Syncing Your Workouts to Your Menstrual Cycle (Episode 335)

Full Transcript: Episode 335

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the fertility awareness method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys — I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I manage to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health, and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

In today’s episode, we are talking about fitness, exercise, and your menstrual cycle — specifically, how to optimize your exercise routine and habits and really cater that to your menstrual cycle. It’s a topic that hasn’t come up on the podcast in 300-plus episodes, and I really enjoyed this conversation. It shows us that there’s so much more we can learn about our menstrual cycles and really work with them. Some of what we talk about is pretty intuitive for many of us — it makes sense that maybe when you have your period, it shouldn’t be the most intense day of your workout, and it makes sense that when you have more energy around ovulation, in the pre-ovulatory phase, that might be when it’s good to really push it. But today’s episode really quantifies that and talks about it in a lot more depth than perhaps you have before, and really makes a case for working your routine around your cycle — not so that you’re married to it and have to do everything in a rigidly structured way, but so that you can be encouraging to yourself all cycle long. I think my biggest takeaway was not looking at your exercise on a day-to-day basis, but looking at your progress and overall goals on a cyclical basis. So with that said, let’s jump into today’s episode with Jenni Hulburt.

I’m excited to be here today with Jenni Hulburt. She is the founder of WILD Wellness, a holistic fitness specialist and natural health advocate who helps women live and sweat in sync with nature. Love that. She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in exercise science and sports psychology, and is a top-ranked wellness advocate with doTERRA essential oils. The WILD Wellness podcast, programs, and products are for women mindfully exploring holistic health and seeking to embody what nature has always modeled — it’s not a sprint, but a cycle. Love it. So, as you’ve already gathered, in today’s episode we are going to be talking about the cycle and how we can move and exercise with our cycle in mind. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Jenni.

Jenni Hulburt: Thank you so much, Lisa, and so happy to be here with everyone listening.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. You had reached out to me and shared that you wanted to talk about fitness and how it relates to the cycle. Although I’m always talking about the cycle, that specifically hasn’t been addressed on the podcast, so I was really excited to get into it with you. Before we do, I’m curious — not everybody emails me and says, “I want to talk about fitness and how it relates to the menstrual cycle.” So how did you get into this? How did you get into your field, and how did you end up with a focus on the menstrual cycle as it relates to fitness?

