SYNC Your Fitness With Your Cycl

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Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist hormone health expert and girl mom. I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in

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This podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit sync.jennyswisher.com That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.

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Hi, friends welcome to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m so excited to dive a little bit deeper into this concept of cycle syncing last week, we really only scratched the surface when it comes to talking about syncing your nutrition with your cycle. It only makes sense that this week we dive deeper into the concept of cycle syncing your fitness, what does it look like for you to really follow the phases of your cycle as it pertains to your workouts? When should you be doing strength training? When should you be doing cardio when should you be listening to your body and resting and following that as well. So we’re going to be talking about all the ins and outs of fitness. This is one of my favorite topics. I am someone who absolutely loves exercise, I fell in love with it. I was a high school athlete, but I kind of really fell in love with fitness in my 20s when I was introduced to home workout programs. So let me just be the first to say that not everyone enjoys exercise. I know I certainly didn’t. When I first started out, I joke around and I tell people that the first time I ever did a home workout, my husband and I did it together. And we probably should have just popped some popcorn and sat and watched it because it felt so challenging and so hard for our fitness level at that time that we really just couldn’t, we just couldn’t even put a grasp on the fact that we were going to do this thing. So I look back on that 12 years later. And I think oh my gosh, how far I’ve come because now I actually look forward to my workouts every day, I workout about five to six days a week, I listen to my body first and foremost, which is exactly what we’re going to be diving into today. But I actually I actually enjoy it, I look forward to moving every day, it turns out, our bodies are made to move. So if you are somebody who is not active enough, starting simple with just a walk every day, getting some extra vitamin D outside, riding a stationary bike moving in some way is going to get your brain flowing, it’s going to get those endorphins pumping, and you’re going to start to really enjoy exercise.

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Now I do know also that there are women listening to this who might not have the typical 28 Day or 35 Day menstrual cycle. So just here at the beginning, I want to pause to just say if you are a woman who is on the birth control pill, and so you’re not having regular cycles that involve ovulation. Or if you are somebody who is perhaps menopausal and you have stopped bleeding, then this information is still relevant. And I’ll tell you how. But it’s definitely catered more to the female who is cycling. So the woman who is ovulating regularly and having a period. So let me just start off by saying that now toward the end of the podcast, I will give some advice and tips to those of you who are either on birth control or you are not cycling anymore, or you’re not regular. Because there is certainly things you can be doing when it comes to your exercise that will help you as well when it comes to this. So let’s go ahead and dive in.

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The first thing that I want to talk about is kind of reflecting back on a previous episode that we’ve had, and I’ll link this in the show notes if you haven’t heard it, where we dove into the four phases of your menstrual cycle. So if you’ve listened to that episode, you might remember that there are four phases. The first phase, of course is your menstruation phase, that’s when your body is bleeding and shedding your uterine lining. Immediately after the bleed we enter follicular phase which is where your follicle starts to become produced. You’re getting ready and preparing for ovulation. The third phase is ovulation phase. It’s a very short brief time in your cycle for those of us who are ovulating. And it’s usually like anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. So it’s a really brief sort of lapse in time over the course of your cycle. And then once your ovulation occurs we enter luteal phase. luteal phase takes up to two weeks. It is the second half of our cycle. It’s where progesterone starts to rise to support a potential pregnancy. And then of course, we start to see our hormones drop and fall and kind of cascade into the bleed again starting that over again with menstruation. So just as a brief recap, you know, if you want to go back and listen to that episode, I’m happy to link it in the show notes. But that’s these phases of our cycle is exactly where we’re going to start today. Because we have to know what our cycle is doing. on a consistent basis, we have to know the patterns for ourselves individually, to know how to cycle sync. So I cannot give you just a generic calendar to follow, you would have to know, you know, how long are your cycles? Typically? Are you ovulating? Are you just assuming that you’re ovulating, if you are ovulating? When is that occurring in your cycle. So all those things are really important, which I feel like I start most podcasts with this. But it’s just it’s so important to say that you need to be cycle tracking. So it doesn’t matter what app you’re using, or if you’re using pen to paper, understanding what your body is doing when it comes to your cycle. I’ll just give you an example. My husband and my five year old daughter know exactly what day of the month I’m on. Like, that’s how common knowledge it is in my house, because I’m so in tune with this concept of cycles thinking. And so they know and mommy is going to be maybe in a little bit of a bad mood, they know when mommy is going to be high energy, they’re gonna they know all that kind of stuff based on what I share with them as it pertains to my cycle. So I find that most women don’t know where they are in their cycle. When I asked them what day they’re on, they’re not even sure how to calculate that. So if you’re listening, and you’re not sure, let me just tell you that the first day of your cycle is when you start your full bleed. Now there are some women out there who have a little bit of trickle when their period starts. So they might have a day or two of sort of a slow trickle and then they go into full flow, your first day is considered to be the first day of your full flow. And then from there, you count all the way until your next cycle begins. Most women that are cycling regularly and ovulating regularly are having anywhere from 25 to 35 day cycles. But that’s not necessarily the case for everyone. So again, take all of this with a grain of salt, know that your body is unique. And so understanding what your body’s doing. And cycle tracking is going to be step number one, to understanding what phase you’re in at any given time. Once you know, okay, I have 28 day cycles, for example, then you start to get a feel for the weeks in which you are menstruating, the weeks in which you’re ovulating and the weeks in which you’re in your luteal phase.

