The Messy Middle Podcast: Key Points on Cycle Syncing and Training

hello there I&#39;m Alyssa olenek scientists exercise Enthusiast weight lifter Outdoors lover and entrepreneur I believe that the Extremes in the Fitness and Wellness Industries are leaving way too many of us out of the conversation not telling us the knowledge that we actually need to succeed in our health our Wellness our nutrition and quite frankly Our Lives they end up giving us black and white polarizing messages that leave us more confused than giving us the answers that we need through my 10 years of studying exercise science metabolism and female physiology as well as exploring the outdoors and being a fitness athlete myself I&#39;m here to bring to you the conversations that need to be have in an industry that often is too far focused on extremes so if you join me on this podcast I truly believe that life is best lived in the messy middle hello there everybody and welcome back to another episode of the messy middle podcast today we&#39;re going to be talking about everyone&#39;s favorite topic the Hot Topic of the year cycle syncing and so if you haven&#39;t first checked out my video um menstrual cycle myths where I kind of debunk a lot of the common claims going around menstrual cycle training what actually it means what how to interpret that all that make sure you go back and listen to that episode or watch that video because today I want to talk about what I would consider a better way to train or work with your cycle so now I&#39;ve given like eight different podcast interviews on this topic and I&#39;m kind of giving the same interview over and over and so I want to kind of bring some of that information that I&#39;m giving in other sources here to you all to kind of consolidate that for my biggest fans and greatest followers so before we dive into today&#39;s episode if you are listening on your favorite podcast platform please consider rating and reviewing the podcast it helps me a ton I really really appreciate it if you&#39;re listening on YouTube go ahead and hit that subscribe button hit a like leave a comment and if you really want to support dockless Fitness and or the messy metal podcast in general go to the opposite platform and leave a review or subscribe or like leave some love and if you listen to this on you know and tag me in Instagram let me know if you learned something you enjoyed something it always helps and someone else might find this information helpful as well so let&#39;s dive in so cycle syncing has become all the rage recently and I want to make some things very clear when talking about this because I think because I am anti-cycle-sinking in the sense of like what is viral on Tick Tock right now that I think that we are you know everyone who menstruates is exactly like a biological male and that&#39;s that doesn&#39;t matter shut up and that is not what I am ever been saying but that does get lost in the sauce because people are so adamantly against cycle syncing that we kind of need to dial back and answer the questions of like well how do we consider our cycle in our performance our health and all of those things because I know that the reason cycle Sun King has become so popular is because women are menstruating individuals do feel really left out and a lot of people constantly remind you you&#39;re left out of science you don&#39;t care this and that blah blah blah screw you and it makes you feel like okay well it&#39;s nothing about me right so to dive in today to start I want to break it into three camps and that is there is the camp of there&#39;s no impact on menstrual cycle whatsoever anything doesn&#39;t matter and I think a lot of people again think I&#39;m in that camp and I&#39;m not there is the Middle Road of like there&#39;s probably parameters within performance that we should consider in regards to your cycle hormonal State whether that&#39;s birth control performance post-menopausal premencopausal pregnancy postpartum all of that stuff and then there&#39;s the our entire life should revolve around this this dictates everything we are fragile butterflies type misinformation camp and so contrary to popular belief I&#39;m a little bit more in that mid Road shocking with a podcast called the messy middle um but I think we need more nuance and context to this discussion because everybody wants you to just suddenly be able to spew off exactly how you should train around our cycle and while we might have hunches or assumptions or we can extrapolate what we think physiologically and mechanistically might apply in the whole body level or in the like training adaptation level the data just isn&#39;t quite there and so unfortunately a lot of people are speaking of hypothesis or we are we can use data that we do have so even though there&#39;s less studies right that doesn&#39;t mean there&#39;s no studies it just means that we don&#39;t have a very large complete body of work done yet quite on administrating individuals or female athletes do I think we need more research yes I do I published the paper showing that six percent of studies are done just on on women I was the second off of bear I&#39;m working on more papers with that group and I wouldn&#39;t have done a PhD or a postdoc in you know women&#39;s physiology if I didn&#39;t care about these things I promise that I am on your side um I think people think that I&#39;m not but the issue is that a lot of that misinformation is kind of giving you this idea that you know there&#39;s none of this data on you but then we&#39;re going to use this data that we&#39;re going to make up use hypotheses to overextrapolate mechanisms to tell you how to alter your life four times a month which can seem really stressful and overwhelming so what I want to break down today is what can we do as female trainees or self-declared athletes or just highly active individuals who have a menstrual cycle or honestly depending on your birth control type can apply to you as well if you have an IUD and or fluctuations with your pill concentrations just how can we adjust our training or work with our bodies and or our hormones not against them in a way that makes sense but also is grounded in the current state of evidence uses Nuance considers things that might be coming forth in the evidence in the future and or you know can be a best practice to apply to coaching our clients and training right so to start when we think about the menstrual cycle uh the phases that really kind of get tossed around or lumped together can kind of be broken down into two major phases the follicular phase and the luteal phase they are marked in the middle by ovulation but you can bring break those down even further to the menstrual phase which is part of the follicular phase the late follicular phase so those kind of are you know early follicular is your onset of your menstrual cycle day one that is the start of your new cycle into that late follicular phase um during this time hormones are really low during your period they&#39;re rising in your follicular phase going into ovulation as some like to call it the main event so to speak of your menstrual cycle but ovulation is very important into the luteal phase and I think the luteal phase really gets cost all as one but really we have early mid and late luteal phase where your hormones coming off of ovulation kind of dip down a little bit again they rise back up where progesterone and estrogen are at their highest in that mid-luteal phase and then they lower back down into the menstrual cycle and it repeats all over again so to recap some of the stuff that I did say in the earlier podcast again go back and listen and watch that for more context and more references probably be more helpful listen to that before going into this um is that most of the evidence and data we have right now shows that you can perform across the entire month you know PR&#39;s in records and events have been performed during All Phases of the menstrual cycle major athletic things like strength output and or endurance and things like that appear to not be super largely impacted by the menstrual cycle but there are some small acute differences between phases and largely overall what we see when we look at meta-analyzes or reviews just based off the data we have now um is in general if we&#39;re going to have a decrease or a negative impact in performance it&#39;s probably going to be in that late ludial phase so right as your hormones are dropping back down and or that early menstrual cycle phase where they&#39;re like kind of flat in the first few days of your period however these seem to be tied more strongly to those who have greater PMS symptoms or you know poor premenstrual symptoms premenstrual syndrome and or you know menstrual cycle onset effects so what it really wraps back to the fact that this is largely individual and that&#39;s we&#39;re going to kind of get into here today A little bit more so that is the general gist of what the literature says and the rest of it is kind of wonky where it&#39;s like 50 of studies show difference between phases 50 don&#39;t 50 of women report you know that agent sport or activity that have been surveyed or asked report that they have you know perceived impact of different menstrual cycle phases or they feel like certain phases feel better or worse for them others report that they find no difference and so that&#39;s what makes this really messy and hard is because every menstrual cycle is different person to person but even cycle phase to cycle phase like things in your life can alter your cycle month to month even and so one of the biggest things that we really want to think about when we&#39;re thinking about the female athlete demonstrating individual you know the women that are engaging in recreational sport however you identify is that we want to remember that even though we are not giving you a blanket statement because you want something to be about women or female athletes or female trainees or menstruating trainees that doesn&#39;t mean we are ignoring you we are saying that it&#39;s so unique that it applies to you so we really need to start with covering our bases here so I kind of went over the menstrual cycle but before we even worry about the menstrual cycle we need to think about the big things that impact our overall health metabolically hormonally you know Fitness output whatever it is that we&#39;re looking at our overall health and well-being we need to start at the base hormones are flashy and sexy right now and there may be a time and place especially when it comes to Performance outcomes especially in Elite athletes especially as the data continues to grow and emerge I&#39;m not here to say that hormones have zero impact whatsoever and then we&#39;re never going to have data that might clarify this a little bit more what I&#39;m saying is that regardless of where the data goes and I hope it I hope it gives us more clarity over the years is that it doesn&#39;t really matter how you adjust to your hormones if you&#39;re not doing the big base building things so to speak I know I use that a lot with aerobic training but like building the base of your pyramid of things that actually matter the big rocks the hard-hitting things that are going to impact you your performance your health and all of that stuff more than adjusting for your menstrual cycle phase right so the first thing is going to be that regardless of Who You Are this happens to Elite athletes this happens to amateur athletes this happens to the everyday woman on average especially you know leaner individuals leaner women tend to under eat so eating enough macronutrients eating enough micronutrients eating enough calories protein carbs and fat for your goals or your health or your desired outcomes is going to be the most important thing ever I cannot stress to you enough that all of the things that we worry about with training in our luteal phase or ignoring our menstrual cycle are actually occurring when you have loss of ovulation so you have an ovulatory cycles and or your immune react so you have a loss of your menstrual cycle altogether under eating you know high stress activity with inadequate food intake you know loss of your menstrual cycle loss of ovulation those things are make exercise training your response adaptations more difficult and more stressful on your body all however unfortunately that is something that&#39;s you know a high prevalence in female athletes Chinese recreational or at the sport level and so we need to be making sure that we have enough energy available I think that the lack of energy availability and or you know having high energy deficits and or the female athlete Triad however you want to you know refer to this as in menstruating individuals and trainees or in general you know this can be masked by birth control stuff like that is that I lost my entire strain of thought everyone um I I think that people forget that energy availability is a bigger deal to health and performance outcome and the menstruating or female individual than the menstrual cycles are packed on performance like I really truly mean that as someone who&#39;s studied female physiology and Metabolism having enough nutrients availability and being well fed is going to have such a significant impact on your health and performance like I think that these menstrual cycle conversations leave out the fact that low energy availability not having enough energy or carbohydrates or protein carbs calories is the word I&#39;m looking for calories for your basic daily functional needs means that your body is going to down regulate those and we do not want that so I I understand wanting to jump to the fancy sexy stuff but the best thing that you can do to start with is to make sure that you are eating adequate protein carbs fat you know nutrients calories that you need just starting with nutrition your hydration and so you can go back to another earlier episode that I have this I believe is only on my podcast I don&#39;t think this is cross poster to my YouTube but I could be wrong on the big three for female athletes let me talk a little bit more about those nutritional needs and why those are so important and why they&#39;re more important um the then cycle syncing or considering your cycle for your health and performance outcome so you want to start there right and that&#39;s a lot of work like if any one of you has gone through working with a nutrition coach a dietitian and or your own Health Fitness food Journey you know that that&#39;s not the easiest thing to do like I was the female athlete in college who thought that it was cool that I restricted carbs and I was like paleo plus oatmeal and I was really lean and I would brag and be like oh you can&#39;t be built like this if you eat carbohydrates and little did I know I was under feeding myself right I didn&#39;t know what the hell I was doing or talking about we&#39;ve all been there um but I thought that high fat and paleo and like on restricting all these things were best for me and then I ended up overeating fat gaining weight having poor performance and then being really confused and frustrated with all of my health and my outcomes right so you know those are things that I think we need to start with and then from there I mean everyone&#39;s like okay Alyssa we get it we know we need to eat more we need to eat enough I&#39;m so sick of hearing that but really like I really cannot trust you enough but we will move on with that being said once you are a hydrated protein filled carb-loaded happy little lady or honestly this also applies to everyone because there&#39;s low energy risk in males or anyone who identifies this male as well because but it&#39;s just a lower threshold right so anyway that&#39;s another topic for another day the next thing is making sure that you are following a well-structured training program working up the period period pyramid your nutrient intake is so much more important than anything else you can also probably toss in their Stress Management sleep all your Healthy behaviors but we&#39;re just thinking about like performance in general like just as a whole and moving up the pyramid once you&#39;re well fed yes you need to consider your sleeping and Stress Management I know that is not helpful go back and listen to my podcast episodes with Dr Karen Norton um Aunt Norton on uh mindset that might help a little bit more there but when we&#39;re working our ways up um we want to then think about following a well-structured training program right what are you thinking if you&#39;re not following something that&#39;s allowing you to get feedback and assess your response or even know how your body&#39;s responding to training like what are what are you thinking right you need to have something to go off of to know when to adjust when to modulate your training when to know how things are responding differently like you just just jumping into a blanket cycle thinking routine of like okay do lifting during these weeks high intensity during this week Plies during this week do slow controlled exercise during this week and then don&#39;t do anything this week but Pilates and yoga or gentle walking is it doesn&#39;t help you it doesn&#39;t tell you anything about your training program especially if you have specific outcomes and goals that you are trying to achieve you really want to think about like okay well like am I following a structured training program to begin with am I following Progressive overload am I getting feedback about how things are responding to