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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the One Day at a Time podcast. If you don't know yet, my name is Scott, and I've got a very strong large accent. So please bear with me if you're from any other part of the world apart from South Wales because sometimes I can speak quickly. But today's topic is an important one.
Speaker 1:So sharpen the ears as we say in Wales, but ears is the correct pronunciation. Okay. For anything of a Welsh accent, as in ear, you as in time, and you as in you right now sounds very similar because of the accent, but let's crack on. So this is there was a there was a research paper looked at, is menstrual cycle training bogus? Okay?
Speaker 1:So should you train depending on what part of the menstrual cycle you're on? And if you're a man listening, don't tune out right now. This is important for you to know because it's about hormones as well, and it does kind of impact. You you don't have menstrual cycle obviously, but, you know, understanding what's happening and and the same type of testosterone thing happening in men, there's something to learn from this. So over the last few years, and we got to go back in time a bit, most research studies were done on men because men don't have a menstrual cycle, it's easier to control variables.
Speaker 1:A woman's hormones can fluctuate a lot and depending on, everyone's got different cycle, a lot of people on birth control, different birth control, so it's a lot of things to try and control. So a lot of the studies are done on men, I think only 4% of research studies were done only on women and it's changing now. It's going to take time to get more studies just on women. So when it comes to understanding the fluctuations in the cycle and all these things that impact women differently to men, then the next phase is, okay, well should training which has been optimized around men, should that be different to women or should the training stay the same? Should you just go week after week after week or should you change then, okay week one of the cycle I should do this, week one, do know what I mean?
Speaker 1:So this is kind of where the topic is at now and it's a hot topic right now. A lot of companies are coming out and pushing menstrual cycle training and all this type of stuff. So the thing goes is there's natural hormone fluctuations, rise and fall in oestrogen, progesterone during the typical menstrual cycle, this may affect muscle growth, for better or for worse. Females can maybe optimise their training by adapting workouts around the fluctuations, so oestrogen and progesterone, when things go up you can maybe push harder in the gym. So as a coach people are thinking, okay, if I tailor a program to this and their cycle, maybe it's better.
Speaker 1:So there was a paper published in the American College of Sports Medicine, Exercise and Sports Scientist Reviews, and the paper's titled Hormones, Hypertrophy and hype. Okay? So let's have a primer first. So on day one of the cycle, it's marked as day one of, you know, the first day of bleeding. So estrogen is at its lowest point at this point of the menstrual cycle, so day one.
Speaker 1:Okay? So we need to understand that. Then as estrogen estrogen levels rise, okay, around day seven, estrogen peaks. Okay? And that's typically when mid cycle, so peaks from day seven to thirteen, there's a few other hormones that peak and triggers ovulation around this point, testosterone and stuff as well, is like where people think maybe this is the best part to train.
Speaker 1:Okay, so after ovulation, oestrogen falls again, and I can share the graph, there's a graph that goes, you can kind of see the rise and fall of this stuff. So it's kind of like should you decide based on your hormone levels, should you decide based on your hormone levels and is it typically the middle or the second to third week, is that the best weeks? And kind of ask what people are thinking, okay, go on week one maybe slow it down, recovery, week two see how you feel, but as the week progresses maybe push it, week three maybe you still got that push and you go for it, week four again back down, you might have pre mental symptoms, PMS and maybe it's not a great week to push and then you bring it back down. Makes sense, okay. But the scientists from McMaster University looked at 61 studies.
Speaker 1:Okay, they looked at 61 studies and wanted to see what the hell is going on and wanted to see if there's truth to this, is it better to train? So this is a quote from the study, okay, so according to the folks who promote menstrual cycle based training, the middle of the cycle when estrogen grows hormone testosterone out of peak is the best time for someone to push at the gym, okay. However, according to the McMaster researchers, rigid menstrual cycle training protocols generally fail. That's because menstrual cycles can be unpredictable. The typical menstrual cycle lasts twenty eight days, ovulation on the halfway mark.
Speaker 1:However, in some females, the cycle is shorter or longer. Even in the same person, the cycle lengths may vary one month to another. Okay? The variations have muddied the results of much of the available research as many studies didn't use calendar tracking. While research has linked long term declines in female hormones with muscle loss, it has yet to show that short term fluctuations have an effect.
