Quick answer
Very few exercises are universally off-limits in perimenopause, and the internet’s fear-mongering “banned” lists do more harm than good by scaring women away from the training that helps them most. The real question is not “which exercises should everyone avoid” but “which movements need modifying for your body,” based on your bone density, pelvic-floor health, and any injuries. The guiding principle is to train around problems, not through them, and not to abandon training altogether.
I have a meniscus injury, and on BODi I pushed through more than I should have before learning to modify with rest, walking, and Pilates rather than grinding on, which is why I now favour joint-friendly work like Pvolve (8.3). 14-day free trial
Key takeaways
- Almost nothing is universally banned in perimenopause; blanket “avoid these” lists are usually unhelpful and often counterproductive.
- The movements worth caution around depend on your individual status: bone density, pelvic floor, and injury history.
- Loaded spinal flexion warrants care mainly for women with low bone density, based on older spine research.
- Resistance and impact training are protective for bone, not something to fear, when matched to your capacity.
- The skill to build is modification: train around an issue with a tolerable version rather than avoiding movement entirely.
At a glance
| Situation | Cautious about | Do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Low bone density | Loaded, repeated spinal flexion | Extension-biased and neutral-spine work |
| Severe osteoporosis | High-impact jumping | Progressive resistance, controlled loading |
| Pelvic-floor issues | Heavy impact and straining | Low-impact strength, pelvic-floor work |
| Doing HIIT daily | Excess high-intensity volume | Fewer hard days, more easy movement |
| Ego-lifting with poor form | Chasing load past technique | Load you can control with good form |
| Sharp joint pain | Pushing through the pain | Modify, rest, or switch the movement |
| No specific issues | Almost nothing | Train normally and progressively |
The plain truth: few things are universally off-limits
Search “exercises to avoid in perimenopause” and you will find lists warning you off crunches, running, burpees, heavy lifting, planks, and more, usually with alarming language and little context. The premise of these lists is that menopause makes women fragile and that whole categories of movement are now dangerous. That premise is wrong, and it is doing real damage, because it nudges women toward doing less at exactly the life stage when doing more of the right training matters most.
Here is the accurate framing. There is no master list of exercises that every perimenopausal woman must avoid. What exists instead is a set of individual considerations: if you have low bone density, some loaded movements deserve caution; if you have a pelvic-floor issue, impact and heavy straining may need managing; if you have an injured knee, you work around it. These are personal, conditional cautions, not universal bans. For a woman with healthy bones, a sound pelvic floor, and no injuries, the list of genuinely off-limits exercises is close to empty.
The reason this matters is that the biggest risk for most women over 40 is not injury from training; it is the muscle and bone loss that comes from the hormonal transition, made worse by doing too little. Resistance training, impact, and progressive loading are the tools that fight back. Scaring women away from those tools with generic banned lists trades a small, manageable, individual risk for a large, universal one. The right instinct is to keep training and get specific about your own body, which is what the rest of this guide does.
Loaded spinal flexion with low bone density
The one caution with the most credible history concerns repeatedly bending and loading the spine when bone density is low. The relevant evidence is decades old but instructive. Sinaki and Mikkelsen studied women with spinal osteoporosis doing back exercises and compared a flexion-based programme, which involved bending the spine forward, with an extension-based programme, which involved arching or extending it. They reported that women doing the flexion exercises had a substantially higher rate of new spinal compression fractures than those doing extension exercises (PMID 6487063). In other words, for women whose vertebrae were already weakened, repeatedly loading the spine into forward flexion appeared risky.
It is important to read this finding for what it is and not overextend it. It concerned women who already had osteoporosis of the spine, and it concerned repeated loaded flexion, not a single gentle forward bend. It does not show that a healthy woman with normal bone density should never round her back, and it does not mean core work is off-limits. What it reasonably supports is caution: if you have low bone density or diagnosed osteoporosis, it is sensible to limit loaded, repeated spinal flexion, such as weighted sit-ups or heavy rounded-back lifting.
The “do instead” is generous. Extension and neutral-spine work covers most of what you want anyway: planks and side planks, bird-dogs, dead-bugs, carries, and hip-hinge patterns that keep the spine neutral rather than rounding it under load. You can absolutely train a strong core and a strong back; you just bias toward positions that do not repeatedly load a vulnerable spine into flexion. If you do not know your bone status and have risk factors, that is a conversation to have with your clinician, ideally with a DEXA scan, rather than guessing.
