 Our next caller is Jasmine from California. Hey Jasmine, how can we help you? Hey guys, I'm very excited to be here. I'm from Orange County, California. I've been listening to guys for a year and love you guys talking about current events. And I used to live in the Bay Area, so I can totally relate when you guys talk about tech trends and housing prices. Yeah, thank you. Ridiculous, right? Yeah, so under your guys influence, this year my focus is strength training. And before that, I did bikini competition and I was doing a lot of cardio. So my question is, how do I continuously make strengths gains during offices of menstrual cycle? So a little more context on that is, so although there is not sufficient research, but there are some research showing that during different phases of menstrual cycle, women performance is at different level. So during the first phase, which is from period to ovulation about two weeks because of hormones, in this phase women are performing on average at a higher level and lift higher, especially close to ovulation because of higher testosterone. Many women hit PRs during this time. And after this time, the second phase of the menstrual cycle from ovulation to next period, there is increased progesterone, so performance drop. And it's not the case for every woman, but it's exactly the case for me. I notice after my ovulation every month, my strength decreased and it's very apparent because right now my focus is on pull-up. And I can do a pull-up before ovulation, but I cannot after ovulation. It's very discouraging because I worked very hard together from a thick band to medium band to thin band and finally got there and then lost it just after ovulation. So I read a lot of articles and they all say, oh, during this phase you should try to relax and do some gentle yoga and gentle cardio, but I really want to make strength gains. So my question is, how do I program my strength training workout during the entire phase so that even though I don't hit PRs every day, even though I don't perform at my best every day, how do I continuously program my workout to make strength gains? This is such a cool question that we actually talked before about creating a program specifically to do this. Now, here's why we... Talk with Dr. Jolene Brighton. Here's some of the reasons why we did it and I'm going to ask you a question, okay? So are you exactly the same as every single woman you've met in your life? No. Yeah, of course not. So here's the challenge and trouble with these kinds of studies and advice, okay? Generally speaking, there's truth behind some of this stuff, right? So when you're ovulating, there's certain hormones, that peak testosterone being one of them. After that, hormones change and that can change how you feel and blah, blah, blah. The problem with this is if we take this at face value, oftentimes what it can do is it can make you ignore the most important possible thing, which is to listen to your own body. When I would train a client, I don't care what phase of her menstrual cycle she's in. If she feels good and strong today, then we're going to train in a way to cater to that. If she's feeling a bit tired, I don't care if she's ovulating and it's in the first phase and I'm reading this book and it says you should make strength gains. If she says she's tired, well, we're going to train at a much lower intensity. So what I would do if I were you, this is good information to understand and know. It'll help you understand yourself. Ultimately though, what you need to do is take it and apply it to listening to your own body. So if you feel good, you have good energy, then it's okay to increase the intensity and train harder. If you don't, it's okay to train lighter with less intensity. Follow that. That will guide you much better than these general pieces of advice. Now, to be a little bit more specific with your pull-up question, if you really want to get better at pull-ups, the best possible thing you could do with it is practice them every day. Now, I didn't say work out with them every day, but rather practice them every day. So get a pull-up bar at home, put a resistance band around it because when you practice them, you don't want them to be super hard and just get better at them every single day. You will see strength gains in your pull-ups very consistently and very quickly if you do it that way. The only value I see in the research around this and the articles, because I've read a lot of this stuff too and like I said, we talked about writing one of these programs at one point and this was the challenge and the hurdle we had is there's such an individual variance between all of our female clients we trained to the sales point. I've had somebody on day three after their cycle feel this way and then I've had a woman who felt completely the opposite. And so if I wrote a program that's for the masses that is telling you, oh, on this day of your cycle, back off and do this many sets or reps, like it's going to be so inaccurate for such a large percentage of people. So the only real value I see in this information is to help give someone insight who doesn't understand why, hey, man, why every time when I get to this part of my cycle, do I feel this way? And then you find out what's going on with your hormones and it's like, oh, okay. And then you can have a little bit of empathy for yourself. So you're not, you know, beating yourself up. Like, what, you know, what am I doing wrong or what's wrong with me? It's like, no, this is completely normal. A lot of women experience this. So just ride the wave. You'll be fine in a few days and you'll be back the other way. But as far as trying to write some rigid program, I don't mean, we don't even believe that take, you know, periods out of this and just a person who is trying to figure out their training program, we don't even believe anyone should follow our programs exactly to a T. You should always, and we're always coaching on the show on how to listen to your body and also calculate in, okay, last night. So if you're following a mass program, you know, a period aside, you're just following a mass program and it's your next day is for you to go hit heavy squats and last night your kid keeps you up till three in the morning and you only get four hours of sleep. I'm not going to have you follow that to a T. We are going to make it audible and we're going to scale back on the intensity. Well, that's actually the direction I was going to go. I was going to ask like, if you've ever kind of checked or tried out HRV and paid attention to your stress levels and obviously you're in tune with your cycle and you're kind of making associations there. I'm wondering if that's something that you're pursuing and trying to track and get more understanding around too. We've talked about this with Joe DeFranco too about how to get like