Jenni Hulburt: Back when I was deciding what I wanted to do for my work, as I was heading into college, I knew I wanted to help people with their health, but I first actually started on a pre-med track. Then, within that first year, I narrowed down and realized I wanted to shift gears — still help people with their health and wellness, but more so with fitness. So my bachelor’s degree is in exercise science, my master’s is in sports psychology, as you heard, and I became a personal trainer. You would think I had a lot of this background and knew what I was doing, right? But I actually never really learned what I’m going to be sharing with you today, which is how to work with our cyclical bodies. Instead, I was just into that mainstream message, that linear training model. I mean, so many good things I learned in my education, of course, but this important piece really came to me through my own experience, because since I didn’t know how to work with my cyclical body — as I trained as a runner, strength trained, and did a bit of biking and swimming, a wide variety of things I enjoyed, but at that time I was primarily running, and I loved the challenge of long runs, getting into ultra distances, and the adrenaline high you get from working out — I ended up really overtraining and overdoing it, probably in conjunction with a lot of other things going on in my life: different stressors, moves, changes. On top of all the training I was doing, I found at one point that I was really exhausted, and it wasn’t the normal fatigue you get over after a long run or a weekend of climbing mountains. It was something that kept dragging on. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I was noticing more pain with my menstrual cycle and different symptoms I hadn’t noticed before. I had this sense that something was really off, that something had shifted over the course of time. Looking back, it was probably many years — it wasn’t just one moment where it switched — but I had to learn a different way. I had to slow down and figure out how to do it healthier instead of harder. That’s really what led me to understanding more about our menstrual cycle and how it affects the way we work out and the way our body feels throughout the month, and so many other things, which I know you all learn from Lisa — learning how to live more in conjunction with everything in our cycle so that we’re not sacrificing our well-being along the way. So that’s how I came to this, and yes, my mantra is now: it’s not a sprint, it’s a cycle, and helping women understand how to do that with movement.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s awesome. I love that you came to this through experience and intuition — I don’t love that you had to burn yourself out to have that experience, but it’s a common story. One of the things I mean, I haven’t talked a lot about fitness on the show per se, but it comes up in a lot of my client work, so I’m talking about fitness and exercise in different ways when I’m working with women. The reason for that, just to give a window into what I see, is that I teach women how to chart their menstrual cycles for birth control, for conception, and for optimal health — that’s the sound bite. So we’re looking at the cycle; the cycle is the center of the client sessions. When I’m with a client, we’re looking at what’s happening before ovulation and after ovulation, and one of the trends that I’ve seen — I’m curious to hear your perspective on this too — is that this is a male world. The fitness world is designed around the male kind of cycle, and males don’t have a monthly cycle, they have more of a daily cycle. So the whole fitness world is basically based on the idea that you’re the same every day, so you’re going to do the same thing every day. It’s about what you did that day — how much did you lift, how much did you run, what was your time — and this idea that if you work it every day, eventually you should see improvement based on that daily approach. Obviously, as women, we have a monthly cycle, so coming from a daily approach is going to be problematic in a number of ways. I see that women who go hard every single day just drive up their cortisol and drive down their progesterone — it really negatively impacts the luteal phase. Our bodies aren’t designed that way. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Jenni Hulburt: Totally — you’re describing me years ago, before I understood this, because that’s how I did it. It’s so interesting, because I was just talking today on a training about how to work out with adrenal issues, and one piece of that was sharing that we don’t have to always end a workout feeling exhausted, or feeling that “good sore” that we might describe as having done something. If you’re a little sore, that’s fine, but just because you’re not sore doesn’t mean you didn’t do an effective workout. What you’re describing is exactly what I started to notice after I learned more about the menstrual cycle and my own cyclical patterns. I thought about fitness culture and realized what I’d been taught, and what I see, is a linear approach — it’s not cyclical. It goes from a lower point and you make incremental changes going up in a linear fashion, and it doesn’t take those cycles into consideration. That’s one of the biggest mistakes women especially can make in a training plan — following a linear pattern that was designed well for a man’s body and hormones, but not for ours. So that “go hard, more is better” intensity mentality isn’t always right, but it’s also not about going easy all the time or doing less. Overall, it’s about the ebb and the flow — you’ll end up doing less overall, but you’ll be more effective, because you’re doing the things that are right for you at the right times. It’s more about timing and being effective at the right time than doing it whenever. That cyclical pattern is so important, because we’re different from men, and we need something different. I remember thinking back to certain times of the month when I would feel really frustrated with myself and confused. After I’d gone through those bumps with adrenal issues and was a couple of years later feeling better but still sorting things out, I remember thinking that at certain times of the month I would start to second-guess myself — like, am I dipping back into adrenal issues again? Because I’d feel lethargic, not like myself, just for that period of time. Now I understand it was probably the luteal phase, every time. As I started to chart and track and figure it all out, it came together, but so many women think about those times they’re feeling that way and tell themselves different stories — that they’re out of shape, or not doing the right thing, or what they’re doing isn’t working. The biggest thing to take away is that your body is so individual, and if you’re used to tracking and charting your cycle, then charting your workouts alongside it is going to give you more information and a lot more peace with your workouts and what you’re doing.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Oh, I love this conversation. It made me think of something — I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who is really into fitness, in really great shape, and she was experiencing really heavy, really painful periods. We talked about that — I have a lot of episodes on that topic, so we don’t need to get into it today — but over the next couple of cycles since our conversation, it improved. Part of that conversation I wanted to bring up is that I feel like when you’re acknowledging that we have a cycle, acknowledging that we have hormones that fluctuate and a cyclical nature, and that this is related to our energy — both physical and emotional — it’s a fine line, because you don’t want to feel like you’re run by your hormones, since our culture tells us that makes us weaker than men. So it’s almost like we’re trying to prove we’re just as strong, even though biologically we are not — it’s a biological fact that men are, on average, faster and stronger. But we live in a culture that makes it seem like we’re the weaker sex because of that, so there’s this conflict between acknowledging those differences and leaning into them, and pushing through in a society that tells us to just push through. So, back to my friend — we were having this conversation, and I told her it’s okay to do a different kind of workout when you’re actively bleeding, because I felt like she had some guilt around not doing a heavy workout on day one of her period. I told her, you do realize you are actively bleeding right now — if you do a really heavy workout, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that your bleeding will be worse, just from a biological perspective. So that’s what came to mind, and I’d love for you to share your thoughts on that, and take us through the cycle — what should we be doing, and when?

