FEMALE ATHLETES - Training For Success
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FEMALE ATHLETES - Training For Success |
Dear Fellow Athlete,
This new book from Peak Performance is an important new reference work for all those involved in the training of female athletes.
“ Congratulations Peak Performance: you are the one-stop-shopping link for developing complete athletes.” - Werner Lamberts, Coach.
The most interesting revelation contained in this new workbook has been, to me, how coaches have traditionally taken a different approach to aspects of training female athletes where the sex of the athlete should make no difference whatsoever.
Strength training is a good example. In fact, if female athletes want to achieve elite performances they must ensure that comprehensive strength training is fully covered in their training schedules, just as with men.
In other areas, however, a coach must proceed with eyes wide open, with a clear understanding of the crucial differences between the sexes. The importance of correct nutrition, minerals and food supplements, for example, is discussed at length, with some functional guidelines that would be folly to ignore. Below is a summary of these contents.
Female Athletes - Training for Success has been published for athletes, parents, coaches, athletic administrators, training staff and doctors. It is now available on 30-days free trial. This means that if you return the workbook at any time during your trial, we will send you a complete refund by return.
Best wishes,
Sylvester Stein
Chairman
Peak Performance
Contents
ACL injuries: why female athletes suffer so many anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries; why the injury rate has increased; non-contact injuries; contact injuries; preventing ACL injuries.
Eating disorders: anorexia athletica; anorexia, bulimia and subclinical disorders; absolute and relative criteria; causes; risk factors for eating disorders in athletes; prevention; getting help; diagnostic criteria.
Nutrition: a sports physiologist explains which minerals are essential for female athletes; bone mass, menstrual function, menstrual irregularities; how irregular menstruation causes osteopenia; the options; the role of nutrition.
Strength training: a fitness specialist shows why this training is vital for female athletes; choosing the right programme for your event; how women respond to strength training; what sort of training; leg exercise; trunk and hips; upper body.
Menstruation and exercise: why all women need to be aware of three key factors: exercise, stress and body fat; why fit women have healthier babies.
PMT: a leading coach shows how PMT can affect athletic performance, and what to do about it; monitoring to find the pattern; dietary advice; nutritional supplements; more about menstruation and performance.
What the scientists say: a round-up of recent research from scientific, medical and sports journals; training, diet and problems of female athletes; should males and females train differently; how to keep your fat furnace working; how to iron out the problems of anaemia; how sport improves the body image of adolescent girls; how training helps women keep their weight down; how menopause limits women’s response to weight training; why women suffer most after strenuous exercise; why there is no major sex divide in sports injuries; hormone replacement therapy; how HRT maintains muscle after menopause.
Female Athletes - Training for Success
Further content details
The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is the most commonly damaged ligament of the knee and accounts for up to 50% of documented ligamentous knee injuries.
ACL injury rates are four to eight times higher in women than men. In this section of the workbook, our specialist surgeons explain why female athletes suffer so many ACL injuries and give four preventative exercises.
The basic anatomy and mechanism of injury of ACL injuries is explained with particular emphasis on the epidemic of injuries in female athletes that has recently come to light.
What can you do to protect yourself?
You can’t control your team mates and competitors; but what you can control is the strength of your knees – and the ACLs within them. Although the exercises given aren’t a foolproof guarantee against ACL problems, they mimic injury-producing movements in a controlled and strengthening – but not threatening – manner. They improve knee strength in a functional way and represent a good way to minimise the overall risk of ACL injury. Each exercise is accompanied by an explanation of the benefits to the ACL:
Exercise one: stretches and strengthens the hamstring muscles on the back of the thigh in all three planes of motion (sagittal, frontal, and transverse). Strong and flexible hamstring muscles give the ACL an assist in its job of controlling the knee joint and preventing the tibia from moving excessively during knee flexion.