High-impact work with severe osteoporosis or pelvic-floor issues
Impact, jumping, hopping, running, is genuinely good for bone in general, because loading stimulates bone to maintain itself. But there are two situations where impact deserves individual caution. The first is severe, established osteoporosis, where the fracture risk from a hard landing may outweigh the bone stimulus; here, progressive resistance training and controlled loading are usually the safer route to loading bone, and impact is added cautiously if at all, ideally under professional guidance. The second is significant pelvic-floor dysfunction, where the downward pressure of jumping can worsen symptoms like leaking.
Neither situation means “never load your bones” or “never train.” For osteoporosis, the resistance-training route is not a consolation prize; it is a well-supported way to load the skeleton, which I return to below. For pelvic-floor issues, the answer is low-impact strength work plus dedicated pelvic-floor rehabilitation, often with a specialist physiotherapist, and a gradual return to impact as the floor strengthens. Many women find that addressing the pelvic floor lets them reintroduce the impact they were told to fear. Again, the theme holds: get specific, modify, and rebuild, rather than accept a blanket ban.
Over-doing HIIT and daily intensity
A different kind of “avoid” is worth taking seriously, and it is not about a specific exercise; it is about dose. High-intensity interval training is useful, but doing high-intensity work every day, or nearly every day, is a common perimenopausal mistake. Intense sessions carry a recovery cost, and during the menopause transition, sleep, recovery, and stress tolerance are often already compromised. Stacking hard session on hard session without recovery can leave you constantly fatigued, sore, and under-recovered, which undermines the very results you are training for.
The fix is structural, not total avoidance. Most women do well with a small number of genuinely hard sessions per week, a couple, alongside strength training and a base of easy movement like walking. Easy days should be genuinely easy, not medium-hard. This is not about being fragile; it is about the fact that adaptation happens during recovery, and chronic high intensity without recovery is a fast route to burnout and niggles. If every workout leaves you wiped out, the problem is usually the schedule, not you.
Ego-lifting with poor form
There is a version of strength training that does warrant caution, and it is not “lifting heavy,” it is lifting heavier than you can control. Chasing a number on the bar at the expense of technique, sometimes called ego-lifting, is where a lot of avoidable strain and injury comes from at any age. A load you can move with good form is productive; a load that forces your back to round, your knees to cave, or your form to collapse is a liability, and it is the poor execution, not the concept of heavy lifting, that creates the risk.
The reframe is that progressive overload, gradually lifting more over time, is exactly what you want in perimenopause to protect muscle and bone. You just earn the load rather than grabbing it. Add weight when your form holds across all your reps, keep a rep or two in reserve on most working sets, and treat clean technique as the thing you are actually training. Lifting heavy with control is protective; lifting heavy with ugly form is the thing to avoid, and the distinction matters because the fear-mongering lists blur the two and tell women to avoid heavy lifting altogether.
Exercising through sharp joint pain
Sharp, localised joint pain is a signal, and pushing through it is where I went wrong. On BODi, I had a meniscus injury in my knee and pushed through more than I should have, telling myself that finishing the workout mattered. It did not; what mattered was the knee, and grinding on made things worse before I learned to modify with rest, walking, and Pilates instead of forcing the sessions. That experience shapes how I write this: the instinct to power through is common, and it is usually the wrong one for sharp joint pain.
The useful distinction is between the ordinary discomfort of effort, muscles working, a bit of general soreness, mild stiffness that eases as you warm up, and sharp, specific, or worsening pain in a joint. The former is part of training. The latter is a reason to stop, modify, or switch the movement. Training around an injury means finding versions that do not provoke it: if a knee hates deep squats, you might reduce range, switch to a hip-hinge, or load differently; if a joint is genuinely angry, you rest it and train everything else. Persistent or significant joint pain is worth a proper assessment from a physiotherapist rather than self-diagnosis. The goal is to keep training the rest of you while the sore part recovers, not to stop training or to bulldoze through.
