Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher talk with Lauren Colenso-Semple about the science of female muscle physiology and how hormonal fluctuations impact strength training.

They explore the misconceptions around women’s hormones, the underrepresentation of women in research, and whether training recommendations should differ between men and women. Lauren breaks down the truth about menstrual cycles, menopause, and testosterone, explaining why cycle-based training plans are misleading and how women can train effectively at any stage of life.

• Lauren Colenso-Semple is a scientist and science communicator who specializes in female muscle physiology. Her extensive research is primarily focused on how hormonal fluctuations—whether from the menstrual cycle or hormonal contraceptives—affect performance and exercise adaptations.
• Lauren explains the key hormonal factors at play, how they change throughout a woman’s life, and why these differences matter in strength training.
• The truth about menopause and muscle health—Menopause is just a moment in time, marking the last menstrual cycle after 12 months of no period.
• Lauren breaks down the historical misconceptions around hormones and strength training, revealing how outdated beliefs have shaped fitness advice for women—and why it’s time to rethink them.
• How much does testosterone matter for muscle growth? While it’s essential for initial muscle development during puberty, Lauren reveals it’s not the sole determinant of how much muscle a woman can gain through strength training.
• Why are women underrepresented in strength training research? 
• According to Lauren, researchers have historically avoided studying female athletes due to the complexity of tracking hormonal cycles, leading to a lack of high-quality data.
• Lauren and Dr. Fisher uncover why men are naturally better at gaining muscle than women.
• Should training recommendations for women be different from men’s? Lauren argues that to truly understand sex-based differences in training, we need better research methods that account for women’s physiology without overcomplicating programming.
• Lauren reveals that the menstrual cycle isn’t always 28 days—and that’s normal.
• Despite the common textbook diagram, cycle lengths can vary between 21 and 37 days, and hormone patterns are rarely identical from month to month.
• Amy and Lauren explore whether women should avoid strength training during certain cycle phases. 
• Research shows no significant differences in muscle-building potential across the cycle, meaning women don’t need to skip or modify workouts based on hormone fluctuations alone.
• Some personal trainers still tell women to avoid strength training at certain times, but Lauren warns that this kind of advice disrupts consistency, misleads clients, and isn’t backed by science.
• Lauren explains how trying to match workouts to hormonal phases adds unnecessary complexity and ignores fundamental principles of progression and consistency. Strength training should be done consistently throughout the cycle, with no need for major adjustments unless personal symptoms—such as fatigue or cramps—warrant modifications.
• Lauren and Dr. Fisher caution against overcomplicating strength training, pointing out that fitness trainers often do this to sell programs rather than to help women train effectively.
• Why strength training is critical as you age—After your 30s, muscle mass and strength naturally decline, but lifting weights can slow or even reverse this process, keeping you strong and independent.
• One of the most powerful benefits of strength training is its ability to reshape not just your body but also your confidence, longevity, and overall health.
• Lauren shares stories of women who struggled with fitness for years, jumping from cardio to group classes to online programs—until they found strength training and finally saw lasting results.
• The empowering effect of getting stronger.
• Amy and Lauren discuss strength training during pregnancy. They share how, with proper guidance, lifting weights can be safe and beneficial for both mom and baby, helping with strength, mobility, and postpartum recovery.
• Why male coaches need to engage in this conversation—Dr. Fisher stresses that understanding female physiology isn’t optional for trainers, and even a basic knowledge of hormone cycles can help them coach women more effectively.
• Dr. Fisher’s message to personal trainers and coaches: cycles are a big part of a woman’s life and a big part of a woman’s training. The least you can do is understand how to train them during these phases. 

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Strength training is important for both sexes because as you age, you will inevitably start to lose muscle size and strength.

There’s so much foundation we can build for a healthy life where we feel and function better when we are strong. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and wellbeing. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode.