Jenni Hulburt: I’m really glad you brought that up, because it reminds me of conversations I’ve had with women about workouts and the cycle. I feel like one of the questions that comes up so often is, “How do I feel better on that first day of my cycle, or during the menstrual phase, when I’m bleeding? How can exercise help me feel better?” — and more so, “What can I do to get rid of the pain so that I can exercise?” Those are the kinds of questions I sometimes get before someone understands that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to use exercise as the solution for that problem — that’s not necessarily its role. It’s also not just about getting rid of pain so we can exercise — maybe that discomfort is there to tell you something. I noticed that the discomfort I felt was definitely a message, something I needed to hear so I would do something different — instead of asking how I can get rid of the pain so I can go exercise, or whether exercise will help or worsen the cramps. For some women, some level of exercise does seem to alleviate cramps, and if that’s you, that’s great. I’ve never found that to be true for myself at this point, though that could change. On that first day, the couple of days before, and days one and two, those are the lowest of rest for me — I have no expectation of what I do physically. It’s usually a walk and some stretching in my lower body. Going on, if you want to talk about the different parts of the cycle and what would be best suited for each, we can go there. Starting with the menstrual phase, that time of bleeding, which is roughly days 28 through day five — or day one through day five, depending how you count — for me it actually starts that last day of the previous cycle. That’s for a 28-day cycle; mine is more like 33 days, and yours might be somewhere in that range, so whatever your cycle length is, it won’t be exactly those days, but it’s roughly the first six days. During the stage of bleeding, I actually call this the “base” phase too, because it’s like our starting point — as I share the other names of the other parts of the cycle, it’ll come together. This is a phase where we might need to move a lot more slowly. As Lisa was saying, and I like how you used the word “active” — we’re actively bleeding, there’s something going on that we need to acknowledge, and it’s a time to go inward and retreat. If you already know this to be true for yourself, or you’re feeling that nudge, embrace it. And if you’ve never heard this before and you’re wondering how you can work out with this, or feeling guilty for not working out on your period, consider this your permission slip: this is the time that’s going to be best for you to rest and recover, really hard. If you want to spend more time alone doing that, that’s quite normal and common — during this phase, it’s common to want to be more alone and not do things with other people. So don’t beat yourself up for not wanting to go to a group yoga class — even a restorative class — if you just don’t want to be with the group that day; do it at home, or take a virtual class instead. Things that are restorative, focused on the lower body, and more grounding movements close to the floor — pigeon pose, a low lunge to stretch the hips, lying on your back and gently twisting your legs side to side, stretching the back — do basically what feels good. For me, that’s often a walk, and I like to walk near water if I can — I feel drawn to that, and I noticed after doing it several times that I was always drawn to it during that time of the cycle, maybe because of the element of flow and water and how tied in that is with our cycle. You want to do something that supports you and doesn’t overstress the system, because what I’ve found is that when you overdo it during this phase, you tend to see the reflection of that in other phases — sometimes the next one is a little more difficult, and you’re not coming back with as much energy in the follicular phase, and then maybe in the ovulatory phase, you’re having late ovulation or not feeling as energized, when that’s usually your peak phase. So just notice what’s best for you.

