Nearly 250 participants joined the latest World Aquatics global webinar focused on women’s health, with athletes, coaches and experts leading an engaging session to enhance understanding of the impact of the menstrual cycle and managing symptoms in aquatic sports.
World Aquatics launched the global webinar series dedicated to women’s health in April 2025, following strong engagement on the topic during the World Aquatics Swimming Championships (25m) 2024 in Budapest.
Olympic Swimming gold medallist Pernille Blume (Denmark) and Open Water Swimming Olympian Caroline Jouisse (France) led the session, and provided powerful testimonies on menstrual stigma in sport and management of menstrual cycle-related symptoms.
“The key takeaways from this webinar are that both physical and psychological symptoms related to the menstrual cycle can be expected, as well as potential side effects associated with hormonal contraception. Intense symptoms that impact daily activity should not be considered as normal, and identifying when symptoms occur and trying different strategies to manage them is recommended,” Jouisse summarised.
The session was interactive throughout, and featured a series of polls on the participants’ main symptoms of the menstrual cycle and when they most feel the effects of those symptoms.
A range of symptoms were identified through the polls, with common symptoms including mood swings, abdominal pain or menstrual cramps, lower back pain and menstrual fatigue.
"I think the cycle can be truly empowering. One thing for sure is that everything changes in nature, and for women we have to learn how to go through change every month. That makes women highly empowered and strong mentally"
Elite coach Tom Rushton offered a coach’s insight on how to support female athletes, and sport scientist Marine Dupuit from the French Institute of Sport Performance also joined the session to present research on how the menstrual cycle can affect performance.
Rushton underlined the need for coaches to build relationships and strong communication with their athletes.
“I think as a coach when you have something that is impacting your performance in training or competition, you are going to start to look at the causes and what you can do to help alleviate that. Educating yourself on things like the menstrual cycle can be helpful. It might not be the first thing I would think of as a cause for some symptoms because I haven’t experienced that, so knowing the menstrual cycle could be a reason for that is really important,” he said.
The webinar discussed potential strategies to help manage menstrual cycle-related symptoms, including nutritional strategies based on anti-inflammatory food, iron-rich food, tryptophane-rich food and magnesium-rich food, therapeutic strategies to reduce pains, and ways to promote a healthy sleep routine.
Stretching strategies, specific warm-ups to reduce injury risk, ways to reduce stress, and how to adapt communication and training were also outlined.
"There is no miracle solution to manage symptoms, there is a lot of trial and error to find what works for you"
The next global webinar focused on women’s health will take place on Tuesday 23 September, and discuss the topic of “Optimising training and performance across the menstrual cycle”.
Further resources on how the menstrual cycle affects elite female athletes can be found here.