Life Cycle of the Female Athlete

A Q&A with author Christine Yu about her new book, Up to Speed.

Jun 07, 2023

Are women’s bodies anomalies in sports? Does a female athlete’s career end with adolescence, motherhood, or menopause? Christine Yu’s answer is a definite “no”.

A sports journalist, Christine has made a name for herself by writing about women athletes and the unique challenges they face for publications like Runner’s World and Outside. On May 16, her first book Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes released from Riverhead Books. Building on her previous work, the book tells the sports science story of the second sex — a story that shows how a field initially focused on enhancing male physical prowess has only recently started catching up on studying the female body, and still has a long way to go.

A couple weeks ago, I called Christine for a brief conversation about her book, the unique experiences of female athletes, and how studying women ultimately helps men too. Here’s what she had to say.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did your previous journalistic work influence your goals in writing Up to Speed?

Christine Yu: I've always been super interested in the human body and trying to understand how it works and how it performs. Being able to look at that specifically through the lens of women and women's sports has been really cool.

As I started reporting on this more, it felt like we kept reporting on the same stories: Female Athlete Triad, losing your period is bad, or there's all these body image and eating disorder issues in sport, or women get more ACL tears than men, can you believe it? But it never felt like we were actually making progress towards, not only broader understanding of these issues, but actually doing something about them.

I wanted to try to understand the underlying reasons behind some of these issues, because there had to be some sort of connection.

One of the ideas you touch on throughout your book is this idea that women’s bodies can be seen as an anomaly in the world of athletics. Did that come from your own experience?

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it always felt like we’d fought so hard to be able to get access to sports, that you had to almost put on a tough demeanor. You didn't want to call attention to the fact that you were a girl or you were a woman, because you could be seen as more fragile or weaker in comparison to the boys and the men that were playing sports. You downplayed that part, so that you could be more like one of the guys. … And it kind of perpetuated this idea that you can't be fully inhabiting your body and your humanness as a person in a female body in this arena [of sports], that you had to leave part of yourself behind — because of all of these other myths about women's bodies being this liability and not fit for sport.

How did the origins of sports science set it up to overlook female physiology for so long?

Sports science came up as the field that we are familiar with now — as kinesiology and all of that — in the 1950s and 60s. That was the time when people were freaking out because American men were so unfit. They were worried about national security. They were worried because the Soviets had started competing in the Olympics, I think, in the early 50s and they were dominating. And this is Cold War time. We can’t have the Soviets dominating.

So there was this urgency to make the field more rigorous, because before then, it was physical education and the field was more geared towards training phys-ed teachers and not training athletes, not being rigorous in that way.

We see this switch to sports science and it becoming more academic, more research-based. A lot of the scientists that came in were men, and they brought a lot of funding with them, so they became the important people in the departments. They're teaching their students methodologies, and then when those students go off and establish their own labs, they're taking those methodologies with them.

It's this big trickle-down effect, where whatever you establish as standard methodology and the way that you do things — that spreads throughout the field and becomes the way to do things. It's then easy to not even notice that you're not including women [in studies], because you've never included them in the first place.

One of the rare women-focused areas that has benefited from a lot of scholarship is what’s known as the Female Athlete Triad. You spend a good deal of space in Up to Speed telling the story of how scientists originally identified this phenomena, along with the more recent, broader concept, RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport).

Can you walk me through those discoveries and the difference that they’ve made for athletes?

As more women started to get involved in sport in the 70s and the 80s, doctors started to notice that amongst some of these athletes, there seemed to be menstrual dysfunction. They were losing their periods or it seemed to be irregular. Part of the concern was: Were the ancient Greeks and the folks in the Renaissance and then in the Victorian age, were they right? Is exercise bad for the reproductive system?

The other thing they started noticing was that a lot of female athletes started coming in with stress fractures and other bone stress injuries. And they saw this relationship between those who had those types of injuries and disordered eating and eating disorders. They noticed there was something going on here, between the eating and the menstrual cycle and the bone stress injuries.

So Anne Loucks did this seminal series of studies that looked at the relationship between menstrual cycle and eating and exercise. They had groups of women who would exercise and eat normally, they had groups of women who would exercise more and eat normally, and then they had, I think, a group that would exercise and then eat enough to recoup those calories.

What they found was: When women were exercising but they weren't keeping up with their daily energy needs, they saw the hormonal dysfunction. When women ate the same amount but increased their exercise, they also saw that hormonal dysfunction. But what was most important about her studies was that they found out that, if the women actually recouped the amount of calories that they were exercising, they would not see those hormonal dysfunctions.

It proved the point that it wasn't that women can’t exercise. It wasn't that exercise was detrimental to the reproductive system or the menstrual cycle — so long as women were eating enough. That proved that it is this availability of energy in your body that is driving the hormonal dysfunction, not exercise.

