By Shelia Burrell
Shelia Burrell is a two-time Olympian in the heptathlon, finishing fourth in 2004 in Athens. She won a bronze medal at the 2001 World Championships. She is the Director of Track and Field at San Diego State University and Co-Founder of Red Moon Recovery, a menstrual cycle-mapping app for coaches, athletes, and active women.
“In 2025, it’s long overdue: We must respect a female athlete’s menstrual cycle to enhance performance, prevent injuries, and train smarter. You can’t coach a woman unless you know her cycle.”
— Samara Gregorio, Red Moon Recovery Co-Founder
With society’s growing interest in women’s sports, one issue has captivated my colleague Samara Gregorio and me for seven years: the menstrual cycle.
As a two-time Olympian now coaching collegiate and professional female athletes, I’ve developed a unique approach to coaching women, one not based on traditional perspectives.
But I didn’t always have this insight.
Early in my coaching career, I devoured everything I could find: coaching videos, articles, books, conferences. I learned to program training for elite performance, energy systems, training methodologies, techniques. It was foundational early in my coaching development.
Then, in the 2018-2019 season, I began coaching 2024 Olympic heptathlete Chari Hawkins.
From Coaching in the Dark to Cycle Mapping
In 2019, I met Samara Gregorio-—a Brazilian physiotherapist with more than 20 years on Olympic medical staffs and trained at Madrid’s School of Osteopathy. She challenged my approach:
“Athletes are more than muscles, ligaments, tendons and tissue. Fixing muscles isn’t the solution to everything!”
When Samara discovered that Chari hadn’t had a period in nearly a year, everything changed. We created a “map” to track Chari’s behavior, training results, and daily feedback. This map became our guide to prevent injuries, manage Chari’s emotions, and time peak performance. No more guessing why she felt “heavy” or was unable to focus during a technical workout.
Shattering the Taboo
Decades of male-dominated research dismissed menstrual cycles as “noise,” ignoring more than 90% of athletes reporting cycle-related performance limitations [2]. The result? a culture of suppression and training protocols that don’t address female biology.
“I’ve repeatedly had athletes say, ‘I feel heavy today’ or ‘What’s wrong with me?’ My response: ‘Nothing is wrong with you.’ We’ve built a space with no shame about cycle symptoms, just adjustments. Symptoms don’t mean she can’t work; they mean you need to adapt communication and expectations.”
— Shelia Burrell
Research shows that normalizing these conversations is key to eliminating stigma and building trust [4]. If coaches respect menstrual cycles like training plans, we’ll see real gains, faster recovery, fewer injuries, better performance, and trust, which changes everything.
When Ignoring Cycles Causes Harm
Dina Asher-Smith (2022 European Championships):
“Cramps ended my 100-meter final. If this were a men’s issue, solutions would exist.” (The Telegraph, August 2022)
Fu Yuanhui (Swimmer, 2016 Olympics):
“My period came last night… I gave my all. This isn’t an excuse—just reality.” (Olympic Channel)
Heather Watson (2015 Australian Open):
“I felt lightheaded and nauseous. Girls know—it’s not a cop-out.” (BBC Sport)
The Critical Gap in Menstrual Tracking for Athletes
While the industry has been slowly catching up with scientific research, with the introduction of several period-tracking apps currently on the market, most serve general health needs, such as predicting bleeding or fertility (see Table 1). For athletes, this lacks critical performance factors, such as:
• injury-risk alerts during high-ligament-laxity phases
• power/endurance forecasts tied to hormonal shifts
• rest/recovery protocols
• coach communication pro-tocols
What athletes actually need:
“A tool that tells me when to push speedwork versus strength work or when to prioritize nutrition—not just when my period starts.”
— Jessica Kain, SDSU alumna and post-collegiate 1,500m runner
At San Diego State University, I use athletes’ cycle information to adjust how I communicate and make decisions on workout modifications.
“Hormonal fluctuations impact performance, injury risk, and recovery. Coaches require individualized data beyond basic cycle tracking.”
— IOC Expert Group, 2019
The prevalence of low energy availability, a root cause of these issues, is significant among athletes, underscoring the need for such detailed tracking [11].
The Old “Fix:” Suppression
Facing this lack of knowledge, generations received one prescription: medicate to suppress. But research proves hormonal suppression reduces bone density and power output [3]. Coaches pushed birth control to “synchronize” cycles, doctors prescribed NSAIDs to mask cramps, and athletes, like Martina Navratilova, took “horse-dose painkillers just to function.”
Cycle Mapping: The Performance Revolution
“A female athlete’s biological rhythm holds the key to peak performance, injury prevention, and recovery—without medication.”
— Shelia Burrell
Coaches can now leverage the menstrual cycle to design training programs, including strength peaks in the follicular phase, injury avoidance in the ovulation phase, and endurance surges in the luteal phase [9,10,18].
Coaching in the New Era
Women are essentially four different people each month. And just like our moods, our performance capacities change as well. Each phase of the menstrual cycle presents different variables based on the interplay between estrogen and progesterone. Table 2 gives a simplified guide for the coach to understand female athletes beyond muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
“Stop asking female athletes to fit male models. Their biology is their advantage.”
— Shelia Burrell
Navigating the Awkwardness
Let’s be real: talking about periods with your athletes can feel uncomfortable, for you and for them. You didn’t become a coach to discuss menstrual cramps. They didn’t join your team to share details of the menstrual cycles. But, when coaches avoid these conversations, we force athletes into silence, NSAID overdoses, or worse, career-ending injuries. When Dina Asher-Smith loses a European final to cramps, or your star steeplechaser tears her ACL during ovulation, silence becomes negligent. Research shows that teams that normalize cycle communication see 37% fewer soft-tissue injuries and 24% fewer “unexplained” performance declines [11]. Here are some tips to communicate with female athletes (see Table 3):
• Start privately: 68% of athletes prefer 1-on-1 talks [11]
• Use direct language: For example, say “fatigue” rather than “girl issues” [4]
• Normalize in training talks: Teams discussing cycles regularly see 30% fewer random performance drops [11]
• Leverage tools like Red Moon Recovery—an app built for athletes and active women—to gain objective insights into performance readiness. Beta users are currently helping refine its usability for both athletes and coaches.
References
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