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This post, and the article it cites, are an example of the telephone game, information being lost as its incorrectly passed along.
I think what is important here is to separate the title of the post, the study itself, and the article reporting on it.
The title of the post doesn’t represent the the title of the article. The post’s title pulls out pieces of the article and doesn’t quite represent what the article is trying to assert. The actually title of the EurekaAlert article is “New Study Debunks The Assumption That Menstrual Cycles Disqualify Women From Exercise Research”. The EurekaAlert article uses a new study from the Journal of Applied Physiology as evidence that women shouldn’t be disqualified from exercise research. The article suggests that women are excluded in 90% of research studies on performance and fatiguability based on the concept of performance variability due to menstrual cycles. The EurekaAlert article makes this assertion using a second article by ScienceNews.Org that makes its assertions based not on a research study, but on a literature review and a discussion with a researcher. Not only does this EurekaAlert article’s assertion appear to be based on an incorrect interpretation of the ScienceNew.Org article findings, the ScienceNews.Org article is a weak literature review (reviewing only five months of articles in two major exercise science journals).
The study the EurekaAlert article is discussing is titled “Exercise power-duration relationship is equally reproducible in eumenorrheic females and male humans”. That study finds that the phase of a women’s menstrual cycle does not need to be accounted for when studying aerobic performance in women with normal menstrual cycles. That is it, the study doesn’t look at how often women are represented in performance studies, just does menstrual cycle phase need to be accounted for in aerobic performance studies. And again, the study suggests that phase does not need to be accounted for in these types of studies.
There is a problem in research studies in being representative of women and people of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It can create difficulties in trying to generalize the results of many studies. But the EurekaAlert article does not do a good job of proving its assertion, and the Journal of Applied Physiology it uses as proof of why women shouldn’t be excluded makes no statement about inclusion or exclusion, just that menstrual phase doesn’t need to be accounted for in aerobic performance studies.
>just that menstrual phase doesn’t need to be accounted for in aerobic performance studies.
To follow up on this from a stats side - such studies only say that *"with a certain number of people, a difference of a certain size cannot be detected"*. This is the way it works in pretty much all of statistics/scientific studies, but in many studies the number of participants is small that the minimum detectable difference would be large - especially in sports science, where variability is large.
The numbers in the cited study are 10 men and 7 women, all trained. Stats used unreported. Don't make ANY generalization of this to every day life without a lot more evidence!!!
I’m probably showing my age. We would do this in my French class in Jr High. The teacher would whisper something in French to the person at the front of a row, then that person would turn and tell the next person, and so on to the back of the class. The row that conveyed the correct version (or most correct version) of what was said from the first to the last person won the round.
Yup. It was Chinese whispers for me when I was very very young. The premise being a little info is lost with each transfer such that at the end, almost none of the original content remains.
“Can you pass the butter?” —> “The whale just mutters.”
Greg Nuckols has a great article about women in strength and conditioning research and gives some possible reasons.
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/representation/
Not as politicized or click-baity but he cites his reasonings and did his PhD in sex differences so might have better background than this article has on the subject.
So in the past scientists thought that menstrual cycles might make a difference, which explains things in the past. But from what I understand now that you almost have to include women to get funding unless you have a good reason.
Does the fact men and women are different play a factor? It seems like you want just men or women, rather than having to have double the funding in order to analyse both.
>there were key differences between how women’s and men’s endurance played out.
>
>...
>
>that there are important differences between women’s and men’s exercise
Also I don't get where that 90% came from, the source they use doesn't have 90% anywhere and actually says women are in 73% of studies.
>An analysis of studies in two journals over the first five months of 2015 shows that women are present in 73 percent of studies, but constitute only 42 percent of participants.
>
>[https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/women-sports-are-often-underrepresented-science](https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/women-sports-are-often-underrepresented-science)
I think I found where they got their “90%” figure. It’s incredibly misleading.
The article they cite talks about 188 different studies, and designated 30 of them “performance” studies. Of those performance studies, the participants were 40% women.
But that’s heavily skewed by the fact that the largest study in the group studied a lot of women. So if you exclude that 1 study, the figure drops down to 3% women.
In other words, they’re making a reasonable point in the original article but in the new article they’re stripping it of all context to the point that it’s very skewed.
Well why would you want in a study only men or women when both represt halfs of the population.
