Period Pain, PMS, PCOS: Why Movement Matters More Than You Think
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, I’m diving into a fascinating piece of research I spotted in The Week; a meta-analysis of 82 studies from University College London looking at how physical activity affects menstrual pain and PMS. The findings are striking: women who move less have a 67% higher risk of painful periods and a 22% higher risk of PMS symptoms.
But this episode isn’t just about the data, it’s about how it intersects with real life. I’m sharing my own PCOS story, from being diagnosed at 17 and barely moving, to being 47, active, and experiencing far fewer symptoms. We’ll also unpack the confused (and sometimes misleading) world of cycle-syncing advice online, including what’s genuinely helpful and what’s been oversimplified by social media.
Plus, I’m talking about the growing role of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy: where they can fit into women’s hormonal and metabolic health, and why it’s not a choice between medication or movement. For many women, the two work beautifully together.
Whether you experience period pain, PMS, PCOS, or you're simply curious about how movement and hormones overlap, this episode is all about giving you tools, not rules. Think of it as a realistic, compassionate look at women’s health, packed with evidence, lived experience, and nuance.
In this episode:
- The UCL study linking activity levels to menstrual pain and PMS
- My PCOS journey: 17 vs 47
- What cycle syncing gets right, and very, very wrong
- Why influencers and experts like Dr Stacy Sims and Dr Vonda Wright create both empowerment and confusion
- How exercise supports hormones, mood, metabolism, and overall cycle health
- A realistic approach to training across the menstrual cycle
- Where GLP-1 medications fit into the picture
- Why movement is a powerful tool but never the only one.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hi and welcome to another episode of the Emma Gunn Show, where I wanted to talk about something that came up in my DMs and emails after last week's episode on Creighton. |
| 0:19.6 | And it sort of coincided as well with seeing the findings of a |
| 0:23.7 | study in the week. And I thought, okay, this is something that we need to talk about. So to frame |
| 0:29.8 | this episode for you, it is going to be across the themes of hormones, movement, misinformation, |
| 0:55.7 | and just a little bit of a soupsaint of how GLP1 sort of play into all of that. Because a lot of the messages that I got after the creatine episode were, okay, great, I'm definitely going to be taking creatine. However, is it true that I have to work out like this during my luteal phase, like this during my follicular phase? And do I have to have certain rest days and if I do if I get it wrong will I undo all my hard work that came up from a lot of people so let's get into that |
| 1:04.1 | and before we get into the research and also just generally this sort of obviously there's an appetite |
| 1:08.5 | out there from you my most excellent listeners to know about this so that you can kind of not, so that you can not feel tripped up by the decisions that you want to make and you can go to the gym or you can choose to do a certain type of exercise and feel good about that decision, not worrying that you've heard somebody online tell you that if you exercise like that on that day, you're going to absolutely undo everything, which is a nonsense. |
| 1:29.1 | But let's, before we get into all of that, I just want to frame something else, |
| 1:32.3 | which is very anecdotal, it's very personal. |
| 1:34.7 | But it absolutely influences how I view a lot of this information, |
| 1:39.1 | whether I nod along or whether I don't. |
| 1:41.3 | And so I want to take you back to the 1990s. I was 17 years old and I was not |
| 1:48.8 | feeling particularly great. And the reason I was not feeling particularly great is because for |
| 1:52.7 | about five years, my weight had been steadily increasing, my skin had been getting spotier and |
| 1:57.8 | spotty and spotty and spotter. My facial hair had gone from fluffy to |
| 2:01.9 | really quite aggressive and I had slight little bald patches. I also had a lot of body hair. |
| 2:09.7 | And I sort of over those five years from 12 to 17, I sort of seemed to, in inverted commas, |
| 2:17.2 | inexplicably just expand and get hairier and spotier. |
| 2:22.3 | It's not a great way to sort of blossom and bloom, especially when you see a lot of people, |
| 2:29.5 | a lot of your school friends going from being girly to being really beautiful young women. It was kind of, |
| 2:36.3 | it felt, it felt, you know, felt a bit unfair. But what turned out was five years, after five |
| 2:42.6 | years of going through all of this, I was very lucky in that I had a young GP, a young male GP |
... |
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