Women are told to change their lifting, cardio, protein and even meal timing depending on their cycle phase. Dr Lauren Colenso-Semple has measured those hormones across many cycles in many women, and she has published some of the key research testing whether cycle phase changes how muscle responds to training. In this episode, she and Cliff look at what the evidence supports, what it doesn't, and why goal-led, individualised training beats a hormone calendar.
In this episode we cover
Why "women are not small men" started as a call for better research and turned into rigid, fear-based rules
How much research in women actually exists in weight loss, endurance and resistance training
Why the textbook 28-day cycle with ovulation on day 14 rarely matches real life
Why sex differences in strength and muscle gain shrink once people are trained
How to auto-regulate training on a bad day without skipping the session
Wearables, readiness scores and handing your judgement over to an app
The luteal phase protein claim, and how it stacks one untested mechanism on another
Fasted training, low-carb diets and the fragility narrative aimed at women
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:12 Catching up after the Austin conference
03:04 Are women just small men?
04:05 When empowerment becomes disempowering
05:37 Why it took so long to study women
08:45 How much research in women do we have?
11:00 Cycle syncing and the 28-day myth
14:21 Lean mass, training status and sex differences
17:23 Train for your goal, not your fibre type
18:16 Overcomplication and selling what you can't measure
20:55 Life stages, PCOS and lived experience
24:55 Do you need lived experience to be an expert?
30:10 Consistency beats optimisation
35:13 How to auto-regulate training
40:55 Objective vs subjective performance
43:18 Wearables, readiness scores and AI
48:00 Tracking your cycle as one variable among many
50:41 Dogma, branding and changing your mind
54:30 Cycle-specific nutrition: the luteal protein story
59:38 Fasted training and low energy availability
1:01:39 Should women fast or go low carb?
1:05:38 The optimisation fallacy
1:09:05 How adaptable humans are
1:13:37 When life gets in the way
1:17:12 "Don't do this" messaging: zone 2, HIIT and running
1:19:44 Lauren's take-home message
1:21:32 The Practitioner's Roadmap
About Dr Lauren Colenso-Semple
Lauren is a muscle physiology researcher who completed her PhD at McMaster University, focused on exercise physiology, endocrinology and sex-based differences in muscle growth. She is co-owner of and a reviewer for the MASS Research Review and a regular voice on the Iron Culture podcast. Find her on Instagram at @drlaurencs1 and at MASS Research Review.
Want to turn evidence like this into a career? Grab the free Practitioner's Roadmap at the link above. For the research behind each topic, see Nutripaedia, HPI's evidence reviews. If you got something from this episode, follow the show and leave a rating - it helps more practitioners find it.
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