Why femtech
Much of sports science was measured on men and handed to everyone. The maximum heart rate formula in most watches came from mixed or mostly male groups. Readiness scores treat a warmer body and a lower HRV as a warning, whatever the reason. And a training app that never asks about a period cannot notice when one goes missing.
For a woman who runs, that adds up. Zones that start a few beats off. A week every month where the scores say ill or overtrained and the plan says rest. A late period, often the first sign of under-fuelling and of the bone stress injuries that follow it, which nobody in the app is looking for. And then a pregnancy, or the menopause, and a plan that carries on as if nothing changed.
A coach that cannot tell a luteal phase from a cold is guessing about half its athletes.
Trailwise is femtech as well as a running coach. Being a woman is an input to every score and every plan it builds, from the day you say so.
Your maximum heart rate uses a formula derived on women (Gulati, 2010). Tick the first day of your period and Trailwise places you in your cycle, expects the warmer body and the lower HRV of the second half, and stops reading them as illness or under-recovery. Readiness and Sentinel say so in plain words, and a logged basal temperature confirms the phase from your own data.
A late or absent period and a low ferritin reading are treated as the early warnings they are. Trailwise raises them gently, points you to a doctor or a dietitian, and makes your plan proposal more conservative until the signal clears. Pregnancy and the months after it switch the plan to a gentle return to running, with no intensity and no return date until your clinician clears you. Perimenopause and menopause keep quality sessions on the table and add a third strength session a week, for bone and muscle.
Everything below is optional, and cycle-aware coaching stays off until you switch it on.
The first day of your period, one tick in the daily check-in. Flow and basal body temperature are optional extras.
A ferritin value whenever you have one from a blood test.
Your life stage under Coaching boundaries in your settings: pregnant or postpartum, perimenopause or menopause.
Basal body temperature from Apple Health arrives on its own through the Apple Health connection.
The evidence that scheduling hard weeks into one phase and easy weeks into another improves outcomes is thin and inconsistent, and individual cycles vary too much to plan against. So Trailwise corrects the day as it arrives and leaves the multi-week structure alone. If replicated evidence lands, the plan engine already has the hook for it.
Everything cycle-related is opt-in and stays off until you switch it on. Trailwise never diagnoses, never tells you to start supplements on your own, and hands every medical question, HRT included, to your doctor. It also says what it cannot do yet: cycle data comes from your check-in or from Apple Health rather than from your watch, and a calendar estimate has nothing to work from if contraception stops your period.
Adjust each day to the cycle. Do not build the plan around it.
Trailwise is not a medical device. Neither is it a replacement for a doctor or a physiotherapist. Trailwise flags what is worth a conversation. It does not diagnose, and it will tell you when it does not know.
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