They coined this term [Female Athlete Triad] because of the seeming relationship between those three different things — between menstrual cycle dysfunction, the eating piece and the energy availability, and then the bone stress injuries. …

Then, over the years, they noticed that it's not just those three areas, but that this under-fueling — what they call low energy availability — has lots of other consequences. It can impact cardiovascular health, it can impact gut health, it can impact immunity, and this whole set of performance-related factors, in terms of training adaptation, recovery, muscle growth and synthesis, and all these other factors. And so this other group has been looking to expand the definition beyond what the Female Athlete Triad has been defined as, into this broader constellation of the potential symptoms, and the fact that this can also potentially affect men.

But whether it's the Female Athlete Triad, whether it's RED-S … all of it centers around this idea of energy availability and making sure that your body has enough energy available to do the things it needs to do.

The fact that that one progression of studies specifically focused on female athletes has now resulted in outcomes revealing things about men makes me wonder what else we could learn about humanity in general if we devoted more resources to studying women.

Yeah, and I think that that's really the point of a lot of it. When we study only men, it is such a small segment of the population — not only in terms of 50% of the population, but if you actually think about it, sports science studies tend to be done with young, college-aged men. And fit men, at that. So it's a pretty small segment of the population. And the idea is, that's not the whole universe. There are so many more people that do not fit into that sliver.

By expanding research and making it more diverse, making it more representative, we actually learn more about all of humans. Because while there are sex-based differences, there is actually a lot of overlap between men and women. So by studying both of these in more equal proportion, we can actually learn things that can benefit men, and vice versa.

The last three chapters of Up to Speed focus on three experiences unique to female athletes: puberty, pregnancy and postpartum, and menopause. Each of these experiences comes with significant bodily changes that may affect athletic performance.

What would you say to young athletes going through that first stage, puberty?

First, acknowledging that it’s really hard. It’s really hard when your body is changing in such potentially dramatic ways. Of course, you feel not at home in your body, and you're trying to figure that out. All of that is very disorienting, and it's challenging. But what I want girls to know is that, this is what your body's supposed to be doing. This is all part of the maturational process.

It makes sense why your performance might feel different, why it might drop off. You are adjusting to this whole new physical form that you have. But this period is a transition. It's not going to last forever. And at the end of it, your body will be stronger. You'll have all the things that you need to be able to continue to perform at whatever level of sports that you want to perform.

The other piece of it is: don't try to stall or prevent puberty because, for whatever short-term gain you might experience, there is a whole long road of potential downsides that you're setting yourself up for. And if your priority is to be the best athlete you can be over the long term — and to be healthy over the long term — you can't prevent your body from going through this process.

Do you have any advice for women going through those other uniquely female stages?

Pregnancy and postpartum and the menopause transition — those are also periods of transition that female bodies naturally go through. It's part of this lifespan of ours. And I know I didn't respect it enough as that. When I was pregnant, I was thinking it's just this blip. I'm pregnant, I'll have the baby, and then I’ll go back to doing what I was always doing. My body will magically bounce back or everything will be the same as before, whereas it's not.

Your body literally, physiologically, and anatomically has changed over that period of time. And that might mean the way that we approach our sport and training and all of that might need to be a little bit different. That's okay. That's not any sort of verdict on who you are as a person, who you are as an athlete, or anything like that. It's fine. That's just the way you're accommodating your new body.

Similarly, with menopause, I feel like as we age, it's so easy to see that time as the natural off-ramp from sports. Because, again — not counting all the life stuff that's probably happening during that time, between raising kids and caring for older parents — physiologically, your body changes. So it feels different. Sports, working out, exercise, all feel different than it did in your 20s and 30s. It can feel harder. And again, like puberty, that can be really disorienting for someone who has been active all their life, and very frustrating. And make you want to quit.

100% that's how I feel right now. Because, aside from being injured, it generally sucks. I don't feel like myself. And that's a hard thing to recognize as not something that's wrong with me, but that this is a period of transition and it is going to take time to adapt to it.

What do you hope that readers take away when they finish your book?

I hope that they don't feel as alone in their experience. Because we don't talk a lot about the female experience — and we haven't because we don't know as much about it, because things like the menstrual cycle have been so taboo for so long, or we don't talk about what it's really like in the postpartum period. It can feel very lonely. It can feel very much like you are going through this by yourself, and there are no resources out there and there's no information.

So what I hope with the book is that people feel a little bit less lonely, and validated in the sense that, yeah, there isn't that much information, but I know that it's not in my head. I know that this experience of mine isn't just me, that there are a lot of other people going through this. And we're starting to see some change.

What’s coming up:

Park workout season is here!

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