Why Women Were Taught to Be Proud of Losing Their Period (And How It's Destroying Female Athletes)

How hard should a woman push through the mental and maybe even physical resistance to train less or not train during a given phase of the cycle? — Again, depends on how she feels. What we can't rely on are things like heart rate variability because we know that changes with the autonomic nervous system change with progesterone. It's a good indication that you've ovulated because your heart rate variability tanks, but it's not a good indication of what your body can do. If you wake up, I always say it's the 10-minute rule. you wake up and you feel awful and you're like, "Uh, I really want to do this workout, but I don't know how it's going to go. " Give yourself 10 minutes. If after 10 minutes you can't hit those intensities or you just feel horrible, change it. Drop it down. Do something that's more recovery, do something that's not going to be so taxing because we do have a limited amount of that stress acumen of how much stress we can handle. So, if you're going to try to exert it all in a highintensity workout, what do you have left over for the rest of the day? And then that compounds because if you're always fighting it, then you're going to increase this baseline sympathetic drive because you're fighting the training, you're fighting life. So, give yourself that 10-minute rule. If it happens three days in a row, that's okay because it's a very short period of time. It's not going to last forever. So a lot of women have this internal conversation of I have to do this and it's really based on some kind of external they think everyone's watching them but internally you don't have to. If you give yourself permission you end up training better, recovering better and getting better gains. On the flip side, if a woman is feeling spectacularly good, — should she just really push it as hard as she can? Or is there anything about the relationship between the hormone fluctuations of the menstrual cycle and feeling really great that training hard can somehow disrupt the cycle? And this is actually kind of the uh the old lore um probably myth I would imagine that high-intensity resistance training is somehow detrimental to female hormone cycles. I don't think there's any evidence for that but I hear that from time to time. Um why do you think that myth came to be? it propagates and what can we do to extinguish it if in fact it's not true? — It's not true. We see it comes from a misstep in food intake and we also see that it's a cultural influence because if we think about how sports started, it started as a way for men to demonstrate how powerful and aggressive they are. And this is the original Olympics, right? There were no women allowed. And as we feed forward into sport and how it became okay for women to be involved at the high performance level, if a woman walks in and shows any fallibility, then she's immediately put on a lower stool, right? No, you can't play with the boys because you have a menstrual cycle, you're bleeding, you're a woman, you're a delicate flower. So women would walk into that professional sports space and be excited if they were amenoric or didn't have periods or they trained hard enough and their period went away because then they were more like men and they could play with the boys. If you start bringing up menstrual cycle in professional sport now as of the past about four or five years it's okay to talk about which is you know what 2020. So that myth of highintensity resistance training causing issues with the menstrual cycle. One, it's a cultural nuance for push back against women being in that space. But then the reality is women weren't eating enough to accommodate for that stress, which then feeds forward to low energy availability, maybe relative energy deficiency in sport, perturbations in all of our menstrual cycle hormones. So, it's not the act of the highintensity resistance training. It's the act of not fueling appropriately for it and then getting the okay to not have your period because yeah, now you're in with you're training hard enough. You've lost it. You're more like a man.