Menstrual cycle tracking for coaches

Menstrual cycle tracking is a great way for athletes to understand their own unique cycle and how it affects them. It can also give them the insight to capitalise on the physiology of their cycle, and manage any challenges their cycle brings.

If your athlete chooses to share information from her menstrual cycle tracking with you, it has the potential to lead to powerful performance conversations. But remember, there are no set rules about what a female will experience at a given time of her cycle, nor how it might affect her ability in training and performing. Menstrual cycle tracking is, for coaches, a powerful tool with which you can understand your individual athlete, and her lived experience of the menstrual cycle and what that means in the context of her training. At the very least it can help explain why some days feel better than others, at best it can provide you with patterns that help you anticipate or plan to exploit or avoid certain nuances of her cycle.

Opening up the conversation about the menstrual cycle and periods may be easy for some athletes, but awkward for others. By sharing their cycle information you make a commitment to share the responsibility of understanding menstrual health and the performance potential within the menstrual cycle. Do so without criticism or judgement.

Endocrin-what-ology?

Endocrinology is the study of hormones, and having a good understanding of the potential effects, both physical and emotional, of the key hormones which fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle (e.g. oestrogen and progesterone) will help you make the most of the information you glean from monitoring.

The ‘coaches eye’ menstrual cycle

Try making notes related to what you observe in your athletes on certain days, which you can cross reference with menstrual cycle monitoring insight. You may find the days when an athlete reports feeling clumsy is also the day where you see she struggles to maintain form in the gym or deliver a skill.

Squad Goals

If you are working with a women’s squad, being in tune and planning around everyone’s menstrual cycle will be more difficult. Empower your athletes to use the insight they gain from menstrual cycle tracking to help develop strategies which means they can get the most out of training and recovery on any given day, and flag anything significant to coaches.

Menstrual Cycle: Not always a medical drama

The menstrual cycle does not need to be medicalised or treated unless your athlete or you feels like it needs to be. If this is the case, menstrual cycle monitoring can provide data to share with healthcare practitioners so that you can get the most effective treatment.

How to Track

Whether tracking with an app, or on a calendar or diary, there are some important bits of information you should record:

Menstrual Cycle Tracking should definitely include:

First day of period (day 1 of cycle)
Flow (light, medium or heavy)
Symptoms on any day of cycle (emotional and physical)

Menstrual Cycle Tracking can also include:

Sleep (Good? Long enough?)
Training (volume, intensity, type)
Training quality
Motivation to train
DOMS/ Recovery

Learn more about managing menstrual cycle sympoms in our post: Mastering your Menstrual cycle