9 Reasons why women should not train like men

Since my article on the natural muscular potential of women went viral with over ten
thousand shares on Facebook alone, my inbox has been flooded with the question
“How should women train and diet?” Here’s the answer.

But first, to put many of the differences between men and women in context, it helps to
understand the evolution of gender differences. Throughout evolution, a classical
division of labor between men and women has existed. While this may bring to mind
a stereotype of women as inactive, just-stay-at-home mothers with no physical prowess,
this is completely unjustified. The activities of hunter-gatherer women would in our
modern times be seen as heavy manual labor. To quote a review on this topic:

“…walking sometimes for hours to find, retrieve, and carry home items such as food,
water, and wood. Women would also help to carry butchered game back to camp.
These foraging efforts often demanded digging, climbing, bending, and stretching and
frequently involved carrying heavy loads back to camp.
In addition, these hunter-gatherer women often had to carry their children for long
distances. The average forager-mother carried her child until he or she was about 4
years, covering upwards of 3,000 miles with the child in her arms or on her back during
this interval of time.
Other routine female responsibilities included shelter construction and butchering.”

The more endurance type tasks women did for millions of years resulted in significant
differences in what the genders are best adapted to. Here’s how you use these
differences to your advantage.
1. Women do better on a higher fat diet

Women burn more fat, less carbohydrate and less protein than men at the same
exercise intensity. Since they rely less on carbohydrate as fuel, they also don’t store
as much glycogen during carb refeeds.

Both differences in the nervous system and the hormonal system, including estrogen,
are responsible for women’s lesser reliance on glycogen. For example, the fight-or-
flight hormone adrenalin burns more fat in women than men. A more obvious
explanation is that women normally have a considerably higher fat percentage than
men of the same weight, not only on their body but also within their muscles, so it
makes sense to use this as the primary energy source.

Basically, women have a glycogen and protein sparing metabolism. This means women
don’t need as much carbohydrate or protein in their diet as men to fuel their exercise
sessions.

The lesser need for carbohydrates frees up calories to consume as fat. Fats have very
positive effects on the hormonal and cardiovascular health of women. In general, the
more fat women eat, the more estrogen and testosterone they
produce. Testosterone and estrogen are both anabolic hormones, in spite of the
bro science you often hear about estrogen.

Low fat diets may even reduce breast size, in part likely due to the low sex hormone
production, since estradiol and IGF-1 levels are significantly correlated with breast
size in women that aren’t on the pill for birth control.

A high fat diet may also be easier to adhere to for women than men. Dietary fat is 15%
more satiating in women than in men.
Women also have less to fear from potential negative effects of a low carb, high fat diet
(which are already rare, but I’ll save that for another article). Fats don’t decrease
insulin sensitivity as much in women as in men. Estrogen plays a large role here. It
helps to keep inflammation in check, burn fat and preserve insulin sensitivity. Lower
inflammation means polyunsaturated fats in particular are less susceptible to being
oxidized, so they can exert their anabolic effects. Women in general have much better
metabolic health than men and have a healthier body fat distribution.

By the way, if you’re worried about breast cancer, the relation between fat intake and
breast cancer risk is found in poor epidemiological studies of inactive, overweight
women eating processed junk fats, like processed red meats. Even then the relation
is weak and controversial. Fats like olive oil actually seem to protect you from
cancer. If you’re lean, you don’t smoke, don’t go binge drinking too often, eat a healthy
diet and you exercise, research has found time and again and again and again that
you have nothing to fear from a high fat diet.

Back on topic, several studies have found that women with polycystic ovary
syndrome lose more fat and less muscle on a low carb diet compared to a low fat
diet, even when protein and energy intake are tightly controlled. Several studies by
Jeff Volek et al. have found similar results in overweight and healthy women, but these
studies were confounded by more protein in the low carb diets. Soon-to-be-published
research found that women with more fat in their diet burn more calories during
exercise, have higher bench press strength and are leaner. In my experience with my
female clients, the benefits of fats vs. carbs depend on the woman’s carb tolerance.
However, I can say with confidence that the popular very high carb, almost zero fat diets
are not optimal for most women.

Women also don’t need as much protein as men for several reasons.
  Women oxidize less protein during exercise than men.
 Women also burn less protein while fasted or after meals than men.
 Due to their higher essential fat mass, women generally have less than men of
the same weight.

A meta-analysis found that the protein requirement of women is almost exactly

10% lower than that of men.

From an evolutionary point of view, women may have better adapted to lower protein
intakes than men.

2. Women do better with higher reps

Untrained men and women have the same fiber type distribution. This changes
with training: in strength training women, muscle fibers are converted to type I
fibers or don’t convert at all, whereas in men they generally change to type IIa
fibers. [Ref #2] Women also have proportionally larger type I fibers than men.

The result is that women are more resistant to fatigue than men, even when women
and men with the same strength level are compared. I test the muscle-fiber type profiles
of all my clients and women can generally do more reps at a given intensity than
men. (If you don’t know the difference between the different muscle fibers, read
my guide to muscle-specific hypertrophy training.)

Because women have more slow-twitch muscles, they should train their type I fibers
more than men to grow to their full potential. This can be done by performing more reps
per set.

3. Women can handle more volume

Having larger and more type I fibers allows women to handle more volume than men.
That’s not the only reason. In my article on the muscular potential of women, you’ve
seen how having more of the female sex hormone estrogen gives women an advantage
over men. Estrogen is an anti-catabolic hormone that aids in muscle repair, reduces
protein break-down during exercise and protects you against muscle damage. This
allows women to train with a higher training volume without becoming overtrained. We
don’t have any direct research on this (gender interaction in the dose-response curve of
training volume), so we have to compare different studies.

