WHOOP Podcast - The science of training and sleeping based on your menstrual cycle

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

On this week’s podcast, we’re talking about how hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle produce highly individual physiological responses that affect training and sleep needs. We have launched a new feature in the WHOOP app – menstrual cycle coaching – which provides personalized sleep and strain recommendations to those who menstruate based on where they are in their monthly cycle. That feature – and this conversation – are based on groundbreaking research conducted by WHOOP and leading female physiology expert Dr. Stacy Sims, who returns to the podcast for an in-depth discussion on this topic with WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and WHOOP VP of Data Science and Research Emily Capodilupo. They talk about why women and coaches need to have more information about the menstrual cycle (3:23), what WHOOP has learned through research of the cycle (8:08), how the pill affects your training (10:49), understanding the phases of the cycle (15:23), training periodization (20:25), alleviating PMS symptoms (24:19), how ibuprofen affects the body (29:29), why periods are a sign of good overall health (32:09), debunking the myths of the menstrual cycle, and why tracking your cycle is critical to high performance (40:30).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more, learning what the best in the world they're doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. We are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's podcast, we're talking about how hormonal changes during menstrual cycles produce highly individual physiological responses that can affect training and sleep needs. In case you missed it, last week we launched a new feature in the WOOP app, menstrual cycle coaching, which provides personalized sleep and strain recommendations

to those who menstruate based on where they are in their monthly cycle. That feature in this conversation are based on groundbreaking research conducted by Woop and leading female physiology expert Dr. Stacey Sims, who returns to the podcast for an in-depth discussion. on this topic with whoop VP of performance, Kristen Holmes, and whoop VP of data science and research Emily Capitaluppo. Stacey, Kristen, and Emily discuss what you should know about each phase of your cycle and how you should think about training and sleep with that in mind, what you need to know about birth control and how it affects your body, why you can push yourself physically on

your period contrary to popular belief, how taking NSAIDs close to bed can affect your sleep efficiency. Plus, Stacey takes listener questions and debunk some of the common myths about the menstrual cycle. This is an important episode. I think it continues our efforts to double down on women's health and physiology. A reminder, you can get 15% off a membership if you use the code will. And without further ado, here are Stacey, Kristen, and Emily. Hello, everyone. We are here with repeat guest, Dr. Stacey. Sims is always a good sign. That means the first podcast was wildly successful and people want to hear from Dr. Stacey again. So Stacey, welcome. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Good to see you

both. Stacey is a member of our newly formed women's performance collective, which we're so pumped about. So Stacey, thank you so much for joining this initiative. And just additionally, Stacey is an author, a scientist, a teacher, a prolific researcher, and founder, of Dr. Stacey Sims.com. That's where you can find her. She's got basically this insane brand that's tackling all things female physiology. So to learn more about her work

and all the different things that she's doing in this field, go to Dr. Stacey Sims.com. We also have another very special guest, a frequent guest on our podcast, of course, is Emily Capitlipo, our vice president of data science and research. Emily, welcome.

Thanks, Kristen. Emily and her team have been hard at work, cooking up and refining algorithms to help our female members to get the best possible mental coaching. So we'll talk about that and much, much more. Let's talk a little bit about a survey that our marketing team ran, which was really interesting. Emily, if you just want to read some of those stats, and then we can get Stacey to comment on them. Yeah, so there were three really kind of meaty stats that came out of this. The first one was that only 9% of the respondents had ever had a coach, trainer, doctor, or other expert, tell them that they should be training, fueling, or

sleeping differently at different phases of their cycle. And to be totally honest, like, I'm surprised it's that high, but we really need that to be like 100%, not 9%. The other two stats that really stood out, whether 23% of respondents said that they knew how estrogen and progesterone, of course, the two primary ovarian hormones, changed throughout their cycle. And it was really surprising to see the kind of more broad. that not everybody even like knew those words. And then 69% of respondents have not been educated

