Barbell Shrugged - [Women’s Health] Reproductive Function, Birth Control and Pharmaceutical Steroid Hormones w/Viktoria Felkar, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #746

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Victoria Felkar is a doctoral candidate conducting interdisciplinary research on women’s health, reproductive function, and pharmaceutical steroid hormones. With a unique background in both the hard sciences and humanities, her work offers a novel and critical perspective into the use of drugs for health and performance purposes within the female athlete population. Victoria’s research has achieved international awards and accolades within both academia and industry. Beyond academia, Victoria is an internationally respected educator and consultant within the fitness, bodybuilding and strength sector. Her unique multidisciplinary background has provided the perfect platform for pioneering work in athlete-centered coaching methods, integrated health-performance methods, and female athlete health. For the past 13 years, she has worked with a wide range of individuals and organizations, including top-level athletes and competitors, special populations, health professionals and strength coaches, and has lectured at events worldwide. Victoria’s professional experience and research are synergistic, providing her with the opportunity to continue to bridge the gap between academia and the industry. Her passion is building and sharing knowledge. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Viktoria Felkar on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Victoria Felker is coming in and she is about to drop some serious, serious information when it comes to women's health, reproductive health, birth control. If you are potentially a coach and athletes are, your female athletes are thinking about performance enhancing drugs, this is going to be very, very informative to you. I also want to, we spent a lot of time talking about the birth control side of things. My eyes were opened dramatically to understanding what different types of birth control, the things that you should be looking for, maybe having the conversation in your own house about birth controls. And then also something that I had never

thought about, this is kind of in males and females of when birth controls can be used in like a performance enhancing setting which absolutely blew my mind but kind of makes sense because they control and regulate hormone production so then you can obviously use them at the right times and specific hormones to have them in an elite high performance setting so you can you can hear all three of myself Doug and Travis many times in this with our minds just completely blown. And then coach Travis Mash,

obviously coaches female weightlifters. So he is consistently dealing with issues around menstrual cycles, training cycles, peaking cycles, and trying to match all those things together. So very, very informative on his side of the house, as well as just kind of like mind-blowing information that I had never thought of before.

So very, very cool show coming your way. And as always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Smash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, Victoria Felker. What's super exciting is we've been talking for the last 10 minutes about just being meatheads, which means welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

We did it. You made it home. These are your people. Thank you. I do want to get a little bit of a history of you training with John Meadows and getting over to Elite FTS, which is some friends of the show. And then we're going to dig into steroids, which is a great conversation that always piques people's interest, contraception, and kind of like women's health. Give us a little background, your meatheadedness that we were just uh talking about doesn't look like a meathead but yeah that she is right i'm like i said i'm retired now i'm

a lot smaller and softer you know about that too um so i started lifting young like i was still in high school it was back in the early 2000s women didn't train in the weight room like they do today it was a different world back then I grew up I was actually a classical competitive ballet dancer but I'm five foot and I've always been meaty so I never had that body type for being a ballet dancer. I ran, I had an eating disorder. I think, you know, I always laugh looking back at it now that being a bodybuilder really was like a transition. It was ballet to bodybuilding. Cause I realized that I was so much better at squatting than I was at doing ballet. So, you know, confidence boost there, you know, went into

sport science for my undergrad at the same time, just absolutely fell in love with everything lifting. And I was so hungry. My body had other plans for me, it decided to probably get into this, I decided just literally to, I mean, break down. And John Meadows at the time wasn't, you know, he wasn't taking on clients that much. He was just a guy on the forums and local supplement store guy saw me gain a bunch of weight really rapidly. And he was like, Hey, what happened? And I was like, I know. And he's like, talk to this guy, the mountain dog on the forums, maybe he'll take you on. He's really smart. And so I sent him an email and you know, the rest is history. John trained me, I, you you know wrote for the original mountain dog website um dr eric serrano was my physician you know all the way back in 2008 2009 and that same trip when i

went down to columbus um john took me to elite fts and back then like i didn't know what that was i knew the minute i walked in that this was somewhere that was really really special and uh i you know I met Dave terrifying first experience for me him telling me that I wasn't doing a hamstring curl properly and I was like what do you mean like how can I not do a hamstring curl properly but you know I just I was a sponge and every opportunity I had I would go down to Ohio and I would learn from three of them and you know fast forward a year here I am is i'm uh i'm i would say i'm a retired academic meathead um because i'm not really as much as a meathead anymore but i still i still

love iron i still love lifting i yeah it's always you look jack let me clarify you still look very fit and healthy you just don't look like maybe i don't know what does it mean to say typical power because they come in all shapes and sizes but especially when i think elite fts i think of you know monsters and yeah yeah people that don't come out until nighttime um when did when did kind of the the transition into female hormone health yeah happen what was that uh progression yeah so it was always an interest for me um i get a bit of a backstory so when i was when i was young very young female you know classical ballet dancer going through puberty i was put on the pill really really really young. And unfortunately, that kind of, I guess, fortunately, at the same time changed the trajectory of my life, because I had a really

serious reaction to when I came off of it, which is actually why I gained weight and why I went to see Dr. Serrano. But you have to imagine that there's like a bunch of simultaneous paths happening. I've got all these health problems from this, this pill that I really didn't understand what it did to me. I was a meathead. So I was in a world where they were, I mean, my dad was a, he was a police detective. And he would always call the guys at the gym, like, juice heads. And I'd be like, what is that? I need to know more about that.