If you’ve read my article on the effect of range of motion (ROM) on muscle growth
on Bret Contreras’s blog, you should now understand the discrepant findings from the
research team of Massey et al. They found that training the bench press with a greater
ROM did not result in statistically significantly more strength gains in men. When they
replicated the study in women, the results became significant. Women can tolerate the
higher training stress of full ROM training better than men, so it was easier to
demonstrate the superiority of training with a full ROM.

The same trend appears in other research. Paulsen et al. and Rønnestad et al. didn’t
find more strength or size gains in the upper body when performing 3 compared to 1 set
in men. New, still unpublished research from Vikmoen et al. from the Norwegian School
of Sports Sciences has replicated this research in women. This time the 3 set group
gained significantly more strength than the 1 set group. The women training with more
volume also gained 62% more muscle mass on their arms, but this difference failed to
reach statistical significance.

Another line of research supporting that women can handle more training volume is the
research where women respond better to training than men. This is found in research
with heavy negatives. Heavy lengthening muscle contractions cause a great deal of
muscle damage. Women can tolerate this training stress better than men.

4. Women should do less explosive training

The superior work capacity of women disappears when training with weights
close to their maximum strength (1RM). While women’s muscles have great
endurance, the female nervous system is not as efficient as that of men. Men are
more explosive than women: they can generate force quicker. The area in the
brain that controls movement (the motor cortex) is in fact literally larger in men,
even after correcting for height. During explosive exercise at very high training
intensities, like powerlifting, men can perform more reps than women.
A more efficient motor cortex is the reason why men tend to do better in explosive
sports. However, the difference becomes very small after serious training. Sports
scientist Renato Manno and his team have compared the strength and explosiveness of
840 elite male and female athletes across 31 sports in research that hasn’t been
published in English yet. They found that relative to bodyweight, women were just as
strong as men and only a few percent less explosive. This makes sense given
that women have the same relative natural muscular potential as men.
Sociocultural differences probably explain why we don’t see more women in high
level athletics.

Men are only more powerful during explosive, dynamic contractions, not during heavy
negatives or isometric contractions, even at a high intensity. So it’s not true that women
should never train heavy. However, women should train to their strengths. Explosive
exercise does not allow women to exercise with as much volume as men. Women also
recover less well after explosive exercise like sprints. In contrast to women’s
generally greater recovery capacity, high volume sprint training can take over 72
hours to recover from in women. This results in worse training adaptations for
explosive exercise in women. For example, women don’t build as much muscle
protein after high intensity sprints as men. This is striking, because after regular
strength training women build just as much muscle protein as men.

5. Women respond better to steady state cardio than

HIIT
Since women don’t react as well to high intensity interval training, steady state cardio
works better for them. And not just physically: mood improvements from aerobic
exercise tend to be greater in women than in men.

Other than the above, I’ve already discussed cardio for women compared to men in
detail during my roundtable discussion with the Martinez brothers (point 4), so I
won’t go into that again here. When cardio becomes necessary to maintain a healthy
diet and increase the caloric deficit further, LISS cardio is highly preferable to HIIT and
both are better than anything in between. Avoiding the interference effect requires using
a stimulus that is similar to strength training (HIIT) or a stimulus that does not require
much adaptation at all (LISS). Avoiding the interference effect altogether is preferable to
minimizing it, so LISS is best in this regard.

The female physiology is well adapted to endurance training and fat burning, so women
do even better on LISS than men.

Thirdly, HIIT increases the risk of overtraining and injuries with no advantage to LISS
other than saving time.

6. Women do better with a slower lifting tempo

Since women are less explosive than men, women can perform more reps with a
more controlled, less explosive lifting tempo. Forcing women to use a fast, fixed
tempo does not take advantage of their higher endurance.

7. Women tolerate metabolic stress better

Another reason women have better endurance than men is that women suffer less
from metabolic stress than men, again even when women and men of the same
strength level are compared. Women have lower arterial blood pressure during
exercise, so they can get more blood and oxygen to their muscles than men. Less
metabolic byproducts like lactate, which causes ‘the burn’, accumulate in the
blood, so the muscles are capable of functioning for a longer time under stress than in
men.

Women’s superior fatigue resistance disappears during blood flow occlusion

training (KAATSU, as the Japanese inventors originally called it). And unlike in men,
women’s muscle growth seems to be blocked by post-exercise blood flow
occlusion. So KAATSU training should be used more strategically in women than in
men.

8. Women don’t need as much rest between sets

The following graphic from Hunter (2014) summarizes the reasons why women don’t
fatigue as much as men. With all of this in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise that women
recover faster after a set than men. In my scientific review with Brad Schoenfeld
on the best rest interval for muscle growth we also discussed this. Women don’t
need as much rest as men to complete the same relative training volume.
9. Women can train with a greater training frequency
Women not only recover faster after a set. They also recover faster after a training
session. This again shouldn’t be a surprise by now, since women have better nutrient
delivery to their muscles, they don’t suffer as much muscle damage and they repair their
muscles faster.

Conclusion
Most women are intuitively aware of their strengths in the gym, but they are often told to
train like men. As a result, they don’t fulfill their athletic potential. Strong male trainees
often instinctively do high intensity training and avoid sets with more than 12 reps.
Women are naturally much more inclined to do steady-state cardio, lift with a more
controlled tempo, perform higher reps, take shorter rest periods and do more total work
(the serious women at least). These are good instincts. Through millions of years of
evolution, women have become better adapted to training that is closer to the
endurance spectrum than men. Use it to your advantage.