Exercise for period pain: what works?

Moving is the last thing you may want to do when you are curled round a hot water bottle. But exercise is one of the better-studied ways to ease period pain, and it may do more than you would guess. It is not a magic cure, and it is not for everyone every day.

What the research found

• Compared with doing nothing, exercise may give a large reduction in how strong period pain is. This applied to gentle exercise like yoga and harder exercise like aerobics. The change was more than twice the amount that people notice.
• Most trials asked people to exercise at least 3 times a week for about 45 to 60 minutes, and to keep it up through the whole month, not only on period days. Some asked them not to exercise on the period itself.
• Nobody knows if less exercise would work as well.
• There was not enough evidence to say whether exercise beats anti-inflammatory painkillers like ibuprofen.
• Safety was not well reported, so the review could not say much about harms.

The evidence is low quality because the trials were small, gave different results, and people could not be blinded to whether they were exercising. So "may help" is the honest wording. A 2018 review of yoga for period pain, which found 8 trials and 6 other studies, also called its results preliminary.

Making it doable

• Pick something you enjoy. The NHS suggests yoga, swimming, walking or cycling for period pain.
• Think small: 10 minutes counts. Build up over weeks.
• Do it between periods too. The trials mostly measured regular movement all month.
• On the day, mix it with what the NHS also suggests: a warm bath, a heat pad or hot water bottle wrapped in a tea towel, a tummy or back massage, and painkillers like paracetamol or ibuprofen.
• If movement is hard for you (pain, fatigue, a disability or a health condition), seated and gentle moves count just as much. See our read on moving when your body makes it hard.