Hey there, beautiful human. You're listening to Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter,

a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk

and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving

your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get and let's go.

Hello and welcome back to another episode on the Embrace for a podcast. Let me guess you're

in the week before your period and suddenly your workouts feel heavier than usual.

The same weight that you were doing for weeks before now feels harder to lift. Your energy is lower. Your motivation feels

very shaky. And even though this happens every month, it still tends to catch you off guard.

Like if you've ever thought, what the heck is wrong with me? I want you to hear this.

Nothing is wrong with you. That pre-period week comes real, real fast. There's lots of physical changes going on in your body. Estrogen, progesterone. They start to dip, which can affect your strength, your recovery and just how overall resilient you feel. Your system is naturally shifting gears and preparing for rest, whether you realize it or not. So when you try to train and push the same way that you're doing during those high energy weeks, your body is going to push back. And that's not failure. That's just feedback. Today, we're going to be breaking this down in a very simple way. And I want you to understand what's actually happening in your body during this phase and how to work with it so that you can keep moving forward without

frustration, without guilt, without feeling like you need to start over every single month.

Today we're going to be talking about why energy and strength can dip the week before your

period, how to adjust your training in practical, realistic ways, simple nutrition tweaks

that support this phase and how learning to work with your cycle builds consistency

and trust over time. All right. We're just going to jump right into today's episode because it's

kind of dense and I want to just get through it so that it's not super long, but it's easily

digestible, but breaks down things in a very organized manner. So I want to kind of walk you through

seven things that really matter when it comes to training the week before your period, kind of what's

going on in your body and how to support yourself. So the week stops feeling so frustrating. So number one,

your strength dips during certain points in your cycle. And this means it's important to know which phase you're in.

So you can really understand your body better. So let's talk about the ludial phase and what it is

and kind of what it actually means in real life. So the late ludial phase is basically those days

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