on how to sleep, train, or fuel at different stages of their mental cycle. What do you make at that, Stacey? Well, there's a lack of the even basic health education now in high school in the States, right? And people don't talk about what reproductive hormones are or how estrogen and progesterone affect every system of the body. And we see that pervasively, not just through education, but biomedical science, sport science, of course, right? And my tagline, women are not small men, is because women have been pigeonholed into male data, male stats, because no one really talks about how these hormones affect every system of our body. And we see it not just in sports science with regards to how they affect us, but we know something like

a concussion. Like if you get hit in the high hormone phase, then recovery is going to be a lot longer or more difficult than the low hormone phase. But people don't talk about that. So the outcomes for concussion completely different for women than men, but the recommendation for return to play is based on male data. So that's kind of the issue. Same with like ACL rehabilitation, right? So we might have better efficacy for looking at how estrogen can facilitate muscle repair and motivation. So there are lots of things that we're looking at how these hormones can maximize our potential. But that message is not getting out there as widely as it should because there's still this prevailing myth that women and men are pretty much the same. Yeah. And I think

it's also such like an interesting example of how like we learn too many things siloed. Right. So like you might have learned that like these are your, you know, ovarian hormones and they determine whether or not you're going to get pregnant and like all those kinds of things. But like, you know, they also affect your circadian rhythm, you know, you're way more likely to tear your ACL during your luteal phase than the follicular phase, right? And that's just an indication that it's doing all these things, right? It affects like the elasticity of your ligaments and stuff like that. Every system is meaningfully affected, not just affected. Right, exactly. There's a conversation in the sport science world that is frustrating where there are a couple of big voices that are saying

there's no evidence to support menstrual cycle phase anything. And there's a couple of They're not looking at the fact that there are new studies that aren't clinically controlled because you can't get that. And there's a lot of robust evidence coming out that shows that there are menstrual cycle phase differences. But because they're loud voices, then they're pushing the same dogma instead of challenging it, which makes it even more difficult to get the message outside that, yes, there are differences and we need to pay attention to it.

So it's frustrating when you're in an industry and you're having these counter old school thoughts that still keep getting pushed out when there's evidence and research, like our study that we did, just is really quantifying what we already know anecdotally. So the more that we get out there and the more that we can keep pushing the dogma, the more we can kind of push back on those voices. Well, why don't we segue? We'll talk a little bit about that paper, which was a beautiful paper. published in the British of Medical Journal. And, you know, we launched a menstrual coaching feature, and this work was largely influenced Stacey by your published paper. And Emily Capulupo and data scientist, Laura Ware, co-authored the paper.

So it was really wonderful to kind of have this incredible team effort. You know, Emily, if you just want to kind of tee up the demographic and just some of those bits, and then Stacey, you can talk about what we found and kind of how it informed, you know, you guys can just talk about how informed the feature and how they can kind of access that too, we should probably just make sure everyone's aware of where they find it in the app and that sort of thing. Yeah, for sure. Well, I think Stacey teed us up so well to talk about this, you know, when she was saying that like there's, you know, lack of consensus in, you know, academic circles right now. And that was really what inspired this whole project that, you know,

we have thousands of women who are tracking their menstrual cycles every month on loop and, you know, they're tracking their sleep and they're tracking their activities. We're like, we have this gold mine that we're sitting on that's really valuable to answer questions like this. So we took almost 400,000 days of data across 14,000 menstrual cycles from almost 5,000 people who menstruate on the WOOP platform. And we surveyed these people.

We asked them if they were using hormonal birth control or any other kind of birth control. And we asked them what kind of birth control they were using. And this is important because while birth control comes in a lot of different flavors, it's always got either estrogen and progesterone or just progesterone. So, like, you know, it comes in the most popular forms like the pill. It also comes in implants and shots and stuff like that, but it's, you know, ultimately these same two hormones. And we were interested to see how people who are

naturally cycling compared to people who are on progestion-only birth control, compared to people who are on the combined contraceptive. Like, there's been a lot of clinical research on heart rate variability across the menstrual cycle, but to have it quantified in fit women was really interesting because we know that as progesterone comes up, then you have a decrease in HRV because progesterone augments the sympathetic nervous system. And so what we were seeing is based on strain and menstrual cycle phase that in the low hormone phase, this is where women who are naturally cycling have the best opportunity to hit it hard. They can be really resilient to strain and stress and adaptation. But as you get through the ovulatory period and into the late

