When we look specifically at girls and young women in sport and explore what holds them back from fulfilling their potential, or worse still, what causes them to drop out of sport completely, it is unsurprising that many of the factors emerging from the research align to the concept of psychological safety. My work in optimising female athlete health, wellbeing and performance has led many sports to ask me how to improve the experience of female athletes within their clubs..
Knowing about what’s happening in your body, and how that is changing, as a woman, during different times of your life, is really empowering. It’s not just a lesson in anatomy and biology, but a lesson in how that biology connects to your own experience, how it influences your capability to fulfil all your hopes and dreams throughout your life. I believe that knowing allows women to be architects of their own health and wellbeing – able to make informed decisions about what is best for them in the context of their own body and their own life.
Start building an intuition, based on a really good understanding of female physiology and psychology, and a really good understanding about your lived experience of the menstrual cycle, in the context of your body and your life. Then you have the exciting opportunity to subtly tweak and adjust things to capitalise or cope with where you are in your cycle.
It’s time we stopped making ‘being hormonal’ a female thing, and started accepting that the more we can tune into our hormones, and how they ebb and flow or even peak and plummet, the more we can tap in to when this is helpful for the things we want to do and achieve. And when it’s not, we can explore and find effective, natural strategies to help us work with our hormones rather than against them.
With a newfound knowledge of the menstrual cycle and the effects that hormones can have on everything from digestion to emotion, suddenly a new world of opportunities seems to opens up. But research hasn’t been quick enough to keep up with the appetite and enthusiasm that we’ve created in sport for understanding female-specific performance.
How we can change the culture and open up the conversation about female topics such as the menstrual cycle. Improving our understanding of our self, specifically what it means to be female, and how what’s happening in our body’s makes us perform – in sport and in other areas of our life is very empowering. If we can stop the secrecy, silence and judgement that surround subjects like the menstrual cycle then we have so many opportunities to allow girls and women to fulfil their potential. !
Using the right language when we are talking about lots of the topics that are important for female health and performance is so important. Yes, it might be embarrassing at first and you might not know all the right words. But if we don’t try, then we won’t be able to empower and educate girls and women, and they won’t be able to advocate for their own health and wellbeing. It’s time to say it right.
Perspective – if you change your view, it could change your life. So true for many things, and in this blog I talk about how the lens through which we view the menstrual cycle has not always been a positive one. It’s time to tap in to the strengths and powers that the cycle can bring us, and look at it from a different perspective.
