Last week, I attended a women’s health conference. There were speakers from different elements of women’s health such as endometriosis, specialist menopause doctors and lifestyle coaches. It was great to get the most up to date information about these issues.
What is possibly most useful to my sphere of interest is the advice regarding exercise and the effect on the menopause or perimenopausal woman. It is interesting in the subtle changes that can happen where the same work out you have done for years or the same activity such as running or cycling may not cut it, when it come to weight management and maintaining fitness. Of interest to me is the effect on tendons the rollercoaster ride of hormones has.
This rapid moment by moment change in hormones explains why one day a peri/menopausal woman feels fine and the next feels awful or achy or low in mood. Our hormones don’t plummet in a linear decline over a gradual period of time, neither do they drop off a cliff in one fell swoop. No they, drop and rise and plateau and drop again. This could be over a few months or few days then even out.
I think this is worth understanding when it comes to the ability to maintain regular physical activity and healthy balanced eating habits. If you can imagine, feeling great one day so you go and work out or have the run or bike ride, have a lovely balanced meal then the next day your oestrogen has dropped. You feel basically p***ed off at the world. Who wants to exercise in that frame of mind? Will you choose the lovely nutrient filled buddha bowl for lunch or the carb and starch loaded bread roll and chocolate bar?
Then to add to the fun, we chuck in the loss of resilience of tendons. So your now erratic training or exercise sessions are inconsistent and not gradually loading the tendons, because you had 4 days off then a day exercising then another few days off. The impact of this putting you at increased risk of injury is now increasing.
This is often where I meet women, Is they have a tendon issue and wallowing around in the weeds trying to work out what went wrong and how they can resolve it. I will talk with them a lot about consistency and how tendons love predictability. They don’t enjoy or respond well to sudden loading or persistent inactivity. This is where shoulder (rotator cuff issues) pain can start or achilles or lateral hip pain. Together we work out how to manage the pain, modify activities and progress to return to previous activity levels.
Remember tendons don’t like surprises!
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