Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 338: Female Hormones, PCOS, Birth Control + Training with Lyle McDonald

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, I'm sitting down with Lyle McDonald talking all things female physiology. We're talking training, nutrition, recovery, muscle growth, fat loss, menstrual cycles, PCOS, birth control, and more. This is part two of a long series of discussions I had with Lyle back in 2020, where he and I archived what I believe to be some of the best practical dialogue around maximizing female performance in the gym and in life, because

we've both worked with tons of female clients. And while both being men, we have quite a bit of empathy for how women are different from men in the gym. And I think there's a ton you can take to either apply with your clients or apply in your very own training as you look to improve outputs in the gym, in life, in health, etc. So enjoy part two of my discussion with Lyle McDonald. This episode is brought to you in special part thanks to our awesome partners over at Ice Barrel. If you're like me, you want to get the absolute most you can out of your fitness and out of what it is that you're doing in life.

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Danny to save 125 bucks. Hey guys, welcome into another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. Today's episode is a highly anticipated follow-up conversation with my good friend Lyle McDonald. Of all the people I know in the fitness space, when I have a question about female physiology, whether it is a question about my client's birth control, about the impact of the menstrual cycle, things like PCOS, or various questions about hormones like estrogen and progesterone, Lyle is my go-to guy. The first episode we did way back in 2020, in the beginning of the pandemic, was the most downloaded episode of the podcast ever. And from that day forward, I knew I needed to get Lyle on the podcast specifically to talk about what we

talked about here today, which is the ways in which your menstrual cycle and the various phases impact your training and how your training impacts those various phases, as well as some of the nutritional nuances that are packed in there, such as, does my body use carbohydrates differently in the luteal phase or the follicular phase? And fun fact, it does. You'll learn a lot about that as we go. And we cap today's conversation with a discussion about birth control, particularly which modes of birth control are the best for women who are looking to not only have a contraception in place, but who want to optimize their gains. So this is a conversation I've wanted to bring to you guys and girls for a very long time.

I hope you enjoy it and I'm sure that you'll get a ton out of it. So sit back and enjoy a conversation with the man, the myth, the legend, Lyle McDonald. All right, guys, welcome into another episode. I'm here with my friend Lyle McDonald. This is his second time appearing on the show. If you guys have not already listened to episode 19, which released back in 2020, I strongly recommend adding that to your queue to listen to next because these two are going to be very much working in concert to help you get a really good handle on how female physiology is unique, how it impacts training. But today's episode is going to be very specific.

We're going to touch particularly on the menstrual cycle and how it plays a big-time role in how you train, how you recover, and the results you can expect. So Lyle, my first question for you, knowing that the menstrual cycle is, of course, uniquely female, and every female has a semi-unique cycle, but there's definitely some consistencies. Yes. What are we really looking at when we hear the term menstrual cycle? What are the different phases and what's happening physiologically there? Yeah. So what I'm going to describe as sort of an idealized menstrual cycle, right? Typically the standard menstrual cycle can last anywhere from 25 to 32 days we tend to assume it's 28 but it's really not and women vary some women are like machines right if their cycle is 26 days it's all and some women it can vary seems like it gets more consistent

with age like younger girls it's very uh it's sort of when the system kind of coming online, it can be very, just not standardized, but depends on the woman. But I'm going to assume it's 28 days just for simplicity. All right. So day one by convention is the first day of menstruation, the first day of bleeding. So the first two weeks of the cycle are called the follicular phase. This is where the follicle, which contains the egg develops and is released at day 14 at ovulation, right? So that's the halfway point of the cycle. The second half of the cycle is called the luteal phase, right? So the follicle bursts, releases the egg, it implants, forms the endome, something called the corpus luteum, hence luteal phase. This is sort of in preparation for pregnancy. If pregnancy does not occur,

we go into week four, which is typically where, you know, PMS week, if it's going to occur as typically then, and then we start over. All right. So we've got first two weeks, follicular phase, ovulation at the midpoint, and then luteal phase weeks three and four. So during the follicular phase, estrogen is not only really the dominant hormone, it's really the only hormone, right? So progesterone starts very, very low, start of menstruation, comes up really gradually to ovulation, doesn't change much, whereas estrogen starts low, starts to come up, peaks right before ovulation before crashing back down. At ovulation, I would mention a few days before and after there's a little spike

in testosterone, which is probably, I mean, let's face it, all of this is really geared towards reproduction, pregnancy. And I would speculate that that increase in testosterone is probably to increase sex drive, because they're just certain, but that can have potential ramifications from a training standpoint, which is why I mentioned it. All right. So that's ovulation. Estrogen is very low. Progesterone is still low. Testosterone kind of blips. Women's testosterone is never that high. So we go into the luteal phase. Progesterone starts to sweep up. It's a peak at the end of week three and then falls back down. Estrogen does the same thing, but it's at a lower level than progesterone. And it only reaches about half the level as in the first two weeks. So really in the second cycle,

progesterone is kind of like, I'm going to use the term dominant, and I don't want people to confuse that with there's this idea of like estrogen dominance and progesterone dominance. I say the alternative, but it's kind of that one of the other hormones is kind of overpowering the other. So, but in that second cycle, really progesterone is having the major effects both directly and by blocking the effects of estrogen. So for all practical purposes, first two weeks, estrogen is the primary hormone. Week three and four, they both go up. The progesterone is still having the major effects. All right. So what are those effects? The first two weeks, estrogen, it's funny, has traditionally gotten blamed for a lot of women's problems with lower body fat.

But if anything, most of its effects are positive. Estrogen is anti-inflammatory, helps control appetite. Many women find that three or four days right before ovulation, their appetite for food and drink is lowered. And it actually appears that so that their appetites for other pleasures will increase. And that's actually been shown in both animals and humans. Estrogen helps remodel skeletal muscle. Very important in women, probably important in men too. Yeah. Cause I've, I've heard that before, which of course with men, we think testosterone is the only hormone that's going to play a positive role in our muscle building.

But estrogen is not a catabolic hormone, is it? Correct. And they found, you know, back in the seventies and eighties, cause men were like, I don't want any estrogen. That's a woman's hormone like that. And when they added anti-estrogens that prevented that, they got worse growth. Like I think a lot of the possible positives of testosterone or hormone replacement or steroids is probably through conversion to estrogen. Because among other things, estrogen promotes fat burning and muscle. If you give men an estrogen patch,

they will use more fat during aerobic activity. Whoa. That will spare muscle on a diet. I think that's another benefit for drug using bodybuilders. No doubt. Estrogen tends to also promote fat storage within the muscle, what's called intramuscular triglycerides, but that's not in the actual body fat. So really, and I'm probably forgetting a couple, estrogen's effects are really overall positive. Yeah, definitely. Okay. And then we go into the second half of the cycle and pretty much everything I just said for progesterone, I'm sorry, for estrogen, progesterone does the opposite. It also improves insulin sensitivity, meaning that carbs are utilized more effectively, insulin works better.