We’ve invited today’s guest to the show to talk about women and strength training. Our goal with today’s episode is to provide an overview of women’s hormones and the phases they will go through over the course of their life, explain how these factors may influence exercise outcomes, and address the debate around whether it is important to recommend different exercise habits during different times of the female cycle. I can tell you that as a studio owner, we work with a lot of female clients that come in every day and they express a certain degree of frustration around this topic. There’s a lot of ambiguity out there on this topic. If you’re a man listening, I hope that this topic will educate you on a little bit more about how women are different from men when it comes to exercise hormones and the factors at play. And so I am very excited to introduce our guest today that we brought on to talk about this topic with us. We have Lauren Colonzo-Simple with us and she is a wealth of information about this topic. So Lauren, welcome to the show.

I would love for you to introduce yourself to us, talk a little bit about what you do and what your mission is.

Thank you. I am a scientist and a science communicator. My research focus is female muscle physiology. So I’ve done some really extensive work looking at the effect of different hormone profiles, either throughout the menstrual cycle or in hormonal contraceptive users and how that might or might not impact performance and exercise-induced adaptations.

Okay, that’s great. There’s going to be a lot there that we’re going to cover, so I’m super excited to dig into what you have discovered and learned from you today. Perfect. So I think let’s start from the beginning. Can you just share with us a little bit about women’s hormones?

What makes women different from men? What are the factors at play? Can you just educate our audience about the phases women go through hormonally over the course of their life and then what distinguishes those different phases? Let’s start there.

Sure, so during puberty, when you have your first menstrual period, you’ll start a cyclical phase of hormone fluctuations. The hormones that we’re talking about primarily here are estrogen and progesterone, But to a lesser extent, but not any less important are luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. And these all work together to regulate reproductive function. So as long as you are in your reproductive years, you are pre menopause, but post puberty, then you will have these fluctuations throughout each menstrual cycle. And if you are on a hormonal contraceptive, those fluctuations go away because you’re introducing an external hormone, an exogenous hormone. And when we introduce exogenous hormones or synthetic versions of those estrogens and progesterones, those endogenous or naturally occurring fluctuations kind of shut down. So we’re not going to see the same profile in somebody who’s on a hormonal contraceptive. Later in life, typically around age 50, you’ll enter perimenopause, which is a period of cycle infrequency or cycle irregularity. Sometimes the cycles are shorter or longer.

And some people experience really unpredictable and dramatic hormone fluctuations during this time. And you might start to miss periods as well. And that will continue until menopause and menopause is actually just kind of a moment in time, it marks the last menstrual cycle you’ll ever have. And that is determined by an absence of a cycle for a 12-month period. And after that, you are then considered post-menopause, during which all the hormones will kind of gradually decline over time, since you are out of your reproductive years.

Great.

So I know the main two hormones at play during all of this are estrogen and progesterone, right?

That’s right.

Could you describe the role that those hormones play and how women feel and why as those levels decrease they might feel differently as they get older?

The absence of estrogen specifically appears to be the culprit for symptoms related to menopause. And the fluctuations that might be unpredictable may result in maybe a couple weeks where you have really bad symptoms, things like hot flashes or night sweats or migraines, and then a couple of weeks where the hormone level’s back to normal. And so then you’re without symptoms. So it can be really difficult to navigate because it’s these sudden spikes in hormones that can change things. But generally speaking, it looks like it’s due to the absence of estrogen for sustained periods of time that are causing a lot of the symptoms people go through during that transition.

Okay, excellent.

