TRAINING THE FEMALE ATHLETE PART 1/4

A little side gig I run along with my PT biz is my long running blog aimed at male and female local and amateur football players and providing a much needed training and coaching resource for mostly under-resourced football clubs/players.

As part of that I have done a fair bit in the female football space for the last 3 or so years and this is information is from a post I developed from my experience in training females as well as specific research I've done over the years.

Even if you're not a footballer, or even a competitive athlete, if you're simply performing training of any sort then this is still need-to-know stuff.

This will be a 4 part series so you'll get 2 posts this week and 2 posts next week just to break this monster post up a bit so here we go.

A NEEDS ANALYSIS OF THE FEMALE ATHLETE


Women athletes have a specific set of requirements that need to be addressed.


At the very top of the list is the need to PERFECT deceleration mechanics, and I mean PERFECT them so you don’t even need to think about them.


Deceleration mechanics refers to slowing down and stopping or changing direction.


It’s no secret that female athletes can be up to 5 x more likely to tear an anterior cruciate ligament in the knee then a male for a variety of reasons including:

• Having a narrower space in the knee for the ACL to pass through

• The actual ACL is smaller and thus weaker in women

• Females have a wider hips resulting in an acute Q angle which is the angle from the most lateral part of your hip to the your lateral knee which presents as knock knees which in turn exasperates internal rotation (knee falling inwards) upon landing or changing direction, putting a huge amount of sorts of pressure on the knee joint itself

• Women tend to have more flexibility to their connective tissue and their muscle tissue is also more elastic than males which can lead to excessive movement and thus a slower contraction time, leaving you vulnerable during high velocity movements

• General weaker muscles of the body are the glutes, hamstrings and upper back and obviously this gets worse with females as they are naturally relatively weaker than men as far as physical strength is concerned. During AFL footy, acceleration and deceleration is a primary function of the glutes, hamstrings and quads. Non-surprisingly women are quad dominant in most cases too so again, females are vulnerable if the correct strength training hasn’t been performed.

• In a single menstrual cycle there are times when a females connective is strong and also times when it is extremely weak so training loads need to correlate with your cycle.

• Poor landing, deceleration an change of direction mechanics

• A runner’s build for a female is small breasts and a small waist so if you’re not gifted in those stakes then maybe try alternate forms of conditioning to ease impact and joint stress at various times of your training

Part 2 will look at the female physiology.

SLEEP...AGAIN

I know I posted about sleep last week but I'm at it again as I'm not quite sure you really got the message!

Here are some points neuroscientist Russell Foster:

 – Those who regularly have less then 7 hours of sleep per night are more likely to develop mood/mental health problems

- By depriving your brain of sleep, you impair essential processes in the brain and reduce overall cognition

- What happens to the brain when we sleep defines how effective we’ll be when we're awake

- You lay down memories, consolidate information gathered from the previous day and the brain also comes up with solutions to complex problems

- A tired brain remembers negative experiences and negative facts and forgets the positive experiences

- Tired brains also see the world a very different way

- Beta-amyloid, a pre cursor to dementia/alzhiemers, is partially cleared while we sleep

- Growth/repair happens at night

- Short term sleep loss effects include being more impulsive, lacking empathy, not being able to lay down memory, can’t problem solve and will see a decrease in cognitive function as well as a loss of humor

- Long term effects include long term stress, increased cortisol, suppressed immune system leading to infection, cancer, coronary heart disease, metabolic abnormalities, type 2 diabetes and getting hooked on stimulants to stay energised

- You’ll release more gherlin which is a hunger hormone, leading to the ingestion of more carbs/sugars which can lead to weight gain

- You can be more vulnerable to mental health problems ranging from depression to bipolar and schizophrenia

- The best indicator of a slide into depression is a change in the pattern of sleep beforehand

- If you have a bad experience then don’t go to bed for 6 – 8 hours so that it doesn’t instill itself in your memories too much

SLEEP...I WON'T TELL YOU AGAIN!!

I'm always harping on about sleep and for good reason - it's when our body regenerates.

And with the busy culture we keep forcing ourselves to live in, there's a thought process that sleep is time we could be doing something wrong.

Outrageous I tell you! 

This piece on sleep is taken from an article by Dr. Matthew Walker.

- There is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and non-REM sleep

- There are 4 stages of non-REM sleep and it's in stages 3 and 4 where body replenishment takes place

- These are also the stages of sleep that 1 half of your brain will resist going into when sleeping in foreign environments (hotel room, camping etc)

- We are a dark deprived society and this lack of darkness is destroying our quality of sleep

- Incandescent light bulbs suppress melatonin and phone/computer screens suppress it even further

- 1 hour of phone use will decrease melatonin production by about 3 hours

- You're peak melatonin levels will also be about 50% less than they should be

Midnight should actually be the middle of your sleep night

- The shorter your sleep on average the shorter your life span

- 1 week of 6 hours of sleep per night results in 711 genes being distorted in their actoivity

- Half of those genes saw an increase in activity but they were the one's related to tumors, chronic inflammation, stress and cardiovascular disease

- The "good half of your genes that are being suppressed are those are related to immune response and than you can become immune deficient

- Resident doctors working 30 hours shifts are 460% more likely to make a diagnostic error in the intensive care unit relative to 16 hour shifts

- If your surgeon has had 6 hours of sleep or less then they have a 170% increased risk of major error so ask them how much sleep they've had

- 1 in 5 resident doctors will make an error due to lack of sleep and 1 in 20 will kill a patient due to a fatigues related error

Surely that will make you prioritise sleep now?