So much more than just the end of your periods.
This of course you already know if you’ve had to, or are having to live with and navigate the menopause taking over your mind and body. In fact, the end of your menstrual cycle for many, is the very least of the matter.
Menopause is an important transition in women’s lives which coincides with living in an older body. Using this stage in your life as a prompt to reconnect with yourself can ensure you take the care your mind and body needs now and for your future self.
Diminished oestrogen and progesterone
It’s the reduction in these two hormones that results in perimenopause and menopause. It can affect you in a variety of ways:
Slower metabolism increasing weight especially over the stomach
Reduced bone density leading to osteoporosis
Heart disease and cancer are an increased risk
Impact on mood and emotions and ability to concentrate and think
Aches, pains and low energy affecting how your body feels and moves
Sleep disturbance
While it may be a ‘natural biological process’ it can feel anything but natural.
Movement and exercise
Your superpower is the knowledge and self awareness of how movement and exercise can benefit your mind and body.
It gives you the opportunity to respond proportionally, appropriately and effectively to live in greater harmony with your body and the world around you.
Believe in your body again
Confidence and resilience in your body is not necessarily achieved with high intensity cardio, boot camp activities, marathon training or vigorous workouts. Unless you know your body needs just that.
If like me, just reading this high energy list exhausts you, then this is not the way you’ll believe in your body again. This is how you will…
Honing your superpowers
Tune in to your mind and body. Identify what you are REALLY feeling, thinking, sensing both mentally and physically.
Connect with your breath, the ground beneath you, your lengthening spine and softening shoulders. What is your body telling you?
Move, breathe and align your whole body as one interconnecting entity, with everything you do.
It can take practice to hone your superpowers. So practice away as a means to understand what your mind, body and soul needs in any given moment.
Listen to the rhythm of your body and adjust what you’re doing to suit how your body feels. Learning to be in tune with yourself more of the time, helps to avoid the ill effects of straining, draining and paining (couldn’t resist…!) your body.
Building your strength, flexibility and fitness will help counter your menopause symptoms and help reduce the associated health risks. But only if you work within your capacity, without depleting your reserves, regardless of what you may once have achieved.
As rule of thumb when increasing your exercise levels during your menopause, always finish any activity feeling you could have done more. If you’re starting with low energy and fitness levels, what you have achieved may seem insignificant, BUT IT’S NOT.
Six months from now
Regular and sustainable exercise and activities HOWEVER SMALL, are like coin deposits in a sweetie jar. Initial deposits rattle around and echo lonely and directionless, but regular and sustainable deposits however small, build up.
Six months on those sweetie jar deposits are more significant and measurable. Strength, flexibility and fitness works in the same way.
With this mindset, even if you’re feeling weak, stiff and out of condition, you can still work towards being stronger, more flexible and fitter than you are now.
Whatever your goal, you have to start somewhere. If you don’t start, in six months time you will be at best, exactly where you are now. At worst, weaker stiffer and even more unfit.
Start with something that appeals. Kitchen dancing, longer walks, cycling round the lanes, tennis with a friend. ANYTHING that is within your capacity, reserves and existing aches and pains.
Aches and pains
If this is a problem please get in touch. General advice is not necessarily going to be pertinent to you.
Rest and recuperation
While moving and exercising is vital to getting you back to feeling more like you, pacing yourself is equally as important. Plan your day, your week and your month to accommodate energy levels, capacity and recovery time.
Take any opportunity to lie down on the ground! I do this regularly and it is extraordinarily underrated. Stop reading and try it now for a 60 second reset. Feel how your body lets go, off loading your muscles while lengthening your spine, as you connect with your breath.
It’s how our ancestors took their R and R for hundreds and thousands of years. Chairs weren’t invented until very recently in our evolutionary history.
It worked for them. It can work for you!
Reconnect with what it is to be human
In what can be a distractingly hectic, device driven, movement limited world, learn to reconnect with yourself and in all things Rachel Kili Physiotherapy “Simply Move!™”.
This is how we were designed to thrive.
This is what it is to be human.
This is how you can learn to navigate life during your menopause.
If you have any questions, do feel free to get in touch.
Rachel
Your Physiotherapist