Talking about the follicular phase, or “inner spring,” I also call this the “build” phase, because your hormones are building — especially estrogen, which is on the rise after your period and peaks toward the end of that phase, close to ovulation. This higher estrogen can actually make you a little more vulnerable to injuries — it’s associated with less muscle stiffness, so in other words, you might overstretch or overpull something, so be cautious with plyometric or bounding-type workouts, or CrossFit-type intervals — quick movements. That said, this is actually a great phase to do those things, because you’ll feel like you have a lot more energy, and shorter bursts of intervals will be a lot easier for you, and your pain threshold may be higher because of the rising estrogen. Your capacity to do harder efforts, and then recover from them, is going to be better. One more thing going on physically is that you’ll be able to use carbohydrates more efficiently in this phase — insulin sensitivity seems to be higher during the follicular phase, so exercise-wise that equates with higher-intensity cardio activities — sprints, intervals where your heart rate is beyond being able to hold a conversation, hill sprints, biking, swimming — anything fast-paced, maybe shorter intervals where you take a break after a minute or two.

Then, moving into the “inner summer,” or ovulatory phase — ovulation itself — I call this the “peak” phase. We went from base to build to peak, because certain hormones are peaking, and we have peak hormone levels corresponding with peak energy levels, so it’s a great time to take advantage of that. The follicular and ovulatory phases are really the more masculine-energy, “yang” phases of the cycle, whereas the luteal and menstrual phases are more yin. So if you enjoy exercising with other people, this would be a great phase to get out with others and do more group classes — you’re going to feel more energetic, more magnetic, more like doing outward things. Think of doing things that really challenge you — this is the best time to do it, and doing challenging things can give us great confidence, because when we match our ability to meet a challenge with the challenge itself, that’s when we get that confidence. But when we try to do something hard when we’re not able to meet the challenge physically, that’s not so good for our confidence — so don’t try to do those things in a phase where it’s not going to line up for you to perform at your best. If you have a race plan, this would be a great time, or something that’s more of a personal record — a harder effort that gives you some indication of improvement. In this phase, you might do more endurance-based activities — longer runs, longer hikes, longer bike rides, a longer class, or a higher-intensity yoga class — yoga isn’t always low-intensity; it can be a higher-intensity thing too.