a grip tester in the morning and give you a pretty accurate read of how ready you are. Your readiness factor going into a strength workout tends to help if you're the type of person that wants that kind of insight and can apply it. So Jasmine, what he's saying essentially is you could, if you really want to get super technical, you could take a grip tester. I can't remember the name, a dynamometer. Dynamometer. Yeah, dynamometer. It'll measure your strength. Mind Pump Store has them. We have one at mindpumpstore.com. You can measure your strength on it and do this for two weeks or three weeks in a row. Use your non-dominant hand. Notice your trends. And then if you're a lot higher than your average, you know that you probably can go harder that day if it's much below your average. Then you want to go a little easier. But at the end of the day, even that, even that is just teaching you to start to listen to your body. There is no better coach in the world than you being able to listen to your body. That's just the bottom line. Just get you more in tune with your natural body signals. Totally. And so here's what I want to do for you. Are you in our private forum, Jasmine? I know. Okay. I'm going to give you free access to our private forum. And here's what I want you to do is I want you to ask people, because we have a lot of trainers and professionals in there. We're in there too. Ask people questions in the forum because you'll get some more personalized advice. So you could say something like, hey, you know, I'm stuck at five pull-ups. Has anybody tried anything here that was successful of getting them better? And you'll get other trainers and coaches commenting for example. So I think that someone like you will find a lot of value in that. We also have done very specific videos on our YouTube channel to that exact question. So if you haven't looked at that, make sure you check those out. I'm sure Andrew will link it on the YouTube channel so you can watch some of the videos that we talk about that. And we've done episodes dedicated to that question. So yeah, you know, listening to your body, you know, and this is the hard part of science, all the great information and studies and stuff that come out. Give you like a diagnosis and then you're stuck there. And I guarantee there's somebody who's listening right now that's well-versed in this area and is going like, oh, there's this. And they want to talk about how much more information there is around this. And it's like at the end of the day, all that goes out the window, if my client feels amazing that day or terrible, I don't care what all the research points to on how they should feel at this point in their cycle. If they don't feel that way, I'm adjusting my program. And that goes for talking about somebody who's on a period or not. That does take that out of the equation. And I am making a decision on my program. I might have written the plan today, but when my client shows up, the way they report back to me on how they slept, how they ate and all that, how they feel ready today is going to dictate the intensity that I bring to that workout. Totally. So Jasmine, we'll see you in the forum, okay? Yeah, so just one last question. So when you say adjust the intensity, you mean not only reps, but also all kinds of stuff you guys talk about, like intervals and weight. Okay. Yeah, just think of it this way, harder or easier. So more intensity is harder, less intensity is easier. And you can use, you can do a total volume, meaning that you do a little less set. So let's say it's a day and you just, even though your program says to get after it and do a hard workout today, you might scale back on the total sets. You may scale back on the weight. All that will lower intensity. And then the opposite is true. You come in and it's a day where you are feeling good. You're well rested. And you know, maybe at this point in your cycle, you tend to always feel stronger. Well, that's the day I'm going to push those limits. Those are the days that I'm going to put more weight on the bar than you usually do and see what you can do. Yes. Thank you very much. No problem, Jasmine. Thank you. Thank you, Jasmine. Yeah, I've worked with people who get so hung up on numbers and the books. And this is what the science says, that they completely ignore their own bodies and it takes them out of their bodies even more than if they didn't have that information sometimes. So you got to, you kind of take it, absorb it, consider it, but you got to listen to how you feel. That's nothing else matters at that point. I don't care what your any test says. You feel like crap. All right, we're not going to, we're going to train you accordingly. Well, it reminds me of, yeah, certain people coming in and they've read articles, they've read studies and then they're like, oh yeah, that's me. And then that's always them from there. Like I'm always a hard gainer. You know, like I can never, I have a really slow metabolism and it's just like this definition that they sort of just carry with them from ever. Well, and I don't, I'm sure I came off a little dismissive of the science that's related to this. And I don't want to come off that way. It's just that- It's providing insight. If somebody had terrible sleep the night before or the last workout they did, they overreached and did too much, those two factors alone individually, not both combined, but individually by themselves will impact their capability to work out today more than a point in their cycle. Right. That's how in, so if you're all hung up and you're watching the period cycle so much, you know, oh, this is the day I'm supposed to feel great, but one of those other factors is out of line and nutrition, another one. Like one of those three things, if you're too low a calories that day or the day before, that will make a greater impact than what day you are on your period. Now, and that also, there's a variance there too. So, but maybe for someone else, it's not like that. Maybe somebody else is listening and they're like, man, that's not true Adam. When I'm, during my cycle, like clockwork, it doesn't matter if I am off calories. It doesn't like, Yeah, but it always points back to the same thing. You're an individual. Yeah, that's right. It's, and then that, that's you. So you, you adjust that way because you've learned, and so that's, I like that stuff because it's just one more thing you're, you're paying attention to and just making you more aware of your body. And I think there's tremendous value in that, but that's where you got to be careful not to get so hung up on it. And this is why a good trainer or a good coach will outperform any program that's out there in the world that's written for a lot of people because a good coach or a good trainer knows exactly how to individualize the training and nutrition to the person.