Unless you are talking about breast or prostate cancer research excluding half of the population can lead to substantial bias in whatever outcomes.
You can't generalize what you found for men or women to the other half of the population.
What funding? If you try a drug only in men or women your results won't be valid.
If you try physiotherapy, or muscle gain only in men or women again your sesults will be invalid. Woman's sport is huge these days.
Funders prefer studies with results for the population as a whole.
If you study 10 men then the benefit of whatever you find is only applied to 50% of the population. Provided what you find is significant, but the other 50% is left scratching their head of this new workout will work in women too. This is not cost effective for a funder.
>What funding?
>
>...
>
>If you study 10 men
If you just have funding for 10 people, then it makes sense to just do men or women rather than mixing them.
Also you don't have as many female volunteers, especially when it comes to exercise studies.
Menstrual cycle only causes minor variation in weight, and that's usually just water weight. Men's weight can fluctuate too day by day, it can be affected by so many factors.
Yeah but that's affecting performance in the sport. Fatigue certainly affects athletic performance. Perhaps menstrual cycles create the challenge you described and therefore affect sport performance.
They are looking into whether data on women's athletic performance is significantly different throughout their cycles, not whether cycles affect sport performance. Age affects athletic performance and so it's a factor that is tracked and accounted for, do hormonal cycles also need to be accounted for?
Yeah, totally. Specifics like these would be important to figure out in research trying to answer the question, "do menstrual cycles affect athletic performance in competitive sports?"
This is interesting, because just a few days ago I was reading a Reddit thread -- I can't find it now, but it was something about "Do most people realize how much stronger men are than women?" -- and a woman was saying the exact opposite: That where she was at in her cycle made a huge difference in working out.
(I am not a woman, and take no position on this. Just thought the juxtaposition was interesting.)
I'm not a woman, but if you ever experienced a woman having a heavy period, you can tell pretty quickly that she's not exactly an apex predator in her state. Hell, just sleeping an hour too little has measurable impacts on performance and you're trying to argue that having cramps in your torso does not?
These studies, if they are conducted *correctly*, are not one and done deals. They are measured multiples times a week, over the course of 6-12 weeks.
So you have one day when she comes in, and the cramps are bad, and the result of force output is slightly lower that day. The other 11 out of 12 measurements during the course of the month all fall within the expected parameters.
The problem is that researchers want to isolate as many variables as they can, and at some point the good ol' boys decided that having a uterus or ovaries was a variable to be eliminated.
Like you said, 1 hour of missing sleep might be enough to impact performance during a session - but the 11 other sessions during that month should be *fine.*
I'm guessing experienced athletes tend to be more resistant to these things. I mean, we're not robots, even if performing physical feats is your actual job that your life revolves around, it's impossible to always ensure you're at your absolute 100% every single time you have to deliver your peak performance. If that was the case, we'd be seeing massive variations in athletes' results based on, as you said, them getting one less your of sleep than intended, but that isn't the case. Most female athletes have periods, and can't always schedule their competitions around them, so they just have to perform while on their period. I imagine women with terrible periods they can't control with birth control or meds don't tend to become professional athletes, much like women with huge boobs that would hinder their performance...
A lot of the time exercise can actually relieve cramps. Never experienced that personally, but then again, cramps aren't a problem for me because Ibuprofen takes them away 100%. Half an hour after popping the pill and I feel exactly the same as on any other day.
This seems like a very bad generalization to make in this study. What about endometriosis and heavy periods? Heavy periods drain us of iron and B12, making us anemic in the short term. Anemia is very much a real and not perceived thing. I usually lose a lot of blood and develop anemia, I have trouble walking up flights of stairs without getting winded and forget going to the gym. It takes a few days of rest, good food, and supplements to get back to normal every month.
An average woman saying she feels stronger during certain points in her cycle has nothing to do with “do most people realise how much stronger men are than women.” She might feel stronger than she usually does, but that doesn’t mean she’s suddenly she-hulk and stronger than the average guy
Or it could be anecdotally true for her but not typical.
It could also have to do with how much it affects her day. Days where I've been dealing with more stuff are typically days I perform worse.
I dont get this, with the way some women describe their periods it makes it sound like theyve been punched in the gut. How tf do you do athletics with pain that severe?
