4 Thoughts on Female Training
When looking at this video there are a number of things I can hear the keyboard warriors saying to themselves.
“The box isn’t low enough!”
“If it’s not ass to grass it doesn’t count!”
“She didn’t sit all the way back!”
“You’re helping guide the bar!”
There are numerous things that could be said about this video of a 17 year old female high box squatting 365lbs.
I would think the same thing as well...if I had no context.
I wanted to provide some context to this video and follow up with five thoughts of training females.
Framing This Lift
This one rep max attempt is at the end of a full 10 week block in which we prepared all summer for. We are peaking for the expression of a new one rep max. Furthermore, this is during an absolute speed realization phase
Thought #1 Muscle Fiber Composition, Metabolism, and Exercise Performance
It’s important to understand a common myth: men are not more fast twitch muscle fiber-dominant than women – both genders have a similar fiber type composition (25). This myth is probably brought about by the findings that women are more reliant on aerobic metabolism during exercise while men are predisposed to using anaerobic metabolism during exercise (12,28). This may be due to the findings that female muscle fibers typically contain fewer anaerobic enzymes than male fibers (28) which would increase their reliance on aerobic metabolism for energy.
So if men don’t contain more fast twitch fibers than women, why are they (typically) naturally stronger and faster? Several studies have shown that while men don’t have a greater percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers, they have significantly larger muscle fibers – especially fast twitch fibers (11,17,25). Some studies also show that men have slightly more muscle fibers in general (17), especially when considering trained bodybuilders (2). The difference in muscle fiber size and overall muscle mass explains many of the differences in strength between men and women, but that doesn’t always explain performance. We do know that a bigger muscle has the potential to have higher contractile forces.
Interestingly enough, studies show that male muscle fibers do not contract more quickly than female muscle fibers (14), however, males typically are able to generate force more quickly (4). You can see this happen when you have men and females attempt a new one rep max or perform speed work in the weight room.
Why is this?
Greater muscle fiber size.
If two fibers are contracting at the same velocity but one is larger than the other, the larger fiber is simply going to produce more force. Studies also show that males can relax during muscle contractions more quickly than females (4). Muscle relaxation during contractions is very important for the rate of force development – the relaxation period is simply the amount of time it takes for the contractile proteins to break a bond and re-bond at another point to continue shortening the muscle fiber. The quicker this relaxation period is, the faster force generation can occur.
This can be seen in max effort sprints in which the force is generated more quickly, repeatedly, at higher velocities.
While men may perform better at strength and speed sports, women have a much higher aerobic threshold. Recall the above in which we mentioned that women are more reliant on aerobic metabolism than men. This allows women to maintain a steady state workload much longer than men (8), resist fatigue better than men (12), and recover more quickly between sets than men (15).
If you’ve ever trained a group of female athletes - they just want to go. No breaks, no water, they can fly through a series of exercises. This is important to note as women need higher intensities at higher volumes to get the same desired outcome as males.
Thought #2 Women Don’t Possess the Same Levels of Synapse Firing as Men Due to Hormonal Differences
Like I said in the introduction, we’re not going to go super in-depth into the gender differences of hormones. There’s so many confounding factors here that we’re going to take a pretty narrow-minded approach on these differences to avoid the rabbit holes that are prevalent when considering hormones and exercise. For all intents and purposes, the differences we’ll discuss are limited to young and healthy individuals.
Since we’ve narrowed the topic down to anabolic hormones, we’re just going to cover the two main sex hormones that are incredibly different in men and women: estrogen and testosterone. We know estrogen is the primary female sex hormone (8), but what effect does it have on exercise performance, muscle mass, and exercise adaptations? Estrogen doesn’t appear to affect muscle fiber force production or contraction velocity per se (8) but interestingly enough, estrogen can actually assist in muscle repair after damaging exercise (22,24). We see evidence of this in studies where women recover from muscle damage more quickly than men (19).
Even though estrogen might assist in recovery from exercise when considering muscle damage, it doesn’t have any effect on muscle fiber size. In fact, rats supplemented with estrogen actually decreased muscle fiber size (27). This could be one of the reasons why we typically see females having smaller muscle fibers than males. There’s a few theories as to why this might be the case, but we do know that studies show estrogen to have both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Antioxidants have been shown to negatively affect protein signaling and resistance training adaptations (20) and inflammation has been shown to be important for growth signals following damaging exercise (13) – so reducing inflammation might also impair muscle growth following training.
Men, on the other hand, have much greater levels of testosterone than women (8). I think we’re all pretty familiar with what testosterone can do for muscle size and performance so we’ll just sum that up and say that testosterone is highly associated with muscle mass and strength (18). Again, however, testosterone itself does not appear to directly increase muscle force production or contraction velocity (8), but the general increase in muscle size due to testosterone will increase overall force production (30).
