Periodisation, ADHD and Rethinking Women’s Training: Why “listening to your cycle” is really about load, recovery and a life that actually works
- Seema Chopra
- Nov 15
- 7 min read
By Seema Chopra
When The Independent asked me to contribute to an article on cycle syncing, I noticed another name quoted alongside mine. Coach and ex-athlete Charlotte Crisp was saying things that felt very familiar. She was talking about menstrual cycles, symptoms, burnout and periodisation in a way that sounded grounded, human and science informed.
So I reached out.
What followed was a conversation about women, hormones, ADHD, heavy periods, coaching, recovery and why so many of us feel like we live at one hundred percent capacity until we crash. This blog distils that conversation into the key themes I wish every high performing woman knew.
Cycle syncing or periodisation in women's training: what are we really talking about?
The term cycle syncing is everywhere right now. It is catchy, it sounds new and it works well on social media. The problem is that a lot of the online content around it is:
Generic
Not very individualised
Sometimes completely divorced from what the science actually says
Both Charlotte and I come from science backgrounds, and we also work practically with women every day. For us, it is less about a trend and more about periodisation.
In sport, periodisation simply means planning your training so that load, effort and recovery are spread intelligently across time. You do not ask an athlete to go all out every single session and every single week. You wave the load. You build. You pull back. You respect recovery.
So the question that kept coming up for me was:
If we are careful with periodisation for athletes, why are we not doing something similar for the high performing women who are training four or five times a week, running households and working demanding jobs?
The menstrual cycle is not the only variable, but it is a huge one. It shapes sleep, mood, energy, temperature, digestion, pain and performance. Ignoring that information does not make you tougher. It just makes training and life harder than they need to be.
When periodisation matters and when it probably does not
Is detailed cycle aware periodisation essential for a woman who trains once a week and has very few symptoms? Probably not.
Is it important for:
Women with significant menstrual symptoms
Women with endometriosis or PCOS
Women with ADHD or other neurodivergence
Women in very high stress roles who are already close to burnout
Yes. Absolutely.
In these situations, I see cycle aware periodisation as a load management strategy. Load is not just the weight on the bar. Load is:
Emotional labour
Cognitive strain
Deadlines and care work
Poor sleep
Pain and inflammation
Social and sensory overwhelm
When all of this is ramped up, it makes little sense to keep your training, social life and output identical every week of the month.
Recovery is not optional if you want to 'perform'
If I could condense my coaching philosophy into one sentence, it would be this:
Recovery is not a luxury. It is the thing that makes your strength training actually work.
Most of the women I work with in my South East London garden studio arrive in a very familiar state. They have hit pause on their laptops, rushed over between meetings or school runs, and landed on my doorstep with their nervous systems still wired.
So before we even think about heavy deadlifts, I usually ask them to lie down.
We do breathwork. We notice the body. We let the brain catch up with the fact that it is no longer in work mode. Only then do we slowly build them back up to lifting heavy.
By the end of the session they may be doing powerful strength work, but it is layered on a foundation of regulation, not frenzy. This is the difference between training that builds you and training that burns you out.
If you never zoom out to see where recovery belongs in your month, you are missing the piece that allows adaptation.
Women, ADHD and the temptation to live at one hundred percent
Both Charlotte and I have ADHD. That adds another layer.
Many women with ADHD feel that their natural way of operating is:
All or nothing
Fast, intense, full immersion
Having five ideas at once and wanting to execute them all yesterday
In the past, that was me as well. Doing everything at full force, all day, then wondering why I was constantly hitting burnout.
What is interesting is that the strategies many of us develop to survive ADHD are the same strategies the wider world needs:
Clearer boundaries on load
External structure and planning
Time blocking and intentional rest
Permission to slow down without feeling like a failure
Charlotte talked about how her own periodisation planner originally came from trying to bring order to what felt like complete chaos in her own life and brain. The niche found her, not the other way round.
Are we addicted to exhaustion?
At one point in the conversation I asked Charlotte:
Do you think people are addicted to exhaustion?
Her answer was honest. She described a mix of:
A very low baseline of wellbeing for many people. They genuinely do not know what “good” feels like.
A culture that normalises being busy, tired and overwhelmed as proof of effort and value.
A tendency to minimise or normalise pain, fatigue and emotional distress as “just life”.