ludial phase, there's decreased availability to withstand stress. So your body's less stress resilient. And that's kind of what we've seen in clinical research. That's what we've seen anecdotally. So to have that quantified, it's fantastic. But the really interesting thing is when we start laying on the oral contraceptipil and the progestin only, different responses. So, When we're looking at the OC, the OC combined OC, estrogen progesterone, it downregulates your natural ovarian hormone responses, so you're not producing anything. And when you're taking a pill, there's a half-life of the pill. So you have this perturbation of the hormones coming up and then dipping down every day,

up, down, up, down, up down. And it takes some time for the hormones to actually come to a steady state. So each day you get a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. So what we saw in the data was the first five to six days of the active pill within were really resilient to stress. So heart rate variability was up. They had all the metrics to say that, you know, I can withstand strain. Then the next six to, like day six to around day 13, 14, it was a little bit worse.

And then we see in the third week of active pills through the first two-ish days of the withdrawal bleed or the sugar pill, not so great. like that would be akin to the late high hormone phase of naturally cycling. And then on the last five days of the sugar pill, women were really robustly akin to being resilient to stress. So it was bookending those pill weeks with the ability to do heavy training and recover from it, which is opposite pretty much of what we saw with the naturally cycling, where there's more of a downward curve for women who are naturally cycling. Now with the progestin only, progestin-only mimic naturally cycling except for the last four to five days of the pill

or akin to the late ludial high hormone phase of women where it actually showed better because that progestin component modulates natural progesterone so there's not a big as big effect for women who are taking the pregestin-only pill so if we're looking at training methodologies and what we should be doing to maximize training and adaptation we need to take an account are you naturally cycling? Are you on a combined oral contraceptive pill? Are you on a progestin-only type birth control? Because that will be able to tailor in when you can push hard, when you should back down. So it's not saying you can't do certain things across your cycle, and we should never say that because women can perform at any point in their cycle. But if we really want to maximize someone's

ability to withstand stress and adapt and really improve on their fitness, then we can work with the way these hormones perturbate over the course of a month. And like I said, oral contraceptive pill different from naturally cycling and progestin only is a little bit different from both as well. It's really fascinating to kind of load these differences. And would you say that one is more advantageous than the other? And I don't know if that's a controversial question, but I'm just curious like what the science tells us. Yeah, when we look at like the higher end aspect of elite performance, when we're trying to get that last bit of performance potential. We know that the oral contraceptive pill is probably not beneficial

because there's higher oxidation, there's higher inflammatory markers, it doesn't protect with bone. It masks if you have a natural cycle or not, so we don't know if someone's following into low energy availability or red-ass. And those are also things to consider even on the really competitive recreational female athlete too. When we look at training scope, because there are some reasons why women need to stay on an OC for health reasons or, you know, they just don't want to change, there isn't any negative point when we're talking about training for either natural cycling or OC, because training is

training. So we look at how we can maximize those different patterns with training. Now, for performance, there is a decrement in performance at one point in time that we call for performance. So if we take a naturally cycling woman versus an OC woman and moderate performance and investigate, there is a slight negative effect of the OC as compared to naturally cycling. It's significant. So if you're looking to like PR or you're looking to like lead the pack and you're on an OC, then the general consensus is to rethink that and see if maybe you want to go on a progestin only and IUD, go naturally cycling.

There's a lot of things to be involved in that consideration, but when we talk about performance aspect, it is something to really consider. And Cece, it was so much fun working on that paper with you. And then, you know, one of the things that we're really proud of having done is that we took all this research that we worked on and we turned it into two really exciting and, you know, totally novel in the space, new features.

So one of them is that we updated, our sleep coach feature so that your sleep is differently efficient during different stages of your menstrual cycle, and so now we're accounting for that in the recommended time in bed that we give you. And then the second one is we updated our strain coach feature so that we're recommending different levels of, if you're familiar with the Woot Platform, strain. If you're not, you can think about it as like load for people based on, you know, different phases of their cycle with a higher load recommended in the follicular phase and a lower load recommended in the ludial phase. Like any good product, we tested these designs with a bunch of members.

