Cycle Syncing Your Exercise Routine (Episode 557)

Full Transcript: Episode 557

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack:

This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 557.

In today’s FAM Research Series episode, I am diving into an interesting question. And it gets into the topic of cycle syncing and whether or not we should be tailoring our exercise habits and routines based on our cycle. And of course, this is part of a broader question of how much should we be tailoring our lives around our cycle. And so we’re going to get into that and more in today’s episode.

So I always say the title of these studies leaves something to be desired, so I’m going to skip the title. But if you’re wanting to dive into the study that we are going into today, you can head over to fertilityfriday.com/557 and the links will be there to the abstract and all the details. You’ll find the study that we’re going into — it’s a really interesting one. It was specifically examining this question of how exercise can be impacted by the cycle.

And the question that they were asking is if you tailor your exercise routine based on the cycle, instead of just tailoring it based on — you know, we have four weeks and week one we’re doing this, week two we’re doing this. So they took those two different options. So one based on the cycle and one just a regular kind of four-week training program. And they determined if it had an impact on the body composition itself. So if the women were essentially doing the same exercises but tailoring it around the cycle, if it had any impact on the body composition of these women. So they were looking at what they termed fat-free mass, which obviously is building muscle, and they wanted to see if tailoring it had an impact. So we’re going to go through the results. I think they’re quite eye-opening, and of course I’ll share some of my interpretations of what I think the research could potentially mean, what it can mean for us when we’re trying to sort out all of this stuff.

So I wanted to start with a quick comment on the recent surge of interest in this concept of cycle syncing. And I certainly have my own biases and my perspectives on it. I mean, first and foremost, I think it’s wonderful that so many women are now becoming aware of their cycle and how we should really be considering this whole point of being cyclical beings. We should really be taking that into consideration in all areas of our life, and also just to give us the permission to do so. So I think there’s a whole lot of positive in recognizing that our bodies are different to male bodies, in recognizing that our world is certainly structured for the man. And when it comes to the way that we structure our daily routines and our weekly routines, that is typically based on this concept that we are coming at each day with the same energy, the same drive, and the same kind of emotional makeup. But if we acknowledge that as women — when we are of reproductive age and when we’re cycling — we actually have a different design. Our bodies are designed in a different way. We don’t necessarily have the same energy exactly every single day. We don’t necessarily have the same emotional basis and capacity every single day. And this isn’t necessarily a negative. I think sometimes when you hear things like that, it could say, oh well, she’s saying that I’m weaker around my period, or I’m ruled by my hormones, or this is a really negative thing. Whether we want to define it as positive, negative, or neutral, it’s still happening. So I think that it’s not about looking down at this as some sort of flaw, but I think that if we acknowledge that it’s real — there really is the cycle, and there really is a shift in our energy and typically our kind of emotional affect throughout the cycle — it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s such a big dip. It doesn’t mean that you can’t function during those phases or anything like that. I don’t think that it necessarily means that it’s such a drastic difference. But when you start charting your cycles and you start paying attention not only to what’s happening with your cervical fluid and your basal body temperature and your cervical position — when you go past that and look at your energy, your emotions, your mood, even the quality of your sleep or a variety of other factors — I think that we would be lying to ourselves if we didn’t acknowledge that these things do shift and change based on the cycle. And the longer you chart your cycles, the longer you start to see that this is real.

And really and truly, it’s not about whether or not you can do things at different times of your cycle — you could do whatever you want. I always give the example of if you want to run a marathon when you’re bleeding, like you can do it. There was a woman — I don’t remember her name off the top of my head — but there was a whole news article because she decided to free bleed and she’s running this marathon and blood’s coming down her legs. Like, you could do it. Obviously she did. But do you want to? Is that optimal? Is that the best use of your time and energy? And is it possible that if we just acknowledge that we’re cyclical beings and organize — whether it’s our exercise routine, our work schedule, even just the pattern of which we do things in our lives — if we were to stack certain activities when we know we typically feel the best, we have the most energy, when we’re feeling the most outgoing, and we stack other types of activities when maybe we feel more inward, less outgoing — maybe more administrative tasks, things that don’t require that same degree of outward energy — I don’t know, but I think you understand what I’m saying here.