So again, in the second half of the cycle, progesterone basically has all the opposite effects on top of blocking progesterone's effects. I'm sorry, blocking estrogen's effects. So progesterone tends to cause some insulin resistance, causes small amount of muscle breakdown, not huge amounts, like protein requirements don't vary enormously, but it is there. It tends to promote the use of fat for fuel, which sounds like a good thing, and it can be under certain conditions. I know this seems a little bit confusing, but progesterone, also one of its big effects, is to actively stimulate fat storage in the lower body. There's something called acylation stimulation protein,

which I don't want to really get into because again, we think about this through a reproductive sense. The first half of the cycle is to produce the egg and prepare a woman for pregnancy. If she gets pregnant, her body wants to store calories in the hips and thighs because that's what's going to support pregnancy. That's right. So many things happen during the luteal phase, weeks three and four. One is that appetite goes up. Cravings typically go up. And some of this is under the influence of progesterone. This gets really complicated, like for researchers to try to figure out what's being caused by progesterone, what's being caused by estrogen, what's being caused by the fall in estrogen, the rise in this, the ratio of

one to the other. What they end up having to do is block a woman's hormones completely and then add one back at a time. So they kind of figured it, but it gets super duper complicated. It kind of doesn't matter in the big picture. These are the things we know occur, which is that. And so that's actually a fabulous point. And I do have one question about this because I get this question a lot, and I'm sure we're going to get to this eventually. But if estrogen, or I should say if progesterone actually enhances fat substrate utilization, and we have a protein sparing effect and an insulin sensitizing effect with estrogen, protein sparing effect and an insulin sensitizing effect with estrogen. With regards to nutrition,

is a weightlifting woman going to be better off eating more carbohydrate in that preliminary phase, that follicular phase? Will she be able to utilize that better for training? Okay. The short answer is yes. And we'll definitely touch on that in terms of how this is impacted. But the short answer is yes. So other things that happen in weeks three and four, since an appetite typically goes up, cravings typically go up, metabolic rate does go up a little bit, right? Body temperature goes up. Way back in the day, they would use basal body temperature to try to determine fertility. It's rough at best okay the problem is that the increase in metabolic rate which is one or two hundred calories can be easily overwhelmed by the increase in food intake which oh yeah typically

three to five hundred in that range depending on how much control is being exerted is that one to two hundred per day yes okay um and it has to it gets it has to do with just how many calories like the endometrium and the corpus luteum are burning. And you get into all the same because the question that comes up just in a hypothetical sense, why don't women just develop the cycle for nothing and women's bodies are nothing if not efficient when it comes to saving calories. So that's why it goes through this seemingly wasteful process every month of building it and breaking it down and excreting it to save energy. Yeah. So in a very, like I said, I hate to say one hormone is, you know, one is good and one is bad because obviously they're both critically important for a woman's overall health function reproduction. But in the sense of what we're talking about in terms of fat loss, performance, muscle gain, in that small context, to a very great degree, estrogen is the good hormone and progesterone is kind of the bad hormone. Again, I'm talking about within this very narrow context.

No, and that makes a lot of sense, right? I think that we understand that there's quite a bit less hormonal volatility with men and men just go to the gym. They eat consistently, they train very consistently. But like you said, you could have a cycle that's anywhere from 25 to over 30 days. Every woman's probably going to have fluctuations between those two hormones that are somewhat unique. And so it's not as simple as it is for men. So you end up with a lot of women trying to figure out how do I best navigate this if I'm putting together my training split or if I'm going to the gym. And a lot of people have postulated that you want to stack your intense training in that follicular phase where you're, like we talked about, more sensitive to insulin or more sensitive

to carbohydrate. You can probably use that substrate better for glycolytic work like weight training. And then maybe you taper down during that luteal phase and you still train, but not as intensely. And maybe you change your nutrition a little bit. Do you think there's any merit to that? Oh, absolutely. And I'll come back to that. I just wanted to say one thing. When you're training men, the same guy is walking to the gym every day. Now he may be tired from a previous workout or not sleeping, but basically a man's hormonal levels. Testosterone is basically a straight line.

Yes. So, you know, there's small fluctuations and throughout the year and it goes down. But in a short term span over your training, you're dealing with the same guy every single day. Whereas a woman, her hormones are changing drastically at least every two weeks. And if you want to really get microscopically managed into it, there are weekly changes going on. Now, I tend to not get quite that. I think you can overanalyze this, but certainly with women and even there, like you said, there are unique responses. Some women have huge performance fluctuations.

And I'll talk about that. Other women, basically a flat line or roughly so. In the same way, only a percentage of women suffer from PMS symptoms. That's really a global thing in terms of cramps, mood swings, cravings. Some women suffer it so extremely, they get what's called premenstrual dysphoric disorder. They may be physically incapacitated. They may suffer from suicidal thoughts. And some women don't experience anything at all. And you will hear women report that women that don't get it are just like, I don't get, what's the problem? Well, you can't

understand what you don't get it are just like, I don't get, what's the problem? Well, you can't understand what you don't experience. Totally. So there is more variability. Just one more example, and I'll get back to your actual question. A nurse practitioner I know and a therapist that I know, the nurse practitioner, when she's addressing mental health issues, for some women, she has to throw in an antidepressant in week four, specifically for the suicidal thoughts. My therapist friend says, with men, you always know who's coming in, but with women, depending on, and he's not using this negatively, just like, I don't really know who I'm treating

till about 10 minutes in. And it can be very much the same thing with a female athlete, with a coach. Totally. So in the broadest sense, yes. And there's been five or six studies on this where they did what they called either, you know, follicular focus training or luteal, whatever terminology they use. And what they typically do is they're like, all right, we're going to do 12 workouts a month, right? We're either going to do, we did like 10 of them in the first two weeks, like five days a week, and then two of them, one a week in luteal phase, or vice versa.

One study, which I think was probably a little more valid, did either clustered them in the first two weeks or clustered in the second two weeks or just spread them across the entire month, which I think is probably a more valid comparison. Totally. just spread them across the entire month, which I think is probably a more valid comparison. Totally. And what the majority of them have found is that there is a superior growth response and strength response in the first two weeks of the cycle. Now, I'm not saying that there wasn't a growth response or that there were no results in the second half. Simply, if you are going to focus your training, it does make more sense to put more into that the first

two weeks than the third. I'm not saying don't train. And this is even outside of the performance changes, which is, this is just looking at it physiologically. So there is absolutely something to that. Now, most of these studies are using fairly moderate training loads. One of the ones that comes to mind, they did like three sets of 12 leg press and three sets of 12 leg curl, either, you know, five days a week for two weeks. And yeah, so it's not like you're doing super voluminous workouts, super intense workouts. I'd have to go back and look to see, you know, if it was, but there was certainly a difference. Now, another consideration here is how women's performance may or may not vary across the cycle. And by performance, I mean in terms of their strength, endurance, etc.

Yeah. So if you look at the research, it all basically says, ah, there's no really apparent pattern. Okay. Now, a lot of that is in endurance training. And endurance training is a very different animal than the weight room. Totally. I was an endurance athlete for years. Now, a lot of that is in endurance training. And endurance training is a very different animal than the weight room. Totally. I was an endurance athlete for years.