And one thing I would love your input on is we did get some feedback from women who saw the lower recommended strain during the ludial phase responded, oh, that feels like a female tax. So I'm wondering, like, how you would kind of think about that, you know, for people, you know, when they're seeing this like, oh, I'm recommend. to like train less like how if you don't want to train less can you kind of make up for sort of realities of your hormones during that phase and um you know how should they think about training during the ludial phase in particular yeah so i'll unpack that a little bit um because there's lots of things that go on besides just hormone perturbations when we look at what's happening in um the ludial phase especially like day 21 so mid ludial to day one, which is when you start bleeding. There's a huge immune response. There's an increased use

of amino acids. Your body needs more calories. There's greater inflammation, oxidation. Progesterone's really catabolic, so it breaks down pretty much everything, and its goal is to provide building blocks for the endometrial tissue. Your body doesn't access or store carbohydrate very well because progesterone shuttles it away to put in the endometrium. The whole goal, of progesterone is, like I said, to create these building blocks to ensure a very robust endometrial lining in case there's egg implantation. So we look at that stress and we take that into context. If you are trying to train or you're trying to go hard, the stress of exercise in that context is trying to deplete carbohydrate to hit high intensities. It also is

catabolic because you're breaking down fuel, you might be tearing muscle, depending on if you're doing eccentric loading or if you're doing really strong work in the gym. So you're compounding all those effects that the body's already under. So when we look at recovery and adaptation, it's kind of a moot point, or I shouldn't say it's a moot point. It's that much harder for you to adapt. So we're not saying that you shouldn't or couldn't train hard during that time period. everyone's menstrual cycle is their own lived experience. So if you feel really fantastic and you want to train hard, by all means, go for it. But also, no, you have to be very, very cognate and very particular in how you are fueling

and how are you recovering in order to gain adaptations. So the idea of a lower strain is not a female tax. It is about how your body responds to stress, how it's resilient to stress, how it's resilient into stress, how it can absorb the training and adaptation. So when we look at immune system changes even after ovulation, instead of having more of a natural killer cell response, which is in the low hormone phase, now you have a pro-inflammatory and a cytokine storm type effect for immune system. So again, it's how is your body responding to normal stress? How is it responding to any kind of invading pathogen.

And so there's all of those things to consider. So when we make recommendations across the menstrual cycle and we're saying, well, in the low hormone phase, your body is, quote, more like a man because you can access carbohydrate better, your core temperature is lower, you have more plasma volume, your immune system is one that is very robust, your body's ability to withstand all stress and be resilient to it is super high. Around ovulation, things start to be a little bit temperamental. and change of it with a surge of estrogen, that drop of estrogen, then estrogen coming up, progesterum coming up, and you have a lot of transient changes. So just being cognate of that

and changing fueling and a little bit of training, training intensity. So then when we get into that late ludial phase, as I described, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on that is part of being a woman. And it is just that physiological aspect of how the body's responding in order to prepare the body to either be pregnant or shed the lining because it's not pregnant. And that impacts training, stress, and adaptation. Cece, I think you put it so well in your book war, which I learned so much from when you talk about it, you know, instead of thinking about the fluidial phase as they're being attacks, you know, you want to think about the other half as being like your power days, right?

You get this awesome boost that you were just talking about. And so, you know, I think like you can think about it as baseline and then going down or, you know, baseline and then going up. Yeah. And the other thing, like when you talk about periodization programs, right, and people are like undulating periodization. So we can think about those last four or five days before the period starts is a little bit of the delode where you're working technique, you're working mobility, you're working functional fitness, your body is absorbing all the hard training from the weeks before. So then when you get into your next hard training phase, your body's primed and ready. And I don't think people think about it that way in a general fitness component because a lot of people don't have coaches. They don't come from a, you know, a structured training background.

They're like, what do you mean I can't go hard? I always go to CrossFit three times a week. And now you're telling me and I need to back down. So it's more of the reteaching, relearnings. Like, yeah, you can go to CrossFit. That's sweet. That's in your program. but instead of focusing on the METCON, focus on the strength component and then do technique in the METCON.