Why fear-mongering lists are unhelpful
Generic “exercises to avoid” lists fail for a structural reason: they answer a personal question with a universal answer. Whether an exercise is right for you depends on your bones, your pelvic floor, your injuries, and your training history, and a list that ignores all of that cannot possibly be accurate for the individual reading it. Worse, these lists tend to target exactly the high-value movements, lifting, impact, core work, because those sound intimidating, which means the reader who follows them ends up avoiding the training that would have helped most.
There is also a psychological cost. Framing menopause as a time when your body becomes a minefield of forbidden movements breeds fear and avoidance, and fear is a poor training partner. Women who believe they are fragile move less, and moving less accelerates the muscle and bone loss the fear was supposedly protecting them from. The more useful message, and the accurate one, is that your body over 40 is capable and adaptable, that training is one of the best things you can do for it, and that the small number of genuine cautions are specific, manageable, and mostly about modifying rather than avoiding.
How to modify rather than avoid
Modification is the core skill this guide is really teaching, so here is the toolkit in one place.
- Change the range. If a full-depth movement provokes pain, reduce the range to a portion you tolerate and rebuild from there.
- Change the load or leverage. Lighter weight, a different implement, or an easier body position can make a movement tolerable while you strengthen.
- Change the pattern. Swap a provoking movement for one that trains the same muscles differently: a hip-hinge instead of a squat, a carry instead of a loaded flexion crunch.
- Reduce the impact. Substitute low-impact versions, stepping instead of jumping, while you build the pelvic floor or manage a joint.
- Address the underlying issue. Pelvic-floor rehab, a DEXA scan for bone status, or a physiotherapy assessment for an injury turns a vague fear into a specific, workable plan.
- Keep training everything else. An injured knee is not a reason to stop upper-body and core work. Train around, not through, and never confuse “modify this movement” with “stop moving.”
To make this concrete, take my meniscus knee as a worked example. A deep barbell back squat provoked it, so avoiding “squats” entirely would have been the fear-mongering-list response, and it would have cost me a lot of lower-body strength. Instead I changed the range, cutting the depth to a point the knee tolerated, then changed the pattern on the days it complained, favouring hip-hinge work and box squats to a comfortable height, and I leaned on low-impact, band-based work through Pvolve and Pilates while the joint settled. The knee got a break from the provoking movement, but my legs, hips, and glutes kept getting trained. That is the whole philosophy in one example: I did not avoid leg training, I modified the specific movement that hurt and kept loading everything that did not. A blanket “avoid squats over 40” list would have talked me out of the very training my knee, and the rest of me, needed.
The same logic scales to almost any issue. A grumpy shoulder does not end upper-body training; it redirects it toward pain-free ranges and angles. A weak pelvic floor does not end lower-body or cardio training; it reshapes it toward low-impact work while the floor is rehabilitated. Low bone density does not end loading; it steers loading toward progressive resistance and neutral-spine patterns. In every case the answer is a smarter version of the movement, matched to your body, rather than a shorter life of avoidance.
Programmes
A few programmes make it easy to train hard while working around bones, pelvic floor, and joints.
- Pvolve (8.3) is a joint-friendly, low-impact method built around resistance bands and functional movement, with clinical backing behind its approach, which makes it a strong fit for training around cranky joints, including my knee.
- Evlo (8.0) is built by doctors of physical therapy and emphasises controlled, form-first strength with lower-cortisol programming and Reset weeks, which suits women who want to load safely rather than grind.
- obé (7.5) offers a wide range of low-impact and modifiable classes, so it is easy to pick a version that respects a joint or pelvic-floor issue on any given day.
- The Sculpt Society (8.2) leans low-impact and joint-considerate while still building strength, a useful option when high-impact work is being reintroduced gradually.
Common mistakes
- Treating generic banned lists as personal advice. What to avoid depends on your bones, pelvic floor, and injuries, not on a one-size list.
- Avoiding lifting and impact out of fear. These are protective for muscle and bone when matched to your capacity; blanket avoidance costs you the most.
- Loading spinal flexion despite low bone density. Older spine research supports caution here; bias toward extension and neutral-spine work.
- Doing high-intensity work every day. Recovery is where adaptation happens; chronic intensity without it leads to burnout and niggles.
- Chasing load past your form. It is poor technique, not heavy weight itself, that creates most avoidable strain.
- Pushing through sharp joint pain. That is a signal to modify or rest, not a test of willpower; I learned this the hard way on a knee.