Like, why are you calling them that? And then, you know, first year university in sports sociology classes, where we're learning about, like, the evils of anabolics. And I'm like like wait a second but my friends they take them like they're not evil and i just i wanted to learn more i just was so hungry because i'm like these things all come together and i don't know how yet but i know that they do and so i put on the peel can i ask yeah why were you i mean we both have very young daughters right now yeah just as like a context and i'm terrified of it yeah i want to know everything so like yeah why were they putting you on that early yeah three boys so he's checked out right now

just a heads up he's lucky there yeah so that one it's, I'm sure we'll get into this more, but the oral contraceptive pill, although we call it like in medical practice, I think a pop culture too, we call it the pill, the contraceptive pill. The reality is, is it gets used, um, kind of off label use to treat a bunch of different things from amenorrhea to heavy menstrual bleeds to dysmenorrhea or painful bleeds. And that that kind of is this very, I'm going to big air quotes here, but like easy way to treat these underlying medical conditions. Now, when you first start to go through puberty as a woman, I mean, depending on your health state and the environment you're in, it can be a really tumultuous time. And for me, I would had two bleeds, and they were both two weeks long,

and I was a competitive ballet dancer. So you can imagine like my mom was a nurse, and she was like, yo, you're going into anemia. She took me into my GP. But you know, it's easier for me to just get a pill versus to get tested for anemia. And unfortunately, that's what happened. And so I was put on the pill, I'd only had two cycles. And just like I mean, the human body is incredibly complex. But if we just think of it very basic, my body had just started to learn how to make this really complex physiological process happened. And then that ability got taken away because the oral contraceptive pill, it castrates you, it shuts down the communication between your hypothalamus, your pituitary and your ovaries. And so that highway of communication was just starting to

figure out what's what, and it got shut down. And then I also had an eating disorder simultaneously to that. And so that's another way that you can actually, you know, naturally cause some disarray in that communication highway. And so those two things happened. And then when I came off the pill, I'd also gotten really into, you know, picked up Oxygen Magazine, Monica Brand on the cover, copied her diet, was eating more. And my body, the first time it tried to do something called ovulation which again i'm sure we'll go talk about that but um to ovulate means to produce progesterone um i don't mean that but that's how women produce most of their progesterone um my immune system attacked my ovaries and that really was this terribly traumatic experience where doctors didn't know what to do with me

because I was a young athletic female. I didn't quote look sick, but you looked at my labs and now, you know, looking back, I was like, dang, it looked like I was on a big ass cycle. The lipids were out of whack. Iron was all out of whack. Hemoglobin was all out of whack everything was how did it make you feel like like were you tired yeah so i was i was fatigued i had cystic acne i had virilized my voice changed so my voice dropped um very suddenly too my uh hair on my head started falling out i got jacked though like i might have gotten fat but i also was so. The meathead silver lining was like, I'm going to leverage this. I'm going to do some good with this. Meanwhile, like 19 years old, chest pressing 90 pound dumbbells, like nobody's business.

What? Go, girl. Give me that. Where's that big shoulder at? Back up. Throwing the 90s around? How old were you? 19. Dang. throw in the 90s around how old yeah 19 dang it usually takes female one serious question

develop that upper body strength that's fast what and not they'll never get to that yeah i'm trying to be on your 19 year old when you put someone when you give someone um the early like that yeah what is what is the risk of permanently like causing damage or like great where the you know and the pill also is like the broad broad category and there's yeah hundreds i feel like like birth controls that you can take inside yeah are there several bills like oh yeah i mean this is this is my phd research because we talk about it as a biopic object the singular object it's the pill or it's hrt the reality is it is this huge umbrella of different compounds with different molecular activities and actions and binding, and they even work at different receptors in alternate ways. So

that the typical oral contraceptive pill is what you call a combined oral contraceptive pill, or a COC. And it has two hormone types in it, it's got an estrogen, specifically, it's usually ethanol estradiol, which is a synthetic estrogen, and then it has a progesterone. And so progesterone, not the same as progesterone, it, you know, it's a wolf in sheep's clothes, it actually works at the receptors differently. And then within each of those different categories, you know, progesterone, there's a bunch of different subtypes. Some are anti androgenic, some are androgenic, some have a greater interaction with glucocorticoids, so more impact on even cortisol binding globulin. And then within each of these, there's different doses and ratios.

So there's a huge umbrella. There is a many, many different types of them. So it's A pill. Pardon me? It's A, not the. It's not A. It's A pill, not the. All right.

Exactly. There's also the monopill, which is a progesterone only. And there's a couple of different types of those now in production. And again, there's different strengths. There's different ways you can take them. There's different dosing protocols for it. Then you have the hormonal IUD, which is intrauterine device. There's also an implant.

