This 6-week program offers a physical and mental reset as well as an opportunity to fine-tune your personal approach to training, especially if you’re navigating the unpredictability that often comes along with the perimenopausal and menopausal stages of life. Although the myriad of symptoms brought on by fluctuating hormones can be frustrating and leave you feeling like you’re living in an unfamiliar body (that doesn’t respond to physical activity the same way it used to years ago), small lifestyle modifications and mindset shifts can bring a sense of predictability, effectiveness, and enjoyment back to your training.

Who is this program for?
This program was designed for anyone experiencing a variety of physical and mental changes associated with hormonal decline during perimenopause and menopause, two sequential stages of life that typically range anywhere from the mid-30’s to mid-50’s. There are three focuses of this program:

1 – Reset: Exercise is an incredible buffer against chronic disease and illness (among many other incredible benefits), but it is still a stressor competing against every other life stressor. As we age, our life stressors and responsibilities increase (family, work, etc.), but our body’s ability to accommodate the physical/mental demand of all these stressors decreases; therefore, the high training load/volume that many of us could tolerate in our 20’s no longer elicits the same training response in our 30’s and beyond (especially when hormone production has also changed). The structure of this program gives the body and mind an opportunity to recalibrate so that the stressors of exercise become reenergizing again (versus depleting and draining).

2 – Retrain: This program stretches the typical one-week, 7-day microcycle (the shortest, repeatable period of training within a larger block of training) to a week and a half (10/11 days). This allows your body a few extra days during each microcycle to complete the prescribed training load. A few benefits of increasing the duration of the standard one-week training cycle include:

• More time for recovery between moderate-to-intense efforts.
• The ability to differentiate between hard training efforts, active recovery, and rest. This allows us to relearn what training efforts should feel like across a variety of workouts with different training objectives.
• Training efficiency and productivity by working at the extremes. Retraining the mind and body on how to work hard when a workout calls for it and truly recover when it doesn’t helps us stave off fatigue, injury, and the “crash and burn” pattern of training that comes from operating somewhere in the moderate zone of effort for every single workout (an approach that was usually much easier and still yielded results during our younger years when less competing stressors were at play).

3 – Reframe: Training versus working out. Movement for the sake of movement and enjoyment will always be beneficial and needed in any training regimen! However, most of us don’t have endless hours to commit to our workouts. Approaching your workouts as “training” increases the intentionality behind each movement session and urges you to be a bit more selective with your time for exercise. This small mental shift in how you think about your movement can produce big mental and physical gains.

What to expect?
Program Roadmap:

WEEK #1 / MICROCYCLE #1 [11 Days] (Mental Focus: Awareness)
-Day 1: Lower Body Strength (Level 3)
-Day 2: Pilates/Core (Level 2)
-Day 3: Upper Body Strength (Level 3)
-Day 4: Mobility/Stretching (Level 1)
-Day 5: HIIT (Level 3)
-Day 6: Choose Your Own! = Active Recovery (Low Intensity) (Level 1)
-Day 7: Active Recovery (Mod Intensity) (Level 2)
WEEK #2
-Day 8: Lower Body Strength (Level 3)
-Day 9: Pilates/Core (Level 2)
-Day 10: Upper Body Strength (Level 3)
-Day 11: Restorative Yoga/Stretching (Level 2)

MICROCYCLE #2 [10 Days] (Mental Focus: Embracing Change)
-Day 12: Lower Body Strength (Level 3)
-Day 13: Pilates/Core (Level 2)
-Day 14: Upper Body Strength (Level 3)
WEEK #3
-Day 15: Mobility/Stretching (Level 1)
-Day 16: HIIT (Level 3)
-Day 17: Choose Your Own! = Active Recovery (Low Intensity) (Level 1)
-Day 18: Active Recovery (Mod Intensity) (Level 2)
-Day 19: Total Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 20: Pilates/Core (Level 3)
-Day 21: Restorative Yoga/Stretching (Level 1)

WEEK #4 / MICROCYCLE #3 [11 Days] (Mental Focus: Tackling Cognitive Distortions)
-Day 22: Lower Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 23: Pilates/Core (Level 3)
-Day 24: Upper Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 25: Mobility/Stretching (Level 2)
-Day 26: HIIT (Level 4)
-Day 27: Choose Your Own! = Active Recovery (Low Intensity) (Level 1)
-Day 28: Active Recovery (Mod Intensity) (Level 3)
WEEK #5
-Day 29: Lower Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 30: Pilates/Core (Level 3)
-Day 31: Upper Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 32: Restorative Yoga/Stretching (Level 2)