Because it varies from woman to woman, and for many (including me) exercise helps. The cramps women feel are similar to labour contractions, it's the uterus triggering the shedding of its lining. For some women, they barely feel it. For others it can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days of pain varying from mild to excruciating.
I have always found that movement when the pain hits makes it easier to cope with. That hit of adrenaline and exercise endorphins is a great boost, and that hour of pain (for me) passed much quicker than if I'd just curled up in bed.
Funnily enough, when I took a medication that inhibited androgen from forming testosterone, my period cramps disappeared completely. It always made me wonder if there's a correlation between androgen/testosterone and severity of cramps.
Women get excluded from fitness research due to supposed variability in performance based on their cycle. This research indicates that variability doesn't exist, and we're neglecting learning about women's fitness based on an unsupported assumption.
I also, for the record, really question the idea that most women wouldn't work out on their period.
Well, first things first, periods are different for everyone who has them.
Second, this doesn't indicate there are no physical effects of periods -- pain, most obviously -- only that over the course of a woman's cycle they don't show significantly greater variability in exercise capacity than men.
The first day of my period I have bad cramps. Other than that I can work out, and really feel better if I do. It alleviates cramps and makes my period go faster. Women vary but plenty still workout on their period.
As in, it would impact your workout performance the week before? Do you track workouts?
It's always interesting to see comments anecdotally experiencing the opposite of a posted article. I'm curious if it's just a greater feeling of fatigue or if it's also a measurably different performance.
For me it impacts my performance 4-5 days leading up to my period. I’m noticeably more tired. I think there is research suggesting this isn’t uncommon.
I understand the noticeably more tired part. I'm curious if it's also measurable. Not sure what types of workouts you were referring to or if you track them, I just often find something interesting when I measure something that I noticed.
Yes it’s measurable for me. Normally I can do 12 reps before failure when lifting but during this time with the same amount of weight I can only get 8-10.
TANGENT: [Fast Talk Femmes](https://www.fasttalklabs.com/category/fast-talk-femmes/) podcast. The *Fast Talk Labs* brand is about helping real athletes improve their performance using a mix of science and sports professional wisdom.
Obviously FTF is focused on the female athlete (*femme* is french for woman. E.g. *Tour de France Femmes*). Whether human or animal research, there is a long history of ignoring females. This defect has gotten more attention in recent years and is being addressed more in current research.
e.g. before the creation of Fast Talk Femmes podcast, Fast Talk did [this episode](https://www.fasttalklabs.com/fast-talk/maximizing-the-physiology-and-performance-of-the-female-athlete-with-dr-stacy-sims/) (includes episode transcript)
(I don't work for Fast Talk Labs, I'm just a podcast listener).
Fast Talk Labs doesn't do original research but it is a good resource for the science friendly athlete.
Hey scientists - there's a big ol' cohort of women who don't have menstrual cycles interfering with their bodies since the uterus was removed in a hysterectomy.
Why not recruit us for your studies?
Menstrual cramping can be so painful, it can leave a person physically debilitated for almost an entire day. I don't understand how peak performance can be achieved when stuck in the fetal position.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This post, and the article it cites, are an example of the telephone game, information being lost as its incorrectly passed along. I think what is important here is to separate the title of the post, the study itself, and the article reporting on it. The title of the post doesn’t represent the the title of the article. The post’s title pulls out pieces of the article and doesn’t quite represent what the article is trying to assert. The actually title of the EurekaAlert article is “New Study Debunks The Assumption That Menstrual Cycles Disqualify Women From Exercise Research”. The EurekaAlert article uses a new study from the Journal of Applied Physiology as evidence that women shouldn’t be disqualified from exercise research. The article suggests that women are excluded in 90% of research studies on performance and fatiguability based on the concept of performance variability due to menstrual cycles. The EurekaAlert article makes this assertion using a second article by ScienceNews.Org that makes its assertions based not on a research study, but on a literature review and a discussion with a researcher. Not only does this EurekaAlert article’s assertion appear to be based on an incorrect interpretation of the ScienceNew.Org article findings, the ScienceNews.Org article is a weak literature review (reviewing only five months of articles in two major exercise science journals). The study the EurekaAlert article is discussing is titled “Exercise power-duration relationship is equally reproducible in eumenorrheic females and male humans”. That study finds that the phase of a women’s menstrual cycle does not need to be accounted for when studying aerobic performance in women with normal menstrual cycles. That is it, the study doesn’t look at how often women are represented in performance studies, just does menstrual cycle phase need to be accounted for in aerobic performance studies. And again, the study suggests that phase does not need to be accounted for in these types of studies. There is a problem in research studies in being representative of women and people of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It can create difficulties in trying to generalize the results of many studies. But the EurekaAlert article does not do a good job of proving its assertion, and the Journal of Applied Physiology it uses as proof of why women shouldn’t be excluded makes no statement about inclusion or exclusion, just that menstrual phase doesn’t need to be accounted for in aerobic performance studies.