So it's not taking away. It's just modifying a little bit of what you're doing to work with your hormones to really maximize their ergonic effect. Can you talk a little bit about the individual variation that might exist for like, you know, from woman to women who are natural cycling? For example, like, you know, right before my period, like I feel like super strong and, you know, it might counter though kind of some of the principles that exist like just kind of talk through like how to pay attention to your body and how to kind of recognize what might be right for you know for me

might go against some of the principles that you've just outlined for example yeah i mean like we have the generalization that we look across the scope like i just described but as i said earlier everyone's um cycles their own lived experience and we don't really talk about what normal is right down to like bleeding patterns um because like we know that that over a third of female athletes experience heavy menstrual bleeding, but no one talks about it, right? And you get help from that. And we're talking about when you feel good and when you don't.

This is where tracking your menstrual cycle really comes into play. So you're tracking how you feel, what your sleep is, and you start to see these patternings, right? So maybe on day 26 of a 28-day cycle for you, Kristen, you're like, I feel bulletproof. I'm going to go hard, get it hard, because I know in two days' time I'm going to feel a little bit flat. So I want that training stress so that I can get that higher stress when I can push harder and then I can adapt to it.

And then I have a little bit of a lower stress time while I'm absorbing it. And I know I don't feel that fantastic. So that's why we want that individualized like tracking and understanding your own body so that you can dial in those days, especially if you don't have a coach, right? Sure. Because I'm the same. Like three days before my period comes, I'm like, yes, I'm ready to go. let's go hit it hard and then my period comes and like no what happened i feel a little bit flat today and that has to do with how fast the hormones drop right so we know that the time point for those

hormones dropping are different for every woman so yeah this is is really paying attention to you doing a little bit of your own biohacking and getting data on yourself i mean we're obviously all very bullish on the idea of tracking but so i didn't even to walk you into a pitch but no i i do it for everybody. We're in a lot of Femtech, which is fantastic. There's lots of opportunities to use Femtech. But I mean, I still have athletes who just put a little star on their calendar. And then they're like, yeah, I started my period today. And then I know, like, next week, I'm not going to feel that great. So they inherently know that. All right. We talked a little bit about symptoms related to PMS. Do we have to deal with them? Like, you know, what are some

ways, you know, to mitigate symptoms of PMS and just kind of explain what's actually happening? during that process and yeah, just any tools and tricks that we might be able to glean to kind of get us into a better spot. PMS is interesting because it is a little bit variable for people, but the primary thing is it's an inflammatory driven issue where we see that they're like the endometrial tissue can accelerate Cox 2, which is a inflammatory marker. It increases prostaglandins that are stimulated. by estrogen. So we're looking at what's happening with cramping, bloating, mood disorder. Those are all driven by inflammation and the elevation, then subsequent drop of estrogen

progesterone. So we look from a physiological basis of, well, what do we do? How do we stop that inflammatory process? So we look and say, hey, look, we can use omega-3 fatty acids. because omega-3 fatty acids, they block Cox 1 and Cox 2, but not only that, they make the Cox 2 and the endometrial lining produce more anti-inflammatory molecules for the most part. So if we're looking at increasing our intake of omega-3 fatty acids during that time, then we reduce the impact of inflammation, which then reduces things like VEGF, which is vascularization of end endometrial lining. So we have less bleeding, less cramping, less inflammation. So the actual bleed phase and the pre-bleed phase is not as hard. We look at magnesium and zinc as well. So we know both of those are heavily involved in building the tissue and immune responses.

So we increase our magnesium and our zinc to support what's going on from that whole endometrial lining being built and then sloughing off. So if we increase those three, then we tend to mitigate a lot of the PMS symptoms. then women who have really heavy and bad cramping, you can look at using ibuprofen, which isn't as great because it's a reversible cox inhibitor. But aspirin is an irreversible cox inhibitor. So what I mean by that is like when you take ibuprofen, they say to take it every four to six hours. It's because then the effects starts to wear off. But if you take aspirin, the half-life and then it stops, the way that it downregulated the cox is not reversed.

so you still have that downregulation. So there's different ways of attenuating that inflammatory response. That is definitely the most comprehensive advice I've ever heard or received. So thank you for that. Sorry, that stems from my PhD work because I was very involved in all of the inflammatory and fluids shifts and the Cox 1, Cox 2, everything. So now I'm like, this is what happens with PMS. It's not about, like, taking ibuprofen and using a heat pack because that doesn't affect what we want.