me am I doing the same workouts frequently enough to actually know if they&#39;re being impacted by things in my life whether it&#39;s your menstrual cycle your sleep your stress you know anything else you work anything else going on in your life right that&#39;s how you will know if things need to change and we&#39;re really skipping over that and and that&#39;s a huge issue too because not only are people you know females chronically dieting or restricting or yo-yo dieting or you may be not eating following the healthiest eating patterns um but they&#39;re also traditionally not meeting physical activity guidelines in general for largely resistance training they might be doing a lot of cardio or I think I see this more often in the like cycles and Coach type community and when I say cycle sync coach I really want you guys to understand like I&#39;m talking about like the self-declared I just I quote unquote balanced my own hormones I&#39;m going to regurgitate a book type people not performance-based people who maybe are like taking these things into consideration from a legitimate standpoint but you know the tick-tockies the Ticky talkies um but a lot of people are either not meeting physical activity guidelines doing a regular exercise changing their exercise routine all the time or we have the group that probably was also maybe under eating or unintentionally putting their body into a larger energy deficit who was constantly doing High volumes high intensity mismanaged volume non-polarized training you know haphazard overloading of all of the all of the things in Fitness and just overdoing exercise volume and intensity while at the same time under eating and they did lead to hormonal hormonal down regulation or dysregulation that&#39;s what you&#39;re seeing a lot so in these these these ticky tacky babies are switching to a cycle-sinking routine and they&#39;re watching their eating all they&#39;re doing is creating more energy that&#39;s more available for the body so it can recover it can adapt it can make progress in their Fitness and then it has enough energy to actually have normal hormonal function restore ovulation restore the menstrual cycle and so I I really want you guys to understand the ties of what I&#39;m saying here to like what you&#39;re seeing out there and so I think that&#39;s a really good example that needs to be talked about because if you are you know overeating or under eating if you&#39;re over training or under training or if you&#39;re training a regular or you&#39;re eating a regular like work on making those more routine more like sustainable for your lifestyle and what you can actually do make sure you&#39;re following good training programs Shameless plug for my programs the list method that will I will straight up tell you as a client if you come to us that maybe you should back off on some of the volume or what you&#39;re doing you might not like to hear it but usually that does yield more results for the people that are overdoers and then we also have the training programs that are concurrent for the people that don&#39;t know how to mix the things together or they just don&#39;t know how to do enough or what to do exactly we can help you out with that so Shameless plug join us in the list method um but with that being said you know give yourself something sustainable and trackable and consistent so you can actually see where hormones or life are impacting these things and so right now this advice I&#39;m giving applies to everyone like you know work on a healthy nutritional habits work on you know having solid exercise routine habits that are sustainable that makes use a mix of resistance training and aerobic training and it&#39;s okay like if you like to do group fitness or CrossFit or things are more variable generally if you&#39;re doing something that&#39;s like well programmed from the top down like a good CrossFit gym even things like orange theory fit I can&#39;t really speak to some of the other things but if it&#39;s well programmed and structured there&#39;s going to be some rhyme and reason to what you&#39;re doing but you should be able to tell like class to class even in that how you are feeling in response to different things like generally they are following some sort of schematic where you&#39;re doing similar workouts every so many days and or every week on the same day things like that so I can&#39;t speak to every programming of every gym and stuff like that um but generally even those are fine like just track what you&#39;re doing be consistent then from there you know you&#39;ve you&#39;re you&#39;re like okay Alyssa I get it like I&#39;m just like you list I you know watch my sleep I watch what I eat I follow a structure training program I assess my feedback all of this stuff blah blah blah blah tell me what to do I know it is very frustrating but I&#39;m going to tell you a few more things to do first so there is first one thing that I think that you should do and that is assess and use and a lot of you can just stop right here honestly for so many of you who are stressed and busy and have jobs and kids or maybe you don&#39;t have extreme fluctuations or contrast in your menstrual cycle or you personally cannot be bothered with this the next thing that you should do and you can stop right here like I said is use rating of perceived exertion so rpe is a scale of one to ten and it&#39;s essentially assessing your difficulty of your exercise and so what you can do is you can use rpe as a way to self-regulate how much intensity that you&#39;re doing within your training programs right and so if you have a back spot three by eight and you&#39;re doing it in an rpe of seven and you are in one phase of your menstrual cycle and you feel fantastic right and you wanted to push it you&#39;re going to do 200 pounds for all three sets of a rpe seven you feel great you feel awesome and you go back into to the gym the next week and you know maybe your kid was sick all night maybe you are in your luteal phase or maybe you&#39;re about to start your period or maybe you&#39;re about to ovulate because some women actually have you know poor feel worse during ovulation I know that&#39;s not as trendy to say but say whatever symptomality is associated with you and maybe where you don&#39;t feel best or you slept poorly or you&#39;re really stressed for work and you walk into the gym and you go okay I&#39;m gonna load this up and you&#39;re doing your warm-up sets and you get to like 170 and you&#39;re like man that felt heavy right so you decide to do your first set at 180 to see how it felt and that 180 felt about as hard as last week&#39;s 200 and you can just stick there and do that regardless of like the menstrual phase or whatever else is going on in your life you can say okay the seven out of 10 effort this week is 180 pounds and that&#39;s okay and if you want to even track that across time so you feel less crazy or less bad about your body or you want to learn your own patterns you can do that but keep an assessment of how that is fluctuating maybe your weight&#39;s changing at the same time every single month maybe your Paces are increasing maybe the way you feel in workouts is better or worse different times but rpe can adjust for volume and intensity indirectly with just using this one simple tool so you don&#39;t have to change your workouts every single week and you don&#39;t have to overhaul the style of training that you&#39;re doing and you don&#39;t have to necessarily be adjusting volume intensity days that you&#39;re training deloads all this stuff which can be really overwhelming especially for Gen pop individuals who are just kind of trying to do enough exercise to keep you know keep themselves active keep healthy maybe you have a few like smaller fitness goals but nothing really overwhelming or really extreme that is a great tool and honestly anyone can use that right I heavily rely on rpe in my own training all of the time and especially someone who works a lot and works a highly stressful job I can tell you that like over the last six months I have felt my training be impacted by my work volume and my work stress but I used rpe to adjust my weights and I&#39;m still making progress I&#39;m still getting better I&#39;m still getting my training in I&#39;m just making it realistic for what I can do in this season but also my body and the same thing applies to you know hormonal fluctuations in your personal experience with your menstrual cycle this may also mean that with auto regulation that you can make the calls on when you feel doing certain activities are best for you or not for others I know that when I ever talk about this on Instagram or with clients or people in general they say I would truly rather die than go to the gym the first day of my period they have high PMS symptoms they feel terrible what whatever that is that can also be a piece of Auto regulation where you say okay the first day of my period I will take as a rest day right you can rearrange your weeks if you track your Cycles long enough you can plan for it that can be part of your auto regulation and that is okay to do right but that&#39;s a part of like you have to just learn to work with your body and listen to your body but if you&#39;re following a consistent training program and you have adequate nutrition coming in the signals of what might actually be your personal fluctuations and your hormones will be more clear rather than it being fuzzed out by the noise that is not getting enough sleep really high stress under eating haphazard training like that&#39;s where you&#39;re going to have more that&#39;s where you might even feel your cycle is impacting you more you might be more sensitive to those changes and fluctuations because everything&#39;s going to feel more extreme your body&#39;s more in a quote-unquote stressed place so to speak um you might just be more sensitive to those things because you&#39;re exhausted and you&#39;re underfed and you&#39;re not consistent with your training so start back at the bottom during those times and phases and then work your way up and listen and find those patterns in your body but using rpe is a great tool because rpe indirectly like I mentioned will adjust your intensity and your volume so three by two hundred for eight wraps is more volume than three by eight at eight reps right that is you&#39;re getting more volume in so if you feel better or you can push more and like maybe it is your follicular phase maybe it&#39;s your ovulation to you know from follicular ovulation to your early luteal phases that you feel good push during those times and push that weight that is okay to do right you can also do it or if you really feel really crummy you can you know jump back and I love the two hard sets rule right you can take it say you&#39;re you are someone who is very impacted by your luteo Delight little phases or maybe you&#39;re just having a bad month or whatever that is you can say you know what I&#39;m going to back off my training by just doing two hard sets instead of three sets for this training or instead of doing four sets today and doing two sets hard and that will indirectly reduce your volume especially if you feel like your your recovery is being impacted you feel really crummy whatever that is you can use the intensity scale out of 10 and a good program should be programming you rpe and don&#39;t worry about hitting percentage percentages or making progress week to week but think about your progress over time right again a great example is how much my work has been impacting my train in the last six months and I&#39;ve watched my deadlift goes from the strongest it&#39;s been in years to pretty Miss to getting stronger to going back down to finally building back up but I&#39;m still making progress over time and that&#39;s what matters most and you need to like zoom out on that especially if you&#39;re a regular person trying to balance kids job work so you can stop there but if you do want to make more considerations that are based around your cycle I&#39;m going to give you some advice following here so you can stop there you can use rpe and that will account for so many things for you you can just kind of in factor that will factor in your hormones that will factor in your sleep that will factor in your stress that will factor in your your fed state that will factor in just how life is impacting training because for most of us training is in our life even if we would like it to be so from there assuming you you know you&#39;re fed you&#39;re slapped you&#39;re managing your stress to the best of your ability for the most part and you&#39;re following a consistent training program and you&#39;re like okay well I am noticing more distinct patterns and fluctuations for myself so what do I do with this information so for those of you who do not track your menstrual cycle what I would say to start is before you do any of this take about three months at the least worth of data of tracking your menstrual cycle there&#39;s menstrual cycle apps there&#39;s calendars I have a free resource actually that I will try to remember to put in these show notes that I made earlier this summer on how to manage and monitor your menstrual cycle and even has like a little paper tracker for you as well um but with that being said you&#39;re noticing patterns so what can you do in response to those patterns in order to you know get the most out of your training based on what we know right now and in general so I like to take what I like to call a nutrition forward approach when it comes to menstrual cycle training and so um a lot of people think that when I talk about menstrual cycle periodization and I think about and I I mentioned how like cycle thinking is kind of bunky and it&#39;s not really all that but it&#39;s chalked up to be is that that means that there&#39;s nothing that we can do in response to anything we are helpless to our cycles and that&#39;s not what I mean but I really like taking a nutrition forward approach so what I mean by a nutrition forward approach is that I like taking changes to our nutrition to try to like reduce or make the effect that we feel of our Cycles go away or feel better and so there&#39;s a few different things that we can do across the month in order to kind of mitigate these changes that we&#39;re feeling or work with our bodies or maximize you know effects that we know from our hormones so there is a good bit of literature that kind of sheds light on changes in metabolism across the menstrual cycle whether that&#39;s um you know in response to eating but in general during exercise and so for those of you who are new here and don&#39;t know this this is quite literally what my PhD is in my entire dissertation was like exercise response um to the menstrual cycle or sex differences and during exercise and postprandial or post eating so this is kind of my bread and butter and so I have a bias towards metabolism and nutrition but with good reason and so we do have a little bit more clear of an idea of like what&#39;s potentially going on here and changes across the menstrual cycle with these things so to start when we have that early menstrual cycle to ovulation period that follicular phase during this time period we&#39;re a little bit more reliant on carbohydrates which means that you know our bodies are more glycolytic they&#39;re using more carbohydrate you need more carbs in order to max out your glycogen stores or to carb loads similar or compared to that of men during this follicular phase so if you&#39;re you know prepping for a big racing event you&#39;re trying to carb load or you&#39;re trying to you know you know you trying to have enough carbs in you for performance you want to increase your total daily carbohydrate intake here slightly and when I say this it doesn&#39;t mean like you&#39;re making huge fluctuations honestly it&#39;s probably trivial in the in the sense of like anywhere from 10 30 grams a day but you can play with this yourself if you&#39;re tracking food and if you&#39;re not tracking food like just eat some more cereal rice potatoes like just think about increasing those Carby foods during this time period especially like if we have high volumes of training and just decreasing or like maybe like instead of two servings of peanut butter we have one so we can eat more carbs like that kind of thing during this time so um during this time period nutrition advice that I have is pretty straightforward it&#39;s pretty much eat more carbs across the day um protein intake is an important across the month and even though protein needs are maybe not as high or as demanding during this phase in general you as a menstruating athlete and trainee want to make sure that you&#39;re prioritizing adequate protein intake and it never hurts to do it like pre-workout post-workout but in general you just want to be making sure you&#39;re eating enough across the day but you might get away with being like being maybe like 10 grams less during this phase or a small percentage less during this phase because of the fact that you know it&#39;s more estrogen dominant and or it&#39;s there&#39;s not as much there&#39;s really no presence of progesterone compared to that of the luteal phase so you can technically get away with a little bit and we&#39;ll talk about that here in a second so really you want to make sure your your prioritizing carbohydrate intake during this time period that&#39;s really the main you know effect on macronutrients there and so when we get into the luteal