Dr. Betty Murray recommends three to four strength training sessions weekly for women in perimenopause and menopause, prioritizing muscle and bone health over cardio. She emphasizes eating 50-60 grams of protein at breakfast and dinner, since older bodies need substantial protein doses to build muscle rather than convert them to glucose. Strength training won't make you bulky, even with hormone therapy.
What is the best exercise and nutrition protocol for somebody in perimenopause and menopause? Absolutely. So, you know, obviously, when we're working with people, we're individualizing it down to their DNA and kind of their build and what their body's going through. But if we look at sort of the general understanding, perimenopause and menopause and beyond is the time period that if you were like into cardio, it is time to change, we have to start strength training. And in most cases, we have to add volume either through heavier weights or more repetition and then progressive load. Right. So it has to get harder over time because we are fighting against a natural biological event of losing muscle and bone. Right. Here's the thing. I should grab it, but we have a 5-pound weight. Everybody's picked up a 5-pound little hand weight, right? It's about that big. 5 pounds of fat— I have a fake one around the corner, but 5 pounds of fat is the size of a bread loaf. When you put on muscle, you cannot get bulky, even with testosterone replacement appropriately done for women. So it is a metabolic girdle, and we want to put on muscle. So that's super important. And I'm like, we need to at least weight train 3 times a week. My recommendation is 4, but if you've never done it, you start with 1. We get efficacy with 1. That doesn't mean we don't do some other things like some appropriate cardio, but this is not the time to kill it in the gym for 2 hours a day. And then the other side of that is what we eat. Protein becomes very, very important, right? That helps us make muscle. Here's the thing. They did the study in 2024. When we're little, we can have— or we're young, you know, like in our teens— we can have a little bit of protein here and a little bit of protein here and a little bit of protein here, and your body will turn around and make muscle out of it. Well, when we get older, what happens is the body turns around and takes those little bits of protein and it makes glucose out of them. It doesn't even try and build muscle. So that first meal of the day needs to have a big chunk of protein, and that last meal at dinner needs to have a big chunk. So my goal is usually 50 to 60 in that first meal, 50 to 60 in that last meal. Grams.