Well, thank you for providing that overview. And so now, I mean, bringing it back to strength training then and thinking about women as they have this hormonal activity in the background, you know, what can you kind of start us now down the path of answering the question, what has the historical thinking been around hormones and strength training? Well, we know a lot about men and hormones and strength training, namely testosterone. There’s been so much research into that and we’ve gone through an interesting journey about what we know about the relationship with testosterone levels and strength gain muscle growth. And what we know there is that during puberty, boys will experience an increase in testosterone that coincides with an increase in muscle mass. So at that point, the testosterone is important for muscle growth in that group. But when you are an adult, and you are lifting weights, your absolute testosterone levels aren’t going to predict how much muscle size or strength you can gain. So it there was once a thought that testosterone was this sort of absolute driver of everything muscle. And what we’ve learned over time is that’s probably not the case, because you can see that between males, there are there’s a huge amount of variability with their levels, what’s normal, like a normal testosterone range is a very, very broad range. And that doesn’t seem to influence their ability to gain muscle size or strength. But if you do introduce that exogenous testosterone, and in the form of steroids, then you are going to see growth or strength gains that wouldn’t necessarily be possible within that normal range. So as long as that isn’t a factor, then testosterone is important for that initial muscle growth during puberty. But otherwise isn’t necessarily going to be the be all end all prediction of how much you can gain when you start lifting weights.

This is really interesting. I think it might be interesting for a lot of our listeners. And I especially want to keep the attention of the male listeners, not least of all, because we’re going to discuss some really important topics. But if there’s something they can connect to with their own hormones with this, I think that’s worth discussing as well. Because it was long thought that testosterone was the driver for muscle growth. you did your PhD on the Stu Phillips, and he published a paper a number of years back that kind of dispelled the idea of the hormone hypothesis that that was the single driver. Now I know that there were old papers, you know, the historic papers were sort of super physiological doses of testosterone, hence muscle mass even without resistance training. And I’ve heard Jeff Nippard talk about those as well. And, you know, we’re kind of aware of that research, but the idea that testosterone isn’t the single biggest driver of muscle growth and actually engaging in resistance training, sorry, for every body engaging in resistance training, there will be kind of genetic differences and a genetic disposition to add muscle or not add so much muscle, but it’s not just related to testosterone. I think that’s really important.

I think that it’s, it’s important to sort of reflect on that journey as well, because as you said, you know, there’s some really conflicting findings. And when we think about the, the, the public perception of the importance of testosterone, that really transcended the lifting community at the time. And I think some of that thought still lives on today. I don’t think that we’ve completely dispelled that myth, if you will. But where where I come in is to a environment in science where we know all of this about men, and we know very little about the influence of the ovarian hormones, partly because for decades people just studied men and so there wasn’t anyone really investigating this. So we have a wealth of data in male participants that we don’t have in female participants. So let’s pause for a second and talk about that because this is really interesting. So as a lecturer with undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students, I had probably two thirds male to one third female number of students come through my courses.

And predominantly the males were more interested in strength training and lifting weights and that maybe led them down a pathway to do research in strength training and lifting weights. And then there were other factors which I want to get into that led them down to recruiting males. And so that becomes this vicious cycle of males maybe move into that strength training area of research, whereas female scientists in the sports sciences maybe move into other areas of sports science, not just muscle physiology and strength training. And because males become the scientists, do you think it’s then males then recruit males, or is there more to this kind of under-representation of women in strength training research as scientists and as participants in studies?

I think what you’ve said is part of it, but least a possibility that the hormone profile will affect an outcome, whether that’s a performance outcome, whether that’s adaptations to training in a longer term study, and to try to quote unquote control for or account for or standardize that that type of testing or training across female hormone profiles is a huge headache and would require a lot of additional resources in terms of cycle tracking and ovulation testing, potentially taking blood hormones. And many labs don’t have the skill set or the resources or the desire to do all of that on top of everything that goes into data collection for whatever the study question is. And so I think in order to avoid having to address that, the default has been, okay, let’s just study young men.

Yeah, this is really interesting. So from my background, one of the things that I always had is this kind of occasional female student interested in strength and hormone cycles and the effect of sort of the spikes in estrogen in the late follicular phase and progesterone in the sort of the mid-luteal phases.

