Who it’s for / Menopause & Post-Menopause
Strength Training Through Menopause and After
Written by Lucus Leung, Masters of Physiotherapy, Bachelor of Exercise ScienceLast reviewed 22 August 2026
Falling oestrogen accelerates muscle and bone loss. Resistance training is the most effective counterweight there is — provided it is heavy enough to count.
Oestrogen protects bone and helps maintain muscle. When it falls, both start to go faster — bone loss in particular accelerates sharply in the years either side of the final period, and muscle follows a slower version of the same curve.
Strength training is the intervention with the best evidence behind it for both, and it is the one most commonly prescribed vaguely and then abandoned. “Do some weights” is not a program, and it is why a lot of people spend a year on light dumbbells and conclude it does not work.
This page is about what to actually lift, how heavy, and how often.
What the evidence says
Progressive resistance training is consistently recommended for preserving bone density and lean mass through and after menopause. This is general information, not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for a conversation with your GP about your own management.
Perimenopause: starting before it starts
The best time to build a strength and bone reserve is before the decline accelerates, which in practice means the years of perimenopause rather than after everything has settled.
That is not a reason for anyone already past it to feel they have missed the window — the training works either way and the gains are real at any age. It is simply that starting earlier means you are adding to a higher base and defending it, rather than rebuilding from lower down.
If you are in your forties and noticing sleep, energy, or that things feel heavier than they used to, this is a reasonable moment to start rather than a reason to wait.
How heavy, how often
Twice a week, and heavier than most programmes marketed to women in this bracket suggest.
Sets of roughly five to eight repetitions, where the last one or two are genuinely difficult, are where the strength and bone response lives. Fifteen repetitions of something light builds endurance and confidence, which are worth having — but they are not the stimulus that changes bone, and they are not what preserves muscle.
The progression matters more than the starting point. An extra kilo or two every week or two, for months, gets you somewhere that a fixed weight never will. Most people start lighter than they expect and end up heavier than they thought possible, and the interesting part is that the second half happens faster than the first.
What about weight gain around the middle
This is the most common question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.
Strength training will change your body composition. It preserves and builds muscle, which keeps resting metabolic rate from dropping as fast, and it changes shape in ways the scale does not capture well. Most people get smaller around the middle over a training block without the number moving much, because muscle is denser than fat.
What strength training is not is a fat-loss protocol. Fat loss is driven mostly by what you eat, and nutrition is outside what I do — if that is the priority, a dietitian is the right person, and training alongside it will protect the muscle you would otherwise lose.
Anyone promising that lifting weights will resolve menopausal weight gain on its own is overselling it. It will make you considerably stronger, and it will change your shape. Those are worth having on their own terms.
What we train
- Squat and hinge patterns, loaded properly and progressed weekly
- Pressing and pulling for upper-body and spinal strength
- Loaded carries — grip, trunk and hips together
- Balance and single-leg work in every session
- Bone precautions applied if a scan has shown low density
Good fit if…
- You are peri- or post-menopausal and want to get ahead of it.
- You have been lifting light weights for a year and nothing has changed.
- A DEXA scan has come back lower than you expected.
- You want to train with a friend rather than alone in a gym.
Bones as well as muscle
Most people who arrive here are dealing with both at once. Falling oestrogen accelerates bone loss and muscle loss on the same timeline, and a lot of people find out about the first from a DEXA scan they were sent for after something else.
The training overlaps almost entirely — heavy, progressive, spine-aware, with balance work at the end. What changes with a low bone density result is that we get GP clearance, we find out about any restrictions, and we are more careful about loaded spinal flexion.
The bone density and osteoporosis page goes through that in detail: what to avoid, how heavy it needs to be, and what is realistic to expect from a year of training.
What the first six weeks look like
Four tests on day one — thirty-second sit-to-stand, grip strength, single-leg balance, and a loaded carry — then you train. Nothing is theoretical; you do real work in the first session.
The program is written around that baseline and progressed weekly. At six weeks we run the same four tests again. That is generally the point at which people stop wondering whether it is working, because the numbers have moved and they can feel it on the stairs.
This is personal training, not physiotherapy
Alpine provides strength and conditioning coaching only — no assessment, diagnosis, or hands-on treatment. Please speak to your GP before starting, and if what you need is physiotherapy, tell me and I'll refer you on.
Common questions
Yes. Muscle remains responsive to resistance training at every age — the response is somewhat blunted after menopause, which means the training has to be a bit more deliberate, not that it stops working. Most people see measurable strength change within six weeks.
Twice a week is the target, and it is what the guidelines recommend. Three sessions is fine if you are recovering well between them. The thing that matters more than frequency is that the weight goes up over time.
Nothing specific to menopause itself. If a DEXA scan has shown low bone density, the usual bone precautions apply — loaded spinal flexion and end-range twisting under load are the ones to avoid. Otherwise the honest answer is that the bigger risk is training too light, not training wrong.
No. Menopause timing is not something exercise changes. What strength training affects is the consequences — the muscle and bone loss that accelerate around and after it, and the strength and balance you carry into your seventies.
It helps with body composition more than with the number on the scale. Resistance training preserves and builds muscle, which keeps resting metabolic rate up and changes shape. It is not a fat-loss protocol, and anyone selling it as one is overpromising. Nutrition drives fat loss; training drives what is underneath.
Heavier than most programmes aimed at this audience suggest. Light weights for high reps build endurance and confidence but do relatively little for bone and not much for strength. The useful range is sets where the last repetition or two are genuinely hard, built up to gradually.
That is a conversation for your GP, not a trainer. Hormone therapy is a prescribing decision with individual risks and benefits, and it sits entirely outside what I do. Strength training and HRT are not alternatives to each other — plenty of people do both.
Come and try a session
Small groups of three, or one to one. All equipment supplied.