Episode 54: Science-Based Tips for Training Around Your Period: How Women Should Work Out
Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode of the Coaching Corner podcast, I'm diving into a question I get a lot from female clients: Should I change my workouts based on my menstrual cycle? The short answer? It depends on you.
I walk you through the different phases of the menstrual cycle—menstrual, follicular, ovulation, and luteal—and break down how hormonal changes can affect your energy, strength, and recovery. I also share the potential benefits of training during each phase, along with practical tips for adjusting your workout intensity if needed.
This episode is all about tuning into your body, making informed decisions, and ditching the myths around performance dips during your period. My goal is to help you feel empowered in your fitness journey and confident adapting your training to your unique cycle.
Let’s stop forcing a one-size-fits-all approach to fitness and start working with our bodies instead of against them.
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Jayd (00:00):
Men's programs typically have a pretty linear progression if it's designed for a man's body. This doesn't always work for a woman's body because we may need to deload every four weeks, and not every program offers a deload every four weeks, right? But you should feel empowered to choose that for yourself and deload as necessary. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. My name is Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. A common question that I get from my female clients is Should I change up my workouts depending on where I am in my cycle? And the answer to this question is, as always, it depends. So in this episode, we're going to take a look at the different factors that go into play at different points of your hormonal cycle and how you might think about changing up your workout program according to where you are in your cycle.
(00:57)
And before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you are watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so you always get the latest episodes. If you're listening to this podcast, make sure to follow the channel so that you always get the latest episodes as well. If you would like more information on me and the services that I offer, check out my website, Jaydigains.com. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-N s.com. Right now, I am accepting new clients to my body sculpt workout program. You can find information for that in the show notes or the video description. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:34)
There's a discussion that we have to have at least once a year because it's something that comes up with my clients. It's something that comes up in the community, which is the question, should I train around my periods? Should I change my workouts around my period? Like any question when it comes to fitness, health and wellness, the best answer I can give you is it depends. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And the reason I say that is because every woman is different and even within the same woman, every period is different and it's going to affect you differently. And there's other factors that get involved in terms of your energy levels and your readiness to train that can play with your hormone levels and what's going on with your body around your period. If you've got really bad cramps and a really bad back ache, maybe you don't sleep as well, so you don't have as much energy.
(02:22)
So it depends. The best thing that I can say is to listen to your body and deload as needed. You don't necessarily have to not work out when you're PMSing or when you're on your period, but give yourself the permission to step back a little bit, take it a little easier. Instead of going to an RPE nine, go to an RPE eight or even seven. The most important thing is just to kind of move because the movement will help you to feel better. However, that is also to say, sometimes resting is the best thing that you can do and you just don't know until you try different things. So it really does depend. Some fitness experts and even I have a client who's seeing a chiropractor and he encouraged her to talk to me about training around her hormonal cycle, which is kind of something that I was already doing.
(03:27)
But I do think that there's a lot of misunderstanding around this topic, and it also doesn't help that it was kind of a trending topic a couple of years ago and you had a lot of influencers coming online, making content about planning your workouts around your hormonal cycle and that you should plan your workouts around your menstrual cycle. They'll sell you like a cookie cutter workout program that it's like this is how you should train around your hormonal cycle. But the problem with that is that, like I said, every period is different and every woman is different. And for some women, you don't even need to change anything about your workouts due to your menstrual cycle. I have a girlfriend who is on a pill that makes it so she doesn't get her period, but every three months and when she gets her period at the end of those three months, it might fuck her up a little bit, but not a horrible.
(04:24)
And then there's other women who are laid out for a week and a half. So anybody who tries to give you a one size fits all solution to trading around your period is just at most innocent misinformed, at worst, the scam artist. So again, it comes down to you got to know your body and listen to your body, but it's also like not all in your head. Don't let anybody shame you for needing to rest or tell you, oh, you suck it up. Basically. You might need that from your coach. If you're preparing for an athletic competition, maybe I don't know, your coach might know your body and know how you perform and be able to say if you had that relationship with them, they might be able to say that. But I see this a lot from women who have male training partners who don't know any better, and the male training partners will give the female a really hard time if she needs to skip because of her period or if she needs to take it easy.
