Training for Women Over 40: The Real Guide to Bone Density, Strength, and Racing Smart

Episode: S6E29 | Kim Nedeau | Aired Sept 17, 2026 | 58 min

Author: Nick Klastava

Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Training for women over 40 is not just running slower and hoping for the best, and this week Coach Amanda and I sat down with Kim Nedeau of Training Inclined and Train Like a Master to take apart exactly what changes and why. Kim ran collegiately at Brown, walked away from the sport in her twenties after a string of injuries, corrected an osteopenia diagnosis with strength training in her thirties, and now coaches a whole community of women who refuse to accept that getting older means giving up performance. We got into recovery, mileage, strength work, bone density, weighted vests, hormone testing, body image, and why the marathon is not always the right goal as you age. Kim has spent years working almost exclusively with women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond through her Train Like a Master community, and it shows in how specific her answers are. Coach Amanda also brought her own experience correcting a bone density diagnosis in her twenties and thirties into the conversation, so this episode is not theory from the outside looking in. It is coming from people who have actually lived through the exact problems we are talking about. There is a lot here, so grab a notebook and let's get into it.

Key Takeaways

• Training for women over 40 should lean harder into recovery, not less, with a two week on, one week deload rhythm doing most of the work.

• Kim caps most of her runners around 40 miles a week and treats cross training as training, not an add on.

• Strength work for masters runners should hit below the knee strength, hip and core stability, coordination, and joint friendly ranges like the quarter squat.

• A slowing pace is not automatically a training problem. Kim runs a full training audit on heart rate, pace variety, warmups, and race frequency before changing anything.

• Bone density for runners becomes urgent well before menopause, and women should push for a scan earlier than the standard age of 65.

• Weighted vests do not meaningfully build bone density on a walk. They work when paired with impact loading like jumps, based on a five year postmenopausal study.

• Marathon training eats the capacity you need for strength and impact work, which is why Kim sometimes steers masters athletes toward shorter races or different terrain.

• Weight gain and body composition changes are common in perimenopause and menopause, and Kim's approach is to support the training and let the number land where it lands.

  
  

Why Training for Women Over 40 Needs a Different Approach

Training for women over 40 is not about starting over. Kim Nedeau made that clear right away, and I respected it immediately. If your training was not solid before you hit 40, hitting 40 does not fix it, it just makes every gap more obvious. Kim grew up in a running family in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, right at the start line of the Boston Marathon, and ran at Brown University before a pattern of injuries pushed her out of the sport in her late twenties. She stepped away, had two kids, and did not come back to running until her mid thirties, this time with cross training, strength work, and much lower mileage. That approach also helped her correct an osteopenia diagnosis from her twenties. Now that same philosophy, built through Training Inclined and her Train Like a Master community, is exactly what she teaches to her masters clients, most of whom are women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond who want to keep running well instead of just running less. Nothing about it is exotic. It is mostly about being honest about recovery, strength, and load management earlier than most runners bother to be.

The Recovery Math: Two Weeks On, One Week Deload

The biggest lever Kim pulls for her masters athletes is recovery, and she is specific about it. Her injury prone and masters runners follow a two week on, one week deload cycle, sometimes stretched to three weeks on with a deload week after that. Some of her athletes take two full rest days a week instead of the usual one. Kim likes calling this super compensation instead of just recovery, because the body actually comes back faster and stronger when you give it the down week it needs. I have written a lot of masters content lately for the exact same reason. A lot of runners hit their 40s and panic that they need to hold onto the volume they always had, when the science says the opposite. People still run personal bests in their 40s. It just requires more deliberate recovery to get there, and that is not a consolation prize, it is the actual strategy.

How Many Miles Masters Runners Actually Need

Kim generally does not program more than 40 miles a week for her clients, with most falling somewhere between 15 and 40 depending on their race distance and what their life can absorb that season. Running itself usually happens three to five days a week, with at least one cross training day mixed in. That is a lower ceiling than a lot of runners assume they need, and it is a good reminder that more miles is not automatically the answer as you get older. Kim is direct about this: she is not reinventing the wheel, and masters runners are not a new species that suddenly needs a totally different formula. They need the same fundamentals everyone needs, applied with a little more discipline about how much they can actually recover from. That discipline is often the hardest part, since a lot of masters runners built their identity around a certain weekly mileage number years ago and treat dropping below it as some kind of failure, when it is often exactly what allows the rest of their training to actually work.

