How hard your workouts actually feel across each phase of your cycle, and what that means for your programming.
Log the first day of your period. Coach Aditya uses this to compute your phase on any training date.
RPE stands for rating of perceived exertion: a 1 to 10 score for how hard a set or session felt. In strength training the most useful version ties the number to how many repetitions you had left. RPE 10 means no repetitions left, RPE 9 means one left, RPE 8 means two left, and so on (Zourdos et al., 2016). It lets you set the weight from how you feel on the day, instead of following a fixed percentage.
For most people the effect is small. A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis of exercise performance across menstrual cycle phases found that performance might be trivially lower in the early follicular phase, the first days of your period, than in other phases. The differences were small, varied widely between studies, and the quality of the evidence was low (Elliott-Sale et al., 2020). The authors did not recommend general phase-based programming and suggested that advice should be individual.
In plain terms, your cycle may change how a session feels, but the pattern is personal. Your own log tells you more than a calendar rule.
Sleep, stress, food intake, illness, heat and caffeine all move your RPE as well. If a session feels unusually hard, check those before blaming your cycle. Our review of cycle and sleep research covers one common link.
Very heavy or painful periods, or periods that stop, are worth a conversation with a clinician. This page is educational and is not medical advice.
Plan a full month of training with the Cycle Planner or the 28-day cycle training plan, and read how cycle syncing nutrition works in practice.