So if you were just to acknowledge that there’s a difference in energy and try to organize things around that, then what would that be like? Because the way I look at it, let’s say you’re in a boat and it’s either you’re going to go with the current so that you can get there faster, or you’re going to go against the current, so you have to work twice as hard when you’re not necessarily feeling your best to get the same results. So what I have found in my clients, and what we’ll be talking about with the research, is that when you just go with the flow and you allow these natural patterns of your cycle — when you know that you typically need a couple of days of downtime leading up to your period or on your period itself, allowing yourself to have that, and then maybe stacking on some extra when you’re actually in that zone when your energy is naturally higher — there’s a whole lot of great that can come from that. And you’re going with the flow instead of going against the current.

What can happen, what can be the outcome for us as women, is we still get there. You still get the result. It’s just that it wasn’t as hard to get the result. So when we move with our cycles, we move with our bodies. It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t get there if we didn’t do it, but it’s just easier. You’re just going with the flow. And yes, I’m using the word flow intentionally as a pun to make my point.

So let’s go into what the study has to say. So as I mentioned, these researchers were looking at how organizing the training around the cycle — so scheduling week one based on that week of ovulation, and then scheduling that rest period, doing different activities, scheduling that to coincide with the menstrual phase. They had the same training schedule, but one group did it based on the cycle and the other group it was just week one, week two, week three, week four.

So let’s talk a little bit about what these researchers found. To give you a little bit more background, it was a fairly small study. And when I look at the criteria for how they selected participants, it kind of makes sense. They were looking for women with regular menstrual cycles who already were resistance training. You could say athletes, but they didn’t specify that. These were women who already were regularly engaging in resistance training and who did have regular menstrual cycles. They did screen out women who use restrictive diet practices, and obviously women whose cycles were either missing or potentially irregular. So they were looking for a very specific group of women so that they could really jump into these targeted exercises and activities, and use advanced scanning to measure the body composition and muscle mass — to really identify whether or not training in these two different ways had an impact on how these women were building muscle.

So this really satisfied my nerd because this is such an interesting question. And this is who they used. They had 14 women at the outset of the study, and the results were ultimately based on 10 women who actually completed all the requirements of the study — five in the group doing just the regular training session where it was week one, week two, week three, four, regardless of where they were in their cycle, and the second group who specifically geared their training to their cycle. That was the only difference.

The researchers also excluded women who had a history of using steroids, and of course that is to keep an even playing field, making sure that there are none of these other potential factors that could confound the results. Similar to other studies that I’ve mentioned, in order to identify that ovulatory phase, they did test urinary metabolites, so they were testing to see when the LH surge was happening so that they could identify around when that ovulatory phase was going to be. And they also were tracking when these women would get their periods. So they were doing their best to identify which phase of the cycle these women were in.

Now, one thing that I wanted to mention — and this is interesting because it’s in line with the protein recommendations that Lily and I make in Real Food for Fertility — for the purposes of this study, they wanted to ensure that these participants, because they’re specifically looking at exercise and building muscle mass, were consuming a sufficient amount of food. They specified how much protein intake they needed per day, as well as dietary fat and carbohydrates, so that these women were not going to be inadvertently in an energy deficit. And in order to make sure that this took place, they actually hired a sports nutritionist who has experience in resistance training to work with the participants to ensure that this was happening.

I wanted to put that out there because that is important. One of the things I talk about quite a bit is that many of my clients — women who I work with, maybe even yourself if you are fairly active — one of the things that I think is very common for women not to do is eat enough. We’re often exercising so that we can tone our bodies, get lean, maybe lose some weight. And as a result, it doesn’t occur to most of us that when we increase our activity level, we actually need to increase our food consumption very intentionally to ensure that we’re not undereating.