- Stopping all training because one movement hurts. Train around the issue and keep the rest of your programme going.
The internet’s “banned” list, movement by movement
Because the fear-mongering lists are so specific, it helps to take their usual targets one at a time and replace the blanket ban with the sensible, individualised version. In almost every case the answer is not avoidance but a modification matched to your status.
Crunches and sit-ups. These get banned wholesale, but the real caution is narrow. Repeated loaded spinal flexion deserves care mainly if you have low bone density or diagnosed osteoporosis, based on the spine research from Sinaki and Mikkelsen, where women with existing spinal osteoporosis doing flexion exercises had more new compression fractures than those doing extension work (PMID 6487063). If that is not you, a crunch is not forbidden. If it is you, the swap is easy and generous: planks, side planks, bird-dogs, dead-bugs, and loaded carries all build a strong trunk without repeatedly loading the spine into flexion. You lose nothing worth keeping.
Running. Impact is generally good for bone, so running is not something most women should fear. The genuine cautions are severe, established osteoporosis, where a hard landing’s fracture risk may outweigh the stimulus, and significant pelvic-floor dysfunction, where the downward pressure can worsen leaking. Neither is a lifetime ban. For the pelvic floor, low-impact cardio plus dedicated rehab, often with a specialist physiotherapist, frequently lets women reintroduce the running they were told to give up. For fragile bones, progressive resistance builds loading capacity first, with impact added cautiously and ideally with guidance.
Burpees and jump training. Same logic as running, concentrated. Plyometric impact is a bone-friendly stimulus for most women and a problem only for the same two groups. If jumping is currently off the table for you, stepping versions, step-ups, fast walking, low box step-downs, keep you training the same patterns while you build the pelvic floor or bone capacity to progress.
Planks. Frequently listed as risky, planks are actually one of the better options precisely because they train the trunk in a neutral or extension-biased position rather than repeated flexion, which is the pattern the Sinaki and Mikkelsen work flags for fragile spines (PMID 6487063). Scaled from the knees and built up, a plank suits most women over 40 well. The only real caution is if it provokes a pelvic-floor symptom or an existing shoulder or back injury, in which case you scale the lever or angle rather than dropping it.
Heavy lifting and deadlifts. This is the most damaging item on the banned lists, because progressive resistance is exactly what protects muscle and bone through the transition. The LIFTMOR trial by Watson and colleagues found that a supervised programme of high-intensity resistance and impact training improved bone-density measures and was safe in postmenopausal women with low bone mass (PMID 28975661), which directly contradicts the idea that these women must avoid heavy loading. The real caution with a deadlift is not the load but the pattern under load: keep the spine neutral rather than rounding it, hinge at the hips, and earn the weight as your form holds. Heavy lifting with control is protective; heavy lifting with a rounded, collapsing back is the thing to avoid, and the two are not the same movement.
Twisting and rotation. Loaded, forceful spinal rotation warrants some care for fragile spines, in keeping with the same neutral-spine principle, but gentle, controlled rotation is part of healthy movement and does not belong on a universal ban list. As ever, status decides: if you have osteoporosis, keep rotation controlled and unloaded and get specific advice; if you do not, rotate freely.
The pattern across the whole list is the same. Almost nothing is banned for everyone; a short set of movements deserves caution for specific individuals; and in every case the productive answer is a matched modification, not avoidance.
A modification-first week in practice
To show how this looks when it is not a list of dos and don’ts but an actual plan, here is how a woman managing a couple of common issues might structure a training week without giving up anything important. Take a reader with mildly low bone density (osteopenia on a DEXA scan) and a history of stress incontinence, which is a realistic combination for the perimenopausal years.
She wants the protective benefits of resistance and loading, which the LIFTMOR findings suggest are available even to women with low bone mass when training is progressive and, for heavier work, supervised (Watson and colleagues, PMID 28975661). So her week is built around strength, not around avoidance. Two full-body strength sessions anchor it, using hip-hinges, squats to a comfortable depth, presses, rows, and loaded carries, all with a neutral spine and load earned through good form rather than grabbed. Given her bone status, she biases her core work towards planks, side planks, bird-dogs, and carries instead of weighted sit-ups, which respects the flexion caution from Sinaki and Mikkelsen without leaving her core untrained (PMID 6487063).
