Cycle Syncing

You Are Not Fragile: Rethinking the Language We Use to Talk About Women and Training

You Are Not Fragile: Rethinking the Language We Use to Talk About Women and Training

There is a particular kind of fitness content that has become so prevalent it barely registers anymore. It lives in the caption of a soft-lit reel, in the breathless voice of a wellness influencer reminding you that your luteal phase is a time for “rest and restoration,” that your body is asking you to slow down, that honoring your cycle means stepping back. The language is gentle. The intent may even be good. But somewhere between the science and the scroll, something important gets lost, and what fills that space is a quiet, culturally endorsed message that a woman’s body is, fundamentally, a source of limitation.

Not because menstrual cycle science isn’t real or important. It is both. The way that science gets translated into lifestyle content and social media trends has a tendency to overemphasize fragility in women’s bodies while underserving women with the full complexity of what the research actually shows. And when you zoom out and look at what women are capable of at the extreme ends of endurance, the narrative about limitation starts to look very thin.

Courtney Dauwalter won the 240-mile Moab footrace through the Utah desert outright in 2017, finishing more than ten hours ahead of the first male competitor. Pam Reed won the 212-kilometer Badwater ultramarathon in Death Valley not once but twice as the overall champion. These are not anomalies meant to dismiss the biological differences between male and female athletes. They are data points that belong in the conversation.

Research published across the last decade consistently shows that as race distance increases, the performance gap between male and female runners narrows. A large-scale retrospective study analyzing over 1.8 million runners across 38,000 trail races conducted between 1989 and 2021 found that the gap between men and women shrinks as trail running distance increases, demonstrating that endurance is greater in women. Across traditional marathon distances, men outperform women by roughly 10 percent. In ultra-distance competitions, that gap can shrink to as little as 4 percent, and in certain conditions, women have outpaced men entirely.

The physiology behind this is worth understanding. Women have a higher proportion of type I, slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are more efficient and fatigue-resistant during prolonged activity. Women tend to oxidize fat at a higher rate, which supports glycogen conservation over very long efforts. Research also suggests women experience reduced inflammation and muscle damage in extended exercise, contributing to faster recovery between efforts. In extreme heat and extreme duration, these traits are not liabilities. They are advantages.

This is not a declaration that women are superior athletes in every context. It is a reminder that the frame we have inherited for discussing women’s athletic capacity was built on incomplete data, and that the sport performance data we are now accumulating is telling a more complicated, more interesting story. A story that the “rest during your luteal phase” reel is not equipped to tell.

It’s incredibly easy to have an emotional reaction to the facts around women’s health, rage feels in alignment with truth here. In 1977, the FDA recommended excluding women of childbearing potential from Phase I and early Phase II drug trials. The policy was sweeping. It applied to women who used contraception, women who were single, women whose partners had vasectomies. The ostensible reason was caution following the thalidomide tragedy in Europe, but the practical result was that for decades, the baseline data driving medical and physiological understanding of the human body was built almost exclusively on male subjects.

It was not until 1993 that Congress wrote the NIH inclusion policy into federal law, requiring that women and minorities be included in all clinical research. That is within living memory. There are women competing in masters divisions of ultra-endurance events right now who were in their twenties when that law was passed. There are women coaching high school athletics whose entire formative years as athletes occurred before that legal standard existed.

This context matters when we talk about cycle syncing, hormone-based training modification, and all the wellness content that has bloomed in the years since Dr. Stacy Sims published her landmark argument that women are not small men and should stop eating and training like them. Sims is right. The problem is that her rigorous, nuanced, research-grounded work gets filtered through social media into something that often sounds less like science and more like permission to do less. The irony is that the entire point of her work is to help women train smarter and harder, not to hand them a biological excuse to scale back whenever discomfort arrives.

The language around cycle syncing rarely contains the depth or nuance a topic this important deserves. It is frequently delivered as a prescription without the underlying mechanism, a lifestyle aesthetic without the physiology. And when you strip the science out of the conversation, what you are left with is vibes dressed up as health education.