There is a vaginal ring. So I mean, the shot. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of

deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep, and then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns, and then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process

by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in,

please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. So there's all these different types of drugs that are under this umbrella of contraceptives. And they don't just get used for contraceptives. So my argument is always, I just call them pharmaceutical estrogens and progesterones. And under that umbrella, there's many different things that they can do. There's many different ways that they can interact, different clinical outcomes, so on and so forth. So for example, in young women, the pill often gets used to be able to support like dysmenorrhea or painful periods. Well, you know, one of my mentors in this field,

her take on it is, is that many times young girls aren't ovulating yet. And so they're creating more of an estrogen environment, and they're not yet creating sufficient progesterone to be able to be like the yin to the yang. And that's why there's complications. That's why there's fatigue and cramping and painful, long, exasperated bleeds. And that once the body is in a place where it will ovulate, which going through puberty, that's time, also circumstances, genetics, environment, so on and so forth, that's time, also circumstances, genetics, environment, so on and so forth, that then that stuff will balance out. But if we just stop somebody from doing that, then there could be potential repercussions moving forward. Now, there's no,

again, and there's no thing, one thing I can say, I can't say that all pills are tragic, and that all pills are going to cause what happened to me and all pills are going to cause sterility long term or anything like that, because there's just not enough research on that. And there's just such diversity. And so because there's so much diversity, it is really complicated to research these things. And it's really complicated to be able to create this one size fits all

protocol for use, but then also risk protocol, like what's going to happen. Yeah. Ethics too. Like ethicallyically it's hard to like do studies on people young girls no or in puberty yeah so like yeah you can't just definitely prescribe it yeah and you know when the pill first was uh was created and brought to market it it wasn't used in young women there was actually like a an age of allowance for to start using. And then there was also a duration of use, because those are two big factors that can come into play as, you know, just like with anabolic steroids, is it when did you start them? And how long were

you on them for? And that those two things can dramatically impact what's going to happen when you come off, or also when you're on. So what are the types of things that we can now see or bring up in terms of like lab work or other types of metrics that can start to shift and change? You know, a great example I like to use is sex hormone binding globulin, which is a protein that helps to transport both androgens and estrogens. But in some pills, the longer you're on it, you actually create an epigenetic change where that's going to be inflated even after use. And so it's not just when you're on it, it can happen now off of it. Now, there's no, you know, great ideas yet about is this happening to everybody? Is this happening with all pills? What is the risk that this is

going to happen with like, let's say pill a versus pill b that's still left to be seen but nonetheless that's a really important finding in my eyes that we need to start to explore more because that might shift protocols for use yeah a few minutes ago you talked about taking one of the pills and you end up getting stronger are there games that are played with combinations of various birth controls for people that they're in a tested sport? Say they're an 18 year old gymnast, they're trying to go to the Olympics, they're going to get tested for steroids, but but they can play the birth control game and potentially get that little bit of an edge. I wish you guys could see my desk right now. I'm not going to show it. But this is this is essentially my doctoral

research. So my doctoral research looks at pharmaceutical estrogens and progesterones within the world of high performance and competitive sport. You know, we have such a kind of ideological and just common knowledge about androgens. Even other drugs like EPO or certain diuretics, there's a stimulants, there's such a well known history of their use in sport, and also kind of current date use, whether it's accurate or not, I mean, and we can talk about that. But when it comes to pharmaceutical estrogens and progesterones, what happened to me was, I know now not abnormal for a young female athlete to be put on the pill,

because that, you know, mechanism of puberty was negatively impacting their performance. And that's a very common thing. And what surprised me is that this has been something that has been done in sports since the 1930s. It actually predates the use of androgens, but we don't talk about it like that. And so oral contraceptives are used in the sporting world, three main ways. There's other ways too, but the three main ones are to support participation. So such as in my circumstance, improved performance. And so there has been different ideas around like their performance enhancing potential that's been attached to them since the 1930s. And then improving health. And a lot of

those things are for athletes, it's like athlete specific health issues, like, you know, ideas are on bone density, or concussions, or being able to improve menstrual cycle, just function, especially if there's amenorrhea involved. Now, then there's these other things that I started to learn about when I went really deep into the research. And that was, yeah, so that was their use, or I guess, let's say their claimed use to help athletes overcome doping control. So nandrolone is an anabolic. There's lots of different 19 nor derivatives, like your DECA you're MPP. And so the, that molecule has a very similar backbone to a progesterone. It's a specific type of progesterone. And so doping control back in the seventies and the eighties, wasn't that well formed yet and not that sensitive. And so athletes

started to realize that, Hey, it can't tell the difference between these two things. And so athletes then started to use or report use. And I've got this great example. There's this one cyclist, professional cyclist that actually wrote on his doping control for Deepro Provera. That's the injectable contraceptive pill. And it was a male. And of of course my mind is i'm going like how is nobody talking like what is going on and i started to also see athletes in the 90s in the 2000s women athletes being wrongly accused of being on uh anabolics when their doping control form actually said a specific contraceptive agent i was like this like, this is not right. Like, this is a story that we need to talk about more for better or for worse. Athletes are using these drugs or reporting their use and that there's a lot more to it.

