Chelsea Women have become the first football club in the world to tailor their training programme around players’ menstrual cycles in an attempt to enhance performance and cut down on injuries, Telegraph Sport can reveal.

Since August, Chelsea, who are second in the Women’s Super League, one point behind Manchester City, have designed players’ individual plans around the phases of their menstrual cycle. It is a groundbreaking initiative that – if adopted elsewhere – could revolutionise the way in which female athletes are managed.

It is hoped that factoring in the menstrual cycle to training and nutrition regimes could help control the weight fluctuations which often affect athletes during certain phases of their cycles and reduce susceptibility to soft tissue injuries, such as anterior cruciate ligament damage, which has been linked to menstruation.

The initiative has been driven by manager Emma Hayes, who felt that for too long female footballers had been treated as physically the same as their male counterparts and that specific allowances needed to be made for the impact of menstruation on performance.

“It is fair to say, I am a female coach in an industry where women have always been treated like small men,” she said. “The application of anything from rehab to strength and conditioning to tactical all come from the basis of what men do.

“The starting point is that we are women and, ultimately, we go through something very different to men on a monthly basis. And we have to have a better understanding of that because our education failed us at school; we didn’t get taught about our reproduction systems. It comes from a place of wanting to know more about ourselves and understanding how we can improve our performance.”

The idea of studying her players’ menstrual cycles came to Hayes while she watched them lose the 2016 FA Cup final against Arsenal.

“We had a lot of players in and around their period for that game,” she said. “I remember watching players close the ball down and thinking everything was reactive and second-best. That was the starting point.”

Last February, Hayes met physiologist and international cross-country runner Dr Georgie Bruinvels, who has developed the FitrWoman app for sports science company Orreco. The app allows women to input information about their menstrual health and related symptoms, which can then be logged and monitored.