Speaker 1:For an example, and this is for men as well, testosterone and growth hormone both rise after doing a strength training session. However, numerous studies indicate that the short term boost isn't robust enough to significantly affect muscle protein synthesis, and it's likely true for the short term hormonal shifts during the menstrual cycle. And here's the quote, final quote, given the current state of the literature and the hypes around in phase based training, it is premature and even misguided for females to plan and periodise their resistance training regime based on hormonally medicated advantages or disadvantages in certain phases of their menstrual cycle. So there's not enough strong evidence to show yet. It doesn't mean it's not true, just not enough strong evidence to show.
Speaker 1:You might over complicate things and maybe it stresses you up more. So the first thing by you is, well you need to remember this as well for men listening, when I was 16, 17, some of the teachers and the coaches would say, look guys, you want to train legs because legs boosts your testosterone level. When you train legs you have the biggest boost in testosterone. And it's true when you do strength training and you do a big body part like legs that short term your testosterone levels rise. Now, a lot of people were then, okay, do legs, testosterone levels go up, I'll gain more muscle and run the rest of my body.
Speaker 1:That's what people believed, but it's not true because that short term boost isn't enough to just be long term muscle growth, okay? So we need to be we do need to be careful when we see things like this, like, oh my god, there was a 988% boost in testosterone levels after this workout. Yeah, not 98% permanently, so it's not going to have the big impact, so we've got to be careful. So this ties in with something I've posted about before and talked about before. There was a study about weight loss and it wanted to see if people's genes, your genetics, if you preferred consuming carbs or if you preferred consuming fats.
Speaker 1:So they theorized that there's differences in fat loss studies but maybe if we tailor the macros to carb focused people and then fat responders then maybe they get better fat loss results. So if we get this hyper personalised stuff And the results were there was no difference. So they did these tests and there was no difference to fat loss results even if your genetics preferred to be a fat responder versus carb responder. So the end result of this stuff is, and the same with this stuff, it's like you can fine tune, fine tune, fine tune and maybe for Olympic athletes it might be worth testing out, but for me and you and the general public, okay, we don't necessarily need to go down this path. Okay, the hyper this hyper kind of like, and it I'm not having to go whoop or nothing like that, think it's a great product, but a lot of people now determine their day based on if whoop tells them their stress score is high or low, okay.
Speaker 1:They're now determining how they feel based on technology telling them if they feel good or not to train. And you know what, sometimes you're meant to feel tired because you are pushing yourself and you need to know that you can push yourself beyond, but there is a level where you're overtraining, but maybe these technologies are misguiding us as well. Do we need to hyper personalise? Or are we human beings in general and the general human being, our base mechanism, we can hit the fundamentals and can we leave it at that? And the thing is, we can leave it at that to get the majority of the results and then there are personalised tweaks at the end that you might want to do if you want to progress further in certain things.
Speaker 1:You know, for example, in jujitsu and martial art, everybody goes through the same basic training, everybody, no matter if you're talented at the start, you're flexible, you're not flexible, everyone does the basic training and you do the basic training for years and years and even you consider three to five years, you're hitting the basics and the fundamentals over and over. Only when people really get to black belt level that they start understanding what they prefer and they start tweaking how they do the sport to prefer the moves they prefer, right, how their body works. So it takes a long time and really that fundamental jujitsu is still the basics everyone learns. It doesn't mean they're going to be better or beat someone just because they're tweaking one or two things, it's something that people want to do after the basics have done and are conquered. And you can apply this to everything.
Speaker 1:You can apply this to everything. So it comes with strength training. You want to hit the basics, you want to do your squats and your dead lifts and your bench presses, your military press, your pull ups, your press and stuff like that, and then you do those for many years. And then you start saying, oh, there's this exercise, it's more complicated, maybe I give that a go, maybe that's going to be something that I prefer doing and gives me slightly different results. But only if the fundamentals have been done first you can even see if that tweak or that more personalised thing in the future works.
Speaker 1:Because if you don't do the fundamentals long enough and you start adding complexity, how do you know it's doing anything? People are quick to jump into taking loads of supplements. Before, they've got their calorie intake in check, their protein is there, perhaps their fruits and veggie intake is there, perhaps their water intake is there in the steps and they're maybe training. When you do those fundamentals for eight to twelve weeks first, before everyone jumping in and thinking there's like this tweak that's going to be the answer, the answer is always the fundamentals. The research is even saying this now, it's like listen, we know, we get it, you have women, you have fluctuations in your menstrual cycle, but there is no strong evidence to say that tweaking your training around this is better for you, you might as well just train like each day, each week you go by how you're feeling and you train, you follow a programme that's structured, you know, you try and lift heavier weight every one or two weeks and you keep it simple and basic, there's nothing complicated about that.