(05:28)
I encourage you to listen to your body and do what you feel is best because there are real things happening in your body when you are going through your different stages of your hormonal cycle. So what I wanted to do today was kind of break down what the science says so that you can, if you do want to train around your period and you do want to plan your workouts around your hormonal cycle, you understand when is the right time to maybe try one style of training and when is a good time to just be very careful and when's a good time to step it back. And I also want to encourage you to just keep in mind that you can perform well at any point of your period. You may feel like shit, but you actually can perform very well even when you have cramps, even when you're grouchy and irritable.
(06:19)
The studies show that athletic performance can stay pretty consistent. So let's take a look at the different aspects of the female 28 day hormonal cycle. So unlike male bodies, the female body has 28 days of its hormonal cycle, whereas the male body has a hormonal cycle of 24 hours where they get different levels of testosterone and other hormones over the course of a 24 hour cycle over the course of a day and the morning, the male body has more testosterone, they have more energy in general, and that starts to wane and come down towards the evening. The female hormonal cycle is different over the course of a month. We have days, whole days and whole weeks where we might have more energy, more focus than others. So it's important that we are cognizant of that in terms of how it might affect our workouts, our readiness to train, our motivation towards training.
(07:21)
The first day of your hormonal cycle is the first day of your period. So we call that the menstrual phase, which is usually days one to five. It can last a little bit longer though when you're in your menstrual phase. Hormones like estrogen and progesterone are at their lowest and that's when you have your period or you would have your period. Some women don't bleed, some people don't actually bleed for their periods, but their hormones still have that cycle. I have a couple of clients that are athletes that don't actually get their periods, but their hormonal cycle is kind of similar. So we try to think about tracking when they would have their cycle and keeping an eye on energy levels that way. After you finish your period, you have your follicular phase, which is usually days six to 14, and this is when your estrogen levels start to rise and your body begins to prepare you for ovulation.
(08:24)
And ovulation is when your body releases an egg. So the ovulation phase usually happens around 14 days, and that's when your estrogen levels rise, rise, rise, rise, rise, and then it peaks. That's when the estrogen levels are at their highest. And then you have your luteal phase, which is that run up to your period between ovulation and actually starting your period. And the luteal phase is after ovulation, progesterone levels rise and they prepare your body for a potential pregnancy. If you don't conceive, then your hormone levels will drop and that's when your period starts. Then the process starts over and over again, plus or minus every 28 days for a really long time. The common belief was that menstruation makes you weaker and less capable in the gym. And a lot of people believed that they shouldn't work out when they're on their period. And it's true for some women, you may feel extremely fucked up when you're on your period.
(09:31)
You may have really bad cramps and you may just feel like you need to rest and stay home for a day or two. And you know what? If that's what your body needs, then you might need to do that. But the science shows that you actually can exercise on your period and you don't actually lose strength and you don't actually see a dip in your performance. So if you're a competitive athlete and you have a competition that just so happens to land on while you're on your period, you may be thinking, well, fuck. Well, there goes the record that I was planning on setting, right? That's not necessarily the case. In fact, women actually can perform really, really well during their period. Right now we're sort of like in this stage where there's a lot of studies being done to kind of look at this.
(10:27)
So the science is really new and it's changing pretty rapidly because just scientists have not really been looking at the effects of menstruation on female athletes for a number of reasons. It's not just because science is sexist and that academia is a male dominated field. That's definitely part of it. But the other part of it though is because the female hormonal cycle has 28 days, it's very hard to use women, female bodies as any kind of control group. It's hard to control for those factors because how a woman's hormonal levels will be different on day to day throughout her entire 28 day cycle. And again, not every period is the same. So on day 13 of last month's cycle, you might have a certain amount of estrogen and progesterone in your body, and then you go to day 13 of the next cycle and it can be radically different and there's no way to predict for that.
(11:32)
So it's hard to study the female body and the effects of these hormones on anything medicine wise or fitness wise because her bodies are so inconsistent. So there hasn't been a whole lot of studies around women's bodies and therefore a lot of the exercise science leading up until now kind of treated women as small men, basically just looking at the muscle mass of men versus women. Women in general tend to have less muscle mass than men. Women tend to be shorter than men. And so a lot of the studies that use male bodies have been used to say, this is what happens in the human body, and apply it over to women just assuming that women are just like a smaller man. And that's not true because our hormonal levels change and they do affect many aspects of our lives, including our readiness to train and how we recover from training a really great source of information on the latest studies and the current science on the effect of the hormonal cycle on women and female bodies who are interested in fitness.
