103. Is Your Exercise Routine Messing With Your Hormones?

Is your exercise routine supporting your menstrual cycles & hormones—or sabotaging it? In this episode of Cycle Wisdom, Dr. Monica Minjeur explores the hidden ways overtraining or undertraining can disrupt ovulation, cortisol balance, and overall hormone health. You’ll learn how to tailor movement to your cycle, why strength training may be a game-changer for PCOS, and how to reclaim energy and fertility with a balanced approach.

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Transcript

Monica: 0:01

Welcome back to Cycle Wisdom, where we empower women to restore natural menstrual cycles, to improve health and promote fertility. I'm your host, Dr. Monica Minjeur, and I'm so glad you're listening today. What if the very workouts you thought were helping your health we're actually disrupting your hormones? Or maybe you've been told to just move more and eat less. But the reality is that your body actually needed more rest. Today we're diving into a topic that so many women struggle with, and that is how exercise impacts your fertility and your menstrual health. For women with irregular cycles, PCOS, or unexplained fertility, it can be hard to know, am I doing too much? Am I not doing enough? Is this the right kind of movement? Is this the wrong kind of movement? And so instead in this episode, we're going to walk through this science behind how exercise impacts hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol. We will look at what the research says, especially for women with PCOS and how resistance training and intentional rest can be game changers. Let's talk about finding the sweet spot in your fitness routine that supports your body rather than stressing you out. So let's get started today with Madeline's story. Okay. Now, when Madeline came to see us, she was frustrated and confused. Her cycles had been irregular for years, and she was slowly starting to see that they were getting to be longer apart. Sometimes 40 days, upwards of 60 days, and sometimes she would go for months without having a cycle. She also had been slowly gaining weight over the years and had been told she probably had PCOS, but no one really explained what to do about it other than recommending she could go on birth control and metformin if she wanted to get regular cycles back. Instead, Madeline tried everything that the internet told her to do at one point in time. She was doing high intensity workouts five days a week, tracking every calorie and micromanaging her activity levels to feel in control. When that didn't work and she didn't see much move as far as her weight loss, she went the opposite direction, barely exercising at all, but trying to lower her stress levels and let her body relax because she had been told that sometimes that's what was needed. Unfortunately, for her, neither approach worked to get her cycles back on track. Madeline still wasn't ovulating. She felt exhausted, discouraged, and really unsure of what her body even needed anymore. On top of all of this, she was continuing to get frustrated by her ongoing weight gain and didn't know what changes needed to be made. So when we started working together, we looked at Madeline's Labs. We tracked her cycles more closely and talked about the relationship with exercise. What she needed wasn't just more cardio or less cardio, or more rest, or less rest, it was a clear pathway forward that helped her to consistently make changes. We helped to figure out what was going on with Madeline Cycles at the hormone level and worked towards a treatment plan that focused on more of what she needed and less of what wasn't making any changes. We created a moderate strength-based workout plan that matched her hormone goals for Madeline. This included three days of resistance training or strength training, daily walks, one rest day per week, and enough food to support her workouts. Combining this with focused recommendations for her supplements and prescription strength medications. Within three months, Madeline's cycles were shortening to somewhere closer to 30 to 35 days apart, and she was no longer just checking the boxes to make sure she completed everything. She was listening to her body and giving it what it needed. Madeline's energy levels improved, her sleep stabilized and best of all, she was ovulating consistently for the first time in years. So many of us realize and know that exercise impacts fertility, and we can use movement as medicine, but only when we're matching it to the current needs of our body. Exercise has significant impacts on your ovulation and luteal phase health, and it does this primarily through your cortisol and your thyroid response. Now, we've talked a lot in past episodes about how cortisol and thyroid can be kind of the master hormones that can hijack everything else, and so if we have too much or too little of a good thing, it can really start to throw the hormones off. We also know that exercise impacts our insulin sensitivity as well as inflammatory markers, which also play a role when it comes to your menstrual cycles, your hormones, your luteal phase, and that ovulation. So for example, if you're exercising. Too much. That is typically increasing your cortisol levels, that stress hormone, which means that oftentimes we're also not having enough hormones that are being made because our body is constantly in this stressful situation. This can lead to hypothalamic amenorrhea, which means when your periods turn off and stop happening altogether. Now, I talked a lot about this back in episode 86 where I dig deep into hypothalamic amenorrhea, and so if you think that your periods have turned off because of too much exercise, that's a great episode to go back and listen to. But the gist of it is, is that you. Don't have a period because you've got too much stress on your body, typically, physical stress, so we've got these increased cortisol levels. Generally we see this from overtraining and under fueling, meaning I'm not taking in enough calories in order to tell my body it's healthy enough to be able to ovulate consistently. Okay. Now on the flip side of things, we do also find that there are many women that come to us that are doing too little exercise. So if you're doing nothing or not doing enough, we can see problems with increased insulin resistance, inflammation, and those hormone pathways that are just being quiet. Because we're constantly in this rest state, your body doesn't have the stimulation in order to get the hormones going. The key is in finding what is the right amount of exercise for your body, and it's not one size fits all. One of the particular cases we talk a lot about is the unique role of