Strength Moves For Steadier Hormones

Most exercise advice aimed at women is about using energy up.

Burn it off. Work it off. An hour of cardio to undo a lunch. Everything is framed as subtraction, and by your forties you have probably noticed that the arithmetic has stopped working the way it used to.

This page is about the other thing exercise does, which nobody mentions and which matters more here.

Muscle is where most of the glucose you eat is stored. It is the biggest place your body has to put fuel. So building a bit more of it is not about how you look or about burning anything off. It is about having somewhere to put lunch.

Why muscle, specifically

When you eat, the fuel from that meal has to go somewhere. Your muscles are the largest destination available.

More muscle means more room, permanently, at every hour of every day, including the ones where you are sitting still. That is the whole argument, and it is a different argument from the one you have been given.

Two more things follow from it.

One session does something the same day. Working a muscle makes it more responsive to fuel for roughly the next couple of days while it restocks. You are not waiting months to see the point of this.

Muscle is what stops your resting burn dropping as far when weight comes off. Which is why, during a stall, two sessions with some resistance in them do more than another hour on a bike.

The part nobody tells you

There is a belief that muscle is a lost cause after forty, and it stops a lot of women before they start.

It is not true. Muscle responds to resistance work in midlife much as it does earlier, and the response arrives on a similar timescale. What changes is that not doing any is no longer neutral. Muscle is lost with age unless something asks it to stay, and it goes without announcing itself. So doing nothing is not holding steady. It is drifting down.

That is the honest version, and it is more encouraging than the usual one, because it means the effort is not wasted.

Start with the legs

If you only work one area, work the lower half.

Your glutes, quads and hamstrings are the largest muscles you have, which makes them the largest storage. So leg work moves things more than arm work does.

It is also the work that keeps you getting off a low sofa without thinking about it in twenty years.

Eight moves, no gym

None of these need equipment. All can be done in a kitchen, in whatever you are already wearing.

Bodyweight squats. The single most useful move here, because it works the muscle that stores the most. Sit back towards a chair, touch it, stand up. That is one.

Glute bridges. On your back, knees bent, lift your hips. Large muscle group, very little to go wrong, easy on the knees.

Step-ups on a stair. Strength and balance in the same move, on equipment you already own.

Wall push-ups. Hands on the wall rather than the floor. An honest entry point, and you can walk your feet back as it gets easier.

Bodyweight lunges. These work each leg on its own, which matters because daily life rarely does.

Standing rows with a band. A band costs very little and is the only purchase on this page. Rows balance out a life spent leaning forwards.

Wall sits. Back against the wall, slide down, hold. Nothing moves, everything works.

Farmer carries. Pick up something heavy in each hand and walk. Shopping bags count, which means you are probably already doing this and not counting it.

How much, honestly

Two sessions a week is the floor. Three or four is better. Thirty to forty minutes is plenty, and twenty is not nothing.

Pick four of the eight. Do each one for as many as you can manage with reasonable form, rest, and go round twice.

Add a repetition or two when it starts feeling easy. That is the entire method, and it is the same one used by people who make it look far more complicated than it is.

You do not need to do all eight, and you do not need a programme. What you need is for it to happen twice this week.

What about cardio

Nothing here is an argument against walking, swimming or anything else you enjoy. Keep all of it.

The order is the only thing worth changing. If your week has room for two things, make one of them resistance work. Muscle is the tissue that responds to it, and there is no other way to ask for more of it.

Cardio does other jobs, and it does them well. It is simply not the tool for this particular one, and for most women over forty this particular one has been the missing half.

The post-meal walk described elsewhere on this site is a separate matter again. That is not exercise, it is timing, and it belongs in your week regardless of what else you do.

The rest of the day counts as well

Two sessions a week is roughly one hour out of a hundred and twelve waking ones. The other hundred and eleven are worth something too.

Stairs instead of the lift. Standing up during a phone call. Parking further away. Twenty calf raises while the kettle boils. Carrying the shopping in two trips rather than one heroic one.

Every one of those makes muscle contract, and contracting muscle pulls fuel out of your blood. None of it feels like exercise. Added up across a week it is more than the sessions are.

What it feels like in week one

Awkward, and probably a bit sore two days later.

That soreness is normal and it is worst the first time. It fades considerably by the third session, and it is not a measure of whether the session was any good. Plenty of useful sessions leave you feeling nothing at all.

What you are looking for in the early weeks is not soreness and not the scale. It is being able to do one more of something than you could a fortnight ago, and stairs feeling slightly less like an event. Both arrive sooner than anything visible does.

Three things that make it work

Protein at every meal. Resistance work asks muscle to be built and protein is what it is built from. Without it you are doing the asking and not supplying the materials.

Sleep, most nights. Muscle is repaired overnight, and a short night also raises hunger the following day. This is the least fashionable item on any list like this and one of the most useful.

Something for the stress. Stress hormones raise blood sugar directly, so a punishing schedule of exercise you dread works against itself. Move for enjoyment rather than as a punishment. Get outside once a day. Say no to something occasionally, without explaining yourself at length.

That last group is not filler. Mental load is an input here, the same as food and movement are.

Where to start this week

Two sessions. Four moves. Twenty minutes each.

Squats, glute bridges, wall push-ups, farmer carries. Do that on Tuesday and again on Saturday and you have done the thing. Everything else on this page is refinement.

This is education, not a training plan, and it is certainly not medical advice. Ask someone who can actually look at you before you start, if any of these apply to you:

• A joint problem
• Anything you are already seeing a doctor about
• A long stretch away from exercise

That is worth doing properly rather than as a formality at the bottom of a page.