(and why you should lift more, not less)
I fell down a rabbit hole the other night.
I’d been reading about how the age of first-time mothers keeps climbing. Here in Singapore, where I live, the average first-time mum is now around 32. In the Netherlands, where I’m from, it’s 30.4. All over the world, women are starting their families later than any generation before us — and for good reasons: education, careers, financial footing, finding the right moment, the right person.
Then I looked at the other end of the timeline.
Perimenopause — the long, often bumpy transition into menopause — typically begins in the mid-40s. But the hormonal shifts can start far earlier. For some women, the first changes arrive in their mid-30s — and from around 35, our hormones and fertility are already quietly changing (it’s exactly why 35 is flagged as a turning point in pregnancy). And here’s the part that stopped me: you can still get pregnant during perimenopause. Most women have no idea.
Put those two facts side by side and something becomes obvious. The gap between these two chapters of a woman’s life — the one where we’re growing and feeding babies, and the one where our hormones start winding down — is shrinking fast. A generation ago, they were separated by decades. Now, for many of us, they’re separated by a handful of years. For some women the stages nearly touch. For a few, they overlap entirely.
You might be recovering from birth and noticing your first perimenopausal symptoms in the same year. Packing away the last of the baby clothes and feeling the first hot flush in the same season of life. Breastfeeding one month, tracking a suddenly unpredictable cycle the next.
And this — right here — is the reason my book holds every one of these phases between the same two covers.
For a long time, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause got treated as separate worlds: separate books, separate experts, separate advice that rarely spoke to each other. That made sense when they were decades apart. It doesn’t anymore. Pre-conception, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause — they aren’t distant islands you visit one at a time. For a lot of us now, they’re one continuous, crowded stretch of road, sometimes folding into each other. So the support shouldn’t be scattered across four different shelves. It should live together, the way these stages now actually live in our bodies and our lives.
And the thing that carries you across all of it is the same.
The instinct that works against you
Here’s what tends to happen when the body changes in perimenopause. The weight settles differently. Energy dips. The old approaches stop working. And the instinct — the one we’ve been trained into for decades — is to shrink: do more cardio, eat less, try harder to make the body smaller.
It’s the worst possible response.
When estrogen declines, you lose muscle and bone faster than before. Eating less and grinding out cardio accelerates exactly what you’re trying to prevent — you lose the muscle that protects your metabolism, your strength, and your independence later in life.
The body isn’t asking you to do less. It’s asking you to get stronger.
Why you should lift more, not less
Strength training is one of the most powerful tools women have in this stage — and one of the most underused. Lifting challenging weights, consistently, does what no amount of cardio or calorie-cutting can:
- It builds and protects muscle at the exact moment your body is trying to give it away.
- It loads your bones, which helps defend against the drop in bone density that makes fractures more likely after menopause.
- It supports your metabolism, because more muscle means a body that works with you, not against you.
- It steadies mood, sleep, and energy — the everyday things that perimenopause loves to disrupt.
- It keeps you capable — able to lift, carry, chase, and move through your life on your own terms for decades to come.
And no — lifting heavy will not make you bulky. It will make you strong. There is a difference, and it’s one the fitness industry has been blurring for women for far too long.
Where to start
You don’t need a perfect plan or a fancy gym. You need consistency and enough challenge to matter.
- Strength train two to three times a week. That’s plenty to start seeing change.
- Lift loads that actually feel hard by the last few reps. Light weights for endless reps aren’t the goal — your muscles need a real reason to adapt.
- Favour the big movements — squats, hinges, presses, rows, carries. They give you the most strength for your time.
- Eat enough, with enough protein. Fuel your body; don’t fight it.
- Respect recovery. Sleep and rest are where the strength is actually built.
If perimenopause is bringing symptoms that are hard to manage, please talk to a doctor who takes them seriously — strength training works alongside good medical care, not instead of it.
The same thread, all the way through
The truth I keep coming back to is this: your strength was never meant to belong to one chapter of your life. Not the pregnancy years, not the postpartum scramble, not the perimenopausal shift. It’s the through-line. It’s the thing that carries you from one stage to the next, especially now that those stages are pressed so close together.
So if your body is changing and everything in you wants to shrink — pick up something heavy instead.
You’re not winding down. You’re building the strength that gets to carry you forward.
If this resonates, the first chapter of my book — Strength Through the Messy & Beyond — is free to read right now. It’s an honest conversation about why most fitness advice was never built around the reality of women’s lives, across every phase. No waiting for the launch.
Daniëlle van der Leest Women’s Strength & Wellbeing Coach | Founder of ActiveWomen | Mum of 3
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