The "rap sheet" on female athletes says that they don't recover from hard training as well as males do.
This 'slur' on females does make a certain amount of physiological sense. After all, the primary male sex hormone, testosterone, is a potent bone and muscle builder and connective-tissue-reconstructor. Oestrogen, the main female hormone, has more limited effects on lean-tissue construction. Theoretically, after a rugged workout in which heavy stress is placed on muscles, tendons, ligaments...
The "rap sheet" on female athletes says that they don't recover from hard training as well as males do.
This 'slur' on females does make a certain amount of physiological sense. After all, the primary male sex hormone, testosterone, is a potent bone and muscle builder and connective-tissue-reconstructor. Oestrogen, the main female hormone, has more limited effects on lean-tissue construction. Theoretically, after a rugged workout in which heavy stress is placed on muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones, males should be able to rebuild those parts of the body more quickly.
Taking all this into account, many coaches design training programmes which are quite different for their female athletes, compared to their males. The usual difference is for the male schedule to contain more hard, high-intensity interval work, with the female programme more geared to lower-intensity, continuous, non-interval efforts. For example, Jack Daniels, Ph.D., one of the most successful collegiate coaches in the United States, often has his female charges running 20-25 minute 'tempo runs' at a pace which is 10-15 seconds per mile slower than lOK race speed, instead of carrying out lots of fast, short intervals on the track at paces faster than lOK velocity. Daniels is tremendously well respected by his peers, but other coaches do often contend that his programme 'works much better for females than for males'. Their implication is that males can recover more readily from tougher training routines and need such high-intensity programmes to reach their true potential.
But do male athletes really recover from rugged exertions more quickly? Males pride themselves on their toughness, durability, and resilience, but the scientific evidence supporting quicker male recoveries is actually pretty weak. In fact, new scientific research suggests that females actually lose less strength than males during the course of a rigorous workout and recover their muscular prowess more rapidly after an exhausting bout of exercise.
In studies carried out at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, for example, 10 male and nine female strength athletes (powerlifters and bodybuilders) performed 20 maximal squat lifts, with three minutes of recovery between each lift. After the 20 lifts, the fatigued leg muscles of both males and females had lost about 20-24 per cent of their maximal strength.
However, various indicators of muscular power favoured the females. For one thing, the 'force-time curve' - an indicator of muscles' ability to contract powerfully and quickly- changed negatively by 28 per cent in the males over the course of the workout but dropped off by only 19 per cent for females. Females also recovered from the 20- lift session more quickly. One hour after the work- out, female lifters' leg muscles could generate about 92 per cent as much force as before the session, while male muscles were just 79 per cent as strong.
Why was fatigue greater and recovery slower in males? Part of the problem seemed to be that the male lifters' nervous systems became less responsive over the course of the workout. From the first to the twentieth lift, activation of leg muscles by nerve cells fell by 20-25 per cent in males but held fairly steady for females. While it's not clear why male nerve activation should deteriorate more quickly, it is clear that females lose less of their muscular power during heavy-duty resistance training and seem to recover more rapidly once a tough session is over.
Unfortunately, research into the effects of tough endurance training on recovery in males and females is scant. What we really need is LONG- TERM research exploring the effects of training programmes of various intensities on male and female athletes. Until that's done, we won't really know whether the recovery process is actually different. In the meantime, the Finnish research suggests that quicker recoveries from truly taxing workouts are achieved by the fairer sex, even though coaches usually make killer workouts the exclusive domain of males.
('Neuromuscular Fatigue and Recovery in Male and Female Athletes during Heavy Resistance Exercise, ' International Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 14(2), pp. 53-59,1993)