8 Hormone Balancing Exercise Tips

Hormone Balancing Exercise Tips

Use these hormone balancing exercise reminders for naturally supporting your best energy and wellness. Exercise matters most when it’s supported by the type, timing, and the lifestyle habits that result in fitness. Exercise provides the opportunity for fitness. The rest of your life determines how effective it will be.

1. Intense Early

Work with cortisol rather than against it. Cortisol, your energy hormone, is rising in the morning. Short sprints of activity alternated with recovery time will boost your metabolism the rest of the day. Shorter sessions are smarter both for your fat and your brain.

2. Weight train to fatigue

Increase testosterone and growth hormone, two hormones that help you build and maintain lean muscle tissue as you age, with the right type of exercise. Hormone balancing exercise after 50 includes intense weight training, whether heavy or light, to fatigue. This will boost lean muscle while tons of repetition will potentially be muscle wasting.

If you’re doing hours of classes every week and elevating your cortisol level due to the volume it will be hard to improve your lean tissue. Even if you once got away with this during hormone changes and compounded by other life stressors you’ll be doing more harm than good.

3. Less is more

Hormones not calories control weight. Positively stimulating hormones is about quality exercise not quantity. You can lose weight with a little exercise but you can store fat with a lot of exercise.

Short bouts of intervals (10 minutes or 20 minutes) and weight training (10 or 20 minutes) is not just “enough,” it is more effective.

When hormone balancing exercise is the goal more of a good thing is not just more, it is more imbalance. Less duration, less intensity, and less frequency especially if you’re fatigued in the morning and can’t get going is usually better.

Older female athletes training for endurance events have to keep this in mind too. The goal for you may be the endurance and stamina and not hormone balancing exercise. You’ll sabotage yourself by increasing cortisol and muscle wasting if you’re doing repeated long slow training sessions.

Even in my Ironman training experience last fall, I reduced the volume of training significantly by increasing the interval type of work, continuing weight training, and scheduled training strategically. By doing so, my hormones were better in December than in June before training began!

(Stay tuned! I am testing what happens this year without bioidentical hormones during training).

4. Take responsibility

It’s not just your hormones or your thyroid. There are habits that may be making it worse. If you’re not prioritizing sleep and nutrition, start there. If you don’t know which foods and supplements you may be using that hurt you or aren’t using that would help, it’s time to get help.

Follow through is important. Even while you might be suffering from brain fog, make getting the right answers, following through on them, your number one. Feel good so you can feel better. Too many women think undue fatigue or soreness constantly is normal and time will take care of it. You can start the right habits yourself. Stay consistent with them and track results. If within reasonable time you don’t feel better a lab test or a functional doctor.

5. Get green exercise time

You will reduce your cortisol levels and stimulate more serotonin and endorphins walking in green spaces than you will slogging away on the dreadmill or walking city streets. As days get longer try to get outdoors or if weekdays are out of the question, take advantage of the weekends.

6. Exercise less move more

A 30 or 60-minute workout doesn’t overcome 23 hours of sedentary activity. Start thinking of yourself as an active person and game this all day every day. Find an excuse to get up and deliver a message. Walk to the mailbox or take the dog out again. Cue up three favorite songs and dance in the living room for 10 minutes. Clean the house. Start a garden. Take up golf.

Your daily movement is directly tied to your risk of overweight and obesity regardless of your exercise habits. Women who are moving throughout their day whether they exercise or not seem to be best examples of hormone balancing exercise – it’s not about calories in and out.

7. Time your nutrition

Wait an hour after moderate to vigorous exercise. If you’re tempted to try intermittent fasting (IF), use the continuum of IF and start at the bottom. If you’re stressed and haven’t got a healthy relationship with food to come back to, IF can wreak havoc with old binge-purge history. If you’re struggling with what to eat, this new Cooking for Hormone Balance Cookbook is an amazing resource.

8. Stop snacking

Eating between meals gives your body immediate access to everything it wants. Why would it ever have to dip into fat stores if you do that? It won’t. If you’ve fallen for the BIG myth that eating more small meals a day will boost your metabolism, you’ve been duped. There is zero evidence this is true and there is research that shows the opposite: snacking and small meals actually increases your ability to store fat.

Snacking is the exact opposite of Intermittent Fasting. How ironic that both of these concepts exist as either lingering or emerging trends in 2018. The big “aha” here is that we’re still looking for a short cut. If you just take a short time to identify your personal blueprint for eating well there is no starving and no binging, there’s just good food that fuels a strong sexy body and hormone balancing exercise.

Enrollment is open right now!