Exercise helps your hormones stay balanced with one another, which keeps you feeling healthy and strong. Here’s how.
Exercise is key to staying healthy and strong. The way that you exercise can also affect your hormones, and that has an impact on your overall health and wellbeing.
But what, exactly, does exercise do for hormones, and what does that mean for your body?
In this article, we’ll take a look at how exercise affects the female hormones estrogen and progesterone, how exercise plays a role in hormone health, what can happen with too much exercise, and how your exercise habits may impact your hormones.
How does exercise affect estrogen? Estrogen, a key reproductive hormone, is crucial to the menstrual cycle, periods, ovulation, fertility, mood, cognitive function, heart health, skin health, and more.
Estrogen is closely linked to exercise, too, and the relationship goes both ways.
>>MORE: Estrogen and Athletic Performance: What’s the Link?
Estrogen plays an important role in exercise-related functions like endurance, cardio, muscle mass, muscle strength, bone health, and joint health. In turn, exercise helps promote a healthy balance of estrogen in relation to other hormones, which keeps you feeling your best.
For example, exercise can help stimulate the release of estrogen to boost estrogen levels and regulate hormonal balance.
On the flipside, exercise can also help lower estrogen levels when needed. Workouts such as strength training and aerobic exercise can help regulate estrogen dominance , relieving symptoms like irregular periods , fatigue, mood swings, and low libido.
Regular aerobic exercise—like running, swimming, cycling, HIIT, or other forms of cardio—may be particularly useful for improving estrogen metabolism, or how your body breaks down estrogen. A 2013 study , for example, found that people who did 2.5 hours of moderate-to-intense cardio each week metabolized estrogen more quickly.
Part of what makes healthy estrogen metabolism important for you is the relationship between estrogen levels and breast cancer risk. Higher estrogen levels correspond to a higher breast cancer risk, whereas lower estrogen appears to coincide with a lower risk. By improving estrogen metabolism, regular aerobic exercise may play a role in lowering estrogen levels and decreasing breast cancer risk.
How does exercise affect progesterone? Progesterone is another key reproductive hormone, involved in areas like cycle regularity, periods, mood, energy, and thyroid function.
Like estrogen, progesterone is also a major player in exercise. Progesterone is connected to athletic functions like endurance, cardio, energy, and muscle strength.
>>MORE: Progesterone and Athletic Performance: What’s the Link?
Inversely, exercise also affects progesterone. How? Exercise can help regulate progesterone levels, keeping this female hormone balanced with other hormones. That means that exercise can both boost progesterone and lower it.
Exercise helps boost progesterone in part by regulating cortisol, a stress hormone. High levels of cortisol suppress progesterone and steal resources that could go toward progesterone production (since the body uses cholesterol to produce both cortisol and progesterone). Regular physical activity reduces cortisol levels, which in turn helps increase progesterone levels.
Exercise can also help lower progesterone levels, particularly when those levels are too high in relation to other hormones. This can help combat fatigue, impaired concentration, confusion, and premenstrual symptoms.
Some research finds that exercise such as strength training can also promote healthy progesterone metabolism. As with exercise and estrogen metabolism, boosting progesterone metabolism and lowering excess progesterone may also help decrease the risk of breast cancer.
How does exercise affect hormone health? Balance is the name of the game with hormones. Exercise helps you get that balance, regulating hormone levels and keeping them in sync with one another.
Exercise helps you reduce stress and anxiety, improve sleep, strengthen the body, increase physical fitness, and maintain your healthy body weight—all of which is good news for your hormones.
Exercise also helps to regulate the menstrual cycle. Key reproductive hormones like estrogen and progesterone are crucial to menstrual cycle function. Exercise harmonizes the balance between these two female hormones, which in turn encourages normal cycle function.
Plus, regular exercise can play a role in managing hormonal imbalances and hormone-related health conditions such as PCOS or endometriosis. Exercise helps relieve hormonal imbalance symptoms like increased stress, sleep disturbance, or weight gain. It also regulates excess levels of androgens (male sex hormones) including testosterone, which helps manage PCOS symptoms like acne and hirsutism (excess hair growth). Exercise even improves the frequency and regularity of both periods and ovulation in people with PCOS.
Regular physical activity is also a useful tool for those in perimenopause and menopause, helping to ease symptoms from fluctuating estrogen and progesterone levels. Exercise may also help counteract decreases in muscle mass and strength that accompany perimenopause and menopause.
How does too much exercise affect female hormones? Regular exercise is great for your physical and mental health, but there is such a thing as too much exercise.
Overexercising can throw your hormones off balance and may cause irregular cycles, anovulation , fatigue, mood symptoms, insomnia, increased risk of injury, and more.
To avoid the negative effects of overexercising, be sure to:
Incorporate rest and recovery time between workouts Vary your workouts by mixing higher-intensity with lower-intensity activity Get at least 7–9 hours of sleep each night Match your diet and your food intake to your exercise habits—if you work out more, you have to eat more! How will exercise impact my hormones? How exercise and hormones relate to you on an individual level depends on your body. Your unique situation and your unique hormones determine the specific ways that your exercise habits affect your hormones. (Plus, your hormones may impact your exercise! The workouts that feel best may change with your cycle, from follicular phase to luteal phase and back around again.)
If you’re interested in understanding how your exercise affects your hormones and vice versa, at-home hormone tracking like the Oova kit can help. Hormone tracking kits measure your individual hormone levels to give you personalized insight about what’s happening in your body.
Once you’ve decoded your hormones with Oova, you can try cycle syncing your workouts with your cycle phases to help you target your exercise, maximize your hormone power, and feel your best.
How does exercise affect female hormones: the takeaway Exercise helps regulate female hormones like estrogen and progesterone, keeping them balanced and in sync with one another. By boosting hormone health, exercise helps key areas in your body function correctly so that you can feel your best.
Be careful not to over-exercise, though, as that can throw your hormones out of sync. Make sure to eat, sleep, and rest in accordance with your exercise habits, to properly fuel your body and keep your hormones happy.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into your unique hormones, at-home hormone tracking like the Oova kit can help you better understand how your exercise habits impact your body.
