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Should Female Athletes Track Their Periods? Here’s What the Science Says.

POM Administrator — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 09:00:27 +0000

When , one of the first things she talked about in her post-race speech was period tracking.

“For this race, a lot of things were actually coming together,” she said in her finish-line interview after the win. “So for example, I was in the first half of my menstrual cycle, and I always told myself, once this happens on a world championship race day, this is the chance. I feel so much stronger than in the second [half].”

It’s not the first time Philipp called out her menstrual cycle as a factor in her triathlon success. After setting an Ironman record of 8:18:20 at Hamburg in 2022, period tracking was a “game changer” in optimizing her training and nutrition.

Does this mean all triathletes with a period should track their menstrual cycles with the same attention to detail as power meter data, nutritional intake, and sleep? Could period tracking really help athletes crack the code for a PR?

If you spend any time on social media, you probably assume the answer is “yes.” Women’s health and performance – specifically, as it pertains to hormones, is a hot topic right now. There’s no shortage of influencers and self-proclaimed experts offering advice on how to use period tracking to optimize athletic performance, but actual credentialed experts proffering detailed advice and protocols? Those are harder to come by. That’s because the science of period tracking for athletic performance is in its infancy, says Dr. Kelly McNulty, sports physiology researcher at Northumbria University and founder of .

It’s great that we’ve had this boom in menstrual cycle tracking,” says McNulty. “Menstrual cycle tracking is more common now, and it’s advocated for, especially within elite environments, as something athletes should be doing. There’s a tendency that everyone’s a female health expert now, but on the flip side of that, the science isn’t quite there yet. We don’t want to be giving bad advice off low-quality research.”

That’s not to say period tracking is a bad idea – only that athletes should beware of one-size-fits-all advice on how women perform during certain phases of the cycle. Let’s take a deeper look at how to make period tracking work for you, whether you’re just starting out in triathlon or an Ironman World Champion.

What the science says about period tracking for athletes

As Triathlete has written about before, . The major contributing factor to this dearth of information is a belief that it’s simply “too complicated” to study women – their monthly menstrual cycle and resulting hormonal fluctuations skew otherwise straightforward results. The lack of research on this topic means data collected on males is extrapolated to females, and female athletes usually train based on recommendations made for male athletes.

McNulty was part of a 2021 research team that reviewed more than 5,000 studies across six popular sport and exercise journals, , with as few as 6% of studies focusing exclusively on females. that even fewer studies looked at women by life stage – a particularly “invisible” cohort is women going through midlife, perimenopause, and menopause. Simply put, the science on women isn’t that great, and though it is an area of increasing interest for researchers, McNulty says it will still be five to 10 years before there’s a robust body of high-quality research.

Still, McNulty warns, “Everybody’s an expert now. And so everyone’s coming out saying that they will tailor your training plan to your menstrual cycle, and it sounds too good to be true in a lot of ways. We don’t want to come in and tell people, ‘No, this is a bad idea,’ but we do feel really strongly about making sure that people know that if you’re paying for someone to do that, and they’re claiming they’re an expert, that nobody’s really fully an expert on that, except for the people who are currently doing the research – and even they don’t have all the answers.”

There are, of course, some already-published studies that indicate hormone fluctuations aren’t a complication; they’re actually key to understanding and optimizing athletic performance in women. Hormones like estrogen and progesterone rise and fall throughout a woman’s month-long menstrual cycle, influencing everything from how she performs in training or racing to how she recovers. have found hormones may affect ligament laxity, suggesting injury risk may increase at various stages of the cycle. There is also evidence that when hormones fluctuate, so too does a woman’s body’s ability to maintain proper hydration levels, metabolize nutrients, and regulate body temperature – unique factors critical to female athletic performance.

Should you avoid period-tracking apps for athletes?

These studies, plus a growing demand for women-specific health advice, have led to an influx of period-tracking apps for athletes, which help women monitor where they are in their monthly cycles. Some apps even recommend what kind of training to do (or avoid) and when.