exercise in PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome. And PCOS oftentimes requires a much more strategic approach because many women that have PCOS are also dealing with insulin resistance. Now if you overexercise, it can actually worsen your stress hormones by raising cortisol levels without improving your insulin levels. And in those cases, we see that excessive exercise can actually continue to see weight gain. In fact, for many women with PCOS, we find that if you are just trying to go hardcore cardio all day, every day, it's oftentimes less effective. One of the key pieces of research that's been done in regards to PCOS and exercise is looking at the importance of resistance training or strength training. We know that by increasing our muscle mass, it will help to improve insulin sensitivity. So if you're somebody who has PCOS and you have something where you eat carbs or sugars, we need that insulin in order to help stabilize those levels. If we have an increased muscle mass, it helps improve our body's ability to react positively to that insulin resistant. Over time, this increased muscle mass will help to lower androgen levels, so the excess testosterone that often comes along with PCOS, that can cause things like facial hair growth and acne resistance training also will reduce the reactivity levels of cortisol, your stress hormone, and it helps to improve your ovulatory function without stressing out your adrenal glands, which again are responsible for that cortisol function. So oftentimes in our women that are dealing with PCOS diagnosis, we talk about the importance of yes, daily, regular exercise. However, we want to focus on getting at least three or four days a week focusing on those strength training exercises. Now, it does not have to be going to the gym and pumping iron. This can be resistance bands. This can be stretches and strengthening exercises you're doing at home. As far as pushups, pull-ups, AB crunches, there are so many things we can do that are really working to build that muscle mass. And then on the days that we're not doing that strength-based exercise along with walking or recovery days. And ideally trying to avoid the high stress environment of the high intensity interval training because that can really just tax the adrenal glands without doing much for muscle mass. So how do I know if my exercise routine is helping or hurting? Now, some of this can be quite obvious, but it's important to keep in mind that more isn't always better. Signs that we know that your exercise routine is right for you. If you're seeing more regularity to your cycles and clearly identifying ovulation, those are always a great sign that your exercise level is appropriate. If you're noticing better energy throughout the day, or improved sleep, or improved time of recovery after an exercise or workout, those are good signs that you're on the right track. Okay. Signs that your exercise might be hurting your hormones, either too much or too little, could be you stop having a period or ovulation altogether. That's obviously a bad sign, and oftentimes it is linked to the fact that you may be exercising too much. If you constantly feel tired or fatigued or low energy, that can be a sign that your exercise routine might be too much. Or perhaps you're finding that your weight has plateaued despite doing the same amount of effort. Sometimes it's important to just mix it up a little bit to kind of break out of that rut. Other ways that we can know if exercise is too much, too little would be to evaluate lab levels. We oftentimes will assess your progesterone to look at the importance of ovulation function. We can check your DHEA, your cortisol, your fasting insulin, and your thyroid function in order to see is your body being overstressed by what else might be going on now, certainly there's lots of other things that can cause stress as far as emotional stress or illness or other chronic disease. But especially when it comes to exercise, our body is very sensitive to knowing if it needs more or a lust. And so sometimes we'll talk about adjusting your workout plan during different phases of your cycle. For more information on cycle sinking and exercise, go back to episode 52 where we talk all about cycle sinking and how changing what you eat and when and how you move during different phases of your cycle might be a good fit for you. One of the most important pieces here is that you don't have to choose between being strong or having regular cycles. If you've been pushing yourself harder only to see your cycle stay irregular or worse, if they've disappeared altogether, you're not alone. Hormone health and fitness don't have to be at odds with each other, but oftentimes mainstream, conventional medicine will talk about fitness in a void of hormone health and the hormones that we need in order to have a quality ovulation and in order to have fertility can sometimes mean a very different level of exercise as opposed to somebody who is training for a high stakes athletic competition or training in order to lose weight or run a marathon. At our clinic, we take a whole person approach to fertility. We help you tune into your body's signals to balance your hormone levels, and to create a personalized treatment plan that supports your goals without burning you out. Imagine if your workouts weren't something you had to overthink because you can finally understand how your cycle and your fitness can work together. Imagine having a guide to help you move with your body, not against it, feeling stronger, more in sync with what's going on and confident in your fertility journey. This way forward is possible, and we can't wait to partner with you to help move you in the right direction. If you're ready to work with our elite team of healthcare professionals, go to our website, radiant clinic.com to schedule a free discovery call and learn more about our package based pricing for comprehensive care. We are currently able to see people for in-person appointments in our Cedar Rapids, Iowa Clinic, or can arrange for a telehealth visit if you live in many different states across the us. Check out our website for current states that we can serve medical clients and let us know if your state is not listed to see if we can still cover you there as we are constantly expanding our reach, please note that our fertility educators are able to take care of clients no matter where they live. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please share this podcast with someone in your life who would benefit from our services. Remember to subscribe to this podcast for more empowering content that I look forward to sharing with you on our next episode of Cycle Wisdom.