OMG: The Women's Health Brief

I don’t think many people dispute the importance of exercise. We hear about it constantly, it’s good for our physical health, our mental health. Even when motivation is low, I’ll often go for a run, not because I love the idea of it, but because I know what it does: it gets my endorphins moving and my brain working. I usually come back feeling better than I did before going.

I’ve run most of my life, on and off, and when people say to me, “You must love running,” I think I’m not sure I love running, but I do value what it gives me afterwards: a clearer head and a brain that’s properly switched on.

I was thinking about this the other day at a barre class, my first one in at least a couple of years. In the meantime, I’ve become a convert to resistance training. I go to the gym and lift weights. I also listen to a lot of podcasts about exercise and midlife. Many of them are great but some of them are a bit preachy and tell us what we should be doing with our bodies.

And honestly, sometimes those messages irritate me.

We’re told we need to be in the gym three or four times a week, lifting heavy, pushing to muscle exhaustion, making the right face so it “counts.” The silly little pink two-pound weights are dismissed, what’s the point of those?

If I’m being very honest, when I saw those weights in the barre class, I had a moment of thinking, here we go, these are the ones “for women”, I’m going to have no problem with these. And then, by the end of the session, I really felt it in my arms. It was a tough workout.

I’ve been lifting weights consistently for about two years now. And yet, those small, controlled movements at the barre reminded me of something I sometimes forget in: there are no absolutes.

There is no single correct way to move your body. No one-size-fits-all prescription that works for every woman, every hormone profile, every energy level, every stage of this transition.

The point isn’t lifting heavy.
The point is lifting something.

The point isn’t intensity.
The point is movement.

True not all movement is the same, but any movement is better than none. Especially in midlife, when fatigue, joint pain, disrupted sleep, and fluctuating hormones are already asking a lot of us.

At heart, this isn’t really a post about exercise at all. It’s about how, in midlife, we are constantly told what we should be doing by experts, by headlines, by people who rarely take into account the reality of our lives or our bodies. The message is often less about helping us move and more about making sure we don’t get it wrong. But the truth is simpler than that. We have to start somewhere. Going from doing nothing to doing something, a walk, a class, yoga, barre, whatever it is matters far more than doing the “right” thing perfectly. A gentle run is not going to send your cortisol levels into dangerous territory, despite what we’re sometimes told. What does real harm is the constant sense that we’re failing before we’ve even begun.

If you’ve never been to the gym, being told that success only counts if you go three times a week, lift heavy, and push yourself to exhaustion isn’t empowering, it’s paralysing.

Midlife doesn’t need any more rules or any more “shoulds.”

It’s about working with the body we have today, and moving in ways that feel good rather than punishing.

Because the exercise you come back to even with two-pound weights is the one that counts.