Five Years on from the USWNT Introducing Menstrual Cycle Tracking, Sports Science for Female Athletes Remains Under-Developed. So What Can Athletes and Practitioners Do about it?

Leaders Performance Podcast

When the US women’s national soccer team started tracking their menstrual cycles, it was seen as groundbreaking.

At least part of their success in claiming back to back World Cup titles in 2019 was attributed to the fact they could adjust individual training plans and nutrition based on the data.

Ellie Maybury was part of the USWNT backroom team that introduced this initiative and, more than half a decade on, tech support for female athletes doesn’t seem to have progressed as much as she’d have hoped. At least in soccer.

“A lot of the technology we have absorbed into the women’s game has come from the men’s game or men’s sports environments,” she tells the People Behind the Tech podcast.

“And maybe some of the processes and metrics that come with that get transferred as well.”

Maybury, who recently founded Soccer Herformance, a performance consultancy for female soccer players, is in the hotseat on episode two of this series.

She addressed the issues that hold back female high performance, from managing the lack of objective datapoints [4:50] and the importance of education for athletes who often misunderstand their own bodies through no fault of their own [26:20], to the need to take athletes on a journey while remaining honest about the limitations of research at the present time [17:00].

Check out episode one:

Paige Bueckers Proved Her ACL Injury Was Behind her at March Madness, but, as Andrea Hudy tells us, Questions Must Still Be Asked about the Injuries that Afflict Female Athletes

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