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.

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?

DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BALANCE AND STABILITY?

Do you have great balance?

Poor balance?

Do you have great stability?

Poor stability?

Huh?

What's the difference you ask?

Well balance and stability are not the same thing and here's why.

- Stability is the ability to resist movement coming towards and into the body - think standing on 1 leg and someone giving a light push from the side.

- Balance is the ability to control your equilibrium or maintain your center of gravity/base of support within a given sensory environment.

- Stability is a state and balanced is a proficiency

- Static and dynamic balance don't correlate to well so you'll need to all the way along the static-dynamic continuum for transfer to whatever you require stability and.or balance for specifically

- Balance is a pretty easy adaptation to acquire as it uses no energy to train train it so you can do so daily without it affecting anything else in your life

- It's all better to train balance with more frequency but in smaller dosages so say 3 - 5mins per day vs 45mins 1/week

- Balance is also task specific so if you train to hold the Tree Yoga pose then that's what you'll become good at, it doesn't mean you should head to the Grand Canyon and tightrope walk across it without a net.

- Standing on unstable surfaces is a means of modifying stability in a given situation (task specific stability), not training actual balance

Some stability exercises to start with include planks and single leg stands.

Some balance exercises to start with include single leg romanian deadlifts and single leg ball (any ball really) throws catches

You can see in that last video as the ball switches from front on to side on, it is far more challenging so make sure you work up slowly.

Need some help with your balance and stability? Contact me today through FB.

QUALITY TRAINING MATTERS (AND HOW I CAN HELP YOU)

Today I want to direct you to a study US strength and conditioning coach Eric Cressey wrote about about a year ago.

Let's set the scene here:

- 52 firefighters

- Split into 3 groups being movement based program (program + coaching), conventional fitness (program only and zero coaching) and control (no program or coaching)

- Pre and post the 12 week program they were tested on the usual things but they also were also tested on 5 whole body tasks not actually trained over the duration of the 12 week program

- Within these 5 tasks they looked at spine and knee motion to gauge movement quality under various conditions of slow and fast speed of movement

- The fitness and movement groups showed significant improvements in all aspects of fitness but only the movement group exhibited improvements in spine and frontal knee motion control when performing each of the 5 transfer tasks

What this shows is that QUALITY TRAINING MATTERS and how do you accomplish this?

With specific coaching.

Quality personal training outcomes are about so much more then just a program (HIIT) or even a good training environment (loud doof, doof group training) - it's also about hammering home loads of consistent high quality reps to markedly improve your CHANCES of positive movement quality.

Later this week I'll be revealing a brand new promotion never before offered by TRF where you'll have the chance to get in the ground floor so keep your eyes peeled for that bad boy!

You can read the full study here.

FALL ASLEEP IN 2 MINUTES

I've posted about sleep many times before but a lot of us still have an aversion to it and I don't know why.

If you're tired then the best remedy is sleep.

If your in pain then the best remedy is sleep.

If you're not recovering from your training then the best remedy is sleep.

It's staring us right in the face but we're far quicker to opt for Netflix late into the night, sleeping pills and costly supplements to fix our issues.

Waste.

Of.

Time.

Your body AND mind recovers when you sleep and most importantly, learning takes place when you sleep.

If you have a huge presentation in the morning and you need to memorise it then staying up til 2am try to remember it word for it won't work - you won't sleep long or good enough for the days learning to become instilled in the brain.

It's too late and you're doing it all wrong anyway.

This blog looks at a sleeping ritual designed for soldiers to be able to sleep under any conditions and it worked for 96% of those who tried it for 6 weeks but nothing much will happen until week 2 or later so you need to be consistent and you need to be patient.

STEP 1 - Sit on the edge of your bed in the dark

STEP 2 - Tighten up your facial muscles then slowly let them loosen/relax and let your tongue fall any whiach way it wants to in your mouth

STEP 3 - Once your face is truly relaxed then let gravity pull your shoulders naturally towards the ground and let your arms dangle 1 side at a time.

STEP 4 - While doing all of this breathe in and out letting your chest relax more and more each breathe and then let gravity relax your thighs and lower legs.

STEP 5 - Once your body is totally relaxed then trey to clear your mind for 10secs and if something pops up then simply let it pass and keep your body loose/limp and after a few seconds your mind should be clearer.

STEP 6 - Now picture 1 of 2 scenarios.

Scenario 1 is of you lying in a canoe in a calm lake with clear blue skies above you.

Scenario 2 is you in a velvet hammock gently swaying in a pitch black room

If your not a great visualiser (try it first though don't assume!) then chant "don't think, don' t think, don't think" x 10secs and at this point it should take about 2 minutes to go to sleep.

You can read the full article here.

Let me know how you go!