ACTIVE SHAKTI

High performing women are not using their smart watches the way we think they should. Not because they don't care about their health but because the data isn't speaking their language. Seema Chopra MSc on why the health-tech industry is getting it wrong.

I sat down to record this episode and my mind went completely blank. Nothing. I'd been thinking about it for days, I had things to say, and then the moment I pressed record — nothing. I sat with that for a few minutes before I started speaking. And then I realised: that blank feeling is the whole episode. Because you know it. The moment you sit down to do the thing you've been meaning to do, and your brain tells you something must be wrong with you.

In February 2023, I recorded a video for my boss explaining why I couldn't come in that day. I sent it. I waited. She didn't reply. And eventually I went back into the chat and deleted it — because I had exposed myself completely, and the silence on the other end felt worse than if I'd said nothing at all.

Perimenopause does not arrive as one thing. It arrives as many things at once — anxiety that seems to come from nowhere, unexplained weight changes, sleep disruptions, a sudden intolerance for stimulation that you used to absorb without blinking. And for women who have built their lives around high output and high capacity, it can feel like the ground has shifted.

Somatics is a word that appears increasingly in wellness and coaching spaces, often without much precision about what it actually means. Korina Tsipoura, a somatic and energy coach who works under the name Amorphous Being, offers a definition that I find both useful and grounding: somatics is the technology already built into the body for communicating, storing, and releasing. It is not something applied from the outside.

Delphine has worked for over 25 years as a VP of product management in global technology. She runs teams across time zones — engineers, data scientists, product managers — and does it as a single mother of two. She is precisely the kind of woman who appears to be managing everything. And several years ago, her nervous system stopped cooperating entirely.

Gillian Evans is a psychotherapist, a yoga teacher, and a social anthropologist. She works with the body, the breath, and the talking cure simultaneously — not as separate disciplines but as different routes into the same territory. Her practice is oriented around a single question: what are the conditions for human flourishing?

Active Shakti feminine painting by Seema Chopra I walked into a room of girls recently and something stopped me. They looked lost. Chins tucked, eyes down, scared to take up the space they had been given. Not because they didn't want to be there. But because nobody had ever taught them how to stand proud in their own wanting. I held out my hand to welcome them in and I already felt the guilt coming back at me. The not-knowing. The not-belonging-to-themselves. Standing here no

The Guardian recently published research that shows that elite female athletes are more likely to experience urinary incontinence than sedentary women. Most never seek help. The ones who do are often told it is to be expected — a reasonable cost of training hard, of having had children, of getting older. The message, delivered in various forms across GP surgeries and changing rooms and online comment sections, is essentially: this is just how it is now.

Periodisation is a word that comes from sport science. It describes the practice of structuring training across time — varying intensity, volume, and recovery in a deliberate sequence so that the athlete is neither chronically overloaded nor under-stimulated. It is how high-performance sports programmes have been designed for decades.

You cannot build sustainable performance on top of a chronically activated nervous system. Recovery isn't optional. It's the work.

Most exercise and health research is based on male physiology. When women are included, cycles are often suppressed with hormonal contraception to reduce variability. The result is a body of evidence that assumes consistency where none exists.

Many high performing women do not struggle with motivation. They struggle with stopping. They have strong work ethic, high capacity, and the ability to push through discomfort. That can create success in business and performance in fitness, but it can also create a pattern of over functioning.

Pelvic health is deeply influenced by stress because stress changes breathing, muscle tone, and nervous system state.

Fasting is often presented as a metabolic strategy, but most active women are not starting from a neutral baseline. They are managing work intensity, family responsibility, cognitive load, hormonal variation, and training demands. Many of them are already running on elevated stress for long periods.

Understanding how your body’s energy fluctuates throughout your menstrual cycle is a game changer. As someone who helps high-performing and neurodivergent women reconnect with their bodies' intelligence through cycle-aware strength training and recovery, I’ve seen firsthand how tuning into these natural rhythms can transform your performance and wellbeing.

Understanding and working with your body's natural rhythms can transform your approach to fitness and wellbeing. As someone who helps high-performing and neurodivergent women reconnect with their bodies' intelligence, I have developed the Synced Method—a blend of science and intuition that guides you to train smarter, recover deeply, and perform stronger through every phase of your cycle. In this post, I will share how cycle-synced exercises can optimise your hormonal health

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 discussed menstrual cycles, symptoms, burnout, and periodisation in a way that was grounded, human, and science-informed. So, I reached out.

Image of woman lifting kettlebell in The Active Shakti Studio, barefoot. We live in a culture that celebrates doing — more workouts, more goals, more achievements. But as Sadhguru said: “Enhance activity without enhancing self, and you will die of stress.” That line struck me deeply. Because so many of us are enhancing activity — training harder, managing more, achieving endlessly — without enhancing the self behind it. And that’s where burnout begins. Not because we’re wea

Don't worry; it's been happening all along. And you absolutely can be outstanding at every stage of your life – no excuses. Our estrogen levels have been on the decline since we were around 30 years old. It's the reason you might be experiencing symptoms of burnout, sleep deprivation, brain fog, fatigue, and mood swings is that your hormones are trying to communicate that they can't perform as they once did. The key to addressing this is to help them function better. So, what