And even when you're tired, you can go put in the miles. It's all kind of submaximal. You can go put in the work even if you don't feel very good. Even, and I don't think they've done a lot, but even with weight training studies, a lot of them are just stupid. I've got a review paper of like 10 studies on the topic and the review says all 10 of these are terrible. I mean, not in scientific terms, basically all 10 of these are low quality, poorly designed, uncontrolled. Some of them rely on women's self-report of where they are in the menstrual cycle. And that's totally inaccurate. They're just terrible studies. Many of them will like test oh we tested thumb strength

yeah that flexor my one of my favorite i love the thumb strength studies or you know hand grip strength and i'm like okay great test one around back squats like test something that might be relevant um and so i think the pattern i've seen in like apparently some early Russian literature, this is how they did it, is they found that most women were strongest about two or three days into the follicular phase. Right. They're kind of done with PMS. And that's that tends to be the strongest week into week two. There can be a little bit of a drop in performance. So they were trying them a little bit lighter. Ovulation hits.

little bit of a drop in performance. So they would train them a little bit lighter. Ovulation hits. And again, you've got that little testosterone spike that may be having a little benefit, a little bit stronger in week three. And then if generally speaking, there's going to be a bad week of the month, it's going to be week four. And any woman listening to this who has experienced what can happen with PMS of varying degrees can understand why that's the case, right? You've got issues with mood, strength, performance, adaptation. There's even coordination issues. Yeah. So when they've looked at injury rates in athletes, this is like soccer, basketball,

stuff like that. ACL injuries tend to be the highest right after ovulation. There's an increase in joint laxity in the looseness of the joints. So for certain activities, you're very much at risk. There's also can be a lack of a loss of coordination in week four. So doing like super high coordinated complex activities like box jumping or the Olympic lifts can be potentially problematic. So that's, again, that's a general pattern. And I've had athletes that absolutely follow that. Probably the most extreme I've seen. I had an athlete that week one, she would hit PRs,

like without fail. Week two, be down a little bit. Week three, she'd feel better. And week four, she couldn't do more than 60% on machines. Her coordination was just through the crapper. She had no strength. And in it, because I'm a dumb, I was a dumb boy, right? Like mid 2000s. I didn't know. I just would look at them just like, what's wrong with you? Go lift the weight. Cause I was part of the problem. And I watched it and watched it. And as I started to look into this, I'm like, okay, I see what's happening. And once I had discerned that pattern for her, I'd be like, all right, week one, we're

going heavy. Week two, a little bit more quality, drop the intensity. Week three, going to go heavy. And week four, we're going to go play. And you're just going to do some machine work and keep some movement in. So what I ended up having, rather than try to force the training onto the cycle, which doesn't work, I adapted the training to her individual response. I love that. And so would you say, I think one of the things that I'm really grabbing from this is

we know substrate utilization is great in week one. We know that we have quite a bit of capacity for work. So that's where you really want to front load, if you will, some of the more complex movements, some of the more training volume, you might see a dip in that second week, but you can still train pretty hard. The third week, you actually get a little bit of a boost, or maybe you stay there. Perhaps that's aided by that small surge of testosterone around ovulation. And in that fourth week, depending on how you respond, whether that's going to be intense PMS, it's going to be not so intense, you're probably wise to reduce training complexity,

maybe reduce training volume. If you're going to deload, that would be the week to deload. Yes, absolutely. Yes. I think that absolutely sort of sums it up in general. Now, one of the things I would add in terms of the performance thing, I think it depends very much on the type of training you're doing, right? If you're doing predominantly bodybuilding training, I mean, you know, more moderate weights, higher repetitions. I don't, that doesn't tend to

get impacted as much because in kind of like the endurance training thing, it's all kind of submaximal, right? So let's say you're doing sets of 12 and it's like 75% of maximum. If your strength is down five or 10%, it may be a little bit harder, but you can do the workout. You know, if I'm training a power lifter and the workout goal is singles at 90% and their max is down 10%, well, that's now we are doing a max at work. And if I want them to do, you know, even like say triples at 90%, which is a really hard workout and their strength is down 10%, that workout cannot be completed because what should Because what should be 90% is now 100. Yeah. So I do think it depends very much on the type of training you're doing. And I tend to think

that heavier stuff. And again, it's just, it's a math thing. If here's your max, if you're training down here, bodybuilding range, that won't, it'll make it harder. And if you're training here and this drops or even drops more than the goal, you can't complete the workout. And one thing that does come up that you've probably seen is whether athlete or not, right? And I don't want women to think this is only for high-performance athletes. women who want to train hard can often feel if they are subject to these kinds of performance variations, like either that they're the failure or that their body is betraying them. Like they go in in week four and let's just say that their biology says it's not going to happen. And then they just are like, I should be able to power through this. Well, no. And then again,

you've got this whole opposite thing where it's like, oh, you're just making excuses and using new, new, new, and I'm not even going to address you're in the US, you know how crazy that stuff gets. But it's like, as far as it is a biology, and if you were biologically impacted by it, just like if a male athlete came in and whatever, he was under stress, hasn't slept, et cetera, et cetera, I wouldn't expect him to power through it because it's just not going to happen for whatever reason if he's over-trained. So I think that's something for women to simply consider. Question about, we've talked a lot about how these hormonal fluctuations in the cycle impacts

performance. And we've kind of gotten to the conclusion that if you are in a performance or strength sport, it's going to have a much more tangible impact than if you're doing just base level hypertrophy work. I want to look a little bit better. How do these fluctuations, if they do, affect body composition? Because I think that we've talked about the interplay between the psychology and how these hormones affect your mind. And it's certainly not as easy to manage acute changes in body composition, I think, for women for a variety of sociocultural reasons. There's a lot more social pressure. And so do we see acute changes in body composition? Because one thing I see a lot with my clients is their desire to train from a psychological

standpoint is heavily impacted by the way they feel they look when they wake up that day. Are there things that women could glean from this and go, hey, I need to be more gentle with how I communicate with myself because I'm at this point in my cycle versus this point in my cycle? I think absolutely. And I do want to go back and make one final point about sort of that menstrual cycle performance thing. You and I can both talk in this idealized theoretical approach, and that's great, but there is so much variance. Ultimately, the women listening to this,

or if they have a coach or a trainer, you're going to have to be your own best scientist, right? You need to keep a couple months worth of data. And what I would generally suggest, like, just pick a standard workout, like set up a standard workout week. And I'm going to do this every week for the next month of the next eight weeks, record things like rating of perceived exertion. If you're doing endurance exercise report, you know, check heart rate, check and you whatever you can get as deep as you want, you can check motivation, you can check, you know, to see, and you whatever you can get as deep as you want you can check motivation you can check you know to see and you'll start to see a pattern discerned and go all right week one i feel strong motivated ready to kill it week four i don't want to get out of bed and then you can a have expectational you know be you know, manage expectations for that game.

We go, look, if I'm going to train like garbage, it is what it is. I'm going to go in, I'm going to adjust my training, make sure it's successful, make sure I come out of it. Maybe, you know, if you're in a performance sport, maybe go do some light technical work. Go do something different

so that when you move back into week one where you're just going to kill it, you'll be ready to really kill it. But that's something, that's a pattern. And there was actually a study they looked at, I want to say younger soccer players. They did that exact thing. They gave them the same weekly workout for a month and then looked at session RP and rating received exertion, all that stuff. Ultimately, that's what you're going to have to do. I can tell you what may generally occur you'll see them say ah world records have been set in every week of the menstrual cycle all older studies all self-reported and it's it just doesn't it's it's a terrible way of doing things all right so to your question

body composition absolutely and again anyone listening to this who's experienced this, certainly body weight can vary. Typically, it will be lowest maybe day two or three of the follicular phase, right? It tends to go up a little bit before ovulation. That spike in estrogen makes women's bodies hold more sodium. So if they're on a high sodium diet, they will tend to hold water and their body weight may go up. Week three, it drops back again. Progesterone, one of its nice effects is it antagonizes the receptor involved in water balance. So water tends to drop off. It also antagonizes the testosterone receptor, which again is bad from a performance standpoint,