And they would typically use either hand grip dynamometer, which I know isn’t ideal, but it’s easy, or knee extension isometric, knee extension strength. And one of the things that we found probably over the course of a decade with not a huge number of participants, but certainly five to 10 different students collecting data with different participants for sort of a four to six week phase. And maybe we’ll get into how the menstrual cycle isn’t as set in stone as a lot of people think it to be over a 28-day cycle. But one of the things we found is that strength testing is not consistent with what you would expect over sort of certain hormone levels. And one of the other things that we found was that absolute strength in females tended to change pretty similar to males, but relative strength in females obviously went up more than males. So we published a number of studies and we had to address this with reviewers. These are going back probably nearly a decade now, where we included a participant sample of males and females all together.

We kind of argued that if they’re doing a 12-week intervention, then the strength change in females is probably similar to the strength change in males at an absolute level. So I don’t know what your thoughts are on that or maybe you’re not going to tell me that some of my research is no good. No, I think that ties back nicely to what we were discussing earlier about testosterone, right, because there has long been a thought that because women have such lower testosterone levels than men, they couldn’t possibly gain as much muscle or strength. But the reality is, it goes back to the fact that the men put on some muscle during puberty, and so their starting point is higher. And so then, when they start training at baseline, the untrained man will be bigger and stronger than the untrained woman. But as you say, relatively speaking, or as a percentage from where you start that growth, those gains are gonna be similar. And so if testosterone was the be all end all driver, then we wouldn’t see such a similar trajectory.

Let’s go back through some of your research journey if that’s okay, because I know that you started to look at this during your master’s, is that correct?

I did some work in women during my master’s, but I didn’t really dive into hormone testing until my PhD.

Okay, okay. So perhaps talk us through that journey of your research from your PhD.

As I said, in order to both open the door for people doing more research in female populations and also to understand training recommendations for women. Should there be sex differences in guidelines, we really need to understand how to properly do science in women and what, if anything, these hormone fluctuations mean. And the challenge is standardizing all of this because as you alluded to, the cycle is not one size fits all by any means. And so if you were to Google hormone fluctuations across the menstrual cycle, you’ll see a nice diagram where the beginning of the cycle, all the hormones are low. And then estrogen starts to increase and we see an initial spike. And that is followed by ovulation.

And that is the follicular phase. So everything up until ovulation, and then following ovulation, there’s an increase in progesterone, which peaks sort of mid luteal phase and a secondary increase in estrogen. And so we’d say the late follicular phase is characterized by high estrogen and the mid luteal phase is characterized by high progesterone and moderately high estrogen and then the hormones decline and the cycle repeats. So when you see that this nice diagram, the cycle will be 28 days and ovulation will occur on day 14, meaning the follicular and luteal phases are equal in length. And each cycle is exactly the same. The pattern of hormone are exactly the same. And that’s really never the case when you look at it on the individual level. Because some people’s cycles, meaning the time from one menstrual bleed to the next, are not always 28 days. A normal cycle can be 21 days, 35 days, 37 days, that’s all considered normal. And some people ovulate earlier or later such that their phases are not of equal length. So you might have a 10 day follicularicular phase and a 21-day luteal phase. So when we start thinking about standardizing all of that for data collection, for research, or trying to implement some sort of exercise-based recommendations that are tied to cycle phase, it becomes really challenging to do that in a way that is what you intended to do.

I know there’s a lot of experts out there, so this podcast is all about strength training and it’s called Strength Changes Everything. And we’ve educated people on the importance of, for both men and women, how important strength training is to quality of life in terms of skeletal health, in terms of brain health, in terms of hormonal health, metabolic health. There’s so much foundation we can build for a healthy life where we feel and function better when we are strong, right, and strength train. And so I have heard some experts out there recommend that women avoid straight training during various parts of their cycle for this exact reason. So what would your answer to that be based on the research and what you just outlined here about how difficult it really is to nail down with precision the exact phases that one may be in at a given time? Well, I did the work that no one wanted to do.

And I did the study that really made sure that you were in that phase, and your hormones were tested, and we took muscle biopsies, and we tested it in the same person, in the same muscle, in one phase or the next. It’s as rigorous as it gets.

