Somewhere in your 40s the old approach stops working. More cardio and less food, which used to shift a few pounds, now shifts nothing and wrecks your sleep. That is not you failing. It is the wrong prescription for what is changing.
Section
What is changing
- Muscle drops faster. Falling oestrogen makes it harder to hold on to muscle, and muscle is what burns calories at rest and keeps you strong.
- Bone density falls. The years around menopause are when bone is lost fastest. Loading bone is how you slow that down.
- Fat moves to the middle. Same calories, different storage. Frustrating, and very common.
- Sleep and mood get harder. Which makes training feel harder, which makes people stop. The loop is the enemy.
What helps, in order
- Lift, two or three times a week. Squat, hinge, press, pull, with weights that go up over time. Barbells and dumbbells, coached. This is the single best-evidenced thing for muscle, bone and belly fat after 40.
- Protein at every meal. Roughly 1.6g to 2g per kilo of bodyweight a day, split across four meals. Most women in perimenopause are eating half that.
- Conditioning that respects recovery. HIIT still works, scaled to how you slept this week. Walking every day does a lot of the fat-loss work quietly.
- Sleep as a training variable. Seven hours or more, and a hard session the day after a bad night is a bad idea. Swap it for a walk.
- Measure the right things. The tape measure and how your clothes fit tell the truth. The scales lie for weeks at a time in perimenopause.
What about HRT?
That is between you and your GP. Plenty of the women in the gym are on it, plenty are not, and the training works either way. Tell me at the consult so sessions are planned around how you feel.
How it works at Sanctuary Fitness
Sanctuary Strength on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings, Sanctuary Functional for conditioning, Personal Training slots if you want to start privately. Most of the gym is 35 to 60. Nobody is thrown at a heavy bar on day one.