I mean, talking to Dave Tate about how guys used to use injectable different types of estrogens for performance benefits. And so we just have such. Why? Why? The bloat. What? Yeah. So the power lifting bloat. And again, you got to... I don't like secondhand reporting, but back in the day when it was really hard to get certain compounds, we don't have the same kind of pharmacy we have now that athletes can have access to, that there were certain types of injectables that would be used to promote getting because estrogen is a performance drug. So is progesterone. If they're

used, I mean, what do we you know, you you take an anabolic steroid, if it aromatizes, you're also getting estrogen. And we know that estrogens are incredibly impactful for muscle health, and just overall power and everything else. More research needs to be done on that because we've focused so hard on androgens. But at the end of the day, I personally, and I guess what's one of my findings from my research, I would call pharmaceutical estrogens and progesterone performance drugs. They have a long history of use within the female athlete population. We need to be talking more about them because when we talk about them in this way, we then can also start to have conversations around their risk profiles. We can start to have conversations around how we can make use safer,

if that's possible. No different than what's happened with androgens. You just blew me away. I never know that birth control could be a performance enhancing so but now i'll be looking into it yeah well also like uh like apologies go ahead yeah here's the thing is it's what do we define as ergogenic and ergalitic and performance enhancing what how do we define that so when we think about within, let's say, pharmaceutical androgens, it's like, these drugs are taken because they increase muscle size, muscle strength, power recovery. So there's this very, and again, it's a very linear thing. It's not actually that simple. But that's the perceived effect that happens with an with a pharmaceutical estrogen and a progesterone,

they can be used for a host of different reasons. If an individual has, let's say perceived negative performance impact of their menstrual cycle, real or perceived, but if they think that they have that and they can use this drug to help them skip having a bleed on the same day of a competition, do we not call that a performance enhancing drug? Absolutely. Cause it's a big thing. Cause you know, coaching women in the sport of weightlifting, you know, when the,

if they're going to be on their cycle, it seems like every time you compete, it just happens to hit, you know, whether it's nerves, but I never thought about just like, you know, trying to skip the cycle.

So they don't have to think about that. Well, and with skipping the cycle too, like that's the main reason why they were initially used in sport, but it, you know, it's a bit more complicated than that. We have to ask, you know, why is an individual having performance declines around their cycle? Is it because maybe they have an underlying menstrual cycle issue, such as an anovulatory cycle or not making sufficient amounts of progesterone and that maybe that's what's causing the performance alteration. It's not the the bleed itself there's been a lot of misinformation around that especially in sport sciences um and

the way that it's been studied in sport sciences in my opinion has been like fatally flawed just like the drugs themselves um when i started diving into like the actual scientific research on hormonal contraceptives and hrt i just saw how poor it's been and such large findings that have been extrapolated from really shitty science. And it made me really sad. Can I ask you a specific question on that very thing? It's like, I know I've read like articles, which means nothing that would say that, you know, that women can, can alter their training based on their cycle. But then when i looked at the actual science it's so different for every person and i think a lot of times like you said

women perceive they're going to do bad because a lot of this literature is saying they're going to do bad but when in reality when they checked it it may or may not be the case so like what is the truth so the menstrual cycle has been historically for millennia perceived to be a time of weakness and even just like mental health issues. And I mean, it's got such stigma attached to it. That followed. I've heard all these things. Yeah, exactly. That followed it through into sport.

And so when women were, you know, when let's think about the history of the modern Olympics, when the Olympics were really coming into themselves in the turn of the century, women were excluded. Why? Because they were seen to be weaker, unable to, because of their physiological and psychological composition. And then once they slowly were allowed to be introduced, the one time that they weren't allowed to be was during the menstrual cycle, because that was still perceived to be this time of just weakness and poor performance mentally and physically and everything else. That's followed the menstrual cycle through time to where we are today, because there is research that's showing that stigma is a huge part of how it gets perceived, not only in scientific research, but also within practice, women themselves that kind of take on this self

fulfilling prophecy. I have the bleed, therefore I'm not going to be able to perform. But you know, some of the earlier research that was done in like the fifties and the sixties, what it showed is, Hey, women are winning gold medals, no matter where they are in their cycle. And that when we actually look at the people that didn't care as much about their cycle. They aren't restricting their performance. They aren't caring if it happens. And that, unfortunately, in today's kind of sports science world, because the research on this is growing astronomically, isn't always being taken into consideration. Not only that, as a lot of the research that's been done hasn't actually looked at what's the underlying kind of hormonal composition happening. They

assume that a bleed is going to have the same hormonal underlying composition in all individuals and that that's going to be the same month to month. It's just way more complicated than that. I'm so glad to hear this. It's been lost. And so when people ask me that question, I've given talks on that even last year or so. The way that I see it is that that question, I've given talks on even last like year or so, the way that I see it is that I'm not saying it doesn't influence an individual's performance. But we cannot say this huge overarching claim and apply it to all women in all menstrual cycles, because there's just not enough scientific research there. And so the fact