Cross Training Is Just Training

Here is a mindset shift Kim pushes hard: stop thinking of cross training as a substitute for running and start thinking of it as training, full stop. Her go to option is the ElliptiGo, but stair climbing, swimming, and water running all work depending on preference and access. The body recovers from these sessions differently than it recovers from running, which is exactly the point. You still get a real cardiovascular stimulus, including hard interval work if speed work on pavement is flaring up old injuries, without piling on the same repetitive impact that got you hurt in the first place. If you have just enough running on the calendar and you reframe the rest as training instead of a lesser substitute, the whole week starts to feel a lot more sustainable.

The Strength Work Every Masters Runner Should Have on the Calendar

Strength training is not optional in Kim's programming, for masters runners or for anyone chasing performance and staying injury free. For older athletes specifically, she prioritizes a few things: plyometric and impact loading work to protect tendon resilience and bone density, below the knee strength because the ability to rapidly plant and flex the ankle declines with age and can slow you down, and hip and core strength to support the more hip dominant running pattern that shows up later in life. She keeps lifts at what she calls joint happy angles, often a quarter range of motion, because it lets her athletes lift heavier weight comfortably while everything from the knees to the hips feels better. Coordination work, like single leg balance drills, rounds it out, since coordination is another thing that declines with age without anyone noticing if nobody trains it on purpose. If you are looking for strength training plans look no further than the Running Explained Strength Training Plans

Why Intensity Still Matters as You Age

It would be easy to assume masters training is all easy miles and strength work, but Kim is clear that intensity still has a job to do. Cardiorespiratory fitness, or VO2 max, tends to decline with age, and keeping some real intensity in the week helps slow that decline while also supporting maximum muscle fiber recruitment. The catch is that not every runner tolerates speed work on the roads the same way, and track workouts, hill repeats, or tempo runs can flare up old injuries in a masters body. Kim's fix is simple: that same interval stimulus can happen on the ElliptiGo, the stairs, or in the water just as easily as it can happen on pavement. The goal is getting the hard effort in, not being precious about exactly where it happens.

Telling Normal Aging Apart From an Actual Training Problem

Getting slower is not automatically a sign something is wrong, and Kim does not jump to conclusions when a client shows up worried about it. Every runner eventually hits a crossover point where they start slowing down, and comparing yourself to someone your age who has not hit theirs yet is not useful. Instead she runs a training audit. She checks whether heart rate data is accurate, since a wrist based monitor can be unreliable, and whether most training sits in a low effort zone with only a small dose at high effort, since too much time in the middle intensity zone stalls recovery and speed. She looks at pace variety, since always training at the same pace, even if it feels comfortable, can mean that pace is actually too fast to build on. She checks the dynamic warmup routine, because skipping it undercuts the fast off the ground mechanics that support speed as you age, and there is always time for five minutes of warmup even on a tight schedule. She also looks at racing frequency, because racing a marathon every season without a real off season adds up fast.

Bone Density for Runners and Why Waiting Until 65 Is a Mistake

Bone density for runners is one of Kim's biggest topics, and for good reason. Current guidance does not recommend a first bone density scan for women until age 65, ten years later than the recommendation for men. Kim's issue with that: by the time you are scanned, you have already been through menopause and lost bone you cannot easily get back. She works with a lot of runners who carry an osteopenia or osteoporosis diagnosis, and while bone density can still improve after menopause with the right training, she would rather her athletes have the information heading into perimenopause instead of after the damage is already done. Prevention over intervention is a phrase she used more than once, and she wishes more of the healthcare system worked that way. Right now the default approach is closer to waiting until things are already bad and then reacting, and Kim would rather her athletes have a baseline scan and a plan years before that point ever arrives.

Why You Should Ask for a Bone Density Scan Before Perimenopause

If you have a history of disordered eating, extreme dieting, overtraining, or simply ran high mileage without eating enough to support it in your late teens and twenties, those are exactly the years peak bone mass is built. Kim's advice is to advocate directly with your provider about your history, and to expect some pushback even with a legitimate reason. She has been turned down herself despite her own risk factors of higher mileage and low body weight as a young runner. Her workaround: DEXA scans are available out of pocket for roughly 200 dollars if insurance will not cover an early one, and that is a reasonable investment if bone density is a real concern for you or if your provider will not budge. Check out our latest blog on Master's Running.