Though such apps can be enlightening for female athletes looking for insights on their individual physiology, that there currently isn’t enough research to make standard recommendations related to period tracking and sport performance.

That doesn’t mean that period tracking is a waste of time; only that experts aren’t at the point to confidently say “on X day of the cycle, women are best off doing Y workout and recovering with Z food.” McNulty says the information period-tracking apps give is often generic, and given the variety in menstrual cycle experiences among women, the information presented might not always be suited to the specific athlete. Some with putting highly-sensitive health information into such apps.

While women wait for the scientific community to endorse a substantial body of evidence, there are still things athletes can do, McNulty says: ”If you are a female athlete or a coach/practitioner supporting a female athlete, then I recommend that you dive into the research and learn all you can about the potential effects hormones can have on women’s physiology. But do this with a critical eye.”

McNulty also says women can develop their own “bespoke athlete guidelines,” where each athlete uses her own expertise of her own body to identify patterns in performance. “When you learn more about your own menstrual cycle – what symptoms you experience and how you perform, train, and recover on certain days – you can use your knowledge and understanding to determine what bits of the research might apply to you and which don’t. From there you can begin to tweak and adjust things to maximize or manage performance/training depending where you are in your cycle,” she says.

It’s in these individual experiences of the menstrual cycle – not the advice of an app – where the biggest insights lie. “Every woman is different, and the research is only the beginning from which we can build our individualized content from,” McNulty says. “But this only happens if we understand our bodies first.”

Coaches and athletes should tune in to changes in training and performance to can glean insights from how their individual body responds to various phases of their menstrual cycle. (Photo: Getty Images)

How to track your period as an athlete

Tracking the menstrual cycle can be as simple as circling a day on a paper calendar or marking an X in your smartphone on the first day of your menstrual flow, or period. The menstrual cycle is counted from the first day of one period up to the first day of your next period.

The average menstrual cycle is 28 days long, but each woman is different. Some women’s periods are so regular that they can predict the day and time that the next one will start. Other women experience menstrual cycles that vary in length. Medically, periods are considered “regular” if they usually come every 24 to 38 days.

That menstrual cycle is further divided into four phases:

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Sports Bras Don’t Suck as Much as They Used To

ntriolo — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 21:49:33 +0000

This article is part of a .

For many women, physical activity was fun–until puberty. Newly developed breasts meant experiencing a novel pain with the sports we long loved. Playtime was over.

A 2016 survey of more than 2,000 adolescent girls in the UK reported that their breasts affected their participation in sports. In the same survey, 73 percent reported at least one breast-specific concern, relating to the sports they played.

It’s not uncommon for women to feel pain while running due to improper support of their breasts. A review, published in Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews, notes that a woman who runs at a cadence of 160 strides per minute, experiences her breasts bouncing approximately 9,600 times in an hour-long run.

A supportive bra may not only reduce pain, but shows that it could also improve a person’s biomechanics, improve their , and positively affect their .

This paramount piece of equipment hasn’t been around nearly as long as, say, running shoes. That late 19th century invention has benefited from more than 150 years of tweaking and perfecting to the point that the highest level of products have become known as “super shoes.” Let’s take a look at where sports bra innovation has been and where it still needs to go.

The Beginning

Evidence of bra-like garments dates back to 1400 B.C., but bras as we know them today weren’t mass-produced until the 1930s. Sports bras wouldn’t come around for much longer.

Despite the discomfort, female runners made do with what they had. Like , the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1966, did so wearing a tank top bathing suit to compress breast movement.

It wasn’t until 1975 that the first bra designed specifically for athletic use was released. Glamorise, a company that had made brassieres since 1921, made the first known sports bra—the Free Swing Tennis Bra. Not just for tennis, advertisements of the product let customers know the bra could also be used for skiing, bowling, skating, sailing, riding, and cycling, too!

