Menstrual Cycle Tracking

Fluctuations in hormones over the menstrual cycle phases can impact female athletes’ athletic performance in different ways with each individual experiencing it differently. Tracking your athletes' menstrual cycle can give you a deeper understanding of your athletes and help you provide them with better support to help them perform throughout their cycle, and reduce their risk of injury.

1. It opens up a line of communication between you and your athletes to give you a better understanding of their well-being and help you to provide them with better support
2. It gives you insights to help you better manage their workload at certain stages of their cycle to reduce injury risk and improve performance
3. It gives you a better understanding of their performance and helps you tailor their training schedule and nutrition to maximize it

With RYPT, you can track your female athletes' menstrual cycle via a simple and secure daily questionnaire. Our daily questionnaire allows female athletes to securely communicate their cycle and report symptoms they're suffering from to their coaches and medical staff by answering a simple 5 question questionnaire.

Capturing Data

Settings

In the RYPT app, your female athletes can set their average cycle length and average menstruation phase length to help with phase prediction, however, when they submit their data the phase prediction feature in RYPT will adjust predictions to the actual data the athlete submits.

Questionnaire

In the RYPT app, your female athletes have the option to complete a daily Menstrual Cycle questionnaire. The questionnaire asks the client/athlete to answer 5 questions:

1. Are you menstruating today? (and is it the 1st day of your cycle)
2. If yes to question 1: Please rate the severity of your bleeding.
3. Are you experiencing any symptoms?
4. If yes to question 3: Please list your symptoms.
5. If yes to question 3: Please rate the severity your symptoms.

They can also record notes if they'd like to flag anything or give you further context around their responses.

The questionnaire is not compulsory and the athlete also has the option to answer questions within the questionnaire as "Prefer not to say" if they're not comfortable sharing certain information. The athlete does not need to fill it out every day in order for it to generate useful data however certain days like the first day of their cycle and the end of their menstruation days are required to carry out phase prediction.

It's recommended that athletes complete the questionnaire any days they experience symptoms to share that information with coaches and so that they're most common symptoms can be tracked in order to help them with strategies to better manage those symptoms.

This video gives you a quick demo of how simple it is for your athletes to fill out the lifestyle questionnaire in the RYPT app.

Video length: 2 mins

Sending Reminders

To improve compliance and engagement you can also send reminders from the calendar to athletes who haven't completed their questionnaire.

Interpreting Data

Calendar

Flags for important data

Your day-to-day monitoring can be done from the calendar which will be populated with all of your athletes' data as they submit it. Flags in the calendar will highlight when someone has submitted that they're menstruating that day, that they're suffering from symptoms, or if they've added notes with their questionnaire, so you quickly know where you may need to dig a little deeper. Identifying particular athletes that you may need to have a conversation with around how they're feeling and adjust their program accordingly.

In the group calendar view, if you click on the menstrual cycle event to open the sidebar you'll see each athletes' current phase for that date.

Mestrual Cycle Phase Prediction

In the individual calendar view, you can see a prediction of which phase of the menstrual cycle your athletes are in based on their responses to the menstrual cycle questionnaire. This data appears in the calendar with phase-specific training and nutrition tips for you and your athletes. You can also view predicted data for their future cycles so that you can better plan their upcoming training and better prepare them for upcoming matches/competitions.

Lifestyle Dashboard

Flags to indicate the athletes' menstrual cycle phase data, symptoms, and notes also appear in the Lifestyle Dashboard in the Analysis section to give more context to their perceptual readiness questionnaire responses. They can be clicked to open the full response data in the sidebar.

Athlete Feedback

Athletes receive feedback in the app after submitting their questionnaire including phase-specific training and nutrition tips and tips to help them manage their symptoms to help them optimize their performance throughout their cycle. They will also be provided with the predicted start date of their next cycle to help them plan their training around their cycle, and information on their most commonly reported symptoms to help them put strategies in place to manage them and reduce their impact on their performance.

This video gives you a full demo of the menstrual cycle tracking feature.

Video length: 2 mins 30 secs