low progesterone & fitness: the connection
Low progesterone in the luteal phase often comes along with pre-period anxiety, depression, spotting, sleep disturbances, fatigue and even constipation. If you’re a fitness coach looking to unravel hormone intricacies of your own or your clients, you came to the right place. Outcome: If you stay until the end you’ll have an in depth understand of how progesterone imbalance happens, the tell-tale signs of low progesterone & how to support progesterone balance with food, fitness and lifestyle.
Watch FULL youtube right here
I am an exercise scientist, menstrual cycle educator and founder of the first hormone health certification program for personal trainers. My journey was marked by overcoming hypothyroid syndrome, PCOS, trauma healing, and gut issues. All of this ignited a passion to bridge the gap between fitness and hormonal wellness.
My mission here is to revolutionize the fitness industry with hormone-friendly practices, educating trainers through YouTube, IG, and my Cycle Coach Academy. My goal is to equip you with the skills, and evidence-based solutions and ultimately help you build to confidence to support your clients hormones all within your scope.
Ready to join the Cycle Coach Academy? "APPLY" here - , spend just 10 minutes on the application, and expect a response within 24 hours.
Here is Beck who balanced her progesterone, reduced her cyclical anxiety and said she had the most symptom free luteal phase in just one cycle using the recommendations I teach in the Academy. And those are the things I’ll teach you right here. Lets start with Progesterone what it does and what happens if it’s too low: Progesterone is the hormone that increases after ovulation. Along with building up the lining of the uterus, it also supports mood regulation and sleep. Progesterone should reach it maximum threshold around the middle of luteal phase. If you have a 28-day cycle, this would be around day 21. If everything is working properly, we should feel good and relaxed before our period. But most of us don’t because we have low progesterone.
Low progesterone often means estrogen is running the show in the luteal phase. Which is the opposite of what you want. Estrogen in excess is referred to as “estrogen dominance”. And while you support estrogen clearance, you also need to support progesterone balance. So after this, I recommend you watch this Estrogen Balancing video .
People with low progesterone often face mood issues in their luteal phase. I know that I’m not the only person who has had relationship issues emphasized in the luteal phase. While relational issues are not due to hormone issues, I want to share that progesterone does support our mood-regulating neurotransmitters, serotonin, and dopamine. So when progesterone is out of balance, we will notice emotions so poorly cateogorized as “mood swings”. Sleep is impacted for a similar reason. Progesterone should have a calming effect on the brain via the neuro-transmitters I just mentioned as well as one of the sleep-inducing neurotransmitters GABA. In the luteal phase, when I got my progesterone balanced, I actually noticed better sleep. So if your client or even you notice sleep pattern changes, night time wakefulness or interrupted sleep in the luteal phase, progesterone changes could be related. Progesterone changes can also negatively impact digestion as well. In the luteal phase, progesterone can slow gastric transit leading to constipation. This is really bad if we’re in a estrogen excess state because our body will end up not clearing estrogen. Instead of pooping out estrogen, the body actually sends it back to liver for re-processing. If you’ve dealt with any of this stuff - digestion changes, sleep changes, mood changes you are not alone in this journey.
Progesterone and Fitness:
If you’re trying to increase progesterone, we need to look at fitness and intensity as well. I know a lot of personal trainers have strong opinions about cycle syncing, but let me assure you this is going to make sense: One recommendation I teach in the Cycle Coach Academy is to decrease stressors in the luteal phase if low progesterone has been identified. That’s because cortisol and progesterone are essentially at odds with each other. If cortisol is high in the luteal phase, progesterone has a hard time reaching it’s threshold for hormone balance. This is important for personal trainers to understand because women who over-exercise are at high risk for hormone imbalance. end IG repurpose
You can probably see a client in your minds eye who is the over-achieving, go-getter who can always be seen doing hit, trying to max out on her deadlifts etc… I share this in other videos, but for a 1-year I didn’t do any heavy lifting while I was healing my hormones. While this is not what I’d recommend for most people, I do want to help paint a picture of how important dialing back intensity is if hormone imbalance has been identified.
A Personal Trainer’s Holistic Approach for Progesterone Support:
Now lets get into some nutritional approaches that you can holistically integrate into your client sessions to get those hormone health transformations all within your scope of practice. This article (Draper.2018. Nutrition) published in the Journal of Scientific Reports showed us that managing nutrition is a helpful strategy for managing PMS and even PMDD. This article highlights the importance of vitamin D combined with calcium, magnesium, omega 3 & 6 and glutathione. While supplements are so helpful and convenient, remember that food has co-factors that help support the body in using these nutritients. Make those foods into a visual list. Helping your clients identify stress-management styles is important as well. Like I said before, it’s different for everyone. But research does identify that repetitive slow movements are most helpful to get people into a meditative state. For me, it’s breathing and yoga that I turn to when I need to relax, for others it might be a cold plunge….it’s up to you to ask the right questions and your client to implement the stress management technique that’s right for them. Blood sugar management is also extremely important, for the same reasons that managing cortisol is - when blood sugar goes down, cortisol goes up and progesterone has a harder time reaching it’s threshold. If you remember Beck, who I mentioned in the beginning of the video, she worked with a practice client and identified low progesterone so one of her interventions was blood sugar balancing basics, which resulted in a significant decrease in her practice client’s anxiety. Eating every 2-4 is ideal for managing blood sugar. Not only that, but eating enough protein is key for managing hormones ESPECIALLY in the luteal phase. 3 nutrition approaches that work to support progesterone while decreasing estrogen include eating all your B-vitamins, eating cruciferous veggies and eating enough fiber. I go into those 3 recommendations deeper in this video - Estrogen Balancing basics which I will link to in the description below.
Gauging Success in Progesterone Management:
You’ll know you’re on the right path with progesterone support when you see these changes in your clients or even yourself: reduced spotting, enhanced mood, less anxiety and depression, and possibly improved sleep.
Now you know the mechanisms of progesterone balance, how to identify it, what happens when it’s out-of-balance and how to bring it back into balance.
If you’re ready to dive deep into mentorship and training in the Cycle Coach Academy, click the link https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18481934&appointmentType=28999296 and you’ll spend just 10 minutes on the application. You can expect a response from my team within 24 hours. If you're eligible, we'll plan an application call to explore if working together is a fit.