It's that time of the month, I know the ladies watching are probably like ‘yeah, I got you’.
I feel like if it was a men's issue, we would have a million different ways to combat things,
but with women there just needs to be more funding in the area.
Women playing sport isn't a new thing.
And neither is menstruation.
But only now are we starting to talk about how the menstrual cycle impacts physical performance.
This happens to 50 percent of our population, um and so normalising that is a really big thing.
Just this thing that's been driven into your head that,
you don't really talk about periods in public like, don't say period too loud.
You have trainings where you feel like you are on top of the world and like you
could do anything and then you just have days where you’re just like, ‘get me out of here’.
I've had like times where it's literally state championships, and like my period
is coming. It's very like, tormenting and I’ve had to miss out on like competition.
To really explain why this matters, we need to start with what menstruation actually is.
The main reason we have a menstrual cycle is to release an egg from the ovaries.
Eva is an Exercise Physiologist, who specialises in women's health,
and she's here to help us understand the very complex, and pretty impressive, monthly cycle.
We like to break it down under four particular sub-headings. So, we start with our period,
or the menstrual cycle phase, when we see that bleed, our hormones are typically at
their lowest so, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, you see them at our lowest.
From day one, really, really bad period pains and it wouldn't just last like I don’t know,
an hour. I'd be up all-night vomiting like until you've got nothing left, but it would just keep
going like bed ridden all day long. When I'm on my period, I think the last place I'd ever want
to be is the gym. I'd much rather go for a run than go to the gym and do weights or whatever.
When I’m on my period, I usually don't go to training. I just get like really tired,
and then like the cramps. That's the most intense pain I ever feel. So,
I just know I literally can't like sit up properly when I want to, so there's no point.
As we gently move into our follicular phase, when we cease or stop bleeding, we see testosterone
start to increase. This is, you know where we're feeling a little bit stronger, we've
got a bit more energy. And then right up to the point of ovulation, we see this great big surge
in estrogen. Interestingly estrogen assists in our pain threshold, so our pain should be better
with an increase in estrogen. When we see that estrogen rise, it comes down quite dramatically.
These hormone changes have different impacts on different people and for Abby,
this point of her cycle is pretty difficult.
Tracked my period for like six months or so and found that two weeks,
one to two weeks before getting my period, I was just crashing like essentially getting
really depressed and down like couldn't get out of bed, having some really bad thoughts.
If we don't see then pregnancy being an outcome, we move into what we call the luteal phase,
through the luteal phase is progesterone peak. Progesterone is an anti-inflammatory hormone,
and that's our happy feel-good hormone. So as that comes up,
we start to feel again, a bit more energetic.
Two weeks after the period, I'm definitely like, just on my grind. I'm just being like,
very energetic and that kind of thing and the week leading up, I just feel flat and then I know
that it's coming so it's just kind of that mental internal knowing, like the clock of where I'm at.
As it starts to taper off, we see that low progesterone, that begins that initiation of
the bleed, and we're back to the menstrual cycle or that first day of the bleed.
At different points throughout the cycle, we might experience...
So, how do you deal with this as an athlete?
These are very real things that happen to women. We need to treat everybody as individuals but
certainly you know, understand and empathise with things that occur in their menstrual cycles.
Meet Dr Rachel Harris from the Australian Institute of Sport, or the AIS.
She's led some pretty important research in this area and says one of the big problems
in managing menstrual cycles in athletes is a lack of research.
Women and girls in general are very underrepresented in most research, only 6
percent of sports science and sports medicine research actually involve women and girls.
Through her work, she's monitored training,
interviewed athletes and looked at factors like nutrition, sleep,
recovery, strength and performance at different stages of the menstrual cycle.
There is such incredible individual variation between women in their cycles. So, there were some
women that felt that during their period was the time that they would like to compete. There
were some that said just before, there were some that said just after, there was some that said,
you know, in the middle of their cycle. So I think that’s the really cool thing.
We've got women that are breaking world records, you know, winning gold medals,
winning world championships, winning grand finals at every single stage of their menstrual cycle.
While it can bring difficult symptoms, Dr Harris' research
also shows that athletes can use their menstrual cycles to their advantage.
I think it gets a lot of bad press. The changes that occur to our body during puberty and because
of that menstrual cycle and the release of those hormones is actually a really positive
thing. Estrogen has really huge benefits on bone, on illness, and also injuries as well.
So does progesterone. Instead of the shame that we have around our menstrual cycles,
it would be wonderful if we could actually be more positive about it and embrace it as
actually a really powerful thing that we can use at different times of the month.
Research like this is all super fresh, but we're already seeing its impacts.
One example is the women's US soccer team winning the World Cup in 2019,
and claiming it was all because they tracked every player's cycle.
They're at an advantage by understanding what's happening at a physiological level
for each individual player. We can understand, how much time are we giving them on field or
how much time are they able to tolerate on field, how much do we need to focus on more
rest and recovery for these players. You know for example, in the follicular phase, it's often known
as sort of the fat burning and muscle, and muscle building phase. So, if somebody is in that phase,
let's look at ‘okay, let's train and adapt their training schedule to focus on that’. Or what if
it's, they’re in a luteal phase, let's, let’s focus more of the fat storing and muscle sparing,
or let's recover muscle if we need to during those lower hormone phases, like the menstrual cycle.
This is all great progress, but to discover the real potential that comes with this research,
there's a massive cultural hurdle to overcome. We need to actually talk about menstrual cycles.
When it doesn't get spoken about, like this happened for me, it like,
like just seeps into other things, and it can like present itself in
like low iron and that kind of thing, which can be really bad.
Staff members, coaches, trainers as well are mostly males. I’m
still not 100 percent comfortable going up to them and being like,
‘I've got my period today’. But I also would 100 percent love to get out there and get
our team talking about it, get them talking about it, get them more educated as well.
It's going to be uncomfortable, and then it might be a bit awkward, and you might
feel a bit yucky about it. But I think it just starts with the conversation really,
like what we're doing right now is the best thing we can be doing.
You literally just taught me something in that. I was like ‘what!’.