TRAINING THE FEMALE ATHLETE PART 2/4

BUILT FOR ENDURANCE


Females, although not as strong in a relative sense compared to men, do have something up on blokes and that’s endurance. 

Women have a far higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fibres which provides them with far greater relative endurance then men.


Female advantages leading to greater relative endurance includes:

• They have a higher % of bodyfat meaning they can power their cells for longer from reserves without the need for replenishment, enabling them to go harder for longer before blowing up

• Because their power output is lower compared to males it means they don’t hit glycolytic pathways (hit the wall) as easy or as often as men. This also means they can burn more fat for fuel during activity and they can also prolong the time it takes to hit your anaerobic threshold (hit the wall again)

• Females will recover far better from high intensity exercise then men again because extremely high power outputs cannot be reached in most cases, so recover occurs quicker

• Female muscles can contain as much force as men but because their muscle mass is far lower, the actual output is lower

• Females can perform more reps of a given % of load then men so where a bloke might get 5 reps at 85% of max load, females might get 7 – 8 reps

• The one disadvantage that females have is that up to 80% of females can have clinical anemia which means you have less iron and thus oxygen in your blood, which can affect mood and energy output.