Then the last phase before the menstrual phase again is the luteal phase, premenstrual — I also call this the “recovery” phase for good reason. This is often the most challenging phase, because we come careening off that high summer energy. Your hormone levels are going to begin to dip, and though progesterone will rise later, this up-and-down of hormones can throw us off energy-wise and make us feel a little more sluggish. You might be experiencing premenstrual symptoms — bloating, mood changes, breast tenderness — that could affect your ability or desire to move. This phase is a time to be careful, to moderate your exercise, to not overdo it or go too intense. Moderate, lower-intensity, maybe longer is better — so whereas you might go for a really long, intense hike before, in this phase you might do that hike but keep it more conversational. I also think of this phase as a time to focus on something specific in the body — maybe stability in the core or pelvic region, alignment work in pilates or yoga, or an injury you’ve been ignoring throughout the cycle. It has the sense of giving you a project, something to focus on that feels productive without needing to be about intensity. Just because you take the intensity down a little doesn’t mean you stop moving — you can do what your body is asking for, and know that you’re not going to lose fitness or strength; it takes much longer than a few easier days in the luteal phase to actually lose what you’ve gained. I think that’s a big fear sometimes — we have guilt around resting because of cultural messages, and we don’t want to lose what we’ve worked toward, but physiologically that’s probably not going to happen; you’d need a couple of weeks of complete inactivity to even start to see those declines. So in the luteal phase, taking a day to slow down and do something different — as Lisa was saying earlier with her friend’s story — it’s okay to do something different. As a runner, I’ve had the experience where if I wasn’t running, it didn’t feel like enough — it’s interesting how that mentality forms around things we really enjoy, and how it can affect how we feel about what we did. But it’s okay to mix it up, and this might be one of the best phases to do that, because it gives your body more versatility and a chance to recover. I find personally, as a runner, that if I do the same thing all the time, I have less ability to recover than if I’m cross-training and mixing it up — so this is a good time to cross-train.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That was really awesome — I took so many notes. I’m really loving this conversation; it’s so important. One thing that’s standing out to me — and it’s interesting, because I actually spoke on a business podcast today about organizing your work around the cycle, and the themes are very much the same. One of the things I see is similar to what you termed the “linear” way we look at fitness, because it’s based on the male model. It’s a daily thing, because men have a circadian rhythm — we all do — but they don’t have a monthly rhythm. So instead of looking at it day to day, or with the expectation that it’s always going up incrementally, if you give yourself permission to look at your fitness goals on a cyclical basis, you could see those improvements incrementally, just not daily. If you’re someone who tracks your times or your lifts or whatever goals you’re working toward, looking at that from a cycle basis instead of a day basis could be a huge shift for a lot of women. I feel like this really comes down to what you said about giving yourself a permission slip — like this whole conversation comes down to the fact that you actually have a cyclical nature, whether you like it or agree with it or not. If you’re living in a female body, you have a cyclical nature, and that means there are times when your body is in a better position to do certain exercises than others, and you can continue to do the same stuff every day to your own detriment, or not. So I feel like this is the fundamental part of it — you have a cyclical nature whether you like it or not, and you have the choice whether you’re going to work with it or against it. It’s not going to look the same for everybody — there’s no template — but if you acknowledge it and give yourself permission to rest when your body needs rest, overall you can actually be more effective.

Jenni Hulburt: Yeah, exactly. I like what you said about checking in from cycle to cycle too, because when we notice those patterns, the luteal phase might be a great time to do that — you’ve sort of come to full completion, the end of the cycle. Similar to what you talked about with cyclical-based business, that would be a great time of the cycle to check in — do a review, an inventory, how things have gone, what projects you’re wrapping up. It’s the same with workouts — how have things been going, how have you been feeling, look back at your tracking or your chart and see the patterns you’ve noticed. One of the things I like women to track in the women’s-specific workout training journal is how they felt, in a general way, giving it a simple number rating, so when you look back you can see, “okay, I’m seeing a lot of ones” — that’s pretty low, I haven’t been feeling good — or “I’m seeing a lot of threes, I’ve been feeling like a rock star.” It’s a quick assessment; there are other details you could include too, but it helps to give it a quick number so it’s easier to track. Like you were saying about the permission slip — I think if we knew this was our nature, and I know this because I understand it now and it’s fine, though I’m not saying I never struggle with wanting to go do something and not feeling up to it. I have to have those reckonings with my body too, like, “am I sure it’s the luteal phase,” even when I had something planned. But once you understand it, you understand it’s of your nature, who you are, and you can work with it or against it — and it’s so much better when you work with it. It’s a process and a practice of embracing the gifts in it too, because there are so many gifts in slowing down and allowing yourself to see things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Also, for what so many people come to you for, Lisa — fertility, optimizing hormones, having a better experience with their cycle — that’s something I’ve noticed within myself. Changing the way I move and exercise has changed my whole experience, the symptoms I’ve had, the pain, the bloating, the ups and downs. There are still things I’m working on and sorting out, and every cycle is different — for example, this last month or two, I was expecting to feel really energized during the ovulation phase but actually had more dips in energy than normal, and I also ovulated late. When you track, you can see those things and note what might have been going on in your life, what stressors were there, what you were doing for workouts, and whether that was the best thing or not. I still have days where I think a workout was the right thing to do, but then I’m depleted the rest of the day, and I could beat myself up over it, but at the time it felt like the right thing. I think I was just in one of those phases where it’s tricky to know at first — we’re all figuring this out, and our bodies are very complex, whether it’s a hormone shift I was sensitive to or whether I just overdid it and needed something different that day. All we can do is adjust from there, take note, and try something different next time. So it’s not always going to be consistent — what I described as optimal for exercise in each phase is very individual, and individual to your own cycle, because it can change month to month.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I think that’s such an important point, because one of the messages I try to share at every opportunity is that this is not about perfection. It’s not about a new version of perfection where now we know how to sync our cycle, so we’re going to do it perfectly — that’s not the purpose of this conversation. It’s similar to the concept in The Fifth Vital Sign, that your menstrual cycle is a vital sign. One of the things you talked about, Jenni, is how if you push it the same way every day, knowing what we’ve just gone over about our cyclical nature, you can screw yourself up by not listening. So this isn’t about perfection — it’s literally about entering into a conversation with your body and learning to listen. Your body doesn’t have a cell phone; it’s not going to text you, it can’t talk to you in words. Your body communicates through symptoms, signs, energy, sensations, and feelings, so this is an invitation to start listening — your body’s already talking, it’s just been a one-sided conversation until you start to listen.