And there wasn’t a difference between phases when it came to, um, muscle anabolism, or we measured muscle protein synthesis. And I think. The idea that you should go an extended period of time without strength training is problematic because it that kind of guidelines are, are, or that kind of guidance is not conducive to good goal setting or just the, the guidelines for good exercise programming, which require consistency and progression. And to say that you should be doing one thing for a week or two weeks and then. Do something else for a week or two weeks. It’s just really counter to everything we know about well-established guidelines for programming.

Lauren, I just want to jump back to what you just said and make that really crystal clear for listeners. Correct me if I’m wrong, you said that you basically took measurements from within a muscle and you said the muscle’s response to strength training doesn’t differ at different times in the hormonal cycle. So there is absolutely no benefit to focus on strength training at one point in the cycle and stop strength training at another phase in the cycle. Correct. Okay, absolutely perfect, thank you. I just wanted to clarify that because I want to really hit that message home because you then went on to raise a really good point that it starts to add difficulties in programming, it starts to add difficulties in kind of training cycle and habit forming and so on and so forth. If you were to say to a guy, or you can already train three months, uh, sorry, three weeks of every month, you have to take a week off because your hormones are right to strength train and so on and so forth. That would just be, you know, guys all over the world would be like, uh, this doesn’t work for me anymore.

And some guys would be like, uh, you know, forget that I’m going to carry on strength training anyway. So you’d get completely, you’d get mixed responses, but the fact that there’s been that kind of prescription by, by so-called experts for females, you know, I mean, this reminds me, I always laugh my sports basketball, as you might see from the jerseys behind me. And I always laugh with, uh, the concept of the sport netball, which is obviously big in the UK and different countries, not so big in the U S. Um, and netball was apparently originated because they said that women can play basketball, but they shouldn’t run up and down the full length of the court because they might break a sweat, you know? So it’s kind of this historic sexism that still underpins and undermines so much of exercise philosophy and prescription. And one of the things that we were talking about before we came on the podcast is that the women are underrepresented as strength training scientists and women are underrepresented as participants. They might even be underrepresented as trainers and yet they make up, by my experience in sort of supervised strength training, more than 50% of the people engaging in supervised strength training are female. It’s probably closer to 60 or 70%, so it’s considerably more females engaging in supervised strength training. So I just wanted to make a couple points around that.

LS And I think for the listener, if they aren’t familiar with some of these recommendations, these programs will look something like here’s your 28 day cycle, you should lift weights for the first two weeks and then for the next two weeks, you should do yoga and light stretching. And people are popularizing these types of programs, I see them more and more and more. I also see the same types of recommendations around adjusting your nutrition, adjusting your social habits, adjusting the type of work that you do based on cycle phase. And so it’s really kind of getting out of hand. And I think we need to look at what the science says before we start making these really broad recommendations that could actually be harmful, right? Because if we’re saying to women, hey, cut your training volume in half, when we think about the whole year of training, that’s harmful, because she won’t reach her goals as quickly. She might not be able to adhere to that crazy sounding program of two weeks on and two weeks off and I think we, whenever we’re going to suggest something that is such a departure from the norm, there better be a really good reason to justify doing it in this case there isn’t.

Yeah this this certainly sounds like the prescription has really just added a layer of complexity which is of course one of the biggest turn offs from from most forms of exercise but especially strength training people look at it they see a degree of complexity in what they have to do, and they walk away from it. And, you know, if we can kind of break down those barriers a little bit and start to provide more science-based prescription in this podcast, then I think that’s going a really good way as kind of a public service announcement for females looking to engage or currently engaging in strength training. So with that in mind, just talk us through what are the recommendations. I mean, basically you’re saying there’s absolutely no reason to disengage from strength training at any point in the cycle.

It can be continued throughout.

That’s correct?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the only time that I would say there are certain exercises that you might want to avoid would be during certain stages of pregnancy. Um, but otherwise there’s no reason not to do regular. Strength training for your whole adult life and start as early as you can, because you will start to lose muscle mass and strength, um, as you age.