Exercise two: sudden changes in direction while running and jumping can cause injury to the ACL due to increased stress on the knee. This exercise helps prepare the ACL and muscles around the knee for these sudden (and often unpredictable) movements in the frontal (side-to-side) plane.
Exercise three: helps develop the balance and body control required to move in multiple directions at various speeds. These exercises require the knee joints to move through a number of different angles and directions, thus mimicking movements that can lead to ACL injury in unprepared athletes.
Exercise four: strong yet flexible and co-ordinated hamstrings help minimise the risk of ACL injury.
Overall, these exercises – if carried out a couple of times a week – should help keep your ACLs away from serious injury.
Increased risk of eating disorders for athletes
If you’re an athlete aiming to optimise performance in your sport, you can obviously reap benefits from paying attention to what you eat. However, for some people this interest develops into an unhealthy obsession with food, calories and body weight.
Athletes worry continuously about what they are going to eat, when and where they’re going to eat, how much weight they’ll put on if they go out for a meal with friends, how many hours they’ll have to exercise to burn off those calories, how they can avoid eating ‘banned’ foods, and so on. Such an obsession with food and body weight is termed an eating disorder.
Eating disorders appear to be on the increase in the population as a whole. For example, the number of people seeking treatment for anorexia and bulimia in one London hospital has increased by 360% over nine years
Studies have shown that athletes are far more prone to developing eating disorders than non-athletes. In addition to all the factors outlined above, athletes face additional pressures related to performance and, for some, aesthetic demands.
Anorexia, bulimia and subclinical disorders: prevention is the key to addressing the problem of disordered eating, and education is a necessary first step. Athletes, parents, coaches, athletic administrators, training staff and doctors need to be educated about the risks and warning signals of disordered eating.
Female Athletes - Training for Success provides diagnostic criteria, a checklist of warning signs and a ‘12 steps’ recovery programme modelled on that of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Nutrition: a sports physiologist explains which minerals are essential for female athletes. Increased mineral needs of female athletes are due to several factors, some of which have been backed up through rigorous scientific investigation.
These may contribute to iron loss, for example, and any athlete involved in heavy training can be affected.
Female athletes in general are likely to have a higher rate of iron loss than men, and also a higher daily requirement, largely because of blood loss through menstruation. Pregnancy and childbirth can also tax iron stores significantly.
Dietary factors that tend to limit iron intake include:
Low total energy intakes. Low total amounts of food will lead to susceptibility to dietary deficiencies
Vegetarian diets. The iron found in meat and meat products is both more plentiful and far more easily absorbed than that found in plant foods, while dairy products and eggs (for those who eat them) do not compensate for iron as they do for other nutrients such as protein
Natural food diets. Certain food additives such as vitamins and minerals are beneficial; a good example is breakfast cereal fortified with iron
Fad diets. Diets with a limited range of food choices are unlikely to fulfil basic nutritional requirements, and athletes who follow unusual eating patterns may well be deficient in iron intake.
Our experts provide sound nutritional advice with a particular emphasis on enhancing iron status, taking into account the two forms of iron found in foods.
The first, haem iron, has an absorption rate from the gastrointestinal system of up to 23%.
The importance of this form of iron is clear when one considers that most of the iron in many athletes’ diets (and all, in the case of vegetarians) is of the second form, non-haem iron, which has an absorption rate of just 2-8% on average.
Strength training: a fitness specialist shows why this training is vital for female athletes – and why you must choose the right programme for your event. In the past, it was believed that strength training was unsuitable for women because they were ‘incapable’ of improving their strength.
But recent research has put paid to this theory. Professor Jack Wilmore from the University of Texas showed that after a 10-week training programme women showed a 29% improvement on the bench press and 30% improvement on the leg press, compared to a 17% and 26% improvement from men. However, while the men showed enlargement in the leg and arm muscles, the women did not.
Recently an official summary of all the research regarding strength training for women reported that:
Women improve fitness, athletic performance and reduce injuries through strength training, just as men do.