that people are strategically doing this like weird periodization in a four week block around their cycle, it just doesn't make sense. There's no research to support that. What? I can't remember the exact birth control that's like eliminates your cycle. But are there any benefits to that? Whichever one that is because like uh i know many moms that are here just don't want to have any more kids and they just like i haven't had a period in three years and you can go like a whole olympic cycle with no yeah uh no period yeah

the repercussions yeah go ahead it's gotta be it's gotta be something on the back end that is not. Yeah. Yeah. Hormones are important for us. I mean, they do. So the idea of taking away like the thing that makes you female and giving life and just, we'll just say this for four years. So human and function and everything else. So number one is, is that when we think about reproductive and I'm going to, I call them like steroid hormones and I use the big three. So androgens, estrogens, progesterones, we all have them, men and women.

They're not sex specific. Women need to have sufficient amounts of androgen in order to have healthy bones and skeletal system or muscular system and brain neurotransmitter function. I mean, everything in our body, we need these things just as much as we also need estrogens and progesterones, but we need to have a ratio of them. What we now know, especially with some of the research that's been completed on estrogens and progesterones is that when women don't have enough progesterone, that that can be incredibly detrimental to their nervous system and neurological health. So progesterone, that that can be incredibly detrimental to their nervous system and neurological health. So progesterone, it converts into allopregnanolone and then into GABA.

So imagine having not enough GABA as an athlete for 10 years of your career, there's going to be an impact for your recovery, your nervous system response. And that will in time have a negative impact on not only your performance, but your health. And then down the road, even more so, markers of resilience, for example, against stress. Estrogen and progesterone need to be balanced at the right ratio, and that's been shown. Bone density, progesterone is incredibly important. Thyroid health, reproductive, just general health with healthy endometrioms and ovaries and everything else. And so we need to

have this right balance of, of hormones, and particularly at different critical phases. And I feel that for a lot of women, when they're in kind of that, I call it like the reproductive prime, where they've maybe had kids, and now they still should be making hormones that's going to prepare themselves for later in life that kind of post kid to like let's say about 50 years old they just go like hey i don't want them anymore i don't need them because all i need them for is reproduction and that's such a fallacy it's such a farce and so that's where you know oectomiesies and different types of protocols to actually promote sterilization come in or some really strong hormonal contraceptives that will actually, like you said, take away the cycle. So one of them is called an extended release formula. Seasonal is the trade

name. It's, you know, promises only having a bleed four times a year. Thing is, is the bleed doesn't, I mean, it's a marketing thing. That's all it was. The bleed on the pill means absolutely nothing. All it means is that your endometrium has been destabilized. So it sloughs. It's just like if I were to give you a cup of coffee every single day for let's say three months, and then all of a sudden say, no, no, no, no coffee for you, you're probably going to feel like crap, you're probably going to get a headache, you're probably going to blow energy, and you're going to have a physiological reaction to not having this stimulus involved. The pill bleed is the same thing. There's no actual physiological underlying reason for it.

You know, you could argue it is to make sure that you have a healthy endometrial balance, but a lot of times the pill isn't even stimulating that endometrium to bleed. So it's, I mean, it's not, that's not what I'm worried about. What I'm worried about is the fact that you're stopping yourself from ovulating. You're stopping yourself from making progesterone. That is critical. You're not getting the normal balance of estradiol to estrone to estriol you're not having this normative ovarian function that you're also doing things like creating androgens because the ovaries are an androgen making machine and so you're stopping that from happening and there could be implications for long-term health or even current health but what do you mean affecting about like like gaba is like yeah i mean wouldn't that affect women's mental health like you know like gaba is affected or inhibited like

that's going to call i mean they would you would always be anxious like you would have nothing to calm you down from having anxiety or stress i, I feel like it would just make everything terrible. GABA is a good thing. GABA is a great thing, but so is estradiol and its influence on serotonin. So is androgens and its influence on dopamine, right? There's this, there's a beautiful, complicated hormonal cascade of chaos that happens in our bodies. And if we just come in and just knock that to shit without thinking through what we're doing, there's going to be implications of that. Yeah.

I just see women too. In the last decade, if you look at men 10 years ago and you look at women and like being a coach in the sport of weightlifting, I've watched it. You know, this is in America, super drug tested. I'm not saying people don't try to cheat. There's not going to be the level of like you know this is a in america super drug tested i'm not saying people don't try to cheat there's not gonna be the level of you know taking the gloves off but i have watched women catch up to men at a rate i mean it is so blatant and obvious and scary it's like like i remember when a girl clean and jerking 200 pounds was a big deal and now if they're not snatching that they're not even in the ball game it's like it's crazy girls two and a quarter i was like something

changed my point is this is i feel like what you said earlier yeah is we just been saying this that girls are this weak entity and i think that you know now that women are like, wait, no, I'm not. And I just think 10 more years from now, that gap is going to be closed at an extraordinary rate. But that's what I'm saying. And sports sociologists and sports historians have been saying that for decades. They've been saying that, wait, wait, wait,

the gap between men and women is more of a potential construction, like a social construction, because we've limited women's opportunities. There's less pull to pull from men and women is more of a potential construction, like a social construction, because we've limited women's opportunities. There's less pull from because women aren't, you know, you know, being told to go out and enter into competitive sports from a young age and

that they're not getting the same levels of funding or same coaching and professional kind of support as men do that. That's been said for decades. And I don't think that that's something we should take lightly. I think that is a really important thing. And I also think that, you know, just us talking about, like, biology of men and women, like, that's a complicated discussion. We could probably go on for hours about that, because it is really, really complicated. The women that you guys are seeing being able to do these phenomenal lifts, they are mutants, right? They have a lot of things going for them.

