Gender-neutral training is dead. Here’s what works instead.

Training Volume: Quality over Quantity

While men often thrive on high training volumes and stacked intensity—thanks in large part to testosterone’s role in muscle repair and red blood cell production—women often see better results with a different approach.

• The Female Advantage: Women generally recover faster from submaximal efforts and can handle higher frequency.
• The Wall: When both volume and intensity are high for too long, women tend to accumulate fatigue faster than men.
• The Fix: Smart programming for women should lean into consistency and strategic spacing rather than just chasing more mileage.

Nutrition: Timing Is Everything

Fuelling isn't just about total calories; it’s about how your body uses them. Women tend to rely more on fat metabolism during endurance efforts, whereas men burn through carbohydrates more quickly at the same workload.

The Big Mistake: Many female athletes try to train "light" to stay lean. In reality, under-fuelling hits female hormonal balance almost immediately, leading to stalled progress rather than performance gains.

For women, recovery nutrition isn't a "nice to have"—it’s a non-negotiable requirement for staying functional.

Recovery: The Cost of "Hero Mode"

Men can occasionally get away with a "push through it" mentality—bad sleep, high stress, and hard training. For women, the bill for that lifestyle comes due much faster.

Biological factors like hormonal fluctuations influence everything from sleep quality to how well your body repairs muscle. To stay in the game long-term, women often require:

The Menstrual Cycle: Just Another Variable

Ignoring the menstrual cycle in training is like ignoring the weather or the altitude of your race. It’s simply a variable that affects strength, perceived effort, and injury risk.

By syncing training with these phases—pushing hard when the body is primed and backing off when it’s not—athletes can stop fighting their biology and start using it as a tool. It isn’t complicated; it’s just customized.

The Bottom Line

The goal isn't to see who can survive a "neutral" plan. The goal is to see who can perform best in the body they actually have.

Equality in sport shouldn't mean identical training. It should mean having the right playbook for your specific physiology. When we respect biology instead of ignoring it, we get fewer injuries, better performance, and much longer careers.

That’s not a trend—it’s just smart science.