Dr. Vonda Wright

Sport and exercise science in itself is a small subset of sports medicine and medical research.

And most of the research has been done on men.

So if we look inherently at most of the recommendations of exercise, recovery, nutrition, it's based on male data.

And we established earlier that that's not generalizable.

Right.

So when we really want to get into the nuances of how do we create an adaptive stress for women, we have to look at it differently.

We have to look through the female lens, understand the female physiology, and acutely how hormones can affect adaptations and how women respond to different environmental cues than men.

So this is the nuance.

And this is something if you'd asked me maybe five years ago, I would have said, sure, from a molecular level, we see that there are certain things that happen with estrogen being in isolation for the most part.

And then when you have estrogen progesterone, we see their metabolic shifts, we see their temperature shifts.

But the caveat is we don't know if a woman ovulates or not.

And I'm sure that Natalie can give some stats about the anovulatory incidences in most women.

If we were to understand and know when a woman ovulates, in addition to how she feels across her cycle, then she can individually tailor her menstrual cycle to her training.

But for general plan, we can't do that.

your own data and you know which days you feel really fantastic that's where you want to put your higher intensity your heavier lifting because you know that you're going to hit those training metrics what we don't want is for someone to go in to do a high intensity session on days they feel flat because then they won't hit the metrics that they need to to get the stimulus we're after can you explain this to me like i'm a 10 year old in terms of where in the cycle typically women will have more energy and really be able to push themselves

Right here, five to seven days before ovulation.

Some women feel really great around ovulation.

Some have a transient where they'll feel really awful on and around ovulation and maybe 24 hours later, they feel really fantastic.

Most women are variable through the early luteal phase.

So if we think about day 6 to 14, that's when we see women feel really robust and strong and feel like they can take on the world.