but it's also part of why women that may have issues with oily skin or acne, their skin clears up in week three because progesterone's effects. And then in week four, usually if there's going to be big water weight gains, because the spike in estrogen causes the body to hold sodium and water, the dropping progesterone does the same thing. You get a same end result for two completely different reasons. And again, anyone listening to this knows that if there's a time when their body weight's going to go up, when they're going to feel puffy or have swollen ankles or their clothes not fit, it's probably going to be in, you know, three to five days before menstruation. Yeah. So yeah, so that is an issue. One thing that can be done is right before ovulation, right before, you know, right into week four, you can reduce your sodium and bring up your potassium. That will help a lot. Yeah. Light salt, high potassium foods, don't get straight potassium salt. That

stuff is gross. It tastes like aluminum. Do not get half and half light salt or you can get two thirds potassium, one third light salt or regular sodium that can help. But yeah, absolutely. That can occur. I've had women, cause I talk about this in my women's book about how we might adjust macronutrient intake in general. And sort of the, the, the too long did to read version of this is yeah first two weeks women's bodies tolerate carbs more carbs should be a little bit higher fat should be a little bit lower weeks three and four women don't tolerate carbs as well bring carbs maybe down by maybe 10 5 10 and we're not talking about huge differences right we're talking about

10 or 10 10 or 20 grams of fat increase, which means 25 or 50 grams of carbohydrates down. Like we're not talking about humongous shifts. And just as an interesting side note, when I was writing the women's book, I looked at all this physiology and that's what I came up with. And I was like, first two weeks, I keep protein pretty stable. Protein should just be set where it should be set. And then go around with the rest of it. And I was like, higher carbs, lower fat week one and two, lower carbs, higher fat week three and four. And then the study came out called the menstrual lean study. And they basically, they compared like traditional government guidelines to a diet that was based around the menstrual cycle. And for the women who there was better adherence,

and they did the exact same thing like what i had derived before i even read it which is always nice when all of my my random theorizing and and stuff actually seems to match up with what what and it works better because it makes sense in the same way that matching training to how you feel in the cycle makes more sense in the long term giving you a diet that you're not going to be able to maintain because you're hungry and your hunger is off the rails in week three and four, not a good approach. And then even in week three and four, it's really interesting. They even said, look, your metabolic rate's up a couple hundred calories.

If you want to add a little treat and they allowed, you know, whatever, a hundred grams of dark chocolate, whatever it was, you can take advantage of that because it's still within your calorie allotment. Because look, if you're going to have those cravings anyway, you can either fight with them. And if some women get away with that, or you can, you know, and we can even look at that from a fat loss standpoint, right? So let's say you're dieting for fat loss. That was my follow-up question. You eat three to four, for your metabolic rates up, whatever, 200 calories extra a day.

There's two ways to look at it. You can eat 200 calories more if you want and still be in the same deficit, or you can keep your calories where they are and get a little, you know, eat out a little bit more fat loss when the body's using more fat for fuel, assuming it doesn't backfire. Yeah. That depends on the person. Totally. Hey, guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast.

And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. I like that a lot because I do think that women have a tendency to punish themselves because I'm not adhering to the deficit. I'm failing my coach. I'm failing my program. I was doing so good. And then just out of nowhere, I really started to struggle with my cravings. And I don't understand why that might be. And I love the idea of, hey, we're going to have you in a deficit, but let's give you an extra 200 calories when

you can afford it. Because to your point, it's probably going to increase dietary adherence. And it's probably a lot less aggressive on your physiology than just eating, not eating that additional 200 calories and having to take on a more, I guess we would call it aggressive deficit when hormonally they're probably way less inclined to tolerate something like that. Yes. And in that, and in, in adding to that, and this was something, again, something I came across in some study is women, as I said, women's appetite is most well controlled in the first two weeks of the cycle for me. And from a logical standpoint, this is for someone who's just starting.

Yeah. And mood tends to be the best. You tend to not have any of those issues. If a woman is going to start a new diet or is going to start a new training program, the first two weeks of the cycle are the best time to do it because they're setting themselves up for at least two weeks of relatively easier success. Right? If you go, all right, just ovulated, I'm going to start a new diet tomorrow. When your appetite cravings,

blood sugar, blood sugar also gets unstable. I forgot to mention that can drive appetite. That is the wrong time to start a diet. And I'm not saying most people aren't going to want to wait, but you need to be aware of that. Yeah, certainly. You're going to have to adjust your expectations. I haven't looked into it a lot, but there's even research that when women decide try to stop smoking or drinking, their success rates depend on where in the cycle they start. Wow. And I'm not up to it, up on the data enough to tell, say when, but this is all, it's all better to take this into account than not. Absolutely. I mean, you're talking about, do you want to have two weeks of high friction dieting, or do you want to have two weeks of low friction dieting? And if you can get 10 to 14 days under

your belt where you're like, I'm rocking, I'm in a rhythm, I have some confidence, you'll do much better in the long run than if you're like, God, I tried that diet for two weeks and every day it was fucking miserable. Yeah, that's exactly, that's absolutely it. And you can even go further than that. I mean, you mentioned one thing. All right, well, we're going to use, you know, we're going to set the deficit for the first couple of weeks. But when we know a woman is burning a little few more calories, let's raise calories a little bit. Because again, that, if that improves adherence over week three and four, well, damn, now you've got a month under your belt going into the next two weeks. And now you've got six. So now you've gone through six weeks of hopefully, you know, solid success. You know, you can go even further than that.

One of the things I've, you know, talked about for God years now, you know, the idea of a diet break of, you know, just taking calories to maintenance in between, and they're finally starting to study it. And one of the things I wrote about in the women's book is if it fits your schedule, if you're going to do a two-week diet break, the time to do that is during weeks three and four. Because you're burning a few more calories. It's hard to adhere to the diet. Go ahead and do that. Calories are a little bit higher because maintenance is a lot easier to maintain, obviously. And then, boom, you're set.

You start again at the beginning of the follicular phase. Boom, you're right back into two weeks of solid dieting. So we talked a lot about the interplay between the menstrual cycle and training with regards to how these hormones impact your training. But what are some ways that training impacts these hormones? Because amenorrhea is quite a popular topic of conversation. I find that it's very prevalent. I'll check my DMs and I get questions all the time from women going, wow, I missed my period or I haven't gotten my period or I started doing this diet or that diet. And what ways do, let's just call it conventional training models and conventional diet culture,

the way women tend to approach food if they're not educated dieters, how can those disrupt the cycle that we're talking about? So without getting too far into the weeds, because this is one of those topics you could spend hours on. Yeah. Central cycle dysfunction is depressingly highly common in women. Yeah. And when women started to enter sports really significantly in the 80s and 90s, they started to see these problems where women would either lose their cycle completely, amenorrhea, or they would develop what's called oligomenorrhea.

