Former Head Of Physiology Dr Emma Ross believes sports coaching needs to be different for female athletes 

Shedding light on the gap in effectively coaching female athletes and their health is sports physiologist Emma Ross, tackling the taboos that exist within sport, and within wider society, when it comes to women’s health. Ross has developed ground-breaking new programmes to supply coaches, athletes and sports practitioners with a better understanding on exercising females, their physiology and psychology. 

As the Head of Physiology at the English Institute of Sport during the 2016 Rio Olympic games, Ross was proposed with the opportunity to crack down on the root of why the female British athletes weren’t as successful to their male counterparts. Data gathered from the Olympic results presented that “our female athletes didn’t bring home as many medals as a proportion of our male medal tally as compared to other top sporting nations.” Considering her major involvement and studies into sports science and her knowledge on the body and excelling within sport, Ross suggested that “what we haven’t does is layered a female filter; my job was to navigate and help people realise why that was important.” 

From first glance, a main concern was the lack of female representatives as coaches as Ross explained “there’s so few female coaches, and it’s a really stubborn number, around 10-15% whatever sports you look at.” This can be impactful considering the relationships between male coaches and female athletes with regard to the lack of understanding of female behaviours and biology as students in sports science or those working towards their coaching qualification have “never been taught the stuff that we are trying to integrate in the work force and sports.” With regards to this statement, Ross recognises how “it’s not just about having more women in the system, and that’s really important to consider, its actually about the system understanding what it means to be female in the context of being a female athlete.” Initially, change is possible and that isn’t just the responsibility of female coaches to take on the role leading these elite sports but for the male coaches to be educated on the various aspects that impact a female athlete’s performance and investigate how to work through these traits in order to get the best results from these women. 

“It’s very easy to say a woman’s body is different to a males body anatomically, physically, bioecologically, psychologically, socially, so therefore we need to do something different with female athletes, but no one has had success in asking why?”

Dr Emma Ross

A major issue for female athletes is the pressure to be lighter, look a certain way, cutting out certain food groups to attain this societal norm of what an athlete should look like and the methods used to achieve this extreme goal. Whilst the human body is desperate to conserve energy because it is hard wired for survival, the reproductive system will shut down as a consequence of an energy imbalance seen in most female athletes. Ross introduced the analogy RED-S, which stands for relative energy deficiency in sport in relation to the imbalance caused by not eating enough to match the demand of training. As this causes the reproductive system to shut down, hormone production comes to a halt, affecting “short- and long-term health such as growth hormones, adaptation to training and recovery; they are essential for bone health, heart health, immune function, gut health, brain health cognition, and so forth.” Reflecting back to the coaching role, it’s evident that women are keeping it to themselves that they don’t get regular periods as they don’t want to appear ‘weak’ or be treated lesser for their health complications. This essentially damages their bodies in terms of the hormones previously mentioned, impacting their performance and gatekeeping personal information from coaches that they might benefit from sharing and personalising their training around their anatomy. 

Table of aspects to consider that impact all female athletes

For female athletes so invested and dedicated to their training, finding the narrow balance can feel impossible, especially without that support from the coaching team. Checking in on female athletes on their period cycles can be vital and needs to be a conversation for coaches in order for them to understand the level at which they are pushing themselves as athletes and also discussing changes that need to be made towards training, so these women have to space to grow whilst effectively getting the best out of themselves actively.  

To learn more about Emma Ross and her movement towards more effective and personalised coaching for female athletes, following along this link: