strategy behind it at all.

That love for movement never left me. It just took different shapes across different decades.

In my twenties, after having my son and moving countries, I lost it for a while. I stopped everything. And when I say nothing was working, I mean nothing: not my mental health, not my body, not my sense of myself. It was in that quiet desperation that I found weight training , and alongside it, yoga. The lifting gave me structure and strength I hadn’t known I needed. The yoga gave me somewhere to put everything I was carrying. I fell in love with both.

Then I became a yoga teacher and let the weights go. Through my thirties I was on the reformer, in the studio, on the mat. I discovered SurfSet, that particular joy of balancing on a board, and trained in that too. I taught. I moved. I was in my body in a way that felt full and right.

I am not telling this story to rank those years or dismiss what they gave me. Every one of those disciplines shaped me. The body awareness I built on the reformer is still in me when I lift now. The breath work from years of yoga practice is part of how I train and how I recover. I would not trade any of it.

But something changed. And understanding what changed, and why, is the whole point of this post.

When the Stimulus Stopped Working

After the pandemic I came back to the reformer fully. I was consistent, working hard, doing everything my instructor cued. Activate the glute. Engage. Control the movement. And I was genuinely trying. But at a certain point, my body stopped responding the way it used to.

Not dramatically. More quietly than that. A plateau that felt different from previous ones. Less like I needed to push more, and more like something had shifted in the rules.

At the same time, a friend looked at me one day and said: your body has changed. Your legs and glutes look different. And she was right. But that change didn’t come from the reformer. It came from the resistance training I had returned to alongside it.

That moment made me want to understand what was actually happening, not just to keep going, but to understand why the same effort was producing different results depending on the tool I was using.

What I found changed how I think about all of it.

What Perimenopause Actually Does to the Rules

Before we talk about movement, we need to talk about what is happening inside the body. Because the rules of adaptation change in perimenopause, and until you understand why, the plateau feels personal when it isn’t.

Perimenopause is more complex than a straightforward hormone deficiency. It is a biological transition, one where the body is adapting to shifting receptor sensitivity alongside hormonal fluctuation and decline. Symptoms arise from withdrawal and changing signalling, not from a broken system.

Estrogen has receptors on muscle fibres, bone cells, and the brain. In muscle tissue, it helps regulate the health of satellite cells, the repair cells that activate after hard work, rebuild damaged tissue, and drive adaptation. It also influences how efficiently cells produce energy and the quality of contraction itself.

When estrogen declines, this whole system becomes less responsive. The body can still adapt. It just needs a stronger signal than it used to.

Researchers call this anabolic resistance. It is a shift in biology, not a failure of discipline.

The plateau is physiological, not moral.

Progesterone tends to go first. It supports the brain’s calming pathways, buffering the stress response and supporting deep sleep. When it destabilises, many women notice they feel wired and tired at the same time: activated but not recovering, running hot but not resting. The nervous system becomes more reactive, and that sets the stage for something broader.

The HPA axis, the body’s stress regulation system, becomes more sensitive in perimenopause with reduced hormonal buffering. Cortisol dysregulation contributes to disturbed sleep, increased abdominal fat, and slowed recovery. This is one reason women who were coping well a few years ago suddenly feel like their body is no longer responding the same way.

Estrogen also plays a direct role in insulin sensitivity, helping regulate a transporter called GLUT4 that moves glucose into muscle cells. GLUT4 responds to two signals: insulin, and muscular contraction under sufficient load.

As estrogen declines, the insulin pathway becomes less efficient. But the body still responds powerfully to muscular contraction, provided the stimulus is sufficiently challenging and progressive. That threshold is higher than most people realise, and often does not consistently reach the loading levels that yoga and Pilates are designed to provide.

None of this means the movement you have been doing was wrong. It means perimenopause changed what your body needs from movement. These practices simply need to be understood for what they actually do.

What Each Modality Does and What It Does Not

This is not a hierarchy. Every discipline here has given me something I still carry. What follows is a physiological map of where each one reaches and where it falls short, given what this transition specifically demands.

Progressive resistance training has the strongest evidence base for the adaptations perimenopause most demands: helping counter anabolic resistance, activating the GLUT4 contraction pathway, supporting bone density, and addressing the visceral fat accumulation that comes with estrogen decline. The mechanism is mechanotransduction: muscle and bone adapt in response to sufficient mechanical load. When hormonal anabolic signalling weakens, that load applied consistently becomes the external substitute. Current evidence suggests that two heavy resistance sessions per week, working in lower rep ranges with compound movements, help compensate for that reduced signalling. It is not about aesthetics. It is about what this stage of life actually requires.

The MEDEX-OP trial compared high-intensity resistance training against a Pilates programme in 115 postmenopausal women over eight months. Resistance training improved bone mineral density. The Pilates programme did not produce the same effect. What bone responds to is axial load, the kind that places real compression through the spine and long bones. That is not a design flaw in Pilates. It is simply not what Pilates was built to do.

The Pilates reformer sits in genuine middle ground, and I say that as someone who still owns one and uses it regularly. The spring resistance creates eccentric loading and variable tension that bodyweight work cannot replicate, and it generates meaningfully higher metabolic intensity than mat-based Pilates. The pelvic floor integration, the range of motion, the quality of movement it builds, all of this directly supports how safely and effectively you can load yourself in resistance training. What it is unlikely to provide is the loading threshold that bone remodelling requires, or the contraction intensity that consistently drives satellite cell activation and the GLUT4 response. That ceiling is simply its physiological limitation, not a reason to stop using it.

Vinyasa yoga earns its place for cardiovascular demand. Flowing sequences can bring heart rate into endurance zones, and a 2025 meta-analysis of twenty-four randomised controlled trials found meaningful improvements in symptoms, sleep, anxiety, depression, and blood pressure with consistent practice. For nervous system regulation, vinyasa activates the parasympathetic system through breath-paced movement, though less potently than slower styles. Where it is less likely to reach is the loading threshold that bone and muscle adaptation now require.

Mat Pilates is strongest for core and pelvic floor integrity, flexibility, and nervous system regulation through breath. Quality of life improvements across perimenopausal women are consistently supported in the research. What it does exceptionally well is build body awareness and movement precision that makes every other modality safer. It is foundational in a different sense from resistance training: not as a primary metabolic intervention, but as the practice that improves the quality of everything else.

Restorative yoga offers something none of the other modalities match: parasympathetic activation as its primary purpose. A meta-analysis of thirteen randomised controlled trials found yoga helped prevent the cortisol rise seen in control groups over twelve weeks. When the stress response is chronically activated and sleep is disrupted, the ability to downregulate is not a luxury. It is part of the metabolic picture. Progesterone’s decline reduces the brain’s natural calming buffer, and restorative yoga supports that same parasympathetic pathway through slow, supported movement and extended breathwork. This is not gentle movement as lesser work. It is targeted physiological support for a system that perimenopause has made more reactive.

Hiking and cardiovascular movement more broadly also have a meaningful place in this picture. Incline walking and hiking support cardiovascular health, mitochondrial function, insulin sensitivity, stress regulation, and time in nature, all of which matter in perimenopause. They are not substitutes for resistance training, but they are not trying to be. Like yoga and Pilates, they serve different physiological purposes. This is not an argument that only lifting matters. It is that certain adaptations, bone, lean mass, glucose disposal under load, require a specific stimulus that only resistance training consistently provides. Different tools, different adaptations.

On Resistance Training and the Fear of Changing Too Much

I want to address something directly, because I hear it often and I understand it completely.

Many women resist resistance training not because of ignorance, but because of something more layered than that. There is a real fear underneath, and it is worth naming honestly.

Part of it is cultural. Women have spent decades being told that lifting makes you bigger, harder, less feminine. That fear has been absorbed so deeply that for many women it no longer feels like a fear; it feels like common sense. It is not.

But there is something else underneath it too, something more personal. Many women in perimenopause are already experiencing a body that feels unfamiliar. The softness is shifting. The shape is changing. The reflection doesn’t quite match the internal sense of self. In that context, the idea of deliberately adding more change, of building muscle, of becoming stronger and more defined, can feel like one more loss of the body you knew.

What I want to offer is a different way of seeing it.