And there's a lot of really important intrinsic things and even external things that are happening to allow them to get there. And that's the same degree of kind of the mutant factor that both male and female athletes have at the highest level. And that that is such a complicated thing. Hormones do matter to that equation, but it's going to matter differently for everybody. There's no one size fits all for this. Yeah. Since you are kind of like playing the game

when it comes to performance of chemistry and getting your hormones to fire the way that would be kind of illicit high performance, how would somebody go about kind of like understanding their own body to then put some sort of like plan together and, and timing this? Like what, what are like the steps that you would go through? So for women athletes, and if you guys coach, this is my number one tip, track for ovulation.

Because we know ovulation is such a critical role in health and a potential influencing role in performance, it doesn't make sense to me why we're not tracking for it. Not every bleed means that you've ovulated. And so if an individual comes to you and they're like, yeah, coach, got my bleed again, what does that mean? Have they made enough progesterone? Have they actually gone through this really important physiological process? Cause if they've made enough progesterone, then that also means they've got some degree of overall health. So progesterone production not only supports health, but it's also a sign that there's some degree of health happening that's enabled that to occur. We know that in the, cause you would only know basically if there's a bleed, but I don't know how we would... Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

I got too excited. So progesterone is thermogenic. It increases your body temperature. So women can track their basal temperature by just taking their temperature first thing in the morning with either just a thermometer, as long as it's got two decimal places, or there's newer technologies. I mean, the Woot, for example, measures this. The newer versions of it, Apple Watches do. There's a great company down in Australia called Femtech that's a wearable ring. You only have to wear it at night. So a lot of athletes love it because it's not this heavy thing that's influencing that's influenced again they live what did you call it yeah what was this name what was

it what was it femtech oh f-e-m-t-e-k gotcha yeah and so you know there's a lot and there's other ones too there's like armbands and everything else. But the thing is, is that by doing this and learning to read our own bodies and get the data from them, we can then have individual personalized data that then as coaches or practitioners or whomever can really then start to hone in and play with. So we know that a healthy normative menstrual cycle, it varies in length individual to individual. And so you can start getting data by just, you know, tracking whenever your bleed starts. That's great entry data, but it doesn't give me enough insight. I want to know, how are you feeling at different points during your cycle?

I want to know if you are having cramps. I want to know if you are having heavy bleeds because I can use all of this data together to really start to dial in and understand what's happening. And the coolest thing about being able to measure your basal temp is that it allows you to go and get labs done, actually at a specific duration that then we can have labs we can use. A lot of times women just go in and they get their hormones checked. And it's like, I mean, the range for estradiol, some labs don't even differentiate at what point in the cycle. There is some labs just go like,

okay, you know, 22 to 2000. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, no, no, no. We have different phases in our menstrual cycle that are going to, in kind of the normative model, reflect a certain milieu of hormone production. Estrogens, progesterone, androgens, FSH, LH. And so if we can get our labs done in that mid luteal phase, which is the second half of the menstrual cycle,

we then should be making the highest amount of progesterone at that time, we go get labs done then. And if we don't have any progesterone, well, hey, that's a problem. We now then need to investigate why aren't we ovulating? Or why are we not making enough progesterone, well, hey, that's a problem. We now then need to investigate why aren't we ovulating or why are we not making enough progesterone, which I have to say, guys, is a relatively common thing in the female athlete population. To have low progesterone production or kind of a more propensity for an ovulatory cycle. I have seen very few elite female athletes maintain ovulation throughout the entire prep for an event or even get it back right away afterwards. Usually it is the elite of the elite that can still

manage that. What do you do if you can't say that you find that you're not? Then would you supplement? So think of ovulation as being a barometer of a woman's health, internal, external, like I call it cellular to social. And so we know that great example, just having negative body image is enough to induce an anovulatory cycle. So not even engaging in, in restrictive eating or overtraining, just having negative body image. So if it's our mind has such a powerful role in this, then we go, okay, hey, let's look at, you know, biopsychosocial, where are you at physically, physically, where are you at mentally, where are you at socially? And what can we do better to help support you from a from a head to toe perspective on health? Are you

sleeping enough? Are you eating enough? Are you having kind of negative, you know, ruminations? I know you guys just talked to my, my good friend and colleague, Dr. Michael Miltech, but like, do you have your ghosts in your closet coming out to get you every night? And so you're not actually having constructive sleep. So we have to start there, we have to look at what can we do that's more of these like lifestyle interventions first, you know, micronutrient deficiencies, for example, they can impact having anovulatory cycles or just our hormone production because the follicles of the ovaries, they need certain ingredients for them to be able to mature and be healthy. Just like our pituitary gland and our hypothalamus needs certain ingredients for them to be able

