There’s a culture in the military that teaches you to push through almost everything.
Fatigue becomes normal.
Poor recovery becomes expected. Missing periods, hormonal issues, constant soreness, low energy, emotional burnout, most people learn to see these
things as part of the job rather than warning signs. This is a mistake I made.
I’ve always been athletic, disciplined and performance-driven. I’ve trained hard, stayed fit
and met the standards expected of me, but behind the scenes I was also dealing with symptoms related to PCOS and hormonal dysfunction that I'm trying to push past.
What made it harder was the fact that I didn’t fit the typical image people associate with hormonal issues.
I wasn’t overweight.
I wasn’t inactive.
I wasn’t visibly struggling.
If anything, I looked healthy.
But that’s one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding women’s health, especially within
high-performance environments like the military. Hormonal dysfunction doesn’t always look
obvious, and women who appear to be coping well are often the ones silently pushing
themselves into burnout.
The Problem With “Just Push Through”
Military training is built around resilience, discipline and mental toughness. Those qualities
matter, and they absolutely shape strong people.
But there’s a difference between resilience and constantly overriding your body’s signals.
A lot of women in demanding training environments learn very quickly to disconnect from
what they’re feeling because they don’t want to appear weak, incapable or unable to keep
up. Symptoms become something to hide rather than something to understand.
Irregular cycles.
Brown bleeding.
Poor sleep.
Mood changes.
Constant fatigue.
Digestive issues.
Low recovery.
Overtraining injuries.
These things are often brushed off as stress or simply “part of being in the military.”
The reality is that women are operating within a completely different hormonal system than
men, and pretending those differences don’t exist doesn’t make women stronger, it just
makes long-term health issues more common.
Women Are Not Small Men
For years, most training systems were designed around male physiology.
The problem is that women don’t recover, adapt or respond to stress in exactly the same
way men do. Hormones influence everything from energy availability and recovery to sleep, body temperature, injury risk and emotional resilience.
That doesn’t mean women are less capable.
It means women need to understand their physiology properly if they want to perform at a
high level consistently.
There’s a huge difference between:
Training hard intelligently AND chronically running yourself into the ground
Unfortunately, a lot of women don’t realise there’s a problem until their body forces them to stop.
My Experience With PCOS While Serving
At one point, I genuinely believed the answer was always to train harder.
I pushed through exhaustion by training harder. If recovery suffered, I ignored it. If symptoms appeared, I convinced myself I was overthinking it.
Like many women in demanding fitness environments, I thought discipline meant
suppressing discomfort at all costs.
But eventually I started recognising patterns I couldn’t ignore:
Short or irregular cycles
Brown bleeding
emotional fluctuations
Poor recovery despite being fit
Feeling “wired but tired”
Changes in energy and resilience
What frustrated me most was the disconnect between appearance and reality. Because I
looked healthy and performed well externally, it was easy for people, including myself, to
dismiss what was happening internally. This is still something I’m having to come to terms
with today.
Learning more about PCOS, hormone health and stress physiology completely changed the way I viewed training and performance.
I realised that being fit doesn’t automatically mean your body is functioning optimally.
You can be highly disciplined, lean, athletic and still be under-recovered hormonally.
Training Smarter Isn’t Training Softer
This is where I think a lot of conversations around women’s health get misunderstood.
Supporting female physiology is not about lowering standards.
It’s not about making training 'easier'. It’s about improving performance longevity.
Because when women understand recovery, fuelling, cycle health, stress load, sleep and hormonal patterns. They can often perform better, recover faster and stay healthier long-term.
The goal shouldn’t be to remove challenge.
The goal should be about creating strong woman who remain capable for years rather than burning out early.
In military culture especially, there’s still a tendency to admire self-destruction disguised as
dedication.
But constantly running on stress hormones isn’t peak performance.
It’s survival mode.
What Needs To Change
I think more education around female physiology needs to exist in high-performance spaces. Not to separate women from standards, but to help them reach those standards sustainably.
Women should understand:
How chronic stress affects hormones
How under-fuelling impacts recovery
Why cycle irregularities matter
How sleep affects performance
How to recognise signs of overreaching before burnout happens
And importantly, women should feel able to talk about these things without feeling like
they’re making excuses.
Because understanding your body is not weakness.
Ignoring it isn’t toughness.
Final Thoughts
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that performance and health are not opposites.
You do not have to destroy yourself to prove you’re resilient.
Some of the strongest people I know are the ones who learned when to push, when to
recover and how to work with their physiology instead of constantly fighting against it.
Women belong in demanding environments.
Women are capable of extraordinary things.
But capability becomes even more powerful when it’s supported by understanding rather
than silence.
And maybe that’s the shift we need most:
Not teaching women to simply endure more, but teaching them how to perform, recover and thrive for the long term...
HARD TARGET JOURNAL CONTRIBUTOR
Written by: Nicole White
British Army Soldier passionate about performance, resilience and women's health in demanding environments.
Instagram: @nicolewhitefitness
TikTok: @nicolewhitefitness
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