phase this is where things get a little bit more detailed on what I would suggest here and so um when we get into the luteal phase and you have that high presence of estrogen and progesterone you are going to be a little bit more relying on fat oxidation fat oxidation is a little bit higher during this phase you&#39;re a little less insulin sensitive you might have a little bit harder time you know tapping in and using your glucose store so to speak there might be less blood glucose relatively available things like that and so what we can do during this phase to mitigate some of this stuff is one there&#39;s also the effect of the fact that your metabolism is slightly increased during this phase it&#39;s like two to twelve percent which might pan out to being like 50 to 200 calories a day depending on how many calories You&#39;re Expecting but that can be very meaningful for your hunger and your performance and how you feel and or respond to your symptoms so the one the thing that you should do is if you&#39;re more hungry during this phase have an extra snack right eat a little bit more increase the serving size of one of your meals have an extra snack whatever it needs to do to get a little bit more you know energy available to your body eat a little bit more calories and if you are dieting or cutting you might want to if you feel really hungry during this phase there&#39;s some evidence suggests that maybe perhaps taking a diet break or using this as a time to bump back up to maintenance might be more of an idea to help you stay on track and or work with your bodies during this time so maybe consider you know getting out of your deficit during the time the week during your Midol phase when you feel really hungry maybe you feel run down or maybe you feel really large impacts on your training because of this eat a little bit more 50 100 150 200 calories more there is variance and you&#39;re like quote-unquote maintenance calories so like even bumping back up means you might still be in slight deficit or you might be able to eat more because your body expense more when you eat more of those things so don&#39;t don&#39;t freak out about how do you know if it&#39;s you know two percent or ten percent or twelve percent to you just kind of eat an extra snack and it&#39;s probably going to even out you know aim for something between 100 and 200 calories and you&#39;ll probably be in a good ballpark if you&#39;re craving fat during this phase feel free to eat like a little piece of chocolate maybe some peanut butter but you also really still want to be considering carbohydrates during this time but the difference is that you want to make sure it&#39;s more prioritized towards your training whether that&#39;s pre or interest so you might end up doing the opposite of what I just recommend in the follicular phase during this time eating a little bit more fat decreasing carbs a little bit and again I this isn&#39;t like huge large fluctuations like you don&#39;t need to go keto for half the month or anything like that which I have seen suggested it&#39;s just making a slight differential preference towards fat oxidation or matching you know that with increasing your your calorines or your Cravings or whatever it is because be as simple as just having a little bit of fat in your snack and calling that a day um but with that being said carbs are still important here and so the tissue is that you&#39;re maybe not as easily able to tap into your carb stores and your muscles during this time and or you might be less insulin sensitive things like that and so in order to work around this we can basically time having a lot of our carbohydrates pre and intra workout and so want a disclaimer to make to the insulin sensitivity thing because I think that gets tossed around the cycle thinking is that if you have a lean body composition and you&#39;re pretty active especially cardiovascularly those fluctuations seem to be a lot less across the month than like lower active people or those with more adiposity so you know starting with the basics right increasing activity level finding a good weight maintenance place for you whatever that means or feels like to you like I&#39;m not going to tell you that you have to diet on this podcast today but those are things that might have more fluctuation there but with that being said why we want to maybe prioritize time you have carbohydrate a little bit more is that some of the negative impacts and performance have been shown to be reduced or go away with carbohydrate feedings there&#39;s a sentence on my dissertation I wish I could read this right now in the background in literature review that I really loved and it was basically like when it comes to like aerobic performance or you know aerobic performance outcomes in you know I was doing menstrual cycle stuff and birth control that it looks like it&#39;s essentially a nutritional status oral contraceptive use and then the menstrual cycle that are going to impact these things more significantly and so it&#39;s really cool when you look at some of these studies that when you feed female athletes before these studies metabolic differences tend to kind of go away and or there&#39;s some other data that I&#39;ve seen where they you know have either more carbohydrate prior to an exercise training session or intra and that the time trial like so time to Performance um differences go away when you are fed so don&#39;t neglect the part that being fed can reduce negative impacts you&#39;re feeling your performance and if you&#39;re in an energy deficit because you need more calories and or you&#39;re restricting them bump them up eat a little bit more carbohydrate prior to your workout or if you&#39;re doing endurance or longer training sessions carbohydrate during that like eat more carbs right but prioritize and tying them around that workout so they&#39;re readily available they&#39;re in your bloodstream you can take them in your muscles will bring little glucose receptors to the outside and pull that glucose in to you into your muscle cell without using insulin so that&#39;s why I like the insulin sensitivity thing you can kind of bypass that with using muscle contraction through physical activity and or time your carbohydrates so that when you are going to do your physical activity they&#39;re kind of right there in your bloodstream ready for you to go um so those are two things that you can do and then the third is that you can time your protein intake and so some people get the advice that like it&#39;s better to take like your protein shake immediately after an alludal phase and I don&#39;t disagree with that but I think something that is largely neglected in the sports science field in Spear and fitness and social media is that yes post-workout amino acid availability is important but having amino acid availability pre-workout might actually be better and more important and think about it like you&#39;re taking in protein and then you&#39;re going to the gym and that&#39;s already in your bloodstream available so once you start to recover it&#39;s able to bring in those you know the building blocks of your muscle so time making sure there&#39;s there&#39;s protein in that pre-workout meal and or that post-workout for sure and so for those of you that are maybe you know working out early in the morning especially in this phase I know you&#39;re like a [ __ ] I&#39;m sensing in energy deficits I don&#39;t want to eat it&#39;s early in the morning I&#39;m training fasted oh my gosh what do I do some carbs and if you can take like an essential amino acid supplement I prefer eaas to BCAAs I think BCAAs are a waste of money eeas are kind of expensive if you can get in like chocolate milk or a little bit of whey protein like even 10 to 15 grams whatever that looks like you know you can or you could do an essential amino acid supplement just get some amino acids available in your body so your your body can pull those in then it won&#39;t you know pull from your muscle tissues but it has some of that available for energy availability and or carbohydrates which can literally be you know some Gatorade applesauce packets juice chocolate milk like I said is like your best bang for your buck between those things I can&#39;t do dairy so I do soy and I put a little bit of Hershey&#39;s Chocolate Syrup in that because that I mean there&#39;s a lot of data in research on chocolate milk but essentially like if you&#39;re training fast in the morning or you&#39;re taking long periods of not eating between like lunch and your training session just try to make sure that you&#39;re getting some sort of protein and carbohydrate in you before you go to the gym and or if you&#39;re doing long extended periods of training like long endurance training you should be prioritizing adequate carbohydrate to begin with but if you are not then making sure that you really are during this phase or see or phase of the month and or bumping it up a little bit and that will also help with Muscle Recovery both the protein and the carbohydrate especially intra-workout carbohydrate for those longer duration and endurance or you know multi-hour gym sessions whatever you&#39;re doing that can help with some of the like post exercise recovery needs because it&#39;s going to be less harsh and less demanding on your body if there&#39;s glucose available for it to perform that physical work output that you&#39;re doing so those are things that you can do with adjusting your macronutrients during these phases to adjust for your training and then my other little bits of advice is that thermoregulation might be impacted by the high hormone phase in the mid luteal phase and so for those of you who especially are working out in the Heat or you&#39;re doing endurance type events increasing your water intake but also increasing your electrolyte intake so having enough electrolytes available which due to alterations and viscosity in your blood and your electrolyte pools and things that are associated with you know heat dissipation and thermoregulation and sweat rate and things like that you want to make sure that you&#39;re bringing in enough water especially if you&#39;re sweating more because you&#39;re losing it more but you&#39;re replacing loss of electrolytes and or helping your body maintain that in response to exercise that might help performance as well but in general that might be something that might help you during this phase of your cycle especially for my endurance athlete friends or those working out outside in the heat whether that&#39;s you know your CrossFit competition your tough monitor your big race or maybe you&#39;re even lifting in a really hot gym and sweating profusely right like so consider using electrolyte supplements during this phase as you all know I love liquid IV my code is dockless Fitness and we&#39;ll have a link in the show notes that you can use to support me and or shop with me as well and it&#39;s usually about 20 or 25 off I can&#39;t remember with sales usually bumping up to 30. but that&#39;s the one that I really like and does have a little bit of carb in there too which is nice you&#39;re getting a little bit of extra carbohydrate or sugar during your workouts to sustain that as well and so during this phase as well there might be potential negative impacts on recovery it might be hard to recover one the protein and carbohydrate will help improve recovery right eating a little bit more carbs will help improve that recovery but this might be a good period of time to work on sleep hygiene especially if you&#39;re someone who&#39;s you feel like your sleep is impacted by a menstrual cycle phase which a lot of people do report that or do you feel that due to the fluctuations on hormones so really making sure you&#39;re like reducing screen time going to bed earlier winding down like doing things to help you like cool down before you go to bed putting maybe like sleeping in a cooler type temperature taking a shower before you you know go to sleep things that can help you kind of ease into your sleep a little bit better um I&#39;m personally on birth control so I cannot speak to having this during a studio phase but I like being it&#39;s like the most woo-woo thing that I believe in and take I I say that transparently but that stuff whenever I I you know want a really good night&#39;s sleep I&#39;m traveling my sleep schedules off whatever it looks like you know I had a heart Training Day I love doing a mug of beam and it really just it knocks me out my whoop data is always significantly better when I take it so you know take that with a grain of salt because we&#39;ve still also new technology these are guess my two boo-boo exposure things but it might be something worth the try that I&#39;ve personally tried and I and I I can attest really helps me my code is list 15 for that as well but again you could try just you know your normal sleep hygiene something else that is getting increasing evidence that might be worth trying and taking as well is um tart cherry juice so tart cherry juice looks like it has some pretty um potential positive impacts for recovery and or like you know your post exercise recovery in general irregardless of menstrual cycle phase but also so might help improve natural melatonin production and or onset of sleep so you could try something I think there&#39;s a couple companies out there there&#39;s like a pouch one I think it&#39;s like Cherry bud I have no code for that I haven&#39;t tried it yet I&#39;ve been meaning to but those might be things for you to play with or try during these phases to help adjust your sleep which will impact your recovery as well as nutritional things that you can do now there are maybe specific supplements that might be able to help but instead of giving blanket supplements of saying take iron take magnesium take you know you know take this this that blah blah I really encourage you all to maybe potentially get blood work first to see so you&#39;re testing not guessing on what you need because I personally supplement with things like vitamin D magnesium and I take fish oil mostly because of the potential benefits on brain health and there might be slight benefits on exercise recovery I use that through Legion fish oil is the one where I can feel more safe saying to you hey you could take this and get potential benefits on these things and there is some evidence to suggest that fish oil during the luteal phase may be beneficial with helping with some of that you know post exercise inflammation and it&#39;s probably not harmful to take but everything else that&#39;s more of a actual vitamin nutrient micronutrient deficiency I would encourage you to test not guess and either work with a professional or I like to use inside tracker man I&#39;m plugging all of the things today I did not mean this guys I really truly just work with companies that I align with the products um where they will give you an analysis but they will give you food and or supplement recommendations kind of based off what you need and what I love is I love printing out that and either working with the Rd that I&#39;m working with and or my doctor before I kind of start to supplement specifically I feel confident enough to make dietary changes based off the recommendations of like increasing seafood or increasing fiber or increasing grains or like this food contains this and it might help improve this metric and you can track it over the time but I always do encourage you all to test my gas and then make sure you know before you take anything that you&#39;re working with a health professional because you might be overtaking something you might not need it you might be supplementing iron because someone told you to do that while you have adequate iron levels yada yada yada so you know Tesla guess I love inside tracker for that reason but you of course can always get blood work with your doctor if it&#39;s covered by your insurance but if you want the kind of analysis and all that stuff my link my inside tracker link below um I do that uh usually once a year but I&#39;ve done it like four times last few years personally so test not gas that&#39;s my disclaimer back to the menstrual cycle so those are things that you can do to kind of help and mitigate some of these things and so the other thing that I will also suggest is there&#39;s actually a new study by my friend Sam who&#39;s fantastic and she works out of Abby Smith Ryan&#39;s lab and they do some fantastic work on supplements nutrition um research all that stuff and that show that even taking creatine my beloved creatine might help with some of the water storage um that comes along with the luteal phase but also like that can help you have high like adequate hydration levels because it does pull in water into the cells it&#39;s part of the mechanism of how it works so there&#39;s some merging evidence or some of those classic supplements across the month and it doesn&#39;t make you fat um with that being said other things that you can consider during these phases there was a study that come out earlier this year that showed that caffeine ingestion during the menstrual cycle phase boosted exercise performance to match that of the ludial phase when there was a decrease in performance there when it came to muscle power output so caffeine is one of the most widely studied Sports nutrition supplements and it has a ton of fantastic data on it and so if you&#39;re looking for a boost in performance some of those muscle recruitment parameters that we see in other studies might help