Why Am I Too Tired and Achy to Exercise? What Helped Me Get Moving Again
There was a point in my perimenopause journey a few years ago when exercise simply didn't feel the way it used to.
I'd always exercised, so I wasn't someone who needed convincing that movement was good for me. But after periods of training less consistently, and convincing myself that a few dog walks in the park was adequate - getting back into it became surprisingly difficult.
I'd exercise and ache for days afterwards. My recovery was terrible. My mobility wasn't particularly good because I hadn't worked on it for some time. And instead of exercise making me feel energised, sometimes it felt as though I'd given myself something else to recover from. It became a vicious circle. The longer recovery took, the less I wanted to exercise. The less I exercised, the harder it felt when I tried again.
And it wasn't only about exercise. When your body feels tired, stiff and slow to recover, you can gradually start doing less of all the things you used to do without thinking - walking somewhere, making plans, carrying things, getting out for the day. Your world can quietly become a little smaller.
At times I remember thinking: what's the point? But what I've learnt over the past few years is that how your body feels today isn't necessarily how it's destined to feel from now on.
My recovery is completely different now. My mobility has improved. I can train regularly without needing hours or days to recover afterwards. And, importantly, exercise has become something I enjoy again. It didn't happen overnight. And it wasn't about simply forcing myself to work harder. It was about rebuilding what my body needed - gradually.
Is this really just part of getting older?
One of the narratives I really want women to question is:
“I'm getting older. Of course I'm going to feel stiff, tired and weak.”
Our bodies do change as we get older, and the hormonal changes of perimenopause and menopause can certainly influence how we feel.
Oestrogen has effects throughout the musculoskeletal system, including muscle, bone, tendons and joints. As hormone levels fluctuate and ultimately decline through the menopause transition, some women notice more joint pain, stiffness or slower recovery. But that doesn't mean becoming increasingly weak and immobile is inevitable.
In fact, this is precisely the stage of life when maintaining and building muscle becomes most important. And that requires us to stop thinking about exercise purely in terms of weight loss.
What if exercise wasn't about being thinner?
For years, many of us were taught to see exercise as a way of burning calories.
Did I work hard enough? How many calories did I burn? Will this help me lose weight? I'd like us to replace that with a completely different question:
What do I want my body to be capable of in 10, 20 or 30 years?
I want to be able to get myself off the toilet without assistance.
I want to squat down to the washing machine and stand back up.
I want to carry my shopping.
I want to travel, walk, lift things and live independently.
Suddenly strength training becomes less about what your arms or stomach look like and more about protecting your future freedom.
And you're not “too old” to start building strength. Muscle remains remarkably responsive to resistance training later in life.
Why might I be feeling tired and achy in the first place?
This is where I put my functional medicine hat on.
When a client tells me she wants to exercise but feels permanently exhausted, stiff or slow to recover, I don't automatically tell her she needs more willpower.
I want to know why her body is struggling to meet the demand.
Hormonal change may be part of the picture. So might poor sleep - something many women become painfully familiar with during perimenopause.
I also think about protein intake and overall nutritional adequacy. Iron, B12, folate, vitamin D and other nutrients all play different roles in energy production, muscle function and recovery. If someone is genuinely exhausted, it's worth establishing whether she's actually giving her body what it needs.
Gut health can form part of that wider picture too. Our gastrointestinal system is where we digest and absorb nutrients, so persistent digestive dysfunction deserves attention rather than simply adding more supplements on top.
And then there's recovery itself: sleep, stress, inflammation, adequate nutrition and allowing your body time to adapt to what you're asking it to do.
Sometimes the answer isn't “try harder.” It's “let's work out why this feels so hard.”
Will pushing myself harder make things worse?
This is where I think we need some nuance. There are days when I don't particularly feel like exercising. I'm not exhausted or unwell. I just don't fancy it.
Most of the time I go anyway - and I'm always very glad I did. This is the mental picture you need to spur you on - remembering how you'll feel after you've done the workout. Particularly with strength training, I can arrive feeling fairly unenthusiastic and leave feeling completely different.
But there are also days when your body genuinely needs something else.
Perhaps you've slept terribly. Perhaps you're run down. Perhaps you're unusually sore from your previous session or simply don't feel well. You don't have to punish your body into fitness.
On those days, movement might mean walking, mobility work, stretching or something restorative rather than another intense session.
