How sport and activity providers can support women to get active during perimenopause and menopause

As we approach World Menopause Day on October 18, it’s a timely opportunity to highlight menopause and how we can support women’s health and well-being in midlife and beyond.

We know that being active during menopause can improve mood, manage weight, and reduce the risk of osteoporosis and heart disease.

However, many side effects of perimenopause and menopause can impact whether women can be active.

“I think the biggest issue that everybody has with it is that we have no idea the symptoms that you’re getting, to begin with, are actually perimenopause,” says Kathryn Meadows, a women’s health coach, Pilates teacher, and personal trainer specialising in the postnatal to menopause phases.

“So a lot of the time, women are looking out for hot flushes, night sweats, some of the kind of the bigger stuff that’s going on, but actually the number one reported symptom is sleep disturbances. 

“Before perimenopause, we might have gone through a good number of years where sleep has settled down, the way you respond to exercise is more predictable, the way you respond to what you eat and how you manage your mental health tends to get a little bit more predictable in most people’s lives.

“Then perimenopause hits, and all of a sudden you’re awake at 2am with really anxious, quite scary thoughts. 

“You start putting on weight around your middle, and the food you’re eating all of a sudden you’re reacting to, and you can’t remember the name of your colleague’s husbands any longer, even though you’ve worked with them for ten years. And you’re thinking, What on earth is going on? 

“Everything’s kind of falling apart. But you are thinking, ‘I’m only 41, this can’t possibly be anything. Everyone says it’s after 45, and it’s night sweats, and things like that. 

“And a lot of the time, unfortunately, women will go to their GP, and they’ll be told, ‘When you’re 45, come back, and we’ll have another chat about it’. 

“So then, there’s a lot of, ‘What’s going on? What do I do? Nothing that helped me previously is actually helping any longer.’ 

“And so one of the issues is that we have a bit of an identity crisis.”

So, what can activity providers do to help women be active in a way that benefits them during this stage of life? 

“One of the things that I try to encourage organisations, team managers, and workplaces to do as much as possible is to inform and educate everybody because we do that without singling out one person,” explains Kathryn. 

“By doing that, everybody might go, ‘Oh wait, hang on. I have no idea that might be just the beginning steps of perimenopause. And what I can do now, because I understand it a little bit more, is to take some steps to help manage that.

“If you’re unsure about something, get someone in to talk about it. 

“When it comes to PT training, or the people who are doing any sort of exercise to music or anything like that, they get no women’s health training at all as their basic training. 

“Not pregnancy, not women as being different to men, absolutely nothing. 

“So anything they do is their choice, which is great if they choose to go and do it.  But most people will not go and do anything that has to do with menopause, and that’s a lot of the time because they don’t realise that they’re talking to those populations. 

“If there’s somebody who maybe runs a leisure centre or a group of leisure centres, and they think there’s a bit of a hole in the education they have about menopause, get someone in to talk about it, do a half-day workshop, or something like that, so that everybody has a general basic understanding of what’s going on.”

That awareness is not just benefiting customers but also the staff working to deliver the activity who may also be in midlife and experiencing perimenopause and menopause.

In recent years, the conversation around perimenopause and menopause has opened up, and the stigma is diminishing. But there is a lot more that needs to be done. 

“What’s going on at the moment with the conversation has been so incredibly powerful for people like me to be able to talk and be able to say the words ‘period’ and ‘menopause’ and ‘perimenopause’ and ‘hormones’ openly and being welcomed into places to talk about it,” says Kathryn.

“But then it takes men [and women] within organisations and at the head of leisure centres and health clubs and things like that, to say, what can we do?”

This is why it is so essential to educate leisure centre providers, class instructors, personal trainers, and councils to increase their awareness about perimenopause and menopause.

Kathryn suggests providers need to be more flexible and adaptable in their exercise programming to cater to the needs of menopausal and perimenopausal individuals.

One idea is offering shorter, more intense exercise sessions or a combination of strength and HIIT-style workouts instead of longer, moderate-intensity classes.

“It is about being a little bit smarter about listening to what’s going on in your body, and then it is about what you do around it: how you eat, making sure you eat before you go into an exercise session, making sure you eat afterwards within 30 to 45 minutes, making sure you sleep well, and making sure you’re hydrated,” Kathryn says. 

“You need to take care of your body so much more.

“What we really want from women is to work harder, more intensively, but for shorter periods of time,” she explains.

“So can the PT who’s running the session say ‘how about we change this around a little bit?  

I’ve been reading that maybe it’ll be better if we do this. Let me know what you think’.”

It is important to note that while research is growing in this field, looking at the mid-life stage, much of the data is on white, cis-gendered, neurotypical, able-bodied women. 

“We know that South Asian women and black women experience menopause slightly differently, but what we don’t have enough data on is what their full experience is.

“We know they maybe go through menopause a little bit earlier, like a couple of years earlier. But then, aside from that, I think there is limited data.

“We need to see so much more research on the lived experience of everybody, and we need to understand the differences in everybody’s experiences.” 

Kathryn Meadows is a women’s health coach, educator and PhD researcher, and you can contact her at www.kathrynmeadows.com