Hormone Health Assessment for Fitness Coaches

If you are a fitness coach who wants to help your clients not only be their fittest but also the most hormonally balanced so that they can be empowered in every area of life, this is going to teach you the assessment method to help you do exactly that. 

If you don’t know me yet, my name is Omega! I’m an exercise scientist, menstrual cycle educator and founder of the Confident Menstrual Cycle Coach Academy and this is one of my personal training clients Sol who is using all the information in the Academy to not only empower herself but also empower her community.

So, I’ll break down 4 assessment questions to ask your clients in order to help you do a hormone health assessment and start helping your clients live cyclically, but before I get into it I want to make a disclaimer: Not all of your clients are as stoked about menstrual cycle health as you are. Use this as an assessment, not an indoctrination. Not all of your clients are comfortable talking about their periods either, so stay until the end for instructions to get the assessment resource that takes the taboo out of female cycle health. So now, here are the questions to ask in your initial assessment:

Question #1: How long does your period usually lastThis question is important because the period is a window to overall health, like Lisa Hendrickson mentions in her book, the period is the 5th vital sign. Periods usually last from 3-7 days. A period shorter than 3 days or longer than 7 days is considered unusual especially if they're coupled with lots of spotting or lots of pain / bleeding. Without going deep into how to address those issues, pain, heavy bleeding and spotting are not normal. But you can arm yourself with tools. 

Okay, so moving onto question #2 to ask…Question #2:

How long is your total menstrual cycle (it can range from 22-40 days). Knowing how long their total menstrual cycle is will help you with the last step in programming workouts around the menstrual cycle. You want to know how long their period is because their ovulation window, which is about halfway through the cycle, is the best time to train heavy, while in the 11-14 days leading up to their cycle, their fat-burning potential increases. I talk about that a lot in this video on the science of cyclical fitness. 

Question #3:: Is your menstrual cycle predictable?

If their menstrual cycle is predictable, then it becomes easy for you to program around their cycle. But if it is unpredictable, then consider having her take her basal metabolic temperature to learn where she is in her cycle (which I described how to do in this video that I’ll link to below).  This will in turn give you, the personal trainer, deeper insight into where she is at in her cycle. 

Having her take her basal body temp will tell her if and when she is ovulating. Again I give instructions on why basal body temp is important and how to do it in the video I just mentioned.Question #4: What PMS symptoms do you experience? This will give you a foundational understanding of the inner-workings of your client’s hormones. Clients with high estrogen are going to have certain symptoms, clients with lower progesterone will have different symptoms and clients with a nutrient deficiency will have other symptoms. I’ll direct you to another video at the end of this video that can educate you more about how different PMS symptoms impact sports performance.

Use the FREE Cyclical Assessment Doc:

Now how to use this information? In the cyclical assessment guide, you can fill out the information I just went over or have your client fill it out, which some of them might be more comfortable doing. In the guide there is a space for charting your client’s cycle so that you know exactly where she is each week when you’re programming workouts. By charting your client’s cycle, you can start training her in different ways throughout her cycle based on her fluctuating hormones, which I described in detail in this video about the cyclical periodization model. When you do chart your client’s cycle in the assessment document, I recommend that you do it one month at a time instead of 3-months in a row. This will help you account for any minor fluctuations in cycle length that she may experience as you go.