Learning the difference between “I don't feel like it” and “my body actually needs recovery” has been an important part of this for me.
How can I start rebuilding my capacity to exercise?
It wasn't doing one type of exercise harder and harder.
Over time, I've worked on different aspects of fitness: strength, cardiovascular fitness, mobility, stretching and recovery.
And the fascinating thing has been how much more capable my body has become.
When I first returned to consistent exercise, recovery could take days. I often even tried to factor in a power nap! As I've become better conditioned, I recover faster. My mobility has improved. Exercise no longer feels like an enormous event my body has to recover from.
There's a physiological reason for some of this too. Regular exercise creates adaptations in skeletal muscle, including changes in mitochondrial quantity and function, which improve its ability to meet the energy demands you're placing on it.
In other words, some of the capacity you feel you're missing can actually be rebuilt by using it. Slowly.
Top tip: Don't compare yourself to anyone else!!
That's why I don't think the answer is finding the “perfect” workout. It's creating enough consistency for your body to adapt. And if you can find movement you actually enjoy - particularly within a supportive community - even better. Exercise is much easier to sustain when it becomes part of your life rather than another health task you're failing to complete.
Instead of asking yourself whether you're exercising “enough”, try looking at the bigger picture. Over the course of a normal week, where are you getting your:
Strength?
Cardiovascular exercise?
Everyday movement? Or your 'NEAT'
Mobility?
Stretching or restorative movement?
Recovery?
You may immediately spot what's missing. You might walk for miles but never challenge your muscles.
You might train hard several times a week but do almost nothing for mobility.
Or perhaps you're trying to do intense exercise while sleep and recovery are completely inadequate.
In Functional Medicine, we don't simply write “exercise more”. We can look at the different types of movement your body needs and build an exercise prescription around the individual.
What if pain or an injury is stopping me exercising?
Please don't automatically accept an injury as the reason movement can no longer be part of your life. An injury obviously needs appropriate assessment and sufficient time to heal. And sometimes rest absolutely is the correct prescription.
But after that, get help.
A good physiotherapist, osteopath, chiropractor or appropriately qualified movement professional can often help you rehabilitate the problem, and there are usually ways of adapting movement while something heals.
Within functional medicine, we can also look at the wider factors that may influence recovery and musculoskeletal health.
The goal isn't to exercise through an injury. It's to avoid allowing “I have a bad knee/back/shoulder” to quietly become part of your identity for the next twenty years without ever finding out what might be improved.
When is tiredness worth investigating?
There's a difference between finding it difficult to get back into exercise and being genuinely, persistently exhausted.
If everyday activity feels disproportionately difficult, you're struggling to recover from relatively modest exercise, or fatigue is affecting your normal life, that's something I would want to understand rather than simply telling you to exercise more.
Depending on the individual, that might mean looking at sleep, nutrition, protein intake, iron status, B12 and folate, vitamin D, thyroid function, hormonal changes, digestive health or other relevant factors.
You don't necessarily need another motivational speech (though that can help too). Sometimes you need to find out what's getting in the way of your energy in the first place.
What if I'm too tired or achy to know where to start?
This is perhaps the biggest thing my own experience taught me. When I was stiff, slow to recover and struggling to get back into consistent exercise, I couldn't imagine reaching the point I'm at now. But I didn't suddenly become capable of exercising and then start exercising.
I became more capable because I kept moving.
My mobility improved because I worked on mobility.
My strength improved because I trained for strength.
My recovery improved as my body became better conditioned.
And my relationship with exercise changed because it stopped being something I did to make myself smaller and became something I did because I want my body to keep working brilliantly for as long as possible.
You don't have to do everything at once. And it will continue to be work in progress. You just have to start rebuilding.
But you may be reading this thinking, I'd love to do all of that, but I genuinely don't have the energy. That's when I want to look at the bigger picture.
In my one-to-one programme, Feel Like Yourself Again, we look at your symptoms together - your energy, sleep, digestion, nutrition, hormonal stage, stress and recovery - rather than treating each one as a separate problem. We can then work out what may be getting in the way and what your body needs to start feeling stronger again.
Because the goal isn't to turn you into someone who loves the gym.
It's to help you feel capable of doing the things you want to do again.
Juliana O'Boyle
IFM-certified functional medicine practitioner, medical herbalist and naturopath
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