22 Years of
Living with PCOS/PMOS,
and 22 Years
of Yoga

I’ve lived with PCOS/PMOS for 22 years — and practiced yoga for just as long. This is what actually worked, what didn’t, and why most PCOS/PMOS fitness advice failed.

Because PCOS/PMOS doesn’t just affect your hormones. It changes your relationship with your own body. Exercise becomes both medicine and obsession. You chase control, energy, relief — sometimes all at once. For years, I thought the answer was more intensity. More discipline. More output. Until my body pushed back hard enough that I had to listen.

Author image

Shruti Kamath

8th May, 2026

The diagnosis.

I have hereditary PCOS. Which, when I was first told, basically translated to: this is just how it is. I spent most of my twenties refusing to accept that. HIIT. Running. Yoga. Long workouts. More sweat. More effort directed at a body that never felt fully cooperative. And honestly — it worked. Until it didn’t. Then came the rebound: inflammation, bloating, hair loss, mood swings, exhaustion. The harder I pushed, the louder my body pushed back. What I didn’t understand at the time was this: PCOS bodies already run high on stress chemistry. I was adding fuel and calling it discipline.

The body from menarche to my mid-twenties.

Movement was never the problem. I grew up active — kho-kho, dodgeball, running. Yoga entered quietly during my teenage years, long before I understood what it was doing for me. The real shift came later. At 22, my job in advertising took over my life. Late nights, early starts, no sunlight, erratic meals. Maggi at 6 pm in the office became less about hunger and more about comfort — a small warm thing to hold onto while everything revolved around work. First marriage at 23. First divorce at 26. First startup at 27.

Not
every
PCOS
looks
the
same.

What PCOS also
brought with it.

Not every PCOS experience looks the same. The emotional side was as real as the physical one. The oscillation was exhausting: low energy, hopelessness, brain fog — followed by sudden windows of overdrive where I felt briefly invincible. I chased those windows constantly. Novelty gave me focus. Achievement gave me relief.

Movement gave me a rush.
This is the part that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve lived it: PCOS/PMOS and the body you’re in become one long negotiation.
Not a problem to solve. Not a phase to push through. A negotiation. One that changes terms over time.

Why high-intensity
training eventually
backfired.

For years, I relied almost entirely on high-output movement to attain good health and regulate myself mentally.
Running. Hiking. HIIT. Strength training. Bodyweight circuits.
Yoga stayed in my life, but never in the front seat. I treated it as supplementary - something I returned to between phases of intensity. And predictably, even in yoga, I chased difficulty.
Advanced holds. Harder transitions. Better flexibility. More control. The pattern never changed. Only the format did. The question was never whether yoga worked. It was why I kept treating every form of movement like something to conquer.

What the knee injury forced me to learn

At 35, after nearly two years of aggressive and inconsistent running, I developed patella tendinitis. Suddenly, the two things I had built my identity around — running and hiking — disappeared overnight.

Yoga wasn’t a new experiment at that point. It was simply what remained available to me. And in combination with physiotherapy, it did something no other form of exercise had managed to do: It kept me moving without making things worse.

That was the moment yoga stopped becoming “extra.” I could train for a half marathon and hold a steady, well-paced 19km — and then suddenly blow it in the final stretch.

Not because I was tired. Something in me just needed to rush. Calm on the outside. Urgency underneath. Rush. Push. Override. That had become my default setting. Yoga was the first practice that gave me real-time feedback instead of a way to escape what I was feeling.

Can yoga help PCOS symptoms?

Yes — but not for the reasons people usually market it. Yoga is not a miracle cure for PCOS. It will not “balance your hormones” overnight.

But it can fundamentally improve the environment your hormones operate within. That distinction matters.

Here’s what took me over a decade to understand: PCOS bodies already struggle with cortisol regulation, inflammation, insulin resistance, and nervous system dysregulation.

Every workout creates stress. The question is never just what you are doing — it’s whether your body is recovering from it. This is where yoga becomes essential. Not because it’s “gentle.” Because it actively teaches the body to come down from chronic fight-or-flight. Yoga became the recovery that made every other form of movement work better.

Yoga is not a miracle cure for PCOS. It will not “balance your hormones” overnight.

Why Recovery Is Non-Negotiable for PCOS

HIIT, strength training, running — all of it has value. I still believe in all of it. But without a counterweight, you end up accumulating stress on a body already struggling to process it. That’s where most PCOS/PMOS fitness advice fell apart. It focuses entirely on output. More workouts. More calorie burn. More intensity. Very little conversation around recovery. For a PCOS body, recovery is not passive. It’s infrastructure.

A study conducted across government schools in Tamil Nadu followed adolescent girls at risk for PCOS through four months of yoga and walking interventions. By the end of the study, high PCOS risk had dropped nearly to zero in the intervention group. Not HIIT. Not punishment disguised as wellness. Yoga and walking. Run, lift, sprint, train hard — but your foundation needs to include movement that doesn’t cost your hormones more than it gives back.

What Yoga Was Actually Training

Yoga built two things simultaneously. The first was physical: strength, mobility, joint integrity, stability, and
body awareness. But the second was neurological.
It improves proprioception, mind-muscle connection, breathing patterns, and nervous system regulation Breath and movement working together repeatedly pull the body out of stress activation and into recovery states. For a PCOS/PMOS body already wired toward inflammation and cortisol dysregulation, that isn’t supplementary.

It’s structural. And here’s the uncomfortable part: Yoga is hardest on the days you need it most.
When you feel restless, overstimulated, emotionally flooded — slowing down feels unbearable. The urge is to speed up, distract yourself, outrun your own nervous system. That feeling is not always motivation. Sometimes it’s cortisol looking for an exit.

Yoga asks you to stay anyway. That staying became the practice.

Is Yoga Enough for PCOS?

No.

And neither is strength training on its own. Or running. Or supplements. Or perfect nutrition.
What finally helped me was balance. Strength training gave me muscle and stability. Running gave me endurance and mental resilience. Yoga gave me recovery, regulation, and sustainability. That combination changed everything. Not because my PCOS/PMOS disappeared. It didn’t. But because I stopped treating
my body like a problem to overpower.

Where I’ve Landed

Today, I spend 50 minutes on the mat, five days a week.
The calm and the effort together - that’s what I return for. My holds are stronger now. My mobility is better. But
that’s not the real reason I keep showing up.
I show up because it’s the one place where stillness and effort coexist without cancelling each other out. And honestly, that’s what a PCOS/PMOS body needs most: Consistent movement that gives back more than it takes. This isn’t a story with a clean ending. PCOS doesn’t resolve neatly. What changes — slowly and imperfectly — is your relationship with your body. Less war. More negotiation. Yoga has been the most reliable part of that negotiation. Not because it’s soft. But because it keeps bringing me back to a 2-by-6 mat long enough to stop rushing through my own life.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

And one more thing that genuinely helped: Tracking and the menstrual cup.

Period-tracking apps. Paying attention to symptoms instead of ignoring them.

None of this has cured PCOS. But it gave me information. And with PCOS, information is half the battle.