I do not come to fitness and sport as a consumer of a trend. I come to it as someone with a legacy that predates the infrastructure that made women’s sport possible. My grandmother played sports while a student at St. John’s University, but she had to play for her church. St. John’s did not field its first official women’s team until the 1974-75 season. Title IX had passed just two years earlier, in June 1972. Think about that sequence. The law came first. The team came after. And the women who wanted to compete before either existed found other ways, because that is what women who love sport do.

My mother was an NCAA Division I equestrian and captain of her team. I am not even the first generation of women in my family to play a college sport. What that lineage gives me is not nostalgia. It is perspective. There are women all around us, many of them still active, still training, still competing, who experienced firsthand what it looked like when women’s athletics had no funding, no infrastructure, no legal mandate. Women who competed anyway.

To look at that history and then offer women a content framework that centers limitation, that frames the menstrual cycle primarily as a reason to reduce intensity, that wraps biological reality in the language of fragility, feels like a profound waste of what those women built.

I will confess that as I write this, I have half a mind to diagnose myself as hysterical in the full Victorian sense, so that I might be prescribed time at the seaside. There is something almost clarifying about that image. A doctor in 1880 looks at a woman who is frustrated, energetic, opinionated, and determined, and concludes that what she needs is to be removed from activity, from purpose, from the thing that makes her feel like herself. Time outside, time to play outside, is genuinely good medicine. The prescription that discourages you from doing what brings you joy? That has never been medicine. That has always been control dressed up as care.

The wellness industry has a version of this problem. When the advice is always to slow down, always to protect, always to reduce, when the cycle becomes a story of what you cannot do rather than an operating manual for what you can, something has gone wrong in the translation. Understanding your cycle, tracking your hormones, knowing that the follicular phase supports higher-intensity output and that progesterone in the luteal phase raises core temperature and increases perceived effort, all of that is genuinely useful information. It is information that helps you calibrate, adjust, and perform better over time.

Calibration is not the same as surrender. And knowing your body is not the same as treating it like something that needs to be protected from your own ambitions. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. There is a better framework available to us, and it does not require abandoning the science. It requires holding the science with more honesty.

Understanding your cycle provides a better comprehension of your true nature and your ability to accommodate the energetic needs of your body. That is not a reason to do less. That is a reason to know yourself better so that you can do more, more strategically, more sustainably, with greater precision about when to push and when to recover deliberately. The moon does not stop the tide. It directs it.

Social media will continue to generate content that reaches for the biggest possible audience, and the biggest possible audience for women’s health content is not the population training for a 50-mile race. It is women who are new to fitness, who are looking for permission to be gentler with themselves, who have been told their bodies are complicated problems to manage. That content will always flatten nuance. That is what the format does.

Which means the responsibility falls to people who know better to say so clearly and often. The gap in women’s health education is real. The research deficit created by decades of excluding women from clinical trials is real. The fact that exercise science has historically been conducted almost entirely on male subjects and then applied to women as though we are simply smaller versions of the same system is real, and it is a genuine failure with genuine consequences.

The answer to that failure is not to treat women’s bodies as fragile. The answer is to build better knowledge, speak with more precision, and trust that women can handle the full complexity of what the science actually says, including the parts that ask more of them rather than less.

That energy is the inheritance. Use it.

Please enjoy the best commercial from my youth where Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan go head to head in athletic challenges:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rcGGdiDsyM

Megan Sherlock is a wellness professional passionate about somatic movement and holistic healing. She combines her expertise in fitness, yoga, and nutrition with the transformative power of energy work to help clients reconnect with their bodies and emotions. Megan holds certifications in NASM CPT, RYT 200, CGFI, CNC, BCS, CF1, ViPR, TriggerPoint SMR, Usui Reiki Master, and PN1. Experience her training in app