Beyond strength and endurance: menstrual cycle complexity in cognition, movement, and performance

Despite growing recognition of the importance of women’s health in sport, our understanding of how the menstrual cycle and associated hormonal fluctuations influence perceptual-cognitive and motor skills remains limited. Research has historically centered on reproduction and gross physical outcomes, for example, endurance, strength, and power, leaving skills, such as decision making, anticipation, reaction time, and movement coordination underexplored. This commentary highlights current evidence linking menstrual phases with changes in cognition and motor behavior, noting both methodological challenges and the importance of moving beyond deficit models to embrace complexity. In this commentary, we argue that sport provides a powerful, accessible context to investigate these links, with implications extending beyond athletes to education, defense, and other high-performance domains where accurate, rapid, and skilled performance is critical. Moreover, by embedding evidencebased menstrual literacy into practice and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, the field can better support women to optimize performance across all stages of life.