What I love about your answer, too, is, like, when you talk about things like omega-3 fatty acids, it's like, okay, like, so eat salmon that week. Yeah, you know, there's some really simple, natural things that we can be doing. And, like, I think it's, it's always a good reminder that, like, food is medicine and that, like, this isn't just, like, something that happens to us. And it's not random that, like, some months it's better. in some months it's worse. There are, you know, phenomena that we can influence that, like, we might not realize which ones are going on, but it's like, okay, let's try and adopt some of these practices, some of which are, like, pretty easy to do, and then we might notice that we're feeling better. So have a couple of nights of pumpkin seed encrusted salmon, and there you get

your magnesium, your zinc, your omega-3s, good to go. Just being careful of ensigns close to sleep because they do impact sleep efficiency taken close to bed. I think within seven hours of bed, they can have a dilettarius effect on sleep efficiency. So we want to try to avoid the ibuprofen family. Yeah. But a lot of women take it right before bed if they had that crampings so that they can sleep better.

I mean, I think about when I was coaching every single athlete was, they were popping ibuprofen daily. I mean, it was just they were. regular diet. I mean, I can't even imagine the gut biome of my athletes. I mean, I don't even know athletic medicine how they get away with that, but there's certainly a better way. Yeah. But I wonder, is there any research on that in terms of its just impact on one's cycle or, I mean, I can't imagine, because there's obviously interaction between the gut biome, right, and our menstrual cycle. Yeah, so there is actually. Because of the-

I'll take you down this rabbit hole, Stacey, I can feel it. I'll take you down this rabbit hole. So because you have a lot of women who are afraid of competing on their cycles, I always get the question, how do I manipulate my cycle? And I spent about a good year really looking at all the literature, like, what could you do to manipulate your cycle instead of going on an O.C? And in the fertility research, there's a lot of investigation into the inflation. inflammatory responses, right? And it comes down to if you take a high dose of ibuprofen, so they're talking 3,000 milligrams a day, split over two doses, for the seven days before your period is supposed to start, it reduces that inflammation that I talked about to the point where your period

will come early and be a light bleed. And over the course of three to four cycles, you actually reset the way that your cycle responds and shorten the ludial phase. And they wanted to do this infertility to be able to then time when they started IVF. So when you look at ibuprofen and how it can affect the cycle, it has a very detrimental effect on the cycle if you start taking high doses after ovulation. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So I mean like you'll have people who are like, sweet, that's great. I'm to start doing that so I can reset my cycle and then all of us who are like what the hell right you're like that's a significant physiological effect that you probably don't really want to play with because then you start running down the rabbit hole of what have I done in ovulatory cycles short and ludial

phase how is that going to affect my total indocrine cycle how does it affect things like hypothalamus responses appetite hormones and it's so much bigger than just shortening the bleed phase totally your response, the HPA access, like your response to stress is going to be totally, totally impacted. Yeah. Yeah. Holy cow. It's like I'm just like going through the mechanistic thing.

Exactly. You're thinking like me now. You're like, you're like, you're down there. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, good gosh. Wow, that's really interesting. I bet like a lot of folks don't, don't realize that. I would imagine, right?

Let's segue a little bit. I'd love for you to talk about and Emily, you know, chime in any time. time the myths of being an athlete and on your period you've kind of like talked a little bit about that throughout the throughout the discussion so far but anything kind of sticks out that you've heard you know as a coach and as a scientist you know what are people saying like what what can we demystify as you know and help people make better decisions around their training and all other things related to their their menstrual cycle so there are two big things like the myth that if you're not having your period then you're ready to to rock

Like, we hear this a lot, oh, my athlete or the athlete says, I'm ready for world championships. I'm ready for this A race because I haven't gotten my period. So I must be training hard enough to, like, really be able to nail it. And we all know that that's not true. Because when you lose your period, then that means there's a misstep in endocrine health. And so you're not really that healthy. And you're more predisposed to a whole cascade of injuries and illnesses and stuff. And then the other is really that whole marginalization of women that we've had for historical

amount of years where you're a delicate flower. You shouldn't be doing anything on your period except kind of hiding. And you definitely shouldn't be doing hard exercise while you're bleeding because that's detrimental. And we look and say, well, actually, no, because when your hormones have dropped, this means that you're very resilient to stress. You're not pregnant and your body is like, okay, we got to move. if we got to go find more things, we got to go find another way. So let's do it.