The body changes many women experience in perimenopause, the softening around the middle, the loss of tone in the legs and arms, the shift in shape, are largely the result of muscle loss, not fat gain alone. As estrogen declines and anabolic resistance increases, the body loses lean tissue progressively. That loss changes the ratio of muscle to fat, which changes shape, which changes how clothes fit, which changes how familiar the body feels. The softness that is appearing is not inevitable. It is partly the visible consequence of insufficient stimulus to maintain lean mass.

Resistance training does not bulk women up. What it does is preserve and rebuild the lean tissue that perimenopause is actively working to reduce. The aesthetic outcome of that process, for most women, is not larger. It is more defined, more capable, more recognisable as the body they remember. My friend noticed my legs and glutes had changed. Not bigger. Different. Stronger. More mine.

The fear of getting bulky is worth examining not to dismiss it, but because underneath it is often a desire to feel at home in the body again. That desire is completely valid. And the physiology suggests that the path toward it, in perimenopause, runs directly through the kind of training that many women are most afraid of.

The Integration Case

In perimenopause, progressive resistance training becomes a foundational intervention. Not because the other modalities are less worthy, but because bone, muscle, and metabolic health in this hormonal environment require a specific stimulus that only sufficient load can provide. Without it, those particular needs go unmet regardless of how much other movement is present in a week.

From there, the picture becomes personal and integrative. The reformer contributes movement quality, pelvic floor integrity, and connective tissue resilience. Vinyasa contributes cardiovascular conditioning and dynamic flexibility. Mat Pilates contributes body awareness and core stability. Restorative practice contributes the nervous system regulation and recovery support that make the whole programme sustainable.

They address different physiological needs. The question is not which one to choose. The question is whether what you are spending most of your time on is meeting the demands that this transition has made most urgent.

What This Means for Your Perimenopause Workouts

For many women, perimenopause workouts stop delivering results not because of effort, but because of stimulus.

If movement is not giving you the results it used to, the most useful question is not what you are doing wrong. It is whether the stimulus you are providing matches what your biology now requires.

Bone, muscle, and glucose metabolism all depend on the body receiving a sufficiently strong adaptive signal. If the movement you are doing is not reaching those thresholds, more of the same will not close the gap. The rules changed. The inputs need to catch up.

Two resistance training sessions per week, built progressively, with compound movements that challenge the whole body under real load, is where this begins. Not instead of everything else you love. Alongside it. But it needs to be in the picture.

I still own a reformer. I still use it. The body awareness it built, the pelvic floor work, the range of motion, all of it feeds into how I lift. The restorative practice I return to, especially when load is high or sleep is difficult, is doing something the barbell cannot. The movement I have loved across my whole life is still part of how I live in my body. It has just found its right place in a more complete picture.

The girl who climbed the rope and played soccer with the boys and fell in love with every discipline she ever tried was never wrong to love any of it. Perimenopause simply changed what her body needed from it.

And for many women, understanding that changes everything.

If you are not sure where your current movement practice sits relative to what perimenopause requires, that is exactly what a Perimenopause Metabolic Audit is for. It is a sixty-minute session where we look at your full picture and build a clear, personalised protocol together. You can book yours at blissfullyamy.com.

Sources and References

Barcelos GT et al. High-intensity resistance training versus Pilates in postmenopausal women with low bone mass: the MEDEX-OP trial. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, 2023.

Collins BC et al. Estrogen receptor signalling regulates satellite cell quiescence and function. Cell Reports, 2019.

Dupuit M et al. Moderate-intensity continuous training or high-intensity interval training with or without resistance training for altering body composition in postmenopausal women. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2020.

Hsu WH et al. Progressive resistance training and musculoskeletal health in postmenopausal women: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 2023.

Maillard F et al. Effect of high-intensity interval training on total, abdominal and visceral fat mass: a meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 2018.

Newton CA, Ramsay T. Metabolic intensity and energy cost of Pilates exercises: systematic review and meta-analysis. Systematic Reviews, Springer Nature, 2026.

Sañudo B et al. Effectiveness of Pilates and Yoga to improve bone density in adult women: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS ONE, 2021.

Sims ST. Menopause 2.0. Course workbook and module materials. 2024.

Thomsen Ferreira S. HPA axis, HPT axis, and HPG axis: sex hormone physiology and clinical application. IFNA Track 2 Module 8. IFNA curriculum.

Wang H et al. The effectiveness of yoga on menopausal symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 2025.