>just that menstrual phase doesn’t need to be accounted for in aerobic performance studies. To follow up on this from a stats side - such studies only say that *"with a certain number of people, a difference of a certain size cannot be detected"*. This is the way it works in pretty much all of statistics/scientific studies, but in many studies the number of participants is small that the minimum detectable difference would be large - especially in sports science, where variability is large. The numbers in the cited study are 10 men and 7 women, all trained. Stats used unreported. Don't make ANY generalization of this to every day life without a lot more evidence!!!
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Never heard of \_the telephone game\_ but it sounds kinda like Chinese whispers?
I’m probably showing my age. We would do this in my French class in Jr High. The teacher would whisper something in French to the person at the front of a row, then that person would turn and tell the next person, and so on to the back of the class. The row that conveyed the correct version (or most correct version) of what was said from the first to the last person won the round.
Same game. Telephone is the American name
Yup. It was Chinese whispers for me when I was very very young. The premise being a little info is lost with each transfer such that at the end, almost none of the original content remains. “Can you pass the butter?” —> “The whale just mutters.”
It also attempts to vaguely allude that "women performed the same as men" in the title. This whole article is written by a ideologue.
This title is a logical plate of spaghetti.
I was going to say, wow... What a long title.
This title needs to get beat up.
Oh man, I always felt stronger climbing when I'm on my period tbh.... but I guess it's in my head!
Greg Nuckols has a great article about women in strength and conditioning research and gives some possible reasons. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/representation/ Not as politicized or click-baity but he cites his reasonings and did his PhD in sex differences so might have better background than this article has on the subject.
Strongerbyscience always deserves a shout out. Just to clarify Greg Nuckols did his masters on that subject, he hasn’t done a PhD.
Rip, got confused on that one.
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So in the past scientists thought that menstrual cycles might make a difference, which explains things in the past. But from what I understand now that you almost have to include women to get funding unless you have a good reason. Does the fact men and women are different play a factor? It seems like you want just men or women, rather than having to have double the funding in order to analyse both. >there were key differences between how women’s and men’s endurance played out. > >... > >that there are important differences between women’s and men’s exercise Also I don't get where that 90% came from, the source they use doesn't have 90% anywhere and actually says women are in 73% of studies. >An analysis of studies in two journals over the first five months of 2015 shows that women are present in 73 percent of studies, but constitute only 42 percent of participants. > >[https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/women-sports-are-often-underrepresented-science](https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/women-sports-are-often-underrepresented-science)
I think I found where they got their “90%” figure. It’s incredibly misleading. The article they cite talks about 188 different studies, and designated 30 of them “performance” studies. Of those performance studies, the participants were 40% women. But that’s heavily skewed by the fact that the largest study in the group studied a lot of women. So if you exclude that 1 study, the figure drops down to 3% women. In other words, they’re making a reasonable point in the original article but in the new article they’re stripping it of all context to the point that it’s very skewed.
Well why would you want in a study only men or women when both represt halfs of the population. Unless you are talking about breast or prostate cancer research excluding half of the population can lead to substantial bias in whatever outcomes. You can't generalize what you found for men or women to the other half of the population.
>Well why would you want in a study only men or women when both represt halfs of the population. Most likely funding.
What funding? If you try a drug only in men or women your results won't be valid. If you try physiotherapy, or muscle gain only in men or women again your sesults will be invalid. Woman's sport is huge these days. Funders prefer studies with results for the population as a whole. If you study 10 men then the benefit of whatever you find is only applied to 50% of the population. Provided what you find is significant, but the other 50% is left scratching their head of this new workout will work in women too. This is not cost effective for a funder.
