In her early thirties, Elizabeth Davies had already been in her law career for over a decade. The parent of two young children, she felt stretched between her career and her family, but kept doing what she was meant to be doing: throwing herself into her career, her parenting and getting back to her pre-baby fitness level.
She was 33 and 18 months post the birth of her second child. In a circuits class, she had a life-changing experience. “I was, in my eyes, back to my pre-baby self: back in my jeans, my weight back to normal, everything was fine.” Then she got to a station with a skipping rope. “I was clumsy, I couldn’t clear the rope, and I was concentrating so hard. When I finally got going, I was very aware that I had wet myself and it was just a mortifying experience.”
Pregnancy and birth are a common cause of urinary leaking, as carrying a child can weaken the pelvic floor. When there is increased abdominal pressure, such as when laughing, coughing, running or indeed skipping, it can lead to involuntary leakage. While conversations around leaking are less taboo in 2026, 10 years ago, Elizabeth was absolutely humiliated. “I got through the rest of the class, went home and burst into tears. Then I started googling to try and figure out what had happened.”
This incident made her realise she wanted to become a personal trainer. “The realisation that there is so much I don’t know about my body made me think there must be millions of other women in the world in the same position,” she says. “Women whose experience of fitness, like me, was: move, sweat, push yourself hard. That was not an approach that served me in that particular moment. I felt really cheated by it, actually.”
She quit her job at 34 and embarked her years-long training to be a personal trainer, which lead her to learn about loss of muscle mass, loss of strength, loss of power, loss of bone density – and the importance of mitigating it. Simultaneously, she was doing the same movements every week for the first time and progressively overloading the weight. “I often wasn’t breaking into a sweat while doing those sessions, but I was getting stronger, and this was the first time I felt that my goal was to build muscle and get nice and dense bones that are going to be less likely to fracture in older age.”
On a whim in 2023, she fired off a quick post on Instagram rejecting summer body messaging (it was spring), instead saying: “F**k no, I’m training for my old lady body.”
“Training for your ‘old lady body’ decentralises the question of aesthetics and, instead, gets women to ask themselves what they want to be able to do decades into the future. It’s not what you want to look like six weeks from now. It’s about what you have to do to keep living independently in old age, and doing the things that fill your soul with joy.”
This mindset, as she calls it, has grown rapidly. It has led to her developing a huge social media following, sharing key workout plans that can work for every age and every level of ability, and now her book Training For Your Old Lady. It has changed her physically and mentally, too.
“Since I started focusing purely on taking care of myself and trying to be better incrementally, I truly don’t care about what I look like. Why would the loose skin on my abdomen from having three babies matter – I’m actually doing things that feel bigger.”
These are her key tips for training for her old lady body.
It doesn’t matter if you skip a day
In her work, Elizabeth breaks training down into five fundamentals: cardiovascular health, strength, muscle power, pelvic floor health and mobility. “All of those are applicable across your whole lifespan: whether you’re in your twenties, your thirties, pregnant with your first child, postpartum and trying to rehab, in perimenopause, or post menopause.”
She is keen to stress that the ways you build those fundamentals change depending on what season of life you’re in. The best way to move with those seasons, she says, is not to prescribe specific exercises for menopausal women or post-pregnancy women, but to learn “auto-regulation”.
“Often, fitness yells at us that we’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day, go hard or go home and so on, but I teach all my clients to adjust their training based on how they’re feeling any given day.” If, for example, your sleep suffered because you’re going through perimenopause, auto-regulation would translate that into a walk instead of the training you had scheduled in, which you can move for a later day when you feel better.”
Basically, it doesn’t matter if you skip a day. “I’m training for my old lady body, so it doesn’t matter if that happens on a Thursday instead of a Wednesday.”
Progressive overload is key
If resistance training is a must-have in any fitness routine, then progressive overload is a crucial component, Elizabeth explains. “This means that you repeat the same movements for a period of time, I would say at least eight weeks, and you build the challenge over that time.” Your starting point can be as accessible as it needs to be, she adds, “but the idea is that over the period of weeks and months you are trying to do a little bit more. That’s how your body adapts.” Strength, Elizabeth argues, is essential for everyone as we reach peak muscle mass in our thirties and experience muscle loss (sarcopenia) from that point onwards. That is exacerbated for women by declining estrogen in menopause.
The idea of doing the same few movements over and over again feels alien to many of us, as though it’s a waste of time or boring, but Elizabeth sees this as a wider problem with fitness culture.
“I think a lot of women’s fitness is just doing a bunch of random shit.” This, she emphasises, is not to suggest that any other form of movement is pointless but, “if your goal is building strength, then there’s got to be an element of repetition and progression. A big part of strength is learning the technique, drilling those neuromuscular connections, and then the progressive overload is really the magic. That’s how you get your body to keep adapting, getting stronger.”
Bone strength is essential, but you don’t have to lift heavy
In the same way we lose muscle, we also start to lose bone density from around 35, with the hormonal changes of menopause speeding up that process. So building up bone density through fitness is crucial to supporting us in old age.
“One in two women over the age of 50 will experience an osteoporotic fracture. That’s a coin toss, it’s not a niche injury. Plus, 20 to 33 per cent of patients die within one year of a hip fracture,” says Elizabeth. “Those statistics were so eye opening for me. It makes you wonder why all these magazines are telling us how to get rid of our bingo wings. Why is nobody telling us how to build lovely, dense bones that aren’t going to fracture?”
The combination of balance work, strength training and power all protect us from falls. But bone strength doesn’t have to come from heavy lifting.
“We know that bones do need a lot of force in order to adapt, but we also know that bones respond really well to impact. So if lifting heavy isn’t for you and jumping is accessible, then jump training can be really effective”.
The key is a) the force going through the bones and b) the lack of predictability. Bones desensitise to repetition, so something like running is actually not going to be as beneficial for bone as you might think. “It needs to be multi-directional: lateral jumps, skater jumps, bounce forward, hops in different directions. The bigger the impact, the more stimulus that’s going to put through the skeleton, therefore more of a cue for our bones to adapt.” Again though, this must be led by auto-regulation: find your starting point and build up gradually.
You can’t forget cardio
While the pivot to strength training is critical, Elizabeth says that “cardiovascular fitness has to be an important part of the conversation, too. A lot of us have such a scarred relationship with it from the 90s and 2000s, but it is absolutely still important, particularly for heart health. Heart disease is the biggest killer of women. We can’t shirk cardio.” Though, she says that you don’t need to put excessive pressure on it – instead, choose something you enjoy and won’t habitually avoid.
Everyone still ignores the pelvic floor
“A lot of us, myself included, only really approach these muscles reactively,” Elizabeth says – but she is on a mission to change that. “It wasn’t nice to be learning about my pelvic floor muscles at a time when I’d already had that leaking incident. I would have found it a lot more of a comfortable experience if this had been part of the conversation throughout my pregnancy, even prior to pregnancy.”
She encourages all women to learn how to do a pelvic floor squeeze, even if they’re not symptomatic. Every day she does a few endurance holds and a few quick squeezes in the shower.
“Sarcopenia isn’t choosy and they are muscles like any other. Add in the menopause transition when estrogen, which is protective of those muscles, is going to decline. That can lead to many women having leaks or symptoms as they go through the perimenopause transition.”
Training For Your Old Lady Body: An honest, no bullsh*t guide to help women (re)frame exercise by Elizabeth Davies is published by LEAP and is out today.