And so the more you start out with, the better, you know, it’s, it’s like we’re saving for retirement, you know, put savings for for your muscle because it’s super important for physical function, and for overall health. And so, but if you’re someone who’s older, it’s never too late to start because we see that the science shows that as well.

You know, there are people who are start lifting weights in their 80s and they can still gain some muscle. So I think it’s, it’s encouraging that, uh, and, and to your point, don’t make it overly complex. It’s not, uh, I think that in the fitness industry, people tend to do this because it can kind of give them an edge. And there was several year period where you know, you if you’re not training with a barbell, you know, why even bother? I hope we’ve got beyond that in kind of popular fitness culture. But I think that using basic exercises, doing time-efficient training, and using machines, if you’re kind of intimidated about using free weights, machines can be great. What would you say to a woman who’s considering starting a strength training habit and who is maybe in that perimenopause phase, looking at entering into menopause, would you recommend, um, strength training to her and why, what are the biggest reasons you would recommend that to her?

I think that strength training is important for both sexes because as you age, as I said before, you know, you will inevitably start to lose muscle size and strength. But we certainly see that in women, as well as a shift in bone mineral density. And some shifts in body composition that we don’t really understand, but it looks like there, there tends to be a trajectory for weight gain and for the transition of visceral fat. The postmenopausal women tend to gain more visceral fat, so fat in the belly area. And I think one of the most powerful things about strength training is the ability to not only improve your health but also to change your physique and improve your body composition. And so I think that when you look at the benefits from both angles, that’s something I would definitely recommend for somebody who’s entering menopause.

Yes, absolutely. Like you said before the the stronger you are when you get started that the better off you’ll be as the the factors at play counteract some of the some of what you built but you know there we do have a choice in the way we age and this is what we’ve talked about in the podcast many times and strength training really is at the heart of that because it helps address mood, bone, you know, muscle loss, fat gain, it’s all related. And so when we can take that step consistently without an eruption, as you’re saying in this episode that we should be doing, we really set ourselves up to have a little bit easier of a time as we do this.

I also find as somebody who, who used to train others, um, I would find that women especially would come to me and I’d say, I’ve tried, you know, this group fitness class or this online program and I, or just, you know just taking 20 minute walks, and nothing ever really seemed to stick. I couldn’t really ever keep the habit. And when they start strength training,

there’s something really empowering about experiencing yourself get stronger and improve from week to week, or learn a a new exercise or see your clothes fit differently. And I think there’s an element of that that’s really important to point out too because there’s something about strength training that’s not just you go and you do it and then you get it over with.

It can kind of be fun and rewarding and empowering in that way. Absolutely. I found strength training in my 30s and before that I didn’t know anything about it, but I definitely had that experience for myself. I felt athletic for the first time in my life. I wasn’t an athlete growing up and it felt empowering and it drips into other areas of life and so I definitely saw that for myself. That’s a great point.

