When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

I was out running today after school drop-off. There are some amazing woods and fields around my children’s school and if I’m working from home it’s a real treat to fit in a run after delivering the kids to breakfast club. I tried a couple of new footpaths today, confident I was running vaguely in the right direction, but mostly enjoying the cool autumnal air and the beautiful brown and gold leaves fluttering from the trees. The new footpath spat me out onto some playing fields and I could see a play park. But I didn’t recognise where I was. Now, I would pride myself on knowing every play park within a 10 mile radius of my house, and be able to rank them on a number of important factors, like slipperiness of the slide and likelihood of finding an empty cider can by the roundabout, but I didn’t recognise this one. I ran around the edge of the playing field. As I looked back at the play park from a new perspective, I suddenly realised where I was. I had used that playpark dozens of times, but I’d never approached it from that direction before, and it had looked completely different. As I jogged away I laughed to myself at how something could look almost unrecognisable from a new perspective. And that reminded me of how I have been trying to encourage people, women in particular, to do just that. To look at the menstrual cycle from a different view, through a new lens. Not as a barrier to peak performance, or a challenge to overcome, but as something to be understood and capitalised on. Something that gives women super powers. 

Sometimes it’s a tough gig. For those women bent double in agonising period pain, or who experience anxiety during their premenstrual period, or in fact suffer any symptom that interferes with their wellbeing and performance in life, seeing the menstrual cycle as a super hero, rather than an arch enemy might be a stretch. But hear me out!

First, there’s no getting away from the symptoms that are caused by the ebb and flow of the hormones related to our menstrual cycle. But there are ways to better understand what they are, when they happen, and that’s when you have the power to do something about them. There is a whole tool box of strategies that might help manage the A-Z of cycle symptoms. Different ones will work for different people, but really understanding your body and knowing exactly what you experience and when you experience it will in itself, make you feel more powerful in managing and often eliminating these unwanted symptoms altogether. I’ve written about improving body literacy in my blog, and menstrual cycle tracking really is the key to getting you started on that journey to all-powerful knowing!

But for all the crap that the menstrual cycle tries to throw at us, there is some amazing stuff that happens because of those hormones, and whether you are an athlete, like the women I work with, or just someone trying to live your best life, knowing about and tapping in to this is so empowering.

We often refer to the menstrual cycle as the fifth vital sign of health (the others being blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate and temperature – all the things the doc checks when you take a visit with an ailment). The presence of a regular menstrual cycle in a woman of reproductive age is a really good indicator of health and vitality. That’s because your body is pretty clever about knowing what functions to preserve and which ones to switch off when it becomes ‘compromised’. An all-too common example of this in sport is when an athlete is doing a very heavy training schedule, and isn’t quite getting enough nutrients and energy in her diet to sustain the demands of training. The body senses this energy imbalance, and one of the first thing that is affected is the menstrual cycle, because the body is not capable of sustaining a pregnancy if it is not getting enough energy or under too much stress. Thus the hormones of the menstrual cycle get turned off, and periods disappear. This should never be considered normal and is a great example of where the menstrual cycle and period are a great warning sign of poor health. 

Let’s look at some other superpowers of your cycle – we have a biological drive for socialisation around ovulation because our biology wants us to find a mate at the time when our ovaries are releasing an egg ready to be fertilised. But, if having a baby is not on our agenda we can still tap into the influence of rising oestrogen which peaks just before ovulation, and a small surge in testosterone that happens around the time of ovulation. Both these hormones will influence how motivated we feel, how energetic we feel, and generally make us into confident go-getters! In that time between the end of our period and mid-cycle, oestrogen can also make us curious, creative and experimental. What’s not to like about that?! And what about the second half of the cycle when progesterone rises to its peak? Progesterone promotes sleep and so resting and recovery may feel easier when this hormone is high. And related to that is progesterone’s calming effect, which can make you feel more able to cope with stress or enhance your mood. We talk to coaches and athletes about tapping in to these super powers – maybe there’s a time when you can rinse an extra 5% out of that intense training session, or try learning a new skill or move, or utilise that extra motivation to go for a new PB in the gym. Perhaps there’s a better time in your cycle to receive some constructive feedback or to develop a new plan or schedule. It’s not that we can’t do all these things all month long, its just that if we tune in to the super-strengths of our cycle we are likely to really be able to exploit them for our benefit.

As well as he benefits of our menstrual cycle hormones that we can feel in our mood or energy, these hormones also have superpowers for our life-long heath. Oestrogen is excellent for bone health, helping bones absorb calcium to make them stronger. It’s also great for brain function, helping important areas of the brain function effectively and even helping new brain connections to form. Progesterone has been shown to reduce inflammation and protect against heart disease and certain types of cancer. 

So, I’d like to encourage everyone to reframe their view of the menstrual cycle. It’s what allows us to conceive, grow and birth life – perhaps the greatest super power of all, but it also gives us opportunities every day to tap into our potential. If you can cope with it’s pitfalls and capitalise on its strengths, there’s no stopping you