Jenni Hulburt: Exactly, that’s really what this is about — there’s no template that says you need to do this exercise in this phase and that exercise in that phase.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: One of the things I wrote down that was really interesting is when you talked about how different hormonal changes can affect how your muscles respond — you mentioned that in the pre-ovulatory phase, when estrogen is going strong, we can have less muscle stiffness, meaning you have more capacity to do more things, which could influence the type of exercise you do. What I think is really fascinating about the way you took us through the cycle is that you can give yourself a general road map — you don’t have to be married to it like it’s a rule or a law — but you can use that general understanding and play with it. I could try more high-intensity interval training, do the things that are really challenging, during a time when I might actually handle it and feel good about it, and then organize a lot of different, less-intense activities around a cyclical nature rather than a balanced day. I’m not a huge fitness person, though I was pretty athletic growing up, so I feel like I understand enough to see that it would be logical from a linear perspective to try to incorporate certain aspects of a workout into every session, or every week, but with your cycle you could lock yourself out of that and instead sort out what makes sense based on where you are. There’s one thing I really want to say — walking is exercise. I say that because when I was in high school playing basketball and volleyball, our coach would run us into the ground in practice, and I remember our coach lovingly forcing us to do cross-country, where you’d be completely gassed. For the longest time, I didn’t think that if I wasn’t drenched, if I wasn’t completely spent, it counted as exercise — walking felt like taking a break, not like exercise. But I did get older, had some babies, and I’m still in decent shape, and walking is exercise — there are times I go for a long walk and I’m actually feeling it. This might sound silly to some people, but it’s really important for others, especially if you have a really intense workout schedule — say, CrossFit six times a week — and someone suggests you walk for several days of your cycle, you might think, “what are you even talking about?” So I’d love for you to share your perspective on that.

