Health and life stages · Menopause
Menopause does not take anything off your programme.
It changes which exercise gets reached for first. Every other condition on this site takes movements away; this is the one tick box on the evaluation that removes nothing at all.
The rule
Standing work goes first, because bone responds to load.
Tick perimenopause or post-menopause and one thing changes: wherever the app has a genuine choice between two movements that are equally right for you, it reaches for the one you do on your feet, carrying your own weight. A standing shoulder press before a seated machine press. Not instead of — first.
And it is a preference, never a filter. Standing work wins a slot only among movements your phase and your current level already allowed. It cannot hand you something you were not ready for, it cannot push aside the muscle your screen said was weakest, and it cannot override an injury, another condition or a clinician’s instruction. Those all outrank it.
Jumping and landing come back in with the power phase, as they would for anyone — as long as nothing else on your record rules them out. Low bone density is the obvious thing that would, and the two tick boxes sit together often. The stricter rule always wins.
The monthly check
Eleven symptoms, and no score.
Once a month, if you want it, the app asks about eleven things — hot flushes, sleep, mood, joints, the rest of the list clinicians usually ask about — and shows each one back on its own, this month beside last month.
It does not add them up. A total is a rating scale’s verdict, and this is a log, not a verdict. Nothing here is coloured red or green, nothing is called high or low or normal or improving, and nothing here changes your programme or your load. It exists so that you, and your doctor, and Brad if you ask him to look, can read it next to the training.
And it has a Not now. Tap that and it stops asking. An app that puts the same question in front of you every time you open it is not collecting data, it is nagging.
What else moves
Four things, from one tick box.
-
Protein gets spread out.
Not raised — spread. Your daily target already accounts for this stage; what the app asks is that you get it across every meal rather than loading it all into dinner. The food side does the arithmetic.
-
Strength work is the point, not cardio.
What you get is a strength programme that happens to know your stage, built on the same model every client gets. Losing muscle is the thing worth arguing with, and that argument does not start at 60.
-
The camera still watches every set.
It draws the measured angle on your body and names what it sees. Nothing about this stage turns that off or softens it.
-
Nothing is taken away.
No movement is removed, no range is shortened, no load is capped. If something is off your list it is because of another answer you gave, not this one.
Before anything else
This is training, not treatment.
VeraForma is coaching. It does not diagnose menopause, it does not stage it, it does not read a blood test and it has no opinion on HRT — those are your doctor’s, and the symptom log is there partly so you have something to take to them. It knows what you told it.
If a clinician has given you an instruction, log what they told you and the app follows it everywhere, on a free account. Their word overrules ours.
The movement screen, the stage rules and the programme that comes out of them are free.
