Dr. Stacy Sims

They used to think it was some kind of insanity and put women into insane asylums to lock them down.

Well, in ex-phys techs, you always had the representative of him or they and the Vesuvius man and all the angles of the male body, but there was never representation of women.

The only time you heard about a female athlete was all the pathophysiology, you know, the iron deficiency, the female athlete triad, which we now…

call relative energy deficiency in sport.

And when you're looking at the historical idea of sport, the only way women were actually included and accepted is when they were amenorrheic, because then they were, quote, more like men.

And then there wasn't a problem with training them, and then they could work as hard.

But we know that that's not appropriate.

That's a sign of illness and overtraining under recovery.

So it is pervasive everywhere.

It's not just the medical, but it goes into when you think about what it means to be successful in sport.

It's the power.

It's the aggression.

It's the infallibility of being human.

And a woman having a menstrual cycle was deemed a fallibility.

So they're trying to push it aside.

of what's going on here i was gonna say i want to get rid of this graph okay so leave it out leave it out but it it shows just a textbook of what a menstrual cycle is is but it doesn't show the daily perturbations of estrogen and the luteinizing hormone pulses and all the things that go as natalie's saying to make it to make it work

And the conversation that we're having now in research methodology is the fact that there is no real definition of normal because every woman's cycle is variable.

So when we look at this, everyone thinks that this is normal, but we don't actually know if that is.

For the fact that a woman's variation, this can change cycle to cycle, this can change cycle to cycle.

Sometimes we have anovulatory cycles.