Can Tracking Your Cycle May Improve Your Athletic Performance?
New research on the menstrual cycle and female athletic performance has uncovered patterns in performance and hormone levels.
Stacy Sims, author of “ROAR: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life” and exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist, at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, believes that tracking your menstrual cycle is vital to athletic training and optimal performance.
“Track your cycle and overlay it with your training logs,” says Sims, “Then you can begin to work with how these phases affect your training and balance that with nutrition and hydration.”
Georgie Bruinvels, an exercise physiologist with sports research company Orreco, has co-created the app, FitrWoman. Apps like these gained a large amount of media attention after the US women’s national soccer team revealed that cycle tracking was “one of many strategies that we deployed that helped us win. ”
“When women understand why they experience different symptoms at different phases in their cycles, they can adjust their approaches to nutrition and hydration.” Bruinvels says. “We believe that female athletes can perform on any day of their cycles by making the right changes for those particular hormonal variations.”
Apps like FitrWoman are one of the many ways to track your cycle and hormone changes. Another way, is to use the Tanita BC-582 FitPlus Innerscan Body Composition Monitor. Not only does the BC-582 monitor body fat percentage, total body water percentage, muscle & bone mass, visceral fat rating and metabolic age, the BC-582 has the Tanita-Developed FitPLUS feature.
The Tanita BC-582 Body Composition Monitor works by educating women on the daily fluctuations and metabolic changes. FitPLUS acts as a calendar reminder to monitor the natural metabolic changes during your cycle so that you can compare the information with how your body responds to diet and exercise. The simple traffic light system can help you maximise your calorie burn and minimise fatigue during exercise.
Used by physicians, clinicians, health and fitness experts worldwide, Tanita is considered the gold standard of bioelectrical impedance analysis scales and monitors.
To check out the Tanita BC-582 Innerscan Body Composition Monitor for yourself, visit https://tanitaaustralia.com/products/bc-582-body-composition-monitor-with-fitplus-feature.
To learn more about Dr Stacy Sims, author of “ROAR: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life” and exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist, visit here: https://www.facebook.com/drstacysims/
To learn more about Dr. Georgie Bruinvels, FitrWoman’s co-creator, and the study, visit here: https://www.fitrwoman.com/post/press-release-largest-global-studyof-active-women