Transcript

EMMA ROSS

So what’s amazing about the menstrual cycle is that every woman’s experience of it will be different. And that will be in the context of her life, her diet, her lifestyle, her training, her nutrition, the stress she’s under. And if you imagine the fluctuating hormones of the menstrual cycle have receptors on cells all across our body, from our brain, our gut, our bones, our blood vessels, our muscles.

And so when those hormones are up or down, they are affecting us not just as part of our reproductive system, but physically and emotionally all across our body. And our sensitivity to those and the levels of hormones in each woman will be different.

So every woman’s experience of their menstrual cycle will be slightly different from the next. But what we do know is that physiologically, performance isn’t actually affected significantly by those hormonal fluctuations of the menstrual cycle.

So determinants of performance like strength, power, V02 max, that’s aerobic fitness, aren’t actually changed as those hormones change across the cycle, but the story doesn’t end there. We can’t just say performance won’t be affected because what is affected is how a woman feels physically and emotionally so we know that women can suffer symptoms, things like nausea, things like headaches, bloating, period pains, back pain.

And those symptoms will affect how a woman can train and perform on any given day. And actually the ability to manage those symptoms and get the best out of yourself on any given day is a real superpower of understanding your menstrual cycle.

So I think there are two things we can do to ensure that we can perform to the best of our ability on any day of our cycle and not be held back by our menstrual cycle. And one is improving our body literacy. And what that means is tracking your cycle and really understanding your experience of it.

When it’s giving you things that are helpful, like energy and motivation, and when it’s giving you symptoms that are challenging to your performance. And then being able to anticipate when that’s going to happen in your cycle and being proactive to do something about it.

And the second thing is opening up the conversation. And this is harder because we aren’t used to talking about things like periods and menstrual cycles, particularly in sport. But actually opening up the dialogue if you’re an athlete between your trainer or your coach, and allowing them to understand how your cycle is influencing you, and what they can do to help get the best out of you on any given day is a really, really helpful approach.