with some of that with the menstrual cycle as well if you&#39;re more sensitive to caffeine during these times like don&#39;t feel pressured to take that but just a suggestion to do as well and then there is some emerging evidence to suggest as well that while some of your perceptions might be valid to you it might not it might be more of a mental perception probably due to alterations and hormones and how that affects like your brain chemistry which is a little bit out of my scope but I&#39;ve seen some of the data on that and your perceived enjoyment and perceived adherence or perceived effort during those fate the late ludial phase of the menstrual cycle but it might honestly actually just be more related to how you cognitively feel than the true muscular performance and output of your body right so with all that being said that is my nutrition forward approach um and also my caveat to like it might kind of be in your head and you might show up to the gym and feel great anyway but I like adjusting nutrition first and foremost before these things before you you know you dive into any of these special training protocols because those might end up like reducing a lot of the issues and I&#39;ve seen this with clients and or when I talk about these things on social media once again or people are like hey I took your advice and I increased my carbohydrate and calorie in taking the ludophase and a lot of the issues that I was having went away right so really that&#39;s how we can dial in our nutrition so to speak in response to our menstrual cycle um then once you know again they&#39;re like dockless is just going to tell me to eat more carbs shut up um after that then you&#39;re like okay well like I really feel dialed in and I&#39;m still feeling some different impacts of my cycle on my performance like what should I do so we&#39;re working our way up that pyramid we&#39;re at the tippy top now where most of you may never need to be and or you can do if you want to not going to stop you can do whatever you want as long as you&#39;re training and fueling yourself I don&#39;t really don&#39;t care what you do or when we get to this more Elite level and this this is where we might consider how things are impacting us differently and unfortunately we while performance doesn&#39;t have the date on performance is a little bit like oh it doesn&#39;t seem to be super impacted some things might be impacted some phases versus other phases that might be better here versus there for performance wise we don&#39;t have a ton on long-term training adaptations right so for one I will say even though women are not men we respond similarly to a lot of things the men so I&#39;m not saying that like studies on men next necessarily exactly apply to us but we&#39;re not going to find anytime soon you know that like we&#39;re not going to respond to Mechanical tension or Progressive overload or you know we don&#39;t respond at all children&#39;s training like the basic parameters of exercise adaptation apply to us the things that we&#39;re looking for in the literature or that cycle based performance considerations are going to include is how do we maximize the potential of each of these phases and I do believe the data in science is going to go that way and I&#39;m excited for it like I hope so like I would love to maybe eventually be doing this who knows where my career will go but like I think that&#39;s really interesting and I&#39;m not against it or changing my mind to these views as more comes out like I&#39;m not anti-bat um though all that to say is we only have a handful of training studies when it comes to the menstrual cycle on you know across the whole month and these are largely done on resistance training and so they&#39;re either single limb and or we have one true training intervention and then one training pilot study um but what we&#39;re seeing is that when we&#39;re looking at the follicular phase versus the luteal phase the follicular phase and muscle growth and strength does appear to be similar or Superior to that of the luteal phase and what these studies did is they did like more sessions in the follicular phase versus less sessions in the luteal phase and then when we look at our one really good I thought this was a pretty well done study training intervention where they had people do more days of training in the follicular phase versus less than the luteal phase or they flipped it or they did it normal across a month what we see is once again doing more sessions in the follicular phase does yield more muscle growth and strength than a luteal phase but when we look at the difference across the entire month it doesn&#39;t appear to be that much different or some of these studies there&#39;s might be small differences in small measures um coming from this but it&#39;s not like this huge massive difference um so to speak so yes if you&#39;re going to like do more workouts or do more volume in one phase of your menstrual cycle like it seems to be Advanced changes to do in the follicular phase and that probably has to do with the positive effect of estrogen on muscle growth um but rate cannot confidently say yet that it&#39;s better than training normally across the month so what I would recommend for you then is to identify your patterns you know you&#39;ve been tracking for a few months you&#39;ve dialed in your nutrition and you know like okay like days X through y you feel really good and that might even creep into your luteal phase I know that&#39;s contrary to popular belief that might you know creep into your luteal phase and then you might want to toy with doing more volume maybe more sets maybe your harder workouts your your more intense effort workouts like especially like if you&#39;re training for a race maybe and maybe you have a deload schedule of every four or five weeks maybe you&#39;re putting your hardest running workouts during this window or maybe you are you know adjusting your training program so you&#39;re doing you know three sets versus two during this window so you&#39;re doing more volume maybe you have a work schedule where you really would rather train more days per week for two weeks of the month and less the last two I mean like there&#39;s nothing wrong with doing that if you want to do that but I think you know consistent weekly training is probably the most adherable for most people um but you can consider you know bumping Up the Volume during those phases and seeing if you get you know better results you can consider increasing the frequency you can consider doing your harder workouts during those phases maybe that is your follicular phase your early menstrual through ovulation type phases even into your into your luteal phase or maybe um you feel better different times of the month and that&#39;s when you&#39;re going to dial up your intensity and training that is absolutely fine to do but then you&#39;ll have more of a clear picture if you&#39;ve actually been following a training program and or eating enough of what feels good when when you feel like you&#39;re recovering better like actually write this down take note of it and then you can cater and adjust your training program to that something that I also really like to consider is like if you do know your behaviors of this and this is kind of like something I made up so someone starts copying this then they copy everything else I do so that&#39;s all right um is I I like to think of like if you know when your your light luteal phase or your menstrual cycle phase impacts you the most you can plan for that accordingly because if your cycle is pretty consistent and you kind of know when your symptoms are coming you could do what I like to consider front loading or back loading those weeks so if you know that like okay this week you know I know that I&#39;m probably gonna get my period on Sunday and so my late luteal phase you know Wednesday through Friday are going to be pretty rough but so I&#39;m gonna do my harder workouts Monday and Tuesday of this week so that I can adjust my volume or my intensity so maybe you&#39;re doing your lower Zone easy workouts later in the week maybe you&#39;re doing the you know lifting sessions that feel less demanding to you during that week and or you working around that window of three to five days where if you do have larger PMS symptoms or your personal individual experience is more severe or you&#39;re working with clients because as much as this might not be necessary for Gen pop if it allows them to adhere to their exercise training program you know by working with these things and letting them feel like they&#39;re leading the way and listening to our bodies absolutely like readjust your week I do this all the time I do this I readjust my training program around running or my work schedule this makes sense right like it&#39;s not crazy to do but you can front load the intensity on those weeks and or backload it potentially to distribute that so it&#39;s not falling on the days where you maybe feel the worst you don&#39;t feel like you recover you don&#39;t feel like you&#39;re training your best so to speak and so you can get the most out of your training sessions and so I like that as a approach first and foremost but there are ways that you can then adjust your training frequency volume and or um intensity in response to how you feel but take note about how you feel when you feel these things and look at your face and not just look at it in four weeks and or all these different phases and if you know how long your follicular window is and your entire menstrual cycle as a whole you&#39;ll get a better idea of like where these things are Falling For You versus just doing it on a traditional 28-day four-week type cycle that&#39;s kind of rinse and repeat there&#39;s no one size fit all because some people Cycles are shorter some are longer um so you know and then you can apply these things too if you do have you know disrupted menstrual cycles maybe you have very long Cycles because you have PCOS or you&#39;re struggling with these things you can still apply this stuff to you to work with your body and listen to yourself and that symptomology that you have while also still making progress in your training so I am not against you saying you know what I&#39;m eating enough I&#39;m tracking I&#39;m doing these things so this is what you can think of as Advanced Auto regulation where you&#39;re like okay well I&#39;m gonna Auto regulate my training so I&#39;m gonna adjust it so I know that for these these weeks or these days I can do more I can get more out of this I can get more bang for my buck and recover where this day or this week or whatever this is I don&#39;t feel so great and I don&#39;t want you to think that that is automatically going to be your follicular versus ludial uh type phases because again some people feel terrible during their menstrual cycle and some people feel terrible during ovulation some people feel terrible in the mid to late luteal phases it&#39;s about identifying your patterns and figuring out when you need to push versus pull back for yourself whether it&#39;s mental whether it&#39;s just you feel terrible you feel run down or you feel like you can get the most out of your training sessions or even your motivation is fluctuating which that is a huge thing for all people and adherence and enjoy ability during these times so that is kind of the tip of the pyramid okay well where can we get these maximize these benefits during these times and so if you do are doing this and you&#39;re like okay well like what if I just want to get the maximum benefit out of my cycle right and I I wish I had more concrete evidence and data to suggest anything other than potentially up regulating your volume and your intensity in your follicular phase to maximize the benefits of estrogen but that&#39;s that that is totally fine to do but we do not have data right now that says you should only do hit during this time in slow steady state during this time and this and that and blah blah we can hypothesize right we can make assumptions based off these things if you want to do you know more of your easy steady state zone 2 type intensity during the luteal phase and so be it if that feels good for you you feel like it&#39;s more oxidative you&#39;re relying more on fat oxidation you feel like you&#39;re going to get the most bang for your buck there and absolutely do that if you want to stick to ramping up intensity during different you know in the follicular phase because you feel better during that I don&#39;t really care what you do the point of this podcast here today is to say that you need to be fed you need to be training intelligently you need to be taking care of yourself outside of the gym then adjust to your cycle with nutrition forward focused first then from there figure out what works for you right some people might skip to that and I can&#39;t that&#39;s fine I mean that&#39;s fine I I can&#39;t stop you from doing these types of things but you might be able to reduce some of those symptoms with all these things but if you&#39;ve controlled all your controllables and you can figure out a pattern and Rhythm that works for you or your clients and absolutely by all means do that that&#39;s what good coaches do independent of the menstrual cycle they&#39;re learning to work with themselves their clients their bodies and adjusting for those things just like like I&#39;m deloading this week because my work schedule is crazy and I had a little bit of a flare up last week with my calf and ankle injury so I wanted to drop the weights this week to give my body a little extra recovery and manage the stress and volume of my work day and guess what that&#39;s an appropriate response and you can do the same thing within your actual training so don&#39;t lose the force for the trees all these technical things I&#39;m talking about application apply to you whether you&#39;re on birth control you&#39;re pregnant you&#39;re not pregnant postmanopausal time periods where things are going crazy and Haywire all the time or just simply being a human but there might be some benefit to adjusting these things whether that&#39;s nutritionally and or potentially maybe for hypertrophy and strength purposes with the menstrual cycle at this time that you may be able to lead with once you&#39;ve kind of got your bases covered so that is my rant for you all today that is my better way to cycle sink um again go back and listen to the menstrual cycle myths podcast that I did earlier um a few months ago I think about I don&#39;t know what I don&#39;t know when this will be published so you know look back in uh 2022 and my top three things for priorities for female athletes go listen to that podcast as well um because those will help give you a little bit more clarity on what you need to do for yourself but hopefully this gives you an idea of how to adjust you know if you&#39;ve covered all your bases what to do how to work these things for yourself because what it comes down to is making sure that your body is in a healthy State it&#39;s fed you&#39;re following good training programs you&#39;re managing all these things and then from there at this point in time the best advice we have is to do what works for you figure out how your body responds how your cycle feels to you and then build your training program around that for you and if you&#39;re working with a coach communicate that right make sure that you are communicating with that and if you don&#39;t have a coach where you can communicate that like maybe consider getting another coach um and working around your personal experience and again that might be different person to person but building the skill set of audio regulation while it&#39;s just using the one to ten scale or the more advanced scale of like actually dictating when you&#39;re going to do more versus Less in your training because of that it is a it is something that will help you navigate that change in yourself across the lifespan and or cycle to cycle or in general it will make you a smarter and better trainee so that is my advice I hope you all enjoy this podcast is pretty long we got pretty into it I thought that was going to be 30 minutes but I just kept talking um so if you found this helpful you learned something you know you you feel like this was eye-opening whatever it is go ahead and leave a comment if you&#39;re on YouTube make sure you rate and review over on your favorite podcast platform tag me if you listen into this and otherwise I will catch you all on the next messing this middle podcast or YouTube video thank you so much for being here and we&#39;ll see you in the next one foreign

