Tweaks I Make in my Strength and Conditioning Sessions Because I am Training Exclusively Women.

My intention with this topic is to demonstrate how easy it is to modify your training of your female clients, even when there are men in the class. To clarify, i don’t mean “make easier” when i say “modify” like we give women push ups on their knees and men push ups on their toes, assuming all women are weaker (cue eye roll!). When i use the word “modify”, i just mean that i understand the fundamental physiological, biomechanical, and hormonal differences between men and women, and will cue different “proper form” for each, for different reasons.

So here’s my list of things i do differently in my classes, because they’re just for women!

I start from a place of “she’s already doing her best” and give my female clients permission to stop, half-ass things, and rest. We enforce a rule of better is better, progress is progress, and we avoid perfection.

I do this for a number of reasons¹:

1. Women are more at risk of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, and they’re more likely to feel anxiety about going to the gym. For this reason I make the gym a pressure-free zone, where their only obligation is to show up before they’ve succeeded.
2. Women are more likely to have a “perfectionist” attitude, and when she doesn’t achieve her expected level of perfection, it can be un-motivating and she may drop out, ruminate, or develop self doubt.
3. Women are usually carrying the mental and physical load of the household, and they don’t need more to feel guilty about. If she’s already doing her best, then it’s amazing she showed up, even when it was 15min late, because she couldn’t get here any sooner!
4. It’s rare I have a female client that gets the minimum recommended amount of sleep, exercise, hydration, and nutrients in a day. This means to smash them every session could be harmful to their delicately balanced hormonal system, and consistency over intensity will get better results with this population.

The doubts I have heard from other trainers in this approach include:

• Judgement that she’s not prioritising her training when she’s always late
• That if people aren’t “pushed” they’ll never achieve their best
• That a client has to achieve X, Y, or Z before the trainer feels successful.

This is what I have to say about that – If she’s late, but she’s shown up, she really wants to be here. Don’t make it about you, and you perception about how she should run her life. Women in the 30-50yr age group are largely managing multiple children, sometimes grandchildren, and elderly parents at the same time. Things are changing, but they’re also still largely responsible for the meals, cleaning, and household management that takes hours every day too^{2 3}. You can’t make their life choices and consequences about you, you can only guide them to better ones, and regular physical activity is one of those positive choices that you can make really easy for her to show up for.

On a side note, I have never had a client take it easy when they feel good. More often than not I am holding my female clients back from pushing too hard too often, because society has told them they’re lazy and not trying hard enough since the day they were born. They don’t need to hear that from me too (not that that is my belief!)

Understand that training is not performance, and even our elite athletes do not give 100% at every single session.

Woman are more at risk of a variety of hormone disorders that long, high intensity exercise can compound the effects of.

In my brief stint at NSWIS, not one athlete trained at 100% every single session because it negatively affects their performance. Furthermore, they literally NEVER come off a competition (ie. A performance session) and repeat it again in the gym for the hell of it.

When they do have back to back comps, they literally spend every hour recovering with physio, ice baths, slow movement, nutrition, hydration, and prioritising sleep. If you’re smashing your clients every single session, it’s likely you’re inhibiting their potential, whether they’re male or female, with possible greater and more harmful consequences on your female clients.

https://youtu.be/RsR97QLJwmQ

Athlete’s periodise for a reason, male and female, and so I do too in the gym. In the absence of a menstrual cycle, our periodisation goes like this:
Week 1) new program, half-ass week
Week 2) getting used to the program, ¾ ass week
Week 3) got the hang of it, just short of pushing as hard as she can week
Week 4) if she’s slept well, hit her nutrition and hydration targets, and isn’t stressed, she can GO FOR IT

You can’t make her results about you. But even if you did, you’d do better periodising her training and going half-assed some of the time.

If she has a cycle, I give the client the choice of formally periodising it to match her phase⁴, but usually we’re going with how she’s feeling on any given day. This means for our mums of babies, they might go MONTHS without a “go for it” week, and this is necessary to allow her body enough time and sleep to recover adequately from the session.

