#1 Women perform better during their period.. a discussion.

Last week saw me accept an invitation to talk on BBC Scotland Mornings Show with Stephen Jardine. My friend Lesley Kay is the show producer, and on Thursday she’d texted to ask if I’d be the sport psychology voice discussing whether women perform better during their period. Also joining the discussion Hannah Rankin, a professional boxer.

The discussion was linked to a research study amongst professional footballers, revealing the women had a lower risk of injury during menstruation and this seemed to contrary to the commonly accepted perception that our menstrual cycle affects us detrimentally. To prepare I reviewed the paper establishing the study focus group was small and specific, the conclusions related to injury and further research would be needed to establish whether performance is actually improved. I also asked a local 20 year old female triathlete about her experiences. She explained,

“Personally I don’t find it affects my performance too much. I know some people who get very affected so I think it’s very variable. On the psychological aspect it can add stress to an already stressful day however. If you are wearing a trisuit for hours there’s always the worry of leaking. I sometimes also feel more anxious when I’m on my period so it can cause more unnecessary anxiety on race day.”

As it happened, there wasn’t time to include this athlete’s experience, instead I commented that women are socially conditioned to accept they will feel negatively impacted during menstruation. Therefore, we believe and think this is true. The link between our beliefs and assumptions about situations, people and the world to our thoughts and resultant emotions, physiological symptoms and behaviour are proven and form the basis of Christine Padesky’s five factor model (see below).

With further research into this topic, the question of whether women perform better (compared to when they are not menstruating) is yet to be proven, however, if we can be open-minded to the idea that we might be able to then we can expect that people inclined towards optimism will take this as a positive and get right on out there and PERFORM BETTER!

P.S. I am not sport psychologist as per the introduction on the interview.. I did let the production team know my actual qualifications beforehand. You can read more about my skillset here