So I now have so many people, I feel like every day that email me, go, I said a PR in my race and my period game. Finally, I understand that I can push on my period. I'm so empowered. And of course, they're caveats, right? So if women have heavy menstrual bleeding or they feel really crampy and awful the first couple of days, then, yeah, you're not going to want to push hard. But we also know that if you do like Tabata type intervals, 20 seconds of really high intensity work, the subsequent anti-inflammatory response that comes from that really helps with bleeding and cramping. So it's trying to get women to understand that you might feel like crap, but you can still push hard. And that hard push doesn't have to be long intervals and really, really taxing full gas.

But doing short, sharp things for a very small amount of time is really beneficial. both to helping mitigate the symptoms, but then also making you feel better from a physiological and a physical standpoint, as well as a mental standpoint. So that's a long-winded story of saying, one, you should have your period because then you know you're healthy. And two, you can do some really fantastic, high-intensity work during your period, and don't be afraid of it. And don't be afraid of racing on your period either.

No, Stacey, ordinarily we would tell people to listen to. to their bodies and not to push if they don't feel up for it. But then you just shared this interesting tip that, like, if you do Tabata, even if you're feeling crampy, like, you're going to get this amazing anti-inflammatory response. So how would you recommend that somebody who's, like, rolling around in bed feeling, like, you know, utter drop. Yeah. Sort of like, should they listen to their body and what could indicate to them maybe that it's, like, okay to ignore their body and that they should try and do

little to bother or something. Yeah, we want people to listen to their body, but if they're in bed with really bad cramps, it's like, well, just get up and move, because any movement is going to help. It's going to help facilitate blood circulation and facilitate cramping. And then once you're moving and you're like, oh, I don't feel so bad, then maybe you're going to go do a push up your stairs. Like if you're on the bottom floor of your house and you want to go to the top floor, try to run up your stairs. Maybe do that and see how you feel there. It's not necessarily purposeful. I have to go to the gym and do this, or I have to get dressed up and go outside in the snow, which you guys are getting ready to experience.

But it's all about moving and just playing around and seeing how a small amount of intensity may or may not make you feel better. If it does, then you know you put that in your arsenal and that's in your wheelhouse. If it doesn't, well, then just bring it back down to doing some low intensity movement because all movement is going to help. That's awesome advice, yeah. And I think it's such a good call out too, right? It's like start slow, see how your body responds, be open to. to like to bottom, meaning stare repeats at home. Yeah.

Yeah. Jump up your stairs. You know, it's funny that it like needs to be said, but I think like too many people think of like, oh, like you're prime to work out means like, you know, you better go put on sneakers and go to the gym or like that you're doing something bad or wasting it if you don't work out. But it's like, here's an opportunity and up to you if you want to take it or not. Yeah, exactly.

I'm not about like everyone has to have purpose. exercise and go push hard in this phase. It's like explore your body and see, you know, maybe you're walking your kid to school and they're scootering and you might be jogging behind. And ordinarily you wouldn't do that, right? So that's not purposeful. Or like I said earlier, do you try some stair reps in your house, see going from the laundry room back upstairs or something like that. So it's all about exploring what you can do and it doesn't have to mean getting all kit it out and finding an hour or an hour and half in your day to go to the gym, do a class, do a weights program. It's just movement. Just movement. Awesome, Stacey. I have two more

myths from our members that we're hoping that you can weigh in on. So one is that certain yoga positions, specifically inversions, are dangerous when you're on your period. Is that a fact or nonsense? That is nonsense. And again, we have to look at, the cultural aspect of where yoga started and it started as a religion to allow for men to come together so when you start talking about inversions and periods i've also heard you can't even do yoga when you're on your period like vinyasa type yoga you should only do yen and it stems from that patriarchal idea of we don't really want women here so we need to figure out or put in rules in place so we don't want inversions because the idea of

