Gut Healing for Female Athletes

Have you ever gone to the doctor, and after getting all your bloodwork done, your doctor looks you in the eye, shrugs their shoulders, and says, “Well…everything looks normal.” Part of you is relieved. The other part of you thinks, everything is not normal. This is where understanding gut health for female athletes can come into play.

The Midlife Athlete’s Hidden Challenge

You’re an everyday female athlete, somewhere in midlife, and you’ve begun to accept that it must be normal for you to feel tired all the time. You learned that feeling unmotivated for your training and having slower recovery is part of the process. You’re battling bloating and other gastrointestinal issues. You have a hard time falling asleep, or staying asleep. Brain fog is real. And, even though you’ve always been able to handle your stuff, you seem to cry for no reason, and walk around with perpetual RBF. Not to mention–you’ve got free t-shirts from your local physical therapy office because your repetitive injuries, longer recoveries, and chronic inflammation have put you on a first-name basis. At this point you ask yourself: Do I just need to go on some kind of medication for this?

Perimenopause: The Silent Disruptor

The truth is, women in midlife really can thrive. Even more so than when they were 20, when it comes to energy and performance. Unfortunately, women in midlife are often experiencing the hellacious symptoms of perimenopause without even knowing it.  In fact, a woman can experience the telltale declining levels of estrogen and progesterone for four to 12 years. This can happen despite not having a clear change in menstrual cycle indicating perimenopause is happening.

Inflammation: The Hidden Enemy

Why is this significant for everyday female athletes?  For a couple reasons–one being that estrogen is in and of itself an anti-inflammatory.  Which means that a woman, by merely existing at this stage of her life, is a living inflammatory process. This naturally translates to a difficulty in producing and processing energy.

Furthermore, progesterone, which supports things like your mood, sleep, and thyroid function, moves its production from your ovaries to your adrenals. Your adrenals are a primary producer of several important hormones, including cortisol.  One reason this is significant is that your body–when given the choice to produce and process either progesterone or your stress hormone cortisol–will always want to choose cortisol.  This makes sense when you consider cortisol to be a fight-or-flight response; your body interprets this as life or death. If given the choice, your body will always choose life over making sure you’re in a good mood and having good sleep and regulating hormones.

What are the implications of this? You can see how a woman experiencing menopause or perimenopause is combating chronic inflammation and proper recovery. This is a recipe for disaster for the everyday female athlete.

Are menopause and perimenopause then simply normal difficulties that everyday female athletes need to “suck up” and deal with?

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The Gut-Performance Connection

Not nearly. An unfortunately often overlooked, but pervasively important component of a female athlete’s health is her gut. Scientists are calling the gut your “second brain.” And there is a good reason for that. It is strongly connected to every aspect of your health, including your energy, your mood and sleep. Your gut health also helps with regulation of your hormones, your ability to recover from training and to even prevent injury. These positive signs will impact your motivation and immunity (think: preventing missed training days from sickness or feeling “run down”).

My Personal Gut Health Journey

My own fascination with gut health began after trying and “failing” to run a marathon, over the course of four years. I healed my gut health, and went on to not only complete my first marathon, but my first three ultras and first two Ironman events in one year. Beyond the finishes,  I also experienced having energy, getting great sleep and recovering more quickly. If that wasn’t enough I was able to prevent injury, heal mood issues, regulate hormones and avoid being sick.

Nourishing Your Gut: Practical Tips

So how do you protect the health of your gut? There are a number of factors that impact our gut health. Nutrition takes primary importance, but is not nearly the only factor. However, some basic gut health principles include that your gut likes to have a strong population and diversity of bacteria. This can be supported through such practices as eating more fiber and fermented foods. Your gut also loves balance. Barring special circumstances, it much prefers to have a balanced mix of whole, nutrient-dense foods, as opposed to cutting out whole food groups. Gut health improves by not restricting food, or severely limiting your eating window. There are things that will ravage the health of your gut. These include highly processed foods, excessive alcohol, stress of any kind (including overtraining), and even anti-depressant medication.

Reclaiming Your Athletic Potential

A word of caution here, though, is that your gut is as individual as you are. What is important for healing one person’s gut, may not be the thing that is important for someone else. This is why one of the first things I do with my clients is test their gut. I want to know exactly where it is and how to heal it. The big takeaway here, though, is that if you are a female athlete, you don’t have to suffer. You do not have to just take it on the chin. By healing and balancing at the source, you can once again have energy and motivation. This can lead to a performance you’re proud of. It can also provide you with better recovery and a love of endurance sports like you’ve always had.

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