(12:52)
If you're a female athlete and you're interested in seeing how your menstrual cycle affects your training, Dr. Stacey Sims has a book called roar. She actually has two books, one called roar, which is all about the exercise science surrounding premenopausal women's bodies, and it goes into how you can optimize your training and performance around your menstrual cycle. She has a second book called, I believe it's called Next Level, which talks about the effects of perimenopause and menopause and how that may affect your training and how to optimize your training to factor in all of the things that are going on with that. So a lot of this, like what we're talking about, comes from Dr. SIM's research and with all of her studies where she's conducted studies but also has been looking at the studies around how the menstrual cycle affects women and their readiness to train and the performance as athletes, she has come up with these recommendations in terms of how to modify your workout program around your menstrual cycle.
(14:03)
The first phase, your menstrual phase, Dr. Sims calls your secret weapon. Okay, so contrary to common belief, your period is actually a really good time for you to train hard because your estrogen and progesterone levels are at their lowest. That makes it a lot easier for you to access stored carbohydrates for energy, which allows you to one, have more energy during the workout, but also to recover from the workout. Your pain tolerance is higher, and that means that you can push yourself past when you maybe normally would stop. So if you're trying to build muscle and you want to get close to muscle failure, you might be able to push a little bit harder during this period, literally during your period. So what Stacey Sims recommends is during this time, if you wanted to do a weekly undulating periodized program, periodized, you could time heavy strength training or high intensity interval training or sprint work, something that's going to demand your body a lot.
(15:12)
You could do that during your menstrual phase days, one through five of your menstrual cycle. Now, your follicular phase, she calls your peak performance time, and as your estrogen levels rise, this can lead to you feeling stronger and having more capacity for endurance training. And your coordination, your neuromuscular coordination goes up as well steadily as your estrogen levels rise from day six to 14 of your menstrual cycle. So at this point, your body is more efficient at utilizing carbohydrates, which makes it a great time for you to be progressively overloading in your workouts and doing your intense or high volume training. This is a good time for you to do, continue doing heavy lifting, explosive power training, speed work and endurance space sessions are really great for this time period. Now, all of this culminates during ovulation. Ovulation is like your mama bear strength time.
(16:19)
That's when you feel like a super woman, your estrogen levels have peaked, your testosterone gets a slight boost as well. And what this can do is lead to you feeling very powerful and you can really perform some prs during this time. However, because the estrogen level is higher, this also leads to higher ligament laity and you have a greater risk of injury. For example, ACL. Tears are very, very common during ovulation, so it's something to be careful of. You can test your prs during ovulation, you'll probably perform really, really well. However, there's a risk of you overdoing it during this time because you feel so strong. So just make sure that you're progressing gradually. Remember the principles of progressive overload. You might feel tempted to jump and add a shit ton of weight to the bar to test some prs or run more sprints than what you normally would.
(17:28)
Make sure that if you are going to be progressing during this time, if you are going to be pushing yourself, keep it within reasonable limits. I personally like to follow a rule of thumb of no more than 20% of an increase at a time. So if you're feeling really strong, then add 20% more weight to the bar or do 20% more reps or 20% more time under tension. Okay, no more than that because more than that, you risk accidentally hurting one of your ligaments. And a ligament injury takes a really long time to heal. Okay? This is a good time for heavy lifting, testing your maxes, doing some explosive power training Olympic lifts, but you do want to make sure that you are properly warming up and performing stability work to prevent injury. And then finally, when you enter into your luteal phase, after ovulation ends and your luteal phase, that's when it's time to shift gears.
(18:28)
That's when it would be if you do tend to be affected by your period, this is a good time to deload. This is a good time to deload because increases in your progesterone levels can lead to higher body temperature as well as reduce carbohydrate availability and increased fatigue, which means that working out is going to feel harder because you're just going to feel more tired. You also are likely going to have a harder time recovering from your workouts during this time, and it also becomes really, really important for you to continue to hydrate. Hydration levels are really important here because with the higher body temperature, you're probably going to be sweating more. So all of that combined can lead you to feeling like crap, and I feel like crap during my luteal phase. So that's usually a time that I am going to deload and maybe scale back a little bit.