And that's a cycle length between 35 and 90 days, an infrequent cycle. Okay. Which can be its own issue. And there was all kinds of ideas, it typically was seen in athletes that emphasize or sports that emphasize thinness, running, ballet, gymnastics. They're now seeing it in men slightly more frequently and it's in runners and horse jockeys of all things because horse maintain a terrifyingly low body weight, like 105 pounds for, you know,

I mean, they're, they're short, but even so they starve themselves. And there was like, so all kinds of theories over why the most prevalent one, and it's still around is that it was a body fat percentage thing, which made a certain logical sense,

right? They, they had identified already that women, that girls didn't start menstruating until they crossed a critical body fat. So the logic was that, well, women need a minimum of body fat to maintain the menstrual cycle. And again, there's a certain logic to that. Having enough body fat to support pregnancy, to support breastfeeding, to support all of that would seem to be important. Probably my favorite theory, and I just mentioned this because I think

it's funny. And again, we're talking early days. Chronic nipple stimulation can actually inhibit the menstrual cycle. Breastfeeding of a certain pattern can cause women to lose their cycle. The way Western women breastfeed, it doesn't. But the way they breastfeed in other countries where the children just breastfeed, because it raises prolactin levels. Yes. And that inhibits reproduction. They thought that maybe the nipple stimulation from running up and down in a bra.

Oh, my gosh. It's wrong. Look, it's very easy to look 30 years ago and go, oh, they were working from the best science of the day. And I imagine the guy who came up with that in the lab thought he was fucking brilliant at that point. Oh yeah. And just randomly, there is a stunning amount of research into sports bra design

because it is a very real issue for women. Yeah. Because there is many women who have larger breasts report that breast discomfort is one of their big barriers to exercise. So like this isn't, it's easy for us to, you know, but it's not, it's not a joke. Even in the weight room, this is an issue that guys don't really deal with. If women have large, you know, there are exercise choice considerations. A woman with larger breasts to do a chest supported row may not be very comfortable. Even bench pressing can be a

set. It can change their center of gravity regardless. So this went back and forth and they were like, ah, it was the stress of exercise and it was body fat. The problem was if you're looking at runners, runners are typically running too much, staying really lean year round, and eating too little. So you couldn't really separate one from the other, right? You've got this whole cluster of things that are happening. Many had eating disorders. So finally, a researcher named Anne Lukes came along, and there is a concept called energy availability, right? So energy availability is calorie intake minus exercise calorie expenditure, right? Now this

isn't the same as energy balance, calories in versus calories out. You can conceptualize this as being the number of calories that are left over to the body after exercise, right? Because everything in your body uses calories, your heart beating, your brain, braining, your kidney, kidney, and all that uses up calories. So energy availability, it's what's left after exercise is kind of paid for. And certain parts of human physiology are more important than others, right? So what do many women with extreme diets report? What their hair and nails stop growing. Yeah. Hair. It's actually called telogen effluvium. I don't know why, but when that's, that's when hair stops growing,

telogen effluvium go T E L O G E N, which I guess is a hair thing anyway, because not having your hair grow is not going to kill you. Immune function does go down. In the short term, that's not going to kill you. If your brain stops working, bad things happen. If your heart stops pumping, bad things happen. Well, the reproductive system is not required in the short term. So when energy availability falls too low, that was the theory was that's when...

So Anne Luke's came along and did some really well-controlled studies where she took women and it was short term five days and she either kept food intake the same and ramped exercise to create a specific energy availability or she kept exercise the same and dropped calories so we created the look to see what was causing what because she had done research showing that if you look at female athletes some will have a menstrual cycle at 12 and others will lose it at 24 there was no critical there's had to be something else and what she found was that when energy availability developed fell too low whether it's from too much activity or too few, too little food, there were changes in

reproductive hormones. So they call luteinizing hormone, which I don't want to get. It's just in one of the main reproductive hormones, thyroid hormone crashed, cortisol went up. There was kind of this global, very similar to what occurs in starvation or long-term dieting. All right. So first she did this study, just, just crushed it, just super low energy availabilities. All right. First she did this study, just crushed it, just super low energy availabilities. Then she went back and looked at these different thresholds, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, and showed that at 30 kcals per kilogram of lean body mass, right? Body fat doesn't use a lot of calories.

Yeah. There was a critical threshold below which these hormonal change. Now, they didn't see a loss of menstrual cycle, but it was the hormonal changes that down the road. Now, there's been a million studies ever since then, and what they find is that it's not quite as clean cut. They will find women who are at like 32 who have menstrual, and it's just between a five-day study and long-term. In the same way that if I if i starve someone for five days their metabolism will crash we know that if i then give them a moderate deficit for six months well metabolic rate will slow down eventually it just takes longer yeah so there

is this energy availability threshold but it can be generated through one of two ways a lot of exercise a lot of because she also showed was that you can do a ton of exercise as long as you keep food intake up yeah the negative effects so it really was and if body fat plays a role it's secondary it's indirect yeah typically you don't see amenorrhea in women carrying excess body fat. One exception being bariatric surgery, because people lose like 100 pounds in a matter of weeks. But you typically don't see the problem till women get below 20, 22%. So body fat is permissive. It is involved. But if you've got a woman at 22% and her energy availability is too low, she may lose her menstrual cycle. Yeah.

Woman at 15% body fat who's eating enough may be completely fine. So yeah, that kind of summarizes it quite well. And I think what we see a lot is I want to look a certain way. I have a desired aesthetic outcome and I'm going to ramp up my training and I am going to ratchet down my calories, and boom, something happened. I guess I should say, how quickly can acute disruption in the menstrual cycle occur if somebody starts the prototypical Western wedding crash diet exercise regimen? I don't necessarily have an answer. I don't know if I can say completely offhand, but women can start within five to seven days of an extreme change in energy availability,

you will already start to see these hormonal changes occurring. So a woman goes, all right, I'm going to just jump into two hours of exercise and take my calories as low as I can. By day five to seven, they will see a decrease in active thyroid hormone. They will see changes in luteinizing hormone, which eventually will cause problems down the road. There's this sort of stereotypical hormonal response. So it can be very quick. Now, there's another wrinkle I do want to mention. So back in the early days, it was self-reported and again they couldn't know what they didn't know yeah never i'm not being critical of 30 year old research the best is what

they they have and what they saw was there was either eumenorrhea which is just a regular menstrual cycle or amenorrhea the lack of it did you say regular or irregular? Regular. Eumenorrhea means regular. E just means normal or regular or whatever. Latin's been too many years ago. Amenorrhea, A just means not. So oligomenorrhea, which again, kind of a different thing or can be. That gets into PCOS and some other stuff. But what more recent research has found is that there are two what they call subclinical menstrual cycle dysfunctions.

Okay. So the first one is what's called a luteal phase defect. Okay. And as the name suggests, luteinizing hormone, luteal, like these are all related, right? Is the luteal phase starts to become, I want to say, shortened. Now, the cycle doesn't change. A woman will still menstruate, but the system is already starting to go awry. And the problem is everything looks normal.

There's no, and that's why they couldn't pick it up in the early studies. You have to do really involved blood work. If you like really involved ultrasound to determine this. So that's kind of the first stage. And I have a study somewhere and it was like with as little as two to three hours of exercise a week well some women would develop luteal phase defect so it didn't even take that much the next stage is an ovulation now the egg isn't being released because again these hormones are all starting to go south at this point and again there may still be some there may still be menstruation there it's not apparent. Because of other things that are going on with bone mineral density loss and stuff, these are kind of like silent menstrual site.