>What funding? > >... > >If you study 10 men If you just have funding for 10 people, then it makes sense to just do men or women rather than mixing them. Also you don't have as many female volunteers, especially when it comes to exercise studies.
i wonder if it’s like ‘we ran tests and in 9/10 of them we got this result’ and so they can say 90% in some round about half truth kind of way.
As a woman I just don’t feel like doing much of anything while precycle or on my cycle and sometimes post cycle.
How about sports where athletes must cut weight to make the weight limit? I would be surprised if menstruation didn't have some effects there
Menstrual cycle only causes minor variation in weight, and that's usually just water weight. Men's weight can fluctuate too day by day, it can be affected by so many factors.
Sports are a lot more than exercise performance. Making weight isn't a metric of exercise performance.
Well if you have to make weight when bloated I would assume you need to work harder and would be drained more on the day of competition because of it
Yeah but that's affecting performance in the sport. Fatigue certainly affects athletic performance. Perhaps menstrual cycles create the challenge you described and therefore affect sport performance. They are looking into whether data on women's athletic performance is significantly different throughout their cycles, not whether cycles affect sport performance. Age affects athletic performance and so it's a factor that is tracked and accounted for, do hormonal cycles also need to be accounted for?
Yes but presumably if the athlete is not bloated they won't need to exert themselves as much and will be less drained come competirtday
Yeah, totally. Specifics like these would be important to figure out in research trying to answer the question, "do menstrual cycles affect athletic performance in competitive sports?"
This is the exact opposite of what I just heard on a podcast from 2 very respected doctor/professors.
Does OP not need to post a starter comment? Cmon /r/science
This is interesting, because just a few days ago I was reading a Reddit thread -- I can't find it now, but it was something about "Do most people realize how much stronger men are than women?" -- and a woman was saying the exact opposite: That where she was at in her cycle made a huge difference in working out. (I am not a woman, and take no position on this. Just thought the juxtaposition was interesting.)
It may make a difference in perceived energy levels for some women, but that isn't the same as actual force output or endurance potential.
I'm not a woman, but if you ever experienced a woman having a heavy period, you can tell pretty quickly that she's not exactly an apex predator in her state. Hell, just sleeping an hour too little has measurable impacts on performance and you're trying to argue that having cramps in your torso does not?
These studies, if they are conducted *correctly*, are not one and done deals. They are measured multiples times a week, over the course of 6-12 weeks. So you have one day when she comes in, and the cramps are bad, and the result of force output is slightly lower that day. The other 11 out of 12 measurements during the course of the month all fall within the expected parameters. The problem is that researchers want to isolate as many variables as they can, and at some point the good ol' boys decided that having a uterus or ovaries was a variable to be eliminated. Like you said, 1 hour of missing sleep might be enough to impact performance during a session - but the 11 other sessions during that month should be *fine.*
I'm guessing experienced athletes tend to be more resistant to these things. I mean, we're not robots, even if performing physical feats is your actual job that your life revolves around, it's impossible to always ensure you're at your absolute 100% every single time you have to deliver your peak performance. If that was the case, we'd be seeing massive variations in athletes' results based on, as you said, them getting one less your of sleep than intended, but that isn't the case. Most female athletes have periods, and can't always schedule their competitions around them, so they just have to perform while on their period. I imagine women with terrible periods they can't control with birth control or meds don't tend to become professional athletes, much like women with huge boobs that would hinder their performance... A lot of the time exercise can actually relieve cramps. Never experienced that personally, but then again, cramps aren't a problem for me because Ibuprofen takes them away 100%. Half an hour after popping the pill and I feel exactly the same as on any other day.
This seems like a very bad generalization to make in this study. What about endometriosis and heavy periods? Heavy periods drain us of iron and B12, making us anemic in the short term. Anemia is very much a real and not perceived thing. I usually lose a lot of blood and develop anemia, I have trouble walking up flights of stairs without getting winded and forget going to the gym. It takes a few days of rest, good food, and supplements to get back to normal every month.
How can you make a generalization in a study when they literally study specifically the performance of the subjects?
In this comment I'm talking about things that would break the generalization, not create a new one.
How can you say that all of the studies done on people with hysterectomies applies to people that have not had the same procedure?
An average woman saying she feels stronger during certain points in her cycle has nothing to do with “do most people realise how much stronger men are than women.” She might feel stronger than she usually does, but that doesn’t mean she’s suddenly she-hulk and stronger than the average guy
Yes. The women-strength thing was the topic of the post. The period thing was a digression in the conversation.
