The "women are just smaller men" training model is partially right and badly incomplete. Most strength and conditioning principles transfer between sexes — progressive overload, heavy compound lifting, hypertrophy training, aerobic adaptation, recovery infrastructure. The barbell does not care about your gender. The cultural framing did. The framing was wrong, and Volume 29 buries it formally.
What is load-bearing in women's training that does not apply equivalently to men's training: the menstrual cycle as context (not a programming-defining variable, per McNulty 2020 meta-analysis); relative energy deficiency in sport (Mountjoy 2018 IOC consensus on RED-S — the most clinically meaningful women's-training topic); bone health across the lifespan (perimenopause and postmenopause shift the bone-loading imperative); injury risk patterns (Hewett 2006 on ACL incidence in pivoting sports; Lauersen 2014 on neuromuscular training); pelvic-floor considerations (defer to qualified pelvic-floor physiotherapy); and the under-representation problem in sports science (Sims 2018, Elliott-Sale 2021 — the evidence base is improving but uneven).
Inside this one
- What transfers from general S&C and what gets women's-specific overlays
- McNulty 2020 evidence vs. the cycle-syncing commercial overclaim
- RED-S and energy availability — the clinically meaningful framework (Mountjoy 2018)
- Bone health across the lifespan — perimenopause and postmenopause emphasis
- ACL prevention for women's team-sport athletes (Hewett, Lauersen)
- Iron and ferritin, hormonal contraception, pelvic-floor referral framework
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →