Week 1 : Workshop 1Â
Breaking The Cycle & Building New Coping Mechanisms
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In order to build a healthier relationship with your body, rest and exercise, we need to understand where the line is with using exercise as a constructive coping strategy and when it’s actually doing your body a disservice. This workshop explores how coping mechanisms are built and the steps you can take to deconstruct unhelpful cycles and begin to replace unhealthy coping mechanisms with more supportive ones to support you in your HA recovery journey and beyond
Week 1 : Workshop 2Â
Self Care
Self-care is a foundation of recovery for many reasons, which we will explore throughout this workshop. You may relate to using exercise or restriction to deal with uncomfortable emotions and feelings that come up and this is why these have become your coping mechanisms and may have led you down the path to HA. A lot of unmet needs can manifest as urges to engage in unhelpful behaviours, and so focussing on other aspects of self-care not only help us to regulate our emotions and feelings better, but also help us to reconnect with our body.
In this workshop, we explore the concept of interoceptive awareness, which you can test using the resources provided and you can improve by implementing basic forms of self-care within your day.
Use the self-care assessment tool to identify areas of your life that need a little bit more care and make a plan using your accountability journal to integrate these within your week.
Checking in with your body’s emotional and physical needs throughout the day can help you to understand the emotions that you might be experiencing throughout your recovery journey and meet these needs through more constructive strategies rather than using exercise and food to deal with them.
In the last workshop, we explored the surfing the urge and 5 minute rule strategy, and the self-care toolkit in the resources can be used for inspiration to help you try out new coping strategies.Â
Week 2 : Workshop 3Â
Your Recovery Routine
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Although exercise may be used to de-stress, we know that when we have HA, exercise is actually more of a physical stress on the body. This study found that after just 20 minutes of moderate cycling lead to an almost 50% higher level of cortisol in individuals with HA in comparison to those with a regular menstrual cycle. Exercise is a stress on the body for everyone, but when we give our body enough resources to recover from it, it’s not a bad thing. You’ll find resources in the HA Hub to help you to fuel exercise better (check out the fuelling timeline in the resources tab to challenge fuelling around exercise better this week) but it’s also important that we do reduce this overall stress load on your body in order to help you to restore your menstrual cycle.
Think about what your body would say to you if it could talk. If you’ve had a particularly stressful day, maybe that HIIT class isn’t a good idea- maybe a walk with a friend or a stretching session might be a better fit.
In our next workshop, we’ll explore how to slow down and deal with the guilt that comes up with that, but this week try to make a plan that you can stick to that encompasses a reduction in the intensity and/or frequency of your training using the workout planner resource.
Week 3 : Workshop 4
 Moving Into The Slow Lane And Dealing With Rest
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We know we need to slow down to get your period back, and remember- this isn’t forever! But establishing new coping strategies will serve you forever, so use this time to really challenge leaning into rest, self-care and meeting your needs without using food or exercise.
It’s understandable that uncomfortable thoughts, feelings and urges might be higher when you do this- it’s hard to go against what your mind is telling you so you might find the strategies in the cognitive diffusion resource helpful to help you to reframe and surf these urges.
Switching your mindset to what your body can do for you rather than solely what it looks like is a powerful tool to help you throughout this process, so be sure to practice the body functionality task this week.
Week 4 : Workshop 5Â
Redefining Your Relationship With Exercise
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Well done for making it this far in the bootcamp challenge! By now, you’ll hopefully be in a better rhythm with checking in and listening to your body and building a better balance between exercising and rest.
In this workshop, we dive into strategies to help you to redefine your relationship with exercise going forward and process the emotions and feelings that can come up with moving towards more intuitive movement when exercise has been something used to control your body and deal with emotions for so long.
