Heather Fell: Girls and guys, listen up. This is a topic for all. Around 50% of
the adult population will experience the menstrual cycle, the other 50% will know,
will work with and potentially even coach those that do. Did you know that women can actually
use their monthly cycle to their advantage when it comes to sport? It's time to break the taboo
around periods and have an open conversation so we look at how we can optimize sporting performance
for women. [music]
Athletes are athletes. In order to improve performance, you need to train hard and recover
well. Some days are different, you might feel really motivated on one day, the next day, it's
really hard to get out of the door. Or maybe you can just keep going all day but you can't reach
that top-end speed. Men and women will experience fluctuations in their training but for women,
they're actually more predictable. As a result, training can be prescribed to fit around this.
In the past, periods have been seen as a hindrance to athletic performance but it is time to flip
that on its head and unlock the potential and use it to actually help with your planning.
In order to do that, we need to look at what's going on at a hormonal level and the hormone
effects on our body. The menstrual cycle can be divided into four phases. It begins on day one
of your period with the menstrual phase. This is also known as the early follicular phase and
the hormones estrogen and progesterone are at their lowest. Due to the drop in progesterone,
the inflammatory response ends and your white cell count will also drop, which increases the risk of
picking up an illness. [music]
In brief, during this phase, you want to try and optimize your sleep and your nutrition. That said,
it has been proven that you are quite likely to experience increased cognitive function. When it
comes to training, try to include more strength training and high intensity. Onto phase two,
which is known as the late follicular phase, and here progesterone remains low but estrogen
actually rises to reach its peak. [music]
Well, that increase in estrogen should help you to feel good and be really energized during this
phase. You also might notice you've got a decreased appetite and your blood sugars,
as a result, will be more stable. When it comes to training you can still focus on
really getting some strength training in. At this phase, your body is actually going to be
able to optimize the repair of muscle tissue. Phase three, ovulation, estrogen drops off
initially here but then rises again along with progesterone and they both remain high during
ovulation. It's obviously different from woman to woman, but there can be some pain and discomfort
at this phase in the abdomen and the lower back area. Interestingly, the basal body temperature
during this phase can actually increase by 0.3 of a degree and as a result of the high levels
of progesterone, some women might notice an increase in their resting heart rate
and their breathing. [music]
Interestingly, during this phase, the basal body temperature can rise by 0.3 of a degree and as
a result of the high progesterone, some people might notice a slight increase in their natural
breathing and resting heart rate. Some of us will experience cravings during this time as
blood sugar levels are less stable. When it comes to training, you might just be feeling a little
bit of lethargy, but there's nothing you really need to change, but do be aware that your body
might take slightly longer to recover. The fourth and final phase of the monthly cycle
known as the luteal phase sees estrogen and progesterone both drop to their lowest levels.
This change in hormones can trigger an inflammatory response, which is partly
the cause of typical PMS symptoms. Again, you might experience cravings for certain food due
to changes in insulin levels and blood sugar fluctuations, but this does vary from woman to
woman. Sleep might be affected, which could affect concentration and also your body's ability to
recover. Exercise is still important to help you feel good during this phase, but you might want to
make use of the lighter, more moderate variety. Your body also is better adapted at this phase,
to use fats over carbohydrates, which again will support doing more aerobic work.
In the past, men and women have used the same training structures but having seen
the effect of the monthly cycle, you can see how important it is to actually adapt your training
to that. Well, Dr. Stacy Sims is world-renowned for helping women to actually optimize their
unique physiology and she's famous for saying, "Woman Are Not Small Men." Well,
I'm delighted to say that Stacy has actually given up some of her time to speak to me.
Dr. Stacy Sims: The real important thing that defines the two phases is ovulation.
Right before ovulation, you have a luteinizing hormone surge that coincides with the estrogen
surge. Luteinizing hormone is really important to understand because without it you can't really
have ovulation. When people start to get into menstrual dysfunction, we first start looking at
the pulsing or the pulsatile aspect of LH and if you have a surge.
For all intents and purposes, your major sex hormones are estrogen and progesterone. They
do phase estrogen and progesterone are low, then estrogen surges right before ovulation,
dips a little, and then comes back up. With ovulation and the release of the egg, that is
how progesterone starts to come up. The job of progesterone is to break down a
whole bunch of tissue to provide a lot of energy to build the endometrial lining.
When we look at it from a systemic effect there are definitely
major effects that both of these sex hormones have on all the other systems of the body.
