There are certain things you expect to become interested in as you get older.
A comfortable mattress.
Whether somewhere has decent parking.
The increasingly satisfying moment when you discover something you regularly buy is on offer.
Muscle mass was not on my list.
I’d spent most of my life thinking muscles were largely the concern of people who owned enormous tubs of protein powder and voluntarily went to the gym before work.
Then I started reading about menopause.
And apparently I needed to add muscle to the growing list of things I was now supposed to be thinking about.
Wonderful.
I’d only just got my head around oestrogen, hot flushes and the fact that my bladder could no longer necessarily be trusted during a particularly funny story.
Now somebody wanted me to do squats.
What happened to Hercules?
The slightly ridiculous thing about discovering that I needed to get stronger was that I’d always been strong.
Really strong.
Strong enough that my family used to call me Hercules.
It became one of those family jokes that just sticks.
Need something heavy moved?
Get Hercules.
Stubborn piece of furniture?
Hercules.
Something that sensible people might have waited for another person to help them lift?
Apparently not.
I’d also been a regular gym-goer when I was younger. Strength and exercise weren’t alien concepts to me.
But then life happened.
Work.
Children.
Responsibilities.
The usual collection of things that gradually occupy the spaces where your own time used to live.
And somehow, without ever consciously deciding I don’t go to the gym anymore, approximately two decades passed.
Twenty years.
Which seems excessive when you write it down.
In my defence, I was busy.
Then menopause arrived and something I had always taken completely for granted seemed to disappear.
My strength.
I noticed it in ordinary things.
Things felt heavier.
Movements that once wouldn’t have registered suddenly required effort.
My body didn’t feel as powerful as it once had.
And because I’d spent so much of my life thinking of myself as the strong one, I think I noticed that loss particularly keenly.
Hercules, it appeared, had misplaced her superpowers.
At first it would have been very easy to shrug and say:
Well, I’m getting older.
End of investigation.
Except I don’t particularly like that answer.
Ageing is real. Bodies change. Menopause brings another collection of changes with it.
But “I’m getting older” isn’t a plan.
And I wanted a plan.
Nobody mentioned this bit
When we talk about menopause, we tend to talk about symptoms.
Hot flushes.
Sleep.
Periods.
Mood.
Brain fog.
But the more I read, the more I realised there was another side to menopause that interested me even more.
What happens afterwards?
Because, with a bit of luck, I’m going to spend quite a lot of my life postmenopausal.
I don’t simply want to make it through the next few years.
I want to be strong later.
I want to be able to get up from the floor without having to roll onto all fours, locate a sturdy piece of furniture and make noises normally associated with competitive weightlifting.
I want to carry my own shopping.
Climb stairs.
Travel.
Walk.
Swim.
Pick things up.
Put things down.
Open jars without having to find a man with better grip strength.
Actually, scrap that last one.
There are principles at stake.
And it turns out muscle has rather a lot to do with maintaining that independence.
Current menopause guidance specifically highlights the importance of maintaining muscle mass and strength through physical activity.
So this wasn’t simply another internet wellness trend.
This mattered.
And in my case, my joints had already started making that very clear.
My shoulders had other ideas
My shoulders had become particularly troublesome.
Eventually, I did something I’d never done before.
I went to see a chiropractor.
During the appointment she told me that I was hypermobile—my joints naturally have a greater range of movement—and she felt this could be contributing to some of the joint problems I was experiencing around menopause.
Then she said something that stuck with me.
I needed to strengthen the muscles around my joints.
The idea was that stronger muscles could help support and stabilise joints that were naturally a little too enthusiastic about moving.
This was mildly disappointing.
I’d been hoping for something along the lines of:
“Have a lie down. Try not to lift anything. Perhaps somebody should bring you a cup of tea.”
Instead, once again, the answer appeared to involve getting stronger.
There seemed to be a conspiracy developing.
But what she’d said made sense to me.
I’d always thought of strength training largely in terms of visible muscles.
Toned arms.
Strong legs.
Perhaps eventually opening a stubborn jar without first banging the lid on the worktop and swearing at it.
Now I was beginning to think about strength in terms of support.
My muscles weren’t there just to make me strong in the obvious sense.
They helped support my joints and helped my body cope with the things I asked it to do every day.
And because I’m hypermobile, that suddenly felt particularly relevant.
It also sent me back to the research.
Was what I’d been told actually supported by evidence?
This is where things become more nuanced.
Strengthening and conditioning are commonly used in managing symptomatic joint hypermobility, with the aim of improving things such as muscle strength, joint stability, movement and function.
The menopause connection is less clear-cut.
Hormones may influence connective tissues and researchers are interested in the relationship between hormonal changes and hypermobility, but I couldn’t find enough good evidence t
