Intense exercise improved movement and symptoms after menopause
Physical performance improved versus home exercise over eight weeks in 40 postmenopausal women, with a standardized effect size of 1.97 measuring the group difference.
Our read
Interventions- Studied:
- Randomized trial in 40 postmenopausal women, against low-to-moderate intensity home exercise group (Sample size calculated, registered NCT07471620)
- What changed:
- Physical performance improved more with high-intensity exercise than with low-to-moderate intensity home exercise
- The catch:
- Unmonitored dietary intake could have contributed to the improvements
- In the record:
- The 5th paper on high-intensity functional exercise with results in people; 11 on record in all.
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Forty postmenopausal women aged 50–65 were assessed in a randomized controlled trial comparing two exercise programs. The high-intensity group trained with a physiotherapist three times weekly for eight weeks, using exercises such as squats, lunges and wall push-ups. The comparison group exercised at home at low-to-moderate intensity three times weekly for 30–40 minutes.
The high-intensity group improved more on walking and chair-rise tests. They also reduced the performance penalty from doing a thinking task while walking or repeatedly standing up. Physical and psychological menopausal symptoms and menopause-related quality of life improved more than in the comparison group. Balance, urinary and genital symptoms, and sexual problems did not differ significantly between groups. No serious adverse events were observed during the intervention.
Why it matters
Physical function after menopause matters for everyday activities as women age. The trial examined exercise as a way to address movement difficulties alongside menopausal symptoms.
Caveats
Several quality-of-life scores differed between groups before training, complicating those comparisons. The retrospectively registered trial covered independently walking women aged 50–65 and excluded women with severe cardiovascular disease or cognitive impairment.
From the paper
- Participants
With 95% power and 5% error margin, it was concluded that reliable findings could be obtained with a total of 40 cases (20 cases for each group) using the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test with d = 1.26, a high effect size.
- Limitation
The clinical trial was retrospectively recorded, which may affect the initial transparency of the study design.
Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.
- High-intensity functional exercise
- Menopausal symptoms
- Urogenital symptoms
- 30-Second Sit-to-Stand Test
- 4-meter walk test
- Humans
The paper
Üsküdar University
BMC Women's Health, Jun 1, 2026, Open access
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