Perimenopause and Your Skating Comeback: What's Actually Changing
Physiotherapist and skater. Came back to skating at 49 and hasn't stopped.
A patient asked me recently whether her body was “turning against her” right when she’d finally worked up the nerve to get back on a board. She was 47, deep in perimenopause, and noticing new aches, worse sleep, and a nagging sense that recovery took longer than it used to. She wasn’t wrong that something had changed. She was wrong about what to do with that information, which was quietly give up on the comeback.
Perimenopause is real, it affects the tissues you’re loading when you skate, and it deserves to be named specifically rather than folded into generic “getting older” advice. It’s also very manageable once you understand what’s actually shifting.
What perimenopause changes, mechanically
Perimenopause is the transition period — often lasting several years — leading up to menopause, marked by fluctuating and then declining estrogen. Estrogen isn’t just a reproductive hormone; it has receptors throughout the musculoskeletal system, which is why its decline shows up in ways that are directly relevant to an active adult, not just as hot flashes and irregular cycles.
Bone density. This is the best-established piece. As estrogen drops, bone loss accelerates — this site’s piece on osteoporosis and skateboarding covers the weight-bearing exercise side of that in depth, and it applies directly here: the perimenopausal years are exactly when building and preserving bone density starts to matter in practice, not as a distant hypothetical.
Ligaments and connective tissue. Estrogen plays a role in collagen production, and connective tissue behaves differently as estrogen declines — but the change isn’t the simple “everything gets looser” story it’s sometimes reduced to. The research here is tissue-specific and still evolving: some of it points to stiffer, less elastic tendon tissue as estrogen drops, which is one reason sports medicine has flagged tendinopathy as more common in this life stage, not just sprains from lax joints. What’s consistent across that research is elevated injury risk around this transition, even where the exact mechanism isn’t settled. This isn’t a reason to avoid loading your joints — the opposite, if anything — but it’s a real reason to be more deliberate about the strength work that keeps a joint stable, not just the stretching that keeps it mobile.
Sleep. Hot flashes, night sweats, and hormonally disrupted sleep are extremely common in perimenopause, and sleep is also when the bulk of your physical recovery from a hard session happens. If you’re skating three times a week and sleeping worse than you used to for reasons that have nothing to do with skating, expect recovery to take longer and factor that in rather than assuming something is going wrong with your training.
Mood and motivation. Hormonal fluctuation genuinely affects mood, energy, and motivation for a lot of women in this transition, independent of anything happening in the rest of their life. If a session that used to feel energizing suddenly feels like a chore some weeks and not others, that’s not a character problem — it can be a hormonal one, and it tends to fluctuate rather than being a permanent state.
What this actually means for how you skate
None of the above is a reason to stop or scale back dramatically. It’s a reason to adjust a few specific things.
Prioritize strength work around the joints you load most. Whatever the exact mechanism, this life stage carries elevated risk for sprains and tendon issues, and the muscles around your ankles, knees, and hips are what actually control how a joint handles load day to day. Two sessions a week of basic strength training — squats, single-leg balance work, calf raises — is a genuinely higher-leverage move right now than it would have been a decade ago.
Take your warm-up more seriously, not less. Tendon tissue that hasn’t been properly warmed up is more vulnerable at end ranges of motion, and that’s plausibly more true, not less, if perimenopausal tendon is also stiffer and less elastic to begin with. A full warm-up before you push into a deep carve or a bank isn’t optional at this stage.
Don’t assume every new ache is serious, but don’t ignore a pattern either. Some extra stiffness and slower bounce-back is an expected part of this transition. A specific joint that’s consistently painful, swollen, or unstable — as opposed to generally achy — is worth getting assessed rather than attributed to hormones by default.
Build recovery around the sleep you’re actually getting, not the sleep you used to get. If night sweats are cutting your sleep short, that’s a real training input. Adjusting session frequency and rest around your current sleep quality — not the sleep quality you had five years ago — will keep your recovery matched to what your body can actually do right now.
Talk to your doctor about the bigger picture. Perimenopause management — whether that’s hormone therapy, bone density screening, or something else — is a medical conversation, not a skating one, and it’s worth having independent of your comeback. What happens in that conversation can meaningfully change how your body handles training load, so it’s not a side issue to your skating; it’s upstream of it.
The reassurance underneath all of this
None of this means your body is working against you. It means your body is going through a well-understood transition that happens to overlap with the exact years a lot of women are returning to skating, and it deserves specific attention rather than being lumped in with generic aging advice aimed at everyone. Adjust your strength work, your warm-up, and your recovery expectations to match what’s actually happening hormonally, and there’s no physiological reason perimenopause should be the thing that ends your comeback rather than a chapter you skated straight through.