Low Impact vs. High Impact Exercise in Perimenopause: What Your Body Actually Needs

The Exercise Question Most Women Get Wrong

You have probably heard that you should move more during perimenopause. What you may not have heard is that the type of movement matters considerably, and that going too gentle may actually shortchange some of your most important long-term health needs.

Low-impact exercise and high-impact exercise both have real benefits, but they stimulate the body in different ways. Understanding those differences can help you build a routine that is genuinely suited to what your body is dealing with during the hormonal transition of perimenopause.

What Low Impact and High Impact Have in Common

Both improve cardiovascular fitness when done consistently at a sufficient intensity. Both burn calories and support metabolic health. Both can improve mood, sleep quality, and energy when incorporated into a regular routine. Both are better for you than being sedentary, which is worth stating plainly.

Both forms of exercise can be modified across a huge range of fitness levels, from beginner to athlete. The key distinction between them is not intensity, which can be high in both, but rather the amount of ground reaction force, the impact that travels through your joints and skeleton each time your foot strikes the ground.

What Low Impact Exercise Does Well

Low-impact exercise includes walking, swimming, cycling, rowing, elliptical training, yoga, and pilates. These activities are gentler on joints, making them well-suited for women with knee, hip, or back pain, for those returning to exercise after injury, or for anyone who finds higher-impact activities uncomfortable.

Low-impact exercise can still be vigorous. A brisk walk uphill, a challenging cycling session, or a power yoga class all elevate the heart rate substantially. Cardiovascular benefits are about intensity and duration, not impact level. The limitation of low-impact exercise is not what it does for your heart and lungs. It is what it does, or does not do, for bone density and muscle mass, two things that become priority concerns when estrogen declines.

What High Impact Exercise Does Differently

High-impact exercise includes running, jumping, aerobics, dancing, sports with running and jumping components, and any activity where both feet leave the ground and land. The forces that travel through the skeleton during high-impact activity are what make it particularly effective for bone health. Bone is living tissue that responds to mechanical loading by becoming denser. Low-impact activity does not generate the same loading forces, which is why walking alone is not sufficient to maintain bone density in the same way that running or jumping activities can be.

Jump training, or plyometrics, has been studied specifically in postmenopausal women and shown to stimulate bone formation at the hip, which is one of the most clinically significant sites for osteoporotic fracture. For women in perimenopause, starting or maintaining some form of impact-based exercise before bone density significantly declines is a meaningful investment in long-term skeletal health.

Resistance training, though not typically classified as high-impact, shares the bone-loading benefits through mechanical force on the skeleton and should be part of the picture alongside impact considerations.

Key Differences: What Each Prioritizes

Low-impact exercise is the better choice for joint protection, recovery, stress management, and gentle daily movement that accumulates benefits without taxing the body. It is also more sustainable over long training weeks and more accessible for women who are early in building a fitness habit.

High-impact exercise is the stronger stimulus for bone density, explosive power, and the kind of mechanical loading that has protective effects on the skeleton as estrogen declines. If bone health is a concern, reducing to exclusively low-impact exercise may not serve you well in the long run.

For most women in perimenopause, the ideal is not choosing one. It is combining low-impact activity for daily movement, flexibility, and recovery with high-impact or resistance-based sessions two to three times a week for bone and muscle stimulus.

Can You Do Both in the Same Routine?

Yes, and this is what most exercise guidelines for midlife women effectively recommend. A well-designed routine for perimenopause includes weight-bearing, impact activity for bone health, resistance training for muscle mass, and lower-intensity activity for cardiovascular health and recovery.

If you are new to high-impact exercise or returning after time away, start with low-impact options and introduce impact gradually. A physiotherapist or fitness professional with experience in midlife women's health can help you progress safely, particularly if you have joint concerns or have been sedentary for a while.

Track Your Training and How Your Body Responds

How you feel after different types of training is useful information. Some women find that high-impact exercise elevates cortisol in a way that worsens sleep and anxiety, particularly when stress levels are already high. If that is your experience, reducing the intensity or frequency of high-impact work and prioritizing lower-intensity movement may give better overall results.

PeriPlan lets you log workouts and track patterns over time. Recording what you do alongside how your sleep, energy, and mood look in the following days helps you spot whether certain training types are serving you well or creating more stress than recovery. This is especially useful during perimenopause, when the body's stress response can be more reactive than it used to be.

When to Seek Medical Clearance First

Talk to your doctor before beginning high-impact exercise if you have been diagnosed with osteoporosis, significant osteopenia, or joint conditions like moderate to severe osteoarthritis. High impact may not be appropriate for all individuals, and modifications or alternatives may be recommended.

Also consider a women's health physiotherapy assessment if you have pelvic floor concerns like leaking during jumping or running. This is more common than many women realize and is highly treatable. Leaking during exercise is not something you should simply accept or avoid exercising because of.

Your Routine Needs Both Kinds of Movement

The answer to low impact versus high impact is rarely either-or. The bones and muscles that will carry you through the next few decades of your life respond to challenge. Gentle movement keeps you mobile and manages stress. Higher-intensity and impact activity preserves the structural tissues that matter most as estrogen protection declines.

Build a routine that includes both, adapted to your current fitness level and health situation. The goal is not perfection. It is consistency with a varied enough stimulus to cover what your body actually needs.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider about your specific situation.