MICROCYCLE #4 [10 Days] (Mental Focus: Radical Acceptance)
-Day 33: Lower Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 34: Pilates/Core (Level 3)
-Day 35: Upper Body Strength (Level 4)
WEEK #6
-Day 36: Mobility/Stretching (Level 2)
-Day 37: HIIT (Level 4)
-Day 38: Choose Your Own! = Active Recovery (Low Intensity) (Level 1)
-Day 39: Active Recovery (Mod Intensity) (Level 3)
-Day 40: Total Body Strength (Level 4)
-Day 41: Pilates/Core (Level 3)
-Day 42: Restorative Yoga/Stretching (Level 1)

-Strength: Strength training is the cornerstone of this program. Think of your strength workouts as the most prominent “extremes” on your continuum of workout exertion (work hard versus rest hard). These are the workouts where you’ll aim to maximize your time-in-training and challenge your weight selections (relative to the workout format and your own physical/mental capabilities of the day). Building muscle mass during the perimenopausal and menopausal stages of life helps improve bone density, stabilizes blood sugars, brings hormones into a more balanced proportion, and acts as the body’s armor against the negative effects from several other changing metabolic factors.

-Pilates: Pilates helps improve mind-muscle connection, improves core strength and stabilization, and the focused breathwork during each session has a stress-reducing/calming effect. This modality of movement is a great complement to externally loaded strength training (weighted exercise) as it helps sharpen the contractile precision, range of motion, and neuroadaptive function of smaller auxiliary muscles helpful to improving form and incrementally increasing weights.  

-HIIT: High intensity interval training (HIIT) remains important as we age! Challenging the cardiovascular system to its higher end of exertion is helpful for improving athletic performance, regulating blood sugars, and boosting confidence; however, frequency, duration, and timing all become increasingly important. You’ll notice that we complete one HIIT workout per microcycle and this workout does not exceed 30 minutes. If you challenge yourself to achieve close to maximal efforts during a HIIT workout (work hard), you must have an equally zealous focus on recovery (rest hard). In this program, HIIT workouts are preceded and followed by lower intensity mobility, stretching, and active recovery sessions.

-Choose Your Own – Active Recovery: These “Choose Your Own” active recovery days are at the lowest intensity of the exertion continuum and are a crucial part of retraining your brain/body to differentiate between different training intensities. During these active recovery days, your movement should be minimally taxing and barely increase your heart rate. Examples include:

•  a leisurely stroll (you should be able to carry on a full conversation with a friend!)
•  folding laundry and putting it away
•  pedaling with minimal effort/gear on a stationary bike (or on a flat road outside)
•  light dancing

Keep these “Level 1” active recovery sessions under 30 minutes. And remember, figuring out your varying levels of exertion takes practice! Active recovery workouts that are the most appropriate for you should leave you feeling replenished, reenergized, and remotivated to tackle future workouts.

-Rest: You always have the option to take a rest day whenever your mind/body needs a total break! Research shows that some form of restorative, low intensity, and short duration movement on recovery days is oftentimes more beneficial to keeping the muscles pliable than complete rest; however, this need not be the directive one hundred percent of the time. Learning how to listen to your mind/body and intuitively develop a sense of when complete rest is appropriate is one of the most important skillsets that ensures continued progress and workout enjoyment.  You’ll notice that there are two days per microcycle that offer “Rest” as an option. Remember, this optionality is just an example of where rest could fit in during this program – you ultimately decide when/if you need a rest day or two within each training cycle. [Optional Rest Days: 6, 11, 17, 21, 27, 32, 38 & 42]

-Mental Reset: There is a different mental focus (in parenthesis in the schedule above) with an accompanying “mental exercise” at the start of each microcycle. These guided meditations are intended to help you improve your awareness and acceptance of physical/mental changes across the lifespan as well as develop reframing skillsets to lessen the impact of unhelpful thought processes and behavior patterns. The mental component of any training regimen is the key factor to implementing long-lasting, positive changes but is often not the easiest element to tackle. Be patient with yourself and know that it will likely take several iterations of practicing a new mental skillset before it becomes second nature.

Equipment:
A range of light to moderately heavy weights and a mat are needed to make this program an enjoyable and effective experience. At least one pair of weights in the light, medium, and heavy-ish categories relative to what you can lift for upper versus lower body exercises will give you enough optionality to challenge your weight loads when necessary and regress them when fatigued. There’s plenty of Pilates/core work throughout the program so a mat is a great idea to serve as a buffer between your body and the floor.

Closing Notes:
Please keep in mind that this program is in no way a prescriptive outline of how you should approach your training into perpetuity nor do you have to be in the stages of perimenopause or menopause to participate in the program. It is an opportunity for you to explore different training variables in a uniquely formatted schedule that lends itself to self-reflection, helps you collect feedback (not judgment) about your responses to varying training stimuli, and hopefully gives your brain and body enough of a challenge to produce a training effect without overtaxing the nervous system. A huge part of training during the perimenopausal and menopausal stages of life is collecting your own data points and determining what small programming tweaks and mental shifts work best for you. Taking the time to reset, retrain, and reframe gives you the ability and confidence to adapt any training program to your goals, needs, and preferences.