hello there I&amp;#39;m Alyssa olenek scientists exercise Enthusiast weight lifter Outdoors lover and entrepreneur I believe that the Extremes in the Fitness and Wellness Industries are leaving way too many of us out of the conversation not telling us the knowledge that we actually need to succeed in our health our Wellness our nutrition and quite frankly Our Lives they end up giving us black and white polarizing messages that leave us more confused than giving us the answers that we need through my 10 years of studying exercise science metabolism and female physiology as well as exploring the outdoors and being a fitness athlete myself I&amp;#39;m here to bring to you the conversations that need to be have in an industry that often is too far focused on extremes so if you join me on this podcast I truly believe that life is best lived in the messy middle hello there everybody and welcome back to another episode of the messy middle podcast today we&amp;#39;re going to be talking about everyone&amp;#39;s favorite topic the Hot Topic of the year cycle syncing and so if you haven&amp;#39;t first checked out my video um menstrual cycle myths where I kind of debunk a lot of the common claims going around menstrual cycle training what actually it means what how to interpret that all that make sure you go back and listen to that episode or watch that video because today I want to talk about what I would consider a better way to train or work with your cycle so now I&amp;#39;ve given like eight different podcast interviews on this topic and I&amp;#39;m kind of giving the same interview over and over and so I want to kind of bring some of that information that I&amp;#39;m giving in other sources here to you all to kind of consolidate that for my biggest fans and greatest followers so before we dive into today&amp;#39;s episode if you are listening on your favorite podcast platform please consider rating and reviewing the podcast it helps me a ton I really really appreciate it if you&amp;#39;re listening on YouTube go ahead and hit that subscribe button hit a like leave a comment and if you really want to support dockless Fitness and or the messy metal podcast in general go to the opposite platform and leave a review or subscribe or like leave some love and if you listen to this on you know and tag me in Instagram let me know if you learned something you enjoyed something it always helps and someone else might find this information helpful as well so let&amp;#39;s dive in so cycle syncing has become all the rage recently and I want to make some things very clear when talking about this because I think because I am anti-cycle-sinking in the sense of like what is viral on Tick Tock right now that I think that we are you know everyone who menstruates is exactly like a biological male and that&amp;#39;s that doesn&amp;#39;t matter shut up and that is not what I am ever been saying but that does get lost in the sauce because people are so adamantly against cycle syncing that we kind of need to dial back and answer the questions of like well how do we consider our cycle in our performance our health and all of those things because I know that the reason cycle Sun King has become so popular is because women are menstruating individuals do feel really left out and a lot of people constantly remind you you&amp;#39;re left out of science you don&amp;#39;t care this and that blah blah blah screw you and it makes you feel like okay well it&amp;#39;s nothing about me right so to dive in today to start I want to break it into three camps and that is there is the camp of there&amp;#39;s no impact on menstrual cycle whatsoever anything doesn&amp;#39;t matter and I think a lot of people again think I&amp;#39;m in that camp and I&amp;#39;m not there is the Middle Road of like there&amp;#39;s probably parameters within performance that we should consider in regards to your cycle hormonal State whether that&amp;#39;s birth control performance post-menopausal premencopausal pregnancy postpartum all of that stuff and then there&amp;#39;s the our entire life should revolve around this this dictates everything we are fragile butterflies type misinformation camp and so contrary to popular belief I&amp;#39;m a little bit more in that mid Road shocking with a podcast called the messy middle um but I think we need more nuance and context to this discussion because everybody wants you to just suddenly be able to spew off exactly how you should train around our cycle and while we might have hunches or assumptions or we can extrapolate what we think physiologically and mechanistically might apply in the whole body level or in the like training adaptation level the data just isn&amp;#39;t quite there and so unfortunately a lot of people are speaking of hypothesis or we are we can use data that we do have so even though there&amp;#39;s less studies right that doesn&amp;#39;t mean there&amp;#39;s no studies it just means that we don&amp;#39;t have a very large complete body of work done yet quite on administrating individuals or female athletes do I think we need more research yes I do I published the paper showing that six percent of studies are done just on on women I was the second off of bear I&amp;#39;m working on more papers with that group and I wouldn&amp;#39;t have done a PhD or a postdoc in you know women&amp;#39;s physiology if I didn&amp;#39;t care about these things I promise that I am on your side um I think people think that I&amp;#39;m not but the issue is that a lot of that misinformation is kind of giving you this idea that you know there&amp;#39;s none of this data on you but then we&amp;#39;re going to use this data that we&amp;#39;re going to make up use hypotheses to overextrapolate mechanisms to tell you how to alter your life four times a month which can seem really stressful and overwhelming so what I want to break down today is what can we do as female trainees or self-declared athletes or just highly active individuals who have a menstrual cycle or honestly depending on your birth control type can apply to you as well if you have an IUD and or fluctuations with your pill concentrations just how can we adjust our training or work with our bodies and or our hormones not against them in a way that makes sense but also is grounded in the current state of evidence uses Nuance considers things that might be coming forth in the evidence in the future and or you know can be a best practice to apply to coaching our clients and training right so to start when we think about the menstrual cycle uh the phases that really kind of get tossed around or lumped together can kind of be broken down into two major phases the follicular phase and the luteal phase they are marked in the middle by ovulation but you can bring break those down even further to the menstrual phase which is part of the follicular phase the late follicular phase so those kind of are you know early follicular is your onset of your menstrual cycle day one that is the start of your new cycle into that late follicular phase um during this time hormones are really low during your period they&amp;#39;re rising in your follicular phase going into ovulation as some like to call it the main event so to speak of your menstrual cycle but ovulation is very important into the luteal phase and I think the luteal phase really gets cost all as one but really we have early mid and late luteal phase where your hormones coming off of ovulation kind of dip down a little bit again they rise back up where progesterone and estrogen are at their highest in that mid-luteal phase and then they lower back down into the menstrual cycle and it repeats all over again so to recap some of the stuff that I did say in the earlier podcast again go back and listen and watch that for more context and more references probably be more helpful listen to that before going into this um is that most of the evidence and data we have right now shows that you can perform across the entire month you know PR&amp;#39;s in records and events have been performed during All Phases of the menstrual cycle major athletic things like strength output and or endurance and things like that appear to not be super largely impacted by the menstrual cycle but there are some small acute differences between phases and largely overall what we see when we look at meta-analyzes or reviews just based off the data we have now um is in general if we&amp;#39;re going to have a decrease or a negative impact in performance it&amp;#39;s probably going to be in that late ludial phase so right as your hormones are dropping back down and or that early menstrual cycle phase where they&amp;#39;re like kind of flat in the first few days of your period however these seem to be tied more strongly to those who have greater PMS symptoms or you know poor premenstrual symptoms premenstrual syndrome and or you know menstrual cycle onset effects so what it really wraps back to the fact that this is largely individual and that&amp;#39;s we&amp;#39;re going to kind of get into here today A little bit more so that is the general gist of what the literature says and the rest of it is kind of wonky where it&amp;#39;s like 50 of studies show difference between phases 50 don&amp;#39;t 50 of women report you know that agent sport or activity that have been surveyed or asked report that they have you know perceived impact of different menstrual cycle phases or they feel like certain phases feel better or worse for them others report that they find no difference and so that&amp;#39;s what makes this really messy and hard is because every menstrual cycle is different person to person but even cycle phase to cycle phase like things in your life can alter your cycle month to month even and so one of the biggest things that we really want to think about when we&amp;#39;re thinking about the female athlete demonstrating individual you know the women that are engaging in recreational sport however you identify is that we want to remember that even though we are not giving you a blanket statement because you want something to be about women or female athletes or female trainees or menstruating trainees that doesn&amp;#39;t mean we are ignoring you we are saying that it&amp;#39;s so unique that it applies to you so we really need to start with covering our bases here so I kind of went over the menstrual cycle but before we even worry about the menstrual cycle we need to think about the big things that impact our overall health metabolically hormonally you know Fitness output whatever it is that we&amp;#39;re looking at our overall health and well-being we need to start at the base hormones are flashy and sexy right now and there may be a time and place especially when it comes to Performance outcomes especially in Elite athletes especially as the data continues to grow and emerge I&amp;#39;m not here to say that hormones have zero impact whatsoever and then we&amp;#39;re never going to have data that might clarify this a little bit more what I&amp;#39;m saying is that regardless of where the data goes and I hope it I hope it gives us more clarity over the years is that it doesn&amp;#39;t really matter how you adjust to your hormones if you&amp;#39;re not doing the big base building things so to speak I know I use that a lot with aerobic training but like building the base of your pyramid of things that actually matter the big rocks the hard-hitting things that are going to impact you your performance your health and all of that stuff more than adjusting for your menstrual cycle phase right so the first thing is going to be that regardless of Who You Are this happens to Elite athletes this happens to amateur athletes this happens to the everyday woman on average especially you know leaner individuals leaner women tend to under eat so eating enough macronutrients eating enough micronutrients eating enough calories protein carbs and fat for your goals or your health or your desired outcomes is going to be the most important thing ever I cannot stress to you enough that all of the things that we worry about with training in our luteal phase or ignoring our menstrual cycle are actually occurring when you have loss of ovulation so you have an ovulatory cycles and or your immune react so you have a loss of your menstrual cycle altogether under eating you know high stress activity with inadequate food intake you know loss of your menstrual cycle loss of ovulation those things are make exercise training your response adaptations more difficult and more stressful on your body all however unfortunately that is something that&amp;#39;s you know a high prevalence in female athletes Chinese recreational or at the sport level and so we need to be making sure that we have enough energy available I think that the lack of energy availability and or you know having high energy deficits and or the female athlete Triad however you want to you know refer to this as in menstruating individuals and trainees or in general you know this can be masked by birth control stuff like that is that I lost my entire strain of thought everyone um I I think that people forget that energy availability is a bigger deal to health and performance outcome and the menstruating or female individual than the menstrual cycles are packed on performance like I really truly mean that as someone who&amp;#39;s studied female physiology and Metabolism having enough nutrients availability and being well fed is going to have such a significant impact on your health and performance like I think that these menstrual cycle conversations leave out the fact that low energy availability not having enough energy or carbohydrates or protein carbs calories is the word I&amp;#39;m looking for calories for your basic daily functional needs means that your body is going to down regulate those and we do not want that so I I understand wanting to jump to the fancy sexy stuff but the best thing that you can do to start with is to make sure that you are eating adequate protein carbs fat you know nutrients calories that you need just starting with nutrition your hydration and so you can go back to another earlier episode that I have this I believe is only on my podcast I don&amp;#39;t think this is cross poster to my YouTube but I could be wrong on the big three for female athletes let me talk a little bit more about those nutritional needs and why those are so important and why they&amp;#39;re more important um the then cycle syncing or considering your cycle for your health and performance outcome so you want to start there right and that&amp;#39;s a lot of work like if any one of you has gone through working with a nutrition coach a dietitian and or your own Health Fitness food Journey you know that that&amp;#39;s not the easiest thing to do like I was the female athlete in college who thought that it was cool that I restricted carbs and I was like paleo plus oatmeal and I was really lean and I would brag and be like oh you can&amp;#39;t be built like this if you eat carbohydrates and little did I know I was under feeding myself right I didn&amp;#39;t know what the hell I was doing or talking about we&amp;#39;ve all been there um but I thought that high fat and paleo and like on restricting all these things were best for me and then I ended up overeating fat gaining weight having poor performance and then being really confused and frustrated with all of my health and my outcomes right so you know those are things that I think we need to start with and then from there I mean everyone&amp;#39;s like okay Alyssa we get it we know we need to eat more we need to eat enough I&amp;#39;m so sick of hearing that but really like I really cannot trust you enough but we will move on with that being said once you are a hydrated protein filled carb-loaded happy little lady or honestly this also applies to everyone because there&amp;#39;s low energy risk in males or anyone who identifies this male as well because but it&amp;#39;s just a lower threshold right so anyway that&amp;#39;s another topic for another day the next thing is making sure that you are following a well-structured training program working up the period period pyramid your nutrient intake is so much more important than anything else you can also probably toss in their Stress Management sleep all your Healthy behaviors but we&amp;#39;re just thinking about like performance in general like just as a whole and moving up the pyramid once you&amp;#39;re well fed yes you need to consider your sleeping and Stress Management I know that is not helpful go back and listen to my podcast episodes with Dr Karen Norton um Aunt Norton on uh mindset that might help a little bit more there but when we&amp;#39;re working our ways up um we want to then think about following a well-structured training program right what are you thinking if you&amp;#39;re not following something that&amp;#39;s allowing you to get feedback and assess your response or even know how your body&amp;#39;s responding to training like what are what are you thinking right you need to have something to go off of to know when to adjust when to modulate your training when to know how things are responding differently like you just just jumping into a blanket cycle thinking routine of like okay do lifting during these weeks high intensity during this week Plies during this week do slow controlled exercise during this week and then don&amp;#39;t do anything this week but Pilates and yoga or gentle walking is it doesn&amp;#39;t help you it doesn&amp;#39;t tell you anything about your training program especially if you have specific outcomes and goals that you are trying to achieve you really want to think about like okay well like am I following a structured training program to begin with am I following Progressive overload am I getting feedback about how things are responding to me am I doing the same workouts frequently enough to actually know if they&amp;#39;re being impacted by things in my life whether it&amp;#39;s your menstrual cycle your sleep your stress you know anything else you work anything else going on in your life right that&amp;#39;s how you will know if things need to change and we&amp;#39;re really skipping over that and and that&amp;#39;s a huge issue too because not only are people you know females chronically dieting or restricting or yo-yo dieting or you may be not eating following the healthiest eating patterns um but they&amp;#39;re also traditionally not meeting physical activity