Speaker 1:You turn up, you try your best, you go back again. Same with everything, you know, you wake up, you try your best with your tracking, your protein in your steps, and you try and get those done for three those three golden trios done long enough, and guess what? The magic happens. Come on. Come on.
Speaker 1:That's what we've got to focus on, guys. I promise you, most of you listening and if we're going be honest with ourselves, because I am you, you and me, we are human beings, we're same, you know, similar minds really, we understand what sadness means and happiness and all these emotions, you know, we share a lot in common as though we think we're individual and very unique people. The thing is we all have the same or similar struggles. Of course there's instances of more severe things that happen to people, but general day to day living like this is why marketing works on the masses, show us ads for food, they know we behave in a predictable way, that's why marketing works, that's why things work. We just need to understand that, we need to understand most of us have never followed and done fundamentals for long enough to see the results from the fundamentals.
Speaker 1:We skip the fundamentals to silly personalised things that don't actually work, right, or don't have any extra benefit. Okay, this is exciting news. I know it might not sound exciting to you, but I am pumped in my brain, in my mind I am so excited for so many of you listening that you're going to do the fundamentals for say eight weeks and you're going to realize just how powerful they are and what you're going to get from a side effect from that is you're going to say, oh my god, I don't actually have to bombard my brain with more things to do in terms of health and fitness right now, I can hit the three main things, I can look at my work, I can look at my family, I can look at my friends, I can look at my I can focus on other things and I've just hit the main three and over time my health is going to improve and blah blah blah, and maybe down the line there'll be something that pops up like, I'm vitamin b twelve deficient, you know, my family got a history of that, you know, I've been tested and I'm just about okay, but maybe you need to have supplementation with B12 down the line, maybe that's something that is personalised to you, but it doesn't mean that that's going to change everything for you, I need the fundamentals in place and then obviously you learn more on tweaks things as you progress on your health journey, find out, but be excited about the fundamentals because they're going to change your life and that's what the app is done, that's what the app is designed around, hit the fundamentals, do not worry about the rest, let's go.
Speaker 1:Okay, so don't worry if yesterday wasn't good. Someone posted in a group, last week I was off my calories, now I've hit my calories, I'm a bit off my protein, now I'm close to my protein, now my steps is about 2,000, I'm going to try and increase my steps, perfect. Step by step by step by step, that's how we go. We don't expect perfection, don't expect you to hit your targets in the first day, it doesn't work that way. It's exciting to actually build up to things.
Speaker 1:Okay, as a reminder, one of the Jim Rohn, okay, Jim Rohn is like, kind of business slash philosophical teacher, from the eighties seventies and eighties, and he says, how long do you give a baby to walk? And he asked his sweet, how long would give a baby to walk? He asked his asks the audience, and like, what do you mean? He's like, how long would you give for a baby to walk? How many times if they fail, you go, oh, you can't walk.
Speaker 1:You failed so many times, baby. You can't walk. You just give up on walking. It's ridiculous, ridiculous, you'd think obviously not, they will eventually get it, some babies are quick, some babies aren't. And it's the same with us, man, you do this until you can, you do this until you understand the fundamentals and get them going, you cycle a bike until you can cycle a bike, you go and you do swimming, you do running, you do things until you learn to do them.
Speaker 1:As a kid there is no someone who comes in, Nope, chop the legs off, can't walk, no point having the legs now. It is ridiculous. So why do we bring this ridiculousness to ourselves when we think about doing the fundamentals? Well, nothing's happened in two weeks, I'm gonna give up on it. You've given up on walking.
Speaker 1:You're the baby that's given up on walking when you know you just need some time. So see it that way, you do it until it clicks, and once it clicks, it changes your life. Super exciting. Now get on with your day, put a smile on your face, get your steps in, hit your calories and protein and just get on with your life guys. Stop trying to micromanage everything in health.
Speaker 1:Just get the big three done and I'll see you back here tomorrow.