to send the right signals to have this beautiful kind of serendipitous effect of hormonal cascades in our body. So I start there. I go my basic, basic fundamentals first. And if I've got those covered, and if I'm say also working with an individual who is an elite athlete going into Olympic trials, I'm not going to affect, I'm not going to expect that I'm going to be able to get them to have what we call like a spontaneous recovery of ovulation. That would be asking a lot for them when I know that they are just there, they're training at an exceptionally high level. And they might have some type of weight restriction in terms of either having to eat up or eat down, depending on their weight class. And there's just this big social weight on them. So if I got all of my bases covered, I might then get them to explore what we call a cyclical bioidentical progesterone replacement.

This is different than a oral contraceptive. This is different than using the mini pill. This is progesterone that is bioequivalent to what we make. And if you do it cyclically, when you should have been making it through ovulation, we know that it can have a really positive impact for keeping the right signaling between the brain and the ovaries, keeping the right balance between the different cells of the ovaries. So we're not overexcreting androgens to be able to help support mood and sleep and, you know, everything else that progesterone does for us and you know because it's a quote big air quote here but female sex hormone water don't care so it is completely allowed under the guidelines wow this is amazing amazing like so let me get this straight. In the second half, you're taking their temperature on a daily basis or you get the watch.

Is it two degree? Yeah. So it varies for each individual. So I always tell people, go for three months, get your own data and see where you're at, and then go get your labs done at that mid luteal phase. And what we want to see is we want to see a relatively even match between follicular, which is the first half of the cycle and the luteal phase, which is the second half of the cycle. And so if you're seeing that your temperature is rising, but only by like 0.6, and it's only happening for four days, though, that might mean that you're not making adequate amounts of progesterone for long enough, right? Because we want to see that being produced. Let's say an individual has a 30 day cycle, we want to see it being produced

for roughly like 1312 to 13 upwards of 15 days a month. If we're not seeing that, then we know, okay, we're not making adequate amounts of progesterone. If we're seeing temperature that's not rising, I mean, point 2, 0.4, then that might be an issue as well. But the easiest way, Travis, that you can measure this in individuals is you do an average because everybody is different. So you take day one of the cycle, which is the first day of the bleed, and then you take the last day right before the next bleed.

You add all those numbers up, you divide them by that total number of days, for my example, 30 days. And then you see that average temperature, you divide them by that total number of days, for my example, 30 days. And then you see that average temperature, you count how many consecutive days in a row they are at that or above. And that will also give you a litmus too. If they're not increasing by much, sometimes it can mean there can be something else going on like a thyroid issue or just measurement, just faulty measurement apparatuses. So then, you know, you can play around with different methods as well. But a lot of times what I see is that that

rise, people think it's going to be like six degrees. And I'm like, no, it's relatively small. When you take the first thing in the morning. Yeah. First thing in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get out of bed, put in the morning? Yeah. First thing in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get out of bed. Put it on your nightstand. Put it in the drawer. So if you've got like an AC unit above, get it out.

Get so it can be as controlled as possible. Yeah. And the other great thing too is that that's one of the metrics that we can use as well to be able to see how somebody is responding to their training program. So let's say you start a female like Olympic level athlete on this, and they're not going to be competing for till December. Okay, well, we can get some really good data right now. So if you're seeing Okay, cool. She's ovulating, she's ovulating. Oh, wait a second. She didn't ovulate. Like 10 days before her cycle. Hey, there's barely any temperature rise now in august oh hey there's

none not then covering there's something else thing going on maybe it's just that training is that much more intense and the way that i see it is that women can have i mean it's totally normal for women to have anovulatory cycles now and again, that is completely normal evolutionary thing that our bodies have developed, but to have them continuously over and over and over, that's when we get into problems. If we've gone six months without ovulating, well, now we're opening ourselves up to having potential underlying clinical repercussions for that. You know, I see athletes, some athletes go into that, what I call hypo hormonal zone, meaning that they just shut down their O reproduction,

hypothalamus isn't producing enough, thyroid's not producing enough growth, everything is shut down along that kind of cascade of hormones, then there's other people that go into the hyper zone. So what, you know, in the clinical world, it's called anovulatory androgen excess. You guys might've heard of it called polycystic ovarian syndrome, but what happens when it is androgen excess is, is that those ovaries are making more androgens of the, the, the stronger androgens than they are testosterone and estradiol. And they're having a habitual and ovulatory menstrual cycle. So those cysts you see on the ovaries are eggs that haven't been able to go through their proper growth and maturation cycle and ovulate. And so you see individuals in that kind of setting that they have these