So the researchers prescribed the participants to consume two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, and the dietary fat intake that was suggested and recommended was one gram of fat per kilogram of body weight per day. And if you’re not in metric, you can do that conversion to determine how much that is for you. But for most of my clients, when we go through and talk about what that would look like for the average woman, it’s typically significantly higher than what the average woman is actually getting.

They mentioned that the research-recommended amount is about 1.7 grams per kilogram of body weight per day of protein, and they specifically stated that they went to two grams to ensure that there weren’t any inadvertent deficits. So there’s a lot of conversation and topic about how much protein would be required to maintain optimal hormone balance and menstrual cycle health. It is worth noting that they not only specified it but went to the next step of having a sports nutritionist work with these women to ensure that this was taking place.

So that is useful — because then in this study, these women maintained their menstrual cycles and their ovulatory cycles. They weren’t specifically testing for the hormones, of course. All of this data would always be really useful if we could do absolutely everything. But they were testing for something specific. And if you have questions about protein recommendations, or if that sounds like a lot to you, I highly recommend that you grab a copy of Real Food for Fertility and read those chapters where we go through the protein and fat recommendations, because we are citing the research and data and you can go straight to the studies.

Also note that when you have an athletic population, those recommendations are going to be higher than for the average woman. And many women do work out and exercise at quite a high level — a level that I would identify as athlete level. If you’re working out four to five times a week, lifting three to four times a week, walking the dog every single day on top of that, going to spin class or whatever — you may not identify as an athlete, but your activity level would put you, I would argue, into that category.

So the study period took place over about eight weeks, and they had their sessions divided into two sets of four-week interventions. As I mentioned, they had these sessions structured — in one group, week one, week two, and in the other group, they just designed it around their cycles. But they were doing the same things. The break and recovery period for one group coincided more specifically with their periods and that menstrual phase.

So if I take a quick comment from what the researchers said in the study: “The premenstrual period was matched to the recovery phase, considering that reduced physical performance, impaired sleep, recovery, cramps, and anxiety have been reported during this portion of the cycle.” So they’re just kind of saying, look, this is what the research says that this portion of the cycle is associated with these challenges, so we’re going to give these women a break at that time.

What the researchers did — as I mentioned — is they actually scanned the participants using what they called a DXA scan. Suffice it to say they took these women, they scanned their bodies, they looked at where they were starting from so they could determine their body mass composition, and then after eight weeks of this training routine, they scanned the body composition again of both groups and then compared them.

And what they found — this is the part that I find pretty fascinating — is that obviously both groups of these women were exercising. It wasn’t to say that one was exercising more than the other. They were doing the same activities. These activities were led by trainers. So these women were doing basically the same types of activities, the same recommended routine, just organized differently. And both groups did see an increase in fat-free mass. Both groups did see that. But the group that was doing their activities based on their cycle showed statistically significant improvements in two specific areas — the bench press and the countermovement jump.

So they describe in the study what the countermovement jump is — what they term CMJ — but essentially they were looking at different types of exercise and different types of muscle mass, and how their athletic performance improved. And they did find that the women in that group had these significant improvements in these two areas that reached statistical significance. So they were significantly better — and it’s so interesting, because they had only changed how they were organizing the workouts, not the workouts themselves.

So again, it’s not to say that the women who did not organize around their cycle didn’t experience gains — they still experienced significant improvements in their muscle mass. Obviously, if you’re exercising on a regular basis, you’re going to see some gains. But what was interesting was that there was this slightly higher gain for the women who were doing the same thing but just doing it based on their cycle. The way that the researchers characterized it, and their conclusion, was that there did appear to be a benefit for the menstrual cycle-tailored program on these two performance areas. And of course it’s limited by the small sample size, so more research is warranted. But really and truly, they had to conclude that there does appear to be this benefit.