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So I’m going to dive straight into this concept of cycle syncing your fitness. And again, if you have any questions later, you feel free to reach out to me, you can reach out to me through the show notes. I have some links there for you to contact me for a phone call or just for an email, because I want to make sure that you guys grasp this in the right way. The first thing that’s most important to know is that you should always listen to your body. Okay, so if you are just simply feeling exhausted, or whether that’s physically or emotionally, it’s, it’s okay to take a rest day. If you knew how many times I have to tell women like girl it is okay to rest. I think sometimes we get into this perfection headspace where we think oh, no, you know, I told myself I was gonna exercise five days a week I need to do it. But if you’re feeling like crap, it’s just not worth it. Like it’s not worth it. So, listen to your body, track your cycles know, know how you feel and base your workouts off of that. Okay, so let’s dive into these four phases. Okay, so we’ll start with the bleed because that’s the easiest to figure out. So your first probably one to five days of your cycle. A lot of women are finished bleeding before day five. Other women bleed up to a week. But that first phase is known as your menstrual phase. This is when I advise that most women take the first two days of their heavy bleed very lightly when it comes to their exercise. Now, there’s a caveat to that. There are some women who have absolutely no symptoms when their period starts. They go into full flow and I have no cramping, no headaches, no nothing, they feel completely normal. If you are someone who has no imbalance symptoms, if you’re not feeling lethargic on the first couple days of your bleed, feel free to do some strength training. However, that is not the case for most women. Most women that I talked to feel drained when their period starts. They feel like I always call it like the Netflix in sweatpants days of the month. Right? They just feel like they want to get into their sweatpants in their hoodie and curl up on the couch with a good book or with a good TV show and just sort of retreat. If that’s you listen to your body and follow its cues. Okay, so resting in those first couple of days of your heavy bleed is advised for most women.

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From there as the bleed starts to end we enter follicular phase right the fall the follicles becoming produced getting ready for ovulation and our estrogen is starting to slowly rise. So at this point in our cycle, we find that in the first part of your cycle that first week of your cycle in follicular phase your hormones are most like a man’s your estrogen starting to rise. But for the most part your hormones are sort of flatlined. If you take a look at this on a typical cycle chart, you’ll see where your your estrogen and everything is quite low. And so this is when science now tells us that we are most like a man. And this is the best time of our month to really push strength training. I have a saying in my groups, which is to lift heavy stuff, we don’t use the word stuff. But for the sake of the podcast, I’ll say stuff, lift heavy stuff during the follicular phase of your cycle, right, like when your hormones are low, your estrogen is starting to rise take advantage of the fact that estrogen is a muscle building hormone, and really start to lift heavy weights, dumbbells, resistance bands, right push ups, pull ups, anything that’s involving resistance and, and strength. That’s what you want to be doing during your follicular phase. Now, a quick side note, because I know there are women listening that are like, Oh, I don’t want to lift weights, I don’t want to get bulky. I hear that all the time. Let me just tell you sis. I have friends who are into the bodybuilding world as females and they have to work to bulk Okay, and what I mean by that is that they have to eat to bulk they have to supplement to bulk. So you will not become bulky by lifting weights. In fact, you’ll become stronger, which will actually raise your metabolism, it’ll raise your muscular capacity, it will help you burn fat. So if you’ve been resistant to the idea of lifting heavy stuff, it’s time to change your mind. Okay, and this is the time of your cycle to really focus on that.

