As author of The Women’s Book Volume 1 a common question I get is about hormonal birth control and athletic performance.    Every day more and more women are entering sport or simply becoming more active.  Research statistics show a large percentage of those women are using birth control.  This makes the topic of birth control and athletic performance an important one to address.

I had intended to cover this topic in detail in the forthcoming Women’s Book Volume 2.   However, realistically that book will not be finished any time soon.  Since it’s such an important issue, I decided to write a shorter booklet instead to address it.

As would be expected, hormonal birth control has an enormous impact on every aspect of a woman’s physiology.   While research has determined many of those effects, much remains to be learned.  Almost no research exists on the patch, ring or hormonal IUD for example.

Hormonal birth control has an effect on nearly every aspect of a woman’s body.  Her hormones are impacted along with how she uses carbohydrate and fat for fuel.  Birth control also has the potential to impact on either short-term performance or long-term training adaptations.

Unfortunately, there is little information on the topic outside of specialized medical textbooks and research.   That writing is invariably difficult to read and gives little in the way of practical advice on the topic of birth control and athletic performance.

My goal in writing this booklet was to remedy that.  To analyze the research and present it in a distilled form for easier reading and understanding.  As importantly I wanted to provide real-world recommendations based on that data.

Topics in Birth Control and Athletic Performance

In it, I examine a number of topics related to athletes and active women.    The first chapters examine the menstrual cycle along with the effect of a woman’s naturally produced hormones.  A detailed examination of hormonal birth control follows those chapters.   The sheer complexity of this topic makes this one of the most complex chapters.

With that background, I examine birth control as it pertains to female athletes/active women.  First I look at the well established positives and negatives along with the impact on body weight, body composition, injury risk and others.

Following that are chapters examining the research on the impact of hormonal birth control on aerobic and anaerobic activities along with strength training and muscular gain.    For each I first discuss the impact of birth control on short-term performance.   Then I look the effect on long-term adaptations to training.   In many cases, there is ample research (although much of it is poorly done), in others very little.

The book ends with an overview of birth control recommendations based on the research to date.   This includes examining different situations a woman might find herself in.  This impacts on whether or not a woman might choose hormonal birth control along with what is optimal.

My goal in this book is not only to help female athletes make an informed choice regarding hormonal birth control and athletic performance.   In writing this book, I tried to find a balance between technical and applied information.  I also provided a full reference list for readers wishing to delve further.

10% from every purchase from will be donated to The Women’s Sports Foundation.  This is a 501c3 charity founded by Billie Jean King and dedicated to creating leaders by ensuring all girls access to sports.

Since the beginning of medical history, women’s unique physiology and needs have gone almost ignored as women were treated as “little men”. It’s only recently that research has begun to examine the differences although more is appearing almost daily on the topic.

The first in the realm of sports nutrition wasn’t done until the 1970’s and even today women are studied perhaps 20-30% as frequently as men.  Even when examining that limited data, differences have been found in almost every physiological system yet examined.

A partial list would include differences in a woman’s nutritional requirements along with how her body uses nutrients after a meal or during exercise.  Women both store and lose fat in a different pattern distinct from men.   There are differences in the stress response, how her body adapts to dieting and weight loss.  Women even differ from men in how they metabolize caffeine.

In some cases, those differences may be fairly subtle.  In others they are quite extreme.  And yet even in 2019 they often go completely ignored.

In the realm of dieting, fat loss and muscle gain, approaches developed by male coaches for male athletes are often either ineffective or, in some cases, outright damaging. Certainly there are commonalities that always apply but a woman’s unique physiology must be taken into account for optimal results.

Women also face issues such as menstrual cycle and hormonal dysfunction or bone loss that men simply never face. There is also the vast amount of misinformation about how women should eat or exercise. Nutritionally deficient diets are often coupled with ineffective exercise programs and endless numbers of women don’t get the results that they should or could with a better approach.

Arguably the primary consideration for women is the menstrual cycle, the roughly 28 day cycle where her hormones vary drastically from week to week, altering her physiology along with it.

To that there is the frequent presence of what I call hormonal modifiers, situations that alter a woman’s physiology in some way. Examples include hormonal birth control, Poly-Cystic Ovary Syndrome, sub-clinical hyperandrogenism (elevated testosterone levels) and menstrual cycle dysfunction including amenorrhea. The age-related hormonal changes that occur during peri-menopause and menopause add a further layer of complexity.

The Women’s Book Vol 1: A Guide to Nutrition, Fat Loss and Muscle Gain sets out to address the above issues and more. In it, I look at the specifics of a woman’s physiology, not only how it differs significantly from a man’s, but how it’s unique characteristics affect how an optimal nutrition, fat loss diet or muscle gain approach should be set up. At over 400 pages virtually no topic goes undiscussed and the book represents a complete resource for women’s unique needs.

While much of the information is related to exercise or training, this is not just a book for the lean female athlete or dieter. I have striven to make it not only as comprehensive as possible by discussing not only the hormonal modifiers listed above but attempting to include a variety of distinct training goals such as general health and fitness (including bone health), the serious trainee, and physique competition along with strength/power, endurance and other performance sports.

Hence the title: The Women’s Book.

Disclaimer: The book does not discuss nutritional needs for pregnancy or breast feeding, Eating Disorder recovery or medical conditions as these should be addressed with a medical professional.

10% from every purchase from will be donated to The Women’s Sports Foundation.  This is a 501c3 charity founded by Billie Jean King and dedicated to creating leaders by ensuring all girls access to sports.