2. Over-exercising damages your hormones as much as under-exercsing.
3. Balance movement with rest and recovery and be kind to yourself
Let’s keep it simple! Any kind of movement is essential as you head into menopause. Moving at the most basic level helps to circulate blood and other fluids carrying nutrients and hormones into our cells and transporting wastes out. It stimulates circulation of lymph in armpits and breasts, groin, and legs to move fats and immune factors around the body. Moving also stimulates the digestive system via the wave-like motions of the gut, preventing constipation.
When you move, you burn calories and start to alter your body composition. Doing the right sort of movement for your body type supports an increase in muscle tissue, bone strength, and joint flexibility essential for healthy aging. With exercise, the percentage of body fat deceases as well as circulating fats in the bloodstream supporting healthy estrogen levels.
Think of the word “e-motion”. Emotions are energy in motion. Exercise and breathing moves energy or chi around the body and helps you to process your emotions and prevents emotions from getting stuck and stagnant in parts of your body, the real basis of dis-ease. Moving makes you happy via the release of endorphins that tell you how good it is to be alive – it is the key to hormone balance, healthy moods, and preventing anxiety and depression into and well beyond the menopause.
Exercise has to be fun, right? So if you are experiencing hormonal symptoms, juggling a lot of balls in your daily life, feeling rundown and stressed, the best type of exercise is one that you enjoy AND supports your Yin or vital fluids that nourish your hormones. My experience is that the multitasking, over-achieving, driven, com- petitive woman is most likely drawn to the opposite: running or hot yoga, intense workouts, boxercise, or weight training.
This type of exercise can trigger the “fight or flight” stress response that raises cortisol and lowers progesterone. Intense activity depletes Yin further and makes hormone balance worse, increasing Yang or heat symptoms. Gentler forms of exercise that build Yin like restorative yoga, tai chi, walking, hiking, swimming, or biking might feel slow and strange to start with but can be better options to build and circulate chi or energy, especially for Vata types and if you are feeling depleted.
Other women find these gentle Yin activities help balance their Yang, intense exercise like running that they love and don’t want to give up. Choosing the right balance of exercise depends on your lifestyle, stress levels, and body type.
As a competitive athlete up to my twen- ties, my workouts have been based on the theory that in order to build up the body you must first break it down. I discovered that pushing my body to exhaustion might have been manageable in my 20s or 30s, but maybe not appropriate in my 40s or 50s. Hanging up my running shoes permanently in exchange for walking and hiking, swimming, and restorative yoga was a blow to my ego but a blessing for my body and soul.