What If You Are Not Inconsistent?
Last week, something felt easy.
Not necessarily easy in the sense that the work required no effort, but accessible. You could find the strength. The correction made sense in your body. You recovered well enough to come back the next day. Perhaps you felt unusually comfortable being seen, taking space, talking to people, trying something before you knew whether it would work.
And then something changes.
The same combination takes more effort. You are still capable of doing it, but access is different. Feedback reaches you differently. You need longer to recover. Noise bothers you more. You are hungry at a time when you normally are not. You would rather be left alone. Or perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all: you simply notice that being the dancer you were last week suddenly costs more.
It is easy to look at the difference and ask:
Why can’t I be consistent?
You experienced variation.
You called it inconsistency.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Variation does not tell you what caused it
There are many reasons why the same dancer may not experience the same work in the same way every day. You may have slept badly, accumulated rehearsal load, travelled, eaten differently or recovered poorly. You may be stressed, in pain, becoming ill, working on particularly demanding material or responding to an environment that is costing you more than usual. Sometimes variation is simply variation, and there may be no useful pattern to find.
There is, however, another possibility: some of the changes may recur.
Perhaps you have had this week before. Not exactly, and not with the kind of predictability that would allow you to circle a date on a calendar and know who you will be when it arrives, but with enough familiarity that, once you begin paying attention, something feels recognisable.
There may be stretches when physical effort feels unusually expensive, or when your appetite changes noticeably. At other times, being watched may cost you more, whereas confidence or artistic expression seems more readily available at another point. Noise, corrections or social interaction may become harder to tolerate for a few days and then cease to be remarkable.
One occurrence tells you very little. Recurrence changes the question.
Inconsistency and rhythm are different categories
When we describe something as inconsistent, we usually mean that it cannot reliably be counted on to behave in a particular way. There is variation, but no meaningful pattern within that variation; consequently, the problem appears to be one of unreliability.
Rhythm contains variation too, although the variation is organised differently. Something changes, returns, intensifies, recedes or becomes more or less available under recognisable conditions. The presence of change does not destroy the pattern because the change is part of it.
Day and night are not inconsistent because one is light and the other dark. A piece of music does not lose its structure because its intensity rises and falls.
The distinction becomes more consequential when we apply it to ourselves, because change alone establishes neither inconsistency nor rhythm. If your access to strength, confidence, concentration, recovery or social openness changes, the fact of that change does not yet tell you what kind of variation you are experiencing.
For female dancers, menstrual-cycle rhythm is one possible contributor to recurring variation. It is not the only one, and knowing where you are in a cycle does not automatically tell you how you will feel or perform. Sleep, workload, stress, nutrition, pain, environment and recovery continue to matter; meanwhile, those conditions may interact with one another rather than operating as cleanly separable causes.
The useful possibility is therefore more modest:
Something you have been experiencing as random may not be entirely random.
That matters because randomness and recurrence give you different things to work with.
The label changes what you try to fix
Imagine that every few weeks your training becomes more costly. You do not know that it happens every few weeks; you simply know that today is difficult.
If you experience each occurrence as an isolated failure, the problem appears to be you.
You were stronger before.
You were confident last week.
You handled this workload perfectly well the last time.
Why can’t you do it now?
The natural response is to try to restore the previous version of yourself. You may push harder, become frustrated by the additional effort or start looking for whatever has gone wrong, because the standard against which you are measuring today is the version of you who could do this more easily.
Sometimes that is exactly what the situation requires. Some difficult days need to be trained through, while some losses of capacity come from insufficient preparation, poor recovery, illness, excessive workload or another condition that deserves attention. A menstrual cycle should not become an explanation applied retrospectively to everything that feels difficult.
At the same time, if a particular change does tend to recur, meeting every occurrence as though it were a sudden personal failure creates a different problem: you keep being surprised by something you may have encountered many times before.
The useful question is no longer only, How do I get back to normal?
It becomes:
Have I seen this before?
A pattern does not have to become a verdict either
There is an obvious trap here. You can replace I am inconsistent with it is my hormones and still be making the same underlying mistake: reaching for an explanation before you have enough information.
A general model of the menstrual cycle might suggest that a particular phase is associated with certain experiences, while your actual experience that month may be quite different. You may feel socially open at a time when you expected to withdraw, or physically powerful when you thought energy would be lower. Meanwhile, a difficult rehearsal week, disrupted sleep, travel or an approaching illness may explain far more about what you are experiencing than your cycle does.
The point, therefore, is not to find a better label and apply it faster. It is to become more accurate about what is actually happening.
General knowledge about menstrual cycles can tell you what may happen across a population; it cannot tell you reliably what happens in your body. Your current signals matter. Your circumstances matter. Over time, your own recurring evidence matters too.
The first shift is not from inconsistency to certainty.
It is from judgment to investigation.
What becomes possible when the question stays open
There is a substantial difference between saying, I never know which version of myself I am going to get, and saying, I don’t yet know whether these changes have a pattern.
The first statement closes around an identity: you are unreliable. The second preserves uncertainty, but it is a useful uncertainty because there is now something you can learn.
You may eventually discover that part of what you experience does appear to follow a cycle-related rhythm, while another part is better explained by sleep, workload or stress. You may find that several conditions interact, so that a recurring phase is manageable under one workload and costly under another. You may identify strong patterns in some areas of your experience and almost none in others.
You may also discover that something you have spent years trying to eliminate was never evidence that you lacked discipline in the first place.
Train Like a Woman was built around this problem: not around the promise that a menstrual cycle can explain a dancer to herself, nor around the idea that every fluctuation should be accommodated, but around developing enough body literacy and personal evidence to distinguish what is actually happening, recognise what tends to repeat and make more intelligent decisions from there.
The work helps female dancers bring menstrual-cycle and female-physiology information into the reality of their own training, recovery and performance: not as a generic prescription for what they should feel at different times of the month, but as information they can test against their own patterns and current conditions. Over time, that makes it possible to move from recurring surprise towards greater anticipation, and from adaptation based on assumption towards adaptation based on evidence.
Before adaptation, there has to be perception. Although knowledge can give you possibilities to investigate, it is the gradual accumulation of relevant detail that allows distinctions to emerge between a bad day, an external condition, a recurring pattern and a rhythm that may be useful to understand.
So, if you notice yourself thinking, Why can’t I just be consistent?, there may be a question worth placing before it:
What, exactly, have I been calling inconsistent?