For cardio, rather than accept the “no impact” ban her pelvic-floor symptoms might have earned her elsewhere, she pairs low-impact conditioning now, walking, cycling, band-based work, with a dedicated pelvic-floor rehabilitation plan, ideally guided by a specialist physiotherapist. As the floor strengthens, she reintroduces impact gradually: brisk walking, then light jogging intervals, then, if she wants it, jumping. The impact is not gone forever; it is sequenced behind the rehab that makes it tolerable.
Notice what this week is not. It is not a fragile, hollowed-out routine of “gentle movement only”. She lifts, she loads her bones, she trains her core hard, and she has a route back to impact. Every genuine caution has been handled by a modification or a sequence, not by subtraction. That is the entire method: get specific about your body, then train around the issues while keeping the high-value work in the plan.
How to find out your own status
Modification-first training depends on knowing which cautions actually apply to you, and much of the fear online comes from women guessing in the dark. Three checks turn vague worry into a workable plan.
Bone. If you have risk factors for low bone density, an early or surgical menopause, a family history of osteoporosis, previous fragility fractures, long-term steroid use, low body weight, or others, it is worth asking your GP whether a DEXA scan is appropriate. Knowing your bone status tells you whether the loaded-flexion caution from Sinaki and Mikkelsen genuinely applies to you or not (PMID 6487063), and reassuringly, even a low result does not mean avoiding loading; the LIFTMOR evidence points the other way, towards progressive, supervised resistance and impact (Watson and colleagues, PMID 28975661). The scan changes how you train, not whether you train.
Pelvic floor. Leaking with coughs, sneezes, jumping, or lifting, a feeling of heaviness or dragging, or urgency are all reasons to see a pelvic-health physiotherapist rather than to quietly give up impact and heavy lifting. A proper assessment tells you what your floor can currently handle and gives you a rehabilitation plan to expand it. Many women discover that the floor, once trained, lets them return to the very movements a banned list told them to abandon.
Joints and injuries. Persistent or significant joint pain deserves a physiotherapy assessment rather than self-diagnosis. A physio can tell you whether a movement needs modifying, which range or load your joint tolerates, and how to progress, which is a far better position than either forcing a painful exercise or dropping it entirely. This is exactly the route I eventually took with my knee after grinding on for too long.
The theme uniting all three is that information dissolves fear. A blanket ban is what you reach for when you do not know your own status; a specific, confident plan is what you build once you do.
Working around an injury without stopping training
Because “train around, not through” is the skill this guide is really teaching, it is worth spelling out the sequence you actually follow when something hurts, using my knee as the running example.
First, distinguish the pain. Ordinary effort, working muscles, general soreness, stiffness that eases as you warm up, is part of training. Sharp, specific, or worsening pain in a joint is a signal to stop, modify, or switch. Getting this distinction right is where I went wrong on BODi: I treated a meniscus signal as if it were ordinary discomfort and pushed through, and it got worse before I learned better.
Second, keep training everything the injury does not touch. An angry knee is not a reason to stop upper-body, core, or mobility work. The moment you let one sore joint shut down your whole programme, you have swapped a small local problem for the large, universal one of doing too little, which is the real risk in perimenopause.
Third, modify the provoking movement rather than abandoning its purpose. My deep barbell squat provoked the knee, so I did not delete leg training; I reduced the range to what the knee tolerated, switched to hip-hinge patterns and box squats to a comfortable height on the days it complained, and leaned on low-impact, band-based work through Pvolve and Pilates while it settled. The legs, hips, and glutes kept getting trained throughout.
Fourth, get an assessment if it persists. Significant or lingering joint pain is worth a physiotherapist’s eyes rather than months of guesswork. A tailored plan gets you back to the full movement faster than either forcing it or avoiding it.
Fifth, progress back deliberately. As the joint settles, rebuild the range and load gradually rather than jumping straight back to where you were. The aim throughout is a smarter version of the movement, matched to your body, not a permanently shorter list of things you are allowed to do.
