Not Just a Man's World

For the last two weeks I’ve been ploughing through some technical material on what is going on with the female sex hormones when taking hormone-based contraceptives.  Last week I put some consideration into what training and diet might work well with hormone-based contraceptives.  So now we put it to the test with some real life experiences.

Contraceptive pill - friend or foe?

First though, here’s some revision on the conclusions I reached, though if you want to rely on them I strongly recommend you read the longer articles which they come from.

Revision – menstrual cycle without hormone contraceptives

Days 1-4: menstrual phase

• Low energy intake requirements.
• Should be the best time for resistance training as you should feel at your strongest.

Days 5-13: proliferative phase

• Fat oxidisation should be good during this phase but protein catabolism isn’t effective.  Glucose uptake won’t be much good until near the end of this cycle.
• Care needs to be taken, especially early on in the phase, with too many carbohydrates, since they are more likely to be stored as fat rather than uptake being into the muscles.  High percentage protein diets with minimal carbs would force your body to burn body fat for fuel in this phase.

Days 13-16: ovulatory phase

• This is the time to load up on the carbohydrates and fill up the glycogen stores.
• Endurance performance is at a peak.
• Resistance exercise is also likely to be good due to the better uptake of glucose to the muscles but both pre and post-workout carbohydrates may be beneficial.
• Recovery from exercise should be good due to the oestrogen-improved blood flow to the muscles. 

Days 16-22: early luteal phase

• Those chasing physique goals may benefit from a diet with minimal carbs and perhaps 50:50 protein and fat.  Protein catabolism is at its best but fat oxidisation is also reasonably good. 
• Towards the end of this phase endurance training sees the best improvements to long-term performance.

Days 22-28: late luteal phase

• Women naturally tend towards a much higher energy intake (across all macronutrients) so be on guard if you’re on a low-carb calorie deficit diet.
• A good time to load up on the carbohydrates to fill up the glycogen stores. 
• Resistance exercise should be good due to the better uptake of glucose to the muscles.  This may also explain the excellent performance some strength athletes see in the last few days before menstruation.
• Recovery from exercise should be good due to the oestrogen-improved blood flow to the muscles.
• The improved endurance training from the mid luteal phase should continue throughout this phase.

Revision – menstrual cycle with hormone contraceptives

For weeks 1-3, when taking the contraceptives, it looks like a diet with a high protein percentage should work well.  Keeping carbohydrates really low except for immediately post workout when glycogen stores are depleted and signalling in the body for replenishing those stores is high.  The body is also likely to cope really well with endurance sports and in the weights room total body workouts could well be the best bet.

Hitting week 4, when undergoing hormone withdrawal, the body can probably handle carbohydrates and fat better so consider replacing some of the protein with fat and allow a little more flexibility with carbohydrates as long as there is plenty of activity going on to keep depleting glycogen stores.  Endurance performance may drop off a little and heavy low rep resistance training should probably be avoided in the first few days (or at least taken carefully to avoid injury).  However, resistance performance may improve in the second half of the week and this could be a good week to do some bodybuilder-style hypertrophy work.

Reader experiences

So that’s what I think should happen, and here’s a table showing what people have experienced – names have been removed for anonymity purposes but you might recognise yourself if you are one of the people who responded to an email I sent you.  The information about diet isn’t really relevant to this article but I thought I would leave it in for information.  Where it says “N/A” I didn’t have any information in that area.

From this the only real consistent point on training seems to be that women on hormone-based contraceptives all seem to feel weaker (or at least not feel at their strongest) at the start of the bleeding.  This definitely holds up with my previous conclusions.  Women who are not on hormone-based contraceptives seem upsettingly inconsistent.  One feels stronger, consistent with the research, one seems to have a similar pattern to the hormone-taking group (does she have a particularly heavy period which acts as a greater stressor, perhaps), and one finds intense exercise more challenging during her period.

It’s a thoroughly unhelpful set of results, but I thought they were worth sharing so that you all know that we’re not alone.  My overriding memory from biology lessons is that real experiments with live test subjects are never consistent…

Hopefully the posts I’ve done around this topic will be helpful in providing a starting point, but as the table above shows, nothing is certain!

Related posts:

1. Menstrual cycle on the contraceptive pill
2. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part two
3. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part one
4. Blog-watch: diet and the menstrual cycle