Women-Specific Coaching
Dr. Stacy Sims says, “Women are not small men.” What does this mean in terms of coaching women? It means you can’t coach them the same way you coach men. You can’t take a running or strength plan that works for a male athlete, and expect to have the same results with a female athlete. (The same goes for diets…a diet that helps a man lose a lot of weight is not likely to have the same effect on a woman). We are not small men, and our unique physiology and hormones necessitate different training methods for optimum results.
We are thankfully seeing a shift in women’s coaching, with many coaches finally realizing that it is not healthy for female athletes to miss their periods, and that thinner doesn’t always equal faster. But we are coming off of decades of athletes who were driven to eating disorders and injuries from under-eating in order to please their coaches. And there are still coaches out there who do not take a woman’s hormones and physiology into account when designing their training plans.
Did you know that if a woman’s hormones are naturally cycling, she can benefit from tailoring her fitness plan to the cycle of her hormones? It’s called cycle-syncing, and many women find it helpful to time easier or harder workouts according to where they are in their cycle. The U.S. national women's soccer team is on the forefront of this, with the whole team tracking their cycles, and the coaches planning workouts accordingly. The phase of the menstrual cycle that you are in determines how easily you can build muscle or lose fat, and taking this into account can help you optimize your results. Your hormones also effect your energy levels, so planning harder workouts when you have more energy is a no-brainer.
If your coach writes you a running or strength plan, and doesn’t take your diet or hormone health into account, they are doing you a disservice. I’m not saying you have to divulge every detail of your diet or menstrual cycle to your coach, but they should know if you are fueling adequately or not, and they should know whether or not there are any red-flags in your cycle health that warrant a doctor’s visit. Following a training plan without taking these factors into account makes you more prone to injury, or at the very least, will inhibit your success.
Women are constantly being bombarded by “quick fixes” in both the diet and fitness worlds. We are always being promised that this one exercise will melt away tummy fat, or shred our glutes, or create 6 pack abs. Newsflash, there aren’t “magic” exercises that can melt away fat in specific areas. There also isn’t one exercise that will give you shredded abs overnight. However, research suggests that the single best thing a woman can do to lose fat is to build muscle! This means focusing on lifting heavier weights over time. Lifting heavier weights can also be very beneficial in combating the loss of bone density that women are prone to as they age. I have had female friends who hired personal trainers to help them get fit, and then when they told the trainer they wanted to work on lifting heavier weights, the trainer refused, and encouraged them to stick to lighter weights! This goes against all the research about what is most beneficial for women!
There are countless diet plans out there that promise to melt the pounds away, but few of them work in practice. Most diets are unsustainable in the long term, and that’s a sure recipe for failure. We don’t need the latest detox or diet. We just need to learn which foods nourish our body and fuel our lifestyle. We need to learn how to eat enough food, so that our bodies aren’t desperately holding onto fat in an attempt to keep us alive while we continually under-eat.
I believe that women deserve coaches who understand their unique bodies, and can help them to have the greatest success possible by taking these factors into account. I am not a registered dietician or a medical professional, but I am constantly seeking to increase my own knowledge about all things women’s health related to fitness. I use this knowledge to make common-sense suggestions to my athletes based off of what I have learned. I do not diagnose or treat issues, but present my knowledge, and recommend a visit to a medical professional when warranted.
I want all women to know that they don’t have to hire (or stay with) any fitness professional who doesn’t seem to be knowledgeable about the unique considerations for coaching women. Women don’t deserve to be treated like small men; they deserve to be treated as the unique individuals that they are, and their training should be tailored to help them reach their full potential.
Furthermore, these considerations are not just for adult women, they are also for young girls. Girls should not be treated like boys when playing sports in school. Their developing bodies and widening hips require different strength training considerations in order to help them prevent injury. Did you know that girls are more likely to tear their ACL because of their wider hips? If they are given the proper strength training regimen to strengthen the muscles connecting their hips and knees, they will be much less prone to injury. But in the past, few coaches knew this or chose to help their athletes take the necessary steps. As more research comes out proving that girls and women need to be coached differently, I hope more coaches will step up and do everything in their power to help females train smarter and stay stronger.
