The female form and God’s glory: A new chapter in sports science

Watching the Lionesses this summer win the Euros for the second time felt like a triumph for women’s sport. However as emotional as I get about the explosion of opportunity now for girls in sport, it has nothing on how excited I feel about the apparent scientific revolution taking place in research into the female body.

For elite athletes such as Chloe Kelly, Michelle Agyeman and Lucy Bronze, it’s no longer good enough to know that sports research has primarily been into the male body and then generalised to women. In the research women’s bodies have been treated as ‘mini-men’ when they are fundamentally different, requiring a different approach to maximise sporting performance.

READ MORE: The impact of women in sport

Researchers found that a poorly fitting sports bra can lose an athlete 4cm per stride

Female body focused research has blown open the doors to understanding sex-related differences and helping pursue equity in sport. For example, researchers found that a poorly fitting sports bra can lose an athlete 4cm per stride through compensatory adjustments women make in their bodies to account for a bouncing chest, adding up to a mile over a marathon. Further, ACL injuries, more common in female than male athletes, may be linked to the positioning of the female thigh bone which alters the angle it connects at the knee, or the high levels of oestrogen women experience at ovulation making the ligament stretchier and more prone to injury.

It is clear then that body specific training, and even simply well-fitted sports bras will help to level the playing field and for true equity in sport, training needs to filter down to grassroots, ensuring this knowledge isn’t the sole possession of the ‘glitz and glam’ of elite sports.

READ MORE: As a female athlete, I support the new ‘open category’ for trans women in elite sport

These aspects of sports performance of course don’t even touch on the impact of the period itself on mental health, cramp pain, PMS and a fear of bleeding through sportswear. It’s only as recently as 2022 that Wimbledon allowed women to wear coloured undershorts to help reduce anxiety related to menstruation. Solutions previously have primarily centred on the contraceptive pill to help ‘time’ periods around competition. However, this oversimplifies the cycle to just bleeding, minimizing the female experience. By focussing on bleeding alone, we can miss the fact that strength training is more effective in the early part of the cycle and endurance can be maximised around ovulation.

So, what has any of this got to do with us ‘normal’ women? 

So, what has any of this got to do with us ‘normal’ women? Most of us are not elite athletes in training for the next world cup or even the next local match, but our cycles unite us so it may be helpful to keep a curious eye on what’s happening in the sports research world. Our bodies can often feel like a battle ground and consequently the temptation may be to minimise or supress the impact of our cycles.

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Recognising the unique nature of the female body can enable us to work with it rather than against it. Many women find cycle tracker apps helpful in predicting and understanding their cycles, some even to the extent of planning their productivity around their powerful ovulatory phase. The more we discover about the female body, the more in awe I am of God’s incredible creation. None of this diminishes the challenges so many women experience in relation to their cycle, but this should only push us to fight harder for female bodied research. If we believe that Gods glory is revealed in his creation (Psalm 19:1), and I think we do, then we must also believe that he has a unique plan to reveal his glory through the extraordinary composition and cyclical nature of the female body.