Can we talk about that cycle syncing chart?

You know the one I mean. Four phases, four colours, a little list under each. Your period, go for a walk. Follicular, smash it. Luteal, be kind to yourself. I've had it on my own feed three times this week, which I assume means I've been researching it too hard and the algorithm has drawn its own conclusions about me.

Anyway. It's on something like 55,000 TikToks and searches for it have gone up 740% since 2022, so if it feels like you've seen it eleven times this month, you probably have.

The BBC asked the researchers what they make of it. Kelly McNulty studies menstrual cycles and exercise at Leeds Beckett, and she didn't soften it even slightly:

A trend based on marketing rather than any kind of research or evidence.

I think she's right. I also think a lot of women are going to read that and feel a bit stupid, and I want to get in front of that, because you weren't.

The bit everyone skipped

Right. Bear with me, because I read this twice and still ended up writing it on the back of an envelope before it went in properly.

McNulty's team pulled all the studies together back in 2020 to work out whether your performance really does change across your cycle. Two things came out of it. Everybody has been quoting the first one this week and nobody has gone near the second.

First one: average across all the women in all the studies and the effect is tiny. Barely there. And the evidence wasn't especially strong to start with, which they say themselves, in the paper, which I don't think anyone reposting it has opened.

Second one, and this is the bit. The authors say, in the paper, that you can't take that group result and assume it applies to any individual woman.

Sit with that a minute, because it took me most of last night to see what it actually meant. Those women weren't all doing the same thing as each other. Some were flat the week before their period. Some were absolutely fine. Add everybody up, the ups cancel out the downs, and you get a number near zero that might not be true of one single actual woman in the study.

McNulty made the same point to the BBC this week, in plainer words. Cycles are highly individual. They differ between women, and one woman's experience can change from one cycle to the next.

So when a chart tells you what your luteal phase does, what you're being shown is an average that you have already been taken back out of.

Which isn't me saying nothing happens. She's clear that some women do notice changes in energy or strength across the month, and I'd never tell you your own month is imaginary. The chart just has no way of knowing which woman you are.

The bit that upset me

There was a second expert in that piece, Dr Faye Bate, who's a medical doctor working in women's health, and she put her finger on the thing I hadn't managed to name.

A one-size-fits-all model of "you should be exercising this way in this phase and a different way in a different phase" shouldn't be advice that applies to all women.

And then, according to the BBC, she raised something else. She's worried that telling women again and again that they'll be weaker or less capable at particular points in their cycle could set off what she calls a nocebo effect, where the expectation itself starts changing how you feel and how you do.

Nocebo. Tell a woman often enough that she'll be weak on day 24 and she turns up on day 24 already beaten, and then of course the session is rubbish, and then the chart looks like it was right all along. It gets to be right because it said so first.

That's the bit that made me put my phone down and go and stare at the wall for a minute.

Because the industry does it in soft lettering with a hashtag stuck on the end, and it looks like kindness. It reads as permission. Be gentle with yourself this week. Who's going to argue with that?

I do understand why women reached for it, mind. For years the options were an industry carrying on like we don't have hormones at all, or a chart. Given those two I'd have taken the chart as well. At least the chart admitted we existed.

It just shouldn't have been the only thing on the table.

A forecast, or a diary

The people who sell cycle syncing like comparing it to a weather forecast. Know what's coming, take a coat.

I actually quite like that comparison, because it hands the whole thing straight over. A forecast is a guess about the future, and that chart is guessing your week off the back of thousands of women who aren't you. And at least with the weather somebody checks afterwards whether it was right. Nobody has ever gone back to that chart in March and asked it to account for itself.

There's a slower option. It's closer to a diary than a forecast, and it is nowhere near as satisfying, I'll warn you now.

You write down what you did. You write down where you were in your cycle. And then you wait, which is the bit nobody wants. Months. Not weeks. And after a while you can look back and see whether there's anything there at all.

Sometimes there is. Sometimes it looks nothing whatsoever like the chart said it would, which I find quite satisfying. And sometimes there's nothing, your training just trundles along the same all month, and that's worth knowing too, because then you stop blaming your cycle and go and look at your sleep.

What we changed this week

FREYA is the cycle side of VALDA. It'll show you where you are in your cycle, a bar across the month with a marker on today. That part is just a tracker. It's your own information, drawn.

What it won't do is tell you what that marker means for your session.

Except. Right. Here's where I have to be straight with you, because until this week we weren't quite living up to that ourselves.

There were four sentences in there, one sat under each phase. Carefully worded, all very reasonable looking, the sort of thing you'd nod at. The luteal one mentioned some people having less power output.

It was the same four phases making the same four predictions as everybody else's chart. Just in a quieter voice. I read the BBC piece, went and opened our own app, and felt a bit sick.

So we changed them on Friday, before I wrote this. They describe what your hormones are up to and then they stop talking. Each one finishes the same way now, which is: whether that shows up in your training is in your own data.

Sorry, where was I. The rest of it works the way it always has, and it's the part that comes with VALDA Pro. It watches what you actually lift and when, lines that up against your own cycle, and says nothing at all until there's enough of your history for it to be worth saying. That takes about three cycles. We tell you that, rather than filling the gap with something prettier.

And it will never tell you that you're going to be weak today. That one's a rule. Written down, with a test sat on top of it so it can't quietly stop being true.

Almost half the month

This is the part of the BBC piece I nearly scrolled past, and it's probably the most important bit in it.

McNulty points out that if you routinely ease off your resistance training, you limit your progress. And strength work matters enormously for us, because we're the ones facing the higher osteoporosis risk later on. Getting stronger needs consistent, progressively harder training. Then she says this:

We don't want to create another barrier by suggesting women train less for almost half the month.

Almost half the month. That's what the chart is quietly asking of you, if you follow it properly. I hadn't added it up like that before and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

And one more from Dr Bate, which I'd want my niece to hear. She warns against treating what she calls "severe symptoms" as normal. Her point, as the BBC reports it, is that if pain or fatigue or mood changes are getting in the way of your training or your actual life, that's worth taking to a doctor, rather than filing it under something you're supposed to put up with every month.

If you've been cycle syncing

Please don't feel daft. You were paying attention to your own body in an industry that mostly can't be bothered to. The instinct was right. It was just a rubbish tool, and that isn't the same thing at all.

So carry on keeping track. Your training and your cycle, in whatever you already use, I genuinely don't mind which. Give it three months. Then go and look at what you actually did, rather than what the chart reckoned you'd do.

You've been keeping the receipts this whole time anyway. Go and read them.

---

FREYA is the cycle side of VALDA. Flow tracking, contraceptive reminders, pregnancy mode, and a report you can take into a GP appointment. The tracking is free, and it stays free. Reading your cycle against your training is part of VALDA Pro. Start tracking

General information only, not professional guidance.