Sports Nutrition for Women

There are usually a few days out of the month when you feel like hell. You run slower, feel achier, and are more likely to skip a workout. “A lot of women finish a hard day and end up flat-on-their-back exhausted,” says Stacy Sims, Ph.D., exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and co-founder of the performance nutrition company Osmo Nutrition. “And your menstrual cycle has a lot to do with it.”

For decades, women—athletes and gym rats alike—have written off these PMS training days as a sacrifice to the fertility gods, but it turns out we have just been eating and refueling the wrong way: We’ve been doing it like men. And our performance has suffered.

The problem is that the recommendations for pre-, during, and post-exercise fueling are based on studies that use 18- to 22-year-old guys. Unlike men, we have high and low hormone phases throughout the month, during which estrogen and progesterone fluctuate, causing slight changes to metabolism, glycogen, and blood plasma levels, all of which affect performance, recovery, and how hard you can push during a workout. That’s why it’s hard to include women as test subjects. But by not studying females or only looking at us during a low-hormone phase, scientists and experts are only getting half the story.

Read the full post here.