guidelines in general for largely resistance training they might be doing a lot of cardio or I think I see this more often in the like cycles and Coach type community and when I say cycle sync coach I really want you guys to understand like I&amp;#39;m talking about like the self-declared I just I quote unquote balanced my own hormones I&amp;#39;m going to regurgitate a book type people not performance-based people who maybe are like taking these things into consideration from a legitimate standpoint but you know the tick-tockies the Ticky talkies um but a lot of people are either not meeting physical activity guidelines doing a regular exercise changing their exercise routine all the time or we have the group that probably was also maybe under eating or unintentionally putting their body into a larger energy deficit who was constantly doing High volumes high intensity mismanaged volume non-polarized training you know haphazard overloading of all of the all of the things in Fitness and just overdoing exercise volume and intensity while at the same time under eating and they did lead to hormonal hormonal down regulation or dysregulation that&amp;#39;s what you&amp;#39;re seeing a lot so in these these these ticky tacky babies are switching to a cycle-sinking routine and they&amp;#39;re watching their eating all they&amp;#39;re doing is creating more energy that&amp;#39;s more available for the body so it can recover it can adapt it can make progress in their Fitness and then it has enough energy to actually have normal hormonal function restore ovulation restore the menstrual cycle and so I I really want you guys to understand the ties of what I&amp;#39;m saying here to like what you&amp;#39;re seeing out there and so I think that&amp;#39;s a really good example that needs to be talked about because if you are you know overeating or under eating if you&amp;#39;re over training or under training or if you&amp;#39;re training a regular or you&amp;#39;re eating a regular like work on making those more routine more like sustainable for your lifestyle and what you can actually do make sure you&amp;#39;re following good training programs Shameless plug for my programs the list method that will I will straight up tell you as a client if you come to us that maybe you should back off on some of the volume or what you&amp;#39;re doing you might not like to hear it but usually that does yield more results for the people that are overdoers and then we also have the training programs that are concurrent for the people that don&amp;#39;t know how to mix the things together or they just don&amp;#39;t know how to do enough or what to do exactly we can help you out with that so Shameless plug join us in the list method um but with that being said you know give yourself something sustainable and trackable and consistent so you can actually see where hormones or life are impacting these things and so right now this advice I&amp;#39;m giving applies to everyone like you know work on a healthy nutritional habits work on you know having solid exercise routine habits that are sustainable that makes use a mix of resistance training and aerobic training and it&amp;#39;s okay like if you like to do group fitness or CrossFit or things are more variable generally if you&amp;#39;re doing something that&amp;#39;s like well programmed from the top down like a good CrossFit gym even things like orange theory fit I can&amp;#39;t really speak to some of the other things but if it&amp;#39;s well programmed and structured there&amp;#39;s going to be some rhyme and reason to what you&amp;#39;re doing but you should be able to tell like class to class even in that how you are feeling in response to different things like generally they are following some sort of schematic where you&amp;#39;re doing similar workouts every so many days and or every week on the same day things like that so I can&amp;#39;t speak to every programming of every gym and stuff like that um but generally even those are fine like just track what you&amp;#39;re doing be consistent then from there you know you&amp;#39;ve you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re like okay Alyssa I get it like I&amp;#39;m just like you list I you know watch my sleep I watch what I eat I follow a structure training program I assess my feedback all of this stuff blah blah blah blah tell me what to do I know it is very frustrating but I&amp;#39;m going to tell you a few more things to do first so there is first one thing that I think that you should do and that is assess and use and a lot of you can just stop right here honestly for so many of you who are stressed and busy and have jobs and kids or maybe you don&amp;#39;t have extreme fluctuations or contrast in your menstrual cycle or you personally cannot be bothered with this the next thing that you should do and you can stop right here like I said is use rating of perceived exertion so rpe is a scale of one to ten and it&amp;#39;s essentially assessing your difficulty of your exercise and so what you can do is you can use rpe as a way to self-regulate how much intensity that you&amp;#39;re doing within your training programs right and so if you have a back spot three by eight and you&amp;#39;re doing it in an rpe of seven and you are in one phase of your menstrual cycle and you feel fantastic right and you wanted to push it you&amp;#39;re going to do 200 pounds for all three sets of a rpe seven you feel great you feel awesome and you go back into to the gym the next week and you know maybe your kid was sick all night maybe you are in your luteal phase or maybe you&amp;#39;re about to start your period or maybe you&amp;#39;re about to ovulate because some women actually have you know poor feel worse during ovulation I know that&amp;#39;s not as trendy to say but say whatever symptomality is associated with you and maybe where you don&amp;#39;t feel best or you slept poorly or you&amp;#39;re really stressed for work and you walk into the gym and you go okay I&amp;#39;m gonna load this up and you&amp;#39;re doing your warm-up sets and you get to like 170 and you&amp;#39;re like man that felt heavy right so you decide to do your first set at 180 to see how it felt and that 180 felt about as hard as last week&amp;#39;s 200 and you can just stick there and do that regardless of like the menstrual phase or whatever else is going on in your life you can say okay the seven out of 10 effort this week is 180 pounds and that&amp;#39;s okay and if you want to even track that across time so you feel less crazy or less bad about your body or you want to learn your own patterns you can do that but keep an assessment of how that is fluctuating maybe your weight&amp;#39;s changing at the same time every single month maybe your Paces are increasing maybe the way you feel in workouts is better or worse different times but rpe can adjust for volume and intensity indirectly with just using this one simple tool so you don&amp;#39;t have to change your workouts every single week and you don&amp;#39;t have to overhaul the style of training that you&amp;#39;re doing and you don&amp;#39;t have to necessarily be adjusting volume intensity days that you&amp;#39;re training deloads all this stuff which can be really overwhelming especially for Gen pop individuals who are just kind of trying to do enough exercise to keep you know keep themselves active keep healthy maybe you have a few like smaller fitness goals but nothing really overwhelming or really extreme that is a great tool and honestly anyone can use that right I heavily rely on rpe in my own training all of the time and especially someone who works a lot and works a highly stressful job I can tell you that like over the last six months I have felt my training be impacted by my work volume and my work stress but I used rpe to adjust my weights and I&amp;#39;m still making progress I&amp;#39;m still getting better I&amp;#39;m still getting my training in I&amp;#39;m just making it realistic for what I can do in this season but also my body and the same thing applies to you know hormonal fluctuations in your personal experience with your menstrual cycle this may also mean that with auto regulation that you can make the calls on when you feel doing certain activities are best for you or not for others I know that when I ever talk about this on Instagram or with clients or people in general they say I would truly rather die than go to the gym the first day of my period they have high PMS symptoms they feel terrible what whatever that is that can also be a piece of Auto regulation where you say okay the first day of my period I will take as a rest day right you can rearrange your weeks if you track your Cycles long enough you can plan for it that can be part of your auto regulation and that is okay to do right but that&amp;#39;s a part of like you have to just learn to work with your body and listen to your body but if you&amp;#39;re following a consistent training program and you have adequate nutrition coming in the signals of what might actually be your personal fluctuations and your hormones will be more clear rather than it being fuzzed out by the noise that is not getting enough sleep really high stress under eating haphazard training like that&amp;#39;s where you&amp;#39;re going to have more that&amp;#39;s where you might even feel your cycle is impacting you more you might be more sensitive to those changes and fluctuations because everything&amp;#39;s going to feel more extreme your body&amp;#39;s more in a quote-unquote stressed place so to speak um you might just be more sensitive to those things because you&amp;#39;re exhausted and you&amp;#39;re underfed and you&amp;#39;re not consistent with your training so start back at the bottom during those times and phases and then work your way up and listen and find those patterns in your body but using rpe is a great tool because rpe indirectly like I mentioned will adjust your intensity and your volume so three by two hundred for eight wraps is more volume than three by eight at eight reps right that is you&amp;#39;re getting more volume in so if you feel better or you can push more and like maybe it is your follicular phase maybe it&amp;#39;s your ovulation to you know from follicular ovulation to your early luteal phases that you feel good push during those times and push that weight that is okay to do right you can also do it or if you really feel really crummy you can you know jump back and I love the two hard sets rule right you can take it say you&amp;#39;re you are someone who is very impacted by your luteo Delight little phases or maybe you&amp;#39;re just having a bad month or whatever that is you can say you know what I&amp;#39;m going to back off my training by just doing two hard sets instead of three sets for this training or instead of doing four sets today and doing two sets hard and that will indirectly reduce your volume especially if you feel like your your recovery is being impacted you feel really crummy whatever that is you can use the intensity scale out of 10 and a good program should be programming you rpe and don&amp;#39;t worry about hitting percentage percentages or making progress week to week but think about your progress over time right again a great example is how much my work has been impacting my train in the last six months and I&amp;#39;ve watched my deadlift goes from the strongest it&amp;#39;s been in years to pretty Miss to getting stronger to going back down to finally building back up but I&amp;#39;m still making progress over time and that&amp;#39;s what matters most and you need to like zoom out on that especially if you&amp;#39;re a regular person trying to balance kids job work so you can stop there but if you do want to make more considerations that are based around your cycle I&amp;#39;m going to give you some advice following here so you can stop there you can use rpe and that will account for so many things for you you can just kind of in factor that will factor in your hormones that will factor in your sleep that will factor in your stress that will factor in your your fed state that will factor in just how life is impacting training because for most of us training is in our life even if we would like it to be so from there assuming you you know you&amp;#39;re fed you&amp;#39;re slapped you&amp;#39;re managing your stress to the best of your ability for the most part and you&amp;#39;re following a consistent training program and you&amp;#39;re like okay well I am noticing more distinct patterns and fluctuations for myself so what do I do with this information so for those of you who do not track your menstrual cycle what I would say to start is before you do any of this take about three months at the least worth of data of tracking your menstrual cycle there&amp;#39;s menstrual cycle apps there&amp;#39;s calendars I have a free resource actually that I will try to remember to put in these show notes that I made earlier this summer on how to manage and monitor your menstrual cycle and even has like a little paper tracker for you as well um but with that being said you&amp;#39;re noticing patterns so what can you do in response to those patterns in order to you know get the most out of your training based on what we know right now and in general so I like to take what I like to call a nutrition forward approach when it comes to menstrual cycle training and so um a lot of people think that when I talk about menstrual cycle periodization and I think about and I I mentioned how like cycle thinking is kind of bunky and it&amp;#39;s not really all that but it&amp;#39;s chalked up to be is that that means that there&amp;#39;s nothing that we can do in response to anything we are helpless to our cycles and that&amp;#39;s not what I mean but I really like taking a nutrition forward approach so what I mean by a nutrition forward approach is that I like taking changes to our nutrition to try to like reduce or make the effect that we feel of our Cycles go away or feel better and so there&amp;#39;s a few different things that we can do across the month in order to kind of mitigate these changes that we&amp;#39;re feeling or work with our bodies or maximize you know effects that we know from our hormones so there is a good bit of literature that kind of sheds light on changes in metabolism across the menstrual cycle whether that&amp;#39;s um you know in response to eating but in general during exercise and so for those of you who are new here and don&amp;#39;t know this this is quite literally what my PhD is in my entire dissertation was like exercise response um to the menstrual cycle or sex differences and during exercise and postprandial or post eating so this is kind of my bread and butter and so I have a bias towards metabolism and nutrition but with good reason and so we do have a little bit more clear of an idea of like what&amp;#39;s potentially going on here and changes across the menstrual cycle with these things so to start when we have that early menstrual cycle to ovulation period that follicular phase during this time period we&amp;#39;re a little bit more reliant on carbohydrates which means that you know our bodies are more glycolytic they&amp;#39;re using more carbohydrate you need more carbs in order to max out your glycogen stores or to carb loads similar or compared to that of men during this follicular phase so if you&amp;#39;re you know prepping for a big racing event you&amp;#39;re trying to carb load or you&amp;#39;re trying to you know you know you trying to have enough carbs in you for performance you want to increase your total daily carbohydrate intake here slightly and when I say this it doesn&amp;#39;t mean like you&amp;#39;re making huge fluctuations honestly it&amp;#39;s probably trivial in the in the sense of like anywhere from 10 30 grams a day but you can play with this yourself if you&amp;#39;re tracking food and if you&amp;#39;re not tracking food like just eat some more cereal rice potatoes like just think about increasing those Carby foods during this time period especially like if we have high volumes of training and just decreasing or like maybe like instead of two servings of peanut butter we have one so we can eat more carbs like that kind of thing during this time so um during this time period nutrition advice that I have is pretty straightforward it&amp;#39;s pretty much eat more carbs across the day um protein intake is an important across the month and even though protein needs are maybe not as high or as demanding during this phase in general you as a menstruating athlete and trainee want to make sure that you&amp;#39;re prioritizing adequate protein intake and it never hurts to do it like pre-workout post-workout but in general you just want to be making sure you&amp;#39;re eating enough across the day but you might get away with being like being maybe like 10 grams less during this phase or a small percentage less during this phase because of the fact that you know it&amp;#39;s more estrogen dominant and or it&amp;#39;s there&amp;#39;s not as much there&amp;#39;s really no presence of progesterone compared to that of the luteal phase so you can technically get away with a little bit and we&amp;#39;ll talk about that here in a second so really you want to make sure your your prioritizing carbohydrate intake during this time period that&amp;#39;s really the main you know effect on macronutrients there and so when we get into the luteal phase this is where things get a little bit more detailed on what I would suggest here and so um when we get into the