Marathon Training vs. Shorter Races: Training for Women Over 40 Means Choosing Wisely

Training for women over 40 sometimes means putting the marathon aside, at least for a while. Kim's reasoning is practical: marathon training takes up so much capacity, between the long runs and the buildup, that there is little room left for the strength work, impact loading, and recovery that matter more as you age. She specifically will not put a marathon on the calendar for an athlete actively working on an osteoporosis or osteopenia diagnosis, because the two goals conflict directly. Shorter races, from the 5K up through the half marathon depending on capacity, leave room for faster intervals, dynamic warmups, and strength training in the same week, all things that support longevity better than one long peak race a year. Kim is not anti marathon. She just wants runners to see the tradeoff clearly instead of assuming the marathon is always the goal by default.

Breaking Up the Monotony: Trail Running, New Distances, and Staying Motivated

One thing Kim and I agreed on is that a lot of what looks like age related slowing down is actually stagnation. Repeating the same training block and the same one or two goal races every year eventually stalls progress, aging or not. Kim often nudges her masters clients toward trail running, since the extra lateral movement on technical terrain is genuinely good for an aging runner, and comparing one trail race to another is basically impossible, which removes a lot of the time pressure that can wreck the fun of a race. Trying an uphill race, switching from road to trail, or just running a fast, uncomfortable 5K after years of the same marathon buildup can shake loose progress that a training plan alone will not. It is not always about running faster or slower. Sometimes it is simply about doing something different enough that your body and your brain both have to adapt again.

Racing Frequency and When to Take a Season Off

Part of Kim's training audit is looking at how often someone races, not just how they train between races. She specifically asks whether a runner's calendar is overbooked, meaning a marathon every single season, fall and spring and fall again, with no real break in between. That pattern leaves no room for the strength and recovery work that masters runners need most, and it turns every training block into damage control instead of progress. Kim will ask clients to consider taking a season off entirely, or even a full year off from racing, not because racing is bad but because a body needs unstructured time to actually adapt rather than constantly peaking. A lot of runners resist this because racing gives training a purpose, and Kim understands that. Her answer is not to remove goals altogether, it is to widen what counts as a goal beyond the next marathon on the calendar.

Finding Community as a Masters Runner

Kim did not build Train Like a Master as just a training plan delivery system. It is a community for women 40 and older to connect, learn how to train as an aging athlete, and have a shoulder to cry on when things get hard, with a sense of humor built in because that helps too. A lot of what makes the menopause transition harder than it needs to be is going through it alone, without anyone to compare notes with. Kim's community spans a wide range, from 40 year old runners just starting to notice changes to 65 year old runners who are years past them, and hearing both perspectives in the same conversation tends to normalize things that feel isolating in the moment. Simple validation, hearing someone else say this really is hard and I am dealing with the same thing, does a lot of work that a training plan alone cannot do.

Working With a Sports Dietitian and Getting the Right Labs

Kim brought up her own sports dietitian, Holley, who works inside her Train Like a Master group, and described her as close to a wizard with lab work and hormones. Holly guides Kim's community on which labs actually matter for aging female athletes, reviews results to flag anything pointing toward why a masters athlete might not be feeling her best, and helps make sure people are eating enough to support training through the menopause transition. Kim was blunt that going through this stage of life without a resource like that is a lot harder than it needs to be. If you do not have a dietitian in your corner, at minimum ask your provider which labs make sense for an aging endurance athlete, not just a general physical.

Do Weighted Vests Really Build Bone Density?

The short answer from Kim is not by themselves, and not while walking. Bone responds to mechanical load, and runners are already sensitized to running's impact, which means adding a weighted vest to a walk is not enough new stimulus to move the needle for someone who already runs regularly. A less active person might get a small training effect from walking with a vest, but a runner's bones have already adapted to a level of impact that a walking vest does not exceed. Where weighted vests do help is when they add resistance to an impact exercise you are already doing, like a jump squat, because that keeps the stimulus from going stale as your bones adapt. Kim was pretty blunt about how tired the weighted vest trend has made her, too. Women going through menopause are already dealing with body composition changes they did not ask for, and telling them to strap on extra weight and go for a walk, framed as some kind of bone density fix, misses the actual mechanism entirely. If a weighted vest walk is something you genuinely enjoy, there is no harm in it. Just do not expect it to move your bone density numbers on its own.

