Talking about periods with your coach: why only 11% of athletes do (and how to change it)

Only 11% of athletes talk about their menstrual cycle with their coach: 4% if he's a man, 55% if she's a woman. And 88% learned these things on their own. It isn't disinterest: it is the absence of a safe channel. What data from 1,086 athletes across 57 sports show, what coaches can actually say, and how to open the channel without forcing anyone to expose herself.

Here is a figure that should make anyone who coaches girls stop and think: when the coach is a man, only 4% of athletes talk to him about the menstrual cycle. Not because the cycle doesn't matter — it matters a great deal — but because there's no simple, safe, non-embarrassing way to do it. The problem in youth women's sport is often not the athletes' motivation. It's the silence.

In short

  • Only 11% of athletes talk about their cycle with their coach; 4% if he's a man, 55% if she's a woman.
  • 88% learned these things on their own: formal education is almost absent.
  • The gap does not depend on competitive level: it affects everyone, not just the youngest or amateurs.
  • The answer isn't "force them to talk", but to build basic awareness and channels that don't require exposing oneself.

How many athletes talk about their cycle with their coach?

Eleven in a hundred. That falls to four in a hundred when the coach is a man, and rises to fifty-five in a hundred with a female coach. These are the figures from a study of 1,086 athletes in Sweden and Norway, and they are the clearest picture we have of a communication channel that simply doesn't exist.

The study spans 57 sports (Höök et al., 2022, IJERPH), and its full set of results captures a precise void:

And one detail that widens the problem: there is no significant difference in knowledge by competitive level (p = 0.171). The gap isn't confined to the young or the amateur: it's everywhere.

One necessary caveat on age: Höök and colleagues' sample includes adult and adolescent athletes together, and the data are not broken down by age band. So we do not have a prevalence measured on 13-year-olds — which is no accident, given that only 6% of studies in sport and exercise science are conducted exclusively on women (Cowley et al., 2021). The picture describes a real phenomenon; the specific number for the youngest athletes simply hasn't been measured yet.

Why doesn't an athlete talk about her cycle with her coach?

Not because the topic doesn't concern her, but because there is no comfortable, private channel to bring it through: athletes live their cycle every month, they simply have no way to say so without exposing themselves in front of the group. It's easy to read that 4% as indifference. It's the opposite. In qualitative research on international rugby players, 93% reported cycle-related symptoms and two-thirds perceived an impact on performance (Findlay et al., 2020, BJSM). Athletes live the topic every month. They simply have no comfortable way to bring it to the person coaching them — especially if he's a man, especially at 13-14, especially in front of teammates.

Silence, in other words, is a channel problem, not a willingness problem. And it has a measurable cost: among adolescents aged 10-18, between 25.2% and 61.1% avoid or reduce physical activity during their period, often out of fear of leaks and embarrassment rather than pain (Harvey et al., 2025, BMC Women's Health). Those are lost training sessions nobody records — a mechanism we covered in detail in the cycle and performance. And periods are not the only topic that stays outside the changing room: urinary leakage during sport follows exactly the same curve of silence.

How do you open the channel without forcing anyone to expose herself?

By working on both sides at once: baseline literacy for the staff, guaranteed privacy for the athlete. The wrong answer would be to ask every girl to "open up" to the coach. The right answer works on two sides at once:

  1. Raise the staff's baseline awareness. A coach doesn't need to become a gynaecologist (in the study, only 3% of athletes had access to one through sport). But he should know that fatigue, pain or a dip in energy can have an explanation, and treat them as information, not excuses. He should know, for instance, that a cycle that disappears is not a sign of good training but a possible signal of low energy availability, or that the words used to comment on a body stay with a girl for years.
  2. Give the athlete a channel that doesn't force her to expose herself. This is where technology can help, if well designed: the athlete observes her own signals in private, and staff receive only an aggregated, anonymous picture of the team — never an individual's data.

This second point is decisive precisely because of the "4% with a male coach" figure: an anonymous dashboard gives staff a useful signal without placing the girl in the embarrassing conversation that today simply doesn't happen.

What each person can do, starting tomorrow

BAB's role

BAB was born exactly in this void. It gives the athlete a private space to recognise her own signals, an educational layer that fills the 88% "learned on my own", and clubs only aggregated, anonymous signals — never an individual's cycle or health. It opens the channel that doesn't exist today, without forcing anyone into a conversation she doesn't want. Because breaking the silence doesn't mean forcing people to speak: it means finally making it easy to.

Sources

This article is for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice.

How many athletes talk about their cycle with their coach?

In a study of 1,086 athletes from Sweden and Norway, only 11% discussed menstrual topics with their coach. The share dropped to 4% when the coach was a man and rose to 55% with a female coach (Höök et al., 2022).

Should a male coach know about his athletes' cycles?

He does not need to know each athlete's individual data — that stays private. But he should have basic awareness of the topic and create an environment where talking about it isn't taboo. Tools like BAB let staff read only aggregated, anonymous signals, without putting the athlete in the position of having to expose herself.

Why do so few athletes talk about it?

Because education is almost entirely informal: in the same study, 88% of athletes had learned these things on their own. There's no shared language and no safe channels. Silence is not disinterest: it's the absence of a simple, non-embarrassing way to communicate.

How can I talk to my coach about my period without feeling embarrassed?

You don't have to share personal details. A functional, training-centred sentence is enough: "my energy is low today, I'd rather reduce the load" tells staff everything they need without exposing anything private. Coaches don't need the clinical fact; they need to know how to pitch the session. And if an environment makes even that sentence impossible, the problem is the environment, not the athlete.

Do you need a female coach for athletes to talk about it?

It helps a great deal, but it is not the structural fix. In the study of 1,086 athletes, the share discussing menstrual matters rises from 4% with a male coach to 55% with a female coach (Höök et al., 2022): the gap is huge, and it says the coach's gender matters. But 53% of athletes rated their coach's knowledge of female athlete health as poor, and 88% had learned these things on their own — so the gap is one of training and of channel, not only of gender. Swapping people is not enough: you have to raise the staff's baseline knowledge and give the athlete a way to communicate that doesn't force her to expose herself.

What else do athletes not talk about with their coaches?

The silence is not limited to periods. Among adolescent female athletes, 87% say they would not discuss urinary leakage during activity with their coach, and between 69% and 90% have never heard of pelvic floor training (Rial Rebullido et al., 2021). It is the same mechanism: a common symptom, no shared language to name it, and therefore no conversation.

What can a coach say to make the topic less taboo?

A few words, said once and backed up by behaviour: "you can talk about this here, and nobody gets judged for it." Then consistency — don't comment on bodies, don't treat fatigue as an excuse, don't ask for details. In Höök and colleagues' study (2022), 53% of athletes rated their coach's knowledge of female-athlete health as poor: closing that gap is the staff's responsibility, not the girls'.