27 Feb Youth Female Athlete Training is the New Women’s Weight Loss Disaster
Over 14 years ago, when I started my training career, I didn’t just work with youth athletes.
I know, I know. I didn’t always focus on this niche, as I was exploring a wide palette of clients, gaining a variety of skills working with all populations, and still generalizing my training practice.
In addition to youth athletes, I worked with women, namely, women in their 30s, 40, 50s, and 60s either trying to get strong, lose weight, feel amazing at work and/or at home, or become pain free. I LOVED working with this population, and I look back fondly on these days before I niched down to youth female athletes only.
This was back in 2012, when lifting heavy weights and doing a progressed strength program was frowned upon for women. There were still the Tracy Anderson’s of the world doing bs body weight circuits, the pilates princesses saying pilates built “lean” muscle, the Orange Theory zealots saying HIIT ciruits 5x a week helped with fat loss, and the Tone It Up girls telling women to lift 5lb dumbbells to get “long and lean muscles.”
Fun fact: you don’t build long muscles. Muscles are attached to bone. They don’t get “longer.”
And the women selling these programs just had good genetics. They could get away with just 5lb dumbbells!
The rest of us, however, had to actually progress our strength training, and couldn’t get results with the foofy nonsense they were selling.
Too, the word “tone” was just a sexy marketing word that really means you need to build muscle size and strength.
It was quite a time to be alive.
Luckily, I worked with the most amazing women clients, who understood what I was preaching: a consistent, progressed strength training program is the single best way to build a strong body comp, feel amazing, and stay healthy.
Now 14 years later, I still preach this message to the young female athletes I train: a consistent, progressed strength training program is the single best way to build a strong body comp, feel amazing, and stay healthy.
It’s all the same message.
Alas, there are still people today in the youth female athlete space scamming young girls like women were scammed in the early 2000s for weight loss.
It’s as if female athletes are delicate little flowers who need a separate program.
Like balance drills for ACL injury prevention. Or, they need a bunch of banded walks. Or, they need more cardio and endless conditioning for improved fitness on the field. Or, they need cute hop drills to stay injury free.
These people don’t discuss loading over time with weights, and actually making female athletes robust.
And these are same people at the highest level saying body weight warmups move the needle for ACL injury prevention.
Body weight drills in a warm up don’t move the needle.
ACL injuries happen in forces of up to 8x body weight, so a dinky balance drill ain’t doing jack squat.
Don’t get me wrong, body weight exercises have a place when teaching a novice how to strength train so technique is nailed down, but eventually, girls going through puberty need to load heavier over a long period of time, and work with a strength professional who understands progressive overload and periodization.
Anyone who says their body weight circuit or 10 minute warm up reduces ACL risk is a scammer.
It’s all the same crap older women were being said to do back in the early 2000s: don’t lift heavy, go light, maybe hold a shake weight while you’re at it, and hope for the best.
Youth female athlete training has become the new women’s weight loss disaster.
Girls are being under estimated with how strong they can really be, and not being told the truth that strength training is the single best way to build an athletic, powerful body composition and make them resilient for their sport.
It’s a disaster because when the body does the same body weight load, or light loads with no progression for a long period of time, the muscles, bones, and tendons adapt and get bored. Their strength and durability plateau.
Eventually, a new stimulus needs to be added in order for the body to truly build.
Female athletes’ parents aren’t being told the truth either, and there are trainers that accept drop-in sessions, with no long-term development plan to truly get strong. They just throw together random body weight circuits or circuits every week with the same 10lb dumbbells.
Personally, I see my athletes weekly and they all are on their own program where they track their loads over time. Most of them have been with me for a minimum of 3 months, but the majority, train with me year-round.
With this model, we can get some serious strength gains.
Stories of Strength
Now back to my time in 2012 working with women clients because they are equally amazing.
I worked with the 40-year-old busy mom who just wanted to feel good in her body again, and after several weeks of progressing her dead lifts, having her do real push-ups and pull-ups, and weighted split squats, amazing things happened. Her jeans fit again, but this was just the tip of the iceberg. What excited me more was she felt more energized, more vibrant, and more confident again. And this was during menopause, a time where she should have felt debilitating symptoms, but didn’t!
I also worked with the 65-year-old woman who just wanted to walk to her mailbox without worrying about falling. She also deadlifted, but we started her with dumbbells, then yes, she did a hex bar! She also did elevated push-ups, band assisted pull-ups, goblet squats, and the results were incredible. Her knees were pain free again, she had muscle definition in her arms, no longer felt frail, and her energy increased.
I worked with the mid 30s postpartum woman who thought she had to kill herself in the gym every day to lose her baby weight. At first, she thought drudging along for hours on the elliptical was the answer. I told her there was a better, simpler way that wouldn’t take up more time, and make her feel more vibrant! So I introduced her to progressed strength training, where we did 30-40 minute efficient workouts, slowly loading the weight she lifted over time. By the end of the program, she said, “I didn’t know it was this simple.” Eventually, too, she didn’t even care about the baby weight. She just felt so amazing, health became her main focus.