Women may have this and not know because everything looks normal unless a woman is trying to become pregnant and can't. Or you can get ovulation tests and things of that nature. But these were kind of hidden until it developed into the full-blown dysfunction and full-blown loss of cycle. And like I said, oligomanorrhea gets into, I don't know if we have time for that whole conversation. It can develop, short version, it can develop sequentially. It can be eumenorrhea, luteal phase defect, and they go in sequence, luteal phase defect and they go in sequence luteal phase defect on ovulation oligomenorrhea amenorrhea but as often as not this oligomenorrhea is due to women with high elevated testosterone levels which would be something like a PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome because originally they just they didn't know they saw it in athletes then they started looking and they were like well we're seeing this in athletes who are not showing this catabolic physiology, who are more muscular, who are stronger, who are in power sports like swimming. And they looked and they were like, oh, the elevated testosterone is causing, so it can occur sequentially. And the difference is if a woman's always had an irregular menstrual cycle, like from

day one, she probably has PCOS. Yeah. If a woman has never had an irregular cycle, if it was always normal and then develops, it's part of the sequence. So that's how you diagnose. That's how you sort of differentially diagnose it. Women with PCOS don't just, you know, now women with PCOS can lose their cycle, but they are coming from that base of the array. So anyway, so we've got all of that. So women, even at a subclinical energy availability, right, it's a little bit low, may develop one of these,

you know, subclinical dysfunctions, but not develop full blown amenorrhea. And when you get into like all the numbers and the thresholds and all this other stuff, the only thing that sort of speaks to the 30 is that all women with amenorrhea have been found to have an energy availability below that 30 kcal per kilogram lean body mass. However, being below 30 doesn't guarantee that you will develop amenorrhea. Does that make sense? Yeah. So basically what you're saying is not all women who are under 30 are going to see amenorrhea, but all women with amenorrhea are under that threshold. Correct. And the treatment for amenorrhea in this case, and amenorrhea can be caused for any women's bodies or for any number of reasons. This is what's technically called functional hypothalamic amenorrhea because it's a change in the hypothalamic hormones. The treatment is

train less and eat more. And when good luck to getting women to do it, but that is the, you know, when they've taken athletes, they give them enough calories to get them back up to like 35. Eventually their cycle returns. Yeah. And some researchers have thrown out that 45 is sufficient. However, this is really, if you're not training three, four hours a day, that's going to be way too many calories. That's like 22 calories per pound of lean body mass. That's way at the extremes. Now, something came out of this was like late 2000s. When this first value got thrown out, this 30, suddenly the dieting culture said, never go below that value, which is great in theory. However, if you're trying to,

if we're trying to get extremely lean, we're talking contest levels, physique levels, 12%. Eventually, she's got to cross that threshold. There's no getting around it. The ideal, the goal is to cross it as late as possible and to stay there for as short a time as possible. Now, I'm not saying all women will have to go under this, right? However, if you're trying to get to the extremes of leanness at some point, that's just the realities of dieting. And at that level, that's probably, you know, again, some women do, there's also something after what's 14 years of what's called reproductive age, right? Now this is different than biological age.

Reproductive age is the number of years since a woman started menstruating. The woman started menstruating at 12 and she's 20. She's got an eight year reproductive age. Gotcha. If at 14 years reproductive age, women's systems become far more resistant to these issues. Gotcha. issues for whatever reasons. It's actually when a woman's pelvis stops developing. So there's something going on there. But the unfortunate reality is most women who are running into this, who are adolescent or teenage female athletes, early twenties, they haven't reached that point and they're going to run into that problem if they go. But yeah, so let's look at classic, what I call toxic dieting culture. I'm going to

jump into as much exercise as I can stand and as low calories within a week, problems can start. And even if a menorrhea doesn't happen for a couple months- You're going to see some dysfunction. You will see some dysfunction. And there's actually some women's book, I cited some case studies of physique athletes. and this is tracking one athlete. So one of them, she started her diet right at the 30 level.

She was already on too few calories. Yeah. She lost her menstrual cycle within the first month of dieting. Yeah. She did not have a cycle for the next six months of her prep coming out of the diet. She decided to do very slow reverse dieting to avoid fat gain. Yeah.

She didn't get her cycle back for like another year after the show. So she, she went 18 months without a cycle and there was another, another physique athlete. They followed. She's, she didn't cross the 30 threshold to like a month before her show. She lost her cycle for a month,

came out of the show, bumped her calories, got her cycle back within a month. Now again, these are case studies. I'm not saying that this proves anything, but it is sort of an example of what we're talking about. There are better and worse ways of going about this type of thing. It's a great point because reverse dieting has become extremely popular, particularly with women who have done a lot of work to achieve a certain level of leanness. And it's very understandable that you would want to maintain as much of that as possible while you reintroduce calories. But it sounds like what you're saying is if you've had amenorrhea or you're experiencing hormone dysfunction from having ratcheted your calories down too much,

a reverse diet is about the slowest way to get back to normal possible. Yes. Because you're staying in a deficit longer and you're not going to re-normalize anything till you get at least above that critical threshold. Now, you don't necessarily... If we're looking at call like a physique dieter, like classic, you know, who's getting down to 10% body fat, she's not trying to sustain that forever or shouldn't be right. She should be coming back up to 18 or 20%. Now, if we're talking about a female dieter, who's gotten, let's say 18%, right. Which is lean, but not excessively. So she may have lost her menstrual cycle. If she brings up her calories

over the next six weeks, this is six more weeks that she has an insufficient energy availability. Now, the physique dieter has to regain body fat. If they are trying to treat a female runner who's at 12% body fat, yeah, she's going to have to regain some body fat. Only 18% may not have to regain body fat, but she is going to have to. And what happens is, and we've known this for years, you can achieve energy balance. It's not a number. It's a moving target. And as much as this is going to come across as like talking about starvation mode or whatever. So you've got a woman who's at too low of energy availability.

Her thyroid hormones are low. Her metabolic rate is lowered because of this. When she comes back up to a sufficient energy availability, it's like 35 and her thyroid hormones improve and all these other things improve. Her NEAT will probably go up because she's not exhausted all the time. She can train more intensely. She may still be in energy balance while being at a higher energy availability. Gotcha.

So she won't necessarily regain it because that's, of course, the fear. Yeah. Now I will say, you know, fine. You don't have to bring up calories like immediately. Would that be ideal? Sure. But if you want to take a week, a couple to bring them back in so you don't lose food control, that's fine. This idea of taking six to eight weeks to come back up to calorie balance, all you're doing is potential long-term damage. Yeah. Another thing in that vein, another case study, it's one researcher, Trent Stellingworth. He followed this-

Sounds like a porn star, not a researcher. Yeah, right? He followed this elite female runner for like seven years and tracked everything, her body composition, body fat, bone mineral density, energy, training, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what she would do is out of season, she would stay about 14, 15% body fat, but with sufficient calories to support her training, to support her progress. And then right before her competition phase, she dropped down to 10 to 12. She would lose her menstrual cycle. Everything would go down, you know, into the toilet. She would compete, but she would bring it right back

up immediately. She'd come right back to 15% sufficient energy availability. And what he found was she set numerous PRs, some records. She never got injured. She was able to stay in her training intensity because she took a very pragmatic approach to it. Yeah. I gotta be 12% to compete as a runner, but I'm not even going to attempt to do it because you can't train effectively on calories that low, your recovery's down. So yeah. Now, does this mean that a woman should never do a crash diet? Well, not necessarily.

