Should women follow the same fitness advice as men?

When you read about the latest news in fitness it's usually been based on scientific research. But what's not clear is the background of that research. Most of it comes from either 18-22 year old male college students or middle aged obese men in clinical trials to reduce weight before surgery!

The results are then generalised to the population and it's then assumed that the same results will work on women.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) is a very well respected organisation on fitness and nutrition. They advise on all manner of levels for intake such as vitamins, carbs, fat, protein, etc. One of their recommendations is on how many carbs a person should eat a day. That recommendation is based on 157 different scientific studies which you’d think would give you a great foundation for sound advice. However, of the 157 studies only 16 of them included women. Do women need the same or just smaller per kilogram amounts? Women cannot absorb carbs in the gut the same as men do and taking too much at once can cause GI distress.

Here’s another example; women need more protein than men.

This is even more the case as they get older (peri and post menopause). Estrogen has an anabolic effect (meaning it stimulates muscle growth). As we age and estrogen levels drop you need to eat more protein to make sure you're not losing the muscle mass you've already got and to ensure that you have enough floating about to make more of it.

You might have heard that after training drinking chocolate milk is the best thing to recover because it has just the right mix of carbs and protein (based on a 4:1 ratio or carbs to protein). But, women need proportionally more protein to make sure the body reacts and starts to synthesise more protein to repair/build muscle. Why? The body needs a certain level of leucine (one of the essential amino acids needed to make muscle). In women, this is measured by the brain - the protein dose needs to be high enough to trigger the brain into starting the protein synthesis mechanism. In men, it is the leucine content level in the muscle - a much lower starting level. Instead the highest leucine-content protein is whey. Try a whey powder shake. If you’re a vegan try adding vegan BCAA’s to your vegan protein shake to boost the leucine content.

So, if you read about some fitness advice which is particular to your sport or age, just consider if the background to that advice is specific to women and based on research tested on women. It’s quite rare that it is and it may be that women need to do something slightly different from the general fitness advice (which is basically just for men).