Movement, Metabolism & the Menstrual Cycle
by Dr Peta Wright
The four different hormonal phases of the menstrual cycle mean that our physiology is so different from the start of our cycle to just before our period that women are almost different people.
Personal Trainer James Smith talks about clients who make PBs and lift their heaviest weights just prior to ovulation where oestrogen and testosterone peak and then who may find performing the same task more difficult in the late luteal phase or PMS time just before the period. This often makes women feel demoralised and less than, but if they only understood the reasons behind these physical changes, they would have the power to train smarter and get the best out of their body during each phase without feeling like there is something wrong with them – because its just biology.
The other area that women constantly struggle with is wondering why they can’t stick to healthy eating as well in the second half of their cycle. Did you know that our basal metabolic rate goes up in the luteal phase so that we need more calories? This is because of the way progesterone increases body temperature by half a degree. This is often why women on a diet feel like failures when their cravings get the better of them in their PMS week. But if we realised that our bodies needed more nourishment and calories at that time – we could add in some more healthy snacks and then not feel like a failure when we cave in and eat the whole bag of chips.
If women could take a deep dive into their biology and realise what makes us tick, perhaps we would stop fighting our natural processes so much and being at war with out bodies. The simple reality is that shredded Instagram models with very low body fat are not the way Women are built. We simply need some fat because our bodies are meant to be able to sustain a pregnancy one day and that takes a lot of energy. That’s why attempts to lose every last inch are so hard. That’s why your boyfriend can eat more and train for less time and still lose weight and women struggle.
Its because we are supposed to have some fat on our body. If you do manage to train so hard and under-eat that you do lose that fat – your body will generally protect you by switching off your reproductive hormones so that pregnancy is impossible. That doesn’t just mean that you lose your period. It means you lose the hormones that help to make you healthy and happy. You lose your oestrogen which is actually anabolic and helps to build muscle and bone. You lose testosterone which helps along side oestrogen to make you almost super-human at ovulation and achieve those PBs in the gym. Not to mention the effect that low testosterone will have on your libido. And you lose progesterone which also helps with bone growth and has a calming effect on mood.
There are so many benefits to the hormones our bodies make throughout the menstrual cycle that go way beyond reproduction, but our biology is governed by some extent by a primal cave-woman desire to protect our bodies so that harboring life is possible one day. Even if that isn’t on your personal radar, we can’t escape our physiology.
So that’s why I say, lets embrace our physiology. Let’s embrace all the incredible parts of us that make us the strong, amazing women we are. We are not linear. Our hormones are not linear. But that doesn’t make us inferior. That makes us unique. If we can finally learn that women are not simply small men and start to mould the world around us to fit our biology for once rather than trying to pour ourselves into the moulds the linear world has made for us, women could be powerful beyond measure. If we learn to listen to what our bodies need, and be kind to ourselves, we will be honouring that innate, ancient wisdom our bodies have held all along.
