LET launches Performances Institute and hormonal health partnership with Jessica Ennis-Hill; Olympic champion's app aims to optimise performance and prevent injury by enabling female athletes to understand their menstrual cycles
Monday 11 September 2023 16:48, UK
The Ladies European Tour and Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill have joined forces to prioritise players' hormonal health with the launch of the LET Performance Institute (LETPI).
A collaboration with Ennis-Hill's cycle mapping app 'Jennis' gives players access to pioneering research and technology on how to enhance their performance during each stage of their menstrual cycle.
"[Jennis] started very much on a pregnancy, post-natal focus, because that's my latter journey out of sport. I learnt so much about my physiology as a woman and the hormonal changes that you go through," said Olympic champion Ennis-Hill.
"It evolved over the year or so of launching and became this focus on how we support females and female athletes to know more about their bodies.
"It's also understanding those four phases of a woman's menstrual cycle and how you can get the most out of your performance through known patterns, tapping into how you change personally as a woman on a day-to-day and month-to month basis.
"The app gives you tailored education and information about your body and it personalises workouts to what phases you're going through."
The new LETPI will make opportunities available to LET players to work with service providers in sports medicine, sports nutrition, strength and conditioning, health screening, research and development, with the aim to be a driving force in health and performance within elite women's sport.
"I'm very much looking forward to working with the women's golf tour," said Ennis-Hill. "Because there's so much thinking time [in golf], you can be in your head, talking yourself out of shots, or thinking about the last thing that's happened and not focusing on the next thing."
As well as pursing optimal performance, women's hormonal health is also becoming a key factor in injury prevention.
ACL injuries plagued women's football last season, forcing the likes of Leah Williamson and Beth Mead among others to miss the Women's World Cup.
Initial studies have shown anatomical and hormonal differences mean women are up to ten times more likely to suffer an ACL rupture, with research from Texas Tech University finding women are at highest risk during the first two days of ovulation.
"When I was in the thick of the career, there was very much a focus on nutrition, psychology, biomechanics, all those different elements. There was an awareness around menstrual health, but there was never a real focus," said Ennis-Hill.
"I think if you speak to many female athletes from different sports, they all know that they feel very different through different phases of their cycle and different times in their life.
"That further education around what that means for training, how to push, how to back off, how that affects injuries, and also how to create strategies around competitions and performing, is something that is only really starting to become a focus I'd say in the past few years."
Dina Asher-Smith, Eilish McColgan and Heather Watson have all recently spoken out about the impact their menstrual cycle's have had on their performances, helping to to break the stigma around issues which impacts all women.
"There are so many times when I trained and I'd have testing weeks where it didn't go to plan and I didn't have that full context around why I was performing at that standard, where I expected more of myself," said Ennis-Hill.
"If I had the patterns, the data, the research behind it, it gives you not just a physical benefit, but also that psychological forgiveness of actually not being a million miles away from where you need to be.
"There's a lack of funding and there's that massive gender data gap and it needs to be addressed, because it's a huge area that can have a massive impact on performance."
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