Keep Your Hormones On Track And Maximize Your Fitness

50 minutes – make that your workout time and you’ll maximise your fitness, calorie burn and overall health from head to toe, research finds. Learn how to hit the gym smarter, not harder.

- Virginia Sole-Smith

As you head outside for a long run or crank up the resistance in a spinning class, you’re focusing on muscles you’re going to build and calories that are being burned. But it turns out you should also be thinking about how your hormones will be affected. Oestrogen and progesterone, the two most important female sex hormones, have a surprising and strong connection to your workouts, research shows. And how hard and long you exercise changes these chemicals in a way that profoundly influences your health.

Done properly, working out helps keep your oestrogen and progesterone levels balanced. This is a big deal. It means, as doctors have discovered, that you have enormous control in maintaining your wellness from top to bottom. “We tend to think of oestrogen and progesterone only in terms of ovulation and menstruation, but they’re actually critical for the health of every cell and organ in our bodies,” says Dr Jerilynn Prior, a professor of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of British Columbia, and the founder of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research in Vancouver.

For instance, studies show that oestrogen helps shield brain cells from damage caused by oxidative stress and beta-amyloid protein, which is thought to be a culprit in Alzheimer’s disease. And oestrogen and progesterone play crucial roles in women’s bone and cardiovascular health, says Dr Jennifer Ashton, the ABC News senior medical contributor for Good Morning America and an ob-gyn in New Jersey.