👋 Hey.
Welcome to issue #41 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here.
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (3 min read):
📕 Book: The Female Body Bible
Did you know that women (on average compared to men):
- 😴 Need 20 mins more sleep each night
- 🥩 Have different macro and micronutrient needs
- 🏃 Are better at using fat as a fuel
- 🦵 Are 6x more likely to get a joint injury
I didn’t either until recently.
And that’s just scratching the surface…
The Female Body Bible is a recently published deep dive into the female body (through a health/sports/performance lens).
Written by a team of women who are experts in their fields (a scientist, a fitness coach and a doctor).
I deadset highlighted half the book.
So I won’t try to crowd all my learns into a few bullet points.
Just that if you’re a female reader, work in the health/performance space with females, or you’re interested, I couldn’t recommend this read more.
I’ve been writing this newsletter for 40 weeks.
I’ve shared over a hundred ideas, learns, resources and data points on improving performance.
But not once through the female lens.
For example, last week I wrote about post-training fuel. But what I never thought or knew to include is that women (on average) need more protein than men.
Naive, yep.
But better now than never.
🗣 Quote: Andrew Strauss on mental skills
Love this from the former English cricket captain:
“I was forced to learn a lot about psychology as a player, and as a captain to get the best out of others. There’s still a lot of scepticism about it in sport and the workplace, but dealing with fluctuations of form, and pressure, and being away from home is more important than your cover drive.”
Highlights that our skills and physical abilities don’t mean much without the mental side.
The growing list of tools in the 🧠 Mindset category of the Everyday Athlete Toolbox is a good place to start.
🏃 Fitness maintenance
A few weeks back I talked about recovery matching as a tool to help you through the seasons of life.
Which sparked another question:
When life ramps up, what’s the minimum training we can do to maintain our physical performance (specifically strength and cardio fitness)?
First, some definitions:
- Frequency = number of sessions (e.g. per week)
- Volume = how much work you’re doing (e.g. session length, number of reps, sets)
- Intensity = how heavy (e.g. kgs) or effort (e.g. heart rate, perceived effort out of 10)
Righto, so based on the research…
💪 The minimum we can do to maintain our strength:
- Frequency = doesn’t seem to matter (even once a week works)
- Volume = about 5 sets a week per body part
- Intensity = unchanged
- Maintenance length = 6-12 weeks
So you could do 5 sets of 3-4 compound exercises, in about 20 mins, once a week.
🏃 For cardio, the numbers are less clear.
One study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research did propose:
- Frequency = 2+ a week
- Volume = one-third to two-thirds (33-66%) of normal volume
- Intensity = unchanged
- Maintenance length = 15 weeks
What is clear though, is that for both strength and cardio it’s the intensity that matters.
There’s obviously lots of variables. Like age, gender, your training program, how trained you are, plus other genetic and environmental things.
But you can use these numbers as a guideline and tailor it to you.
Key takeaway:
When life ramps up, it can cut our time and access to the usual training and recovery we do.
So to maintain our fitness in these seasons of life, we can cut how much work we’re doing (frequency and volume), as long as how hard we’re working (intensity) doesn’t drop too.
And don't forget to recovery match.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
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