You have to accept that there will be consequences for it. And if it is done, it should be short term, right? If you want to, you know, because again, I've written a book about crash dieting, but it's like, yeah, if you're a lean woman, two weeks tops. Yeah. The problem is when women try to do it week after week, after week, after week without a break. Yeah. There is also, you know, there is the debatable possibility. What if you insert higher calorie days? this offset the problem there's very limited research on this um this would be something like a refeed if you right or i i've actually gotten really away from that term because it tends to be people like i just eat every every food that's not nailed down

i just think of it as a maintenance day and I find that I think psychologically that avoids some of the problems people get into. So, and Luke's again, she's done this, like this is her career, right? This is just what she's done. And she's generated some of the best data on this that's ever been seen. Is they knew that in animals, if you starved them and then refed them for one day, everything would normalize. Now, animals work on a much faster timeframe than we do. Like one day for a rat is like seven days for a human. So she took women and she put them on five days of super low energy availability.

And then she did overfeed them. It was something like double maintenance. It was like 6,500 calories a day for one day. Something just crazy. Whoa. And there was no change in hormone levels. It did nothing. It's just too small of a window. One day was not enough. Now there was another study that was actually looking at something completely different. And what they did was three days of total fasting,

but I went and mapped it out. And the total deficit was actually about the same, three days of no food versus five days. And then just, and they measured hormones and everything went into the toilet. And then just for whatever reason, they were like, we're going to let them eat at maintenance for two days and then remeasure them. And everything had normalized. So two days might be a sweet spot, whereas one day is just insufficient. Correct. At that, and it may, you know, and it may depend on the degree of low energy. Maybe if you're at 10 kcal

per kilo, maybe different. We don't have that data. And if you look at really what I've said over the years, I don't think that one day per week at maintenance really does much metabolically. I've really changed because I just don't think the data supports it. Or even psychologically. Yeah. I mean, it can. I think two days is better. We then get into debates. Do they have to be two days in a row? What if you have two days, a Wednesday and a Saturday? Will that offset it? We don't really know at this point. We do know that a two-week diet break will certainly reverse it yeah one of one of my favorites is this is in men but again they're starting to see similar phenomenon in men and which has its own issues they're now you know what they used to call the female athlete triad yeah that had to do with all

this which had to me the unfortunate acronym of fat i think they could have probably done better since it was seen in lean women who were starving themselves, but that's just me. They're now calling it relative energy deficiency syndrome to really emphasize that this is an energy availability issue. Neither here nor there. But in men, there was an old study. It was like Navy SEALs or Army Rangers who went through eight hours of like 16 hours a day of activity, too little sleep, like 400 calories a day, like just, I mean, military training. The end of it, they lost all their body fat. Their testosterone levels were castrate. Their cortisol was through the roof.

Their thyroid was crashed. Like they showed the same hormonal profile that you see. They refed them completely for one week while keeping activity high and their hormones basically normalized. So within one week of maintenance calories, that now will that necessarily reverse amenorrhea? No, that's not what I'm saying. However, if a woman wants to do that, maybe we need to put a diet break every six to eight weeks where they take a week and raise calories. Maybe like we talked about, we schedule that so it's going to happen in the luteal phase. Of course, it's worth mentioning, if a woman loses her menstrual cycle,

there is no menstrual cycle dynamics. The hormones aren't changing anymore. They're just all tanked, right? They're just all tanked. Exactly. They're just all in that place. But even so, but so in that case, but if she's still menstruating, there's still a cycle and there's probably some sort of subclinical disorder. Well, maybe do a week at maintenance or even two weeks at maintenance during the weeks three and four, you know, do that every, would be every six weeks or every 10 weeks, right? It has to be alternated. And then that helps to normalize your hormones.

And again, diet long enough, get lean enough by keeping calories too low. It's not a matter of if it's going to happen. It's a matter of when it's going to happen. The idea is to prolong that point for as long as possible, but as importantly, to reverse it as quickly as possible. Makes a lot of sense. So just to circle, go ahead. Just to circle the wagons here before we, before I move on to a few quick questions that might not be too quick because they're about birth control, but for women with a conventional healthy menstrual cycle, where we're looking at a follicular phase ovulation and eludial phase the hormonal variations for healthy women we want to

try to if we can for performance training front load it into that follicular phase be a little bit gentler with how we train on the back end. For people who are training for physique, you're probably going to do a little bit better in the follicular phase, but the style of training isn't as demanding. So you'll be relatively okay staying consistent. Substrate utilization is going to be different. You'll use more carbs in the follicular than the luteal. You'll use fat perhaps more efficiently in the luteal than the follicular. Body compositional changes, water changes, whether that be fluid or sodium related, are going to be all over the place. So it's always a good idea to track your cycle,

gauge how you're doing. If you're working with a coach or if you're not, you recommend really getting a good idea of where you are on that 25 to 32 days, getting in a rhythm and tailoring your programming and your nutrition to kind of your unique situation to the best of your ability. Correct. And the one thing I would add about sort of if you're physique training, right, we've now established that kind of any repetition range to a degree will work. And it may very well be that in the follicular phase, when you're stronger, when your recovery is better, well, you can go a little bit heavier. You can go sets of six to eight or eight to ten.

And then in the luteal phase, weeks three and four, when you maybe don't feel quite as strong, well, do your sets of 12 to 15. Love that. Love that. That's awesome. And you can do, again, the same thing for performance athletes to less of a degree. You're never going to hit PRs in week one, boom, go do it, go hit your 90% plus for singles and just put it up week two. Maybe you're doing doubles or triples at 85. Maybe in week three, we're going to do slightly more. You might be a little bit stronger, you might not. And in week four, well, maybe you're just going to go do technical work at 65% if your coordination is there, right? That way you're at least training productively towards your goal, or maybe not,

maybe you don't even have that. And you've just got to do, do what you're going to do and do polls or, you know, whatever it is, runners and, you know, we're not going to get into endurance sports, but there's probably places there as well where you're better off, you know, you don't use carbs as well in weeks three and four. High intensity training that require carbohydrates is not going to go as well. Maybe that's when you do more long, slow endurance training. Maybe that's when you really utilize that body's ability to use fat for fuel. Then weeks one and two, when you've really got the ability to use some carbs well, that's when you really utilize that body's ability to use fat for fuel. Then weeks one and two, when you've really got the ability to use some carbs well, that's when you do your time trial work and your HI, you know, and cycle it. Like I said,

endurance, sports, whole separate thing. And again, it's also submaximal. It doesn't matter as much. I still, I love the idea of if you're going to, you know, making the assumption, if we train close enough to failure, we're going to get a hypertrophic stimulus, regardless of the rep range. If you want to train in more of a mechanically tensioned focused rep range, like a three to eight, do that during the follicular phase. If you want to stimulate maybe more of the metabolic pathways or those higher rep ranges, sprinkle those in. And then maybe in that fourth week, like you said, if you want to isolate and do machine work where the movement complexity is very low, you're highly stable. That would be the time to really hammer those things. Absolutely. I love that. Yep. So last question. And this is an interesting one because I get it

a lot and it's the interplay between birth control and hypertrophic or muscle building potential. And so I really just want to simplify this as much as I can. Is there a form of contraception that is best for women who are looking to prioritize their muscle growth potential, but also want the benefits of contraception? Right. And the answer is, oh my God, this is so complicated. And the research is so terrible that it hurts me sometimes. Without getting into that, because birth control could be an entire hour to try to explain it. Yeah. We're going to have to do an episode just on birth control. Yeah. The short version of this that like I said said super quickly is birth control. There's a synthetic estrogen.