Physiological responses of males and females to the use of weight training and resistance exercise are similar.
Women should train for strength using the same exercises and techniques as men.
There is no significant difference between the sexes in the ability to generate force per unit of cross-sectional muscle. Men display greater absolute strength than women do largely because they have a greater body size and higher lean-body-mass-to-fat ratio.
Women do experience muscle hypertrophy in response to resistance exercise, but the absolute degree is smaller than in men.
The conclusion to be drawn is that women are equally as strength-trainable as men. If female athletes want to achieve elite performances they must ensure that comprehensive strength training is fully covered in their training schedules.
In competitions, it is the fastest who wins, and that’s the end of it. If you want to be that winner, you have to optimise your strength. This must be a training priority.
So 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.
To devise the best strength programme based on the event’s requirements, we 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.
This kind of ‘needs analysis’ should govern the design of any strength programme. Example exercise programs are given for leg muscles, trunk, hips and upper body.
Menstruation and exercise
Absence or cessation of menstrual periods – technically known as amenorrhoea – is a common problem among sportswomen competing at high levels in any physically demanding sport, whether it be running, swimming, cycling, martial arts or tennis.
Intense training of any kind places immense strains on many of the body’s systems. Physical and mental processes that regulate human biological function can be disrupted and may then take the body on a journey it was never designed for.
However, this problem is not an inevitable consequence of strenuous exercise. The onset and maintenance of menstruation is controlled by a regulating factor released by the hypothalamus in the brain, known as gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH). Other factors that affect this highly complex system are:
Stress
Body weight
Body composition
Our experts explore how reproductive health can be maintained.
A leading female coach shows how PMT can affect athletic performance, and what to do about it
A lot of uncertainty surrounding PMT over the last 30 years stems from an inability to define the condition accurately.
Dr Katherine Dalton, an expert on the subject, defines PMT as: ‘The appearance of symptoms in the premenstruum and their disappearance in the postmenstruum’. Unlike most other medical conditions, the diagnosis is based in the cyclical nature of the symptoms rather than on the actual symptoms themselves.
An astounding 150 symptoms have been described in PMT. Some women suffer only one but the norm is half a dozen.
Dr Abraham has shown that the majority of women with premenstrual symptoms have a poor nutritional intake compared to those who have no PMT, which is often due to low levels of certain minerals, which affects blood sugar control and hormonal metabolism.
Other dietary inbalances aggravate fluid retention and breast tenderness. Research also reveals that PMT sufferers cannot efficiently metabolise the essential fatty acid, linoleic acid, which is mainly found in good-quality vegetable oils.
This section of the workbook lists the vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements needed to counteract the symptoms of PMT. We give a six-point dietary plan for PMT athletes – which foods to eat, and the foods and drinks to reduce.
Food supplements should be taken for three months before deciding whether or not they are effective because, as we explain, some hormonal or gynaecological problems can have symptoms similar to those of PMT.
Further facts about menstruation:
About one-third of all female Olympic gold medals were won during menstruation. Two-thirds were gained a week after the cessation of the period
Menstruation can be adjusted so that the competition dates coincide with the time of maximum efficiency. This might be pre-ovulation (days 9-12) or post-ovulation (days 17-20)
Sportswomen whose performances are affected by menstruation and who have a continuous programme of events can have menstruation completely suppressed for a few months. This requires expert management by a sports physician because some of the drugs (hormones) used for this purpose may be on the list of banned substances
Professor Tim Noakes has discovered that bone density declines in non-menstruating athletes, and advises hormone replacement therapy to preserve the health of their skeletal systems
What the scientists say: this round-up of recent research from the scientific, medical and sports journals looks at the training, diet and problems of female athletes.
Should men and women train differently?
The ‘accepted wisdom’ on female athletes is that they don’t recover from hard training as well as males do.
