Five ways the Fitness Industry fails Women in Mid-Life
A fitness industry veteran’s perspective on five pervasive & false marketing messages women are pummeled with in mid-life.
Menopause = fragility
The Mainstream Message: Perimenopause and beyond is a sign of inherent physical decline. It implies that the body is breaking down, becoming brittle, and you must safely bubble-wrap yourself or back away from challenging physical exertion.
The Antidote: Build absolute capability, starting today (it’s never too late to start). Fragility has nowhere to hide when you step into a weight room and prove that you are fully capable of taking up space by becoming stronger & more resilient. Side effect: fewer aches & pains, sick days, and better sleep.
Psst - Bodies in post-menopause “gain the same strength, build the same muscle mass, and lose the same fat from resistance training as premenopausal women.” PMID: 41963141
Narratives that take agency away from women (the effects of cortisol, glucose, hormone loss, etc.).
The Mainstream Message: Your biology is a rogue wave that is completely out of your control, and will leave you feeling broken and hopeless.
Practices like avoiding bananas (glucose) or coffee on an empty stomach (Cortisol spikes), skipping high-intensity workouts, or taking a supplement to suppress a biological response are a few of the “solutions” sold to women.
The Antidote: Take back your personal agency. Hormone shifts are real, and peri-menopause symptoms make it far tougher to do normal life. But they don’t leave you powerless.
The actual solution to these problems is not about avoiding the inputs; it’s about adapting a body’s capacity to tolerate the inputs. Clear, reliable, and “boring” anchors like lifting and eating to support your goals will pull you out of panic mode, and back into feeling good about your trajectory.
Psst - No significant weight gain is attributed to menopause transition. PMID: 22978257.
Go Hard culture, optimization strategies, moralizing food, chronic over-correcting/coaching.
The Mainstream Message: your approach isn’t working because you aren’t doing it right, and that’s your fault, because you're not trying hard enough. And also eat certain foods but never eat others, do a certain workout but not another type, take (more) supplements, time your eating, sync your training with your cycle, get your hormones checked, and a million other tasks.
The effects of these approaches aren’t accidental. They fit neatly into a broader neoliberal framework that turns vulnerability into something that can be monetized.
When aging—or any major phase of life—is framed as a personal failure of discipline, it creates a kind of moral panic: a fear of falling outside what we’ve been taught is acceptable. And once aging becomes something we’re supposed to prevent, fix, or overcome, there’s an entire industry ready to sell us the solution.
The wellness industry takes an inevitable biological transition and turns it into an endless cycle of consumption. We’re encouraged to believe that if we just buy the right products, follow the right routine, eat the right foods, or work hard enough, we can earn our way back into compliance with a standard we were never meant to meet in the first place.
The Antidote: Come to terms with the idea that taking the Mainstream approach isn’t working. I give you permission to stop participating in 95% of that noise. Instead, focus on the Big Rock behaviors (sleep quality, movement, food, and exercise). Choose one small change within each category that you can realistically add to your life: take a 5-minute walk before breakfast, pre-make lunches for tomorrow and the next day, get an analog alarm clock and kick your phone out of your bedroom.
Making your exercise & nutrition routine resource-consuming for very little benefit in exchange.
The Mainstream Message: The wellness industry loves to make midlife health feel like an advanced math problem. They tell you that you must track macros down to the microgram, workout strictly according to fluctuating daily hormone charts, and buy endless supplement stacks. At a time when you probably have the most responsibilities and least time to give!
The Antidote: These complex exercise or diet plans are actually just business models designed to create dependency. If they make fitness look impossibly complicated, you’ll feel like you can never survive without remaining attached to the maker and their offerings.
In reality, 95% of midlife physical longevity comes from these four basic, sustainable pillars that work for any old 25-year-old: lifting weights, eating enough protein & fiber, moving around enough each day, and sleeping enough. True coaching shouldn't keep you tethered to a gatekeeper forever; its entire purpose should be to help you understand the evidence-based frameworks that make up your plan, so you can confidently carry on your own routine someday.
Focusing on symptoms instead of guarding low capacity and over-pathologizing pain.
The Mainstream Message: up to 70% of women in Perimenopause experience pain and increased injury susceptibility. It’s easy to get caught up in the reactive practice of treating every aches and pains like a game of whack-a-mole, getting distracted with treating or micro-managing every issue. It treats every bout of midlife pain, fatigue, or low mood as an isolated disease to be medicated, micro-managed, or hyper-focused on, completely ignoring your actual day-to-day capacity.
There are so many tools that can help you through periods of time that make you feel like it’s safer to not do anything low capacity days, pain, or injuries are all likely to happen in your menopause experience.
The Antidote: Guarding baseline capacity. True coaching stops treating your body like a broken machine. Instead of obsessing over every ache, it actively guards your overall capacity and teaches you how to train safely through life's low-energy seasons. It prioritizes stress regulation, nervous system resilience, and joint-friendly movement so that your routine rejuvenates your life rather than draining the tiny bit of energy you have left.
Anne Koski