There is synthetic progesterone called a progestin. Mainly I'm going to focus on the progestin. Progestin can act kind of like progesterone depending on the type. There's four different generations that have been developed over the years. First generation, second, third, fourth. They all vary in how they impact a woman's body but in this context the main thing is how do they impact the androgen receptor are they androgenic or not right androgenic just means masculinizing right they're called anabolic androgenic steroids

yeah now first generation birth control we're talking the 70s got it caused women to get oily skin acne highly androgenic so it's basically sort of sending all the bad signal with none of the good signal essentially yeah right second generation was a little bit less androgenic third generation is the least androgenic. Fourth generation is anti-androgenic, meaning that it binds the receptor and blocks it, right? So that's the main anti-androgenic progestins. There's Yaz. Well, the commercial brands are Yaz and Yasmin. It's called drospironone is the actual progestin. Women love it. They drop body water, they lose weight, clears up their skin, acne, oily skin, because it's preventing the testosterone in their body from having any impact.

Yeah. That would have the single worst effect on muscle gains. Great. Of course it would. It makes a lot of sense. Hasn't been studied directly in this sense. And their research on this is all terrible. Who's going to pay for that, right? Well, I mean, they do it, but but it's like because it's an important question but a lot of these birth control studies are like all right we took 10 women they were on five different kinds

of birth control that are all acting differently in the body and then we had them compared to and then we took the data and we smooshed it together i'm like you gotta be kidding me something like 50 of all women are on birth control and you couldn't find 10 on the same kind. You got to be joking. Occasionally researchers would be like, all right, we put them on either a second or a third gen, whatever, like that actually did good research. So probably really the study that, and it's weird, got published as a poster in 2009 and it just got published as a full paper like a week ago. Oh shit. Good timing. I really want to email the researcher and go, why did it take this 12 years to get published? I

don't know what's going on. It must've been a peer review hell. So what they did was they took women not on birth control and women on birth control and training for eight weeks, hypertrophy training. And what they found is that the birth control prevented muscular gains. Okay. And the non-birth control gained like three pounds, kilo and a half, something like that. But then they divided it up and they said, all right, the more androgenic birth control, the ones that have a progestin that binds harder to the androgen receptor, gained less muscle. They gained like 0.3 kilos. The less androgenic birth control gained about a kilo.

So it was about half a kilo difference. It's a big difference. Well, it is and it isn't. All right. All right. If you are an elite athlete, a female power lifter, an elite Olympic lifter who is trying to maximize your muscle gain and your performance to the highest level, that matters. If you are the I got I hate to use the word typical or average because it sounds really, really demeaning. And I don't mean it in that sense. If you are a female who is training for just general body, like because trust me, recreational athletes or trainees will bust their butts just as hard as anybody else. So I'm not, I'm not saying like that's a lesser goal, but you have to ask yourself, are the benefits of birth control, the potential benefits, whether it's controlling my menstrual cycle, they can help prevent anemia

because you're not losing iron in the blood every month. Birth control can have a number of benefit effects. Is that half kilo muscle different? Does that matter to me? You see the same thing in the aerobic studies. They're like, all right, this birth control lowers performance by 5%. Does that matter for the average trainee? No. Does it matter for an elite runner?

Yeah. So if I were going to make a suggestion, it would be an oral form of birth control, combined oral contraception. The synthetic estrogen doesn't seem to matter much. Although one study said it wasn't a progestin at all. It was the estrogen does. At this point, tomorrow, a study could come out that say everything I'm saying is wrong and I'll be okay with that. I am drawing inferences from a lot of various research. problem is that estrogen the synthetic estrogen can cause women to hold more water that shows up as lean body mass who the hell knows and it would be combined oral birth control that had a third generation progestin, which means, I have to look it up.

Go for it. Those are, they're called desogestrel, gestidine, and norgestimate containing pills. Let me share my screen real quick. And then I guess the other form that I'm aware of is somebody with a very rudimentary knowledge of these things is IUDs. Okay. Yeah. And that's actually worth bringing up because there are, you've got the other forms of birth control. You got the pills is sort of the most traditional one.

You've got the patch, the ring, the implant, the Nexplanon implant, Depo-Provera. Depo-Provera is awful. I will say that. It is easy because it's a shot once every three months. It causes the most weight gain. It causes muscle loss. It doubles the risk of obesity. It causes bone mineral density loss. I will thump till the end of my day is that that stuff should be taken off the market. Why are we all still using a 50-year-old high potency synthetic progesterone? Has nobody come up with anything better in the last 50? I don't believe that they can't. Just get the researchers, stick them in a lab and don't give

them any pizza until they work this out. This is not an intractable problem, right? Just you got to motivate them with the right thing. Okay. So the hormonal IUD is different than all the rest of these. All these other forms of birth control are putting synthetic hormones into a woman's body and essentially replacing they are causing changes in her you know luteinizing hormone what's called follicle stimulating hormone all forms of birth control actually lower testosterone by about half which is another consideration lower free testosterone by half this is why they're used to treat polycystic ovary syndrome, which tends to have to, and it treats the acne, the oily skin, the body hair, all that stuff to reduce the testosterone,

which is great. If you're a PCOS woman who wants the health benefits, PCOS women have a huge advantage in sports. They may have doubled the testosterone of women. So again, context. Anyway, They may have double the testosterone of women. So again, context. Anyway, the hormonal IUD is purely local. It releases a synthetic progestin, which thickens the endometrium. It also is a barrier method because it's like a copper IUD. But it doesn't, a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of the synthetic hormone gets into a woman's bloodstream.

So women will still menstruate. Her hormones will still cycle normally. It should not impact muscle gain or perform now, nor will it, if one's got huge performance variations, nor will it level those out, right? That is another valid reason for a female, because if her performance is doing this and this and this, if you're a female because of her performance is doing this and this and this if you're a female athlete you may be losing one week 52 you know whatever you may be losing 12 weeks a year to not being able to train hardly at all that's a consideration many women will use contraceptives not only for contraception but to simply regulate their menstrual cycle so that they don't have a week

where they're incapacitated so that it level at least levels things out you have to weigh that yeah there are pros and cons to all of it i love it the iud shouldn't affect muscle gain it will still provide contraception but it will not flatten out a woman's hormonal cycles if they're there i think it's a it's it's a perfect place to wrap it up it's unfair to talk about the menstrual cycle and not, in some capacity, talk about the ways that women go to manage it therapeutically with things like birth control. Oh, absolutely. Lyle, wonderful conversation as always. So appreciative of your time.

Thank you for having me. There's plenty of women who are going to listen to this and who are going to want to find your work and your resources. Where can they do that? So my website since forever is just called bodyrecomposition.com. That's where my articles are. My books can be found at store.bodyrecomposition.com. five very text very technical small font uh pages it's it's not an easy read but if you really want to dive into the the depths of this um my facebook group is extremely active also called body recomposition um i got a lot of brilliant experts in my group i tend to attract see i got a great ob-gyn who can handle the questions that i'm not, you know, that I'm not usually medical type stuff. I am on Instagram, but I mainly post dumb memes and dad jokes. So if you're looking for fitness content, that's not where to go.

But yeah, my Facebook group is really where I'm most active at this point. And I got a lot of smart people in there. Cool. Hey, thanks again so much for your time. I know this will be really valuable and we'll do a third episode soon. Sounds good. All right, man. Have a good one. You too. All right, everybody. There you have it. Thank you so much for tuning in. And thanks again to Lyle for coming on. What a resource he is. What a great friend to the show he has been. Cannot wait to sit down with him in the next couple

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