This slur on women does make a certain amount of physiological sense. After all, the primary male sex hormone, testosterone, is a potent bone and muscle builder and connective tissue construction. Theoretically, after a rugged workout in which heavy stress is placed on muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones, males should be able to rebuild those parts of the body more quickly.
This is why many coaches design training programmes which are quite different for their female athletes compared to their males. The usual difference is for the female programme to be more geared to lower-intensity, continuous, non-interval efforts.
However, recent scientific research suggests that females actually lose less strength than males during the course of a rigorous workout and recover their muscular prowess more rapidly after an exhausting bout of exercise.
How to burn fat by keeping the fat furnace working
A big problem for older, sports-active women is that body fat tends to increase with age. This heftiness interferes with the ability to exercise: each additional pound of fat is a weight which must be lugged across the tennis court, carried around a 10K race route, or dragged through a rigorous, step-aerobics workout. The fat does nothing to enhance performance; instead it raises exercisers’ heart rates and makes workouts feel more difficult.
We give the causes of this age-related increase in corpulence, and the easy way to maintain or increase muscle mass and therefore boost fat oxidation.
How to iron out the problems of anaemia
Iron problems and female athletes are closely linked. In Great Britain and the United States, about 30% of adult women and 40% of adolescent women are iron deficient, while around 6% of both groups suffer from true iron-deficiency anaemia.
However, studies of athletes report higher frequencies of iron problems; research indicates that up to 19% of swimmers and runners may be troubled by iron-deficiency anaemia, which can have a strongly negative impact on performance.
We explain how iron difficulties can take two forms, either iron deficiency or true anaemia, with possible causes and solutions. We list which foods to eat and which foods and drinks inhibit the absorption of high-iron foods.
How sport can help improve the body image of adolescent girls
We live in a culture that celebrates thinness. In young women, the fear of becoming fat develops during adolescence and continues into adulthood, even among thin, active females. We explain how to deal with these fears, which can create patterns of over-exercise or under-eating with devastating health consequences.
How training helps women keep their weight down
These findings have important implications for understanding the relationships between physical fitness, body weight regulation and the efficiency of nutrient digestion, absorption and storage.
How menopause limits women’s response to weight training:
High-intensity weight training promotes bone growth in older men but is less effective for older women. Our researchers conclude that resistance training may help offset musculoskeletal declines associated with ageing and is beneficial to both older men and women.
Do women suffer more after strenuous exercise?
The theory that women incur less muscle damage than men after strenuous exercise has been exploded by a recent study which suggests the opposite: far from being protected against exercise-induced damage, women seem to be more severely affected, with a relatively reduced range of motion which persists for at least a week afterwards.
Most previous studies in this area have relied on indirect – and unreliable – markers of tissue damage, particularly the muscle protein creatine kinase, and have used small sample sizes and inappropriate exercise tests.
This study is the first to evaluate changes in muscle function in women and men in response to an exercise damage protocol.
There is no major sex divide in sports injuries
Several studies have shown that sportswomen are at much higher risk of injury to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) of the knee than men. But does this perceived gender difference extend to other sports-related injuries?
In this 15-year retrospective study comparing sports injuries in men and women the researchers conclude:
‘Except for some minor gender differences in total injuries for two sports and several differences in total injuries by anatomical location, our data suggest very little difference in the pattern of injury between men and women competing in comparable sports’.
HRT maintains muscle after menopause
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after menopause is widely believed to counteract the increased risk of heart disease and bone loss which accompanies the loss of the female sex hormones, particularly oestrogen.
Recent research from Finland suggests that HRT also plays a key role in maintaining post-menopausal muscle performance, which is good news for women in general and female athletes in particular.
Even better is the implication that the benefits of HRT combined with high-impact physical training exceed those of either HRT or training alone.
‘The results... suggest that continuous administration of a combined HRT preparation has beneficial effects on muscle performance, muscle mass and muscle composition in early postmenopausal women.... The results also suggest that the effects of HRT combined with high-impact physical training may exceed those of the two treatments separately.’
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