So the way that I look at it when I was looking at this study — it doesn’t mean that there’s a right way or a wrong way to do it. This study doesn’t say that the other women didn’t have benefit as well. They’re just saying that the women who tailored it had slightly better gains in certain areas. What I think that we can take from it is that, again, going back to this world that we live in that’s highly male-dominated, that has us thinking that we have to do things the way that it has been modeled for us — if you’re doing an exercise routine, we tend to think, okay, I’m going to do this six-week routine, week one I’m going to do this — and we don’t even take into consideration our cycle or energy, even though we’re cyclical beings.

And I can’t tell you how many clients that I’ve worked with who don’t give themselves permission to take a day off when they’re bleeding. I mean, hey, if you’re bleeding from your vagina today, you have the right to take a day off. And so I think that what this study shows us is that if you were to organize your exercise around your cycle, and if you were to allow yourself either to do lower-impact activities or to just take a break when you’re bleeding or during some of those days leading up to your menstruation, in line with your natural inclination, your natural energy level, paying attention to how you actually feel — giving yourself that permission — this study shows us that you’re not losing anything. The women who were doing this based on their cycle didn’t lose out. They didn’t have less muscle mass development or anything like that. They actually had slightly higher. Which, again — what’s the explanation?

Now, one possible explanation — I didn’t see in the study a real explanation as to why they thought this was happening. So if I were to try to say, okay, what would my hypothesis be for why these women saw these gains, I would go back to what I was talking about earlier. I would suggest that maybe it’s possible that simply by aligning the heaviest workouts with when we typically have the most energy, those women were probably able to do a better output when it was time for them to do that type of work.

I can think of a non-exercise example that might be helpful. Right now, I’m recording a podcast episode, and I’m actually batching them — recording several of them at the same time. And it just so happens that I’m in a phase of my cycle where I feel like I have the energy to do this. So if you’re trying to force yourself to do a lot of athletic work during the five days leading up to your period — now I’ll speak for myself for a moment and say that during the days leading up to my period, I tend to be a little bit more tired, especially the day or two before. If there’s one day I could use more sleep and I tend to want to stay in bed a little bit longer and feel a little bit more like I want rest, it typically is that day or two before my period and the first day of my period. And I’ll often make that comment of, “Yeah, I feel really tired today, I could use more sleep” — and that’s typically when my period is showing up.

So, it doesn’t mean I couldn’t push through and do all this work during that time. Of course you could do anything you want. But it means that it’s going to take more effort to get it accomplished because I’m going against my natural inclination. And I’ve read lots of business books and personal development books that say go hard, go hard. But what this study shows us is that potentially, if we actually acknowledge our cycles and work with them instead of against them — back to that boat in the sea — if we go with the current versus against, we still get there either way. But we have to put in so much more effort if we’re going against the grain.

So my hypothesis would be that maybe these women in the study — because their exercise routine was tailored around their cycle, because they were allowed to rest when they naturally may want more rest, and they were allowed to work out when they naturally might just feel more energetic — maybe those workouts they were able to push themselves a little bit harder and get a little bit more done. And maybe it was just easier. And maybe that’s why they had some of those additional gains. I mean, what other possible explanation could there be? They were doing the same exercises, over the same period of time. So how is it possible that the only change — which was when they did the work — resulted in more gains? So definitely worth thinking about.

Like I said, this study fully satisfied my nerd for the week. It was a great study to dig into and read about. It was interesting for me to read about even the ways that they’re measuring the body mass, and how specific they were to identify whether or not modifying the schedule of exercise changes the actual muscle composition — how we’re putting on muscle. I thought that was a really, really interesting study.

So bottom line — both approaches did work. I would simply argue that one approach might be harder in the sense that you’re going against your natural inclinations, while the other approach may be easier because you’re going with the flow.

So I am going to wrap this episode here. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you can think of somebody who would benefit from hearing it, I would really appreciate it if you would share. The share link for today’s episode is fertilityfriday.com/557. If you’ve been enjoying the FAM Research Series, you can tune in to all of the research series episodes at fertilityfriday.com/research. We have quite a few episodes in this series now — well over 50 at this point — so lots to dig into. So with that said, I hope that you enjoy the rest of your week. And of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.