← All articles

Lifting through your cycle: what the research actually says

By Chris Ayers 7 min read

I read the papers because the app had to say something true. Ferrabelle shows a daily training call, and I did not want it resting on a chart someone made for Instagram. So I went looking for the actual strength training and menstrual cycle research, expecting a clear answer. I did not get one. I got three reviews and one careful recent study, and they disagree with each other in interesting ways, and I think you deserve the scorecard rather than the headline.

Three reviews and one study

The 2020 review in Sports Medicine by McNulty and colleagues is the one I see cited most. It included 78 studies on exercise performance across the cycle, and 51 of them were eligible for the first pooled analysis. The finding: performance “might be trivially reduced during the early follicular phase,” the first days of your period, compared with every other phase. Trivially is their word. They rated the quality of the evidence as low, and their closing advice was that “general guidelines on exercise performance across the MC cannot be formed.” They asked for a personalised approach instead.

Then in 2023, Colenso-Semple and colleagues published an umbrella review in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. An umbrella review is a review of reviews. They found “highly variable findings among the published reviews” and a pattern of poor and inconsistent methods underneath them. They stressed checking which phase a woman is actually in, because they found “a pattern of poor and inconsistent methodological practices” in the studies underneath. In the authors’ opinion, it is premature to say that short-term hormone swings appreciably change acute strength, or long-term strength and muscle gains from training.

So far, two reviews saying roughly the same thing: if there is an effect, it is small, and the studies are not good enough to be sure.

The 2024 meta-analysis by Niering and colleagues in Sports pushes back a little. Across 22 studies and 433 women, they found a medium effect on isometric maximal strength favoring the late follicular phase (seven studies), a small effect on isokinetic strength favoring ovulation (five studies), and a small effect on dynamic strength favoring late follicular (three studies). They also wrote that “the early follicular phase is unfavorable for all strength classes.”

Here is the part worth slowing down on. Dynamic strength is what a barbell lift is. It had the smallest effect in the whole paper and rested on three studies. Isometric strength, where you push against something that does not move, is where the medium effect lives. That matters for lab tests. It matters less for a squat.

The newest piece is from 2026, Munteanu and colleagues, also in Sports Medicine. It is a single study, not a review, but it did the thing the umbrella review complained about: it checked phases properly. Twenty-eight resistance-trained women did two supervised training blocks, about eight weeks in all, with bench press and trap bar deadlift. Phases were checked with ovulation tests and blood hormone levels, not only a calendar. Bar speed differed from expected by roughly 0.01 to 0.02 meters per second across phases. That is tiny, and the authors called the phase effect minimal. What did predict a good session was motivation to train. Self-rated readiness did not. The authors’ conclusion was plain: the findings “support consistent resistance training across the menstrual cycle, without the need for phase-based adjustments.”

Where the evidence disagrees

If you want the one-line version, it is this. The two broadest reviews find trivial or no effect and rate the evidence as weak. One meta-analysis finds a medium effect, but on a kind of strength that is not lifting, and a small effect on lifting itself from three studies. One careful recent study of 28 lifters finds no meaningful difference and points at motivation instead.

That is mixed. I am not going to pretend it is settled in either direction. The honest reading is that if your cycle changes your strength, the average change is small enough that most studies cannot see it, and the ones that do see something see it mostly in the early follicular phase, the first days of your period.

A second honest point: average effects hide people. McNulty’s team gave three reasons they could not write general rules: the effect was trivial, the studies disagreed a lot with each other, and many were poor quality. So they recommended going by each woman’s own response. A population average does not tell you how your body responds.

What this means for the app

This is why the Ferrabelle home page says research on cycle phases and strength is mixed, so your own logs count for more than your cycle phase. I should be straight about how the app does that today. The Fe Score, the daily number behind the training call, does use your phase, and phase is its biggest single input at 35 percent. The other 65 percent comes from your own sleep, stress, recovery and calorie balance, and a hard session already done that day takes a few points off. So together your logs outweigh the phase, but the phase still counts for more than any one of them. Given the papers above, that weighting is something I am still working on.

I am aware this is less satisfying than a color-coded chart telling you to go heavy on day 12. But if the strongest evidence says the phase effect is small and personal, then a chart that says the same thing to every woman is going to be wrong for some of them. Your own history, three or four cycles deep, tells you more about you than any of the 78 studies McNulty reviewed.

If you want the detail on individual phases, I have written them up separately: the follicular phase and whether it really is your strong window, the luteal phase, and whether to plan whole training blocks around your cycle.

What to actually do with this

Lift on a schedule you can keep. Log how the session felt and what the bar did. After a few cycles, look at your own pattern. If a dip shows up at the same point every time, you will see it in your log, and you can plan around it. If it does not, you have saved yourself from planning around a problem you do not have.

I am a software developer, not a coach or a doctor, so take the training advice above as a summary of what the papers say, not as a program.

This is general information, not medical advice. Talk to your doctor about your own health.

Ferrabelle is in a closed test on Google Play right now. If you want to try it and see what your own logs say, you can join at ferrabelle.com/testers.

Sources