Remember, strength and fitness gains are made IN BETWEEN your sessions, in particular, when they’re asleep.

I Encourage Silliness, Play Games, Dance, and Sing for Hormone Balance and the Health Benefits of Connection

Mothers, particularly working mothers, have higher levels of circulating cortisol than other working people⁵. We’ve talked before about how cortisol, our stress hormone, can impact our menstrual cycle and hormone balance by joining to the same cell receptors as progesterone, thereby blocking progesterone acting on that particular cell⁶. This is useful to stop pregnancy in the event of famine (for example), but is problematic in the long term, particularly for heart and brain health⁷.

Exercise is another stressor, it will elevate cortisol levels⁸, and when you load exercise stress on top of lifestyle stress, you have a recipe for hormone disaster. This is particularly true for women engaging in long, steady state cardio^{9 10}.

To mitigate this, we play. Whether that’s a literal game or some playful banter, I am performing for every hour that I am with these women, trying to get them to laugh, dance, or do something silly. Dance in particular has been shown to reduce circulating cortisol¹¹, while the playfulness of the session ensures that connections between the group participants are made, and encouraged, as they laugh together.

Spontaneous laughter, in and of itself, has been explored as a potential treatment for stress and lowering cortisol¹²!

Social connection has been shown to be as healthy for a body as regular aerobic exercise¹³!

https://youtu.be/bmm0wVh1T9w

There is nothing to be lost by dropping the seriousness of your sessions and turning up the silliness. In fact, for your female clients, it’s potently healthy!

I tweak the free weights to make it easier for women’s hips and shoulders to align and stabilise.

I explained before how women are generally more mobile than men, and as such, I train them as often as possible on their own two feet. However, I have a couple of other little tweaks that I make to further stabilise them, usually in upper body weights (hacking their shoulder blade position) or in the lower body (hacking their wider hip base).

In upper body positions, I tend to modify the prescribed exercise to allow the client to have her elbows in front of her ribs. This is because women have a rounder rib cage, so to keep her shoulder blades against her rib cage she has to be more rounded than her male counterpart – who has more of a rectangular rib cage. So her lat pull down will always be in front of her chin. Her shoulder press will be aligned with her nose rather than her ears. Easy easy tweak to help her be more successful at her weights.

During lower body activity I am more likely to cue a wide stance with some kind of grounding/spreading cue for her feet. This is because women have wider hips and are generally more comfortable, therefore find it easier to control, when they’re in a slightly wider, toes out position. Simply trying to force her knees out in to a straight, average male body, “proper technique” squat won’t work with many of your female clients, or they’ll adopt weird compensations to make it happen (like squatting on the outside of their feet). This obviously isn’t conducive to stability or to lifting to their full potential! So try that little tweak and see how you go!

https://youtu.be/LbB1MVFLIIQ

I learned these skills in the Applied Women’s Physiology and Training University’s 8-Week Course, you can browse these here.

If you’re not quite ready for the above journey, you can dip your toe in with our Mini Course The Biomechanics of the Female Body here.

I avoid machine weights.

I am not sure machine weights are good for anyone except those who have a lot of time. However women are more likely to be less stable than their male counterparts, which means I want to spend as much time as possible on their own two feet, controlling and stabilising their bodyweight and the weight they’re moving.

Furthermore, most machine weights are designed for an average male body, at average male angles, I am just not comfortable trying to force a female body in to those positions. Aside from these movements being not particularly useful for a person, my female clients are often time poor, so I’d rather put our time and energy into something that helps them in their activities of daily life.

I am also particularly uncomfortable with machines that hinge using the elbow or knee joints – like a bicep curl machine or a leg extension/leg curl machine. The reason for this is the carrying angle at the elbow, and the Q angle at the hips.

