New Delhi: Elite sport runs on precision but the female body doesn’t always follow the script. After all, the barbell doesn’t care if you’re cramping, the runway doesn’t care if your body feels heavier, and the weighing scale doesn’t care if your body is retaining water.
“I didn’t know how my body would respond. The leap was built not just on technical improvements, but on learning to manage a body that often refused to cooperate. “It affects me mentally and physically. As a jumper, I need to stay lightweight, so I have to work extra hard. “But if it doesn’t happen the second month, it starts affecting my body.
Because they also dictate how her body responds to training, for Sojan, irregular periods don’t simply mean discomfort for a few days every month.
“It was the first day of my period,” Gyaneshwari said immediately after her silver medal-winning lift at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in July. “I have PCOD and weight gain problems,” Sojan told HT before heading to Japan. “The first month if my period doesn’t come, it’s manageable,” she said. I can’t perform well, can’t sleep well, gain weight…” “Competition doesn’t wait,” she told HT, explaining that the broader training plan remains unchanged because athletes must be ready to perform at any time. “I could get my period even if I am at a major tournament, as it happened this time at CWG, so I also need to be used to it.”
With PCOS delaying her periods for weeks, Sojan and her support team have tried natural remedies such as papaya and sesame laddoos in the hope of inducing menstruation, though with little success. “My muscles feel loose. “More than injury risk, I feel this affects my journey mentally and physically. “But after they arrive, I feel so much better.
I gain weight and I don’t even feel like I look like an athlete,” Sojan said. “The first two days when my period arrives… I feel dead,” she said. “The commercial wellness industry has popularised cycle syncing,” Dr Samuel Pullinger, head of performance science at the Inspire Institute of Sport, told HT. “But in high-performance sport, it’s really based around individual symptom tracking over time, not following a generic template.”