was, well, we might trap demons within the woman, and we don't want that to happen. So when we think about the history of how it all came to be, we know that it's not true. From a physiological perspective, putting your legs up and having some kind of inversion when you are on your period really helps relax the cervix and reduce some of the inflammation. So it's probably one of the better things that you could do. Well, that's definitely a relief to hear. I was a gymnast my whole life, and we trained straight through the menstrual cycle. So I'm glad to hear I wasn't doing anything wrong. One more myth for you to validate or bust, but is it true that you're more likely to get

injured during certain phases of your cycle? It's not true. And the fact that when we look at protocols and loading and even stimming back down to how women are taught around puberty or not taught around puberty, how to run, how to land, how to jump, all of those things that need to be retaught around. that time when your biomechanics are changing. It's a long history of why women are perceived to have a greater injury risk around different points in their cycle. We hear about ACL risk increasing around ovulation and in the ludial phase because of estrogen's effect on laxicity, but there's

a reactive response in the fact that, yeah, estrogen increases laxicity, but then there's a counter response to increase the tension within the tissue itself. So the body isn't going to allow you to have a period of increased injury risk from a survival aspect when we think back to hunter-gatherer days. Because if you have a higher injury risk and you go to grab your kids and want to run away from the beast and you accidentally tear your ACL, then that's the end of that, right? So the body has really good reactive responses. So the idea of increased injury risk comes from a whole bunch of stacked things that we haven't been paying attention to, starting at puberty and reteaching and mechanics, periodization and training loads,

not paying attention to when your body is more resilient to stress. So we look at training loads before ACL injury. A lot of women will have high training loads in that late ludial phase when their body's not that resilient to stress, continue that high training load, and then boom, they get ACL injury. So it's not because of, of the fact that they are around ovulation is because of the training loads preceding it. That makes total sense. Well, thank you for busting those myths for us. You're welcome. Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners about eventual cycles

or how to train safely or intelligently around them? The two big things really, like, is track and understand your own body. So a lot of women don't even know what phase they're in. So once you start understanding that, and we say, track for about three months to start see some patterning. So you'll see, oh, day 18, I feel fantastic. Day 23, I don't feel that great. So then you can start saying, oh, well, I'm going to go hard on this day. It also takes that negative thought away because if a lot of women aren't tracking or they don't know what their patterning is and they have a really awful day from a fitness

standpoint, they always self-doubt, oh, I'm not fit enough, I'm not strong enough. I didn't recover well, I didn't sleep well, when actually it's just that day within their cycle where their hormones are making them feel a little bit off. So the more you know about yourself, the better you can tailor your own training into it. So I'm always about track and understand yourself and then dial in your training to your own patterning. So well said, I think the like the 10 years of loop, it's been, you know, you can't manage what you're not measuring. And, you know, this definitely, you know, is included in that. That if you start tracking, it all of a sudden you're going to see these patterns and oftentimes they're just going to

pop right out at you well stacey thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today um if people want to find you do you want to remind them once again where you can be reached uh so the overview of everything i'm doing is on the website that's dr stacy sims dot com but instagram facebook's uh at dr stacey sims and that is like a daily update of all things what we're trying to push out yeah so those are And then if you are more of an academic geeky person, I'm on Twitter and, of course, Google Scholar. You can find all the publications and things that I'm up to. Yeah, including the paper that we wrote together that we were talking about earlier. Exactly.

Exactly. All of which we will happily link in the show notes for everybody to find. Yes, and it's open access so anyone can read it. Stacey, we are so grateful to have you on. Thank you very much. And I know we'll talk again soon. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks to Stacy, Kristen, Emily, fearless team for telling us more about women's physiology

and the menstrual cycle. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, be sure to leave a rating or review. Make sure to subscribe. You can check us out on social at WOOP, at Will Ahmed, and you get 15% off a W-W-M membership if you use the code Will. That's W-I-L-L. That's all for now, and we will be back next week. Stay healthy, folks. Stay in the green.