Finding Balance Through Pilates for Menopause and Aging
How exercise became my menopause medicine
When menopause came for me a few years ago, it came in like wrecking ball*. Madame Menopause hit me much harder than she hit any other woman in my family. To be honest, I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy ride, but still I was unprepared.
Since the age of twelve, my cycles had been set-your-watch regular but never entirely normal. For decades I struggled with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) and also something called mittleschmerz, which means “middle pain,” or very painful ovulations. Due to a history of migraines, birth control medication to stop ovulation wasn’t an option. That meant no other cures were available.
(Side story: A former OB-GYN suggested to me I should just get pregnant so at least I wouldn’t have mid-monthly pain for a while. Not only was I very single at the time, it just seemed like a terrible reason to have a baby.)
Along with occasional hot flashes, awful sleep, and moods swinging like a screen door in a hurricane, some of my biggest menopause symptoms were joint pain and heavy fatigue. I’m talking so tired and in so much pain that simply standing up from a chair was a daunting task.
My menopausal problems started peaking around the same time as the pandemic. Working from home full time meant I sat a whole lot and didn’t get up and move around much. Oh, and there was brain fog. The “am I descending into early dementia?” kind of brain fog.
At my wits end I initiated an email exchange with my OB-GYN who directed me to a nurse practitioner who specialized in menopause. It was a brief and frustrating call. I was in real pain and asking for help and was provided very few options. At one point her actual advice was to “tough it out, like most women have to do.”
At the end of the call, she prescribed an anti-depressant for the hot flashes I rarely experienced and said, “Maybe you could try Yoga?”
Now this made me mad. No, more than mad, the best description would be incandescent. How in this day and age could a very respected medical health organization’s best advice to be to “tough it out” and do some Yoga.
In retrospect, I am glad they were so completely useless. It led me on an incredible and successful journey to take back my health.
Step One: Find someone who will actually help
For years my sister had recommended consulting with a Naturopathic doctor. After doing a search of local doctors, I found someone who had graduated from a reputable school and was licensed by the State of California.
After our first consultation, we did blood work, tested for food sensitivities, and began to work on a plan to get me feeling better. One area where I went around and around with my regular doctor, my Naturopath, my family, and my husband was in regard to exercise.
“If you exercise you will feel better,” was the common theme. Sure, this is true, but with fatigue so bad I could hardly stand up and excruciating joint pain, exercise hardly seemed feasible.
In working with the Naturopath with strategies that included eating, vitamins and supplements, over time the joint pain did start to ease. Then there were no more excuses, it was time to try exercise. Let’s be honest, exercise and I have never really been the best of friends. As a woman of some size, it has been a freighted thing for most of my life. This body was built for comfort, not for speed. Exercise can be absolutely boring, unsatisfying, and now with menopause added in, downright painful.
One discovery was that I loved swimming. And by love, I mean obsessively chasing the feeling of being in the water, floating, and feeling strong enough to swim powerful laps. In fact, I loved swimming so much that I hurt myself by overtraining both my right ankle and my right shoulder.
That bum ankle meant that my balance, which was already not great, became something very scary. Uneven surfaces caused me to slowly pick my way through. Going downstairs meant turning sideways and gripping the handrails. Generally, I could not trust my own body to stand firmly on its own two feet.
This brought on massive waves of depression. With sore joints and wobbly balance, I felt impossibly old. Menopause and the idea of letting go of youth and fertility was already a struggle.
During this same time, I also made the decision to grow out the color in my hair and let it be natural. Seeing my face surrounded by gray hair was certainly an adjustment. Sometimes it is still hard to reconcile myself to what is in the mirror.
Step Two: Stop fighting and start loving (or at least be nice)
A major tipping point for me came when I asked for and received the most adorable pair of roller skates for Christmas. As a kid I love, love, loved to roller skate and just knew I could pop back on up on eight wheels and soon feel the breeze through my hair while cruising the sidewalk. It would replace swimming as my new exercise of choice, I was just sure of it.
Try as I might, I could not make roller skating work. My balance was a mess, and my core strength was a joke. My hips were stiff from sitting too much for work and when I fell (which was a lot) it was a really hard time getting back up. Skating was something I truly wanted, but I had to ask myself if it was just too late. If it was silly to even try.
After stewing on it and moping about it and crying a little (okay maybe a lot), I packed away all of my skate gear and resigned myself to old age. This was it. Not even old enough to be eligible for retirement but my life was over.
Thankfully I have a very patient therapist who is not afraid to dispense tough love. She advised that it was finally and firmly time (and perhaps a bit overdue) to stop hating my body. This was radical. Over half a century spent loathing myself from the neck down. Never slim enough, never athletic, hell my shitty body even failed me when I found an exercise I did like!