hyperinflated androgens, usually like low SH, I mean, all the things you see when somebody takes a pharmaceutical androgen. But then you're also usually now introducing hyper. I mean, all the things you see when somebody takes a pharmaceutical androgen. But then you're also usually now introducing hyperinsulinia or insulin resistant issues. You're also typically kind of playing with anxiety and depression because even though we don't think of FSH and LH as doing anything other than regulating our reproductive system, they do have an impact. They have an impact on our brain. For example, when LH is sky high, which is what you see in an ambulatory androgen excess, that this can increase anxiety. And then anxiety gets exasperated now, because you don't have enough GABA being produced. So you don't have your lifeline to help you through that. And now

that's going to just keep that cycle going. Because why would you why would your body be ready to make babies when you're anxious, and you're you're not mobilizing nutrients properly and everything else and so it is a big thing it's something that I will definitely tell you guys that I think professionally personally practically we're going to see hopefully more conversation in the years to come but I'm also not convinced it's going to be a fast process. Even though you have some really great information about like, you know, US soccer team tracking their menstrual cycle and using this data, they're not having this more nuanced conversation about it. And that is problematic. Why? Why are we not? I think that was the first time. I feel like that was the first time in the entire show you've said the word testosterone was just now.

And if you had at the beginning of this, I would have assumed that we were going to be sitting here talking about like what happens to the female body when you inject testosterone into it. And that's not I'm guessing it, where all the bad physiological, like a cliche things start to happen when we start just like piling testosterone into the, into the female physiology. But it's been so much better than that though. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it's not, it's not that simple though. Right. Yeah. That's what I'm, I'm very much learning. Androgen physiology is incredibly complex. I mean, I did a talk at Swiss this past year on it

because I am so pissed with people simplifying the conversation and destroying individuals' health and performance as a result of it. That's what I think about every time I see it is I'm like, who told you to do this? There's gotta be a better way because it's within months where these like the hair is growing, the jawline changes, like all these physiological things start happening. And you go, there's no there's no coming back from that. But what you're explaining seems like a significantly healthier process to understand it. Well, and then, you know, there are individuals that

they can, like we all influence and interact with the hormones differently. It's not as simple as how much or how little we have in our bodies. It's so much more than that. We have to have, you know, the right metabolism of them. We have to have their transportation, there's androgen receptors and how they interact and their density and there's just there's so much involved there that there are some individuals that can use certain drugs and not have the same implications as other users but by and large what i see right now is we're just like simplify washing everything and going like all women can do this and all athletes should do this. And it's just, it's, it's gross. It's really, really gross.

Yeah. Because it's, it's such a complicated thing. I mean, if you have an individual, let's say she's a female athlete, that's taking a hormonal contraceptive, it's an anti androgenic progesterone. Okay. Why the frick would you put an androgen in the mix? Yeah. brick would you put an androgen in the mix yeah like if you are having this drug in there that is causing androgen blockage at multiple sites around the body and now you're adding an androgen

and we don't have that type of data to tell us what's going to happen now there are you know with some of the trans studies that are going on right now there are some more information i went back like east german this is what did. So I got my hands on that stuff and was able to see like what they were seeing and happening. But, you know, that's in an individual athlete or an individual patient that we can't apply that to everybody. So we can't think that our one athlete who you're not doing proper lab work, you're not talking to them about getting a pelvic ultrasound to see it the state of their ovaries and their activity or talking to them about their mental health. We can't say then that this is, you know, you're going to get off scot-free. We just don't have that type of

information available. And I don't think we ever will because it is so individual. I know we're getting close to time, but I can keep talking. We need to have you back on. When are you defending your doctorate work here? Wow, good question. When does all this come hit the publications? It's been a long time. Actually, I just changed supervisors after a very tumultuous few years. So things are progressing along.

We sent in a draft last week. So it is right now for me, just some time of editing and revising. And hopefully by year end, I will have it all wrapped up. I'm still doing stuff in the industry. I still work with clinics and practitioners and clients and coaches and do seminars, but definitely a lot less than I would like to be because the PhD. Yeah. Where are you doing your PhD? Do you want me asking?

Yeah. So I'm at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I've been a member there of the school of kinesiology, sports science, human kinetics. They keep changing the name. Yeah. Since, gosh, that was, I mean, it's when I started. So 2007.

Wow. A long time. Not my PhD in 2007. I started my undergrad in 2007. Yeah. Where, uh, where can people find you? My website. So victoriafelker.com, my social media, which I should be posting on that a heck of a lot more than I am, but I still update it now and again with things. Um, those are the two main places and whenever I do podcasts or anything else, I try to put them up on my website

so there's a big, big library of stuff. I love it. Fantastic. I'm going to for sure be checking out the library. Coach Travis Bash. Mashlee.com. You can check out all my articles on zimware.com at the blog section.

But that was amazing. That was, that was amazing for a person who coaches females and has a daughter, uh, two daughters. Um, that was amazing. Thank you,

Doug Larson. Good. Uh, I'm on Instagram. Douglas E. Larson, Victoria. Thank you for coming on the show.

I always really enjoy the highly technical shows where we're talking about the nuances of physiology. So I really enjoyed that. I appreciate you being here. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on the show. I always really enjoy the highly technical shows where we're talking about the nuances of physiology, so I really enjoyed that. I appreciate you being here. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner

and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that you can access over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we will see you guys next week.