Heather: This is a big question. how can we adapt our training to fit around this
fluctuation in our hormones? Stacy: One of the first things is because every
woman is a little bit different and understanding how you feel across your menstrual cycle really
can give you some insight to how you dial things in. Some women feel bulletproof right around
ovulation, and then some have a delayed feeling of feeling bulletproof and they'll feel really flat
for about 36 hours after ovulation. If you're one of those women that feels like bulletproof,
right around day 14 or 15, then you can dial in your training to go really hard and get that hard
training adaptation because your body's going to let you. If you feel really flat, don't fight it,
just delay that hard workout a couple of days until you feel that surge of energy again.
Across the follicular phase and that low hormone phase, as estrogen starts to come up,
you'll have really fantastic days as well, because estrogen is anabolic. It's neuro stimulatory,
so there's a lot of benefits of estrogen coming up in isolation without progesterone.
After ovulation, when estrogen and progesterone both start coming up, some women are unaffected,
they don't feel anything until about three or four days before their period starts.
That's when you have the most elevation of estrogen, progesterone, and a huge inflammation
response, and an immune suppression. This is where you start to feel sick, bloated, tired, fatigue.
If you know how you feel on those certain days, then you can dial in your hard workouts,
and your de-load or recovery workouts. Heather: Any tips for doing, say strength
training in a phase when you're not anabolic, or a phase when you've got a certain amount
of training you want to be doing but it doesn't suit that phase you're in? It
sounds like you're going to say, "Well don't do it," but you are an athlete as well.
Stacy: No. Heather: What's your suggestion around that?
Stacy: If you're working with a team of athletes, you can't really dictate,
"Okay, someone's in a follicular phase, you've got to do this one rep max type stuff." "You're in the
late luteal phase so you go in the gym and you do something different." When you're working in
a team environment you can't really be like that. When you know where you are, and your teammates
are, or however that group is, with regards to where they are in their menstrual cycle, you
can say, "Okay, well, we're all going to do some power training today." I know that you're in the
later luteal phase where you're not in an anabolic state, you're starting to feel a little bit flat.
Instead of really pushing that topend high intensity, we're going to work technique and not
put a lot of load on, but for those who are around ovulation or in their early follicular phase,
we're going to work in that hard, heavy load. You're getting the same benefits with regards to
the session in the gym. It's just the technique a lot of people forget. Or they say, "Oh,
I'm a few days before my period and my cognition is a bit low, my reaction time is slow. It's not
efficacious for me to do technique." That's the time you want to do it,
especially if you're a triathlete because you're trying to work on economy of motion.
If you're working on your skill development, your economy of motion when your body's in
a perceived tired state because of the way the hormones are affecting the central nervous system
and some of your neurotransmitters, then you can make a lot of gains, especially for
running off the bike, and you're trying to run tired. If you're working on technique,
and you're working on bar technique, under loads, and then going and doing some running drills,
then all of it feeds forward to how you perform running off the bike.
[music] Heather: You work with women all the time and
getting them to optimize their strength and their training ability. Have you got any other general
advice that you think our viewers at GTN could learn from your huge knowledge in this area?
Stacy: I think the biggest thing is there's so many women that are unaware of where they are in
their cycle when they're doing things. They don't track. They don't know how they feel and so that's
the first thing I always tell women to do. Track your cycle. Don't listen to someone else about
what to do. Find out how you respond to different things, how you sleep in the days leading up to
your period, how you feel around your ovulation. Track your own cycle for at least three months
to get some really good data of training, how you feel in training, how your sleep is
against your menstrual cycle so that gives you really objective data. Then you can start making
some informed decisions from there. Even coaches in that same regard,
if they have their athletes tracking and getting this objective data, then they too can help
facilitate better training practices especially if you're a triathlete and have individual sessions
of how to maximize the training load around the days where you feel great and kind of
de-load or have a little bit more recovery on the days that you don't feel so great.
[music] Heather:
This development and research really could be a game-changer in women's athletic performance.
Now knowing more about the menstrual cycle, it seems crazy not to optimize this and take it into
account when we're planning our training. Maybe you're already ahead of the game and you're
using this in your own training, and you're planning out according to your monthly cycle.
Maybe you're someone who coaches athletes that experience a monthly cycle. I would love to know
how you're going about that and what differences you've experienced, so please let us know in the
Comments section below. This is obviously a bit of a different topic that we've delved into here at
GTN but hopefully, you've enjoyed it. Please give us a Like and remember, you can also follow us on
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