What Colorado Springs Women Need to Know About Exercise and Recovery At Altitude
If you're a woman who trains hard in Colorado Springs (running trails, chasing fourteeners, hitting the Incline) here's an uncomfortable truth: most of the training advice you follow was never studied on bodies like yours. On this episode of Springs and Things, host Carly Ries talks with Dr. Marissa Baranauskas, PhD, an exercise physiologist at UCCS and lead investigator at the 6% Performance Lab, about what the science actually says for female athletes, and how to apply it starting this week.
Why is women's training advice unreliable?
Only about 6% of exercise science research is conducted exclusively on women. Because of that gap, major governing bodies like the American College of Sports Medicine don't issue sex-specific training guidelines. The result is "general" advice built largely on male physiology, even though men and women adapt to and recover from training differently.
How does your menstrual cycle affect training and recovery?
Not every woman is equally sensitive to hormonal shifts, so the practical move is to track your own patterns. Log your symptom burden (aches, low-back pain, fatigue) across a full cycle alongside how key workouts feel. Baranauskas's research found that women's recovery tended to lag — sometimes a full day after a hard interval session — particularly in the window right before to right after bleeding (late luteal to early follicular), when delayed-onset muscle soreness and muscle damage run higher. That's a normal hormonal response, not a training failure, and a good cue to prioritize recovery or swap in an easy aerobic day.
Why is training at altitude harder for women?
At high intensities, women tend to desaturate (carrying less oxygen in the blood than men of similar fitness) partly because female airways are roughly 25–30% smaller even at the same body size. At Colorado's altitude, that effect may be amplified. You can't change airway size, but respiratory muscle training (breathing against resistance) can strengthen the breathing muscles to help sustain high ventilation.
Is it normal to lose your period from training?
No. Losing your period (amenorrhea, defined as 90+ days without menstruation) is a warning sign, not a badge of fitness, it can signal overtraining or underfueling and is hard to reverse. Subtler disruptions like anovulation and luteal phase defect are even more common in active women and often go unnoticed. At-home hormone monitors (like Mira) can catch these earlier, and are more reliable than drugstore ovulation sticks, which frequently miss ovulation in active women because their hormone thresholds are calibrated for less-active bodies.
What is Low Energy Availability, and how do I check it?
Low Energy Availability (LEA) is when too little energy is left over after exercise to support basic body functions like muscle repair and hormone health. The formula: (calories eaten − calories burned in exercise) ÷ kilograms of fat-free mass. Below 30 kcal/kg of fat-free mass per day is the clinical LEA threshold; around 45 is optimal. You can estimate this at home with a free diet log, your GPS watch's calorie estimate (a chest strap is more accurate than wrist heart rate), and a body-composition scale. Even a few days of LEA can hurt cycle function, recovery, and performance.
How should female athletes train through perimenopause and menopause?
Women lose type II (fast-twitch) muscle fibers earlier and faster than men, leading to greater declines in strength and power. Counterintuitively for endurance athletes, this is the time to add intensity (high-intensity efforts like hill repeats) plus strength training 2–3 times a week to preserve muscle power as you age.
Two things to start doing today
Monitor energy availability during hard training blocks, even once a week, can be a game-changer for performance, recovery, injury prevention, and hormonal health.
Track your symptom burden and work with your cycle instead of pushing through, back off on high-symptom days, and save intensity for when you feel strong.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Learn more about Dr. Baranauskas's research at sixpercentperformance.com or reach her at mbaranau@uccs.edu.
FAQ
Who should listen to this episode? Any active woman (recreational to competitive) especially runners, climbers, and endurance athletes training at altitude.
Is this medical advice? No. It's general education; consult your doctor for individual guidance.
What is the 6% Performance Lab? Dr. Baranauskas's UCCS research lab studying how stressors affect menstrual cycle health and how the cycle affects performance in female athletes.
This content is for general education and is not medical advice.