Jenni Hulburt: That makes me think of a couple of things — one is that the words “workout” and “exercise” can be loaded with a lot of meaning, which is why I often like to say “moving your body” instead, because it’s more general and doesn’t carry that same weight for people. Exercise, workout, and fitness can be triggering words, so it’s worth noticing your own language and thoughts about what counts as exercise or a workout, and what that means for your body. If you’re doing CrossFit consistently, or you’re an endurance runner doing ultra marathons all the time, and I’m suggesting that in the luteal phase you might need to slow down, or on the first day or two of your cycle you might do nothing, that might not fit with your training plan if you have a long run scheduled. This is all something I’ve had to navigate and sort out — how do we work with that? It comes down to having a plan, but not falling in love with the plan, because your body will need you to adjust in other parts of the cycle. It’s important to have a plan if you’re training for something, so you’re making healthy, incremental progressions rather than random leaps that lead to injury, but you also need to take into consideration what part of the cycle you’re in. It can’t just be a linear plan you downloaded online for couch-to-5K or training for a half marathon — that’s not going to be exactly right for you, though you could adjust it if you know how to adapt it to your own cycle. You’re still going to have to pay attention and listen to what’s going on with your body. If the idea of going from high-intensity intervals or CrossFit to just walking during the luteal phase sounds really foreign, it could instead be doing lower, slower weights that day, or half the workout instead of the whole thing, or just doing the warm-up and deciding from there how you’re feeling. I do that a lot, especially when I’m not sure where I’m at — if I’m going for a run, I’ll run for ten or fifteen minutes, and by then I usually have a good idea of where I’m at, and I’ll either go for the hill sprints I planned or shift gears to something more moderate. If you can adjust depending on where you’re at, that’s ideal, though sometimes location or circumstances make that harder — but even in a group class, you can sit one out and know that’s the right thing for your body. It would be amazing if the whole fitness world embraced this, but ultimately, the important thing is that you understand your body and know what’s best for you, and no one else is judging you the way you might imagine — we make up stories about what people might be thinking when we take a break, but ultimately, once you know how good it makes your body feel to work this way, that’s what matters.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I had a thought too — when you look at things from a cyclical nature, if the voice in your head is telling you that you’re lazy or not good enough, one of the ways to shut that down is to remember that summer is always coming back. Fall comes, winter comes, but it’s followed by spring and summer, so you don’t have to worry when you’re looking at this from a cyclical perspective, because the spring and summer energy is always coming back around. I think that can help stop those negative thoughts, because you’re reminding yourself that this is okay — this is the time when rest is okay, and you’ll be back in that high-intensity phase again. There are so many more questions I could ask, but at some point I’ll have to let you go — I did want to get your thoughts on weight loss, because a lot of women work out pretty hard for the purpose of losing weight, and we live in a culture that treats it as a math equation — reduce caloric intake and exercise until we’ve exhausted ourselves. That might be a recipe for weight loss, but it’s not necessarily a recipe for health. One of the challenges with trying to optimize your cycle while balancing your workouts, particularly at an athlete level — and I often tell clients that working out intensely four or five times a week is athlete level, whether or not you identify as an athlete — is that not all women realize that requires the caloric equivalent of an additional meal. A lot of women also end up doing the same type of exercise every day, the linear model we’ve talked about, and end up gaining weight instead of losing it. I’m sure you have thoughts on that, and this seems like a nice place to end, since I know some listeners are wondering about it too.

Jenni Hulburt: It’s more involved than just calories in and calories out — our hormones have such an effect. I’m thinking back to when I started having adrenal issues, and I noticed weight gain in certain areas, especially my hips and lower abdomen, even though I was working out the same and eating the same. It turned out my cortisol was consistently very high, I was pumping out adrenaline all the time, and over time that shifted to low cortisol, but my hormones were off either way. So if you’re in that place wondering where the balance is for you when weight loss is your goal, my message is that you do want to move your body — not just for weight loss, but for health, as part of a healthy lifestyle — and it’s fine to want a body transformation goal and to lose weight, with movement supporting that. But if the message you’ve been hearing is that you need to do high intensity, or a certain number of days, or a certain number of hours, that’s too general to be good advice for you specifically. I’d really encourage you to track your workouts alongside your cycle — track the things you’ve learned to track through working with Lisa, and what I’ve shared a bit of here too, and I can give more on tracking workouts specifically. But at least track what you’re doing and how you’re feeling, and start to notice the patterns, because as you align more with your cycle in terms of your workouts, you’re going to see optimal health, optimal metabolism, optimal weight — though I’m not saying that’s the only piece, since there’s nutrition, stress, and sleep involved too. But if you’re going for alignment with yourself, rather than reaching a certain goal in a certain way, that’s where you’re going to find the most success.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: It’s interesting, because this is basically the exact opposite of everything the media tells us about weight loss, and if you follow certain male fitness influencers, this is not what they’re saying at all. So this is such a great reminder about the importance of listening to your body, and it’s ironic, because it means there’s actually an easier, more enjoyable way of achieving your goals that’s more aligned with your actual nature.