Though it was made from stretchy and supportive performance-oriented materials (Lycra Spandex), it still resembled a fashion bra with thin straps and frilly embellishments. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a start.

The first truly innovative sports-oriented bra hit stores a few years later with the debut of the Jogbra. It was the late 1970s and jogging was trendy. Lisa Lindahl, a 29-year-old University of Vermont graduate student, tried it for the first time and knew that running was for her. She loved it. She didn’t love the lack of breast support, though.

In 1977, Lindahl teamed up with Polly Smith, a childhood friend who had degrees in fashion and costume design, to create a prototype. Lindahl imagined her athletic bra would have stable straps and compression to prevent excessive movement and be made from a breathable, chafe-free fabric.

After several attempts, the infamous first working prototype was two jockstraps—a piece of supportive sports apparel invented for men in 1874–sewn together to serve as a pair of breast cups with shoulder straps. It was originally nicknamed the “jockbra” but Lindahl eventually coined the name “Jogbra” and it stuck.

They evolved and improved their initial designs, which did a good enough job at the time—especially compared to anything else that was available to women athletes—but there was no scientific testing to prove its performance value, as is the standard today.

In 1978, Dr. Christine Haycock, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, published the first research on breast biomechanics to better understand what was causing women pain while exercising.

Based on her research, Dr. Haycock recommended that sports bras have the following qualities: constructed with a non-elastic material that is absorptive; provide firm support; no seams near the nipples; no metal or plastic clasps touching the skin; and the ability to add padding to reduce traumatic injury in contact sports.

As the original American running boom gained momentum, more and more women were getting involved, and the Jogbra became a staple of the small but growing women’s running movement. Another friend of Lindahl and Smith, Hinda Miller, came in to help grow Jogbra Inc. (JBI) to the industry leader it quickly became, selling first in running specialty stores and later department stores. According to the , sales topped $500,000 in the initial year.

On November 20, 1979, the Jogbra—with its compression front panel, elastic straps, and wide supportive rib band—was issued its first patent. It was made from cotton, polyester, and Lycra for comfort, durability, and support.

Although competing brands emerged, Jogbra became a cultural phenomenon that, in addition to providing comfort and support for running, also represented the freedom for women to participate in sports and a sense of modern athletic feminine style. Not only did Jogbras not resemble traditional lingerie, but they were offered in a wide range of colors.

The original Jog Bra from Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith, inductees into the Inventors Hall of Fame. Sales in the first year grew to $500,000 via running specialty stores and, later, department stores. (Photo: Courtesy Science History Institute)

The Middle

As time went on, other sports brands started to recognize women as a worthwhile target demographic.

Moving Comfort, one of the largest brands of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, can trace its roots back to 1977, when runners Ellen Wessel and Elizabeth Goeke stitched together custom-made running clothes on a Singer sewing machine.

In 1979, Nike, then a nascent sports apparel and footwear brand, introduced its first women’s athletic wear line. The company began studying breast motion in women in the 1990s at the Nike Sports Research Lab, and it eventually led to the development of the first compression sports bra in 1999.

By the 1990s, women’s sports apparel was booming. JBI was sold to bigger players: first to Playtex in 1990, then the Sara Lee Corporation in 1991 and eventually becoming the Champion Jogbra Division. Moving Comfort was eventually purchased by Brooks in 2007.

But by the early 2000s, sports bras were still not reaching their full potential.

“When I started in the industry, there were very few options [still],” says Julianne Ruckman, senior manager of apparel product line management at Brooks. Ruckman has been contemplating sports bra design since 2003, when she worked with Harpo Studios to outfit women for transformation segments on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She remembers the options available having stiff components, adjustability in the wrong places, lack of size variety, and were generally unappealing.

Slowly, brands designing sports bras for bigger-breasted women began to take space in the industry. Prior to that, styles existed in the range of extra small to extra large, Ruckman recalls.

“I can tell you, if I put a lineup of six different 34Ds, they’re going to carry their tissue and look very different.”

Narrow sizing doesn’t work for the array of body types in the world, Ruckman insists. (As an example, Brooks has 46 unique sizes across two collections of sports bras today.)

A lot of the changes that have been made to sports bras aren’t visible. In the 1990s and 2000s era of bra design, every component was visible with chunky seams connecting “comfort stretch panels” to “support panels” like a puzzle made of a patchwork of materials. Sports bras on the market today look and feel more simplistic by design.

“It may have looked like we walked away from support, because you didn’t see all of the same work, you didn’t see where things were engineered in,” Ruckman says. Now bras have more internal engineering and are made from advanced material that can alternately provide comfort, support, compression, and style.

Over the duration of Ross Weir’s career consulting on sports bra research and development, he’s seen brands invest more in their teams to create better products.

“Twenty years ago it was unlikely we would be working with a biomechanist within the brands team, but today it’s not all that uncommon,” says Weir, co-founder of Progressive Sports Technologies, a sports tech and apparel consulting firm. “We also see roles like anthropologist, mechanical engineer, and materials scientist in these product development teams.”

Today, runners have access to the most advanced breast support in history. Brands still have interest in innovating. In 2017, released the Enlite Bra, launching an era of smart designing and fabrics that allow for more natural movement of the breasts and responsiveness.

Nike has taken their process a step further, unveiling a robotic mannequin capable of sweating that mimics the soft tissue in breasts in 2022. The tech is being used to test new sports bra designs without relying on human models. The brand has also revealed that it is using data visualization and avatars to take into consideration the wide range of curves, heights, and body weights of sports bra wearers.

(Photo: Courtesy Brooks)

The End?

Nearly 50 years later, the invention of the sports bra is still being celebrated. In 2019, Lindahl wrote a memoir called ), that told stories about women in business dealing with success, power issues, and personal growth. Three years later Lindahl, Smith, and Miller were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their achievement in developing the world’s first functional sports bra.

However, even with all the advancements since the first designs, more than 40 percent of both physically active women and elite female athletes report still suggesting that sports bras have not hit the mark of what they are designed to do.

�� of women in Australia found that straps—either slipping off or digging in—are rated the most problematic feature. Tightness around the chest was the next feature women disliked most.

Have sports bras come as far as they reasonably can?

Weir notes that it’s not uncommon for a woman who finds a sports bra comfortable to relax in, will find it uncomfortable during physical activity, and vice versa.

“Comfort is a simple word for a complex sensation. It continually evolves as we interact with products, especially our clothing,” he says. Women want to be able to go from one activity to the next without changing bras.

According to the Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews paper, the next level of breast support may come from electromaterials that can sense changes in breast movement and adjust the level of support automatically.

Ruckman notes that solving for variability in breast sizes within a single person—factoring in that the left and right breast can be different cup sizes and that breast size can change over the course of a month due to the menstrual cycle—and improving on/off maneuverability are top priorities for sports bra designers right now.

“Support is the expectation, comfort is the goal,” says Ruckman.

To see a melding of the competing desires, Weir notes that consumers may have to pay higher prices for sophisticated solutions to truly balance comfort and support.

“I have no doubt that the product could be rapidly improved and custom fit be offered if the consumer’s sentiment changed to value the sports bra in the same way as sports shoes,” he says. “This is one of the biggest barriers the sports bra sector faces in bringing new innovative products to market.”

The quest to build a better sports bra still continues.

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Chasing Goodness: Lauren Fleshman’s ‘Good for a Girl’

mmitchell — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 16:22:00 +0000

To start Lauren Fleshman’s book Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World is to start with a question: did she mean something is good for a girl? Or a sarcastic she’s good… for a girl?

Maybe the answer is a little bit of both? Part memoir, part critique of a sports system built around a man’s body, Fleshman offers a searingly candid look at her own victimhood and complicity, interlaced with compelling data and concrete ideas on how we can change this environment.

Fleshman is a retired professional runner and an entrepreneur who co-founded Picky Bars and coached at Littlewing Athletics. Currently, she works as a brand strategy advisor for the female-led running brand, Oiselle, based out of Seattle. At a recent running camp by Oiselle, Fleshman mentioned that her intention for this book is to help readers re-think about the system. “We have an attribution problem. When there’s a pattern of struggle, we tend to put the blame on individuals, instead of the systems that they’re setting them up for. When it comes to attrition in coaching, women in tech… so many examples of predictable friction points that keep women out (of a smooth advancement curve). We’re living our lives in a world that wasn’t built for us. If you can’t see yourself in my exact story, I hope you can recognize yourself in moments of your life when you fell off the train, but it wasn’t your fault. We are worthy of building a system around ourselves.”

The story is always personal. Fleshman started and ended the book with her father, who was an alcoholic. The loving yet turbulent relationship between the two set the foundation of both Fleshman’s courage and insecurity about her options. “I lived a lot of my teenage years and my twenties hedging… I came from a place without a lot of financial stability. I had a lot of opportunities… but I also felt they could be taken away at any moment,” said Fleshman.

The working-class family background was Fleshman’s shadow behind her fierce competition on the track and at cross-country races, both to satisfy her own curiosity, and to win her father’s approval. Until one day, she realized she was performing to belong to a club marked with power. “Greatness, it seemed, offered a sort of protection, honorary membership to a more powerful class. Now I felt even more motivation to win.” Fleshman writes.

And win did Fleshman: five NCAA championships at Stanford and two national championships. Yet like most of the elite runners, Fleshman’s decorated career is filled with many failures and abject heartbreaks: missing the Olympics team twice due to injuries and poor timing of training, coming in dead last at the Olympic Trials in 2012. Her laser focus on winning to her best ability has muted a little voice inside: something isn’t quite right with female athletes.

Hyper sexualization of the female body, from abstaining from discussing the breast, to racing uniforms that highlight the sexual desirability of a female body, to even Runner’s World’s magazine cover photo guidelines (tight shorts and revealing mid-section) years ago.
Unrealistic body-image expectations that come along with elite racing: the ridiculous standard of the jiggle test: the expectation that your body should be so lean that nothing on it should jiggle when you bounce. As a recreational runner myself, I chuckled reading this part, shaking my head with disbelief. I used to think elite runners are simply past the body comparison stage, unlike us middle to back of the pack runners. Who would’ve thought the elites have it even worse than the rest of us? The comparison trap spares no one.
A total disregard of the female development curve: puberty, menstruation, childbearing and rearing, post-partum comeback… “Contracts penalized the rocky road inherent to life, especially the one commonly traveled by women.” Fleshman writes. As a result, 65% of female athletes develop disordered eating habits. RED-S, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, is prevalent among female elite athletes.

It was the female athletes’ obsession with the body and the right racing weight that led Fleshman to reflect about her role in running, besides winning. Yet, she waited for her turn to speak. She operated under the assumption that only winning would give her a voice and credibility. She had to be “good” to be heard. “They weren’t talking unless they were winning, reflecting back on rough times long gone.”

It wasn’t until she met the Oiselle crew in her 30s that she started to piece together how these issues are connected to each other. In the meantime, her Ask Lauren Fleshman website had been growing its readership steadily. She was getting inquiries frequently about the female body, with a common theme around “what’s wrong with me?”. These forces finally came together to make her realize she wasn’t alone in feeling alienated, powerless and disposable in the world of professional running. She joined Oiselle as a partner in 2013, with a dream to build a system “entirely around the female athlete”.

(Photos, from left: Kirby Lee, Courtney White, Heather McWhirter)

Fleshman is still hard at work creating conversations around the equality female athletes deserve. In the meantime, she’s candid about how the traditional white-female-centric feminism has failed repeatedly. “Like generations of white feminists before me, I believed the most important thing was getting in the room with those in power; once rights had been secured for the group white men were most likely to cede it to, then it would be easier to expand those rights to others, or they would somehow miraculously trickle down. I couldn’t have been more wrong.” Fleshman, along with Oiselle, has been on a learning journey of intersectional feminism, decentering the female body from the overall harmful sports environment. Recently, she has also been vocal about trans-women’s inclusion in sports.

Fleshman is an undeniably masterful storyteller, owning her own complicity in the system while holding others accountable, in a loving and nuanced way. It’s impossible to critique the “system” without talking about the complex characters in her life. “You can’t write a memoir if you’re afraid to hurt people,” Fleshman said. To this end, she writes bravely about coaches’ lack of understanding of a woman’s body and their failure to protect it. When a coach mentioned that the women’s team did not have integrity like the men’s team, Fleshman writes, “There was nothing overtly inappropriate about Vin’s integrity talk. All those observations were true to some extent… What makes me cringe now is Vin’s – and my – inclination to place blame on the women, without any acknowledgement of the forces at play for us. The outcomes he described – eating disorders, self-harm, self-sabotage – predictably show up on teams all over the world. But instead of asking why, we shake our heads in frustration and continue to blame the women. These behaviors look like personal choices, but they are choices made within a particular sporting environment that women had to fight to get access to but did not get a chance to create.” (pg 84).

With the same delicacy and courage, Fleshman examines her own complicity: “I had made comments among close friends, piled on when someone else criticized a poor performance, referred to someone as a head case.” (page 158) More than anything, it was the failure of inaction, first seeing a Black athlete’s struggle with a Nike contract. “I didn’t think I could do anything about it. I didn’t think that was my job to do… It would take several years… to develop the courage to become an active ally.”

All the self-reflection and growth did not dampen the tenderness of Fleshman’s milestones so far: leaving for college, getting married to Jesse Thomas, and her father’s death.

For anyone who has ever left the comfort of childhood home in pursuit of their/his/her own life, Fleshman’s writing feels like inserting a scalpel into an old wound of guilt. “I wasn’t coming back, not really. I speed down the freeway with the windows open while my air conditioner tried to catch up. I felt selfish. A good daughter would stay closer for college, emotionally support her mom and sister, keep attempting to predict and moderate the tides of her dad’s alcoholism. But I didn’t want to be a good daughter. I wanted the freedom to make a life.” She quotes from Freeman in Paris, Joni Mitchell’s masterwork, “Nobody calling me up for favors, no one’s future to decide but my own.” (page 59) Tears started to flow when I read this part. There’s nothing more morose than being reminded of all the people you’ve left behind as an immigrant.

The levity and joy from the scene of Fleshman and Jesse Thomas’s wedding excludes from the page: “it was perfect – low on budget, but high on personality… Kids fell asleep on parents’ shoulders in cookie comas. Someone passed out on the front lawn. Someone else went home with the photographer. It was exactly what we hoped for.” If you’re a believer of economics professors Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M Mialon’s on the inverse relationship between cost of a wedding and the length of a marriage (the less you spend on a wedding, the longer the marriage tends to last), you’ll be rooting for the long-lasting marriage between these true partners in life.

Fleshman ends the book with a dream and a run. After her father’s passing, she woke up with her father in his youth, standing by the closet. “The idea of ghosts bent all logical reasoning, but I had no choice but to accept… knowing I would be facing my first day without him.” Grief leaks out of the page, with nowhere to go but to stain the page like ocean-blue ink. So much love. So much sorrow.

Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club was a guiding light through months of Fleshman’s writing journey, amid a global pandemic and a personal mental health crisis. Navigating through many false starts, Fleshman went the extra mile and had the book vetted by a panel composed of a scientist, a journalist, a filmmaker and a writing professor for data rigor and story clarity.

What struck me the most, though, is the wide range of emotions I felt reading her memoir: The intensity of the heartache, the disappointment, anger, triumph, disbelief, and frustration, the joy, but the most important of all these was her unbridled love of running and life.

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