Dr. Stacy Sims

I think learning to listen to your body and the signals that it's giving you across the stages of your life, that's really key to so many of the questions that we're talking about because you want to understand your own response.

And where many women are falling short is that

They've been suppressing their cycles.

They don't know about it.

And they were not taught all of these different changes that are perfectly normal.

And so it's very hard to then hear a social media post that says, only do this in the follicular phase and don't ever do cardio in the luteal phase.

And you get a lot of mixed messages when, in fact, there's no absolutes.

No.

Assuming you have a regular menstrual cycle.

Right.

I think there's different time periods, which we've mentioned before, PCOS, hypothalamic amenorrhea, time periods where you're not making estrogen or making it reliably, you can get away with less.

And so we want to protect a little bit of that.

But when it comes to exercise...

Variety is the name of the game.

You want to adapt so you shouldn't be doing the same thing every day.

That doesn't mean you can't have a plan.

There's seven days in a week.

You don't have to move every single one.

But you should pick these different activities based on your life, your schedule, what you want to accomplish.

And it will vary some in different phases of your life because your goals are going to be different.