It was time to learn how to stop those mean words and thoughts. It’s hard to knock the brain out of a deep groove but I kept trying. While meditating I would try to talk to my body and ask her what she needed. Looking in the mirror, I would apologize for everything mean thing said and done to this body over the years.
Step Three: Do something small, but do something
Through reading and researching, I found that the menopausal body needs different kinds exercise than a young body. A young body needs cardio, a menopausal body needs strength to maintain bone density.
There are different nutritional requirements too. For example, it was time to stop fighting my lactose intolerance and finally accept it. It was also time to stop eating foods (like wheat) that bloated me up. And it was time to stop drinking. Not that I’d ever been out of control with alcohol, but a few glasses a night was still too much.
The better I ate, the better I started to feel. I thought about what that nurse practitioner said about Yoga and then rejected it that out of hand. It’s not my cup of tea for a variety of reasons. A dear friend is a Pilates instructor and while not knowing what to expect, I started to look into it.
A short internet search later led me to a once a week Pilates class at the local community center. The class description said it was a kind and gentle form of Pilates. In addition to being a certified Pilates instructor, the teacher was also a dancer and a Feldenkrais movement expert.
Nervous, angry, and wearing Spandex, I attended my first class in March 2023. It hurt, I wasn’t able to do all of the moves, and I was the fattest person in the room. Curiously, I wasn’t the oldest person in the room by a long shot.
For six weeks I attended every one of the classes and signed up for the next session. And the next one. My body hurt for two to three days after every class but with time I started to notice it didn’t hurt as much or for as long.
My energy began to improve a little. My hips didn’t ache every single evening.
Balance started to dramatically improve. I could walk up a set of stairs without clinging to the handrail. Going down was still a bit of a question with the difficult ankle, but I had more confidence than before.
Last week in class I realized I could do most of the moves.
My body is looser and easier than it was before starting the classes. Actually, I was able to hold a plank (from my knees) for longer than I ever thought possible. Because my hips feel light years better, I have also been able to start walking two to three times a week. Slow, but purposeful. There is no longer near constant joint pain and standing up from a chair is no longer accompanied by sharp pain and loud groans that mimic the sound of a cow’s moo.
Pilates did not just make me physically stronger; it also helped me to appreciate my body more. My instructor is amazing at explaining how the body works and how a movement in one place causes counter movement in another. For example, if you have a sore lower back, consider how your upper back and neck are also feeling. They are related.
As I noticed how my body moved and learned to appreciate what it can and cannot do, I began to… well it’s not love… but I appreciate my body so much more than I ever have in my whole life.
I feel connected to my body in ways never before known. It makes me cry just to type those words.
This body of mine never deserved all of the hate I heaped on it since childhood. For all of those years of active hate, this body still took care of me, got me around in the world, and allowed me to survive. Pilates helped me to find both physical and emotional balance in this post-menopausal body.
So now what?
It is February 2024, and it has been almost a year since I started gentle Pilates. My body is stronger, and my mind is sharper. So where do we go from here?
While my overall strength has improved, now it is time to start doing actual strength training to help maintain muscle and bone mass. I continue to tweak how I eat (more protein, less sugar) and continue to work every day on how I feel about and treat my body.
Progress is slow and I am working to stay gentle in this process.
There are good days and bad days. Steps forward and setbacks. Days of pain and days of no pain at all. I am becoming a different person and growing emotionally. It is a little self-contained miracle.
My only regret is that I wish I would have learned how to be kinder to myself a long time ago. So many years wasted on being mean to myself and wallowing in low self-esteem. I am reminded that this is a journey. I wasn’t ready back then. It had to get bad before I discovered I wanted to get better.
Just recently I signed up for the latest six-week session of Pilates and I might actually start taking a second class each week. My balance is improved but there is room to go. A recent visit with a physical therapist helped me to understand that my ankle won’t ever go back to where it was before the injury, but there are plenty of things I can do to manage it.
Now that my core is stronger and my balance has improved, someday soon, maybe this Spring, I want to try roller skates again.
Maybe for even a minute I can feel the joy of rolling on eight wheels. If my body isn’t quite ready for it, that’s okay too. There is still time. Time to get stronger, time to move my body in different ways.
And still plenty of time time to have fun.
*Nod to Miley Cyrus for the very useful phrase.
Karen Fayeth was born with the eye of a writer and the heart of a storyteller. Her work is heavily influenced by her New Mexico roots and continues to evolve in an urban setting. Karen has won awards for her writing, photography, and art. Now living in the San Francisco Bay area, she can be found online at www.karenfayeth.com and on all the socials: Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook
