Menopause Strength Training & Fitness | 40+ Fitness for Women
Jun 2, 2026 · 21 min · 9 segments
If the idea of strength training makes you nervous, bad knees, old injuries, being told you need to lift heavy, this episode is going to change how you think about it. I'm sharing some stories in…
No entities detected.
Today, I wanna talk about the fact that a lot of women come to me convinced that strength training is gonna hurt them, especially if they follow the advice to lift heavy.
I mean, I had a knee that I could barely bend thanks to arthritis and an old hip injury that had come back to haunt me, but I'll tell you, strength training is what fixed them.
Many of them are in their 60s and 70s, and they've been able to ramp up to lifting heavy for them safely.
So if you're sitting there thinking that strength training is somehow risky or just not for someone in your situation, then this is the episode for you.
By the end, you'll understand exactly why strength training is safe regardless of what your starting point is.
So the reason that strength training is so safe is it can be completely tailored to you.
It is completely customizable, and that is completely unlike a group fitness class or an instructor-led session where they're deciding what to do, they're dictating the pace, they're telling you how long you need to do something for and how much the rest periods are, and that is very much harder to adapt to your needs.
So first of all, you're choosing the exercises that work for you, and I think this is a very key component here because you may have injuries, right? You may have some parts of you that don't work so well.
For example, I have clients who have arthritis in their ankles, and they can't bend their ankles.
So certain exercises are just painful for them, so we swap them out of their program for other exercises that don't require that kind of ankle mobility.
And though you may see people online doing back squats, doing deadlifts, doing bench pressingThose exercises, you do not have to do them.
[laughs] Okay? They're super popular, and social media will have you believing that that is strength training.
Let me tell you something, I don't do any of those three, and I am super strong.
When I'm choosing exercises, I don't want exercises that compress my spine, which is what barbell back squats will do, and deadlifts, conventional deadlifts don't work with my arthritic knees.
Today, I wanna talk about the fact that a lot of women come to me convinced that strength training is gonna hurt them, especially if they follow the advice to lift heavy.
I mean, I had a knee that I could barely bend thanks to arthritis and an old hip injury that had come back to haunt me, but I'll tell you, strength training is what fixed them.
Many of them are in their 60s and 70s, and they've been able to ramp up to lifting heavy for them safely.
So if you're sitting there thinking that strength training is somehow risky or just not for someone in your situation, then this is the episode for you.
By the end, you'll understand exactly why strength training is safe regardless of what your starting point is.
So the reason that strength training is so safe is it can be completely tailored to you.
It is completely customizable, and that is completely unlike a group fitness class or an instructor-led session where they're deciding what to do, they're dictating the pace, they're telling you how long you need to do something for and how much the rest periods are, and that is very much harder to adapt to your needs.
So first of all, you're choosing the exercises that work for you, and I think this is a very key component here because you may have injuries, right? You may have some parts of you that don't work so well.
For example, I have clients who have arthritis in their ankles, and they can't bend their ankles.
So certain exercises are just painful for them, so we swap them out of their program for other exercises that don't require that kind of ankle mobility.
And though you may see people online doing back squats, doing deadlifts, doing bench pressingThose exercises, you do not have to do them.
[laughs] Okay? They're super popular, and social media will have you believing that that is strength training.
Let me tell you something, I don't do any of those three, and I am super strong.
When I'm choosing exercises, I don't want exercises that compress my spine, which is what barbell back squats will do, and deadlifts, conventional deadlifts don't work with my arthritic knees.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.