Aimee Willmott Talks Periods, Puberty And Performance
Periods have been described as the last taboo in sport. I spoke to Commonwealth swimming champion Aimee Willmott on International Women's Day about her own experiences of their effect on performance and how she addresses this with young female swimmers.
“The biggest message is you can do everything while you’re on your period: you can still train, you can still race. The example I use is what if you get to an Olympic final and you’re on your period? Are you going to say sorry I can’t race today? You wouldn’t dream of it.” – Aimee Willmott
Let’s talk periods.
Not “the curse” with its inference of sinister witchcraft.
Not the whispers of “women’s things”.
Not “that time of the month”.
Type slang words for periods into a search engine and you can come up with up to 5,000 euphemisms for something that affects around 49.6% of the world’s population.
That’s around 3.9 billion females. Who. All. Have. Periods.
Hundreds of years of stigma have conspired to bring us to a point in 2021 where there’s still a sense of shame, albeit slowly eroding.
Periods have been described as the last taboo in sport and only in recent years have athletes started to talk openly about menstruation and its effect on performance.
Willmott has chosen to use her own experiences and platform to address the subject with the goal being to keep girls in the sport.
She has spoken to girls and young women whose ages range from 11 to 18 at clubs across Britain and Ireland as well as Swim England Talent and Swim Ireland.
Her goal is to ensure girls remain in the sport by sharing her own experiences to encourage communication and counter the isolation that puberty can bring and the subsequent effects on performance.
She said:
“It became important to me – when girls just quit at 15, 16 because they’re like ‘I’m not PBing and all of a sudden I’ve slowed down. I’m growing, I’ve got a spotty face, I’ve got boobs I don’t really want to hide in a costume’.
“The clothes you might hide behind, you can’t as a swimmer and I feel that stops a lot of girls carrying on.
“They’re developing but they aren’t seeing the result they want in the pool so it could be two or three years but by that point they’ve already stopped.
“So it’s raising awareness of yes, you are a girl in sport, you might start your periods at 13 and it might cause havoc for your body.
“You might have no energy and even though you’re training hard you’re just growing, you’re not getting the results that you want on the clock.
“It’s trying to get girls to stick with it and continue.”