Do you experience changes in mood, energy levels or coordination during your period? If so, you might also struggle with reduced motivation to keep training and find yourself in a constant cycle of starting over after a monthly break. Many of us were raised to believe that taking a break during our periods is required to accommodate lower energy levels, but for athletes, that can be disruptive to training. And according to one research expert in the field, you may not need to.
“There’s a conversation where you actually back off doing any exercise because you’re going to feel weak,” explains Dr Natalie Brown at a recent lecture at the . “Actually you can still feel super strong and achieve the same adaptations from training but we just need to be a bit proactive in terms of what we do.” Brown is a research associate at Swansea University and Sport in Wales working for the Welsh Institute of Performance Science and the founder of .
She’s also a climber, runner, biker and surfer and as someone whose job it is to read the research on menstruation and sport, she thinks she’s cracked the case when it comes to keeping female athletes active. I’m here covering the academy as a writer, taking some and clinics, and coincidentally, I’m on my period. I consider myself a fairly fortunate period-haver and don’t tend to experience extreme pain or fatigue, but I am familiar with the dips in energy she’s talking about; in fact, before this workshop, I pulled on my for .