Reading a Study Instead of Just the Headline

Kim pointed to a specific study on postmenopausal women, called long term exercise using a weighted vest prevents hip bone loss in postmenopausal women. Participants did roughly 50 jumps three times a week while wearing seven to fourteen pound vests, for 32 weeks out of the year with a break for the rest of the year, repeated over a five year period. The women doing the jumps maintained their bone density instead of continuing to lose it, while the control group kept losing bone the whole time. Maintenance alone is a meaningful win for a postmenopausal woman. Kim's point, and mine, is that a five year study with a real protocol and a built in break tells you a lot more than a two day study on two young men that somehow turns into a headline claiming everyone can double their VO2 max by eating a specific berry. Read past the abstract before you build your training around a study.

Body Image, Weight Gain, and Redefining Health After 40

Weight gain during the menopause transition is close to universal, and Kim estimates something like 95 percent of the women she works with go through it, even if it shows up as a shape change rather than a number on the scale for some of them. One of her masters athletes summed it up in her group discussion better than Kim could: why are we obsessing over the size and shape of our bodies when literally doing the opposite is also an option. Kim's coaching philosophy separates the training goal from the body composition outcome. Eat enough to support your training, do the strength work and the running that makes sense for your body, and let your weight land wherever it lands. She does not coach for weight loss, and small things like buying clothes that actually fit instead of clothes you are trying to fit back into make a real difference in how people feel day to day. Fighting the number too hard tends to end in injury, fatigue, and hormone problems, which defeats the entire purpose. Training for women over 40 works better when health, not the scale, is the actual goal.

Guest Bio

Kim Nedeau is a running coach, educator, and the founder of Train Like a Master, a training and education community for women 40 and over who want to keep running, get stronger, and perform well as they age.

Kim has spent more than a decade coaching runners and exploring the intersection of running, strength training, injury prevention, and healthy aging. Her work focuses on helping women understand how their training needs to evolve as they get older, which can mean setting new personal records or sometimes slowing down. Kim is also a masters runner herself, so she knows the highs and lows firsthand, sometimes finding herself running surprisingly fast for a master, and other days wondering how she got so slow.

Through her coaching, writing, and educational work, Kim brings an evidence-informed but practical perspective to topics like muscle loss, bone health, menopause, injury, recovery, and performance in the masters years.

• Website: kimnedeau.com / https://traininginclined.com/

• Instagram: kimnedeau_traininginclined

Frequently Asked Questions

What changes when it comes to training for women over 40?

Recovery becomes more important than volume, strength work moves from optional to essential, and bone density and hormone changes start shaping what a smart training week actually looks like. None of the fundamentals change, but how much room you have for error shrinks.

How many miles a week should a masters runner run?

Kim generally programs no more than 40 miles a week for her masters clients, often less, spread across three to five running days with at least one cross training day mixed in depending on the goal race.

Do weighted vests improve bone density?

Not on their own for runners who are already used to the impact of running. They help most when added to an impact exercise like a jump squat, based on a five year study on postmenopausal women that showed maintained bone density instead of continued loss.

When should women get a bone density scan?

Standard guidance says age 65, but Kim recommends asking your provider for a scan heading into perimenopause, especially with a history of disordered eating, extreme dieting, or high mileage without adequate fueling in your teens and twenties.

Is marathon training a good idea for masters runners?

It can be, but Kim points out it takes up so much training capacity that there is little room left for strength and impact work, which is why she sometimes steers clients with bone density concerns toward shorter races or different terrain instead.

Is weight gain during menopause normal for runners?

Yes. Kim says the vast majority of the women she coaches gain weight or change shape through the menopause transition. Her approach is to support solid training and nutrition and let body composition land where it lands rather than chasing weight loss.

Should masters runners take a season off from racing?

It is worth considering. Kim looks for runners whose calendar is overbooked with back to back marathons and often recommends a full season, or even a full year, without a goal race so the body has real time to adapt instead of constantly peaking.