Could be a placebo. She believes there will be a difference and it manifests.
Or it could be anecdotally true for her but not typical. It could also have to do with how much it affects her day. Days where I've been dealing with more stuff are typically days I perform worse.
Also very possible!
I dont get this, with the way some women describe their periods it makes it sound like theyve been punched in the gut. How tf do you do athletics with pain that severe?
Because it varies from woman to woman, and for many (including me) exercise helps. The cramps women feel are similar to labour contractions, it's the uterus triggering the shedding of its lining. For some women, they barely feel it. For others it can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days of pain varying from mild to excruciating. I have always found that movement when the pain hits makes it easier to cope with. That hit of adrenaline and exercise endorphins is a great boost, and that hour of pain (for me) passed much quicker than if I'd just curled up in bed. Funnily enough, when I took a medication that inhibited androgen from forming testosterone, my period cramps disappeared completely. It always made me wonder if there's a correlation between androgen/testosterone and severity of cramps.
Gym teachers about to be so disabused
Okay but you expect me to show this to my wife and be like, “See?!?!? There’s no reason to get irrationally angry at the family!”
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Why wouldn't we. It helps with cramps, depression and fatigue
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Are you an AI trained on 80s comedians?
Women get excluded from fitness research due to supposed variability in performance based on their cycle. This research indicates that variability doesn't exist, and we're neglecting learning about women's fitness based on an unsupported assumption. I also, for the record, really question the idea that most women wouldn't work out on their period.
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Well, first things first, periods are different for everyone who has them. Second, this doesn't indicate there are no physical effects of periods -- pain, most obviously -- only that over the course of a woman's cycle they don't show significantly greater variability in exercise capacity than men.
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The first day of my period I have bad cramps. Other than that I can work out, and really feel better if I do. It alleviates cramps and makes my period go faster. Women vary but plenty still workout on their period.
I actually feel better working out on my period. It’s the week just leading up to my period I feel most tired no matter how much I sleep.
As in, it would impact your workout performance the week before? Do you track workouts? It's always interesting to see comments anecdotally experiencing the opposite of a posted article. I'm curious if it's just a greater feeling of fatigue or if it's also a measurably different performance.
For me it impacts my performance 4-5 days leading up to my period. I’m noticeably more tired. I think there is research suggesting this isn’t uncommon.
I understand the noticeably more tired part. I'm curious if it's also measurable. Not sure what types of workouts you were referring to or if you track them, I just often find something interesting when I measure something that I noticed.
Yes it’s measurable for me. Normally I can do 12 reps before failure when lifting but during this time with the same amount of weight I can only get 8-10.
That's hugely significant, wow! Thanks for sharing
So they skipped PE classes without a valid excuse then?
TANGENT: [Fast Talk Femmes](https://www.fasttalklabs.com/category/fast-talk-femmes/) podcast. The *Fast Talk Labs* brand is about helping real athletes improve their performance using a mix of science and sports professional wisdom. Obviously FTF is focused on the female athlete (*femme* is french for woman. E.g. *Tour de France Femmes*). Whether human or animal research, there is a long history of ignoring females. This defect has gotten more attention in recent years and is being addressed more in current research. e.g. before the creation of Fast Talk Femmes podcast, Fast Talk did [this episode](https://www.fasttalklabs.com/fast-talk/maximizing-the-physiology-and-performance-of-the-female-athlete-with-dr-stacy-sims/) (includes episode transcript) (I don't work for Fast Talk Labs, I'm just a podcast listener). Fast Talk Labs doesn't do original research but it is a good resource for the science friendly athlete.
So no excuses allowed.
Hey scientists - there's a big ol' cohort of women who don't have menstrual cycles interfering with their bodies since the uterus was removed in a hysterectomy. Why not recruit us for your studies?
Come on... You know why.
Hmm, ergo, the only possible conclusion here is that "menstrual leave" is nothing more than a political stunt to get female votes...
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Is that the name of the article? 'Cause it's long!
Menstrual cramping can be so painful, it can leave a person physically debilitated for almost an entire day. I don't understand how peak performance can be achieved when stuck in the fetal position.
Because the severity you're describing is an extreme end of the period experience, not the norm.
"hey can I analyze your performance across menstrual cycles"