And today, I’ve worked with thousands of young female athletes who have strength trained year-round and have stayed healthy with no ACL surgeries.
It will always come back to consistent strength training that is progressed.
But sadly, some girls and women still don’t see this today.
It was bad back in the early 2000s, but nowadays, I see the trend creeping into youth female athlete training: the more complex the workout, the more flashy the drills, the longer the training session, the more random filler exercises, the more viral the post, the more she sweats and pukes, the more jumble of cool movements, means it’s better, right?
That’s a hard no.
Young female athletes need simple, and they need consistency more than anything. The biggest cause of ACL injuries is not having the movement quality and strength capacity to withstand sport load.
Can girls move well? Can they decelerate, get the hips low, and transfer their center of mass efficiently? Do they have robust strength, relative to body weight?
Can a 120lb teenage girl new to strength training work up to dead lifting at a minimum her body weight? Then, can she do 1.5x her body weight before college sports?
Remember, ACL injuries happen in forces of a up to 8x body weight, so yeah, body weight circuits for her entire high school career ain’t it!
Eventually girls must load after they have mastered the movement patterns with their body weight.
Girls can start learning how to squat, hinge, pull, push, lunge, and then gradually load over time, starting as young as age 11.
Not only is progressive strength training good for injury prevention, it’s also good for:
– Increasing bone density during the growth spurt
– Increasing tendon tolerance
– Increasing collagen for integrity of the ligaments
– Improving speed and explosiveness
– Improving ability to decelerate and change direction
And for the adults reading, strength training boosts metabolism and builds your body composition.
It blows my mind girls and women today, still don’t understand the endless benefits of strength training. It blows my mind girls and women think they can make progress in performance, body comp and health with body weight exercises only.
It blows my mind girls and women think they need to crush themselves with more cardio and circuits to get better.
Not to blow sunshine up my own, you know, but I’m 36 now. I’m extremely strong, and my workouts are no longer than 30 minutes 3x a week.
To all of you no-days-off-grinders, your faces would melt if you saw how often I rested and recovered.
It’s about efficient, focused programming. Work hard on training days, rest hard on off days.
Of course, dialing in my nutrition has played a major role in my body composition, but that’s a blog for another time. I believe that progressive strength training over a long period of time is the lowest hanging fruit for girls and women to start doing now for performance and health.
I started strength training with a strength coach in middle school, and I’ve been doing it ever since because I see the insane benefits it brings me today as a 36-year-old woman retired from soccer – high energy levels, strong body composition, efficient metabolism, strong bone density, pain free joints, anti aging and longevity, improved cognitive function and confidence.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot more girls getting in the gym nowadays, and there are also many amazing strength coaches doing it right.
But overall, I still see parts of the youth female athlete training world regressing back to women’s fitness in the early 2000s.
They think that more is better. They think that they have to grind and obliterate themselves. They believe that complex is better. They believe more cardio and less weights helps their sport performance. They believe that body weight warm ups in high school are better, and will protect them against the violent forces in their sport.
They don’t.
Female athletes need focused training. Quality over quantity. They need more efficient workouts that have a progression. They need to challenge the weight on the bar. They need to stick with the main lifts actually master them. No random nonsense.
And they definitely don’t need more cardio, as they’re already overflowing this bucket between practices, games, and skills lessons.
Don’t let your daughter buy into the grind of more, the no days off crap, the flashy complex drills from Joe Scho the speed guru who played on his JV high school soccer team.
Don’t let your daughter grow up to be the mom one day who thinks more is better, and who kills herself on the elliptical, shoves kale salads down her throat, tries all the fads and weight loss trends that sound promising, yet never deliver.
Don’t let your daughter become the woman who program hops and doesn’t stick to anything.
Don’t let your daughter become the woman who fears weights and always ends up frustrated she has no muscle “tone.”
Don’t let your daughter become the next women’s fitness disaster.
Instead, do this:
Encourage your daughter to continue the pursuit of true strength, and move past those itty bitty 10lb dumbbells once and for all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erica Mulholland is a former college 3x All-American soccer player and now Hall of Famer from Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Master of Science in Exercise Science and is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach, who has been helping female athletes of all sports with speed, agility, strength, power, and conditioning for 14 years. She works with youth female athletes who want to become stronger and faster, as well as ACL and meniscus surgery rehab for female athletes in the later stages (over 3 month mark post-surgery) who want to return to sport better than they were prior to injury.
Work with Erica in Tampa and Lutz Florida for speed, agility, and strength training, OR late stage ACL rehab (must be at minimum 3 months into physical therapy and post-surgery): BOOK ASSESSMENT HERE
Interested in REMOTE TRAINING for Female Athletes? BOOK A CONSULT HERE
Get Erica’s book FEMALE ATHLETE HIGH PERFORMANCE
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