Your Period as a High Performer

In this episode, Amanda Smith discusses the importance of understanding menstrual cycles, how to track them, and the various phases of the cycle. She emphasizes the significance of nutrition and exercise tailored to each phase, and how this knowledge can enhance overall well-being. Amanda also highlights the importance of communication regarding menstrual health and offers insights into healing and support for those struggling with menstrual issues.

In this episode:
00:00 Understanding Menstrual Cycles
05:39 The Phases of the Menstrual Cycle
12:02 Nutrition and Exercise During Each Phase
17:05 Communicating and Navigating Life with Your Cycle
20:21 Healing and Support for Menstrual Health

Join Mellissa Seaman's free Quiz Creation Masterclass (affiliate link): https://bit.ly/Quiz-Masterclass
Dive deeper into understanding your life cycle and life initiations with Maria Yraceburu: https://www.yraceburu.org
Get an Initial Body Scan with Amanda to start you on the road to healing: https://BodyWhisperHealing.as.me/initial

Period Diary App by Bellabeat: https://bellabeat.com/period-diary/

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Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
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Pinterest: AmandaGSmithBWH
LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to find out how your athletic mindset might be holding you back from healing your chronic health issue: https://gutsychickquiz.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Menstrual Cycles
• 5:39 The Phases of the Menstrual Cycle
• 12:02 Nutrition and Exercise During Each Phase
• 17:05 Communicating and Navigating Life with Your Cycle
• 20:21 Healing and Support for Menstrual Health

Transcript

0:00

Menstrual cycles, the rules to live by with your menstrual cycle and how to break those rules in our modern world. That's what we're talking about on this episode of Spirit of an Athlete. I'm your host, Amanda Smith, creator of the Gutsy Chick Quiz and the Heal to Grow process. Check both of those out at bodywhisperhealing.com. Yeah. Guys, you may or may not wanna stick around for this episode. But if you have women in your life, stick around. You're gonna learn something about what they're experiencing and how to help them. So here's what I've learned in my lifetime about the menstrual cycle. It applies to all women, whether you have a cycle or not. I'll explain more about that in a little bit. If you follow the rules, everything goes better. Everything moves with ease and flow. And it's not always easy to follow those rules in a modern world. And I'm going to show you how to break those rules, but still. Find the ease and flow. Those of us who follow our cycles, track them and listen to them and are able to move with them tend to have more pleasure in their lives. Who doesn't want more pleasure? Menstrual cycles can be challenging to track, but please track them. This one, cannot stress enough. Track your cycles. The way you track your cycle is you get a piece of paper and a pen and you write down the date and you put down, I am bleeding. And then you mark down how many days you're bleeding. That's the old school way of doing it. You can use a calendar and that way you can actually see and count out how many days, but you need to know how many days or how, the length of each part of the cycle is, or you can just get an app. I use the app called period diary. I'll put the link in the show notes so you can go grab it. There are probably a hundred different apps to use at this point to track your period cycle. The beautiful thing about these apps is you can look at it and immediately know I am three days out from my period. I am two days out from my ovulation. I'm in the follicular phase. I'm in the luteal phase. But most women don't even know what those two phases mean. And in this episode, I am covering that. So stick around. All right, the complete menstrual cycle broken down by how many days? Here we go. Menstruation is between two and seven days long, according to the Mayo Clinic. The follicular phase comes next. It's actually at the same time as menstruation. It's 13 to 14 days long. Ovulation one day. In fact, it's a couple of hours. If you use certain tools to find out if you're trying to get pregnant, tracking ovulation is very important to you. There are certain tools that can break it down to the day. They can break it down to the hour. Luteal phase. This is just after ovulation and it's 14 days long. That's again these are all perfect world numbers so keep that in mind. I am someone who believes in having a tolerance ban on everything. That was something that I taught in aerospace and I love that menstruation is two to seven days. We have a tolerance ban there. Follicular 13 to 14 days. We have a tolerance ban. It's a little tighter. Ovulation. One day it's actually a couple of hours, deludial phase, 14 days, the end. Now most women cycle is between 27 to 29 days, but the sweet spot is 28 days and it lines you up with the moon's cycle. The moon cycle is 28 days. So if you don't have a menstrual cycle, what you're timing yourself with is the moons. The full moon, ideally perfect world is when we're bleeding and the new moon is when we're ovulating. And the reason that we time it up like that is because the full moon is when we release and let go. The new moon is when we call in and the whole point of ovulation is to make a baby. So we're calling in, making a baby. Now, Who in the world here actually lives to this perfect world? I know probably five times in my life, I managed to sync up with those moons perfectly. Five times. I've been having a period for 32 years. That's not very often. Okay. Here are the rules and the rules include how we feed ourselves during our cycle, how our life should look during this time of in our cycle and workouts. If you're an athlete or aspire to be an athlete or just like to work out. tune in, pay attention. Perfect world. During menstruation, we are chilling, relaxing, and doing restorative practices. This is not the time to be super duper active. This is a time to rest and relax because your body is already working very hard. It's bleeding for two to seven days. That's a lot of work. And our hormones are going through a big flux. We've gone to zero on some of our hormones and some of our hormones are skyrocketing depending on how our body handles this portion of our cycle. Again, perfect world. Most of our hormones have dropped out and they're just starting to climb as we get to the end of our cycle, our menstrual cycle. foods to eat during this time would be high in iron, vitamin C so that the iron can get absorbed, B vitamins, folate specifically, and anti-inflammatory foods. We are inflamed during this time and it would be a great idea to eat anti-inflammatory foods like ginger and cinnamon, put them in tea and drink them. And then my favorite food to eat during this time. dark chocolate with orange peels. You get the vitamin C from the orange peels and the dark chocolate is low in sugar and gives me exactly what I need during this time of the month. The follicular phase, this overlaps with menstruation. Remember that. So the first part of the follicular phase is menstruation. After menstruation, this is the time that we want to start ramping up our workouts, ramping up our activity. We're starting to go into higher intensity life. This doesn't mean we're maxing out. We're maxing out our capabilities. It just means we're ramping up. The foods to eat during this time are going to be... really, whatever you want. This is kind of the free for all time in my humble opinion, but pay attention specifically to sugar and how your body is responding to sugar. are a, uh, more sensitive to insulin at this time. So pay attention to how your body is responding. Ovulation. This is when we want to crush our goals. This is when you hope that you've got big meetings, big competitions, hard practices. Life is really throwing it at you because you've got more energy and more drive during this one day than any other time during the month. Uh-huh, perfect world. Here's the caveat. During ovulation, your body has more laxity in its and ligaments means they're like wobbly and loose. You're stronger than any other time, which doesn't play well with loose joints. And we have poor neuromuscular control. Your brain doesn't talk to your muscles very well. This is all from a study that is in PubMed out of Spain. Now in Spain, they don't have PMS that much. but they do have issues with their athletes getting injured during ovulation and their luteal phase. There is a little bit of this that leaks into the luteal phase since ovulation is only one day and it's not like our body just bounces back right, right and quick. Okay, you have more energy and drive because peak estrogen has released testosterone. Mm, yeah, this is when I would want to perfectly schedule my power lifting meets. Because who doesn't want to hit a PR? Okay, you're also less sensitive to pain. And it's a more inflammatory time for some women. Eating fish can help reduce that inflammation. For vegans and vegetarians, you're looking at nuts and seeds to help with inflammation. if you tend to have a little more pain during this time, or you notice like I had my period and halfway through the month I got pain again, kind of like PMS, you're ovulating. The luteal phase. This is for strength training and keeping your brain calm because cortisol is high during this time. I plan my workouts for sanity during the luteal phase. I am going for training my brain and not my body as much. I'm not pushing it very hard. And that's my recommendation to you in the luteal phase. Don't push it unless you can. And this is where you'll ebb and flow your workouts with how you're feeling. In this phase, you're less sensitive to the effects of insulin. So not a horrible time to eat sugary things, but food should also be high in fiber, slow digesting carbs. And again, that dark chocolate with orange peels because PMS at the end of the luteal phase, some people do have premenstrual syndrome. And in the United States, it's more prominent because we do have a more inflammatory diet. So this is why I keep stressing in each of these phases to pay attention. If you're in an inflammatory phase of your cycle, eat anti-inflammatory foods. Okay. So that's the perfect world. Here's the real world during menstruation, get as much rest as you can put into your schedule. The more rest, better, the more recovery, better. Sleep harder during your menstrual cycle. That might be easy because you're exhausted or it might be hard because you're exhausted, but your brain's like, I got so much to do. And we tend to have more of a spiraling brain during menstruation. Our brain is much more active. Check out Yoga Nidra. We talked about this in episode 46 with Renee Yumtub. Phenomenal episode to learn more about what yoga nidra is and how you can get deeper sleep and basically cheat on sleep with that practice. Also Epsom salt baths helping with the inflammatory response during menstruation. Epsom salt baths are a game changer. And then when it comes to your food, Because you need more rest, cook your meals before preload the work, before you end up with PMS at the end of your luteal phase or in your menstrual cycle. That way you can rest more and the food's already ready for you and you don't have to think about what am I going to have for dinner tonight when you're already bleeding. The follicular phase, follicular phase, man, I'm gonna screw that word up more, I bet. If you know you've got a big meeting, hard practice, competition, plan some recovery workouts into your week. This is how you're gonna help yourself through this phase. More recovery workouts during this time. If you don't know what a recovery workout is, check out... Episode three with Barrett Smith, we cover some ways to do recovery workouts, other things to do that aren't pushing yourself at your sport or pushing yourself in the boardroom. Ovulation. This is when you pray you've got a big meat, like I was talking about before. Try to schedule getting PRs knocking out big projects, knocking out big meetings and give yourself a couple of days window around this ovulation. Going into ovulation, your energy is spiking. At ovulation, your energy is the highest and then after ovulation, it's starting to trickle off. So you've got a window of opportunity around your ovulation day to really amp up your energy and use it to create these PRs and go gung ho on whatever you need to do. Don't think it's just one day. Luteal phase treated the same as the follicular phase. You are adding in more recovery workouts during this time. So understanding the rules and now knowing how can I actually live my life and then break those rules, but still living in this flow. Hopefully that's what this has shown you when it comes to food. You have more control over this than you do scheduling for practices and games and competitions and big meetings and big projects at work. So really harness the food piece of what I've shared here. Help yourself through food. It, it's a game changer, truly. And I do plan on having Amy Gallow on to talk about insulin and how our bodies as athletes respond to insulin. And we will cover. the female cycle in this. The more, you know, the better you can treat yourself. That's what this episode is really all about. Understanding your cycle also helps us better communicate with our team. Communication is key in any relationship. So you're tired. Let your team know you really just want to hunker down in a hole. Let your team know if you're moody, let your team know. They'll be there to support you. And if there are women on your team, they get it. They understand where you're at in life and they'll help you out because they're going to be there eventually too. The monthly cycles are really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding your body. I have been in a deep study with Mellissa Seaman and Maria Yraceburu for the last five years, understanding your life cycle, your yearly cycle. And then what I've just explained here, your monthly cycle is a study. I have. Gained profound insight into how to treat this body and really land in that pleasure space, that ease and flow of life space. And that truly is my goal for all of you. That is my hope for all of you. So I'm mentioning Mellissa and Maria, and I'm going to drop their links into the show notes because. Shameless plug. Mellissa is my business coach. She helped me create the Gutsy Chick Quiz and it was a game changer for how my business brought in leads and how quickly those leads convert to clients. If you are a female business owner who needs a better lead gen tool, Mellissa is hosting a free quiz creation masterclass on February 5th. The link for that, it's an affiliate link. is in the show notes, go check out her free masterclass on quiz creation. It's a game changer. You go from three to 5 % opt-in to 30 to 50 % opt-in. Those are phenomenal numbers, you guys. Okay. This deep study that I'm in with Mellissa and Maria, it's changed my life. It's made me have a better way of handling how I flow through my day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, and my entire life. If that is something that you feel you could benefit from, I know everyone could benefit from understanding those things, please check out Mellissa Siemens. website channel, your genius. has a podcast. She's her business academy, her wisdom academy. she's phenomenal. Maria Yraceburu is my Apache Shima mama. She will take you deep into the indigenous practices of these life cycles, initiations that we've stripped out of our day to day and our life cycle. Those kinds of initiations are what keep us grounded and help us from a mental place to navigate this life. Please go check out their work. If you are a person who is struggling with their menstrual cycle, please check out my initial body scan. It's $97. We sit down for 20 minutes and I put you on the path to healing. Right there in that 20 minutes, we will go over how it looks to heal your hormones. And trust me, it's more than hormones that need to be healed. When our hormones are showing us things are out of whack. Some of the symptoms that I've helped people work through are missed periods. Acne, mood swings, depression due to a faulty menstrual cycle. The list goes on. If you're struggling, please reach out. I have helped several women come back to balance with their hormone cycles, with their menstrual cycles, with the cycle that they should be living to when they've become menopausal or post-menopausal, their wise woman years. Let's get you on the road to healing. Thanks for listening.