This is why in the weight room, bar speed, and load attempts can be much greater. For example, a one rep max attempt. You must be strategic in the jumps you make because females can generate as much force as man as the weight on the bar increases. A male, can process the heavier load and equally match the force needed to lift the bar. Females have trouble generating the appropriate intent needed to match the weight on the bar.
Here is an example of a one rep max or even 3rm attempt in males vs females.
Male squats 405lbs | Female squats 225lbs for one rep max
This is obviously an example and is subjective to this individual. I would argue nonetheless, working with hundreds of female athletes between 12-22, this has always been the case in regards to number of warm ups and attempts to hit a new one rep max PR.
This helps ease in overload with each attempt to help match force output, modestly ramp up intensity, and build confidence.
As I mentioned in thought #1, this is why they need more volume in singular exercises, and more high intensity reps. They can recover much quicker than men so total volume over a session must be higher.
This leads me to thought #3.
Thought #3 Differences in Training Recovery
Here’s where things get really interesting between genders as we have solid data on both sides of the fence. Some studies show that men recover more quickly from resistance training (7), others show that women recover more quickly (9,10), and others show no difference between the two (15). Why the disparity? Let’s look at the protocols and see if there’s any evidence that takes a majority vote.
Men recover quicker than women in a protocol that involves performing 5 sets of 5 repetitions on the squat at 85% of their 1RM (7). Both subject groups had been strength-trained for at least two years. The protocols that found women to recover quicker involved trained athletes performing 20×1 @ 100% of their squat 1RM (9) or 10×10 @ 70% of their squat 1RM (10).
This information would validate my theory on single attempts. Women can handle higher intensities at higher volumes.
All subjects in these studies had similar levels of training experience, so the theory that trained individuals recover more quickly here doesn’t really make a difference between any protocols. I think, however, we can all agree that performing 20×1 @ 100% and 10×10 @ 70% are immensely more stressful workouts than 5×5 @ 85%.
Is it possible that men recover better from moderate volume and moderate/high intensity while women recover better from both high volume and high intensity? None of the studies looked at this principle in depth. I will go on a limb and say through empirical experience that this is the case. As with the video shown, it took this female athlete almost 18 sets to reach a top single of 365lbs.
Another study compared fatiguing sprint protocols between men and women. Subjects performed multiple sprints per day for several days in a row. Women were able to recover more quickly between same day sprint trials, but both men and women recovered similarly between days (15).
I have no doubt that estrogen in women may have played a role in the more intense studies showing that women can recover more quickly. Since we know from the above that estrogen can help in repairing muscle damage, protocols that induce extreme amounts of muscle damage might favor recovery in women. 20×1 @ 100% and 10×10 @ 70% would both induce much greater amounts of muscle damage than 5×5 @ 85% or the repeated sprint protocol.
Another thought, can we surmise then, that women are more capable of recovering from extremely damaging exercise than men?
In the VH Speed System Free Course, I talk about how PNS (peripheral nervous system) fatigue plays a major role in a well designed speed program.
Why?
Men usually experience greater muscle damage and a greater inflammation response to exercise than women (26). This is more than likely related to estrogen like we already mentioned. Inflammation can easily lead to increased levels of muscle soreness and pain beyond muscle damage alone which can reduce voluntary muscle activation (31). Since many protocols assess recovery by measuring maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) force compared to the baseline level, men may not produce as much MVC force in the days following exercise as they will probably have more muscle soreness.
Overall, the difference between male and female recovery from exercise isn’t exactly certain. Women may be better off recovering from more extreme training sessions while men might recover better from what we would consider, “normal training.”
Our extensive database used by Fusion Sport, have shown that female times do not drop off more than .01% within a session when rest times between sprints varied. Whereas men showed a more significant drop off in times (0.03%) when rest times were under one minute.
If this is the case, how differently should we train to get similar adaptations>
Thought #4 Differences in Training Adaptations
If you're familiar with our work, you know we place an emphasis on novice, intermediate, and advanced individuals. This allows you to make better programming decisions, strategically induce stress, and progress individuals appropriately.
Studies show that untrained men and women make very similar gains in size and strength when beginning a training protocol (1,5,6,16,23). While these gains will eventually diverge, this is an incredibly interesting scenario when considering all of the above we just talked about. Women make the exact same progress as men when beginning a training program. Everyone always thinks that women will make much slower gains and have fewer results than men, but for at least the first 6-months or so of training, both can expect similar results.
So why do men eventually make greater gains while women tend to slow or plateau earlier? If we review the initial adaptations to resistance training, we see that gains in muscle size are essentially the last adaptation and can take months to significantly occur. So studies of 8-12 weeks duration don’t really paint the full picture when considering long term gains. Men will eventually make greater gains in size and strength and that probably has a lot to do with testosterone.
Testosterone increases muscle size by ramping up protein synthesis (30). Positive protein balance is necessary for muscle growth to occur, so men are more than likely to be in a greater positive protein balance than women at all times. Men have higher baseline fiber size, so increasing that size to a greater extent compared to a female muscle fiber makes the difference in overall muscle size almost exponentially greater in the long term.