Exercise is powerful medicine, and women struggle to use it to heal and support their hormones instead of wrecking them partly because the type and dose that's right for one woman may be the exact thing that doesn't work at all for her girlfriend or her sister.

Many women also haven't been taught how to listen to their own hormonal talk: the clues our hormones give us all day tell us how they are doing with our current diet, lifestyle, and workout style. Instead of heeding their hormonal messages, they keep going—or worse, they double down on exercise that isn't working, assuming something is wrong with them, that they need to try harder, #beastmode, #noexcuses, or other nonsense that makes women think it's their fault. So they trudge ahead; they keep going, and with that they drive their hormones into further disarray.

Exercise is a stress on our hormonal system and metabolism, and we can harness that for favorable change to our health and body composition, or it can become just another stress on our already overburdened system, and in some cases, it can backfire entirely by causing weight gain that can be due to an increase in appetite after we've upped our exercise.

Appropriate testing is an incredibly useful tool to see how your hormones are doing; however, knowing how to make sense of the cues that you get from your hormones every day can be super useful—and empowering especially when it comes to knowing whether your current exercise regimen is working for your hormones.