The carrying angle is the angle between the long axis of the upper arm, and the long axis of the extended forearm, and allows the forearms to swing clear from the hips when walking. The carrying angle on a female body is usually less on a female body, but will vary from woman to woman, from her left side to her right side (the dominant side often being at a smaller angle. ie. Further out from her hips), and between races¹⁴. As such, a dumbell curl allows for the client’s variability, and we can adjust the angle to suit the person. Furthermore, we can get more range using dumbells than a machine, and we can mimic movements of daily life, like picking up a toddler. If you MUST lock your female clients in to a machine, make sure she’s in a neutral grip to allow her fibres to contract and relax straight.

https://youtu.be/kc4p9D_C97c

The Q Angle is the the angle between the upper leg to the patella tendon. Once again, women have a larger angle, and as such, makes being locked in to a machine more awkward¹⁵ (just a reminder that I know I am talking in generalisations and averages!). This, combined with women being generally more mobile than their male counterparts, means that there’s a risk that she’s going to be hanging, straining, stressing her ligaments more so than her target muscles in these machines. If you MUST do a leg extension at all, use a ankle attachment to a low cable and allow your female client to extend at a 45 degree angle, rather than straight up and down. Or better yet… train a squat!

Pelvic Floor and Stability before “Abs”

We’ve talked before about the reasons why women are generally more mobile, and less stable than their male counterparts, and also why women are more vulnerable to pelvic floor dysfunction, and it’s for these reasons that my “core” components of any given workout are usually stability (through motion) based or pelvic floor inclusive exercises.

Oestrogen has a role in ligament laxity¹, and as such will fluctuate throughout the month² as well as the lifespan. This means that her ability to stabilise will also vary, and therefore will need constant work to keep her progressing. Stability training doesn’t always look like bird-dogs or standing on one leg though, sometimes I do an obstacle course, or some kind of get-up-and-get-down kind of game that has them moving through levels and changing course and direction.

If we do traditional abs training, then I always incorporate pelvic floor work. The reasons for this is the high number of women, especially active and athletic women with pelvic floor dysfunctions, and the effectiveness of pelvic floor training in the prevention and reversal of these dysfunctions. Again, we’re not always lying down for our abs and pelvic floor work, but oftentimes hanging from a bar, performing a squat or deadlift, or doing a back extension as often as a crunch with pelvic floor lift and drop.

So it’s rare to find us lying on the floor doing sit-ups, but when we do, we’re incorporating pelvic floor work, and the rest of the times we’re upright and working on stability (as well as pelvic floor!).

https://youtu.be/1EmkmPpB_lI

We Meditate in Every Session

Why? For cortisol and hormone balance…

In 25 years of training women, mothers, and grandmothers, I have literally never met a single lazy one. Most of the women I have trained are:

• Exhausted
• Self deprecating
• Rushed off their feet
• Frantic
• Not sleeping well
• Not eating well
• Lacking confidence
• Feeling the “shoulds” – they “should” exercise, they “should” be a certain size, they “should” lose weight – but they’re living in an environment where those “shoulds” are unsustainable.

Many of these things tip the balance of a woman’s health towards a hormonal imbalance, and a chronically elevated stressed state (which also a hormone imbalance).

Exercise is another stressor, but it also builds resilience to stress! The answer to the stress of exercise is not to stop exercising, but to start meditating. Meditating has massive health benefits, and it doesn’t have to be long, just 2-5min will start to dial down her stress response, which she’ll get better at as she practises³.

The health benefits of meditation include⁴:

• Reduce risk and severity of depression and anxiety
• Boost your immune system
• Decrease risk of heart disease and heart attack
• Reduce chronic pain
• Decrease blood pressure
• Bring LDL cholesterol down and improve HDL levels
• Improve symptoms of diabetes

Many of these issues affect twice as many women as men, making meditation an integral part of our strength and conditioning sessions.

https://youtu.be/0Zxh42qO0Cw

You can read more on stress and how it exacerbates a variety of issues that affect women more than men, including hormonal imbalances, in my blog.

You can learn more about how to balance cortisol in this mini course: Stress Management Through Movement for Women’s Hormonal Health.

So it turns out there’s quite a lot of little changes i make for a variety of reasons! Stay tuned for Part 2 of this topic, which will probably take us through to the end of the year!

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