Dr. Vonda Wright

And then some women are down for the count because of it.

So they don't plan any physical activity around that because they just can't, from a physical and mental standpoint, put themselves through anything.

So that's why I'm saying like ovulation, some women feel bulletproof.

Other women have this transient feeling of really flatness and pain.

And then afterwards in these...

early luteal phase so day 16 to about day 22 is variable well some women will feel like on top of the world still other women will feel i can't quite hit eye intensities and then in general these few days about day 24 to 27 before those hormones actually drop this is where you have your pms your premenstrual syndrome and cramping and fatigue and a lot of women are like not so great

So this is where we have to think about periodization.

First, lifestyle, but also how a woman is feeling.

We don't want people to do high-intensity interval training every day because that's just not going to create an adaptive response.

We have to think about the reason why we're exercising is to create a stress that the body is going to respond to.

We don't get fitter during exercise.

We get fitter from the stimulus of exercise and the recovery from it.

So if someone's doing high intensity interval training every day or five days a week, they're not ever going to get that subsequent recovery to be able to hit those high intensities and that stress that we want.

We talk about high intensity during our reproductive years.

You can pretty much get away with whatever you want to do during your reproductive years because you have the benefit of our hormones working for us.

We start getting into perimenopause and we start getting into menopause.

This is where we have to really carefully look at volume versus intensity.

So that means if we're doing lots of stuff, or are we doing really purposeful high intensity versus low intensity?

Because we're trying to create what we call a polarization of the training so that when we hit high intensities, we're actually hitting the intensities we need to create change.

But on the other side of it, we want to hit really low intensity so that we can have recovery.