Cycle Syncing Won't Fix Women's Fitness

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Cycle Syncing is All Vibes and Little Evidence By Haley Weiss Health Reporter Can you name all four phases of the menstrual cycle? Unless you use a period-tracking app or just finished high-school health class, you probably can’t. That’s because for most women without hormonal conditions, the three phases in between periods—follicular, ovulatory, and luteal—don’t feel all that different. But a whole new wave of fitness programs wants women to plan their workout (and in some cases, their diets), around those four phases. The concept is known as cycle syncing, and programs include overviews of the relative levels of different menstrual hormones throughout the cycle and exercises tailored to the generalized ups and downs in pain, energy, and other physiological states that can occur. While the approach is no doubt helpful for some, the reality is these programs are based on both oversimplified versions of the wildly unique menstrual cycles people experience and out-of-context assumptions about new and sometimes unproven findings in sports medicine. And though cycle-syncing programs encourage people to become more familiar with the ways in which their own menstruating bodies work, experts fear women will unwittingly accept the sexist idea that they are governed by their hormones. READ MORE Share This Story

What Else to Read Column: Internalized Racism Almost Kept Me From Becoming a Mother By Debora Kuan 'For me, the fear of motherhood was inextricably tied to race,' writes Debora Kuan. Read More » What To Know About High Cholesterol in Kids By Sandeep Ravindran Detecting it could reduce the risks of heart attacks and strokes later in life. Read More » Is There Really No Safe Amount of Drinking? By Jamie Ducharme What the latest science says on drinking and health. Read More » Love Languages Actually Do Improve Your Relationship By Angela Haupt Research links relationship satisfaction to whether partners use each other's preferred love language. Read More » Stop Spending Money to Avoid Uncomfortable Emotions By Jenn Lim Happiness expert Jenn Lim on why we misunderstand the relationship between spending money on ourselves and our emotional wellbeing. Read More »

ONE LAST READ How Big Tobacco hacked snack food What do Camels and Teddy Grahams have in common? At least for a while, their owners. In the 1980s and 1990s, Big Tobacco brands owned food giants including Nabisco and Kraft—and, as this eye-opening Washington Post story reports, tobacco executives purposely created snack foods almost as addictive as their cigarettes. Read More »

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