As an illustration of such an analysis, let’s look at running the 10K. This kind of ‘needs analysis’ should govern the design of any strength programme. To devise the best strength programme based on the event’s requirements, we have to analyse the event in terms of muscle use, the type of contractions each muscle uses, the biomechanics of the movement and whether maximum strength or strength endurance is the goal. Looked at from this point of view, any athlete must improve her (or his) strength if their profile is less than the strength demands of their event.
That being said, the next question is, what is the best form of strength training for women? The answer is not a matter of gender but more a matter of the particular requirements of the athlete’s event, being the same for both men and women. In my opinion, that is a training priority. If you want to be that winner, you have to optimise your strength. It is the fastest who wins, and that’s the end of it. Competitions, unlike laboratory research, do not compensate for lean body mass. If female athletes want to achieve elite performances they must ensure that comprehensive strength training is fully covered in their training schedules. The conclusion to be drawn is that women are equally as strength-trainable as men. In response to resistance exercise, but the absolute degree is smaller than in men. Men display greater absolute strength than women largely because they have a greater body size and higher lean-body-mass-to-fat ratioĥ.
There is no significant difference between the sexes in the ability to generate force per unit of cross-sectional muscle. Women should train for strength using the same exercises and techniques as menĤ. Physiological responses of males and females to the use of weight training and resistance exercise are similarģ. Women improve fitness, athletic performance and reduce injuries through strength training, just as men doĢ. Recently an official summary of all the research regarding strength training for women was presented in the US by the Women’s Committee of the National Strength and Conditioning Association. The tentative conclusion must be that in general most women find it more difficult to gain muscle mass. Later research has been equivocal – some has shown that women can increase muscle mass significantly, some has not. Wilmore hypothesised that the reason for the increased strength in women must be due to an increased ability to recruit muscle fibres and coordinate the movements. However, while the men showed hypertrophy (enlargement) in the leg and arm muscles, the women did not. Professor Jack Wilmore from the University of Texas showed that after a 10-week training programme women showed a 29 per cent improvement on the bench press and 30 per cent improvement on the leg press, compared to a 17 per cent and 26 per cent improvement from men. But more recent research has put paid to this theory. In the past, it was believed that strength training was unsuitable for women because they were ‘incapable’ of improving their strength. Nevertheless, research has shown that normalising for lean body mass, which takes out the overall differences in muscle and fat, muscle pound to muscle pound women are similar in strength to men. This different distribution of extra fat and smaller muscle mass accounts for much of the disparity in strength between the sexes, women being about 66-75 per cent as strong in the legs and 50-60 per cent as strong in the arms. Women have smaller arm girth and greater arm skinfold thickness than men, similar leg girth but greater leg skinfold thickness than men. Indeed, research has shown that most of the differences in strength between men and women can be explained in terms of differences in lean body mass and muscle and fat distribution. The differences can be explained by the fact that at puberty boys have increased testosterone levels which promotes muscle development and bone growth over the next few years, whereas girls have increased oestrogen which promotes quite fast pelvic bone growth and fat storage around the hips and thighs.Īfter puberty, boys’ relative fat mass decreases from 16 to 13 per cent, while girls’ relative fat mass increases from 18 to 26 per cent. These statistics merely illustrate what everyone knows, that women naturally develop less strength than men.