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There’s a new fad for runners who menstruate: synching your workouts with your menstrual cycle. The idea is that your changing body hormones make certain types of workouts better suited to different times of the month. However, there is not much evidence that suggests this is useful for the majority of athletes, and many experts are not sure about the effectiveness of this approach. Instead, they say it makes more sense to train through hormonal fluctuations.
“We’ve had an explosion of menstrual-cycle-based research looking at how athletes might be impacted, but on a population level, we’ve seen that the menstrual cycle typically doesn’t have a significant impact on most performance metrics,” says Dr. Megan Roche with the Stanford Female Athlete Science and Translational Research Program. “We see that in practice too, where we’ve had athletes performing at…