luteal phase and you have that high presence of estrogen and progesterone you are going to be a little bit more relying on fat oxidation fat oxidation is a little bit higher during this phase you&amp;#39;re a little less insulin sensitive you might have a little bit harder time you know tapping in and using your glucose store so to speak there might be less blood glucose relatively available things like that and so what we can do during this phase to mitigate some of this stuff is one there&amp;#39;s also the effect of the fact that your metabolism is slightly increased during this phase it&amp;#39;s like two to twelve percent which might pan out to being like 50 to 200 calories a day depending on how many calories You&amp;#39;re Expecting but that can be very meaningful for your hunger and your performance and how you feel and or respond to your symptoms so the one the thing that you should do is if you&amp;#39;re more hungry during this phase have an extra snack right eat a little bit more increase the serving size of one of your meals have an extra snack whatever it needs to do to get a little bit more you know energy available to your body eat a little bit more calories and if you are dieting or cutting you might want to if you feel really hungry during this phase there&amp;#39;s some evidence suggests that maybe perhaps taking a diet break or using this as a time to bump back up to maintenance might be more of an idea to help you stay on track and or work with your bodies during this time so maybe consider you know getting out of your deficit during the time the week during your Midol phase when you feel really hungry maybe you feel run down or maybe you feel really large impacts on your training because of this eat a little bit more 50 100 150 200 calories more there is variance and you&amp;#39;re like quote-unquote maintenance calories so like even bumping back up means you might still be in slight deficit or you might be able to eat more because your body expense more when you eat more of those things so don&amp;#39;t don&amp;#39;t freak out about how do you know if it&amp;#39;s you know two percent or ten percent or twelve percent to you just kind of eat an extra snack and it&amp;#39;s probably going to even out you know aim for something between 100 and 200 calories and you&amp;#39;ll probably be in a good ballpark if you&amp;#39;re craving fat during this phase feel free to eat like a little piece of chocolate maybe some peanut butter but you also really still want to be considering carbohydrates during this time but the difference is that you want to make sure it&amp;#39;s more prioritized towards your training whether that&amp;#39;s pre or interest so you might end up doing the opposite of what I just recommend in the follicular phase during this time eating a little bit more fat decreasing carbs a little bit and again I this isn&amp;#39;t like huge large fluctuations like you don&amp;#39;t need to go keto for half the month or anything like that which I have seen suggested it&amp;#39;s just making a slight differential preference towards fat oxidation or matching you know that with increasing your your calorines or your Cravings or whatever it is because be as simple as just having a little bit of fat in your snack and calling that a day um but with that being said carbs are still important here and so the tissue is that you&amp;#39;re maybe not as easily able to tap into your carb stores and your muscles during this time and or you might be less insulin sensitive things like that and so in order to work around this we can basically time having a lot of our carbohydrates pre and intra workout and so want a disclaimer to make to the insulin sensitivity thing because I think that gets tossed around the cycle thinking is that if you have a lean body composition and you&amp;#39;re pretty active especially cardiovascularly those fluctuations seem to be a lot less across the month than like lower active people or those with more adiposity so you know starting with the basics right increasing activity level finding a good weight maintenance place for you whatever that means or feels like to you like I&amp;#39;m not going to tell you that you have to diet on this podcast today but those are things that might have more fluctuation there but with that being said why we want to maybe prioritize time you have carbohydrate a little bit more is that some of the negative impacts and performance have been shown to be reduced or go away with carbohydrate feedings there&amp;#39;s a sentence on my dissertation I wish I could read this right now in the background in literature review that I really loved and it was basically like when it comes to like aerobic performance or you know aerobic performance outcomes in you know I was doing menstrual cycle stuff and birth control that it looks like it&amp;#39;s essentially a nutritional status oral contraceptive use and then the menstrual cycle that are going to impact these things more significantly and so it&amp;#39;s really cool when you look at some of these studies that when you feed female athletes before these studies metabolic differences tend to kind of go away and or there&amp;#39;s some other data that I&amp;#39;ve seen where they you know have either more carbohydrate prior to an exercise training session or intra and that the time trial like so time to Performance um differences go away when you are fed so don&amp;#39;t neglect the part that being fed can reduce negative impacts you&amp;#39;re feeling your performance and if you&amp;#39;re in an energy deficit because you need more calories and or you&amp;#39;re restricting them bump them up eat a little bit more carbohydrate prior to your workout or if you&amp;#39;re doing endurance or longer training sessions carbohydrate during that like eat more carbs right but prioritize and tying them around that workout so they&amp;#39;re readily available they&amp;#39;re in your bloodstream you can take them in your muscles will bring little glucose receptors to the outside and pull that glucose in to you into your muscle cell without using insulin so that&amp;#39;s why I like the insulin sensitivity thing you can kind of bypass that with using muscle contraction through physical activity and or time your carbohydrates so that when you are going to do your physical activity they&amp;#39;re kind of right there in your bloodstream ready for you to go um so those are two things that you can do and then the third is that you can time your protein intake and so some people get the advice that like it&amp;#39;s better to take like your protein shake immediately after an alludal phase and I don&amp;#39;t disagree with that but I think something that is largely neglected in the sports science field in Spear and fitness and social media is that yes post-workout amino acid availability is important but having amino acid availability pre-workout might actually be better and more important and think about it like you&amp;#39;re taking in protein and then you&amp;#39;re going to the gym and that&amp;#39;s already in your bloodstream available so once you start to recover it&amp;#39;s able to bring in those you know the building blocks of your muscle so time making sure there&amp;#39;s there&amp;#39;s protein in that pre-workout meal and or that post-workout for sure and so for those of you that are maybe you know working out early in the morning especially in this phase I know you&amp;#39;re like a [ __ ] I&amp;#39;m sensing in energy deficits I don&amp;#39;t want to eat it&amp;#39;s early in the morning I&amp;#39;m training fasted oh my gosh what do I do some carbs and if you can take like an essential amino acid supplement I prefer eaas to BCAAs I think BCAAs are a waste of money eeas are kind of expensive if you can get in like chocolate milk or a little bit of whey protein like even 10 to 15 grams whatever that looks like you know you can or you could do an essential amino acid supplement just get some amino acids available in your body so your your body can pull those in then it won&amp;#39;t you know pull from your muscle tissues but it has some of that available for energy availability and or carbohydrates which can literally be you know some Gatorade applesauce packets juice chocolate milk like I said is like your best bang for your buck between those things I can&amp;#39;t do dairy so I do soy and I put a little bit of Hershey&amp;#39;s Chocolate Syrup in that because that I mean there&amp;#39;s a lot of data in research on chocolate milk but essentially like if you&amp;#39;re training fast in the morning or you&amp;#39;re taking long periods of not eating between like lunch and your training session just try to make sure that you&amp;#39;re getting some sort of protein and carbohydrate in you before you go to the gym and or if you&amp;#39;re doing long extended periods of training like long endurance training you should be prioritizing adequate carbohydrate to begin with but if you are not then making sure that you really are during this phase or see or phase of the month and or bumping it up a little bit and that will also help with Muscle Recovery both the protein and the carbohydrate especially intra-workout carbohydrate for those longer duration and endurance or you know multi-hour gym sessions whatever you&amp;#39;re doing that can help with some of the like post exercise recovery needs because it&amp;#39;s going to be less harsh and less demanding on your body if there&amp;#39;s glucose available for it to perform that physical work output that you&amp;#39;re doing so those are things that you can do with adjusting your macronutrients during these phases to adjust for your training and then my other little bits of advice is that thermoregulation might be impacted by the high hormone phase in the mid luteal phase and so for those of you who especially are working out in the Heat or you&amp;#39;re doing endurance type events increasing your water intake but also increasing your electrolyte intake so having enough electrolytes available which due to alterations and viscosity in your blood and your electrolyte pools and things that are associated with you know heat dissipation and thermoregulation and sweat rate and things like that you want to make sure that you&amp;#39;re bringing in enough water especially if you&amp;#39;re sweating more because you&amp;#39;re losing it more but you&amp;#39;re replacing loss of electrolytes and or helping your body maintain that in response to exercise that might help performance as well but in general that might be something that might help you during this phase of your cycle especially for my endurance athlete friends or those working out outside in the heat whether that&amp;#39;s you know your CrossFit competition your tough monitor your big race or maybe you&amp;#39;re even lifting in a really hot gym and sweating profusely right like so consider using electrolyte supplements during this phase as you all know I love liquid IV my code is dockless Fitness and we&amp;#39;ll have a link in the show notes that you can use to support me and or shop with me as well and it&amp;#39;s usually about 20 or 25 off I can&amp;#39;t remember with sales usually bumping up to 30. but that&amp;#39;s the one that I really like and does have a little bit of carb in there too which is nice you&amp;#39;re getting a little bit of extra carbohydrate or sugar during your workouts to sustain that as well and so during this phase as well there might be potential negative impacts on recovery it might be hard to recover one the protein and carbohydrate will help improve recovery right eating a little bit more carbs will help improve that recovery but this might be a good period of time to work on sleep hygiene especially if you&amp;#39;re someone who&amp;#39;s you feel like your sleep is impacted by a menstrual cycle phase which a lot of people do report that or do you feel that due to the fluctuations on hormones so really making sure you&amp;#39;re like reducing screen time going to bed earlier winding down like doing things to help you like cool down before you go to bed putting maybe like sleeping in a cooler type temperature taking a shower before you you know go to sleep things that can help you kind of ease into your sleep a little bit better um I&amp;#39;m personally on birth control so I cannot speak to having this during a studio phase but I like being it&amp;#39;s like the most woo-woo thing that I believe in and take I I say that transparently but that stuff whenever I I you know want a really good night&amp;#39;s sleep I&amp;#39;m traveling my sleep schedules off whatever it looks like you know I had a heart Training Day I love doing a mug of beam and it really just it knocks me out my whoop data is always significantly better when I take it so you know take that with a grain of salt because we&amp;#39;ve still also new technology these are guess my two boo-boo exposure things but it might be something worth the try that I&amp;#39;ve personally tried and I and I I can attest really helps me my code is list 15 for that as well but again you could try just you know your normal sleep hygiene something else that is getting increasing evidence that might be worth trying and taking as well is um tart cherry juice so tart cherry juice looks like it has some pretty um potential positive impacts for recovery and or like you know your post exercise recovery in general irregardless of menstrual cycle phase but also so might help improve natural melatonin production and or onset of sleep so you could try something I think there&amp;#39;s a couple companies out there there&amp;#39;s like a pouch one I think it&amp;#39;s like Cherry bud I have no code for that I haven&amp;#39;t tried it yet I&amp;#39;ve been meaning to but those might be things for you to play with or try during these phases to help adjust your sleep which will impact your recovery as well as nutritional things that you can do now there are maybe specific supplements that might be able to help but instead of giving blanket supplements of saying take iron take magnesium take you know you know take this this that blah blah I really encourage you all to maybe potentially get blood work first to see so you&amp;#39;re testing not guessing on what you need because I personally supplement with things like vitamin D magnesium and I take fish oil mostly because of the potential benefits on brain health and there might be slight benefits on exercise recovery I use that through Legion fish oil is the one where I can feel more safe saying to you hey you could take this and get potential benefits on these things and there is some evidence to suggest that fish oil during the luteal phase may be beneficial with helping with some of that you know post exercise inflammation and it&amp;#39;s probably not harmful to take but everything else that&amp;#39;s more of a actual vitamin nutrient micronutrient deficiency I would encourage you to test not guess and either work with a professional or I like to use inside tracker man I&amp;#39;m plugging all of the things today I did not mean this guys I really truly just work with companies that I align with the products um where they will give you an analysis but they will give you food and or supplement recommendations kind of based off what you need and what I love is I love printing out that and either working with the Rd that I&amp;#39;m working with and or my doctor before I kind of start to supplement specifically I feel confident enough to make dietary changes based off the recommendations of like increasing seafood or increasing fiber or increasing grains or like this food contains this and it might help improve this metric and you can track it over the time but I always do encourage you all to test my gas and then make sure you know before you take anything that you&amp;#39;re working with a health professional because you might be overtaking something you might not need it you might be supplementing iron because someone told you to do that while you have adequate iron levels yada yada yada so you know Tesla guess I love inside tracker for that reason but you of course can always get blood work with your doctor if it&amp;#39;s covered by your insurance but if you want the kind of analysis and all that stuff my link my inside tracker link below um I do that uh usually once a year but I&amp;#39;ve done it like four times last few years personally so test not gas that&amp;#39;s my disclaimer back to the menstrual cycle so those are things that you can do to kind of help and mitigate some of these things and so the other thing that I will also suggest is there&amp;#39;s actually a new study by my friend Sam who&amp;#39;s fantastic and she works out of Abby Smith Ryan&amp;#39;s lab and they do some fantastic work on supplements nutrition um research all that stuff and that show that even taking creatine my beloved creatine might help with some of the water storage um that comes along with the luteal phase but also like that can help you have high like adequate hydration levels because it does pull in water into the cells it&amp;#39;s part of the mechanism of how it works so there&amp;#39;s some merging evidence or some of those classic supplements across the month and it doesn&amp;#39;t make you fat um with that being said other things that you can consider during these phases there was a study that come out earlier this year that showed that caffeine ingestion during the menstrual cycle phase boosted exercise performance to match that of the ludial phase when there was a decrease in performance there when it