Lauren, there’s a few things that you’ve said that I just want to go back and sort of touch upon. The first of which I think you mentioned was pregnancy. And of course, we’re aware that the strength training recommendations and guidelines might change at different phases of pregnancy, but there’s also a lot of research out there to support that strength training can be healthy for mom and baby during pregnancy. And Amy might want to speak of that in a second. But also, we talked about post-menopause and some of the other health benefits of strength training. And of course, a lot of the studies on bone mineral density are done in post-menopausal women with the argument that if you can improve bone mineral density in post-menopausal women, if you can improve bone mineral density in post-menopausal women, you can probably improve bone mineral density in pretty much anybody. And then the final thing that you said was just about as a female trainer, a lot of female clients coming to you engaging in strength training. Well, I hope that this podcast has really sort of opened some doors, uh, and maybe enlightened some male listeners and male coaches as well, because, uh, as a male trainer, sort of 20 something years ago, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to ever engage in a conversation like this with a female. I’m not for a second, suggesting that every male trainer suddenly starts to go and ask every female client about their menstrual cycle. But I am suggesting that this is a big part of a woman’s life and it’s a big part of a woman’s training and at least an understanding of how to train them, whether it’s even to say, hey, we don’t need to adapt training based on your phase of the menstrual cycle, despite what I may have heard on YouTube or Instagram or other social media sites, it’s really important for male coaches to engage in with their female clients. I know that I’ve just blurred out a few key points there. Amy, perhaps you want to speak about the pregnancy comment? Well, I think the point being is that I think there are, strength training is always beneficial, right? And so it’s easy to select or hand-pick phases or parts of life as a woman that is that you’ll sort of weed yourself out from the rest of the crowd when it comes to participating in strength training exercise. But what I’ve gleaned from today’s conversation is that that’s not necessary and the benefits far outweigh what you may perceive as the risks or the downfalls to participating it no matter what phase you’re in. Now obviously if you are really close to giving birth, you know, you don’t want to overdo it, but being strong all the way through your life is always going to be to your benefit and so that’s kind of my takeaway from this conversation. Lauren, I really appreciate your work in this area, and I think that your voice is important when it comes to reminding all of us that just because we might see some various impacts of hormones as we are in our fertility years and then as we enter perimenopause and menopause, we may feel and function slightly differently, but it doesn’t mean we stop strength training. In fact, that’s actually a foundational piece to help us feel our best no matter where we are. And so thank you for providing the foundation behind, and the research behind that message, and for your work on that topic.

Thank you so much.

Before we wrap up, there was something that you said just before we started the show that I want to go back to because we were talking about whether we’re all on the same page about strength training. One of my points was that obviously strength training for females shouldn’t change during the cycle and your response to me was you’d go a step further than that. Just tell us both and the listeners what your comment was, please.

Yeah, not only is there this real lack of evidence to suggest you should be training differently during different cycle phases or training differently if you’re on hormonal contraceptives, there really isn’t evidence that women should be training differently than men. The rules of sound programming and progressive overload and consistency and effort, those apply regardless of sex.

I think that’s just a fantastic point to make and a really strong point to finish on. Did you have any other comments to make, Lauren or Amy at all?

The one thing we haven’t addressed that I do think is important is menstrual symptoms and if people feel unwell during the first few days or maybe the last few days of your cycle, which many people do experience symptoms for a day or two, that you should feel completely empowered to take a day off or train a little lighter or adjust your session in the way that that makes sense and is more comfortable for you.

But that isn’t the same as doing these huge, broad preplanned changes for how you’re going to exercise throughout the cycle. In my mind, that those should be a sort of auto regulatory component of a program and treat those the same as you would if you were jet lagged, or if you know, you’re going through a period of high stress, or you just feel like a cold’s coming on, I would treat it the same as you would if you were jet lagged or if you’re going through a period of high stress or you just feel like a cold’s coming on, I would treat it the same way.

Yeah, and of course the same goes for anybody. If they’re feeling under the weather for a day or two, then you’d encourage them to maybe take a day off training. There’s no harm at all in taking a day or so off training. We certainly might do more harm to our immune system if we train while we’re unwell and we kind of go into that overreaching phase.

So yeah, absolutely taking a day or so off is not the same as pre-planned programming around kind of hormonal phases. That’s a great point, thank you.

And thank you for that because almost on a daily basis we remind our clients about the factors that influence their performance, right? Because not every day is up and to the right when it comes to your strength and performance in exercise. And so we do ourselves favors when we keep in mind the the factors at play and give ourselves some grace for some of the factors that are going to influence our performance or our recovery at any given time, including those symptoms like you talked about and all of the ones we just mentioned.

So thank you so much for that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Perfect.

Well, Lauren, thank you so much for being here. This was a great conversation and it really opens the door to consider recommendations when it comes to staying strong, when it comes to the female body. And I really, really appreciate the conversation. I know it’s going to mean a lot to our listeners. Thank you so much for being here and we hope you enjoyed today’s podcast.

Remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s

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