Loading your bones safely: what “progressive” really means
The single most misread word in this whole area is “progressive”. The banned lists hear “heavy loading” and imagine a woman with fragile bones grabbing a maximal weight and getting hurt. That is not what the supportive evidence describes. The LIFTMOR programme that improved bone-density measures in postmenopausal women with low bone mass was supervised and progressive (Watson and colleagues, PMID 28975661), and both of those words carry weight. Progressive means the load was built up gradually over time, not seized in one session, and supervised means a professional watched the technique on the heaviest work. Read that way, the evidence is not permission to improvise heavy lifting alone; it is a description of how to load fragile bones safely, which is a very different thing from avoiding loading altogether.
So what does earning the load look like in practice? Start below what you think you can handle, and let good form be the thing that unlocks the next increment. Add weight only when you can complete all your planned repetitions with a neutral spine, controlled tempo, and a rep or two still in reserve. When form holds across a full session, nudge the load up a small amount and repeat. This slow ratchet is how you build genuine strength and loading capacity without the collapse-in-form moments that create most avoidable strain. It is the opposite of ego-lifting, and it is exactly the kind of controlled progression the bone research rests on.
There are a few practical guardrails worth keeping. Prioritise the big, spine-neutral patterns, hip-hinges, squats to a comfortable depth, presses, rows, and loaded carries, because they load the skeleton efficiently while keeping the spine in a safe position. Keep the heaviest work for movements you can control, and consider having a coach or physiotherapist check your form on the big lifts, particularly if your bones are a known concern; that supervision is not a luxury, it is part of what made the loading safe in the first place. Warm up into your working weights rather than jumping straight to them cold. And separate your heavy sessions with recovery days, because bone and muscle both adapt during rest, not during the session itself.
For women who cannot yet load heavily, whether because of severe osteoporosis, a recent fracture, or simply being new to training, the on-ramp is still generous. Bodyweight movements, resistance bands, and lighter dumbbells all provide a starting stimulus, and the same progressive principle applies: build the pattern and the tolerance first, then add load as your body earns it. Impact, if it is appropriate for you at all, is layered on last and cautiously, ideally with guidance, because a hard landing asks more of a fragile skeleton than a controlled lift does.
The reason this matters so much is that the fear-mongering lists get it precisely backwards for bone. They tell the woman with thinning bones to avoid the loading that could help maintain them, on the grounds that loading is dangerous, when the better-supported message is that appropriate, progressive, supervised-where-needed loading is one of the most useful things she can do. Avoidance does not protect fragile bones; it removes the very stimulus that keeps a skeleton from weakening further. The genuine caution is narrow, high-impact jarring and rounded-back loading in someone with established osteoporosis, and both of those are handled by modifying and progressing, not by putting the weights down for good.
None of this replaces individual medical advice, and if you have diagnosed osteoporosis or a fracture history it is worth building your loading plan with a GP and a suitably qualified exercise professional or physiotherapist. But the direction of travel is clear and encouraging: get specific about your bones, load them progressively and with good form, add supervision where the weight gets serious, and keep going. A capable, well-loaded skeleton is far better protection than a fearful, unloaded one.
Where the evidence is still evolving
Some of the caution here rests on older or narrow evidence, so it is worth being clear about the limits. The spinal-flexion finding from Sinaki and Mikkelsen comes from a small study of women with existing spinal osteoporosis several decades ago (PMID 6487063), and while its logic is sound and widely applied, it should not be stretched into a universal ban on any spinal flexion for everyone. On the encouraging side, the LIFTMOR trial by Watson and colleagues showed that a supervised programme of high-intensity resistance and impact training improved bone density measures and was safe in postmenopausal women with low bone mass, which challenges the assumption that these women must avoid heavy loading (PMID 28975661); still, that programme was supervised and progressive, which matters. Pelvic-floor and impact research continues to evolve, and much perimenopause-specific exercise-safety guidance is extrapolated from broader populations rather than tested directly in the menopause transition. The safe summary is that individualised, progressive, supervised-where-needed training is well supported, and blanket avoidance is not.