(19:20)
And what I'll do often if I am in a power lifting block when I enter my luteal phase, I don't feel safe to do any really heavy lifts. I'm not really going to be trying to lift anything above 80% of my one rep max. So even if I am in an intensification block or a peaking block for power lifting, if I'm really feeling the effects of my luteal phase, I will just drop the weight down to more of an accumulation range of weight. So I'll be doing something between 60% and 75% of my one rep max, and I'll just do more reps because it's just safer. It feels safer, and you also lose a little bit of coordination during this time too. You might find that when you are in your luteal phase, when you're PMSing, you're more clutsy, you might be more clumsy, you knock things over, you drop things more.
(20:20)
Well, when it comes to your workouts, especially when it comes to something that is really demanding neuromuscularly like power lifting, heavy lifting or Olympic lifts, if you're not fully connected to your body or if you've got a little bit of coordination issues, that could very easily lead to injury. So if you're feeling really fucked up due to PMSing, this would be a good time for you to deload back, maybe focus on more muscle building or accumulation level lifts, or you could just take a full break from lifting or whatever high intensity activity you do, and instead just do some steady state cardio. Again, you could bump it back to just being moderate level resistance training. Doing some yoga and mobility work is also a good option for this time period, and it will probably make you feel better too, doing some breathing exercises or just going for walks.
(21:17)
These are all good options if you're feeling really fucked up during your luteal phase. And then once you hit your period, once day one of your period starts, then you can go back to progressively ramping up your workouts. So if you are affected by your periods, this is a great way for you to think about changing up your workouts. As you go through your 28 day cycle, what you can probably do is think of a three week block progressively gradually increasing the intensity of your workout sessions basically until you hit your luteal face or your PMSing in usually week three, right? Day 17 to 28. Well, I guess week four, that would be week four. So you could do three weeks on, and then week four would be a deload for you because you know you're going to be ramping up to being on your period that week deload, and then restart in day one.
(22:18)
And again, gradually increase progressively week one through three, deload, week four, rinse and repeat. So that's a great option to train around your period. Now, I do have to say for a lot of women, your period may not actually be that consistent. In theory, yeah, sure should be getting my period every four weeks, but for very different reasons. You might get one every three weeks, maybe every six weeks, maybe every eight weeks. If you are experiencing perimenopause, you might have months without your period. You may go three, four, or 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 months right before you have a period again. So this is not like a surefire thing, it's not a one size fits all, but it does give you something to think about in terms of, again, I want to encourage you to listen to your body if you feel like your period is affecting you.
(23:16)
Just know that there is some very real science behind how your hormonal cycle is affecting you, and I want you to feel empowered to make some choices about how you might modify or choose in the moment how to modify your workout program. There's nothing wrong with just getting on a regular bro program like a bro split five days a week, and men's programs typically have a pretty linear progression if it's designed for a man's body. This doesn't always work for a woman's body because we may need to deload every four weeks, and not every program offers a deload every four weeks, but you should feel empowered to choose that for yourself and deload as necessary. The studies don't show that you're actually going to, performance is going to suffer. It's more that you will suffer, you will suffer, but your performance might not necessarily suffer. So if you are signed up for a competition, don't worry if you are on your period or if you're up PM sing because you can still perform well, you'll just feel like shit, and you might have a hard time recovering. So these are things to think about, right? As a woman or someone who has a female body, I want to empower you to listen to your body, know your body, and you can use this information to make the best decision for yourself when it comes to training around your hormonal cycle.
(24:49)
Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I hope that you found the information in this podcast episode helpful, and let me know if you have any questions. If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave your questions or comments in the comments below. Again, make sure that you have liked this video, if you found it helpful, and that you've subscribed to the channel so that you always get the latest episodes and videos. If you're listening to this podcast, thank you so much. Make sure that you follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered to your device. I drop new episodes on Mondays and Thursdays, and if you check out my YouTube channel, I also drop smaller videos throughout the week. You could also join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, doing my workouts on Tuesdays and Fridays. Just go to Twitch.tv/Jaydigains and hit follow. Thank you so much again for joining me. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, take care.
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