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From there we move into that really brief 24 to 72 hour window of ovulation. When ovulation is occurring, there is a huge fluctuation in our hormones happening right there’s a huge surge in LH FSH, estrogen, progesterone is starting to come into the picture to take over for luteal phase. So as our hormones start to rise, a lot of women notice that during that phase of ovulation, they feel a little bit more tired. And I like to give the analogy especially as a personal trainer, this is something that I tell people often you don’t want to eat a big meal 10 minutes before you jump into a workout. Because if you if your body is trying to digest that meal, you’re not going to get a great workout, your body can really only focus on one thing at a time. So when your hormones are at a high during ovulation phase, and you’re feeling that sort of lethargic or tired feeling that most women feel for that couple of days, it’s okay to back off again on the workouts, it’s okay to do something maybe more active recovery, you could do a walk, you could do yoga, you could do Pilates, you could do bar, something that’s just a little bit more low key and low impact, while your body is focusing on producing that egg and ovulating. Okay, so a lot of women will, you know, they’ll say, Gosh, I really feel tired during that time of the month, but they push through anyway. And that’s not what I want you to do. So by tracking your cycle, you’re going to get a better feel for when you’re ovulating. And when you know you’re ovulating. You’ll be able to say you know what, I am feeling kind of tired. I’m going to do more active recovery and you’re going to listen to your body. You’re going to serve it what it needs, and you’re going to feel so much better.

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Once ovulation has occurred, you go into that sort of longer phase of your cycle known as the luteal phase. It is my favorite phase because it involves my favorite hormone, progesterone. Progesterone is your female fertility hormone it is what preserves a pregnancy, or a potential pregnancy it rises regardless of implantation or not. But it’s also your feel good hormone, right, it helps you stay relaxed and calm and helps us sleep. So when progesterone starts to rise, we see this sort of shift happen again. So estrogen again is sort of your muscle building hormone. Progesterone is your fat burning hormone. So we start to see progesterone rise in the luteal phase. And that means that our body is now in perfect, a perfect place for really metabolizing fat and burning and burning it for energy. So this is where we want to be focusing more on HIIT training, high intensity cardio intervals, doesn’t have to be doesn’t need to be an hour, it could be 20 minutes, 30 minutes max, where you’re just getting the heart rate up and you’re doing a little bit of high intensity interval training. So that is what I like to advise for the luteal phase.

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Now that does not mean that the first half of your cycle, you’re only lifting weights, and the second half of your cycle, you’re only doing cardio. What I mean is the majority of your week in the first two weeks is going to be strength training, and the majority of your weeks in the second half of the month are going to be cardio. So I like to tell people you know from the time your bleed ends until ovulation, we’re looking at about four strength days per week, and one to two cardio days with at least one day off completely per week. You always want to make sure you’re incorporating one full rest day for muscle adaptation The second half of the month, which is after ovulation after you’ve taken a couple of active recovery days during ovulation, and you enter luteal phase, that’s when we focus on three to four days of high intensity interval training cardio, and just one to two days of strength training to maintain that baseline until your bleed, a lot of women will get to like day 25-26, especially in a 28 day cycle just a couple days before their bleed starts and they start to notice that their hormones are falling, they might get headaches, they might start feeling extra tired. Again, they kind of feel their period looming. Maybe they have some PMS symptoms. If that’s the case for you, again, I recommend that you listen to your body. And for those couple of days before your period, you scale back, maybe you do some flexibility, training, some yoga, some stretching, like I said, go for a walk.

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So this is what a typical cycles thinking plan would look like. These are the things that I provide to my sync course takers, when they take my digital course, I give them a calendar that they can use to customize to their own menstrual cycles. So if you’re thinking, Gosh, this sounds awesome, I wish I had it in writing. Or I wish I had more guidance on exactly what to do every day from home, I’m happy to help you with that. That’s something that we can have a conversation about, especially as it pertains to getting into my course and letting me kind of really help you nail down these details, and do even more in the realm of cycle syncing. So last but not least, let’s just kind of cover our key points from today. Key Point number one is to always listen to your body, okay, you don’t know what your body needs if you aren’t listening to it. So start cycle tracking, use an app on your phone, use pen to paper do something to journal to write down how many days of the site how many days your cycle tends to be when you think your ovulation is occurring based on signs and symptoms, you know how long your bleed is, and kind of map out what the phases of your cycle look like. I promise you that if you listen to this again, or you listen to that four phases of your menstrual cycle episode that’s linked up in the show notes. If you listen to it again, you’ll be able to write down your cycle compared to a typical cycle and create a general calendar for what you think your body needs. And then again, just listening to your body on top of all of that. Now, at the beginning of this episode, I told you that if you are a female who was on birth control, and you’re not, you’re just having pill bleeds, you’re not having necessarily periods or ovulation, obviously, or if you are a woman who is menopausal and your periods have stopped, I want to give some advice to you.

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First and foremost. If you are menopausal, someone who has just your periods have ended, I’m going to tell you that strength training is the absolute best thing that you can do for your body. We as women are losing muscle every day after the age of 30, if not sooner. So if you can start to incorporate higher protein into your nutrition, if you can start to lift heavier weights more frequently. If you’re somebody who’s been sort of like a cardio junkie, if you like the elliptical or the treadmill and running, it’s okay to continue doing a little bit of that. But don’t overdo it. A lot of women will find themselves constantly fatigued, but it’s because they’re really pushing it too hard with their cardio workouts. They’re not strength training enough to build up muscle. And they’re not listening to their body when it when their body says to rest. So I usually recommend that women who are menopausal, take a rest day every three days. So you could do a strength day, a cardio day, a rest day, a strength day a cardio day a rest day. And that typically works well for most women. The other idea that we that we use in my sync course is to cycle sync women who are not having regular cycles to the moon. So if you take a look at the moon’s calendar typically follows the same patterns as we do as women. I know it’s kind of funny when I started tracking my own cycle years ago, I started to notice that I almost always ovulate on a full moon. And I almost always start my bleed around a new moon. And that’s very, very common. Some women are New Moon ovulators, and some are full moon ovulators. And so even for women who are postmenopausal or again like I said, if you are not having a period because of the birth control pill or your regularity cycle syncing to the moon can be a very powerful thing. I’ve had several women who have taken my course who have done this and they have said they can’t believe how much their energy in any given phase of the moon cycle matches their energy. So it’s it is just so cool when you start to put these things together and you utilize these tips to really create a cycle sinking plan for yourself.

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So my friends again, I could go so deep into this we could go even more detailed but I wanted to just send you the basics today and get you the information you need to start cycle syncing your fitness, hopefully combined with the information from last week, where we really dove into cycles thinking your nutrition, you can start to see where living in alignment with your female physiology can really behoove you, and help you reach maximum energy. We are lunar beings, we are cyclical beings, we have that advantage over men. And so we need to be taking advantage of that and saying, Okay, how can I really feed into these phases of my cycle? How can I take advantage of my high energy phases? How can I rest and listen to my body and regenerate and rejuvenate during the lower hormone phases of my cycle. So that’s what I’m teaching you that’s what I’m wanting you to understand and take away from this is that there is science to this. There are several experts now in this field who are really diving deeper into what women need when it as it pertains to their, their nutrition, and as it pertains to their fitness plans, because up until this point, friends, most of our exercise regimens, and our general I’ll call them, you know, fad diets have been really shared with male physiology in mind. So a lot of programs that have been created up until the last decade have been created using a man’s body a man’s physiology, and it’s just not the same for women. So if you’re wanting results, if you’re feeling like you’re at a plateau, and you’re not seeing those results, it could be because you’re following a man’s plan, or you’re following no plan, and you’re just exercising, and you’re eating healthy foods, and it could make all the difference for you to fall into this rhythm of cycle syncing.

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So again, I’m here for you with questions, I hope to keep bringing valuable content to you I have so much mapped out from now through months from now to just keep teaching you and informing you and bringing awesome experts to you to help you better understand this concept. So I am so grateful for you and for your listening for your subscribing. If you’re downloading. If you have a chance, please give me a rating review on your favorite podcast app that would mean the world to me. I’m so happy that we’ve connected and we’ll talk again next time. Thanks guys!

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Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. Hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them, you can live your life with all the energy you need to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those who love. Until next time.