How Femmi Helps Women Run With Their Hormones, Not Against Them

What happens when an elite runner is praised for losing her period in the name of performance until it nearly breaks her body, and forces her to truly listen to it?

In this episode, elite runner, coach, and Femmi co-founder Lydia O’Donnell joins us for a raw and honest conversation about disordered eating, hormone health, and how training with her menstrual cycle helped her rebuild performance, health and confidence from the ground up.

If you care about women’s health, sport, or creating solutions that are genuinely built for women, this is an episode that will stay with you long after it ends.

Key Takeaways:

• Find out how losing her period and being told it was a “good thing” pushed Lydia to completely rethink her body, her health and her running
• Learn why most coaching and sports science still default to male bodies and what that actually does to girls and women in sport
• Understand how FEMI went from one-to-one coaching on five messy platforms to a single app that connects training, cycle tracking, learning and community
• Find out what questions FEMI asks on onboarding (from goals to PBs to cycle info) to make training feel like having your own coach in your pocket.
• Discover what it’s really like pitching to 100+ investors as female founders building only for women, and why the 2% funding stat hits so hard
• earn how FEMI’s Friday women-only run communities and new in-app groups help women find their tribe, whether they’re in Auckland, London or Hong Kong
• Understand Lydia’s vision for using AI, wearables and hormone data to build truly hyper-personalised training
• Find out how reframing “bad” training days as normal hormonal shifts can stop women from blaming their bodies and start trusting them
• Discover Lydia’s one big piece of advice for founders in women’s health who feel scared to start but know the system wasn’t built for them

Resources:

Lydia O’Donnell: LinkedIn

Femmi: LinkedIn

Femmi: https://www.femmi.co/

Maaike Steinebach LinkedIn

Website Femtech Future: https://www.femtechfuture.com

Instagram Femtech Future: @femtech_future

Hit play on this episode and walk alongside Lydia as she turns “just push harder” into “listen to your body” and shows what happens when running, hormones and women’s health finally line up. If you’ve ever thought sport wasn’t really built for you, this conversation might just change the way you move and how you see yourself.

This isn’t just a story about an app; it’s about women refusing to shrink themselves to fit into systems that were never built for them and building new ones instead. You can be part of it.

If this episode moved you, be part of the movement, share it with a friend, hit like, and leave a quick review so more people can find these stories.

See you next week on FemTech at Work for another honest conversation with a founder changing the future of women’s health!