For years, my coaching focus mirrored most of the industry: get stronger, lift heavier, progress the load. And to be clear, I still believe in every bit of that. Strength training is one of the most important things a woman can do through perimenopause and menopause, and nothing I’ve learned since has changed my mind about that.
But somewhere along the way, I started noticing a pattern I couldn’t unseen.
The pattern
My clients were getting stronger. The numbers said so, their logbooks said so, and they could feel it, heavier shopping, easier stairs, more done in the garden without paying for it the next day. By every measure I was tracking, the work was working.
And yet. A handful of them, women training consistently for months and undeniably stronger, would still say things that didn’t match their numbers. That they felt a little unsteady on uneven ground. A little slower to react when they stumbled. A little less confident stepping off a kerb or onto a train, even though their legs were objectively strong.
For a while I put it down to confidence, or age, or a bad night’s sleep. But it kept coming up, in strong women, and eventually I had to admit it was telling me something about my programming, not about them.
The missing layer
What I’d been training was strength, how much force they could produce. What I hadn’t been training, at least not on purpose, was power: how quickly they could produce it.
Those are genuinely different qualities. Strength is the slow, heavy grind. Power is the fast, reactive catch, the split-second correction that stops a stumble becoming a fall. And it turns out power declines faster than strength as we age, and faster still through the menopause transition, because we lose our fast-twitch muscle fibres and the speed of the signal from brain to muscle first. (I went into the full science of that in a separate piece, if you want the detail.)
So my strongest clients were, in a sense, half-trained. Brilliant at the slow grind. Under-practised at the fast catch. No wonder some of them felt steady lifting a heavy box but wobbly the moment the ground did something unexpected.
What Changed: Adding Power Training
Not much, honestly, and that’s the part I want other coaches and women to hear. I didn’t tear up anyone’s programme or add hours to their week. I added intent to move quickly to movements they were already doing.
A fast, deliberate drive up out of a squat or a sit-to-stand, then a slow, controlled lower. A few crisp, low-rep sets where the goal was speed and quality, not fatigue. Explosive always meaning controlled and deliberate, never reckless, never at the expense of form. Just two short doses a week, folded into the strength work that was already there.
I also went back to the research on creatine and fast-twitch fibres specifically, because if power was the missing layer, I wanted every tool available to rebuild it. Creatine’s best-known for supporting the slow grind, strength and lean mass. But it also supports the quick, high-force output that fast-twitch fibres rely on, which matters more as we lose them through menopause. So alongside the speed work, I had my strongest clients add a small daily dose of creatine monohydrate, nothing dramatic, just consistent. It became the other half of rebuilding what training alone wasn’t fully reaching.
What happened
The shift wasn’t dramatic, and I want to be honest about that rather than sell you a transformation. But it was real. More confidence on stairs. Quicker reactions. A few women told me, unprompted, that they’d “caught themselves” from a trip in a way they didn’t think they would have a few months earlier. A sense of everyday capability that all the strength work, on its own, hadn’t quite delivered.
That’s when power stopped being a footnote in my programming and became a deliberate part of it.
Why I’m sharing this
Because I think a lot of women are doing everything right, training consistently, getting stronger, and still quietly wondering why they don’t feel as steady as their effort deserves. And I think a lot of that gap is power that was never trained on purpose.
Relearning this changed how I coach every woman through midlife: train for the body you have now, not the one you had at 25; build in speed as well as load; and pay attention to what the whole system is doing, not just the number on the bar.
Strength keeps you capable. Power keeps you quick. After 40, you want both, and the second one is easier to add than most people think.
General information, not medical advice. If you have joint problems, balance concerns, or any medical condition, check with a qualified professional before starting new explosive movements.