In the ongoing quest to ensure that women are well served by sports science, there’s a subtle tension between two conflicting impulses. One is to emphasize the many ways that women are different from men, and the resulting need for woman-specific training guidance derived from woman-only studies. The other is to emphasize the many ways that women are similar to men, and the resulting need to stop excluding them from existing research initiatives and stop making training advice more complicated than it needs to be.
There’s merit in both perspectives, so finding the right balance can be tricky. Keep that tension in mind as you consider the results of a new systematic review, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living by a team led by Lauren Colenso-Semple of McMaster University in Canada, that assesses the effects of menstrual cycle phase on strength and adaptations to strength training. Colenso-Semple and her colleagues don’t pull their punches: they don’t think the claim that strength or trainability varies over the menstrual cycle is supported by the evidence, and they don’t think we should be…