When you add hormonal shifts, PMDD, endometriosis, ADHD or chronic stress to that picture, it becomes even harder to see the wood for the trees. The chaos feels normal.
Part of our work as coaches is simply to say:
Your baseline does not have to feel like this.
You are not weak for wanting life to feel easier.
Short term comfort is not the same as long term ease.
You are allowed to want an easier nervous system, not just an easier workout.
Corporate life, chronic conditions and why businesses should care
We also touched on the corporate side. Conditions like PMDD and endometriosis are not rare edge cases. They are affecting productivity, sick days and retention.
When women are regularly:
Taking days off work because of symptoms
Struggling with brain fog, low confidence and emotional volatility before their period
Navigating misdiagnosed depression or anxiety that may actually be hormone related
The business loses out as well. Investing in education and flexible support around menstrual and hormonal health is not a “nice extra”. It is a pragmatic move if you care about performance and staff wellbeing.
What about the pill, the coil and those with fewer symptoms?
A lot of women I speak to are on the pill, the coil or other hormonal contraception. Many do not experience a typical bleed. Some have very few obvious symptoms.
They often assume that all of this talk of cycle aware training and periodisation does not apply to them. I do not agree.
Even if your natural fluctuations are blunted or altered, you still have:
Stress
Workload
Social load
Sleep disruption
Training load
If you are training hard, socialising constantly and packing everything into every week with no variation, you can still end up in burnout. Contraception does not exempt you from the need for intelligent load management.
For these women, simple tools such as symptom tracking over several months can be eye opening. Even on the pill you may notice patterns in mood, sleep, hunger or energy that are worth honouring in your training and life.
The curiosity gap: you have to want to look
One of the biggest barriers we both see is not information. It is willingness.
To periodise your training and life, you have to:
Be curious about your own body
Be willing to track or reflect, even in small ways
Face yourself honestly and notice what is not working
A lot of women say, quite simply, “I do not have time for that.” It feels intimidating to slow down long enough to see the patterns. It can feel easier to stay in the race and keep pushing.
But if you never stop to look, you cannot change the way you run.
Girls, puberty and the next generation
Towards the end of our conversation, I spoke about something that is increasingly important in my work: girls’ strength and conditioning.
I have an eight year old daughter. She has ADHD, she does not enjoy team sports and she thrives one to one. Her body is already changing. Her movement is changing too.
If we do not meet girls like her with support, the risk of dropout from movement and sport is very high once puberty hits. Hips change, motor patterns shift, periods arrive and suddenly it all feels harder, heavier and less fun.
So alongside my work with women in their thirties and forties, I am:
Completing my youth strength and conditioning specialist qualification
Running weekend strength, mobility and breath sessions with my daughter
Reaching out to schools to deliver sessions on periods, performance, kit, fuelling and confidence for girls
Every woman I speak to says some version of, “I wish I had learned this when I was younger.” My hope is that our daughters will be able to say, “I did.”
Heavy periods, iron and listening beyond the gym
On a personal note, heavy periods have impacted my own training and participation for years. Recently I have been looking more closely at:
How my heart rate responds across my cycle
How intensity feels in different phases
How much iron I am actually getting and absorbing
It is very easy in the follicular phase to ride the wave of energy and do more, more, more. But if you have lost a lot of iron in your bleed and then do not support yourself nutritionally, that “high energy” is built on very shaky foundations.
It is not just about red days and green days in a training app. It is about the blood in your body, the oxygen you can transport and how your heart and brain are coping.
Where this conversation goes next
As we wrapped up the call, we realised how many parallels there were in our stories. Former athletes, ADHD, heavy periods, iron deficiency, science backgrounds and a deep drive to help women live and train differently.
There is much more we could have said about exercise specifics, sport history and the details of managing iron deficiency and heavy menstrual bleeding as active women. That will be a conversation for another time.
For now, I want to leave you with a few questions.
Where in your month do you genuinely recover?
What would change if you stopped expecting yourself to be at one hundred percent all the time?
Are you curious enough to look closely at your own patterns, even if what you see means changing things?
If this resonates and you would like support in periodising your training and life around your hormones, energy and reality, you are always welcome to reach out.
@active_shakti and @charlottevcrisp
Your body is not a machine. It is a living, changing system. When you work with that, instead of against it, everything becomes more sustainable.
Comments