came to muscle power output so caffeine is one of the most widely studied Sports nutrition supplements and it has a ton of fantastic data on it and so if you&amp;#39;re looking for a boost in performance some of those muscle recruitment parameters that we see in other studies might help with some of that with the menstrual cycle as well if you&amp;#39;re more sensitive to caffeine during these times like don&amp;#39;t feel pressured to take that but just a suggestion to do as well and then there is some emerging evidence to suggest as well that while some of your perceptions might be valid to you it might not it might be more of a mental perception probably due to alterations and hormones and how that affects like your brain chemistry which is a little bit out of my scope but I&amp;#39;ve seen some of the data on that and your perceived enjoyment and perceived adherence or perceived effort during those fate the late ludial phase of the menstrual cycle but it might honestly actually just be more related to how you cognitively feel than the true muscular performance and output of your body right so with all that being said that is my nutrition forward approach um and also my caveat to like it might kind of be in your head and you might show up to the gym and feel great anyway but I like adjusting nutrition first and foremost before these things before you you know you dive into any of these special training protocols because those might end up like reducing a lot of the issues and I&amp;#39;ve seen this with clients and or when I talk about these things on social media once again or people are like hey I took your advice and I increased my carbohydrate and calorie in taking the ludophase and a lot of the issues that I was having went away right so really that&amp;#39;s how we can dial in our nutrition so to speak in response to our menstrual cycle um then once you know again they&amp;#39;re like dockless is just going to tell me to eat more carbs shut up um after that then you&amp;#39;re like okay well like I really feel dialed in and I&amp;#39;m still feeling some different impacts of my cycle on my performance like what should I do so we&amp;#39;re working our way up that pyramid we&amp;#39;re at the tippy top now where most of you may never need to be and or you can do if you want to not going to stop you can do whatever you want as long as you&amp;#39;re training and fueling yourself I don&amp;#39;t really don&amp;#39;t care what you do or when we get to this more Elite level and this this is where we might consider how things are impacting us differently and unfortunately we while performance doesn&amp;#39;t have the date on performance is a little bit like oh it doesn&amp;#39;t seem to be super impacted some things might be impacted some phases versus other phases that might be better here versus there for performance wise we don&amp;#39;t have a ton on long-term training adaptations right so for one I will say even though women are not men we respond similarly to a lot of things the men so I&amp;#39;m not saying that like studies on men next necessarily exactly apply to us but we&amp;#39;re not going to find anytime soon you know that like we&amp;#39;re not going to respond to Mechanical tension or Progressive overload or you know we don&amp;#39;t respond at all children&amp;#39;s training like the basic parameters of exercise adaptation apply to us the things that we&amp;#39;re looking for in the literature or that cycle based performance considerations are going to include is how do we maximize the potential of each of these phases and I do believe the data in science is going to go that way and I&amp;#39;m excited for it like I hope so like I would love to maybe eventually be doing this who knows where my career will go but like I think that&amp;#39;s really interesting and I&amp;#39;m not against it or changing my mind to these views as more comes out like I&amp;#39;m not anti-bat um though all that to say is we only have a handful of training studies when it comes to the menstrual cycle on you know across the whole month and these are largely done on resistance training and so they&amp;#39;re either single limb and or we have one true training intervention and then one training pilot study um but what we&amp;#39;re seeing is that when we&amp;#39;re looking at the follicular phase versus the luteal phase the follicular phase and muscle growth and strength does appear to be similar or Superior to that of the luteal phase and what these studies did is they did like more sessions in the follicular phase versus less sessions in the luteal phase and then when we look at our one really good I thought this was a pretty well done study training intervention where they had people do more days of training in the follicular phase versus less than the luteal phase or they flipped it or they did it normal across a month what we see is once again doing more sessions in the follicular phase does yield more muscle growth and strength than a luteal phase but when we look at the difference across the entire month it doesn&amp;#39;t appear to be that much different or some of these studies there&amp;#39;s might be small differences in small measures um coming from this but it&amp;#39;s not like this huge massive difference um so to speak so yes if you&amp;#39;re going to like do more workouts or do more volume in one phase of your menstrual cycle like it seems to be Advanced changes to do in the follicular phase and that probably has to do with the positive effect of estrogen on muscle growth um but rate cannot confidently say yet that it&amp;#39;s better than training normally across the month so what I would recommend for you then is to identify your patterns you know you&amp;#39;ve been tracking for a few months you&amp;#39;ve dialed in your nutrition and you know like okay like days X through y you feel really good and that might even creep into your luteal phase I know that&amp;#39;s contrary to popular belief that might you know creep into your luteal phase and then you might want to toy with doing more volume maybe more sets maybe your harder workouts your your more intense effort workouts like especially like if you&amp;#39;re training for a race maybe and maybe you have a deload schedule of every four or five weeks maybe you&amp;#39;re putting your hardest running workouts during this window or maybe you are you know adjusting your training program so you&amp;#39;re doing you know three sets versus two during this window so you&amp;#39;re doing more volume maybe you have a work schedule where you really would rather train more days per week for two weeks of the month and less the last two I mean like there&amp;#39;s nothing wrong with doing that if you want to do that but I think you know consistent weekly training is probably the most adherable for most people um but you can consider you know bumping Up the Volume during those phases and seeing if you get you know better results you can consider increasing the frequency you can consider doing your harder workouts during those phases maybe that is your follicular phase your early menstrual through ovulation type phases even into your into your luteal phase or maybe um you feel better different times of the month and that&amp;#39;s when you&amp;#39;re going to dial up your intensity and training that is absolutely fine to do but then you&amp;#39;ll have more of a clear picture if you&amp;#39;ve actually been following a training program and or eating enough of what feels good when when you feel like you&amp;#39;re recovering better like actually write this down take note of it and then you can cater and adjust your training program to that something that I also really like to consider is like if you do know your behaviors of this and this is kind of like something I made up so someone starts copying this then they copy everything else I do so that&amp;#39;s all right um is I I like to think of like if you know when your your light luteal phase or your menstrual cycle phase impacts you the most you can plan for that accordingly because if your cycle is pretty consistent and you kind of know when your symptoms are coming you could do what I like to consider front loading or back loading those weeks so if you know that like okay this week you know I know that I&amp;#39;m probably gonna get my period on Sunday and so my late luteal phase you know Wednesday through Friday are going to be pretty rough but so I&amp;#39;m gonna do my harder workouts Monday and Tuesday of this week so that I can adjust my volume or my intensity so maybe you&amp;#39;re doing your lower Zone easy workouts later in the week maybe you&amp;#39;re doing the you know lifting sessions that feel less demanding to you during that week and or you working around that window of three to five days where if you do have larger PMS symptoms or your personal individual experience is more severe or you&amp;#39;re working with clients because as much as this might not be necessary for Gen pop if it allows them to adhere to their exercise training program you know by working with these things and letting them feel like they&amp;#39;re leading the way and listening to our bodies absolutely like readjust your week I do this all the time I do this I readjust my training program around running or my work schedule this makes sense right like it&amp;#39;s not crazy to do but you can front load the intensity on those weeks and or backload it potentially to distribute that so it&amp;#39;s not falling on the days where you maybe feel the worst you don&amp;#39;t feel like you recover you don&amp;#39;t feel like you&amp;#39;re training your best so to speak and so you can get the most out of your training sessions and so I like that as a approach first and foremost but there are ways that you can then adjust your training frequency volume and or um intensity in response to how you feel but take note about how you feel when you feel these things and look at your face and not just look at it in four weeks and or all these different phases and if you know how long your follicular window is and your entire menstrual cycle as a whole you&amp;#39;ll get a better idea of like where these things are Falling For You versus just doing it on a traditional 28-day four-week type cycle that&amp;#39;s kind of rinse and repeat there&amp;#39;s no one size fit all because some people Cycles are shorter some are longer um so you know and then you can apply these things too if you do have you know disrupted menstrual cycles maybe you have very long Cycles because you have PCOS or you&amp;#39;re struggling with these things you can still apply this stuff to you to work with your body and listen to yourself and that symptomology that you have while also still making progress in your training so I am not against you saying you know what I&amp;#39;m eating enough I&amp;#39;m tracking I&amp;#39;m doing these things so this is what you can think of as Advanced Auto regulation where you&amp;#39;re like okay well I&amp;#39;m gonna Auto regulate my training so I&amp;#39;m gonna adjust it so I know that for these these weeks or these days I can do more I can get more out of this I can get more bang for my buck and recover where this day or this week or whatever this is I don&amp;#39;t feel so great and I don&amp;#39;t want you to think that that is automatically going to be your follicular versus ludial uh type phases because again some people feel terrible during their menstrual cycle and some people feel terrible during ovulation some people feel terrible in the mid to late luteal phases it&amp;#39;s about identifying your patterns and figuring out when you need to push versus pull back for yourself whether it&amp;#39;s mental whether it&amp;#39;s just you feel terrible you feel run down or you feel like you can get the most out of your training sessions or even your motivation is fluctuating which that is a huge thing for all people and adherence and enjoy ability during these times so that is kind of the tip of the pyramid okay well where can we get these maximize these benefits during these times and so if you do are doing this and you&amp;#39;re like okay well like what if I just want to get the maximum benefit out of my cycle right and I I wish I had more concrete evidence and data to suggest anything other than potentially up regulating your volume and your intensity in your follicular phase to maximize the benefits of estrogen but that&amp;#39;s that that is totally fine to do but we do not have data right now that says you should only do hit during this time in slow steady state during this time and this and that and blah blah we can hypothesize right we can make assumptions based off these things if you want to do you know more of your easy steady state zone 2 type intensity during the luteal phase and so be it if that feels good for you you feel like it&amp;#39;s more oxidative you&amp;#39;re relying more on fat oxidation you feel like you&amp;#39;re going to get the most bang for your buck there and absolutely do that if you want to stick to ramping up intensity during different you know in the follicular phase because you feel better during that I don&amp;#39;t really care what you do the point of this podcast here today is to say that you need to be fed you need to be training intelligently you need to be taking care of yourself outside of the gym then adjust to your cycle with nutrition forward focused first then from there figure out what works for you right some people might skip to that and I can&amp;#39;t that&amp;#39;s fine I mean that&amp;#39;s fine I I can&amp;#39;t stop you from doing these types of things but you might be able to reduce some of those symptoms with all these things but if you&amp;#39;ve controlled all your controllables and you can figure out a pattern and Rhythm that works for you or your clients and absolutely by all means do that that&amp;#39;s what good coaches do independent of the menstrual cycle they&amp;#39;re learning to work with themselves their clients their bodies and adjusting for those things just like like I&amp;#39;m deloading this week because my work schedule is crazy and I had a little bit of a flare up last week with my calf and ankle injury so I wanted to drop the weights this week to give my body a little extra recovery and manage the stress and volume of my work day and guess what that&amp;#39;s an appropriate response and you can do the same thing within your actual training so don&amp;#39;t lose the force for the trees all these technical things I&amp;#39;m talking about application apply to you whether you&amp;#39;re on birth control you&amp;#39;re pregnant you&amp;#39;re not pregnant postmanopausal time periods where things are going crazy and Haywire all the time or just simply being a human but there might be some benefit to adjusting these things whether that&amp;#39;s nutritionally and or potentially maybe for hypertrophy and strength purposes with the menstrual cycle at this time that you may be able to lead with once you&amp;#39;ve kind of got your bases covered so that is my rant for you all today that is my better way to cycle sink um again go back and listen to the menstrual cycle myths podcast that I did earlier um a few months ago I think about I don&amp;#39;t know what I don&amp;#39;t know when this will be published so you know look back in uh 2022 and my top three things for priorities for female athletes go listen to that podcast as well um because those will help give you a little bit more clarity on what you need to do for yourself but hopefully this gives you an idea of how to adjust you know if you&amp;#39;ve covered all your bases what to do how to work these things for yourself because what it comes down to is making sure that your body is in a healthy State it&amp;#39;s fed you&amp;#39;re following good training programs you&amp;#39;re managing all these things and then from there at this point in time the best advice we have is to do what works for you figure out how your body responds how your cycle feels to you and then build your training program around that for you and if you&amp;#39;re working with a coach communicate that right make sure that you are communicating with that and if you don&amp;#39;t have a coach where you can communicate that like maybe consider getting another coach um and working around your personal experience and again that might be different person to person but building the skill set of audio regulation while it&amp;#39;s just using the one to ten scale or the more advanced scale of like actually dictating when you&amp;#39;re going to do more versus Less in your training because of that it is a it is something that will help you navigate that change in yourself across the lifespan and or cycle to cycle or in general it will make you a smarter and better trainee so that is my advice I hope you all enjoy this podcast is pretty long we got pretty into it I thought that was going to be 30 minutes but I just kept talking um so if you found this helpful you learned something you know you you feel like this was eye-opening whatever it is go ahead and leave a comment if you&amp;#39;re on YouTube make sure you rate and review over on your favorite podcast platform tag me if you listen into this and otherwise I will catch you all on the next messing this middle podcast or YouTube video thank you so much for being here and we&amp;#39;ll see you in the next one foreign

Transcript for:The Messy Middle Podcast: Key Points on Cycle Syncing and Training

Transcript for:
The Messy Middle Podcast: Key Points on Cycle Syncing and Training