Jenni Hulburt: Yeah, and even though it can feel like less work overall throughout the cycle, for some people it’s still doing a similar workout, just differently, or for less time, or lifting in a different way — so it’s not necessarily less work, it’s organizing the work differently relative to where you are in your cycle rather than relative to someone else. You could actually end up working less in some ways, but in other ways working more — you might end up doing more days of movement, because instead of being limited to only high-intensity workouts, you might do a variety of different movements, so you’re actually able to move on more days overall.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s interesting, I see what you’re saying — that’s true. So, to bring it full circle, it sounds like if you had a weight loss goal or a fitness goal, working with the cycle instead of resisting it could give you much better results, much better mental health, much better periods — you’d have that balance between resting, recovering, and working hard, because you’d know when to really push yourself. It sounds almost too good to be true, but it seems like when you resist your body’s nature, you end up disrupting your hormones and your cycle — your fifth vital sign is essentially telling you to stop, and when all these symptoms crop up, it’s your body saying no, and making things more difficult. I really love this, Jenni, and I think it would be amazing if this was just how we exercised, how we moved our bodies, instead of the linear model.

Jenni Hulburt: Yes — the one thing I think all women need to know.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, this has been so much fun. Let me know if there’s anything else, any last words you want to end on, any messages for the audience, and let us know where listeners can go to learn more about you, your podcast, and the work you do with women.

Jenni Hulburt: I’d say what I’ve said maybe a couple of times, but if you were multitasking, come back and hear it again — it’s not a sprint, it’s a cycle, and work with your body instead of against it. Thank you, Lisa, for the great conversation, and thank you to everyone listening — it’s been really fun sharing this with you. If you want to learn more, go to jennihulburt.com, where you’ll see a lot of free resources — one is a training on how to challenge yourself without feeling depleted, and one is a quiz that will tell you your natural workout style according to the seasons we talked about, since we all have an inclination toward one of those. Once you know how to optimize with your natural style, you can also figure out how to balance it out with the ones that are more difficult for you. You can go to jennihulburt.com/wild to go directly to those — that’s Jenni with an “i,” H-U-L-B-U-R-T.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Awesome, and you have a podcast as well?

Jenni Hulburt: Yes, the WILD Wellness podcast is where you can come and listen.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Awesome, so we will have all the links on the show notes page. Thank you again, Jenni — this conversation was so great.

Jenni Hulburt: Thank you so much.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/335.

Well, what can I say — that was such a fun and insightful conversation. I really loved jumping into these topics, and I think it’s so important that we look at our cycles. After you listen to this episode, it makes perfect sense that you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself if, at certain times of your cycle, you aren’t performing at the same level as you are at others. Once you break the cycle down and understand the physiological and energetic differences throughout the month, it makes perfect sense. I think it’s interesting that this goes hand in hand with a recent episode, because it’s really about giving yourself a break — instead of being so hard on yourself for not being productive or energetic every single day, in the same way, for basically not being a man, we can appreciate our cyclical nature and start to work with it, giving ourselves grace at the times of our cycle when we don’t feel as energetic or productive, whether that’s in exercise or other areas of life. I think it just makes life a lot easier in a lot of different respects, and really, I feel like the biggest thing is that it can help us stop being so critical of ourselves and acknowledge our actual cyclical nature. That doesn’t mean for one week out of the month you’re not going to do anything at all — it just means we can be more reasonable, and more intentional, about whatever aspect of life we’re looking at, whether that’s fitness, work, productivity, or anything else. So I hope you got something out of today’s episode — I know I did, and if you’re big into exercise and fitness, I’m sure you did too. If you know anybody who would benefit from today’s episode, please share it, and you’ll find the link over at fertilityfriday.com/335. Thank you for tuning in to today’s show — I hope you have a wonderful week or weekend, whenever you’re listening, and of course, as always, until next time: be well, and happy charting.