Sport01
Menstruation
Estrogen and progesterone at their lowest. Many feel drained, some surprisingly strong. Listen to your body instead of forcing the plan – light to moderate training or a deliberate break.
It's part of your biology – just like heart rate or lactate. Understand it instead of ignoring it, and you train smarter, recover more precisely, and never have to just accept pain.
Most training plans come from studies on male athletes and run rigidly on a weekly schedule. But the female body doesn't follow a fixed 7-day rhythm – it follows a hormonal cycle of roughly four weeks, with direct effects on strength, endurance, recovery and injury risk.
„It just comes with the territory“ is not a medical diagnosis. Women often grow up believing they simply have to accept pain during their cycle and train through it. That's wrong and potentially dangerous: severe period pain is a signal from your body that should be investigated – not something you train away or mask with painkillers.
Rough guidance for a 28-day cycle – your individual length and pattern matters, not the textbook.
Estrogen and progesterone at their lowest. Many feel drained, some surprisingly strong. Listen to your body instead of forcing the plan – light to moderate training or a deliberate break.
Estrogen rises, energy, strength and pain tolerance increase. The window for hard intervals, strength training and peak loads.
Peak performance, but also higher injury risk due to looser connective tissue. Use the intensity, but keep technique & landings deliberately clean.
Progesterone rises, body temperature & resting heart rate too, recovery takes longer. Focus on volume over peak intensity, and pay extra attention to nutrition & sleep.
In the SportPerformance Method, the cycle is part of the Biological Matrix: you learn to track symptoms, energy levels and performance across your cycle, and steer training, nutrition and recovery accordingly – combined with HRV and blood-value diagnostics from our expert network.
I'm a mother of three and still made it to the world's top level – because I learned to work with my body instead of against it.Elisabeth Brandau
Common, but not „normal“ in the sense of something to accept. Mild discomfort happens, but severe pain or pain that limits your daily life is a symptom that should be checked out – not something you simply train through or wait out.
No, quite the opposite – moderate movement can even ease discomfort. What matters is the dose: listen to your body's signals and adjust intensity instead of stubbornly sticking to the plan.
Training, nutrition and recovery are adapted to the four phases of the female cycle instead of being planned rigidly by calendar week – with the goal of achieving performance and health together.
An irregular or absent cycle is often one of the first warning signs of a relative energy deficiency (RED-S) – and should always be taken seriously, never dismissed as „convenient because it's simpler.“
Yes, it's part of the Biological Matrix in the SportPerformance Method and can be explored in depth individually in 1:1 Mentoring.
Start with the free intro call – we'll look at your situation together.