Glossary
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Spinal flexion | Bending the spine forward, as in a sit-up or rounded lift |
| Spinal extension | Arching or straightening the spine backward |
| Neutral spine | Keeping the spine in its natural curve, neither rounded nor arched |
| Bone density | A measure of how strong and mineral-rich bone is |
| DEXA scan | A scan that measures bone density |
| Osteoporosis | A condition of weakened, fracture-prone bone |
| Pelvic floor | The muscles supporting the bladder, bowel, and uterus |
| High-impact | Exercise with a jarring or jumping landing force |
| Progressive overload | Gradually increasing training demand over time |
| Modification | Adjusting a movement so you can do it safely |
Frequently asked questions
Almost none universally. The exercises worth caution depend on your individual status: bone density, pelvic-floor health, and injuries. Generic “avoid these” lists are usually unhelpful because they answer a personal question with a one-size answer.
No, quite the opposite for most women. Progressive resistance training protects muscle and bone. The LIFTMOR trial by Watson and colleagues found supervised heavy resistance and impact training improved bone measures safely in women with low bone mass (PMID 28975661). What to avoid is lifting past your form.
Not inherently. But if you have low bone density or osteoporosis, repeated loaded spinal flexion deserves caution, based on Sinaki and Mikkelsen’s spine research (PMID 6487063). Extension and neutral-spine core work like planks and bird-dogs is a sensible alternative.
For most women, yes, and impact is good for bone. Caution applies mainly with severe osteoporosis or significant pelvic-floor issues, where you would build up gradually and address the underlying issue first. It is about individual status, not a blanket ban.
HIIT itself is fine; doing it every day is the mistake. Intense work has a recovery cost, and recovery is often already compromised in perimenopause. A couple of hard sessions a week, plus strength and easy movement, works better than daily intensity.
No. Sharp, specific, or worsening joint pain is a signal to modify or rest, not to power through. I pushed through a meniscus injury on BODi and made it worse before learning to modify. Ordinary muscle soreness is different and part of training.
It means working around an injury or issue with tolerable modifications rather than either forcing the painful movement or stopping training altogether. An injured knee is not a reason to stop upper-body, core, and mobility work.
Not necessarily, but if you have risk factors for low bone density, a DEXA scan gives you the information to train confidently rather than fearfully. Knowing your bone status turns vague worry into a specific, workable plan.
Generally yes, and they are often a better choice than weighted sit-ups. Planks train the trunk in a neutral or extension-biased position rather than the repeated loaded flexion that Sinaki and Mikkelsen’s spine research flags for fragile spines (PMID 6487063). Scale from the knees, build up, and only modify further if a plank provokes a pelvic-floor symptom or an existing injury.
For most women, yes, and it is one of the most valuable things you can do for muscle and bone. The LIFTMOR trial found supervised heavy resistance and impact training improved bone measures safely in postmenopausal women with low bone mass (Watson and colleagues, PMID 28975661). The caution is the pattern, not the load: keep a neutral spine, hinge at the hips, and add weight only as your form holds.
Get your status checked rather than guessing. Ask your GP whether a DEXA scan is appropriate if you have osteoporosis risk factors, see a pelvic-health physiotherapist for any leaking or heaviness, and get a physio assessment for persistent joint pain. Knowing your bone, pelvic-floor, and joint status turns a vague fear into a specific, workable plan, and a low bone-density result points towards progressive loading, not avoidance (Watson and colleagues, PMID 28975661).
No. Train around, not through. A sore knee or shoulder is a reason to modify the specific provoking movement and keep training everything else, not to abandon your whole programme. Reduce the range, change the pattern, or switch to a tolerable version, and get a physiotherapy assessment if the pain persists. Stopping all training swaps a small local problem for the bigger risk of doing too little.
Bottom line
The fear-mongering lists have it backwards: the biggest risk in perimenopause is doing too little, not doing the “wrong” exercise, and scaring women away from lifting, impact, and core work sacrifices the training that protects muscle and bone. Almost nothing is universally off-limits. What exists is a short set of individual cautions, loaded spinal flexion with low bone density, impact with severe osteoporosis or pelvic-floor issues, daily high intensity, lifting past your form, and pushing through sharp joint pain, each of which is best handled by modifying rather than avoiding. Get specific about your own body, train around problems, and keep going, because a capable, well-trained body is the whole point.
Related guides
What to do next
References
How I make money: I pay for every programme I review. If you subscribe through my links I earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. Full disclosure.
Informational, not medical advice. Her Daily Fit is not a medical service and this guide is educational only. Talk to your GP or a qualified clinician about your own health, symptoms, or before making significant changes to how you exercise, especially if anything is severe, persistent, or getting worse.
